New Rules 2011

With football over and baseball still a month away, it's hard finding a single topic to dedicate a decent amount of my trademark snark towards. I mean, look at our choices: Last Saturday's Slam Dunk Contest? Meh. NBA All-Star Game? Can't say I watched it. NASCAR? Not a sport. The pending NFL lockout? Too depressing. There were a few things that caught my eye over the last couple of weeks and I figured "Hey, it's a new year. Let's break out some New Rules!".

Done and done.

NEW RULE: Denver Nuggets management has to admit they don't know what the hell they're doing. Look, I'm Melo'd out(See what I did there?). First, the Nets are in. Then, they're out. Then, 'Melo might stay. Then, he wants to go. Here's what I know, as a man who has no inside ties to NBA front offices and gets all his news from the occasional SportsCenter segment and Twitter: Carmelo Anthony wants to be a Knick. Yes, the Nets offer up a superior deal to the one New York is offering....except for one key component: Anthony's signature on a contract extension. So, what's with all the pussy-footing, fellas? Melo wants the Knicks. The Knicks want Melo. The Nuggets want something back for their soon-to-be departed franchise player. Let's make a deal already! The Nuggets price is a bit extreme, as they are asking for damn near every Knick short of Chris Childs. If something is going to happen, Denver has to settle for about 75% of what they are asking for(maybe less) from New York. Still, that's better than zilch, right? In the time it has taken for the Nuggets to make a Melo trade, the Hornets have made four deals. FOUR! And they would have had a fifth if Milwaukee didn't shut the door on a trade for Corey Maggette. Four trades by a team that, just this summer, was also thinking of shopping its franchise guy(Chris Paul).

I wrote this a month ago and it still holds true now: The Nuggets have two choices, send Melo to the Knicks or keep him and force him to walk out on them this summer. That's it. He's going to brush off any deal on the table with anybody else because, as he's said 100 times, he wants to be a New York Knick. He wants the Garden. He wants Spike Lee doing the Dougie in the front row during the playoffs. He doesn't want to tag team with a walking stiff like Brook Lopez and what's left of Chauncey Billups. He doesn't want to wait two years to play in New York when he can do it right now. So, let's make this thing happen already, people.

NEW RULE: Michael Jordan has to come out of retirement again. Sports media types around the country pissed their pants a couple weeks ago because His Airness decided to come down from his ivory tower to scrimmage with the team he's helping destroy. To further add fuel to the "MJ's playing ball again!" fire, interim coach Paul Silas spouted off not too long after Jordan's run with the whippersnappers and declared MJ could still drop 20 on these young guys. The sad part is, Silas is probably right. At 48 with Joe Namath's knees, Jordan might be the physical equipment of that ashy dude at the park with the Horace Grant goggles and his knees wrapped like a mummy but, given how defense is played(or, not played, to be precise), is it farfetched to think Jordan couldn't come off the bench and drain a few shots against defensively-challenged opponents?

That's the question that needs to be answered. Look, I'm no Jordan fan, but this NBA season has been dominated by three stories: 'Melo's trade options, the Miami Heat, and the decline of Kobe and the Lakers. People aren't talking about Derrick Rose putting up MVP numbers in Chicago. People aren't hyping up the Spurs, who only have the West's best record. We need a new wrench thrown into this season. Brett Favre has already set the bar for once-great, past-their-prime, ego-driven icons making ridiculous comebacks. Jordan can shatter that. Who doesn't want to see Jordan's knees buckle trying to stand in front of a 270lb freight train like LeBron? Tell me Jordan carrying Charlotte to the 8th seed in the East won't make that first round matchup with Miami(or Boston) much more entertaining. Give us something new by giving us something old. Give us MJ.

NEW RULE: No more free-throw dunks. It's 2011. Surely, evolution has proved that today's athletes can come up with better ways to thrill us with their above-the-rim affairs than recycling a dunk made famous nearly forty years ago. When Dr. J did it, it was astounding. Then, Jordan took it to another level. Now? Every dickhead with a 40' vertical is doing it. Just as a rule of thumb, Slam Dunk champion hopefuls, if Brent Barry can do it, it's not cool.

Personally, I'd like to see the Slam Dunk contest abolished because they can never reel in any of the marquee names and we're left with 7-footers getting bush league perfect scores because they can do windmill dunks on a rim three feet above their heads. We used to be able to see 'Nique and Vince Carter and Kobe and Jordan.....now, we get Serge Ibaka. Alot of people think JaVale McGee got robbed in his loss in the Finals to Blake Griffin in Saturday night's Slam-boree. That may be true. After all, Blake dunking over the hood of the car may sound impressive, but call me when he's going over the roof of an Escalade or even this.

You know the real reason McGee lost to Griffin Saturday night? BECAUSE HE'S JAVALE MCGEE! He's the 3rd best player on the 2nd worst team in the Baby Brother Conference. Fans are supposed to vote for THAT guy over a man they've watched tear down the house on Sportscenter all season? In Griffin's backyard? Back to the free throw dunk, let's retire it. If we are going to continue to go with this charade of a competition, we should retire a famous dunk every year. This year, it will be the free throw line dunk. Next year, it can be Jordan's cradle dunk. After that, we can retire Vince Carter's 2000 Slam Dunk Contest, if for no other reason than it will be the only thing Vinsanity will be enshrined in other than a Tampax Hall of Fame.

