NCAA Basketball Quiz: 1) The NCAA has been keeping individual scoring records since the 1947-48 season. Who are the only three to average 40 points per game and lead the nation, including postseason contests where applicable? 2) Looking at the schools in today’s Big East, who is the last player from a Big East school to lead the nation in scoring? [Hints: It’s not Oscar Robertson, and this player’s average was 30.4.] Answers below.
**Brett Favre is retiring…good riddance, mused the Jets fan**
Katie Couric, interviewing Alex Rodriguez in 2007: “For the record, have you ever used steroids, human growth hormone or any other performance-enhancing substance?”
Couric: “Have you ever been tempted to use any of those things?”
A-Rod: “No….I’ve never felt overmatched on the baseball field. I’ve always been in a very strong, dominant position, and I felt that if I did my work…I didn’t have a problem competing on any level. So, no.”
Feb. 9, 2009, A-Rod admits to doing steroids. “I did take a banned substance. And for that I am very sorry and deeply regretful…I was stupid for three years. I was very, very stupid. I was an idiot.”
“While A-Rod didn’t quite knock it out of the park in his interview with ESPN’s Peter Gammons, he didn’t strike out, either, as so many steroid cheats have done in the past. Rodriguez admitted to using performance-enhancing drugs from 2001-03 and he apologized. He even said he was ‘deeply regretful.’ Good for him.
“The Yankees are probably pleased, for the most part, with Rodriguez’s performance on TV on Monday, as they wanted the truth. They made clear in conversations over the past two days with Rodriguez’s handlers that the best course would be to tell the truth – whatever that might be. And it appears that’s what he gave Gammons in his first interview since SI.com broke the bombshell story that Rodriguez failed baseball’s survey drug test in 2003….
“Rodriguez admitted in the interview that he took performance-enhancing drugs during his three years in Texas and said he has not taken any since coming to New York. Now everyone around him will hold their collective breath in hopes that proves to be the truth, or at least isn’t proven false. It certainly is a lot closer to the truth than his previous comments on this subject.
“He did well. Though curiously, Rodriguez also told Gammons he wasn’t sure what performance enhancer he took. That’s a little tough to swallow.
“And when Gammons pressed A-Rod as to whether his PED-taking period was confined to 2001-03, he answered, ‘That’s pretty accurate.’ He was nervous, but the inclusion of the word ‘pretty’ was a little troubling.”
“Alex Rodriguez made clear Monday that one thing still separates him from Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens, from Rafael Palmeiro and Sammy Sosa and Mark McGwire: he’s smarter.
“He saw Bonds and Clemens hide behind denials, daring the federal government to come and get them. He saw Palmeiro wave his finger at congressmen. He saw Sosa practically forget how to speak English in the Rayburn building. He saw McGwire turn into a parrot who was ‘not here to talk about the past.’
“Like any good hitter, Rodriguez studied the men who came before him, learning from their mistakes and adjusting accordingly for his turn at the plate.
“As public relations strategies go, it is generally wise to look back at every choice Bonds has ever made, and then do exactly the opposite. And so, in an interview Monday… Rodriguez admitted that he used performance-enhancing drugs while playing for the Texas Rangers from 2001-03, a period in which he hit 156 discounted home runs. It was appalling because he portrayed himself as a product of a ‘loosey-goosey’ clubhouse culture that condoned steroid use. But it was also refreshing because at least he didn’t say he took ‘a tainted supplement.’ That’s how low our standards have sunk….
“ ‘When you take this gorilla and this monkey off your back, you realize that honesty is the only way,’ Rodriguez told ESPN’s Peter Gammons, 15 months after he told CBS’s Katie Couric that he never used a performance-enhancing drug. ‘I’m finally beginning to grow up. I’m pretty tired of being stupid and selfish, you know, about myself. The truth needed to come out a long time ago. I’m glad it’s coming out today.’
“No matter how many sweet nothings he says, he is still going to have a brutal spring and a brutal season. His legacy is trashed, his Hall of Fame credentials are tarnished, and any records that he eventually owns will be rendered as meaningless as the ones that Bonds owns now. But eventually, he will be able to move on with his life and his career, just as Jason Giambi and Andy Pettitte were allowed to move on with theirs. Such is the reward for even the slightest bit of transparency.
“It is hard to know if Rodriguez is hiding anything else. Curiously, he claimed that he did not know what kind of performance-enhancing drugs he took, though SI reported that he tested positive for Primobolan and testosterone. He indicated that he stopped taking the drugs during spring training 2003, but it was in ’03 that the positive test was administered. He also blamed his steroid use in Texas on the $252 million contract he received from the Rangers in ’01, and the pressure he felt as a result. But that did not stop him from opting out of his contract last winter and negotiating an even richer deal with the Yankees, for $272 million.
