At loggerheads over a logo?

It was announced this week that my high school alma mater, Mansfield (Mass.) High School, has chosen a new sports logo. 

Mansfield High's new Hornet logo.

More accurately, it has updated an old logo -- bringing to an end a five-month process that allowed my school to embrace its 79-year history as the Mansfield Green Hornets while updating its look and protecting it from those that might abuse it.

As pictured to the right, the new Hornet is bolder, stronger, with a touch of confidence and cockiness that the old one lacked. And it's greener. Our hornet's face is now green and he's proud enough of his heritage and association with our school to be wearing the newly-designed "M" logo on his shirt. 

You can see the differences in the new Hornet and the older one (pictured elsewhere in this missive). I really liked the older one, which has been around the halls of Mansfield High for more than a decade, but it's a little more cartoonish than The New Guy. 

And the big problem, one of the driving forces behind the decision to make the change, is that the old Hornet wasn't ours. We didn't own his rights, and free agency where logos are concerned can be a costly proposition.

The former Mansfield Hornet.

The former logo is a slightly-altered version of the Yellowjacket logo that represents Georgia Tech on the national stage. Take out the yellow and throw in some green and silver tones, and bingo -- we had a logo that was a damn sight better than some of the faltering images adopted by MHS over the years that struggled at making a stinging insect a sympathetic figure and something you wanted to rally the troops around.

It's no wonder that, in the late 1970s, a group of enterprising students decided to paint a mural of the Incredible Hulk inside the James Albertini Memorial Gymnasium. The Marvel Comics character was depicted as bursting through the cinder block wall of the gym, with the banner "MHS Green Machine" above it -- and, following decades of being the doormats of the Hockomock League and reading headlines that relied upon tired clichés such as "Hornets stung" or "Hornets squished," Mansfield athletes tried to tell the world through the Incredible Hulk that they were tired of being regarded as insignificant insects. 

Over the last quarter-century, Mansfield athletics have been on a huge upswing. The football, baseball, boys' basketball, girls' basketball, soccer, lacrosse and track-and-field teams, and others as well, have become perennial league contenders. That's the product of better athletes and better coaching, but I also have to believe that the adoption of a common logo to represent Mansfield teams helped forge a shared identity.

Georgia Tech's Yellowjacket.

But it's very important to note here that, as I said before, the logo wasn't ours. It was really Georgia Tech's. And that could have led to the manufacture of bootleg logo attire for which Mansfield High would receive no income whatsoever, or the possible use of the logo in manners that would not represent the values of the Mansfield School System -- or even worse, prompt Georgia Tech to step in and issue a cease-and-desist order for unauthorized trademark infringement. 

The pro leagues and major colleges protect the use of their logos and trademarks, knowing that firm control means additional revenue. The NFL has a department called NFL Properties which enforces trademark protection quite aggressively, regardless of whether it's a current logo or something from a member franchise's past.

Case in point: Some time back, a liquor store opened in one of our local towns calling itself "Patriot Liquors." Now, the word "patriot" is in common use and the New England Patriots have no say over who can or who can't use it. But this particular store featured a sign that ripped off the team's old logo, the crouching "Pat Patriot" caricature created by artist Phil Bissell in the early 1960s, with just one difference -- the football that Pat was about to snap in his classic pose was missing.

That wasn't enough to avoid the wrath of NFL Properties, which started the process of legal action to stop the use of the Patriots' former logo. The issue met its own resolution when the liquor store went out of business.

You may also recall that many years back, Major League Baseball demanded payment from teams in the well-known summer Cape Cod Baseball League that used MLB trademarks and nicknames, forcing many of the teams to change their identities entirely. But more often than not, pro and college teams don't take offense when high school programs use their logos. Franklin High used the Carolina Panthers' logo on its football helmets for a few years before designing its own unique logo. Another local school briefly used Northwestern University's stylized "N" on their helmets, but quickly went back to a common typeface. I'm not sure if that school heard from Evanston, but it certainly was a quick decision.

And, of course, you have the current and ongoing controversy in Foxboro over the use of the Washington Redskins' former logo. We'll get into that issue a little further down in this missive.

Anyway, the process in Mansfield was swift and relatively painless. Since Insect-Americans do not seem to be offended by the use of a hornet as our logo, a panel consisting of school administrators, athletic department officials, coaches, teachers, students and community members (including me) was formed and asked to offer opinions as to how a "new" hornet should reflect the values that they believe were the best of what Mansfield represents.

My dad's letter sweater
(Class of 1937).

Also brought on board was a fellow named Jeff Eagles, who runs a design firm out of Canton that has worked with high schools, colleges and pro teams in designing dynamic new logos. Among his clients are the Vegas Golden Knights and the Florida Panthers of the NHL as well as recent rebrandings for Attleboro High and Canton High. 

Eagles did his homework, looking through archival photos dating back more than 120 years to see how Mansfield represented itself. Old Townies like me knew that the inspiration for the nickname came not from an insect, but from a student vote in 1945 that reflected the popularity of the radio serial "The Green Hornet." Second place, by the way, was "Marauders." But I didn't know that it was in 1909 that the Mansfield High baseball team adopted green as its primary coloring for the lettering on their uniforms, and green and white gradually became the official school colors.

In the many meetings of this panel, several options were presented. Some of the Hornets weren't very good at all. One version looked like the Hornet had been exposed to massive amounts of gamma radiation (you have seen the Marvel movies, right?) and became The Hulk -- totally 'roided out and dripping with far too much testosterone to accurately represent Mansfield's girls' teams. 

The laughable "Bucky Hornet."

That version reminded me of a horrible attempt to create a similar logo back in the 1980s by then-athletic director Vincent Messina, who fancied himself as an artist. Sensing that student sentiment was turning away from most portrayals of a hornet as a pest that should be eradicated, he created the ludicrously bulging "Bucky Hornet" logo you see at right. Well-intentioned as it was, it was clearly the worst logo ever to represent the school and an immediate target of ridicule.

The chosen iteration really was the best. It still features that feisty stature and that sly smile that says, "I'm ready to whip your ass." It's modern and a little angular, but it's relatable, too. It enjoys being from Mansfield, as indicated by the logo shirt it's wearing. And he's totally unique to Mansfield, which means that the Mansfield School Department has total control over how and when it can be used.

I posted photos of it online today, and for the most part, reactions have been very positive. Some still say they want to go back to the old logo, but that just isn't going to happen because of the trademark issue and the desire of Mansfield school officials to have control over its branding. I, too, liked the old logo -- but I fully understand why it had to give way to something new that we can call our very own.

One other aspect of this rebranding is that Mansfield now also has a standard font for use on its uniforms. The word "Mansfield" will also appear framed by arches above and below, which are symbolic of the train line that runs through the center of town (a major factor in the town's industrial growth in the late 1800s) and the underpasses that were built in the 1950s to help keep Mansfield a hub of transportation in the region. This rebranding will also re-emphasize green and white as the official colors of MHS athletics, and hopefully eliminate the overuse of black alternate uniforms that have led us astray from our athletic roots.

Even the letter "M" has a subtle change. You will notice at the top of the letter that there are little points that penetrate inward from the serifs. That is to make the top left and top right serifs appear to separate from the base of the letter, symbolizing the wings of a hornet. They were much bigger in earlier designs, but many of us started to see the letters M and V on top of each other (as if this was a new logo for Martha's Vineyard), so the design was altered.

As far as I can tell, the whole process has been accomplished without rancor and ill feelings. The biggest point I made during the procedure (and I was quite the pain in the ass about it) was that I didn't want to see Mansfield adopt uniforms that had dark green numbers on the green shirts, as Canton High has done on its road basketball uniforms. That color combination practically renders the numbers invisible from a distance -- and as a 70-year-old basketball announcer, I need to be able to see those numbers. 

