Los Angeles Clippers supporters have been waiting a long time for their team to win an NBA championship. Or play for a championship. Or even get into the Western Conference finals. None of which the club has accomplished.
Which seems to have made many of them impatient.
They figured Kawhi Leonard, architect of the Toronto Raptors championship last season, was the marquee signing of the offseason, and they are eager to see him out there playing for the red, white and blue.
But, apparently, they did not carefully read up on the situation pertaining to Leonard and how much he will play under a system sometimes known as “load management”.
Kawhi sat out Wednesday’s game with the Milwaukee Bucks so as not to wear down his body in the season’s first month.
The idea is to keep him fresh-ish during the 82-game regular season. Leonard has a history of injuries, including a mysterious thigh injury that cost him most of the 2017-18 season.
Not surprisingly, a lot of fans think “load management” is a load. Like those who turned out to see the Clippers play the Bucks, led by MVP candidate Giannis Antetokoumnpo.
I grew up in Long Beach, California. My mother and siblings still live there. Several nieces, too. I haven’t lived in the city since 2009, and have not spent a lot of time in it since 1976, but it remains my hometown, and I have the Long Beach State baseball cap to prove it.
Which is why I make a point to read a little online newspaper, the Long Beach Post, which is the most significant surviving media presence in a city of 495,000.
The Post is a handful of kids and veterans trying to do journalism at its most basic level.
That handful of people includes one very-well-known — in Long Beach — individual, name of Tim Grobaty, columnist for the Post, as he was for the Long Beach Press Telegram before it.
I might still have been at school at Long Beach State when Grobaty started writing for what is now a shriveled remnant of a newspaper.
Grobaty is a Long Beach lifer, to my knowledge, and he is the kind of writer with a mandate to, well, tell it like it is, on the news side.
Grobaty seems to prefer the light and happy and curious, around Long Beach. But, in line with the best general columnists, he can rain down fire and brimstone on powerful people whose actions anger or disturb him.
In this case, Grobaty went Defcon 1 on the mayor of the city, shaming him for his inattention to local events as Long Beach endured a siege of violence that led to six dead and nine wounded in a span of three days last week.
Grobaty believes a mayor should be the reassuring face of a city when his constituents are hurting or frightened, and he finds Robert Garcia, the Long Beach mayor, derelict in his duty for the greater part of a week.
This thing started just the other day! September 20. That was just last week … or last month … or nearly last month.
The ninth Rugby World Cup concluded today in Japan. South Africa overwhelmed England 32-12 to end the 20-team tournament on its 43rd day. And people complain that the baseball playoffs are too long.
This was my first rugby final, and it started at 10 a.m. local (France) time because the matches were being held in Japan, where it was night.
It has been mentioned, on this blog, that my brain generally seems to reject the concept of rugby. To me, it is the primitive older brother of American football that never learned the forward pass.
When living on the western side of the Atlantic, a sports fan can pretty much ignore rugby. But when they wheel out the big rugby nations here at the end, the New Zealand, England, Australia, Ireland, South Africa crew … just to remain conversant in your neighborhood, where the expats live, you need to know who is who. And — get this — France is a serious rugby country, too. Crazy, right?
It was getting late for Howard “Howie” Joseph Kendrick.
He had a solid career. Of course he did. No one lasts 14 years in Major League Baseball without being solid. Solid enough to be paid $65 million over those 14 seasons. Good enough to have played in an All-Star Game in 2011 and received an MVP vote in 2014.
But it would not be unkind or unfair to suggest that Howie Kendrick — at 36 and in the twilight of his career — had never done something truly memorable in his baseball career. Nothing that would make a batch of baseball fans stand up and say, “Howie Kendrick? Of course I remember Howie Kendrick!”
We had a fine time. Almost-perfect weather, from Venice straight through to Rome/Civitavecchia, plenty to see and do but also time for relaxation and conversation.
A look back at 10 nights and 11 days onboard the Celebrity Constellation, fixing some oversights and passing on some thoughts about the trip.
The final full day on the Celebrity Constellation cruise offered a menu of attractions that pretty much overwhelmed even the most ambitious of shore-going travelers.
Start with Naples itself. One day cannot adequately convey the history and energy and madness of the First World city that most closely resembles a Third World city.
But then you might want to take a trip out of town. One option? The memorable ruins of Pompeii, destroyed by the eruption of Vesuvius 20 centuries ago, but leaving behind a ghostly tableau of how Romans lived and played in the First Century AD.
Another option? A boat over to the island of Capri, known for a blue grotto, upscale tourism and the former home of the brutal Roman emperor Tiberius.
How about a bus trip to Sorrento, where ceramics of the sort many travelers adore are made by the truck load every day.
Or a boat ride down the Amalfi Coast, or a gastronomic tour of Napoli?
We went with Topic 1: A bus tour of the busiest, nuttiest, loudest big city in the civilized world. Hey, at least the garbage was being picked up this week. Or most of it, anyway.
Want to see bustling Messina? Today is the day. Intent on having a look at the self-impressed cliff-side mountain retreat Taormina? C’mon down. Fancy a peek at a smoking volcano? Etna isn’t all that far, is it?
The voyagers on the Celebrity Constellation awoke today to find their ship tied up at a dock just a few watery miles from the Italian mainland.
Messina is not really a destination; it is a jumping off point for Sicilian food and wine and culture.
I spent a total of about 25 minutes ashore. I saw Taormina once before, and thought it was interesting — till the cruise-ship people showed up in their hundreds and swamped the town.
Which is why I am going in a different direction today: Wondering what goes on below-decks on a major cruise ship.
I became aware of the island country of Malta when I was a kid, reading about how 500 Knights Hospitaller led the defenders against the Ottoman Empire in the Great Siege of Malta, in the year 1565.
It is a wonderful yarn, the story of the few and the outgunned who clung on tenaciously against an empire that had suffered very few setbacks in its push to make the Mediterranean into an Ottoman lake.
That the defense was led by the 500 members of a military order that took its name from running hospitals during the Crusades … made it that much better. The notion of an elite force of fighting men with utter devotion to a noble cause, well, it’s hard for the western mind to resist.
What I expected as we steamed toward the little island midway between Sicily and Tunisia was some sort of way of investigating the battle.
We have entitled this travelogue of our 10-day outing “Cruising the Mediterranean”. But weren’t we in some other seas entirely, to get where we are now, headed south for Malta?
It can be argued that the Adriatic and Ionian seas are the only watery areas the Celebrity Constellation has passed over, in the past week.
But we have chosen to think of the bigger picture.
