The Pre-Pregame

Since Game 4 of the Magic-Pistons series is scheduled for 5pm on Saturday -- whatever it takes to make ESPN happy -- I found myself in a production meeting on Friday morning, a full 30 hours before tipoff. Hope we make it in time.

(Note: Saturday's game is a "side-by-side," meaning that Sun Sports will produce and televise this game right alongside ESPN's national broadcast. If you love your country, you'll choose to watch the Sun Sports version over the Four Letters. We'll give you the familiar announcers with the hometown vibe, plus the added bonus of me, potentially reporting something totally mind-blowing from the Pistons huddle. Hey, it could happen. You better watch.)

Usually, we hold these meetings on the day of the game, but with the early tip, we figured we could gather a day early and make it a more casual affair. So it was on Friday that I wandered into the Magic's headquarters, the RDV Sportsplex in Maitland, to hear what my assignments might be for Game 4.

Our roster included Tye Eastham and Kevin Patterson, the two gentlemen who produce Orlando Magic basketball on Sun Sports, plus play-by-play announcer David Steele, color analyst Matt Guokas, former Magic GM John Gabriel (who will join us as a special guest on Saturday's pregame show), sideline host Paul Kennedy, and me. We were lounging around a glass coffee table in a lobby at the Sportsplex, watching the palm trees sway outside as we waited for practice to end.

While still killing time, we welcomed Magic Chief Operating Officer Alex Martins, who stopped to chat while on his way to something undoubtedly important. Alex goes back to the expansion days of the Magic in 1989, and therefore knows John Gabriel quite well. In fact, I couldn't help but notice the high levels of expansion-era experience in the room -- Alex, Gabe, David, Paul, and Matty were all on the ground floor of this franchise in one way or another. That's a ton of Magic history in one lobby. For what it's worth, Tye, Kevin and I can all trace our connections back at least as far as the Shaq-Penny era. Call us the JV division.

As the casual chatter continued, in walks the irrepressible Pat Williams, best remembered around Orlando as the Magic's original general manager and the man who made the NBA happen in Central Florida. Pat still holds an executive role with the franchise and is highly sought after as a public speaker. The man can flat-out work a room.

If you know Pat at all, you know he's always on his game when faced with an audience. And so it was that he looked around the table -- at Alex Martins, John Gabriel, Matt Guokas, David Steele, Paul Kennedy, and the rest of us -- gave it a perfect pause, and then dropped this one:

"Wow. I hired everybody in this room."

Never mind that he didn't, really -- great line nonetheless.

Oh, yeah, and one more thing: the Magic are going to win this series against Detroit. This team is going to the Eastern Conference Finals. Been saying it for two weeks now, to anyone who would listen. It's gonna happen.

Know how I know? Because going to the Eastern Conference Finals would REALLY throw my work schedule into the washing machine. Most likely, it would mean live pregame and/or postgame shows on Sun Sports. That's how I know. It's been too quiet around here for too long. My hair has not been on fire for a full week. Thus, the Magic will beat Detroit and make all of us nuts again. Book it.

Gotta go do a pregame show. See you on TV.

Don't Hate The Player, Hate The Game

"The reasonable criticism [of sports blogs] is of the tone of gratuitous potshots and mean-spirited abuse."

So sayeth Bob Costas, and so it shall be done. Wait, was that mean-spirited?

If you haven't watched it yet, the recent episode of 'Costas Now' that focused on the blogosphere is worth a few minutes. Specifically -- and this is the part that everyone is talking about -- you need to watch the exchange between Will Leitch of Deadspin and Buzz Bissinger, author of 'Friday Night Lights.'

Bissinger, who attended Penn and Harvard and therefore immediately earns my distrust (I went to Cornell, and yes, that was a gratuitous potshot), leaps off the top rope immediately and never stops swinging. Draw your own conclusions from the video, but I liked what Jerry Greene wrote in the Orlando Sentinel this weekend:

"Buzz committed virtual hari-kari -- and took with him everyone that has problems with the excessive and worthless nature of the worst of blogging. Wrote Leitch almost immediately afterward on Deadspin: "We just watched a man immolate on national television. To have piled on the carnage would have been discourteous."

