By Bob Markus
My business is dying. That doesn't make me any different than millions of Americans, except that my business is the newspaper business and I don't own it. I just borrowed it for most of my adult life. The paper I once wrote for, the Chicago Tribune, once a Colossus of the industry, has gone into bankruptcy. I haven't seen it for awhile, but friends tell me it has become a hybrid, a traditional broadsheet for home delivery, but a tabloid at the news stands. The paper I read now, The South Florida Sun-Sentinel, is owned by Tribune Company. It is no better and probably not much worse than most newspapers today. Of course, it's op-ed page, the one with the syndicted columnists, has been cut in half and now offers just two opinion pieces a day. Then, too, like most other newspapers, it has surrendered unconditionally to its eventual murderer, the internet.
I used to scoff at people who told me the internet was going to replace newspapers. The idea of sitting in front of a big box and reading the electronic sports news while sipping my morning coffee seemed preposterous. It still hasn't come to that for me, but apparently for millions more it is becoming a way of life. The day the Oscar nominations came out, the Sun-Sentinel ran a story mentioning some--but not all--of the major nominations. For the complete list, it told me, I should go online. I threw the wretched thing against the wall.
The sports section of the Sun-Sentinel does a good job covering the local teams. But it offers just one sentence on other games and, in the case of hockey, no game summaries. It has some good writers. Columnist Dave Hyde is usually topical and occasionally brilliant. The section's best writer, Charley Bricker, has either died or just faded away and I'll probably never know which, but I do miss his writing on tennis and the National Football League. Oh, well, I never cared much for tennis, anyway, and that's one more thing I don't have to pay attention to, any more.
This morning the Sun-Sentinel sports section almost jolted me out of my chair and onto the floor. Not for anything it had, but for what it didn't have. Not a paragraph, not a line, not a single word about the most anticipated sports story in years--the return of Tiger Woods. True, the world's greatest golfer does not tee it up until tomorrow at the Accenture Match Play championships. But what ever happened to the concept of advancing a big story? And they don't come much bigger than this. With Woods making his first tournament appearance since willing his way on tortured legs to the U.S.Open title last June, this story has the potential of becoming huge.
When Bobby Riggs played Billie Jean King in the Battle of the Sexes back in 1973, I was writing columns out of the two camps for two or three days before the big match. So were writers from New York, Detroit, Los Angeles, and places inbetween. That's the way it was done--and still is done--in most places. Even the Sun- Sentinel writes a week's worth of advances on the Super Bowl.
True, the paper did print a story, I think it was Sunday, announcing Woods' decision to make the match play tournament his comeback venue. That should have sent golf writers everywhere scurrying to make plane reservations for Tucson. In most instances, it probably did. Given the nature of match play it set me to wondering, who will be Tiger's first round opponent and does he have a chance to upset the World's No. 1 ranked player? I found the answers, finally, not in my daily newspaper, but on the internet. So, if you live in South Florida and care even marginally about golf or Tiger Woods, you can Google it on the internet or, since you're already here, read on.
Tiger's first round opponent is Australian Brendan Jones, ranked No. 64 in the world, which doesn't much resemble Tiger's world. Jones, at 33 the same age as Woods, plays most of his tournament golf in Japan. He did spend one full season on the PGA tour and finished 144th. So what chance does he have in tomorrow's first round match, considering that Woods is the defending champion of this tournament and has won 31 of his 37 matches over the last nine years? Well, obviously, Tiger has failed to win this match play event six times in the nine years it has been played. Three times he has been knocked out by Australians and one of them, Peter O'Malley, did it in the first round in 2002 when Woods was ranked No. 1 and O'Malley No.64. Another Aussie, Nick O'Hern, defeated Woods twice--in 2005 and 2007. Asked if he had spoken with either countryman Jones quipped, "No, but I spoke with Stephen Ames and he gave me some advice." Ames is the Canadian golfer who in 2006, prior to a scheduled meeting with Woods, said he thought he had a chance to win because Tiger was having trouble hitting his drives straight. Tiger went out and mugged Ames, 9 and 8, which means he won nine of the 10 holes played. Asked afterwards if he had any reaction to Ames' pre-match remarks, Tiger said, "Yes, 9 and 8."
