Greg Cote has been a Herald sports columnist known for his wit and sharp insight since 1995, after previously covering the Dolphins, University of Miami football and major events including Super Bowls, the World Cup and Barcelona Olympics. Greg and his infamous 'Upset Bird' present the ever-popular NFL predictions page every Friday during football season.
E-mail Greg at gcote@miamiherald.com.
The heartache’s name might be terrorism, an evil plot of many, or the heartache might spring from a single deranged mind at work in a movie theater, or in an elementary school. The heartache might claim thousands of innocent lives or it might claim dozens or it might claim two, but, no matter the particulars, here we were once more on Monday, America, doing what we do:
These are strange, strange days for the NCAA and its president, Mark Emmert. He wants to look up and feel like dancing in a shower of confetti. Instead, he looks up and must run from a curtain of acid rain.
Brittney Griner began this week seen as the best women’s basketball player on the planet, by acclimation. Maybe even the best ever. That was pretty good. That was plenty.
Harry Truman popularized the phrase by putting it on a walnut sign on his White House desk in 1945, turning a homespun colloquialism into a declarative about taking responsibility:
There will be an upcoming referendum on whether to spend public money on Dolphins stadium improvements, and the vote will be bitterly contested and the outcome angrily decried no matter the verdict, with well-meaning folks on both sides convinced they are right and no middle ground on the ballot.
The real Cinderella died as midnight crept into Saturday morning, the dastardly, unaccommodating, fairy-tale-spoiling Florida Gators turning Dunk City into Funk City. People in Fort Myers now go back to doing whatever it is people in Fort Myers do as Florida Gulf Coast University disappears quietly back into the ether, as if it never happened.
Top-ranked Serena Williams is the only player in tennis who is so good, when at her best, that anyone on the wrong side of the net is rendered a clear and nearly hopeless underdog. Even when that other player is the second-ranked women in the world, Maria Sharapova.
As the strangest season we have seen in South Florida sports bore in close, I asked Marlins president David Samson this week if he understood how most people in Miami, the team’s would-be fans, feel about franchise owner Jeffrey Loria. “Hated” was a word I happened to use, although something stronger to better convey the venom might have been more fitting.
Forty-plus years of tradition begun with the Dolphins’ 1972 Perfect Season installed Florida as a football state and Miami its capital. Ten college national championships by the Hurricanes, Gators or Seminoles between 1983 and 2008 solidified football as our state sport by acclaim — the title unofficial but uncontested.
The symbiosis happened during a third-quarter timeout at the Heat game here Friday night, when the video screen showed a tribute to the Hurricanes, and all at once Miami basketball became one, with Heat fans chanting “Let’s go Canes!”
The Heat’s season anniversary logo has a big ‘25’ on it and so, now, does the team’s winning streak.
The first question of Serena Williams in her postmatch media session Thursday probed her fashion sense — how she goes about picking her outfits (she designs them), and her preference in colors (loves white because she wears it so seldom). The second reference, naturally, was to her nail polish (an unmistakable bright red).
I might nominate these mid-March days as some of the best we have had for Miami sports if excitement, importance and variety all are weighed.
It is Selection Sunday in men’s college basketball, such a treasured national holiday I’m surprised Hallmark doesn’t have a card for it. This is the night when a 10-man selection committee sets the 68-team field and seeds for the NCAA Tournament — when the sport gives birth to the hallowed bracket.
Mike Wallace, the fresh new face of the Miami Dolphins’ plan for the playoffs, dismisses the idea of feeling any external burden to meet or exceed expectations. “I put enough pressure on myself,” he said Wednesday.
The Dolphins spent big Tuesday for the premier wide receiver they have so needed and also to add an unexpected prize on defense, but this franchise-in-need was doing much more than instantly improving the team. It was doing much more than just purchasing players.
From a simple metal smokestack atop the Vatican on Tuesday, a papal conclave of 115 cardinals in Rome will reveal their globally anticipated vote — white smoke indicating a new pope has been chosen, black smoke indicating no decision.
Winning the World Golf Championships would be a tremendous achievement for almost any golfer. For Tiger woods, it isn’t enough.
The distractions challenging professional golfers at Doral might fairly be characterized as somewhat unusual. I have in mind jet engines, a bull languidly munching Bermuda grass on a fairway and, of course, gunfire.
A quick inventory as South Florida plows forward through its all-round busiest sports month:
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