For his part, Jeff Eagles said that while he came up with the designs for Canton's rebranding, he did not recommend that color combination for the Bulldogs' uniforms. Hopefully that message was delivered loud and clear to my friends at MHS.

And that brings us back to the travails of the Foxboro Warriors.

You may recall that last year, the School Committee voted to eliminate future use of any Native American imagery in logos representing the school, while at the same time reaffirming "Warriors" as the nickname. Fearful of threatened state legislation that would ban all Native American-themed nicknames and logos, the committee acted in a manner that it hoped would preserve the popular nickname, which has been in use since the 1950s, while sacrificing the use of the former Washington Redskins' logo which was first applied to Foxboro football helmets in the 1980s.

Many schools in Massachusetts and elsewhere have changed their representation similarly, or chosen entirely new identities, rather than facing the possibility of being forced to change if one of the many attempts to legislate against Native American imagery finally succeeds. King Philip Regional High School recently dropped all Native American imagery for a simple logo with the letters K and P interlocking, still keeping the Warriors nickname, with nary a peep of protest. It was done quietly and with absolutely no fanfare, and no one was the wiser that it had happened.

Foxboro probably would have been wise to take the same approach. Instead, the school committee meeting was filled with angry Townies claiming that the loss of the Redskins logo -- which had been ripped off from a pro team and would later become the most disgraced image in all of logodom -- would be the worst thing ever to happen to the town. It was, in a word, embarrassing.

But the vote was taken and the decision was made -- a decision that would cost a couple of incumbents their places on the committee in the next election. But before that happened, a committee was formed to create a new logo -- and that committee's mandate came due this past week.

Much like Mansfield's, the Foxboro panel was populated with a cross-section of school officials, private citizens and students. From all indications, it worked very hard and very judiciously to feel the pulse of the community about this hot-button issue, but all the while having to buck widespread opposition to anything but the old Redskins logo.

This could be Foxboro's new logo.

The panel had 16 designs submitted to it. The first to be eliminated were those featuring a fox as the central element, because most feedback indicated that Foxboro residents polled didn't identify with the animal as representative of the community. Eventually, four "finalists" were selected and the apparent winner is the one you see at right. It wasn't my favorite, but it's not much better or worse than any of the others. In this instance, the logo's central element is a half-blue, half-gold helmet which, I think, is supposed to represent warriors of ancient times, Greek or Roman themes coming to mind. I, however, tend to be stuck in my Marvel Comics mindset, and what I see is the image of the helmet worn by Magneto, master of magnetism and the arch-villain and nemesis of the mutant X-Men. If you don't know what I'm talking about, go on demand and play "X-Men: Days of Future Past." I prefer Michael Fassbender's version of the younger Magneto to Ian McKellan's portrayal of the older Magneto in the original trilogy, but you will see both of them in the role in this movie.

The school board voted 3-2 to accept the design and send it on for some final tweaking, which may involve removal of the "W" on the helmet, changing it to more of a side view, and a few minor changes to the type fonts. But you can bet that there will still be cries of objections to the procedure, no matter what they finish with. 

I also think the Foxboro board made a mistake by not establishing the logo and the "Warriors" nickname as the standard for the entire school system, as Mansfield has done. Elementary schools in Foxboro have their own nicknames and imagery, and they don't become Warriors until Grade 9. That just doesn't make sense to me, but hey, I haven't been a Foxboro resident since 2015, so I really have no say.

I can't say much more, opinion-wise, because I still have great friends in Foxboro and they are very nice to let me call games played by the girls' basketball team on Foxboro Cable Access (including their last two state championship wins). I've tried to tell them that this is for future generations and not their own, but they don't want to accept that. And I've tried to understand how they feel, but it's tough for me to do so because my town chose an insect to serve as its mascot, and not the indigenous peoples of this land who were massacred in the name of Manifest Destiny.

Maybe if those Mansfield kids in 1945 had been really faithful to the radio serial and chose the Green Hornet's Asian sidekick, Kato, as their mascot, we'd have been in a world of hurt today from the Asian community over our use of a distasteful stereotype to represent our athletic teams. 

But they didn't, and thank God for that.

Mark Farinella has been designing sports uniforms and logos just for fun since the 1970s, and no one has ever seen any of his designs. But he always makes a point of analyzing every uniform he sees during a televised game. Contact him at theownersbox2020@gmail.com.

The Owner's Box, Ep. 54.

Should Caitlin Clark be going to the Olympics? I'll straddle the fence a little on this one.

Back to work on the podcasts after a busy spring season, and it's time to get topical with a couple of HOT TAKES!

First, I discuss the latest controversy surrounding the best thing since sliced bread in the WNBA, Caitlin Clark, and the apparent snub from USA Basketball in selections for the U.S. Olympic team for the 2024 Paris games. On one hand, it's a terrible marketing decision. But on the other hand, maybe it's time this 22-year-old phenom got a rest.

Then I weigh in on the star-studded gala induction ceremony for Tom Brady as he enters the Patriots' Hall of Fame. I'm not going. "How can that be?" you might ask, as I did cover all of his career in Foxboro. Well, there are valid reasons -- not the least of them being that I don't really care all that much.

And finally, I offer a few coming attractions with a brief preview of the coming Episode 55 in this series of the best little podcasts in all the land. 

Enjoy!

Cheap shots on Clark aren't helping WNBA.

Caitlin Clark (right) hits the floor after taking a cheap shot from Chicago's Chennedy Carter.

A very good female friend who was a basketball player of considerable talent told me something years ago, and I've been reminded recently of its wisdom.

She said, "There is no worse form of jealousy than what some female athletes have for other female athletes."

Ladies and gentlemen of the court of public opinion, I present to you Exhibit I in the case of Jealous Athletes v. Caitlin Clark.

I turned on the TV promptly at noon Saturday to watch the WNBA game between the Chicago Sky and the Indiana Fever in Indianapolis. That brought my season total of WNBA games viewed to seven, which is at least seven more than I had watched in the previous 26 seasons of WNBA competition. And while I did have some warmth in my heart for the Chicago franchise (you may recall that Bishop Feehan's own Missy Traversi had a tryout with them during their inaugural training camp in 2006), I found myself rooting for Indiana to earn its second victory of the Caitlin Clark era.

They love the Fever in Indianapolis.

And why not? Just about everyone that watches the WNBA these days is doing it only because Clark, the former Iowa star, has brought her formidable, attention-grabbing talents from college to the pros. And please, don't try to tell me otherwise. If not for her arrival in the league and the immediate boost of popularity it has gotten in return, the WNBA would still be lingering deep at the bottom level of sports limbo. 

For example -- The Fever defeated the Sky, 71-70, before more than 18,000 fans at the Gainbridge Fieldhouse in Indy. Right after the game, ESPN switched to the regular-season finale in the United Football League pitting the Michigan Panthers against the Birmingham Stallions in the latter city. Birmingham won, 20-19, before a crowd that can best described as "relatives and close friends." Even the UFL website left the attendance line blank in the official box score, embarrassing as it must have been. There was no camera angle possible that could make it look as if there was anything other than empty seats within the 47,100-seat Protective Stadium.

The times, they are a'changing -- but rather than embrace its newfound popularity, the WNBA seems to be bound and determined to undermine it.

With very little time left in the third quarter of play, Clark was positioned by herself to the right of the lane, about basket-high, as the play started to head to the other end of the court. Before Clark turned to join the play, however, Chicago reserve forward Chennedy Carter came from nowhere to slam into Clark, slamming both hip and shoulder into the 6-foot (and considerably more slender) guard and sending her careening to the floor.

