The Oscars are nearly here, which means two things:
1. Rob Schneider will, criminally, once again go home empty-handed.
2. Someone is preparing to face the cameras and admit it was "an honor just to be nominated," even though the rest of their night will be spent drowning their sorrows with complimentary cocktails at the Vanity Fair party and complimentary tranquilizers from Dennis Hopper.
I watched the USA men's Olympic hockey team play its games in Torino last week. It won once, lost four times, and tied Latvia, which I'll be man enough to admit I couldn't find on a map if you spotted me the longitude and latitude.
But one look at the U.S. men's team roster, and the only thing I can say is that it was an honor just to make the medal round.
If you thought this team could win gold, it might be time to slowly remove that DVD copy of "Miracle" you've been playing on a continuous loop for the last three months and get some fresh air. If you had visions of silver, I'd look into corrective eye surgery. Even the bronze would have been a stretch, if only because the rest of the teams vying for glory in these Games were just so much better than the Americans, from the crease to the center men.
I'm a realist. Others have killed Team USA for its lackluster effort. ESPN blared the headline "Debacle on Ice" after its loss in the medal round quarterfinals to Finland. Dan Wetzel of Yahoo! Sports (more on him later) wrote that, "there was never a sense of urgency here. Never a bit of hunger. Team USA, with 23 roster spots filled with 23 NHL players (a number matched only by Canada) spent too much time pointing fingers, worrying about management slights and playing time, never pressing, barely caring."
Syndicated columnist Bernie Lincicome juxtaposed Sasha Cohen's success with the hockey team's failure: "Little Sasha on her flashing blades would replace the sour apathy of the U.S. hockey lugs who did not want to be here and did not want to make their own plane reservations to be here and played hockey as if they flew tourist with crying babies on each side of them."
(I will now point out, yet again, that Lincicome once suggested that the New York Jets change their name after the 9/11 terror attacks; because I made a personal promise to spotlight one of the single most idiotic notions in the history of sports journalism every time this man's name appears in my column. So there you go.)
In 1998, the U.S. flopped with NHL players in Nagano and trashed a hotel. In 2006, the U.S. again didn't medal and center Mike Modano trashed his coach, the management, and the fact that American players were distracted because they had to book their own flights, hotels and tickets. (I'd say someone who makes what Modano makes should be able to afford an assistant, but with his track record of investments, who knows what his bank account looks like.)
Modano's hissy fit — which his teammates pathetically passed the buck on during the team's final meeting on Thursday — will unfortunately paint this year's Olympic hockey squad with a broad prima donna brush. Instead of being remembered as a hard-working team that just didn't have the weaponry to compete in Torino, these Americans are now just as ugly as Bode Miller and the snowboarder who thought she was competing inside a PlayStation game and cost herself a gold medal.
In reality, American hockey is in a generational flux. General Manager Don Waddell and the USA Hockey brain trust were in a difficult spot. Their best prospects — forward Phil Kessel, center Zach Parise, winger Bobby Ryan, defenseman Paul Martin, and goalie Ryan Miller — were deemed too inexperienced to be effective in the tournament. Their veteran offensive stars — Modano, Doug Weight, Bill Guerin, and Keith Tkachuk - are on the sunset sides of their careers, while the rest of the forwards aren't exactly the kinds of players who strike fear in the hearts of opposing penalty killing units. The defense would have been extremely green had it not been for Chris Chelios, Mathieu Schneider, Derian Hatcher, and Brett Hedican, but only two of the four had impressive overall tournaments.
The team's biggest flaw remained between the pipes. Throughout the tournament, other teams had a stopper in goal that could change a game by standing on his head — hell, even Italy and Latvia had one. Rick DiPietro didn't have a bad tournament (2.28 GAA), but he didn't steal a game. Robert Esche and John Grahame wouldn't have been an improvement, either.
Modano did have one good point: USA Hockey needs new blood. The Americans will get a transfusion heading into the 2010 Games in Vancouver, with players like Modano, Weight, and Tkachuk out of the picture. (We should be thankful Tkuchuk was only a minus-5 on the score sheet and a plus-3 in the waistline after two weeks in Italy.) Perhaps getting some of the team's rising stars a few games in 2006 will make all the difference in 2010.
Coming home without a medal hurts. But any hockey realist knew in his heart that it was a probability, and had 2010 already circled on the calendar.
You want real hurt?
Ask Canada what that's like.
All Wetzel
Kurt Cobain once wrote, "Teenage angst has paid off well; now I'm bored and old."
