June 2008 Archives

Tonight's oddity at Dodger Stadium, where the Dodgers didn't get a hit but beat the Angels 1-0, will have baseball fans reminiscing about the no-hitters they've seen. Tell us about your no-hitters. Use the "Comments" button.

Though I've covered and attended hundreds of major-league games, I haven't witnessed a no-hitter in person. But for a few months many years ago, I had. Maybe that needs some explanation.

A lot of columnists, commentators and Congressmen are taking an interest these days in horse racing's problems with breakdowns and drugs. To them I say: Welcome to the wake. What took you so long?

As someone who covered racing full- and part-time for 16 years, I'm happy to see non-racing writers on the case, but I'm ticked off by the suggestion that some kind of shameful secret has been exposed. Shameful, maybe. Secret, hardly.

In my very first week on the racing beat in January 1991, I covered hearings into the detection of cocaine in horses in the care of 15 mostly prominent California thoroughbred, harness and quarterhorse trainers. In one of my last horse-racing columns in early 2007, I wrote about some of the sport's leaders trying to crack down on steroids. In between my byline appeared over probably hundreds of stories about equine drugs -- the Daily News online archive shows 107 horse-with the word "medication," 38 with the word "Clenbuterol," 19 with the word "morphine," etc.

Stories about allegations of illegal -- or at least controversial -- medication use in racehorses were in the paper all the time.

It's no use trying to impose your own nostalgia on other people. For instance: There will never be another Nolan Ryan. But if the kids like John Lackey, you can't stop 'em.

I thought of this over the weekend after going not to a game but to a movie: "Get Smart," which I felt I had to see, despite the bad reviews, because I loved the TV show.

Comparing everything about the Steve Carell version to the Don Adams TV original, I was disappointed. The moviemakers wrecked the overarching jokes, beginning with making this Maxwell Smart a not-too-bumbling secret agent. They managed to make the old catchphrases unfunny -- though the "Would you believe ...?" bit produced a good laugh.

As for the rest of the people in the sold-out theater, they got a kick out of it. They laughed throughout, if not at the same things the TV audience used to. Most clapped at the end.

Most of them were too young to have watched every "Get Smart" episode 20 times as I have. I'd have told them they don't know what they're missing. But they were having too good with what they were seeing.

You know all these stories in newspapers and on TV about how Tiger Woods' injury will affect golf's popularity? I haven't read a single one of them. Please tell me if I'm missing anything.

Let me guess: Many people like to watch Tiger Woods play golf. If Tiger doesn't play, fewer people will watch golf. Period.

As a newspaper editor and writer who has to decide what to cover, I can't ignore signs that this or that sport is getting more or less of a following. But as a fan, I don't give a damn what everybody else is watching, or whether network executives are happy with the NBA Finals matchup, or whether Big Brown's rise and fall will cause more or fewer people to bet on horse races.

Arash Markazi of Sports Illustrated's Web site expands on something we talked about here last week -- looking back at how reporters on the scene saw Lakers-Spurs playoff game 6 in 2002, the game that disgraced referee Tim Donaghy now claims was manipulated by the officials. Nice job by Arash, and I say that not just because he interviewed me and the Daily News' Vinny Bonsignore. Read the si.com article by clicking here.

Some commentators are calling Tiger Woods' U.S. Open victory his greatest triumph because he did it in a tough playoff despite pain from a recently operated-on knee. They're saying it's greater than his 12-stroke victory in the 1997 Masters or his 15-stroke win in the 2000 U.S. Open. This leads me to a simple question for you.

It was announced this morning that Staples Center will no longer be open for fans to watch the Lakers-Celtics games on TV from Boston. This is a response to the fights in the stands (much viewed on YouTube and much blogged-on) during game 2 on June 8. A press release from Staples Center and the Lakers said the decision was made "after meeting with law enforcement and city representatives" and cited "concerns for resources needed to ensure the safety of fans throughout Los Angeles on (game) nights." What do you make of all this? What does it say about L.A. fans? Click the "Comments" button and sound off.

