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I was just thinking the other day that Dave Hyde hadn't seemed to have written anything monumentally soppy or boneheaded in a good long while. Was he getting better or did I just not give a damn anymore?

I didn't know until now, the beginning of the football preseason. He's still the same old Hyde.

If y'all missed the Dolphins' first preseason game against the Jaguars Saturday night, it had some good and bad. The bad was the team's first-string offense, with Trent Green failing to electrify (imagine that!) and Ronnie Brown finding little room to run.

Ho hum. Anybody who expected much out of Green doesn't know football. He's an old man and a

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I've got bad vibes about Ernesto. I call him Che -- and if the guerilla revolutionary has revenge on his mind, there's only one place to go: Miami. And it's not just for the Cuban exile community that reviles him, but former CIA spook Felix Rodriquez, who tracked him down in Bolivia and was there when he was summarily executed in the jungle. Rumors abound that Rodriguez has Che's hands, which were cut off during the ordeal, in a jar in his Miami house. Who knows if it's true, but that alone might bring Ernesto around to take a look.

Okay, you may find that a ridiculous notion, but it's not all that far from the way reporters write about hurricanes. Look at the Palm Beach Post front page today: "Ernesto targets Florida." See, the hurricane has goals and aspirations. It's called anthropomorphism -- the Pulp's 20-dollar word of the day -- and

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Not Arison -- Or Is It?

Dave Hyde's column about Mickey Arison is on the Internet. The only problem: It's accompanied by a photograph of Jeffrey Loria (thanks to NT colleague Candice Gulley for the heads-up). But hey, who cares? They both own sports teams and sort of look alike. In fact, they might be the same person!

Oh I forgot. Hyde doesn't investigate -- either journalistically or intellectually. He just writes whatever idiotic thing comes into his head, apparently. I've written a lot about the dunderhead lately because of the Heat championship run, but then I swore off all things Hyde. Then came this morning's column, where Hyde's reflexive instinct to nudge his nose into sports luminaries' nethers surfaced yet again. The column is a debacle, basically applauding Arison, a mega-billionaire who personifies the cold dark force of corporatism run amok, for being, well, dull and invisible.

[Okay, I've deleted a portion of this post because it was, well, wrong. I confused something about Arison the father with Arison the son. An anonymous reader commented: "You come across as someone with a vendetta who twists facts to make the point or maybe someone who isn't as good at criticism as he thinks." Touche.
Also, the Sentinel corrected the on-line version, so some (extremely neglible) good came from this.]

Cuban

This back-and-forth between Sentinel sports columnist Dave Hyde and Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban is pretty funny. You can't really lose when a dunderheaded scribe goes up against a jerky billionaire. (An aside: What's with the brackets where parentheses ought to be?) Hyde also had a column today that begins with Pat Riley's 1995 promise to bring a championship parade to Biscayne Boulevard. I was hoping to be spared all that who-ha, since this run has nothing to do with it. Riley has been soundly defeated and self-vanquished from the coaching ranks since making that declaration. Hyde's recent worship of Riley aside, there's only one reason the Heat are in the position they are today: Dwyane Wade. Even Riley admits that. After Game 5's heroics, a writer asked the coach about his strategy at the end of the game. He said it was to get the ball in Wade's hands. "We did not have a second option, believe me," Riley said. When Shaq was asked about how Wade has been so successful, he said, "We just give him the ball and he does what he does."

Seriously. They give him the ball and get out of his way. It's that simple. (And Wade was fouled on that drive with 1.9 seconds left -- only it was Devin Harris that thigh-bumped him, not Nowitzki). I don't know if there's been a player so integral to his team's success since Michael Jordan. Allen Iverson comes to mind, only he's been missing the success part for the past few years. There's certainly not been a player who resembles his Airness more than Wade. Extremely similar games, those two.

But the small matter of getting a victory in Dallas remains undone. The Sentinel's Mike Berardino remembers how hard it was for Riley to win an away game in Texas during the Finals 12 years ago. Prediction: Dallas frosts the Heat tonight. And Game 7? Well, we'll get there when we get there.

