Welcome Back

When the horn sounded on Game 5 of the Magic-Raptors series on Monday night, I did something unusual. Unusual for me, anyway.

I'm really no fun to hang out with when I'm assigned to report from the sidelines. I've got the play-by-play call being fed into my wireless earpiece, so I can listen to our Sun Sports/FSN Florida announcers and react to storylines they may be developing. Our producer in the truck also communicates with me via this earpiece throughout the night. It's akin to having a sports talk radio show playing in your head while the game is going on, and it requires a certain level of concentration, which is why I'm not much fun at the game.

Friends, neighbors, Sun Sports viewers will see me and say hello, and I'm usually staring off into space, trying to keep track of all the voices (which is probably another blog entirely). Throw in the fact that I've called dozens of games as a play-by-play announcer myself, and am therefore conditioned, Pavlov-style, to reflexively check the score and the clock after every possession, and you end up with a zombie in a suit.

For most of the game, I stood in the tunnel behind the visitors' bench, listening carefully to the traffic in my earpiece, arms folded, lifting my eyes every 24 seconds to check score & clock, score & clock. It's a pattern I have repeated in that building -- and about a dozen other NBA arenas, and a few Major League Baseball ballparks -- for more games than I can count. Like I said, fun.

On Monday night, the venerable Amway Arena was bursting at the seams. Even the Magic game night staff, those impossibly young and attractive 20-somethings in blue shirts who slave over t-shirt launches every night, were hooting and high-fiving as the Magic barrelled toward their first playoff series win in twelve years. The atmosphere was electric, the closest thing to the franchise's 1995 Finals run that I can remember. Pure noise, and pure bliss. Even Tiger Woods, sitting in a front-row seat across from the visitor's bench, got a little geeked. A little.

But when that final horn sounded, I did something unusual. I delayed my walk back to the Magic locker room for a moment and instead walked to the middle of the floor. The streamers were falling, the players were saying their goodbyes, the various broadcasters were grabbing the stars of the game for interviews. I simply stood at center court and listened, for the first time all night.

Did you hear it?

The Magic are back in the second round.

Let the record show that the three Magic players who had the biggest impact on this first-round series win over Toronto are the three players to whom GM Otis Smith has hitched his professional wagon: Dwight Howard, Rashard Lewis, and Jameer Nelson. Dwight was Dwight, with three 20-20 games in the series and one more giant step forward in the history he writes with every passing month of his career. Rashard Lewis, he of the much-discussed contract, delivered a little bit of everything, from scoring to rebounding to a surprising toughness on defense. Nelson may have made the largest leap in this series, distributing the ball, playing fearlessly and aggressively, paying Otis back for the faith his GM invested. This trio is locked up in Magic blue for the foreseeable future -- this is your team, Orlando -- and they delivered. Did they ever.

How does that plan for a new arena look now? How about the hiring of Stan Van Gundy after the Billy Donovan situation? Does anyone remember all the angst in 2004 when the number one overall pick came down to Dwight Howard vs. Emeka Okefor? Still wondering why the Magic signed Hedo Turkoglu as a free agent a couple of years ago -- you know, the guy who just won the NBA's Most Improved Player Award?

Anyone heard from Steve Francis? Has Tracy McGrady called?

Pat Garrity, the longest-tenured member of the Magic and the last uniformed connection to the team's collapse against Detroit with a 3-1 lead in the first round of the 2003 Playoffs, said Monday night that the Magic "haven't done anything yet." I know what he meant, but I beg to differ. He was providing a voice of reason as an NBA veteran, saying the right things, but he needs to give his squad a bit more credit.

The Magic have made themselves important again. Important in the 2008 NBA Playoff picture, and important in Central Florida. My wife called me at 9:30 this morning as she was dropping off one of the kids at school to report that "there are Magic spirit flags all over the parking lot."

Anyone else remember the giant Horace Grant goggles hanging off a downtown building back in '95?

Rodney Powell does. "Sid," as we call him for reasons too lengthy to explain, is the Magic's team operations manager. He's been there for just about all of it. My last impression before leaving the building last night was the sight of Sid collapsed in one of the plush player's locker room chairs, staring off into space as the room emptied around him, no doubt thinking of all the travel arrangements, equipment moves, and basketball details that awaited him in the second round. I walked up and offered the same congratulatory greeting that I had offered to the rest of the Magic staff veterans I saw that night:

"Welcome back," I said.

Through the exhaustion, he smiled. "Yeah."

Pause. "It's been a long time. Too long."

Welcome back, Magic.

Let The Games Begin

The Orlando Magic are the only team in the NBA that finished the 2008 regular season with more road wins than home wins.

