The Masters. Huge. Quickly.

As seen in the April 12 edition of The Heights, Boston College's Independent Newspaper

The Masters is the first sign that golf is actually here. It’s the start of spring, and watching it sure makes you think, “This is the year I get my handicap down to single digits.”

It’s not.

Still, the drama of Amen Corner and the green jacket is too good to pass up. Do a running diary? Why not?

Over-Under on number of Tiger jokes: 4.5

4:48 p.m.: KJ Choi clearly does not care about playing with Tiger for all four days, as the man is playing out of his mind. Plus, Choi used to be a competitive power lifter, so he’s got that going for him, which is nice.

4:53 p.m.: I’m loving the fact that Freddy Couples has no back, is wearing slippers, and still blasts the ball over 300 yards.

He is one of my favorite golfers. He seems like the kind you could just hang out with during a tailgate and slug a couple of Natty’s. You know, if it weren’t weird drinking 50-cent beers with a 50-year-old pro

golfer who’s made millions. Your call.

4:55 p.m.: Phil Mickelson is now forced to punch out from deep in the shrubbery, somewhere I find myself way too often. That’s what makes golf so much fun … Never mind, Phil nearly greened it. Let’s just say I wouldn’t have.

5:03 p.m.: Couples in the water -- that could spell the end. Right Said Fred

with the wrong shot choice there. Tough to go for that pin with a Sunday placement on the water-filled 12th.

5:09 p.m.: So Eldrick Woods just hit a shot from in the trees that kept him in the trees. Second shot? Tiger then hit it through the branches to within eight feet. The man is not human.

5:14 p.m.: The short stick has been killing everybody today – except KJ. He could wind up with a three-stroke victory before anyone notices. Anthony Kim has also been rolling them in, making a late run sending my friend Hirsh into an absolute roar. He loves him some AK.

5:19 p.m.: The Phil collapse hasn’t happened. Maybe it’s the fact he’s looking trim. The need for a manziere is minimal ... at least this week.

5:24 p.m.: Hirsh was just awoken to a frightening volume by Anthony Kim’s eagle and proceeded to break out a caddie-level awkward fist pump in celebration. Kim now sits at 11-under after two birdies and that eagle. He’s one behind Choi and Phil but will post his number early and apply the pressure.

5:27 p.m.: Whoever made the decision to put a mic on Tiger is a genius. We just got a solid, “God! Ti-Ger!!” Almost as good as yesterday’s, “Tiger Woods, you suck.” Talking in the third person just sounds ridiculous. Popko’s ready for some more Tiger sound bites.

5:35 p.m.: Anthony Kim is absolutely unconscious with his putter. Drained it from about 20. Hirsh’s phone is now blowing up with congratulations for his boy’s success. The level of one-sided bromance is at an all-time high. I’m starting to feel this run, too.

5:36 p.m.: And AK just hit his tee shot onto the wrong hole. I should stop talking now.

5:43 p.m.: Phil and AK both in the woods, and Phil just hit the shot of his life. From behind a tree in the pine straw through a gap about four-feet wide to within five feet … for eagle. Let’s see if AK, or anyone else for that matter, has it in them to top that.

5:52 p.m.: I spoke too soon on Phil. Just missed a putt I would have taken as a gimmie. In other news, I am not 14-under at the Masters. Tiger just three-putted from eight feet, and golf’s big boys are leaving strokes on the green.

6:08 p.m.: Anthony Kim drains a 15-footer for par on 18 -- the man put on a putting clinic today, shooting a 65 -- and posts t

he clubhouse lead of 12-under. Only problem is Phil is two strokes ahead, and he and Westwood are on the par 5, 15th that Tiger just put home an eagle on. It’s looking like AK is going to need some luck. Hirsh is slightly more subdued now.

6:16 p.m.: At this point, it’s Phil’s tournament to lose, but he has choked before. He probably still has nightmares about Winged Foot. Hirsh thinks he’ll pull it out, and I think he has one more epic choke job in him, but it’s tough to see it coming today. I’d love to see him come back to AK, but honestly, Westwood is the only one who can catch him, and he had the look of defeat on his face six holes ago. There are just not enough streaking golfers out on the course at this point.

6:19 p.m.: Lee Westwood also cannot putt, Phil’s lead is three, and I’m going to have to call it. The water on 16 and a Westwood ace is about all that could change that right now. No matter what, Lee is guaranteed another great finish. He has gone second, third, third in the past three majors. That, that is insane.

6:33 p.m.: The final pairing goes par-par on 16, and a three-shot lead with two to play looks too tough to overcome. Phil would need to channel his inner Jean Van de Velde to lose this now.

