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MurphGuide Sports Archives previous sports columns by Jim Murphy

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"Beat the Mets" April 6, 2004
Title Town  July 11, 2003
The Evil Empire June 11, 2003
Draft Day May 13, 2003
A Punch in the Gut January 8, 2003
Summer Olympics November 10, 2002
Opening Night October 23, 2002
Fore! July 1, 2002
Wave That Flag May 29, 2002
In the Garden of Evil May 1, 2002
Peanuts & Cracker Jack April 1, 2002
Productivity - March 13, 2002
You Don't Say... - February 28, 2002
Hangover Cure - February 12, 2002
Knuckleheads - January 28, 2002
Derek Jeter: King of New York Sports - January 13, 2002

"Beat the Mets"  
By Jim Murphy
April 6, 2004
A couple of years ago I wrote a baseball preview column where I predicted dire things for the 2002 Mets.  This was their first season after Steve Phillips’s giddy off-season where he went out and got Roberto Alomar, Mo Vaughn, Pedro Astacio, etc.  Most Mets fans were pretty psyched for that season, but being the cynical bastard that I am, I sensed something was amiss, and it turns out I was right.

I’m sad to say that I have the same feeling as I look over the 2004 Mets.  I think this team is a speeding train that’s about to go off the rails right in front of our eyes.  This has been a last place team for two seasons now, and the closer I look, the more I see the same result for 2004.

First, I’ll address the positive moves the Mets have made recently.  Towards the end of their disastrous 2003 season, Jim Duquette made some shrewd moves in unloading all of his dead weight, like Alomar, Jeromy Burnitz and Armando Benitez.  I’m not sure, but I think in the course of all those trades they got back something like eight or nine minor league prospects.  I’m going to gamble that at least one or two of those young kids makes an impact in the majors sometime soon (I’m rooting for the relief pitcher with the great name,  Royce Ring).  So the Mets seem to have the groundwork laid for some future success.  And to try to give the fans a reason to come to Shea this year,  Duquette went out and acquired Mike Cameron, and the best player from Japan named Matsui whose first name is not Hideki, shortstop Kaz Matsui.  Of course, he could have showed a little moxie and put a legitimate offer together for Vlad Guerrero, but either he wimped out or was told by the Wilpons not to break the bank.  Either way, that was a sign to me that the Mets are not really that interested in winning this year.

At the top of the Mets lineup will be the speedy duo of Jose Reyes and Matsui.  One problem is that Reyes is starting 2004 the same place that he finished 2003 - on the disabled list.  For a 20 year old, he seems to have about the same tolerance for injuries as that freakish guy Sam Jackson played in “Unbreakable”.  The kids at school in that movie called Jackson’s character “Mr. Glass”.  I say if Reyes keeps this up we nickname him “Senor Cristal”.  And Reyes is rubbing off on Matsui  - he was an Iron Man in Japan, never missed a game - so he comes to Florida and promptly misses two weeks of spring training with a finger injury.  The next time Reyes and Matsui take the field together at second and short will be the first time.  Something tells me that a healthy Reyes is not as bad as he looked in his first month in the big leagues last year, nor is he as good as he showed right before getting hurt.  I don’t think we’re looking at the next A-Rod here, or even the next Alfonso Soriano.  Matsui has looked more out of place in American batter’s boxes than Bill Murray looked in Japan in “Lost in Translation”.  Again, we’re not looking at the next Ichiro here.  I think we’re looking at the next Tsyuoshi Shinjo, right down to the stupid hair dying.  

Next up for the Mets is their “heart” of their order, which is about as healthy as Dick Cheney’s.  I believe that the Mets’ 3-4-5 is very possibly the worst in the league.  Seriously, I’ve been looking at the other teams.  Put together Mike Piazza, Cliff Floyd and Mike Cameron, and none of them had 30 homers or 100 RBIs last year.  I know Piazza and Floyd were hurt, but they were both pacing towards about 25 homers each.  That’s probably where they’ll both end up this year, with about 85-90 RBIs each.  Cameron will probably give them about 20 homers (remember, Shea is not exactly a power hitters paradise) and about 125 strikeouts.  This is a day and age where most teams have at least one 40 homer guy and one 30 homer guy, and two or three 100 RBI guys.  I don’t think any Met is going to hit those numbers this year.

Rounding things out are a collection of rejects, has-beens and never-will-bes like Ty Wiggington, Jason Phillips and Karim Garcia.  Now Phillips and Wiggington aren’t terrible, and a team that had some legitimate superstars could support guys like them at the bottom of the lineup, but on this team, at the power positions (first and third), they just don’t give you enough.  The platoon of Garcia and Shane Spencer is sure to produce some fireworks this season.  These two guys can’t seem to stay out of trouble.  I hear the over-under on their combined appearances at the courthouse on Queens Boulevard is three and half, and I’m tempted to take the over.

Defensively, the Mets should be better, at least on paper.  Cameron is a huge improvement, at a huge position.  Matsui would seem to be an upgrade at short, but apparently his agent didn’t tell him that most American ballparks have grass fields, which don’t give you those reliable hops that you get in Japan.  He committed five errors in spring training, which, combined with his strikeouts and low batting average, projects to “this guy is a bust” over the course of a full season.  At the “hot corner”, Wiggington is incapable of getting to balls that aren’t hit directly at him, and even those can be a challenge.  And anywhere Piazza is with a glove on his hand is a dangerous place.

It’s the Mets pitching staff, though, that really separates them from the elite teams in their division (it separates them from the mediocre teams too). Tom Glavine is on the verge of becoming the biggest free agent fiasco in Mets history.  He’s got some good competition (George Foster, Bobby Bonilla), but I think he’s going to pull it off.  This guy is clearly finished.  He doesn’t get the big strike zone that he used to, and without it, he’s at best a .500 pitcher, making something like 12 mil a year.  I like Al Leiter a lot, and he’s not going to go down without a fight, but his body seems to be breaking down on him.  And Steve Trachsel has somehow become the best starter on the team, which is a pretty scary thought.  I guess these three guys could somehow all pitch out of their minds, and combine for around 45-50 wins, but I think 30-35 is the more likely number.  The thing to ask yourself is, where would the Mets top three guys fit in on the better pitching staffs in baseball (Yankees, Cubs, Astros, A’s).  Would Tom Glavine make the Yankees starting rotation?  Would the Cubs even bother keeping Al Leiter around?  I don’t even know who the Mets four and five starters will be.  They have about ten guys going after these coveted two spots, a combination of Koreans, Hawaiian rookies, 35 year old last-leg types and glorified long relief pitchers.

Keep in mind that the Mets are playing in the same division as the defending World Series champs, a Philly team that seems loaded at every position and finally acquired a closer over the winter, and an Atlanta team that no matter how bad they get will always beat the Mets.  The only thing keeping the Mets out of last will be the Montreal/San Juan Expos, who will certainly have some jet lag issues to deal with, but who should have enough young talent to claim fourth, and hand the Mets their third straight last place finish. 

The Mets upper echelon has said that their goal this year is to play “meaningful games” in September.  They need to rethink this goal, and scale it down a bit.  I think “meaningful innings” is more realistic.  I think if the Mets are playing the Cubs, Braves or Yankees, and are three or fewer runs behind in the seventh, eighth or ninth innings, they will have shown good improvement.  But try to keep the faith Mets fans - the days of Victor Diaz, Scott Kazmir and Royce Ring are not far off.  We’ll get ‘em in 2005!  Or maybe 2006.  Hmmmm…. 2007? Definitely 2007.

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Title Town
By Jim Murphy
July 11, 2003

Let’s make like Austin Powers and take a trip back in time.   Not to the swinging 60’s, but the groovy 90’s.  June 1994, to be exact.  George, Jerry, Kramer and Elaine were must-see TV.  The baseball players still hadn’t gone on their ridiculous year-long strike.  And no one outside of the Lewinsky household had heard of Monica.

Something happened that year that’s almost unprecedented in sports – two teams from the same city simultaneously playing for the championships of their respective sports.  Of course I’m talking about the Knicks and Rangers.  It was one of the giddiest weeks in New York sports history – every night one of them was playing, and it seemed like the roof was going to blow off the Garden.  

A few other cities have done it, and even here in New York we’ve had some good runs before – but usually separated by a few months.   We had an especially awesome stretch from January 1969 to June 1970 when the Jets, Mets and Knicks all won championships (can you even imagine the same thing happening now?)  But there’s something pretty wild about two teams going at it on consecutive nights.

