Barcelona edge through to semis in El Clásico

Barcelona missed a two-goal lead to a goal against Real Madrid, but the renewed victory in the semi-finals of the King's Cup in a 2-2 draw at the Nou Camp to make it 4-3 on aggregate.
Choose a Real Madrid coach Jose Mourinho's Portuguese international Pepe in his starting lineup despite his stamp on Lionel Messi in the first leg, Real Madrid made the best chance early on, Gonzalo Higuain will be close and Ozil Masoud crashed a shot against the underside of the crossbar.


 




Hosts then suffered a blow on the half hour mark when he had to leave Andres Iniesta field with a hamstring injury to be replaced by Pedro, and the alternative, which opened the scoring two minutes before halftime. Messi made brands run ended with him to reconcile the ball to Pedro inside the penalty area, and the young of any error in the launch of the past Iker Casillas. Although against the run of play, and went 2-0 Barcelona amazingly right on the whistle until the end of the first half, Dani Alves was "resounding in the top corner giving Casillas no chance.
Real break after thinking they had reduced the arrears when Sergio Ramos headed home, only to have it ruled out for tug-on Alves, but Real Madrid did not get themselves back in the middle of the game in the second half with two goals in three minutes. First, by Cristiano Ronaldo raced to round goalkeeper Jose Pinto and slot home from a tight angle, and then substitute Karim Benzema finished clinically after an error by Gerard Pique.
Barcelona, ​​and then suffered a difficult end to the game before Ramos sent off after two minutes from time for a second yellow card and Pep Guardiola's men will now face the winners in Valencia and Levante in the semi-finals.
After that, you do not have Mourinho much to say at the press conference, giving journalists answers to the questions unilaterally, but congratulated Barcelona on winning, though only on their performance in the first leg, and even claimed that he had heard some players say in advance it would be impossible to win at Camp Nou .
"We played well and it was easy to talk half the time for me," said the Portuguese. "When your team does not play well in the second half and is short, but I said what had to be said in just one minute. We had four or five good chances in the first half, things changed in the second half.
"If you want me to congratulate Barcelona will win over Real Madrid, where he won convincingly, but we came here in hopes of beating them. I'm not saying that it was impossible to win here but I did not hear that in the dressing room."
Defender Ramos used his Twitter account to vent his feelings and suggested that the verdict was that cost his team the game.
"I'm very proud of my team," he tweeted. "But there are some things you can not fight. Today I played football and Real Madrid were very superior. From power, do not comment. Images are professionals and can analyze what happened. Hala Madrid!"

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Bolton complete £2.5m signing of American Tim Ream

And training for 24 years with both West Bromwich Albion and Bolton last month during a season in MLS, where he played for the New York Red Bulls.

Maon replaces Gary Cahill, who moved to Chelsea earlier this month, in the heart of the Bolton defense.

"Tim was late by a couple of clubs, including Arsenal and West Brom, so it's great to see the future here," said Bolton boss Owen Coyle.

"He is young, has a great attitude and a winning mentality, and I know it will fit perfectly with the rest of the team."

Ream, who played seven times for the national team of the United States since his debut in 2010 against South Africa, and looks forward to making this impression in Bolton.

"I knew there was interest in me when I came over last year, and train for a few weeks, then after the Holiday Birth things have started to ramp," said Ream.

"Being able to play against Paris Saint-Germain and Arsenal in the Emirates Cup [last summer for the Red Bulls] gave me the idea and knowledge into what you do not need to be successful here.

"Now we have these games in the week and the week will make me a better player in all respects. Competing in the top league in the world can only help a player.

He added: "Working in a good run of form and now I'm just looking to contribute in any way I can."

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Great memory turns Gabbert into top prospect

Blaine Gabbert rattled through math problems so easily as a child, remembering everything from multiplication tables to batting averages, that his mother, Bev, began to imagine something magnificent going on in her oldest son’s head.

“He’s almost got a photographic memory,” she says over the phone from the family house just outside St. Louis.

This is the attribute that might just take Gabbert far in his pursuit to be a starting quarterback in the NFL. He already has those other things the NFL desires: standing 6-foot-5 with the ability to fling the ball three-quarters of the field in the air. But it is his mind that might push him farther, for in the complex world of football offenses little matters more than memory.

“Once you say it to him it is set in stone,” says David Yost, University of Missouri offensive coordinator and quarterback coach. “His ability to process the information is amazing. You give it to him, he retains it.”

The NFL has all kinds of tricks designed to test a quarterback’s intelligence. Over the past few weeks, as Gabbert has talked to the teams that need a quarterback in this draft – Carolina Panthers, Buffalo Bills, Arizona Cardinals, Tennessee Titans and Washington Redskins – the challenges have come out. Teams have handed him pens and asked him to draw from memory his offense from college. Then they dictate the elements of their own offense, often one he has never seen before. After he has scribbled this on the same board, they erase it and tell him to write it all over again.

Gabbert shows off wheels at the combine.
(US Presswire)

Here is where the NFL men learn about the minds of their future passers. Can they learn fast? Can they adjust? Ultimately the result is often more important than if the quarterback can hit a receiver on the dead run with a 65-yard throw.

And the reports that have trickled back to Missouri where Gabbert played quarterback are that he has dazzled with his ability to decipher offenses. And it is probably the biggest reason he has risen as a junior who left college early to one of the top two quarterbacks taken in next week’s NFL draft.

“I guess I’m good at remembering and picking things up quickly,” Gabbert says over the phone with a bit of an embarrassed laugh. “I’ve always retained things quickly.”

Few characteristics are greater for NFL quarterbacks than their mind. Offenses have become so complex, with so many different variations and adjustments made each week that a quarterback who can understand what is going on becomes invaluable. The 700-page playbook Al Saunders introduced to the Washington Redskins when he was hired as their offensive coordinator in 2006 immediately became legend around the league, until it was revealed that 700 pages was actually normal for an NFL team and that Saunders’ book might really run closer to 1,000 pages with all the other options the plays demanded. Many others are similar in size.

