It won't be the same without Jeff Gordon

I used to hate Jeff Gordon. I admit it. 

It wasn't just that he won all the time, although it was. I know there's a belief that dominant champions are good for a sport because everyone wants to see if they'll get knocked off, but I've never bought it. Unless it's who you're rooting for, why watch when you know who's going to win?

But not only did he win all the time, he was just so ... perfect about it. He had the good looks (after he got a decent haircut and shaved his cheesy mustache), the beauty queen wife, the crew chief who seemingly always made the right call (and with just a whiff of wondering if chicanery was involved, for instance the red car in the top picture), the owner who had all the money and always spoke like he was reading from a PR handbook.

It's like someone he was pressed in a factory somewhere and programmed.

And God, was it annoying.

Yet reading the news today that Gordon won't be racing full-time after this season didn't leave me with the sense of glee that it once would have.

Because you see, somewhere along the line, I stopped hating Jeff Gordon. Yes, part of it was because he stopped winning all the time, but he also stopped being so perfect. He had ups and downs in his personal life (a divorce, remarriage and children), grew a beard once in a while, laughed at himself and even got into a couple fights.

He was, dare I say, human.

And when he became human, he became a lot harder to hate.

So while I don't exactly root for Jeff Gordon, I don't spit and sputter at the thought of him winning (that would be the younger Busch brother), and I can say with respect that if he's not in the lineup of the 2016 Daytona 500, it won't be the same.

Me and my cars

Honest, they were in a display case.

My wife and I are going to be moving, which means we're working on boxing stuff up. Today, that included my collection of die-cast cars. 

With the exception of a couple Randy LaJoie cars and a Robby Gordon, all my cars of Dale Earnhardt, Dale Earnhardt Jr. and Kevin Harvick. I mostly get them as Christmas and birthday gifts, unless I see a good deal somewhere, like when I was able to grab a couple Harvick cars (including an autographed one) on clearance at the Childress museum last year. I actually have a couple that aren't shown here, but since I just got them for Christmas and knew I would be packing them up, anyway, I didn't bother taking them out.

Fortunately for both my parents' and my bank accounts, I'm not a completist; I basically get the stuff I like. I still don't have any Harvick No. 4 cars, something I obviously have to rectify, and in addition to whatever current cars I add to the collection, I'd like to grab the Earnhardt Wheaties car, the Earnhardt Jr. and Harvick ACDelco cars and maybe a Ron Hornaday NAPA truck if I can find them somewhere.

As I looked over the collection spread out on our TV room floor, for all the color (and yes, I have four cars with Wrangler-themed paint schemes), the one that jumped out at me was mostly white.

Mine

The original

This may sound crazy, but I don't think Kevin Harvick has ever gotten enough credit for what he did.

The most-popular driver in the sport had just died during the Daytona 500, the entire sport and its fans were in mourning and Richard Childress, instead of finding a veteran to finish out the season and buy time until he could decide on a permanent driver, turned to Harvick, his 25-year-old, second-year Busch Series driver.

Not only did he have to start racing a white No. 29 car that just the last week had been the iconic black No. 3, he was keeping his full-time Busch Series ride.

So all he did was win his third Cup start in a you-remember-where-you-were-when-it-happened moment, finish in the top 10 in Cup points and take the Busch Series title ... with reminders of what was lost and whose car he was driving present every week. (How Dale Jr., who, after all, lost his father, managed is beyond my feeble comprehension.)

Harvick couldn't replace Dale Earnhardt -- an impossibility if there ever was one -- but he and Dale Jr. (remember the trip back to Daytona that season?) at least gave his fans something to celebrate.

John Oliver and I ... (not really) best buds

Mrs. Last Honest and I went to see John Oliver tonight in Boston. It was a brilliant show, and he told a joke that just laid waste to Patriots fans, which I'm cool with. As a sign of how good he was, it was far from the only joke that mocked Bostonians, and instead of cringing in horror or getting angry, because they were that kind of jokes, people laughed.

I had known either from a story or an interview that Oliver was a Liverpool fan, so it wasn't a surprise when he talked about going to his first game when he was a child, and then he moved on to visiting the Liverpool locker room at Yankee Stadium this summer, in a story that also involved fellow Liverpool fan Daniel Craig. (I won't spoil the story here, plus I could never be nearly that funny, but John Oliver, Yankee Stadium, James Bond and Liverpool is a whole lot of awesome in one place.)

