A basketball blessing?

I've written about sports for more than 35 years, in which time I've come to believe that God doesn't care who wins a ball game.

After all, in a world in which earthquakes have devastated Haiti and Chile, a tsunami is threatening Japan, and which lives with the daily threat of terrorism, there are much more significant ways in which divine intervention is needful.

But sometimes you see things that make you wonder....

I spent this afternoon watching Wingate's final regular-season basketball games of the season against South Atlantic Conference rival Carson-Newman. I had set up an interview with Emily Paffrath, one of Wingate's best women's basketball players of recent years and now a Carson-Newman assistant coach, for a story for this blog that I hope to post tomorrow. But I figured I'd stay for both games to see if both Bulldog teams could end up-and-down regular seasons on a positive note going to next week's SAC tournament.

Carson-Newman's women's team showed why they're ranked No. 20 nationally in NCAA Division II, defeating Wingate 76-65 to run their record to 22-4.

The men's game figured to give Wingate a better chance to pick up a win, matching the 13-13 Bulldogs against a Carson-Newman team that was 10-16 and near the bottom of the standings. But things have seldom worked out as expected this season for the young Wingate team. "Tough luck" doesn't come close to describing it.

Six of Wingate's losses have been by two points or less, and nearly all of those came down to a last shot. In a couple of those games, the Bulldogs took a final shot that wouldn't go in. More recently, in the past two games heartbreak came on the road at Lenoir-Rhyne and Newberry in the form of a "buzzer-beater" by the home team.

For a while, it didn't look like that would be a problem on this afternoon, as Wingate held a 13-point lead with about 10 minutes left in the game. But Carson-Newman gradually fought back with the help of a turnover here and a bad shot there by the Bulldogs.

You could just feel the tension increasing, as the Bulldogs missed four or five free throws in the final couple of minutes that would've given them some breathing room. And you could almost see the "here we go again" look in the players' faces.

Anyway, the game came down to a final possession. Wingate clung to a 66-65 lead with less than 6 seconds remaining. The Eagles were a little slow getting the ball up the court and guard Cameron Sharp had to let fly a shot from just beyond the midcourt line at the final buzzer. It looked like it was on target and about to produce one of those YouTube moments and another crushing loss for the Bulldogs.

But the shot clanged off the front of the rim. Game over. Wingate had survived. Seniors Larry Staley (16 points) and David Johnson (13), who had played well in their final home game, went out as winners.

I congratulated Wingate coach Brian Good as he prepared to do his post-game radio interview. "Yeah, we were awesome," he said with a relieved smile. I don't think he meant me to take him literally.

But as the old saying goes, sometimes it's better to be lucky than good. Or was it luck? I'm just sayin'.......

Tiger Woods and the Dalai Lama

There isn't much to say that hasn't already been said about Tiger Woods' news conference -- given the limited media presence and the lack of media participation, like none, it seems disingenuous to use the term.

But I was struck by two reactions to it over the weekend from widely disparate sources. I heard a host on ESPN Radio on Saturday evening interviewing a guy whom the host described as being a public relations consultant from "one of the biggest firms in New York" -- I didn't recognize the name, quite frankly. But he said something that was pretty insightful, if a little obvious.

In answer to a question from the host, he said that Woods' public image wasn't going to be rehabilitated by doing news conferences and interviews. Woods has never been a media friendly sports figure anyway, and many commentators remarked last weekend on his career-long discomfort with being a public figure -- particularly in uncontrolled situations like live media interviews.

I thought, as many others did, that he came off as rehearsed and a little wooden, and so did the PR expert. "He's going to rehabilitate himself with the public by doing well what he does well, and that's play golf," he said.

The other comment on the Woods situation that stuck with me was from that noted golf expert, the Dalai Lama.

The Buddhist religious leader is in the U.S. to visit with President Obama and make some other public appearances, and the Associated Press asked him during an audience in Los Angeles whether he had any thoughts on Woods and his situation. Woods, of course, referred in his remarks Friday to straying from his Buddhist faith with his affairs.

Turns out the Dalai Lama had never heard of Woods. But when he was filled in on the details, he said that Woods would be well-served to fall back on his faith in trying to repair his marriage, given that "self-discipline with awareness of consequences" was a major tenet of Buddhism.