At Missouri, Yost sometimes changed the Tigers’ offense depending on the team they were playing, a common adjustment professional teams make. He learned early that Gabbert, who reportedly scored 42 out of 50 on the Wonderlic test during the NFL scouting combine, could handle the change. Where most quarterbacks he worked with usually needed to see the play on a board or have it explained with video, Blaine almost always understood when the play was first described.

For instance, while preparing for the Insight.com Bowl against Iowa late last year, Yost mentioned a particular red zone defense Iowa likes to play to Gabbert and quickly offered a solution. Later that day, in practice, a red-zone situation arose and Gabbert immediately made the change even though it was something he had barely discussed with Yost hours before.

Subtle emergence

In an autumn where the quarterback news was dominated by Stanford’s senior-to-be Andrew Luck and Auburn’s Cam Newton, who might be the most scrutinized Heisman Trophy winner in years, Gabbert was an afterthought. His Missouri Tigers won 10 games yet he was never much in the conversation as a first-round draft pick for this spring. He could throw long but he played in Missouri’s spread offense in which the quarterback is almost always in the shotgun. It’s the kind of offense that’s generally perceived not to translate well to the NFL.

So in many ways Gabbert is kind of a new discovery. Obviously the pros knew about him. but they didn’t seem to understand exactly what they were getting. One big misconception is that he was not fast or athletic compared to Newton who can tear down the field. Lanky with blonde locks that spill out from beneath his helmet, Gabbert looks like he wouldn’t be very agile or fast. But Gabbert ran a 4.62 40 yard dash at the combine and is, if nothing else, elusive. At Missouri he rushed for 458 yards.

He also knows how to play under center having worked since midway through high school with a private quarterback coach Skip Stitzell, who often drove to the Gabbert’s St. Louis-area home. Stitzell only instructed Blaine on running a pro-style offense – even while Gabbert was in college – figuring it to be the best base from which to learn.

“I have a joke with Blaine that everyone says he’s going to have to learn to stand under center and do three-, five- and seven-step drops,” Stitzell says by phone from his Fayette home. “No he doesn’t. I think he’s actually better under center than in the gun. He’s got better rhythm and timing. He’s very good at the play-action stuff which you need to do in the NFL.”

“Would another year in college have made him a better quarterback?” Yost asks. “Sure. But talking to NFL people I don’t know if another year would have made him more marketable to the NFL.”

So he left.

“The timing was right,” Gabbert says. “I know I need to challenge myself at the next level. From a quarterback standpoint I knew I was the best quarterback coming out of college football.”

Gabbert had a school bowl record of 434 passing yards in the loss to Iowa.
(US Presswire)

He does not say this in a cocky way. Rather his tone never changes. It is something he is sure of, something he believes. He had a decent junior year throwing for 3,186 yards and 16 touchdowns in 13 games and probably could have improved on all of those numbers had he come back next season. It was a surprise to some that he came out, but then, Gabbert can surprise.

Like when he says that if he hadn’t been such a top athlete he might have gone the way of his good friend growing up, Steve May, who went to West Point. When the rest of his teammates ask to play the traditional “Halo” in the Missouri locker room, Gabbert insists on the game “Call of Duty,” showing a unique understanding of World War II battles and generals’ tactics.

He says he loves to read about war history, often reading on planes when his colleagues are more likely to be sleeping or watching movies. His favorite book is “Lone Survivor” by Marcus Luttrell, the story of a Navy SEAL who was the only member of a four-man team to live through an attack in Afghanistan.

In a league where coaches often look to the memoirs of military leaders for inspiration, Gabbert’s interests will undoubtedly be an asset. As will his memory.

“He’s the smartest guy I’ve ever worked with,” Yost says.

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Unlikely hero lifts Bruins back to final

BOSTON – For those last seven minutes, a huge cleansing scream filled the inside of the TD Garden. It rattled off the stands. It rolled off the ceiling. It pierced eardrums and left stomachs clenched against its fury. It was a combination of love and elation but tinged nonetheless with the dread that something would go wrong, just as it has all those times before.

But when the end came and there was no great collapse, no trap door opening in the ice to let the Boston Bruins fall through, the 17,576 fans who roared and agonized all at once began to chant.

“We want the Cup!”

“We want the Cup!”

Boston's Tim Thomas (L) congratulates Game 7 hero Nathan Horton.
(Associated Press)

“Oh, you know we are the same way as all of them,” said Bruins right winger Nathan Horton(notes) late Friday night, having written his name into the endless Boston sports scroll with the Game 7 goal that sent the Bruins to the Stanley Cup Finals with a 1-0 victory over Tampa Bay.

In this recent run of Boston sports teams shedding decades of old ghosts, the Bruins have been the one franchise denied. So many misses. So many blown chances. In a Garden where the banners hanging in the rafters are everything, that last Stanley Cup title from ’72 looks old and worn. All around the arena’s corridors hang pictures of Bruins players clutching the Cup, kissing it, caressing it. But they are wearing paisley shirts with wide collars and checkered sports jackets. Unkempt sideburns adorn their cheeks.

It has been a long time for the Bruins, a time that has eluded New England’s hockey team in the most damning of ways, perhaps none worse than last year’s blown 3-0 series lead against Philadelphia in the second round. And when Boston failed to close out this series with the Tampa Bay Lightning in Wednesday night’s Game 6, it seemed everything was falling apart once more.

But it took a player who had never played for them before this year, one who didn’t experience last spring’s tumble, to slip through the Tampa Bay defense, tap the puck into the net and bring all of Massachusetts to its feet. Maybe this is the way it was supposed to be; the outsider swooping in to save everyone. In Game 6, Horton had made himself something of a villain when cameras appeared to capture him spraying water on fans in Tampa Bay in anger. This led to wild speculation that he would be suspended for Game 7 on Friday.