It was, by all definitions, the textbook example of a cheap shot -- totally unnecessary contact away from the ball. Various video replays that caught Carter's approach not only showed Clark's entire body seemingly rippling with impact waves from the violent force of the contact, but they also caught Carter shouting something at Clark before laying the check on her (I'm no lip-reader, but it surely looked like, "Yo, bitch!").

It was ruled just a common foul, and not what should have been a flagrant foul worthy of ejection from the game. (Sunday update: After reviewing the play, the WNBA upgraded Carter's foul to a Flagrant 1, which is little more than an "our bad" admission.)

TV replays also caught Sky rookie forward Angel Reese, she of the celebrated rivalry with Clark during their LSU vs. Iowa games, embracing Carter as she came off the floor and celebrating the cheap hit her teammate dropped on the league's leading rookie scorer, and arguably, its most popular player.

Shameful. Absolutely shameful.

After the game, during the post-game press conference involving Carter and Sky coach Teresa Weatherspoon, reporters did their jobs and asked Carter directly about the play.

"I ain't answering no Caitlin Clark questions," Carter said. At that point, Weatherspoon, a first-year coach but a former WNBA star who suffered the indignities of playing in a league that nobody cared about, called an abrupt halt to the press conference. The only thing missing was a Bill Belichick-like "We're on to New York," referring to her next game on Tuesday against the Liberty.

Not only shameful, but classless.

(Another Sunday update: The WNBA has fined the Sky franchise $5,000 for not following WNBA media-availability policies and Reese $1,000 for not making herself available to reporters. I bet their wrists stung for a couple of seconds.)

The WNBA is squandering its meal ticket.

Look, I'm not saying that Caitlin Clark should be enveloped in bubble wrap and treated like a piece of fine china. She broke every scoring record in the NCAA record books. Of course, players in the WNBA were eager to see if the increased level of physicality in the pro game would take her down a peg. And from what I hear, she does her share of trash talking and occasionally overacts when hit, trying to draw the foul. Legendary Celtics' announcer Johnny Most used to call that the "Stanislavski method" of flopping when opponents tried to get a call. Of course, he never described flopping by the Celtics that way.

So far, there have been adjustments. Clark rarely gets free for her signature "logo threes" from way downtown. Her defense has been pedestrian at best, but she's still getting plenty of points and lots of assists -- although she'd be getting a lot more of the latter if her teammates had the skills to be where they can handle Clark's thread-the-needle passes. 

Clark certainly should not be leading the WNBA in turnovers, but the Indiana Fever have her for a reason. They're not a very good team, and they didn't get much better even with the previous year's No. 1 draft pick, forward Aliyah Boston, who is only starting to figure out the potential benefits of playing with Clark.

It doesn't help that Christie Sides, in her second year coaching the Fever, acts like she could be seriously outcoached by at least four of the women that coach high school basketball locally. She has no idea when or why to get Clark out of a ballgame for rest. In at least two notable circumstances I've seen recently, Indiana had tenuous leads going into the middle of the fourth quarter when Sides put Clark on the bench for extended stretches -- during which time the opposition went off on runs and either took the lead or cut the margin significantly.

Christie Sides: She's overmatched.

Nor has Sides had the courage to come to her star player's defense. She has one technical foul so far, earned in protesting one of the many away-from-the-play hits that Clark has taken. Even after Saturday's game, she told assembled reporters that she was sending films of the questionable hits to the commissioner's office, but then she paused -- and said meekly that she didn't want to be fined as a result of her comments.

That was considerably spineless of her.

Also spineless has been the response of Clark's own teammates to her travails. Maybe there was some initial jealousy of Clark's popularity when she first arrived, but at least some members of the Fever are starting to realize that she is their meal ticket. Now, they have to learn how to defend her when she is being assaulted. 

Maybe players like Carter or Reese (the latter who looks like she'd be afraid to get her makeup smeared) would think twice about trying to put Clark out of a game if they knew they were going to get a right hook to the jaw from Boston immediately afterward. I'm not a fan of retaliation -- and I have a story to tell at the end of this to illustrate why -- but Clark's teammates absolutely have to let her know that they have her back if they are to continue to grow and prosper.

Also, the WNBA clearly needs to step in at some point. Weatherspoon should be fined and Carter suspended for a few games to send a message to the rest of the league that this behavior is unacceptable.

Sure, the league wasn't even a sports fan's afterthought until Clark arrived on the scene. There is evidence to suggest that some of these issues may be racially motivated -- I find it interesting that, aside from Diana Taurasi's early comment about the W being a next-level challenge for Clark and how that was misinterpreted somewhat, much of the negativity about Clark's popularity seems to come from Black athletes that believe they and their predecessors were wrongfully shortchanged before Whitey White Girl arrived on the scene.

Well, maybe they're right. That was wrong. But now, America seems to care about women's basketball in a way that it has never cared before -- and now is not the time to re-open old wounds and to let anger over past mistakes derail a promising but fragile chance for widespread acceptance.

What sort of message is this crusade against Caitlin Clark sending to the most important fans of all, the next generation of female basketball players that will be the league's lifeblood in the decades to come? I've covered high school sports for 56 years now, and the one thing that is constant is that young athletes tend to emulate what they see from their heroes in the pros. Even to this day, boys and girls alike will slap the bottoms of their sneakers exactly the same way that Larry Bird used to, although my guess is hardly any of them realize that's where the practice originated.

I've also seen that girls have been more resistant than the boys to some of the more negative influences of pro players' excesses. I see a lot of jawing and posturing in the boys' game, and frequent mugging to the crowd. There was one game I covered in last year's MIAA boys' tournament where one kid on a visiting team kept complaining to an official about an obvious call long after he should have stopped, and then he turned to the crowd and started gesturing. Having seen enough of that, I was quite pointed in my broadcast commentary about the lack of wisdom being displayed by the athlete and his coach for letting that behavior continue.  

Girls don't do that. I can say without hesitation that coaches like Foxboro's Lisa Downs, Bishop Feehan's Amy Dolores, Mansfield's Heather McPherson and Attleboro's Bri Bracken would nip it in the bud quickly if it did. And I can also guarantee that none of these coaches want to see future players showing up in their practices acting like the ladies in the WNBA that believe they need to deliver "messages" to Caitlin Clark.

Defend the hell out of her, yes. Faceguard her. Bump her around when it's legit. Make her work for every point, rebound and assist. Stop her if you can. And if you can't, don't blame her for the reasons why people ignored the WNBA for the better part of three decades and just work harder the next time.

To do anything else -- including this ridiculous rookie initiation of Clark that is totally classless, thoroughly undignified and potentially injurious -- is to spit in the face of young girls everywhere that want to grow up to be the next WNBA superstars.

I did say I had one more story to tell, about why I'm not a big fan of retribution even when it seems justified, and here it is.

Many years ago, a good friend of mine played for what was then Bryant College. She was a double-figure scorer and rebounder and a pretty dynamic player, so naturally, a lot of her opponents tried just about everything to limit the damage she could do in a game.

One day, she was playing in a game at St. Anselm and was doing just about all of the good things she always does. And at some point, somebody from St. A's decided to do something about it.

In action under the boards, an outside shot had already clanged off the rim and was heading long and outside the paint. My friend was poised in rebounding position but was already aware that the ball was going elsewhere, so for a brief moment, her guard was down. Suddenly, a St. Anselm forward of equal size raced into the paint and delivered a hip check into my friend's side that sent her backside and waist going in a direction neither was designed to do -- almost identical to the hit that Carter delivered to Clark on Saturday.

