Of Wizards and Roses

It had been days of wine and roses at the Yard. The Bruins landed one of the top basketball recruiting classes in the nation. The Lakers and Clippers were into the second round of the playoffs. McCourt was finally out as owner of the Dodgers. The Dodgers responded with their best start since their last World Series Championship in 1988. The Galaxy was bumping with Obama about their championship at the White House. The Yard became a hockey fan as the Kings took out the top seeds in the west and made the Stanley Cup Finals as an eight seed. The Staples Center hosted six playoff games in four days. It was the first time in the history of the building that all three tenants made the playoffs. It was the best of times. A week later, the Lakers were run out of the playoffs by the OKC Thunder. The Clippers got swept by the Spurs. Matt Kemp was on the DL. The prescient had tantalized and flirted with our shallow objectives. The future grounded it fallow. The Lakers and Clippers came to the dance with much expectation. The Kings, not so much. For the first time in many years, all three teams were still playing in the building that the Lakers built. The Kings are still playing hockey in June for the first time in 19 years. The Clippers have never played basketball in June so they were just happy to make the second round for the second time in franchise history. Go Kings! It was bad enough that the young guns in Oklahoma ran the aging Lakers out of the building but then they clowned the Lakes at the post game press conference. Russell Westbrook and Kevin Durant came to the press conference in their Rerun glasses and brightly colored bowling shirts. Apparently, every NBA star except Kobe and anyone on the Celtics is required to be festooned in wide framed glasses at press conferences. No one seems to have a vision problem on the court but when facing the media, clown glasses are required. They did boat race the Lakers so the Yard needs to deal. Go Spurs! The Yard is rooting for a Spurs-Celtics NBA Final. We do not particularly like either team but we despise their opponents. It is shaky ground for the Yard to root for the Celtics but Miami is the team to tip the balance. Lebron James is the league MVP but he is not the man with the game on the line. Lebron would rather be the guy inbounding the ball with 7.6 seconds left than the guy who is receiving that inbounds pass with the clock clicking. Lebron is the man for the first 46 minutes. He is rare to take an important shot. He struggles with an important free throw late in the game. Kobe Bryant is a polarizing individual but he will take the final shot in any game any time under any circumstances. He has been doing that since he was seven years old. He will fight to get open with 1.2 seconds left to attempt a ridiculous 3-pointshot. He fails more than succeeds but he takes them all. Kobe is fearless despite his failures. He shows up at the press conference without facial apparatus or excuses. Lebron fears failures so he defers to others to take that shot. He is the league MVP for quarters 1 to 3. He is still the MVP with two minutes to go but if the game is the on the line, he is always making one more pass to anyone else. Kobe rarely gives up the ball up with the game on the line. Lebron does it instinctively. Go Celtics! Many times a team gets rid of a bad manager or a disruptive player and the team responds. We do not recall an instance when a team responded, like the Dodgers, when the owner was replaced. The Guggenheim billionaires have placed Magic in the owner’s seat as the face of the franchise. Magic is popular but the sheer joy of Frank McCourt not being in that seat has brought the fans back. Last year with Jamie and Frank were haggling over our city’s most cherished team and who would own it, Dodger Stadium became a morgue of discontent. Frank was never at the games because he was reviled. Jamie was not at the games because she was just vile. Magic sits proudly in their seats with Tommy most nights and brings his smile and spirit to LA’s first franchise. It is good to see him there but better to see Frank and Jamie nowhere. We are truly sorry the new owners had to pay those bitches so much money for a team they ran into the ground. Feces happen. After the SI article about Bruins in ruins, it was great to see UCLA basketball rise like a Phoenix out of the bong water. It had been a particularly miserable stretch after Ben Howland had generated so much expectation in his first five years. The SI article probably enhanced UCLA’s chances at landing this recruiting class of McDonald’s All Americans divas. With sordid stories of VIP limo rides to Beverly Hills mansions, plenty of weed and girls, what All American would not want a piece of that action? Hopefully, Howland can corral the show ponies into a team. Howland will never replace the Wizard Wooden in UCLA history and mythology. It is a tall task for any coach at any University. But there had always been another wizard in Westwood even when Wooden was doing his basketball magic. Harry Potter was not the only sage at Hogwarts just the guy with his name on the franchise. Wooden’s name will be everywhere at UCLA for now and for always. UCLA volleyball coach Al Scates retired this year after 50 years as the head coach. During Al’s tenure as UCLA head coach, John Wooden coached UCLA to ten titles. Al Scates coached the Bruins to 19 NCAA titles in volleyball. John Wooden won 620 games in 27 seasons. Al Scates coached the Bruins to 1,217 victories over 49 seasons. Wooden won seven titles in a row. Scates won only three titles in a row but his teams did it three times. No team in any sport has ever won three titles in a row three different times. From 1970 to 1998, Scates’ teams won fifteen titles or nearly half of the available titles. In 2006, UCLA was 12-12 and was in jeopardy of missing the playoffs for only the second time during Scates career. Al Scates had not coached a championship team since the 1998 campaign. The 67 year-old Scates coaxed a team without a single All-American to fourteen straight victories to close the season. UCLA swept #1 CSULB to become the lowest seeded team to make the NCAA Final Four for volleyball. UCLA faced Penn State in the finals which were hosted at Penn State. UCLA swept the Nittany Lions to win Al’s 19th and final championship. UCLA volleyball did not pay Scates for the first ten years. He was never paid his worth and that was never his goal. Al Scates paid it forward for two generations of Olympic medalists, beach volleyball superstars and the grand University he served for most of his adult life. God bless Al Scates! "Al Scates?! Precisely. The one and only. The man who is to volleyball what (John) Wooden was to basketball, (Red) Sanders was to football, Napolean to artillery..." Jim Murray.