Horton smiled at the thought he might have missed Friday’s game when it was suggested to him. He said the league never called about the incident and nobody from the Bruins mentioned anything about a suspension.

“I don’t know about that; it just felt great,” he said.

Having played his career elsewhere, perhaps he could not have understood exactly what he brought the Bruins on Friday, or how much he saved their fans who would have been apoplectic had Boston not found a way to somehow win this series. Whether those suffering in the Garden or the bars outside appreciated the brilliance of this Game 7 is lost in the chaos that came after Horton’s goal with 7:33 left in the last period. Boston pounded Tampa Bay’s goalie Dwayne Roloson(notes) with 38 shots – some he must never have even seen – and yet nothing went in. Cheers for good shots soon turned to groans of disappointment and then shrieks of despair. Heartbreak couldn’t happen again … could it?

Later, when looking back at the failures of recent seasons, Bruins defenseman Zdeno Chara(notes) used the word “unfortunate.”

As the third period wound down, it seemed like such an understatement.

Then came Horton.

He found it funny that people thought his goal came on a designed play. There was no design, no coordination. He rushed at the goal as hard as he could, saw the puck flying in and tapped it with his stick at the last moment. Roloson never stood a chance.

And the party was on.

The roar was so loud in those initial moments after Horton’s goal that the stands shook. Some of those who have seen plenty of sporting events in this arena say it was the loudest they’ve ever heard it. As time ticked down, something was released by nearly everyone in the building.

“How long has it been since Boston was in the Finals?” Bruins goalie Tim Thomas(notes) asked.

Twenty-one years, he was told.

He nodded.

“It’s been a long time for Boston,” he said.

Next week brings Vancouver and the Stanley Cup Finals. The last ghost has not been vanquished. The Bruins still don’t have a sixth championship banner to hang next to the one that reads “1972.” Back then, when Bobby Orr patrolled the ice, it must have seemed like the Bruins would forever play for more titles. Then everything went dark – until Friday night, when it took a newcomer who might have been suspended were this not a Game 7, to take Boston four games from the Stanley Cup.

For a night, everything seemed possible in New England again.

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Taurasi's travails strangely gave her peace

It is impossible to watch Diana Taurasi, the best player in the WNBA, probably the best women’s player in the world, and not feel the fire burning through your television. Few women – heck, few men – play with what seems like an intense, pulsing glow radiating across the court.

It is also impossible for Diana Taurasi to turn off her fervor. There is no switch, nothing to trip her mind, to tell her basketball is over for the day and it is time to settle down. Instead the pulsing continues. Did she have a good practice? Was she productive? Will she be productive tomorrow?

Will she win? She must always win.

“I think about it 24 hours a day,” she says. “I feel like Bobby Fischer a little bit.”

Diana Taurasi's banishment from a Turkish team prompted her to relax.
(Getty Images)

For all those who mock the WNBA, who think the league that begins its 15th season Friday lacks the seriousness of the NBA, perhaps they have never watched the guard from the Phoenix Mercury, never seen her take charge of a night, careening through the lane to score basket after basket when her teams needs them most.

Every day there is someone to sway – a coach, a teammate an opponent – even after they’ve all acknowledged that she’s probably the best ever. Their affirmations aren’t enough. She has to show them, show herself, tell them the extra 20 minutes of lifting weights, the extra jump shots, the running was worth it, that somehow in the day she is making herself or someone better. Slowing is so hard.

Only this winter she had to stop. The Turkish team for whom she was playing last winter dropped her after she tested positive for a mild stimulant called modafinil. She vehemently denied the allegations, even taking a polygraph test to establish her innocence. Her protestations were so strong, the Mercury’s general manager, Ann Meyers-Drysdale (who was something of the Taurasi of her day), believed her player immediately. Perhaps a part of Taurasi’s intensity is the fact she had never lied to the team in the past, and it seemed hard to believe she would now.

It was only after Taurasi returned to the United States that word came down: The testing company had made a mistake. There had been no positive test. There hadn’t been a stimulant. As if she needed anything more to drive her on the court. This week, the World Anti Doping Agency suspended accreditation for the testing company for six months, as much a validation that Taurasi was telling the truth as any.

But her banishment from the Turkish team also brought a strange but welcome benefit. It prompted her to relax.

She never had time away from basketball before. While playing at the University of Connecticut, there were always summer teams, national teams, tournaments in which to play. Her first four years in the WNBA she’d play the summer-fall league season in the U.S. and then go to Russia to play professionally through the winter and early spring. Add in the Olympics and World Championships and she was exhausted.

Meyers-Drysdale remembers Taurasi’s former college coach Geno Auriemma, who was also coach of the national team last summer, lamenting at the World Championships that Taurasi was there in body but her mind was drained. By missing the rest of the Turkish season, Taurasi could rest.

“Actually, they did her a favor,” Meyers-Drysdale says.

The general manager pauses to consider the notion, then adds, “You know she’s never been healthy since she’s been in the WNBA?”

Now she is.

Where do you go when you’ve won nine championships between college, the WNBA and overseas? You keep pushing.

Diana Taurasi was forced to grow up when faced with some personal adversity.
(Getty Images)

“To me, it’s like Bill Russell, you sustain it,” Meyers-Drysdale says.

There was a time Taurasi did not like the attention. This came early at Connecticut, one of those rare places where women’s basketball players are festooned with the kind of acclaim most men at even big college basketball schools aren’t. The interviews kept coming. Day after day. The words repeating in her mind. She began dreaming she was doing interviews, sitting up in bed, tying her hair in a bun – as she often did when talking to the media – and prepared for the onslaught of questions until she realized it was nighttime and there was no interview and she could go back to sleep.

