Sports
Danny Ainge might have been hated by fans outside of Boston for his constant complaining to the officials, but at least he had a good sense of humor about it.
I think the referees got the calls right. I don’t think it was a hard foul. I think the one involving LeBron against Boozer, that was flagrant. I think the officials got it right . . . I think that it’s almost embarrassing that LeBron would complain about officiating.
Coach Riley came back with some stark words in support of his star player:
“Danny Ainge needs to shut the f— up and manage his own team,” Riley said in a statement released through a Heat spokesman. “He was the biggest whiner going when he was playing and I know that because I coached against him.”
First time I’ve ever seen a coach drop an F-bomb in a statement released by his team’s spokesman. That is so much more emphatic than saying it off the cuff to a reporter.
And that is some serious smack talking there for Riley to call Danny Ainge out as the “biggest whiner going” when he was a player.
Ainge replied to the statement with some pretty good smack of his own:
I stand by what I said. That’s all. I don’t care about Pat Riley. He can say whatever he wants. I don’t want to mess up his Armani suits and all that hair goop. It would be way too expensive for me.
Pretty good comeback, but I think Riley wins that round. Not only does Riley know what a whiner Ainge was because he coached against Ainge in the NBA Finals in 1984, 1985 and 1987, but anyone who watched the game back then knows Riley’s words are true. I’d rather be known as a sharp-dressed man with my hair slicked back than the biggest whiner going.
Remembering how Danny Ainge used to cry on every call brings back all the memories of Showtime and being a Laker fan and loving L.A. and hating on the Celtics and even hating all of Boston itself and all the pasty-skinned fans that used to pack The Garden. (Of course, I say “hating” in just a sports fan kind of way.)
As ESPN reporter Stephen A. Smith said, complaining on every call was part of Ainge’s game plan. Might have been something a Celtics fan would cheer, but for anyone else watching, all that crying and complaining was completely insufferable. The only other guy I remember from that era who was as much of a non-stop whiner on the court was Bill Laimbeer. Don’t even get me started on that guy. But this little war of words really did bring back memories of all the fun of being a Laker fan in the 80s.
I think Celtics coach Doc Rivers summed it up best:
Asked if Rivers believes Riley’s statement could further stoke the Miami-Boston rivalry, Rivers noted, “Not unless they are playing. Really, I just think it’s talk both ways. I’ll let those two grown men handle their own grown-men argument. I’m going to stay out of it. On a side note, it just gives me a smile and it’s interesting. I think it’s fun. It’s a flashback.”
source: ESPN
You can hate a team for one single football game and what they did to your team, so it is for this Raiders fan and the Patriots over that blown call on a Tom Brady fumble in the Tuck Rule Game in 2002, so it is with the Ravens for beating my Raiders 16-3 in the AFC Championship the year before. Heck, I hate the Steelers for the Immaculate Reception in a game that happened before I was even watching football. The clip alone has been played so many times it’s as if I experienced that miserable miracle first hand.
As a lifelong Raider fan, other than two years I lived up in No. Cal., I’ve been a So. Cal. Raiders fan my whole life, so I don’t hold that same strong Bay Area Raiders / Niners rivalry that was bad enough to end in a stabbing death in a in the parking lot of a preseason game this year (it’s sports you idiots, it’s not something to kill anyone over, leave that to greasy-haired soccer fans in Europe) so in the week leading up to the Super Bowl, I was just about to root for the Niners, but then Randy Moss called himself the greatest wide receiver ever to play the game, which to deny that of Jerry Rice is just asinine, it’s like saying water isn’t wet, and then there was the homophobic diatribe from Chris Culliver and suddenly I couldn’t tell which team I liked less.
Ray Lewis? There are a lot of people who think the man got away with murder – literally – but the truth is, there are probably only three people alive who know what happened in that stabbing death after the Super Bowl in 2000 and I’m not one of them. All I know is, whatever kind of bad people he may have been associating with back then, for all we can tell, the man has been nothing but a model citizen the last thirteen years, so don’t count me in with the Ray Lewis haters.
But you have to pick one team to root for (or against) and I can still feel the sting of that AFC Championship game from 2001, so call it the lesser of two evils, but I’ll pull for the Niners today for that reason and because that Colin Kaepernick is a heck of a player and a lot of fun to watch.
Enjoy the game all – even you, Grumpy Cat!
