I stopped by Walmart on my way home from work the other day and went in to pickup up some detergent or something else boring. I walked out, however, with a pack of baseball cards, the first pack I’ve purchased in at least eight years.
Since I’m just 22, I collected cards in the boom years, when Beckett Monthly was the bible for many elementary and middle school boys. I didn’t grow up a huge baseball fan, but I collected cards like I was. I’m confident that my younger brother and I assembled the entire 1991 Fleer set from buying pack after pack from a Roses Discount Store (a poor man’s WalMart if you can believe it) in Eastern North Carolina. We bought the 1991 Fleer packs in 1993 because they were only 50 cents a pack versus $1. It was all about volume, because you had a better chance of tracking down a Bobby Bonilla or a Len Dykstra.
Then again, I didn’t have much of a choice but to collect cards, I certainly couldn’t play the game. I was a decent left fielder for the BB&T Bank minor league squad, but I couldn’t get a hit if my card collection depended on it. That was against the pitching machine too. It was as if the words “keep your eye on the ball” meant zilch to me.
So I grabbed a pack yesterday, largely for nostalgia’s sake. It was absent of the dreaded checklist card, if those even exist anymore, so that was a major plus. The only memorable player in the $1.99 pack was Pudge Rodriguez though, and while I love Pudge, he was it. Everything else was rookies, which I guess wouldn’t be a bad thing if I was a diehard collector, but I’m just picking up a random pack. I’d like to see something besides AA or AAA statistics since those cards will probably end up in some random box or in the floorboards of my car (that’s their current position).
I highly suggest picking up a pack every now and then though. It’s good to remember that we all started out as fans once, and at heart, we’re all still fans. Yeah, we’ve gotten more mature about it, or, in the case of Pistons’ fans, less mature, but we still like the games because they’re fun, and there’s nothing wrong with it.
So, go buy a pack of cards. Then let me know, because I’ve got a 2005 Topps Pudge Rodriguez card just itching to be traded.

While at Baylor University in Waco for the first time yesterday, I ran into their live bear mascot. Handlers were leading “Lady” around on a leash. Just a medium sized bear, ambling around campus.

It reminded me how much I like the idea of live mascots. Live animals are one of the better college football traditions out there, be it Ralphie, a 1,300-pound buffalo, charging the turf at Folsom Field in Boulder or UGA roaming the sidelines down in Athens. I mean, UGA tried to bite an opponent, snapping at an Auburn wide receiver during a game. UGA alone is justification enough for the live mascot.

And there’s Bevo in Austin, who might be, outside of UGA, the most revered live mascot of them all. Bevo has even gone mass media, with Bevovision (an all University of Texas highlight package) available through Time Warner Cable in central Texas that has officially made Bevo the Oprah of live mascots.

PETA’s people will probably argue that the use of Mike the Tiger (Louisiana State’s Bengal tiger) and Rameses (North Carolina’s horned ram) is harmful or cruel. Lady and Joy (Baylor’s other bear) will draw particular ire from the animal rights groups because bears are usually wild, while bulldogs and steers, are, well not. If you see a pack of wild bulldogs you should…well, I don’t what you should do, but that would probably be awesome to watch.

I’d argue though, and few would disagree, that farm life or life in the wild is a lot rougher on these animals than being a mascot. The Baylor bears have their own display area called the Steve Hudson Memorial Bear Plaza and at least three trained personnel were assigned to Lady’s walk alone. That’s solid treatment for a bear, I’m sure they’re seen as the rock stars of their race.

And look at UGA, who boasts an air-conditioned dog house between the hedges for Georgia home games. How many dogs stuck in a backyard with ‘caring owners’ would kill for UGA’s accommodations? The man’s a movie star, sharing the screen with John Cusack in Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. Not bad for a dog with George Costanza’s build.

The list of live animal mascots goes on and on (I have to mention Smokey, a blue tick coonhound at Tennessee) and, moral issues be damned, we need them to stick around. It’s part of the pageantry of college football.

And yes, I did just utilize an absolute non-issue in order to talk about Ralphie, UGA and Bevo.

