It was almost 30 years ago that some very bright, young men gathered at the late, lamented La Rotisserie restaurant in New York City to hammer out the framework for baseball's first fantasy league (or "Rotisserie baseball," as it is still known by the game's first generation of players).

No doubt these folks had some modest ambitions for their little game and themselves. But given that they were journalists and, thus, both perpetual cynics and limited in their intellectual scope, they would never have regarded themselves as visionaries and certainly weren't craving mainstream respectability. But it came anyway, with roto-ball exploding over the next couple of decades into not just a game and guilty pleasure but an industry that would embrace many sports, serve millions of participants with vital (as well as worthless) information and produce billions in annual revenues.

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Before March Madness consumes you, check out a film that pays homage to basketball's black pioneers.

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We fans are a fickle and forgetful bunch. It was only a few years ago that many of us were pleading with Brett Favre to hang 'em up. We fervently hoped that after a pair of seasons in which he was foundering—he threw more interceptions (47) than touchdown passes (38), and his completion percentage in 2006 was the lowest of his career—he would spare us more embarrassing, over-the-hill performances that might further tarnish his illustrious career.

He didn't listen, and we are all grateful for that. Now, at 38 years old, it's time for Brett to go. Favre may not have gotten his fondest wish, the rare Elway exit in which a superstar goes out on top, but this past season he came close—closer than he or anyone else had reason to expect. Despite playing with a bunch of no-name receivers, Favre put up his best passing numbers in years, including the highest completion percentage (66.5) of his 16 years in Green Bay.


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We journalists tend by nature to be observers rather than activists. But back in 1968, when I was still a college student, I wrote the only protest letter of my life.

After sprinters Tommie Smith and John Carlos had made international headlines with their black power salutes from the Olympic podium in Mexico City, Avery Brundage, the right-wing American who was at the time the head of the International Olympic Committee, ordered their expulsion from the Olympic village and suspension from the U.S. team. I wrote Brundage decrying his decision, insisting that the two men had represented our country with great dignity on and off the track and that their protest embodied America's finest free-speech traditions.

Now, 40 years later, I remain a fervent believer in free speech. But I confess, as the issue threatens to once again provoke an Olympic controversy—this time at the 2008 Games this August in Beijing—my view is a little more nuanced.


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I am a writer of some literary pretensions as well as aspirations and know very well that today's recipe for success is intimate revelations—the more gruesome and salacious the better.

Sadly, my parents were very nice and loving people, and I have lived a life almost totally devoid of salace. For intimacy, I'm afraid you're going to have to make do with a medical update. I am, possibly even as you read this, lying on a slab in a Boston hospital undergoing an invasive procedure that is recommended as a preventive precaution for folks of a certain age.

I am not a stoic about colds or splinters, and so it has not surprised me—or my wife or anybody else to whom I've already kvetched—that this experience has not proved to be an exception. I did try to find some consolation, something beyond the possibility, of course, that it might save my life. About the only comforting notion I could come up with was the certainty that I will not be eating Jell-O again for another five years. After continually asking myself, "How bad can this be?" I concluded that, at least for me, it would pretty much be the equivalent of watching a Super Bowl XLII replay.

Actually, I am more of a stoic about Super Bowl losses, and Sunday's proved no exception. I brooded a little into Monday, but nothing too serious. It wasn't remotely as bad as 1976, when the referee Ben Dreith (I remember!) called a ridiculous roughing the passer penalty on "Sugar Bear" Hamilton against the Oakland Raiders on what would have been a game-ending play, costing the Patriots what I am certain would have been their first Super Bowl crown. My friend had to hold me back from kicking in the TV. (It was his TV, so he was motivated.) It certainly wasn't comparable to the Bucky Dent or Bill Buckner moments of Red Sox infamy, the latter of which cost me my dad's precious watch (and some plastering expenses) after I smashed a hole in the living room wall with my fist. This time there were no real goats, no horrendous gaffes, no egregious calls. Their guys just kicked our guys' butts—and made all the plays—in a fashion reminiscent of the Pats' Super Bowl upset of the Rams six years earlier.