Not expecting the violent level of contact, my friend was sent reeling from under the basket to almost out of the lane entirely. But she kept her feet -- and outraged by the painful and unnecessary nature of the hit, she wheeled around and delivered a roundhouse right to the back of the offending player.

Of course, the official under the basket did not see the initial contact. He only saw the retaliatory punch, blew his whistle, called a technical foul and ejected my friend from the game -- which, I suppose, was warranted. As far as St. Anselm was concerned, it was "mission accomplished."

No, I'm not overreacting just because the player was my friend. I have it on videotape, it's exactly as I described it, and the tape is still as clear as day. It was the cheapest of cheap shots, and I definitely had flashbacks to that moment Saturday as I watched Caitlin Clark careening to the floor. 

There is no place for that nonsense in basketball at any level, for any reason. 

The game is more physical than it used to be, no doubt, and it should not become anything else. I don't want to see it go back to six-girl rules or peach baskets. But there needs to be a proper context for the physicality, and that absolutely does not include trying to injure a player just because she made your league a lot more interesting than it was at any time in the 26 years that preceded her arrival in it.

The WNBA needs to act upon this, and quickly, lest the progress of recent months be undermined by petty jealousies and a failure to see what's best for the long-range future of women's basketball.

Mark Farinella has covered women's basketball at the high school and college levels since 1977, and he's loved every minute of it. Contact him at theownersbox2020@gmail.com.

Ponderous thoughts I was pondering ...

This year's bunny crop includes this tiny newcomer, who likes my Benz.

Ponderous thoughts I was pondering while realizing that if "notes" columns are good enough for Dan Shaughnessy these days (as he recovers from heart surgery), they are also good enough for me -- and I'm not recovering from anything:

* It could be another "summer of bunnies" around here, as my furry friends have emerged from their hidden homes and are again making their daily rounds to munch on the tasty grass in my backyard.

I know this probably sounds a little ... um, sensitive? ... on my part, and probably earns a mocking shrug in response from some of my former readers from my residence in the sports pages of The Sun Chronicle. But you have to understand one thing. The wild cottontails that live in my yard are such innocent creatures, their presence is a soothing factor in my efforts to cope with the notion that I'm now 70 years old and I'm a lot closer to the end of the road than I am to its start.

Right now, I have three regular visitors to the backyard. I have no idea what their genders are, but they're here and they tolerate my presence, which is a lot more than a lot of humans did over the years.

One of them looks like it has some mileage on it. It's the largest of the three and it's a little more wary of me than the others. It's just comfortable to nibble on the grass and to know where the nearest exit is.

The second one has much lighter fur than the others. It's the middle-sized one and I think it was present last year, because it seems to have the least amount of fear of me and will frequently run up to within a yardstick of me before retreating ... but not far. And sometimes, as I sit in my camping chair, it will find a comfortable spot and stare at me, content to watch the strange human doing the same thing in return.

And the third is a little baby bun, just out of the nest and learning how to fend for itself. It's cute and fearless, not having had to deal with too many threats in its brief lifetime. It will bounce merrily through the grass to say hello, then just as energetically hop away to return to dining. Sometimes I park my car in the backyard, and the little bunny absolutely loves to run under it and peek its head out from underneath every few seconds.

I also have a family of woodchucks whose tunnels run from the foliage overgrowth near the edge of the adjacent pond (I keep it untrimmed as a sanctuary for the wild animals) to at least three openings in my yard. I'd be concerned if those holes were in the open or near a garden (I don't have one), but they mind their own business and are getting a lot less skittish when I'm nearby.

Between the bunnies, woodchucks and various cardinals and blue jays that frequent the yard, it's a lot of harmless entertainment for an old man that enjoys a life that includes less pressure and stress than it used to have.

* Speaking of stress, I was watching the Celtics-Pacers game before I started typing, and the only thing I could think was that the Celtics were seriously lacking in heart by letting this Indiana team hang with them and possibly steal Game 1 of the Eastern Conference finals at TD Garden.

Jaylen Brown makes a move.

But then a combination of turnovers and mental mistakes by the Pacers and a clutch three-pointer by Jaylen Brown sent the game into overtime, and the Celtics righted themselves and went on to dismiss the Pacers, 133-128, and this series was finally headed in the right direction.

I'm still not sold on the Celtics, even though it's pretty clear they have the most talent remaining in the playoffs. I've just never felt that this group had the cohesiveness and sense of purpose to win decisively in a big game. They just always seem to want to let an opponent creep back into a game before finding the resolve to get the job done.

But then again, I admit I haven't watched a whole lot of this team. Now that it's practically the only game in town (the Red Sox are still hardly more than an annoyance), I'll pay more attention. And if they bring home Banner 18, I promise I won't act like I've been in their corner all the time. I'm just not that invested in them to get overly excited.

* Meanwhile, I've noticed a few negative articles about the New England Revolution in the big-city media lately. The Globe, especially, tore the soccer franchise a new asshole in a recent analysis piece, saying that it's a poorly-built team, with little talent and a lot of behind-the-scenes turmoil.

Is there need for any further evidence that the Kraft Group doesn't give a damn about this team?

There have been rumblings for quite a while that Robert and Jonathan Kraft have given little more than lip service to the effort to return the Revolution to past levels of success. I can't speak to that because I can't say I've ever cared whether they win or lose, but I have been aware that they really want to get the soccer team and its small crowds out of Gillette Stadium, and have for some time.

Yeah, yeah, I know they packed 65,612 people into the place when Lionel Messi came to town with his Miami team. And I know their average attendance figure has crept over 20,000 per game in recent years -- although I've heard that number reflects tickets sold and not necessarily fannies in the seats. It still costs the Krafts a lot of money to have to drape tarpaulins over two-thirds of the seats and to not realize income from those seats and the potential they have to increase concession sales and parking revenue (big crowds would demand actual parking fees). 

You'd think that if the Krafts really had the clout that their turnaround of the Patriots should have merited, they would have long ago built that soccer-specific stadium that would be more appropriate for the smaller audiences and more cost-effective to operate. But that pipe dream continues to linger in limbo. The best shot so far has been a 30,000-seat stadium close to the Encore casino in Everett, but that couldn't overcome site development issues and a lack of highway access and parking lot space. 

I guarantee you, the Revolution's existing fan base will not trade Foxboro for nothing but public transit.

Hey, I'm as happy as anyone that Gillette Stadium will have a top-tier, seven-game slate of World Cup games in 2026. I won't be going to them, but I'll gladly watch as the World Cup represents the sport at its best -- and it rarely disappoints.

But if Bob and Jonathan aren't serious about using some of the family's $11 billion (according to Forbes magazine) to build a winner and find an appropriate venue for it, then maybe it's time to stop wasting everybody's time and find someone that might want to take on the challenge.

* And once again, I renew my call for the Krafts to use some of that $11 billion to do something that should have been done in Boston long ago -- bring a WNBA franchise to Boston. The time is ripe to jump on board with the momentum the women's game is enjoying, and the Krafts don't even have to buy more land along U.S. 1 to build a 10,000-seat arena.

Here's what $11 billion looks like.

I'm sure there are worries that the Caitlin Clark phenomenon will lose steam if the Indiana Fever continue to lose. And it's troublesome that there seems to be so much resentment among many current WNBA players (and a few notable rookies) over all the attention Clark is getting in her debut season. But the fact remains that Clark has accomplished something that the entire league failed to achieve in 27 years, and that's attracting enough interest for people to actually watch the games and then argue like fools over them on social media afterward.  

There are at least three new franchises coming over the next few years and several other cities are vying for consideration. But Boston is conspicuously absent -- and as I've said before, if Wyc Grousbeck and the Celtics aren't willing to take the lead, perhaps Kraft, the wealthiest of Boston's pro sports owners (well above John Henry's $5.1 billion), should strike a blow for athletes who are begging for recognition and respect.