Read that again.

Thirty teams, sixteen of which made the postseason. All eight of the Western Conference's playoff participants won at least 50 games this year. In the East, the top-seeded Boston Celtics went 66-16, their highest win total since the 1985-86 season, when the Bird-Parish-McHale squad won 67 games and finished with the franchise's 16th and last NBA Championship.

But in 2008, nobody -- not the Celtics, not the Pistons, and not one of those 50-win teams in the West -- did what Orlando just did.

That may end up meaning absolutely nothing in the Playoffs, but it bears mentioning. It's also a fine place to start a Magic-Raptors preview.

To add to all the analysis you'll read about this series in the next few days, here are two more points to ponder:

1. Bosh vs. Howard

Both are franchise players. Both are well shy of 25 years old. They're both smart, personable, and perfect ambassadors of their respective teams and the league at large. But they've got their differences.

Bosh is by far the more polished offensive player, with a mid-range game that can occasionally stretch even further -- he was 10 for 25 from three-point range this season, while Howard has only attempted 10 treys in his entire NBA career (almost always under duress). Bosh can also dish it, averaging almost three assists per game, or twice as many as Howard did. On the other hand, Howard is considerably more explosive, having led the league in rebounding at 14.2 per game, which is a full five and a half boards more per night than Bosh. Howard's 2.2 blocks per game doubles Bosh's average. Howard shoots nearly 60% from the field; Bosh shoots 84 percent from the line. Howard's a righty, Bosh a lefty. For every punch, there's a counterpunch.

Consider the three games that Orlando played against Toronto this season: Howard scored 17 points with 9 rebounds in their November meeting, went off for 37 and 15 when they met again in February, and then hung a 19 and 14 on the Raptors in March. Bosh responded thusly: 26 and 10 in the first game, 40 points and 5 boards in the second meeting, missed the third game due to injury.

I hosted that March game in Orlando on Sun Sports, and asked head coach Sam Mitchell about the matchup between Howard and Bosh. He responded, in tones reserved for the very slow, that it was of no interest to him to discuss players who weren't on the floor that night.

Well, coach, you're gonna have to talk about it now.

Let me go on record as saying I don't think Bosh vs. Howard will decide this series. If we've learned anything from their regular season meetings, it's that the two counteract each other. It's worth noting that on the February night when Howard went for 35 and 17 against the Raptors, the Magic lost; back in November, when Bosh recorded his 26 points and 10 rebounds in 38 minutes against Orlando, the Raptors lost -- and Howard scored only 17. Punch, counterpunch.

Instead, what will most likely decide this series is...

2. The Guards

Orlando has been shredded all season by teams with quick point guards who can get into the lane and force defenders to help out. Jameer Nelson and Carlos Arroyo struggle with perimeter defense, while Keyon Dooling gives yeoman's effort but is often similarly outquicked. San Antonio, Phoenix, Detroit, Dallas, even Atlanta -- the teams that had Orlando's number this season were teams who broke down the Magic's first line of defense and compelled them to collapse. Once the ball goes up, Orlando isn't dead -- the Magic were the 4th-best team in the league this year in defensive rebounding -- but the opposing team's ability to get by Orlando's guards is a real concern, something that Stan Van Gundy has been harping on all season.

Toronto, of course, offers Jose Calderon and T.J. Ford, two of the best in the business on the bounce. Their ability to create open looks for their teammates, and Orlando's ability to stop that, will be the swing vote in this series.

The X-factor for the Magic, as has been the case all season, is Hedo Turkoglu. Not only has Turk produced a Most Improved Player-worthy season, he's got the playoff experience that most of his teammates lack. For that matter, I would throw Maurice Evans into that mix, as he's been in the postseason both in the NBA and in Europe (something he pointed out to Paul Kennedy on the air after the Magic's win at Atlanta last week).

The Magic should win this series. Note that I write "should." I may as well write "need," seeing as how the team has not advanced past the first round since 1996. If we are to believe that the Orlando Magic are all the way back, that the presence of Dwight Howard and Hedo Turkoglu and Stan Van Gundy has truly, inexorably, honestly vanquished the ghosts of seasons past, they must get past Toronto. After that, it's probably Detroit, and we'll start all over again.

Games 2, 3, and 5 (if necessary) can be seen in HD on Sun Sports. See you on TV.

Rubbernecking At Augusta

Hearty congratulations and general huzzahs to 2008 Masters champion Trevor Immelman. Let me be the first to say, I had absolutely no confidence that he would actually win the thing.

Not that Immelman can't play -- we know he can. He was the PGA Tour's Rookie of the Year in 2006, and already has 7 wins worldwide. He belongs.