I'm wondering if the news in all this really is that there's someone in the world who hasn't heard the Woods story yet, given all the attention it's commanded for a while. The Dalai Lama's response puts it all in refreshing perspective.

Do y'all believe in miracles?

It’s the 30th anniversary of the United States’ improbable victory over the mighty Russian ice hockey team in the 1980 Winter Olympics in Lake Placid, N.Y. Given the current U.S. team’s electrifying victory over Canada last night – sure it just was a preliminary round game, but it didn’t feel like one – it’s especially timely to celebrate it again.

And maybe to clear up some things that have been lost in the mythologizing of that event over the last three decades. Click the link for a good column by Joe Posnanski on SI.com, "10 Interesting Facts You May Not Know About the Miracle on Ice."

And one thing that nobody’s writing, that I think is an interesting byproduct of the Miracle is that it set the stage for hockey to become popular in places where it didn’t have much of a skateprint.

Growing up in the South in the Fifties and Sixties, I didn’t have much opportunity to be exposed to this sport other than every four years in the Olympics. The NHL wasn't on TV in South Carolina and as I started my daily newspaper journalism career in the Seventies in Myrtle Beach, we may have been the only paper in the state to put in the hockey scores and standings every day, as a concession to the transplanted Yankee retirees and "snowbirds."

(As my editor in Pittsburgh once said when I went to work covering the Penguins for his newspaper, "I’ve got a hockey writer and the only ice he’s ever seen is in a glass of sweet tea." I’ve always preferred to think that was a good-humored joke.)

Anyway, to return to the point, the Olympic brand of hockey was much more watchable than the NHL product of those years before the rise of Wayne Gretzky to stardom. Think of the old joke, "I went to a fight and a hockey game broke out." Not only was this our national team, but they played a tough game with grace and skill.

I've always thought that that game in 1980 planted a seed for the growth of the sport to non-traditional hockey markets, resulting a generation later in NHL teams in places like Nashville and Tampa and minor league teams in any decent-sized city needing to fill an arena's open dates.

Falling from grace

I don’t think it’s morbid, but it's just out of a general curiosity about life’s transitions that I tend to pay attention to the deaths of people who are or have been newsmakers. Regular readers of this blog may have noticed that I’ll remark on some person’s passing every now and then.

Dana Kirk, who was a former head basketball coach at (as it was called at the time) Memphis State University, died on Monday at the age of 74. I took note of this because I interviewed him once during my time as a sports reporter for the Pensacola News Journal in Florida.

Kirk is most famous for leading Memphis to the 1985 Final Four, the highlight of a successful eight-year tenure there. But he was fired before the 1986-87 season, a couple of weeks before a federal grand jury indicted him on charges including tax evasion and mail fraud. He spent four months in a federal prison, and Memphis was placed on NCAA probation for rules violations under Kirk’s watch, including allegations of ticket-scalping and taking kickbacks from tournament promoters.

I encountered him in Pensacola after he was trying to put his life back together, as a coach for a team called the Hot Shots of the Global Basketball Association. The team moved from Memphis to Pensacola in the middle of the 1991-92 season.

The GBA was one of the many pro basketball minor leagues that have tried to make a go of it on a shoestring budget over the years. (One of the franchises was memorably named the Raleigh Bullfrogs.) And the Hot Shots, featuring Keith Lee, a star on those Kirk-coached Memphis State teams, moved into town after a popular Continental Basketball Association franchise, the Pensacola Tornados, moved out.

I talked to Kirk before the Hot Shots’ first game in their new city. He didn’t want to discuss much of anything about the past. He said he was focused on his current team and getting it introduced to a new set of fans. Which was challenging enough – he was worried about having enough players on hand to field the league minimum of eight, and was considering putting himself in uniform on the active roster until his full team arrived.

“I’m 54 years old, so I’m probably not going to be leading the fast break or taking any charges,” he joked.

It was a long, long way from being at the top of the basketball world, as he had been five years earlier.

To the best of my recollection, the Hot Shots played out the rest of the season before paltry crowds at the Pensacola Civic Center and didn’t come back. Kirk returned to Memphis, where he hosted a sports talk radio show and lived quietly in retirement.

A former player put this story in eloquent perspective when he was interviewed by CBSSports.com on Monday evening.

“He was a good basketball coach, and it's just a shame what happened to him because the stuff he did -- or the stuff he was accused of doing -- he didn't really need to do,” said John Wilfong, a guard on that Final Four team.

