Back to the Toy Store

It has been a hectic 10 days here at TMFW. Quite frankly, I am tired. So let's do something simple just to get something up here and let people know that I am still alive.

So, let's return to the Toy Store! Let's bitch about sports!

1) The NBA! As many of you may know, the NBA Finals are upon us. Which means that the conspiracy theorists that follow the sport, and their name is Legion, will be on the 'Net and the talk shows claiming that the games are fixed, pretty much by the edict of NBA commissioner David Stern.

The most recent example of this thinking comes from the irrepressible Rasheed Wallace of the Detroit Pistons, who after they lost game 5 in the Eastern Conference Finals to the Miami Heat claimed, "They (the league) wants there to be a Game 7." This extemporaneous opinion cost Rasheed $20,000.

Forget Rasheed. He is a lunatic. And lest you think TMFW be hatin' on Rasheed, let us examine the record. He set the NBA record for ejections from games when he was with that roving jail break known as the Portland TrailBlazers. This should come as no surprise when you consider that 'Sheed may be the only player to have ever gotten tossed in McDonald's All-American game when in high school for Christ's sake. You could look it up. Indeed, an NBA scout once said of Rasheed, "Portland's biggest problem is that Rasheed Wallace isn't their biggest problem." Whoa! So let's forget Rasheed.

One of the reasons that conspiracy buffs find it easy to believe that games can be fixed is that, well, basketball is one of the few team sports in the modern era where games have indeed been fixed. You had the scandal at CCNY in the early fifties. Former NBA superstar Connie Hawkins took money from gamblers while in college. More recently gamblers got to players at Boston College and Tulane in the eighties. (As an aside, despite being bribed to shave points, Tulane's Green Wave always played it straight against Louisville because they hated them so much. Ya gotta love those idealistic college kids.) And Eddie Sutton, back when his paranoia was in full flower at Arkansas and Kentucky, would sometimes refer reporters to the power ratings and the point spread in the newspaper after a close loss as proof that the game was rigged from the opening tip.

Look, the common denominator in all of these scandals is criminal activity. It would not surprise me at all if the NBA would like each series to go the full seven games to milk the maximum advertising revenue out the event. But if you actually believe that David Stern could possibly orchestrate a conspiracy between the league and the refs to favor one team over another and to keep it a secret, well, you need to stick with Intelligent Design, the Homosexual Agenda and the DaVinci Code. You would be better off and your time would be better spent. Conspiracy theories thrive in the Petri dish of the unprovable. Thinking that the NBA is fixed is just stupid.

2) Wally! On June 7, Wally Hall wrote a typical discursive ( the unkind might say rambling and incoherent) piece in which he opined that Susie Gardner, the coach of the women's basketball team at Arkansas, might be in Frank Broyles' cross-hairs after a couple of mediocre seasons. On June 8, he was back pedalling at warp speed.

In a piece entitled " Observation of power not meant to be offensive", Wally wrote that his suggestion that Frank Broyles is running the Athletic Department up there was not meant to be a knock on Bev Lewis who is the Women's AD. He even apologized in print to her for suggesting that she would allow Broyles would to intrude upon her turf.

What has Wally been smokin'? Frank Broyles is practically omnipotent. He could have Mike Huckabee fired if he wanted to. But Broyles is nothing if not politic.

Here is how it would work:

Rinnnnnng!

" Bev Lewis."

" Bev, this heah is Frank. I want you to fiyuh Susie. Call yah press conference at 2 this aftuhnoon. I'll be on a flight to Augusta by then."

" Ok. Cool. Who do you want me to replace her with?"

" I'll have to get back to you. Aftuh all that shit with Nolan, the lawyuhs say it needs to be a black woman who is over 40. Meanwhile, I gotta call in to Pat Fostah. Bye now, heah?"

But is really interesting is the first sentence of the piece wherein Wally writes, " As soon as I read it, I knew it hadn't worked."

Didn't work? I thought journalism was supposed to be fair, accurate, thought-provoking even incendiary. It's not suppose to work. And if he knew it didn't work as soon as he read it WHY RUN THE PIECE?

This is just another example of what we at TMFW have always maintained about Wally: that he pretty much writes the first thing that flies into his head which for some reason is allowed to grace the front page of the sports section of the State's largest paper without having been first scrutinized by an actual journalist-editor.

We do not know this, but we suspect that somebody up on the Hill called and bitched and Wally retracted so as to not offend.

God forbid we ever do that on the sports page. Especially in a column entitled "Like it Is."