What I mean is, I couldn't foresee anyone winning at Augusta on Sunday. It was like watching a train wreck in spikes. The winner, to beat a cliche' to death, was the golf course itself, which yielded a final-round scoring average of 74.67. Immelman's Sunday 75 was the highest final-round score by a Masters champion since Arnold Palmer did the same in 1962.

As contender after contender went smashing into the shoals -- Brandt Snedeker, Steve Flesch, and Paul Casey were all within four shots of the lead on Saturday night, and all three went plus-5 or worse on Sunday -- I was reminded of a comment made by Tom Kite many years ago at the Players Championship near Jacksonville.

It was 1994, when I was a freelance producer for a golf radio network and Kite was still a relevant member of the regular Tour. You may recall the '94 Players as the year that Fuzzy Zoeller famously waved the white towel at Greg Norman, who won the event with a four-round total of 264, a staggering 24 under par.

At one point that week -- probably after his opening-round 65 -- Kite opined that if the Players truly wanted to be considered a "fifth major," as tournament organizers desperately wished, the course needed to be harder.

"The fans want to see us chop," I remember him saying.

This became a theme to the weekend, as several other players were asked about the relative ease of the TPC layout at Sawgrass. Zoeller himself took an opposing stance to Kite, saying "they shouldn't make any changes...there's nothing wrong with the course. It was just the conditions and you can't do anything about that."

(Note: Zoeller shot four rounds of 68 or better at Sawgrass that year and made $270,000 for the effort. What else is he gonna say?)

History suggests that the PGA Tour, which owns the TPC Sawgrass complex, took Kite's words into consideration. The winning score at the 1995 Players Championship was a mere five under par -- 19 shots higher than Norman's blitzing the previous year. In the thirteen Players' Championships since '94, no winner has come within six shots of Norman's tally, and six of those 13 winners didn't crack ten-under.

The 2008 Players will take place next month, and you can expect this 13-year trend to continue, if not worsen. The Stadium course at the TPC Sawgrass was blown up and rebuilt from March 2006 through January of last year. At the moment, the pro tees on the Stadium course have a USGA stroke rating of 76.8 and a Slope of 155 -- that last number representing the highest possible number the USGA will assign to a golf course. It would be no surprise at all if the winner of next month's Players Championship came in at or above par.

Tough setups are hardly new, of course. At the 1974 US Open at Winged Foot -- the famed "Massacre," won by Hale Irwin at 7-over -- the conditions were severe to the point of incredulity. When players complained, as they are wont to do, championship committee chairman Sandy Tatum uttered these famous lines: "We're not trying to embarrass the best players in the world. We're trying to identify them."

(Coincidentally, it has long been assumed that the 1974 Massacre at Winged Foot was the USGA's response to Johnny Miller's final-round 63 at the '73 Open at Oakmont. Greg Norman is to Sawgrass '95 as Johnny Miller is to Winged Foot '74.)

Tatum's iconic statement from 1974 is not only revisited every year at each US Open, it has become the USGA's core philosophy in setting them up. Intentionally or unintentionally, the other majors have followed suit -- even staid Augusta National, which claims to care not a whit about such things.

Ever since Tiger Woods smashed the Masters scoring record in 1997 at 18 under par, the course has undergone a steady diet of subtle changes designed to, well, make it harder. It hasn't done much to stop Woods -- in his four Masters wins, he's a combined 58 under par. However, the "new" Augusta can produce days like Sunday, when two players shot in the 80's and 23 players -- fully half the field -- failed to break 75. Further, as CBS Sportsline's Steve Elling notes, Woods himself has only broken par five times in his last 13 rounds at Augusta National.

Elling begs for a softening of Augusta National because he misses the birdies and "crazy rallies," and it's true that Sunday's final round of the Masters offered nothing in the way of such hope. However, that's not what turns me off about the 'bigger, badder, harder' course setup philosophy.

With all due respect to Tom Kite, he's wrong. I do not watch professional golf to see them chop. If I wanted to see hackers, I would set up a lawn chair along the first fairway at Winter Park Country Club.

I watch professional golf with the expectation of seeing something I CANNOT do. Putting the ball off the green, rinsing a tee shot on a 150-yard par-3, making double or triple on a par-5 -- been there, done that, have the scorecard. Sure, I identify with the misery, but does that mean I want to watch it on television? I suppose there's a sizable element of the golf-watching public that revels in the Tour stars' pain, gives it a mental "now you know how I feel!" at each agonizing miscue, but I'm not in that group. In a related story, I cannot watch five minutes of "Borat" without feeling a pang of discomfort in my stomach. I derive no entertainment value from others' pain or embarrassment.