“He could've had a 15-year or 20-year run at Memphis and just had incredible success, and I think he knew at the end of the day that he blew it, and that he would never get another chance. Matter of fact, he never got another chance."

Signs from above

I’ve always been a fan of church signs – you know, the ones outside churches which advertise the name of the pastor, time of services, and often provide some sort of inspirational message for the passer-by.

By now some of them are a little bit cliched, like “Seven days without prayer make one weak.” Some warn of the dire consquences of sin: “Forbidden fruit creates many jams.” And for the old newspaper guy like me, the appeal is the same as a well-written headline, a cogent and attention-getting message contained within a limited space.

But whether time-worn or original, all have that valuable bit of takeaway, leaving one with something to ponder.

Well, there’s a whole book of those things that someone has done, with text and photos of these signs from all around the country. I wish had written down the title and author so I could post it here. But you can find it in the lobby at your nearest Cracker Barrel restaurant, which is where I saw it when Jayne and I went out for dinner on Sunday evening.

One of the signs in the book really stuck with me. And maybe it’s a reflection of an issue faced by churches all around the country as they deal with the issue of ministering to people who don’t look and talk “like us.”

It was from a Methodist church, somewhere in the Midwest, and it said: “Jesus didn’t speak English.”

Powerful stuff, and worth thinking about.

New team, same name

It's a tale of two cities and one's loss is the other's gain.

The Charlotte Checkers, the local minor league hockey club, held a news conference Wednesday to announce that team owner Michael Kahn, a local businessman, has bought the Albany (N.Y.) River Rats of the American Hockey League. The River Rats will move to Charlotte and play in the AHL this fall under the Checkers' nickname.

I did some reporting at the news conference for the Albany Times Union, where the story is obviously a little different from the upbeat story here of moving up the minor league hockey ladder. The Checkers have been members of the ECHL (formerly the East Coast Hockey League), two rungs below the National Hockey League, since 1993.

The River Rats began play in the AHL, the highest minor league in North American hockey, that same year. But the team has been plagued by financial problems and low attendance in recent years, ranking 26th out of the 29 teams at 3,517 fans per game. The Checkers, by contrast, are sixth in the 20-team ECHL, averaging 5,233 fans at the Time Warner Cable Arena.

The River Rats have been the AHL affiliate of the Carolina Hurricanes of the NHL for the last four years, and the Hurricanes have been interested for some time in having their top minor league players a little closer to Raleigh for easier call-ups and more up-close observation.


"We like the idea of our affiliate being a couple of hours' drive away," said Hurricanes general manager Jim Rutherford, pictured here talking to the media at the news conference. "There's one flight out of Albany every day that our players could get to make it to Raleigh, and it would arrive here barely in time for a player to make it to the arena."

The affiliation agreement was set to expire at the end of this season and Rutherford said the uncertainty of the River Rats' situation contributed to the Hurricanes interest in the sale.
"We wanted an affiliate in Charlotte, but to have an affiliate, you have to have a franchise," Rutherford said. "We didn't know whether it would be Albany's or someone else's."

Checkers owner Michael Kahn said the attraction was mutual. "If it had been Nashville or Atlanta that was interested, I don't know that I would have jumped so readily," he said.
The loser in all of this, of course, is the city of Albany. Team owner Walter Robb, an 81-year-old former corporate VP for General Electric, couldn't sustain any more financial losses. He wasn't at the news conference.

"You can only pour money into things for so long," Rutherford said. "I'm sure Dr. Robb hung on for as long as he could."

And comments at the end of this post in the Times Union's hockey blog indicated that, rather than being angry at Robb, fans were grateful that he stuck with the city as long as he did.

So Charlotte fans get to await news about coaches, players, ticket prices, uniform colors and everything else associated with a new team. And Albany fans wonder whether they will have a team to root for next season. Several other AHL franchises' affiliation agreements are up or are considering moves, according to the ever-active hockey grapevine.

Possible candidates for relocation include the Hartford WolfPack, which ironically is the AHL affiliate of the current Charlotte Checkers. That Checkers team will be sold within a month, Kahn said at the press conference -- making room for a new era to begin.

Super Bowl revisited

I figure that someone somewhere in New Orleans is still drinking to the Saints' Super Bowl victory whenever you're reading this, so some final thoughts on the game are still timely.

