NO RESPECT!

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Not only am I an Atlanta resident (actually I live in a suburb just east of Atlanta), but I was born and raised here. I love my city. After college, I turned down any out-of-state job offers because this is where I want to live. In my opinion, there is no better city in America in which to reside. Atlanta really has it all. This is the quintessential big city with a small town feel. We have perfect weather (winter temperatures were in the sixties until this past week), a variety of museums and playhouses, phenomenal restaurants, several Fortune 500 companies, an assortment of interesting tourist attractions, great shopping, and plenty of awesome venues for live music. In addition to those amenities, Atlanta has also become a new music, television and film Mecca, and has a tremendous nightlife. If you feel like just kicking it with some friends, there are plenty of lounges to choose from. For those that like to party, there is no shortage of nightclubs to frequent. The world famous Magic City (not to be confused with the Magic Kingdom) is also located here. Single guys say that for the right amount of money, you could perhaps have a life changing experience there. These are several reasons that people move here in droves.

Although my city is a lot of wonderful things, there is one thing that it is not, A SPORTS TOWN! I find this fact particularly frustrating because I am such a huge sports fan. Sports in this city simply aren’t a priority. We have three major professional teams in this city as well as one major college that plays Division I athletics. The attitude of the city’s residents towards all of these teams is ho-hum at best. Although I have lived here my entire life, and I am the biggest sports fan that I know, I must admit that I really don’t care much about the teams that represent this city. Unfortunately, the vast majority of the populous share this opinion with me. I believe there are several different reasons for this, which we will discuss.

ATLANTA IS A CITY FULL OF TRANSPLANTS – Whenever I meet someone for the first time and I tell them that I was born and raised here in Atlanta, they first thing that they say is, “Wow, that’s rare! You are the first person that I have met that was actually born here.” The secret has gotten out to the rest of the country that the ATL is indeed the place to be. This has definitely helped out the local economy, but it has also eliminated any home court/field advantage that our sports teams would expect to have. There are as many Yankees, Mets, and Phillies fans living in Atlanta as there are Braves fans. Also, please don’t get me started on the NBA. Whenever the Knicks come to town, it looks like Spike Lee is filming a scene for one of his movies in Philips Arena. You can actually shoot a Timberland commercial in the arena filled with New Yorkers wearing Knicks hats and their peanut butter colored boots. If Timberland ever decides to do that, I will make sure that they cut me a check for stealing my idea.

WE DON’T HAVE ANY SUPERSTARS – The biggest star in this city before Michael Vick was Dominique Wilkins. The biggest star in this city since Michael Vick is…….. well we haven’t found him yet. One thing that I hate about my city is the fact that the people here are so superficial, which has created a celebrity (real or imagined) culture. You can easily cross paths with celebrities on any random day at any random place. This makes people feel as though they are a celebrity too, and that they should be wherever the celebrities are to feel important. When Michael Vick was a Falcon, the Georgia Dome was transformed from a football stadium to the place to be. Women were wearing stilettos with their best club attire to football games. I guess they actually thought the players were going to come up into the crowd at halftime to play the dating game. This naturally made the guys step their game up because they wanted to take advantage of these women whose heads were filled with such “basic” thoughts. The festivities didn’t end when the game clock struck 00:00, in fact they were just beginning. Of course there was an after party hosted by Vick, some other player(s) or a local or visiting celebrity. So really it was never about football, it was always about being “Hollywood” and on the scene.

The Falcons and the NFL for that matter are trying their best to make Matt Ryan an elite quarterback and a superstar. This is simply because he is the anti-Mike Vick. During his tenure in Atlanta, Vick was caught with weed, treated for herpes (under an alias), and incarcerated for dog-fighting. I can guarantee that none of these things will happen to Matt Ryan, which is commendable. However, I can also guarantee that he will never have the dome rocking or the city buzzing like Vick once did and still does when he visits with the Eagles. Even if he becomes a great quarterback (which he won’t), he will never own a city that values style over substance as Vick once did.