This year, East Rutherford matched New York in certainly the only way it ever could - the Devils made the Stanley Cup finals and Nets made the NBA finals.  The net result, no pun intended, turned out the same for both cities – one win, one loss.  So I thought I’d do a little post-mortem, to try to predict how history might record this momentous occasion.   I broke things down according to various sporting and cultural touchstones, and came up with the following results:

On-Field -  Like I said, in both cases, each city one won and lost won.  And in both cases it was the hockey teams that won.  Analyzing a little further, all four of the series were very similar – three of them went seven games, and one went six.  But the Rangers’ game seven against Vancouver was a far better game than the Devils’ game seven against Anaheim – the Rangers’ game was a one-goal game, whereas the Devils’ game seven was pretty much sewed up by the middle of the second period.  Basketball-wise, it’s no contest.  The Knicks took Houston to a seventh game before falling, and most of the games were close and well-played, if low scoring.  And how many people remember that the Knicks were within a made basket as time expired in game six of winning the whole thing?  The Nets only went six games before succumbing to their Texas opponent, and the New Jersey-San Antonio series was the most brutal, ugly display of basketball ever witnessed by humans.  It was like a bunch of guys throwing rocks at each other.  Terrible shooting from the field, no fast breaks, only one really big game by a superstar (Duncan, game one), and the Nets collapsing with their season on the line in the last game.    ADVANTAGE:  NEW YORK

Heroes – The hero of ’94 was undoubtedly Rangers captain Mark Messier.  He acted like he had never won a Cup before, and he showed his true colors by splitting as soon as he got an offer for more money a few years later.  But there’s no question that he was the leader of the team, both through his performance and his leadership (Ranger fans will be talking about his game six guarantee against the Devils long after we’re gone).  The Devils hero is a little tougher to pin down.  The rap on them is that they’re an anonymous team, devoid of any of their sport’s superstars, and that’s basically true.  Martin Brodeur set a record this year for most playoff shutouts, and Jeff Friesen scored a bunch of big goals, but the MVP award went to the Ducks’ goaltender, Frenchy-Sebastien-Pepe Le Pew.  When the MVP of a playoff series goes to a player on the team that didn’t win, that’s usually a sign that the winning team is more of an efficient, well-oiled machine than a top-heavy collection of studs.  Come to think of it, it really doesn’t happen all that often in sports, but it also happened to another local team – Mike Scott winning NLCS MVP in ’86 for the losing Astros instead of one of the Mets.  BIG ADVANTAGE:  NEW YORK

Goats:  The easiest goat to target on the Knicks in 1994 is John Starks.  If you’re going to go 3-for-18 in a game 7, with the title on the line, you’re basically putting a big bulls-eye on your back.  Tougher-minded Knicks fans might target Patrick Ewing, using the 1994 Finals as proof that he wasn’t a winner.  But the way I remember it, that Knicks team was basically Ewing, Charles Oakley, and a bunch of role players, Starks included.  I think it’s more of a credit to Ewing that they even made the Finals, than a knock against him that they didn’t win it.  No, the Knicks goat was clearly John Starks.  His crappy shooting put the Knicks into a hole early in game seven, and his continued crappy shooting ensured they’d never get out of it.  The Nets ran into a similar situation in their last game – Kenyon Martin’s 3-for-23 in game six.  This came on the heels of his four point performance in game five.  At some point someone should have pulled the plug on Martin.  You could say that the Nets real goat was head coach Byron Scott, for going overboard with Martin, for not doubling Duncan in game one, and for completely misusing Dikembe Mutombo.   I think the 1994 Rockets were a better team than the 2003 Spurs, so the Nets and their various goats have more egg on their faces.   ADVANTAGE:  EAST RUTHERFORD

Intangibles – Prior to 1994, the Rangers had one of the longest droughts in sports, in terms of “years since last championship”.  Islander fans took special glee in tormenting the Rangers with chants of “NINETEEN-FORTY!” every chance they could.  If the Rangers had lost game seven against Vancouver, some Islander fan probably would have rented a plane and spelled out that fateful number in skywriting, or taken out a full page ad in the Post, just to rub it in.  But the 1994 Rangers drove a stake through the heart of that 54 year-old vampire.  Islander fans can still get off on the fact that their team won four titles in a row in the early 80’s, and that no other pro sports team has done that since then, but if the Rangers never win another Stanley Cup, or even if they never make the playoffs again, they can think about 1994 and die happy.  The Devils’ Cup was third in less than 10 years.  There’s just no way to get as jazzed about that, no matter what a Devils fan might tell you.  BIG ADVANTAGE:  NEW YORK

Victory Parade – New York honored the Rangers with a ticker tape parade down lower Broadway, “The Canyon of Heroes”, where they trod in the footsteps of astronauts, war heroes and Charles Lindbergh.  East Rutherford held a glorified tailgate party in the parking lot of Continental Arena.  SLAM DUNK:  NEW YORK

Celebrity Felon – Even the most die-hard Knicks fan, whose blood pressure rose and fell with every made and missed shot, starting with the first shot of game one, would have to admit that the most indelible image of the Knicks-Rockets series did not take place on the court.  It was the surreal sight of NBC splitting their screen during game five, showing the game on one side of the screen, and O.J. in Al Cowling’s white Bronco on the other side.  While all that was going on, I called a friend of mine, and we were both aware that we were watching something that people would remember their entire lives.  How many people do you think remember the game that was being played while that was going on?  This year our celebrity felon was Martha Stewart.  While certainly a more enjoyable diversion than 1994’s double murder, there’s no way Martha can match O.J. for sheer drama.  ADVANTAGE:  NEW YORK

The Evil Empire

By Jim Murphy
June 11, 2003

The great English singer Billy Bragg once told a very funny joke during a concert of his.  “What three British soccer teams have curse words in their names?” is the setup.  Arsenal is first (“arse” being the British slang for, well, you know).   The second is a team from a town in England with the misfortune of having one of the most obnoxious words in the English language as its middle four letters.  On a family website like Murphguide.com I simply can’t make the reference.  But the third, and the punch line, is, “Manchester F’ing United”.  Such is the hatred of Man U that many British folks have taken to rooting for AB U - “anyone but United”. 

The reason for this hatred is simple - Man U recently captured their eighth league title in the last 11 years.   And not only do they seemingly always win, they have a limitless amount of money to spend on new players.  They invariably spend every off-season collecting the best of whatever free agents are available on the world market, even if the player the new guy would be replacing was doing just fine.  Apparently the suits at Old Trafford (where Man U plays) aren’t satisfied unless United wins the league title AND the F.A. Cup AND the European club Championship EVERY year, even though they actually did achieve this historic “treble” a few years ago.  So they whip out the checkbook every June and start shopping like a drunken lottery winner, sky’s the limit.

If you’re wondering what this has to do with anything, just substitute “Yankees” for “Man U”, and you’ll see where I’m going with this.  Manchester United has the same reputation and stokes the same passions in England as the Yankees do here.  They’re both out-of-control bulls in the china shops of their respective sports.  And the scariest part of all is, they’re joined at the hip.

A few years ago, the Yankees and Man U decided that domestic conquest was boring, and that global domination was the next logical step.  So they formed a “marketing partnership”, which in its most benign form means each team’s merchandise store selling the other team’s stuff.  I haven’t been there in a while, but I guess in theory if you go to the Yankee Clubhouse store in Times Square you’ll find some Man U stuff.  But to me it speaks to something much more sinister.  These are two evil empires that have joined forces.  Imagine Microsoft merging with Dr. Evil’s Omnicom, and you’ll be getting warm.  Baseball may be on some shaky ground, but I don’t think it will ever lose its status as America’s national pastime, and in England, soccer is something that is looked at more as a religion than a sport.  And these two 800-pound gorillas will not rest until their team names basically become synonymous with the games they play, kind of like Hellman’s with mayonnaise and Kleenex with tissues.

The most hideous permutation of this marriage made in hell is what you’re seeing on TV.  Having recently had the YES network foisted upon me by Cablevision, I can now see what all the fuss was about.  In addition to Yankee games, which get repeated about a half-dozen times before the next one airs live, you get such life-altering programming like “Yankees Clubhouse”, “Yankees Biography” and documentaries like “Godzilla:  Matsui’s Tale”.  I’m not making up this up - this is what passes for programming on the YES network.  But when the Yankees have a day off they have a hard time stretching out their schedule with this fluff, so of course they look to their friends across the ocean to fill in the gaps.  You get repeats of Man U’s most recent game, “classics” from the Man U archives (the ’99 match against Fulham seems to get shown quite a bit), and even Man U’s filler programs:  “Red Hot News” from Man U TV.   It might enlighten New Yorkers to know that the whole reason for the YES network’s existence is Manchester United.  Man U decided that they didn’t want to share TV revenue with the rest of the teams in their league, so they started their own channel a few years ago, and apparently it’s been a huge success for them.  Someone from their side must have brought this up in a meeting with George Steinbrenner, and the rest is history. 

The partnership between the Yankees and Man U has all kinds of possibilities.  Imagine a player exchange:  Derek Jeter could start sending in crossing passes while roaming the midfield for United, and David Beckham could take grounders at short for the Yankees.  If they threw Beckham’s wife (Posh Spice) into the deal, Jeter would probably do it in a heartbeat.  Or what about a fan exchange?  Send the most hardened, grizzled bleacher creatures from the Bronx across the pond and have them learn some of the great soccer chants.  And we could have some of Man U’s fans come over here - preferably upscale, non-hooligan types.  The funniest thing about this, though, is that both sets of fans would probably leave mid-game, complaining about how boring the other team’s sport is.