“During those negotiations, Rodriguez showed just how savvy he can be when his image is at stake. After he opted out of his deal with the Yankees, and no other team stepped forward to sign him, he was painted as a traitor and a mercenary. So Rodriguez went running back to the Yankees and announced that he was initiating talks on his own, without agent Scott Boras – always a convenient scapegoat. Rodriguez came across as a victim who was loyal to the Yankees and misled by his agent, even though Boras still finalized the contract and retained Rodriguez as a client.
“Despite all of his struggles in the clutch, Rodriguez is best in a crisis, so it was no surprise that he used Monday’s interview as an opportunity to start his rehabilitation. He has hundreds of steps left to go, but he is one up on Bonds and Clemens.”
“His limited confession tried to imitate the nonspecific apology Jason Giambi had used to calm down the mob. Seen in its entirety, however, the apology by Rodriguez sounded trite. But consider the source….
“The industry cannot penalize Rodriguez for the 2003 positive test because the players association and Major League Baseball managed to delay serious penalties until later. Rodriguez was apparently one of 104 players who tested positive, a result that should have remained confidential and been destroyed.
“In the same report on Saturday, SI.com said that Gene Orza, the chief operating officer of the players union, had notified Rodriguez in September 2004 that he was about to be tested. Orza denied it Monday. If anything like that happened, it would be a much more serious breach of confidence than anything a player did….
“When the first quotes of his confession surfaced in midafternoon, it sounded as if Rodriguez really understood he had done something wrong. In the full interview, the more he talked, the more disassociated he sounded. He still doesn’t get it.”
Kevin Kernan / New York Post
“As one A-Rod adviser noted of this Alex Rodriguez, ‘This was the real deal.’
“Said a friend of Rodriguez, who talked to him after the interview, ‘He said he felt like a weight had been taken off his shoulders.’
“But there remain some tough questions for A-Rod, so that baseball can learn from this:
“How were the steroids obtained? How did he take them? How were they transported through baseball? How can you prove you did not take HGH, and are not taking it now?
“A-Rod admitted his guilt for 2001-03. That’s big. That’s a lot more than other ‘roiders have done….
“(But) MLB does not test for HGH. Wouldn’t it be great if A-Rod led a charge in which players would submit to blood tests so MLB can screen for HGH? That would help show he really wants to do something for the kids, as he repeatedly said.
“It would help if the other 103 players who failed that 2003 test would have their names released. That would put things in perspective. Get it out now and get baseball moving forward.
“This was more than a simple apology. This was all about A-Rod trying to make himself trustworthy as a ballplayer again. There are asterisks everywhere when it comes to A-Rod, Bonds, Clemens and all the others, including (for now) The Nameless 103.
“This was a positive first step, and for that A-Rod should be commented.”
Bill Dwyre / Los Angeles Times
“Curt Schilling says that he gives Alex Rodriguez credit for ‘manning up.’ Clearly, A-Rod has the needed testosterone level.
“The next big question in this new slippery slope upon which Rodriguez has placed his sport is whether baseball itself will ‘man up.’…
“The truly perceptive hinted that the apocalypse is now upon us when they said: Jose Canseco was right.
“There was also a moment of comforting knowledge that, no matter the situation, little changes in sports. Rodriguez’s New York Yankees teammate, Jorge Posada, was quoted as saying, ‘As soon as he talks about it, whatever he is going to say, he can put it behind him.’
“Professional athletes and ax murderers lead the world in their always immediate desire to put all transgressions behind them….
“The ideal response is that the consumer takes all this as the final straw, stops going to games and watching on TV and sends Major League Baseball into the same economic black hole currently occupied by the rest of the country. Like Enron, it would deserve that. Remember how Enron laughed at us California suckers as it ripped us off? It’s different with baseball. Its chuckle has been national in scope.
“A boycott won’t happen, of course, because we have been so hardened by the liars and creeps who destroy companies and lives and the elected officials who let them, that baseball is merely more of the same.
“The next best course of action is for baseball to ‘man up.’ Not just pretend. Not just make pompous statements and hope all this will fade with the first crack of the bat on opening day.
“ * Release the other 103 names on the list of positive tests. No matter how many lawyers and agents whine and how much yelling there is about promised confidentiality, the cow is out of the barn.
