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By Tom Archdeacon
| Monday, September 1, 2008, 12:44 AM
Today is Labor Day and, unfortunately, the Cincinnati Bengal who best personified this day and what it’s all about is out of a job.
Willie Anderson, the 6-foot-5, 340-pound right tackle, was cut by the Bengals on Saturday because he was getting old (he’s 33), he was banged up and they felt his production no longer matched his big paycheck. When Stacy Andrews beat him out of his starter’s job, the Bengals thought he was expendable.
Mark my word: This team is going to regret dumping the 13-year veteran and a four-time Pro Bowler who started 173 of his 181 games as a Bengal.
The team will miss him not just for what he did on the field — he still can play and likely he’ll get picked up somewhere — but for what he did in the dressing room.
Like Carson Palmer — but for much longer than the star quarterback — Anderson was the team’s rock-solid cornerstone in a room full of too many criminals and one self-absorbed superstar who too often put the focus on everything but the unity of his team.
Willie showed young players a different way to go about their jobs than how Chad “Hey, look at me” Johnson does it. And he certainly was the flip side of continual foul balls like Chris Henry.
Willie was a pro’s pro — on the field, in the dressing room and in the community where he was one of the most active Bengals players when it came to charity and civic concerns.
He played hurt. He was the team’s conscience, its salt-of-the-earth foundation and the one guy who— behind closed dressing room doors — could call out a bad actor in the midst of the Bengals.
A guy like that any team would miss, but more so Cincinnati
They are going to regret this move.
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By Tom Archdeacon
| Monday, August 25, 2008, 04:16 AM
BEIJING — I leave China with many questions unanswered:
How can folks here eat scorpions, silk worms and yak, seal and snake penis? That’s right, there’s one Beijing restaurant that serves nothing but penis.
How do they handle those no-commode squat toilets?
How do they remember those 30,000 pictograms that make up the written Chinese language?
And yet the biggest mystery for me is how did Kobe become King of China?
Hands down, the most popular athlete of the Beijing Games was the the Los Angeles Lakers’ Kobe Bryant.
The other night after a late game and a long stint in drug testing, Bryant emerged from the hoops arena into the Beijing night at about 1:30 a.m. And there, in the non-stop rain that had been falling for hours, waited several dozen people, their handmade signs soggy — the inked messages running off the cardboard — but their affections as warm as ever.
At each game during the U.S. run to the gold medal here, the Chinese crowd would continually chant “Ko-Be!…Ko-Be.!”
When his white-capped, blue blazer image flashed on the giant overhead video screens in the Bird’s Nest stadium during Opening Ceremonies, the crowd went nuts.
The other day the Beijing Youth Daily, one of the best read, most respected newspapers here had a glossy poster of Bryant wrapped around its paper. The headline read: “Kobe — Nobody Can Compare.”
Over the the past two basketball seasons, Bryant’s jersey has been the top seller in China, where it is estimated there are 450 million NBA fans. By the way, Boston’s Kevin Garnett is No. 2 in sales and Yao Ming’s jersey has dropped to 10th.
This past year, one of the most popular shows on Chinese TV was Kobe Mentu — or Kobe’s Disciples — a reality TV show where fans eventually travelled to the U.S. to be mentored by Bryant.
While he remains a debatable figure in the U.S., Bryant is like Michael Jordan and Elvis all rolled into one over here.
“We all thought we were somebody until we came over here with him,” New Orleans star Chris Paul told Palm Beach Post writer Hal Habib.
Bryant is as taken aback by the love fest as anybody.
“To be honest, I can’t explain it at all,” he said.
Part of the explanation is that he’s he’s made five lengthy Nike-sponsored trips here over the years to put on clinics with people throughout the country,
At the Games, Bryant — who also speaks fluent Italian and Spanish — was a man of the world, maybe more so than any other U.S. Olympian. He attended beach volleyball games, soccer matches,. swimming, track and field and women’s basketball.