I’m sure I’ll be tagged as a typical, jealous, Yankee-hating Mets fan for all this.  And while I’ll never hide my hatred for the Yankees, I certainly don’t envy the Yankees and their Pac-Man type gobbling of the world sports market.  I feel fine knowing that the Mets are a strictly New York sports team.  The fact that sports fans in London or Liverpool or Hong Kong can’t watch Mets games or buy Mike Piazza jerseys doesn’t trouble me one iota.  In fact, I prefer it this way.  Let the Yankees sell themselves all over the world.  I’ll keep rooting for the Mets, going to games in their cesspool stadium in Flushing, and commiserating with fellow New Yorkers.  If the Yankees feel the need to “brand” themselves globally, good for them.  But I’ll stick with my lovable hometown losers, instead of a team looking to affirm its popularity by selling T-shirts to people who wouldn’t know a balk from a walk. 

Draft Day

By Jim Murphy
 May 13, 2003

In football, there are fans, and there are psychos.  Unfortunately, I consider myself to be more of the latter than the former.  I do not think twice about going to Giants Stadium in 20-degree weather, with wind chills that cannot be measured.  I moan about real life events that intrude on my ability to watch Giants games.  And, I insanely get into the NFL draft.

The NFL draft, like all sports drafts, is a decidedly un-sporting event.  It boils down to a bunch of guys in suits talking on the phone.  The team representatives at the draft talk on the phone to their superiors, who are usually ensconced at team headquarters, and of course wearing suits, to discuss which player they want to take.  The elite players are in the “green room” at the draft, wearing suits that the team guys could never afford, talking on their cell phones to their families, or more likely, their agents.  The fact that most of the players’ phone calls are staged, to make any team thinking about taking them think that THERE’S A FLURRY OF INTEREST IN THIS GUY AND YOU BETTER TAKE HIM NOW NOW NOW only adds to the silliness of the whole affair. 

The lack of actual sporting conquest (unless you think backroom trade offers and that tense “pick clock” in the lower right of the screen count as visceral action) does not prevent ESPN from covering it as thoroughly as they do the Super Bowl.  Because they know that there are plenty of idiots like me out there that completely get into it.  I’m sure if ESPN wasn’t getting good ratings - and turning a profit - on their draft coverage, they’d fold up their tent and tell Mel Kiper to get a real job. 

 But this year watching from home wasn’t good enough for your fearless reporter.  No, I didn’t go to the draft, held at the Garden.  You have to wait on line starting the night before to get in, and apparently you also need to paint your face in your team’s colors, scream loudly every time the camera is on you, and react with melodramatic horror/surprise/joy when your team makes its first round pick.  You have to sit there for hours on end, there’s no food served, and most of the crowd probably didn’t bathe before getting in line.  Yes, it takes a special kind of  nutcase to actually go to the NFL draft, and I’m proud to say I haven’t reached those depths yet.  But give me time.

 No, I went to something else – the Giants’ first ever “draft party”, held at Giants Stadium.  I was lured by the promise of great perks:  food and drink served all day, trivia contests, interactive whatnot (kicking field goals, passing drills, etc), players roaming around signing autographs, and most intriguingly, the ability to go onto the field and into the locker room.  Not having anything better to do, and it being a crappy, rainy day, I hopped in the car and made my way to the stadium.

 What first struck me was how easy it was getting into the stadium.  I’m used to jockeying for position among thousands of cars at the Turnpike tollbooth at exit 16W, then again at the booth to pay the parking fee.  On draft day, I don’t think I even put my foot on the brake from the time I got on route 80 until I was pulling into my parking spot, which I might add, was about twenty feet from the gate.  You have to show up about four hours before kickoff to get a spot like this on a game day.

 Before long, I was inside the Giants’ version of Shea Stadium’s Diamond Club, the big restaurant/bar where fans congregate before and after the game.  My only challenge was dodging the hyper-aggressive reps from Verizon, the corporate sponsors of the day’s activities.   I’ve already got a Verizon phone, so I held it up to them as one would use a cross to ward off a vampire and kept walking.  There were some great-looking food stations set up – taco bars, carving boards, etc., but the vibe here was a bit mellow for my tastes, so I made my way over to the practice bubble.  The bubble was reconfigured for the day – temporary flooring had been put down over the (fake) grass, and tables and chairs were set up.  Sid Rosenberg from the FAN was working the crowd, big screen TV’s all over place, the interactive stuff, the same hot dog and Mrs. Field’s booths that are inside the stadium….yes, this is where I would watch the NFL draft.

 After a few minutes I found myself eating my usual game day concession stand meal of hot dog, soda and peanut M & M’s.  As I said, this was a decidedly non-sporting event, but I felt the need to recreate the aura of being at a Giants game.  Did I mention I was wearing one of my many Giants’ shirts and my Giants’ jacket?  Somehow I forgot my binoculars, but there were enough sets around, so I wound up not needing them.  I watched the first few picks from a spot at one of the tables, as Sid introduced Howard Cross and Joe Morris.  I guess the plan was to start with former Giants, then work their way up to current team members.  Regardless, I knew it would be a while before the Giants picked, so after finishing lunch I decided to check out the field and locker room.  There was a slight drizzle, but they still let us onto the field.  Granted, they confined us to the end zone- except for the sugar-fueled five year old who made it to about the 50 yard line before collapsing from exhaustion.  But there was something neat about taking that walk out of the tunnel onto the field.  I could almost hear Bob Shepard…”Starting at quarterback, Jim Murphy”.  OK, so it could never have happened in a million years, but cut me some slack and let me have my moment.  Then I checked out the locker rooms.   There was a decent line for this and they had to keep everyone moving along, but again, this was a pretty neat perk.  I noticed they had permanent plaques over certain lockers, for the guys who’ve had their numbers retired.  So a backup scrub linebacker is using a locker with a gold “Harry Carson” plaque over it.  How’s that for pressure?  Moving along, I noticed a big congregation around Jeremy Shockey’s locker, as if they expected him to magically appear and rip his helmet off and start screaming at everyone.  Sadly, he didn’t, and we were left to ponder the Costco-sized gallon drum of “fuel enhancers” in his locker.  But I guess if it ain’t steroids or ephedrine, what he puts in his body is his business.  Then I noticed linebacker Mike Barrow’s locker.  I had always heard that he was a bit of a Holy Roller - there was a rumor that he was forced out of Carolina for his relentless preaching.  Sure enough, there was a whole stack of quasi-religious reading material there.  Didn’t see a Bible, but there was enough other stuff to stock a small Christian bookstore.    

A Punch in the Gut
January 8, 2003   

 Most of my MurphGuide columns have been fairly well thought-out pieces, usually with a clear goal in mind in terms of what I was hoping to convey.  This will not be one of those columns.  This will be a completely visceral, almost-real-time reaction/rant to one of the most gut-wrenching things I’ve ever experienced, Sunday’s Giants-49’ers game. 

You might remember that I wrote a column a few months ago where I reviewed my experience going to the season-opening Giants-49’ers game.  But I don’t think I’m really regurgitating that last column here– that one was really more about my actual attendance at the game, as opposed to the game itself.  In fact, the season-opening game was a pretty dull affair, a real snoozer compared to what happened Sunday. 

Where should I start?  I guess I’ll go chronologically.  In the first quarter, after Collins’s interception (which was Ron Dayne’s fault, by the way), the 49’ers scored on the very next play, the 76-yard catch and run by Terrell Owens.  What was with Brandon Short on that play?  It would have been a 12-yard completion if he had bothered to tackle him.  Instead he went for the Sportscenter hip-check tackle, where the defender just crashes into the guy with the ball, instead of wrapping him up and bringing him down.  But that doesn’t look nearly as good on TV.  Terrell Owens is a jerk, but he’s also a physical specimen, and he bounced off of Short’s make-believe tackle and scampered down the sideline unmolested.  

Still in the first quarter, we heard the announcers talk about how Jeremy Shockey was going to tone down his WWF theatrics, at least until the Giants offense started to get going.  Sure enough, moments later, Pam Oliver is on the sideline talking about how Shockey just threw a cup of water into the stands, and that security was being brought over, supposedly to protect Shockey from the fans, and vice versa.  Pam went a little overboard, screaming about how the crowd was really affecting him and taking him out of his game.  Memo to Pam:  if you’ve seen the Giants play even once this year, you know that Shockey is certifiably looney-toons, and that he plays his best ball when acting like that.  I can picture him under his helmet going up to a defender and making that creepy Hannibal Lecter/fava beans “ffft ffft ffft” noise.    The way things turned out, maybe he should have gone into the stands and punched someone, he might have caught that pass in the end zone in the fourth quarter.

By the middle of the second quarter, things were looking good for Big Blue.  Collins was winging the ball all over the field, mostly to Toomer and Shockey, who by now was foaming at the mouth.  San Fran even helped out with a huge special teams gaffe (the muffed punt), and the Giants managed to convert that into a touchdown.  They were scoring TDs in the red zone, the defense had mostly shut down Owens after his initial catch, it was all going right.  Being up 28-14 at the break, I confidently ate my halftime meal of pizza English muffins.  By the middle of the 3^rd quarter, they’re up by 24, and I’m actually starting to lose interest a bit.  I try to make up for a weekend full of football-watching laziness by helping out in the kitchen, doing some dishes and straightening up during the commercials, and not freaking out if I’m not back in front of the set by the time play starts. 