With the Lakers' collapse against the Celtics Thursday in mind, I've tried in my column for Saturday to list and rank all of the really painful disappointments in L.A. sports' recent history. If I've succeeded, it's because L.A. really has suffered relatively few crushing heartbreaks. Listing all of the really thrilling successes, now that would be impossible.

Look at the column, then share your opinion ...

Maybe that headline will satisfy the Celtics faithful.

Now that Boston has indeed shown itself to be the better team in the NBA Finals, blogger Eric Wilbur (click here) of the Boston Globe takes the opportunity to rib me for a pre-series column (click here) saying these Celtics aren't the intimidating "natural-born winners" that the 1960s and '80s Celtics were.

Wilbur writes: "Think the man [me] wants a re-do?"

No, thanks.

In the wake of the Lakers' collapse against the Celtics Thursday night, we're making a list of the most historic cases of Southern California teams snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. Send your suggestions in a comment. What's the most painful memory? Dodgers beaten by Jack Clark -- or Joe Morgan, or Reggie Jackson? Angels stunned by Dave Henderson? Rams losing the Mud Bowl game to the Vikings? Kings tripped up by Marty McSorley's illegal stick? USC falling to Vince Young and Texas? An earlier Lakers loss to the Celtics? Or something else? With your help, we'll have the definitive list in Saturday's papers and at this Web site.

Disgraced former NBA referee Tim Donaghy's allegation that refs conspired to extend the 2002 Lakers-Sacramento Kings playoff series to game 7 has sent reporters to their clip files to see what we wrote about the series as it developed. In the Daily News, coverage of the crucial game 6 at Staples Center consisted of 10 stories and columns, and the officiating was addressed in four of those. And my column on the morning of game 7 in Sacramento was a sarcastic rant against the "aggressive" and "creative" officiating in that epic Western Conference finals.

Yes, everybody was talking about the refereeing after the Kings got most of the calls in game 5 and the Lakers got the edge in game 6. Of course, the fact we all noted the inconsistency hardly proves Donaghy's claim made in court papers as he awaits sentencing for taking cash from gamblers and betting on NBA games. It could be that Donaghy, desperate to "cooperate" with authorities, simply searched recent NBA history for events in which game-fixing allegations would seem at all plausible.

Still, it's interesting to look back at how that series was viewed at the time.

The Lakers won game 6 by a 106-102 score on May 31, 2002, shooting 27 free throws in the fourth quarter.

Daily News Lakers beat writer Howard Beck's game story said the Lakers "got the calls they needed" and quoted Kings coach Rick Adelman saying "they got the game called the way they wanted it to get called."

Vinny Bonsignore's sidebar from the Kings locker room had Vlade Divac insinuating that (as Vinny put it) "the Kings never were meant to win game 6" and Divac "wondering whether things might have been settled before the teams took the court."

Columnist Steve Dilbeck referred to the Lakers' earlier complaints of pro-Kings officiating and said they "happily saw the whistles blow very much the other way."

I wrote that Shaquille O'Neal's improved performance was "a case of the officiating making the difference everybody knows it makes for O'Neal."

My column the day after that had a tone more of ridicule than accusation. It shows how much the talk of the officials dominated that otherwise great series. Here's that column, published June 2, 2002 ...

My Wednesday column was written from the Lakers-Celtics game. Steve Dilbeck and I huddled quickly at the end of the game, making sure we weren't writing the same angle, and it turned out we had ideas that complemented each other in a good-cop bad-cop kind of way. I wrote that the Lakers displayed the toughness to win despite not playing their best, while Steve wrote that they're still in trouble unless they play better than this.

My column follows ...

In our effort to cover sports in a lot of different ways, we've added a 14th sports blog at dailynews.com.

The difference in this one will be obvious right away: It's written in Spanish.

Take a shortcut to the new blog, Deportes Daily News, by clicking here.

Marc Berman, who covers the Knicks for the New York Post, observes in his Knicks blog that sportswriters in Boston's two major newspapers were unanimous in picking the Celtics to beat the Lakers. This is unremarkable, since writers do tend to hear more from the hometown team and often are swayed by its optimism.

