Our government works with a system of checks and balances. Congress may pass a law but the Supreme Court can declare the law unconstitutional. The president is not allowed to go to war without congressiOur government works with a system of checks and balances. Congress may pass a law but the Supreme Court can declare the law unconstitutional. The president is not allowed to go to war without congressional approval and he is not allowed to lie in order to get that approval. O.k., so that part isn’t working too well at the moment.

We like to think that the rest of society works in the same way and that does seem to be working a little better. We hope that a second part of the system steps in to take over if a first part fails. After police officers in the Rodney King beating were found not guilty in a Simi Valley courtroom, two of the officers were found guilty of violating King’s civil rights in a federal court.

Even corporate chieftains are finding their way to jail. I once sat next to a retired working class woman on a subway who lost $100,000 in a 401K plan she had while working for WorldCom. She might take some comfort in the conviction of Bernard Ebbers on all nine counts related to accounting fraud that led to WorldCom’s bankruptcy.

I know that I take some comfort in the congressional hearings on steroids. Baseball almost got away with it. Mark McGwire almost got away with it. If Lil’ Kim and Martha Stewart can go to jail for lying to authorities, you know McGwire is feeling the heat. Sammy Sosa is just not very creative. No tears or qualifications, just a categorical denial. In a survey on sports radio, Sosa came in with the lowest vote of confidence, lower than McGwire, only 4% of listeners believed him.

One way or another, society will always find a way to make life difficult for someone who does not follow the rules.

Of Human Bondage by W. Somerset Maugham is probably the quintessential coming of age novel. The main character, Philip, is a lonely orphan with a clubfoot, a physical deformity that causes him great embarrassment. Philip is desperate to find freedom from his suffering and longs to find his place in the world. He’s given up on Christianity. There is no good and evil, he reasons, there are only those acts that benefit society and those that don’t. Furthermore, “Society has three arms in its contest with the individual, laws, public opinion, and conscience: the first two could be met by guile, guile is the only weapon of the weak against the strong: common opinion put the matter well when it stated that sin consisted of being found out; but conscience was the traitor within the gate…”

Laws failed in the case of steroids in baseball. There was no rule against using steroids even though it was illegal. Before Balco, there was no hard evidence that ballplayers were using steroids. The excitement of breaking Roger Maris’s record and the likelihood of breaking Hank Aaron’s record far outweighed the suspicion. Public opinion didn’t have a chance. Conscience is the voice from within. Who knew that it would be the voice of the class clown, Jose Canseco.

One way or another, society will always find a way to make life difficult for someone who does not follow the rules. This is not always a good thing. Watch Ken Burns latest documentary about Jack Johnson the boxer. Johnson was the first black heavyweight champion. He lived the high life – he rode fast cars and stayed in fancy hotels. He beat every great white hope thrown at him and he had sex with white women. He even married them. The government finally got him by sending him to jail for violating the Mann Act, a law designed to prevent prostitutes from being transported across state lines, because he gave his white girlfriend a train ticket to travel from Pennsylvania to Illinois.

Still, I think they got it right this time. They were making baseball pay for its arrogance. Baseball thought it could get away with lying about their complicity in steroid use and ride Boston’s improbable championship run into the next season and away from steroids. How much will baseball have to pay? They probably won’t lose their antitrust exemption. Mark McGwire won’t have an asterisk next to his record because the urine tests are long gone. But at least someone stepped in and caught baseball in its lie.onal approval and he is not allowed to lie in order to get that approval. O.k., so that part isn’t working too well at the moment.

We like to think that the rest of society works in the same way and that does seems to be working a little better. We hope that a second part of the system steps in to take over if a first part fails. After police officers in the Rodney King beating were found not guilty in a Simi Valley courtroom, two of the officers were found guilty of violating King’s civil rights in a federal court.

Even corporate chieftains are finding their way to jail these days. I once sat next to a retired working class woman on a subway who lost $100,000 in a 401K plan she had while working for WorldCom. She might take some comfort in the conviction of Bernard Ebbers on all nine counts related to accounting fraud that led to WorldCom’s bankruptcy.

I know that I take some comfort in the congressional hearings on steroids. Baseball almost got away with it. Mark McGwire almost got away with it. If Lil’ Kim and Martha Stewart can go to jail for lying to authorities, you know McGwire is feeling the heat. Sammy Sosa is just not very creative. No tears or qualifications, just a categorical denial. In a survey on sports radio, Sosa came in with the lowest vote of confidence, lower than McGwire, only 4% of listeners believed him.

One way or another, society will always find a way to make life difficult for someone who does not follow the rules.

