Ramble On ... Are you Worthy?

BIG GAME, JAMES...

When the LA Lakers were winning championships in the '80s, I was always a HUGE James Worthy fan.

While Earvin Johnson and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar were the cornerstones of the LA championship teams, I always marveled at the speed, agility and all-around game of Worthy. "James" earned the nickname "Big Game James" because he always rose to the occasion to play 'even bigger' when the Lakers played a pivotal game in a series or a "Game Seven."

When the Dream Team was named in circa 1991-92, everyone made a big deal about Isiah Thomas being left off the squad. I wondered aloud why Worthy wasn't named to the team, possibly as a starter. Without a doubt, the powers that be (in the NCAA) should have checked their egos at the door and left NCAA rep/Duke center-forward Christian Laettner home and added Worthy. (Dominique Wilkins would have been another possible choice).

Anyway, why do I bring this up now?

An ESPN the Mag article on David Stern reminded me of Worthy's greatness. Here is the clip:

The Mag: You have said the league has gotten beyond race as an issue. Did that happen during the Jordan years?

Stern: I think it started before Jordan, with Magic and Dr. J and Kareem and James Worthy and Robert Parish. The conventional wisdom was a black athlete wouldn't do well as a pitchman, but Magic chipped away at that. Dr. J chipped away at that, Kareem, Isiah, Jordan, Barkley, Pippen. It became a non-issue. Look at what you just saw during the Super Bowl. Shaq, Charles Barkley, Dwyane Wade, footage of the NBA in a Coke spot and an ad for Semi-Pro, a basketball movie.

Stern included Worthy with Magic, Doc, Kareem and The Chief. How great is that?

He is right on the money. Worthy was named to the NBA's Greatest 50 Players. I would name him to the NBA's Greatest 25. (Of all-time). He was THAT good. And, as much as I loved James' big game dunks on the break, his uncanny ability to make a 15-footer, his hustle and rebounding, I just marveled at his work against the likes of Larry Bird on the defensive end. Michael Cooper had the media portraying him as the defensive specialist. Worthy played tough "D" as well.

The next thing you know, we'll be having a similar discussion about my "Second" favorite NBA under-rated player....

Andrew Toney.

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Candace Parker = Spencer Haywood = Curt Flood


KNOXVILLE, Tenn. -- Candace Parker, the Tennessee All-America forward who made dunking in women's basketball almost commonplace, ended all the speculation.

Parker, the first woman to win a national slam dunk contest, will skip her final season at Tennessee for the chance to play professionally.

"This was the most difficult decision I've ever had to make, but my family and I think this is the best choice for me," Parker said Wednesday.

Candace Parker, with an eye on the Olympics and the pros, is one of six women to have dunked in a college game.

"I've been blessed with great coaches and teammates, an outstanding education and the best women's basketball crowd support in the country. I will miss Tennessee, but I am eager to take this next step in my career."

The redshirt junior will graduate at the end of this season and plans to participate in the summer Olympics and pursue a professional career, Tennessee coach Pat Summitt said. Parker redshirted her freshman season to recover from surgeries to repair a torn knee ligament.

Parker will be honored as part of the third-ranked Lady Volunteers' senior night activities before the Feb. 28 game against Florida.

"Obviously we'd love to have her another year," Summitt said. "Who wouldn't?"
The 6-foot-4 Naperville, Ill., native leads the team in scoring with 20.6 points per game and rebounds with 8.8 and is one of six women to have dunked in the college game.
Kara Lawson, a Sacramento Monarchs guard and former Lady Vols star, said Parker's experience at Tennessee has prepared her to play at the professional level.

"Playing for coach Summitt, the opportunity to play with the players they have there, the tough non-conference schedule all gets you ready," she said. "You look at the success of the players who have gone there and what they've done at the next level."
In 2004 Parker beat five male competitors to win the slam dunk contest as part of the McDonald's High School All-American Game.

Since then she has dunked seven times, becoming the first women's player to go above the rim twice during a game and in a NCAA tournament game.

After leading the Lady Volunteers to their seventh national championship last season, Parker played with the U.S. national team during her summer break as the team earned its 2008 Olympic bid.

