I’ll never forget the time B.B. King came over for a barbecue. When we went to the backyard, I looked around and said, “B.B., the grill is gone!”
He said, “Say that again.” I said, “The grill is gone.” He grabbed Lucille, his guitar, and the rest is R&B history.
My point? You never know what inspires brilliance and what inspires ignorance. Take Bob Huggins, a Machiavellian career college basketball slug, who this week got in a heap of hot water. The same TV folks who for years pretended that he’s just a big, whimsical Teddy Bear whose teams win a lot, had to pretend they had no idea.
Informed viewers knew better, but, as always, were on their own.
As the longtime coach of Cincinnati, then West Virginia, who in September joined many other college basketball coaches enshrined in the Basketball Hall of Fame for no apparent good deeds other than winning by whatever sleazy means it took, Huggins was fully indulged by the highest authorities, starting with college presidents.
While at Cincy, Huggins was nationally known for recruiting players with no legit reason to be enrolled in any college. Even by darkly comical NCAA standards, Huggins’ Cincy teams, with 14 NCAA Tournament appearances, were a wink-and-a-nod academic joke. And with the school’s tacit approval, arrests outnumbered graduates, walk-ons excluded.
At Cincinnati, Huggins also starred in a video, the one of him being arrested for a DUI.
But worry not. After his firing by Cincy, West Virginia, his alma mater, was waiting. And Huggins’ ways and means continued. Until this week, when on a Cincinnati radio show, he “playfully” referenced the student body of Xavier — a Jesuit university in Cincy — as “all those f–s, those Catholic f–s.”
Well West Virginia would have none of that, so it sprung into action and did as close to nothing as it could.
It suspended Huggins for the first three games of the season — pay-to-slay home games against Missouri State, Monmouth and Jacksonville State — and hit him with a $1 million pay cut to $3.2 million, still a school-high salary for a guy who this week made himself virtually impossible to hire.
Also, this week, in what seemed a sign of the times, the media were more outraged that Huggins bashed homosexuals than that he bashed Catholics. Is one bigoted bashing more acceptable than the other?
But for more than 25 years, TV folks knew Huggins to be an uncouth, self-entitled loophole-reliant stinker. Yet almost weekly, he was presented on TV as a sweetheart. How many men and women who call college sports telecasts tell non-pandering truths? How many have aided and abetted the fraud that further allows colleges to serve as mob-like fronts for sports?
This week, ESPN “SportsCenter” host John Anderson apologized for a childish crack he made about Golden Knights defenseman Zach Whitecloud. Unaware of the obvious — Whitecloud is a Native North American — Anderson said his name sounded like a brand of toilet paper.
Anderson seemed sincere in his apology and Whitecloud was gracious in accepting it.
Yet Anderson’s employment by ESPN is predicated on his presence as a wise guy, thus ESPN was at least as responsible for what Anderson said as was Anderson, who had merely stayed in his ESPN character.
In the last 10 days, Alabama’s baseball coach was fired and at least 40 student-athletes at Iowa and Iowa State are under investigation for gambling “irregularities” and suspicions. Scandal, inevitable due to sports gambling’s saturated commercial climate — no one loses, get-rich-quick, bogus come-ons target the young and vulnerable — has arrived.
But how do all these TV and radio shills and sportscasters, from Michael Kay, to Charles Barkley, to Evan Roberts, to Colin Cowherd, handle those stories, along with others involving the sports gambling busts of pro athletes?
Do they make “shame-shame” at the accused or sanctioned? Do they ignore the growing stories? Or do they rationalize their own involvement by backing the violators as society’s children just responding to commercial prompts?
How did these broadcasters and their bosses not see any of this coming? How did they not avoid such personalized entanglements? Why did they allow their employees to attach their names to sucker ads? The inevitable is here, but the grill is gone.
Ignoring early reveal insult to audience
SO ESPN, which wrecks everything it touches, messed up the NHL draft lottery on Monday when, headed to commercials, co-host Kevin Weekes revealed the early inside tip that Columbus would select third, leaving Chicago or Anaheim to the first pick and the latest can’t miss, Connor Bedard.
The prematurely spilled info removed much of the audience’s anticipation.
Sherman, set the Wayback Machine to 1984. … Working the U.S. Olympic boxing trials, “Tell It Like It Is” Howard Cosell called a close bout between Pernell Whitaker and Joe Belinc.
Cosell was then surreptitiously given the result by ring announcer Chuck Hull before it was revealed on TV. Cosell then applied his “genius” to “guess” at the result he already knew.
But then he blew it. After “predicting” Whitaker in a close decision, the winner was declared.“There it is,” said Cosell, “a three-to-two decision for Whitaker.” But the scores of the bouts were never announced!
Later, after Cosell wouldn’t return my calls — and I told ABC exactly what I was preparing to write — I wrote it. Cosell then issued a statement claiming that he was a victim of “a documented, long-term vendetta against me by certain writers of the New York Post.”
But he didn’t deny that he’d been caught being dishonest.
ESPN, which didn’t acknowledge on its telecast Monday what had just happened, relied on its audience being too stupid to notice.
Boone keeps raiding bullpen till it flops
Yankees manager Aaron Boone was tried and convicted for the wrong crime, after an 8-7 loss to the Rays on Sunday.
Did Boone allow Gerrit Cole to stay in too long, as a 6-0 lead turned to 6-6 after five innings? Only in retrospect. Cole has shown self-corrective, in-game successes that have helped him achieve ace status.
But what followed was irreconcilable. By now, you know the Aaron Boone Baseball Bullpen drill:
First, Boone removed Clay Holmes after he went one-two-three, with two strikeouts. Then, Wandy Peralta after three up, three down, two Ks. Then Michael King after one inning, one hit and three strikeouts. As always, Boone went looking for better!
In Albert Abreu, Boone’s search was over. In the 10th, with a Rob Manfred runner on second, Abreu allowed the game-ending hit.
Joe Kapp, hard-bitten Vikings quarterback of the late 1960s and a favorite of those who appreciated “winning ugly,” died Monday at 85. Kapp’s three seasons in Minnesota were fun to watch. He threw 37 TD passes for the Vikings, some of them spirals.
Early in Game 4 of Heat-Knicks, after Miami hit a short jumper, Ian Eagle, calling the game on TBS, spoke some new-age nonsense: “Miami has a high execution level,” leaving himself to explain himself, “They get the shots they want.” Oh.
Hey, hey, hey! Rangers-Mariners, on Monday, ran only 2:16. But it was fast bad baseball. Seven pitchers combined to strike out 26 — 48 percent of the outs.
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