I had expected to get a call Sunday night from at least one of my good friends.
Some kind of friends, eh?
You see, I knew they were in New Orleans, hopping from jazz club to jazz club in the French Quarter. They were there, in the heart of Saints country, enjoying the Super Bowl on television; they were hoping, praying and cheering for not just a team but for a city.
You can find no quick truths to a man's contrition. Take Gilbert Arenas, for example. Arenas wrote a column in The Washington Post decrying the stupidity of his brandishing handguns, as if he were Wyatt Earp, in a place where Glocks and .44 Magnums didn't belong.
His essay was a compelling piece of prose, words worthy of a man who knew his behavior was outside the lines.
"I understand the importance of teaching nonviolence to kids in today's world," Arenas wrote an op-ed piece for The Post. "Guns and violence are serious problems, not joking matters -- a lesson that's been brought home to me over the past few weeks."
From his words, he sounds as if he understands his civic failings, though who can be certain. I mean, what Gilbert Arenas wrote might just be another one of those SportsCenter moments that athletes are fond of.
For we've seen apologizes aplenty from high-profile athletes - from men like Mike Tyson, Kobe Bryant, Mark McGwire, Alex Rodriguez, Donte Stallworth, Michael Vick, and we all know that, at some point, we will see Tiger Woods producing his camera-ready moment. It will, of course, come with the appropriate tears and the maudlin words penned by Tiger's agent to give humanity to his client's serial infidelity.
But Tiger and Tyson and none of the other athletes gone wild are what interest me this day. Besides, a few of them have already fallen on their swords in hopes of being forgiven. I'm sure some people have forgiven, knowing that nobody's life is absent flaws.
His act has long ago worn on people's nerves.
Caldwell should be as fortunate. For it's hard to find a Super Bowl coach who has had a lower profile than his.
It was a thought too luscious to consider. It was something you had longed for -- dreamed about, really -- hoping it was more than words floating in the air like the aroma of fresh peach cobbler.
You wanted to believe more than disbelieve, and LeBron James had left much for basketball fans to discuss: In or out, who could say for sure?
He had dropped hints that he might be "in." Yes, LeBron had weighed putting his name into the NBA Slam Dunk Contest, an All-Star Game sideshow that used to be cooler than the game itself.
But its cool factor has taken a beating in recent seasons. The contest is akin now to pay phones in an IPhone era. For gone are the days when Dominique Wilkins, Larry Nance, Kobe Bryant, Vince Carter and Air Jordan himself - the highest of the high flyers -- signed up for the slam-fest.
The contest needed a big name to revive interest in it, and no name in the NBA is bigger these days than LeBron's. Of course, having Kobe back would have heightened interest in the contest as well, but Kobe had done his turn. He won the contest in '97 when it was played in Cleveland, LeBron's town.
The invisible man has reappeared. He's back in baseball, back where he always belonged, back where he had made a name for himself - a name tarnished now, though.
Even the empty-headed can sometimes find the smarts to take ownership of a good idea now and then, and that applies to the most know-nothing executive in the history of team sports. For Bud Selig is to intelligent leadership what Tiger Woods is to fidelity or what Bernie Madoff is to wise investing.
But the baseball tsar -- His Royal Budness -- has hit a home run with his interest in taking the sport to global heights it hasn't reached before. Selig has held talks with Ryozo Kato, commissioner of the Nippon Professional League, about a real World Series: the best team in the United States against the best team in Japan.
Not that the idea was Selig's. How could a fresh idea come from a mind that hasn't had one since the turn of the 1600s? Yet Selig deserves a tip of the ballcap for recognizing a good idea when he sees it.
And this is a good idea whose time has come: the Major Leagues vs. the Japanese League for a"world" championship.
My friend Nick's question was simple: "What do you think of this year's HOF vote?"
He mentioned his teammates first. In his postgame interview Friday night, he took pains to recognize the big men who blocked in front of him. He thanked them; he praised them. He gave those big men their due.