And then there was his ply on the court as he led the U.S. team — the Redeem Team — to again establish itself as THE force in world basketball
And when Sunday’s final had ended and the American players were decorated with their gold medals, the Chinese crowd had just one thing to say:
“Ko-Be!…Ko-Be!…Ko-Be!”
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By Tom Archdeacon
| Friday, August 22, 2008, 09:24 AM
BEIJING — Well, I just took in THE contact sport of the Beijing Olympic Games.
Boxing?
Oh no — think more contact.
Wrestling, judo, maybe taekwondo?
Nope, all too tame.
I’m talking about shopping at Beijing’s famed Silk Market, where the experience is like Let’s Make A Deal, American Gladiators and a ride on the Tilt-A-Whirl at the county fair all wrapped into one.
I spent two hours there and it felt as if I’d been in the ring 10 rounds with Mike Tyson. Actually, he’d be a walk in the park compared to this. All he’d do is knock you out or bite off your ear.
The chattering, pushing, grabbing, haggling, cajoling, conning, relentlessly pleading ladies who run the seemingly thousands of stalls here, would never stop with a single bloody ear.
They’re all trying to get you into their little four-foot-wide , over-stuffed world of bogus Pumas, Nikes, North Face jackets , under the counter knock-off Louis Vuitton purses and Chanel jackets. There’s also some beautiful Chinese handicrafts, jewelry, traditional Chinese clothes, electronic goods, t-shirts, well you get the idea — everything under the sun.
And every sale is a matter of dramatic back-and-forth debate. The performances on their part are worthy of an an Academy Award, while for you it’s enough just trying keep your wits and your wallet.
The way it goes is the vendor punches in a price on a hand held calculator and passes it over to you. You hit the erase button and punch in your figure. The vendor looks terribly hurt, tells you “what good deal” she “make for you” and punch in another number. This goes on and on until your head is spinning and you usually give in.
I made the mistake early on of starting in on one of these negotiations, getting cold feet and trying to walk away, Next thing I know, I literally had an old lady latched onto one forearm and two young gals pulling at the other as I dragged them down the crowded aisles while every few feet some other shop keep tried to wrest me from their grasp and start their own sales pitch.
Hyleas Fountain, the Kettering heptathlete who won bronze at the Olympic Games here last week had the same experience when she shopped the Silk Market a coupe of days ago.
“I bought quite a few things there for my family and for the people who helped me get ready for the Games, but I’ll tell you, it’s a little different than shopping in the States,” she said in an understatement worthy of a gold medal.
“It was definitely draining for me.. Everybody’s touching you. I’m not sure if I liked that too much. I had one woman smack me. I told her I didn’t really appreciate that and it kind of backed her up. But they were right back on me a few feet further down the way.”
I went there to buy my wife a few things and while I thought I bartered pretty well on one or two items, I pretty much got taken for a ride on some of the others.
I did strike what I thought was one great deal, but I didn’t have the nerve to follow through on it.
I was looking at ornamental hand fans and one beautiful young girl — probably 20 or so — put the hard sell on. We had passed the calculator back and forth a couple of times and finally she smiled and said “100 more yuan, I come to your house and fan you every day.”
Sounded great to me, but I didn’t think it would go over so well with the wife.
Besides there’s no way me, this gal and that fan would all fit in the doghouse.
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By Tom Archdeacon
| Thursday, August 21, 2008, 12:30 PM
BEIJING — On a day when one Dayton-area Olympian’s medal hopes were dashed, another’s appear about to be upgraded.
Washington Township hurdler Maurice Wignall — running for his native Jamaica Thursday night at Beijing’s steamy, rain-splashed Bird’s Nest Stadium — finished sixth in final of the men’s 110-meter hurdles.
Saying his stride got out of sync through the mid-hurdles Thursday, Wignall finished in 13.46 seconds.
The event was won by Cuban world-record holder Dayron Robles in 12.93 seconds. America’s David Payne won the silver medal with a 13.17 finish and his U.S. teammate David Oliver took bronze in 13.18.
