Frank Deford

Virtually all professional sports franchises make a point of aligning themselves in some ways with charities. From a cynical point of view, it's good public relations. But my experience is that the teams are genuine in their good works. And a funny thing often happens. Perhaps especially where children are involved, some of the athletes who initially look upon their involvement with a team's charity as drudgery — just more PR duty — end up being quite moved.

Precocity is always in vogue in sports. Or anyway, the media love to cuddle up with precocity, to present us the next great thing. A new phenom can't merely be promising. No, he obviously must be the best there ever was.

And here comes Rory McIlroy now, winner of exactly three professional tournaments, a prefabricated legend, already being carried off to golf heaven.

For those of you depressed that two of our grandest leagues, the NFL and the NBA, are both temporarily out of business via lockout, cheer up: There's other major news to divert you. Drugs are back, front and center. In fact, right now it's a veritable pharmaceutical hullabaloo.

Always, the worst thing you could call an athlete was "goat." He's the chump who cost his team by dropping a fly ball, making a turnover, fumbling.

Bill Gallo, the beloved New York Daily News cartoonist, would draw a portrait of the goat of every World Series game, depicting the poor stiff with horns for ears. In fact, I suspect the designation of the goat as the figure of ridicule derives from the medieval sign of the horn for a cuckolded husband.

Now, in the heart of the baseball season, a time of NBA and NHL championships, another fabulous Nadal-Federer final, the start of golf's U.S. Open, the lockouts — continued and impending — in the NFL and the NBA, one name in sport still stands above the rest: ESPN.

Of course, the self-proclaimed Worldwide Leader in Sports always bestrides the athletic world like a colossus, but in the astrology of sport, this June has even more so been under the sign of the behemoth.

As sure as death and no new taxes, American sports fans are always convinced that the people who run sports here are dimwits. Well, yes, we have occasionally had some real nincompoops in charge of various professional American sports, and not even Pericles could successfully manage the NCAA, but in point of fact, our domestic sports are a paragon of efficiency and integrity compared with the way international athletic organizations are managed.

Miami beat Dallas Tuesday night in the first game of the NBA finals. Boo. Hiss.

Please understand, that's just the consensus expressing an opinion. Nobody much outside of South Florida roots for the Heat. In fact, it's hard for anybody outside of South Florida to like the Heat fans, inasmuch as they all come wearing white, so a Heat home game, like last night, looks like a dentist convention or an agricultural rally of Cuban Communists in Havana.

Suddenly, with a diverse sampler of incidents, the subject of homosexuality in sport has again moved back to the forefront. Invariably, too, this brings up the question: When will the first gay male American athlete in a prominent professional team sport step forward and declare his sexuality?

True or not, male athletes have generally been assumed to be uneasy about gays in their midst, if not downright homophobic.

In a springtime of pro basketball and hockey playoffs, of NASCAR and, heaven help us, mixed martial arts, it may be hard for anybody on the sunny side of the baby boom era to appreciate that what took place last Saturday would have been, not so long ago, about the biggest sports day of the year.

Yes sir, both the Kentucky Derby — the fabled Run for the Roses — and the greatest boxer on the planet, the legendary Pacman, defending his title. Same day. What a twin bill.

I've always thought that one of the best things about American sport is that we aren't dominated by one team game, as so much of the rest of the world is soccer-centric. That's why we can have our own American dream. The dream of most other countries is simply to have their national soccer team do well.

Ice hockey has a reputation for televising poorly: You can't see the puck! Even ESPN, which buys up the rights to every sport this side of musical chairs, let the National Hockey League go. So what's happened? NHL ratings have soared, and the league just signed a new contract with Comcast, doubling its old figure.

Recently, we seem to have had some especially spectacular and even tragic defeats. But of course, in sport we don't devote much extended contemplation to those who lose –– unless, of course, they should come back and win.

Do you get the feeling that the National Football League labor negotiations harken us back to nothing less than the Vietnam peace talks? Any minute now, I expect the two sides to start arguing over the shape of the table.

Both sides have essentially said, "Yeah, we sure do want to talk, only not actually to one another" — until finally, a judge has ordered them to meet again again, pretty please, starting tomorrow.

If you haven't been paying attention, which is to your credit, the whole business has been turned over to lawyers.