He had thought he was bigger than the college president, a mistake one of his former Texas Tech counterparts had made on an early stop in his career. But just like Bob Knight at Indiana, Mike Leach misread his standing, a miscalculation that cost Leach his job.
In a way, Tech's decision yesterday to fire Leach could represent a tectonic shifting in the intercollegiate landscape, a reminder to people that football and basketball coaches don't lord over an institution like Third World strongmen. Even a coach with Leach's coaching portfolio can't design all the rules at an institution of higher learning.
That fact seems to have lost its currency over the years.
Let a coach win enough games and championships, and nothing he does ever earns him censure. His fiefdom has one man in charge, and anybody else who enters must take off his shoes at the front door.
Just think about how college coaches have demanded the world from university officials and ended up with the universe. Alumni talk about how energized they are because their alma mater is winning.
The school's graduation rate?
Leave it to a rump organization like the NCAA to worry about that. Besides, a Top 10 ranking in the year-end AP Poll always trumps a 10-percent graduation rate, right?
To drug test or not, that's seems to be the nettlesome question that's threatening what should be the fight of this century: Manny Pacquiao vs. Floyd Mayweather Jr.
A childish dispute over drug testing looks like a lousy excuse for delaying the bout or for keeping it from happening altogether.
But what's surprising here?
Isn't this simply how professional boxing has been for the better part of 1990s and beyond?
The sport has given its fans this head-fake before. It has stoked interest in a signature match only to let trifling matters undo everything. What should be an easy fight for promoters Bob Arum and Richard Schaefer to make has become more complicated than the U.S. tax code or the "simple" instructions to a do-it-yourself project that promises even a caveman can do it.
Nothing falls into the easy category, however, when it comes to putting together big-time fights. Greed and ego ruin everything, so can stupidity, which is the reason Mayweather might not step into the ring against Pacquiao after all.
Sports editors called steroids the biggest story of 2009. Theirs, of course, was an intriguing choice last week, but it was a choice that, frankly, seemed out of step with the prevailing trend.
For the steroids story is as passé as disco dancing and polyester bell-bottoms. Steroids might have been a headline-grabber, oh, two or three years ago, but at this point in a tale of sports figures' going bad, the story doesn't resonate; it's a tired report that soon will have its eulogy read.
In sports and in American pop culture, the story of 2009 was Tiger. Yes, it was the year of the Tiger -- as in golfer Tiger Woods.
What other story proved bigger?
For Tiger's story was a profile of what has been the undoing of sports today: greed and privilege. His story speaks to the entitlements stars have come to demand.
His biggest play last Sunday was his last big play of the season.
Sure, Brady Quinn, the Notre Dame poster boy, finished out the game, turning his 24-yard bootleg into what would be the game-winning points. But Quinn also hurt his right foot on the play, and the injury has ended his season.
His getting hurt was the last thing Browns coach Eric Mangini wanted.
Make no mistake here, Quinn wasn't Mangini's ideal quarterback. No other alternative on the Browns is. But Quinn was Mangini's best option, considering those alternatives. Now with Quinn sidelined, Mangini has to use Derek Anderson, whose return to the lineup threatens to revive the quarterback controversy that began this season.
Milton Bradley can find men -- other black men like himself -- who have taken the same trails in life, run into troubles and then got to the end of the trail to confront some unintended, often horrific, consequence.
Maybe Bradley's life hasn't played out yet quite like O.J. Simpson's or Mike Tyson's or Chris Henry's or Plaxico Burress' or Jayson Williams' or Michael Vick's. To his credit, Bradley has had no criminality attached to his crass behavior or, apparently, no long list of "baby mommas" like Shawn Kemp to eat into his net worth.
That's a comfort of sorts. It's also a reminder that, for all of his temper tantrums, Bradley has escaped what has undone other big-name athletes. Then again, it might just be his dumb luck.
