USA Today: The Continental Baseball League, slated to begin play in the spring of 2007, will award the trailing team double the runs for the first home run hit in the 7th inning.
In 1945, Howard Hobson, basketball coach of the University of Oregon Ducks when that team won the NCAA championship in 1939, came up with an idea. Why not award three points for a long-range basket? After all, if shooting percentages decline the further the player's distance from the hoop, wasn't a short-range shot a less worthy accomplishment?
And so in an exhibition game between Fordham and Columbia that year, the three-point shot was launched. It was subsequently adopted by the American Basketball Association, and in 1980, the NCAA gave the Southern Conference permission to experiment with 3-pointers during the 1980-81 season. At 7:06 p.m. on November 29, 1980, Ronnie Carr of the Western Carolina Catamounts scored the first three-pointer in official NCAA history in a game against the Middle Tennessee State Blue Raiders.
Baseball, football and hockey have not followed suit, sticking to single-level scoring regardless of the distance a shot, run, pass or hit carries. Until now. The Continental Baseball League, a ten-team pro league that will field teams in the growing but baseball-deprived U.S. southwest, will double the runs scored by the first home run hit by a player on the trailing team in the seventh inning of its games, creating the possibility of an 8-run grand slam.
Some people, as George Bernard Shaw once said, look at the world as it is and ask--"Why?" Others, like CBL President Ron Baron, look at the world as it might be and say--"What the hell?"
Which leads one to ask--who's next? Imagine the following scenario:
It's fourth and long for the Albuquerque Tumbleweeds, down by nine to the Tucson Gila Monsters. The Tumbleweeds are within field goal range with 3:47 left on the clock. Time for a quick three points, and a three-and-out on the Gila Monsters' next possession gives Albuquerque a chance to tie the game on a Hail Mary pass, and win on the extra point. Coach Ben Buckner calls time out, and quarterback Joe Shane comes to the sideline. "What do we do, coach?" he asks.
"I want you to take a loss of 15 yards."
"But coach," Shane complains. "What about my Yards-Per-Pass-to-Sack Ratio? My bonus depends on it!"
"Never mind that," Bucker barks back at his signal-caller. "I'll make it up to you. After you're tackled, I want you to call the flea flicker."
"Coach--that play never works."
"So what? If we score on it, a hand-off plus a lateral beyond the forty adds three points and we tie. Plus I get a brand-new Buick LeSabre, with leather seats, a six-CD sound system and Bluetooth."
Shane puts his helmet back on and calls the Tumbleweeds into the huddle. "Cheese enchilada X-right, on three--break!"
The Gila Monsters sense something is up. Tumbleweeds' tailback Le'Carr Jamison is lined up in the slot as Shane gesticulates wildly at the Gila Monsters linebackers, a la Peyton Manning.
"Tackle me and win a prize!" he shouts. "Rolex watches available now for a half-sack, Sub-Zero Refrigerator for an unassisted sack."
Sensing a trick play, Gila Monsters' rover back Ty Andrews calls for a prevent defense with a cover two. "Let him run," Andrews says. "Don't nobody tackle him."
Shane takes the snap, fades back, stands--and waits. With precious seconds ticking down, he rolls right, makes it to the thirty--and drop kicks the ball!
"What the hell are you doing?" Buckner yells at his quarterback as he uses his last time out.
"There was a special one-time offer," Shane explains. "Use any obsolete play from the Duluth Eskimos playbook, and win a game-worn Bill Belichick sweatshirt."
CUMMING, Georgia. Tiffany Marie Shoemaker and Naomi Wingate were getting along fine at a Mary Kay Cosmetics party at a friend's house in this exclusive Atlanta suburb last Thursday night.
"Naomi has two little girls, and so do I, so we were kinda commiserating. Then we discovered we both went to Randolph-Macon Woman's College, so we shared some fun memories about the good ol' days," Tiffany said, smiling through artificially whitened teeth as she straightened her pleated skirt.
Things turned sour when the two women told each other what sororities they had belonged to, however. "Tiffany's a Tri-Delt, which is basically the biggest bunch of snots in the South," said Naomi. "She's a 'Kite'," said Tiffany Marie, the derogatory term for a member of Kappa Alpha Theta, a competing sorority.
Tiffany said Naomi looked like a model from a farm implement catalog, and Naomi replied that Tiffany should stuff her Talbot's handbag someplace where no one would have to look at it, it was so ugly. When their hostess asked them to take their dispute outside, they did, along with their "seconds", two Junior Leaguers with needlepoint headbands who would assist them as they joined a growing number of women taking up a sport previously reserved for Southern gentlemen--dueling.
Since it was Tiffany who issued the challenge, Naomi chooses the weapons from a standard menu; Salad Shooter, Aqua-Net Spray-On Gel or Pam Cooking Spray. The distance between the combatants is shortened from forty paces to twenty due to the contestants' lack of strength. "My momma wouldn't let me play sports, 'cause she says chunky upper arms aren't ladylike," says Tiffany Marie.