Let Games Begin

It has been a slow season of late at the Yard. The teams of our destiny have not performed as cached in our memories. The sordid scandals of the past year have squished the comic tendencies out of our cynical nature. Our research staff did uncover this quiet little story about an Ivy League Taiwanese kid rising from obscurity to become a starting point guard of the New York Knicks! We hoped to get the word out to our loyal membership but Sports Illustrated trumped us while we were stranded wine tasting in Napa. It was a great story but the barrel tasting at Peju Vineyards winery is not something to be skipped for a scoop. Linsanity would have to wait and it appears to have run its course anyways. There are not many priorities at the Yard but Napa cabernets always trumps Asian point guards even if they play in NYC.

We needed to rest up anyways for our largest event of the year-The NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament. For 14 days of March and the first two days of April, college basketball and all of its madness will rule the Yard. There will be 62 basketball games played all over the nation. We had a practice run during championship week trolling through 272 conference tournament games starting last weekend and culminating with the Big Ten title game. There have been upsets and upstarts and the first round is still four days away.

Preparing for the 48 hour Thursday-Friday shift of 32 tournament basketball games later this week is not a regiment we take likely. With three TV’s playing three different games, the Yard was scanning round robin through the ACC, SEC, Conference USA, Mid-Eastern Athletic Conference, Atlantic 10, Big 10, Southland Conference, Pac-10 and Mountain West Conference season ending tournament games. We got started on the Deuce at 8:00 AM settling in for the highly anticipated Vermont Catamounts versus the Stony Brook Seawolves matchup. We warmed up the second 48 inches of LCD madness at 8:30 with the Marshall-Memphis game on CBS. Remote dexterity had to be taken to another level with the SEC and ACC Semifinals tipped off simultaneously on ABC and ESPN. Four games and only three TV’s, our skills were being tested to extreme viewing levels. Jo at the Yard was caught switching on the Food Channel on the main screen when we took a quick lunch break after the UNC-NC State game. No explanation was needed as we recovered the remote with extreme prejudice and returned to our myopic programming. Anthony Bourdain will still be on TV April 3 and Jo is just going to have to hang in there until then.