Then all hell breaks loose.  Jeff Garcia starts running a no-huddle offense, and begins to channel the spirit of Joe Montana.  He’s looking for Owens on almost every play now, and he usually finds him, with Jason Sehorn snacking on Owens’s dust. Sehorn looks lost out there, and he’s getting whiplash from watching Owens sprint past him.  And when Garcia’s not hitting Owens, he’s scrambling all over the place for first downs, and eventually, a touchdown.  I know Garcia’s a fairly mobile quarterback, but he’s not Michael Vick or Donovan McNabb, and he made the Giants’ defenders look like they were wearing ski boots instead of cleats. 

At this point the Giants much-celebrated special teams takes over.  Matt Allen lets loose with a whopping 27 yarder.  Dhani Jones adds insult to injury by tackling the return guy, who had signaled for a fair catch.  Granted, it looked like the guy had taken a few steps after catching the ball, and could have been flagged himself for it, but Jones has to lay off there.  In the 4th quarter the Giants have a chance to make it an eight point game with a late field goal, but in a great use of foreshadowing (they really are theatrical, our Giants), the snap is bad and the other Matt completely butchers the attempt.  

After the missed field goal (and it’s open to debate whether the Giants should even have tried it, I would have rolled the dice and gone for the first down), the Niners get the ball back down five with three minutes left.  This game was seen by tens of millions of people across the country.  I doubt there is a single person out there watching who did not believe San Francisco was going to score on this possession.  It was a question of “when”, not “if”.  It seemed like the Giants were catching a break when the Niners scored their touchdown with a full minute left.  Then they catch another break when Terrell Owens starts doing his usual punk act, and he goes overboard this time and gets called for not one but TWO unsportsmanlike conduct penalties.  But sure enough, the Giants retaliate each time, costing them 15 yards they could have used on their last, ill-fated drive.

So now the game boils down to the botched field goal, a play that is going to become one of the most-replayed, most-analyzed in New York sports history.  There were so many things that went wrong with this one play it boggles the mind – the bad snap, the holder’s terrible decision (there are at least two things he could have done which would have given the Giants another chance), the fire drill/ineligible receiver nonsense, the non-call on the pass interference that took place.  Everyone’s pointing fingers and assigning blame, and there’s plenty to go around.  Take your pick of villains – Trey Junkin, Matt Allen, Tam Hopkins, the refs.  And that’s just who to blame on that one play.  More villains:  Sehorn, Shaun Williams for retaliating against Owens, Michael Strahan and the whole defense for allowing San Fran to come back in the first place, Shockey for not catching that ball in the end zone in the 3^rd quarter, Fassel for not going for it on fourth down with three minutes left.  Hell, I’m almost tempted to blame Wellington Mara for buying the team in the first place, but I think that would be going too far.

So now what?  The NFL has admitted their mistake on the blown pass interference call, but I’m not convinced that the Giants would have made the field goal anyway, if there had been a replay of the down.  All I can do is sit and stew, and brood, and think about what might have been.  I’ve seen some really bad Giants games in my life – the “Fumble” game against Philly, the blown nine point lead in the playoffs against Minnesota in 97, the Super Bowl debacle two years ago.  But I think this takes the cake.  I feel like I’ll be scarred for life as a result of this.  There are about eight different things the Giants could have done to win this game, and they didn’t do one of them.  After the game I felt like I had been punched in the stomach, and had the wind knocked out of me. 

I think every member of the Giants feels the same way.  And every one of them that’s back with the team next season is going to remember how they felt walking off the field in a daze, how they felt on the plane ride home, and how they’ll feel this Sunday when they watch the Niners play Tampa, knowing it should be them.  The Houston Oilers barely made the playoffs the year after their 32 point collapse in ’93, then didn’t make the playoffs again for five years after that, so it’s possible that this could really cripple the Giants’ mentally and they could go 4-12 next year.  But I really think they’re going to bounce back from this, in a big way.  They’ve got what seems to be a stellar offense, with multiple weapons, and a more-than-capable defense, the second half of Sunday’s game notwithstanding.   If they can re-sign Ike Hilliard and Luke Petitgout, make a smart draft pick, and find someone other than Matts Allen and Bryant to do their kicking and punting (I’d settle for Matt Damon, or even Matt Dillon), I think this team could go really far next year – i.e., the Super Bowl.  Yes, I’m going to go out on a limb right now and anoint the Giants as next year’s Super Bowl champs.  They’re going to have to do that, or at least make it to the Super Bowl, if for no other reason than to apologize for ripping the heart out of every single Giants fan on Sunday.  

Summer Olympics
by Jim Murphy
November 10, 2002
By now, everyone’s heard that our great city is a finalist to stage the 2012 Summer Olympics.  We beat back a challenge by San Francisco to become the American nominee, and now we go up against the likes of London, Moscow, Paris, Rio de Janeiro and Toronto.

 Sometime in 2005, the International Olympic Committee will decide among all those cities and probably a few others.  Right off the bat, you can eliminate Toronto.  Canadian cities should be allowed to host only the Winter Olympics.  Moscow’s got a little too much baggage - they’re practically at war with those damn Chechens, and their economy’s in the toilet even worse than ours.  London’s a great city, and it’s been forever since they hosted the Olympics, so I’d give them a chance.  Paris?  I’m sorry, but France just hosted the World Cup a few years ago, they’ve had the Winter Olympics a couple of times, and they’ve had the Summer Olympics before.  That’s enough for them.  Rio’s an interesting choice.  They’ve got some great beaches there, and it’s a fun town (maybe too fun – could you imagine our NBA players down there?  They’d never make it to the arena for the games). 

 And according to the mayor of Rome, we should be making our plans already.  In the immediate aftermath of Sept 11, he said that if New York emerged as the U.S. candidate, all the other international cities should step aside and basically let New York have it, as a show of support.  Of course, even the other American cities (at that point there were eight in the running) didn’t step aside, and it seems that now that push has come to shove, it’s every man for himself, and buh-bye to all those crocodile tears everyone was shedding for us New Yorkers last year.  Hell, they’ll probably use Sept 11 as an excuse not to give it to us.

Now personally, I have to admit that I have VERY mixed feelings about all of this.  Part of me thinks that it would be undeniably cool if the Summer Olympics were held here, for a variety of reasons.  First, just from a sports point of view, there’s the opportunity to actually go to the Olympics.  I know the prices would be high, especially for the really high-profile stuff (men’s b-ball, women’s gymnastics, the Opening and Closing ceremonies), but a large block of tickets are always put aside for the host city, and I think that tickets would be there for any New Yorker who really wanted to go to some events.

Another reason I’d like to get it is to see the city jazzed up.  Now I don’t pretend that ten years from now we’d still need a pick-me-up because of what happened last year.  I think we’ve recovered phenomenally well.  I’m just saying I’d like to see all New Yorkers getting worked up about something, and this would be a case where pretty much all New Yorkers would get into it.  Remember the tizzy we were all in during the Subway Series?  Imagine what it would be like if we had the Olympics here.  Take the frenzy the city was in during the Subway Series.  Multiply that by a thousand, and you’re still nowhere near it (apologies to Irvine Welsh, I just stole a line from “Trainspotting”).   Because unlike the Subway Series, this wouldn’t appeal to just native New Yorkers and baseball purists like Bob Costas and Ken Burns.  Our undeniably large immigrant community would get into it, full-force.  The Colombians in Jackson Heights, the Poles in Greenpoint, the Koreans in Flushing….I could go on, but you get the idea.  Let’s face it, EVERYONE in this town has relatives who live in another part of the world.  For three weeks we’d all have our distant cousins from Bogota and Warsaw and Seoul and Dublin sleeping on our respective couches.  All those people will be saving up their pesos and euros and whatnot for years, all to come to New York and spend big bucks while they’re here on the vacation of their lives.  Add in all the media and corporate types filling up all the hotels and chowing at every restaurant on their fat expense accounts. Now if that doesn’t give us a shot in the arm financially, I don’t know what would.

The flip side of all this, the part that makes me leery, is what we’d need to do to actually convince the IOC dudes that we’re more worthy than London and Paris and whoever else.  Yes we’ve got some built in advantages that they don’t have, but they have some advantages we don’t.  For one thing, the IOC is headquartered in Switzerland, its current President is Belgian, and its membership is something like 50% European, so they’re bound to favor fellow European candidates.  The 2008 Olympics are being held in China, and the IOC will probably want to get back to its pattern of alternating a European host city with a non-European city.  Plus, like it or not, there seems to be a pretty strong anti-American sentiment in the rest of the world right now. 

But the part that makes me the most uneasy is the financial ramifications.  It seems that, fiscally speaking at least, we’re going to have to sell our soul to the devil to get the Olympics here.  To start with, we’re going to have to have our plans in place to build that much-talked-about stadium on the west side.  By 2005, when the voting happens, we may not have to have broken ground yet, but we’ll certainly need to have the financing in place, the blueprints drawn up, etc.  And given the pace that major construction takes place in this city (the word “glacial” comes to mind), I’m just not convinced that Mayor Mike can pull this one off.