Of Human Bondage by W. Somerset Maugham is probably the quintessential coming of age novel. The main character, Philip, is a lonely orphan with a clubfoot, a physical deformity that causes him great embarrassment. Philip is desperate to find freedom from his suffering and longs to find his place in the world. He’s given up on Christianity. There is no good and evil, he reasons, there are only those acts that benefit society and those that don’t. Furthermore, “Society has three arms in its contest with the individual, laws, public opinion, and conscience: the first two could be met by guile, guile is the only weapon of the weak against the strong: common opinion put the matter well when it stated that sin consisted of being found out; but conscience was the traitor within the gate…”

Laws failed in the case of steroids in baseball. There was no rule against using steroids even though it was illegal. Before Balco, there was no hard evidence that ballplayers were using steroids. The excitement of breaking Roger Maris’s record and the likelihood of breaking Hank Aaron’s record far outweighed the suspicion. Public opinion didn’t have a chance. Conscience is the voice from within. Who knew that it would be the voice of the class clown, Jose Canseco.

One way or another, society will always find a way to make life difficult for someone who does not follow the rules. This is not always a good thing. Watch Ken Burns latest documentary about Jack Johnson the boxer. Johnson was the first black heavyweight champion. He lived the high life – he rode fast cars and stayed in fancy hotels. He beat every great white hope thrown at him and he had sex with white women. He even married them. The government finally got him by sending him to jail for violating the Mann Act, a law designed to prevent prostitutes from being transported across state lines, because he gave his white girlfriend a train ticket to travel from Pennsylvania to Illinois.

Still, I think they got it right this time. They were making baseball pay for its arrogance. Baseball thought it could get away with lying about their complicity in steroid use and ride Boston’s improbable championship run into the next season and away from steroids. How much will baseball have to pay? They probably won’t lose their antitrust exemption. Mark McGwire won’t have an asterisk next to his record because the urine tests are long gone. But at least someone stepped in and caught baseball in its lie.

First of all, the Tennis Channel is not available where I live. Second of all, I have an addiction to television so I go out of my way to have very little of it in my life. However, my friends and I like to watch Monday Night Football. We auditioned every sports bar we could find, including Barney’s Beanery in West Hollywood. Strangely enough, considering it’s location, it is the most conservative bar I’ve ever seen. I felt like I was at happy hour for the Young Republicans. We went to Hollywood Billiards for a few weeks but we had to wear our winter socks and even then we were cold.

There was no choice. If I wanted to watch the game, I had to get cable or satellite service and run it through my projector since I don’t own a television. Comcast would have been perfect. For $10.87 a month I could get the basic package – network television. But my area is not serviced by Comcast, it’s serviced by Adelphia. Adelphia does not have the same basic package – their cheapest offering is $28.59. Satellite costs even more so I went with Adelphia.

To avoid sitting in front of the television and turning into a statue, I downloaded all of the channels through my VCR tuner and then promptly turned off all but a few channels. I kept ESPN2 because they show a lot of tennis and this is, after all, a sports column focusing on tennis.

A few months after installation, Adelphia sent me a notice saying that they are now offering the basic service except that they are eliminating the service I had been using. If I wanted to keep ESPN2, I would have to pay over $45 a month. I’d had enough of Adelphia and I was sick of having to remember to set up the VCR every time I wanted to record a tennis match. Today, for instance, ESPN and ESPN2 are broadcasting six hours of tennis.

So, I ordered satellite television service for $31.99 with a DVR for $4.98 per month extra. However, the DVR must be plugged into a phone line and the phone line has to have caller-id. It says so on the customer agreement.

I have a funky multiplex phone system like you see at your dentist’s office. The plugs are like Ethernet plugs and each jack outputs every phone line in the house, not just one phone line, so I will have to pay $125 to have a jack put into the living room.

I first time I called SBC to have caller-id added I hung up in frustration because they wanted the three numbers after my phone number on my bill. I said I didn’t have it available and they asked for the last four digits of my social security number. I said, “You shouldn’t have it.” The operator said, “You’re right we don’t have it. But I don’t have information about you so I can’t help you unless I have those three numbers.” What is this? You ask me for my social security number even though you don’t have it and it wouldn’t have been enough anyway? That was when I hung up.

I managed to calm down and call back only to find out that caller-id costs $6.17 per month. That is more than 25% of my local phone bill! Are these people kidding? No they’re not. So satellite service really costs $31.99 +$4.98+$6.17=$43.14. And that doesn’t include $125 for a new jack.

Wait, I thought to myself, SBC has satellite service and I should get a discount because I have an SBC phone line. Nope, SBC does not service my neighborhood.

I called up Dish Network to complain and whine and see if I really, really had to get caller-id. It turns out that, no, I don’t have to. Not only that, but I don’t need a phone line for the DVR either. The next highest model needs the phone line and caller-id, not the model I’m getting.

