Daily News Sports People of the Year: the suffering New York fans

 Michelle Musler is miserable, and has every right to be. She is paying $975 per game to sit behind the Knick bench and watch her favorite team stink out the joint, every night. Now that the Garden has been fully renovated, she is squeezed in the middle of a 22-seat, debris-filled row with no aisle in sight. She can’t get in, she can’t get out. She can’t cross her legs. In front of her, a zillion Knick assistants, whose jobs are unclear, stand or fidget in her way. One of them accidentally kicked his metal folding chair back onto Musler’s shin during the Indiana playoff series last May, cutting her leg.

So Musler literally bleeds for the Knicks, and can back up that assertion with $312 in medical bills. She is 78 years old and has been a season ticket-holder for 36 years. She probably won’t live to see her team win another championship. None of us will.

“This might be it. This might be it,” Musler said, expressing her ritual doubts about renewing her ticket package in the spring. “Forget the players and the coaches. The management of this team is absolutely, absurdly incompetent and getting worse and worse by the minute. If it were a real business, it would have gone bankrupt long ago. There is no hope.”

Musler says she might stop commuting from Stamford, stop paying the ridiculous prices, stop sitting next to the dilettante corporate types who only care about which Hollywood star is freeloading in the front row on any particular night.

Except that she’s only kidding herself. Musler won’t stop coming, of course. None of them ever stop coming. New York fans are as addicted and dumb as they get, which is why the Daily News this year celebrates these 2013 martyrs as our collective Sportsmen and Sportswomen of the Year. Step right up, bend over and get kicked in the pants one more time. You’ve earned it.

Clearly, New York fans love the abuse. It was a terrible, horrible year for our sports franchises. The Yankees didn’t make the postseason. The Mets will never make the postseason, no matter what Sandy Alderson promises. The Giants, Knicks and Nets were supposed to be good, but instead are dreadful. The Jets were supposed to be awful and are merely bad, which is considered a triumph of sorts.

The three hockey teams range from barely mediocre (the Rangers) to disappointing (Devils) to pathetic (the Isles). The Red Bulls recorded the best record in MLS, then got knocked out in their first playoff series. Coaches have been dismissed, or are on the brink of dismissal. Alex Rodriguez is still hanging around, depressing everyone.

 Yet the fans still come, and pay too much. They come to Section 203 at Yankee Stadium, where the Bleacher Creature known as Kinicki regularly ruins his shoes from the floods in the front row. They come to the Jet games to fill the top rows of MetLife Stadium, where it is nearly impossible without binoculars to discern whether Geno Smith just threw another interception.

They come to watch the Rangers fail to score goals. They come to observe the Nets get out-rebounded. They come to behold the Mets fall out of the NL East race by mid-May, in yet another rebuilding year.

There is no stopping, no discouraging the New York fan. Consider that the woeful Knicks stand third in the NBA, with an average attendance of 19,812 — playing to full capacity. The Nets, in a smaller arena, are doing just fine, drawing 17,173, or 94.9% capacity.

The Yanks boasted the fourth-highest attendance in Major League Baseball in 2013, with 3.28 million. The Mets drew 2.14 million, despite lacking a functional outfield. More than 5.4 million fans reportedly paid real American dollars to watch these two ballclubs combine for a 79-83 record at home.

Denver Broncos' Peyton Manning named SI's Sportsman of the Year

All the apple-cheeked babies, captured for eternity in Creamsicle onesies three sizes too big, are nearly grown. They are high school valedictorians and college athletes, Eagle Scouts and black belts, yearbook editors and engineering majors. They are in the National Honor Society. They lead Bible study. They raise money for cancer research. They lifeguard in the summer. They work part-time at Cracker Barrel. One directs short films. One blew the trumpet in a high school band at President Barack Obama's second inaugural parade. One earned a marketing award for helping develop a project to sell reusable popcorn containers at football games. One is a linebacker and a defensive end recruited by half the SEC, one is a three handicap, one runs a 5K in 18:20, and one hit an unforgettable grand slam in the ninth. One became the first girl in an all-male wrestling club, as well as the first deaf member of that club. She then captured the state championship in her weight class. Most hail from Tennessee, but you can find them as far away as lacrosse fields on Long Island. Some know each other. They were born in the same hospitals, attended the same schools, played on the same teams. Beyond that, they don't have much in common -- besides, of course, their first name.

