After four years and 143 races, Dale Earnhardt Jr.’s winning drought is over. It ended at the same track where he got his last win, in June of 2008: Michigan International Speedway. Once the rains cleared in Brooklyn, MI, Junior roared out to lead 95 of 200 laps and ran away from Tony Stewart and the rest of the field on the way to a comfortable victory, with speeds topping out at 212 mph along the long straightaway.
The 88 team has been having a good year. After 15 races, they have 11 top ten finishes, 8 of which were top fives, one of which was yesterday’s victory. This win has been a long time coming not only because it has been a long time since Junior’s won, but because he’s run pretty solidly during those four years, and particularly last year and this year, and he seems to have encountered more than his fair share of bad luck. The stretch, while probably longer than anyone would’ve liked it to be, did give Earnhardt the opportunity to show his critics that wasn’t going to lose due to being immature or a bad teammate. It’s been a long time since anybody could legitimately accuse him of being either. (And the persistent immaturity of the Busch brothers certainly provides a helpful foil.)
In the end, though, I feel pretty good saying that the reason Earnhardt Jr. finally broke through and made it back to victory lane was due to the black paint scheme on his Chevrolet yesterday.
From the first time the baseball world got a look at Vlad, it was clear we were dealing with a very different kind of subject. Read Dan Le Batard’s Guerrero profile from 10 years ago and you begin to understand why. There are the usual stories of future sports stars growing up in poverty … and then there’s Vlad, who drank from puddles as a child and had to share two beds with six other family members after a hurricane blew the roof off the Guerreros’ shack. There are the usual disconnects between English-speaking reporters and Spanish-speaking players … and then there’s Vlad, who’s so shy about his lack of education and a fear he’ll be perceived as unintelligent that he rarely talks to anyone outside his immediate circle.
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And yes, he approached the game differently from anyone else, including sizing up opposing pitchers by facing them on his PlayStation. One of the oldest axioms in sports is to practice the way you play. No problem for Vlad. He swung at everything on PlayStation, too.
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People tell stories about Vlad the way they might about Roy Hobbs, if he were real. I once saw Vlad make a diving catch over an alligator in right-center. Oh yeah? I once saw him hit a ball that landed in Moose Jaw. Pfft! You weren’t there when he threw a guy out at home while lying in a sleeping bag in the right-field bleachers while his mom read him ghost stories.
Thing is, everything short of gators and Moose Jaw and sleeping bags actually happened. … Read More
In one of the most significant changes in the 139-year history of the Kentucky Derby, Churchill Downs will determine the 20-horse field for next year’s event through points accrued in selected prep races.
The points system, to be known as the “Road to the Kentucky Derby” and intended to build advance fan interest, will begin this fall, with 2-year-olds able to earn points for the May 4 Derby in designated races.
Churchill’s management believes the new structure, which it plans to announce today, organizes the preps into the equivalent of a regular season and playoffs, to which fans can relate. Ever since the field has been limited to 20 horses, some form of earnings has been used to determine the field. Since 1986, Churchill has used graded-stakes earnings.
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The plan calls for 36 races, as opposed to about 185 races worldwide that counted toward Derby selection under the previous arrangement.
The campaign of races leading up to the Derby is being divided into four phases with different point scales.
The first is called the Kentucky Derby Prep Season, typically spanning stakes from late September through late February. That will offer a 10-4-2-1 point scale for the top four finishers.
Next is the first of a three-phase Kentucky Derby Championship Season, which typically will span the 10-week run-up to the Derby. Races in the first phase of the Championshp [sic] Season will offer a 50-20-10-5 point scale.
That’s followed by the most important part of the Championship Season. These races will encompass the biggest events: the Florida Derby, Wood Memorial, Santa Anita Derby, Arkansas Derby, Toyota Blue Grass and Louisiana Derby, while also including the $2 million UAE Derby in Dubai. Those races will offer a 100-40-20-10 point scale.
