GOOD SPORTS
IT’S time to dig deeper to find the silver linings.
Last Friday’s 102-0 girls high school basketball game in Montana — the score held down by a running clock during the second half — generated anguished national attention.
Yet did you know that all five of the losing team’s starters — the only players it had — will be back next season? The team loses no one to graduation!
See what I mean? Sunny side up.
Sure, Sunday’s NFL games — especially the one in which the Patriots’ Rob “Everyone Loves The Gronk!” Gronkowski flattened (assaulted?) an opponent who already had been flattened, then had the gall to appeal a one-game suspension — were again left vandalized.
But, oh, that Gronk! He’s such a scene-stealer, ya know? We love him for it — or are told we do — especially for his unfiltered vulgarity, identified as hilarity.
And then Monday night’s renewed Steelers-Bengals gang warfare — neurological health-imperiling “game” that should be adjudicated from guard towers, the officials ready to deploy tear-gas canisters — even moved ESPN’s Jon Gruden to condemn the excessive brutality he has quietly indulged or even applauded for the past eight seasons.
Although an attentive commissioner would have read both teams the riot act before the game, there’s nothing so wrong with the NFL that it can’t be fixed by starting over. For now, telecasts should be prefaced with, “Viewer Discretion Is Prohibited.”
And Roger Goodell will be retained at $40 million per to continue to serve only the best interests of the game, which apparently means the continued marginalization and elimination of fans and customers who no longer can suffer the loss of time and money on free-flowing garbage.
But Tuesday night, from the precipice of the abyss, temporary rescue arrived. Two rarities: sports that resembled sports, that is, their long-lost versions.
First, on ESPN, Villanova played Gonzaga at the Garden. Jay Wright’s Villanova teams are often good for what ails basketball; they can be uplifting, a restorative salve on the depleted better senses.
You see (or perhaps you saw), Villanova passes the ball, not just to try to escape a turnover in the corner or a double-team on the outside, but to quickly, decisively, and preemptively avoid such predicaments to score relatively easy points.
Even ESPN’s Jay Bilas was moved to put aside his stentorian pronouncements to simply say, “The reason Villanova is a good shooting team is that it’s a good passing team.” Exactly!
Hadn’t seen much open-man basketball like that in the Garden, certainly not during the extended-contract Carmelo Anthony Error. Such basketball even leads to practical wonder as to why NBA teams always draft fairly good scorers well before superb passers.
Although the game appeared on ESPN, Villanova’s style is both antithetical and anathema to ESPN’s sense of noteworthy. For 25-plus years it has chosen any flamboyant slam-dunk, often followed by a mean-mug toward the TV camera beneath the backboard, to daily and nightly emphasize as good basketball.
So all that was left was to overlook, Tuesday, the national scam of student-athletics, as the Connecticut-Syracuse game that followed began at 9:40 p.m. Clearly, though, that met with the approval of the university’s presidents, the always reform-minded NCAA and Disney-owned ESPN.
Over on MSG-Plus, the Devils, at Columbus, were busy beating a good team, 4-1, similar to the way Villanova won by 16.
The goal that gave New Jersey a 2-1 lead was beautiful — before, during and after. From the right wing, Nico Hischier, 18 years old, spotted Taylor Hall skating down the left. He connected with a bull’s-eye pass Hall immediately shot into the unguarded side of the net.
But wait, there’s more! As Hall flew to the ice, the result of a too-late bump, he was already pointing toward Hischier in appreciation and admiration of such a pass. He gave his teammate a flying ovation!
Wonder if pandering Goodell, who this season invited players to enact rehearsed, all-about-me “spontaneous fun” celebrations after scoring TDs — as if they had no help from 10 others — would have approved of Hall’s spontaneity.