TGIM

From The Daily News of Monday, Sept. 10, 2007 . . .


With apologies to the late, great Jimmy Cannon, nobody asked me but . . .
a The game of tennis can’t be as easy as Roger Federer makes it look.
Take Andy Roddick, for example. He met up with Federer in a U.S. Open
quarterfinal and it’s hard to imagine Roddick playing any better. It didn’t
matter. Federer won two tiebreakers and swept aside Roddick in three sets.
In Saturday’s semifinal, Federer hardly looked to break a sweat as he dumped the hard-working Russian, Nikolay Davydenko, in straight sets. But, then, Federer rarely, if ever, looks to be sweating on the court.
In Sunday’s final it was the turn of Serbian Novak Djokovic to play about as well as he can and lose in straight sets. Djokovic, like Roddick and Davydenko before him, will have woken up this morning and wondered how he could play so well and not get at least to a fifth set.
Oh, how frustrating it must be to play the Rajah of tennis.
It was analyst Mary Carillo who on Saturday made the comment that when you watch Federer in person he makes you rethink your definition of excellence.

a Rick Ankiel, the pitcher turned slugging outfielder, was the feel-good
story of the year, at least for a couple of weeks. But it seems that Ankiel,
of baseball’s St. Louis Cardinals, had help feeling good.
And it’s safe to say now that all athletes fall into the same category as something Grandma used to say: If it sounds too good to be true, if it looks too good to be true, it likely is.
Ankiel and Toronto Blue Jays third baseman Troy Glaus are the latest
athletes to have their names dragged into the performance-enhancing mud thanks to the Albany, N.Y., district attorney’s office digging into the
workings of an Internet pharmacy based in Orlando, Fla.
Ankiel, it turns out, received shipments of human growth hormone (HGH). He says he used it under medical supervision, and he used it before Major
League Baseball banned HGH so Bud Selig, the commissioner, will be
hard-pressed to do anything.
Glaus, meanwhile, has turned into Mr. No Comment, but SI.com reported that he received shipments of steroids. Through the no comments Glaus has yet to issue a denial.
Before the HGH stuff hit the fan, Ankiel was a terrific story, with nine homers and 29 RBI in 23 games since being recalled by the Cards . Now, however, he has become just another poster boy for all that’s wrong with sports.
Obviously the time has come to stop looking to sports for our heroes.
As Jeff Blair, The Globe and Mail’s baseball writer, put it the other day:
“It's . . . another reason to admire what these people do on the field while
remembering that they get nice tax breaks for all those off-field charitable endeavours and that at the end of the day they're just doing whatever they can to make more money as fast as they can, blurring the rules and in some cases breaking them because individual or team success equates to greater wealth. They're no better than anyone else. You want inspiration? Best look elsewhere.”

a It was early last season when the Canadian Hockey League, with great
fanfare, announced that it would begin random testing of players in January 2007.
It now is September 2007, another season is upon us, and the CHL has yet to implement that anti-doping program, one that it said would run in
co-operation with the Canadian Centre for Ethics in Sport.
With the way the landscape continues to change — for example, there isn’t a reliable blood or urine test that will reveal the presence of HGH — and with the availability of all kinds of performance-enhancing substances over the Internet, one can only hope the CHL knows the labyrinth it is preparing to enter.

a Still, when you stop and think about it, you have to ask this question: How can athletes be faulted for doing anything they can if it means getting to the top or prolonging their stay at the top?
The schedules are so long and so demanding, an athlete’s body is almost certain to break down at some point. The human body simply wasn’t built to withstand the kind of grind demanded of athletes, even junior hockey players.
And the pot of gold at the end of rainbow is so big these days, the temptation so great, that, well, we are seeing the results and they are spelled H-G-H.

a Are you old enough to remember when the Baltimore Orioles were a real Major League Baseball team?

a It could be worse, you could be a fan of the Michigan Wolverines.

Gregg Drinnan is sports editor of The Daily News. He is at
gdrinnan@kamloopsnews.ca.