It's hard to know what to expect from Woods tomorrow, but given his enormous pride it's a good bet that he is physically and mentally prepared for this challenge. There is always the chance, slight though it may be, that Tiger may play only 18 holes--or even less--in this tournament, which would be an interesting story. What most writers will hope for, is that he plays all seven of the matches it will take to win the tournament. That would likely be the most compelling sports story of the year and the biggest in golf since Ben Hogan came back from near fatal injuries suffered in a car crash to force a playoff with Sam Snead in his first tournament back. That was in 1950 and although Hogan lost that playoff, in the mist of time he will always be the winner.
I really don't understand how the editors of the Sun Sentinel failed to grasp the significance of this story. And if they want to tell me to mind my own business, I'll tell them: This is my business!
Tuesday, February 24, 2009
Tuesday, February 17, 2009
By Bob Markus
Watching the rain-shortened Daytona 500 Sunday was like having sex without an orgasm; it was like entering a marathon and dropping out with four miles to go or climbing three fourths of the way up a mountain and then turning back. It can be exhilerating while you're doing it, but it ultimately provides no satisfaction. Except, of course, to the winner, Matt Kenseth, who was in the right place, first place, at the right time when the rains came. Victory does not always go to the fastest car and driver, which may or may not have been Kenseth on Sunday. Almost as many races are won on fuel economy or tire conservation or some other pit strategy as are won by some driver simply blowing the doors off his competitors. But at least they have a definable end game scenario. This one left viewers hanging, wondering what would have happened had the race gone on to its scheduled conclusion.
Would Jeff Gordon or Mark Martin, my own two favorite drivers, have come back to win, Gordon for the fourth time, Martin for the first? Both had the car, the time, and the talent to do so. Would Tony Stewart have turned his first drive as a car owner into an improbable victory? Would Dale Earnhardt Jr., who had a miserable day, with two pit road snafus and one lame-brained wreck-inducing wrench of the wheel, somehow have found his way into Victory Lane? He was, after all, still on the lead lap at journey's end. We'll never know the answers and it all could have been avoided had not NASCAR switched the starting time to late afternoon from its traditional 1 p.m., Eastern Time, green flag to accommodate television. The race should have been over, all 200 laps of it, long before the rains came.
The Daytona 500, which has been called "The Great American Race," is unique in that it is widely regarded by drivers as the Super Bowl of the sport, yet it opens the season rather than closes it. Winning it assures a driver lasting fame, if not a season championship. In the 51 years the race has been run on the 2 1/2 mile Daytona International Speedway, only eight times has the winner gone on to claim the season championship. Five of those perfectas were notched by the Petty family, patriarch Lee Petty accomplishing it in 1959, the year of the inaugural Daytona 500,and his son Richard winning the big one in four of his seven championship seasons.
The others to do it are all going to be in the racing Hall of Fame--Cale Yarborough,
Jeff Gordon, and Jimmie Johnson.
When I was writing sports for the Chicago Tribune, the Daytona 500 was one of my favorite assignments. I loved the race day walk from my hotel to the track, about a mile and a half away, with the fans waving banners of their favorite drivers and the sun already beginning to warm the day. I remember one such race day morning when I was being interviewed by a Chicago radio station and I offered: "There's nowhere else in the world I'd rather be on this day than right here in Daytona." I was the first writer for The Tribune ever to cover it and my first race was one of the two Daytona 500s that changed the face of auto racing in the United States. The year was 1976, the bicentennial year, and Richard Petty was in mid-reign as The King of stock car drivers. There were plenty of other top tier drivers out there, guys like Bobby Allison, Buddy Baker, Cale Yarborough, and Benny Parsons, to name a few. But Petty's most persistent pursuer was David Pearson, the Silver Fox, considered by many of the southern writers as Petty's equal, if not his superior. The race was so riveting from start to finish that I didn't leave my seat in the press box, even to go to the bathroom, for fear I'd miss something. It came down to Petty and Pearson with Richard leading on the final lap before David drafted past him in the back stretch. Entering the fourth turn Petty tried to stick the nose of his car back in front, but the two cars banged doors and started to spin into the infield. The fans were going nuts and the good old boy writers in the press box were thunderstruck and so was I. The whole scene was so chaotic that I didn't know who had won the race. When I asked the writer next to me he bellowed what sounded like "Parsons." "Benny Parsons won?" I said. "No, not Parsons, Pearson." The Silver Fox had managed to keep his engine running and get back on the track to cross the finish line. Petty, meanwhile, was futiley trying to crank his engine as his car sat in the grass some 100 yards from victory. It was tradional back then to bring only the winning driver up to the press box for the post race interview. But this time both made the trip up through the stands.
