It's All About Lebron

I haven't seen the ratings for Lebron James' hour–long self–lovefest yet.

I know. A few months ago, I wrote in this blog that it was all about Tiger Woods. But that was following Tiger's public "apology" — which, it is worth noting, did not require anywhere near an hour.

Of course, neither did Lebron's announcement. Well, I'm guessing it didn't take an hour to make it. I didn't watch the show.

And, in fairness, Lebron's announcement was an ESPN exclusive. It wasn't shown live on several networks simultaneously — the way Tiger's apology was.

But it did include sponsors, which makes it a commercial endeavor, whereas Tiger's apology was treated as a "news" event.

So, while I still believe that it was all about Tiger back in February, I believe it's all about Lebron now.

Both were shows, not really news events, although there were kernels of news to be found in each one. But they were faux news events. Tiger's sorry he cheated on his wife — how many times? Lebron's going to play for the highest bidder?

What were the odds?

I was amused yesterday when I saw an article at NPR.org, which suggested 20 ways that Lebron could fill "the other 59 minutes and 45 seconds."

Of course, the hour did include commercial breaks, and the revenue from the commercials was earmarked to benefit Boys and Girls Clubs, which is a good thing.

But make no mistake about it.

This production was really about Lebron.

I guess it shouldn't surprise us, this obsession with themselves that so many celebrities seem to have these days.

At its worst, it can be seen in the blatant narcissism of Lindsay Lohan's ongoing saga. But it is everywhere, really, to varying degrees.

So Lebron is not alone.

And he certainly doesn't appear to have been alone last night. If his ESPN "special" was, in fact, a media circus, as Richard Deitsch writes for Sports Illustrated, there were plenty of clowns running around.

And some people have the audacity to suggest that this is "reality" television.

Whose reality would that be?

Hall of Fame, ESPN Mark Milestones

On this day in 1963, pro football's Hall of Fame opened its doors in Canton, Ohio.

There were 17 charter inductees. All of them are dead now. The last survivor, Sammy Baugh, died at the age of 94 last December.

According to the Hall of Fame's website, there are 253 members of the Hall of Fame. And the living Hall of Famer who has been a member the longest is Steve Van Buren (class of 1965). A halfback who played his college ball at LSU and then played his pro ball for the Philadelphia Eagles in the 1940s, Van Buren is now in his late 80s.

It was probably coincidental, but on this day in 1979, ESPN (an acronym for the Entertainment and Sports Programming Network) was launched.

Over the years, ESPN has evolved considerably. These days, it carries live broadcasts of popular mainstream sports. Today, in fact, ESPN will broadcast a couple of college football games — Cincinnati at Rutgers (3 p.m. Central) and Miami at Florida State (7 p.m. Central). The network also televises pro football, baseball and basketball games.

Initially, though, ESPN aired a lot of stuff that wasn't part of mainstream programming — like Australian Rules Football, Davis Cup tennis, pro wrestling, boxing and some college football and basketball games. And it didn't show exclusively sports programming.

But things changed in the late 1980s. ESPN gradually added NFL and college football and major league baseball to its lineup. Today, it provides live coverage of such mainstream sports on nearly a daily basis.

One thing that hasn't changed is "SportsCenter," the network's flagship program. It aired once a day originally — now it is shown as many as a dozen times in a single day. A noteworthy exception was Sept. 11, 2001, when it interrupted its regular schedule to show coverage of the terrorist attacks.

The network considered not airing "SportsCenter" that day, but eventually it did air that evening, reporting the cancellations of sports events that had been announced up to that time.

Most, if not all, of the inductees into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in the last decade or so appeared on ESPN at least once. They would probably tell you their lives would have been different — to a certain extent — if ESPN had not existed.

Most of the non–athletes of the world would probably say the same thing.

What the Newspaper Crisis Means for Sports Coverage

I am both a sports fan and a trained journalist. I worked in the business as a reporter and a copy editor for more than 10 years. I spent much of that time working on sports desks for the old Arkansas Gazette and the still breathing Denton (Texas) Record-Chronicle.

If you've been following the news in recent months, you've no doubt heard of the problems many daily newspapers are facing these days. If they were patients in a hospital, the condition for most of them would be critical.

