WHEREFORE ART THOU KOBE?

    There was a time, about five years ago, when you’d almost rather watch an NBA playoff game than, say, a game from week 3 of the NFL preseason. April was actually a marginally exciting time in sports back then. There are some historians who will even claim that there were people who had real rooting interests in certain teams in those days. Michael Jordan did not yet have a mustache, and we were not yet sick to realize we missed even that. Dose were good times, all right. And they’re long past. Charles Barkley said it all about today’s NBA. “It sucks now. It’s the best basketball there is, but it still sucks.” Today’s NBA is very defiantly about three things: Kenny Smith’s three-button sportcoats, three-pointers that clang off the rim, and the tragedy of the L.A. Lakers chemistry problem. Somewhere along the line this year, the feud between Shaq and Kobe developed into quite possibly the most intensely-discussed relationship in the history of the human race, easily lapping Antony and Cleopatra and appearing to beat out even Burt and Loni. This past week the mania over the Shaq-Kobe dispute reached truly astonishing levels as NBC courtside reporter Jim Gray managed to get a comment on the matter out of Bill Clinton, who had come to the Staples Center with Steven Spielberg to watch the Laker-Knick game. Clinton told Gray that he “still thought the Lakers were the best team” and that “if they can work out their differences, they look good for the playoffs.” Imagine that: even the President of the United States is worried the two won’t ever make up. Hey, Bill, maybe you try out those peacemaking skills you used on the Israelis at Camp David... Cliche watch: the cross-pollination of sports cliches is accelerating rapidly. A few years ago, hip and savvy sportscasters started using the tennis term “hold serve” to describe a baseball pitcher who finishes an inning without giving up any runs. Chris Berman was one of the pioneers. “So,” he’d say, as ESPN went to commercial, “Ponson holds serve in the bottom of the fourth as the score remains: Baltimore 6, Toronto 4. Up next: da Birds!” Soon after that, it started to become fashionable for hockey broadcasters to use baseball terms: “Goalie Roy pitched a shutout against the Habs.” This was followed by the spillage of hockey language into a whole range of other sports, as meaningless touchdowns, home runs and three-pointers at the end of games began to be referred to as “empty-netters.” Now, this year, at the Ericsson tennis Open (formerly known as the Lipton), the trend has come full circle. Baseball, which started off the movement by stealing tennis terms years ago, is now returning the favor by offering its own language to tennis. Raging dyke tennis commentator Mary Carillo, who makes sure at least four or five times per broadcast to remind viewers how much she digs manly, sweaty sports, has begun to refer to the area within a player’s racket radius as his “strike zone”. She had been plugging away with the baseball reference for months, and it looked as though the play was going to fail, when suddenly Andre Agassi surfaced at the Ericsson and picked her up. Said Agassi of his opponent in the final, Jan-Michael Gambill: “He doesn’t have the biggest strike zone, but when he gets it in there, he really takes it for a ride.” We’ll be seeing blocked punts in Olympic dressage very soon... Meanwhile, the outgrowth of new sports statistics— and the rapid rate at which sports fans are achieving fluency in them— is reaching truly terrifying levels. Football writers now routinely cite the results from the physical exams of draft-eligible college football players on the assumption that readers will know what they’re talking about. It used to be that the only stats sports fans knew about college prospects were height, weight, and time in the 40-yard dash. Now fans know about the intelligence test (consensus #1 pick Michael Vick scored a respectable 20), the all-important 225-pound bench rep test (370-pound tackle Leonard Davis of Texas exceeded 35), the cone dash, and a host of other tests. It has now become news— actual news, as in newsworthy enough to command its own 500-word AP story— when a college player opts to undergo a “private workout” for scouts rather than go through the full battery of tests at “Indianapolis” (the accepted shorthand term now for the NFL scouting combine, which takes place in Indianapolis). AP, for instance, recently ran a story: “Terrell private workout shows mixed results.” The trend this year in draftology has been to laud receivers who have “size and hands”, running backs who “can be true feature backs” (the term “feature back” now gradually giving way to the more common “every-down back”), huge offensive linemen (for some reason, every self-proclaimed draft specialist the drafting of Jonathan Ogden was the penultimate moment of the sport in the 1990s, and are anxiously awaiting the second coming) and guys who can “make an impact right away.” Draft experts are also placing more emphasis on character this year. A few years back, the Minnesota Vikings personnel people were hailed as geniuses for drafting a troubled wide receiver named Randy Moss in the first round. That was after they saw Moss play. The following year, those same writers didn’t even wait to see the finished product to applaud the Dolphins for taking a chance on running back Cecil “The Diesel” Collins, who had been arrested twice in college on forcible fondling and breaking and entering charges. Collins was a bust on the field in the pros, and then soon after was arrested for breaking into the house of a female neighbor to “watch her sleep”. The Diesel was sentenced to 15 years a few weeks ago in Miami. Draft experts are therefore extremely quiet this year about certain draft-eligible prospects. The best running back in the draft, for instance, might be Michael Bennett, but most draftologists have Ole Miss halfback Deuce McAllister and Texas Christian Horned Frog LaDanlian Tomlinson above Bennett “on the board”, as they say. Bennett had a few alcohol-related arrests in school. Nonetheless, coaches “love his explosiveness” and his “cut-back ability”, which means that he “projects” as a late first-round pick. Look for him to end up on some team that doesn’t need a running back as much as yours, like the Titans... Speaking of the NFL, can you imagine anything more beautiful than the shit-cloud which has perched itself over the Dallas Cowboys? The team was forced to cut Troy Aikman both for salary cap reasons and because Aikman’s head exploded last year; it has no first-round pick this season, having given theirs up to Seattle in exchange for Joey Galloway, a wide receiver who tore his ACL last year and may be done for his career; it is so completely fucked from a salary cap standpoint that it will end up paying more than $20 million of his $57 million cap limit next year to players who are no longer on the team, meaning that the team will almost uniformly consist of rookies, undrafted free agents, and minimum salary veterans; and finally, best of all, the team recently signed, as its quarterback of the future, none other than Tony Banks, who is perhaps the most loathsome player in the NFL. There are many people who would rather kill themselves than have to sit through an entire season with Tony Banks quarterbacking his favorite team. We’ll have to sit tight and see if the bodies start piling up in Dallas. One can only hope.