Today's Wally

There is a lot of stuff going on in sports nowadays. Phil Mickelson blew the U.S. Open golf tournament with a choke job for the ages. The Dallas Mavericks performed the equivalent by gagging away the NBA Finals despite a 2-0 head start, a huge lead in Game 3, and with the final two games on their home floor. Most impressive.

Over in baseball, Ozzie Guillen just got fined and ordered to sensitivity training after using a slur to accuse Jay Mariotti of the Chicago Sun-Times of being a homosexual. The College World Series started last night. The St. Louis Cardinals, despite having the advantage of being managed by a Certified Baseball Genius and despite the return of Albert (editorial note: The original version of this referred to Pujols as Alex. This is proof of what can happen when you get in a hurry. My bad. Mea culpa.) Pujols have lost something like 6 straight games.

Wimbledon begins next week. Andre Agassi announced that he will hang up his racquet after the U.S Open in August. What an impact he has had on the game. I wonder how history will judge him? The high school all star games were played last Friday night. It sounds like it was a good chance to get a look at some future Razorbacks. The NBA draft is next week. Wonder where Ronnie Brewer will wind up? Wonder how many European players will be drafted in the first round? Wonder where Larry Brown will pop up next now that he has been canned by the Knicks, who by the way, make the Saints appear well run.

You would think that all of this activity would provide ample fodder for the reasonably curious and thoughtful sports writer. Judging from the sports page of today's Arkansas Democrat-Gazette you would be wrong. Instead of writing an actual sports column, Wally Hall wrote today about some poor family who evidently got snookered by a home builder " from north of here."

Now I am sorry that these poor folks got sideways with their builder and have been forced to go to court. But the only connection this story has with sports in general is the apparent fact that the aggrieved family are such big Razorback fans that they had a Razorback emblem molded into the floor at the entrance of what was to be their "sport's room." That's it.

But then again, I guess it is easier for Wally to hack out a maudlin column about people that he probably heard about for the first time over at Corky's or at the Busch Classic softball tournament than it is to actually write a thoughtful piece about any of the million interesting things going on in the sport's world nowadays.

That would be too much like work, I suppose.