Shaun White of the United States celebrates after winning the gold medal in the snowboarding halfpipe event on February 17, 2010

It’s been a wild week in Vancouver, and the Winter Olympics are just heating up. John Powers of the Boston Globe joins Bill to discuss skiing, skating, and everything in between.

Many companies used to be “proud sponsors” of Team USA, but major organizations like Bank of America promptly dropped their sponsorships before Vancouver 2010. Fortunately, Bill reports, that hasn’t prevented the U.S. from excelling in the Winter Games, as some of America’s big names and small businesses have stepped up to sponsor Team USA.

Cookies and milk, Romeo and Juliet, Batman and Robin – they just go together. But cross-country skiing and rifle shooting? As Only A Game’s Sadie Babits reports, the Winter Olympic biathlon brings athletics and accuracy together, and Team USA is eager to win its first medal in the event.

Mark Yost’s new book, Varsity Green, claims that massive coaching contracts and countless NCAA violations have tarnished the reputation of today’s major college sports. He joins Bill to reveal some glaring examples of how college athletics have gone crooked.

Tiger Woods finally faced the music on Friday, and Bill and Only A Game analyst Charlie Pierce are ready to discuss his apology. Also, they’ll cover snow sports, a birthday present for Michael Jordan, and a great excuse for missing the first week of spring training.

Dozens of dogs travel to the Big Apple each year for the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show, and they’re treated to all the amenities: expert grooming, plenty of attention, and of course, a top class hotel. As Only A Game’s Ron Schachter reports, New York’s Hotel Pennsylvania opens its doors to these “very important pooches” year after year.

Lance Armstrong celebrates on the podium after winning the 15th stage of the Tour de France cycling race between Bagneres-de-Bigorre and Luz-Ardiden, French Pyrenees, Monday, July 21, 2003. (AP Photo/Christophe Ena)

Bill previews the Tour de France.  And on the topic of the legendary race, Bill reviews the book Lance, and finds that enjoyment of the book depends largely on preconceived notions of cyclist Lance Armstrong.  Armstrong fans will admire author John Wilcockson’s insider look at the famous and controversial athlete, while detractors will point to the character traits Wilcockson fails to mention.

The storylines are flying fast and furious at Wimbledon this weekend.  The women’s final has a familiar-and familial- feel to it, and the men’s final has plenty of talent and star power of its own. 

The landscape of sports, and sports coverage, shifts radically as the age of New Media progresses.  But change isn’t always for the best.  Keith O’Brien chronicles the impact that a dying newspaper industry has on fans who crave news from personalities they trust.

Bill remembers a time when dinosaurs roamed the earth-and newspaper beat writers were the only voices young boys could count on to cover their favorite teams. 

Only A Game analyst Charlie Pierce joins Bill to talk about the latest sports news.  On tap for discussion is a Cuban defector, an unusual baseball delay, and a disgruntled soccer star. 

Only A Game’s John Kalish is in New York to spend time with Billy “The Greek,” a fisherman with a reputation as big as some of the fish he catches.

Coach Auriemma smiled and said, “Recruit Rebecca Lobo.”

If someone were to ask David Falk what advice he might have for a young attorney aspiring to be a great sports agent, and if David Falk had Gino Auriemma’s sense of humor, Falk might say, “Sign Michael Jordan as your client.”

In The Bald Truth: Secrets of Success from the Locker Room to the Boardroom, Mr. Falk is more inclined to say things like “Say what you mean, and mean what you say,” and “Remember the golden rule: He who has the gold rules.”

David Falk made a lot of money representing Michael Jordan, Patrick Ewing, and many other pro athletes. He certainly must know a good deal about how to negotiate contracts, structure payment schedules, and navigate around salary caps. But an awful lot of The Bald Truth is devoted to Mr. Falk’s contentions that he’s smarter than a lot of people who went to Ivy League schools, even though Falk went to Syracuse and got his law degree at George Washington University. I’d always been under the impression that both Syracuse and G.W. were excellent schools, but Mr. Falk presents his success at building and then selling his agency for one hundred million dollars as a triumph over the handicap represented by his credentials.

And to hear Mr. Falk tell it, the triumph has been monumental. Every owner in the NBA but one asked for his help in building their basketball teams. “Virtually every agent in the business” has tried to “replicate our blueprint.”

“I like to set trends,” David Falk writes. Then he likes to pat himself on the back for what he’s done.

Sometimes it’s ironic, as when players clad in helmets developed for their safety features figure out how well the new headgear can work as a weapon. Then the players collapse the lungs of their opponents, break their own necks, and otherwise invent damage that would have been impossible without the safety helmets.

And sometimes the hypocrisy is just funny.

