Mike Cullity

Saint win would lay ugly past to rest

I'm looking forward to watching this year's Super Bowl between the Indianapolis Colts and New Orleans Saints. I'm particularly intrigued by the match-up of this season's two premier NFL squads, given their experience with futility.

While the Colts had a winning tradition in Baltimore, capturing Super Bowl V and three NFL championships before the AFL-NFL merger, they reeled off nine consecutive losing seasons from 1978-1986. They suffered through an abysmal 2-14 campaign in 1981, posting bookend victories over the equally horrendous New England Patriots. In 1982, led by immortals Mike Pagel and Curtis Dickey, they finished 0-8-1 in a strike-shortened season. And in their first three seasons after owner Robert Irsay moved the team to Indy in the dead of night, the Colts went 12-36.

The Saints, meanwhile, didn't enjoy a winning season until the franchise's 21st year. The lowlight was 1980, when the squad finished 1-15 with Archie Manning, Peyton's dad, calling the signals. Things were so bad that year that Saints fans started wearing paper bags over their heads, launching an entertaining sporting custom.

Things are much different now, of course. The Colts won the 2007 Super Bowl and could very well have gone undefeated this season had they not rested their starters down the stretch. And the Saints looked dominant when I watched them dismantle my hometown Patriots at the Superdome in November.

If there's an underdog here, it would have to be the Saints. Their losing tradition dwarfs the Colts', and Hurricane Katrina knocked New Orleans for a loop in 2005. The Colts are a class organization, and Peyton Manning is a first-ballot Hall-of-Famer, but I'd like to see Drew Brees and the Saints win to boost civic pride and put to rest the ghosts of the franchise's ugly football past.

"Caddyshack" joins the academy

Get this: "Caddyshack" has joined the academy.

According to a news release that graced my in-box yesterday, a sports management professor at Florida's Lynn University is offering a mini-term seminar this month entitled "Caddyshack 101: Lessons from the Coolest Sports Movie Ever Made."

The seminar uses the classic golf film as a springboard for daily discussion of issues such as the dangers of social-class stereotyping, the growth of American sports gambling, the advancement of catchphrases in language, and the importance of civility and etiquette, the release said. The class also deals with animal rights (think Carl Spackler and the pesky gopher) and golf-course based environmental conservation.

"We use this hilarious, crude, wonderful film as a way to get into some very serious discussions," Ted Curtis, an assistant professor of sports management and the apparent driving force behind the course, says in the release.

Kudos to Curtis for bringing a dorm-room favorite to the classroom. I suppose if I were a parent paying tuition I might question my son or daughter enrolling in a class that uses the zany adventures of Spackler, Judge Smails and Caddyshack's other nincompoops as fodder for academic discourse. Still, you've gotta give Curtis "a little somethin' for the effort," as Spackler would say.

Bird-Magic book scores a three

For me, few Christmas gifts are more enjoyable than a good read. This year, my brother and sister-in-law gave me "When The Game Was Ours," the Larry Bird-Magic Johnson collaboration with former Boston Globe sports columnist Jackie MacMullan detailing an epic basketball rivalry turned friendship. 

Having grown up in the heyday of the storied Boston Celtics-Los Angeles Lakers rivalry of the 1980s, I enjoyed reliving the classic NBA battles of the era through the eyes of Bird and Johnson, their two main protagonists. But better yet, MacMullan recounts what happened behind the scenes to illustrate how the unique Bird-Magic relationship has evolved over the last three decades. 

Their story begins in April 1978, when the future Hall of Famers were frustrated second-string teammates on a college all-star squad competing in the World Invitational Tournament. Despite playing behind the stars of the NCAA champion Kentucky Wildcats, Bird and Johnson emerge with admiration for each other's games. But the voluble Johnson and withdrawn Bird did not strike up an instant rapport. 

Instead they became bitter rivals, first in the 1979 NCAA Championship final, in which Johnson's Michigan State Spartans defeated Bird's Indiana State Sycamores, and later in the NBA. Each watched enviously from a distance as the other won an NBA title (Johnson as a Lakers rookie in 1980, Bird with the Celtics in '81), and each followed the other's stats in the papers. Looking back, each acknowledges that the other was his prime motivator. 

Their rivalry reached a fever pitch in 1984 and '85, when the Celtics and Lakers faced off in consecutive NBA Finals. The Celtics prevailed in '84, with Bird garnering MVP honors, but the Lakers evened the score in '85. 

The moment at the heart of the book came three months after the Laker victory, when Johnson and Bird got together at Bird's Indiana home to shoot a TV commercial for Converse basketball sneakers. Ever the competitor, Bird had refused to participate unless Johnson came to him, and Magic, in true Showtime fashion, rolled into rural West Baden with his entourage in three limos. But when the two pow-wowed privately in Bird's basement, they discovered that they had a lot in common.

Although Johnson and Bird never faced each other in another NBA final, they remained fierce rivals while their mutual regard grew. After Johnson was diagnosed with the HIV virus in November 1991, he made sure his agent, Lon Rosen, informed Bird before the press conference in which Johnson announced his condition and retirement from basketball. Told by Rosen that Johnson would be in touch in a few days, Bird insisted on calling his rival right away. "My God," Bird said to his wife, Dinah, after the ever-upbeat Johnson consoled him over the phone. "Magic's gonna die."

MacMullan does a nice job recounting the hysteria, fueled by lack of information, that followed Johnson's HIV announcement. And she's equally adept in relating the tale of the 1992 U.S. Olympic "Dream Team," on which Bird and Johnson once again competed as teammates, bringing their story full circle.

One of the book's best passages recounts a pre-Olympic scrimmage in Monte Carlo in which an "East" team led by Bird and Michael Jordan comes back to beat a "West" squad anchored by Johnson, David Robinson and Charles Barkley. "It was the most fun I've ever had playing basketball," Jordan said tellingly.

As far as entertaining reading goes, "When The Game Was Ours" scores a three-pointer in my book.