Three years later the race was nationally televised for the first time and what a mid-winter treat for America's auto racing fans. The race came down to a duel between Donnie Allison and Yarborough and I was secretly rooting for Cale because, a few years earlier, he had visited me in the hospital while I was recovering from surgery. Allison led for most of the race, but on the final lap, Cale tried to squeeze past him entering the backstretch and wrecked both cars. While Petty circled the track to win for the sixth time the fans in the third turn were treated to the spectacle of Allison and Yarborough throwing fists and helmets at each other, a fight eventually joined by Donnie's brother Bobby, and all of it caught on camera.
In all, I covered nine Daytona 500s and some of them were routine and some were memorable. Among the latter were 1989, when Darrell Waltrip celebrated his only Daytona 500 win with a victory dance while shouting childlike: "I won the Daytona 500, I won the Daytona 500."; 1990 when Dale Earnhardt, Junior's father, seemed poised to finally win the race that had always eluded him until, while leading halfway through the final lap, he cut a tire in turn three and Derrick Cope swept past him; and 1993, when Gordon made his Daytona debut by winning one of the Thursday qualifiers and finishing third in the big show while Earnhardt and Dale Jarrett dueled it out over the final laps. I can still remember hearing Ned Jarrett, Dale's father, who was lead announcer on the telecast, screaming, "two laps to go, it's Dale and Dale," trying to report objectively while his son was earning the biggest victory of his career. That in fact was my last live memory of the Daytona 500.
The next year we had a new sports editor, Margaret Holt, the first and so far only woman sports editor the Tribune has had. I liked Margaret and she always treated me with respect. The day she was removed as sports editor she called me at home to tell me and I thought that was a classy thing to do. But our relationship did not start out so well. Shortly after her arrival she invited me to lunch at the hotel dining room next door to Tribune Tower and wasted no time in telling me: "You're not going to Daytona. The Orlando Sentinel (owned by Tribune Company) has an auto racing writer and we'll use her stories. Now you've got five minutes to get mad and get it off your chest and then I don't want to hear any more about it."
A few weeks later I was at home when I received a call from the copy desk. "Neil Bonnett just got killed at Daytona, can you make some phone calls and get us a story on it?" "No," I replied. "You've got a writer from the Orlando Sentinel covering. Use her story."
Watching the rain-shortened Daytona 500 Sunday was like having sex without an orgasm; it was like entering a marathon and dropping out with four miles to go or climbing three fourths of the way up a mountain and then turning back. It can be exhilerating while you're doing it, but it ultimately provides no satisfaction. Except, of course, to the winner, Matt Kenseth, who was in the right place, first place, at the right time when the rains came. Victory does not always go to the fastest car and driver, which may or may not have been Kenseth on Sunday. Almost as many races are won on fuel economy or tire conservation or some other pit strategy as are won by some driver simply blowing the doors off his competitors. But at least they have a definable end game scenario. This one left viewers hanging, wondering what would have happened had the race gone on to its scheduled conclusion.
Would Jeff Gordon or Mark Martin, my own two favorite drivers, have come back to win, Gordon for the fourth time, Martin for the first? Both had the car, the time, and the talent to do so. Would Tony Stewart have turned his first drive as a car owner into an improbable victory? Would Dale Earnhardt Jr., who had a miserable day, with two pit road snafus and one lame-brained wreck-inducing wrench of the wheel, somehow have found his way into Victory Lane? He was, after all, still on the lead lap at journey's end. We'll never know the answers and it all could have been avoided had not NASCAR switched the starting time to late afternoon from its traditional 1 p.m., Eastern Time, green flag to accommodate television. The race should have been over, all 200 laps of it, long before the rains came.
The Daytona 500, which has been called "The Great American Race," is unique in that it is widely regarded by drivers as the Super Bowl of the sport, yet it opens the season rather than closes it. Winning it assures a driver lasting fame, if not a season championship. In the 51 years the race has been run on the 2 1/2 mile Daytona International Speedway, only eight times has the winner gone on to claim the season championship. Five of those perfectas were notched by the Petty family, patriarch Lee Petty accomplishing it in 1959, the year of the inaugural Daytona 500,and his son Richard winning the big one in four of his seven championship seasons.
The others to do it are all going to be in the racing Hall of Fame--Cale Yarborough,
Jeff Gordon, and Jimmie Johnson.
