MidValleySports.Com

Joe T., always working hard…

By Joe Torosian

Kick it!

This weekend was a reminder of why sports are great. The elite, the ones who are too full of themselves, politicians and celebrities, who demean sports and competition, were humiliated. 
Two things really stood out: the men’s Olympic Hockey team/Jack Hughes, and UCLA Basketball.

Hughes scores the goal to win the gold medal…after getting his teeth knocked out. LeBron can’t play a back-to-back in the same city.

The argument will be that LeBron is plus-40, and it’s only a regular-season game. Well, when you make the kind of bread you make in the NBA, and the fans pay the prices they pay every night, it should be a gold medal game attitude—but it’s not.

If you can’t give your best…then get out. Dimaggio did.

I can’t stand the Olympics… I’ve made it clear I need the Soviets and Eastern Bloc countries to get into it. They’re gone, and have been replaced by these pansy, softer than their mama’s love, athletes who criticize their own country while overseas.

Is that every Olympian? No, but it’s enough for me to keep me from investing.

In my youth, I got to rub elbows with an AP writer. We were talking, and I asked him who the best athletes were to deal with. To that point, I had only interacted with professional basketball players and a little bit of the NFL. 

“Hockey,” he said. “Hands down, those guys are the best.”

Hockey’s not my favorite sport, but it’s the hockey team that can rejuvenate a country when things are falling apart under Jimmy Carter.

It’s a hockey player who keeps skating even after his teeth are knocked out.
And it’s hockey players, U.S. hockey players, that honor the memory of teammate Johnny Gaudreau, who was killed by a drunk driver. 

It’s one thing—awesome—that they brought out his jersey and held it high…But it was amazing, wonderful, marvelous to see them bring Gaudreau’s little children onto the ice for the team photo after.

(“Niagara Falls, Frankie Angel.”)

Then there was UCLA’s win over Illinois. Trailing 33-10 to a top ten team, at home, on the heels of the Mick Cronin-Steven Jammerson II flap…it was over, and Cronin was being booked and ticketed to Fredonia U.

To see the Bruins come all the way back and win, 95-94, on Donovan Dent’s coast-to-coast dash was another testimony about what sports teach.

That’s why it’s called gut-check time.

I’ll be the first to say that it wasn’t great basketball. It was little more than a three-point shooting contest for long stretches, but within that competition, when it would have been so easy to quit, the Bruins found a way.

It was inspiring.

What a lesson to see played out when everything’s going wrong, to keep grinding.
You have that…and then you have Kansas freshman Darryn Peterson, who operates like he’s already in the NBA.

The Dude abides…

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John 3:1-10

jtbank1964@yahoo.com

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