Tebow won’t be under center for The Donald

July 15, 2016

The deathless Deflategate is back as the Second U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has decided not to rehear Tom Brady’s case, having already ruled against him.

Which means Tommy’ll have to stalk Ruth Bader Ginsburg and the rest of the Supremes or face the music of the four-game suspension for his alleged role in deflating footballs in the 2015 AFC Championship. And don’t think he won’t take this all the way to the Supreme Court. Guy’s got an ego the size of Texas.

In other Brady buzz, he won’t be a speaker at the Republican Convention for his good – and equally modest – friend Donald Trump. The lineup for the convention – which begins Monday in Cleveland – is hardly stellar, but one name stood out, Tim Tebow’s. ...

Colin Kaepernick and ‘lynching’ in modern America

July 8, 2016

The world is like a restaurant with a major conflict in the front of the house and a fire in the kitchen.

In the front of the house is Brexit – the tip of whose Titanic-smashing iceberg we’ve just experienced. In the kitchen, we have terrorism in Istanbul and Bangladesh and the shootings in Baton Rouge and Minnesota.

Brexit will have sweeping, long-term effects – not the least of which will be the continued rise of women to the heights of political power, probably the only good effect.

But the more immediate issue is the continued violence in this world. ...

Novak Djokovic’s Brexit from Wimbledon

July 7, 2016

Novak Djokovic has lost to Sam Querrey, who’s having a helluva Wimbledon. So no Grand Slam, and I can’t pretend that I’m not disappointed even though I’m not entirely surprised. Nole had won 30 Slam matches in a row. Though there’s no Law of Averages, the longer you win the closer you are to losing.

No one wins forever, but the good news is that no one loses forever. “Anyone can be beaten on any given day,” former New York Football Giants’ coach Tom Coughlin said after his “mediocre” Giants beat the “perfect” New England Patriots in Super Bowl XLII. “It’s not important to be the best, it’s only important to beat the best,” John McEnroe said in his pursuit of Björn Borg. Querrey must’ve been repeating these as mantras – or words to these effects. Whatever he did, he’s come through on a big stage, so congrats to him. ...

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. ...