Kobe, Stallworth, and Joba Ferrari

Opinion from the Opinionated: John Quirk

Kobe Bryant could win 8 titles. I’ll allow a couple paragraphs for that to sink in.

In the meantime let’s get into Stanley Cup and how awesome it was watching NBC focus the camera on Marion Hossa for ¾’s of his procession through the team he left behind. I can’t recall ever rooting for someone I despised so much, just to see a certain set of circumstances take place. Either my sports knowledge and taste is becoming more refined, or I am going a bit looney. Whatever the case I know I couldn’t help but yearn for this to happen. No one except the motor city wanted to see Detroit repeat, and Gary Bettman would have sold his soul to see Sidney Crosby hoist the Cup. Especially if he knew it would be like a hero on a bum leg.

I watched game 7 on a fishing trip with my Dad and he remarked how he couldn’t believe that Crosby didn’t play hardly at all in the last period because of the injury. Normally I would’ve been the first to jump on board and crush Crosby (seeing as how I never really liked him to start with) but something about the way he at least tried to get out there and just couldn’t, gave me an entire different perspective. Congratulations Sidney, it is great for hockey.

That’s right, this may have been what the NHL needed. How Bettman and the owners parlay the success of a young marketable star and recent jumps in TV ratings remains to be seen.

This is how you blueprint it though for a foundering league that still has a diehard fan base,just waiting to be reinvigorated. Get two teams who play great hockey, and have the good looking, crazy talented youngster slay the big (European feeling) red dragon. To me there was something of a home town feel in rooting for the penguins. I know Crosby is Canadian and Malkin is Russian, but something about Detroit’s style of play and long hair just screams Europe, while the grinders like Guerin on Pittsburgh just look like steel mill workers. (For the record I checked, and Detroit in fact has only 3 American players to Pittsburgh’s 7) Factor all these things together and you had me clapping and yelling at the TV for the first time since Ovechkin got ousted, pulling for Mario’s boys. America watched as well, in numbers that haven’t been seen by the NHL since 1973. Maybe I can work in hockey after all.

Now on to the black mamba, what a badass nickname, and that’s truly what Kobe Bean Bryant is, a bad bad man. How daunting a task it must be to have to guard this man. If you watched a fair amount of the series, and ABC’s phenomenal coverage, you saw Bryant repeatedly hitting contested shots, the likes of which are simply bad shots if anyone else takes them. Webster should literally use a picture of him for their color version; you could use him next to the words: stud, clutch, leader, lethal, and even arrogant. For the French version, just simply take out a page and put him next to incroyable. I loved his tenacity in this series and his willingness to let ‘his guys’ be teammates and feel involved enough to the point where he could get them where he wanted to go. That is a sentence you can’t type without feeling some resentment for the guy though, I mean he literally can control how many points he and his teammates get.

And he knows it.

His post game interviews could make you puke, but we remain in awe. Every time he rises and fires with Mickael Pietrus’ hand right in his face, only to find twine, we are in awe. I’m sick of his daughters always being too close to the limelight but I’m still in awe, awe of his command over seemingly everything and everyone he comes into contact with. He gets to play the game he loves like one of us on a play skool hoop with our younger cousins. It literally seems that easy for him. His hard work is well documented, but his get-away-with everything card ascends him to a place few get to reach. HE controls the interviews he does, never the reporter. He makes people understand how awesome he is, while trying not to sound like a TOTAL pompous jerk. He literally can do no wrong as far as the public is concerned, probably right up to and including murder. I don’t know how much of it is earned and how much is luck and the right tutelage, all I know is I love watching him be better at basketball than I may be at anything in my life and if I was ever that good, I might just act like Kobe Bryant.

I was happy to hear Mike Francessa rant about the jail sentence, or lack there of, for Browns wide receiver Donte Stallworth. I was at first shocked by what I had read on ESPN’s ticker, then I was sure for a half an hour I had either seen wrong, or more plausibly ESPN had made a mistake. To my dismay it was confirmed to me later that Done Stallworth got drunk, got in a car, killed an innocent person and his punishment was going to be 30 days in jail. Who knows how harsh his conditions will be, and even setting aside the fact that he probably will be in a one bunk Hilton, 30 days for a persons life is insane. I would expect to lose at LEAST one decade of my life upon committing such a foolish act. The most disturbing part is the “confidential financial settlement with the family of the 59-year-old construction worker” that Stallworth’s lawyers so expertly finagled. It sends a terrible message to other atheletes and young people alike that when you are talented the rules change for you. You can’t tell me a young talented athlete who is idolized in his school right now, and who uses ESPN as his sole means of getting news, isn’t watching this and going, ‘damn I can pretty much do what I want.’ Only Eric Cartman only does what he wants without real consequence, the rest of us live in the real world where killing another person isn’t just frowned upon and met with a wrist slapping.

Finally I just wanted to make a couple more points about the baseball season up until now and offer my stance on a couple of the real hot button issues surrounding New York baseball. First off I am not backing off my Rangers pick, but I now also think they need to add an arm to their staff to make a serious playoff push, doesn’t have to be a starter but a solid (preferably veteran and cheap) arm to help them in the second half. Pedro Martinez if he is healthy makes a lot of sense in the Texas heat.

I’ve reached my breaking point with the Mets, but for me it wasn’t the Louis Castillo drop (which has prompted my cousin to renounce his fandom, and his two sons, and seek New York Liberty tickets) for me it was watching Fernando Tatis ground into a game ending double play. A DP that came with the score 4-3, the bases loaded, off a guy who threw two balls no where near the strike zone and had just walked the previous man. I told my roommate if he didn’t at least take a pitch, and worse if he grounded into a DP, I was renouncing my fandom. And like a fairytale it played out, six, to four, to three.

Mushroom cloud…

As for the Yankees I wanted to write something about Joba Chamberlain because he is as big an enigma as I’ve seen in New York sports. I once saw a cut out of Joba standing in a Dunkin’ Donuts in Queens and I knew something was going on, this guy was the next big thing. But after having watched his last start nothing could be further from the truth. Here is a guy who has been so mismanaged Mike Tyson could feel bad for him. Looking at the recent success in baseball, and even the Yankees championships in the late 90’s, one thing is strikingly clear. Bullpens are normally a great show of how good a team really is. It says you have enough arms in the rotation, and skills and money allocated elsewhere, that you can afford to have a few guys who come out of the pen and get it done. Mo, Wetland, Stanton, these guys where as good a trio as there has been and that’s when people will remember the modern day Yankees looking their best. Those teams didn’t mash, or do magazine spreads of themselves kissing mirrors, but they fought like heck and had great bullpens. (Hence my logic on Texas) So I think moving a guy who looks to be as sure a thing as there is in the bullpen, and while you have all the arms you need to fill the rotation, into a spot where he obviously isn’t thriving... is proving to be ludicrous. 98mph and nasty as a son of a gun, has turned into trying painting corners and a pitch count. Rules and changes to this kids mechanics have rendered him a Toyota with Ferrari stickers. His pizzazz is gone and one can only hope he gets it back.(Joba fist pump)