To give you an idea of how badly the Heat have been playing in the Finals, consider that Dave Hyde has stopped his continuing worship of Pat Riley long enough to start complaining. But if you want to read some reality about Riley, check out this column from the Palm Beach Post's Dave George.

This Finals series is Edward G. Robinson vs. Steve McQueen in The Cincinnati Kid. It's The Man vs. The Kid. Drago vs. Rocky. Business vs. Fun. Greed vs. Hunger.

Let's face it, Miami is the bad guy in this flick.

Last night before the Game 2 meltdown, ABC aired a rather intimate interview with Jason Williams. It was the best (only?) Q & A that I've seen with the Heat guard since he came here during the off-season. In it, he said (and this isn't quite a direct quote), "it used to be about fun for me, now it's about winning a championship."

Yes. That's precisely the problem. We got Jason Williams stripped of the run, robbed of all the craziness and creativity that made him a household name. We got Shaq with three rings, a chip on his shoulder, and the bounce out of his step. We got Antoine Walker minus the shimmy.

Hell, it starts with the owners. Nutty Mark Cuban with his courtside histrionics and odd expressions vs. Mickey Arison, the cold cruise ship magnate we really didn't know existed until he showed up on the court after the Detroit victory. Then the coaches. Young, fresh, straight-from-the-hip Avery Johnson vs. old guard Pat Riley, whose slicked-back hair now looks more sinister than cool. You know, the Heat might have had a chance against Dallas if Don Nelson had come back from retirement so Avery could abandon his career while at the peak of his profession to spend more time with his family.

But the Heat, if joyless, are strong. They'll make a stand at home and I think they're going to make this a series. I'm afraid the ending, though, was written long before this thing began.

-- Andrew Marra hits a troublesome topic: Rising gun violence in Palm Beach County. Great work, sorely needed.

-- Citation alert: The Miami Herald, which has made great strides during the past year or two in crediting other publications, gave a nice heads-up to the Daily Business Review for breaking the Jose "Pepe" Diaz federal grand jury investigation. Tere Figeruas Negrete and Larry Lebowitz cited the work of Oscar Musibay and Julie Kay prominently while at the same time putting together a good piece and advancing the story. Can't say the same for Erica Bolstad, who regurgitated themes about Deerfield Beach from the Sentinel and New Times without adding a thing to the discussion. In fact, she did a disservice by not even conveying most of the real issues going on in the town. Why does the Herald even pretend to care about north Broward? Quite lame.

I'll be rooting for the Heat tonight, no doubt. But a part of me is still gonna be pissed about Stan Van Gundy. And if you've been reading sports columnist Dave Hyde's commentary in the Sun-Sentinel throughout these playoffs, you've probably noticed that as the Heat's success grows, he's become more and more sychophantic of Pat Riley. Hyde's reptilian theory (which he shares with a lot of other elite sports brains): Since Riley made it to the Finals, he has been thoroughly vindicated for his personnel changes in the off-season and the loss of Stan Van Gundy early in the season.

After Miami closed out Detroit, Hyde wrote: "It was Riley's vindication, too. Between the offseason moves and in-season return to coaching, he became a target this season. Friday's scoreboard proves him right. It gives the only necessary answer."

The only necessary answer. Success and dominance is the sole judge of whether someone is right or wrong. By that horrific standard, TV producers are great no matter what kind of crap they come up with -- so long as the ratings are there. Make suburban housewives lap up camel feces out of the bowels of a rotting jackal? Hey, people LOVE it! It's a great show.

You can take it a step further. The World Trade Center collapsing was all we needed to see to know that Osama bin Laden was on the mark all along. George W. Bush's election in 2004 proves that the Iraq War was a good move. Adolph Hitler's rise to power proved in 1930s Germany that anti-Semitism really was a great idea.

