The Sports Lounge

A record of 1-4, which the Niners now sport, looks a heckuva lot better than 0-5, which they were staring in the face Sunday until the comeback. More importantly, the win suddenly catapults the Niners into the not-terrible catagory. Look at the rest of the league with one-win records - Arizona, Cincinnati, Green Bay, Kansas City, Tampa Bay and Washington. Heady company to say the least, the very least. OK, maybe all these teams are terrible. But what adjective do you use to describe Buffalo and Miami, which are worse than terrible?

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Did you hear the big news? The Seattle Storm won its first championship!

The Lounge knows what you're thinking, "What in the world are the Seattle Storm?" You'd have to look pretty intently at the sports pages to know. The Storm are the 2004 WNBA champs, beating the Connecticut Sun in the best-of-three WNBA finals.

In one of the papers the Lounge receives, there is actually a story and a picture about the game, which is about 100 percent better coverage the league receives during the regular season. Now, the Lounge is not saying that women's basketball shouldn't be played, but has any professional sport been less publicized than the WNBA? It's amazing it's still around, but for those in the know, the league has been propped up by the NBA since its inception.

The Lounge isn't here to bash women's hoops. It's just another one of those sports that is misplaced. The WNBA runs from about June to October, right after the NBA season concludes. The casual fan is just not prepared to watch basketball - of any gender - during the summer. It's not in their programming.

Remember the XFL, USFL and World League football leagues? Those upstart leagues believed the nation was ready for professional football in the spring. Wrong. The sporting nation is ready for baseball in the spring, football in the fall and hoops in the winter. That's the way it is. That's the way it'll more than likely stay.

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Former Chicago Bulls and Los Angeles Lakers coach Phil Jackson is releasing a book detailing his final season with the Lakers in which he describes his relationship with Kobe Bryant as "psychological warfare."

The Lounge saw a talking head on television wonder why Jackson would choose to air dirty laundry in a tell-all book. Because that's the way things are done nowadays in professional sports. Yankees' outfielder Gary Sheffield does it in a Sports Illustrated article. Jim Bouton does it in his book, "Ball Four" (one of the greatest sports book ever written, by the way). You hear athletes all the time questioning manager's/coach's decisions or teammates in the media.

There was a time when stuff going on in the locker room stayed there. But as all pro athletes are wont to say, "pro sports is a business." As such, there's another old business-PR adage: "Bad press is better than no press at all."

Jackson's not coaching this season. He needs some money because he is, like all modern-day pros, "used to living a certain lifestyle." What better way to drum up some cash with as little work as possible than writing a scandalous book? It's the American way.