The Rocky Mountain News already has shut down completely, and more appear likely to follow. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer has stopped publishing a daily paper and is now an online-only publication, perhaps foreshadowing a trend.

Still others have reduced their staffs and cut the pay of those who remain on the payroll or they've cut the number of days they publish or both — anything to tighten the belt without entirely cutting off (pardon the pun) circulation.

And when a newspaper goes out of business or cuts the number of days it publishes or even cuts its staff, sports fans suffer.

Jim Caple writes about this for ESPN.

He talks about the human toll, also, acknowledging that "the only difference between these employees and the millions of others thrown out of work in the past year is that the newspaper pink slips strike much closer to home for me."

But he makes a good point when he and others ask, "Who will report the news?"

"That's the key," writes Caple. "I'm not comparing newspapers to blogs. I'm comparing the information fans receive from newspapers plus the blogs and Web sites to the information they would receive strictly from the Internet without any newspapers."

And what does Caple say would be sacrificed?

• Game stories with analysis and quotes.


• Statistics.


• News.

Now, before you protest that the internet can give you all these things, read what Caple has to say. There definitely will be things that will be lost when local coverage disappears. And, as Caple observes, there is no revenue model in existence that online-only organizations can follow to pay someone to travel with teams and spend the kind of time around the players and coaches and organization that is necessary to learn about things like clubhouse issues or injuries or coaching changes. Is such a thing possible in the future? Absolutely. But it doesn't exist right now.

Baseball — a sport that will be played daily from the beginning of April to the end of September — will be the first to experience the change, and it is the focus of Caple's article. Clearly, as Caple writes, it is expensive to pay the salary of a writer along with his travel, lodging and meal expenses for 81 games a year.

But, even though football and basketball teams play fewer games, this change will affect fans of all sports.

Do you follow football? Or basketball? If you're a college sports fan, where will you get reliable news about your favorite school if the newspaper that covers it goes out of business? Some schools have athletic reputations and will always get attention from whatever media exist, but what if your school, be it large or small, isn't an Oklahoma or a Notre Dame or a North Carolina?

The same is true of professional sports. It's true that every professional sports team has a presence on the internet, but do you really believe the information you will find there is free of bias? Who will honestly report about coaching changes and player acquisitions?

For a few years, I worked with undergraduate journalism students. The internet was really just emerging in my last year of teaching, and one of my students asked me what now seems, in hindsight, to be a prescient question. The student asked me what would become of newspapers in the digital age. I replied that I believed the internet and newspapers would find a way to coexist.

In an odd way, I still believe that. But I think it may take the deaths of many of the traditional newspapers to bring about the re–birth of the medium.

It may take that for people to realize what they've lost.

'A-Fraud' Can't Compete With Evidence

Alex Rodriguez apparently came clean today, acknowledging, in an interview with ESPN's Peter Gammons, what just about everybody already knew.

He used steroids.

Rodriguez gave the following as his excuse — he was young, he was naïve, he was under a lot of pressure to produce because of the extremely lucrative contract he signed a few years earlier.

Well, cry me a river.

Thomas Boswell wrote, in today's Washington Post, that Rodriguez needed to tell the truth and live with the consequences.

But he also suggested that, at some point, we need to finish this and move on.

Indeed we do. But this isn't finished — not until the whispers that remain about other ballplayers have stopped. And that won't be achieved unless we permit the investigations in baseball to run their course. A player's personal popularity is no measure of whether he is guilty of using steroids or not — Roger Clemens and Mark McGwire were popular with the fans, but they appear to be as guilty of steroids use as Barry Bonds, who was widely disliked and now faces perjury charges.

And Rodriguez has been generally popular, although there have always been fans who resented his enormous paycheck — and his inability to lead teams to the World Series.

Using steroids is cheating, plain and simple. Joe Posnanski is right when he writes, for Sports Illustrated, that Rodriguez didn't need to take steroids. He had an abundance of talent.

Some players with far less talent may have felt that steroids would keep them playing longer and help them play better than they might otherwise. But Rodriguez wasn't one of those players. In 2003, when he tested positive for steroids, Rodriguez was the highest-paid player in baseball, by far, and he was widely viewed to be a natural talent. He was still in his 20s, and people were speaking of him in the same way they speak of the legendary players of the past.