I'm not comparing Riley to Hitler or bin Laden or Bush (they're in a category all their own), but I'm not going to say that the coach is vindicated either. Riley abandoned Van Gundy, but not in Hyde's revisionist world. He's been aggressively selling the fiction that Van Gundy really did quit his job coaching two of the greatest basketball players on Earth so he could spend time with his teenaged kids.

In his column Monday, Hyde wrote a glowing peaen to Riley that included this sentence: "But he didn't want to return to coach this year, a fact even Stan Van Gundy's brother, Jeff, has said nationally."

Then on Wednesday, Hyde, in obnoxious and unfunny fashion, cited 50 ways that Heat doubters were wrong. No. 7: "Riley fired Stan Van Gundy."

Hyde's love of Riley and his new Success-brand deodorant is causing the columnist to distort the "facts." First of all, Jeff Van Gundy is bitter as all hell at the way his brother Stan was treated. Read this story by the Palm Beach Post's Chris Perkins to get a taste of Jeff's anger. He doesn't like Riley, doesn't root for the Heat, and feels the organization shafted his bro. Does that sound like vindication for Riley? Yes, he did say that the decision was his brother's to quit. But that doesn't mean Stan -- who did a magnificent job as coach and would have almost surely been in the Finals last year were it not for a fluke injury to Wade -- wasn't run off the team.

Riley undercut Stan by hinting in the off-season that he would coach. Then he didn't publicly back the coach. With Alonzo Mourning pining publicly for his old coach, Riley, to return, the writing was on the wall. And Riley, the only man who could have ended all the speculation, stayed quiet on the sidelines waiting to take over the team. So Stan stepped down. And, on the day Riley took over, he sure as hell sounded like he wanted to coach.

"Right now, at this moment, I'm the best person," he said at that charade of a press conference.

Look, I think Riley is doing a good job right now as coach. And I have a natural affinity for him since we're both University of Kentucky guys (I was sports editor there when Rick Pitino was coaching the Cats). But I'll never think of him the same way after I saw what he did to Stan Van Gundy. And he's still doing it. The Heat has put a veritable gag order on the former coach. When was the last time you saw the guy? The Heat knows it acted shamefully and they're keeping their shame locked up and put away.

And what about those personnel changes. Riley traded most of the supporting players for a new set that included Antoine Walker and Jason Williams. The team played listlessly during much of the season and basically cruised to a 52-30 record -- seven games worse than last season. That's two weeks worth of extra losses. They went from an elite team to a pretty good team during the regular season.

Does the fact that this team couldn't muster any passion -- for themselves or the fans -- count for nothing? Is the fact that most Heat fans have absolutely no emotional connection to most players on the team irrelevent? Does the fact that this team slept-walked until the playoffs, falling short against the best teams again and again, mean we should all be happy?

Hey, they're winning. So the popular answer is yes, yes, and yes. But the truth is that the brunt of the months-long regular season sucked because a bunch of strangers were playing together. Now they're coming together because they covet the ring. It's not exactly an inspiring and heart-warming team here, people. It's a cold fish, a bunch of pros driven to mount something on their walls.

Other than Dwyane Wade, that is. He's sensational. Truly great. And I'll tell you this. I could win with D-Wade and Shaq. Just like I could have won with Magic Johnson and Kareem. Or Michael Jordan in his prime. Everybody knows coaches are way over-rated in the NBA, including Riley. But what does Hyde write? "[Riley] has been proven so right about this Heat team -- right about his bold personnel moves, right about Shaquille O'Neal, still right about Dwyane Wade -- that he really is the main reason if the Heat wins."

Read today's column by the Miami Herald's Greg Cote -- who seems to actually be an intelligent, sentient being -- if you want to see how it really worked.

Look, no matter how daft and wrong-headed any sports columnist can be, it doesn't change the fact that Riley is a good, if flawed, coach. And, like I said, I'll be rooting for him and his team in these Finals. I can't help it. I'm part of the culture now, for better or worse.

So, um, go Heat.

