Sports offered plenty of distractions in a difficult 2008

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USC tight end Fred Davis and USC got the best of Illinois in the Rose Bowl on Jan. 1, taking a 49-17 victory. It was the second consecutive Rose Bowl win for the Trojans, who earned their fourth straight trip to Pasadena with another Pacific 10 Conference title -- their seventh in a row. (Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)

2/26

The Philadelphia Phillies celebrate their first World Series championship since 1980. After a two-day rain delay, they beat the Tampa Bay Rays, 4-3, in the title-clinching Game 5 at Citizens Bank Park in Philadelphia in 78 minutes of wild and wacky baseball. (John G. Mabanglo / EPA)

3/26

Lakers forward Lamar Odom has his shot blocked, but Boston Celtics forward Kevin Garnett gets called for a foul in Game 6 of the NBA Finals on June 17. The Celtics looked vulnerable in the first three rounds of the playoffs, but their fierce approach to defense helped them win the title with a 131-92 blowout victory over the Lakers in Game 6. (Wally Skalij / Los Angeles Times)

4/26

Tiger Woods holds his U.S. Open championship trophy after winning a sudden-death playoff against Rocco Mediate following an 18-hole playoff round at Torrey Pines Golf Course in San Diego. Woods won his 14th major tournament while playing with an injured left knee that required reconstructive surgery. (Chris Carlson / Associated Press)

5/26

Roger Federer, left, congratulates Rafael Nadal after the young Spaniard’s 6-4, 6-4, 6-7, 6-7, 9-7 victory at Wimbledon on July 6. Nadal’s victory ended a string of five consecutive Wimbledon titles for Federer, who also lost his No. 1 ranking during the season. The Swiss star had held the No. 1 spot on the ATP from Feb. 2, 2004, until Aug. 11, 2008. (RYAN PIERSE / AFP / Getty Images)

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Michael Phelps of the U.S. displays the record eight gold medals he won in swimming events at the Beijing Olympic Games, eclipsing the mark of seven golds won by American swimmer Mark Spitz in the 1972 Summer Games. Phelps now has a record 14 gold medals and a second-best 16 medals overall (gymnast Larissa Latynina of the former Soviet Union won 18 in the 1950s and ‘60s). (STF / AFP / Getty Images)

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Jamaican sprinter Usain Bolt wins his second event of the Beijing Games -- the men’s 200-meter final -- in a world-record 19.30 seconds at the Bird’s Nest stadium on Aug. 20. Bolt also won the 100 in record time (9.69 seconds) and ran on his nation’s champion 400-meter relay team, which also set a world record (37.10 seconds). (CARL DE SOUZA / AFP / Getty Images)

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Kobe Bryant kisses his gold medal after the U.S. men’s basketball team defeated Spain, 118-107, at the Beijing Olympics on Aug. 24. Bryant was selected the NBA‘s most valuable player in May. (Wally Skalij / Los Angeles Times)

9/26

Dodgers left fielder Manny Ramirez is all smiles after a win over the Colorado Rockies at Dodger Stadium on Aug. 21. Ramirez, who is now a free agent, hit .396 with 17 homers and 53 RBIs in 53 games with the Dodgers after a July 31 trade from the Boston Red Sox, helping L.A. win the NL West and beat the Chicago Cubs in the first round of the playoffs. (Alex Gallardo / Los Angeles Times)

10/26

What appeared to be the end of a Hall of Fame career for Green Bay’s Brett Favre during a tearful announcement about his retirement on March 6 was only the beginning of a yearlong saga. The Packers had lost in the NFC championship game in January to the New York Giants. When Favre decided to come out of retirement, Green Bay wasn’t sure it wanted him back, instead turning to Aaron Rodgers to play quarterback. Favre eventually landed in New York and quarterbacked the Jets to the brink of the playoffs going into the final regular-season game. (Cory Dellenbach / Associated Press)

11/26

Danica Patrick became the first woman to win an open-wheel race on the elite level when she captured the Indy Japan 300 at Twin Ring Motegi in Tokyo on April 20. Helio Castroneves points out to Patrick the difference between the runner-up trophy and the champion’s trophy during the podium presentation. (Katsumi Kasahara / Associated Press)