Well, Babe Ruth and Hank Aaron and Willie Mays combined for more than 2,000 home runs, and none of them ever took steroids. They accomplished things with their natural talents. Many others may have wished they had those skills, and some may have resented the fact that Ruth and Aaron and Mays had those skills, and they did not.

But that's the way life is. Some people have natural skills — whether those skills are for hitting a baseball or playing a musical instrument or performing on the silver screen — that have the potential to produce a lot of income. Most do not.

It is good, as Barack Obama said tonight, that baseball is taking this issue seriously — at last. It has taken 20 years, but perhaps now baseball is sending an unmistakable signal to the young people of America that "there are no shortcuts." That may be the only good thing to come of this, but, if so, it may be sufficient.

For baseball to restore its integrity, it must rid itself of the cheaters — just as it did in the wake of the "Black Sox Scandal" 90 years ago.

Arkansas Has Rare Opportunity Against Texas

I must admit I was disappointed, but now I realize it simply means a greater opportunity.

My alma mater, the University of Arkansas, pulled off its most significant basketball win in recent times by beating fourth-ranked (and previously unbeaten) Oklahoma, 96-88, on December 30.

But when the next polls came out, Arkansas hadn't received any votes for the Top 25 — and OU hadn't budged from its position at #4.

Now, the Razorbacks have an opportunity to beat two Top 10 basketball programs within a week of each other — and, hopefully, break into the Top 25 in the process.

Eighth-ranked Texas (11-2) faces unranked Arkansas (11-1) on ESPN at 8:05 p.m. (Central).

If you grew up in Arkansas before the Razorbacks left the old Southwest Conference in the early 1990s, any competition between Arkansas and Texas will bring back memories of autumn afternoons on the gridiron or winter nights in the fieldhouse.

When I was a little boy, Arkansas-Texas was significant only in football. Once football season was over, neither school seemed to exist until September rolled around.

But, when I was in junior high school, something amazing started happening. Arkansas and Texas became competitive in basketball and, by the time I was in high school, the Razorbacks were competing on a national level, advancing to the Final Four for the first time in 30 years.

And, in my college years, the Razorbacks were always playing in the NCAA Tournament.

They battled Larry Bird and Indiana State to the very last second for a trip to the Final Four.

They knocked off Louisville, the defending national champion, with a midcourt shot at the buzzer — years before such a shot would count for three points.

And every year, it seemed, the Razorbacks and the Longhorns met in the SWC's postseason tournament — which inevitably gave the schools three meetings in basketball in a single season.

As a writer from Sports Illustrated observed at the time, that was two more shootouts in a season than the schools' fabled football coaches, Darrell Royal and Frank Broyles, ever had, even in their best years.

The schools haven't faced each other regularly in any sport for 16 or 17 years now. But this academic year is resembling the days of my youth — last fall, the football teams met in Austin, Texas (in a game that was postponed for a couple of weeks by Hurricane Ike), and, on Tuesday night, the basketball teams will face each other in Fayetteville, Ark.

As familiar as the scene appears to an old Razorback fan like myself, I know it won't last. Both teams will revert rapidly to their current roles, and the memories of the old SWC will recede.

Texas opens its Big 12 schedule Saturday at home against 10-4 Iowa State. After that, the Longhorns have a couple of challenging road games, at 13-1 Oklahoma on January 12 and at 10-4 Texas Tech on January 17, followed by a home game against an old football rival, 13-1 Texas A&M on January 24.

For Arkansas, the SEC schedule also begins Saturday. The Razorbacks host 9-5 Mississippi State, then they also must go on a two-game road trip — to 9-5 Ole Miss on January 14 and 12-2 Florida on January 17. Arkansas will be at home on January 24 against Auburn (10-4).

In the meantime, both teams come into the game with certain things they do much better than the other.

Texas, for example, is one of the best teams in the nation when it comes to blocking shots. The Longhorns average 6.3 per game, which is 13th in the country. Senior Connor Atchley is responsible for nearly one-third of those blocked shots.

The Longhorns are 43rd in the nation in rebounds, averaging 43.2. Junior Damion James averages 8.4, and sophomore Gary Johnson accounts for 7.4.

Texas also ranks 64th in avoiding turnovers, averaging 12.8 per game.