"Candace was ready for the pros two years ago," U.S. team coach Anne Donovan said. "I think it's an exciting day. Tennessee's had her long enough."
Parker also earned the women's 2007 John R. Wooden Award.

***

The Navy PR campaign on pin-pointing and shooting down an old, out-of-whack satellite with a missile was made out to be a gem of precision and military science. It got more publicity than the Wright Brothers' first flight. Please? Wasn't it like shooting a duck on a still pond?

A missile fired from a Navy cruiser in the Pacific Ocean hit an out-of-control spy satellite falling toward Earth last night, Pentagon officials said.

They said that a single SM-3 missile fired from the USS Lake Erie hit the satellite at 10:26 p.m. Eastern time. The missile struck the dead satellite about 150 miles above Earth as it traveled in orbit at more than 17,000 mph.

Military officials had hoped to rupture the satellite's fuel tank to prevent 1,000 pounds of hydrazine from crashing to Earth, a situation they depicted as potentially hazardous for people on the ground.

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Looking ahead to St. Patrick's Day, there seems to be a bit of a collision of calendar items in the works. Boston.com explained it in an artcile posted last Thursday:

Calendar collision for Irish Catholics
St. Pat's Day vs. Holy Week

By John C. Drake, Globe Staff

The 2008 calendar presents a rare clash between St. Patrick's Day and Holy Week, with parade organizers across the country and in some Massachusetts communities yielding to the Catholic Church.

But the fiercely independent South Boston organizers of one of the nation's largest St. Patrick's Day parades say the parade will roll on during the afternoon of March 16, Palm Sunday.

Chicago and Philadelphia have pushed their parades up to March 9, a week ahead of the start of Holy Week, which begins on Palm Sunday and ends a week later with Easter celebrations.

Organizers in Worcester and Holyoke also preferred not to hand Catholics a conflict, scheduling their parades for March 9 and March 29, respectively.

But not so in Boston.

"We aren't scared to do things that aren't fitting to, say, 'peace on earth' and all that," said John "Wacko" Hurley, who organizes the parade for the Allied War Veterans of South Boston. "We all want peace, but our obligation is supporting the armed forces. So, nope, we don't have any problems with that."

State Representative Brian Wallace, who represents South Boston, said the parade should not interfere with any church services.

The parade is set to start at 1 p.m. at the Broadway T station. By the time it passes St. Brigid Church on East Broadway, the noon Sunday Mass should be over, Wallace said.

Worcester parade organizers decided last year that they did not want the parade bumping into Easter or Palm Sunday, said organizer Leo Quinn.

"A good part of us are Irish Catholics, so that had some bearing on it," said Quinn, who has been involved with parade planning for about 25 years.

This is the first year since 1940 that St. Patrick's Day will fall during Holy Week, and it won't happen again until 2160.

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Jason Whitlock writes a column for the Kansas City Star a few times each and every week. However, his writings on or about NBA All-Star Weekend seem to get the most national attention.

Here's what he had to say about the event in New Orleans:

It's a tame All-Star Weekend

NEW ORLEANS | There’s nothing to see here, other than a modest, dignified contingent of NBA All-Star Weekend diehards, a few locals trying to glimpse a celebrity and a bunch of seasoned cops who have patrolled far bigger and rowdier crowds.
I was wrong. The Big Easy appears to be swallowing All-Star Weekend like it’s a bingo convention for sanctified grandmothers.

Whatever happens the rest of the weekend, we can accurately chalk it up to typical French Quarter madness, the normal revelry and criminality that go along with partying in a city that takes pride in its dirtiness and corruption and is struggling to heal from Mother Nature’s wounds.

I’ve been coming to New Orleans for Final Fours, Super Bowls, gumbo and hurricanes since 1993, since Chris Webber called a timeout the Michigan Wolverines didn’t have. This All-Star Weekend crowd is the tamest and thinnest I’ve ever seen. Friday night, as I strolled the French Quarter a little past midnight, a cop on horseback estimated the crowd was one-fourth of what the Quarter gets for the Bayou Classic, a traditional football game between Grambling and Southern.

“Nobody came,” said my buddy Branson Wright, who covers the Cavaliers for the Cleveland Plain Dealer newspaper.

“My only regret,” Players Association president Billy Hunter said, summarizing his All-Star feelings, “is we don’t have the kind of crowds we usually get.”