“ * Suspend all 103 players still active, plus Rodriguez, until July 1. Without pay. Characterize that as ‘an evening of the playing field.’…
“ * Have a news conference in which Selig, Rodriguez and union chief Fehr announce that each will take his 2008 earnings and donate them to separate charities, none having anything to do with baseball and each voted on by the fans. Call it a penalty for ‘failed performance.’
“ * Also announce, at the same news conference, that by league mandate baseball will cut ticket prices, parking and concessions 10% across the board for the next five years and will also return 10% of its TV and radio rights revenue to the networks. Admit that what fans were paying to see, and TV and radio were paying to broadcast, was a fraud.
“ * Ask that Hall of Fame voters consider the entire careers of all players, but place an asterisk on the plaque of any enhancement-drug user who gets in….
“Play ball. Or whatever it is.”
Joel Sherman / New York Post
“Rodriguez is essentially saying you can remove the 156 homers he hit as a Ranger and the 2003 AL MVP award he won. He is sacrificing them, like amputating a leg infected with gangrene as a way to save the whole body, which in his case is still the body of work of an undeniable Hall of Famer.
“Will this work? Will Rodriguez salvage big chunks of his reputation and statistical legitimacy by telling Peter Gammons of ESPN that he was a steroid cheat for just a three-year period, 2001-03?
“The answer does not come from a single attempt at absolution. It comes with further exploration of Rodriguez’s past and how he handles the future.
“Remember, his credibility already is dubious. He lied to Katie Couric in 2007 in saying he never used illegal performance enhancers, and to many reporters – me included – who directly asked him these questions over the past few years. So could he be spinning again, trying to blunt as much of his dirty drug history as possible? You bet.
“A-Rod always mulls over which words will make him look best. So you can bet he was coached like crazy for this ESPN interview. His first answer to Gammons sounded rehearsed, as if he were readying a one-man show for Broadway.
“And the most passionate he was in the 30-plus-minute interview was in attacking the motives and tactics of Sports Illustrated reporter Selena Roberts, who broke the story about A-Rod’s 2003 failed steroid test. She quickly and convincingly repudiated his contentions, leaving the impression A-Rod was being disingenuous on the most important day of his life in which he needed to be totally truthful….
“For A-Rod’s sake, there better not be a smoking syringe out there with a date prior to his Texas arrival or since his Yankee entrance five years ago.
“Because if new, credible evidence arises linking Rodriguez to steroids as either a Mariner or a Yankee, then he is A-Fraud forever; no further shots at image sprucing.
“But let’s give Rodriguez the benefit of the doubt today. Faced with the SI revelations, Rodriguez did not use his first public statement to say he did not want to speak about the past or that he ‘mis-remembered’ his past.
“A-Rod owned up to falling prey to the size of his ego and contract, and to a culture that rewarded cheats. But that is not enough. He has the rest of his baseball career and the rest of his life to try to make as many amends as possible.”
–Thomas Boswell / Washington Post
“Alex Rodriguez may actually be telling something close to the truth. Not the public relations version of the truth, which heretofore has been A-Rod’s first, as well as final, standard. But maybe the actual true facts.
“Rodriguez may have taken performance-enhancing drugs for only three years – never before, never after….
“Rodriguez’s character – or his lack of it – lends credence to his confession Monday. A-Rod’s defining quality, beyond his physical ability, is that he can’t take the heat in any situation. He doesn’t just crumble in October (when he has one RBI in his last 58 at-bats in the postseason in that infernally scalding Yankee uniform).
“Just as he squirmed and overacted like a kid in his half-hour ESPN interview, he always wriggles when hot. Anything to escape pressure. Isn’t Rodriguez just the kind of person who might start cheating to protect himself from the scrutiny of a new $252 million contract in ’01?….
“Because he’s so ill at ease, except on a ballfield, and so desperately image conscious, Rodriguez also seems like the kind of guy who, when hit with a positive drug test in 2003, might be so scared of public exposure that he might really shy away from the juice….
“If we need more evidence that A-Rod is a personality type who avoids conflict and might back off the ‘roids if caught once, look at what he just did this week. His confession, as painful as it was, was his least hellish option. It gets him out of the constant daily fire of accusation and denial in the tabloid echo chamber.
“However, someday, A-Rod’s dream of a best-case scenario may come true. Someday it may be generally accepted that he only cheated for three years and only lied for eight. What a great guy, relatively speaking.
“If that time comes, Rodriguez may only be mildly detested by fans, not utterly shunned. Instead of staying sequestered in a gated community like Mark McGwire or facing trial like Bonds or awaiting a federal grand jury investigation like Clemens, Rodriguez may spend some of the last nine years of his Yankee contract just playing baseball.