The Razorbacks are 12th in the nation in scoring, averaging 82.7 points per game — they're 39th in field goals made (27.8 — same as UConn and a full field goal more than Texas).

But Arkansas is way down the list in average field goal attempts per game (96th while Texas is 73rd). And lots of field goals made combined with not too many attempts means the Razorbacks are in the Top 50 in field goal percentage (47.4%).

The Razorbacks have always been solid in scoring, though. But an encouraging development for long-time Arkansas fans is clear improvement in both free-throw shooting and rebounding.

Currently, the Razorbacks are sixth in the nation in free throws made (20.1). That may be due, in part, to the job they've done at drawing fouls. They're second in the nation in free throw attempts (30.7). Now, I'll grant you that their 65% accuracy rate isn't one of the nation's best, but it's not bad when you consider that they're attempting nearly 31 free throws per game.

And it's a distinct improvement over what the Razorbacks did from the free-throw line when I was a student.

Arkansas is also 17th in rebounding (44.9), thanks in large part to junior Michael Washington, who is 18th in the nation (10.4).

Freshman Courtney Fortson is 16th in the nation in assists (6.4), and he had one of his best games of the season against Oklahoma, accounting for 10 that night. As a team, Arkansas is 69th in assists, with an average of 15.3.

Can the Razorbacks do it? They'll be playing in front of an enthusiastic home crowd and a national TV audience.

As someone who's seen more Razorback basketball games than he can recall, I say this — it can be done.

(Almost) Seems Like Old Times

More than 20 years ago, just about any conference basketball game featuring the Georgetown Hoyas was looked upon as a big game — and seemed to qualify automatically as a "rivalry."

In fact, as Ray Fittipaldo observes in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the Big East Conference "is known for its rivalries, and none recently has been better than the series between Pitt and Georgetown."

The Hoyas fell on hard times after making back-to-back appearances in the national championship game in the mid-1980s, beating Houston and then losing to conference foe Villanova.

But the name "Hoyas" — whatever that name means — always retained its magic when mentioned in a basketball context. And recently, Georgetown has been back on the NCAA map.

And, tomorrow, you can re-live that old-time feeling on ESPN, which will televise the Big East match between the Hoyas and the visiting Pittsburgh Panthers at 11 a.m. (Central).

Pitt is undefeated (13-0) and ranked third in the nation behind top-ranked North Carolina and Big East rival Connecticut. Georgetown is ranked 11th in the country and boasts a record of 10-1.

In their most recent games, Pitt rallied to beat conference opponent Rutgers on New Year's Eve, and Georgetown upset UConn on Monday.

In most statistical categories, Pittsburgh seems to enjoy an advantage.

Neither team is among the leaders in scoring — Pitt is 45th in the nation, averaging almost 78 points per game, while Georgetown is 73rd in the country with an average of about 76 points per game.

That may be due, in part, to the fact that neither team is in the Top 100 in three-point shooting.

But Pitt has a huge advantage in rebounding, ranking 25th in the country with an average of 44 rebounds per game. Georgetown isn't even in the Top 100.

And the Panthers' advantage is even more pronounced in assists and field goals, both attempts and field goals made per game. Pitt is 14th in the country with nearly 18 assists per game, 21st in field goals with slightly more than 29 per game and 41st in field goal attempts (61.2 per game). Again, Georgetown didn't make the top 100 in any of those categories.

But Georgetown turned the tables on Pitt in free throws. The Hoyas are fourth in the nation in free throws made per game (20.8) and 11th in free throws attempted (27.6) while the Panthers failed to make the Top 100 in either category.

Georgetown also has outperformed Pittsburgh in steals, ranking 38th in the country (averaging 9 per game) while the Panthers are 62nd (with an average of 8.4). And the Hoyas are ahead of the Panthers in blocked shots per game, 4.7 to 4.2.

Pittsburgh, however, has been more efficient at avoiding turnovers. The Panthers have averaged less than a dozen turnovers per game while the Hoyas again are not in the Top 100.

On an individual level, Pittsburgh sophomore forward DeJuan Blair is 18th in the nation in field goal percentage (nearly 63%) and he's second in the nation in rebounds, with more than 13 per game. Senior guard Levance Fields is one of the nation's leaders in steals, averaging seven per outing.