Today is chock-full of baseball and football. I'll get to that, don't worry.Weekend Wake Up: Alexis Thompson’s Hello, Hockey’s Quiet Start, Iverson’s Discontent
Today is chock-full of baseball and football. I'll get to that, don't worry.Who Is Alexis Thompson? That’s the lede in the Associated Press story about the LPGA’s latest teen sensation, 14-year-old Alexis Thompson, who enters the weekend tied for the lead at the Navistar LPGA Classic with four players, including world No. 1 Lorena Ochoa. Thompson’s also the youngest player to qualify for the U.S. Women’s Open, making the field two years ago at the ripe old age of 12. The youth movement in women’s golf is strong indeed.
Hello, Hockey? Yesterday, while flipping through channels on my TV during the day, I came upon Versus, which was airing, live from Helsinki, the NHL’s Premiere Tip-Off Shootout Classic (I think) between the Florida Panthers, nominally my favorite team as a Floridian, and the Chicago Blackhawks. Tomas Vokoun made 52 saves, including two in a shootout, and the Panthers won 4-3, but it seemed strange to me that the NHL -- despite a Thursday night inauguration of the season by its biggest, brightest, most boisterous star, Alexander Ovechkin, who scored the first goal of the 2009-10 season in a Capitals win -- is still anonymous and small-minded enough that it thinks overseas opening week games that produce midweek midday games aren’t a bad idea. Major League Baseball tried this same trick with games in Japan, but MLB also saturates TV with midday games, which are as old as the professional sport itself.
I understand that there is value to expanding the NHL’s reach in Europe, but it would seem like that need not be done at the expense of putting games on at times Americans can see them. Then I remembered that Gary Bettman is still the commissioner of the NHL, and it made sense: He must be deliberately positioning the league to cut into General Hospital’s audience! Brilliant man, that Bettman.
Iverson Isn't Hamlet. He's actually more Richard III, with this summer the winter of his discontent. See, as Iverson tells ESPN's Scoop Jackson, he's the sort of player who sees contributing off the bench as a "disrespect" to his career, someone whose perceptions of slights seem more important than their existence, whose inability to be anything but himself is his greatest asset and liability. And since his inception as a national figure, AI has met a part of the world wanting to love him, and a segment determined to make him a villain. What he will do, in Memphis, for a team filled with scorers and leapers, will mean more to his legacy than the half season of distress in Detroit. But one thing is certain: He will either help the Grizzlies become better by being Allen Iverson, or hurt them in the same way.
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