Of course, I'm not in favor of Bob Hope Classic-style birdiefests, either, and I like watching the US Open just fine. I'm simply asking for something in the middle. Narrow the fairways, plant some trees, do what you gotta do, but soften the greens a hair and keep the tee boxes in the same county as the rest of the course. Allow shotmakers to make shots. "Bomb and gouge" sucks, but so did Sunday.

Can we not have some moderation?

A Tradition Unlike Any Other

Nine times out of ten, I write these blog entries with the reader in mind. This is not one of those times.

This is for me, and for any serious player who may read it.

By "player," of course, I mean one who plays golf. Note that I write plays golf, not "golfs." "Golf" is not a verb. One does not "golf," any more than one "soccers" or "tennises" or "baseballs." One plays golf. If you get that, and agree with that, read on.

Zach Johnson, the pride of Iowa and a current resident of Seminole County, Florida, won the Masters last year. He has won three times on the PGA Tour and twice on the Nationwide Tour. I once chatted with him on the driving range at my club, talking football and such. He's all of 5-10, maybe a buck-65 soaking wet. A wee thing. Hits it as pure as the driven snow.

Justin Rose, on the other hand, has won five international events, and has a history of early leads at The Masters, as you may have heard during Friday's second round coverage. He's a star. Broke out at the 1998 British Open, appears in television ads, has a swing to die for. He's dreamy. On the surface, if you were a betting man, you'd take Rose over Johnson every day of the week and twice on Sunday, especially the Sunday of a major.

Unless you're a player. In which case, you'd recognize one of your own. Which brings me back to Friday.

There were two moments that stood out to me in watching coverage of the Masters, both involving Johnson and Rose. I'm leaving out Tiger, because everything he does is a "moment." Yes, his par save on 18 on Friday was All-World. Of course it was.

Let's instead start with Johnson's par save on 18 on the same day. Little Zach Johnson, he of the sweepy hook swing and wedge game, got himself into downright jail on Augusta National's final hole. He hit it long, to the back tier of the three-level green, in a position from which no human could possibly escape. Par was the goal, bogey was the reality. He was deader than fried chicken.

Sometime within the same ten minutes, Rose decided to lay up on the par-5 fifteenth, even though he had but 213 yards to the hole. This decision, although on Friday and not Sunday, may someday be regarded in the same breath with Chip Beck, but that's another blog entirely.

The point is, Johnson looked over his 80-foot birdie putt from nowhere and promptly knocked it down to within a brush-in. It will never be revisited again, because Johnson won't win tomorrow, but it was among the five best putts I have ever witnessed.

Rose, on the other hand, with a sand wedge in his hand from less than 100 yards, dunked it into the creek. Drop, thin skank over the green, chip, two putts, triple bogey. Goodbye, Masters.

Johnson, I failed to point out, came to 18 on the heels of an atrocious double-bogey on 17, where he toured every bunker on the hole. Yet, rather than pack it in, he redoubled his efforts and managed a stellar 4 on the final hole, thanks to that incredible putt. It's worth noting that he bounced back to shoot 68 on Saturday, with five birdies and one bogey.

Justin Rose, who is, as we have agreed, dreamy, responded to his triple on 15 on Friday by throwing a bogey at 16, followed by three more bogeys, one double, and four birdies on Saturday en route to an irrelevant 73, a stretch in which he pretty much played his way out of the Tournament.

Understand that I come here not to bury Rose. Rather, I come to identify with Johnson, who is nothing if not a grinder. He willed himself into contention on Saturday, as tenuous as that may be. That's the difference between a guy who has won a major, and a guy who has a nice swing.

The final round comes tomorrow, one of my favorite days on the sporting calendar. If I had to pick anyone other than Tiger to win it, I would go with Steve Flesch or Brandt Snedeker, both of whom have demonstrated the kind of stuff that Johnson showed on 18 on Friday -- fearlessness. That's the secret, in case anyone was wondering. Fearless swings at precise targets, as Gio Valiante likes to say. Not how, but how many. The battle of wills is what makes Augusta so compelling, year after year.

Me, I'll be rooting for the grinders, if only because that's the sort of player I'd like to think I can be.

Spreadin' The News

So yeah, did the New York thing this weekend.