There’s a theory that people skipped this weekend because they feared post-Katrina New Orleans, its exacerbated economic crisis and desperate citizen survivors. The theory doesn’t hold up when you consider the relatively strong crowds that attended the 2007 Bayou Classic and Essence Festival.

People were afraid of the kind of crowd ASW attracts. That fear multiplied after Las Vegas last year. It’s a terrible, factual generalization, but Vegas’ proximity to Los Angeles made it way too easy for LA gang members to drive to The Strip and hang out in hotel lobbies for three straight days.

From what I can see, there is a totally different crowd in New Orleans than Vegas. There are more sports coats than white T-shirts, more smiling, laughing faces than mean mugs. The Las Vegas air of hostility has been replaced by an air of good times.

Now, it is a bit more difficult to find that good time because the crowd is so small.

TNT broadcaster Kenny Smith has traditionally thrown one of the biggest, baddest parties of All-Star Weekend. A year ago in Vegas, there were nearly as many people waiting to get inside Smith’s party as there were partying inside.

Friday night, I walked over to Smith’s party at the House of Blues with Lincoln Prep grad and Washington Post NBA writer Michael Lee, and we glided right inside to an empty party. It was just before midnight, and the place was dead. Warren Sapp was the only celebrity we saw.

Lee had earlier stopped by Michael Jordan’s party and said it was much better.

“Jordan’s party was real nice, real classy,” Lee described. “Probably more laid back than other All-Star affairs I’ve been to. This is my sixth All-Star Weekend. But there were a lot of women at Jordan’s party and a lot of former and current players.”

Just my luck, I wormed my way into the wrong party. ESPN also threw a hot party, featuring a live performance from positive rapper Common.

“Common put on a good show,” my boy J.A. Adande reported. “He didn’t just do a couple of songs and break out. He did a full, legit set with a live drummer and keyboard player.”

I ended my night at Harrah’s Casino, another mistake. The cheapest craps table I could find had a $25 minimum. You start taking full odds on those bets and it’s real easy to leave New Orleans broke, especially when the Marriott on Canal Street is charging $4 for 16-ounce bottles of Evian water.

Unless something wild happens at the Players Association party Saturday night — Maze (featuring Frankie Beverly) and Snoop Dogg are the scheduled performers — I’m going to turn my attention for the rest of my time here to basketball and what is shaping up as a terrific NBA season.

Note to self: "T, you better start getting 'cool' or whatever, as all those years of working the NBA All-Star Weekend and being happy with a minute or two to get a cold beer in the media hospitality room never allowed you to network to the likes of MJ's party, the ESPN party, etc... who has all these tickets, anyway?

This year, we made a run over to the EA Sports party and a good friend at the NBA dropped a pair of tickets to Kenny Smith's House of Blues affair.

***

This in from the NYT:

MORE AMERICANS GIVING UP GOLF...

By PAUL VITELLO
Published: February 21, 2008

HAUPPAUGE, N.Y. — The men gathered in a new golf clubhouse here a couple of weeks ago circled the problem from every angle, like caddies lining up a shot out of the rough.

“We have to change our mentality,” said Richard Rocchio, a public relations consultant.

“The problem is time,” offered Walter Hurney, a real estate developer. “There just isn’t enough time. Men won’t spend a whole day away from their family anymore.”

Over the past decade, the leisure activity most closely associated with corporate success in America has been in a kind of recession.

The total number of people who play has declined or remained flat each year since 2000, dropping to about 26 million from 30 million, according to the National Golf Foundation and the Sporting Goods Manufacturers Association.

More troubling to golf boosters, the number of people who play 25 times a year or more fell to 4.6 million in 2005 from 6.9 million in 2000, a loss of about a third.

The industry now counts its core players as those who golf eight or more times a year. That number, too, has fallen, but more slowly: to 15 million in 2006 from 17.7 million in 2000, according to the National Golf Foundation.

The five men who met here at the Wind Watch Golf Club a couple of weeks ago, golf aficionados all, wondered out loud about the reasons. Was it the economy? Changing family dynamics? A glut of golf courses? A surfeit of etiquette rules — like not letting people use their cellphones for the four hours it typically takes to play a round of 18 holes?

Or was it just the four hours?