Some Southern men say they view this latest feminist inroad into a formerly all-male preserve as troubling. "If the ladies are going to start shooting at each other, who are we gonna defend?" said Ashley Wilkes VIII. "It's the only quality time guys get to spend together other than hunting, fishing, watching football, drinking, cussing, watching basketball and smoking cigars," he explained. "Oh--did I mention spring football?"
Naomi picks Salad Shooters, and says she'll risk her husband's wrath for a few hair-raising moments of excitement as she contemplates the prospect of a slice of cucumber whizzing past her ear. "We've been cooped up in our air-conditioned kitty-boxes for too long," she complains. "Why is it only the men who get to go outside and do stupid stuff?"
NEW YORK. Representatives of ten elite liberal arts colleges today announced that they will form a new athletic conference in the hope of drawing automatic bids to the Bowl Championship Series and the NCAA March Madness basketball tournament for their high IQ student-athletes.
"The TV money's there for the taking," said Dr. Sumner Farnsworth, an internationally-known nuclear physicist who will be the league's first commissioner. "All we've got to do is field the teams and we can fund a tenure-track position and a new particle accelerator at every school."
The Metrosexual Conference will be composed of New York University, Brandeis University, the University of Chicago, Case Western Reserve, Washington University in St. Louis, the Unversity of Pennsylvania, Carnegie-Mellon University, Reed College, Johns Hopkins and Georgetown. All are located in or near major urban areas, where the term "metrosexual" has come to refer to men with an orientation towards the arts and culture who are not necessarily ####.
Metrosexual League coaches say they won't be "in it to win it" and hope to instill more important values in their players. "Say we're down by five touchdowns to a Big Ten school with two minutes left," said Carnegie-Mellon quarterback coach and drama professor Patricia Highsmith-Jones. "Rather than throw some stupid, sectarian 'Hail Mary' pass I would like to see our guys reflect a little and maybe present a tableau vivant to the crowd on the futility of life and absurdity of the universe."
In keeping with Robert Frost's famous dictum that a liberal is a person too broad-minded to take his own side in a quarrel, cheerleaders for Metrosexual Conference schools will only cheer when their opponents score. "We need to be sensitive to the fact that our graduates will go on to earn a lot more money than kids at some of the cow colleges we'll be playing," said Highsmith-Jones. "When our opponents score, we'll yell, 'That's all right, that's okay--you're going to work for us someday!'"
NCAA officials promised to review the league's application carefully, but expressed concern that lowering the bar of athletic quality would encourage schools to engage in low-budget recruiting abuses. "Some of these kids with high SAT scores come from homes where a hardback edition of Dickens is a big deal," said Bob Saccomandi, an NCAA compliance officer. "Give them a cappucino and a ticket to a Belmondo flick and they feel like they got a muscle car and a freshman cheerleader for the weekend."
GREENSBORO, North Carolina. NCAA officials today smoothed Duke University's road to the Final Four by awarding the Blue Devils the overall no. 1 seed shortly before tipoff in its ACC tournament final against Boston College. Duke was also given first, second and third round byes in an effort to ensure that they reach the finals of "March Madness".
Myles Brand, NCAA President, said the decision was made to maximize television ratings of the national championship game, which have lagged in recently years with the Monday night success of The WB's "7th Heaven" and TNT's "Wanted". "There's just something about Duke in the Final Four," Brand explained. "If they're not in it, I probably wouldn't watch myself."
Other schools have complained about favoritism towards Duke in the past. "Shane [Battier] got all the calls," said Gilbert Arenas, who played for Arizona in the 2001 championship game against Duke. "One of the refs asked for his autograph, and another asked me to take his picture" with the Duke star.
Duke haters have created web sites such as TruthaboutDuke.com, and conspiracy theorists blame the school, founded on tobacco wealth, for the spread of lung cancer and the clubbing of baby seals.
Under the package offered by the NCAA, each Duke player will receive a Rolex watch if the team wins its Elite Eight matchup, and a Cadillac Escalade if they advance to the finals. Various other prizes, including the Nobel Prize in medicine and the Pulitzer Prize for outstanding musical composition, would be divvied up among the players if they are crowned national champions.
Head coach Mike Krzyzewski was offered $40 million to switch to the NBA's Los Angeles Lakers in 2004 but decided to stick with the school where he has won three national titles. "I was told that Kobe Bryant swears in the huddle," he said at the time. "As a coach of impressionable young men, that's my job."
Krzyzewski, known for his sideline temper, is affectionately referred to as "Coach K" on Duke's web site because the school's sports information department is afraid of misspelling his last name.
INDIANAPOLIS. The US Chamber of Commerce filed suit against the NCAA in federal court here today alleging that college basketball's "March Madness" tournament hurts American businesses.
