Murphy’s Blog

       I want to see Roger Clemens hang.  It’s not because I hate him or because I hate the Yankees and he played for them, twice.  It’s not even because he kept retiring and then coming back, each time demanding more and more outrageous salary figures.  It’s because I think he’s guilty and I’m pissed off about the way he’s handled the whole PED allegation thing.  In keeping with the traditions of Ash Wednesday, I’ve been thinking a lot of repentance and how if The Rocket had just come clean from the start, America probably would have forgiven and forgotten.  Look at Giambi: that meathead offered a half-hearted excuse-me swing of an apology and the normally merciless NYC media and a-holes, er, Yankees fans acted as if it never happened.  Here is why I think Clemens is guilty: 1) When the allegations first arose, he said nothing.  A truly innocent person would not need to meet with his legal team for days to dig up dirt on an accuser and to carefully craft a press release.  No, a truly innocent man would have climbed to the rooftop to profess his innocence.  2) No one gets better after the age of 35 in sports, no one.  Some people can continue to perform at a high level, but no one can stay the same or get better.  3) Rocket is a proud sumbitch who is obsessed with numbers, most notably his strikeout total.  Hell, he named his kids all with K names because K is what’s used in the books to record punchouts.  No way does a dude that driven to succeed not take steps to increase or prolong his performance.  All this Texas-sized douche is doing at this point is climbing higher up the ladder, thereby making his fall from grace that much farther.  In hearing the whole melodrama of McNamee v. Rocket, I can’t help but think of a time when I was younger and my family was sitting around the table eating dinner.  My younger brother must have been 4 or 5 at the time and he accidentally knocked over his glass of milk, spilling it everywhere.  My mom told him to clean it up and when he asked why, she told him it was because he had knocked the glass over.  ”No I didn’t,” he said, even though all of us had witnessed the event.  I couldn’t fathom what could have possessed my little brother to lie in the face of the evidence, and I am starting to feel the same way about Clemens.  If the latest reports are true and McNamee really does have physical evidence linking Rocket to PEDs, I can’t wait to hear the bullshit his lawyers dream up.         

       Message to the mainstream media: lay off Bob Knight already.  Cowherd was pissing me off today as he railed on about Knight being a hypocrite and about how college coaches shouldn’t want to graduate players.  His argument was that if you have players who stay for 4 years of college, you clearly didn’t recruit very well.  Only George Mason has 5 seniors, Cowherd said.  Because we all know that most college basketball players go on to earn millions in the Association.  Yeah, nice one Colin.  He said that Knight went to Tech so that he could bully the administration and the players, since it’s a low-profile football school in the Big 12 and because it’s in the middle of nowhere.  Maybe he just wanted to escape from at least a little of the shitstorm that is NCAA basketball.  Finally, Cowherd said that by retiring in mid-season, Knight is contradicting all he’s ever taught.  I guess it never occurred to Cowherd that The General might have been doing a disservice to his team by staying around and going through the motions even though his heart was no longer fully in it.  He had already named a successor, his son Pat, and said individual was able to step into his new role seamlessly.  If I was a player for Coach Knight, I’d rather that than he just leave at the end of the season with no contingency plan in place.        

       As a small addendum, and this really pains me to say, I am going to throw my lot in with Dick Vitale on a certain topic.  IU needs to name the floor at Assembly Hall, or maybe even name the Hall itself, after Robert Montgomery Knight.  Miles Brand, the asshole who runs the NCAA, is no longer there and Knight is no longer coaching, so it’s about damn time they give the guy his due.  Actually, you know what?  I’m going to back off of the statement about naming the floor or the arena after him; they need to name the library after him.  During his tenure at IU, Bob Knight raised millions and donated quite a large sum to the library because he actually cared about the education of the students there.  Coach Knight has been, and will continue to be, a polarizing figure at IU and in the country at large, but his accomplishments cannot be denied.  Now that his career is seemingly at an end, I would hope the university to which he brought so much is able to lay aside the issues of the past and recognize him properly.  And I hope ESPN will continue to run countdowns of his greatest soundbytes.

       Finally, I received a pretty cool link in an email today; it asks you a series of questions and then uses your responses to calculate which Presidential candidate’s platform you most closely agree with.  Sure, it’s not very scientific, but I thought it was pretty cool.  Here’s the link: http://www.electoralcompass.com/.  And just in case you were wondering, I was pretty evenly aligned with Ron Paul, Obama, and Bill Clinton’s wife.