I once spent eight months retrieving $10,000 from a mortgage company that had incorrectly charged me for paying off my mortgage early after I sold my house. After five or six furious phone calls, reams of notes and a few phones smashed against the wall, I called up my mortgage broker who called the area representative for the mortgage company who promptly returned my money.

Yesterday there was an article in the New York Times that described various techniques people use to deal with the day-to-day frustrations in life. One man saves up all of those subscription cards that fall out of magazines and mails them back to the magazine so they will have to pay for the postage. I sense a kinship.

My life has become a smorgasbord of coping techniques and I am not coping. Before I start hoarding subscription cards and throwing fits and hanging up on operators who have no control over their company’s policies, possibly I should just make that extra phone call.

I was watching a show about Scottie Pippen on ESPN today and it got me wondering about Phil Jackson and Kobe Bryant. When you talk about Pippen’s career, you always have to cover the 1994 playoff game against the New York Knicks when Pippen refused to go back into the game with 1.8 seconds left on the clock. He was outraged that Phil Jackson had drawn up the game winning shot for Toni Kukoc instead of him.

This was a huge moment for Scottie Pippen. Michael Jordan had retired the season before and Pippen wanted to use this opportunity to come out of Jordan’s shadow and take his rightful place as one of the top NBA players in history. The Bulls had won 55 games during the regular season, Pippen was the MVP at the All-Star game and he came in third in voting for the league MVP. Everything was working out. Making the winning shot in a playoff game would be another big step. It would make him just like Mike.

Of course Phil Jackson knew all this. He had already coached Pippen and Jordan to three championships and he knew what it was like to be the teammate of someone as competitive and insufferable as Jordan. But he chose to give Kukoc the shot. He probably decided that Kukoc could create the best shot for himself. Pippen had a transcendent all round game that made everyone on his team better but he wasn’t the one-on-one player that Jordan was. Still, neither was anyone else and Kukoc was an NBA rookie so it must have hurt Pippen’s pride deeply to see the opportunity taken away. Pippen would still have an argument today. Kukoc has had a solid career but he’s never even been an All-Star.

Things are tough here in Lakerland. The team doesn’t play defense and the longest winning streak of the year is three games. One coach has left already and an interim coach is trying to teach them the triangle offense on the run. There are not a lot of NBA coaches out there that don’t seem like retreads. There is really only one available coaching star: Phil Jackson.

At the moment, Los Angeles is like a person who is in a bad relationship. You know it’s never going to work but you keep trying to find ways to convince yourself that it could work. We are all desperate for Phil to come back and coach the Lakers and we’re trying to convince ourselves that Phil would do it. That’s the first sign of desperation. Then we are trying to convince ourselves that Kobe Bryant would welcome Phil back. That’s the second sign.

Phil made it abundantly clear that the offense goes through Shaquille O’Neal during his tenure in Los Angeles. True, Kobe was given a lot of opportunities to make the last second shot but he knew he would never be able to reach his potential, or get the credit he was due, as long as he was Shaq’s teammate.

We are all desperate for Phil to come back and coach the Lakers and we’re trying to convince ourselves that Phil would do it. That’s the first sign of desperation.

I know Kobe watches ESPN. If he saw the show about Pippen today, he would have felt a kinship with him. He may agree with Jackson’s decision to give the shot to Kukoc, he may not. But he certainly doesn’t want to give Phil Jackson another opportunity to make a decision that might have such a huge effect on a player’s career. Especially his.

Don’t get me wrong here, basketball is a team game and the idea is to win. But the NBA brand depends on superstars and a superstar psyche depends on a big ego. That’s just the way it is.

Meanwhile, back here in Lakerland it’s time to move beyond our relationship with Phil. It’s over.

The collective minds of NBA basketball are much smarter than the NHL. They will agree on a new collective bargaining agreement before the start of next season. The players’ union and David Stern disagree on two important issues. Stern wants a twenty-year-old age limit for NBA players – it’ll never happen – and he wants to expand the NBA development league so players can be sent down to the developmental league just as baseball players can be sent to the minor league – it should happen.

I’ve talked about his before. A true basketball minor league, a league whose players are under contract to NBA teams, should help crumble the pretense of college basketball. College basketball is based on the idea that the players are amateurs, that they don’t get paid. You might not pay much attention if Maurice Clarett says he received $3,000 a week for a no-show job but you better believe that Chris Webber received $280,000 from a booster while he was one of the fab five at Michigan because it’s there in the court records.