For Bradley has shown he's a hard push from going off sanity's precipice. He's a blood-and-guts example of pent-up madness; he's an emotional volcano that threatens to erupt like Mount St. Helens. He doesn't need a change of scenery; he needs psychiatric treatment.
What Bradley, 31, doesn't need is a maple or ash bat in his hands and people around him. He proved as much in past seasons and last season. For the Cubs, he went postal, fighting people's efforts to restrain him. His rage, though, was impossible to corral. Much like trying to harness a rattlesnake, you steer clear of it, ever mindful that the rattler can kill at any moment.
Not sure what to make of the Browns these days. Now, I can't see this team as among the league's elites, regardless of how many games it runs off as this season of disappointment staggers to a conclusion.
But these Browns are showing life, a pulse that belies their 3-10 record. They haven't quit on their embattled coach, whose tenure at the team's helm might be a new general manager away from its end.
The hand coach Eric Mangini was dealt might not be one any coach should have been told to play. Mangini was brought in to put together a puzzle that had pieces missing. He inherited a football team with little talent, and he had a quarterback controversy that never did sort itself out.
Mangini didn't help matters with his waffling on Derek Anderson and Brady Quinn, a strategy that didn't engender confidence in either man. Both have played like quarterbacks with no belief in themselves.
The job is now in Quinn's hands -- again. But what Quinn has shown in his last three games, two of which were wins -- suggests he holds a loose grip on it. He has played like a quarterback with no feel for the position and no confidence.
Look at his latest performance. In a 41-34 win Sunday, Quinn was -- how to put it kindly -- a caretaker. His contribution to the win was a 24-yard bootleg that kept alive a fourth-quarter drive which led to the winning touchdown.
Take away that run, and the Browns would have been better off sticking Josh Cribbs behind center. Quinn completed 10 passes, a measly total in a game that saw the Browns score 41 points. His quarterback rating was 27.7. His passing yards came to 66. That's no misprint: 66 yards.
Talking about a shocking trade that didn't help anybody: look at the Milton Bradley-for-Carlos Silva deal Friday that the Mariners and the Cubs agreed to.
One (Bradley) is a bad actor; the other (Silva) is a bad pitcher. Both carry heavy-duty contracts, which limited any potential suitors. It took two organizations with the same purpose to swallow this deal whole.
Yet if somebody had to pick a winner here -- and it'll be a photo finish -- he'd give the edge to the Cubs, because getting anybody to take Bradley off the team's payroll was a dream Cubs general manager Jim Hendry couldn't possibly have expected to come true.
Not that Silva will help the Cubs much; he won't. A lousy pitcher in the American League won't become a Cy Young winner merely by switching leagues. But Silva won't turn the clubhouse into a nut house, which Bradley is sure to do in Seattle.
Now, the Mariners say they are hopeful Bradley's nuclear temper will chill a bit under the influence of Grade A characters like Ken Griffey Jr. and Chone Figgins, a recent acquisition. They are also counting on a calmer, more sedate Milton Bradley being a productive Milton Bradley.
My friend has grown weary of the Tiger tale. He's weary of how everybody from the media to the paparazzi to people who don't know golf from Ping-Pong has obsessed over the world's greatest golfer.
He's unwilling, of course, to pardon Tiger's adultery. How could he? He himself is a person of principles, and his principles don't brook behavior of Tiger's kind. Yet my friend has weighed in his mind what his conduct might have been had he been, well ... the world's greatest golfer.
He offers no answer.
"I wish I could pull into town and have 50 women outside my hotel wanting to do anything I wanted them to do," my friend tells me. "The women - the women you dream about having when you were in high school -- they're everywhere."
When you're the world's greatest golfer, these women are everywhere. They are everywhere when you're the world's greatest basketball player or the world's greatest sprinter or the world's greatest cyclist or the world's greatest violinist. The women show up in all the places where a so-called "great" man goes, my friend says.
They have no qualms about a man's marital status or a man's sexual appetite. They will sate that appetite for him - and do whatever else a man might want women to do, my friend says.