* The best news of the week was that U.S. Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-Texas) has trademarked her classic putdown of Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Georgia) after the latter criticized her "fake eyelashes" in a Congressional hearing. 

I can't wait for the "Beach Blonde Bad Built Butch Body" swag. Not saying I'd wear it, but I'm all for it.

* I don't know if you saw this, but someone brought a digital thermometer into the New York courtroom where the Orange Turd is on trial for election finance fraud involving the payoff to porn actress Stormy Daniels following her tryst with the future president. And the results have been posted on social media as a means of putting into context Trump's complaints that the courtroom is "an icebox" and being kept deliberately too cold.

Temperature readings have been consistently between 72-73 degrees, with humidity between 57 and 64 percent. In other words, it's not an icebox. I keep my house around 75 during summer days, 71 during the winter, and always 66 at night.

Trump has obviously never worked in a normal office building in his lifetime. I had an air conditioning vent directly over my desk at The Sun Chronicle, and I swear that one reason why I look younger than my age was because the cold air put me in partial suspended animation. I would have regarded 73 degrees and 64 percent humidity as "balmy."

And let's face it. At around 6-foot-3 (maybe) and 280 pounds (if only that), Trump would seem to have enough insulation to keep him warm inside a full suit and his loaded Depends. The fact that he often emerges from the courtroom dripping with perspiration as he prepares to deliver his daily diatribes tells me that he was literally trembling for six hours trying to keep his sphincter closed, or he has some very serious problems with substance abuse, or sky-rocketing blood pressure or anything that would disrupt his body's ability to regulate its own temperature. Most likely, all of the above.

Or he could be just an incredibly whiny baby.

* Just two more North TV telecasts (that I know of) left for me this school year -- later today at the King Philip gym (5 p.m., actually), Alex Salachi and I will provide the narrative as the boys' volleyball team plays Medfield with hopes of reaching .500 by the end of the season and qualifying for the MIAA Tournament. Then on Friday, Del Malloy and I will bring you the Westwood-KP baseball game, live from the Gary Lombard Field at 3:45 p.m., as the Warriors hope to reverse their current scuffling ways and get back on track to the postseason.

They will both be live on North TV's Community Channel. And then, unless I get the call for possible playoff action, I'll be off until September. What in the world will I do with myself?

* Have a great Memorial Day weekend, everyone. I promise, there will be more audio and video podcasts coming soon. In fact, Alex Salachi and I are working on another "Mansfield Memories" episode that will inform and entertain you with tales of our hometown's past. Cheers!

Mark Farinella still regrets owning a rabbit's foot good-luck charm when he was a mere tyke. Contact him at theownersbox2020@gmail.com.

This whole Caitlin Clark thing.

Caitlin Clark gets a sample of WNBA defense against the Connecticut Sun.

People that know me know that I have been involved in the promotion of girls' and women's basketball since the 1970s, not long after the Federal government made Title IX of the 1972 Educational Amendments the law of the land and established that expenditures for men's and women's athletics had to be equalized as a means of offering equal opportunity to women.

It could have happened sooner, in fact, but I was pretty much an arrogant ass when I was in high school. I had a job covering sports for the local weekly newspaper and I was going to all of the boys' games for free and making money and feeling really good about myself. And then one day, I was asked by my girlfriend (Jackie Cross, who was 5-foot-11, the starting center for the Mansfield High girls' team and a far better athlete than I could have ever hoped to be) why I never covered any of her games.

Jackie Cross (left) in an exhibition game.

"It's only girls' basketball," I said smugly, like she should understand and accept that she was inferior.

I don't mind telling you that the look of anger in her eyes is something that has stayed with me to this day -- and was also a motivating factor long after we parted company for me to change my ways.

When I entered my post-collegiate professional life, I still needed a few reminders of why it was important to start promoting equality for female athletes. But once I got on board, I never jumped off. And it has been one of the most rewarding decisions of my life.

It hasn't always been easy. A lot of male sports fans called me every derogatory name in the book, often questioning my sexual identity, because I wanted to get the girls' games into the paper along with the boys' games. There were even obstacles to overcome within the management structure of the newspaper, some members of which clung to old notions of male dominance in the sports world a lot longer than they should have. After all, we were welcoming another 50 percent of the population into the audience of a section previously deemed off-limits to them.

These days, those arguments are heard a lot less -- but there are still walls of resistance that say women's college and professional basketball are inferior products.

And then came a woman from Des Moines, Iowa, named Caitlin Clark -- and suddenly, huge cracks have appeared in those walls. 

Caitlin Clark became a sensation.

Clark is a 6-foot gym rat who, in case you've been residing under a rock for the last four years, shattered all the NCAA Division I scoring records for the University of Iowa and became the No. 1 overall draft pick in the WNBA. Along the way, she started filling arenas everywhere she went and raised interest in the women's college game to levels it hasn't even come close to over the previous half-century.

And that pissed a lot of people off.

It pissed off the old guard of misogynists that still believe, as the Kansas City Chiefs' placekicker, Harrison Butker says, that women should be barefoot, pregnant and in the kitchen.

It pissed off a lot of Black athletes already in the WNBA, who claimed that the only reason why America was going gaga for Caitlin Clark is because she's the great white hope.

It pissed off players like former LSU star Angel Reese (drafted by Chicago) and teams like the University of South Carolina. They have championship rings and Clark doesn't, but she's white, haven't you heard? 

It pissed off even some of the old-guard white girls in the WNBA, most notably former UConn star Diana Taurasi, who is one of the best women's players in history and yet, in an alternate broadcast of the NCAA title game hosted by her and fellow UConn and WNBA great Sue Bird, made a point that Clark would be in for a rude awakening when she started playing the veteran athletes in the pros on a regular basis. It wasn't an invalid statement, but it did come off as a little mean-spirited by Taurasi, who makes no apologies for having an element of "punk" in her persona.

And I won't even get into the social media debates by people that probably never watched a minute of women's basketball in their lifetimes until this past year. The word "newbies" wasn't coined just for them, but it should have been.

Anyway, Clark played her first regular-season WNBA game last night for the Indiana Fever, right nearby in Uncasville, Conn., against the Connecticut Sun. And in case you're that clueless about the WNBA, the Sun is about the closest thing that Boston can claim to having a franchise. Yes, the city that has 17 NBA championships in its back pocket has never lifted a single finger to play host to a WNBA franchise. 

It wasn't the happiest of career openers for Ms. Clark. Connecticut won the game, 92-71. She finished with 20 points (many in what we'd call "garbage time" when the outcome was all-but certain), but had 10 turnovers (a WNBA record for a player's first game) and just 3 assists. She shot 5-15 from the field overall and was 4-11 from three-point land.

I watched most of it. It wasn't hard to tell at the start of the game that Clark was pressing to make things happen, but she was writing checks that her teammates couldn't cash. She tried her signature no-look drop passes and eye-of-the-needle bullets into the paint, but most of her 10 turnovers were the result of her new teammates being unprepared or unable to handle Clark's feeds.

And she was being hammered. Connecticut played her physically -- sometimes way too physically -- but that's how the pro women's game has evolved and Clark is just going to have to get used to it. 

The bottom line is that it was one game, the first of her career. There's not enough data to make any sort of judgment. But that didn't stop a lot of the Great Unwashed from having their say.

The misogynists said she was a flop and that the league still sucks and we'd all be better off watching reruns of "The A-Team" instead of the WNBA.

The folks that claim Clark's popularity is based in racism were gleeful that Whitey White Girl had her come-uppance in the opener.

