21,000 people sold out Madison Square Garden on Saturday to watch Miguel Cotto give Antonio Margarito his comeuppance, and there would be no other acceptable outcome.
A Margarito victory would have been catastrophic, as would have a run-of-the-mill boxing debacle akin to Bernard Hopkins’ aborted match against Chad Dawson a few weeks back. As such, with the exception of the first Mets game at Shea Stadium after 9/11, I’m not sure I’ve attended a sporting event where the outcome seemed quite so crucial.
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As evidenced by my relative lack of activity here, November didn’t turn out to be as placid as I would have liked. I make my living in baseball, and it seems to never really shut down at this point between awards, transactions and the new CBA being announced. In addition, my fiancée has moved into my apartment, so a lot of my time has been spent making sure this place is inhabitable for someone other than me. I’d characterize all of this as the good kind of busy.
After Thanksgiving dinner, my fiancée dozed off at around 10 p.m. while I watched episodes of The Walking Dead – pretty standard.
Amazingly, she still insists she intends to marry me after I woke her up at 11:30 to drag her to Wal-Mart.
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The night Prayer for a Perfect Season premiered on HBO, I sat in a banquet hall watching it with the people who had the most personally invested in it.
The documentary was moving, but as it portrayed the fading vestiges of a golden era, the reactions of the St. Patrick High School community while watching it were far more so.
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For lack of a better place to put them, just picks this week — I’ve been exceedingly busy with Mike Krzyzewski’s record-breaking 903rd win, which I wrote up for Dime. I’ll probably resume with some random thoughts early next week.
WEEK 11 PICKS
Season record: 13-11-3
Last week: 2-1. Hit on Patriots, Bears. Should have hit with Giants.
Bears -3.5 vs. Chargers – San Diego is too beat up to keep up with the Bears.
Giants -4.5 vs. Eagles – No Vick means a far less exciting game, and I doubt the Giants will let up at all given how they were humiliated at home by Philly last year.
Cowboys -7.5 at Redskins – Washington is terrible, and DeMarco Murray is the man.
Halloween/Watch The Throne/recovering from baseball … it all added up to me missing a week of this. It was a pretty lousy week to miss NFL pick-wise, as I went 10-4 in my weekly league.
As a Dolphins fan that just saw his team’s Suck for Luck hopes dashed by a demoralizing victory over the Chiefs, I’m still baffled by one thing: Why wasn’t I supposed to root for them to lose as many games as it takes to get the No. 1 pick in the Draft?
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I can’t remember exactly when, but there was a point on Tuesday night while watching Jay-Z and Kanye West perform in Baltimore when I turned to my fiancée and said, “I don’t know if I’ve ever felt as cool as I do right now.” This despite wearing a Mets jacket.
This is what Jay-Z and Kanye elicit with their “luxury rap”: You don’t do the same things they do, you don’t have their money, you can’t really relate to the majority of how they describe their lives.
But you still can’t help but feel cool, and somewhat inspired, by association.
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I haven’t had a ton of time to write lately because of the World Series, and some stuff I’ve done for Dime Magazine with Kyrie Irving and Penny Hardaway. Expect some more next week, I have a couple of ideas I’ve wanted to put out there.
But for now, I’m enjoying the Halloween weekend. If you’ve been a longtime reader of this site, you know I like everything about the holiday – the movies, the decorations, all of it. It’s basically the only holiday I truly like, though New Year’s isn’t that bad and I’m very slowly warming up to Christmas.
My belief is that you’re never too old for Halloween; I’d better believe that, since I’m now 32. But for a few days a year, I think it’s cool to embrace your weirdness and just enjoy the creepiness of this time of year. I don’t get into the whole party thing – I think about 98 percent of the people I see with their drunken nonsense in New York City are pathetic. I enjoy the holiday in other ways; snowed in today, I indulged in a double-feature of Death Proof and Drag Me To Hell.
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Some random thoughts, starting with a series finale I just watched five months after it happened.
Working nights, I pretty much only watch television with DVR, and there are two types of shows for me: the ones I can watch any old time just to keep up with and get out of the way, and the ones I save for when I can truly enjoy them.
Law & Order SVU minus Christopher Merloni has become a show I can shoehorn in while I’m eating my cereal in the morning, or getting ready for work. Boardwalk Empire, on the other hand, requires my full concentration.
This dynamic was the reason that despite airing back in May, I only watched the final episode of Friday Night Lights last night, tempering my curiosity with the desire to watch it at exactly the right time.
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Charles Oakley said a lot of provocative things in his one-hour media session at K1X on Saturday, most of which have already been printed elsewhere. (I’m sure you’ve already heard his take on the current-day Knicks, Amar’e Stoudemire and Isiah Thomas.) Transcribing an hour of Oak was a bear, but I enjoyed every minute of it, and I wanted to share some more of his comments after the jump, along with my take, after the jump.
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The narrative after Charles Oakley’s tour de force at the K1X store in Soho on Saturday was that he’s a loose cannon, not afraid to speak his mind because, well, who messes with Oak? I was there for Dime Magazine, and that was the angle we took. It pretty much had to be.
If you paid close attention, though, there was one topic Oak wouldn’t talk about even when prodded: the NBA lockout. Logically, that’s because it’s the one thing he thought he might actually get fined for speaking his mind about.
But there was also a hint of underlying sadness – perhaps Oakley couldn’t talk about the lockout, but it also seemed as if he simply didn’t want to, since it didn’t come close to representing the ideals he always applied to his chosen profession.
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