Yup, I'm Surprised

At this point in my life, the reality side of sports have made me pretty jaded. When I see a great individual effort, especially in baseball, I immediately wonder whether or not it's legit. Drug tests in sports are notoriously easy to fake your way through, so much so that when people actually do fail one people are more concerned about how stupid it makes you seem instead of the fact that you actually took the drugs. But, at the same time, with so much money at stake and an easy answer there for the taking, any player taking steroids should not stun me.

But, hearing that Manny Ramirez has failed a drug test did actually take me by surprise. Manny never had one of those dramatic shifts in body type that was the hallmark of a guy like Barry Bonds or a sudden surge in power, like a Brady Anderson. All we heard about was how much time he put into the batting cages and how natural he was with his swing. If you had asked me to list the 50 players who I immediately suspected took steroids, Manny would not have been on that list.

Now, of course, he's going the route of blaming his doctor for prescribing him illegal drugs for a different medical condition, but I would think that someone in Manny's camp would have double checked their legality before he took them. Then again, Manny never struck me as the type to make sure that he's done his due diligence.

Oh, and speaking of the mental side of sports:
-I've watched roughly 53,000 Celtics games in my life.*

At this point, I kind of feel like I know what I'm going to get from this year's Celtics team. I expected them to be dead for game 1 of this series and I also expected a much better effort in game 2. But last night's game taught me a lot more about the Orlando Magic than it did about the Celtics.

You see, here's the difference between a team that is the defending champs, and a team that is just going to be an also-ran for the near future. The Magic got up 28 in the first game and relaxed. The Celtics never stop playing, got the game back and almost stole a win. The next game the Celtics got up big and never stopped playing, keeping the lead in double digits for the rest of the game.

The Magic should have come in, ready to take the Celtics early run that everyone knew they would put up in an effort to avoid going down 0-2 and then getting the game back to a normal pace. They should have been a lot more determined to take both games in Boston, essentially ending the series. Instead, they gave it a go after halftime, getting the lead down to the teens, but other than that they seemed content to go back to Orlando with the series tied. Champions go for the throat. That's why, despite having a player inside that should dominate this series, no one would be surprised to see Orlando lose to a Celtics team missing their best inside defender.

* OK, that number may be kind of high.