Basketball players could choose to be true student-athletes instead of taking courses called “Playing Basketball” and “Officiating” to meet eligibility requirements. Boosters won’t need to pay for no-show jobs because a player coming out of high school could actually make a living in minor league ball. Players will have somewhere they can mentally and physically develop instead of sitting at the end of the Portland bench for four years as Jermaine O’Neal did. Speaking of the bench, it might stop the practice of assigning the last person on the bench a phantom injury when a better player comes off the injured list. Send them down so they can play.

It also gives teams more options. The next time a rookie refuses to go back into a game, as Carmelo Anthony did last year, threaten him with a minor league assignment. If Darius Miles has a fit and drops the “N” word on coach Maurice Cheeks over twenty times, what can Portland do? They can suspend him for a few games but so what?

Here we get we get into the third contentious issue in the collective bargaining agreement: shortening maximum guaranteed contracts from seven years to four. Probably a good idea. Miles has a six year, $48 million contract, guaranteed.

It’s a funny thing. I was looking for all the evidence that colleges make money hand over fist from sports and I kept finding research that says it isn’t so. One third of Division 1A athletic programs are losing money. And if schools were forced to include capital expenses – upkeep, new facilities – in their costs, every Division 1A program loses money.

The only one who isn’t losing money is the NCAA. The television contract for March Madness is $6 billion over 11 years. After spreading the money around to member teams, they have $20 million left over this year for administrations costs.

A basketball minor league could help universities help themselves. Academic institutions could return to educating students instead of trying to educate athletes who don’t want to be there. Colleges might begin to rein in sport program budgets. Schools would not bankrupt themselves by becoming Division 1A program without the necessary millions.

…if schools were forced to include capital expenses – upkeep, new facilities – in their costs, every Division 1A program loses money

And I would have enough money to go to a professional basketball game because I could see my local minor league team play. It’s a good thing.

Spring training is here. The posturing has started up where it left off – Schilling calling out Alex Rodriguez for slapping the ball out of Bronson Arroyo’s glove has turned into the Red Sox piling on Rodriguez as soon as camp opened. Lots of fans call up radio shows to talk about football and basketball but it’s nothing compared to baseball talk.

I can’t count how many new friends I’ve taken to a baseball game who have refused to ever go again. “Jeez, it’s so boring. I don’t know what you see in it.” I’m jabbering their ear off about an upcoming pitching change and the left handed pinch hitter, the available setup men and the player they’re showcasing because the trade deadline is near. And they are not getting it. Half of baseball is the undercurrent, all the things that could possibly happen and all the talk that leads to more talk that could, just might, turn into a defining moment on the field. Teams know that only a handful of players would ever run out to the mound and start a fight with a pitcher who throws at their head. Most players posture and yell but don’t stray more than two feet from the plate. Jason Varitek has a toughness that Rodriguez doesn’t and their fight helped define the Red Sox last year.

This year, though, it’s been laughably over the top. A newspaper reports a Red Sox player saying that Rodriguez is not a Yankee – in other words he’s not a winner. Another player called him a deadbeat dad because he was running steps at 6am instead of attending to his newborn baby girl. Rodriguez’ teammates don’t have his back. How silly does all that sound? Before I could get around to weighing in on the silliness, Harvey Araton’s column in the New York Times shows how the media misrepresented the Red Sox players’ comments and says that reporters repeatedly asked questions about Rodriguez when they’d already been given an answer that wasn’t negative enough for them. Araton calls it “one of the most distasteful instances I have witnessed in 45 years of covering baseball,” which is a bit much. Where has he been? What does he think sells newspapers?

Half of baseball is the undercurrent, all the things that could possibly happen and all the talk that leads to more talk that could, just might, turn into a defining moment on the field.

Still, I’m happy that he set things straight. It does point out the place of posturing and jabber in the undercurrent. Coming back from 0-3 to win a playoff series is thrilling and winning the world series is thrilling. Talking about it, though, that supports entire radio stations and a year round season of newspapers.

Practice and Competition Report: practiced for and hour and a half and played three sets with T, 6-4, 4-6, 6-2
Solutions Analysis:
1. Looking for a solution to trying to hard. Three times I approached the net with the intention of smashing the ball instead of just getting it into my opponent’s court. Three times I hit an unforced error.
Success Analysis:
1. As I’m warming up my serve, I use a very relaxed service stroke. Instead of trying to crush the ball, I used the relaxed stroke throughout the match and my first serve percentage was very high. Watch Federer, relaxation incarnate.
2. At the beginning of the match, T was hitting the ball short to get me to the net and then lobbing me. I kep hitting my overhead into the net. I hung in there, though, and started getting the overheads over the net and started to win points at the net. Rather than get upset after hitting the ball into the net a few times, I persisted in focusing on getting the ball across the net and eventually that’s what I did.
3. I returned serve very well.