6:35 p.m.: Tiger’s on 18, so I need to say this now: If the Masters were at Bethpage Black, is there even a chance he returns? It would be absolutely brutal. He got destroyed by masses of drunk New Yorkers for taking out an umbrella when it was raining. Become a sex addict, and he’d never stand a chance.

6:39 p.m.: Tiger finished with a 69 as America chuckles. He’s out of it. Westwood needed a miss from Phil, but no luck, as Phil is draino. Up two with just one hole left. He is about to play the most conservative hole of his life. Three wood it is.

6:53 p.m.: Westwood just misses, and needs a Phil four-putt for the win, and … nothing but the bottom of the cup. Birdie. Three-stroke win, and now it’s just signing the scorecard and time for the peoples’ champ, Angel Cabrera, to present the blazer.

7:09 p.m.: Phil is rocking an epic farmer’s tan and mullet combo, and now he has his third green jacket. What a solid four days. Very few people could be mad at Phil winning. Plus, Freddy Couples competed, and Anthony Kim had a four-hole coming-out party.

The Masters. Huge. Quickly.

Masters Final Round Live Blog

Live Blog Courtesy of The Heights

Consolation Road to No Where

As seen in a March 18 Blog Post in "The Heights" blog, 'SidelineSuperfan'

It’s a sad day for Boston College basketball. The NCAA tournament is just around the corner, and the Eagles can’t boast a team in either the men’s or women’s fields. Worse than that, there is no NIT. No CBI. Heck, the collegeinsider.com tournament didn’t even bother sniffing around Conte Forum.

Perhaps what’s most surprising is neither team was without options. Al Skinner refused to put his team in anything below the NIT. For that reason, Rakim Sanders will be free to travel -- excuse me, jab step (or was that a crab dribble?) -- wherever he wishes instead of hosting the likes of Fairfield in the CBI.

Sylvia Crawley and the Lady Eagles flat-out rejected an NIT birth despite the fact they could quite possibly win the tournament without leaving Chestnut Hill. The locker room was apparently divided over their participation, and rather than play as a team divided, they will sit as a team united.

I generally support playing as much competitive basketball as possible. An NIT or CBI title might not be a National Championship, but you have the chance to win some hardware and be one of only a few teams (two for women, four for men) that can say you ended the year with a W.

When it comes to Skinner and Crawley, I actually agree with their decision. One hundred percent. I may not have said that much about Skinner much this year, but for these teams, they fell well short of expectations, and they didn’t deserve to keep going.

If you watched BC basketball this year, you saw a pair of enigmas. For every high, there were more than a few lows. If the teams didn’t feel they were worthy of a second or third-rate tournament, good for them.What makes tournaments like the NIT great theatre isn’t the BC’s that don’t deserve any recognition for failing to do what they were supposed to.

The NIT is for the teams like Stony Brook. The Seawolves have only been one Division I team since 1999 and have never been in the postseason. They lost to BU -- and not even in Hockey, which is depressing -- in the America East tournament, but were granted an NIT berth thanks to their regular season title.

Stony Brook may have been given an eight seed, the lowest the NIT has to offer, but thanks to Cirque Du Soleil booting top-seeded Illinois from Assembly Hall, the school from the north shore of Long Island got to pack out their 5,000-seat gym for a postseason game Wednesday and host what they called the biggest game in Stony Brook history.

I’ve been in the gym. I've played on that floor. It bears a strong resemblance to a high school gym in that your high school gym may actually look more imposing. But they were pumped to have this opportunity for the first time ever. They sold out and were louder than every non-Duke crowd BC has seen. Because of that, an American East state school pushed to the limit a team that Skinner would likely have lost to by double digits (of course this IS Boston College, so an absolute stomping behind a 28-18 for Corey Raji is within reach as well).

Do you think Conte Forum would see that kind of support for a postseason tournament that is ultimately meaningless? I didn’t think so. Would it see even half capacity? The women’s team hosted an NIT Final Four game last season, and I bet most students reading this didn’t even know that.

Unable to get their goal, the Eagles didn’t want the token “set of steak knives” that comes as the door prize. As much as I’d like to see a few more games of Ayla Brown or Tyler Roche, I can’t say I want a consolation road to nowhere, either.

Where 2010 Happens

As seen in the Feb. 22 Edition of The Heights, Boston College's Independent Newspaper

The world of the NBA trade is an animal in and of itself. Deals are not often struck for the purpose of two or three teams coming out the other side better. You get players’ actual talent traded for the proverbial bucket of balls –- only if that bucket of balls was Jerome James.

If you were paid way too much once upon a time, and can now attach the words “expiring contract” to your bio, you become instantly valuable. A few years ago, it turned Raef LaFrentz into one of the league’s most sought after big men.

Trades are made to get under the luxury tax threshold or the salary cap, and young talent or future draft picks are nowhere near as valuable as is the freedom from having to pay them.