When I was writing sports for the Chicago Tribune, the Daytona 500 was one of my favorite assignments. I loved the race day walk from my hotel to the track, about a mile and a half away, with the fans waving banners of their favorite drivers and the sun already beginning to warm the day. I remember one such race day morning when I was being interviewed by a Chicago radio station and I offered: "There's nowhere else in the world I'd rather be on this day than right here in Daytona." I was the first writer for The Tribune ever to cover it and my first race was one of the two Daytona 500s that changed the face of auto racing in the United States. The year was 1976, the bicentennial year, and Richard Petty was in mid-reign as The King of stock car drivers. There were plenty of other top tier drivers out there, guys like Bobby Allison, Buddy Baker, Cale Yarborough, and Benny Parsons, to name a few. But Petty's most persistent pursuer was David Pearson, the Silver Fox, considered by many of the southern writers as Petty's equal, if not his superior. The race was so riveting from start to finish that I didn't leave my seat in the press box, even to go to the bathroom, for fear I'd miss something. It came down to Petty and Pearson with Richard leading on the final lap before David drafted past him in the back stretch. Entering the fourth turn Petty tried to stick the nose of his car back in front, but the two cars banged doors and started to spin into the infield. The fans were going nuts and the good old boy writers in the press box were thunderstruck and so was I. The whole scene was so chaotic that I didn't know who had won the race. When I asked the writer next to me he bellowed what sounded like "Parsons." "Benny Parsons won?" I said. "No, not Parsons, Pearson." The Silver Fox had managed to keep his engine running and get back on the track to cross the finish line. Petty, meanwhile, was futiley trying to crank his engine as his car sat in the grass some 100 yards from victory. It was tradional back then to bring only the winning driver up to the press box for the post race interview. But this time both made the trip up through the stands.
Three years later the race was nationally televised for the first time and what a mid-winter treat for America's auto racing fans. The race came down to a duel between Donnie Allison and Yarborough and I was secretly rooting for Cale because, a few years earlier, he had visited me in the hospital while I was recovering from surgery. Allison led for most of the race, but on the final lap, Cale tried to squeeze past him entering the backstretch and wrecked both cars. While Petty circled the track to win for the sixth time the fans in the third turn were treated to the spectacle of Allison and Yarborough throwing fists and helmets at each other, a fight eventually joined by Donnie's brother Bobby, and all of it caught on camera.
In all, I covered nine Daytona 500s and some of them were routine and some were memorable. Among the latter were 1989, when Darrell Waltrip celebrated his only Daytona 500 win with a victory dance while shouting childlike: "I won the Daytona 500, I won the Daytona 500."; 1990 when Dale Earnhardt, Junior's father, seemed poised to finally win the race that had always eluded him until, while leading halfway through the final lap, he cut a tire in turn three and Derrick Cope swept past him; and 1993, when Gordon made his Daytona debut by winning one of the Thursday qualifiers and finishing third in the big show while Earnhardt and Dale Jarrett dueled it out over the final laps. I can still remember hearing Ned Jarrett, Dale's father, who was lead announcer on the telecast, screaming, "two laps to go, it's Dale and Dale," trying to report objectively while his son was earning the biggest victory of his career. That in fact was my last live memory of the Daytona 500.
The next year we had a new sports editor, Margaret Holt, the first and so far only woman sports editor the Tribune has had. I liked Margaret and she always treated me with respect. The day she was removed as sports editor she called me at home to tell me and I thought that was a classy thing to do. But our relationship did not start out so well. Shortly after her arrival she invited me to lunch at the hotel dining room next door to Tribune Tower and wasted no time in telling me: "You're not going to Daytona. The Orlando Sentinel (owned by Tribune Company) has an auto racing writer and we'll use her stories. Now you've got five minutes to get mad and get it off your chest and then I don't want to hear any more about it."
A few weeks later I was at home when I received a call from the copy desk. "Neil Bonnett just got killed at Daytona, can you make some phone calls and get us a story on it?" "No," I replied. "You've got a writer from the Orlando Sentinel covering. Use her story."
Tuesday, February 10, 2009
By Bob Markus
Just when you thought it was safe to go back to the ball park, along comes A-Rod, dropping an A-bomb, live, on your television screen. You might as well surrender, unconditionally, baseball fans, because it is now apparent that an entire generation of the best and brightest the sport has to offer is and has been playing under a cloud.
We've hardly gotten used to the idea that Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens, arguably the best hitter and pitcher, respectively, of their time, if not all time, have given new meaning to the term "a shot and a beer," and now we learn that Alex Rodriguez, the greatest star of the next generation, also has used so-called performance enhancing drugs.