After nine years in the league, and three trips to the Finals, LeBron James finally gets a ring for those ringless fingers.
Haters gon’ hate and yeah, I’m gonna keep on hatin’ too, because LeBron James is the most unlikable, least charismatic player in the entire league. Take the top 50 players in the league, and it would be a pleasure and a privilege to meet 49 of them, but I’d rather shake hands with a dentist who’s about to tell me I need a root canal than shake hands with this guy.
How much do I dislike LeBron as a player? Put it this way, if he got traded to the Lakers tomorrow, that would be the end my lifelong love affair with them.
And I am not at all a player hater, you have to go all the way back to the NBA days of the goofy little short shorts to find the last time I really couldn’t stand an NBA player this much, all the way back to the days of Bill Laimbeir and the “Bad Boy” Pistons.
Laimbeer was a guy who specialized in the flagrant foul (as a matter of fact, it’s said the NBA instituted rules addressing the flagrant foul because of Bill Laimbeer) and yet no matter how obvious most of the calls against him were, almost every single time you’d see him launch into a wild, gyrating protestation like he’d just been dealt the greatest injustice in league history.
And yet even with all the elbows and the cheap shots and the histrionics and even adding to that some of the most blatant flopping you’ve ever seen, even with all that, I still don’t think Laimbeer was any more annoying than the guy who began calling himself King James back in his high school days. I’m pretty sure none of that will change now that the ringless “king” has become the “chosen one” of the one ring.
Q: What kind of asshole does it take to hold the hearts of an entire city hostage through an entire season, only to let them know on live TV that he’s going elsewhere?
A: A king-sized asshole.
But beyond the infamous “Decision” on live TV that broke Cleveland’s heart and looking past the fact that LeBron has shown himself a poor sport in dissing fellow players on the post-game handshakes and ignoring for a second the way even the most clever commercial writer can’t make this guy seem affable for a mere thirty-second spot, I think it was the way LeBron took to the Heat management’s lame idea of a parade and celebration before they’d ever won a single game that really sealed the deal for me as far as being resolved to root against LeBron and Co. for as long as they play the game:
I can’t even stand to watch that whole dog and pony show with all the premature fireworks and hoopla, so I included the transcript if you can’t stomach it either.
Here’s LeBron, asked about bringing a championship to Miami:
Not two, not three, not four, not five, not six, not seven . . . hey, and when I say that, and when I say that, I really believe it, you know, I’m not just up here blowin’ smoke and none of these fans, um, because that’s not what I’m about, I’m about business.”
I can only wonder what Michael Jordan was thinking watching this, sitting at home with his six rings while LeBron, having won absolutely nothing up to that point in his career, was talking about winning eight rings like it was nothing, as if it was already a done deal.
I also love the fact that there were 1,343 people who voted “dislike” on that video as opposed to the 330 Miami fans that liked it.
. . . we gon’ challenge each other in practice and uh, the way we gon’ challenge each other in practice, once the game starts, I mean, it’s gonna be easy.
Wow. There are some unwritten rules in the league, first and foremost being that you never snitch on another player for leaving the club with a woman who’s not his wife, but I’m pretty sure there’s also somewhat of an unspoken rule among these professional athletes that you should never make an ass of yourself by disrespecting your fellow players and dismissing the talent of the entire league by saying things like it’s all going to be easy once the games start.
So after nine years in the league, LeBron finally came through on his third trip to the NBA Finals. Hooray for you, LeBron, but you still suck. That’s not just Cleveland saying that, that’s just about everyone outside of Miami saying that. You suck because you’re the least likable man in all the NBA and you suck because you’re still seven championships shy of your own prediction.
They say he has the intangibles, the heart of a champion, he has all those things you can’t quantify that makes someone a winner. His winning itself is so unexplainable, they’ve taken to calling it “Tebow Magic” because it seems like you can only explain it as something supernatural, something not of this world, so I ask myself maybe, just maybe, has Jesus Christ become a football fan? Has Jesus taken an active interest in this man, Tim Tebow, the most overtly devoted worshiper of Christ in football history?
Tebow's eye black, Ephesians 2:8-10 reads, 'For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God not by works, so that no one can boast.'
