By Natasha Julius

The Stanley Cup was finally awarded Monday night after a spectacular championship series that took the full complement of seven games. The finals featured salty veterans, unlikely heroes, the first-ever short-handed overtime goal, and one team’s stirring rally from a key injury. And guess what? Nobody watched.
That’s because the National Hockey League has gone out of its way to make itself unlovable. From the lemonade of a growing nationwide fan base, they have extracted the lemons of a rancorous labor dispute and a canceled season. It’s not just the NHL, though. There seems to be a gene in the DNA of the sports world that triggers self-inflicted injury to reputation among some of our most prominent leagues, franchises, and athletes. Here is our list of the 13 most impressive jock implosions.

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Posted on June 21, 2006

By Steve Rhodes

Ever since the Tribune Company bought the Chicago Cubs in 1981, the company’s newspaper subsidiary, the Chicago Tribune, has lived under a huge shadow of suspicion about its coverage of the team amidst a conflict-of-interest (and arguably a violation of the company’s and paper’s own ethics policies) as big as Sammy Sosa’s ego in its prime.
I’ve written many times that I’ve never seen or heard evidence of the Tribune sports section favoring the Cubs because the players and sportswriters work for the same company. But I’ve also argued – as have Tribune writers themselves – that the paper will never overcome the perception that its Cubs coverage is biased. Nor, as unfair as it seems, should they be allowed to, because readers can never know for sure what goes on behind the curtain.
That curtain lifted briefly last week when The Score‘s Mike North interviewed the Tribune‘s Cubs beat writer Paul Sullivan about a recent meeting he had with team officials about his coverage. North’s interview was prompted by an item in Chicago Sun-Times gossip writer Michael Sneed‘s column last Thursday that said “top Chicago Cubs executives Andy McPhail and Jim Hendry berated Chicago Tribune sports editor Dan McGrath and Cubs beat writer Paul Sullivan over what they felt was the paper’s unfairly critical coverage of the team. The expletive-laced tongue-lashing supposedly took place last week at Wrigley Field, according to a source.”
On Friday morning, Sullivan told North on the air that the Cubs seems to believe the Tribune should be the team’s “house organ” – and that positive Cubs coverage in the Sun-Times is “part of the problem.”

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Posted on June 2, 2006