While Bonds and Clemens have followed the time-honored advice of cheating husbands--deny, deny, deny--Rodriguez has fessed up, in hopes that a forgiving public will take him back in its embrace after the revelation that he was one of 104 major league players whose specimens were red-flagged when baseball conducted its first drug test back in 2003.
Results of that test were supposed to be confidential, but in this era of camera phones and bloggers it's no secret that there is no secret that can be kept much longer than it takes for another giant corporation to file for bankruptcy. Somewhere, 103 baseball players are having trouble sleeping at night. Over this last week-end, A-Rod was outed by Sports Illustrated, through its website, and, after examining his options, apparently decided that the truth might set him free.
The New York Yankees' super star voluntarily sat for a lenghty interview with ESPN's Peter Gammons, a former newspaper guy who knows how to ask the right questions. But, although Rodriguez admitted taking steroids during a three-year period from 2001-2003, he was not entirely forthcoming. Gammons made several attempts to find out what was A-Rod's drug of choice, but the celebrated slugger kept fouling off good pitches. Like a politician responding to a question about his specific plans for ensuring world peace, Rodriguez kept insisting that it was "a different culture in those days," as if in 2003--six years ago--women were wearing hoop skirts and schoolboys were wearing knickers.
By the time Rodriguez, who had just jumped ship from Seattle to the Texas Rangers, began dabbling in steroids, the drug culture apparently was in full swing. During his exciting mano-a-mano with the Chicago Cubs' Sammy Sosa in pursuit of Roger Maris' single season home run record, St. Louis Cardinals' slugger Mark McGwire made no attempt to hide bottles of a drug that, although not banned by baseball at the time, was considered performance enhancing. I'm not certain just how performance enhancing steroids are. They may make you bigger and stronger, but to hit a home run you've still got to put a solid stroke on a ball thrown at up to 100 m.p.h. by a guy who himself could be on steroids.
Sosa himself never was caught using banned drugs, although he was caught using a corked bat and perhaps the latter is one reason few people believe him when he says he never did illegal drugs. Once a cheat, always a cheat. Rodriguez told Gammons that he had an epiphany before the 2004 season when he began to see that continued use of illegal drugs might impact not only his career, but his post career legacy.
Because whatever drugs he was taking were not banned by baseball at the time, Rodriguez is not likely to be punished by major league baseball. But he is right to worry about life after baseball. He probably will retire as baseball's all-time home run leader. At age 34, he needs 209 more to tie Bonds' record of 762. But consider McGwire, who otherwise would have been a cinch to get into the Baseball Hall of Fame on the first ballot. He hasn't come close in his first three years on the ballot. It appears he will never make it. Nor will Sosa.
It will be interesting to see how the Hall of Fame voters react to Bonds and Clemens when they come up for enshrinement. As a voter myself, I'm interested in seeing how I'll react. How can you keep the all-time home run leader out of the Hall of Fame? The same way you can keep baseball's all-time hits leader, Pete Rose, out of the Hall of Fame. Rose, of course, has been ruled ineligible because of his admission of gambling on Cincinnati Reds games--betting only on his team to win--while he was manager of the Reds. His name has never been on the ballot. Perhaps the solution is as simple as that. It's baseball's problem; let baseball solve it. If a player's name is on the ballot, a voter should consider what the player did on the field and vote accordingly. In fact, hang in there, Mark McGwire. I think you just picked up another Hall of Fame vote.
Just when you thought it was safe to go back to the ball park, along comes A-Rod, dropping an A-bomb, live, on your television screen. You might as well surrender, unconditionally, baseball fans, because it is now apparent that an entire generation of the best and brightest the sport has to offer is and has been playing under a cloud.
We've hardly gotten used to the idea that Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens, arguably the best hitter and pitcher, respectively, of their time, if not all time, have given new meaning to the term "a shot and a beer," and now we learn that Alex Rodriguez, the greatest star of the next generation, also has used so-called performance enhancing drugs.
While Bonds and Clemens have followed the time-honored advice of cheating husbands--deny, deny, deny--Rodriguez has fessed up, in hopes that a forgiving public will take him back in its embrace after the revelation that he was one of 104 major league players whose specimens were red-flagged when baseball conducted its first drug test back in 2003.
Results of that test were supposed to be confidential, but in this era of camera phones and bloggers it's no secret that there is no secret that can be kept much longer than it takes for another giant corporation to file for bankruptcy. Somewhere, 103 baseball players are having trouble sleeping at night. Over this last week-end, A-Rod was outed by Sports Illustrated, through its website, and, after examining his options, apparently decided that the truth might set him free.
