The myth behind the "Patriot Way"

Joan Vennochi wrote a delightful little piece of tripe in today's Boston Globe stating that given the Aaron Hernandez murder case, the New England Patriots should go back to the so-called "Patriot Way" of "valuing character over performance," as first defined by the late Myra Kraft, wife of owner Robert Kraft.

However, to believe in the Patriot Way, you have to believe in its founding myth, what I call "The Myth of Christian Peter." We pick up Vennochi's tale after the Patriots drafted Christian Peter out of Nebraska in 1996, in spite of Peter's troubled past.

"(Myra) took her concerns to her husband. He looked into them, and the Patriots cut Peter loose. It was the first time a drafted player was waived before the start of training camp. "I don't want thugs and hoodlums here," Kraft reportedly told Parcells. But Myra Kraft was the first to take a stand on the issue."

But in order to believe that story, you have to believe the reason the Patriots gave for drafting Peter in the first place ... that they didn't know the extent of his history.

And if you believe that story, you have to believe, incomplete NFL security file or not, no one in the Patriots organization read the newspaper, watched TV or read Sports Illustrated.

Let me put it this way. In April of 1996, I was finishing up graduate school and living in Albany, NY. I had no connection with an NFL team, nor was I about to have one. What I knew about what was going on in the sports world was from the newspaper, magazines, television and the Internet.

But I knew about Christian Peter, and you mean to tell me the New England Patriots, particularly their owner, didn't?

The thing is, though, if the story is about ignorance of a problem that you quickly rectify once it becomes known, that makes a lot better story than the one where it potentially looks like after his more-celebrated teammate with his own history was drafted high in the first round seemingly without angering too many people, you drafted Peter in the fifth round, when no one but hard-core fans were watching, but lo and behold, women's groups apparently were watching, and they weren't pleased.

So you cut him, claim what appears to be beyond all reason that the organization didn't know (and if people in the organization did know, but didn't tell the owner, why were they not fired on the spot?), and get on with building the myth of an organization that does things the right way.

Some questions for Kyle Petty

Dear Kyle Petty:

So you said some stuff about Danica Patrick.

I'm a fan of hers (and my wife, who otherwise couldn't give a darn about NASCAR, bought one of her hats when we visited Stewart-Haas Racing while we were on vacation), so I hope she eventually proves you wrong. However, I'm not here to disparage you, your driving career, your family or your work on TV; in fact, I love what you guys do on TNT and wish you covered the whole season.

And I have no idea what your ponytail has to do with anything, either.

However, if you are reading this ... first, thanks! ... there are a couple things I'd like to ask.

1. In your opinion, is Danica the only bad driver?

One of the things that has always bothered me about NASCAR announcers is their refusal to criticize anyone or say that someone isn't good enough. Now I understand that the worst driver in NASCAR's lowest-tier series can do things with a racecar that the average person could never dream of, but there are Sprint Cup drivers who are out of their league.

Have you ever talked about any of them?

Like I said, I'm not here to rip you for your opinion. You said what you honestly thought, better that than some marble-mouthed answer that you don't really believe. And if you said what you said in response to a question, has anyone else ever asked you about a driver you didn't think was very good? What did you say?

Or is Danica Patrick the only bad driver?

2. What if she does get good?

Maybe as she gains experience, Danica will become a good Sprint Cup driver. I'm not talking Jimmie Johnson, or even someone who wins one championship, although that would be cool. I'm talking someone that runs in the top 10 to 20 most of the time, makes the Chase as often as not and even picks off a win once in a while.

You see, it's hard to argue with people who say Danica isn't very good, especially given the amount of publicity she receives, although I'm still waiting for the Venn diagram of Tim Tebow fans who complain that Danica "gets too much attention." She's not very good right now.

But what if she gets good? I wouldn't expect you to make a big show about being wrong on TV, but would you admit she's better than you thought she would be?

What do you think Danica's other critics will do? Will they admit she's better than they thought, or will they always find some reason to criticize her? And if they do insist on criticizing, will it be about something other than her ability?

Thanks for reading.

Dreaming of a Jeter comeback

I had an awesome dream last night. You want to hear about it?

Of course you do.

Cue the harps.

I'm flipping through the Twitter machine, checking a little news, a little sports, the big U.S. Senate election here in Massachusetts yesterday.

And then I saw it, with a picture and everything, from Derek Jeter himself:

"Visit from Dr. Kelly over the weekend, who gave me the best news -- the green light to play games again!"

