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Saturday, Jul 11, 2009
In a no-nonsense 2005, Terrell Owens and BALCO fizzled, while the hard-working Pats, Spurs, White Sox and Colts sizzled.
Photos by AP/Wide World
Terrell Owens, Tim Duncan and Rafael Palmeiro
Dec 26, 2005 | What a sober year it was, this year in sports. An upstanding law-and-order year, a do-the-right-thing year. It was a year of new rules and regulations, stiffer penalties, the bad guys getting theirs. Humble lunch pail brigades took home championships this year while flash and self-glorification were sent into exile.
Except for Reggie Bush. The Heisman Trophy-winning tailback from USC was so spectacular that even this hat-in-hand, nose-to-the-grindstone annum couldn't dim his luster.
Maybe the sports world was chastened by the Brawl of Palace Hills in November 2004, the consequences of which were felt well into '05.
Maybe it was the prospect of playing games in the face of a wave of worldwide disasters, of tsunami aftermath and earthquake, war and, especially, Hurricane Katrina, that injected a note of humility to the proceedings and had athletes, coaches and the commentariat talking again and again about "perspective."
Maybe it was just one of those years, and with one or two things breaking differently -- high-flying Dwyane Wade staying healthy and leading his glamorous Miami Heat into the NBA Finals, say, or the New York Yankees going on one of their October runs -- this theme wouldn't fly at all.
Thank heavens for small favors.
The year began, as sports years tend to do, with college bowl games, and a massacre at the Orange Bowl. But the lasting memory from that National Championship Game wasn't Southern Cal toying with Oklahoma on the way to a 55-19 smithereening. It was Ashlee Simpson getting booed off the stage at halftime.
It was as if sports fans were serving notice that this was a new day. Keep in mind this was the Orange Bowl, which is to impossibly cheesy halftime entertainment what Siberia is to ice. The assembled crowd had only moments earlier had no problem with Kelly Clarkson, a minimally talented, manufactured product of the instant-celebrity hype machinery.
And now they rose up as one to say no -- they pronounced it "Boo!" -- to the amateurish keening of Simpson, who isn't even a minimally talented, manufactured product of the instant-celebrity hype machinery. She's the untalented sister of one. "That's where we draw the line," the people declared: "Boo!"
What does this have to do with sports? Everything. It was a harbinger, a signal that 2005 would be a year of no nonsense. A few weeks later, that no-nonsensiest of football teams, the New England Patriots, won the Super Bowl for the second straight time -- and with nary a costume malfunction during the forgettable halftime show.
The Patriots have won three of the last four Super Bowls without benefit of a superstar other than quarterback Tom Brady, a good-looking but unassuming fellow who is not going to make the popular culture forget Joe Namath. Or even Dan Marino. This blue-collar year saw a TV ad campaign make Brady's offensive linemen almost as famous as he is.
In between those two championship football games, Minnesota Vikings wide receiver Randy Moss elicited outrage when he pretended to moon the crowd in Green Bay after scoring a touchdown and pitcher Randy Johnson, then the newest New York Yankee, was filmed acting imperiously and roughly with a TV news cameraman.
Those served as opening acts. By the fall the outrageous behavior of an NFL wide receiver and the assault of a cameraman by a major league pitcher would be two of the biggest sports stories of the year, but Moss, traded to the Oakland Raiders over the summer, and Johnson, who couldn't fix the Yankees' pitching problems, weren't involved.
