Redskins Not Getting the Signs

The Washington Redskins - who now have stooped to making up rules as they go along, like the ones stopping fans from bringing signs into FedEx Field - are doing the entire sports-loving world a favor. They’re teaching a long-overdue lesson about what it means to be a good “fan’’ (which is derived from “fanatic’’) and to be a good “customer’’ (derived from “gimme what I’m paying for, dammit’’).

Think about all the times organizations have put lousy products on the field, all the times fans have gotten fed up and stopped showing up – and all the times that someone has chided them for being “bad fans.’’ The times they’ve been called a “bad sports town.’’ The times they’ve been told they don’t “support their team,’’ and that heck, why not, just move them to another city that’ll appreciate that lousy product on the field.

(Continue to The Steele Drum)

NBA's Back ... All's Right with World

There’s so much negativity out there that can feed a column topic today. After all, we’re less than 12 hours removed from the Redskins’ nationally-televised spanking by the Eagles, in front of a stadium where many of the seats not left empty by boycotting fans were filled by either Philly supporters or protesters against ownership.

As usual, the intersection between sports and society is the scene of a gruesome pile-up. Mark McGwire is being waved back into baseball by his ex-manager and his big heart and huge blinders. Officials in virtually every sport are being raked over the coals, deservedly so, especially in SEC football (again). Bob Griese is being suspended for a mid-game “joke’’ that turns the clock on the so-called conversation on race back another 50 years. Larry Johnson did the same, maybe double, with the conversation on sexual orientation. Steve Phillips has joined the non-exclusive club of successful middle-aged men tossing their careers and families into turmoil for a pointless “indiscretion’’ (to use Rick Pitino’s term). There’s much, much more.

(Continue to The Steele Drum)

Disconnect the Cable, Please

It’s late Friday morning in late October, and Tom Cable is still the head coach of the Oakland Raiders. Somebody please explain why.

Never mind, for the moment, that in an investigation that somehow stretched out for nearly three months, Cable was spared of assault charges by police in Napa, Calif., where the Raiders’ UFC camp … er, training camp hosted some sort of incident in August that left assistant coach Randy Hanson with a broken jaw.

Also, never mind that the Raiders’ rock-solid grip on laughingstock-of-professional-sports honors is being loosened this week only because of the slapstick routine that the Redskins franchise has become – and because the Raiders managed to win a game last week.

(Continue to The Steele Drum)

Chalk Up Another Win for Dumb Jocks

It ended with a statement from the leader of the ownership group, Dave Checketts, Wednesday afternoon. It was pushed along by the NFL commissioner, the head of the players’ association, no less than two team owners, the head of the NAACP and (as always) the Rev. Al Sharpton.

But the very first pushback against Rush Limbaugh’s bid to own part of the St. Louis Rams came from a couple of dumb ballplayers.

Well, it’s obvious now, not so dumb.

(Continue to The Steele Drum)

Rush Limbaugh Isn't the Only Problem

There is absolutely no way the NFL can allow Dave Checketts to own a team.

No, you read that right. True enough, there’s no way it can allow Rush Limbaugh to own a team, and that cannot be emphasized enough nor played down in any way. Actually, I don’t even believe that Limbaugh will ever get close to it. Just as I don’t believe Limbaugh represents as large a percentage of America’s views on anything as he and his proponents want us to think, I don’t believe three-fourths of the other NFL owners will be swayed by whatever money Limbaugh brings into the bid for the St. Louis Rams’ ownership, into overlooking the damage this resolutely dangerous man will do to their select group, their league, their sport and its reputation.

You think the resistance to Michael Vick’s return was noisy? Just wait and see what happens if Limbaugh ever gets that far with the NFL. It's even got players, normally content to speak only when trash-talked to first, prepared to revolt.

(Continue to The Steele Drum)

How Curt Flood 'Ruined' Sports

Today is the 40th anniversary of what seemed like a fairly big, but hardly earthshaking, baseball trade: Curt Flood, Tim McCarver and two others to the Philadelphia Phillies; Dick Allen and two others to the St. Louis Cardinals. Pretty cut-and-dried. Until Flood refused to report and then asked the commissioner to make him … a free agent.

We all know what happened after that, and if you don’t, check out a series of stories on Fanhouse, including a pair that I wrote.

And then check out some of the comments on those stories, then decide whether you agree with them. Flood is, in fact, the Father of Free Agency … and four full decades later (technically, three and a half, because it wasn’t fully granted for baseball players until 1975), it’s still held as gospel by a stunning percentage of fans that free agency “ruined baseball.’’ Or, more comprehensively, “ruined sports.’’