The Diana Taurasi acolytes claim that the world owes their heroine apologies for accurately pointing out that Clark would be humbled by veteran ballplayers. 

And so on, and so on, and so on.

Look, as I said, it's only one game. I've come away with some obvious conclusions -- first, that Indiana is not a very good team, which is why they've had the No. 1 draft pick two years in a row. Connecticut, one of the best defensive teams in the W, was fundamentally stronger at almost every position and every needed skill, and the results bore that out. 

Second, it may require some adaptations on the part of the Indiana coaching staff to let Clark be Clark -- moving, creating, taking the big threes -- until her teammates get on the same page with her. I've seen a lot of basketball in the past 60 years and I fully believe that some of what Clark can do with the ball is other-worldly. But the talent level is higher and while I fully expect Clark to adapt, it still behooves her coaches to not break her spirit during that adaptation period. Let Caitlin create.

And finally, it cannot be denied that Clark has brought the game to the masses. The arena at Mohegan Sun was banged out, with 8,910 tickets sold, an all-time record for the Sun franchise. The game also pulled in a TV rating of 2.12 million viewers on ESPN2, which beat the Bruins-Panthers playoff game (2.0 million) that was showing on ESPN. And in the past several weeks, many WNBA franchises have switched games to larger arenas within their host cities to accommodate ticket demand.

Will this evaporate if Clark doesn't instantly become the greatest thing since sliced bread? That's entirely possible. A lot also depends on what college ball presents in the post-Clark era -- and for my money, I'm hoping that UConn's Paige Bueckers has a tremendous and injury-free final year to keep the momentum of the women's game building, because before her knees betrayed her, Paige Buckets was Caitlin Clark before there was a Caitlin Clark.

In the meantime, the WNBA is talking expansion. San Francisco and Toronto are already on board, and the league has revealed that NBA cities Philadelphia, Portland, Denver and Miami are under consideration, as well as non-affiliated Nashville.

But where is Boston? 

One of the most liberal cities in the nation, a bastion of the women's movement and the capital of a state which has a female governor and a female U.S. Senator, does not have a WNBA franchise. And that's ridiculous.

That's why I've been saying for some time now that if Celtics' owner Wyc Grousbeck doesn't want to get on board with the future, perhaps the richest Boston team owner should. Patriots' owner Robert Kraft is worth $11 billion according to the latest list of American billionaires compiled by Forbes Magazine, and his NFL investment basically takes care of itself no matter how bad the team is. The Revolution soccer team is nothing more than an afterthought in the Kraft empire, or else they would have already built a soccer-specific stadium somewhere and spent ungodly sums to bring championships to the Revs' tiny fan base.

Kraft can do better things with his time.

Almost every year around April (well, four times since 2018), Kraft has welcomed the girls' basketball team from Foxboro High School to look at his trophies and take the same tour of the stadium to honor the state championships the Warriors have won. It's almost old hat. But if Kraft, now 82, wants to add positively to his legacy, maybe he should seize upon the moment and spend some of that $11 billion to bring the WNBA to Boston.

It's not a huge investment -- other than rent at the TD Garden, the players get ridiculously small salaries and there are only 13 or 14 of them. It's also a short season at a time of year where there's little else going on other than the disappointing Red Sox. Above all else, it might help Kraft buy back some of the good will among women that he may have lost as a result of his embarrassing dalliances at that massage parlor that Tom Brady doesn't want me to joke about. 

C'mon, Bob. You know you can't take it with you. And Jonathan is just going to mess everything up anyway. Do something good for the female athletes of the region that are begging for opportunities.

Odds and Ends: A few related thoughts to end this diatribe.

* Old friend Sarah Behn has a new job, and it's back in high school coaching.

Foxboro's Sarah Behn.

The one-time leading scorer in the history of Massachusetts girls' basketball (2,562 points at Foxboro, another 2,523 points at Boston College) has accepted the top girls' job at Archbishop Williams High School in Braintree.

Behn has been inactive in the coaching ranks since leaving Brown University in 2020, but she hasn't been out of the game, running an AAU program and giving instruction at her new camps. She coached in the past at North Attleboro High, Framingham State, Franklin Pierce, Franklin High, Foxboro High, UMass-Lowell and Brown.

Archbishop Williams, formerly a terror in MIAA Division 3, has been enduring hard times lately. Last year, D1 state champ Bishop Feehan got out to a 27-2 lead in the first quarter of one of its two Catholic Central League games against the Bishops (don't call them the Archies!). So it's clear that Behn will have her work cut out for her.

Best of luck to the best high school athlete I every covered, in any sport.

* My best argument for WNBA expansion may be the plight of a former local standout, Lauren Manis of Franklin, who starred for four seasons at Bishop Feehan and went on to become the only Holy Cross basketball player of either gender to score more than 2,000 career points and grab more than 1,000 rebounds.

Feehan's Lauren Manis

Upon graduating from Holy Cross, Manis became a draft pick of the Las Vegas Aces in 2020. She was released by the Aces in training camp, and went on to play professionally overseas. She had another shot with the Aces in a subsequent camp and drew interest from the Seattle Storm, but in each instance, she was released and returned to the international circuit.

Manis, a 6-1 forward with a great long-range shot, has played in Belgium, Hungary, Israel, Greece and is currently in her second tour of duty with the Halcones team based in Xalapa, Mexico. At every stop she has been a double-figure scorer and rebounder, and she clearly has the skills to play at the next level. But there are a lot of even more talented athletes in the WNBA and not enough teams or roster spots available. 

With two more teams coming on board in short order and a third very likely soon after, maybe there's hope that Manis, who'll be 26 on May 29 and is in the prime of her career, may have a shot to finally get to the W.

See you all soon with another post and podcasts as well.

Mark Farinella has covered women's basketball at the high school and college level since 1977. Contact him at theownersbox2020@gmail.com.

What's old is new again.

Mansfield High School, 54 years old and still going strong.

I've been reading stories in my old newspaper about scoreboard replacements and the need for new schools and how "the taxpayers are getting screwed!" and so on, and I just have to chuckle.

Anyone in a town whose last "new" high school was built in the 1970s has absolutely no right to complain about anything. Unless they spent the money to properly maintain their "new" high school over the many years since it was built, they've gotten their money's worth. And if they had spent the extra money, maybe they wouldn't be faced with the need to build a new high school now.

I just want to point out a few facts about my hometown that has preserved it from some of this angst -- and not just because I think the town is superior to its neighbors (it is, of course), but just because what they did in Mansfield over the latter half of the 20th century seems to have made so much more sense now.

My dad's high school, now the Town Hall.

When my father entered Mansfield High School in the fall of 1933, the school he attended was 21 years old. It was built in 1912 -- yes, the year that Fenway Park went up and the Titanic went down -- and my father graduated in 1937. He got married in 1945, moved back to Mansfield, went to work in the family clothing store and in 1954, I arrived on the planet -- the same year that Mansfield opened a new high school on East Street.

The old Mansfield High School still stands today. It was repurposed into the Park Row Elementary School for many years, and then was renovated from top to bottom to become the town hall in 1997.

I entered the East Street school in 1967 as an eighth-grader (yes, we listened to the World Series games between the Red Sox and Cardinals over the intercoms), but already, the town had looked at at growing enrollment numbers and realized that the school would soon be obsolete. Over winter vacation in the 1969-70 school year, the second Mansfield High School on East Street opened. I graduated from that school in June 1971.

The Qualters School added new wings.

So, the school at the South Common lasted 42 years as MHS. The first one on East Street served in that capacity for just 16 years (although through the perception of youth, I thought it had been there forever before we moved out of it). It, too, has been repurposed as the Harold L. Qualters Middle School, named after the former MHS principal.

