Thank you, NBC Sports

May 14, 2019

Several years ago, when I was still in high school, ESPN had a contract with the NHL and developed their own theme music for games that became iconic. It is still hard for me to sit down to watch a hockey game and not hear that music in my head. The theme music even made it into the ESPN NHL 2K5 hockey video game, which was fun to hear, even if the game was not all that great to play. It has been 14 years since that game came out. In that time, NBC negotiated for, and received, the rights to televised games in the United States. I was one of many fans who was extremely disappointed ...

Franti was an oldtime coach

May 8, 2019

It was with more than a little regret that I read about the recent retirement of long-time Ontonagon High School basketball coach Dick Franti. In a business where you see coaches come and go with the regularity of a north wind off Lake Superior, Franti was unique. Sure, he was around for a long time. He’s been coaching basketball since the late 1970s, and was elected into the Upper Peninsula Sports Hall of Fame a couple of years ago. But he was also a person who coached boys and girls hoops. He scored 232 wins on the boys side, while collecting 514 victories in girls ...

Many strange things baffle in sports

May 1, 2019

There are a number of strange things in the world of sports, that quite honestly, baffle me. Take the just completed National Football League draft, if you will. After listening to a so-called battery of experts (Mel Kiper Jr. and numerous others) dissect the draft for the last year, I still can’t figure out why some teams came up with Grade A while others were lucky to land a D-plus or C-minus. It’s a well-documented fact that the accuracy of a NFL draft takes a minimum of two years to completely grade. That’s because of the majority of the players taken will require that long ...

Rollercoaster of emotions

April 30, 2019

Last week, hockey fans were treated to not one, not two, but three Game Sevens. Man, talk about an opportunity ripe with chances to run the full gamut of emotions over the course of 30 or so hours. On Tuesday evening, the Boston Bruins and Toronto Maple Leafs got things going with a bang, almost literally. A 0-0 game quickly became a 2-0 lead for the hometown Bruins as they shocked their own fans with a pair of goals that, looking back at it, Maple Leafs goaltender Frederik Andersen probably wants back. Longtime Bruins star Patrice Bergeron capped the scoring with an empty-netter of ...

Mission accomplished; 50 years late

April 24, 2019

It was one of those things I intended to do …. but never got around to. The year was 1968, one of the most turmoil-filled in the history of this country. There was unrest in city streets, assassinations of our leaders and riots wherever you looked. But it was also the Year of the Tiger, the Detroit Tigers to be precise. Those Tigers led the American League most of the season behind the brilliant pitching of Denny McLain and a number of clutch hitters. The exploits of Al Kaline, Norm Cash, Willie Horton, Jim Northrup, Bill Freehan, Mickey Stanley and Dick McAuliffe were in the ...

Multiple Game Sevens

April 23, 2019

With two exciting games on Sunday afternoon and early evening, NHL hockey fans were treated to events leading to two of the best words in the English language: Game Seven. The Boston Bruins overcame a 1-0 deficit to the Toronto Maple Leafs in the afternoon game with power play goals from Brad Marchand and Torey Krug to take a 2-1 lead into the first intermission. Jake DeBrusk, the villain of sorts to Maple Leafs’ fans who were angry with the team’s loss of Nazim Kadri for the remainder of the first round, then gave the Bruins a 3-1 lead shortly before the midpoint of the second ...