Wow! If that's true, it's awesome. Jayson Nix has done a nice job at shortstop in Jeter's absence, but still, this is Derek Jeter ... star, captain, talisman. (Why, yes, I do let English soccer terms slip into my dreams. Why do you ask?)

So I keep reading, and there's Yankees GM Brian Cashman confirming the news. Jeter would probably start his rehab stint in Tampa, first as designated hitter, then moving to shortstop. If all went well, he'd move up to Trenton for a few games, and then Scranton. Barring any setbacks, he might be back in the Yankees' lineup in a couple weeks, maybe even for the Twins series the weekend before the All-Star Break.

During the Yankees TV broadcast, Michael Kay and the gang are naturally stoked, and John Sterling is absolutely out of his tree on the radio. I'm pretty sure he even missed a catchphrase or two.

After the game, Jeter is all anyone wants to talk to Joe Girardi about, even though the Yankees won on a walkoff homer by Ichiro.


My fellow Yankees fans are also going nuts, knowing that the main man could be back before too much longer.

"Maybe this is the start," I think. "Jeter comes back, then A-Rod, then Granderson, then maybe Teixeira (spoiler alert: no). They've been pitching well, and if that keeps up ... ."

Katy Perry's "Wide Awake" comes on. No, I haven't asked Mrs. Last Honest if she chose it as her alarm for that reason.

Wow, that was quite a dream. It was like the dreams I still have a few times a year where I'm convinced I have a term paper due the next day, and I have to wake up to remember I haven't had any term papers due since 1996.

That tweet from Jeter seemed so ... real.

It's over. It's really over.

The Stanley Cup Finals were not supposed to end this way.

I don't mean they weren't supposed to end with the Chicago Blackhawks winning, or even winning the way they did, a way that left Boston Bruins supporters to stare numbly, curse or both. The Blackhawks are fine and worthy champions, and as Michael Hurley noted, it was about the hockey, without a lot of other garbage.

"It was evident when, minutes after seeing their team suffer the most stunning of defeats, a healthy majority of the fans in attendance stayed in their seats to applaud the effort displayed on the ice. They didn't hurl cups and rags onto the ice but instead gave a rousing ovation before doing the work of any good hockey fan base and booing Gary Bettman."

No, they were supposed to end in Game 7, winner-take-all ... or even better, in overtime of Game 7, next goal wins the Stanley Cup, like when you're playing in the yard as a kid and your parents call you in for supper and you say, "Next score wins."

It was the only way the series could end. This was a series where neither team had a three-goal lead, and the only two-goal leads were as follows:

* Game 1 -- Boston from 51 seconds to 3:08 of the second period and 6:09 to eight minutes of the third period.

* Game 3 -- Boston from 14:05 of the second period to the end of the game.

* Game 4 -- Chicago from 8:41 to 14:43 and 15:32 to 17:22 of the second period.

* Game 5 -- Chicago from 5:13 of the second period to 3:40 of the third period and the last 14 seconds of the game after an empty-net goal.

The entire rest of the series was a one-goal margin or tied, and three games went to overtime.

It was thrilling stuff, between two outstanding teams in cities that are passionate about hockey, and the ratings, relatively speaking, were high.

There's only one problem ... next season won't consist of nothing but the Bruins and Blackhawks leaving their guts on the ice. Not only will there be untold nameless, faceless matchups (Columbus versus Florida in February, anyone?), but playoff hockey may be more different from regular-season hockey than any other sport's regular season compared to its playoffs.

It has to be. Not only are the teams better during the playoffs, players go out there basically every other night for two months putting their bodies through such punishment (Exhibit A, Patrice Bergeron) that if they tried it during the regular season, there wouldn't be any players left for the playoffs.

So savor what you just saw, everyone, enjoy next season where you can and get ready for another playoff ride.

 

The meaning of Donnie Baseball

When Don Mattingly brought his Dodgers to Yankee Stadium last week to face the Yankees, he got the obvious reaction -- a hero's welcome from both the team and the fans.

As Yankees legends go, Mattingly's career didn't reach the same gaudy heights as others -- unless he pulls a Joe Torre and becomes a highly successful manager, he won't make the Hall of Fame (thanks, injuries), and his only postseason experience was a losing series against Seattle when the Yankees were the 1995 wildcard -- but he is beloved by Yankees fans, particularly those of a certain age ...

... like me, in my early 40s. It's no accident that his retired number is my Twitter avatar.

For us, rooting the the Yankees during the Mattingly years meant supporting a team that was sometimes good, sometimes bad, sometimes awful, but never quite good enough until 1994 and the strike and 1995 and the fifth game against Seattle and 1996 with Tino Martinez playing first base. The Yankees' Wikipedia page actually has a section called "Struggles: The Mattingly Years (1982-1995)."