12/26

Anthony Kim, a former junior golf champion from the Southland, celebrates a 16 1/2-11 1/2 victory over Europe in the Ryder Cup on Sept. 21 at Valhalla Golf Club in Louisville, Ky. Kim was one of six rookies for the underdog American team, which hadn’t won the biennial competition since 1999. (Harry How / Getty Images)

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Yankees closer Mariano Rivera delivers to Baltimore’s Jay Payton during the ninth inning of the final game played at Yankee Stadium on Sept. 21. The Bronx Bombers will move to a new stadium in 2009. Yankee Stadium’s inaugural game was on April 18, 1923, vs. the Boston Red Sox. Babe Ruth christened the new stadium with a three-run home run in a 4-1 victory. New York won its final game as well, 7-3 over the Orioles. (Julie Jacobson / Associated Press)

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Reggie Willits is caught in a rundown by Red Sox catcher Jason Varitek after Erick Aybar‘s failed squeeze attempt in the ninth inning of Game 4 of the American League division series in Fenway Park on Oct. 6. Boston won, 3-2, eliminating the Angels for the third time in five years. (Wally Skalij / Los Angeles Times)

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Bloodstock agent Frank Lyons hugs Big Brown following the Belmont Stakes on June 7. Big Brown blew away the competition in the Kentucky Derby and the Preakness, but finished last at Belmont Park, pulling up down the stretch, the victory going instead to 38-1 longshot Da Tara. (Kathy Willens / Associated Press)

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Although it’s nothing new to older fans of UCLA, the Bruins appeared in their third consecutive Final Four this year, where they lost to Derrick Rose and Memphis in the semifinals. Darren Collison and Alfred Aboya, shown pressuring Rose into a turnover, return for another run as the heavy Pacific 10 Conference favorite. (Wally Skalij / Los Angeles Times)

17/26

Kansas guard Mario Chalmers rises to shoot the three-point shot against Memphis that would send the NCAA championship game into overtime. The Jayhawks would then capture the title with a 75-68 victory. It was Memphis’ freshman guard, Derrick Rose, who had a dominating performance by scoring 14 of his team’s 16 points during one stretch to lift the Tigers to a 60-51 lead with 2:12 left. (Wally Skalij / Los Angeles Times)

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Former Santa Monica Crossroads High and UCLA star Baron Davis returned to his hometown when the Clippers signed him as a free agent this summer. Davis was part of a nearly complete overhaul of the organization, which shed Hall of Famer Elgin Baylor as general manager and brought in 10 new players, including Marcus Camby, Ricky Davis, Zach Randolph and rookie Eric Gordon, through free-agent signings, trades and the draft. (Spencer Weiner / Los Angeles Times)

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Candace Parker made a big splash, both as a personality in L.A. and a player in the WNBA, this year. She won a gold medal with legendary teammate Lisa Leslie at the Beijing Games and then finished off the WNBA season by receiving the MVP award. How did the year close? The Associated Press selected her the female athlete of the year. (Eric Gay / Associated Press)

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Serena, left, and Venus Williams won their second gold medal in doubles with their victory in the Beijing Games. The sisters now have a combined 15 victories in Grand Slam events after Serena captured her third U.S. Open title with a 6-4, 7-5 victory over Jelena Jankovic in September. Venus had added to the major total in July by winning her fifth Wimbledon crown with a 7-5, 6-4 victory over Serena. (Wally Skalij / Los Angeles Times)

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Kerri Walsh and Misty May-Treanor begin to celebrate their 21-18, 21-18 victory over China’s Tian Jia and Wang Jie on Aug. 20 in Beijing as they repeated as Olympic champions. The victory was the 108th in a row in professional and Olympic competition for the American duo. The streak would end at 112 matches, but the pair would eventually capture another AVP season championship. (Wally Skalij / Los Angeles Times)