Unfortunately the Hawks are also void of a superstar player that carries a national reputation. Our best player is Joe Johnson. He is as quiet as Tim Duncan, paid more than LeBron James, but plays like Kevin Martin. No disrespect to Kevin Martin, he’s a good player, but it’s safe to say that he will never be the best player on a championship team. When your best player is not good enough to lead you to a championship, you would at least hope that he could put butts in the seats. Unfortunately no one is coming to see Joe Johnson display his assortment of mid-range jump shots. The Hawks do have their very own high-flying highlight machine in Josh Smith. Not only does he put up solid numbers and make plays that are “Sportscenter Top 10” worthy, he is also an Atlanta native. This combination should mean that people will come out in droves to see him. That is not the case. He simply isn’t very charismatic, and doesn’t have any real star qualities. Up until three years ago, the Hawks advertised their games by making commercials that encouraged fans to come out and see LeBron, Kobe, and Dwight Howard at the Highlight Factory (Philips Arena). Thankfully those days are over, and they are finally using their own players in their commercials (mostly Joe Johnson, Josh Smith, and Al Horford). However, party promoters are still paying visiting stars to use their name to promote parties after the game. I bet you can’t guess which strategy is working the best. Let’s just say that the “Velvet Room” is usually jumping after a weekend Hawks game, while the Philips Arena crowd is usually small enough to fit on one Marta train (that is unless the Heat, Lakers, or Knicks are in town).

BAD OWNERS MAKE STUPID DECISIONS – The Braves are owned by a faceless corporation (Liberty Media) that views them as simply a line-item on their balance sheet. The Braves have one purpose, and one purpose only to their owner, which is to make a profit. Payroll is kept low and winning baseball games is seen as a bonus. In my book that qualifies them as horrible owners.

The Hawks are owned by a group of people who didn’t have enough money to buy the team individually. Aside from that, they really don’t get along all that well. They tried to sell the team this off-season, but apparently the potential new owner wasn’t quite NBA rich. He may have been MLS (Major League Soccer) rich, but he didn’t have deep enough pockets to join the ranks of NBA ownership. This group of inept owners has made some really bad mistakes over the years. The first of which was to hire Dominique Wilkins as the color analyst for the television broadcasts. He is absolutely terrible! I’m going to guess that he never got anything above a "D" in any Spelling, Composition, Literature, or Speech class that he has ever taken. Yet, he gets paid six-figures to talk for a living. That has nothing to do with the on court performance, but it is still an excellent example of bad decision making. They also agreed to pay Joe Johnson $119 million for six years of slightly above average basketball. That pretty much assures they won’t be able to pay a real superstar. It’s unfortunate because Atlanta native Dwight Howard is set to become a free-agent. It’s probably also why he isn’t even considering the Hawks. First of all he knows that they can’t afford him, and secondly he knows that ownership is a mess and that they will never take the necessary steps required to become an elite team. The Hawks have been the perennial four seed in the Eastern Conference playoffs for most of my life. Why on earth would that change now? I used to be the World’s Biggest Hawks Fan, but now it is hard to be interested in them. It was fun seeing them build themselves back up from nothing and become respectable. Unfortunately they are unable to take that next step from respectability to contending. At the beginning of each season I know that the Hawks will be the four or five seed in the playoffs and lose in the second round, no matter how well they start. That’s just the way it is, so why waste my time watching a movie that comes on every year and ends the exact same way.

Truth be told, I like Arthur Blank. I think he is a man that wants to win very badly and is willing to spend the money necessary to do so. Unfortunately, he has also made some incredibly stupid decisions during his tenure as the Falcons owner. The first thing that he did was make a change for change sake. He fired Dan Reeves because the Falcons had a terrible season when their franchise (Michael Vick) was hurt during the 2003 season. For the record, Reeves was a heck of a coach (who took the Falcons to the Super Bowl), and he kept the team relatively competitive in Vick’s absence. He replaced him with Jim Mora, who exploited Vick’s talents and took the Falcons to the NFC championship game. The bottom quickly fell out from under him shortly thereafter. He then surprised everyone with the hiring of Bobby Petrino, which also didn’t work out so well. To his credit he has bounced back nicely from the Petrino episode and the Falcons are now respected throughout the league. Although he has made his share of mistakes, he is still by far the best owner in the city, and is working hard to bring a championship home. Unfortunately he has a quarterback that is closer to Mark Sanchez than Aaron Rodgers, so I don’t see it happening anytime soon. However, it will be fun watching him try.