It is an unusual name, or at least it used to be. According to the Social Security Administration, which started tracking the popularity of names in 1960, Peyton had never cracked the top 100 in Tennessee. But in 1994 the state's flagship university welcomed a freshman quarterback from New Orleans named after his uncle Peyton, a Mississippi farmer who grew cotton and soybeans, raised cattle and loved sports. When Peyton Manning enrolled at Tennessee, he took an orientation seminar with freshman football players, overseen by associate athletic director Carmen Tegano. The players were instructed to take notes. Afterward, Tegano collected their spiral notebooks and perused what they wrote. Manning had filled 30 pages. That night, Tegano told his wife, "If God is willing and I live long enough, I'll either work for that kid or I'll vote for him." A year later Manning directed Tennessee to its first win against Alabama in 10 years, and roughly 10 months after that Southern hospitals noted the first outbreak of Peytons. Call them Bama Boomers. "It was an epidemic," says Manning's older brother, Cooper, who was forced to quit football at Ole Miss because of a spinal injury. From 1996 through '98, a total of 68 Peytons were born at the University of Tennessee Medical Center alone, compared with 10 the decade before. By 1997, according to babynames.com, Peyton was the 51st-most-popular- newborn boy name in the state.

Families showed up to Volunteers practices, orange-clad infants in tow, and thrust them into Manning's reluctant arms for photos. "What am I supposed to say?" he asked his father, Archie, the iconic Ole Miss quarterback. "I don't know," his dad replied. "I only had dogs and cats named after me." Twins in Knoxville were named Peyton and Manning. A boy outside Nashville was named Peyton Cooper as a reminder that "there's nothing guaranteed in life." Doctors in Kentucky lobbied a woman in labor to call her son Tim, after Wildcats quarterback Tim Couch. "It will be a much more prosperous name," they told her. "He'll be so much more successful." They grudgingly delivered yet another Peyton. The unorthodox spelling caused confusion. Dr. Tara Burnette, a neonatologist at the UT Medical Center, once saw payton written on a note card attached to a baby's incubator in the NICU. "You misspelled the name," she told the nurse on duty. "No, the nurse insisted. "The mom spelled it for us." Burnette shook her head. "That baby is a Peyton," she said. Twenty-four hours later, the card had been changed.

There is no more personal display of fan devotion than naming one's progeny after an athlete, but the gesture carries inordinate risk, especially when the player is only a sophomore in college. Who knows what controversy lies ahead? Names become synonymous with scandals. Think of the Lances and McGwires running around. You can always buy a new jersey or hang a new Fathead, but rewriting a birth certificate is more difficult. "Sure, he could have been a dud," says Kim Dukes. "But I kind of knew, deep down inside, that he'd be special." Dukes was diagnosed with Hodgkins lymphoma as a sophomore in Knoxville, underwent chemotherapy, and was informed by doctors that the treatment had left her incapable of bearing children. She had Peyton Dukes anyway. "He's not a quarterback -- he's not even a football player," Kim says. "But we raised him to be a good, honest person, and that's the most important thing he shares with his namesake."

Though Uncle Peyton died a bachelor, his name will live forever. Archie remembers reading an article, in the early 2000s, in an education newspaper about a first-grade teacher with nine Peytons in her class. In 2007 the Knoxville News-Sentinel put out a query for Peytons and received more than 160 responses. "You hope your children are going to do great things no matter what you name them," says Dana Lara. "Going into it, you do think maybe this will give them a leg up by association." Peyton Lara is now a senior at West High and an aspiring nuclear engineer with a 4.46 grade point average.

Australia beat England at Perth, reclaim the Ashes

England were all out for 353 on the final day at the WACA Ground to hand the home side an unbeatable 3-0 lead in the five-match series.

It capped a remarkable turnaround for Australia, who went into the series just months after a 3-0 Ashes loss in England.

"I don't really know what to say. We've got them back, I couldn't be happier," Clarke said of the Ashes, which England had held for the past three series.

"Credit to the team for how they played: they were outstanding."