Beginning in March, the month when even lots of people who don’t know tar heels from tangelos pay attention to college basketball, Fox Sports Net will be broadcasting programs featuring former coach Bob Knight and long-time broadcaster Billy Packer analyzing the NCAA men’s tournament from a sports book in Las Vegas.

It would be refreshing if this move were to be accompanied by the cheerful admission by everybody involved that college basketball generates a fantastic amount of gambling, since broadcasting from one of the places where the activity is legal would seem to constitute the embrace of the symbiotic relationship between the game and the act of putting one’s money where one’s mouth is. Instead, Billy Packer told reporters on Monday that the show wouldn’t mention gambling. This is no doubt because the NCAA prefers to maintain happy fantasy number eleventy seven on its list of same, namely that people watch the games for entertainment purposes only. But Mr. Packer also said that he wants the broadcasts to be part of the experience of watching games in Las Vegas, which, he maintained, “ranks second only to watching the games from courtside.”

Am I the only one led to wonder what – besides the opportunity to bet – earns Las Vegas that distinction? Top notch guacamole? Especially crunchy chips? Numerous wine-dark couches of buttery-smooth Corinthian leather set in front of the world’s largest high def TV’s?  

And after a program from Las Vegas analyzing, which is to say handicapping, college basketball games with no mention of gambling, what comes next? A cooking show about the delights and nutritional benefits of vegetarian cuisine filmed in a steak house?

Monday’s verdict in the class action law suit means the National Football League Players Association has been found guilty of cheating its most vulnerable members.

The federal jury in San Francisco agreed with the attorneys representing the retired players that the NFLPA had cut them out of payments they should have received from video game companies using the images of the retirees. The union had advised the electronics companies to alter those images so they wouldn’t have to pay the players.

More than two thousand retired players are party to the successful suit, so the multi-million dollar award may not be large for any of the individuals concerned. But the precedent could be significant. If the retired players can build on the successful assertion that their union shouldn’t be allowed to neglect their interests in favor of further enriching active players, more of the men who were damaged during their careers may get some relief from the injuries that have diminished their lives.

By now the stories of Andre Waters, Mike Webster, Terry Long, and various other veterans of the National Football League who suffered irreversible brain damage as a result of playing pro football are well known. And these grim sagas of delirium, homelessness, and premature death may be more common than previously assumed. In his new book, Giants Among Men, Jack Cavanaugh includes the story of Hardy Brown, whom he calls “the meanest man in the NFL” during the 1950’s. After his career ended, Brown was diagnosed with dementia caused in part, according to physicians, by “many blows to the head” which he suffered as a player. He died in a mental institution in 1991.

Historically, the teams and the leagues that have employed pro football players might be charitably characterized as negligent in terms of taking responsibility for damage to their workforce. The opposition of physicians employed by the teams notwithstanding, recent research, including the clinical evidence of brain damage to players dead in middle age, has brought some pressure for change in that attitude.  Perhaps the next step will be for the union to more energetically join the struggle to address the health and insure the security of the players who helped build the NFL into the colossus it is today.

What I will remember about the ’08 World Series is the ridiculous images of Game 5, part one.
 
Rays sliding into second base and home plate preceded by mud and spray. Hitters on both teams wiping off their bats between pitches, hoping said bats wouldn’t fly out of their slippery hands and helicopter into the box seats. Announcer Tim McCarver solemnly proclaiming that in a driving rainstorm, the pitcher has the advantage. Maybe he was right, maybe not: but in a driving rainstorm, why were they playing baseball?

Commissioner Bud Selig can thank Carlos Pena for singling in the run that tied the game in the top of the sixth inning and handed the umpires the opportunity to suspend the circus. Otherwise we’d have had more images of Tampa Bay Manager Joe Madden on the dugout step, ear flaps down, huffing and puffing gusts of vapor into the freezing gale as if he were skippering a small boat in a bad sea rather than a baseball team.

The following night it snowed in Philadelphia. The summer game, indeed.

Hindsight is easy, so let’s skip the question about whether Game 5 should have started as scheduled. But folly can beget learning, and what Major League Baseball and the players’ union should learn from this post-season is that they ought to cut the regular season back to 154 games or fewer so that the post-season, even if each series requires the maximum number of games, would be over by the end of the third week in October. Of course this wouldn’t guarantee that cold, wet weather wouldn’t interrupt or postpone games, but it would give the World Series a cushion it no longer has, and it would eliminate the pressure Commissioner Selig apparently felt to try to get game five played on a night when the weather made a farce of his spectacle. Ironically, according to the schedule for 2009 which Major League Baseball recently released, if next year’s World Series goes to seven games, it will end on November fifth.
    
Major League Baseball’s season has grown longer as the various parties profiting from it have grown greedier. Recently we’ve been hammered by a lesson regarding greed as it operates throughout our now-hobbling economy. The difference between the financial landscape in general and Major League Baseball in particular is that the latter would be a lot easier to fix.