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Tuesday, Nov 24, 2009
Miracle comebacks, working-class heroes and gracious champions. Flying chairs, rape charges and steroids. 2004 was all about taking the bad with the good.
Dec 21, 2004 | It was a year of teamwork and humility, hard work paying dividends, underdogs coming through, gracious winners, great champions and a little chestnut colt who came out of a second-tier barn and conquered a nation. Fans of the Boston Red Sox were finally rewarded for lifetimes of suffering and devotion. 2004 was a year when sports showed us everything it's so good at showing us.
And then there was BALCO. There were chairs and fists flying in the stands, an entire sport shutting down in a labor war and a transcendent NBA superstar shuttling between playoff games and a courtroom where he was facing rape charges. And there was the incessant drumbeat of corruption, deceit and exploitation that is big-time college sports.
Those are the things sports are good at showing us too. Best of times and worst, thrill and agony. Sometimes, especially during the Olympics, there was all of it in one day, in one second. In the end 2004 was just another year, only more so.
The NFL offered up the first, best vision of how sports oughta be, serving up a Super Bowl between a pair of blue-collar teams devoid of superstars and their attendant egos.
The New England Patriots were in the midst of what would become a 21-game winning streak achieved by excellent but not spectacular play on both sides of the ball. The out-of-nowhere Carolina Panthers were a no-name team given little chance to make the playoffs and no chance to get to the Super Bowl or beat the Pats. They did the former and nearly did the latter.
Unfortunately, that terrific championship game was overshadowed by the silly controversy over Janet Jackson's wardrobe malfunction, the first of two brouhahas involving football-related entertainer nudity during 2004. But it set the tone for the year in North American team sports.
Springtime found the Calgary Flames and Tampa Bay Lightning playing for the Stanley Cup, not the richer, more glamorous Detroit Red Wings or Colorado Avalanche against the Philadelphia Flyers or Toronto Maple Leafs. Though the Lightning had some stars, the marquee player of the series was Jarome Iginla, leader of the heavy-underdog Flames and maybe the best player in hockey, but at heart a hard-nosed power forward who grinds and grinds, outworking his foes.
The Stanley Cup Finals, which the Lightning won in seven games and which sparked an outpouring of love, partying and flashed breasts on the eventual losers' behalf in Calgary, went a long way toward making people forget the year's ugliest on-field incident in any sport, Todd Bertuzzi of the Vancouver Canucks attacking Steve Moore of the Colorado Avalanche from behind during a game, breaking three vertebrae in Moore's neck among other injuries.