Despite a determined rearguard action -- led by rookie English batsman Ben Stokes, whose maiden Test century frayed Australian nerves -- the home team ran through the English tail after lunch to claim a famous victory.

The Australians had won the first two Tests in Brisbane and Adelaide and secured the urn when rejuvenated paceman Mitchell Johnson claimed his 23rd wicket of the series to remove Jimmy Anderson and end the England second innings.

Although the Ashes have been regained, Clarke said Australia were targeting a 5-0 win in the series as they seek to climb from fifth in the world Test cricket rankings.

"We want to get back that number one ranking," he said. England captain Alastair Cook praised the character of Stokes and admitted the English were starting to dream of the impossible, but added that the result reflected the series.

"Just when we got a partnership going, we haven't managed to turn it into big one," he said.

"We have been outskilled in all aspects, and it is hard to say that. They have been ruthless. It hurts."

Set a record 504 to win, England went to lunch on the final day at 332-6, needing 172 more runs with four wickets in hand and Stokes still at the crease.

However, Australia turned the screws when spinner Nathan Lyon (3-70) picked up the wicket of Stokes for 120 in the third over after the break.

Stokes, who scored the first English century of the series in just his second Test, attempted to sweep a ball outside off stump and got a thin bottom edge, with wicketkeeper Brad Haddin continuing his outstanding series by hanging on to a diving catch.

It was the end of a superb knock by Stokes, who showed up his more senior teammates by staying at the crease for 257 minutes and facing 195 balls, hitting 18 fours and one six. His departure also ended a 40-run partnership with Tim Bresnan.

Lyon then picked up Graeme Swann for four, caught at short leg, as Australia closed in on victory.

Bresnan (12) was the next to go, brilliantly caught by a diving Chris Rogers at mid-off from the bowling of England's chief nemesis Johnson as celebrations by local fans went into full swing.

The match was over when Johnson (4-78) claimed his final scalp of the innings, with Anderson caught at short leg by George Bailey.

England had resumed on 251-5, but Stokes defied the Australian attack for the entire morning session, losing only Matt Prior (26) along the way.

Stokes, 22, was temporarily denied a century when he drove Johnson straight and the ball deflected off the bowler's hand into umpire Marais Erasmus, costing him the two runs he needed to reach the milestone.

But he got a top edge to fine leg for a boundary from the next ball to notch his first Test century.

Not for the first time in the series, it was Johnson who delivered a dagger to English hearts by removing Prior in his third over with the second new ball, ending a 76-run partnership with Stokes.

Phoenix Coyotes look East to move up standings

The Coyotes continually monitor the Western Conference standings, but they won’t be able to pry away points from the teams they’re contending with for the next two weeks.

Thursday’s meeting with the visiting New York Islanders was the first of six consecutive games against the Eastern Conference. Four of those games are on the road.

“I don’t mind getting on the road a week before Christmas, take the distractions away,” coach Dave Tippett said.

The Coyotes went 3-2 on their last East road swing, which started with a stop in San Jose. There is at least some benefit in playing out-of-conference games. It removes the fear of giving up the loser point in overtime or shootout results.

“When you play teams out of your conference, that’s an opportunity to get points that other teams can’t get,” Tippett said.
Bye, bye bug

Goalie Mike Smith was back between the pipes against the Islanders after missing Tuesday’s game in Colorado with the flu.

“He’s back to 100 percent health he said,” Tippett said.

Smith wasn’t even on the bench against the Avalanche but was the backup for the night. If he wasn’t able to do that, the Coyotes had a preliminary plan to use assistant coach Newell Brown’s son, Adam, as an emergency backup.

Adam Brown plays goalie for the Colorado Eagles in the East Coast Hockey League.

“That happened a few years ago in New York when we grabbed an assistant coach of a college team (Tom Fenton) and put him on the bench,” Tippett said. “Sometimes you have to take drastic measures in drastic times. We had that kind of in the back of our mind, but it didn’t work out.”
On the mend

Captain Shane Doan (illness) stopped by the Ice Den in Scottsdale briefly Thursday morning but still isn’t expected back on the ice any time soon.

“Hopefully he’s making some progress,” Tippett said. “We’ll see where he gets by the end of the week whether he goes on that trip next week.”

Meanwhile, defenseman Derek Morris could rejoin the team today after leaving a week ago to attend to a family matter.