It meant seeing unbelievable greatness and an unfair decline, betrayed by a body that could no longer do what it did before.

But during that time, Mattingly was our guy. As wave upon wave of players came and went, he was there, giving all he had, even if was only good and not the great of his early years. Yet we remembered those early years, and we rejoiced at the reminders of them.



After Mattingly retired, the Yankees started a new dynasty, and we loved the heroes of those teams: Tino, Bernie Williams, Paul O'Neill, David Wells, Andy Pettitte, Mariano Rivera and Derek Jeter. But before any of those guys, there was Don Mattingly.

And we'll always love him for it.

Sports travels: Bristol Motor Speedway

I was recently merging photos I had stored on various computers onto a single thumb drive, and came across photos I had taken from visiting sports venues over the years. So I figured I'd share some of them, along with some stories behind them.

* * * * *

Several years ago, Mrs. Last Honest and I were contemplating a vacation around a friend's wedding in Durham, N.C., when she came to me with an idea.

We could fly into Raleigh, then drive to Asheville, which is one of our favorite places, for a couple days. Then we could drive a couple hours down out of the mountains to Knoxville, TN, for the University of Tennessee and the Women's Basketball Hall of Fame ...

... "and if you're good, you can go to Bristol."

Apparently I was good, because when we left Knoxville, we drove the couple hours up to Bristol Motor Speedway. The first thing I noticed about the track was before we ever got there, namely that it is out in the middle of nowhere. It actually appears to be nowhere near the city itself or the famous sign indicating Bristol straddles the states of Virginia and Tennessee.

It was quite the chore just getting there.

Yes, I stood in the middle of the road to take this picture.

We weren't sure how much we were going to be able to see once we got there. I had called ahead about tours, and there weren't any the day we were going to be there, as there was supposed to be some kind of testing going on that day, I think for a Late Model series of some kind. But the woman said we could watch the testing if we wanted.

However, when we got there, we were told the track wasn't open at all. I registered some displeasure at this, and the woman told me there was one open gate I could go through if I wanted to see the track, so long as I stayed in the stands.

I was cool with that, so off to the track we went.

I would have been OK with this.

After a little while gazing around some the bleachers, someone (I have no idea who) told us that we could walk down on the track if we wanted to, as long as we didn't bring our car on the track.

I didn't run through the fence, but I didn't exactly waste my time getting down there. Once I was down on the track, it seemed strangely ... small. Being only a half-mile, it obviously doesn't have as large a footprint as a Daytona or Charlotte, both of which we've been to, but I imagined stands stretching up into the sky, and it didn't look that way.

Somehow, I imagined it would be bigger.

Of course, the nice part about Bristol being a half-mile track was that it wasn't very hard to walk around. Walking up, though, was a bit more of a challenge. This was in the days before the track was reconfigured, so the banking was a straight 36 degrees.

It's pretty steep. Notice the tire marks headed toward the wall in the upper left-hand corner.

Check out the gouges in the concrete.

After we had explored as much as we could, we headed out after an unexpectedly up-close look at the track.

If players want greater drug penalties, they probably can have them

Out of the latest chapter in Major League Baseball's history with performance-enhancing drugs, the Biogenesis scandal, comes word that players really, really want something to be done, that they're really, really mad about what the cheaters have done to their game. Richard Justice said as much in an interview last night. (To hear the specific comments, go to about the 2:03 and 4:22 marks.)

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And Arizona Diamondbacks pitcher David Hernandez expressed much the same sentiment.

"I think you should be out of baseball. It sounds harsh but at the end of the day you're making it harder on somebody else who is trying to make it in the game. You're essentially ending someone else's career if you're cheating and putting up numbers. You should be gone."

If what Justice is saying is true, and if Hernandez's beliefs are shared by his fellow players, this can happen, and maybe soon ...

... if the players ask for it.

Major League Baseball players have a union, actually, one of the few strong unions remaining in America. They have player representatives to that union, and the union has an executive director in Michael Weiner who is hired by the players to look out for their best interests. If the union membership wants stricter penalties for drug users, what's stopping them from going to Weiner and saying, "Make it happen"?

And if they do, what do you think Bud Selig will do if Weiner marches into the commissioner's office and says, "My membership demands this, and I demand it"? You don't think that Selig wouldn't love to have one of his last achievements as commissioner before he retires to be a suspension program that's not only stricter than anything he ever bargained for, but something the players demanded their union negotiate with him?

