The world according to Jim:
• Diana Taurasi announced her retirement this week, and the news seemed way underplayed. All of the things that are coming to the current stars of women’s basketball, in its era of newly discovered popularity and prosperity, have been built on the accomplishments of the sport’s past stars, and Taurasi – Chino Don Lugo High’s own, University of Connecticut star, the WNBA’s all-time leading scorer with the Phoenix Mercury and a six-time Olympic gold medalist – might be the OG of the OGs. …
• A reminder, for those whose exposure to the women’s game is recent: For years the stars of the WNBA had to play overseas in the fall and winter just to pull in anywhere near the salary appropriate for a professional athlete. There was, in fact, a season in the middle of the last decade when the team Taurasi played for in Russia paid her a bonus to take the WNBA season off and get some rest. (Rest, of course, being a foreign concept to Taurasi, who couldn’t get enough of this game.) …
• This was, of course, well before the arrest of Brittany Griner in Russia in 2022, which should have been a sign for Americans to reconsider playing in that country. More of them now play in the Unrivaled 3-on-3 league, and their salaries for that circuit augment a WNBA pay scale that still lags but could jump upward soon, since negotiations for a new collective bargaining contract will take place following the 2025 season. …
• I asked Taurasi in a 2014 interview, when she had just turned 32, how long she wanted to play. “I’m gonna play until it’s not fun or I can’t walk, one or the other,” she said. “We’ll see which one comes first.”
But eventually the fatigue overrides the fun. Taurasi said in an exclusive retirement announcement with Time Magazine earlier this week that while she usually starts to ramp up her workout schedule around the first of the year, this New Year’s “I just didn’t have it in me. That was pretty much when I knew it was time to walk away.” …
• If the TV folks are looking for someone outspoken, feisty and funny – the female Charles Barkley, perhaps – the search should stop at Diana’s doorstep. Consider, for example, her reminiscence of where her ferocious work ethic came from.
“I guess I want to go out there and play every day,” she said in that 2014 interview. “When I was younger if I didn’t have practice I was in the driveway every single day. Ask my mom. She’d yell, ‘Get in the house!’ It was 11:30 and boomp, boomp, I’d be playing, the neighbors would be screaming and yelling. I just loved doing it, loved playing, loved the game.”
She loved the game, and the game loved her back. That’s a fair trade. …
• I’m not sure how much attention Colorado two-way football star Travis Hunter has paid to Shohei Ohtani, but his insistence that he wants to play both wide receiver and cornerback in the NFL might run into the same resistance Ohtani faced when he was determined to both pitch and hit. The difference here: Being a designated hitter in baseball is far less perilous than it is in football.
The quote attributed to him by ESPN: “They say, ‘nobody has ever done it the way I do it.’ I tell them, ‘I’m just different.’” We’ll see who, if anyone, is willing to let him try. …
• Nestor Cortes – former New York Yankee, now in the Milwaukee Brewers’ camp, last seen trudging off the mound while Freddie Freeman took his joyful trip around the bases at the end of Game 1 of the World Series last October – was bold enough to say in a recent interview with The Athletic, “We were the better team.”
His rationalization seems rather pained.
“We had done enough to win that (Game 1),” Cortes said. “They can talk whatever they want to talk, but we win Game 1 – which we should have – we lost 2 and 3, we win Game 4 and we should have won Game 5. Then we go back to L.A. up 3 to 2. So people can say it slipped away from us, people can say we made a lot of mistakes, which we did. But at the end of the day, we were the better team.”
Suit yourself, Nestor. Bottom line is, the scoreboard determines which is the better team, always. And the rings are going to be handed out in L.A. …
• Tristan Boyer, a former Stanford tennis star who reached his first main draw at a Grand Slam event last month at the Australian Open, will participate in the BNP Paribas Open in Indian Wells beginning next week, but he has some business to attend to first.
Boyer, an Altadena native whose family had to evacuate their home during last month’s fires, will hold a fundraiser for fire relief and autograph session Saturday from 9 a.m. to 11 a.m. at the 24 Hour Fitness in Altadena, 2180 Lincoln Ave., building 4. Additionally, 24 Hour Fitness will donate $200 for every Boyer ace at Indian Wells. …
• Things I wish I’d written: “When Don Drysdale entered a room, the room knew it. When Drysdale walked to the top of a mound, it seemed to grow and rise, and everyone in the ballpark knew anything was possible or at least memorable.”
That is the first paragraph of retired SCNG columnist Mark Whicker’s biography of Big D, “Up And In: The Life Of A Dodgers Legend” (Triumph Books, $30), which hit bookstores and online book platforms last week. If you are a fan of this publication’s former lead columnist – and really, why wouldn’t you be – this book is absolutely worth your time, as is Whicker’s Substack newsletter, The Morning After.
jalexander@scng.com