Did you ever feel like you live in a soap opera? Huge amounts of drama for no real reason? Conniving, sniping behind people’s backs?
Did you ever have a friend who dated someone for a long, long time, but never quite got married? They finally break up, only to get back together again, because they can’t live without each other, even if they can’t really live WITH each other.
Meet Jerry Sloan and Greg Ostertag.
Now I had the distinct pleasure of working the night of the Jazz / Sonics mess. Listening to it at work, it was pretty obvious after about five minutes that this would be one of those games that I would immediately execute from my DVR. No skimming through it, seeing what took place when, just go to “Erase” and WHAMMO! It’s gone.
So, I was reading the paper online (we don’t subscribe; my wife thinks that newspaper is “icky”), and when I saw that Jerry and O-Tag had a blow-up after the game, I instinctively looked for a calendar and said, “Is it that time of year already?”. Just like dirty black snow on the roads and weeks of inversions that make people feel like they have black lung disease, this little episode is a rite of spring here in the Salt Lake valley.
Shouldn’t we come up with a cute name for them like the tabloids do for couples? You know…like “Bennifer”, or “Brangelina”, or “TomKat”? What about “Jerritag”? Any objections? Okay, Jerritag it is.
Everyone knew this was coming. Heck, Ostertag even mentioned something in the preseason, about how he would probably butt heads with Jerry at some point. At first, Tag was the #1 cheerleader on the bench, and he really seemed animated during the games, allowing light to pass under his feet tens of times during the first month of the season. But now that we’re stuck in the grind of the season, three to four games a week, it seemed like we were on “Jerritag Watch 2006″. And it all came to a head the other night. From everything that I read, they started yelling at each other in a training room, only to have the bossman, Larry Miller poke his head in the door and take his turn at Ostertag as well.
JerLarItag? SloMillerTag? Probably a little much.
Larry has had a very short fuse this year, and the fact that Ostertag is from Dallas, where all of those gay cowboys come from, and I’m sure that Larry has him on a VERY short leash. Wouldn’t you love to see Sloan look at Tag and say, “I wish I could quit you” like on the “Brokeback Mountain” preview? It would be the highlight of the Jazz season so far, I’m quite sure.
So what is the end result of this? Ostertag won’t play in his hometown on Saturday night, leaving the Jazz with the two-headed monster of Okur and Collins against the Mavericks, one of the hottest teams in the league. Boozer will probably feel another twinge in his hammy, because that hasn’t happened in days, and Denver is starting to put some distance between them and the Jazz. Utah is clinging to the eighth seed in the West by a half game over the Nomadic New Orleans-Oklahoma City Hornets, hoping to squeak into the playoffs and be the first round sacrificial lamb of the Spurs.
Fortunately, there’s a long way to go in the season. Jerritag is good for at least one more blow-up. These two have been here before, they know to pace themselves, and they’ll take things day by day.
Mid-April sounds about right to me. Stay tuned…