NEW RULE: Albert Pujols can't get $300 million from the Cardinals unless he breaks both Roger Maris' 61 home runs record AND Hack Wilson's single-season RBI record(191 RBIs) THIS SEASON. I know, I know, "Terminator"(as he was aptly re-named in this space last year) deserves to be the league's highest paid slugger, but it's a recession, you animal! There was a 9.0 unemployment rate in this country last year(don't hold me to that. I Wiki'd it.), and we're supposed to sit back and accept a man getting $300 mil to work 6 months out of the year? Wasn't the last two A-Rod contracts hard enough to digest for blue collar America?

On top of that, Pujols is 31. Assuming he gets 10 years from St. Louis(a far-fetched assumption, but bare with me), he'll be making $30 million a year deep into his late 30's and as he's kicking 40's door down. Guys like Vlad Guerrero and Jim Thome and Manny Ramirez are struggling to find work in their late 30's(let alone $30 million a year), and Pujols(while, admittedly, better than all three) isn't head-and-shoulders better than those guys were in their primes. I agree Pujols needs to get paid and I'm sure fantasy baseball fanatics will be salivating over the words "Pujols" and "contract year" this season, but we have to draw the line somewhere with these exuberant contracts. Is it unfair to the best slugger of the last 40 years that the gluttonous paydays had to stop with him? Absolutely, but the alternative to that is Pujols not getting the money he wants from the Cards and we spend next winter watching Boston and New York(both the Mets and Yankees) battle over Phat Albert like two Kardashian sisters over Cam Newton while baseball in St. Louis(one of the best sports towns in America) dwindles into obscurity and irrelevance. That being said, if Pujols puts on a contract year statistical beatdown for the ages, it will be hard to justify NOT backing up a fleet of Brinks trucks in front of the man's feet. Still, that's where the bar should be set. Either set the world on fire, Albert, or quit reaching for the stars with these contract demands.

NEW RULE: It's time to lay pro wrestling to bed. This next paragraph or two will inevitably get me made fun of by Gabe and, if you have absolutely no interest in pro wrestling, you are more than welcomed to skip out on the blasphemy I'm about to spew. In the last few weeks, I've had a sort of wrestling epiphany. I re-watched "The Rise and Fall of WCW" on DVD, and even caught a glimpse of Monday Night Raw for the first time in ages. It was a clip of The Rock's return to the WWE. Within those two moments, I had two separate conversations with my friends about the glory days of wrestling that we remember and how it translates to what we have now. The consensus? Wrestling is dead. Now, I know pro wrestling still resounds in the hearts of so many in various regions throughout the country, but you know what, so does NASCAR. So does boxing. So does bowling, and cricket and soccer. If you're a fan of pro wrestling, you'd be a damned fool to say that what is being pawned off on us as "sports entertainment" is anywhere close to what we grew up with during the 90's(I'm assuming, of course, that you are around my age range, in your late 20's). I watched The Rock go into his usual gimmick and, while entertaining, it made me sad for the state of affairs wrestling now resides under. In the post-Nipplegate Era, entertainment can no longer be risky. Sure, you can have some off-color jokes like you see on South Park or Family Guy, but what made wrestling enjoyable a decade ago won't fly in the PC world we now live in. That's a strong reason for the decline in pro wrestling's entertainment. Another big reason is the lack of competition WWE now faces. After WWE chairman Vince McMahon bought out its main competitor, WCW, there was no rival to offer up a counter punch. WWE's attempt at trying to assimilate both worlds failed because there's only so much room for so much talent, and when Chris Benoit went off the deep end, pro wrestling as a whole had to reassess how it did business. What we have now is a scaled down version of what used to be "sports entertainment". There's no DX chops. No Austin 3:16s. No middle fingers. No sexual innuendo. It's become Sports Illustrated for Kids. In the late 90's, we had Rock, and Austin, and Undertaker, and what was left of guys like Ric Flair and Hulk Hogan. Now? You have John Cena, who used to be so popular that he became unpopular. People got tired of liking him so much(except women, of course). Perhaps it's that I've matured so much in my prime years that I now find what the WWE offers to be foolish, but there was a certain charge that flowed through me watching the old WCW glory days and watching The Rock go into his schtick. It was a feeling of nostalgia combined with the fact that we will never get to that point again. The once self-proclaimed "male soap opera" will never match the edginess and violence and envelope-pushing of 10-12 years ago.

....And that's why it should end. If there's anything I've learned over the last few episodes of WWE's offerings that I've seen, it's that the biggest draws the WWE has to reel in its former hardcore fans is when they bring back guys like The Rock or like they did a year ago in bringing back Bret "The Hitman" Hart. In other words, they've become a business banking on "Old Timers' Night". WWE will still generate money with people who refuse to give up on it and will go down as the ship is sinking, but there's something to be said about quitting while you're ahead. Most of your marquee superstars are making side money doing movies these days anyway. If The Rock was ballsy enough to give up on a wrestling career that saw him make his mark as one of the 5 or 10 most popular wrestlers of our generation to go film tankjobs like "Gridiron Gang" and "Fast Five", it has to tell you something about how he saw the future of pro wrestling. That was almost a decade ago. Here we are now. Pro wrestling still catches a few eyes, much like a Manny Pacqauio fight will get hardcore fans of the sweet science to break out their wallet, but it's a shell of what it once was. So, my proposal to WWE is this: Either go back to being crotch-chopping, bird-flipping, chair-swinging, swearing rebels that made censors sweat and put fear into sponsors........or give it up. Nobody wants family-friendly pro wrestling and the people that do need to stop kidding themselves. Wrestling was once a threat to Monday Night Football. Now, it's hardly more entertaining than an episode of SVU.