Category: Sardonic Side

Seems like everyone is properly impressed with the Bucs’ new summer camp setup at Disney’s Wide World of Gruden Complex. The fields are manicured and the 115-room Celebration Hotel is hardly your Spartan training camp digs.

Which, in a way, is kind of a shame.

For fans who otherwise cannot realistically identify with professional athletes, the University of Tampa scene was a bonus. Millionaires were forced to live in amenity-challenged dorms and walk to work. Want a TV? Bring one. Need more blankets? Bring them too and carry them up yourself. That after-hours hunger attack? Try Subway or Mr. T’s on Kennedy Boulevard.

Now it’s posh rooms, cable TV and room service. But it was humbling while it lasted.

Call them the Gang That Couldn’t Scalp Straight.

Imagine anyone scalping Tampa Bay Rays’ tickets? As in get-’em-while-they-lapse ducats for the worst team in baseball, one that draws more bankruptcy and contraction rumors than fans. But that’s exactly what three Miami men were arrested for recently.

They had used a stolen credit card to buy 180 Rays-Seattle Mariners tickets. Did they think Lou Piniella was that big of a draw?

This had to be the dumbest local crime since last month’s Days Inn hold-up in north Tampa by a guy who was staying there. He was arrested in his room.

Here’s a solution to Major League Baseball’s All Star dilemma.

Mandate that managers of both sides continue to substitute with abandon and try to play everyone. Keep in mind that actually “winning” the erstwhile mid-season “classic” is of little relevance any more.

This prime time exhibition is merely a forum for cameo celebrity-athlete appearances. The era of inter-league play has already removed most of the mystique, and free agency is incompatible with traditional allegiances.

Anyway, it should be further required that the All Star game must end after the regulation nine innings regardless of the score.

In the event of a tie, however, it will be decided by designated position players, who will pitch. But not to opposing batters.

Instead, they will match dead-aim tosses in a dunk-tank competition featuring buoyant Bud Lite Selig. Not only would this be a workable, entertaining compromise, it would actually reward fans who cared enough to show up or tune in — and root for a tie-breaker.

As to the rest of baseball’s problems, there isn’t a big enough dunk-tank.

There might never be a last word on Ted Williams. He was that good. The statistics still dazzle: from .406 in 1941 to 29 home runs in 1960, when he was 42. He was a bona fide baseball legend.

But he was also a hero, and precious few athletes actually deserve that label. He was a Marine Corps pilot in two wars. Imagine Barry Bonds as a fighter pilot. Didn’t think so.

But now we have this macabre, cold-blooded circus — involving court injunctions and cryonics plans — going on among his kids. Scenarios for saving and selling Williams’ DNA are afoot.

From a purely marketing standpoint, this is a disaster. Passing along DNA is no guarantee of anything. Just look at Williams’ children, who had his DNA passed on to them the old-fashioned way.

It’s now official. America’s most prominent celebrity-rapist, Mike Tyson, was part of the highest-grossing pay-per-view event in history. Joint venture partners HBO and Showtime grossed $103 million on 8.1 million buys.

Once again, the pithy platitude of P.T. Barnum rings too true.

Sure, those 8 million buys represent a lot of suckers who weren’t about to distinguish a fight from a farce. Suckers who didn’t care or notice that Tyson was a shot fighter, an erstwhile bully turned flailing heavy bag. And that Lennox Lewis was bigger, better and — by default — brighter. But then, boxing has always had its cannon-fodder followers.

Unfortunately, those 8 million buys also represent millions of enablers. They made possible the American Scheme and likely some sleazy sequels. Tyson is nothing if not nasty, vulgar, menacing, conniving and criminal, with or without his meds. Combine this with eroded skills and a string of hateful, obscenity-laced press conferences and interviews and the result is an 8-figure payday, which may or may not be enough to get him out of debt.

Although Tyson was fighting for a championship belt, he should have been fitted for a societal straitjacket.

For all those pay-per-view voyeurs who made it happen: Thanks for subsidizing and perpetuating all that’s wrong in society and in human nature.

And to P.T. Barnum: apologies. Not even you could have envisioned this.

So that megaphone for diversity, the St. Petersburg Times , has been called out by the NAACP. Someone finally noticed that there are more whites on the NAACP’s board of directors than there are blacks on the Times’. Actually there are no blacks at all on the Times’ board, and Andy Barnes, Times chairman and CEO, seems properly defensive.

Barnes, who selects the members of the board for Times Publishing Co., told Darryl Rouson, president of the St. Petersburg branch of the NAACP, that filling executive positions in the company with African-Americans is one of his highest priorities. “No one feels more frustrated about this than I,” said Barnes as quoted in a Times’ account.

Barnes, according to the Times, also told Rouson that he will work hard before he retires in 2004 to appoint an African-American to the board.

Still left unaddressed: a diversity-driven timetable for appointing a white, male conservative.

Yes, it’s another one of those American Film Institute’s lists of “greatest movies” sure to prompt reveries of nostalgia and fits of disagreement. In the case of “the 100 greatest love stories of all time,” there is, of course, plenty of both.

I mean who can quibble with “Casablanca” topping the list? Rick and Ilsa now have more than Paris. The screen epic “Gone With The Wind,” second to nearly none, seems properly placed. From third, “West Side Story,” on up it gets appropriately debatable. Should (7) “Doctor Zhivago” come before or after (12) “My Fair Lady,” for example?

But “King Kong” at 23? Even if it is the original (1933). Even though Faye Ray was a vulnerable babe. C’mon.

Ahead of (41) “Funny Girl,” (50) Shakespeare in Love,” (52) “The Graduate,” (56) “The English Patient” and (61) “Breakfast at Tiffany’s”? And barely behind (20) “From Here To Eternity” and (22) “On Golden Pond,” which are incongruously sandwiched between (21) “Pretty Woman.”

I mean if you’re that enamored of the hackneyed beauty-and-the-beast theme, there’s always, well, (34) “Beauty and the Beast.”

Spokespersons for both Jeb Bush and Janet Reno are indicating that Bill McBride may now have a business-related campaign issue to defuse. That’s because his old law firm, Holland & Knight — the state’s largest — has been experiencing cutbacks and now layoffs.

Suggestion: If you want to go after McBride, go no further than his liberal agenda. Order off the menu.

But to target McBride because H & K is not immune to the nation’s economic slowdown seems lame. And since when is freezing the pay of and laying off lawyers considered such a liability?

Had Dante foreseen it, he surely would have included the waiting rooms of car dealer service departments as a level of hell. Bad magazines, bad TV and bad news abounds. It’s the worst kind of downtime.

And that’s before you realize that “Family Feud” is on the waiting room’s big-screen TV. Why is this show still on? Why was it ever on? Does anyone watch TV at 9:30 a.m. who isn’t in a waiting room?

Anyway, it was the Epsteins against the Olsens, with the former, featuring two lawyers, a personal trainer, an artist and a financial planner, taking an early lead. That was due to uncannily intuitive answers to: “What I wouldn’t want to see when I returned to my car.” A flat, a ticket, a bird dropping, etc.

From what I saw of the Epsteins celebrating their early score, I perversely started to root for them. They were obviously high-five challenged, and the chance for bodily harm loomed likely.

As for that other storyline, the part would have to be ordered and, no, they had no loaner.

You can’t make this stuff up.

Recently making its publishing debut: Heeb magazine. Honest. According to its founders, it’s “the new Jew review