Eventually grew out of his and came to dominate women’s college basketball. Twice she was the college player of the year and led UConn to three national titles. For seven years she’s essentially been the face of the WNBA, its best player, the one who generates its few highlights on the nightly roundups, who seizes the games down five with two minutes left, attacking, attacking, attacking until Phoenix finally wins.

This has made her an MVP. This has won her two titles with the Mercury. This has left Auriemma to laugh at the silliness of the question when asked who in the armada of stars who played for him was best. Taurasi.

But there was a price to pay; a heavy one when she was arrested in 2009 and charged by Phoenix police with an “extreme DUI” after she tested with a blood alcohol content of .17, more than twice the legal limit. She later pleaded guilty to a DUI and served a day in jail. A lesser player in the league probably would have avoided the public shame, yet since arrests are a rare thing in the WNBA and Taurasi was the league’s best player, the words “extreme DUI” hummed across the news wires. It was an embarrassment for a league trying to hard to grow.

And yet it was something else too.

“She woke up,” Meyers-Drysdale says. “She made it a positive. She turned her life around.”

Asked exactly what this meant, Meyers_Drysdale replies: “It got her life back. In how she lived away from the game.”

A lot has happened to Taurasi in the last two years. In addition to the DUI and the issue in Turkey, there was also the 2009 murder of Shabtai Kalmanovitch, owner of the Russian team Spartak Moscow for which she played four years after the WNBA season was finished. She was close to Kalmanovitch’s family, Meyers-Drysdale says.

Suddenly Taurasi, who faced so little adversity, for whom everything came easy and as a result was probably given great leeway in return, was forced to grow up a bit. This is never easy. But she began to find peace in simpler things. Once she would have raced home from practice to sit on the couch and text and tweet and email as many friends as possible, surrounding herself with a close but invisible cocoon of safe faces. Since the arrest and the stimulant test, she puts the phone and computer away, ignoring the social media she once craved.

Last year she posed nude on the cover of a national sports magazine. She did not want to do it. It was a lot of control to relinquish. Her agent asked her four times before she agreed and even then she only did so because the agent said it would be a good thing for her to do. It was only after the magazine came out and she saw the photos that she was glad she did the photo shoot.

“As I’ve gotten older I’ve learned how to relax a little more,” she says, insisting she is serious. “I can sit on the couch now and read a magazine or sit on the couch and have a cup of coffee.”

Which is about as much as the most intense player in the WNBA can possibly let go.

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Hockey Pop: Popeye Jones' Son Is A Rising Star, But Not In Basketball

Hockey?

To Popeye Jones this had to be a phase. His sons wanted to play hockey? At first he smiled when the subject came up after he returned home from an NBA season away. Sure, he liked watching hockey and he noticed that the neighborhood children played it outside their suburban Denver home. But he was an NBA basketball player, after all, a forward well into an 11-year career. Didn't basketball players' kids want to be basketball players too?

He looked at his three sons, amazed.

"You want to play ice hockey?" he asked.

They were standing in the middle of a sporting goods store, more than 10 years ago now. All around them lay piles of skates, sticks, helmets and sweaters. His credit card was out, the register was buzzing. Suddenly he felt an anger welling inside. He had a certain cache in being Popeye Jones. He was a 6-foot-8, a power forward, not a superstar but known enough to be recognized wherever he went. Now his kids were telling him they wanted to become hockey players?

How did they even learn how to skate?

Popeye chuckles at the memory. He's had time to adjust. His oldest son Justin, 20, just finished a season with a junior team near his Dallas home called the Texas Tornado. His youngest boy Caleb, 14, is showing promise too. But it is his middle son, 16-year-old Seth, whom hockey people are talking about. They say Seth, a tall, rugged defenseman who plays for the U.S. Under-17 team, might be a top 10 pick in the 2013 NHL Draft.

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Popeye doesn't know much about hockey, not like basketball where he is an assistant coach with the New Jersey Nets. Over the years, he has stood in the back of rinks, a giant of a man trying to hide as he watched his sons skating across the ice. He calls out encouragement. He has learned the game but not enough that he can break down their performances.

Once, at the Pepsi Center in Denver, he bumped into Joe Sakic of the Colorado Avalanche.

"My sons want to play hockey, what do I do?" he asked.

Sakic stared at the man towering before him.

"They'll probably be big," Sakic replied.

Popeye can tell Seth is going to be very good. It doesn't take the trained eye of a hockey expert to realize he has skill. He's a defenseman, 6-foot-3, 185 pounds, physical but not intimidating. When Popeye watches Seth play, he sees a leader. The first word that comes to mind is "intelligent." He glides with purpose, weaving through players, never firing the puck too hard or too soft.

"When he's playing I see a calmness," Popeye says. "I see the ability when he is on the ice that more often than not he will make the right decision."

Or as his ex-wife Amy, the mother of his three boys says: "Seth sees things the others don't."

At USA Hockey they love Seth. The coaches there notice the same things that are so obvious to the father. The Under-17 team coach, former NHL player Danton Cole, calls Seth "a point guard."

"When it needs to go fast he speeds it up," Cole says. "When it needs to go slow he slows it down. His poise and maturity are an interesting combination. He's a tremendously mature young man as well."

Cole pauses.

"That kid was born to play hockey," he says.

Any hope Popeye had of converting his middle son to some other sport died soon after Seth first started playing hockey at about age five. When Amy realized the children loved the game, she took them for skating lessons. After that Seth wanted nothing more than to be a hockey player. Popeye tried to get him to fall for another game. There was basketball, of course. And when Seth turned out to be left-handed, Popeye -- who grew up playing baseball in addition to basketball -- thought maybe he could make his boy a pitcher. No chance. Seth wanted hockey.

"Since I started playing this is what I have wanted to do," Seth says. "It's just the speed and the intensity of the game."

