As the spoken idiom “going forward” escalates in usage — an idiotic idiom unless time stands still — the future ain’t what it used to be.
Let’s go forward, in its practical usage, to the last regular-season games of this NFL season, Dec. 30.
We see the following scheduled games: Colts at Titans, Cowboys at Giants, Lions at Packers, Cardinals at Seahawks.
These games have one thing in hard-to-miss common: The visiting teams play their home games in domed stadium, the home teams don’t.
With winter weather anticipated to coincide with winter, the four games carry the likelihood of patrons having to endure both rotten traveling conditions plus three fully exposed outdoor hours in order to watch the games.
The Falcons, who play beneath a roof, will also be on the road, but at Tampa Bay, thus customers reasonably risk only heavy rain.
In the early days of the NFL Network, a Travels With Roger piece was produced and presented portraying Roger Goodell as the simpatico Papa Football tending to his scattered flocks.
From Wisconsin he was seen in a room in which Packers’ ticket-holders were gathered. He answered one question from a concerned participant with the soothing reassurance that the man’s concerns are unwarranted because, on his watch, “It’s all about our fans.”
Soon, he would be wiping out generations of pre-existing and wait-listed Jets and Giants ticket-buyers with onerous, unaffordable PSLs, accompanied by his demonstrably bogus claim that PSLs “are good investments.”
Goodell remains accomplished at allowing late-season games in frigid regions such as Green Bay to be “flexed” to night games in order to meet the conditions greedily sold to TV.
I know, I know. In exchange for roughly $40 million per year he’s just doing his job, including spoken con jobs.
Such is modern life, when the promise of truth-telling has been replaced with the vow to become “more transparent.”
Going forward, ESPN’s “Sunday Night Baseball” was green-lighted by MLB to present April 7’s Dodgers-Rockies game — in Colorado. Freeze, you suckers, freeze!
ESPN, for April 7, could have chosen — or strongly urged to select — more weather-welcoming games: Rangers at Angels, Red Sox at Diamondbacks, A’s at Astros — the Astros’ park even has a retractable roof — but humanity and civility, going forward, can’t compete with money.
This week we learned that Urban Meyer, a religious man infamous for recruiting crime-disposed players and reportedly ignoring warnings that one of his favorite assistant coaches is an accused serial wife-beater — is not quite retiring as first reported.
His long collegiate résumé for winning at any and all deeply compromised costs, first at Florida then at Ohio State — in his defense he only did what the schools allowed him to do, paid him millions to do — will not be done at OSU following this Rose Bowl.
Instead, he will teach a course titled “Leadership and Character,” which means, going forward, that OSU has a perverse sense of both humor and scholarship.However, going backward, there has been worse.
Those 18 years of no-show, A’s-for-all, keep-them-eligible courses arranged for varsity athletes reportedly operated under the auspices of Jan Boxill. She’s the since-resigned Chair of Faculty and Director of UNC’s Parr Center for — ready? — Ethics.
“Where you going?”
“Forward.”
“You’re headed the wrong way.”
Capstraw comes through for ‘Tip Off’ at last minute
Kevin Williams is the longtime heart and soul of Jersey Shore sports. He’s a broadcaster over WOBM Radio, director of Shore Sports Network, a tireless organizer and promoter of high school events. Oh, he’s a sweetheart, too.
Williams runs the WOBM Christmas Classic, which he has grown from an eight-team H.S. basketball tournament in 1984 to a weeklong, 32 teams — girls and boys — jamboree.
Each tournament begins with a Tip Off Breakfast. Williams supplies a keynote speaker.
But this year, it was getting late and Williams still had no speaker. Red Bank Regional girls’ coach John Truhan suggested Tim Capstraw, the former Wagner College men’s coach, now the Nets’ superb analyst on WFAN.
Williams didn’t have the nerve, with just five days’ notice, to ask Capstraw to drive 70 miles from his home in West Orange to Toms River.
“And his only compensation,” he added, “would be a T-shirt and breakfast.”
But he gave it a shot.
And Capstraw told him to get lost.
Hardly. Capstraw drove down, spoke for 20 minutes to 270 coaches and players, told funny stories and delivered head-and-heart messages about commitment to do right on and off the court in service to self and a greater good.
“He made a lot of grateful friends at the Jersey Shore,” Williams said, “and I’m first on that list.”
Hoops a 3-ring circus
Clyde Frazier, within MSG’s Knicks telecasts, gets it. But as one who can make a difference, he just doesn’t speak it often and loudly enough. He knows that the reliance on 3-point shots, often as first-options, is removing both the beauty and winning practicality from the game.
Tuesday, the 20-11 Pacers lost at home to the 7-24 Cavaliers. Of course they did. They made 4 of 24 from 3-point range, 18 percent. The Cavs were 6-of-31, 19 percent.
Thursday in Miami, the Rockets lost to the Heat, 101-99, a game played as if it were Home Run Derby. It was bereft of anything designed to create winning basketball as 83 3-pointers were attempted. Another S.O.S. — save our sport.
Public incivility at sports events are now heard and seen as common, no filter, no shame.
Monday, as seen on MSG, the Islanders took a 1-0 lead at Colorado when MSG cut to a shot of a young woman wearing an Islanders jersey. Not a bad idea.
But the moment she appeared she turned and gave the finger to a nearby Colorado fan.
As the epidemic of endless talk over telecasts grows, I wonder:
What if we were to sit down with NBC’s Sunday night NFL analyst and endless talker Cris Collinsworth and juxtaposed his current work with his spoke-a-lot-less/no speeches analysis from say, 10-12 years ago? Which would he choose as better for him and his audience?
And it isn’t as if anyone at NBC — or any other network — knows good from bad, thus he’s unable to help himself create, especially at the end of another NFL TV talk-a-thon Sunday, a more palatable telecast.
A Yankees deal with Manny Machado should include this: Every time he doesn’t bother to run to first at expensive-tickets Yankee Stadium, drinks on the house!