Atlanta is a city that is full of sports fans. Unfortunately, it isn’t a city that is full of Atlanta sports fans. Part of that blame belongs to the fans for not supporting the home team, but an equal amount of blame belongs to the teams for not providing the fans with the type of teams that they will support. The advent of cable television, the internet, and satellite radio has made it really easy to follow any team from anywhere in the world. This is one instance where technology is hurting my city. Now people can continue to follow their native teams when they move here as if they still lived in their hometowns.

Truthfully, I don’t know if it’s possible for Atlanta to ever become a real sports town. I just don’t see it happening. There are some that would say that the ATL is not a strong sports town because we don’t have a strong history of winning championships. I honestly don’t think that would be enough. The only thing that will get people’s attention here is for us to win championships with style. If Tim Duncan had played his entire career in Atlanta and led the Hawks to four NBA championships, Philips Arena would still be mostly empty on a nightly basis, simply because Duncan plays a fundamental and boring brand of basketball. However, Allen Iverson would have been able to fill the arena up on a nightly basis, and he has no rings. In a city full of celebrity wannabes, flashiness and drama have become necessities for entertainment success. This is precisely why more ATLiens can name the Real Housewives of Atlanta than can name the Hawks starting lineup. Pathetic, isn’t it?


And now for my Baller & Scrub of the Week….

BALLER – Jeremy Lin: Alright, this is the obligatory Jeremy Lin mention that is required in all things written about sports for the last two weeks. Please excuse my sarcasm, but ESPN is making it impossible for me to enjoy what is really a remarkable story. Their coverage of this guy reminds me of their coverage of some guy who plays running back (sorry they call it quarterback there) in Denver. Jeremy Lin has literally come out of nowhere and taken the NBA by storm. He has been playing great basketball ever since he finally got his shot with the Knicks. Over his last six games, Lin has averaged nearly 27 points and 8.5 assists per game. It is certainly no accident that the Knicks are also on a six-game winning streak entering Wednesday’s game. His statistics as well as the results that they are producing prove that Lin and Tebow are certainly different in one aspect. Lin is a legitimate NBA point guard, while Tebow is a terrible NFL quarterback.

While the rest of the world is going “Lin-sane in the Membrane” over the latest phenomenon, I will try my best to enjoy it for what it is. A kid from Harvard is taking the NBA by storm. He is the real deal, and once all this hype dies down, he will have a long career as a solid NBA point guard. Although I don’t think will become one of the truly elite point guards in the game (i.e. Rose, Rondo, Paul, Westbrook, or Williams), I do predict that he will be the Eastern Conference starter at point guard in the 2013 All-Star Game. Will he deserve that honor? Probably not, but you must remember that he Chinese-American. China, the world’s most populous country, is absolutely crazy about the NBA. They also love voting for the all-star team, which is why Yao Ming was a mainstay. I think it’s safe to go ahead and pencil him in as next year’s leading vote-getter.

SCRUB – NBA Coaches: The NBA allows the fans to vote for the starters of their annual all-star game. The reserves are chosen by the coaches. When looking at the list of reserves, there was one glaring omission. For some reason Atlanta’s own, Josh Smith was not listed. Smith is currently averaging 15.6 points and 9.2 rebounds per game. He also ranks 6th in the NBA in blocks with 2.1 per game. The fact that he was left off of the team yet again, really drives home the point of this blog entry. My outrage may sound like sour grapes from an Atlanta native, which is a fair point, but let’s look at the numbers. Luol Deng was selected as an all-star by the coaches at forward. He is averaging 15.9 points and 7.0 rebounds per game. Is he having a better season than Smith? I think not! How about Andre Iguodala, and his 12.4 points and 6.6 rebound averages? You couldn’t make a recreation league all-star team with those numbers, and yet he was chosen. Josh Smith being left off the team is a disgrace and really shows that our teams really don’t exist on the national sports scene.