“Oh, not this year. This season is going to be priceless. But after an ’09 of heckling, he may almost become a normal ballplayer. A normal fellow? He’s probably too egocentric and eccentric for that….
“Don’t believe Rodriguez just because he says so. Who’d be that ‘stupid and naïve’? This is the guy who said he and Madonna only studied ancient mystical religious texts together. Instead, the stats A-Rod worships may end up helping him. If Bonds has been incriminated by his own numbers for years, why can’t A-Rod gain credibility?
“In his three years in Texas, from 2001 to 2003, he averaged 52 homers vs. 39.2 everywhere else. The jump was even bigger when compared to his previous five superstar years in Seattle, when he averaged 36.8 homers.
“After hitting 42, 42 and 41 homers in his last three years in Seattle, he hit 52, then 57 in his first two years in Texas. Granted, the Ballpark is a launching pad. Rodriguez slugged .666 there in three years vs. .576 on the road. But that’s still worth only a few extra homers a year, not 12 or 15….
“(In) a year or five, Rodriguez may find himself in a place that Miguel Tejada* and Raffy Palmeiro, Bonds and Clemens, McGwire and Sammy Sosa can only envy. It’s a strange twilight limbo where some tormented public figures finally reside, their spirits partially at rest.
“Their celebrity sins are not forgotten. But because they tell something close enough to the truth to satisfy the world, their misdeeds recede to a distance so great that it is the next best thing to forgiveness.”
*Tejada, a perennial All-Star and 2002 AL MVP, pleaded guilty on Wednesday to lying before Congress about steroids.
Mike Wise / Washington Post
“Alex Rodriguez shouldn’t have to play the shame game alone. Expose them all, every last testosterone-infused baseball player wielding a bat or winding up for his delivery six years ago.
“Release every name on every bottle of steroid-tainted urine, because that’s the only way a complicit sport will ever have closure.
“We have to know everyone who cheated the game, or as many as we can. We have to know who stole untold millions and fame from their clean peers, who sullied baseball and who didn’t. To not do so would be to cheat the real victim of the performance-enhancing drug era in the game: the career minor leaguer, the real-life Crash Davis….
“Baseball…should release the names of every player who tested positive for a banned substance in 2003, if for no reason that it would clear the names of more than 600 major league players who refused to sully the game or themselves that year.
“The notion that a whole generation of players must have aspersions cast on their careers because a known number of their workforce at the time, in fact, did test positive is just plain wrong-headed.
“As much as the 2005 congressional hearings on baseball embarrassed union chief Donald Fehr and Commissioner Bud Selig to come up with more stringent testing, President Obama is right in suggesting Capitol Hill shift its focus to more pressing national matters.
“But if we have genuinely embarked on a new era of personal responsibility in this country, why not start with outing the people who morally and financially hijacked the grand old game? Why not go after the players so insecure about their own legacies or ability to stay in the game they had to seize the dream from others?….
“It’s not about meting out more justice and shame, so we can type ‘A-Roid’ and ‘A-R*d’ and continue to treat Alex Rodriguez and Barry Bonds and Mark McGwire like pariahs.
“No, it’s so we can clear the names of those who deserve to have everyone know they didn’t fall prey to cheating’s addictive lure, to the syringes, the pills and the millions they promised to bring.”
Sally Jenkins / Washington Post
“Putting athletes on trial for their performance-enhancement habits, or for lying about it, only creates a larger cycle of untruth. Performance-enhancing drugs are a culture issue, not a baseball, football or track issue. By chastising athletes for it, aren’t we really hindering our ability to get at the whole truth? And isn’t the larger, truer question whether the majority of the public even views ‘performance enhancement’ as particularly criminal?
“It’s a fundamental question, for instance, whether Major League Baseball has a larger performance-enhancement problem than Hollywood, and whether athletes use more artificial aids in the performance of their jobs than Sylvester Stallone. Congress’s public grandstanding against baseball has created the impression that it’s somehow worse than other leagues, or professions. But are pitchers and hitters bigger frauds than, say, politicians? A show of hands, please: How many people think Tejada is a worse liar than a member of Congress or a cigarette company executive? And while we’re asking questions, who cheated America more, Marion Jones or John Thain of Merrill Lynch?….
“(And) why are Tejada, Bonds and Clemens facing federal charges for lying, when tobacco company executives are not?….
“The public flogging of athletes and the forced extraction of their confessions is becoming a disgusting spectacle….
“Nor are these public confessions particularly persuasive, or useful. There is a rush to praise Rodriguez for being more candid than most athletes in his position. But it’s hard to see how his rehearsed admission will dissuade anyone from using performance-enhancing drugs. And how honest was he, really?….