In truth, I've found all the Patriots' Super Bowl losses relatively easy to take—and I've been tested three times now—even when my distress is compounded by a squandered shot at immortality and a champion that goes by the name New York (not to mention a quarterback that goes by the name Manning). Super Bowl defeats are, since we have been talking medical matters here, the equivalent of ripping off a Band-Aid—a flash of intense pain and then on with your life. World Series losses, by contrast, can be the equivalent of major surgery, and a bitter end to a seven-game series can scar for life.

Far worse when it comes to football fates is losing in the conference championship game, as the Pats did last year to the Indianapolis Colts. Then you are forced to endure two weeks of ceaseless hype about a bitter rival. After the Super Bowl everybody goes home, win or lose. Sure, New York gets a party, a parade and bragging rights (or, as is the case between our two cities, the reigning insult). But in Boston our heads and hearts are already drifting toward Ft. Myers, where pitchers and catchers report for spring training next week.

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NEWSWEEK Contributor Robert Cox files this report from the Super Bowl:
 

...I will be totally stoked to be in Arizona for the big game.

Early tomorrow morning I board a plane bound for Sky Harbor Airport and a week of fun and sun in the Grand Canyon State where Tom Brady and his juggernaut New England Patriots offense is expected to smash open another gaping hole--this one in the New York Giants secondary. We’ll see. The Giants are on a roll, playing like the old Parcells teams over the past month, and if they gave a darn about meeting expectations their season would have ended in Florida three weeks ago.

I have to admit that last summer, when I accepted an invitation to attend the Super Bowl, it never occurred to me as a lifelong Giants fan that my team would actually be playing in the game. So it was with absolute and unmitigated joy that I watched spellbound as yet another Lawrence Tynes field goal try first sailed aimlessly into the frigid Wisconsin night and then just as quickly righted itself and veered towards the center of the uprights, sending the Giants on one more miraculous road trip.

Still I’m worried. All throughout their improbable play-off run, the Giants have been like my guilty little secret. Now the secret is out: The Giants are a very good football team.  No one among the legion of football analysts and talking heads on the cable sports networks gave the Giants the slightest chance to win the NFC Championship. Even the most loyal of Giants fans would be lying if they told you they expected the Giants to be playing this weekend. They were picked to lose in Tampa Bay, lose in Dallas and lose in Green Bay. At each stop I’ve wondered, “Could it be that the Giants could somehow put together a streak and be there when I get to Glendale?”--and then pushed that thought right out of my mind as being utterly absurd. And yet, here we are.

The cherry on top was being offered the opportunity to contribute to Mark Starr’s blog over the next few days here at Newsweek.com. As the President of the Media Bloggers Association, I've been working with the folks at Newsweek for several months developing The Ruckus, a political blog covering the Presidential campaign.  Since I was going anyway, I offered to contribute to Newsweek.com's coverage of the big game and to my great pleasure they agreed. Mark is an experienced reporter who has been covering major sporting events for years so I am not even going to pretend I am “covering” the Super Bowl the way a guy like Mark can. What I can do is share my experiences with the overall spectacle of the Super Bowl from a fan’s perspective. I am going to do my best to get around town, attend various events, talk to fans and--if possible--current and former players as well as some of the other myriad celebrities and overall interesting folks who attend an event like the Super Bowl.

This will be my fourth--and third with the Giants. I was at Pasadena when the Giants won their first championship behind Phil Simms. I was in San Diego when John Elway led the Broncos in a huge upset over Brett Favre’s Packers. And, sadly, I was in Tampa when the Giants had their heads handed to them by Ray Lewis and the Baltimore Ravens. At those Super Bowls I met people like Warren Moon, Marv Levy, Chris Berman, Marty Schottenheimer, Chris O’Donnell (the actor), Denny Hastert (the then-Speaker of the House), John Fox, Sean Peyton, Bart Starr, Lester Hayes, Merlin Olson, Daryl Strawberry and many others. There are so many interesting people at this game that it is less like a sporting event and more like some psychedelic "happening" from the Summer of Love - even some of the bands performing are the same.

You just never know who you are going to bump into during a week like this and I plan on being ready so I’ve got my Nikon D-80 camera, my Apple Powerbook, iPhone and a letter from Newsweek saying I really am covering the Super Bowl for them. Cool!

More importantly, I’ve got my official NFC Champions Locker Room Hat, my Giants flag for the car and, since it can get cold at night in the desert, my blue and red Giants flannel pajamas which always bring good luck for the G-Men.  Next stop, Phoenix baby! Super Bowl XLII here I come.