It’s funny.  The same mayor who’s telling everyone how we have to buckle up and get used to higher property taxes, a new commuter tax, cigarette taxes, etc, while also inflicting on us  cutbacks to basically every service the city offers, is saying, sure, we can pony up a couple of BILLION or so to build a new 80,000 seat stadium on the west side and extend the 7 train all the way over to 11^th avenue.  Is he high?  There’s no way the Jets (the stadium’s intended post-Olympics tenant) are going to cough up that kind of money.  It’s painfully obvious that the funding for most of this is going to come from the likes of me and you, in the form of some kind of new, creative (ie, sneaky) tax.  I think they’ve already named it, something like Tax Incremental Financing (TIF).  And I’m not sure that with the state of the city right now that that’s where we should be funneling that kind of money.  Rebuilding the World Trade Center should be our first priority, and that’s not going to be cheap.

The recent history of Olympic host cities is not all that promising.  Atlanta lost money.  Sydney lost money.  Given how much dough we’d need to cough up to do it right, it seems hard to believe that we’ll be able to end up in the black.  And I’m just not sure we should bankrupt the city for a generation for the sake of three weeks.  They would be undeniably great weeks, no doubt, but it just doesn’t seem like the right time.  I’m starting to think that the city’s money is going to be better spent by taking whatever money would have gone towards the Olympic effort and completely rebuilding the World Trade Center, and making it a truly spectacular destination, that both tourists and natives will always come back to. That would leave a real, lasting legacy, better than a big football stadium and a couple of cheesy logos and pins.  

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Opening Night
October 23, 2002
I realize it’s been a while since I’ve appeared on the (web) pages of Murphguide.com.   For that I apologize.   But I became a father over the summer, for the first time, and have found that the concept of free time has become a vague, abstract idea, not based in reality.

So not only has it been a while, but my topic for today might also seem a little out of date.  I realize that the football season has been going strong for almost two months now, but I figured I’d tell the tale of the first game I went to this year, the Giants’ opening night game versus San Francisco. 

To start with, I must thank my glorious, beautiful wife Kathy.   At some point before her due date of August 20^th  - it was probably the same day the NFL announced each team’s schedule - I noticed that the Giants were opening the season in early September with a night game.  I mentioned this to her immediately, thinking that if it wouldn’t have been cool for me to go that I would want to sell my tickets.  She replied that under no circumstances should I miss the game, unless she was two weeks late delivering, and in labor.  In my mind I figured that meant active, pushing, baby-is-on-the-way-out labor, not that boring “don’t come to the hospital until the contractions are X minutes apart” crap they showed us on the Lamaze video.  Luckily our potentially differing opinions on what actually constitutes labor never became an issue, since she wound up having the baby a full month early, before they even played a preseason game, let alone a regular season game.

So it was with a clear conscience that I left for the game on Thursday night.  A clear conscience, and bags under my eyes.  I had taken that entire week off to spend with Kathy and our son, Owen.  The timing of it worked out well, since I wouldn’t have to worry about waking up for work on Friday morning, the day after the game.  But as part of my week off, I volunteered to do some of the infamous “night shifts” that all new parents are familiar with.  Owen certainly wasn’t sleeping through the night at this point.  Crying through the night would be a better description of what he was doing.  And since I was going to be out of the house for all of Thursday night, I agreed to take the night shift on Wednesday.  That night/morning he slept about two hours total from 11 pm to 7 am.  I didn’t have any of those tricks up my sleeve to get him to go to sleep, so I had to ride out the storm armed only with good old-fashioned caffeinated Coke and my trusty TiVO.  The only good that came out of that night was that I was probably the only person on the entire eastern seaboard to see that crazy Oakland A’s-K.C. Royals game, the one where Oakland won their 20^th straight, after blowing an 11-0 lead and winning on a homer in the bottom of the ninth.  The game ended around 2am, but things like that don’t seem to bother young Owen Patrick Murphy.

Sometime Thursday the thought occurred to me that I might actually fall asleep at the game during a timeout, or, given the Giants’ drowsy style of offense, during the game itself.  I tried taking a power nap at around three, but to no avail, it was bright and sunny out and my body did not allow it to happen.  So I headed out for the game at around 5:30 for the 8:30 kickoff. Without traffic it’s about a 35-40 minute drive from my house in Jersey to Giants Stadium, and I was hoping to get there around 6:30 to go to my friend’s tailgate party.  Now, from years of experience of going to Giants’ games I know there’s a window of time when 90% of the cars arrive at the parking lot within the space of ten minutes, and I always try to get in before that blackout period.  Maybe it was the lack of sleep, or the unusual start time, but I miscalculated, and I wound up driving into the mouth of the nastiest backup I’ve ever seen heading into the stadium. The Turnpike, Route 3, all the tollbooths - everything was a friggin’ disaster.  I was diverted over to the parking lot for the Byrne Arena (sorry, but I grew up calling it the Byrne Arena, and no amount of money paid by Continental Airlines is going to make me call it anything else) and finally pulled into a spot around 7:15.  As you probably know, the Byrne Arena is about half a mile from the stadium, and the ramp from the arena to the stadium is another half mile from where my friend’s tailgate was, so I finally got there around 7:30, way too late.

Which was a shame, because this was no ordinary tailgate party.  This is a bunch of guys who for regular games throw a nice tailgate party, and for night games, throw a pig roast.  Yes, they hire a guy who shows up with a big fat pig, throws it on a spit and starts cooking around noon.  I went to their pig roast last year – I made it on time - and had some of the sweetest tasting pork I’ve ever eaten in my entire life.  Vegetarians would have converted on the spot if they had been there.  But this year, I got there at least an hour late.  The guy doing the carving saw me staring at the carcass of what was once a fine strapping pig and asked, “Want some tongue?”  This is the last thing I wanted to hear from a guy a holding a 12 inch carving knife who looked like he just wandered in from the set of “Deliverance”.  I passed on what may well have been some tasty tongue and instead picked at the scraps of what was left in the tray, a paltry selection that hardly justified my not having eaten all day in anticipation.  To add insult to injury, there were almost no side dishes lying around.  No potato salad, no cole slaw, nothing.  I would have settled for beans, but alas, there were none to be found.  Shortly after I got there a brawl nearly erupted when the guy who was supposed to bring five pounds of homemade mac and cheese showed up empty-handed.  He was late also obviously, was forced to park at the Byrne, and claimed the parking lot police wouldn’t let him carry a hot dish across the lot.  The whole thing sounded fishy, but at that point I was in the throes of both exhaustion and hunger and couldn’t stick around to see how it all ended.

I raced across the lot to meet my friend Glenn at the gate, I had his ticket so I had to meet him outside.    Finding and meeting up with him, which could have potentially been a disaster, was actually the only thing that night that didn’t go wrong.  I had just enough time to get a dog and a soda before getting to our seats, so I was spared the indignity of resorting to cannibalism.

Then the game starts.  As usual, the Giants’ offense was as exciting as ever.  I really should have bought something to read, or a pillow.  The Giants led 6-3 at halftime in a stirring battle of field goals.  It occurred to me that if the NFL was serious about having a season-opening midweek game in the future -  and there’s talk that it will in fact become an annual thing -  the league might want to re-think having the Giants involved.  Sure it makes sense to have the country’s biggest market represented in such a marquee game, but having the Giants and their 19^th-century offense on display is hardly the image the league wants to send out.

Pretty much all the excitement in the first half was generated by the buzz surrounding the upcoming, much-anticipated halftime show.  We were to be treated to a “concert” by Bon Jovi, who apparently had just choppered over from midtown where they performed in the Times Square league-sponsored season-opening kickoff party.  Thoughts of halftime concerts from last year’s Super Bowl (featuring Aerosmith and Britney Spears, what a combo that was) and this year’s (a career-defining set by U2) raced through my head.  My first inkling that it might not live up to my expectations was when I looked at the scoreboard.  Halftime for a regular season NFL game is exactly 12 minutes long.  With four minutes left, roadies were still assembling the little mini-stage that was erected at the east end zone tunnel.  About a minute later, with no introduction, the lads from Jersey took the stage.  I figured either we were going to get just one song, or that halftime would be extended, which didn’t seem likely.  Operating under the one-song assumption, I crossed my fingers and hoped for “Livin’ on a Prayer”, or “You Give Love a Bad Name”, or anything to get my mid-80’s mojo going.  But instead I got that crappy new song of theirs, which I heard in the car coming over, again at the game, and which I could not remember as soon as it was over.  The only thing I remember is the ridiculous outfit guitarist Richie Sambora had on, which looked like he swallowed an American flag, and then vomited it onto his clothes.  

The second half was more of the same, football-wise.  My struggle to keep my eyes open was matched only by the Giants’ struggle to get in the end zone.  They finally did, in the last two minutes of the game, only to allow the 49’ers to march down the field for the game-winning field goal.  So my reward for slogging through traffic on an empty stomach, missing out on some fresh pork, and sitting through the dullest game in history and rip-off of a halftime show, was a thoroughly disappointing Giants loss.  The next day I got to sleep in till around nine and spend lots of quality time with my adorable son.  When he’s not crying or fussing, he looks so peaceful and happy it breaks my heart.  He has no idea that he’s been born a Giants fan, with no choice or freedom to change, and he’s setting himself up for countless Sundays of frustration and disappointment in section 133, row 27, seat 14.  

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Fore!
by Jim Murphy
July 1, 2002

It’s been said that golf is a good walk spoiled.  If that’s the case, I had an awesome walk utterly annihilated at the recent MurphGuide golf outing.