Through most of the game, I delayed any decision on whom to root for, and it wasn't because I wanted to back the front-runner -- after all, I've been a fan of Clemson basketball for 40 years. Nothing against the Indianapolis Colts, who play the game well and tend to be good citizens -- though I didn't buy quarterback Peyton Manning's excuse for leaving the field without shaking hands with Saints players following the game.

But, lacking a rooting interest, the old sports writer in me usually ends up pulling for the best story, which was clearly the Saints. I'm glad they rewarded one of the NFL's most loyal fan bases, which has historically gotten minimal return on their emotional investment. Not to mention the well-chronicled trauma the city of New Orleans has been through in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005. The New Orleans Times-Picayune's front page from Monday captures the feeling.

And I loved the shots of Saints quarterback Drew Brees and his young son after the game was over. The TV cameras captured it and the announcers stayed out of the way -- a nice job all around.

To be honest, a DVR glitch caused me to miss just about all of The Who's halftime show when I went out for wings. (And no disrespect to surviving band members Roger Daltrey and Pete Townshend, but it's like getting Paul and Ringo together and calling them The Beatles.) Apparently they did a creditable job of doing what these classic rock performers have been called upon to do at halftime in recent years -- deliver a brief medley of the big hits without suffering a "wardrobe malfunction." But here's one critic who disagreed.

And finally, there was the usual round of commercials, as big an attraction for some folks as the game. I enjoyed the Google spot and have always found Budweiser's "Clydesdale" ads nostalgic and evocative.

But the biggest non-story turned out to be the ad that received the most pre-game hype. The Focus on the Family spot featuring University of Florida quarterback Tim Tebow was anti-climactic after the huge furor from women's groups and proponents of abortion rights leading up to its airing. The spot itself was inoffensive and the message positive, although what the critics were expecting is probably addressed in a lengthier video on the organization's website, which is touted at the end of the spot. Click here and draw your own conclusions.

I've seen some conservative bloggers crowing about how Dr. James Dobson and his organization put one over on "the Left," and the public relations strategy was indeed clever. Let the other side make a mountain out of a molehill and end up looking silly.

But there's a lesson here for anyone, right or left, who wants to pass judgment on a creative work -- find out what it says first. (I've also read my share of stories about conservative "culture wars" protests against books, plays, movies, etc., where the objectors have never read or seen what they're so worked up about or take things out of context.)

Anyway, this brouhaha was the only controversial note in one of the few events left in American society where Republicans and Democrats alike can attend the same party without throwing the guacamole at one another. Let's hope that it endures.

Tim Tebow, free speech and the Super Bowl

The Super Bowl seems an unlikely place for a battleground over social issues, including abortion and free speech.

But the decision by CBS to air an "advocacy ad" featuring former University of Florida quarterback Tim Tebow and his mother, sponsored by Dr. James Dobson and his Focus on the Family organization, has created some controversy in advance of tomorrow's game.

Organizations which support the rights of women to choose to have abortions -- most notably the National Organization for Women and Planned Parenthood -- have criticized the network for airing the message, which will make the case against abortion.

The ad is called "Celebrate Family, Celebrate Life" and I haven't been able to find it on the Internet, but those who have seen it say there's nothing objectionable here -- nothing like some of those ads and literature I've seen from anti-abortion groups that feature photos of burned fetuses in a dumpster, etc.

According to reports, in the ad Pam Tebow recounts her decision to go against doctors' recommendations to terminate the pregnancy which produced Tim after she became ill on a mission trip to the Phillippines in 1987. Previewers say they've found the message inspirational and uplifting.

Of course, abortion being the divisive issue that it is, the Tebows, Dobson and Focus on the Family have been criticized (or as it's always said when your side is criticized -- "attacked" or "demonized") for wanting to inject this message into the All-American celebration that is the Super Bowl. And as proof that public life leads to strange alliances, I've seen some folks on Facebook, where there's a group supporting Tebow's right to speak, that includes some self-avowed Gator-haters.

The criticism is unwarranted, or at least misdirected. Of course, Tim Tebow has the right to speak on this issue, and on Super Bowl Sunday, advertising dollars bestow some of the most powerful free speech rights of all. He should be heard and not censored.