Roger Clemens and Mike Wallace once boasted the best fastballs in their respective games. On Sunday we'll see how they match up.

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Major League Baseball has had no claim to the sacred for a very long time—certainly not after many of its big-name players began falling out of the pharmaceutical closet. And this year it truly descended to the profane when Barry Bonds, just months ahead of his federal indictment for lying to a grand jury about his use of performance-enhancing drugs, broke the game's most hallowed record as its all-time home run king.

So perhaps nobody should have been surprised—certainly not after some of the rare confessors, like Jose Canseco and the late Ken Caminiti, described steroid use in baseball as epidemic—by anything former senator George Mitchell revealed today as a result of his investigation into drug use in the game. Still, there had to be gasps throughout the nation as the greatest pitcher of the modern era, Roger Clemens, was fingered as a drug cheat right alongside Bonds. For his part, Clemens is denying everything. Late in the day Clemens's lawyer, Rusty Hardin, issued a statement calling the inclusion of his client's name "very unfair." Hardin said, "He is left with no meaningful way to combat what he strongly contends are totally false allegations. He has not been charged with anything, he will not be charged with anything, and yet he is being tried in the court of public opinion with no recourse."

Nobody, certainly not Mitchell, was pretending that the list of some six dozen names was comprehensive. Most of those named appear to be players unlucky enough to have procured steroids from one of two men: Kirk Radomski, a former New York Mets clubhouse assistant who cooperated as part of a federal plea agreement, and Brian McNamee, Clemens's former personal trainer who became a New York Yankees strength and conditioning coach. And the report owes a clear debt to "Game of Shadows," the book about Bonds's ties to the BALCO drug lab. Still, after a 21-month chase, with virtually no players cooperating with him and no special investigatory powers, Mitchell did name names that reflected a broad cross-section of the game, from a potential Hall of Famer to marginal big-leaguers, from bulked-up sluggers to scrawny infielders, and pitchers of all stripes—not just pin-.

The list included current big-name players—Andy Pettitte, Miguel Tejada, Eric Gagne, Paul Lo Duca, Gary Sheffield, and Brian Roberts—as well as former stars—Kevin Brown, Chuck Knoblauch, Lenny Dykstra, David Justice, Mo Vaughn, Matt Williams and Benito Santiago. (See a gallery of some of the biggest names among current players in the report). Except for Clemens, none of the players named in the report had immediate comment. Mitchell insisted that he didn't simply rely on the testimony of cooperating witnesses, but that he had corroborating evidence. Still, some of it, at least as produced in the report, seems rather sketchy, vague and possibly inconclusive.
 

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I'd like to raise a glass of Champaign to the University of Illinois. When the Illini upset Ohio State in Columbus last weekend, they spared college football fans the pain of watching the Buckeyes' inexorable march to a second straight blowout loss in the BCS national championship game.

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Those sportswriters who like to precede the World Series with a disposition on the historical intersections of the two teams are plum out of luck this October. Relations between the Boston Red Sox and Colorado Rockies are a virtual blank slate, and about the only significant dealings between the two teams was, in fact, a nondeal, a trade the two teams failed to consummate just before this season that would have sent Todd Helton to Boston and Mike Lowell and Manny Delcarmen west to Denver. Given the critical roles played by Helton as the veteran stalwart at the core of a young team and Lowell as the most consistent Red Sox hitter all season, it was a trade that likely would have hurt both clubs and, quite possibly, produced a different World Series pairing tonight.

Still, though their hitters have been important, both teams provide further evidence, as if any were needed, that pitching is the pathway to championships. Both teams, although the Rockies for a far shorter duration, have been perennial also-rans for most of their history, playing in ballparks that were hitters' paradises and pitchers' nightmares. Boston's Fenway Park, with its short perch in left and its vast open space in right, favored fly-ball hitting righties (Tony Conigliaro, Rico Petrocelli) and lefties who could spray the ball to all fields (Freddy Lynn, Wade Boggs, Mike Greenwell, Mo Vaughn). And Coors Field, with its light, dry air, favored any hitter with an uppercut swing, turning middling sluggers (Dante Bichette, Vinny Castilla) into stars and stars (Larry Walker, Todd Helton) into monsters.