WINTER O's CLOSE; BASEBALL'S SLOWS; COLLEGE HOOPS' WOES

                NEWS: Winter Olympics end.

               

                VIEWS: Finally.

                I covered three Winter Olympics—in Calgary in 1988, Albertville in 1992 and Lillehammer in 1994—but didn’t especially enjoy any of them.  The weather was one reason, of course, even when the problem was too warm (in Calgary) rather than too cold, but the real rub was that I had no affinity for winter sports. I never skied and wasn’t much of a skater on the ice rink created during the winter by flooding the playground behind my Chicago grammar school. As a kid I played a lot of ping pong in friends’ basements when the weather was cold, and racquetball was my winter sport of choice as an adult.

                 I had nothing against the athletes at the Winter O’s, who possessed the same virtues as other top-level jocks, but I did have quarrels with some of the games they played. Most winter-sports races are staged as singles or pairs against the clock rather than the line-‘em-all-up-and-see-who’s-best formats of, say track and field or swimming. Thus, they lack dramatic impact or a satisfying conclusion.

   Further, too many winter sports involve judges, which is to say they’re inherently open to bias. That’s especially true of figure skating, the Winter Games’ marquee events. Yeah, the figs are beautiful, and the skaters are terrific, but if it’s a sport so is ballet.  As for the TV commentary, it’s set me to giggling ever since I saw “Kentucky Fried Movie” (remember?).

                With only nations with the requisite frosty climes participating, the Winter Games are less universal than the summer ones, and because their overseers have dictated that both follow the same, 17-day schedule the winter calendars were much sparser than the summer ones at the Games I attended. The skeds have been beefed up for recent Games, mostly with X-Games daredevil stuff I can do without, but also by the addition of curling, that cross between bowling and shuffleboard that defies any definition of athletic endeavor. The revelation that a Russian curler was caught doping at Pyeongchang was one of the oddest sports stories ever. A curler doping? What in the world for?

                Wife Susie loves the figs, and because we were traveling for much of the recent Winter Games I was forced to watch quite a bit of them in our hotel rooms. Thus, I found the end of the competition especially welcome. It’ll be four years until the next one, not enough time to recover but almost.

                NEWS: Major League Baseball moves to speed games by limiting pitcher’s-mound conferences.

                VIEWS: The devil is in the details.

                The new rule, just announced, places a limit of six on mound visits by managers, coaches, catchers or other players during a nine-inning game, plus one for each extra inning, but it contains so many exceptions that it’s impact should be minimal. To wit:

                --Visits to check out possible pitchers’ injuries aren’t counted, nor are visits after an offensive substitution.

--Catchers still can talk to pitchers from the infield grass.

--Positions players can come to the mound to clean their spikes on the mound board (and whisper messages).

--Visits over the limit to correct pitch-sign cross-ups are permitted if the home-plate umpire agrees.

                The trouble with all the above exceptions is that each could be subject to umpire interpretations that will lead to arguments. MLB has tested a 20-second pitch clock during the last couple of Arizona Fall League seasons, and in the few instances umps invoked it they had to weather managers’ beefs that more than negated whatever time savings the rule might have brought. Look for a repeat of that this season.

                NEWS: More shoes drop in the FBI’s investigation of college basketball.

                VIEWS: There’s a centipede out there.

                The probe, which in September resulted in indictments of assistant coaches from Arizona, USC, Auburn and Oklahoma State, plus player agents and executives of the shoe company Adidas, rattled college hoops to its core, especially because the agency hinted there was more to come. Nothing further has been announced, but last week Yahoo Sports reported that some 20 more schools have been caught in the G-men’s net, including perennial powerhouses Duke, North Carolina, Kentucky, Michigan State and Kansas. It also identified a half dozen current or recent college players who received payments in the scheme, in which the coaches funneled money to the kids to attend certain schools, wear certain sneakers and, later, employ certain agents.

                That only assistant coaches were named initially made it look like your typical NCAA enforcement charade, but big cheese Rick Pitino of Louisville quickly got fired when his school was implicated (it was a last straw thing; he’d more than deserved firing for things he’d done previously) and Sean Miller of Arizona was benched a week ago when it came out he’d been taped discussing with one of the indictees paying $100,000 to a coveted recruit, Deandre Ayton, who wound up at Arizona.

The Yahoo piece, and one by ESPN’s excellent websight, said that about 4,000 phone calls, emails and other documents were seized during a two-year investigation, including a pile from Andy Miller, a well-known player agent. Some of the college game’s sainted head coaches, including Bill Self of Kansas and North Carolina’s Roy Williams, have issued “not me” statements, indicating, at least, that some “You too’s?” have been whispered in their presence.

                The main reason the coaches are squirming is that this is an FBI probe, not one by the toothless NCAA. That means that penalties can include prison time, not just some BS loss of scholarships or post-season-game ban. It’s more than a little ironic that the federal criminal laws the agency is seeking to enforce were enthusiastically supported by the NCAA in its never-ending quest to keep money from so-called student-athletes.  It’s a classic case of watching what you wish for, because you might get it.