And the current MHS has been in place for 54 years and is still going strong. It's been renovated and enlarged (some of the enlargements aren't needed right now), and boilers and roofs have been repaired. And we're even getting around to finally replacing the 54-year-old gym floor this summer for the use of our outstanding basketball teams and other related necessities.

So why aren't we talking about the need for a new high school as neighboring North Attleboro is? 

Well, maybe it's because we paid when needed to take care of this building. We didn't decide to artificially lessen the tax rate by letting things slide when maintaining a building was necessary.

North's history of high schools is similar to Mansfield's. Mansfield had two older wooden buildings serve as the high school before the Park Row school was opened to accommodate changing times. North had two high school buildings burn down before the one downtown (now called the Community School) was opened in 1919. It lasted as NAHS for 54 years before the current school opened on Wilson Whitty Way, and that school is now 51 years old. 

The debate is ramping up in North whether to build a new high school or simply renovate (although it looks like a new building is becoming inevitable). And thus, in a town where the bottom line on the tax bill has always been artificially low, taxpayers are facing high sticker shock because not only are they likely to have to pay $250 million for a new high school in the near future, they are also having to foot the largest share of the bill for a new Tri-County Regional Vocational-Technical High School in Franklin because they send the largest number of students to it.

Someone plug it in!

So when people learned last week that the new $300,000 scoreboard at the high school football field might not work because there isn't enough electricity flowing into the stadium project to power everything, it was panic in the streets in Big Red Country. I won't bore you with all of the details or the reactions, but in a nutshell, North has spent $6 million or so to renovate the football stadium. Of course, people with axes to grind complain that that is causing the potholes in the streets to go unrepaired. And now there's a subculture emerging that says that families that don't have kids in the schools shouldn't have to pay for public education.

If you want to amuse yourself, just go to The Sun Chronicle's Facebook page and read the comments below stories about the North school building projects. Most telling are the number of respondents that react like this is the first time any of these issues have ever come up, even though something like the stadium project has been underway since the stands were condemned in 2018. You know what they say about "an informed electorate," right? 

Hey, this may happen soon enough in Mansfield, too. At some point, the needs of a 21st century education will outstrip the infrastructure of a building built in 1970, no matter how much we try to keep up with the changes. I may not be around by then, but it would be interesting to see where the town could build a new high school. There's not enough room next to the existing one to put up a new one and keep the old one operating. Across the street, the Robinson and Jordan-Jackson elementary schools take up a lot of space. Town-owned Memorial Park on Hope Street might have to be sacrificed to maintain a campus atmosphere for Mansfield's school facilities, but surrounding wetlands and nearby residential properties make that a can of worms to be opened another day.

But in the meantime, there is no panic in the streets in Hornetville. Not just because of what's available to read, either; people in this town seem to have an honest commitment to their children and the quality of their education, not to mention a fuller understanding of what it means to live in a "community."

Ponderous thoughts I was pondering ...

Tom Brady didn't help his national image with that curse-filled Netflix roast.

Ponderous thoughts I was pondering while cursing the heavens for the cloud cover Friday that prevented me from seeing the Northern Lights for the first time since the late 1950s, when my parents brought me to the Plainville Drive-In to see a movie, and all I could do was look out of the windows of our '56 Chevy and marvel at the light show in the skies:

* I was not terribly impressed with the recent roast of Tom Brady that appeared on Netflix. In a nutshell, I thought it was overly profane, sometimes in very bad taste, and Brady didn't do himself any favors by coming off as a conceited douchebag during his roast-ending rebuttal time.

Maybe I'm not qualified to judge a modern comedy roast. I remember watching the old Dean Martin roasts on NBC when I was young, and those were sometimes funny and sometimes pretty boring, sanitized as they were for the network-television audience. And I'm not a total prude, or else I wouldn't be able to tolerate any number of the specials that appear on HBO and Showtime. I know that comedy today is "edgy," and pulls no punches. I know they use the words that you couldn't use on over-the-air TV. I've been known to use a few of those myself, although when I call Donald Trump a "diseased fuck," I really don't mean it to be funny and I don't apologize for it. Truth is my defense.

But for most of the Brady roast, I got the feeling that host Kevin Hart, some of the comedian guests and even some of Brady's former teammates made a point of dropping F-bombs just for the sake of doing it. I don't know how many times "fuck" was said during the course of the three hours, but I might actually re-watch it and use a hand-clicker for the purpose of counting them all.

"Wolf" was filled to the hilt with F-bombs.

By the way, the recent movie "The Wolf of Wall Street" with Leonardo DiCaprio and Margot Robbie, is generally recognized as having set a record for big-budget mainstream flicks that have used the F-word prodigiously. Technically, it's regarded as the No. 3 film of all time (there's a documentary and a low-budget movie that no one saw supposedly ahead of it) with 569 uses. Others in the top 10 include "Uncut Gems" with Adam Sandler (560), Spike Lee's "Summer of Sam" (435) and "Casino" with Robert DeNiro, Joe Pesci and Sharon Stone (422). Interestingly, both "Casino" and "Wolf" were directed by Martin Scorsese. 

Anyway, I did enjoy the segment in which Nikki Glaser delivered her jokes. She's known as someone that unabashedly pokes fun at her own sex life and holds back very little, but there's also something endearing about how she does it. She's funny. I also think that Brady's predecessor at QB, Drew Bledsoe, was engaging and extremely funny. 

Not everyone else was.

I did my share of cringes over jokes based upon Aaron Hernandez, who was convicted of murder and killed himself in his jail cell. Maybe that's because I was covering the Patriots when all that happened and I found very little that was funny about it, so the jokes fell flat.

There was also an overabundance of "dick jokes" and a few too many references about Brady possibly being gay because he's such a pretty boy. It just got tiresome. The references to ex-wife Gisele Bundchen and her supposed dalliance with a martial-arts instructor seemed awfully mean-spirited at times. And yet Brady chose not to protect the mother of his children (well, most of them) from the barrage, and instead had the gall to tell one of the comedians not to tell another massage-parlor joke about Patriots' owner Robert Kraft, whose well-publicized side-trips to the Orchids of Asia spa in Jupiter, Fla., is the stuff of high comedy because of its hypocrisy.

For the most part, however, the roast seemed like an opportunity for these athletes to act like immature schoolboys once more, just because they could. It was on a streaming service, where anything goes. 

I'll admit it, I laughed at some of the jokes. I even found myself grinning at a few that Bill Belichick told, although he still needs to work on his delivery. A lot, in fact.

It came as no surprise, however, that Peyton Manning could walk on the stage and come away unsullied by the lowest-common-denominator tone of the roast. Manning is one of those rare individuals that can walk into a room and deadpan his way through a multitude of comedic lines and leave everyone completely entertained.

I could go on and on, but I'm sure many readers will consider these thoughts the ramblings of a humorless old fart. In fact, many of my former colleagues in sports journalism praised the roast as a tour de force and a sign that real comedy is back! 

Well, there's no accounting for taste. 

I admit, I'm not a fan of runaway political correctness. In today's overly-sensitive climate, a movie like "Blazing Saddles" could never be green-lit -- and I'm of the firm belief that Mel Brooks' classic may have been the funniest movie ever made.

But by the same token, I'm not a fan of runaway profanity or bathroom humor. My tastes clearly run somewhere in the middle. The jokes that ran to the high side of that determining border made me laugh. The others just bored me. I wasn't invested enough to be offended.

I'm not sure it was the best decision for Brady to agree to do this. If his intention was to improve his image to the 95 percent of America that already hates him, I don't think it helped much. But it wasn't his worst decision of the night.