My wife and I were sitting in the balcony, and as he was telling this ultimately fairly harrowing Liverpool story, I wasn't just laughing, but wishing I had a chance to talk to him not as successful comedian and riotous TV show host (him, obviously) and complete nobody (me, obviously) but as Liverpool fan to Liverpool fan.

Because as different as our lives are, we have that in common.

A Last Honest college basketball preview

I've stayed away from the blog for way too long, but the start of college basketball season is enough to make me blow off the dust.

I love college basketball, especially with the new format where the selection committee chooses the men's Final Four teams. Yes, the tournament was great, especially with games all day and night the first weekend, but football rules, and so why not decide the champion the same way football does? Also, since the champion can be decided in just one weekend, that's more time to concentrate on what really matters -- spring football practice and NFL draft previews. (Every minute Dick Vitale gets on ESPN is one less that Mel Kiper Jr. gets, after all.)

For me, the big question isn't just what four teams the committee picks (Vitale, of course, will have 27 teams in the Final Four), but which team will get the automatic ACC bid. As a Syracuse fan, I obviously hope it's the Orange, but they always seem to find a way to mess up, and it looks like Duke is being tipped as the team to beat in the league this year.

But maybe the ACC will get two. Why not? After all, the league has Duke, Syracuse, North Carolina, Louisville and Virginia, among others, but there are no easy outs in the conference. You try going to any of those arenas and win. In any other league, losing to one of the lesser teams is a huge upset; in the ACC, it's just a testament as to the awesomeness of the league.

What other league can say that? Maybe the Big 10, especially now that they've imported Maryland from the ACC. Perhaps you can pencil the league in for a Final Four spot, but I wouldn't use Seth Davis' Sharpie ... just in case.

I know Kentucky's the top-ranked team in the preseason, they went to the final last year and the Wildcats' end-of-the-bench walk-on is probably a low first-round NBA pick, but other than Florida and Kentucky, the league hasn't been any great shakes lately. Probably the best thing for an SEC resume is a close loss to an ACC team. (There is no truth, however, to the started-by-me rumor that, to keep ratings up, ESPN plans to replay the entire football season on the SEC Network in lieu of basketball, complete with alternate ending in the unlikely event that a team from some other  conference is allowed in the college football playoff and dares to actually win the thing.)

What about UConn? After all, they won the national title last year! Yeah, but did they really deserve it? All they did was win a bunch of games at the end of the year. Big deal! If they were the team in New England worth having and had the sterling academics of a school like North Carolina, the Huskies would be in the ACC and not the American.

At least the American and maybe the Big Ersatz are on the fringes of the conferences good enough to send a team to the Final Four if everything goes right. Those other conferences should feel happy that their champions will be allowed in the NIT, which will continue. After all, the ACC teams not picked for the Final Four need something to do.

(In case you're wondering about the women, will anyone beat UConn? There is the question of this season.)

Let the games begin!

A very minor Derek Jeter memory

Several years ago, my wife, in-laws and I went on a tour of the old Yankee Stadium as part of some package where you saw the stadium, took a bus tour around the Bronx and ate lunch at some terrific Italian restaurant the name of which I do not remember.

Needless to say, my main interest was in the stadium tour, although the bus tour was surprisingly interesting, and I already mentioned the great lunch. Unlike a tour I later took in Phoenix where the perhaps-teenage tour guide pronounced Robin Yount's last name "Yunt," our guide at Yankee Stadium was a longtime employee who closed the tour by showing us his World Series ring, which appeared to basically be a convenient play to store lots of diamonds.

It was during the off-season, and a pretty raw day as I recall, but we hit all the important spots, most of which are standard on a tour -- the press box, the edge of the field, the dugout, some of the behind-the-scenes hallways -- and, of course, since it was Yankee Stadium, we went out to Monument Park.

And we went into the clubhouse. With the exception of Anfield, it was like any stadium or arena tour I've taken since, where you can see the clubhouse or locker room, but don't go much past the inside of the door and stand behind a rope. Our guide pointed out all the lockers we'd be interested in, including Thurman Munson's unused locker, and then pointed out Derek Jeter's.

If I remember correctly, it was on our left, in the middle of the group of lockers on that side of the room. Our guide informed us that until September call-ups required its use, the locker next to Jeter's was left vacant in order to hold his fan mail. One of our fellow tour-goers asked if Jeter answered all his fan mail, and our guide's answer is etched into my memory.

"It is a physical impossibility."

The NFL wouldn't actually do this ... would it?