I should preface all this by saying that I am a completely amateurish golfer – prior to the MurphGuide outing, I had played exactly one round of golf in my entire life, and that was over 15 years ago.  So despite being relatively familiar with the basic golf swing – mastered over time from countless trips to the driving range and miniature golf course  - I was completely unprepared for what awaited me when I got there.

Going in, I was somewhat optimistic.  A co-worker had told me the day before that the Meadows course was a good course for “hackers”.  Granted, I wasn’t sure if I was entitled to be put into the elite status of hacker – something in the sub-hacker range would have been more appropriate – but I was comforted nonetheless.

Now you might be asking at this point what I was doing out there in the first place.  Obviously I have no business playing a round of golf with anyone, let alone people who actually know what they’re doing.  But a big part of the appeal was that it was a MurphGuide event, with the attendant social/fun element, and that I would know plenty of the participants, and would probably end up in a foursome with people I knew.  That kind of security blanket is exactly what I needed.

As it turns out, I played in a group with my friends Don, Teresa, and Joe.  I quickly seized the opportunity to share a cart with Don, since I knew he had been to plenty of these things before, plays several times a year on his own, and has his own clubs.  I was in desperate need of an on-course mentor, and he fit the bill perfectly.  I had heard that there are all kinds of rules on a golf course – some involving the course itself, some involving etiquette, and all of them completely foreign to me.  Don quickly learned that he had not just signed up for a round of golf but for an afternoon of babysitting as well.  I really should have given him the standard eight bucks an hour.

So onto the course we go.  All the groups started simultaneously, on different holes.  We happened to start on four, which looked like more of a pitch and putt hole.  I could have underhanded the ball into the hole from the tee.  But the thing I learned about these kinds of “gimme” holes is that they’re on the course as kind of a tension-breaker, thrown in to give you some confidence after three or four straight heart attack-inducing 450-500 yard monsters.  Starting off with the easiest hole on the course gave me a false impression of confidence, which shortly thereafter was deflated, crushed, and spat on.

Pretty soon we were at a hole which didn’t seem too imposing at first, either in terms of distance or fairway placement.  But what it did have was water.  Lots of it.  It was on this hole that I proceeded to place two different balls into different water hazards.  It takes a really special level of incompetence to do that.  And I have to confess, it was not the only hole where I needed three balls to reach the cup.  Luckily, I was well prepared for this.  A box of balls was included in the price of the event, a nice touch I thought.  Don didn’t seem to realize this, and I wound up with his, but he had his own anyway.  Also, before we hit the course, our host Murph sensed I might encounter some problems, and he encouraged me to get some more at the pro shop, which I did.  I needed every friggin' one of these balls, because I spent the better part of the day sending them into every piece of water on the course, in addition to the Raritan River, the Hudson River and Lake Hiawatha. 

Over in the other cart, Joe and Teresa were having a great old time.  They got into the spirit by betting on almost every hole, usually on who could hit farther off the tee.  Teresa was hitting off of the women’s tee, and sure enough, there was a ton of imaginary money flying back and forth.  I couldn’t really keep track, but when all was said and done, I think one of them owed the other a couple of hundred dollars.

 Since I’m in full disclosure mode, making public all the stupid things I did out there, I’ll keep going.  By the 13th or 14th hole we played, it was becoming increasingly obvious that I was slowly turning into Pig Pen, Charlie Brown’s perpetually filthy friend with the omnipresent dust cloud.  My shorts (light beige) and shirt (white) were by this point covered in dirt.  Since nobody else in the group was, I was able to deduce that it must have had something to do with the copious amounts of sunscreen I had put on.  Every third or fourth hole I’d whip out the bottle (with a PBF factor of about 150, my pasty Irish skin demands it) and start slathering it on good.  Since it was all over my hands, arms and legs, some of it found its way to my clothes, and the dirt kicked up by the carts we rode in stuck to me like glue.  One golfer later on asked if I had been wrestling with my ball in a sand trap.  Next time I golf in warm weather I’ll be sure to wear lots of dark earth tone colors, to keep the dust cloud from eating me alive.

Eventually I found myself getting more comfortable with my swing.  With about two or three holes left I started hitting some decent shots, and I got a few legitimate bogeys.  They might have been pars, but 50 foot puts are not part of my repertoire yet.  So with a decent finish I was able to feel slightly good about myself, despite a score which would make for a terrific I.Q. but an embarrassing golf round.

Afterwards, all the thirsty golfers retired for the clubhouse for an open bar, followed by a nice buffet dinner.  Murph handed out the awards – low score, longest drive, straightest drive, etc.  Needless to say, my name was not called once, although I thought I might get an honorable mention for highest score, or dirtiest golfer.  Even though I walked away empty-handed, it was a great day.  Perfect weather, a day off from work, hanging with friends.  I was reminded of the other cliché people say about golf, kind of the opposite of the “good walk spoiled” notion:  that a bad day of golf is better than a great day of work.  If I use that as my motto for the day, I could say that I had a disastrous day golfing, and still had a blast.

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Wave That Flag
by Jim Murphy
May 29, 2002

If there’s one thing Americans do well, it’s getting behind our teams at international competitions.  Prior to the Winter Olympics, had anyone outside of the Ohno family ever even heard of that freaky little speed skater?  All it took was one or two decent trips around the ice for him to become a Wheaties-box candidate.

There’s another opportunity at hand for us to show our patriotism – the World Cup is here.  Now, if there’s one thing Americans don’t do well, it’s play soccer (at least the men).    But with a little effort, you can show your patriotism in a way that won’t make you feel cheesy, and prove to the rest of the world that even on the soccer field, nobody pushes us around.

Some people just don’t get it with soccer.  They can’t comprehend why the World Cup is such a big deal.  So let me put it in terms the average American sports fan can comprehend.  Imagine if EVERY country of the world played NFL-style football. And that it was as popular in those countries as football is here.  Then imagine a World Cup of football, where the U.S. sent a team consisting of Kurt Warner, Michael Strahan and Randy Moss against other countries fielding teams just as good.  Imagine that at least ten countries played football as well as us, and that ten or twenty others were capable of pulling an upset, and that it wouldn’t be three weeks of blowouts, the way it is when an NBA “Dream Team” competes in the Olympics or a World Championship.  Can you imagine the frenzy this country would get into over that?   The sports-talk radio stations would be full of people worked up over who should be on the team, who the starters should be, who the head coach should be, and what tactics to use.  That’s basically what happens in the rest of the world with soccer’s World Cup, except for maybe the U.S. and Canada.   When Italy, Germany, Ireland, or Brazil are playing, the whole country shuts down, kind of like this country does on Super Bowl Sunday.

Hopefully I’ve made you a little curious, and you’re thinking, “Hmmm, maybe I’ll check this World Cup thing out.”    So here’s a little primer for you, on the U.S. team and the rest of the field.

The tournament for the first time is going to be co-hosted, by Japan and South Korea.  Six years ago those two countries were furiously competing against each other for the right to be the host, and FIFA (soccer’s governing body, you’re going to be seeing that anagram a lot in the next month) basically wimped out and told them that they both could.  So South Korea gets the opening game, Japan gets the final, and everything else gets split down the middle.  The main problem with having the tournament there is the time difference.  The games will be played in the late afternoon and evening locally, which translates to anywhere from 2am to 7am here in New York.  The U.S. was placed in a group of four teams based in South Korea, and unfortunately, all three of their first round games will take place during the week, making it even harder to check them out.  I’ve been eyeing the schedule for some time now, and here’s how I think we can all watch the games and still be reasonably alert during the day.

The first game is on Wednesday June 5^th, against Portugal, at 5 am.  Here’s my plan.  I’m hoping for a decent nights sleep the night before, hopefully I’ll be tucked in by around 10p, and have the alarm set for 4:55 am.   Just enough time to wipe the crud out of my eyes and turn the TV on.  Now the beauty part of soccer is that the games don’t drag on for hours and hours (I swear the Nets-Celtics game I watched last night took almost three hours to play).   There are no commercial interruptions or TV timeouts, so I already know that the game will end no later than 7am, and if I shower and get dressed during halftime, I can catch my usual 7:10 train that morning.  The second game is against South Korea on Monday June 10^th.  The problem here is that this game starts at 2:30am.  There is no chance at all that I will roust myself out of bed at that hour.  But what I will do is tape the game, which will end at 4:30 am, and then repeat the same process as the Portugal game.  Up at 5, put the game on, take the 7:10.  The third game is on Friday the 14^th against Poland, and this game starts at 7:30am.  This would make it very hard to watch the game, commute, and work that morning, since the game won’t end until 9:30am.   So I’ve decided to take the day off.  I’ll watch the game live at 7:30a, then I’ll have the whole rest of the day to putz around, run errands, and work on my golf swing at the driving range for the upcoming MurphGuide golf outing.   I’m looking at it as an excuse for a three-day weekend.