He is in Ann Arbor, Mich., when he says this by phone. He moved there over a year ago when the U.S. team called, leaving his mom and his brothers behind to live with a host family and attend high school far away from the suburban Dallas home where his family relocated a few years ago. It is a lonely life in a way. "A different life," Seth calls it. But it might also be the greatest gift his father could have provided: An ability to focus completely on a sport, locking himself into it for weeks, even months at a time.

Through the years, Popeye brought his children around to the practices and locker rooms and games of whatever team he happened to be with at the time. From a young age they all noticed how it was a job to the players, how they had to work for hours lifting weights and practicing jump shots. It wasn't lost on Seth, for instance, that Mavericks forward Dirk Nowitzki took hundreds of jump shots alone in an empty gym just to be able to make 10 in a game.

Basketball took Popeye away for months at a time. For a few years, whenever he changed teams, the family moved along, following him from Dallas to Toronto to Boston and eventually Denver. When he signed with the Washington Wizards in 2000, they stayed behind in the Denver suburbs. Popeye played in Washington and moved back when the season ended. That's when the hockey started.

Popeye and Amy agree this is the way it had to be. Basketball was not something Popeye could fake and the nomadic life of a basketball player bouncing from team to team does not give the children a stable life in which they could stay in the same schools or keep the same friends. When hockey came along, everyone in the family says, it was Amy who had to drive the boys to practice, sit for hours in frigid rinks watching workouts and games until she could detect flaws, and tell her son about them the moment he was off the ice.

Asked if Popeye was the kind of father who came to games, yelling at the referees and harassing the coaches, Seth laughs. No, he says. When his father came, he'd stay in the back, out of the way. It was his mother who yelled. "She's been a great role model," he says.

But, of course, the story is always about Popeye because this is something most people can’t believe. In some ways it is a racial thing. Popeye Jones is black and while there have been more African American hockey stars in recent years, it is still seen as very much of a white game. With Popeye being so visible, a man most people have some kind of mental picture of, the fact his boys play hockey can create mild confusion.

"A lot of people do double-takes," Popeye says of his trips to the rink.

Amy is white, however. And maybe because of this and the fact the children were so good, the comments that might have been made in the past have never come up. Almost nobody makes mention of Popeye on the ice. Cole says he noticed Seth was asked a lot by the U.S. teammates and officials about his famous father. He answered the questions and then the conversation went somewhere else. "That's only going to go so far in a locker room," Cole says.

Popeye has a lot of funny stories about the cultural divide between his life and his sons. He remembers returning home from his seasons away and sitting down to watch basketball playoffs on television only to be overruled by his wife and kids determined to watch hockey. “I got banished to another room to watch basketball," he says.

Jokingly he blames Mike Modano. It was Modano, the former Dallas Stars center who first invited him to a hockey game after they met at a charity function when Popeye was a young player with the Mavericks. Popeye brought his wife and young children. They had so much fun, he remembers they kept going back. Maybe if he had never met Modano, or if they had never gone to the hockey game, things would have turned out differently. His boys would be playing basketball or baseball -- something he understood better.

Mostly, though there is pride mixed with a father's regret of a life lived on the road. So much he missed.

"It tore at my gut to not be able to see him on the (U.S.) team," Popeye says.

His salvation came from a video company who has an office in the Nets training facility. The company can make a DVD of any game that has been televised anywhere and it found many of Seth’s games for Popeye, burning a recording on a disc and leaving it on his desk for him to watch later. Last year, when the Youth 17 Championships coincided with a Nets game, Popeye found himself sitting in his hotel room at 2:30 a.m. watching recordings of the hockey, amazed by his son's poise and maturity.

He realizes Seth is so different than himself at that age. At 16 Popeye didn’t even know he wanted to be a basketball player. He played baseball and football in addition to basketball and loved them all. The fact Seth is so devoted to one thing amazes him.

"I know Popeye misses being around it," Amy says.

But this was the price of a life in basketball, a life that despite the long gaps also gave their children advantages others never had. The children never wanted for much outside of hockey, but there was always money for equipment and rink rental and lessons along with those trips to the NBA locker rooms and the understanding of how much you have to sacrifice to become great.

It's all worked out for the best.

Except Popeye still has this one thought. Every time he watches his son on the ice it won't go away, nagging in the back of the coach’s mind. Seth is so tall, so smooth, so in control ...

"I still think he'd make a great basketball player."

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The window remains open for Lefty

BETHESDA, Md. – The Last American climbed the hills of Congressional Country Club in a white shirt and pastel linen pants. Things have been good for Phil Mickelson in these final days before he turns 41. He can feel it in a swing that has needed little tinkering. He can see it in the putts that finally rolled true two weeks ago at the Memorial.

Yes, he said, smiling at yet another television reporter, “I really believe I can win this tournament.”

The frequent narrative about the last American to win a major – Lefty captured the 2010 Masters – is often about the things he doesn’t win. For years, all everyone talked about was how he couldn’t win a major, and then he won the Masters in 2004 and won it again and again. But now it seems that isn’t enough, that somehow his career isn’t complete unless he wins a U.S. Open. And with Tiger Woods gone for what could be a significant period, the idea is that this weekend, here, is finally his time.

BETHESDA, MD - JUNE 14: Phil …
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Which is why he spent much of the last few days walking around Congressional saying again and again: “I think I can win this tournament.”

Woods is gone but he always lurks near, ready to leap from the shadows. Mickelson never won many battles with Woods. Few have. Maybe that’s why Woods’ name keeps coming up this week, almost as a qualifier, signaling freedom for Mickelson to have his victory at last. With the 14-time major winner out of the way, won’t that make things easier?

Michelson smiled. It’s a delicate question. Yes, Woods’ absence makes for a psychological advantage. It removes an impediment no matter how poorly Woods had been playing before these latest injuries. But it also leaves a wide-open tournament, one that seems less predictable and less safe. Woods, he said, pushed him the way no one else did, pulling out his best game even if the result was another dispiriting defeat.