“Maybe if athletes could be persuaded to talk more openly about performance-enhancing drugs, we’d make some headway against the larger problem. But real honesty is not what we’re getting. A-Rod was a lot of things in his tremulous interview, but perfectly frank was not one of them. Tejada’s cop of a plea is hardly illuminating, either. All of these legal proceedings inhibit honesty, rather than promote it. That’s too bad. We lecture athletes, and lash out at them, without ever getting at the problems. We should try listening to them.”
Mike Lupica / New York Daily News
“Alex Rodriguez is a constant load, sometimes double-wide. He is a load of home runs and RBI and slugging percentage and filling up a box score, a load of talent and poses and money and controversy and headlines and – now – of denial about what he’s done and the way he’s handled it. He certainly is a load to all Yankee fans who can’t root for their team without rooting for him. A-Load Rodriguez.
“Tuesday Joe Girardi talked about the tears he saw in Alex Rodriguez’s eyes during Monday’s interview – Rodriguez’s own form of ‘Celebrity Rehab’ – and how the tears showed him how much Rodriguez is hurting. He’s hurting, all right. Mostly it is because he got caught and has to go through the rest of his career, and it is going to be a long one at Yankee Stadium, as an admitted steroids user.
“On top of everything else, Rodriguez is a load of contradictions.
“When it suits him, he acts as if he has distanced himself from agent Scott Boras. Rodriguez did that when he figured out that the only real money for him after opting out the way he did during the 2007 World Series was with the Yankees. So he Yankeed everything up because it sounded good and looked good at the time, acted as if he and Warren Buffett handled the negotiation all by themselves. In this case, a load of total nonsense.
“But as soon as he gets hit by Sports Illustrated with his positive test for testosterone and Primobolan, he goes back to Boras on the dead run. He was supposed to be speaking from his heart Monday but really seemed to be channeling Boras and his other handlers instead. He even brought back the long-suffering ex-wife, Cynthia, as a supporting player in a drama that seemed to have everything except cue cards.
“And Rodriguez manages to get through the whole thing without uttering the word ‘steroids.’ He talks about ‘banned substances’ and ‘supplements.’ Never ‘steroids.’ Rodriguez apparently thought he could get over with this. And maybe, with some people, he did get over. Talking about dope and treating the rest of us like dopes.
“Laying out his own defense brief for his own Hall of Fame credentials, at the beginning of a trial that could last as long as 15 years. That part of it was absolutely brilliant, even if Rodriguez’s performance fell short, like a ball to the warning track.
“By the time his name is on the Hall of Fame ballot, in 2024 or 2025 – about the time poor Tom Hicks will make the last of his back-end payments on Rodriguez’s original contract with the Rangers – there will be a whole new generation of voters. Rodriguez was talking to them on Monday as much as anybody else, basically asking them to throw out what he did in Texas like it was this week’s recycling. Asking people at the same time to give him a fresh start on Opening Day. Why? Because he wants a fresh start, that’s why. And Rodriguez is used to getting what he wants by now….
“If there was one question you wanted him asked on Monday, it was this: ‘Have you ever used HGH?’ Just so the camera could see if that question got the same reaction that Katie Couric did little more than a year ago when she asked Rodriguez if he’d ever used steroids or performance-enhancing drugs….
“One bit of advice for Rodriguez: In Tampa [when training camp starts] he shouldn’t attack Selena Roberts of Sports Illustrated the way he did on Monday, as if somehow his problems are her fault. On a day when he said he was being accountable, that turned out to be the biggest load of all.”
“So lies the career, however neatly parsed for us, and the image of Alex Rodriguez. Even when he took a proper step forward, admitting on Monday that he was a drug cheat, the mirror he looked into was a fun-house mirror. Believe me now, he told us, while making belief difficult for people such as Tom Hicks.
“Hicks, the owner of the Texas Rangers, paid Rodriguez $150 million to play just three seasons in Texas and then go away. The Rangers finished in last place every year and Rodriguez admitted on Monday that he was dirty every year, pretty much assuring that this was the worst investment in sports history.
“Hicks made a similarly oversized personal investment in Rodriguez, befriending him and ceding to him strong influence on personnel matters. Of course, those times being what they were in baseball, those two discussed steroids, Hicks says, and Rodriguez didn’t just slough off the subject. According to Hicks, Rodriguez personally assured his good friend that he would never get involved in anything like that. It was, of course, not just a lie but a dramatic lie.
“ ‘I feel personally betrayed,’ Hicks said on a conference call Tuesday. ‘I feel deceived by Alex. He assured me that he had far too much respect for his own body to ever do that to himself….I certainly don’t believe that, if he’s now admitting that he started using when he came to the Texas Rangers, why should I believe that it didn’t start before he came to the Texas Rangers?’….