The worst decision was the awful hairpiece he was wearing. It made William Shatner's rug look completely natural by comparison. I mean, that had to be a hairpiece, right? Why in God's name would he want his real hair to look that bad?

Ba-dum DUM! Thank you, thank you, ladies and germs. Don't forget to tip your waitresses. And try the veal!

* Speaking of jokes, sometimes I chuckle at the many told these days at the expense of the Boeing Corporation, which has had a spectacular run of bad luck with the problems its commercial airliners have experienced of late. I guess I'm lucky to be laughing, because I've never been on a plane that lost an emergency exit door in mid-flight. 

Although ... 

The fateful trip to Florida boarded at JFK.

When I was in my early teens, I flew with my parents on a Boeing 727 "Whisperjet" flown by Northeast Airlines bound for Jacksonville, Fla., for our annual visit with the grandparents. Somewhere over North Carolina, the cargo door came ajar, resulting in a full depressurization of the aircraft, the loss of breathable oxygen, and the need to actually use the oxygen masks that did, as promised, drop from the overhead compartments. Long story short, no one was hurt other than a few ruptured eardrums and a few panic-induced fainting episodes. And a lot of screaming once the pilots leveled the plane at 10,000 feet and the air was breathable again.

I figured that from that episode, I had expended my lifetime storehouse of potential airline calamities, and I was never afraid to fly thereafter. And that's a good thing, because I flew a lot over the years to come.

But the point of this commentary is that I feel badly for Boeing because it was one of the largest contributors to the war effort in the 1940s, and one of the main reasons why we, and not the Germans or Japanese, emerged victorious.

Boeing produced two of the most famous bombers in warfare history, the B-17 Flying Fortress and the B-29 Superfortress as well as contributing to the design and production of a number of other warplanes used during World War II. Both gave the United States a huge advantage in that they were the long-range bombers that the Axis powers failed to develop. In the Cold War era, Boeing produced the ultimate long-range bomber, the B-52 Stratofortress -- which, remarkably, remains the vanguard of American air power today.

And of course, Boeing has produced the most iconic jets of the passenger aircraft industry -- the 707, which revolutionized air travel; the 727, which brought jet service to smaller cities and shorter routes; the 737, still the versatile workhorse of the fleet; the 747, the wide-bodied "queen of the skies," and the 757, 767, 777 and 787, many of which make up the bulk of airline fleets today.

I have flown on all of those except the latter two, which are the newest widebodies devoted mostly to transoceanic travel. I probably would fly on them if I had any real desire to go anywhere. But I see them flying over my house every day at about 38,000 feet (yes, one of my hobbies is plane-watching).

No doubt, Boeing's production standards have slipped some. The problems that get the big headlines could destroy the company if not corrected. And I imagine nobody is shedding any tears in the corporate offices of Airbus, whose planes I have flown frequently as well. It's my fervent hope that Boeing can rediscover the greatness that made it a world-wide leader in aviation -- and end the jokes.

* I can say without fear of contradiction that I have absolutely no interest in that trial involving a woman from Mansfield who is accused of killing her cop boyfriend at a party in Canton some time back. But it's definitely the sort of in-the-gutter crap that will hold a particular audience and never let it go. 

I just wish the newspapers and broadcast media would stop calling her "... of Mansfield" in every reference. She's not a native. And it's giving my hometown an undeserved bad name.

* In a similar vein, porn star Stormy Daniels had her day in court this past week during the Trump hush money trial in New York. The trial is about whether our former president authorized the payment of $130,000 to keep her from revealing her story of a sexual tryst long before the 2016 election, but with the potential of derailing his candidacy. If it can be proven that Trump funded the payoff through campaign funds, he's guilty of a felony -- one of many with which he has been charged in various cities.

Stormy got her day in the sun.

The best part of the coverage was watching the anchors of the various news services cringe at having to read some of the testimony, as Ms. Daniels described the fateful evening in which she had sex with the married Trump (whose mail-order wife, Melania, had just given birth to Barron) in a hotel room at a golf tournament.

You want comedy? Here's real comedy. Watching seasoned pros like CNN's Jake Tapper struggling to read highlights of the testimony about Trump changing from silk pajamas to a T-shirt and boxers before bedding the actress was just plain hilarious. And then, the networks started calling the testimony "salacious" (Webster's definition: "rousing or appealing to sexual desire or imagination"). I'm not sure that's really the proper word, because any description at all of a tryst between Ms. Daniels and that orange-hued whale carcass sends my imagination careening in the opposite direction from arousal.

And remember, Stormy had been enjoined against providing the truly salacious details -- particularly a description of Trump's genitalia, which she had previously described in public discourse as being comparable to a small mushroom. 

While that was never entered into the court record, we have been graced with the knowledge that two nicknames for Trump have been forever codified into record -- that some of Trump's inner circle called him "Donald von Shitzenpantz" as a reference to his widely-rumored incontinence, and "Orange Turd," which appeared in one of Stormy's tweets.

Remember when candidates didn't have to be felons to lose elections? Mike Dukakis rode in a tank wearing an ill-fitting helmet and looked like a fool. Howard Dean shrieked weirdly in joy after winning a primary and was immediately shamed from his race. And yet the Orange Turd has cheated on all of his wives, supported white supremacists, taken reproductive rights and health care away from women through his Supreme Court appointments, and is still ready to sell out the country to the ultra-rich, and he's still a viable candidate to oust an incumbent?

Maybe Robert Kennedy Jr. isn't the only one with brain worm problems. Nearly half of the electorate must be off its rocker to still be supporting this worthless bastard.

* Brain worm! Say it over and over, with feeling. That's the lamest excuse I've ever heard. For anything.

* Odds and Ends: Here are a few quick thoughts to polish off this missive.

Old friend Megan Morant of the WWE's television productions (Megan O'Brien Connolly when she worked for the Patriots' media productions; "Morant" is her stage name) is not only a fellow former Northwestern Wildcat in good standing, but she is also a life-long Chicago White Sox fan, and she got to throw out the first ball at a Sox game recently. Must have been a great thrill! ... Happy birthday wishes of the last week go to my current boss, Peter Gay of North TV, and the Boston Globe's Christopher Price, who's a beat writer covering the Patriots and a terrific guy. ... My old newspaper lost a couple of cherished alumni recently. Veteran news editor Larry Kessler passed unexpectedly after having sought treatment for chest pain and breathing difficulties. He was 71. And former reporter Don MacManus, who was on staff when I joined the newspaper in 1977, was killed in a tragic bicycling accident. He left the paper to become a lawyer and was Seekonk's town counsel for many years. He was 76. Both are missed. ... Former Bishop Feehan hoop standout Lauren Manis is back playing pro ball in Mexico with the Halcones team based in Xalapa. It's her second time with the team. There's no better argument for WNBA expansion than Lauren, who was drafted by the Las Vegas Aces out of Holy Cross, was cut, re-signed for another training camp and then had a tryout with Seattle. But there just aren't enough roster spots available, so she continues to play as a pro all over the world. I really hope she gets another shot at the W. ... Maybe it's time for Bob Kraft to stop simply giving tours of his stadium to a girls' team from Foxboro that's won four state titles, and maybe invest some of his $11 billion (according to Forbes magazine) in bringing a WNBA franchise to Boston as a real and lasting tribute to young female athletes that don't have enough opportunities to continue their careers. 

Next podcast, coming soon. And there will be a few good ones coming down the pike. Stay tuned.

Mark Farinella spent 42 years covering the New England Patriots for The Sun Chronicle of Attleboro, Mass., and the next time he laughs at a joke told by Bill Belichick, it will be the first time. Contact him at theownersbox2020@gmail.com.