A two-night, three-day mini-vacation of sorts in Manhattan with kids in tow. I've covered events in New York before, but never taken the whole gang down the tourist path in the city. We met up with my wife's parents at the Yale Club, midtown, across the street from Grand Central Station, which is an exceptional base of operations if one wants to see the sights. You can get anywhere from there, and we did -- the American Museum of Natural History, Central Park, Times Square, you name it. It's refreshing to travel with kids sometimes, if only to witness the wonder of seemingly banal endeavors, like taking a taxi or riding the subway. My 8-year-old son loved it; there was lots of information to process, which is right up his alley. By the end of the weekend, he pretty much had the subway lines memorized. The four-year old found her personal Nirvana at the American Girl Place on Fifth Avenue, which, for those of you without female children of a certain age, is "Cabbage Patch Kids" for the next generation. Our newest "kid" is named Lacey, she looks remarkably like my daughter, and she has lots of expensive clothes to wear courtesy of my father-in-law (not unlike my daughter herself). Given the great distances we had to walk every day and the fine layer of grime that covers one's skin after a full day in the city, my kids were troopers, so much so that my wife and I were willing to overlook the fact that both of them threw up during the bumpy flight back to Orlando. Ahh, parenthood.

Of course, in the media capital of the world, you're never out of touch, and so it came to pass that I watched the NCAA men's semifinals from the Grill Room of the Yale Club on Saturday night. While Memphis and Kansas were clearly the better teams on that night, the TV guy in me couldn't help but chuckle at what I know are pained grimaces on the faces of CBS executives at the moment -- Memphis-Kansas, while interesting, cannot hold a candle to North Carolina-UCLA in terms of grabbing the Middle Ground. Similarly, when Stanford beat UConn in the women's semifinals, denying us another round of Auriemma vs. Summitt in a championship game, my former colleagues in Bristol must have been punching figurative holes in figurative walls -- a sound perhaps matched by the good people at the Tampa Bay Sports Commission, the hosts of the 2008 Women's Final Four.

Shannon Owens writes in Monday's Orlando Sentinel that Stanford's win over Connecticut provides "indisputable confirmation the women's game is not confined to the Big East, ACC, and SEC." She's right, but that won't do much for the ratings on Tuesday night, which will pale in comparison to what Tennessee-UConn would have drawn. Given that women's college basketball, financially, has been a losing proposition in the modern era -- $169 million in the red for the 2005-2006 season alone, according to the U.S. Department of Education -- the prospect of getting drilled in the Tuesday night ratings by the likes of "American Idol" is precisely what the women's game doesn't need.

That same Department of Education report tells us that men's college basketball recorded a $240 million profit during that same '05-'06 season, "largely on two things the women still lack: a lucrative TV package and strong attendance." As I've written in this space before, television is reactive, not proactive; TV deals happen AFTER the consumer shows interest in a given sport, not before. For examples, see poker, NASCAR, mixed martial arts, or anything else that has blown up in the last ten years. Television did not and cannot create interest in these sports; it merely reflects it. One way to measure interest is through attendance -- an area where, as the article above correctly summarizes, the women's game suffers tremendously.

If the 330 NCAA institutions that offer women's basketball were reporting jam-packed arenas night after night, the 'lucrative TV package' would surely follow. That's how our business works. I can remember working the desk at ESPNEWS a few years ago and hearing a rival women's basketball coach lamenting the fact that UConn received such tremendous national attention "because they're in ESPN's backyard."

Umm, no. ESPN only got on board after Connecticut starting winning like crazy, and after the locals in Storrs started packing the rafters. Same thing in Knoxville, by the way. That same principle, in reverse, is also why the NHL has failed as a national television sport -- while hockey holds on to passionate fan bases in certain local markets, it doesn't resonate at a national or even regional level. TV cannot change that, no matter how hard the game is promoted.

Reactive, not proactive. Remember that.

As an aside, I like the women's game just fine, for a simple and selfish reason: the pace of the game is a half-beat slower than the men's, which makes it much easier to call as a play-by-play announcer. Having broadcast dozens of high school and college women's basketball games on Sun Sports and FSN Florida, I speak from experience. Time exists to set up storylines, give background on certain players, and break down the X's and O's -- much more so than with the men, high school or college. Of course, I recognize that this does nothing for most casual viewers, who would rather see end-to-end action than a well-executed back-door cut. Another reason why the men's game outpaces the women's game as a TV sport.

And speaking of basketball, and New York: tip of the cap to Magic assistant coach Patrick Ewing and Heat head coach Pat Riley, two members of the 2008 class in the Basketball Hall of Fame. No arguments here. The list of names that didn't make it, including Chris Mullin, Dennis Johnson, and Don Nelson, probably deserve a new blog entry, but for now, credit where credit is due. Ewing and Riley, along with Hakeem Olajuwon, all made it in their first year of eligibility, as they should. Fitting honors for careers that truly match the definition of "Hall of Famer."

Now, Dick Vitale? We'll save that for another day.