“The challenge now is, without him playing his best or even competing like he’s not this week, is pushing myself to achieve a level of play that is there without him forcing me to do so,” Mickelson said. “So in that sense it might be a little difficult.”

It was perhaps as honest a comment as you might hear from an athlete. Most would never let similar words leave their mouths. The natural assumption would be to believe the fact that this is the U.S. Open would be enough to make Mickelson play his best, but here he was admitting that he would almost have to summon the ghost of his fiercest rival to reach that height.

He’s always come across as more complicated than Woods, who openly wore his single-minded zeal, burying any hint of a personality in a carefully -crafted monotone. Woods would never admit he needed another player to push him to a higher level. He also wouldn’t stroll easily through the grounds, waiting patiently for television reporters to set up their interview before forcing him to smile and say hopefully enough: “I really believe I can win this tournament.”

But Mickelson has been through so much, little seems to bother him now. He started talking about the wretched hours between the end of a round Saturday and tee time Sunday during a tournament when winning is a possibility. This is where crazy thoughts creep into a golfer’s mind. It’s where Woods was always his best and where Mickelson has often struggled.

“Does holding the trophy go through your mind?” he said, “because if it does, you’re going to have a problem the next day.”

He’s learned the hard way.

The loss at Winged Foot in 2006 is Mickelson’s most spectacular U.S. Open defeat, but he also looks back to the 1995 Open at Shinnecock, one in which he finished tied for fourth, as the moment he first understood how to play this event. It was there where he stopped trying to reach the green on the par 5s, stopped trying to steal strokes on holes designed to trap the impatient golfer.

The Last American was asked this week if he is staring at a closing window, having lost too many years to the shadow of Woods. It was a polite way of wondering if he is nearly too old to ever win this thing. The words slapped into him, stopping him for a moment.

“Not yet, no,” he said, his voice filled with surprise.

But this is how it is going to be for the Last American, the one for whom a nation turns to this week. On Wednesday, Mickelson will go to the White House. He is excited about this and talked happily about how his wife, Amy, is coming into town early for the occasion.

“(Obama) plays left-handed so it’s the biggest decision he’s done right,” said Mickelson, feigning his own left-handed swing.

Everybody chuckled. He stood under a tree near the tennis courts. A television network was putting together its interview, the camera guy finding focus, raising his hand, 3-2-1 ready. Here came the first question.

And Phil Mickelson smiled once more.

“I really believe I can win this tournament,” he said.

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Fort Valley State prospect closes in on NFL dream

The father sells hope to the forgotten.

Every day Earl Lockette moves slowly through the halls of the Turner Job Corps Center in Albany, Ga., where he is a counselor advising those who don’t have a diploma or are have maybe been in trouble. It’s the last chance for many.

As he strolls, he tugs on the pass from the NFL’s scouting combine around his neck, a gift from his 24-year-old son and adjusts the combine cap on his head, hoping the pass or the hat can attract a curious look from one of the students, perhaps a question, allowing Earl a moment to engage.

“Oh you like football? OK. By the way, my son is playing football, he’s doing pretty good. You know, he’s got a chance to play in the NFL …”

Then he is into the story of his boy Ricardo; the one who loved football, the one who desperately wanted to be a professional football player. And yet the more Ricardo wanted to be a football player, the farther away he seemed to get. Except he never quit on his dream, pushing it until one day this winter a letter arrived from the combine telling Ricardo he was one of some 300 players in the country who had been invited. Suddenly the impossible fantasy of the NFL was on the verge of coming true.

And always Earl laughs.

“He’s the proof in the pudding,” Earl says.

He tells them how Ricardo desperately wanted to be a wide receiver at an SEC school but bad grades and low test scores chased the big-school coaches away, leaving him to run track at Wallace State (Ala.) Community College, then tiny Division II Fort Valley State. He describes how Ricardo won a national title in the 200 meters and barely missed the Olympic trials after a qualifying time was ruled to be wind-aided. He tells them too how Ricardo did play football at Fort Valley and how that career was nearly disrupted when he tested positive for a banned over-the-counter supplement at a track event and had to sit out an entire season after his junior year.

And then he always finishes with this: Ricardo came back for that senior year at Fort Valley and despite catching just 23 passes this past season, the NFL was still interested. In fact he might well be a late-round pick in next week’s NFL draft.

“I’m so proud of him,” Earl says.

He just hopes the students are listening. He wants them to believe. He wants them to trust that just like Ricardo, anything is possible.

“I always use Ricardo when I’m talking to them,” Earl Lockette says. He is on the phone, talking from Albany, where Ricardo was raised. His voice rises. “Even now, he hasn’t even made it to the NFL yet but he’s stuck to his guns. The greatest thing I’ve heard anyone say is ‘he’s going to be successful.’ With these kids I tell them: ‘if you don’t make it right away, keep working. You will make it. You will get your dreams.’ ”

Ricardo was once asked by a reporter: “Did speed run in your family?”

His reply: “No, determination did.”

Many times Ricardo Lockette wanted to give up football, throwing away his silly hope and finding something more substantial to do with his life. When the coaches at one SEC university supposedly told him he wouldn’t have the grades and test scores to get into school and suggested a year at a prep school, he was devastated and then defiant. He did not want to go to a prep school. He wanted college. He claims several schools told him they would give him a scholarship to run track. Fort Valley, which is where his father and grandfather went, would take him.

“I’ll just go to Fort Valley State and run track and go to the Olympics,” he told Earl.

When the qualifiers for the 2008 Olympics came and went and he wasn’t a part of it, he began dedicating his time again to football. He was always fast and though his skills weren’t as refined as someone who had been playing his whole life, he knew he was fast enough to get past defenses.

“I was a receiver by Division I standards,” Ricardo says by phone from Georgia where he has been training for the draft.

