Look at this — before Jackie Robinson, they didn’t let black guys play major league baseball!

Right . . . that was 70 years ago, in the 1940s. Let’s move on already.

You know what else they did in the 1940s? They rounded up Japanese Americans, just took them right out of their homes and their jobs, and stuck them into “relocation camps.”

When’s the last time you heard a Japanese person talk about relocation camps? They don’t talk about relocation camps because they’re too busy being engineers and doctors and businessmen and raising their families and sending their kids to top universities.

You can focus your mind on what other people did a long time ago or you can focus your mind on what you’re doing right now.

Let’s move on already.

Rating:

Footnote: We’ve come full circle on blacks in baseball. The defending World Series champion San Francisco Giants don’t have a single black player on their current roster (although some of the Latin players are pretty dark). Black men can play baseball if they want to but they don’t want to.

My wife asks how my job is going . . .

“I’m hittin’ home runs like Willie Mays!” I reply. “You know Willie Mays?”

“No.”

“I’m hittin’ home runs like Mark McGwire!”

“I know Jackie Robinson.”

“Jackie Robinson didn’t hit a lot of home runs.”

I’m sad. As a lifelong Laker fan, I kind of feel like I knew the guy. He bought the Lakers in 1979, which means he was younger than I am today, and now he’s dead at the age of 80. I feel old.

Dr. Buss was a USC alum. Fight on.

R.I.P. Jerry Buss

Sorry to spoil Reggie Miller Jersey Retirement Night at the new Pauley Pavilion, but you should know better than to schedule these things against the Men of Troy.

FIGHT ON!

Kyrie Irving

My son (age 19) and I are driving to Staples Center to see the Lakers take on the Cleveland Cavaliers, listening to the pre-game show on the radio. Because the Cavs are basically a one-man roster, and that one man is Kyrie Irving, there’s a lot of talk about Irving on the pre-game.

One of the analysts offers up his opinion that Irving is as good as he is at such a young age (he’s 20) because Irving’s dad was hard on him as a kid and pushed him and didn’t let him take breaks.

As always, when the topic of someone’s dad bullying him to greatness comes up, the boy gives me a melancholy look to say that my lack of abusiveness as a parent is the reason he’s not a professional athlete. “You let me take breaks,” he says.

“You know,” I say, “I think for every guy who says, ‘My dad wouldn’t let me back in the house until I made 100 layups with each hand and now I’m in the NBA,’ there’s 900 other guys whose dads tried the same shit and these guys got nowhere and now they’re extremely angry about it. You just never hear from those 900 guys because they’re nowhere, as I just said.”

My boy, a college sophomore, and I are watching the Lakers play the Charlotte Bobcats on the TV . . .

“Did you know,” he says, “that I’m a full two months older than [Bobcats forward] Michael Kidd-Gilchrist?”

“Hmmm . . . really?”

“He grew more than me.”

Kidd-Gilchrist is 6’7″, 232 lbs. He turned 19 in September.

107-2 — Bloomington South girls basketball team beats Arlington — ESPN

They gave up two points?! Who’s coaching the defense, Mike D’Antoni?

Cal head coach Jeff Tedford at the 2009 Cal Fan Appreciation Day at Memorial Stadium in Berkeley, California.

BERKELEY – Jeff Tedford, who has overseen the Golden Bear football program for the past 11 seasons, has been relieved of his duties as head football coach at the University of California, Director of Athletics Sandy Barbour announced Tuesday.

— The University of California Official Athletic Site

Tedford must have seen this coming back in August when he put his house on the market for a cool $5.35 million.

He was saddled with a doofus quarterback as a throw-in on the Keenan Allen deal and the team’s 3-9 record speaks for itself.

Tedford did a lot of good things at Cal. He took over a 1-10 team in 2002 and won seven games his first season. In 2004, Cal went 10-2, finished ninth in the final AP poll, and in 2006, the Golden Bears went 10-3.

Tedford was getting NFL offers during that time and turning them down. He was loyal to Cal. Rumor has it that Pete Carroll was recommending Tedford for NFL jobs, hoping to get him out of the Pac-10 Conference.

Bleacher Report has a list of the top 5 candidates to replace Tedford. The San Jose Mercury News has a longer list.

We’re watching SportsCenter when a picture of Jerry Kill, coach of the Minnesota Golden Gophers football team, comes on the screen, accompanied by the unfortunate news that Kill suffered a seizure following the team’s 21-13 loss to Northwestern.

“He’s still alive?” my son asks. “He didn’t die?”

“He had a seizure,” I say.

“So he’s still alive, right?”

“Yeah.”

“In that case, I’m going to go ahead and say that he looks like a gopher.”

Card stunt

We’re in Berkeley for Parents Weekend, watching Cal and UCLA battle it out on the gridiron.

One of the halftime highlights at Cal football games is card stunts. I know, welcome to the 1920s, right?

Everyone held up their cards, which were either blue or gold. The cards on the opposite side of the stadium from us spelled out “Memorial Stadium” but we couldn’t see what our own cards spelled.

“I hope they say ‘UCLA Sucks,’” I said to my wife standing next to me, but unfortunately loud enough for a nearby husband-and-wife team of Bruin fans to hear me.

“Did you really just say that?” the woman asked. “We’re helping.” Meaning that they were holding up their cards to support the card stunt and didn’t deserve to be insulted.

When you venture into enemy territory, you have to expect some derision.

We’re up here in Berkeley for Parents Weekend. I was saying since we arrived that this looks like a winnable game for Cal and couldn’t find one person — student or parent — to agree with me. Cal was 1-4, UCLA was 4-1.

Cal fans are conditioned for disappointment. I’m a USC guy and USC fans were the same way in the pre-Pete Carroll era. Fans showed up for games not to cheer on the team but to bemoan another disappointing performance.