Buzz later admitted he "subsumed the valid points" he was trying to make."

Immolate: to kill as a sacrifice; to kill (oneself) by fire; to destroy.

Subsume: to consider or include (an idea, term, proposition, etc.) as part of a more comprehensive one; to bring (a case, instance, etc.) under a rule; to take up into a more inclusive classification.

The first one I get; Bissinger went down in flames. I drew the same conclusion.

The second one took me a moment, but I believe that Bissinger is admitting that his naive hyperfocus on one small aspect of the Deadspin blog -- the admittedly snarky comments from readers -- crippled his ability to objectively criticize the concept of blogging.

Leading off his counter-argument with "I think you're full of s**t" didn't help much.

What did this exchange accomplish? Let's take me as one example.

First, I read Deadspin for the first time, and thought it was pretty damn funny.

Second, I continued my long and proud tradition of never watching a single episode of 'Friday Night Lights' on TV -- only now I have the added benefit of believing the show's creator to be cranky, arrogant, hopelessly out of touch, and generally despicable. Which, I predict, will not compel me to change my mind about the TV show or rush out to buy one of Bissinger's many other works.

Nice work, Buzz! And it only took you 10 minutes!

What he did, of course, was completely and totally legitimize Will Leitch, Deadspin, and by extension, every other blog out there that attempts to accurately capture the attitude of the fan. He accomplished this by hating them.

Not 'hating on them,' playa, but simply 'hating them.' Because, Grasshopper, the opposite of love is not hate. The opposite of love is indifference.

If one truly considers something completely devoid of any lovable characteristics, one simply doesn't give a crap and ignores said thing. If, however, one recognizes this nebulous 'thing' as a threat -- if one views the 'thing' as potentially dangerous, and therefore worthy of concern and respect, even as a target -- then one chooses to expend energy on this 'thing.' And that energy, class, is hate.

You have to care about something to hate it. Bissinger cares about blogs, because they are (in his mind) a threat to traditional media, an affront to true journalists like himself who attended Phillips Andover and wrote a book about high school football in Texas that got so many people so pissed off that he was unable to set foot in Odessa for several years. That, you see, is REAL writing. Simply pissing off the guy who went to Andover doesn't count, I guess. Anyway, he hates the blogs. Which means he feels threatened by them.

Should he be?

Yeah, probably. You'll read this one hundred times in the aftermath of the Leitch visit to Costas Now -- if you haven't already in the aftermath of Costas himself making that galactically stupid 'high-tech place for idiots' comment several weeks earlier -- but the upshot is this:

The whole blog thing? It's not going away. That horse, as I have written before, is well out of the barn. Those who 'get it' will be those who ride the wave, as most major newspapers around the country already understand. Those who don't get it will be those who feel threatened by it, those who, to be frank, are pissed off that their own hard work, education, and experience counts for nothing in the court of public opinion.

Because isn't that what this really comes down to? People like Bissinger are appalled at the mere suggestion that some schmoe who didn't go to Andover, Penn, and Harvard could actually produce something in print that could rival the great classically-trained sportswriters of our time. No, wait -- what he's really tweaked about is that more people might choose to read it.

It's the ultimate exercise in free press, this blog thing. You read what you find entertaining, not what you're told is "great writing." That scares the living you-know-what out of people like Bissinger and Costas, who admittedly worked very, very hard to get where they are today. But they're finding that reputation and resume' only counts for so much.

So in the absence of career-threatening tirades on television, what should they be doing?

Like we used to say in the gym -- if you don't like my trash-talking, beat me.

Work harder, Buzz. If the blogospheric (loving that word right now) audience is so important to you, as it appears to be, then show us something. Be more entertaining than Deadspin. Be funnier than Every Day Should Be Saturday. Be sharper than Bill Simmons. Go ahead, do it. Do it, and we'll read your stuff.

You CAN do that, can't you?

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?