My guess is he'd run over a small child to make that announcement.

Exhibit A for Alex Rodriguez's defense

So the baseball world has been in a bit of a tizzy over the news that Tony Bosch was going to cooperate with Major League Baseball's investigation of his former Biogenesis of America clinic and the hefty suspensions that could result, also known as "YYYYEEESSSS! THEY'RE FINALLY GOING TO GET ALEX RODRIGUEZ ... (and Ryan Braun, and a bunch of other guys)!"

Hell, it's so bad, I'm not even sure Yankees fans have had A-Rod's back, although their fondest wish in that regard may not come true.

But as the details of the story game out, I started to think people who were assuming the players would have the book thrown at them about 20 minutes ago should pump the brakes a little bit.

After all, any suspension is going to be met with an instant appeal, and given the severity, I wouldn't be surprised if it eventually hit the courts. When it does, Major League Baseball's lead witness will be a guy who only agreed to cooperate if he could be indemnified against liability, have the lawsuit against him dropped, be provided security and have a good word put in with anyone who might charge him with a crime.

However, I understand those things happen sometimes, that bad guys agree to become state's evidence to prosecute a larger crime ...

... but then came this.

When (Alex) Rodriguez rebuffed Anthony Bosch's request for money, believed to be in the hundreds of thousands, the self-styled "biochemist" turned to a strange bedfellow -- MLB.

In the most-charitable explanation, Bosch was desperate, tried to get help from Rodriguez and agreed to take MLB's deal when that didn't happen. In the least-charitable, as Mrs. Last Honest described it this morning when I told her about it, it could be blackmail.

Either way, probably not good for the ol' credibility for a guy who might be viewed as not exactly credible anyway.

To be clear, I think it's entirely possible that Rodriguez, Braun and the other Biogenesis clients were getting performance-enhancing drugs. I am also not a lawyer, nor did I stay in a Holiday Inn Express last night. I don't even watch a lot of courtroom dramas on TV.

However, if Braun can get a suspension overturned because the person who collected his urine didn't ship it out fast enough, it's possible that a decent lawyer (and A-Rod's and Braun's, at the very least, will likely be far better than decent) can make a certain A-to-B-to-C connection between "witness went to player for money," "player said no," "witness went to Major League Baseball" and that it might actually work.

If David Stern can't even do a fix right, maybe it's good he's retiring

As someone who believes the 1985 NBA draft lottery was fixed so the Knicks could pick Patrick Ewing, thinks Michael Jordan's first retirement could have really been a secret suspension for gambling, is convinced Aaron Craft was allowed to mug the Syracuse guards in the 2012 East Regional final to keep the Orange out of the Final Four and has a good friend named Cy Nical who believes everything anyone tells you is bull, I can appreciate a good sports conspiracy theory, especially if it has to do with someone you don't like.

And thus we have the "David Stern is fixing the Heat-Pacers series so the heat can get in the NBA Finals!" conspiracy. Dave Zirin even referenced it in a piece he wrote arguing that Pacers center Roy Hibbert should be suspended for saying "no homo" while talking to the press after Game 6. It also came up on his Twitter.

@EdgeofSports That is an issue "@Tuckyargh: @EdgeofSports If Roy Hibbert is suspended for game 7, I will have no doubt the NBA is officially rigged."

However, if Stern is doing his behind-the-scenes manipulations to make sure the ratings-drawing Heat make the NBA Finals, he has one big problem ...

... the San Antonio Spurs.

The Spurs are a terrific team. Tim Duncan is an all-timer. Tony Parker and Manu Ginobili are outstanding. All they do is win year after year after year.

They are also ratings death.

Granted, the article linked above is six years old, but given that the NBA Finals since then have featured the Lakers and Celtics playing each other twice, the Lakers again and the Heat twice, I'm going to guess that these stats largely hold up:

• The 14 lowest-rated NBA Finals games since 1981 featuring the Spurs.
• All four Spurs titles being among the 10 lowest-rated NBA Finals since 1976.
• The Spurs having the two lowest-rated NBA Finals since 1976.

And this is the team that awaits the Heat-Pacers winner. Surely Stern the evil overlord should have done something about this and found someone to beat them beforehand!

Unless ...

Maybe, just maybe Stern is preparing for his greatest trick yet in his last playoffs as NBA commissioner. Perhaps he has an in with the Nielsen people and has gotten assurances that the ratings for the NBA Finals, no matter who the Spurs play, will be through the roof, regardless of how many people actually watch.

You know, just to prove he can.