(Continue to The Steele Drum)

O's Fans Hounding Trembley

For nine baseball teams (soon to be eight), it’s the start of the postseason. For a bunch of others, it’s the start of the firing season. As usual, it’s the managers who are on the hottest seats, largely because fans, for reasons directly related to the root of the term “fan,’’ tend to lose all sense of perspective and rationale when their teams circle the drain. Lose enough, and no matter the circumstances, the manager gets all the rifles pointing his way.

When this happens, you end up with – just to pull a random example out of thin air, that has nothing to do with the author’s location or the team he once regularly followed – the Baltimore Orioles catching 11 different brands of hell for retaining Dave Trembley after a 98-loss season.

Now, this is far from a singular phenomenon, even in the Baltimore-Washington area, in which Eddie Jordan was fired early last season by the Wizards because he was failing to win without Gilbert Arenas, and where Jim Zorn is being dragged over the coals for having been unprepared for and undeserving of the job capriciously handed him by Dan Snyder.

(Continue to The Steele Drum)

You Can't Fire the Owner

For a sports fan, nothing is more agonizing than wanting to fire not the coach, not the GM, not the quarterback or cleanup hitter or point guard … but the owner.

Nothing makes you feel more powerless, more impotent, more feeble in your rage.

Consider Sunday’s Lions-Redskins game in Detroit. In the wake of the worst loss in most ‘Skins fans’ lifetime, there’s the usual venting about firing novice head coach Jim Zorn and former first-round quarterback Jason Campbell and the defensive coordinator and the overpaid defensive tackle and all the usual suspects. But the common theme aims blame straight at the top, at owner Dan Snyder, who has done a masterful job of alienating one of pro sports’ most rabid supporters within just a decade.

(Continue to The Steele Drum)

Here's the Bill, Belichick

The football gods really have long memories. Either that, or they took extra-long notes on the 2007 NFL season.

How else to explain what happened to the New England Patriots on Sunday at the Meadowlands? Better yet, how it happened?

Think about this: in Week 2 of 2009, the New York Jets talked junk about the Patriots and threw it all into the streets about what they wanted to do to them, and how they weren’t about to bow down to them, and all the things that should have had them eating about 10 flavors of crow by game’s end. And not only did the Jets back it up, they actually did make the Patriots look bad, even keeping them out of the end zone.

Not a huge deal, you might say, since this clearly is less of what we’re used to seeing of the Patriots, less of what we expected of them, and more of the injured Tom Brady than the rehabbed Tom Brady. But those who believe in karma have no doubts about what went on Sunday.

Payback.

(Continue to The Steele Drum)

The Customer Is Always ...

While the American public wrung their hands and wailed to the heavens about the breakdown of civility and politeness among elected officials and celebrities, they forgot once again that they have no room to talk.

In fact, just in the past three weeks, sports fans proved that they can match the very stars they blast for their anti-social behavior, outburst for outburst. It didn’t seem that way for a while, but a pair of Buffalo Bills fans closed the gap earlier this week.

These two couldn’t even wait for the rage at Serena Williams to cool down. Two days into the nationwide flogging of the 11-time Grand Slam winner for unleashing her tirade against a line judge at the U.S. Open, the “fans’’ staged an early-morning vandalism run on the home of the Bills’ Leodis McKelvin, whose late-game fumble had opened the door for New England’s comeback victory over Buffalo in Foxboro a few hours earlier.

(Continue to The Steel Drum)

Enough Serena Bashing ... Let It Go

You saw and heard what Serena Williams did at the U.S. Open last week, and you’re shocked and angry. Fair enough. But it’s not just that.

You think she’s a disgrace to her sport. You think she’s tarnished her reputation and her legacy. You think that she really did “threaten’’ the line judge, came at her with the intention of taking her life in front of a packed stadium and a national television audience. You think that if she’s said and done that “on the street,’’ she’d surely be arrested and thrown in jail.

You demand an apology, then another one, then another one, then berate her for offering it too late, or for the first being too weak. You think her fine should have been a whole lot bigger, like her entire winnings from the Open. You think she should be suspended, too.

(Continue The Steele Drum)

The NBA's Greatest Generation

With no disrespect intended to the two tremendous coaches being enshrined in Springfield, Mass., today – Jerry Sloan of the NBA’s Utah Jazz and C. Vivian Stringer of three Final Four teams – the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame class of 2009 will be identified by the three Dream Teamers inducted: Michael Jordan, David Robinson and John Stockton.

And even while Jordan is eclipsing the other two more-than-worthy inductees, the everlasting impact of all three can never be overshadowed. They were key figures on that groundbreaking, never-to-be-duplicated 1992 U.S. Olympic basketball team. And they, in turn, are icons of the greatest era in the history of the sport.

They are part of the NBA’s Greatest Generation.

