The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
Sunday Gravy: LeBron’s brilliance foiled
There’s an old Looney Toons cartoon where Bugs Bunny takes on a baseball team of hulking roughnecks by playing every position himself. He stages a massive comeback, socking homer after homer and foiling the thugs with inventive tricks at every turn.
Bugs eventually wins the game when he takes a cab to the “Umpire” State building, rides an elevator to the roof, hoists himself atop a flag pole and tosses his glove high into the air to catch what would have been the winning homer.
It turned out to be pretty much the same scenario for LeBron James in Game 1 of the NBA Finals. He was a one-man show whose brilliance brought the Cavaliers to the brink of victory against the mighty Warriors.
The only difference between reality and the cartoon was just as LeBron tossed his glove into the air to catch that potential game-winning homer, J.R. Smith knocked him out of the way and fumbled it over the edge of the skyscraper.
⏩ J.R. Smith is catching most of the heat for his gaffe, which is taking a lot of attention away from George Hill, who looked absolutely terrified right before missing what should have been the winning free throw.
⏩ Four straight years of Warriors-Cavs is about as exciting as ordering vanilla ice cream at Baskin-Robbins. But if the rest of the series is anything like Game 1, filled with inexplicable decisions by players and referees and an all-time performance by the game’s greatest player, it might be worth watching.
⏩ At first, I embraced officials in football, baseball and basketball using video review to ensure the right calls were made. Now I’m completely disillusioned. Replay is being abused and games are more of a mess than ever.
Between an endless parade of penalties, lengthy video review and commercial breaks, the NFL has become a chore to watch.
Baseball reviews on bang-bang calls on the base paths are tolerable. But it shouldn’t be used to call a runner who clearly beat the throw out because he lost contact with the base for a millisecond during his slide.
And it’s inexcusable to reverse an offensive foul call during a crucial moment in the NBA Finals when review is inconclusive at best. Super slow motion, as we saw in Game 1, can be misleading and counterproductive. Let the refs call what they see.
⏩ The best part of the whole Bryan Colangelo kerfuffle is that he used anonymous Twitter accounts to defend himself against those who criticized his fashion sense. Those open, 70’s-style shirt collars look great, you guys.
⏩ Yale, thanks to the Ivy League’s new partnership with ESPN, will play three games televised nationally by the self-proclaimed World Wide Leader this fall. Unfortunately, for purists who prefer watching Ivy League football on crisp autumn Saturday afternoons, two of them are Friday nights in October.
Dartmouth’s visit to the Yale Bowl was bumped up to Oct. 5 at 6 p.m. Yale was going to honor Carm Cozza that Saturday. The school hasn’t decided if those plans will change now that the game is on Friday.
Yale’s trip to Penn was also moved to Friday, Oct. 19 at 7 p.m.
The Yale-Harvard game, to be played at Fenway Park, is still set for Saturday, Nov. 17. It will air on ESPN, ESPN2 or ESPNU, a decision that likely won’t come until early November.
Six of the remaining seven games will air on ESPN+, a pay-per-view service that at $4.99/month is half the price of the now defunct Ivy League Digital Network. Only the seasonopener at Holy Cross isn’t covered by the new deal.
⏩ It’s hard to think of anybody calling UConn men’s basketball and football games other than Joe D’Ambrosio. But his contract is with WTIC and they won’t lend him out to UConn now that the station no longer has radio rights to the Huskies. Games won’t be the same without him. The good news is Wayne Norman, Joe D’s longtime broadcast partner, and women’s basketball voice Bob Joyce are making the transition.
⏩ The final paragraph of a recent Yale press release: “A molecular, cellular & developmental biology major with a 3.89 GPA, he shadowed cardiac surgeons in Africa as they worked on impoverished children one summer. He worked in a Yale cancer research lab focusing on cancers found in the blood (leukemia), and then spent a summer working at the University of Rochester doing research on tumors of the neural crest while shadowing a pediatric oncologist at Strong Memorial Hospital. He will continue his medical research at Yale in the fall.”
The release was about Ben Reeves, who this week led Yale to a national championship and won lacrosse’s version of the Heisman Trophy. That’s what you’d call making the most of the student-athlete experience.
⏩ From the “I get by with a little help from my competition” category: fierce weather in Sarasota, Florida caused severe damage to both of the Yale women’s crews team’s varsity eight boats last weekend at the NCAA rowing championships. One boat had four fist-sized holes; the other had a single hole and broken fin.
Before the Bulldogs had even arrived on the scene, coaches from competing teams Central Florida, Ohio State and Washington were in the process of fixing the less-damaged boat by cutting out and replacing the damaged carbon fiber and honeycomb material and fetching a new fin.
Coaches from Stanford, Cal and Texas twice assisted in reconfiguring the boat’s setup so it could compete in all heats. The NCAA even delayed start times so the Bulldog boat could be properly prepared.
Yale turned in top-10 finishes in all its races and placed eighth in the team standings, highest of any Ivy League entry.
“I can’t say how refreshing it is,” Yale coach Will Porter said in a story written by Megan Herboth for NCAA.com. “You hear all of these negative stories about coaches and athletes; this is such a positive thing. I just couldn’t thank everybody enough. I’ve been coaching in this sport since 1989 and I was overwhelmed, once things settled down, by everybody’s willingness to help. It’s just wonderful. It makes me proud to be in this sport; proud to be a coach and associate with my peers.”
An endowment makes Porter’s official job title “The Friends of YWC Head Coach.” It appears Yale Women’s Crew has a lot more friends than it may have realized.