Finally, there’s a last chance “wild-card setup” — Keeneland’s Lexington Stakes two weeks before the Derby and Churchill Downs’ opening-night Derby Trial a week before the Run for the Roses. Those points (20-8-4-2) could put a “bubble” horse over the top.
I like this idea. I don’t know if the audience for horse racing is growing, and I suspect it is not, but this will help in two ways: 1) it will help people focus on and understand the value and importance of certain pre-Derby races, and 2) it will enhance the experience of watching the Derby and the other Triple Crown races by contextualizing them, familiarizing fans with the participants further in advance of the big races. The further hope is that this will lead to broader television coverage. I look forward to learning more about Saratoga, Santa Anita, Arkansas, and, of course, Keenland. Not so much Pantoji.
When a certain Nashville restaurant decided to stop being an obvious organized crime front and take the business above board, one of the succession of attempted ventures in the space was a sports bar so desperate for customers it was almost giving away beer. The question was, is “two-for-one” beer the same thing as half-off beer, and if not, which is preferable?
Anyway, you need not choose, because here in a single post are two quick hits about beer and guys who don’t want any of it. First up is the now “viral” (HT: Laura) Bryce Harper:
The very elemental 2012 NBA finals tip off tonight between the Heat and Thunder, and while we don’t know which way Captain Planet’s going with this one, I did think everybody outside of South Beach was on board with cheering for Oklahoma City. Probably more accurately, I thought everybody was on board with rooting against LeBron James & co.
Now that King James is (again, admittedly) on the verge of winning his first NBA championship, the internet’s writing hands are rushing to join his camp. Whether they really are tired of harping on James for The Decision, the pep rally, and his promise of eight championships in Miami or they’re just following the old, adhere to one view for a long time and then publicly and suddenly change positions to get attention model, or maybe they see that James’ time is here and they want to be on the right side of history, everybody’s suddenly all-in on LeBron James.
How to accomplish this switch? Remind everybody saying OKC “did it the right way” that OKC did it the wrong way first, by ripping the franchise out of Seattle. Continue reading →
This week’s issue of Sports Illustrated includes a transcript of Dan Patrick’s interview with former Kentucky Wildcat and presumptive New Orleans Hornet Anthony Davis. Included was this exchange, initiated by DP’s curiously worded question:
Patrick: Did you tell Kentucky Coach John Calipari you were going to go pro or did he tell you?
Davis: He told me. He told me to [come into his office]. When I walked in, first thing he said: “Look, Ant, you have to leave. You did too many great things this year. Won a national championship, got every award. There’s no point in you coming back.” I started laughing. But he had no smile on his face. He was dead serious.
Patrick: Did you want to stay at Kentucky?
Davis: I wanted to stay. Great team, great coach. But the way life is, you have to move on.
It’s tough to know how much to make of this out-of-context exchange. When Coach Cal called Davis into his office, was that the first time they talked about the star freshman’s departure? When Davis laughed, was it because he found the suggestion outlandish and wanted to stay, or was he just being sheepish? When Davis told DP he wanted to stay, was he being serious?
Still, there’s a persistent feeling that Cal really was kicking the kid on down the line to make room for the next crop of high-profile players. In a program operated on a one-and-done model, having a player of Davis’ talent stick around for another season could mean that UK would lose at least one of its top recruits, who commit to Kentucky because they want to shine for a single season and move along to the league where players get paid above the table.
During last weekend’s Pop Music Symposium at SUNY Clinton, I heard for the first time Carly Rae Jepsen’s “Call Me Maybe,” and late Wednesday night, reader Cactus William sent a/the music video, which will serve as this week’s Jam.
There’s a lot at play here. First, the song itself: I’ve only listened to it twice, and for different reasons, neither listen was a careful one, but it seems to be comprised of two fairly devastating pop hooks cycled as many times as three minutes and change will allow, and one less interesting bridge-ish segment with lyrics confusing in light of the purported plot. As for the singer herself, I’ve never heard of Jepsen before, and I can only assume that she comes from the Rebecca Black School of Corporate Music Manchurian Candidates, a vehicle to deliver said hooks and smile as her creators reel in the money.
