Miami Heat: Who Needs Big Men? - Wall Street Journal (blog)

By David Roth

Reuters

Without looking, Udonis Haslem checked to make sure Tyler Hansbrough’s face was still there during the chippy Game 5 between Miami and Indiana.

Allen Iverson got a warm ovation from Philadelphia fans before Game 6 of the Eastern Conference semifinals between the 76ers and Celtics, and then watched as the Sixers showed Iversonian grit in forcing a Game 7. But while the hard-nosed, closely-played Sixers-Celtics series has something of a throwback vibe to it, it has nothing on the tense, chippy, exceedingly heated series between the Miami Heat and Indiana Pacers. If this year’s overachieving Sixers have recalled the happy Dr. J years of the 1970s and early 1980s, the Heat-Pacers series feels like something out of the sharp-elbowed ‘90s.

The series has had an edge to it from the startâ€"the Heat complained about the Pacers’ (very brief) celebration on the floor after scoring an upset in Miami and publicly grumped over Danny Granger’s tough-guy routine. Then Miami players expressed their dissatisfaction over a taunt from end-of-the-bench Pacer Lance Stephenson in Game 5 with flagrant fouls that laid out Stephenson and Tyler Hansbrough, and earned suspensions for foul-authors Dexter Pittman and Udonis Haslem. (With Chris Bosh already hurt, this leaves the Heat exceedingly thin down low.) “Maybe it’s time for red cards in basketball,” the Miami Herald’s Linda Robertson writes. “NBA commissioner David Stern had no choice but to punish Haslem and Pittman. They were lucky it wasn’t worse. Pittman’s foul, which sent Stephenson to the X-ray room, was arguably as malicious as Metta World Peace’s elbow to the head of James Harden, who sustained a concussion. Is the warrior stuff really necessary? Among adults? Who are not MMA cartoon characters?”

At Yahoo, Adrian Wojnarowski traces the recent mayhem to both Heat president Pat Riley’s tough-guy ethos and an urge to stick up for LeBron James. Pacers boss Larry Bird did little to settle things when, after the game, he called his team “soft, S-O-F-T.” Whether he was calling for more rough stuff or a superior effort to the team’s scattershot Game 5 showing was, and remains, an open question.

“Bird isn’t calling for more fouls with malicious intent,” the Indianapolis Star’s Bob Kravitz writes. “He isn’t calling for the Pacers to gain revenge on the Heat, the way Udonis Haslem and Dexter Pittman got revenge. He’s calling for more competitive toughness, a renewed will and belief and effort. They’ve got to fightâ€"not fight in the hockey sense, but fight back competitively, man up and refuse to go quietly in a series they’ve made so compelling and competitive.” Whatever the outcome in Thursday’s Game 6, things going quietly doesn’t really seem to be in the cards.

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Given that it’s the world’s most popular sport, it makes sense that soccer is the biggest of big-money businesses. But while thoroughly sponsored and meticulously branded events like last weekend’s Champions League final bring in boatloads of dough the legitimate wayâ€"and while FIFA, international soccer’s hugely profitable non-profit governing body, brings in even moreâ€"there’s another, darker economy to soccer that generates equally eye-popping revenues. That would be the shadowy industry of soccer betting, which has expanded to include some astoundingly flamboyant match-fixingâ€"from 2010′s bogus international friendly featuring a fraudulent version of Togo’s national team to games that never even happen.

“The world’s most popular game is also its most corrupt, with investigations into match fixing ongoing in more than 25 countries,” ESPN the Magazine’s Brett Forrest writes. “Soccer match fixing has become a massive worldwide crime, on par with drug trafficking, prostitution and the trade in illegal weapons. As in those criminal enterprises, the match-fixing industry has been driven by opportunistic greed. According to Interpol figures, sports betting has ballooned into a $1 trillion industry, 70 percent of which is gambled on soccer.”

In this sweeping piece, Forrest introduces both the Australian investigator brought in to fight the corruption that came with that booming underground economy and the alleged Singaporean super-fixer responsible for the aforementioned Not Really Togo’s National Team incident, among innumerable others. It’s an enjoyable read even for those who wouldn’t know Togo’s real national team from its not-so-real counterpart.

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The thing with glossy magazine profiles, besides the certain inevitable silliness that attends anything that takes famous people so extremely seriously, is that they have a tendency to make everyone sound alike, at least with regards to how Significant and Different Subject X is from his/her public image, other people, etc. Esquire’s Chris Jones is one of the more artful celebrity-profilers working. But in Bruce Jennerâ€"once recognized as the world’s greatest athlete as a gold medal-winning decathlete, now most recognizable as a hapless stepfather and source of comic relief in Kardashian-related reality televisionâ€"he also has a uniquely odd subject. Jenner seems to have made the transition from athletic hero to reality foil happily and with relative ease, but that doesn’t mean the transition was an uncomplicated one.

“Bruce Jenner has suffered the curse of fathers everywhere, but he has suffered it more dramatically and more publicly than perhaps any other American dad,” Jones writes. “There are entire generations who have no idea that he did what he did, that this man once flew through the air on the end of a fiberglass pole, that he was once just as lean and hard and well trained as he could possibly be. They don’t know that because his framed singlet is in storage somewhere, it turns out, and his gold medal is locked away in a safe.”

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Jon Kitna was never exactly a superior NFL quarterback. But he was good enough to find work for 16 NFL seasonsâ€"long enough to back up both Warren Moon and Tony Romoâ€"and effective enough to pass for nearly 30,000 yards over his career. Even at nearly 40 years old, Kitna is almost certainly good enough to tote a clipboard and provide some strong-armed insurance for another few more well-compensated seasons. But Kitna had other plans, and retired after last season to pursue a job that he first applied for back in 1996, before his long-shot, long-running NFL career got going: a gig as a math teacher and football coach at Tacoma’s Abraham Lincoln High School, his alma mater.

“How did a man who played 16 years of professional football and made millions of dollars wind upâ€"voluntarilyâ€"in a classroom at the most impoverished high school in Pierce County?” Danny O’Neil asks in the Seattle Times. “It’s not hard to imagine a former NFL quarterback filling his afternoons with football. It’s tougher to imagine that same man â€" a guy who was making $3 million last year â€" arriving on campus at 7 a.m. and bringing breakfast for kids who need extra help, hosting a home room and then teaching two periods of algebra. That’s what makes Kitna’s return so extraordinary.”

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