With household priorities re-established, the day marched on. There was a small tear when the Norfolk State University Spartans earned their first ever NCAA bid with their victory over the Bethune-Cookman Wildcats. Duke gave us another reason to root against them when they signed Austin Rivers. The Dukies were already in our cross hairs but signing the progeny of Celtic head coach Doc Rivers was another pinch of venom in our legacy cauldron of distain. It was nice to see them get upset in the ACC semifinal by Florida State. Ohio State looked formidable against the Michigan school in Ann Arbor. The State University in East Lansing will be a more formidable opponent for the Buckeyes. Coach Tom Izzo is gearing up for another long run into March. If Missouri does not get the #1 seed in the Midwest after winning the Big 12 Tournament, there should be an SI investigation. The Tigers boat raced Baylor in the Championship game after Baylor boat raced the Jayhawks in the semifinal. Kansas and Missouri split the season series. Kansas will get the #1 seed because they are Kansas. Missouri will get shipped out as a #2 seed because they are Missouri. Pacific 10 conference tournament is the worst of the lot. Colorado versus Arizona is like watching a mid-major before that was a cool thing. UCLA may be on well documented hard times but the whole conference sucks this year. The Mountain West has better players and is more entertaining to watch than any team in the moribund Pac-12. Let the games begin!

All of the major recruits who left UCLA in the past three years will be playing in the NCAA tournament this year. If all of them had stayed at UCLA, the Bruins would have been a Final Four type of team. Chace Stanbach and Mike Mosher of UNLV left UCLA and were All Conference selections in the MWC. Kendall Williams and Drew Gordon were MWC All Conference selections at New Mexico. Matt Carlino was all WCC Honorable mention as a freshman point guard at BYU. With those who stayed, UCLA will be lucky to get an NIT bid.

Final Seconds: UCLA has marketing posters at the Sports Arena asking for donations to help support athletics. The poster broke down all of the related costs for a student athlete including tuition, housing and books. The data factored in $3,875 for health and fitness per student athlete. The numbers sounded reasonable but the student athlete that was the canvas for the narrative was UCLA’s 6’10” 305 pound center Joshua Smith. Observing Josh’s health and fitness these past few years as he has piled on the pounds while huffing and puffing up and down the court, one has to wonder where that money went? Not the best example for that marketing pitch.

Overtime: There are some records that will never be broken in every major sport. Most of them are unreachable because of changes in the games related to numbers of games, longevity of players, performance enhancements and other clinical stuff. One such record that had escaped our radar was the NBA record for average minutes per game by a single player. For any player to play all 48 minutes of an NBA basketball game is rare. It has happened on occasion and it is always well noted in the sports world. In 1961-62season, Wilt Chamberlin averaged 48.5 minutes per game for the entire season. He played an 80 game season.

Happy New Year from the Yard

At the heart of a New Year’s resolution is the desire to resolve to do something, ideally to the betterment of something or someone. Resolutions are easy to define and elucidate. Resolutions require resolve if they are going to happen. The Yard has defined many resolutions to pursue. Resolve is a more difficult resource to allocate with our limited focus, sports myopia and vices. We have resolved to take a much closer look at this resolution thing in 2012. We have created a task force internally and expect to have suggestions by Q2 2012 and hope to have a plan in place by this fall.

This post was going to be a New Year’s Day-ish post but the Yard plays by the same rules as college football and the Rose Parade. We don’t blog on New Year’s if it falls on Sunday. College football was very sacrosanct that there will be no college football whenever New Year’s Day falls on a Sunday. So when the BCS starts on a Sunday we have college football games all week most of which used to be played on one day. Apparently, on Sunday January 8 it is possible to play a college football game and not just any Sunday college Football game-The Go Daddy Bowl! So the Rose Bowl can never be played on a Sunday but Go Daddy on the following Sunday?! Bring it on! It is more about the Benjamin’s than the guy in the flowing robes.