So now that I’ve laid out a way for everyone to check out the U.S. team, what are the chances that they’ll make it worth our while and not get smoked, the way they did four years ago?   Well to start with, they can’t do any worse than they did in France in ’98.  That’s because they came in 32^nd out of the 32-team field.  Not coming in last isn’t really the idea - what everyone wants is for them to advance out of the first round and make the round of 16.  To do that, they’ll have to finish ahead of both South Korea and Poland, assuming that Portugal wins the group.  So to make the second round, they’ll have to knock out one of the host teams, and a decent Polish team.  For a little perspective, keep in mind that no host country has ever failed to reach the second round, and that our record against teams from Europe is atrocious (0-4 this year, and only one tie in seven games against European teams in the last three World Cups).  So our odds of making the second round would seem slim, but there is some cause for optimism.

To start with, our defense will have to play well.  At various points in the last two years our defense has looked great - during qualifying last year, and at the beginning of this year in the regional North American tournament.  At other times our defense has looked shakier than the Mets’ infield on a bad day.  I’m hoping that since the team has been together for about a month now in training, the kinks have been worked out and we won’t be letting in goals at an alarming rate.   On offense, we’ll need Clint Mathis to step up and score some goals.  Mathis is a brash, trash-talking goal-scoring machine, who plays professionally for the Metrostars.   He’s always around the goal, taking shots from angles most players couldn’t dream of.  Every team needs a guy like him, and it’s been a long time since the U.S. has had such a creative striker.  He’ll need support from the midfield, probably in the form of Springfield, NJ’s Claudio Reyna, our best pure player, and the guy through whom pretty much our whole offense will flow.  There’s a chance we could see contributions from the “future” of U.S. Soccer – 20 year-olds Landon Donovan and DaMarcus Beasley.  They’re fast, they love taking on defenders, and would be completely out of place playing conservative soccer.  U.S. head coach Bruce Arena has said that both of these guys will either get starts or see significant time off the bench.  After the disaster of four years ago, shaking things up with some young guys can’t really hurt.

As far as the rest of the field is concerned, the obvious favorites are France and Argentina.  France is the defending World Cup AND European champion, has some of the best players in the world up and down their lineup, and a first round draw which can only be described as a tasty piece of cheesecake.  But France didn’t impress me in the last World Cup – despite playing at home, they needed overtime to beat Paraguay, penalty kicks to beat Italy, and barely squeaked out a win over Croatia in the semifinals.   Argentina steamrolled their competition in South American qualifying, and pretty much everyone on their roster currently starts for a big team in Spain or Italy.  But they got drawn into the toughest opening group, with England, Nigeria and Sweden, and will have to fully exert themselves just to make it to the second round.

Ireland was all set to be my sleeper team, until their best player (Roy Keane) had a meltdown on arrival in Asia and got himself kicked off the team.  If the English were fully healthy I’d say they were a safe bet for the quarterfinals at least, but they’ve got a couple of key guys  (Neville, Gerard) out of action, and another (David Beckham) who’s bound to be rusty after a long layoff with a broken foot.  My sleeper pick then is Senegal, an up and coming African team that’s been getting some good results lately.  They’re drawn with France, but Senegal is probably better equipped to take them on than anyone else, since the entire Senegalese team plays professionally in France, and the French will be without Zidane for the first game.  I’m predicting Senegal gets at least a draw with them, then takes care of the other two teams in the group, Uruguay and Denmark, and makes it to the second round in their first World Cup.  And as far as a winner is concerned, I’m going with a team that’s won the World Cup three times before – Italy.  They’re healthy, they’ve got an easy first round draw, and the way the brackets are set up, if they win their group they wouldn’t have to face France, Brazil or Argentina until the final. 

If the U.S. were to put together a couple of good games and go deep into the tournament it would make the Miracle on Ice look like a preseason hockey game.  So get a T-shirt, a cap, a jersey, whatever, and show your support.  Let’s show the rest of the world that when we put our minds to it, there’s nothing Americans can’t do.

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In the Garden of Evil
by Jim Murphy
May 1, 2002

I’ve finally come up with a way to use the oft-mangled title of Iron Butterfly’s “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida”. For truly, this year Madison Square Garden was a garden of evil.Every morning, MSG boss Charles Dolan must get to work and ask himself, “What the hell happened?”

Seriously, I’m wondering the same thing.How could two teams playing in the same arena, in front of nightly sellouts, in the biggest market in the country, have sunk so low?And it must really burn him that the Knicks’ and Rangers’ primary foes, the Nets and Islanders, both enjoyed renaissance seasons and made the playoffs for the first time in eons. That’s the ultimate slap in the face. So what went wrong?

As far as the Knicks are concerned, some people have said their demise can be traced back to the botched Patrick Ewing trade, but I don’t buy that.  The Knicks got a relatively decent year out of Glen Rice last year, while Ewing was continuing his decline in Seattle.  Ewing’s atrocious production this year, in Orlando, proves that he was a lost cause, and would not have contributed anything to the Knicks this year if they still had him.

If you really want to point the finger (perhaps your middle one), look no further than General Manager Scott Layden. Seemingly every player on the Knicks (and a few not even currently on the roster) is under contract for about the next five years, at anywhere from five to 15 million dollars a year. The Knicks pay starter money to their benchwarmers, and superstar money to guys (Camby, Houston and Sprewell) who do not even come close to giving them superstar output. Since the whole team is overpaid, there’s no way to trade anyone, so the Knicks are probably stuck with this roster for the foreseeable future.  Houston and Sprewell are good players, not elite guys, both capable of occasionally winning a game single-handedly.  But Houston gets whiplash on defense watching guys blow past him, and at crunch time disappears faster than an intern in Gary Condit’s office.  Sprewell has just as many four-for-15 shooting games as he does 10-for-15, has apparently never owned an alarm clock, and seems to enjoy suing the league when punished for his various absences and assaults on coaches.  Camby is about as healthy as the Bubble Boy on a bad day, and will never go more than 10 games without a trip to disabled list. Collectively, these three guys alone eat up about the payroll of some whole teams, and the Knicks are stuck with these flawed “superstars”.

Throw in the fact that their coach is an ineffective pushover who knows he’ll be out the door as soon as Dolan can find a big-name coach, and this whole team is cursed.  If David Stern can pull a fast one and get the Knicks a top three pick in the draft, that would be a huge help, but it doesn’t seem likely.  They have a 4% chance of getting the top pick, sure to be the 7’ 5” circus freak from China.  But more than likely they’ll be picking seventh, eighth or ninth, and the chance of getting an impact player there seems really slim.  I think those folks who pay a grand for their courtside seats may want to take that money and do something just a little smarter with it next year.

Now the Rangers.  This is the one that’s really mind-boggling.  The Knicks at least have had some success the last few years.  But the Rangers have missed the playoffs for five straight years.  In the NHL, the Charlestown Chiefs (remember “Slap Shot”?) could make the playoffs at least once every five years – more than half the teams in the league get in, so the law of averages says if you show up every night and don’t forfeit any games, you’ll probably make it.  How the Rangers, with the highest payroll in the league, could miss out for five straight years qualifies as one of the all time sports screwups.

And unlike the Knicks this year, who started out the year mediocre, then proceeded to crappy, sucky and brutal, the Rangers this year started out in great shape. At the midway point of the year they sat (admittedly, tenuously) in first place in the Atlantic Division. Eric Lindros came on board, stayed healthy, and played the part of superstar.  The Fleury-Lindros-York line was looking like one of the best in the league.  And they were getting decent goaltending from the combination of Mike Richter and Dan Blackburn.  But then everything started to go wrong.

It all happened during a brutal stretch at the beginning of 2002.  They went winless in eight games to start the year, and they never recovered.  Lindros was coming back from what seemed like (especially for him) a mild concussion, but clearly wasn’t himself.  Messier went down with an injury and never even made it back.  Theo Fleury stopped scoring goals, and started acting like the maladjusted child he is.  And the defense, which had played respectably if not spectacularly in the first half of the year, fell apart entirely -  6-3 and 6-4 losses became routine.   The low point had to be getting one point out of a home and away series against the Columbus Blue Jackets.  Columbus is the laughingstock of the league, winning maybe one or two games a month.  The Blueshirts blew a two goal lead at home and settled for a 2-2 tie, then followed up by losing 2-0 in Columbus.   That was pretty much the end of their year right there.

Of course panic set in, so Glen Sather went out and got Pavel Bure.  Granted, for what they gave up for him, it’s a steal, but a one-dimensional forward is not what the team needed, and it came too late in the season to change anything anyway.  Laughably, Sather complained that the trading deadline was too late in the season.   Maybe he doesn’t understand that the deadline is the LAST day you can make a trade, not the only day.  Ron Lowe was predictably fired as soon as the season ended, and now the Rangers are looking for their own big-name coach.  So the Rangers are now an old team, with a huge payroll, no coach, a clueless general manager, and a defense shakier than the Mideast cease fire.  Looks like those wiseass Ranger fans who used to love trash-talking the Islanders are going to have to keep it down for a little while.

All I know is, my sister, who works at the Garden, is missing out on huge tip money thanks to both teams not making the playoffs.  So Charles, for her sake, and for the sake of all New Yorkers, please fix this mess your sports teams have become.  We deserve better than this. 

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Peanuts & Cracker Jack
by Jim Murphy
April 1, 2002

It's baseball time again. Opening day of the baseball season is one of the best sports days of the year, a great day to play hooky from work or school and get out to the Stadium, whether it be Shea or Yankee. For the first week or two you'll watch most of the games and check the boxscores religiously. Then you'll realize there's five and a half months more to come and you'll move on with your life, and you'll check back in July. But the first week or two is great.