“Hopefully he’ll be at practice,” Tippett said.

With the Coyotes roster currently at 23, a corresponding roster move would have to be made to add Morris, who didn’t count against the limit while he was away. Doan is still on the active roster.

“When you’re missing key guys like that, the other guys in the room step up and your leadership in the room doesn’t dip at all and you can continue to play well,” Tippett said.
Fourth-line production

Most fourth lines are responsible for delivering energy, and the Coyotes’ unit certainly is tasked with doing that. But that isn’t the only priority on the line’s to-do list.

Center Jeff Halpern is the faceoff specialist of the group, winger Jordan Szwarz is earning penalty-kill time and winger Paul Bissonnette adds a physical presence.

It’s a bonus, though, when they chip in a goal — like they did Tuesday against the Avalanche with Szwarz tapping in a rebound from a Halpern shot off a Bissonnette pass.

“We have been getting some scoring chances of late and just haven’t been burying them,” Szwarz said. “The other night in Colorado it was nice to finally get one.”

It's Not Just Football

When the Ivy League announced in the summer of 2011 that it would limit contact

in football practices to minimize head trauma in athletes, the move was

unprecedented. Since then, concerns about the long-term effects of concussions

have bubbled to the surface of public discourse.

One other Division I conference has copied the Ivies so far, while other

conferences have made other rules changes, and started long-term research

projects on head trauma in athletes. Bolstered by the new rules, advocacy

groups like All Players United, increased media attention for head trauma in

the National Football League, and the deaths of football players who suffered

from head trauma, calls for action in the sport whose revenue helps keep

college athletic departments afloat have become impossible to ignore.

But as researchers and policy makers know, concussions aren't only a danger in

football—in fact, football isn't even the sport in which they present the

greatest risk, at least in terms of frequency.

Football may have the highest number of concussions by sport because of the

roster size, but many other sports see higher occurrence rates per athletic

exposure. According to a National Academy of Sciences report released last

month, field hockey, lacrosse, soccer, wrestling, ice hockey, and basketball

have all proved about as dangerous or more so than football in recent years.


“It’s hard to turn on ESPN and the news and listen for very long without

hearing something about concussions,” said James T. Eckner, an assistant

professor of physical medicine and rehabilitation at the University of

Michigan. “Almost every state now has a concussion law in place that mandates

athlete and coach education.”

Eckner is a co-investigator on the NCAA-funded National Sport Concussion

Outcomes Study, which will include more than 1,000 students in 11 sports at

three universities. While he and other experts agreed that there is a

disproportionate (but not exactly “bad”) emphasis on head trauma in football,

they also say intensified education efforts throughout all sports have helped

address that.

“We’ve seen concussions in golfers and we wouldn’t want to manage it any

differently,” Cohen said.

Last month, University of New Haven officials announced they would be the

latest (following at least two other institutions) to use impact sensors to

monitor head trauma in football players, and women's and men's soccer players.

Women's lacrosse is next on the list.

Even lawmakers are asking questions. Just last week, Reps. Charlie Dent and

Joyce Beatty held a panel on Capitol Hill on the effects of head trauma in

athletes. This summer, the politicians introduced the National Collegiate

Athletics Accountability Act, which would include a requirement for baseline

concussion testing of all athletes.

Proud to beat the No.1 ODI team: AB de Villiers

South Africa took an unassailable 2-0 lead against India after recording yet another convincing win here on Sunday.

"Winning seven out of our last 10 ODIs means we are definitely on the right track. There have been problems for us when it comes to consistency. We have been going through some tough times over the last two years in ODI cricket and sort of building a team,” he said.

"We have been sticking with the same players for a while now and we are enjoying our cricket. The results are starting to come through but we are nowhere where we want to be. But obviously, winning the series against the no.1 side in the world is very satisfying. It is something we can really be proud of," he said.

South Africa put up 281 runs on the board after openers Quinton de Kock and Hashim Amla put on 194 runs, bringing up their individual hundreds.

The middle order didn't fire though, unlike at Wanderers, with the captain coming up at number three himself and falling cheaply. It left the task to Ryan McLaren and Vernon Philander to give them a push in the latter overs.