This is a nice wakeup call for the Bruins. Despite their record and ranking coming into the game, they’re not very good.

I hope the NFL keeps replacement refs around forever. I hope they bring in a new batch of them every season. I hope they bring in replacement refs for the replacement refs.

Why do people think the “real” refs are actually good? Was last night’s Seattle-Green Bay game really worse than the “Tuck Rule”? Was it worse than 2006 when the “real” refs cost the Seahawks the Super Bowl?

Sports fans are the biggest cretins on the planet. When their team wins, they gloat, usually in the first person: We won! We beat those guys!

There are no bigger mental and emotional retards than people who refer to sports teams in the first person. It’s an inability to separate fantasy from reality. (Imagine a Roger Federer fan screaming, “I just won Wimbledon!”

When ther team loses, they blame it on one of two things: 1) Bad coaching; 2) Bad officiating.

Replacement refs play right into #2. It’s perfect. Every jackass fan now has a built-in excuse as to why his team lost.

The NFL will be more popular than ever.

The U! – Kansas St 52, Miami 13

What is this simpleton Rick Neuheisel doing as a studio analyst on the Pac-12 Network? How many Pac-12 football programs has Rick Neuheisel destroyed?

Let’s review . . .

You wouldn’t know it from watching them lose at home today to Colorado State, but the University of Colorado was an elite program, a national championship winner, when Neuheisel inherited the program from Bill McCartney. Colorado football has never recovered from Rick Neuheisel.

Washington Husky football, thanks to Steve Sarkisian, is just starting to recover from Rick Neuheisel.

I can’t say that Neuheisel wrecked the UCLA football program because there wasn’t much to wreck, but he was at least as bad and probably worse than his abysmal predecessor, Karl Dorrell. Neuheisel’s last game at the helm was a 50-0 dismantling by USC, the worst loss in the rivalry in 70 years.

Neuheisel is a stupido. He looks stupid. He sounds stupid. He’s killing my enjoyment of the games and he’s killing the credibility of the network.

How does Jeff Tedford have a $5 million house?!

Cal opened their new stadium with a 31-24 loss to Nevada. The Bears looked sloppy, more like a high school team.

FIRE TEDFORD!

That said, time to switch over to Fox and watch some REAL football at the L.A. Memorial Coliseum as the top-ranked Men of Troy take care of some Unfinished Business!

FIGHT ON!

Penn State announced that its uniforms will feature player names on the back of its jerseys for the first time in school history. Once the Nittany Lions run out on the field this weekend, USC football will be the only FBS school never to have had surnames on the back of its jerseys.

By being traditional, USC football has become unique…

— The RipsIt Blog

We don’t play for the name on the back of the jersey because there is no name on the back of the jersey.

We only have numbers so our moms can recognize us from the stands.

Modern copy of Myron’s Discobolus in University of Copenhagen Botanical Garden, Denmark (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Deadspin has an excellent “as told to” story on former Olympic discus thrower Mac Wilkins (What The Discus Can Teach You About Life: Lessons From One Of America’s Greatest Throwers)

Wilkins made four straight U.S. Olympic teams, winning a gold medal in 1976, a silver in 1984, and finishing fifth in 1988. He was also the first man to throw the discus more than 70 meters, and he held the world record for over two years, bettering his own mark three times between April 1976 and August 1978.

Some excerpts:

So one day I go out to train and I say, Oh, what the heck. Let’s just give it a little extra effort today. And I did, and I got better and it went farther. And I thought that was kind of fun. What if I could that again tomorrow? And so pretty soon, I’m hooked on, Can I do it better today? And it was fun. I knew I could get better and I enjoyed it.

It was all about, There are no limits. There are no limits. I have no restrictions. I have no inhibitions. And you can achieve anything that you set your mind to. There are no limits.

I thought that the [1980 Olympic] boycott was a stupid thing to do. We continued to sell wheat to Russia. We continued to sell Pepsi to Russia. We bought vodka from Russia. It was business as usual except for the Olympic Games. And, of course, we only boycotted after we won the ice hockey game in Lake Placid that year. So I thought it was very naïve, and I was very disappointed because I really liked Jimmy Carter. And there’s still a war in Afghanistan, even to this day. So it didn’t do anything.

Is there a moral to the story? Well, probably.

I have so many, so many times when I would fall down or fail. Being a teacher/coach, I have to be … well, it’s exactly like being a parent. You have to be a better person than you really are.

USC baseball alum Bill “Spaceman” Lee, age 65, pitched a complete-game 9-4 victory for the San Rafael Pacifics of the independent North American League Thursday night, to become the oldest pitcher to win a professional game.

Lee already held that record anyway, having won a Can-Am League game in 2010 at age 63.

The notable thing here is that for some reason, professional pitchers in their prime can no longer do what a 65-year-old man can do, and that is to pitch a complete game.

Knucklehead of week: Bill ‘Spaceman’ Lee – SFGate

If you’re too young to remember Bill Lee, he was a major league pitcher from 1969 to 1982, primarily with the Boston Red Sox. He is regarded as one of the game’s all-time colorful characters. (If you’re wondering whether that reputation is deserved, Baseball Almanac has compiled some Lee quotes for your perusal.

Astronaut Neil Armstrong, first man to walk on moon, dies at age 82 – Cosmic Log

I’m sorry to hear this. For people my age, NASA and the space program were such an important part of our childhood. We’d wake up any hour of the day or night to watch launches and splashdowns.

Astronauts were as famous as pro athletes and rock stars . . .actually, they were more famous than athletes. Being a pro athlete in the 1960s wasn’t what it is today.

It would be nice if I could let this go without mentioning that Armstrong was a graduate of the University of Southern California, but I can’t.

R.I.P. Neil Armstrong