That being said, what you're probably expecting now is a thorough, in-depth analysis of the 2002 Mets and Yankees, their strengths and weaknesses, and the chances of another Subway Series. Unfortunately, you won't be getting that here. You'll be getting my random thoughts, observations and opinions. If it's in-depth analysis you want, pick up The Sporting News.

First, I need to weigh in on the YES network nonsense. By the time you read this, the issue may already be settled, but I need to vent, regardless of how it turns out. As a Mets fan, and a Cablevision customer, I applaud Cablevision's hard line stance. Under no circumstances do I want my cable bill to go up just so the idiot down the block who flies a Yankee flag in front of his house 365 days a year can watch his team. Something tells me if the situation was reversed he wouldn't want his bill to go up because the Mets were starting their own channel. And I REALLY resent those radio commercials the Yankees are running, where a bunch of Yankees fans are whining about how "all New Yorkers love the Yankees," etc. Cablevision should take out counter ads where they ask non-Yankee fans, or better yet non-sports fans, how they feel about their already-too-high cable bill going up again.

Granted, Cablevision is no angel when it comes to sports: they make me pay $4.95 a month to watch Mets games on Fox Sports New York. The channel itself is part of their basic package, but they black out live games (Mets, Islanders, Nets, Devils) and make you pay extra to watch them. They try to make it sound like you're getting a different channel (they call it "Fox New York Sports Live"), but all they're doing is blacking out the only thing worth watching on the channel and making you pay extra for it, making it in essence a pay channel.

The bottom line is that this is all nothing more than George Steinbrenner wanting to line his pockets even more. The MSG network would have given him hundreds of millions of dollars to carry the Yankees, but that wasn't enough. The Yankees' owner inflicted this on his own fans. Let them pay for it.

Another Yankee media deal that has me sideways is their radio deal. They'll be heard on WCBS-AM this year. WCBS is one of the two all-news stations in New York, and the one that I used to listen to. I always found WINS a bit annoying, with their goofy reporters (John Montone, and that "gather those rosebuds" financial guy) and ancient-sounding fake ticker sound effects. But with the Yankees on CBS now, I really can't listen to them without having my blood boil. They air promos every five minutes, and of course every promo has John Sterling shrieking his patented loony-bin "Yankees win" call. Also, every sports report they did in the month of March originated from Yankees training camp in Tampa, and featured a completely disproportionate amount of Yankees coverage. I can't really tolerate that in my all-news station, so I've been forced to switch to WINS.

On the field, I'd say the Yankees have kind of an unusual dilemma. True, they've got the best starting pitching in the league, the best closer, and one of the best lineups. But because their top 10 or 11 guys make so much money they haven't been able to stock a decent bench. Think about it: between Giambi, Jeter, Williams, Clemens, Rivera, etc, their starting eight, plus five starters and Rivera, will probably average around seven-eight million this year. But after that the talent level falls off the cliff. The class differences on this team are deep enough for Robert Altman to film a sequel to "Gosford Park." It's great that the Yankees can afford to spend so much on their top players, but if one of them goes down for an extended period, guys like John Van Der Wal and Ron Coomer will have to carry the load, and they might not be up to it. A few years ago someone wrote that the Yankees' payroll, one of the highest in the league, consisted of 25 guys making three million a year. Now it consists of 12 guys making eight million and 13 making minimum wage.

The 2002 Mets will certainly be more interesting to watch than last year's model. Kudos to Steve Phillips for trying to fix an offense that last year had more problems scoring than Ellen Degeneres at an all-boys high school. But all cynical Mets fans like myself are secretly worried: is Edgardo Alfonso really healthy again? What if Roberto Alomar and Mo Vaughn can't hit National League pitching? Will Shawn Estes do a Dave Dravecky and have his arm fall off in the middle of a game?

The Mets have a team which I suspect will either be very, very good or very, very bad. Vaughn is either going to hit 40 homers or 20. Estes, Pedro Astacio and Jeff D'Amico are either going to average 16 wins each, or nine. This is what's going to make the Mets interesting this year - their unpredictability. The one thing you can count on is Bobby Valentine figuring out a way to screw up the lineup. The Mets' lineup card practically fills itself out. There may be no other team in the league where the eight starting position players are so clearly defined. But Bobby V will mess with it. He'll get nutty and decide to bat Jay Payton in the cleanup spot, or Piazza second, and he'll say it's because of some intricate, minute matchup strategy that mental midgets like us couldn't possibly understand. His whole M.O. is about micro-managing, and always getting credit for his genius moves. He'll let Steve Phillips get the credit for any Mets success this year over his dead body.

With all that said, here's my quick take on what to expect this year. The Yankees will win the A.L. East, despite some key injuries, due to the complete ineptitude of the Boston Red Sox and the rest of the division. But this year, the Oakland A's will finally get their revenge and knock the Yankees out of the playoffs. Over at Shea, the worst-case scenario plays itself out. Mo Vaughn's body continually breaks down and he misses huge chunks of the season. Jeromy Burnitz strikes out 175 times. Mike Piazza finally suffers an injury he can't shake off and goes on the D.L. The five starters - who averaged eight wins apiece last year - do not improve on that. And the Mets miss the playoffs for the second straight season.

Of course, that's just the cynical Mets fan in me speaking. Maybe they'll surprise me, and I'll end up seeing you at Shea in October.

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Productivity
by Jim Murphy
March 13, 2002

A couple of years ago a prominent Japanese government official caused a minor ruckus when he offered up his opinion on the decline in American productivity. He surmised that the American economy falters from the fact that we lazy Yanks spend most of Friday talking about our plans for the weekend, and most of Monday talking about what we actually did, costing us two days, thereby decreasing productivity by 40% over the typical Japanese Monday-Friday worker bee work week.

I offer up to you a theory on another potential reason for productivity decline, at least one that affects the month of March: the NCAA basketball tournament. Yes, it’s time for the diaper dandies and the all-Windex team, the bubble teams and the Cinderella teams, the sweet 16, the elite eight and the final four.

My premise is that the NCAA tournament is responsible for blotting out at least one full week of production from American men. Here’s what the first week of the NCAA Tournament usually looks like for the typical American male office worker:

Monday - Start poring over the brackets, checking several different papers to see which one photocopies best. Field multiple emails and phone calls from friends and co-workers trying to get you into their pool. Spend several hours mulling over which one to join, based on payout, wrinkles, etc. Begin having multiple conversations about the matchups, feigning an in-depth knowledge of college basketball: "Can you believe Gonzaga is only a six seed?" "How bogus is it that Pitt gets to play a home game?" Begin compiling as many cheat sheets you can from newspapers and websites.

Tuesday-Wednesday - Do the serious homework. Read everything tournament-related imaginable. Begin striking up conversations with the two guys in your office (who you haven’t talked to in months) who really do follow college basketball, the ones that can name all five starters for Duke, Maryland, and, terrifyingly, UNC-Wilmington.

Thursday morning - Crunch time. By now your head is spinning and you’re having a hard time telling Ole Miss from Mississippi State. In a fit of anxiety you watched "Season on the Brink" on ESPN, trying to learn anything at all about Bobby Knight, Indiana, or at least Brian Dennehy. Begin filling out your sheet. Cruise through the first round. Find the second round games a little tougher, especially those three-six and four-five games. Quickly realize that trying to absorb three months of college basketball into a ridiculous three day cram session is like trying to have an intelligent conversation about "War and Peace" having only glanced at the Cliff Notes for 30 seconds. Continue filling out the sheet, at the end realizing your final four teams are all number one seeds. Come to the conclusion that a third-grader could have done the same thing.

Thursday 12:01 PM - First tip is at 12:20, leaving you 19 minutes to get to Hooters, Connolly’s or wherever else. There are at best three games going on, with 29 more to go in the first round, and guys are acting like their entire pool is being decided right then and there. Invariably, a 14 seed will get out to a 22-12 lead over a three seed in the first half, and guys start reacting like they’ve just been told Andrea Yates is going to be their new nanny.

Thursday 2:00PM - Stagger out of Hooter’s (don’t forget your sunglasses) and head back to the office. Once there, spend the entire afternoon hitting the "refresh" icon on your web browser, while logged on to CBS Sportsline.com. Every ten minutes pop into the conference room, where of course the TV is tuned to Channel 2. One of the early games is bound to produce a close finish, and when that game ends every guy on the floor will be in the conference room, waiting breathlessly to see if Wake Forest, which is a thousand miles from New York, can hold off Pepperdine, which is three thousand miles from New York, and the place will erupt like the Rangers just won the Stanley Cup.

Friday morning - Get to desk, immediately start grading sheet, spending still more time online to check the scores of the late games. Spend the rest of the morning telling everyone how screwed you are, how so-and-so lost, and you had them beating so-and-so in the second round, and now THAT team can’t beat so-and-so in the third round, and you might as well just throw out your sheet right now.

Friday 12:01PM - Back to Hooter’s. Decide to drink heavily this time, figuring it’s Friday, and you were going to be checking out scores all afternoon anyway. All your despair over your sheet is out the window. B