“Tom Brady’s agent said the Deflategate report has ‘significant and tragic flaws’,” writes Brad Dickson of the Omaha World-Herald. “Can we perhaps save the word ‘tragic’ for things more important than some guy letting the air out of a ball?” . . . Dickson adds: “The Patriots are claiming that text messages using the term ‘deflator’ are a reference to an equipment manager's weight loss. Everyone on the planet who believes this will be meeting on Saturday in the Patriots' training whirlpool.” . . . That equipment manager apparently goes by the nickname The Deflator. “They said it's because he's trying to lose weight,” Vancouver comic Torben Rolfsen says. “Remember when A-Rod was always having fun making jokes at his teammates' expense? That's why he was called The Needler.” . . .
Here’s ABC-TV’s Jimmy Kimmel: “I hope Deflategate is a good lesson for kids. If you cheat and don’t play fair, you will be the MVP of the Super Bowl and marry one of the most beautiful women on earth. Remember that.” . . . Here’s NBC-TV’s Jimmy Fallon, after noting that the Deflategate report said it was ‘more probable than not’ that Brady knew game balls were being tampered with: “Did they do this investigation with a Magic 8 Ball? ‘Try again later?’ ‘Reply hazy?’ ” . . . After hearing about Brady having been suspended, TNT’s Conan O’Brien offered: “They’re going to punish him by making him stay home in his mansion with his supermodel wife and think about what he did wrong.” . . .
The NHL opened its conference finals with games on Saturday at 10 a.m., Pacific, and Sunday, at noon. Hey, Gary, it’s a long weekend up here and the weather is glorious. I’m sorry but there were a million better things to do than watch your referees swallow their whistles for a couple of more games. . . . Bryan Clay, a former U.S. Olympic decathlete, used his javelin to help his daughter, Ellie, get rid of a loose baby tooth the other day. Yes, he did it exactly the way in which you are thinking. . . . “Here’s hoping Ellie doesn’t let her dad pierce her ears,” writes Ian Hamilton of the Regina Leader-Post. . . . Comedy writer Alex Kaseberg added: “Let’s hope she never gets tonsillitis.” . . .
Women of Algiers, a Picasso painting that was done in the early 1950s, has sold at auction for US$179.3 million. Take away the 12 per cent commission and the price is $160 million. . . . Be careful that you don’t get trampled in the painting section at Michael’s by soon-to-be painters. . . . Dwight Perry of the Seattle Times, comparing the price of that painting to the salary of the Seattle Mariners’ ace, wrote: “Felix Hernandez, by comparison, gets roughly only $750,000 per masterpiece — but then again, he just paints the corners.” . . . “Kris Bryant, Chicago’s highly touted rookie, hit his first career home run the other day and his Cubs teammates responded by emptying the dugout,” writes Bill Littlejohn, our South Lake Tahoe, Calif., correspondent. “It’s one of the few empty dugouts this season that didn't involve the Kansas City Royals.” . . . “The baseball record books are wrong,” Littlejohn claims. “Before Corey Kluber, the last to record 18 strikeouts did it on match.com.” . . .
After Tiger Woods and Lindsey Vonn split up, Steve Schrader of the Detroit Press noted: “Hey, it worked for Rory.” . . . RJ Currie at SportsDeke.com: “According to the Daily Mail, Lindsay Vonn split with Tiger Woods because he cheated on her. Talk about a guy wasting a mulligan.” . . . If Woods really was out and about again, the afore-mentioned Hamilton noted, “it proves once again that a Tiger can’t change its stripes.” . . . One more from Currie: “Prince William and Kate, the Duchess of Cambridge, named their new baby girl Charlotte Elizabeth Diana. NHL translation — Charsy.” . . .
Jack Finarelli, aka the Sports Curmudgeon, checks in with this: “Just in case you were worried that hyperbole might be on the wane, CBS announced that Super Bowl 50 — to be televised on CBS in February, of course – will be ‘the most historic broadcast event of all time.’ Really? Have the suits at CBS forgotten already about Katie Couric’s colonoscopy and that time Judge Judy had to interrupt and scold one or both of the ‘litigants’ in her ‘court,’ and/or the final episode of My Mother the Car?” . . .
“San Francisco has banned chewing tobacco in sports venues starting Jan. 1, 2016,” reports Janice Hough, aka The Left Coast Sports Babe. “John Shea in the San Francisco Chronicle quotes one anonymous Giants player as asking: ‘But you can smoke weed?’ ” . . . Here’s Hough, again: “Reports say that New Jersey governor Chris Christie spent $82,000 at Jets/Giants games at MetLife Stadium between 2010 and 2011. Well, to be fair, at NFL prices that’s probably only a few dozen beers.” . . . With a playoff game on the line the other night, David Blatt, the head coach of the Cleveland Cavaliers, drew up a play that had LeBron James making the in-bound pass. “The play that was drawn up, I scratched,” James said after making a buzzer-beater. “I just told coach, just give me the ball.” . . . According to Hough, Marshall Lynch said: “Damn, you can DO that!?” . . .
Headline at SportsPickle.com: Yankees honor A-Rod’s HR achievement with new car that has the brake lines cut. . . . Headline at TheOnion.com: Raiders considering taking chance on prospect with zero off-field incidents. . . . Another headline from TheOnion.com: Jimmy Garoppolo informs locker-room attendants how he likes footballs. . . . Jimmy Garoppolo? He’s the man for the Patriots if Brady is under suspension when the NFL season begins.
(Gregg Drinnan is a former sports editor of the Regina Leader-Post and the late Kamloops Daily News. He is at gdrinnan.blogspot.ca and twitter.com/gdrinnan. Keeping Score appears here on weekends, except when it doesn’t.)
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