Monday morning after the NFL draft is like Sunday morning after a wild college party. You either had a great time, a lousy time or you wait to learn if you made a fool of yourself.The Lions will have to wait. It was a strange weekend. The home team took another receiver with its highest pick. A great receiver, we are told, but still another receiver. That's four in the last five years. And as rare a bird as Calvin Johnson is, his Georgia Tech team last year went 9-5. Guys who catch the ball do not ensure victories.
Break your nose. Right now. Go on. Break it. Then fly 500 miles and have it reset. Surgically, by the way. None of that cup-your-hands-and-snap-it-back stuff, OK? Now come out of anesthesia, get on a plane and fly 500 miles back.You with me so far? Good. Now comes the hard part. Put on a plastic mask, tie it around your head and go out to play an NBA playoff game.Now the really hard part.Watch your team stink up the joint.
In the fog of the draft, this much is clear: Everyone thought Calvin Johnson was the best player on the board. The Lions chose the best player on the board.And you can have the best player on the board - and still lose a lot of games.The Lions had Barry Sanders for a decade and lost a lot of games. They've had Roy Williams - a Pro Bowl receiver - and have lost a lot of games. Now they have another receiver, Calvin Johnson, whose very name seems to cause analysts to salivate. He is big. He is fast. He apparently was born on Krypton.The roster just got better.
And with the 17th pick, Lions fans said "Who?"Gosder Cherilus. That's the pick. Gosder Cherilus. Yep. An offensive lineman with a name more suited to a horror film (the old guy in the haunted house?) has filled the spot that has been fretted over, agonized over and argued over for months. Gosder Cherilus. Boston College. Let us say right here that you or I have no idea if he will be any good.But no one saw him coming.
It's silly season again. The NFL draft is a few days away. At some point in history, the draft went from an insider thing to an outsider thing. That is when it got silly. It used to be a bunch of bleary-eyed football coaches in small rooms with chalkboards. Now there are endless TV updates, devoted Web sites, all-day Internet conversations, talk radio shows - all about which team might take which player with which pick.
The first hit that made any noise didn't come until five minutes in, and two of the loudest cheers came off the scoreboard: One when they ran a replay of Darren McCarty pummeling Claude Lemiuex back in 1997; the other when they showed Al Sobotka taking the octopus he'd been told not to swing on the ice and swinging it in the tunnel instead.
First of all, no more 1 o'clock games on Sunday, OK? Both teams looked half asleep when it started. There's a reason they call it "Hockey Night" in Canada, not "Hockey Brunch." You don't play the game with a bagel and a Sunday paper. Secondly, no more talk about the "new" NHL. So far in this Red Wings-Oilers series, it's the NHL playoffs as it always has been the NHL playoffs: funny-looking goals, trap defenses and a goalie you barely heard of suddenly becoming the story.
I was sitting at the Pistons game, fans screaming, giant men racing up the court, when Matt Dobek, the Pistons' PR vice president, pointed at a TV and said, "My god, did you see this?"There in the corner of the screen, was a "breaking news" alert: David Halberstam killed in a car crash.
They say the first stage of grief is denial. And at the funeral of the rapper Proof, some folks were apparently in severe denial - about what he contributed, the world he celebrated or their own part in the culture of violence that killed him.
Don't call it college. It's not college if you don't even declare a major. It's not college if you needn't bother finishing your second semester. It's not college if you spent most of your time in the gym, or on a plane, or being interviewed. It's not college just because you wore a uniform with the school's name on it.We are hearing lately about all these freshman basketball stars - Kevin Love of UCLA, O.J. Mayo of Southern Cal, Derrick Rose of Memphis, Michael Beasley of Kansas State - leaving college to jump to the NBA. Leaving college? Please. They were never really there.
"We're gonna get back to playing the way we're supposed to, or we'll get our butts kicked by a young, hungry team."- Lindsey Hunter, after the Pistons' 90-86 loss in their playoff openerSo here, in the final minute, was Jason Maxiell, stretched high as if on a rack. Remember, if Maxiell were a tube of toothpaste, he'd be squeezed from the bottom and all balled up near the top. Thick chested, broad shouldered, he is a mountain of a torso, and mountains are damn hard to move.
He gets the best parking spot. That's one perk. Over the years, he jokes, his space has moved "closer and closer" to the Joe Louis Arena door and now "I only get bumped for two people.""Mr. Ilitch being one?" I say."And his wife being the other," he laughs.
