The first of many blogs to come

I always wanted to have a personal sounding board and a lot of people have been encouraging me to start a blog, especially my wonderful niece, Jackie, so here goes, a little helping of some "Just wondering" columns I've written over the years...

Just wondering if everyone is as sick of all the Carmelo Anthony talk as I am. Local basketball fans can be enthralled that he's coming to the Knicks, but the bottom line is this. The man held three franchises, the Nets, the Knicks and the Nuggets, hostage for the last four months. They all kissed his royal rectum for all that time. I have heard 'Melo is not a bad kid, but no one deserves all that attention and no one deserves to hold up three entire franchises like that...

Just wondering what happened to regular television...Everything is reality-related crap...I think what TV needs is a 24-hour Law and Order network....All Lennie, all the time...

Just wondering how the New Jersey Devils can go from being the absolute dregs of the NHL to unbeatable just like that. It's like something I've never seen in my nearly 30 years of being a sportswriter....Did I just write that? Three decades of sportswriting? I need a break...

But the Devils went from being awful to unreal just by bringing back Jacques Lemaire? He's not only the NHL Coach of the Year. They might have to rename the block around the Rock as Lemaire Place....

A real good guy, Ron Drogo, who I worked along side covering the Meadowlands Grand Prix Indy race for years, then worked with when I covered the Knicks and Nets for the Star-Ledger, passed away last weekend. He worked on Saturday for the Bergen Record, putting together the local section, went home and passed on. He was one of the best guys I knew in the business.

It reminded me of two funny Drogo stories. One was the way we used to jockey for position to go out in the pace car at the Meadowlands race. We didn't want to have some pace girl drive us around the track at 35 MPH. We wanted one of the drivers, so Ronnie and I used to push each other to get Emerson Fittipaldi, Arie Luyendyk or Bobby Rahal to tool us around the Meadowlands parking lot at 100 MPH.

Another was when Drogo was a copy editor at the Ledger and I was covering some minor league basketball team called the Newark Nightcats that played at NJIT. In the game story, I wrote that the Nightcats won "before a dozen fans." Drogo called me to ask what I meant by a dozen.
"Twelve," I said. He said, ``If there are 12 fans there, then why are we covering it?" I guess he had a point.

The local sports journalism world has lost a host of great guys in the past year or so, guys like Bill Handelmann and Vic Ziegel and Mike Celizic and Maury Allen and Bill Shannon and Gene Picker and now Ronnie Drogo....There are a lot of idiotic jackasses in the field and those guys were not that way at all...It's a shame we've lost so many good ones in such a short time.

Just wondering if others can appreciate the talents of St. Anthony basketball sensation Kyle Anderson, who gets better and better each day. He's an absolute joy to watch perform and he's a credit to his father, Kyle, Sr., who obviously taught him well.