The other day, I came across a Sports on Earth post by Will Leitch in which he wrote that it's OK to watch the NFL and still be disgusted by the way the league has handled the Ray Rice, Greg Hardy, Adrian Peterson and Ray McDonald situations (although he doesn't mention McDonald by name).

I won't go too far into his argument (you should read the post for that), but he basically calls the NFL entertaining escapism and claims you can both enjoy the games and still want the league held accountable for basically doing everything wrong when it came to domestic violence among its players.

My feelings about the NFL have been conflicted in recent years. I still enjoy football, and I still enjoy watching the games, but the league's ridiculous, growing self-importance, aided and abetted by the media, repels me more than it attracts me. (I say that while admitting my fascination with both hockey culture in Canada and soccer culture in England, but then again, I don't live in either place.)

There's also the growing evidence that the players are maiming themselves for our entertainment and some fans' acceptance of it and even insistence that nothing be done to rectify it.

Between the two, I'm watching watching less and less than before, and that was even before the last couple weeks. However, my Chargers were on TV against the Seahawks Sunday, and I watched, and I enjoyed the win. I won't lie. I'm not like the friend of mine (who I don't think was wild about football to begin with), who not only won't watch the NFL, she posts photos on Facebook of whatever she's doing on Sundays while her husband watches football. It's actually quite entertaining.

And that was before recent events.

But then Leitch wrote this.

"We can't be so entranced by the games that we let things slide like we have in the past. You can already see how last week's events are going to be spun: It's not (commissioner Roger) Goodell -- who appears to have, in spite of it all, almost universal support from the owners, his bosses -- it's those unruly players. You're starting to see a narrative develop: Those players are out of control. It's time for the league to get tough. Ray Rice, Greg Hardy, Adrian Peterson ... they're just bad apples. The league just needs to police those players more. They need to come down harder."

When I read that, I thought, "They can't ... can they?" While Rice, Hardy, Peterson and McDonald are all at least allegedly very bad apples, the outrage has been that the league hasn't been tough enough by its own choice. Goodell could have come down on Rice before the in-elevator video was released, when Hardy was convicted, McDonald arrested or Peterson indicted, but he didn't, and neither have the teams absent public pressure.

To make this just about the players, while washing its hands entirely, would be a remarkable bit of verbal jiu-jitsu on the NFL's part.

What's worse, there's nothing to say they wouldn't get away with it.

You know it, and so do I.

Another reason for fans everywhere to hate Boston

"Missing: a seven-pound sterling silver symbol of football excellence. Owner: the New England Patriots. Information: our trophy has been misplaced since 2004 and despite a couple of close calls it has not been returned. The latest information indicates a Southern California surfer named Pete may have it in Seattle."

Just in case you don't get Chris Gasper's point in today's Boston Globe, the Lombardi Trophy belongs to the New England Patriots, even though they haven't won a Super Bowl in 10 years. (Fans in Detroit, Cleveland, Buffalo and San Diego, among others, surely feel their pain.)

And the inclusion of the "Southern California surfer named Pete" is a nice touch, given that because Pete Carroll did not succeed as Patriots coach, he's high on the list of People Who Are Never Allowed to Succeed along with anyone from New York (self-explanatory), Joe Thornton (Bruins phenom who never panned out), Peyton Manning (because God forbid anyone dare think he's better than Tom Brady), Phil Kessel (left Boston for more money) and Drew Bledsoe ("He threw lots of interceptions!" "Brady's better!")

Funny thing is, once the entitled yahoo-ism subsides, Gasper points out relatively intelligently that the Patriots have to take advantage of opportunities to win, and this year could be a good one, given Darrelle Revis' arrival, Rob Gronkowski being healthy (for now), the wide receivers having another year of experience and the return to health of both Vince Wilfork and Jerod Mayo.

So maybe the part about the Patriots "owning" the trophy may have been just a rhetorical device designed to get people reading the column ... except for this at the end ...

"The 12-win seasons that are celebrated now will be painful reminders of championships that might have been if the Lombardi Trophy isn't returned to its rightful place at Patriots Place."

So clearly Gasper means it.

If you're a Boston fan and wonder why people who aren't from Boston hate you and your teams, it's stuff like this ... the belief that because your teams have had a pretty nice 10-year run, you're now entitled to championships. For more, see this from Deadspin. (In the interest of fairness, here's the one for San Diego, which made me feel ashamed to be a Chargers fan.)

But this isn't some idiot Patriots fan saying this; it's one of the lead columnists of the major daily in town.