“I’ve got to say, it’s still been a good Olympics,” said Wignall, who finished fourth in the event at the 2004 Games and trained for Beijing at Centerville High. “I tried my best today. I was very rusty. I guess I was going faster than I thought, then I just got into trouble about hurdle three or four.
“I tried to correct all of that — tried to get quicker strides and get them shorter — but it just got me closer and closer to every hurdle. So finally I just tried to hold on and see what place I could get.”
Kettering heptathlete Hyleas Fountain is holding on as well to see what place she’s about to get.
Last weekend she won a bronze medal in the competition, but Thursday the International Olympic Committee’s Disciplinary Commission announced that both the A & B urine samples of Ukrainian silver medalist Lyudmila Blonska tested positive for the anabolic steroid methyltestosterone.
She’s been provisionally suspended from all Olympic competitions — she was third going into Friday’s long jump finals — and her Olympic accreditation has been provisionally suspended.
The IOC Executive Board will announce its final decision soon, but it appears the 30-year-old Blonska is about to be banned from international competition for life. She served a doping suspension between 2003-05, so this would be her second offense.
If she is bounced, Fountain would move up to the silver medal and Russia’s Tatiana Chernova would get bronze.
“Hyleas just called me and told me what’s happening,” Lynn Smith, Fountain’s personal coach and the Central State women’s track coach, said late Thursday night. “There’s word (Blonska) has been removed from the Athlete’s Village.
“The thing is, all you can do is worry about yourself, but really there’s more to it than that. I had a couple of other coaches in years past say when you have a clean athlete, you look at it as these other people as someone who’s stealing from you.”
That’s exactly how British heptathlete Kelly Sotherton sees it.
She won the bronze medal in the heptathlon at the 2004 Athens Games and finished fifth here. Over the past two years, she’s been a vocal critic of Blonska, who won the silver medal in the heptathlon at last year’s world championships in Osaka, Japan, and took gold in the pentathlon at the 2006 world indoor championship in Moscow.
“I’ve been saying all along that she got caught doping when she was scoring 6,300 points, how can she not be doping and scoring 6,800?” Sotherton told reporters. “I have not seen any of her results since early June and then she comes out here and is producing good performances, which was suspicious.
“The thing I hope for is that the Russian and American who will be upgraded, get their medals in a proper official presentation. Otherwise they have lost that moment forever.”
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By Tom Archdeacon
| Wednesday, August 20, 2008, 10:36 AM
BEIJING — With a crafty last-second bob at the tape, Maurice Wignall ducked beneath China’s Shi Dongpeng to claim the fourth and last qualifying spot in his 110-meter hurdles Olympic semifinal heat at Beijing’s rocking Bird’s Nest stadium, Wednesday night.
That means for the second Olympic Games in a row, the 32-year-old elite Washington Township athlete — who trained at Centerville High and runs for his native Jamaica — will be in the finals of the 110-meter hurdles. The race will be run Thursday night in Beijing (Thursday morning in Dayton).
Wignall qualified at 13.40 seconds. Six of the eight hurdlers who made the final had faster times, with Cuban world-record holder Dayron Robles leading the way at 13.12. Two Americans will be in the field as well. David Payne qualified at 13.32 and David Oliver, who won Wignall’s heat, ran 13.31.
Coming off the final hurdle, Wignall was sandwiched between Spain’s Jackson Quinonez on his left and Shi on his right.
In a similar situation in the finals at the Athens Games, he was nosed out of a bronze medal by 1/100th of a second when Cuba’s Anier Garcia lunged past him at the last second.
That moment flashed across his mind as headed to the last hurdle Wednesday night.
“I felt the Chinese guy and the other guy on my left, I felt everybody. It’s hard not to feel everybody,” he said. “I thought I’d have to come off the last hurdle, keep my composure and then try to dip at the right time. I did and it worked.”
He and Quinonez crossed the line in 13.40. Shi, surprised by the Wignall move, stumbled and finished at 13.42.
Asked about this chances now, Wignall just grinned:
“I have to see what happens tomorrow. I’m not a prophet.”
He is a crafty veteran and that’s why he’s in the finals.