The Palm Beach Post and Sun-Sentinel both ran with the giant sloth story on their front pages this morning. The stories, by Tim O'Melia and Peter Franceschina, respectively, both did the job telling of the find of ancient bones in the muck of the Everglades in Hendry County. It was about as good as any giant sloth remains coverage I've seen, to tell you the truth. What lifted the Post's coverage above the Sentinel's was Rebecca Vaughan. Who is Rebecca Vaughan? She's a staff artist for the Post who she did a sketch of one of those weird looking beasts for the newspaper. The Sentinel, in a large spread including photos and graphics, somehow failed to show us what the thing look like when it was roaming the Glades.

All you could tell from the coverage was that the animal was the size of an elephant. Only Post readers saw that the prehistoric thing looks like a subtropical version of the abominable snowman. For you Sentinel readers who missed out, I've found a rendition and included it above (I believe it's the original model from which Vaughan drew).

Spastic Editors Lose Quote
So you probably saw on Romenesko that the British media is making a deal out of Tiger Woods' calling himself a "spaz" for his bad putting at the Masters. The Telegraph noted that the L.A. Times changed the word, which is of course short for spastic, which is used to describe people with some forms of cerebal palsy. Instead of spaz, LAT used [wreck]. The NY Times and Washington Post chose not to use the quote at all. The Brits claimed they were all protecting the golden boy Tiger from his own imprudent mouth.

This was peculiar. For one thing, the word is so often used in America that it's not generally seen as offensive. And it was definitely the best sports quote of the day and for the Big Three to either alter it or expunge it does indeed reek of some strange form of censorship.

So we checked to see how the local papers handled it:

-- The Post: Golf writer Alan Tays quoted Woods entirely and accurately, write down to the spazzy ending.

-- The Herald pulled an NYT and didn't include the quote at all. Golf writer Jeff Shain skipped it in his story about Woods putter and columnist Edwin Pope also took a pass.

-- As did the Sentinel's Randall Mell, who cut the spaz out of his stories. But the intrepid Dave Hyde did the opposite, earning our respect. He left Tiger saying only, "I was a spazz." It was a bold stroke made even more audacious by the fact that, in true Hyde fashion, the columnist misspelled the word in the process.

-- The Sun-Sentinel's Community News section was at it again Sunday with a headline that belongs in the Hall of Fame of D'Uh: "Dry Weather Increases Risk of Brush Fires." This follows last week's headline about keeping children safe around pools: "Water-Safety Experts Say There's No Subsitute for Supervision."

Both are part of a silly Sentinel series called "On Alert," which puportedly "highlights public safety issues." Writing the series is Nicole T. Lesson, whose work also led to the memorable headline: "Report Unusual Activity."

Even if it only occurs in the Sun-Sentinel?

-- Sentinel sports columnist Dave Hyde provided more evidence in his a href="http://www.sun-sentinel.com/sports/sfl-hyde09apr09,0,5135873.column">column on Sunday that he is always, always wrong. You name a sports personality who has been around here -- Wayne Huizenga, Pudge Rodriguez, Dave Wannstedt, Dontrelle Willis -- and you can bet Hyde has been wrong about him. Time to add Tiger Woods to the list.

-- Finally, the most remarkable thing about Maucker's column on Buddy was its terseness. There even seemed to be a touch of anger in it, or at least a notable lack of sympathy for his now-former political reporter. Nothing about Buddy's years of service, his unmatched experience in Broward politics, all of that kind of thing. Just hardcore "Buddy screwed the newspaper over" stuff. It makes me wonder if the other part of the story — the fact that Nevins said at the GOP meeting the newspaper had a liberal bent and pointed to the numerous gays and lesbians working at the newspaper as evidence — wasn't also weighing on Maucker's mind. Or was he trying to assuage people inside the paper who felt that more drastic action -- aka termination -- should have been taken against Buddy?

There are a lot of rumors swirling out there about Maucker's lowering the hammer on Nevins -- and about Buddy's future in, or out, of the newspaper game. Might be interesting, yet.