The New York Yankees' super star voluntarily sat for a lenghty interview with ESPN's Peter Gammons, a former newspaper guy who knows how to ask the right questions. But, although Rodriguez admitted taking steroids during a three-year period from 2001-2003, he was not entirely forthcoming. Gammons made several attempts to find out what was A-Rod's drug of choice, but the celebrated slugger kept fouling off good pitches. Like a politician responding to a question about his specific plans for ensuring world peace, Rodriguez kept insisting that it was "a different culture in those days," as if in 2003--six years ago--women were wearing hoop skirts and schoolboys were wearing knickers.
By the time Rodriguez, who had just jumped ship from Seattle to the Texas Rangers, began dabbling in steroids, the drug culture apparently was in full swing. During his exciting mano-a-mano with the Chicago Cubs' Sammy Sosa in pursuit of Roger Maris' single season home run record, St. Louis Cardinals' slugger Mark McGwire made no attempt to hide bottles of a drug that, although not banned by baseball at the time, was considered performance enhancing. I'm not certain just how performance enhancing steroids are. They may make you bigger and stronger, but to hit a home run you've still got to put a solid stroke on a ball thrown at up to 100 m.p.h. by a guy who himself could be on steroids.
Sosa himself never was caught using banned drugs, although he was caught using a corked bat and perhaps the latter is one reason few people believe him when he says he never did illegal drugs. Once a cheat, always a cheat. Rodriguez told Gammons that he had an epiphany before the 2004 season when he began to see that continued use of illegal drugs might impact not only his career, but his post career legacy.
Because whatever drugs he was taking were not banned by baseball at the time, Rodriguez is not likely to be punished by major league baseball. But he is right to worry about life after baseball. He probably will retire as baseball's all-time home run leader. At age 34, he needs 209 more to tie Bonds' record of 762. But consider McGwire, who otherwise would have been a cinch to get into the Baseball Hall of Fame on the first ballot. He hasn't come close in his first three years on the ballot. It appears he will never make it. Nor will Sosa.
It will be interesting to see how the Hall of Fame voters react to Bonds and Clemens when they come up for enshrinement. As a voter myself, I'm interested in seeing how I'll react. How can you keep the all-time home run leader out of the Hall of Fame? The same way you can keep baseball's all-time hits leader, Pete Rose, out of the Hall of Fame. Rose, of course, has been ruled ineligible because of his admission of gambling on Cincinnati Reds games--betting only on his team to win--while he was manager of the Reds. His name has never been on the ballot. Perhaps the solution is as simple as that. It's baseball's problem; let baseball solve it. If a player's name is on the ballot, a voter should consider what the player did on the field and vote accordingly. In fact, hang in there, Mark McGwire. I think you just picked up another Hall of Fame vote.
Tuesday, February 3, 2009
By Bob Markus
"Winning isn't everything; it's the only thing."--Vince Lombardi.
"When that one great scorer comes to mark against your name, he'll ask not if you won or lost, but how you played the game."--Grantland Rice.
The concept of "moral victory," so antithetical to Lombardi, the great football coach, so philosophical bedrock to Rice, the legendary sports writer, merits a long second look in the wake of Sunday's epic Super Bowl thriller. Surely destroyed by the Arizona Cardinals' dead game but ultimately doomed performance was that other old bromide--"Nobody remembers who finished second."
This time,they'll remember, all right. In fact, I suspect that, in years to come, the Cardinals will be remembered more for their magnificence in defeat than the Pittsburgh Steelers will be glorified for their resilience in victory.
This was, unquestionably, the greatest Super Bowl ever. Of course, it didn't have much to beat. The great majority of past Super Bowls have been, in a word, boring. I covered 10 of them for the Chicago Tribune, including nine in a row--numbers IV-XII--and only one of them, Pittsburgh's 21-17 win over the Dallas Cowboys in Super Bowl X was even moderately exciting. That includes Baltimore's 16-13 win over the Cowboys in Super Bowl V, which, athough decided on a last minute field goal by Jim O'Brien, was a sloppy, mistake-filled game for the first 59 minutes.
