Tiger & Bicycles

Both big sport’s stories from the weekend- Tiger winning something important in England and some nice American person winning the Tour de France- didn’t interest me one whit. Other than I am pleased anytime an American wins something in Europe that causes the Europeans angst.

No, instead I was drawn to the simple bitterness in the papers this weekend. To begin with, Don McKee has a point, no?

Michelle Wie has never won a professional golf tournament. Danica Patrick has never won an IRL race. Anna Kournikova never won a WTA tournament. I wonder if they would have become media darlings if they looked like Roseanne Barr instead of pinups?

And in a way, Joe Misiti from Staten Island in Sunday's New York Post speaks pithily for me- the Phillies fan trapped in Manhattan with a ton of annoying Mets’ fans who have absolutely no context for evaluating their achievement:

Why do Mets fans have to keep comparing their team to the Yankees? Stop threatening to win the next five World Series and go out and do it. And they're constantly crying about the Yanks buying players. How did the Mets get Pedro Martinez, Tom Glavine, Carlos Beltran and Billy Wagner? Not to mention acquiring Carlos Delgado and Paul Lo Duca because the Marlins did not want to pay them more. Fred Wilpon has deep pockets, but if it is so easy to buy a world championship you would have thought the Mets could have done it more than two times in the almost 50 years they have been around.

Ouch! And dead right. You can’t complain for a generation- as Mets’ supporters have- about the Yankees buying success and back-page supremacy- and not have a great deal of humility about the construction of this current collection of real mercenaries.