Still, the financial circumstances of a song’s conception need not dictate its real value, and here I think we may have something of broader importance. I wrote earlier that Brad Paisley’s channeling of Arthur Conley with “Old Alabama” signaled country music’s arrival as America’s popular music genre, and I think something very roughly analogous is happening with “Call Me Maybe” vis-a-vis dynamics in popular gender politics. The thesis is that this song stands for a tipping point in male-female relations that sees a woman asserting herself, though just barely, as the first mover in the courtship context, contrary to traditional expectations. This thesis doesn’t ignore strong, demanding women of the past (Janis, “Tell Mama”) or even aggressive women of the present (e.g., Carrie Underwood, “Before He Cheats”), but it is operable to the extent it can bracket such apparent counterexamples as being either out of the mainstream or persistently reactionary despite their aggressiveness and focus its comparative backdrop on the likes of Taylor Swift, ALDLAND’s favorite anthro-feminine alien. On the other hand, this paragraph may have set back gender relations by a few decades or at least demonstrated my ignorance of contemporary popular music. Moving right along.
Next is the video, which stars members of the Miami Dolphins cheerleading squad. The first question here is, what motivated this? Was this just a sunny day romp around South Beach after cheer camp let out? Or, in Bring It On/Mean Girls fashion, was this a response to the leaked photo shoot of Lauren Tannehill, wife of Miami’s rookie quarterback and number eight overall draft pick Ryan Tannehill (who, if he didn’t outkick his coverage with his bride, certainly did with his draft position), in varying amounts of Dolphins-colored gear? To the extent this is knowable, determining the answer would initially involve comparing the dates of the leaking of the photos and the posting of the video, something I’m not going to do. Precision like that likely becomes less important when you’re striving for attention and HBO’s cameras are rolling.
To the extent that there’s any sports angle here, this video eventually will make you remember that, whether it’s the Hard Knocks curse, the implications of merely having cheerleaders, or the fact that Miami actually drafted Ryan Tannehill, the Dolphins are not going to be good this year, so enjoy this while you can, which is forever, because the internet is forever, unlike Dan Marino:
This SundaySaturday, at New York’s Belmont Park, Kentucky Derby and Preakness winner I’ll Have Another will try to become just the eleventh Triple Crown winner, and the first since Affirmed in 1978. (Interesting and surely irrelevant note: I’ll Have Another won the Derby and Preakness by the same margins that Affirmed did in ’78.) Of the twenty-one horses to win both the Derby and the Preakness, eleven have gone on to win the Belmont Stakes. After last week’s post on probability, I’m hesitant to say whether I’ll Have Another has a good shot at winning the Triple Crown after having won the first two races, but his chances have to be better for having done so. That said, I’ll Have Another hasn’t felt like a favorite in any of the two prior races, but neither does he feel like a stranger at this point. With Bodemeister’s withdrawal from the Belmont field, we won’t get to find out what would happen if these two top horses reprised their Derby and Preakness battles. The longer Belmont track would seem to have favored the late-breaking I’ll Have Another over the hard-running Bodemeister, but it could create new timing and endurance challenges for the Triple Crown contender and his young jockey. I don’t know how much Gutierrez keyed on Bodemeister in particular, but one has to expect that the pack’s overall pace will be slower around Belmont Park’s 1.5 mile track than it was in the last two, shorter races.
As with our Kentucky Derby preview (though not so much with the Preakness preview), the following is a collection of online stories and other items to help prepare your viewing experience of this weekend’s Belmont Stakes:
I’ll be on the road this weekend, so there will be no live blog of the race. You’re just going to have to watch it by yourself, without the benefit of alternatively insightful and weakly snarky running commentary.
