Hole Punch Sports

The United States men's basketball team just finished a perfect Olympics with a fabulous 118-107 victory over Spain, giving the Americans their first gold medal in a major international tournament since the Sydney Olympics in 2000. Let me extend one final [thank] you to NBC for its horrendously confusing schedules. When I checked its online listings late last night, I saw that the gold medal game would run from 1:30 to 3:30 a.m. Mountain time. (Even put in my cable company and everything.) When I woke up at 1:30 Mountain time, you guessed it, the U.S. was holding a 69-61 halftime lead and I'd missed Dwyane Wade's impressive first half. Great. Of course, NBC's Olympic website still says the game starts at 1:30. At least we got the matchup I wanted. Last week I got an e-mail from my brother, a missionary in Spain, who was ecstatic about the United States' 37-point victory over them in the opening round. He said that ever since he got there he's had to hear the ...

Michael Phelps just won his eighth gold medal of this Olympics, and the 400m medley relay was the seventh race he won with a new world record. It was such an incredible meet, especially the finishes to the 400m free relay and the 100m butterfly, that it's hard to put in perspective. (With his win over Crocker in '04, with his amazing .01 touch this year, and with his leg of the 400m medley relay just finished, I think Phelps swimming the butterfly for one hundred meters is officially my favorite thing to watch in sports.) The closest I can do to giving this justice is to think of what Mark Spitz said last night on NBC about how the greatest athletes know how to win. I've never been dominant enough at anything to know what that phrase really means, but it's as close as I can come to describing the zone some athletes get in where any victory is possible. What's amazing is how unsurprising Phelps' triumph was. Yes, my faith faltered during that 100m butterfly, bu...

I woke up early this morning to watch the U.S. beat Spain live in basketball, one of the few live events I've seen this year. (Which reminds me, I screwed up again on the 200 IM, accidentally checking Phelps' Wikipedia page for his career medals breakdown before the race was shown live in Mountain time. Thanks again, NBC!) Anyway, the Americans—or Redeem Team, as they are so cutely called this year—dominated the Spaniards with superior athletic ability. Fittingly, Coach K had us looking like a Duke team, except like one from the late-90's, when they were good: they combined pressure defense and exquisite ball movement. Carmelo continued his torrid shooting with four threes, and Dwyane Wade especially continued his great play. LeBron James was good today but overall my opinion of him is almost down...he's still a little too prone to the what-the-heck-are-you-doing-type plays where he pulls up for a three when it's far from the best shot. However, he pulls some of th...

Today I was discussing with commenter David V about how'd he accidentally learned the results of the men's 4 x 100m freestyle relay yesterday before he'd seen the race on TV. At first, I didn't even believe him that the race wasn't live, thanks to some annoyingly deceitful tactics from NBC . (If my fact-checking is accurate, they did it again tonight. The "LIVE" graphic was up in the right-hand corner through the men's 100m backstroke, in which Americans Aaron Peirsol and Matt Grevers went gold-silver. But judging from the times on NBC's website (which say the event took place at 10:31 a.m.) and online world clocks (which say it was about 11:30 a.m. in Beijing when I was watching) the race was tape-delayed here by about an hour.) One reason I didn't believe him was that I'd thought I'd checked ESPN.com frequently before the race Sunday night but had seen nothing of the American team's victory. I couldn't imagine what ESPN cou...

Some of my favorite and most dramatic American wins in the last two Olympics have taken place in the pool. In 2000, swimmers Gary Hall, Jr. and Anthony Ervin tied for the gold in the splash-and-dash 50m free over a field including Russian Alexander Popov, who'd won the gold in the event in both 1992 and 1996. (Don't think Popov was over the hill: he'd set the world record in the event a few months before the 2000 Olympics.) In 2004, Michael Phelps trailed U.S. teammate and world-record holder Ian Crocker by a body length at the turn of the 100m butterfly, but chased him down for the gold and set a new Olympic record. Neither was as cool as what just happened . * * * The 4 x 100m free relay was billed as a showdown between the United States and France, but the color commentator, whoever that is, seemed awfully sure the Americans didn't have a chance. It seemed odd, considering the United States team had set the world record in the race the day before with their B t...

In a move that must be breaking hearts across Wisconsin, the Green Bay Packers have traded quarterback Brett Favre to the New York Jets. It's a sad finish to an avoidable saga. We never found out the answer to the most important question: why wouldn't the Packers take Favre back? He had them a home game from the Super Bowl just a few months ago, right? I didn't just dream that, did I? My impression based on the news of the last few days is that Favre was willing to stay in Green Bay (and even compete for his job, which is lame), but that the Packers were ready to move on. I'm going to assume that's true. I've heard many reasons why the Packers were so eager to go forward without Favre, and most of them had two things in common: they involved Aaron Rodgers, and they were incredibly stupid. Common was the contention that the team owed something to Rodgers, who has, after all, endured three years on the bench despite a sparkling career quarterback rating of 73....

A Few Seconds of Panic , Stefan Fatsis' new book about his time with the Broncos as a kicker before the 2006 season, includes on its one hundred sixty-second page the following awesome quote: This year's per-team salary cap is $101,866,000, and the Broncos will come as close to that number as possible. Fully funding the team was a condition Shanahan set when he became head coach in 1995; a few years earlier, he had spurned an offer from Bowlen for reasons of internal politics and authority. Bowlen says he wouldn't do it any other way. 'I'm not going to be judged on how much money this organization made,' he tells me one day. 'I mean, [f], that doesn't even enter the equation. Zero. It's, 'How many games did he win? How many Super Bowls did he win?' There's not a lot of things that I really want other than winning Super Bowls. I mean, what do I want, a bigger house? No. More space in Hawaii? Own my own jet? I mean, none of that makes a ...