The Cavs beat the best

June 21, 2016

Maybe God was compensating Cleveland for having to host the Republican/Trump Convention.

Just kidding.

The Cleveland Cavaliers overcame a 3-1 deficit in the NBA Finals – the first team to do so – to take the championship from the vaunted Golden State Warriors 93-89. Native son LeBron James was named MVP and will most certainly draw the largest cheers when the team is feted with a parade Wednesday.

As I’ve written in a previous post, the only thing as fascinating as a triumphant underdog is a flawed winner. The Warriors won 73 games in the regular season. Their star, Stephen Curry, was the regular-season MVP. They were a lock, particularly early on in the championship series. ...

Will Nyquist conquer a soggy Preakness?

May 21, 2016

Well, experts like Joe Drape and aficionados like Thomas DeChiara will be rooting for Exaggerator – the Andy Murray of Thoroughbred racehorses. But I’m sticking with Nyquist for the Preakness Stakes Saturday at Pimlico Race Course in Maryland (5 p.m., NBC), where the forecast is for rain.

That shouldn’t bother Nyquist. You gotta love a horse that simply will not let anything or anyone get in front of him for too long, a horse that has the will, the sheer grit, the heart to propel himself to the front of the pack. Some animals – some people – simply must be first. ...

Deflategate suspension upheld

April 26, 2016

It’s ba-ack.

Just when you thought it was safe to move on to baseball, the Second U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in favor of the NFL and against Tom Brady in Deflategate, upholding the league’s four-game suspension of the New England Patriots quarterback for his probable role in deflating footballs in the Pats’ AFC Championship win over the Indianapolis Colts. That blowout victory paved the way for the Pats’ Super Bowl championship last year.

Though the Court of Appeals’ decision reversed a lower court’s ruling that the league overreached in suspending Brady – in violation of the collective bargaining agreement – for me this has always been about what Brady knew and when he knew it. ...

Where have you gone, Jackie Robinson?

April 10, 2016

I saw Jackie Robinson in person once. It was at Yankee Stadium on Old Timers’ Day, and Iike a lot of other wiry kids, I craned my neck to take in as many legends on the field as possible. I thought then that Robinson looked old and sickly for his age. (And indeed he would die of a heart attack, complicated by diabetes, at age 53.) The other thing I remember thinking was that he was a big man, larger than life – which he certainly was.

I was reminded of Robinson – the man who had that special combination of physical and spiritual grace to break baseball’s color barrier in 1947 – because Ken Burns’ miniseries about him is set to debut Monday and Tuesday, April 11 and 12, and because Jay Caspian Kang has written a column for The New York Times Magazine’s April 10 edition in which he suggests that racism is killing baseball. ...

Whither Kaepernick in the game of musical quarterbacks?

March 13, 2016

So I’m sitting in a sports bar in Tallahassee that has, according to my nephew James, 59,000 TVs, most of them tuned to college basketball, this being March madness. But a few are checking out the NFL Combine and the new prospects like Ohio State defensive star Joey Bosa, all glorious 6 foot, 6 inch, 276 pounds of him.

But there was no time to measure his defensive pulchritude as the networks quickly moved on to the game of musical quarterbacks. With Peyton Manning retired from the Denver Broncos, Brock Osweiler would’ve seemed to have had a lock on the job, but no, he bolted – a favorite verb of sportswriters – to the Texans. The Broncos then traded for Mark Sanchez, formerly of the New York Jets and Philadelphia Eagles, but no one thinks he’s a permanent first-string solution (except probably Mark Sanchez). ...

Peyton Manning’s last hurrah

March 8, 2016

Peyton Manning’s retirement speech Monday in Denver was everything you’d expect from someone who studied theater in school and turned football into a kind of theater, as Daily News columnist Mike Lupica said. It was eloquent and emotional.

“There were other players who were more talented,” he said, choking up frequently. “But there was no one who could out-prepare me and because of that I have no regrets.”

It was a classic example of how to walk away – without bitterness and with gratitude for the roles others have played in your life. In hitting all the right notes, though, Manning added some unusual grace notes. It was, he said, the little things that loomed large in hindsight:

"I’m going to miss a steak dinner at St. Elmo's in Indianapolis after a win. My battles with players named Lynch, Lewis, Thomas, Bruschi, Fletcher, Dawkins, Seau, Urlacher, Polamalu, Harrison, Woodson and Reed. And with coaches like Fisher, Ryan, Belichick, Kiffin, Phillips, Rivera, LeBeau, Crennel, Capers, Lewis, the late Jim Johnson, and so many more. I always felt like I was playing against that middle linebacker or that safety or that defensive coach. ...

America’s son – Peyton Manning

March 6, 2016

When I was a child, I used to envy star athletes. They would retire young – having already accrued a lifetime of fame, wealth and accomplishment – and life would now be an open road on which they could do whatever they wished, being rich enough to do it and young enough to enjoy it.

But what if the open road were a vast wasteland? Who knows if athletes see delicious anticipation and opportunity or dread in retirement?

We can only imagine what’s going through Peyton Manning’s mind as he prepares to call it a day after 18 years of throwing a football with commanding accuracy. ...