Contracts. Mega million dollar contracts for people to hit a baseball, shoot a basketball, throw a pass, score a goal. Meanwhile the unemployment rate hovers at 10% (or so we are told) and good honest people who just want to work still can’t find a job. If I ran the world, which I know is a scary thought, teachers, librarians, social workers, construction workers, and that waitress who is a single mother and works two jobs to feed her two kids at home would all be very, very wealthy people. Athletes? No. They’d make enough to keep them right smack dab in the middle of the middle class, which, by the way, is vanishing before very eyes throughout America. Now, if there are some among us who have to be, well, just above the poverty line, it would the politicians in Washington who stopped caring about us and their country a long time ago.
Yeah. I’d love to see some of those members of congress struggle to make ends meet. To know what it feels like to have your heat cut off in the dead of winter because you can’t pay the bill. To not be able to afford a few Christmas presents to put under the tree for your kids this year. A dose of reality, you know. And, you know, the more I think about it, maybe some of those athletes could stand a little perspective and deal with those kinds of issues as well. Some of them are pretty clueless. I’d love to hear your thoughts on this as well.

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I don’t know about you but the return of the NBA is NOT on my Christmas list. In fact one way to assure a less than perfect holiday season is to ruin it with an NBA game. Any NBA game. Especially regular season games. I’m dreaming of an NBAless Christmas. That’s what I’d like this year. But it looks as though they will be playing after all. Good for them. Just don’t expect me to watch it. How about you?

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Everyone once and awhile one of those really fun images just seems to appear out of thin air. This one, oddly enough, came while showering. Now stay with me. The late great Bill Mauldin, who won multiple Pulitzer prizes as an editorial cartoonist, used to make it a rule that he had to have 10 ideas every morning while he sat in the bath tub. Creativity happens at weird times and usually it’s when you’re in the midst of some mundane task, like shaving, or driving a car. Anyway, I couldn’t pass up the chance to draw the witch from Snow White. It seemed like the perfect metaphor for Carmelo Anthony’s recent case of New York blues.

The song says ” If he can Make it there he’ll Make it anywhere, it’s up to you New York, New York.”
And, for Carmelo Anthony, so it is. He might be thinking by now, this Big Apple idea was a really bad one. And he’ll find out soon enough, if he hasn’t already, people in New York are much less forgiving than those of us here in Denver. Especially the media. It’s that old adage. Be careful what you wish for.
You all have any thoughts about Melo’s choking on the Big Apple? Rant away!

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There’s no crying in Baseball. Basketball, apparently, is a whole different matter. Members of the Miami Heat actually teared up in their post-game press conferences Sunday night after dropping their 4th game in a row. The Avs have lost 15 of their last 16 and I don’t see any Hockey players crying in their beer. Course maybe that’s whats wrong with the Avalanche. They seem like they have stopped caring.

When LeBron “took his talents to South Beach” I’m sure this isn’t exactly what he and his teammates had in mind. It reminds me a bit of a pickup basketball game we played in one morning before school.
We had a bunch of guys in our neighborhood who were not bad (OK, I WAS really bad) but certainly not to the level of the starting 5 from our 8th grade team that we played that morning. We beat them. A bunch of Sandlot kids beat the starting 5 for the Morehead Red Raiders. Why? Because our guys played together as a team while the real “team” played selfishly, and with arrogance. Sure it wasn’t an official “game”. But it was a lesson. A lesson in teamwork. Which is what 99% of the players in the NBA could stand to learn. Especially the Miami Heat.

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With the “so-called” National Championship game now over and the NFL playoffs edging closer to a conclusion, I always feel a sense of panic this time of year.
And the fact that one of my favorite teams (the Saints) is out of the mix it even makes even more pronounced. I’m not an NBA fan. Haven’t been since the days of Magic vs. Bird and really since the era of Unseld and Maravich. Besides, I’m really tired of the Melo trade talk here in Denver.
It seems a long way off until the Rockies open spring training. They trained in Tucson until this coming spring and I made many journeys to that lovely city during that time. It pains me to know the people of Tucson are going through what we experienced at Columbine.
I am back on board with the NHL, after giving it a rest after the ugly Bertuzzi cheap shot years back so there’s that. But, still, the end of the football season is always tough on a lot of us. If you feel like I do please, oh, please feel free to comment.

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