infinite improbability

Bests and worsts of '04: Worst in sports

I thought that given all that's happened in the past year, it's worth taking the time to put together some best and worst of 2004 lists. Today's edition is the worst moments in sports in 2004, coming later will be the worst in news, and then best of sports and news.

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Worst Sports Moments of 2004

10) Wardrobe "malfunctions": It's hard to make a list of this past year in sports and leave this out. The year began with Janet Jackson's wardrobe malfunction at the Superbowl, and ended with MNF stunt which is technically not a malfunction, but in interest of symmetry that's what I'll call it. Janet's stunt set the tone for the year--crass and increasingly more pathetic incidents in sports. The worst thing about both of those stunts is that they overshadowed good games. Other lists have ranked this higher, but I prefer to take note of it and then move on.

9) Idiot athletes: Every year you have uberegotistical athletes, but between TO's relentless pursuit of self promotion to Ron Artest and his album to Keyshawn Johnson suggesting a female sideline reporter who did a critical story needed spanked, this year was pretty low.

8) Idiot Fans: Where to begin? This year saw San Jose Sharks fans bringing racist signs to games during the Calgary series, baseball fans heckling leading to a chair tossing incident, and of course the drink tossing incident that led to the Pacers/Pistons basketbrawl

7) Ricky Williams plays hooky: Somebody please explain to me why a guy who retires so he can smoke pot is a praised as a sensitive philosophical guy, which he may be, but ht's a sensitive philosophical guy with a drug problem. If he had walked away because he wanted to leave while he could still walk, fine, I would respect him for that. But leaving to smoke pot? People shouldn't praise him; they should be staging an intervention to get him some help. And, the is he/isn't he waffling about a return didn't endear him to anybody.

6) The Yankees collapse: It led to the breaking of the curse, but still, any team that is 3 outs away from a sweep and a trip to the World Series deserves a spot on this list

5) The Pistons/Pacers brawl: This was pretty low even before they started fighting with fans. Just another sign of the classless way that this year went down.

4) Notre Dame fires Tyrone Willingham: Further proof that class has gone the way of the Dodo bird. Notre Dame is supposed to be different, they're supposed to care about more than just winning games, whatever happened to Rudy and "win one for the Gipper" and all of that sentimentalism that goes along with Notre Dame football? Totally classless.

3) Steroids: Basketball and hockey are the only two sports that haven't been touched by the Balco scandal and the broader steroid problem. In football, it appears to be isolated to certain Raider players that weren't particularly a surprise--Bill "the walking pill bottle" Romanowski for on. Track and field, how can you trust any of the records that have been set by any of the myriad of athletes connected to Balco? And baseball? Pretty much everything in the past 5 years or so has to be questioned.

2) Pete Rose "confesses" to sell more books: Now that we know that he bet on baseball for certain, all the more reason not to let him in. And, what else isn't he telling us?

1) The NHL lockout: The National Hockey League displayed an unparallel level of ineptness in locking out the players this year. A dozen or so years ago, Gary Bettman took a gamble and expanded the league into non-traditional markets, and just as that gamble is starting to pay off with the Lightning's Stanley Cup run, they turn out the lights and lock the doors. That's not a way to run a business. You need to capitalize on the successes in non-traditional markets, and it's really dumb to tell fans "hey, we got you hooked on this sport but sorry, now that you're hooked we're going to yank it away."

Posted by kathryn at Diciembre 31, 2004 02:10 AM | TrackBack