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By Tom Archdeacon
| Tuesday, August 19, 2008, 09:10 PM
BEIJING — So now a fourth controversial photo has emerged showing Olympic athletes posing in a team photo while pulling back the skin on the sides of their eyes in an — you chose the qualifier here — offensive, derogatory, racist, innocent, affectionate, funny reference to Chinese people.
My vote is for offensive.
And yet I know I can’t claim to come from the most culturally sensitive state. Not as long as we still have Chief Wahoo grinning away atop every Cleveland Indians ball cap.
Anyway, here at the Beijing Olympics, a two-week-old photo has surfaced of four women soccer players from the Argentina team posing in their blue uniforms as they pull their eyes back. The image was published in the Argentine sports newspaper Ole.
Before that, it was Spain’s Federation Cup tennis team — one that had just beaten China in a pre-Games competition — posing at a dinner party, their eyes pulled tight in what one reference called “a Chinaman’s pose.”
And before that, the whole debate was ignited by full-page ads of the Spanish men’s and women’s Olympic basketball teams in Marca, the country’s best selling sports daily.
Done as an ad for the courier company Seur, official sponsor of the Spanish Basketball Federation, it shows the 15 Spanish players using both hands to pull back their eyes in what is supposed to be the stereotypical Chinese look
Ironically, Spain’s basketball teams have been sponsored by and now wear uniforms made by the Chinese company Li Ning since 2002. And they just signed an agreement to continue the partnership through 2012.
As the photos have drawn worldwide attention, the interpretational debate has intensified and often gotten quite nasty.
The Spanish teams don’t see what the big stink is about. The basketball federation said the ad was a gesture of “love, sympathy and appreciation toward the Chinese people and their country.”
Only Pau Gasol, the Los Angeles Laker from Spain, seems to have some reservations about being a part of the photo, though he said it’s “absurd” to call to it racist.
“Some of us didn’t feel comfortable doing it just because to me it was a little clownish for our part to be doing that,” Gasol told media members at Beijing Normal University.
“But the sponsors insisted and insisted. I think it is just a bad idea, but it was never intended to be offensive or racist against anybody.
I didn’t find it very funny. I didn’t find it offensive, either. I guess some guys didn’t mind.
“I don’t want to be that way, to be doing that stuff. If anybody feels offended by it, we totally apologize for it. We never meant anything offensive by it.”
While the debate goes on, sometimes karma takes care of matters best.
Take those women soccer players from Argentina.
They lost all three of their Olympic games , including a 2-0 defeat to China in their final match.
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By Tom Archdeacon
| Tuesday, August 19, 2008, 09:55 AM
BEIJING — Getting faster and faster as each Olympic round goes by, Maurice Wignall advanced to the semi-finals of the 110 meter hurdles at the Beijing Olympic Games Tuesday night at the Bird’s Nest stadium.
The Washington Township hurdler who runs for Jamaica won his heat in 13.36 seconds, his fastest time of the season. It was the fourth fastest time among the 32 hurdlers in Tuesday’s second round heats.
U.S. hurdler David Oliver clocked the fastest time at 13.16. Cuban world record holder Dayron Robles was second at 13.19 and American David Payne was third at 13.234. Poland’s Artur Noga tied Wignall’s 13.36 mark.
This is Wignall’s second Olympics. He finished fourth at the 2004 Athens Games. For Beijing, he did much of his training alone at Centerville High School, where he said Elks’ personal were especially accommodating.
His wife Janelle — herself a two-time swimming Olympian for Jamaica and a Wright State assistant swim coach — was in Beijing Tuesday night, but not at the stadium. She couldn’t get a ticket.
Wignall — who competes in the semi-finals Wednesday night — declined comment after his run Tuesday night.
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Award-winning columnist Tom Archdeacon — an old-school storyteller in a brand-new venue — writes about sports, the city, southwest Ohio and anything else that catches his fancy… or yours.
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Let me add that I agree that Mike Brown is a puddin’ head. Making Stacey Andrews a franchise