Lockette participates in drills at the combine.
(US Presswire)

Just because it is a small school does not mean Fort Valley State is a football wasteland. Databasefootball.com lists 11 Fort Valley players who appeared in at least one NFL game, including former Pittsburgh Steelers linebacker Greg Lloyd, onetime Raiders safety Eddie Anderson and receiver Tyrone Poole(notes). Ricardo says the coaches there welcomed him enthusiastically. He began to blossom in his junior season but then the positive test for a banned substance came in.

Ricardo will not reveal the substance. He describes it as something he bought at a national supplement chain and believed to be allowed by the NCAA. He says he has no clue he did something wrong until he got a letter announcing his positive result and a one-year ban from college sports for the 2009-10 academic year.

“It was tough,” Ricardo says of his season away from football. He thought about leaving school but for what? Instead he chose to make the suspension a test.

“You really learn about people in how they battle through adversity,” he says. “It caught me off-guard but there’s no use crying over spilled milk. I hope I can help people through my mistakes. I’m not ashamed of it at all. It’s an honest mistake that’s happened.”

For a moment he is quiet.

“It’s been a long road to hopefully get to the NFL,” he says.

At the combine Ricardo ran fast. There had been some talk he could break the all-time record of 4.24 seconds in the 40-yard dash tied three years ago by Tennessee Titans running back Chris Johnson. Instead he tied for fourth at this year’s combine with Abilene Christian receiver Edmond Gates with a 4.37, which is still very fast and helps make him a candidate to be drafted. He says the Cleveland Browns, New England Patriots, St. Louis Rams and Philadelphia Eagles have shown interest. Most who have talked to him say they see him someday returning kicks or playing on special teams.

At this point he’ll take anything.

And Earl Lockette has something more to tell the students at the Turner Jobs Corps.

“The significance of Ricardo is that I can give them something concrete, it’s real,” Earl says. “A lot of my students now know about Ricardo. But I show just as much energy as I do talking about Ricardo as I do when one of the kids who gets a diploma or a GED or they’re 50 percent through with GED work.”

Earl laughs one last time before he has to go back to work.

“The NFL would be great but I’m already at the point where Ricardo can’t impress me anymore,” he says. “Let his success be there for someone else to be inspired from.”

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Decertification was failing strategy by NFLPA

For all of his shouting and table pounding and proclamations that the NFL Players Association “went to the mattresses” with the NFL, here is where DeMaurice Smith has his decertified union two months into the lockout: about to argue a case it will probably not win in a labor battle his constituents will soon tire of fighting.

The NFLPA’s rhetoric in the months leading up to this spring’s work stoppage never matched the issues. Nothing was serious enough to warrant a shutdown. Nobody will ache for the rookies who won’t get $40 million guaranteed in whatever new deal emerges, while the splitting of $1 billion in a league that has made so many rich is hardly a horrible problem to have. And yet the leaders of the players union were dying to decertify as far back as 2008, apparently screening executive director candidates on their willingness to push the nuclear option.

DeMaurice Smith (right) with Colts player representative Jeff Saturday.
(Getty Images)

So now we are mired in the doldrums as each side waits to go through the motions with the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals, a body that has already signaled its intent to uphold the lockout. All of this is less a legal wrangle – if it ever was one – than a bout between egos tussling to see who can claim momentum and thus a victory before sitting down to the negotiations which could have been done in March.

At stake is only the football season.

The blame for this lockout should be shared equally. Fingers have rightly been pointing at the NFL’s owners for starting this mess. They are easy to hate right now, complaining of weak annual returns while sitting on civic assets worth north of $1 billion in some cases. In many instances, they extorted their communities for gleaming stadiums which only helped to fatten their wallets. They cut a labor deal they never wanted in 2006 to protect Paul Tagliabue’s legacy, then blew it up two years later, attempting to illegally squirrel away television money as a lockout fund.

Still, to scream at the owners while ignoring the NFLPA leaders’ behavior in the sandbox is misguided, for the NFLPA pushed this drive to the cliff in the final days of civility. Back when Judge David Doty ruled the NFL couldn’t collect its lockout stash from the television networks, the players were gaining momentum. They got the owners to bend. The owners even agreed to show parts of their books. It wasn’t everything, but it was something more than they offered before – a real sign of progress – only to have the players reject the attempt.

One source with knowledge of the negotiations said the message delivered by the players’ leadership was that the show of demanding the owners’ books had become too valuable a PR move to give up. Then, after threatening to blow up the talks with decertification and lawsuits, they did just that – leaving many to wonder if this is what they wanted to do all along.

But why? Decertifying and getting the courts to rule the lockout illegal was always a long shot. The Eighth Circuit loomed with a history of favoring business in labor matters. Yes, the union won free agency in a similar fashion in the early 1990s. It became a big part of the narrative of the NFLPA’s previous leader, Gene Upshaw, who often spoke fondly of those days. And it became a great selling point to the players, who have never had the stomach for a true labor dispute the way their colleagues in other sports have. What wasn’t peddled nearly as well was a very real risk that the court option would slam into a wall, cornering the players and leaving them with nowhere else to turn.

“Look at it this way: If the union loses a decertification lawsuit, then it has gone and shot everything it has,” said Michael Cramer, director of the University of Texas Sports and Media program, who went through labor disputes in baseball and hockey. “You drew a 13 at the blackjack table and now you’ve got to go back to the negotiating table with nothing. Who would have bet they’d win a decertification lawsuit? You just don’t do it.”

Cramer, who was part of a group that looked seriously at buying at least two NFL teams in recent years, is amazed the labor situation has gone this far – shaking his head at the actions of both players and owners who are fronted by leaders so desperate to establish their dominance.

“This is so unbelievably easy to solve – that would be if there was leadership on either side,” Cramer said. “This is a contract that should be agreed to tomorrow. That these two goofballs [Smith and NFL commissioner Roger Goodell] are waiting around for the courts to tell them what to do to get this solved is crazy.”