CBS, on the other hand, has taken some heat for what critics call their hypocrisy. In the past, they've rejected advocacy, or issue-oriented Super Bowl advertising from controversial organizations like PETA and MoveOn.org. And they also rejected a pretty innocuous-sounding ad from a Canadian gay matchmaking website for this year's game. One can imagine that the same folks that support the Tebow ad would have a different view of free speech had CBS chosen to air one of these ads.

Planned Parenthood, interestingly, has already aired a response to the ad with former NFL player Sean Jones and former Olympian Al Joyner. The two athletes say they respect the Tebows' choice but say they hope that their daughters will grow up in a world where women are similarly free to make decisions about their health and their future.

But that's the beauty of the First Amendment, which we should celebrate as we observe this most American of unofficial holidays tomorrow evening. We have the right to speak about issues and people have the right to disagree. We can readily consume messages that confirm our beliefs, but others have the right to challenge them.

We should no more expect or try to enforce unanimity in that marketplace of ideas than we'll have on the question of whether the Saints or the Colts should win.

Happy Super Bowl Sunday, everyone.

RIP Tom Brookshier

I appreciate a Facebook friend posting an item from the Philadelphia Daily News, as I would have missed this news otherwise. Former broadcaster and, before that, Philadelphia Eagles star Tom Brookshier died Friday at the age of 78.

He was revered in Philly as a standout for that legendary 1960 Eagles NFL championship team, but I remember him better behind a microphone, paired with Pat Summerall as CBS' top NFL announcing team in the Seventies. They called several Super Bowls, and as I recall, a lot of Dallas Cowboys' games.

They were a good match, the briskly efficient Summerall handling the play-by-play, but Brookshier keeping the proceedings and his partner loose with his sometimes irreverent commentary.

“With Brookie, it was more of a conversation, like two guys in a saloon,’’ Summerall once told The New York Times.

That off-the-cuff style once famously got Brookshier, who also called other sports for CBS, in a little trouble for an offhand comment that the University of Louisville men's basketball team “had a collective IQ of about 40.”

Brookshier apologized and later visited the Louisville campus to mend fences. (In fairness to him, some of those Denny Crum-coached teams did win games more on their talent than by playing a thinking man’s style of basketball.)

But that unpredictability was a trademark and it served him well as an early practitioner of sports talk radio in Philadelphia.

Click the link for a column on Brookshier by another Philly sports media legend, Bill Conlin.

A blast from boxing's past

When my male students talk about getting together to watch “the fights” on TV, they’re talking about mixed martial arts, not boxing. Kind of sad, really.

I’ve never seen enough MMA to give it a valid critique, but it appears to be a cross between boxing and a Bruce Lee movie, and does seem to require more athleticism than those abominable “Tough Man” contests.

But mainstream sports media like ESPN and Sports Illustrated have given it some legitimacy with their coverage, and it appears to have considerable traction among young males. Still, as I like to joke, it reminds me of what you can see for free around closing time if you hang around the parking lot of any Southern honky-tonk filled with alcohol and testosterone-fueled good ole boys.

But back to boxing. I was reminded of the reduced state of this “legacy” sport after I saw a news item announcing that Roy Jones Jr. and Bernard Hopkins would be matched against each other in a middleweight bout for the first time in 17 years. Jones, of Pensacola, Fla., defeated Hopkins in 1993 in Washington, D.C., for the IBF middleweight title.

That was when both were in the prime of their boxing careers. Hopkins is now 45 and Jones 41. They’ll fight in Las Vegas on April 3. And one has to wonder who’ll be watching.

Boxing has been marginalized over the last couple of decades, a situation largely of its own making – too many champions because of an alphabet soup of sanctioning organizations, and the biggest fights and boxers available to fans only via expensive pay-per-view telecasts.

As I said, that’s sad to me because I grew up watching larger-than-life boxers like Muhammad Ali, George Foreman and Joe Frazier. And sports history is full of boxing legends like Jack Dempsey, Sugar Ray Robinson and Joe Louis.

There’s a wealth of good writing about boxing, starting with A.J. Liebling’s “The Sweet Science,” named by SI as the all-time best book about sports. And as a sports journalist, I’ve enjoyed the opportunities I’ve had to cover boxing. You can get close to the action – but don’t wear a white shirt – and the fighters are accessible and among the more honest athletes to interview. (The same can’t be said of some I’ve encountered in the management and promotion of the sport.)