Bring on September.

Sometimes as a kid, for whatever reason, you don’t pickup a favorite team in a certain professional sport. Maybe you don’t live near a city that one of the big four leagues calls home, or maybe your dad or friends aren’t into a sport. It happens.

A lot of people become bigger sports fans in college, and when I was in school it seemed like everyone, overnight, became a Red Sox fan. I didn’t go to Boston University or Harvard, so it just didn’t seem right, but there they were, legions of Virginia residents pulling out a cap with a B on it.

The thing is, I’ve got no problem with taking on a new team in a sport you just started following actively or never had a favorite team. I did it two years ago with the Milwaukee Brewers, and that got me thinking. There has to be some guidelines to choosing a team if you don’t live in a big league city. If you live in a city, take the hometown team, no matter how bad they are. It’s just the right thing to do.

These are just a start; feel free to add your own guidelines and exceptions.

One…Don’t chose a loser, but jumping on a bandwagon, like all those Red Sox fans that suddenly sprung out of the ground, that’s not cool. Believe me I liked Pedro and Ortiz as much as the next guy. They’re fun players and so is Damon. The ALCS was great drama, and it was hard not to pull for the Sox. But jumping on that bandwagon, and we’ve all made the mistake, I’m not without fault, takes away from the diehard fans’ glory in victory. You dilute the fan base and make the lifelong fans defend their loyalty when answering the accusation that “They’ve just jumped on the bandwagon.” The same thing happened to Cowboys fans back in the mid-1990s. It’s easy to just jump on board and take the ride, but it just doesn’t seem right.

Two…try and choose a team with at least one player you really like, preferably someone you cheered for in college or is from your hometown. If you’re a North Carolina fan that makes the Charlotte Bobcats a pretty easy choice, I’m surprised they haven’t tried to get Roy Williams to take the reins. UNC-Charlotte must be getting ticked off, the Bobcats are making a run at their title. My buddy did this with Dwayne Wade and it’s been working out pretty well.

Three…go with geography. I was raised a Packers fan, so I took on the Brewers because of the Wisconsin connection. Sure, the Brewers are perennial losers, and Robin Yount was the last truly great Brewer, but who doesn’t love the old school Brew Crew logo? The glove is an M and a B put together. That’s fantastic stuff.

Four…take a risk and try to get lucky. Take my buddy became a Heat fan because of Stan Van Gundy (he loved the mustache) and Wade. A week or two later, they signed Shaquille O’Neal. He’s like the lottery winner of choosing new teams, the Heat hadn’t been good since I was a high school freshman, and that was only because of Tim Hardaway’s crossover. I’m hoping for similar results with the Brewers if they can find a way to keep Prince Fielder, Ben Sheets, Rickie Weeks and the gang happy. Right now, a good risk might be the Lions. It’s Kitna Time. Catch the Fever.

Before the pre-draft coverage reached fever pitch, Brett Favre’s possible retirement seemed to be the only thing sportswriters in Wisconsin, and some national writers, had to speculate about in the NFL.

Until this year, I was completely in Favre’s corner but I wavered slightly this offseason mainly because I got bored with the misleading stories and the constant back and forth between Favre and the media. It just seemed like too much this time.

The Packers have been soft on Brett, unlike most other pro sports team that seem to have a ‘it’s an honor for you to play’ mentality that doesn’t put players first.

After watching what the Tennessee Titans have done this offseason to Steve McNair though, I certainly prefer the Packers approach. McNair and Favre are similar in style, durability and desire. They’re both the face of their respective franchise, unless you think Drew Bennett or PacMan Jones the face of the Titans. Eddie George hasn’t played since 2004 and he might be the second most famous Titan. Oh, forgot about NFL icon Tyrone Calico, my mistake.

Sure, McNair is ####ed up and he isn’t the same athlete he was in 2003 when he was named the co-MVP. But Favre is ####ed up and he isn’t the same athlete he was in 2003 either. McNair can’t even get in the building because the Titans are afraid he’ll get hurt. Tennessee’s starting quarterback wants to work himself back to the best condition and the Titans leadership can’t get the padlock up fast enough.