In Super Bowls past there have been many more routs than pivotal moments. A full 20 of the first 42 were decided by more than a two touchdown margin. How many memorable moments can you recall from Super Bowls past? I'll give you Scott Norwood's missed field goal on the final play of Super Bowl XXV, which let the New York Giants off the hook in a 20-19 victory over Norwood's Buffalo Bills. I'll give you Super Bowl XXXIV, when St. Louis Rams linebacker Mike Jones tackled Tennessee receiver Kevin Dyson a yard short of the goal line on the final play of the Rams' 23-16 victory. I'll give you Super Bowl XXXVI when Adam Vinatieri kicked a 48-yard field goal on the final play to lift the New England Patriots to a 20-17 upset over the Rams. And, of course, there was last year's dramatic 17-14 shocker for the Giants, denying the Patriots' bid to become the first NFL team to go 19-0 in a season.
None of these can match Sunday's game for magical moments. The pivotal play was the last one of the first half, when the Cardinals, perched on the Steelers' 2-yard line, seemed certain to tie the score with a field goal or go ahead with a touchdown. Instead, they went into the halftime break down by 10 points when linebacker James Harrison turned their world upside down with his 100-yard interception return.
When The Steelers upped their lead to 20-7 entering the final quarter, there was little reason to think the Cardinals had much of a chance. No team had ever come back from that big a fourth quarter deficit to win a Super Bowl. And in 10 postseason games, the Steelers had never lost even an 11-point cushion in the final quarter. But these Cardinals, who entered the game with the worst record of any Super Bowl team, were far from finished.
First, quarterback Kurt Warner, who had earlier been honored with the Walter Payton trophy for outstanding contributions to his community, added a few more outstanding contributions to his football team. He collaborated with wide receiver Larry Fitzgerald on a pair of touchdown passes that had the Cardinals in front for the first time all day. But not for long. With just over 2 minutes to play it was Ben Roethlisberger's turn. The 26-year-old quarterback, like Warner, had a Super Bowl scalp hanging from his belt. But unlike Warner, who was MVP of his Super Bowl triumph, Roethlisberger had not played well in his first grab at the big prize, reaching it only on the backs of his teammates. Now he would show how far he had come in the three years since that game.
The young gunslinger not only directed the Steelers to the go-ahead touchdown, a 6-yard toss to Santonio Holmes in the far right corner of the end zone, but he left Warner only 35 seconds to attempt to retaliate. It now began to remind me of the famous Doug Flutie-Bernie Kosar duel when both were in college, Flutie at Boston College and Kosar at Miami. Almost everyone remembers that Flutie won that game, 47-45, on the famous "Hail Mary" pass into the end zone on the final play. But I remember it, too, for an earlier Flutie scoring drive when the cameras focused on Kosar, standing on the sidelines. The Miami quarterback gave a nod of his head, as if to say, "Nicely done," then trotted onto the field and led the Hurricanes back into the lead. I thought that this game, too, would be decided by who had the ball last.
In all the pregame buildup, it was widely surmised that Warner's legacy was on the line. A victory for the Arizona qurterback would make him a two-time Super Bowl winner and the only quarterback to win a Super Bowl with two teams. Instead it is Roethlisberger who has two Super Bowl crowns. But it is too early to start a Hall of Fame campaign for Roethlisberger, who still has miles to go before he sleeps to dream of such things. It is not too early to insist that Warner, despite Sunday's loss, has already done enough to qualify. Sunday's was his third Super Bowl and he has the three highest passing yards games in Super Bowl history. He won one Super Bowl with the Rams with a 73-yard tie-breaking scoring pass to Isaac Bruce, lost another on Vinatieri's final play kick, and came within 35 seconds of winning another on Sunday--just 35 seconds separating him from being a possible three-time winner. Warner, with his background of being a grocery store stock boy-cum-European Football League player-cum-NFL star, has always been a great story. His Walter Payton award demonstrates he is a great person. And his play on Sunday underscores the fact he is a great player, one who deserves to be in the Pro Football Hall of Fame.
"Winning isn't everything; it's the only thing."--Vince Lombardi.
"When that one great scorer comes to mark against your name, he'll ask not if you won or lost, but how you played the game."--Grantland Rice.
The concept of "moral victory," so antithetical to Lombardi, the great football coach, so philosophical bedrock to Rice, the legendary sports writer, merits a long second look in the wake of Sunday's epic Super Bowl thriller. Surely destroyed by the Arizona Cardinals' dead game but ultimately doomed performance was that other old bromide--"Nobody remembers who finished second."
This time,they'll remember, all right. In fact, I suspect that, in years to come, the Cardinals will be remembered more for their magnificence in defeat than the Pittsburgh Steelers will be glorified for their resilience in victory.