The Tebow phenomenon is the story of how a man who had been slighted, doubted and disparaged by most analysts came in to take a hapless 1-4 team going nowhere and turn it into a 7-5 team headed for the playoffs. The story is also of a player who has put religion into the forefront of the discussion about football and how Tebow has become a lightning rod in the debate as to whether his overt displays of his faith are somehow inappropriate for the football field. It’s a story so improbable, he’s become a man so polarizing that the Tebow phenomenon has become a bigger story in the NFL than the Packers themselves, a 12-0 team in pursuit of perfection and a Super Bowl repeat.
Never has a player had so many doubters . . . from Tebow’s FRS energy drink commercial, self-described, but a career summary few would deny:
They said I couldn’t be a high school quarterback, they said I couldn’t get a [division 1 college] scholarship . . . that you can’t make it, you’re not good enough, you’re not skilled enough . . . they said I couldn’t win a Heisman, they said I couldn’t win a national championship, they said I wouldn’t be a first round draft pick, they said I couldn’t play in the league, ‘ppreciate that.
Source: Official FRS Healthy Energy Fuels Tim Tebow Ad
And yet at every level, despite all the doubters, Tebow just kept doing everything they said he couldn’t do.
It didn’t stop when he made the NFL. After the Broncos got off to a 1-4 start, the Denver faithful were clamoring for Tebow to get a chance to play, chanting his name, and in what looked like a throwaway season, the greatest Bronco of all, John Elway gave into the fans, probably thinking he’d just throw Tebow to the wolves and be over it. You see, John Elway thinks you need a great pocket passer to win championships (you know, a guy taken straight from the mold of John Elway himself) but sometimes, being a great player does not make you a great judge of talent.
In Week 5, after being put in the 2nd half with his team down 23-10 to the Chargers, Tebow almost pulled off a furious comeback.
The next game was his first start. Down 15-0 and with the game on the line, Tebow suddenly injected life into an offense that had been sputtering all game, throwing a TD with 2:44 to go in the 3rd and then another TD with 17 seconds on the clock, and the entire game came down to do or die, a 2-point conversion to tie, and Tebow did. Tied at 15-15, the game went into overtime, and Tebow led the team down the field to an overtime win. Both a game-tying 4th quarter drive and a game-winning overtime drive in his first pro start.
With a hiccup – getting clobbered by Detroit in his second start – Tebow Magic then went on to roll for five straight wins:
- two road game victories against divisional rivals at the Raiders and at the Chiefs
- beating the Jets with less than a minute to go on a memorable game-winning 20-yard TD run by Tebow
- on the road against division rival San Diego he lead two more drives to add to the collection: a 4th quarter game-tying drive and a game-winning drive in overtime.
- at Minnesota, he showed clutch passing in coming from behind twice in the 4th quarter, a game which the Broncos won on a game-ending FG.
As Tebow was leading his team to these victories, the cameras would cut to shots of Elway in the team suite and as he clapped somewhat artificially Elway’s face looked as if he was sucking on a lemon. You could almost read his thoughts, “It wasn’t supposed to happen this way, I was willing to give into the clamor of the fans and put this guy in and watch him flame out so we could be done with the whole Tebow experiment and go back to finding ourselves the kind of pure passing quarterback the Broncos deserve.”
They say he can’t throw a pass, how he’s got the worst mechanics of any NFL QB we’ve ever seen and I’ll readily admit that he’s thrown some of the worst looking passes I’ve ever seen watching pro football, but here’s a stat that overrides all of that, I call it “the Tebow 4th quarter clutch factor”:
Ugly as he can look in the first three quarters, through seven games, Tim Tebow has a quarterback rating of 109.7 in the 4th quarter and a rating of 120 when his team is within 7 points. To put that in perspective, in an 11-year Super Bowl winning career, Drew Brees has logged a QB rating of over 100 for the season only three times, with the highest at 109.6.
The scary thing is, I have a feeling that if Tebow can do it in the 4th, one day he’ll figure it out and learn to play with the same mindset and passing accuracy in the other three quarters, and when Tim Tebow learns to take his Tebow Magic and spread it across all four quarters . . . look out NFL!
As a Raider fan, even when the Broncos were too far back in the standings to worry about them, it was still such a strange thing to feel my Raider heart rooting for this Tebow kid in a Bronco uniform, but now that the Bronco team that was a hapless 1-4 have come storming back to win 6 out of 7, tying the Raiders for the AFC West lead at 7-5, it’s time to recheck my allegiances.