Follow me on twitter @scashhomey

I LOVE MY CITY, BUT….

Before I get started, I would like to invite everyone reading this to follow me on twitter @scashhomey.

As a person that was born and raised in Atlanta GA, I can say first-hand how great of a city that it is. I love it so much that I chose to attend college and live my adult life here. Honestly, I have never seriously entertained the thought of living anywhere else. Don’t get me wrong, I love to visit other places, but I definitely prefer to call the ATL home. This is a city with great weather, beautiful people, wonderful restaurants, lively night-life, and great venues to see live theatre and music. Why wouldn’t everyone want to live here? This is one of the few cities in America with big-city amenities, and a slow laid back life-style. As a matter of fact, I have met quite a few people who visited in the mid 90’s for a certain “black college festival,” and never left. You know who you are, and you are probably reading this with a reminiscent smile on your face.

Although I love so many things about my city, there is one thing that I absolutely hate about Atlanta. That is the fact that we absolutely suck as a sports town. Our teams epitomize mediocrity and will never be serious contenders for championships, and the fans here are primarily fair weathered who only root for the teams in the playoffs and only attend games when stars from other teams are on the schedule. It’s bad enough when the Hawks run ticket ads advertising the likes of Kobe Bryant and LeBron James, but it’s even worse when party promoters are even throwing parties after those games “hosted by” stars from other teams. I guarantee you that Joe Johnson and Josh Smith aren’t hosting any parties in South Beach, and that they aren’t on the cover of the LA Times when the Hawks play the Lakers. This is despicable and it all stems from a city-wide acceptance for mediocrity. I for one am sick of it, and will not accept it any longer.

Atlanta is home to the Falcons (have not had a lot of success in their history, but are really trying these days), the Braves (mediocre and perfectly happy being that way), the Hawks (good enough to make the playoffs, but will never get out of the second round, and that’s OK with them), Georgia Tech (football will forever be average and the basketball team has a coach they can’t/won’t get rid of), and the Thrashers (its hockey, so I don’t care).

Georgia Tech is in a precarious situation. Their football team will never win big on a consistent basis simply because of the location of the school. Sure they may win their division within the ACC every 5 years or so and may even win the ACC Championship once every 10 years, but they will never have any sustainable success. That is because in a sport that is so heavily reliant on recruiting, they are in the worst possible location. They will never be able to out-recruit the University of Georgia, and they will also lose players that they covet to the likes of Florida State, Florida, Alabama, Auburn, Tennessee, and LSU. They don’t have the deep pockets needed to land top recruits who share a financial advisor with Cam Newton, and their academic standards are too high to admit the type of marginal students that SEC football has been built upon. Therefore they will never be big winners, although it is really no fault of their own. The geographic gods simply did not smile upon them.

Before I get to the basketball team, I must first ask, "Why is Paul Hewitt still the coach?" He has done absolutely nothing since the last 2003-2004 season and has missed the NCAA tournament in 6 of his 11 seasons at Tech (I am making the safe assumption that he will miss the tourney this year as well). One thing that Hewitt has proven is that he knows how to recruit the occasional no impact one-and-done player that will be a lottery pick in the NBA. Although these players don’t make impact while at Tech, they blossom into NBA stars (i.e. Chris Bosh and Derrick Favors in a couple of years). That being said, his coaching leaves a lot to be desired. He runs a run of the mill ACC team that is nothing special and has been playing in a virtually empty gym for the last two years. I always thought that Tech was a sleeping giant in the ACC, waiting to emerge and regain the status that is once enjoyed among the league’s elite. However, Hewitt has put the program into a deep hibernation that looks like it will be impossible to recover from all while happily collecting his $1 million plus annual salary.

