What a great week in sports.
The two biggest stories had little or nothing to do with wins and losses, instead dealing with the only topics that snap many Americans out of the mouth-breathing trance that fuels both the reality-television industry and Rush Limbaugh's ratings.
Yes, sex and violence.
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First came Towel-gate. (See how I did that? Adding "-gate" to the end of a word relevant to a "scandal"? That's one of the tricks they teach us at the Liberal Media Academy. It even makes it through spell-check, so it must be a word!)
The skit introducing Monday night's game between the Philadelphia and Dallas infamously featured Eagles wide receiver and "Desperate Housewives" star Nicolette Sheridan cavorting in the locker room. It amounted to a parody of a parody, which is about as appealing as listening to a song about another song.
It ended with the actress dropping the aforementioned towel to expose, gasp, her bare back and shoulders. She then leapt into the football player's arms, followed by the sort of witty banter from her co-stars that we've come to expect from these awkwardly forced commercials trying to pass as entertainment.
Now, I've been offended by Monday Night Football's introductions ever since the show's honchos decided about 15 years ago that plain old football on Monday night wasn't enough to keep our attention.
ABC's idea of "entertainment" started with the marginally talented Hank Williams Jr. caterwauling through a clumsily customized "song" hyping that evening's combatants.
Ratings continued slipping. So, for a while, they tried adding more music, with a singer like Vanessa Williams lip-synching through one of those embarrassing highlight montages featuring one of the evening's stars.
That didn't reverse the downward trend. So along came Dennis Miller. To the surprise of absolutely no one, that didn't help either.
Even still, the numbers fell. So now we get insipid sketches followed by Bocephus' warbling. In all, Monday's foolishness burned up two minutes and 21 seconds before MNF's true theme music began.
No wonder so many people find other things to watch by 9:03 p.m. Eastern Standard Time.
I make a habit of missing Junior's weekly disgracing of his father's memory, and have been careful to skip the opening skit since inadvertently catching some manner of foolishness involving Bernie Mac earlier this fall.
So I didn't even hear about the latest Terrell Owens controversy until the next day. Not being much a prime-time watcher, either, I thought they were talking about Nicolette Larson at first.
What could the woman who sang "Lotta Love" do to offend anyone? A little Web research revealed, however, that Ms. Larson died in 1997.
Once online, it took about two seconds to run across a breathless news story on the MNF controversy, replete with frothing quotes from the morality police and plenty of hummina-hummina-ing from league and network officials.
I did finally see the segment in its entirety. Admittedly, I'm not easily offended. But, geez. Is that all it takes to get people worked up anymore?
The woman -- "Edie," apparently -- explains her presence in the locker room by saying, "My house burned down."
Anyone who took anything following that line seriously should have their First Amendment rights suspended (hey, they'll be tightening up that Patriot Act soon, so there's hope), or at least be forced to go to bed by 8:30 p.m.
You'd think the self-appointed members of the morality police would be too busy worrying about who is marrying who to pay attention to a football game, anyway. Particularly with all the butt-patting that goes on during the game.
For all those sobbing about the skit's impact on their poor, impressionable children, you'd better be clasping your hand over your little one's eyes during every sideline shot of a cheerleader and beer commercial. And have a ready explanation for just what medical condition Levitra treats.
Valid or not, the controversy raged through the week. By Wednesday, radio talk-show hosts were even cutting into the time normally reserved for complaining about welfare recipients and Hillary Clinton to offer the dork-with-a-deep-voice perspective on the matter.
After Federal Communications Commission Chairman Michael Powell, eager to prove his worth now that Dad's not around to protect him anymore, harrumphed his chagrin, the apologies started flowing. The league, the network and the Eagles all threw themselves on the mercy of the court of public opinion. I got so caught up in things, I apologized to a guy walking down the street.
As if the whole thing wasn't stupid enough, it then became a racial issue. Because, you know, Larson, I mean, Sheridan, is white. And Owens isn't.
One of the stories about Howard Hughes' descent into paranoid madness holds that in the late 1960s, he refused to buy ABC after seeing what he incorrectly thought to be an interracial couple on "The Dating Game."
If last week's screechers are correct, our collective morality has come to mirror that of a guy who walked around with his feet in Kleenex boxes. Thankfully, by the time this paper hits the streets, it's a lock that they'll have been offended by something else.