The blog was having fits and starts underscored by issues with resolve to get to post for the New Year. Monday, we got caught up in the most amazing Rose Bowl Game in recent history. Oregon has been tearing up the Pacific-10 or 12 for the past three seasons but never won a bowl game. Wisconsin has been lighting up the Big Ten or Big Eleven-ish but lost to TCU last year in the Rose Bowl. Oregon and Wisconsin would have played in last year’s game if the Ducks had not traded up to play Cam Newton and the Auburn Tigers in the 2011 BCS Title game. It was a game for the ages and having the Ducks secure the final win in a nice Yard parlay helped ease the pain of the Bruins not saving hunger in the Kraft Fight Hunger bowl on New Year’s Eve.

The Bruins played in a better bowl game than the team deserved in the Kraft Fight Hunger Bowl. The Bruins were the first team in NCAA history to earn a bowl berth with a losing record. It was a second tier bowl for a third tier team and they played like they would rather be at home eating rather than in San Francisco leading the fight against hunger one miserable play at a time. We also forgot that one of the brother-in-laws went to the University of Illinois when the post-game phone call reminded us. The Illini were navigating on the precipice of mediocrity as well in 2011 but they were the cream of the crap on New Year’s Eve. The game was the first game since the end of the Neuheisel era if there was one. UCLA did play in the first Pacific 12 championship game although they were 31 point underdogs. Yard interns are researching that but that might have been the heaviest underdog in any championship game in any sport, at any level…ever! The Bruins easily covered the spread losing only 49-31 in Rick’s last game. The 50-0 beat down by USC the week before is one of many reasons Rick is not coaching today. Our earnest wish for Christmas was a bright future in the NFL for Mr. Barkley in 2012. It has been a wonderful season but that gift was not found under the tree.

Barkley decided to return for his 6th or 7th year at USC. Lane Kiffin told the press that Barkley really needed one more year at USC to be ready for the NFL. What Lane meant was that USC really needed one more year of Barkley to compete with the SEC for a BCS berth. When Barkley won the starting job as a freshman, not too many top prospects were eager to come to USC and play the Matt Cassel role. It is hard to understand why Barkley would come back for another season. Even with the new NFL labor deal, a first round pick will be getting nearly $15 million on a guaranteed contract. At time of press, the Yard is not certain how much of his USC money is guaranteed but anonymous sources say that it is not Reggie Bush type money. Barkley should have considered that he will never have another opportunity during 2012 to earn $5 million. He will earn NFL money and probably a lot of it. But the $5 million that would have been in his checking out account next year will be gone forever. Barkley should have also considered how his predecessors fared by staying for one more year of being Trojan nation’s epochal center. If the end game is being well paid in the NFL, staying one more year at USC is bad bet on your future. Carson Palmer and Matt Leinhart stayed one more year when the NFL beckoned. Palmer has wallowed in Cincinnati and now Oakland. Leinhart has just wallowed.

It would be impossible to review all of the stories that we thought of covering in 2012. The popularity of the Kardashians was one carousel we missed. We just do not get that one but Kim’s porn tape is not bad…from what we hear. Ruth Madoff’s revelation that she and Bernie attempted suicide after the scandal broke was not surprising. Trying to commit suicide by taking a couple of Ambien before going to bed did not show much resolve in their plan! Yard favorite Adele had a break out year in music. Her soulful songs about boyfriends who wronged her have been atop all of the award lists. One universal axiom for the Yard audience is never date and then piss off a chick songwriter. Taylor Swift, Alanis, and Avril have all had chart toppers about failed relationship and the bastards that failed them. Russell Brand better keep an eye out for the Katy Perry shit storm heading his way in 2012.

As the sun rises in 2012, we at the Yard sincerely hope that our musings and rants have provided humor and distraction in your day. We never have set the bar high just a constant stream of random utterings about stuff that incites or amuses us. We appreciated your feedback all year and plan to continue with the same random resolve that makes this all possible.

New Year's Day… now is the accepted time to make your regular annual good resolutions. Next week you can begin paving hell with them as usual. Mark Twain