The Braves are a franchise with a self-imposed budget in a sport in which the teams that spend the most usually win. Baseball is a sport where you really can buy a championship. Of all of the major sports, chemistry and teamwork matters least in baseball, which is why an owner can simply buy the best players he can find and they can win. The Braves are run by a faceless corporation as an investment property that they expect to return a designated annual return on their investment. This means that winning is not the priority, which begs me to ask why they won’t simply sell the team to someone who actually wants to own a baseball team and will not treat it as simply a line item on a balance sheet. The Braves in recent years have managed to have just enough talent to win the Wild Card and get slaughtered in the first round, and my feeling is that they have that as a stated goal again this year. I wouldn’t be surprised if new manager Fredi Gonzalez stands in front of the team after clinching the NL Wild Card this season and simply says, “Good job guys, mission accomplished. No go ahead and book your vacations to start after game three of this first round series.” Then all of the guys will cheer and pat themselves on the back, feeling a sense of accomplishment.

The Falcons are trying their best to build a winner and fight for respect in the NFL. Arthur Blank has hired a brilliant GM, who has in-turn hired a good head coach and drafted a quarterback that has been solid and has a promising future. That being said, they are still not a well respected franchise in the NFL. Although they went 13 – 3 last season and were the #1 seed going into the NFC playoffs, did anyone really expect them to make the Super Bowl? This is a solid team that is being built the right way, but they will never be fully embraced by this city for one simple reason. They lack a super-star. When they win, they will be embraced by a ton of bandwagon fans, but they won’t develop a true and loyal fan base in this city because they lack the superstar player. The Falcons were tremendously popular when they had Michael Vick, because he was a transcendent star. He is now gone, and the team will never be embraced the same way again. That is largely because this is a terrible sports town. In Atlanta, people will go to the games if it is considered the “it” thing to do, or if it is the place where they can see and be seen. Unfortunately the Georgia Dome is not that place.

The Hawks have frustrated me to no end. This is the only team in the city that I considered myself a true fan of. I watched them grow from nothing to the peaks of mediocrity. The problem is that once they got to mediocrity they forgot to look up and see if there existed anything beyond that. Until this year, I watched about 75 Hawks games per season. Although they were bad in the beginning, it was fun watching a young and exciting team develop. I didn’t care if they got their brains bashed in each night, I simply enjoyed watching the process and I felt as though I was in on the ground floor of something special. Well, I was wrong. What this team was building towards was nothing special at all. Instead of a team developing into a serious championship contender, we have a team that is good enough to be the fourth or fifth best team in their conference, and who is yet to win a second round playoff game. I didn’t say series, I said GAME! This year, I have probably watched about 10 Hawks games in their entirety. Not because I don’t want them to do well or because I don’t feel like they will win the championship (I didn’t expect them to win it this year or anytime soon for that matter), it’s just that I have seen this movie before. It is a very frustrating feeling to watch other teams make moves to get better, while your favorite team simply stays the same. When Miami signed LeBron James and Chris Bosh, we countered by overpaying Joe Johnson and signing Josh Powell. When the Knicks traded for Carmelo Anthony, we traded for Kirk Henrik. When Boston deepened their bench by trading for Jeff Green and signing Troy Murphy, we get Hilton Armstrong. Is anyone noticing a trend here? I am fan of teams making an effort, but unfortunately I live in a city where none of the teams (except the Falcons of late) are making a legitimate effort.

The bottom line is that I love my city, and I wouldn’t want to live anywhere else (unless I was being paid an obscene amount of money). But sometimes the sports fan in me wishes that he could live in Boston where the Celtics, Red Sox, and Patriots start each season with the goal of winning a championship and spend each off-season figuring out a way to reach that goal. Maybe that part of me would like to live in Chicago where the Bulls seem to be building something special and the Bears are trying their hardest to become winners again. Or is the place to be now New York, where the Yankees are well, the Yankees and the Knicks are in the midst of building a serious championship contender. Truth be told, I don’t want the sports fan in me to leave my city. I would rather the teams in my city take their cue from these other cities and work to satisfy the sports fan within me and every other real sports fan in Atlanta.


Once again, be sure to follow me on twitter @scashhomey.