Ponder This...

I’m rooting for Floyd Landis in the Tour de France. (Well, as much rooting as you can do for a person while avoiding watching their event on television at all costs because cycling is perhaps the most boring thing to watch in world history.) Anyway, I’m rooting for Landis. But he’s going to have to try a lot harder to get my sympathy and blind allegiance a la Lance Armstrong. Landis says he has a painful degenerative hip condition that will require him to get a hip replacement following the Tour. Oooh … hip pain. Big deal. Lance Armstrong had friggin’ cancer. Cancer in his brain and testicles. If Landis is trying to come up with a story about some ailment so he can use performance-enhancing drugs and so he can build sympathy to make himself bulletproof to all allegations for the rest of his life, he’s going to have to try a lot harder. Plus, no one is ever going to pay a dollar for a plastic band to wear around their wrist in support of degenerative hip conditions. Nut cancer is way more sexy.

Michael Jordan has hired Charles Oakley to an as yet unspecified position with the Charlotte Bobcats. It could be to coach Charlotte’s big men, it could be to serve in the front office, who knows. But I can most definitely guarantee that in Oakley’s job description will be: “Kick the living crap out of Adam Morrison every time he tears up or his bottom lip starts quivering.” And probably also: “Oversee effort to keep my gambling private so I’m not thrown out of the NBA for good this time.” And maybe even: “Distract my wife when she arrives at the office unexpectedly and I’m banging cheerleaders in my office.”

Washington Redskins owner Daniel Snyder launched three sports talk radio stations in the D.C. metro region this week that will broadcast Redskins games, ESPN radio programming and a talk show hosted by John Riggins. The stations will broadcast under the name Triple-X ESPN Radio. Why that name I do not know. But in the off-chance there will be pornographic stories involving Chris Berman broadcast over the stations’ airwaves, I plan to never turn on a radio again anytime I’m within 150 miles of Washington, D.C.

Whew! That was close! Barbaro seemed so close to kicking it last week, but now he is reportedly improving and, according to his doctor, “remains positive” and is “in a good frame of mind.” Of course, you might want to take Barbaro’s medical prognosis with a grain of salt considering his doctor thinks an animal with a brain the size of an almond can be “positive” and “in a good frame of mind” about an injury. Of course, maybe I’m the moron and horses are far more intelligent than I’m giving them credit for. But if that’s the case, I better be getting a thank-you letter from that freaking horse for all the get-well messages I sent him.

After Michelle Wie shot 6-over 77 last Thursday – 13 strokes behind the leaders and eight strokes off the projected cut line – on the very easy layout at the PGA Tour’s John Deere Classic, she had this to say: “Considering that I had the water hazard penalties, considering that I had to call unplayable, considering that I hit my driver like 50 yards right, I felt like I played really well.” Wow, wow, wow, wow, wow. And wow again. This statement comes a week after she claimed she played great – except for “a lot of bad breaks” – in getting smoked 4-and-3 in a women’s match play event. For whatever reason, she seems completely unable to grasp that she is not nearly as good as she has been told she is. But perhaps I’m too hard on Wie. I need to be more positive like her. And, you know, overlooking that she is adored and protected by the media despite never winning anything, and that she routinely avoids playing other top golfers in her age group out of fear of losing, and that she doesn’t pay her dues, and that she’s disliked by loads of her peers, and that her comments suggest she has no concept of reality, I’m actually quite a big Michelle Wie fan.

By the way, sorry to be constantly harping on the Barbaro and Michelle Wie stories, but neither of them seem to die. (And I mean that their stories won’t seem to die, not them. Although Barbaro will probably be dead soon enough and if Wie plays in any more tournaments where temperatures break 80 degrees, she could be a goner, too.)

Here is my Page 2 column from Monday: http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/page2/story?page=gallo/060717. As the one millionth person to write a column on baseball’s second half, I won a free $100 shopping spree on MLB.com. Sweet!

Nine paragraphs into this story – http://www.journalnow.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=WSJ%2FMGArticle%2FWSJ_BasicArticle&c
=MGArticle&cid=1149189217144&path=!sports&s=1037645509200 – you will find one of the best, most concise scouting reports I have ever come across: “He will kill you ... he reminds me of Ray Lewis.” (Full disclosure: I didn’t read the whole article, so I don’t know if that line is taken from a scouting report on a football player or from a parole rejection report on a prisoner. I can see it being from either.)