I’ll say it right now – Tim Tebow, I predict you will win every game to finish out the year and make the playoffs, I predict you will beat each team you meet in the playoffs and I predict that you, Tim Tebow will win the Super Bowl and be awarded the MVP.
This is Raider fan and yes, I just put the jinx on you, Tim Tebow.
May Jesus have mercy on me.
In his white Raiders jumpsuits with his shades and slicked back hair, Al Davis was pimp before the word had even become an adjective.
I was seven years old when my thirteen year-old neighbor Alex came over and said, “Hey Mikey, you gonna watch the Super Bowl?”
“Super what?”
“The Super Bowl! Mikey, the Oakland Raiders are playing the Minnesota Vikings in the Super Bowl! The Raiders, Mikey! They’re the meanest, badest team in all of football, a bunch of convicts and murderers released straight from prison to the football field!”
It was the first football game I’d ever really watched, but that Sunday, I was riveted and the Raiders lived up to all of Alex’s hype. To my seven year-old eyes, these guys were like pro wrestlers, they were like super-villians from comic books, but these characters were for real, and they proved it on the field with one of the most dominating Super Bowl performances ever. I’d never seen anything like it.
The Raiders were like a bunch of marauders come to pillage and plunder your town, and in the years that would follow, I’d discover that the whole character of the team stemmed from the owner, Al Davis and the type of team he envisioned as a winner. He was the master of finding players that other teams had tossed on the scrapheap, he was the master of taking the outcasts and the misfits and giving them a new home with the Raiders, and the formula had been working for years when I discovered them and kept on working for so many years after.
I was hooked from that very first game – a Raider fan for life, and at the start, it was all gravy – the first seven years I was a fan, Al Davis engineered the team to winning three Super Bowls (1976, 1980, 1983.) I can remember Raiders games at the L.A. Coliseum in the 1980s and they would always post on the scoreboard the Raiders record as the best all-time win percentage across all professional sports, so it’s been hard to come down from that high and keep rooting for a team that has hit so many lean years since then, but while you could question some of Al Davis’ picks and acquisitions and his meddling with the coaches, you could never question the fact that with every loss, you knew your owner felt the loss even deeper than you and you knew you could never question Al Davis’ commitment to spend every dollar he had to make it a better team and you could never question his dedication and the fact that this was a man who lived, breathed, ate and slept Raider football every hour of the day.
One of Al Davis’ greatest legacies is the way his dedication to “just win, baby” manifested itself by not just talking the talk when it came to judging people by the content of their character, but by walking the walk – he was a trailblazer who hired the NFL’s first Latino head coach in Tom Flores, the NFL’s first African-American head coach in Art Shell and the NFL’s first female CEO in Amy Trask.
I don’t think there’s a single owner in all the NFL who has been so identified with his team. Most fans know their team’s owner, give them a second and they can probably recall the owners for a handful of other teams, but for even the casual fan, when you would say “Raiders”, Al Davis would pop instantly into mind.
If you were a Raider fan, Al Davis was your leader, through the ups and downs, the good picks and bad, he was your leader and he was as much the Raiders as the very Silver and Black worn by the players and fans.
Al Davis had no shortage of enemies. He waged legal wars with cities, he waged wars with the NFL itself, on a personal grudge he was capable of benching a player like Marcus Allen who still had a lot left in the tank, and if you were his coach and he didn’t like the results, he’d fire you and try to find grounds to cancel the remaining contract (as he did with Lane Kiffin, although Kiffin still had kind words for Mr. Davis today) so there were probably more than a few people who harbored some hate for the man, but for most fans, he was the like the bad guy in a very good movie – the football world was so much more fun with Al Davis in it because he was the guy all the other fans loved to hate.
It’s hard to imagine being a Raiders fan with anyone other than Al Davis as supreme commander. There were some lean years, but there were also those three Super Bowls, the beauty of seeing a bunch of misfits and castaways banded together to become World Champions, and Al Davis’ dedication to the Raiders and his Commitment to Excellence can never be questioned.
I know you’ll be up there in Raider Heaven, wearing your white jumpsuit and watching every single play of every single game. Here’s to hoping the Raiders will be making you proud, Mr. Davis.
*** UPDATE ***
What an unbelievably dramatic win for the Raiders today. Very few regular season wins can bring tears to my eyes. This one did.
Check out Hue Jackson’s emotional postgame speech.