“(What ESPN’s Peter Gammons) missed…is that Rodriguez clearly never admitted to using steroids. His choice of words was Clinton-esque. He never wanted that sound bite in which he spoke the world ‘steroids’ to put in the time capsule – a manufacturing of the truth that created the clumsiness.
“So we got Rodriguez first telling us he used ‘a banned substance,’ then saying ‘I don’t know exactly what, um, substance I was guilty of using,’ and then going to the plural and saying, ‘I started experimenting with things that today are not legal.’ So what he is saying is that this fitness freak took something or some things for three years and didn’t know what they were, but even though he didn’t know what they were, he somehow knows that they were banned….
“The worst performance, by both Rodriguez and Gammons, was in the treatment of (Selena) Roberts. Rodriguez went out of his way to try to impugn Roberts – mostly with what Roberts has called ‘fabrications’ – in response to questions that had absolutely nothing to do with her reporting….Not once did Gammons follow up, letting attacks on a fellow journalist with a sterling reputation go unquestioned. Rodriguez was well advised to take the high road in making an admission, but he undermined that standing with a personal viciousness that took him off point.
“Rodriguez’s hope is that this managed interview will put his drug use in ‘a vault,’ he said, so he can move forward. It’s a nice sentiment, not just as it applies to him but also for the entire Steroid Era. We should hope it is true. It’s just not realistic, not when too many questions remain and the truth, like water from an aquifer, is relentless.”
“Alex Rodriguez claimed in his ESPN interview that the Sports Illustrated journalist who first reported the Yankee star had tested positive for steroids in 2003 had stalked him and was cited by the Miami Beach police for trying to break into his home as his daughters slept.
“But police departments from New York and Hoboken to Miami and Coral Gables say A-Rod never reported Selena Roberts’ alleged crimes to them….
“During the interview…on Monday, Rodriguez accused the SI columnist of stalking him and trying to break into his South Florida home.
“ ‘What makes me upset is that Sports Illustrated pays this lady, Selena Roberts, to stalk me,’ Rodriguez told Gammons. ‘This lady has been thrown out of my apartment in New York City. This lady has five days ago just been thrown out of the University of Miami police for trespassing. And four days ago she tried to break into my house where my girls are up there sleeping, and got cited by the Miami Beach police. I have the paper here.’
“A-Rod did not provide ‘the paper’ to Gammons. His agent, Scott Boras, did not return several calls inquiring about police reports that may have been filed by the Yankee third baseman.”
Roberts did try to gain access onto the island where A-Rod lives and Detective Juan Sanchez of the Miami Beach police said “they had no right to stop her. It’s a public right of way. She can stand in front of his house and do whatever she has to do as long as she doesn’t step on his property. There’s no follow-up. She was not arrested. She was not cited. It doesn’t go on her record. It’s not even entered into our system.”
Roberts said, “I never rang his doorbell. I never stepped on his driveway. I was never anywhere near his house.”
“Last week, hundreds of luminaries, including baseball Commissioner Bud Selig and Bill Clinton, gathered in Atlanta to celebrate (Hank) Aaron’s 75th birthday. While they partied Bonds was in a San Francisco courtroom pleading not guilty to perjury charges.
“Neither Aaron nor Selig addressed the topic of steroids. Retired CNN Chairman Tom Johnson did, albeit indirectly.
“ ‘You will always rank No. 1 in my record book, without an asterisk,’ Johnson told Aaron during a tribute. ‘Henry, you never disappointed us. Not once.’
“Let baseball’s best player think about that while perusing the (Sports Illustrated) swimsuit issue and being reminded that you can’t airbrush a reputation.”
USA TODAY surveyed 20 Hall of Fame voters to gauge whether they would vote for A-Rod after his admission.
I’ll have a bit more next Monday, and I’m sure the entire season as we follow the Yankees, but for now I’m disgusted with the way A-Rod treated Selena Roberts. Everyone, baseball fan or not, should be aware that this dirtball is getting away with murder, figuratively speaking, in alleging all manner of falsehoods against her. I hope he’s taken to court over this single matter.
I also believe that the Washington Post’s Mike Wise makes a brilliant point in that the scumbags like the Steroids 104 took away job opportunities from those seeking to play clean and by the rules.
Lastly, as I said would happen last time, Derek Jeter has already had his first mini-blow-up with the press. Watch this dynamic. It’s going to be a different sort of Bronx Zoo this summer.