OK, enough with the sex. On with the violence.
Evidently trying to fill the void left by the National Hockey League lockout, the Indiana Pacers and Detroit Pistons threw down with each other, and the fans, on Friday night.
Indiana's Ron Artest started the chaos with a cheap, pointless foul on Detroit's Ben Wallace in the final minute of a game his team led by 15 points. The usual pushing and shoving ensued.
As the officials broke things up, Artest -- most recently in the news for complaining that he was "exhausted" less than a month into the season, due to a busy summer promoting a hip-hop CD -- reclined on the scorer's table.
There, he became the target of a cup full of beer thrown from the crowd. And all hell broke loose.
The Pacers stopped fighting the Pistons, and instead went after the Detroit fans. Artest attacked one fan, who may or may not have been the cup-thrower. Two of Artest's teammates, Stephen Jackson and Jermaine O'Neal, each punched fans who may or may not have done anything.
Nobody comes out of this looking good. The fan who threw the beer ignited the situation just as the shoving on the floor was ending. And nobody likes having things thrown at them, but the Pacers involved didn't need much provocation.
Artest is 6-foot-7. Jackson's 6-8. And O'Neal stands a towering, muscular 6-11. Fortunately, no one got killed, or seriously hurt.
The whole mess pointed up perhaps the biggest problem with professional sports -- the growing gap between the worlds occupied by players and spectators.
Some fans, frustrated by the ultimate emptiness of living vicariously through their heroes, think buying a ticket gives them the right to say or do just about anything.
And too many players, conditioned by a lifetime of entitlement based on their athletic skills, think they can do whatever the hell they want.
After seeing what happened Friday night in Detroit, is a woman's bare back really all that offensive?
It got buried beneath the Owens/"Housewives" controversy, but the New York State Athletic Commission told Evander Holyfield something that's been painfully clear to anyone who has watched or listened to him lately: He's finished.
From 1990 to '98, Holyfield was the best heavyweight in the world. He destroyed Buster Douglas, gamely waged a brilliant trilogy against the much larger Riddick Bowe and exposed the myth of Mike Tyson.
Even his lesser fights, like knockouts of Bert Cooper and Michael Moore, were made exciting by his aggressive style and willingness to take punches in order to give them.
But making every bout into a war takes a toll. Holyfield has been paying that price for the past five years, and so have fans who shelled out to see him fade.
For those lucky enough to have missed them, his pitiful showing against Larry Donald on Nov. 13 was his fifth official loss in nine fights. Two others ended in draws.
That feeble summary is misleading, too. Both the draws, in his first fight with Lennox Lewis and third with John Ruiz, were gifts, as was his decision over Ruiz in their first meeting. His other "win," a technical decision over Hasim Rahman, was the result of a head butt that should have gotten Holyfield disqualified.
Whatever the official outcomes, Commander 'Vander has taken a beating in each of his last nine fights. If you had the misfortune of seeing Donald slap him around for 12 rounds, you saw the walking definition of punchy -- a fighter unable to throw more than one punch at a time or even keep his balance.
And listening to his comments after the fight, when he said he still thinks he can win the undisputed heavyweight championship, and following his suspension, when he prattled on in semi-coherent fashion about his "right" to box, there's little doubt the commission did the right thing.
Boxing gets precious little coverage from the major networks lately, but thanks to cable television and the Internet, there's no shortage of pugilism information available. One Web site, www.tigerboxing.com, features the work of Niagara Falls native Lyle Fitzsimmons.
A bat boy for the Niagara Falls White Sox of the New York-Penn League in the mid-1980s, Fitzsimmons made his journalistic bones as a stringer for the Niagara Gazette in the early 1990s.
After a stint working with your friendly sports editor at a late, unlamented start-up daily newspaper in Rochester, his time at the Batavia Daily News served as a springboard to his current post as a staff writer at The Intelligencer in suburban Philadelphia.
Tiger Boxing requires a subscription to read some stories, but also contains a fair amount of free content.
While it's tempting to chide Lyle for his prediction on Saturday's Winky Wright-Shane Mosley rematch, anyone who reads the weekly NFL predictions on the Niagara Falls Reporter Web site knows what a tricky business prognostication can be.
| Niagara Falls Reporter | www.niagarafallsreporter.com | Nov. 23 2004 |