The notice about the Jones fight has special resonance with me, as I had a few opportunities to cover him at the beginning of his professional career when I wrote for the News Journal in his hometown of Pensacola.

Jones first made national headlines as a member of the U.S. Olympic boxing team in Seoul in 1988, when he was robbed of a victory in his gold medal match after pummeling South Korea’s Park Si-Hun for three rounds. He lost a 3-2 judges’ decision to Park, who pretty much had to be propped up to receive his medal and later apologized to Jones for winning.

Jones’ professional career started slowly, as his father and then-manager Roy Jones Sr., rarely let him fight outside Pensacola for the first two years and matched him against opponents who were marginal talents at best and, at worst, unfit for the ring. He later broke with his father and won his first championship fight as a super middleweight in late 1992. He’s held some sort of title in a couple of different weight classes almost continuously since then.

But 21 years is a long time to be a professional boxer and Jones – who has dabbled as a rapper and a minor league professional basketball team owner and player – lost his most recent fight, an IBF cruiserweight title bout, in a first-round knockout by young Australian contender Danny Green in December. Click here for the entire fight.

Too many boxers have – because they just couldn’t quit or needed the money – hung on long after their skills have diminished. In most sports, it’s just embarrassing. In boxing it can be damaging to long-term health. It happened to Ali and I hope it doesn’t happen that way for Jones.

Peppers, with a grain of salt

NOTE: Every once in a while, I do requests. Today's post is in response to one -- and while I claim no special insight or inside access on this topic, that at least puts me on an even footing with a few thousand sports bloggers out there.

The "whither Julius Peppers" story is cranking up again for the Carolina Panthers, fast becoming our region's version of the annual off-season "will Brett Favre retire -- and stay that way -- or won't he" saga. Only I'd guess that this one will have a much shorter shelf life, being dependent more on the economics of the game than one man's whim.

Or maybe not. Peppers, a veteran linebacker out of North Carolina, tried to leave the Panthers at the end of the 2008 season, and the team almost struck a deal sending him to the New England Patriots. But Carolina management tagged him as its "franchise player," for the 2009 season, meaning that he wasn't free to sign with another club. But in return he had to be paid at least the average of the top five salaries at his position as of April 16, or 120 percent of his 2008 salary -- whichever was greater (got that?).

The bottom line was that for the inconvenience, Peppers gritted his teeth through a $16.7 million contract year. The Panthers can apply the franchise tag again and keep Peppers for another year against his will, but this time that would necessitate a deal of at least $20 million. (You know, no job is perfect....)

Right now, things are in limbo. Peppers hasn't said whether he definitely wants to return to Carolina. His agent has made vague statements that the issues with the Panthers that spurred Peppers to look around after the 2008 season no longer exist. But any time a player of the 6-foot-7, 280-pound Peppers' physical gifts hints he might be available, the rumor mill starts to grind.

And Peppers' own statements have helped that along. "Anywhere is a potential landing spot," he said recently. "I'm just trying to get on a team. I just want a contract."

A search of Google News a few minutes ago resulted in newspaper and blog reports that, variously, the Atlanta Falcons, Chicago Bears, Kansas City Chiefs, New York Jets and Jacksonville Jaguars are -- or ought to be -- interested in Peppers, who would certainly, according to these reports, be the answer to these teams' defensive deficiencies. (Peppers in an Atlanta red uniform would especially be anathema to Panthers' fans.)

Meanwhile, Peppers, who says the Panthers aren't communicating with him right now, just played in his second straight Pro Bowl after a season in which he recorded 10-1/2 sacks and forced five fumbles. It was his sixth double-digit sack performance in eight NFL seasons.

But somehow, the perception persists that Peppers doesn't play up to his capabilities. As noted at the beginning, I haven't covered many Panthers games since I had a regular assignment supplying stories to a coastal N.C. daily newspaper during the 2004 season. So I'm not sure I'm the best judge.

At that early point in his career, he struck me as accessible and personable, a very media-friendly player. And, as they say, he had a tremendous upside -- size and quickness, someone who was as comfortable running the floor and blocking shots for the UNC Tar Heels basketball team as he was rushing a passer. And the record points to a solid career so far.

We'll see how this one turns out, and I think it will be settled long before the Favre question is.