Some teams can’t get people to their facilities in the offseason, and don’t think the Titans aren’t going to have their own share of problems getting LenDale White dedicated to the offseason program if the reports about his postseason weight gain and work ethic are true.

The Titans have shown a lot of disrespect to McNair, and, even if the Packers have shown too much respect and been too deferential to Favre it could be worse for Green Bay fans. Titan fans could tell them that. Tennessee is obviously not interested in winning this year, because Vince Young and Billy Volek surely don’t give them the best chance to win in 2006, McNair does. And Volek is better than most people think but he’s no McNair. That’s a tough pill to #### for fans shelling out $1,000 or more for season tickets. That’s even tough to #### for a Nashville resident dropping $230 on the DirectTV NFL Sunday Ticket package.

“Come watch…uhh…Vince Young carry a clipboard?”

Another fun year in Nashville ahead.

Greatness is tough to come by, and superior greatness, being indisputably the best is by far tougher to come by. To be the greatest of all-time, you don’t just face off against the man in front of you, you face off against history.
In Kobe Bryant’s case, the man in front of him this week may be Steve Nash, but the man that Kobe is really playing against, and I don’t doubt he knows it, is Michael Jordan. If you think he doesn’t care about that, check out J.A. Adande’s blog, the part at the end juxtaposing Bryant’s celebration in Game four and Jordan circa 1997. They’re nearly identical.

http://adandeblog.typepad.com/overtime/2006/05/not
hings_change.html

See, Kobe has the unfortunate burden of not facing Michael in his prime, but facing a fan base that watched nearly every minute of Air Jordan’s career. Kobe can’t go out and go toe to toe with mid-1990s Michael and beat him on the court, and until Doc Brown finishes the flux-capacitor, he won’t be able to.
So, to prove he’s the best of all time, and I don’t doubt that Kobe wants to, Bryant has to surpass Jordan by leaps and bounds. He has to leave no doubt.
Sure, Kobe could’ve found a way to live with Shaq and maybe he’d have won title after title. But by forcing out the Big Aristotle, Kobe made it possible to dispose of an asterisk on his NBA Championships as big as many baseball fans want for Barry Bonds— all titles won with Shaquille O’Neal.
Nobody ever suggests that Jordan’s titles came with an asterisk indicating Scottie Pippen’s role in the championships, because Scottie is no Shaq. Scottie was never the most dominant player at his position in his era. Shaq was until recently the most feared center in the league. In Kobe’s eyes, O’Neal is an anchor on his legacy as the greatest player ever, and if Kobe was going to surpass Jordan convincingly, he had to clear a path for success on his shoulders in Los Angeles by letting go of that anchor. Sure, it was underhanded, forcing Shaq out. But maybe Kobe isn’t just naturally sneaky, maybe he’s just a Machiavellian, ends justify the means kind of guy. Maybe he just doesn’t want to be hampered by debate.
If he can lift the Lakers to the title with this group of players in the next two years, it’ll be a start to ending that debate. Five more titles with Odom, Luke Walton, Kwame Brown, Ronny Turiaf, Smush Parker and the gang, plus a few retirements and a stint with the Durham Bulls and he’ll be really close to what he wants. See, Jordan only played AA ball. If Kobe could make a AAA roster, Kobe would have what he truly wants: to be undeniably better than Jordan.