You end up getting contract swaps like Brian Cardinal for Darko Milicic, or the pure salary dump of Matt Harpring and 2009 first-round pick Eric Maynor for the rights to 2002 German second-rounder Peter Fehse, whose entire value lies in the fact that he is not in the NBA and never will be, making him as much of an asset as I am.

The NBA has always been a freak animal, but something has come over the league recently. It’s the mythical “Summer of 2010.”

LeBron James. Dwyane Wade. Chris Bosh. They all are free agents this summer, and whatever sacrifices are made between now and July 1 are just water under the bridge.
My New York Knickerbockers were the poster child of horrendous NBA deals under Isiah Thomas, and now they are trying to reverse that trend. Donnie Walsh has, in under two years, managed to jettison Stephon Marbury to China, get rid of Jared Jefferies, Jamal Crawford, and the aforementioned Jerome James, though James most likely would have eaten all traces of his contract anyway.

In the process, he has brought in a potential star (that right there is called a New York bias) in Danilo Gallinari and has a chance to sign Tracy McGrady at a steep discount, as his albatross of a contract will come off the books at the end of the year.

With the final shedding of Jefferies, the Knicks can attempt to woo two top-class free agents with maximum money. As long as he doesn’t spend it on the likes of Michael Redd and Jermaine O’Neal, two guys who really don’t deserve the close to $20 million they are making this year, he could be a hero.

Largest media market in the country? Coach famous for a run-and-shoot offense known as “seven seconds or less?” Knicks fans are dancing like Jeff Jagodzinski after beating Virginia Tech.

The only blemish on Walsh’s record is the failure to get rid of Eddy Curry, the man who was once a solid post presence, but as he aged, it became clear that his “baby fat” was actually man fat, and the only thing he could do in seven seconds or less is pound down a Big Mac and large fry.

The summer of 2010 has replaced the draft as the place where teams go for hope. Everybody that wants a shot has one.

New Jersey is saddled with an NBA team that will almost certainly fail to crack 10 wins, in addition to the sad fact that, well, they are in New Jersey. Still, they could have the most cap space in the NBA and can offer LeBron a fresh start in Brooklyn with his boy Jay-Z.

The Bulls can offer Wade a hometown crowd.

The Clippers can offer the second biggest media market in the country and Blake Griffin.

The Timberwolves can offer … okay, not much, but they can throw down tons of money.

Teams see the horizon, and every one of them sees the superstar they want in their jersey. All these pointless trades create cap space and the possibility to be an immediate championship contender. The consolation price if LeBron and friends don’t want to spend their time hanging out in a city like Milwaukee? I guess you can still have Fehse.

THIS is March Madness?

As Seen in the February 8th Issue of The Heights

Bigger is better in America. It’s landed Tony Siragusa a sideline gig. It made Darko Milicic a higher pick than Carmelo Anthony. It even made everyone consider Barry Bonds’ size-15 head a good thing.

So when it became widely reported that March Madness would be expanding to 96 teams, how could it be a bad thing? Coaches loved it. Networks loved it. Yet it caused most fans to react as if they found Tiger Woods’ number in their girlfriend’s cell phone.

Sports fans are willing to concede a lot of things, so long as the sanctity of the game they love isn’t compromised. Do not touch our yearly bracket pool.

I consider there to be three purely perfect sporting events left: the World Cup, the NHL playoffs, and March Madness. You can argue anything else – the Olympics, the Super Bowl, whatever – and I will say no. Any time a spectacle like the opening ceremony or the commercials draw nearly as many viewers as the actual sport, you have already lost perfection.

March Madness is the pinnacle of what should be untouched. More classes have been cut by yours truly in honor of the first two rounds of the tournament than I am willing to divulge. (Sorry to any professors of mine that happen to read this.) I even dropped a class second semester last year partly because there was a “can’t miss class” during the first round of games.

I’ve gone as far as riding in a broken down 1980s Volvo through a blizzard to avoid missing a second of UNLV-Georgia Tech.

Normally you might think that an extra 32 teams (well, 31 I guess. Thanks play-in game!) would give one-and-a-half times the fun. Wrong. Sure, a few more mid-majors would get a chance, and the Pac-10 would stand a chance at multiple bids, but who would get the majority of those bids? Middling power conference teams. If you really want to watch Auburn vs. Oregon for the right to lose to Kansas by 40, well, you can just watch the NIT.

Of course, Texas A&M-Corpus Christi and Co., stands less of a chance against the big boys, but that’s what makes the tournament so great. I still remember Hampton upsetting a dominant Iowa State team, and Bryce Drew sinking a buzzer-beating 3-pointer for Valparaiso.