But this should make us all appreciate our own columnist Steve Dilbeck and the steely objectivity he displayed in his NBA Finals prediction column. Dilbeck picked the Celtics to win, even though that's not what most readers here wanted to hear.

Read on for Berman's complete blog item.

What's disappointing about today's Belmont Stakes is not that Big Brown lost but that he didn't run his race. We might never know exactly why he didn't. We'll definitely never know what would have happened if he did.

Of the 11 hopefuls to come up short in the Belmont during this 30-year Triple Crown drought, Big Brown is the only one to lay an egg like this without an apparent hard-luck excuse -- something like Spectacular Bid's safety-pin mishap or War Emblem's stumbling start.

As the ABC-TV commentators speculated that the well-documented left-front-foot trouble had been worse than the trainer Rick Dutrow let on, I thought of a 1971 Sports Illustrated cover headline: "CANONERO SHOULD NOT HAVE RUN."

Even if the horse racing gods don't stop Big Brown's slightly sleazy owners and trainer from winning the Triple Crown, a more earthly obstacle might get in the way of the Belmont Stakes favorite.

Namely, the extra quarter-mile of soil that makes the Belmont a wholly different challenge than the Kentucky Derby. I covered too many failed Triple Crown bids -- five in my years as a racing writer -- to think Big Brown is going to have it easy. I saw too many horses look like Triple Crown winners as they turned into the long homestretch to think Saturday's race will be over before it's over, let alone before it's begun as trainer Rick Dutrow has boasted.

I looked up the postmortem I wrote after the 2004 Belmont, in which Triple Crown hopeful Smarty Jones led but was passed by Birdstone. ...

I didn't hear it myself, but the Daily News' Vinny Bonsignore says ESPN radio talk-show host Colin Cowherd complained today that NBA Finals games start too late. Yet another example of ESPN's eastern-time-zone bias.

Now, if you're really feeling creative, pretend you were a sportswriter covering the game, and tell everybody what your lead would have been. Just a paragraph or two. Use the Comments section.

We're as ready as the Lakers and Celtics are for the Lakers and Celtics to tip off tonight. Here in the sports department, we've been gameplanning for the NBA Finals for a couple of weeks now.

You'll begin to see the results in eight pages of series preview material wrapping around the sports section in today's paper, followed by four pages of coverage wrapping around the sports section in the paper following each game. We've scheduled more in between, including news- and features-section stories to appeal to non-basketball fans, keepsakes and surprises.

Look for more Lakers posters in the next two Sundays' papers: this week, a poster honoring Lakers all-time greats, and next week, a celebration of this year's Lakers team.

A couple of thoughts ...

One in an occasional series about the people behind the Los Angeles Newspaper Group's sports bylines:

When Elliott Teaford began his first season on the Lakers beat for the Los Angeles Newspaper Group, he had no idea it would still be going and hitting its dramatic peak here in June. Teaford, 46, who was born in Milwaukee and grew up in Philadelphia, has spent his entire sportswriting career in Southern California and has covered high school sports, major-league baseball and hockey as well as basketball. But he says none of those experiences matched this one, on which he been on the scene practically every day watching the Lakers rise from the controversy of last summer to the NBA Finals that open Thursday in Boston. Elliott is used to asking the questions, not answering them. But he had some interesting thoughts when I posed some questions to him on-line ...

My Wednesday column is about how these Boston Celtics aren't the Celtics we're used to. How in fact nothing about the upcoming Lakers-Celtics series is as it was in the 1960s and '80s. And what that means for what we're going to see starting Thursday night. Read on. Then tell me what you think.

The poll is still open if you'd like to weigh in on what's most significant about the Lakers-Celtics NBA Finals. Click here to vote.

My vote? I say the most significant thing -- especially in the long run -- is either Phil Jackson's shot at his 10th NBA championship or Kobe Bryant's attempt to win a title without Shaquille O'Neal.

Hiroki Kuroda has been the Dodgers' most consistently effective starting pitcher this season, and it's little fault of the Japanese right-hander that his record is only 2-4 going into tonight's start against the New York Mets.

Never mind what an L.A. Times stats box this morning seems to suggest.