Coach's Corner

I suppose if anyone's to blame, it's Dr. Spock -- not to be confused with Mr. Spock of the Starship Enterprise -- but Dr. Benjamin Spock, the late doctor of the baby boomer generation. I'd venture that Dr. Spock's book, published on the cusp of the boom, about a kinder way of child rearing, sat in all of your childhood homes. Of course I could come up with many seldom-used books: Encyclopedia Britannicas, a musty copy of Don Quixote, Roget's Thesaurus, that looked good on our parents' dusty bookshelves. In fact, these same infrequently consulted tomes sit within sight of where I type today.

But Dr. Spock's Baby and Child Care was read -- obsessively -- by our moms and dads, an educated generation who believed they could be better parents if they followed the commonsense advice of this kindly, gentle doctor. As a matter of fact I, as a tot, read Spock; probably more compulsively than my parents … just to make sure Mom was getting it right. A precocious and obnoxious child, it wasn't unusual for me to quote Dr. Spock verbatim when I felt a day off from school was appropriate. Yes, well, here I go again. About to fly off on an irrelevant tangent … yes. I was about to blame Spock for the permissiveness of my generation and, far worse, for its most mutant and corrosive offspring: political correctness. Spock came to mind when I caught myself correcting my thinking, nothing that I'd actually said, but what I was pondering, on the subject of stupidity.

Spock taught us we couldn't call a person a dumb-shit, at least not to their face. This sort of harsh, negative talk harms the self-image of tots, teens, and octogenarians alike. And so I find myself unconsciously censoring my mutterings as I read the day's sports page. I can't call golf czar Tim Finchem, for example, a dumb fuck. This unfairly paints Mr. Finchem with far too broad a brush. He might be a speed-reader and a whiz in the stock market.

All of him can't be a dumb fuck. More on this in a moment.

Being PC is damn hard work; calling for solid, abstract thinking for working out how to talk to people. Since this is my own little private space, today I chose to ignore political correctness. It appears last week, for some reason (global warming, prolific whale hunting, ozone problems) many prominent people in the sports arena were consuming bottles of stupid pills … mistaking them for M&M's, I guess.

° First, we'll visit Milwaukee and the Three Refs on the Grassy Knoll. The Bucks, playing late in the postseason for the first time since the days of Lew Alcindor, have collectively and individually lost their minds. They're convinced a league conspiracy is in place to cheat them out of an East title, presumably because the folks in Milwaukee think America is clamoring for the 76ers to be mulch for the Laker machine instead of the Bucks. Normally rational coach George Karl certified this slide toward insanity when he publicly put forth this festering hypothesis in the wake of his team's pathetic collapse, losing a 16-point lead and Game 5 to Philly. Sam Cassell, a sweet player (who's never fouled anyone but in turn is brutally fouled every time he touches a ball) picked up the conspiracy theme, followed by a usually fairly erudite Ray Allen, who was about to start into alien abductions before Ervin Johnson pulled him aside. Most conspiracy theories require many leaps of faith, this one more than most. 1) Why should the league care who wins? These are going to be the lowest-rated finals, no matter who plays, in decades. 2) Glenn "Big Dog" Robinson had a three-foot jump shot to win Game 5, which he missed. Allen himself missed the easy tip-in of Dog's brick at the buzzer. 3) It's hard to get many foul calls when the last time a Buck drove the lane was Oscar Robertson in '73. Conclusion: Bucks hitting the Schlitz too hard.

° Arizona Diamondbacks manager Bob Brenly went totally batshit when San Diego's young catcher Ben Davis, in a 2-0 game, had the gall to actually try to win the game by getting on with a bunt, thus breaking up Curt Schilling's no-hit bid in the eighth inning. This sort of poor form (trying to win) was once considered a good thing. Conclusion: Brenly's swallowing too much Red Man and hitting the Schlitz too hard.

° Jerry Jones announced the Cowboys would win 10 games and make the playoffs. Conclusion: Jerry needs to put down the single malt and switch to Schlitz.

° The Supreme Court makes a rare sensible decision, allowing a crippled Casey Martin to ride in his cart. PGA chief Tim Finchem is responsible for a public relations fiasco of a dimension I'm at a loss to express. Most of the tour pros, following Finchem's stupid, misguided, idiotic lead, further made collective asses of themselves with petty, loutish remarks, particularly Jack Nicklaus, who needs a thick leather muzzle strapped on his wrinkled mug. The pros came across as selfish, insensitive, spoiled country-club snobs. Conclusion: spoiled country-club snobs? Pro golfers? Where's the Schlitz?

° Avalanche goalie Patrick Roy, wandering the rink like he's playing Pin the Tail on the Donkey, almost cost his team one game and did it in another. Another Molson, Patrick?