"We generally see a drop-off of twenty-five to thirty percent in non-farm productivity once the tournament starts," said Edward Hutchins of WidgetTek, a maker of electronic thingamabobs for the computer industry. "All of sudden people who don't give a rat's #### about Gonzaga the rest of the year are checking scores when they should be filing paper in manila folders or doing something useful like that."
The Chamber is seeking a court order that would reduce the number of teams in the tournament from 64 to sixteen so that play can be completed in two weekends. The group also seeks to limit the number of bracket sheets employees of small businesses could fill out.
"In a mom-and-pop company, you can't have people doing a 'money' sheet, a 'hedge' sheet and a 'sentimental' sheet," Hutchins said. "It takes too much time. Plus there's always a secretary with a boyfriend laying off bets from his regular office pool who ends up winning," he added bitterly.
An NCAA spokesman said it would try to reach an out-of-court settlement with the powerful trade organization, but was not optimistic. "Your average businessman is about as flexible as Bobby Knight on a bad day," Allen Barkley noted. "They don't negotiate--they throw stuff."
FRAMINGHAM, Mass. Scientists at the National Institute of Occupational Health today released findings showing that sports team mascots live shortened lives due to adverse working conditions.
The longitudinal research, which tracked two generations of high school, college and pro mascots, revealed that individuals who don tiger, bulldog and other animal outfits to entertain spectators at sporting events have a shorter life expectancy than non-mascots.
Dennis Radik, a mascot for the Seekonk, Mass. Quahogs, a minor league affiliate of the Tampa Bay Devil Rays, said the research confirmed his experience. "It gets hot in those outfits and you get dehydrated. Plus the fans think they can just haul off and belt you." A quahog is a thick-shelled clam, but Radik's costume consists only of a thin layer of foam rubber stretched over a chicken-wire frame.
Dr. Evan Steinberg, a veterinary epidemiologist, said that the team of scientists who worked on the study developed a precise calculus for determining the effect that life as a mascot has on a person's longevity.
"We found that feline mascots--lions, tigers, jaguars, wildcats--could expect their lives to be measured in cat years," he said. "Canine mascots--bulldogs and terriers--you project their life spans in dog years."
Steinberg ran the numbers to show that a 20-year old Georgetown student who wore that school's forty-pound bulldog costume over the course of a Big East basketball season would be considered 141 years old in dog mascot years. An LSU student of the same age who dressed as that team's tiger totem would be 107 in cat mascot years.
"We have to educate kids that putting on that big fuzzy outfit is a real risk," Steinberg said. "Being a mascot is as dangerous as smoking, driving without a seatbelt, or calling an escort service."
INDIANAPOLIS, Indiana. Emboldened by the NCAA's decision to bar teams with Native American nicknames from post-season tournaments, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals today demonstrated at the athletic group's headquarters in an effort to ban mascots based on non-human animals as well.
"There is nothing so demeaning to a tiger or a lion as to sit in a cage while a zookeeper watches Penn State or LSU on TV," said Heather Ulrich, PETA spokesperson. "Wild beasts have feelings too."
The ban would extend to insects such as the Georgia Tech Yellow Jackets, Ulrich added, even though she admitted to swatting mosquitoes herself. "Sometimes the personal isn't political."
Under PETA's proposal, the only teams allowed to compete in the NCAA's March Madness, BCS and College World Series tournaments would be those named after colors, vegetation, forces of nature, minerals and regional human sub-groups such as the "Sooners" of Oklahoma and the "Hoosiers" of Indiana. "We couldn't care less about people," Ulrich explained.
The Stanford Cardinal, a color-based name that is symbolized by a undergraduate dressed as a tree, could thus pass muster on either of two grounds, she noted, "although how that guy ever gets a date is beyond me."
Asked to provide member schools with an easy-to-remember yardstick to determine whether their mascot would be permitted under the PETA proposal, Ulrich's colleague Michelle Shaloob said, "Miami Hurricanes--fine, UCLA Bruins--nein."
If the NCAA agrees to PETA's demand the Iowa State Cyclones would be unaffected by the new policy, but assistant football coach Ogden Fry was not mollified by this fact. "I don't like to be on the same side of any issue with your wing-nut liberals," he explained. "The guys at the coffee shop will give me grief for the rest of my natural born days."
Con Chapman is a Boston-area writer. He is the author of "The Year of the Gerbil: How the Yankees Won (and the Red Sox Lost) the Greatest Pennant Race Ever," a history of the 1978 AL East pennant race, and a number of plays, including "Number One Hockey Mom," "Please, Pope," and "What Mickey Belle Isle Told You," a trilogy about hockey (JAC Publishing). His work is available on Amazon Shorts (at 49 cents a dowload), and he writes on sports for Flak Magazine.
