LIVESTRONG... With a little help?!?

After years of speculation, he said she said, and strong denials the USADA has finally formally charged 7 time Tour de France champion Lance Armstrong with doping.  There will be a hearing and ultimately an arbitration panel will decide whether or not those wins will be have to be vacated.  What does all this mean for Armstrong?  For his legacy?  For his charitable work?

Nothing.  If we are honest about it cycling is barely a blip on the radar screen of most American sports fans. If we are willing to forgive and forget about the PED use by our heroes in the more prominent sports we certainly will have no such problem doing the same for Armstrong should he be found guilty.  His legacy will be tainted to an extent but again, it's cycling.  Most Americans couldn't tell you who would be considered our greatest cyclist if the title is stripped from Armstrong again should he be found guilty.  (BTW it would be Greg LeMond)  His charitable work won't suffer.  While his celebrity is valuable at this point I'm not sure he really needs his image to be squeaky clean to continue to raise money for cancer research.  It's cancer!  It doesn't need a celebrity face to make people want to help cure it.

Hopefully this all goes down fairly quickly and we will have an end of some sort to the last decade of prominent athletes being on trial for doping.  At least until the next future HOF baseball player shows up for a season and needs a new hat size.  

It Was All A Dream

It's been a long time.  I shouldn't have left you.  Without a fly blog to......read?!?  Tried to invoke a little Eric B. and Rakim to the start of this blog but it just didn't flow the way I wanted to.  If you don't know the song google search 'I Know You Got Soul'.  Anyway, I know it's been quite some time since my last post.  As many of you know I have been doing the weekly podcast with Demetri and thank you to all who have been listening.  Since we are on a bit of a hiatus due to some scheduling conflicts and Demetri being back on the radio (congrats my friend) it looks like I will again have the time to blog.  And what better way to get back to it than to discuss the greatest sports team ever assembled.  The Dream Team.

It has been twenty years since FIBA decided it was ok for NBA players to participate in the Olympic games and we sent the likes of Michael Jordan, Magic Johnson, Larry Bird and a host of hall of fame players to Barcelona to show the world how to play basketball.  This was all spawned by the U.S. losing the gold medal to the Soviets in 1988.  I won't bore you with the whole story but I will encourage you to check out the documentary 'The Dream Team' that NBATV recently debuted.  What I do want to do is talk about how that team and their performance in those Olympics changed the basketball world.

Let's first look at the influence it had internationally.  While it was already huge, the success of that team probably catapulted basketball into position only behind soccer as the #2 sport in the world and I would argue that the gap is closing fast.  That team showed the world a whole new level of basketball and it has spawned a boom of international players who are now not only good enough to play in the league but to even dominate.  Look at Dirk Nowitski who led the Dallas Mavericks to the NBA championship last year.  Or Tony Parker, who may be the best point guard in the league.  This list goes on and on.  International players now make up nearly 20% of the players in the NBA.  I would say if  one of the goals was to expand the game world wide, the other being to bring the gold back to America, mission accomplished.

Now let's look at how that team changed things here and I'm going to offer a perspective a little different than any I have ever heard.  And it is relevant to what's going on in the NBA finals.  That team, in my opinion, began the current culture of superstar players wanting to play together.  You could argue they were the first traveling AAU all star team, a concept that was foreign then but is huge in basketball here in America today.  Many of the stars of that team have been asked if they would do anything like what you see many young superstar players doing today, best example being the Heat with LeBron, D Wade, and Chris Bosh joining together to try and win championships.  To a man they all say NO, they wanted to kill each other, couldn't imagine doing it.  Inadvertently though I think The Dream Team started this culture.  In the documentary and in interviews I had seen of the players before now, they all talked about how they developed relationships with the other great players.  And how the competitive environment pushed them.  And how they would be lobbying to play on certain teams in practice.  These are all things that you hear from traveling AAU teams and now you are seeing manifest itself in the NBA with every team trying to put together 2 or 3 superstar players with the hopes of winning a championship. 

If the Miami Heat, the first team in what is becoming the new NBA, are able to win the championship with their 'Big Three' after having lost in the finals in year one of this experiment last year we will have officially seen a changing of the mentality of players.  And superstar players will do what they can to get to teams where they can play together.  As all sports fans know, players will always be judged by if they won a title.  America's greatest players getting together in 1992 to dominate the world started all this.  That's why they will forever be the only DREAM TEAM!  But I do have a new nickname for them, I'm going to start calling them 'THE BLUEPRINT'.