       I want to see Roger Clemens hang.  It’s not because I hate him or because I hate the Yankees and he played for them, twice.  It’s not even because he kept retiring and then coming back, each time demanding more and more outrageous salary figures.  It’s because I think he’s guilty and I’m pissed off about the way he’s handled the whole PED allegation thing.  In keeping with the traditions of Ash Wednesday, I’ve been thinking a lot of repentance and how if The Rocket had just come clean from the start, America probably would have forgiven and forgotten.  Look at Giambi: that meathead offered a half-hearted excuse-me swing of an apology and the normally merciless NYC media and a-holes, er, Yankees fans acted as if it never happened.  Here is why I think Clemens is guilty: 1) When the allegations first arose, he said nothing.  A truly innocent person would not need to meet with his legal team for days to dig up dirt on an accuser and to carefully craft a press release.  No, a truly innocent man would have climbed to the rooftop to profess his innocence.  2) No one gets better after the age of 35 in sports, no one.  Some people can continue to perform at a high level, but no one can stay the same or get better.  3) Rocket is a proud sumbitch who is obsessed with numbers, most notably his strikeout total.  Hell, he named his kids all with K names because K is what’s used in the books to record punchouts.  No way does a dude that driven to succeed not take steps to increase or prolong his performance.  All this Texas-sized douche is doing at this point is climbing higher up the ladder, thereby making his fall from grace that much farther.  In hearing the whole melodrama of McNamee v. Rocket, I can’t help but think of a time when I was younger and my family was sitting around the table eating dinner.  My younger brother must have been 4 or 5 at the time and he accidentally knocked over his glass of milk, spilling it everywhere.  My mom told him to clean it up and when he asked why, she told him it was because he had knocked the glass over.  ”No I didn’t,” he said, even though all of us had witnessed the event.  I couldn’t fathom what could have possessed my little brother to lie in the face of the evidence, and I am starting to feel the same way about Clemens.  If the latest reports are true and McNamee really does have physical evidence linking Rocket to PEDs, I can’t wait to hear the bullshit his lawyers dream up.         

       Message to the mainstream media: lay off Bob Knight already.  Cowherd was pissing me off today as he railed on about Knight being a hypocrite and about how college coaches shouldn’t want to graduate players.  His argument was that if you have players who stay for 4 years of college, you clearly didn’t recruit very well.  Only George Mason has 5 seniors, Cowherd said.  Because we all know that most college basketball players go on to earn millions in the Association.  Yeah, nice one Colin.  He said that Knight went to Tech so that he could bully the administration and the players, since it’s a low-profile football school in the Big 12 and because it’s in the middle of nowhere.  Maybe he just wanted to escape from at least a little of the shitstorm that is NCAA basketball.  Finally, Cowherd said that by retiring in mid-season, Knight is contradicting all he’s ever taught.  I guess it never occurred to Cowherd that The General might have been doing a disservice to his team by staying around and going through the motions even though his heart was no longer fully in it.  He had already named a successor, his son Pat, and said individual was able to step into his new role seamlessly.  If I was a player for Coach Knight, I’d rather that than he just leave at the end of the season with no contingency plan in place.        

       As a small addendum, and this really pains me to say, I am going to throw my lot in with Dick Vitale on a certain topic.  IU needs to name the floor at Assembly Hall, or maybe even name the Hall itself, after Robert Montgomery Knight.  Miles Brand, the asshole who runs the NCAA, is no longer there and Knight is no longer coaching, so it’s about damn time they give the guy his due.  Actually, you know what?  I’m going to back off of the statement about naming the floor or the arena after him; they need to name the library after him.  During his tenure at IU, Bob Knight raised millions and donated quite a large sum to the library because he actually cared about the education of the students there.  Coach Knight has been, and will continue to be, a polarizing figure at IU and in the country at large, but his accomplishments cannot be denied.  Now that his career is seemingly at an end, I would hope the university to which he brought so much is able to lay aside the issues of the past and recognize him properly.  And I hope ESPN will continue to run countdowns of his greatest soundbytes.

       Finally, I received a pretty cool link in an email today; it asks you a series of questions and then uses your responses to calculate which Presidential candidate’s platform you most closely agree with.  Sure, it’s not very scientific, but I thought it was pretty cool.  Here’s the link: http://www.electoralcompass.com/.  And just in case you were wondering, I was pretty evenly aligned with Ron Paul, Obama, and Bill Clinton’s wife.