This was, unquestionably, the greatest Super Bowl ever. Of course, it didn't have much to beat. The great majority of past Super Bowls have been, in a word, boring. I covered 10 of them for the Chicago Tribune, including nine in a row--numbers IV-XII--and only one of them, Pittsburgh's 21-17 win over the Dallas Cowboys in Super Bowl X was even moderately exciting. That includes Baltimore's 16-13 win over the Cowboys in Super Bowl V, which, athough decided on a last minute field goal by Jim O'Brien, was a sloppy, mistake-filled game for the first 59 minutes.
In Super Bowls past there have been many more routs than pivotal moments. A full 20 of the first 42 were decided by more than a two touchdown margin. How many memorable moments can you recall from Super Bowls past? I'll give you Scott Norwood's missed field goal on the final play of Super Bowl XXV, which let the New York Giants off the hook in a 20-19 victory over Norwood's Buffalo Bills. I'll give you Super Bowl XXXIV, when St. Louis Rams linebacker Mike Jones tackled Tennessee receiver Kevin Dyson a yard short of the goal line on the final play of the Rams' 23-16 victory. I'll give you Super Bowl XXXVI when Adam Vinatieri kicked a 48-yard field goal on the final play to lift the New England Patriots to a 20-17 upset over the Rams. And, of course, there was last year's dramatic 17-14 shocker for the Giants, denying the Patriots' bid to become the first NFL team to go 19-0 in a season.
None of these can match Sunday's game for magical moments. The pivotal play was the last one of the first half, when the Cardinals, perched on the Steelers' 2-yard line, seemed certain to tie the score with a field goal or go ahead with a touchdown. Instead, they went into the halftime break down by 10 points when linebacker James Harrison turned their world upside down with his 100-yard interception return.
When The Steelers upped their lead to 20-7 entering the final quarter, there was little reason to think the Cardinals had much of a chance. No team had ever come back from that big a fourth quarter deficit to win a Super Bowl. And in 10 postseason games, the Steelers had never lost even an 11-point cushion in the final quarter. But these Cardinals, who entered the game with the worst record of any Super Bowl team, were far from finished.
First, quarterback Kurt Warner, who had earlier been honored with the Walter Payton trophy for outstanding contributions to his community, added a few more outstanding contributions to his football team. He collaborated with wide receiver Larry Fitzgerald on a pair of touchdown passes that had the Cardinals in front for the first time all day. But not for long. With just over 2 minutes to play it was Ben Roethlisberger's turn. The 26-year-old quarterback, like Warner, had a Super Bowl scalp hanging from his belt. But unlike Warner, who was MVP of his Super Bowl triumph, Roethlisberger had not played well in his first grab at the big prize, reaching it only on the backs of his teammates. Now he would show how far he had come in the three years since that game.
The young gunslinger not only directed the Steelers to the go-ahead touchdown, a 6-yard toss to Santonio Holmes in the far right corner of the end zone, but he left Warner only 35 seconds to attempt to retaliate. It now began to remind me of the famous Doug Flutie-Bernie Kosar duel when both were in college, Flutie at Boston College and Kosar at Miami. Almost everyone remembers that Flutie won that game, 47-45, on the famous "Hail Mary" pass into the end zone on the final play. But I remember it, too, for an earlier Flutie scoring drive when the cameras focused on Kosar, standing on the sidelines. The Miami quarterback gave a nod of his head, as if to say, "Nicely done," then trotted onto the field and led the Hurricanes back into the lead. I thought that this game, too, would be decided by who had the ball last.
In all the pregame buildup, it was widely surmised that Warner's legacy was on the line. A victory for the Arizona qurterback would make him a two-time Super Bowl winner and the only quarterback to win a Super Bowl with two teams. Instead it is Roethlisberger who has two Super Bowl crowns. But it is too early to start a Hall of Fame campaign for Roethlisberger, who still has miles to go before he sleeps to dream of such things. It is not too early to insist that Warner, despite Sunday's loss, has already done enough to qualify. Sunday's was his third Super Bowl and he has the three highest passing yards games in Super Bowl history. He won one Super Bowl with the Rams with a 73-yard tie-breaking scoring pass to Isaac Bruce, lost another on Vinatieri's final play kick, and came within 35 seconds of winning another on Sunday--just 35 seconds separating him from being a possible three-time winner. Warner, with his background of being a grocery store stock boy-cum-European Football League player-cum-NFL star, has always been a great story. His Walter Payton award demonstrates he is a great person. And his play on Sunday underscores the fact he is a great player, one who deserves to be in the Pro Football Hall of Fame.
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