Allow me to paraphrase: "Sport or not-a-sport debates have paid off well; now I'm just bored with them."
Yes, this is coming from the same sports columnist who once provided all the evidence he could for an award-winning piece called "Golf is Not a Sport" for The Connection Newspapers a few years ago. And yes, I've been known to fire up a NASCAR fan now and again by questioning the athletic achievement of what amounts to a glorified Go-Kart race. I even presented an argument for why playing Pac-Man could be considered a sport in a column last year.
So call me a hypocrite, call me what you will, but these debates have become simply tedious and quite inane. You think race car drivers aren't athletes? Fine, but be consistent about it: if what they do isn't athletic, then neither is what a horse jockey does. It's all about using your strength and stamina to control a beast much stronger than the "athlete" is.
If you want to consider golf a sport, fine — just don't be so quick to dismiss billiards as "a skill" when the only thing that separates the two are a few long walks and 12 holes.
The bottom line for anyone who will dabble in these pathetically pointless debates is to just be consistent. Stick to your guns. Don't back down if the establishment is contrary to what you believe to be true. If you really, truly think a sport is illegitimately labeled, don't be afraid to state your case and make it stick.
Take Dan Wetzel, a columnist for Yahoo! Sports. He's in Torino covering the Winter Games, and he wrote the obligatory "figure skating is not a sport" feature this week. (Obligatory in the sense that Wetzel has a penis, and therefore must fight against his urges to enjoy a sport that produced both the Ice Capades and Brian Boitano.) In it, he wrote:
"But figure skating is a competition, not a sport, and it has nothing to do with how difficult or entertaining it is. It is simply a matter of how the winner is determined. It is the same for gymnastics, diving, beauty pageants, or anything that chooses a champion solely by human judging.
A sport needs to have a quantifiable way to determine a winner and a loser. There can be no debate about the scoring system. A ball must go into a goal or through a hoop; a runner must reach home or finish before the others. The winners run faster, jump higher, score more."
(At this point I might point out that every sport, at its core, is a series of human judgments that determine everything from the validity of a scoring play — ask the Seahawks about that — to the fate of every single player who comes to home plate. But like I said, I'm done with these debates.)
Of course, the premise of Wetzel's argument is completely bogus. Here's what a sport is, from dictionary.com:
Sport: n. An activity involving physical exertion and skill that is governed by a set of rules or customs and often undertaken competitively.
Figure skating fits the bill just as much as the hammer-throw and curling, doesn't it?
Wetzel later lamely defends another famous "judged" sport called "boxing" by claiming that since one fighter can knock out the other, it brings a ruling-less finality and therefore is a sport. "The judges are only used when the fight has gone on so long that it has to be stopped for the safety of the competitors," wrote Wetzel.
Two points:
1. The "safety of the competitors?" Try for "the friendly confines of television," which used safety as a rallying cry to shorten bouts by three rounds back in the late 1980s.
2. Is he claiming the mere possibility of a knockout makes boxing a sport? Do bouts that go to the scoreboards get demoted to competition-status? And what about figure skaters who fall and then can't get back up — are their truncated routines more of a sport than others that the judges decide?
Whatever you think of Wetzel's premise, it's ballsy to take a stand like this when you're a national columnist who actually has to cover an event you just knocked down to exhibition status. I actually anticipated Wetzel's next few pieces on Olympic figure skating — instead, I found this, about Sasha Cohen, two days after his figure skating hit piece:
"She knows it is now or never for Olympic gold. She knows this is her prime. Her sport doesn't take aging well, her right thigh was wrapped with an ice pack immediately after the race..."
Yep. "Her sport." I wonder how the judges would rule on that 180-degree spin?
One More Thing
So Bryant Gumbel doesn't want to watch the Winter Olympics because there aren't enough African-American athletes competing?
Maybe he's a got a point. Perhaps his time would be better spent watching his own station, HBO. There are plenty of blacks on HBO. You've got black actors playing criminals on "OZ," black actors playing criminals on "The Wire," black actors playing criminals on "The Sopranos," black pimps selling black ho's on "America Undercover," and ... well, I lost count.
But obviously those would be better role models than, say, Jarome Iginla.
Greg Wyshynski is the Features Editor for SportsFan Magazine in Washington, DC, and the Senior Sports Editor for The Connection Newspapers of Northern Virginia. His book "Glow Pucks and 10-Cent Beer: The 101 Worst Ideas in Sports History" will be published in spring 2006. His columns appear every Saturday on Sports Central. You can e-mail Greg at [email protected].
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