Two athletes’ addictive personalities were back in the news the last two weeks. Ricky Williams was tossed from the NFL for a season for violating the league’s substance abuse policy, while the Associated Press reported that PGA golfer John Daly’s book reveals that he’s lost $50-60 million dollars gambling.
It’s amazing to me how differently fans and media treat these two players. Daly is, mostly, revered and celebrated, Williams, mostly, detested and shunned.
Both players’ vices have come to dominate how we view them. Williams is the butt of every joke for his pot use, and sometimes, he just makes it too easy to make him the butt of a joke. He became a walking stereotype when he went on his one-year walkabout and was studying holistic medicine and yoga. If he’d swung by a local love-in in Washington State, he’d have hit the hippie trifecta.
Williams is hated as a player by a large percentage of the NFL’s fan base. People accuse him of being a cancer on the Dolphins’ clubhouse, a quitter and, for all intensive purposes, a burnout. In a sport where loyalty and “giving it your all” is supposed to be the maxim by which all players live, Williams is seen as the enemy of all the things that gritty, undersized high school linebackers make their lives about.
Daly, on the other hand, isn’t a malcontent he’s a character. He quit drinking and the entire golf world watched the aftermath when he withdrew from a tournament with the shakes. People have laughed about how he’s replaced beer with Diet Coke (he drinks an insane amount of the soft drink everyday according to Rick Reilly’s book Who’s Your Caddy).
I mean, what golf fan hasn’t made a John Daly joke? He makes them all the time, he’s one of the most sel####eprecating players on the tour. He revels in his good ole boy appeal, taking on Hooters as a sponsor. He’s just making it too easy to laugh at John Daly just like Ricky Williams, and that, possibly, is what Daly actually wants.
It’s hard to figure out why both athletes, clearly battling similar addictive personalities, draw such different responses. I don’t think it’s because Ricky’s drug of choice is illegal while Daly’s isn’t. We aren’t a legalistic enough society to act like weed is some awful thing that only the most sordid get involved with. Nobody really cares about it; weed has become, for right or wrong, as harmless as alcohol in much of America’s eyes.
Maybe fans think that because Daly is in an individual sport, he only hurts himself with his destructive behavior, and that makes it different than Williams’ transgressions. When Williams walked out, Zach Thomas and Jason Taylor, not to mention Dave Wannstedt, suffered because of his actions. Maybe the hurt of a teammate quitting on the squad rubs people the wrong way, or, for former athletes, reminds them of a past experience where a fellow player mailed it in.
Either way, even with the barrage of jokes at his expense, Daly will continue to be a PGA favorite, despite, or, in some cases, because of his flaws. Daly remains the target.
Ricky? He is the joke.

Like many football fans without any tangible responsibilities, I watched a majority of ESPN’s draft coverage this weekend. I noticed that both Mel Kiper, Jr. and Green Bay Packers general manager Ted Thompson both have a certain dead quality in their eyes, a dead quality reminiscent of—a machine.
Many pundits have accused of Kiper of being “plugged in” but I think it goes deeper than that. I think Kiper was sent here from the future to protect the perfect prospect, John Connor, from the wrath of T2. Ted Thompson, T2…coincidence, I don’t think so. A good friend of mine brought this dark secret to the forefront.
Packers fans better hope Ted’s liquid metal arm doesn’t turn into a machete and mistakenly slash future star linebacker A.J. Hawk at his introductory press conference. That could be terrible.
Besides the obvious Terminator parallels, brought on by too much exposure to draft coverage, Thompson was an important story in the draft. As a second year general manager, nobody in the league seemed to learn as much from his and his franchises’ mistakes as Thompson. Thompson went from getting caught up in the pre-draft workouts last season to concentrating on high motor players this season; winners and players with strong college credentials.
Last year, the rookie version of T2 took a ton of players with a lot of upside, but not a ton of credentials. Sure, Aaron Rodgers in the first round had the resume, but after that, the majority of the players are guys from lower tiered schools like Bethune Cookman and North Carolina A&T, and a player named Michael Hawkins.
Hawkins played for one season at Oklahoma (five games, five tackles) and spent a year in the Arena League. While Hawkins made the team, he’s been a project. He’s extremely raw with the talent of a number one pick and absolutely none of the polish. Sure, Hawkins seems to be working out, but he won’t contribute regularly just yet (eight total tackles last year and hampered by groin and ankle injuries) and on a 4-12 team, that may be a luxury the Packers can’t afford. Particularly in a defensive backfield that might consider my younger sister a talent upgrade. When the Packers signed Charles Woodson last week, you’d have thought Ronnie Lott circa 1988 was coming to town.
This year, Thompson refocused his draft strategy, and went with players like A.J. Hawk, a two-time All-American at Ohio State. Vernon Davis had all the measurables, all the leaping ability, all the speed. There were questions about Hawk’s hip fluidity and his ability to change directions, but no defensive player in the draft was more productive. Davis might have tempted Thompson 1.0, but 2.0 seems to have learned from his mentor, Ron Wolf. Build with the draft and acquire productive players.
He did the same thing with Greg Jennings, a wide receiver from Western Michigan who gained 1,000 receiving yards in three different seasons. Abdul Hodge, the Packers third round selection out of Iowa, averaged 13.2 tackles per game. He also ranks third in Iowa history with 453 tackles. Sure, Hodge only ran a 4.6 in the 40-yard dash, but for Thompson it was all about instinctive, productive football players.
“I call it a country football player,” Thompson told the media late on Day two of the draft. “It’s a guy who knows how to play the game. He might not be as big or as fast as another guy, but he always seems to make the play.”
We’ll see how tracking down “country football players” works for T2. As long as Thompson doesn’t slash them all to death in his search for the future leader of the resistance against Skynet.