Then again, the NFLPA – which has spent heavily on outside legal fees in recent years – loves litigation. It always seemed the preferred weapon of Upshaw, who was criticized later in life for ignoring important issues such as disability and retirement benefits in favor of quick and easy revenue increases which keep current players happy. Smith was supposed to represent a change from those days.

Instead, we get bizarre moments such as his recent address to graduates at the University of Maryland, in which he ended an otherwise inspiring speech by pleading with the students to scream “You suck!” in an imitation of the drunken louts at Terrapin and Washington Redskins games.

“And for anybody who would ever think that it is the wrong thing to do to care so much that you’re willing to risk everything because it is right, reserve those two words for them,” he said to the crowd as graduates and parents stared dumbfounded.

Let’s hope the owners and players are secretly negotiating even as the court date looms, because it’s hard to believe the players are going to want to “risk everything” on oversized blather and a Hail Mary they had little chance to complete.

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Seven Years After His Death, Pat Tillman Is Needed By The NFL Community More Than Ever

Last Thursday morning, as the NFL and its players sat through another sham of a mediation session unwilling to divide $1 billion between them, Jeremy Staat, once an NFL defensive end and United States Marine scoffed as he drove across the desert toward Tempe from his home in Bakersfield, Calif.

"If I could run the NFL, I'd take away these $80 (million) to $90 million contracts these young guys get," he said, spitting out the words as he spoke. "Unfortunately in the NFL these guys are making money, but they aren’t giving back. That left a bad taste in my mouth when I played -- the self-righteousness of these guys. They have this feeling of entitlement.

"You know, it's just a game."

That he was driving to his old college town where he would run in a race for his old Arizona State teammate, Pat Tillman, who walked away from a lucrative NFL life to give his in a mountain pass in Afghanistan made the irony all too clear.

As another one-time Tillman teammate, Zach Walz would later say:

"Pat never cared about the money."

Friday marks seven years since Tillman was killed in Afghanistan and nothing has changed, even if everything has changed. The official military announcement that he died in an ambush has proven a piece of grievous fiction replaced by a more unsettling truth that he was in fact killed by friendly fire. The wars in the Middle East that he so valiantly volunteered to fight have lost the attention of many people back home -- white noise to an impatient country that has already changed the channel. His name is a pawn now: Equally used by those who believe in the wars and those who despise them.

A book has been written, a movie made. His life has been cut open and dissected, all his complexities and contradictions parsed and yet in a world where heroes prove as cheap as the wind that blows through their paper-thin facades, Tillman remains as revered as the day he died.

After everything that happened he still matters.

Last weekend they ran the race they always do in Pat Tillman's name at Arizona State. They call it Pat's Run. And this time 28,000 people showed up at the school's Sun Devil Stadium to run the 4.2 mile race for the player who wore No. 42 there as an ASU linebacker. They made the loop across the Rio Salado, over the 202 highway and back down into the stadium finishing on the 42-yard line because the money raised for the Pat Tillman Foundation goes for college scholarships for returning soldiers, because this seems right and because as one runner, Jason Blakley, of Phoenix said: "Gosh, how many people walk away from a pro football contract?"

"To me, it's not how he died, it's how he lived," says Doug Tammaro, who is a sports information director at Arizona State and an organizer of Pat's Run.

Tammaro, in his role as a public relations man for the athletic department, deals with athletes in a way few ever see. He's the one who must endure private temper tantrums, beg kids to visit a hospital or talk to a fan who is just dying to meet them. He's the one who knows which men are genuinely kind and giving and which ones just put on a smile for the cameras. Tillman he loved. Tillman was real.

He thinks often about the last night he saw Tillman. It was in Seattle not long before the Tillman's death. ASU was playing a basketball game at the University of Washington, and Tillman was based about an hour away, outside Tacoma. Tillman had been up all night as part of his training, he was tired, but still he made the trip with his wife and brother to see the PR man he considered a friend. This was Pat, he said.

"There were probably 1,000 other people who wanted to spend time with him," Tammaro recalled. "But he gave to everyone."

And last Saturday when he looked at the throng gathering outside Sun Devil Stadium, Tammaro smiled. There were so many children running through the parking lot, children with T-shirts bearing the No. 42 and as he watched them all he could think was how they were barely alive when Tillman was killed and how at some point their parents would have to explain why they were at this race and what his life meant. And that made Tammaro smile.

"He was just very respectful of everyone he met," Tammaro said. "You judge a person on how they treat people who can't help you in return."

It's easy when people die to only see the good. This is especially true when the dead person is young and seemingly selfless like Tillman, who by all accounts, was so moved by September 11, 2001 -- watching the attacks and the World Trade Center collapse at the Cardinals headquarters -- that he quit football less than a year later to join the Army.

It is likewise probably unfair to juxtapose Tillman's sacrifice against the current NFL lockout. He would have been 34 now and had he returned from the war he might have come back to football and still be playing. Regardless of his feelings about the labor dispute he would have been forced to sit out like everyone else.

But everyone who knows him has said the same thing. He would have been impatient with the posturing. Tillman was terribly organized, Tammaro said and not one to suffer inactivity well.

"The decisions he made in life, not one was about money," Walz said. "He would be: 'Just let’s get this crap done, we're entertainers.'"

And the image of a player who turned down a $9 million contract with the Rams to stay with the Cardinals, who had taken a chance on him with the 226th pick in the 1998 draft, is too hard to ignore these days. So too is the fact he never came close to making that $9 million by staying in Arizona and threw away unknown millions by going to war.

Walz remembered how Tillman, early in his career with the Cardinals, rode a bicycle around Tempe for a season. When he finally got a car it was a used Volvo, which he drove with flip-flop covered feet dangling out the window.

"I don't think people focus on the war with Pat, they focus on what he represented," Waltz said. "He represented putting aside materialistic things that drive people today."

And as the lockout drags on into yet another week isn't that a lesson we could all stand to hear?

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