Mostly for structural technological reasons, this ALDLAND writer doesn’t watch a lot of TV. Like anyone even loosely following popular media and culture over the last few years, though, I’ve seen Conan– primarily on-demand, online, and for reasons unrelated to O’Brien himself– and have some opinion on him that I haven’t enunciated because it didn’t seem worth the effort to put into words that someone else would want to read that Conan really isn’t that funny. His move away from NBC piqued interest in the way that Charlie Sheen’s meltdown did– a spectacle was happening, and the corporate networks were openly trying to figure out how to handle it– but the only real consequence I felt was that the Mighty Max was off daily television.
But after a week watching The Great Conando pant after nobodies and ding Americans for being overweight, I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s not the lower ratings that should concern TBS. It’s the lowered expectations. By constantly moving the goalposts and pre-apologizing for Conan’s numbers, TBS only reinforces the perception that they’re less interested in the reality of Conan as a talk show than they are in the projected fantasy of it as some sort of web-friendly content farm. (Last week, Vince Vaughn “stopped by” to debut a trailer for his new movie. Yes, the star wattage was nice, but it seemed like an awfully expensive way for TBS to involve itself in something the Internet already does well enough for free, the equivalent of priority-mailing a letter to announce an e-mail you plan on sending in the morning.) Koonin’s hands-off policy and drama-free endorsements (“He’s our Mount Rushmore”) must make for a pleasant change of pace after 17 years among the backstabbing brownshirts at NBC. But it also seems to have stripped O’Brien of his most powerful weapon: his ferocious survival instinct.
Whether he was staving off cancellation rumors with coked-up werewolves or blowing off NBC’s rescheduling plans by blowing their money, O’Brien’s comedy has always worked best when he’s fighting for his life. . . . Now, tasked with little more than delivering a modest number of age-appropriate eyeballs, O’Brien seems both stunted and settled, lavishly rewarded for doing what he loves most for a company that seems to value the end product the least. It’s been well established by now that Conan O’Brien can’t stop. But it seems he’s only transcendent when someone is trying to make him.
Which is a nice way of saying what I wrote above, I think.
I also think that the reason I find myself watching him on youtube (again, for the guests) more than his competitors (that’d be Letterman, Leno, Jimmy Kimmel, and Jimmy Fallon) is because those comedians who seem to be smart (Louie, Norm, Tracy, Will) also seem to really respect Conan, and they seem to elicit honest, non-Guy Smiley reactions from Conan, and those do add to the experience of watching the guest.
It was unfair to call Lidstrom “The Perfect Human.” Nobody’s perfect, not even him. And sometimes his spotless performance and quiet personality worked against him. He was too often taken for granted because there were no downs to illustrate the ups. He was never beloved quite like his predecessor as captain, Steve Yzerman, who transformed himself from a slick scorer into a gritty leader. Who can relate to perfection? How can you celebrate a triumph over adversity when there isn’t any?
Still, Lidstrom lived up to the label somehow. If he lacked any love or attention, he never seemed to mind. He was never rude. He always had time for everyone.He was as close to perfect as a player and person could be, the definition of consistency and class, the ultimate high-performance, low-maintenance superstar. Actually, Holland called him “no-maintenance. ”
He retires as the best defenseman of his generation and one of the three best in the history of hockey. Bobby Orr won the Norris eight times. Doug Harvey won it seven times, like Lidstrom did. Though Orr could have won it more had his knees not given out, Lidstrom could have won it more, too. He was underappreciated early in his career, a three-time Norris runner-up, and the 2004-05 lockout erased a season of his prime. … Read More
After four years and 143 races, Dale Earnhardt Jr.’s winning drought is over. It ended at the same track where he got his last win, in June of 2008: Michigan International Speedway. Once the rains cleared in Brooklyn, MI, Junior roared out to lead 95 of 200 laps and ran away from Tony Stewart and the rest of the field on the way to a comfortable victory, with speeds topping out at 212 mph along the long straightaway.
ALDLAND 