–Hey, do you own any A-Rod memorabilia? As Matt Lysiak of the Daily News reports, Peter Siegel, owner of a midtown New York store selling such stuff said, “It’s amazing. A few days ago I was paying $200 for a signed [A-Rod] baseball and selling them on a regular basis for $325, but today I wouldn’t give anything for it.” Siegel added, “I can’t remember the last time I got a request for Bonds or Clemens. A-Rod is headed for the same fate.”
Brad K., your collection of legitimate greats only grows in value…at least in the next economic up cycle, that is.
–The Mets are in the news for all the wrong reasons. Ex-Mets, that is. Darryl Strawberry has a new book coming out in April, “Straw: Finding My Way,” wherein he describes the 1986 Mets thusly.
“We were the boys of summer. The drunk, speed-freak, sneaking-a-smoke boys of summer. [An] infamous rolling frat party…drinking, drugs, fights, gambling, groupies.”
Beer “was the foundation of our alcoholic lifestyle. We hauled around more Bud than the Clydesdales. The beer was just to get the party started and maybe take the edge off the speed and coke.”
The team’s mantra on the road, Straw writes, was to “tear up your best bars and nightclubs and take your finest women…The only hard part for us was choosing which hottie to take back to our hotel room. Lots of times you…picked two or three.”
Yup, as reported on the New York Post’s Page Six, the Mets picked out girls from the stands for quickies. The Post: “He once watched a pitcher march a frisky fan to a private room for oral sex: ‘I was jealous. When I saw her heading back to her seat, I gave her a sign. She smiled, turned right back around, and met me in that same little room….I had to be quick and run back out on the field.’”
Good gawd. I don’t think Straw will be doing too many stints in the booth with Keith Hernandez and Ron Darling as he did last season.
–And then there is a report in Wednesday’s Daily News that “Baseball great Roberto Alomar has full-blown AIDS but insisted on having unprotected sex, his ex-girlfriend charged Tuesday in a bombshell lawsuit.
“The shocking claim was leveled by Ilya Dall, 31, who said she lived with the ex-Met for three years and watched in horror as his health worsened.”
According to Ms. Dall, he tested positive in January 2006. Alomar retired from baseball for health reasons in 2005. Robbie hasn’t said anything in response to the suit as yet.
—College Basketball [posted before Carolina-Duke contest on Wednesday]
7. Wake Forest…lost to NC State as freefall continues
9. Michigan State
10. Marquette…lost Tues. to No. 13 Villanova
15. Butler…thought they would have dropped more
21. Utah State
2. Oklahoma…pretty remarkable No. 1 and 2 the same for both
23. South Dakota State
Interesting sidelight on the coming NCAA hoops tournament. The economy is impacting the budget with some athletic programs so sending clubs far out of their home region will be costly, but the NCAA will not violate the integrity of the process. Plus, there are only so many teams that would qualify out West to stay in the region, and too many in the East and South not to have some have to travel to the West.
–Edwin M. Yoder Jr., had the following comment in a piece on Abraham Lincoln for The Weekly Standard.
“He was so persuasive when putting pen to paper that he outclassed all other noted public rhetors in our past – even Jefferson, even Madison, even Hamilton.
“The ultimate proof lies in his two great inaugural addresses, and to my taste, the subtle letters he dispatched to military commanders obsessed with their own importance and foolishly blind to his.
“Who can forget his laconic note to Gen. George McClellan when, in October 1862, the dilatory Union commander complained that his horses were too few and too tired?
‘I have just read your dispatch about sore-tongued and fatigued horses. Will you pardon me for asking what the horses of your army have done since the battle of Antietam that fatigues anything?\’
“And this, a few months later, to McClellan’s overconfident successor, General Hooker:
‘I have heard, in such a way as to believe it, of your recently saying that both the army and the government need a dictator. Of course it was not for this, but in spite of it, that I have given you the command. Only those generals who gain successes can set up dictators. What I now ask of you is military success and I will risk the dictatorship.’
“[Hooker is mainly remembered today as the boastful general who was utterly routed by Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson at Chancellorsville a few months later.]”
And in looking through the book “History in Quotations,” by M.J. Cohen and John Major, some oldies but goodies:
“Don’t duck! They couldn’t hit an elephant at this dis…”
–General John Sedgwick, last words before being shot by a Confederate sniper at the Battle of Spotsylvania, May 9, 1864.
–General William Tecumseh Sherman, on hearing that three war correspondents had been killed by artillery fire.
“Let me know what brand of whiskey Grant uses. For if it makes fighting generals like Grant, I should like to get some of it for distribution.”
–President Abraham Lincoln; after critics told Lincoln Grant had a reputation for hard drinking.