"Hashim and Quinton have been giving us really good starts, and today it was sort of finished off nicely by the middle and lower order. I was chuffed at how the lower order scored some runs today. Those were very important runs. They just got us over that par score, which I thought was 230-240. 280 all of a sudden looked like really good score," he said.

"I am hopefully still a wicketkeeper in the Tests," said the Proteas' ODI captain, when asked about the form of young Quinton de Kock in particular.

"Quinny is obviously showing he has got the skill and the talent to keep in all three formats of the game. Maybe he still has got to get a bit of experience to gain when it comes to Tests. It is up to the selectors to decide, and the coach and the captain to make that call."

Cano Said to Leave for Mariners; Beltran Reportedly Heads to Yanks

On Thursday afternoon, shortly before they were scheduled to meet with the Seattle Mariners, representatives for Robinson Cano placed a call to the Yankees, saying they believed their client could get a 10-year deal for more than $230 million. They wanted to know how the Yankees would respond.

As a final offer, Brian Cashman, the Yankees’ general manager, said the team could go to seven years and $175 million but no higher, knowing full well it would not be enough to sway Cano. It was the last time the sides had communicated as of early Friday night.

While the Yankees held firm in their position, the Mariners swooped in and agreed with Cano on a 10-year, $240 million contract, pending a physical, according to two people in baseball who had been informed of the deal.

To offset the loss of Cano, the Yankees wasted little time in adding another bat, agreeing to a three-year, $45 million deal with Carlos Beltran, according to a person with direct knowledge of the deal, giving him some of the money they had budgeted for Cano, who leaves with almost everything he wanted. The only things Seattle could not provide Cano were the tradition and mystique of the Yankees and the buzz and excitement of New York that he long thrived upon.

But they could provide riches. The Mariners, in desperate need of a power hitter, gave Cano the third-largest contract in baseball history. It matches Albert Pujols’s deal with the Los Angeles Angels and trails only Alex Rodriguez’s two most recent contracts: the 10-year, $252 million deal he signed in 2000 with the Texas Rangers, which he opted out of, and his 10-year, $275 million deal from 2007, when he re-signed with the Yankees.

The Mariners would not confirm the deal, which was negotiated by Cano’s new agent, Jay Z, and Brodie Van Wagenen of Creative Artists Agency, but a statement on Seattle’s Twitter page hinted an announcement would be forthcoming.

“We aren’t able to confirm any news regarding Robinson Cano at this time,” the statement said. “If & when an agreement is completed & finalized, we will announce.”

For several years Cano has been regarded as the Yankees’ best all-around player, perhaps one of the top five position players in the game. Cano, who hit third in the lineup last season, has displayed superb defensive skills and was as dependable as he was good, playing in almost every inning of every game for the past seven years.

The Yankees were willing to make a significant offer to Cano, one of their few remaining homegrown players. What they would not do for Cano, who came up with the Yankees in 2005, was meet his ultimate demand of extending a deal past seven years. The Yankees feared that such a contract for Cano, 31, would one day become the same kind of burden to the team that Rodriguez’s deal had turned into.

Throughout the negotiations, which began last spring, with Cano’s agents — he was originally represented by Scott Boras — the Yankees made lucrative but restrained offers. They shied away from what they saw as the same trap they had fallen into with Rodriguez, and there was a strong sentiment within the organization that the $25 million a year that they had allotted for Cano could be invested in several players instead of just one.

Even before Cano had left, the Yankees had been working on alternatives, calculating from the tenor of the negotiations that Cano would leave. The seven-year, $153 million deal they reached with Jacoby Ellsbury on Tuesday, with an average annual salary of $21.9 million, is just a tick below Cano’s $24 million average annual figure. The Yankees made the deal with Ellsbury under the strong belief that Cano would not return.

The Yankees’ negotiations with other free agents continued Friday and were described as intensifying by two people with knowledge of the talks. The Yankees have been in close contact with Boras, who represents outfielder Shin-Soo Choo and infielder Stephen Drew, but the addition of Beltran would rule out Choo, the person said. The Yankees have also spoken with the agent for second baseman Omar Infante, who hit .318 for the Detroit Tigers last year, and they recently agreed to a one-year, $3 million deal with the utility player Kelly Johnson, who may be the starting second baseman.