By Todd Williams

The busiest stretch of the high school sports season is half finished, with gymnastics and wrestling in the bag and girls and boys basketball coming in up in back-to-back weeks, beginning next week.

With the Journal’s reach primarily the West River area, it is most interesting that much of the blog traffic on our news stories has focused on the basketball season, even in the midst of a Black Hills dominated wrestling tournament. Granted, the tournament was in Aberdeen, but it seems that although wrestling is arguably the most successful sports for Black Hills schools (arguably largely because of Rapid City Stevens track and cross-country squads dominance in recent memory), it generates a low amount of blog traffic.

Perhaps the nature of the sports and their fans speaks most to this fact. I can remember heading to the locker room after basketball practice in high school, laughing and joking with my teammates only to be met by the icy stares of the wrestlers, who had just finished their own, much more grueling practices.

And while the basketball stories continue to light up the blogs more, the weekend coverage of the wrestling tournament did manage to top off all general site traffic, thanks in part to videos of each championship map.

With the backdrop of Major League Baseball spring training getting underway in sunnier places, Seven-time Cy Young Award winner Roger Clemens and former trainer Brian McNamee, testified before congress today on McNamee’s assertions that Clemens used both steroids and Human Growth Hormone.

Since being “outed” in the Mitchell Report, Clemens has vehemently and repeatedly denied such use of performance-enhancing drugs, appearing on just about every media outlet short of Al Jazeera to proclaim his innocence. McNamee is just as steadfast in his claims.

One of these guys is clearly not telling the truth, and worse, not telling it to a congressional committee.

Will we ever know, or will the denials continue to drag on forever?

I want to believe Clemens. I really do. I wonder why McNamee would retain what he says is incriminating evidence (including needles and gauze pads allegedly containing Clemens DNA) for years after the alleged injections took place.

On the other hand, it’s also difficult to believe Clemens wouldn’t have used steriods or HGH to prolong his career in an “Everybody’s Doing It,” atmosphere that has permeated the game.

The opening of baseball camps is one of my favorite signs of the coming of spring. However, the bitter cold winter of cynicism will be long with us because of this sad chapter in baseball history.

–Jim Holland

There’s a reason why I cover motorsports, rather than participate, and today’s first round of the Heartland Entertainment Media Challenge For Charity definitely reaffirmed why I need to stay in the infield and not get on the track.
Almost two dozen of us media types are racing virtual stock cars in Heartland’s NASCAR Silicon Speedway racing simulators. Heartland Entertainment is located on Cambell Street just a little south of Kmart. This is absolute must for a race fan, or if you like video games on steroids.
The sims give a pretty reasonable idea of what it’s like to race a Sprint Cup stocker. Starting today and for the next two weekends, we ‘ll do battle to determine the media champion, but the big winners are the various charities that we all represent.
Team Journal (myself, Dan Daly and Mikel LeFort) are racing on behalf of the Rapid City Club for Boys. Anyone who shows up to try out the racing can mention the Journal and a percentage of the entry fee will go to the Boys Club.
Soooo, how did I do today? Ummm, Well? Let’s just say I got more air time than a contestant at the X-Games. I was driving, rather, crashing, King Richard Petty’s No. 43 very capably handled in the real world by Bobby Labonte.
I got off to a good start, but got punted by good friend (?) Scotty Jensen of Prairiewave Communications on the first lap. Then I crashed a couple of other times on my own and wound up 14th of 29 cars, but trailing the pack of three other media people in the race. Drat.
Jensen, his Jimmie Johnson Lowe’s No. 48 sporting a big smear of Petty Blue on the front bumper, led the way in seventh. It figures.
Dan takes over next Sunday at 2 p.m., and Mikel races the final day on Sunday, Feb. 17. Their challenge is to do better than I did.
Not that I set the bar very high…

–Jim “If you can’t be fast, be spectacular” Holland