–Remember J.P. Hayes, the PGA Tour golfer who disqualified himself from the second-stage of Q-School last fall for inadvertently playing an illegal ball, though no one else would have ever known? So far he has been invited to play in at least five PGA Tour events that he might not have otherwise as a non-exempt player. Hayes tees it up at Pebble this weekend and four others gave him unsolicited invites. Go J.P.! [Larry Dorman / New York Times]
—SHARK! It’s been an awful time Down Under, what with the tragic bush fires, and then the other day Navy diver Paul Degelder was attacked by a shark in Sydney Harbor.
“The 31-year-old, of the Royal Australian Navy, was taking part in an underwater counter-terrorism trial” when a hand and part of his leg were bitten off. He is in intensive care but stable condition, at last report.
The Aussie Fleet Commander said it was the first time he’d heard of a navy diver being injured in an incident like this.
The diver punched the shark and it swam off but the damage was done. Experts say it was a bull shark, the most dangerous known to inhabit the Harbor and a maneater. Remember when they held the triathlon swimming portion in the Harbor at the Sydney Games and we were led to believe there weren’t any sharks at the time?
—CROC! And, sadly, the other day “A five-year-old boy is feared to have been snatched by a crocodile in floodwaters in northern Australia.
“ ‘The boy was walking with his seven-year-old brother and dog earlier this morning when he followed his dog into floodwaters,’ police said in a statement. ‘He disappeared in the water and his brother saw a large crocodile in the vicinity of his disappearance.’” [London Times]
Ironically, the boy’s parents operate a river tour and crocodile spotting company and police said the parents do not want the crocodile harmed if it’s found.
Needless to say, the 7-year-old brother is in a state of shock. Another report said “100 resident mature-age crocodiles in the Daintree River system were ‘hungry, aggressive and on the move.’” [It’s not a time for attempted humor on top of this. We wish the Aussies well in dealing with all the tragedies there this week.]
–On a somewhat lighter note, a team of BBC aerial photographers has filmed a pod of narwhals (the Arctic unicorns) in the Arctic sea, perhaps the first footage of its kind. Even though there are supposedly thousands of these fascinating creatures, they aren’t the easiest things to find. As a cameraman said, “we were all just completely gobsmacked when we saw them.” The appendage alone can reach 7-feet.
–Skier Lindsey Vonn had tendon surgery on her right thumb after cutting it on a champagne bottle and could miss Thursday’s giant slalom at the world championships.
–Mel Kaufman, the linebacker who appeared on two Super Bowl champion teams for Washington in 1983 and 1988, passed away. He was only 50 and died at home. An autopsy was scheduled.
—Jennifer Aniston turned 40 on Wednesday. You go, girl!
–And we congratulate Tiger Woods and his wife Elin on the birth of their second child, Charlie Axel Woods. We also thank Tiger and Elin for giving both children, the other being Sam Alexis, normal first names.
–When I wrote my Grammy comments the other day, it was late Sunday night and I didn’t know the details of the Rihanna / Chris Brown incident that in all probability spells the end of Brown’s career. Evidently, it started Friday night at a pre-Grammy party, and then escalated at another event at Clive Davis’ home on Saturday night.
Brown was miffed at Rihanna for her spending time with Timbaland, and then Rihanna got upset when she saw a text Chris received from a young woman. “He got a booty call,” a source told the New York Daily News.
Both Brown and Rihanna were to perform at the Grammys, but if you saw the telecast, as I did, give it up for Al Green and Justin Timberlake, who just hours before the show went on were told they were being pressed into action. Their act was a highlight, and Justin continues to rise in my book.
Top 3 songs for the week 2/13/82: #1 “Centerfold” (The J. Geils Band) #2 “I Can’t Go For That (No Can Do)” (Daryl Hall & John Oates) #3 “Harden My Heart” (Quarterflash)…and…#4 “Open Arms” (Journey) #5 “Turn Your Love Around” (George Benson) #6 “Shake It Up” (The Cars) #7 “The Sweetest Thing” (Juice Newton) #8 “Physical” (Olivia Newton-John) #9 “Waiting For A Girl Like You” (Foreigner) #10 “Sweet Dreams” (Air Supply)
NCAA Basketball Quiz Answers: 1) Three to lead the nation while scoring 40+ ppg. Frank Selvy, Furman, 41.7 (1954); Pete Maravich, LSU, 43.8, 44.2, 44.5 (1968-70); Johnny Neumann, Ole Miss, 40.1 (1971). 2) Last Big East player to lead the nation: Jimmy Walker, Providence, 30.4 (1967).