(Continue to The Steele Drum)

Boise a Big Boy - For Better or Worse

The new college football rankings will be out sometime Tuesday, but no doubt Boise State will have moved up the polls from its preseason No. 14 spot. Good, because if nothing else was proven in its opener against Oregon on Thursday night (besides what a sharp right jab LeGarrette Blount possesses), these Broncos proved that they’re nobody’s tiny, mid-major, Cinderella outsider anymore.

No, their program can be as bloated, over-entitled, overbearing and devoid of all perspective as any member of the exclusive BCS club it’s trying to crack. Oh, yes, they’re big-time over at Boise State now.

They showed it before the national TV cameras that night, starting from the moment – just before Blount threw the infamous punch – that they threw down the first no-class card.

(Continue to The Steele Drum)

Commish: Do Something About Snyder

We’ll be hearing from Roger Goodell again very soon, I’m sure.

If he’s serious about the league’s public image being at stake, if the concept of a code of conduct he has enforced the last few years has any meaning, if “protecting the shield’’ is more than the cliché it has become lately, then the commissioner of the NFL will be calling Redskins owner Dan Snyder into his office and demanding that he explain himself – and then slapping him with a fine, or suspension, or both, that will be heard and felt from his FedEx Field luxury box to wherever in the world any casual fan has tugged on a cap with an NFL team logo.

Because if Goodell thinks his sheriffing job stops at the wallets and livelihoods of the players, he’d better think again. For every way in which the actions of the Michael Vicks, Plaxico Burresses and Pacman Joneses reflect poorly on the NFL, multiply it by a thousand – and that’s what Snyder and his partners in crime in the Redskins’ front office are doing to their own fans, right down to their own decades-long season-ticket holders.

(Continue to The Steele Drum)

Donovan McNabb: Fragile Porcelain Doll

Upon further review, the Donovan McNabb-Michael Vick marriage isn’t headed for an early annulment after all. Not even a counseling session. That’s not to say you can afford to let your attention drift away from it, though.

For a couple of days, it seemed as if the biggest obstacle to Vick’s return would not be Roger Goodell, or PETA, or the vast reaches of the BWG (Bitter White Guy) Radio Network – but the very quarterback who supposedly had lobbied to bring Vick into the Philadelphia Eagles’ fold. McNabb clearly was not overjoyed with exactly how Vick was used in his comeback game against Jacksonville last week. However, he insisted Tuesday as he tried to “re-calibrate’’ his post-game comments, there was no rift between him and Vick and no objection to having him there.

(Continue to The Steele Drum)

Public Enemy No. 4

The biggest of the Michael Vick plotlines have now played out, with his return to live action Thursday night with the Philadelphia Eagles. But the Brett Favre storylines are just getting started.

And none is bigger than this one: How did this man, this icon, this exemplar of modern NFL manhood next to whom everybody else seemed puny and weak – how could Brett Favre turn America against him so swiftly and so completely?

Because he has lost more cache in a shorter time than almost any superstar you can think of. At this time last year, people were screaming from the rooftops that anybody who didn’t open their arms to Brett’s return from his tragically-forced retirement from Green Bay was a fool, a hater, a bitter, jealous hack.

(Continue to The Steele Drum)

The Man, the Myths and the Beas

The tale of Michael Beasley’s recent entrance into a rehab facility, a little over a month before the start of training camp for his second NBA season, has turned out to be both far less and far more than what was originally assumed and reported.

Much has happened to clear the picture up, so we likely can stop blaming Twitter, and stop praising Twitter. We can shut up about this being proof that ballplayers need to go to college, and about spoiled millionaires not appreciating how lucky they are. We should give up on the insta-cyber-polls about what the Miami Heat “should do about him,’’ and on the debate over whether he is a future All-Star or current bust.

In short, time to stop turning 20-year-old Michael Beasley, of Seat Pleasant, Md., into a cautionary tale, and to turn him back into a flesh-and-blood person.

(Continue to The Steele Drum)

A Delayed Bolt of Lightning

All the praise, adulation, historical perspective – even reasoned skepticism – should have come to Usain Bolt a year ago.

A year ago, Bolt was doing almost exactly what he just finished doing in Berlin at the World Track and Field Championships, except he was doing in Beijing at the Olympics, on an immeasurably larger stage. That should have been his moment, his time, his chance to savor the global spotlight.

Problem is, the spotlight ran away from him, as fast as he ran away from his competitors. The only time it turned toward him was to rain dirt, disrespect and insult on him. What Bolt is getting – for taking three gold medals, for setting world records, for reveling in his own excellence and inviting the world to revel in it with him – is nothing more than a late payment on what was due him when he originally earned it.

(Continue to The Steele Drum)

Welcome to the Drum

Or, to be specific, the next stage in whatever passes for a sportswriting career these days.

Truth be told, this is not my first thrust at blogging. Past Baltimore Sun readers (maybe a few current ones, too) might remember the roughly two-year exercise that eventually was named "Steele Press.''

(Continue to The Steele Drum)