I’m very excited to see Deion Sanders back in the news. Sanders bought a share of the Austin Wranglers of the Arena Football League, and that’s the best thing that could happen to the Arena League, sports, perhaps even America.
Sanders makes Fred Smoot and Terrell Owens look like the quiet kid in the back row of class. I mean, the man did an interview on ESPN’s Pardon the Interruption from his barbershop while actually getting a trim. Very few people could make that work. Imagine if Jon Kitna or Peyton Manning tried to pull that stunt.
That’s the thing about Primetime though, very little falls flat with him. If Deion chose business coming out of Florida State he’d be a black Donald Trump, he’s a marketing mastermind. Thankfully, for us, he chose to play football as one of the most exciting lockdown corners in his prime, and one of the game’s most colorful characters his entire career.
Deion makes the game more fun with everything he does. And his legacy hasn’t completely left the game no matter how many times the masters of the cliché refer to the NFL as the No Fun League. Sanders pioneered a lot of Chad Johnson’s own shtick, the brash ‘I’ll call anyone out’ gag Johnson is living on. If only Deion had thought of the list, he could’ve listed National League pitchers and NFL quarterbacks on his own version. Johnson is the heir to the Deion throne, high achievement mixed well with a heavy dose of entertainment value.
Deion hasn’t stopped talking in his current retirement. Buying into the Wranglers ownership group just gave him yet another forum, another pulpit on which Reverend Sanders can hold forth.
“I’m going to be the first owner with the capability of actually going downstairs and playing,” Sanders told Rick Herrin of Knight Ridder. “Tell Jerry (Jones) to do that. Only one problem: I don’t know if (Wranglers general manager) Glyn (Milburn) could fit me under the salary cap here.”
Now, Sanders surely doesn’t care that John Elway is also an owner in the league and could probably still trot his way onto the turf and throw for 200 yards and a few touchdowns for his Arena League team in Colorado. When Sanders is in his Primetime mode, forget about reality and just enjoy the ride.
Sanders isn’t universally loved, but few brash athletes are. Keyshawn Johnson and Warren Sapp certainly have their detractors, but Deion, again, stands alone. His trash talking came with a level of humor that endears him to many fans. Johnson, Sapp, most of the other big talkers out there, just aren’t as funny.
Sanders was scheduled to arrive at his first Wranglers game as an owner Saturday with friends Nate Newton, Jamal Lewis and the WBNA’s Nancy Lieberman. I like that foursome. I’d love to ride along if that group decided to play a round of golf; I can only imagine the conversation. What would Lieberman and Newton discuss, their 401K plans?
Deion is the common ground for those former athletes for one reason. Many can’t help but get caught up in that excitement that surrounds the one they call Neon. There isn’t anyone exactly like him, keeping him involved in the game, on whatever level, is definitely a good thing. And he’ll be a good thing for Austin, as long as he doesn’t try and teach the Wranglers’ defensive backs how to tackle. While a return of Sanders is welcome, a return of his tackling form certainly wouldn’t be.