Maybe they should rename it bye-bye week. NFL teams have been getting their break, and many subsequently have been breaking down. That sobering thought was presented Wednesday at Ninerville by Alex Smith, who along with his teammates is coming off a bye.
“I’ve seen the reports,” said Smith, the 49ers’ quarterback. “Teams coming off their bye week this season are 3-9.”That’s not the only reason Smith worked out on his own during a week 49ers players were not required to practice.
He is aware of what has been accomplished and doesn’t want to see it change.
Read More
Who cares about decorum? If the people running the 49ers — meaning Jed York — cared about decorum, protocol or manners, they might have hired someone who knew how to shake hands.
Instead, they hired someone who knows how to win football games. Shake that.
Yeah, San Francisco is showing its muscle and its attitude. Jim Harbaugh is the best thing to hit town since Bill Walsh, a man who also poured it on you at the end of a game. As Tony Kornheiser wrote after one of those Niners wins in a Super Bowl, Walsh not only beats you, he picks his teeth with your bones.
Read More
The man knew football. Also football coaches. Al Davis gave Jim Harbaugh his first pro coaching position. Al Davis gave Hue Jackson his first pro head coaching position.
Davis had his well-reported faults, but consider his virtues. Those two gentlemen always will.
“I don’t think there’s a day goes by I don’t try to implement something that I didn’t learn from Mr. Davis,” Harbaugh said.
Read More
The mantra of golf is “It ain’t how, it’s how many.” Style points aren’t counted, strokes are. And the most important are those on the greens, which can save a round, or for Tiger Woods on Thursday, ruin one.
“This is probably the worst putting round I’ve ever had,” Woods said. Maybe an exaggeration. Maybe not.
A man who at his best could make anything from anywhere, who for nearly a decade was judged the best putter in the game, seemed flummoxed.
Read More
One man, and the dynamics changed. One man, and a golf tournament not everyone noticed a year ago is receiving star treatment. Tiger Woods arrives, and suddenly the Frys.com Open has arrived.
He needed some game action, as it were, competition. The Frys, opposite pro and college football and the baseball playoffs, needed a boost. Both sides are delighted.
“I’m excited to be here,” said Woods on Wednesday. Here, is CordeValle Golf Club, tucked into the hills off U.S. 101 some 80 miles south of San Francisco, where today the Frys begins. “I’m excited to play.”
Read More
What happened to the Giants? The better question is, what didn’t happen to the Giants?
From Opening Day, when they were beaten by the Los Angeles Dodgers and Clayton Kershaw — and Buster Posey was still healthy — there was a sense this year might be as frustrating as last year was elating.
Read More
This is the way it ends, with a lot of cheers, a few tears and, once again, if not an unused ticket in a ballpark sold out from first game to last, certainly a lot of unfulfilled hopes.
In this season of 2011, the year after the World Series, the Giants broke their all-time attendance record, luring 3,387,303 fans. Yet in their attempt to repeat as Series champions, they couldn’t even get to the playoffs, breaking a great many hearts.
“We had planned on working in October,” Giants manager Bruce Bochy said ruefully.
Read More
There’s a segment on ESPN in which a former player, now employed by the network, tries to judge an NFL team’s immediate future. It’s labeled “Patience or Panic,” which is self-explanatory. In the Bay Area, it would be called “Panic or Doctor, can I get a prescription for sedatives?”
After two games, the 49ers and Raiders are 1-1. And people are giving up already. Maybe they have the NFL confused with the NL, where unfortunately, it’s time to give up on the Giants. Drat that Clayton Kershaw, anyhow.
Read More
Jim Harbaugh is as much a football coach as a psychologist is a pixie. His words are measured, his thoughts unlimited. There’s a reason for every comment, just as there is for every play call.
Wednesday at 49ers Central in Santa Clara — and via phone hookup — Jason Garrett of the Dallas Cowboys, who play the Niners on Sunday at Candlestick Park, said what one coach always says about another: That Harbaugh is brilliant.
Read More
It was supposed to be the men’s singles final today, but fate and the weather have upset the schedule. On this painful anniversary, on a court in a complex only a few miles from ground zero, it will be the ladies who take the stage at the U.S. Open.
Read More
Perspective is a word fans do not like and often don’t understand. They are looking for wins and championships, not explanations or reference points. Yet for the 49ers, in what surely will be a transition season, perspective may become the saving grace.Jim Harbaugh has arrived as the coach with a big contract and big expectations, but also with big problems. It’s much like Bill Walsh — 32 years earlier also came from Stanford to a Niners team desperately attempting to escape its past.
Read More
The way Larry Scott is remolding the Pac-10 — err Pac-12, um, Pac-16 — is no surprise to those here in New York at the U.S. Open. They saw the way he reworked what once was called the Women’s Tennis Association but now goes only by the initials WTA.
Scott was the demon of change when he served for six years as the chairman and CEO of the tour.
“He elevated the sport to new heights,” said Andrew Walker, chief marketing officer of the WTA. “He had a clear vision across all our key business drivers on how to establish new milestones for the sport.”
Read More
"Athletes at Stanford are not heroes." A sociology professor at the university, one Sanford Dorenbusch, said that to Sports Illustrated in 1972 when the mood in America, trying to extricate itself from Vietnam, was very unheroic and the mood at Stanford was not much different than it is now.The school takes itself seriously, selects its students carefully and deals with athletic success in a blend of pride and embarrassment, as if — unlike the Auburns and LSUs — it is a gift bestowed on those wise enough to have gained admittance.
Read More
It was here in the Big Apple 60 years ago that Chuck Dressen, manager of the Brooklyn Dodgers, declared in a statement that some English teachers defended on the grounds a team is a collective noun, “The Giants is dead.”
The New York Giants weren’t — coming back from a 13½-game August deficit to force a playoff with the Dodgers, which resulted in the “Shot Heard ’Round the World,” by Bobby Thomson.
The San Francisco Giants are.
Not that anyone back here cares.
Read More
The headline wasn’t wrong. "Injuries Leave Big Holes for the Giants to Patch." That was in the New York Times. About the New York football Giants, not to be confused with the San Francisco baseball Giants, who have as many big holes because of injuries and virtually no time to patch them.
Different sports, same nickname, same problems. Too many missing pieces for the S.F. Giants. Too many missed chances. This is not a June Swoon, it’s an August Collapse.
Read More
URL: http://www.sfexaminer.com/people/art-spander?page=4&%3Bquicktabs_6=0&quicktabs_6=1