A great game between two heavyweights is a beautiful thing for sure, but it’s the minnows attempting to flip everything on its head that bring out the sucker in everybody.
Oftentimes, the final bubble slots are a struggle to decide between which team is more wholly mediocre. A field of 96 means no longer are you looking for the mediocre – you are trying to decide which team sucks the least.

Imagine the selection committee deciding between a 18-13 Northwestern team that went 6-12 in the Big Ten and a 16-14 South Carolina team that went 7-9 in the SEC?

John Shurna! Sam Muldrow! This is March Madness!

By expanding to let in teams that floundered throughout the regular season, you open the door for teams like, well, Boston College into the big dance.

Look, I love BC basketball. To see Al Skinner’s team scrape into the tournament with something like a 6-10 ACC record and those resume-boosting losses to Maine and Saint Joseph’s would just make my day, and I assure you some “illness” will overtake me that Thursday. But it just isn’t right.

The Eagles aren’t dead in the water for the 65-team field yet. It would take some sort of miracle run from now till the end of the season. Rakim Sanders would have to enter some never-before-seen “eff-you, I’m scoring 30 tonight, and I dare you to try and stop me” mode, Reggie Jackson would have to tighten his handle, and Josh Southern would have to find both a secondary post move and a pulse.

Since that’s about as likely as a steep drop in the school’s cost of tuition, the NIT or, gulp, the CBI awaits.

Note: If Rakim really does decide to take that step (he showed flashes against FSU and Duke), I will eat my words as happily as I would a Steve’s Sizzling Steak – trust me when I say very happily.

Speaking of the NIT and the CBI, could you imagine what those tournaments would look like?

We’d get first-rate ESPN2 coverage of Jay Bilas analyzing the length of Deilvez Yearby and the IPFW Mastodons against Prairie View A&M in the CBI championship. On the plus side, that would allow Digger Phelps to rock a killer Prairie View A&M purple shirt and marker combo. It’s the little things that will keep me watching when CBS and the NCAA cash in on an extra week of pseudo-madness.

In addition to the billion-dollar contracts that are thrown about in return for the broadcast rights and advertising, it’s the millions that coaches stand to make from their tournament appearances that will eventually push the scales toward expansion.

Even “old-school” coaches like Mike Krzyzewski endorse the expansion. Why? Because coaches are often judged by their ability to get the team to the main event in March. The more teams in, the more secure everyone’s job will be, right?

Considering that it would set a new standard for which coaches would be judged, the advantage would be negated within a few years. Throw in the always prevalent economic downturn, and the only way a coach will get fired is if he takes up a Rod Marinelli level of losing or if some kind of abuse allegation from a player surfaces.

You can understand Coach K standing up for his brethren and maybe even trying to help his own chances in the tournament by watering down the field and hoping teams like VCU get knocked out before they can get to the Blue Devils, but it’s an idea that is panned by everyone outside the decision-making process.

It’s like the decision makers are sitting in a late ’90s Enron board meeting. The CEO (schools), CFO (NCAA), and accounting department (networks) have decided it would be a great idea to cook the books.

Well, at this point, the employees would like to disagree. You can continually water down the regular season, but don’t you dare touch our tournament. Internally, it may seem like a win-win, but it’ll be the viewers who come out on the losing end.

I want to care about Southeast Missouri State, Stony Brook, and Maryland Eastern Shore playing against the powers. You give the top 32 teams a bye and, what, maybe a half dozen Cinderella stories make it through?

You lessen the number of potential upsets, and suddenly you could end up with virtually none. No TJ Sorrentine drilling a 32-footer in Syracuse’s face. No Clifton Lee (and his outrageous afro) on Northwestern State there to bust my Final Four sleeper of Iowa. It might be hard to believe it now, but maybe no Davidson, no Gonzaga, no George Mason.

Suddenly the only “I could be that guy!” story you have to rally behind is Tennessee’s Skylar McBee, and you really couldn’t be him because, let’s face it, his name is just better than yours.

Without McBee we’d be left with nothing, and frankly that’s not something I’m willing to accept.

Sorry for the Layoff

Hey all, sorry its been a while since I've written a post. I know, I know, all four of you out there must be very disappointed. Anyway, I just wanted to write to let you know that I have settled into a schedule with work and school and see some time on the horizon (ok, well actually Saturday) when I just might be able to sit down and give you my thoughts on Jets/Chargers, Jets/Colts, The Nate Robinson Situation, Whether or not the reason Donnie Walsh hasn't made a trade yet is because he refuses to communicate by any means other than telegram, or whatever else happens in the wide wide world of sports strikes my fancy. Until then, I hope everyone is enjoying this seasons new hit show, "Survivor: Revis Island."


SPOILER ALERT: Just like ABC's "Lost," the island wins