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Henry Cejudo celebrates his gold medal in men’s freestyle 55-kilogram wrestling after beating Japan’s Tomohiro Matsunaga at the Olympic Games. Cejudo is the son of illegal immigrants who spent part of his childhood in Los Angeles. Cejudo, who had to come from behind to win the U.S. Olympic trials, trailed in all three of his preliminary matches in Beijing but he never trailed in the final. Cejudos parents divorced when he was 4 and he saw his father, Jorge, only one more time before he died in Mexico City. But his mother, Nelly Rico, raised a family of six children on her own, bouncing from low-paying jobs in California to New Mexico and Arizona. (Wally Skalij / Los Angeles Times)

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Driver Jimmie Johnson and his wife, Chandra, remind everyone how many NASCAR Sprint Cup Series championships that he’s won in a row after the season’s final race on Nov. 16 at homestead, Fla. Only Cale Yarborough (1976-78) had won three consecutive titles in NASCAR’s top division. (Terry Renna / Associated Press)

24/26

U.S. men’s volleyball Coach Hugh McCutcheon guided the Americans past Brazil for the gold medal just two weeks after tragedy struck his family. McCutcheon’s father- and mother-in-law, Todd and Barbara Bachman, were visiting a tourist site in Beijing and were attacked and stabbed by a man who then committed suicide. Todd Bachman died and Barbara was seriously hurt, as was their Chinese guide. Their daughter, Hugh’s wife, Elisabeth, was with them. McCutcheon took a few days to be with his family before returning to the team. (Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)

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China won the women’s gymnastics team title over the United States at the Beijing Games this summer. China’s (from left) Deng Linlin, Jiang Yuyuan, He Kexin, Li Shanshan, Yang Yilin, and Cheng Fei show off their medals during the awards ceremony. Although there were indications that at least three of the gymnasts were too young to compete in the Olympics, the international gymnastics federation (FIG) and the International Olympic Committee concluded that they were all eligible. (How Hwee Young / EPA)

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Driver Lewis Hamilton celebrates after his fifth-place finish in the Brazilian Grand Prix earned him the Formula One series championship. Hamilton, who became the first black driver to compete in the elite open-wheel series, is the youngest Formula One champion in history at 23. He was series runner-up in his rookie season of 2007. (Ricardo Mazalan / Associated Press)

By Mike Penner

Dec. 27, 2008 12 AM PT

It was a sports year that often seemed blissfully out of touch with the times, with Beijing staging an opulent Olympics amid the backdrop of an earthquake that killed tens of thousands and the New York Yankees’ spending hundreds of millions on free agents while an American economy shivered in the winter cold.

It was a year in which sports took its ability to distract quite seriously, delivering epic and historic achievement on a regular basis.

In the NFL, New England opened 2008 having just completed a 16-0 regular season, extended it to 18-0 heading into the Super Bowl against a seemingly overmatched New York Giants team. Then in Glendale, Ariz., Eli Manning outplayed Tom Brady and Tom Coughlin outcoached Bill Belichick and the Giants scored an upset comparable to that of another New York team, the Jets, almost 40 years earlier.

In the NBA, for the first time in 21 years, the Lakers and the Boston Celtics met in the Finals, which was welcomed by the league as a rescue mission after the San Antonio-Cleveland Finals of ’07. It was heralded as a dream matchup across the land, even in Los Angeles, until the Lakers were eliminated in a nightmarish Game 6.

Baseball gave us a World Series between the Philadelphia Phillies (one Series championship in their first 125 years) and the worst-to-first Tampa Bay Rays, then gave us a Game 5 clincher that was interrupted by a 46-hour rain relay.

Hockey, after years of off-Broadway matchups in the Stanley Cup finals, finally got a pairing worthy of the marquee: Detroit against Pittsburgh, with the Red Wings’ veterans prevailing over the Penguins’ precocious young stars in six games.

Tiger Woods and Rocco Mediate played 91 holes at the U.S. Open before a winner -- Woods, bad left knee and all -- could be decided.

Rafael Nadal and Roger Federer played a classic Wimbledon final, Nadal finally besting Federer on grass in a 9-7 fifth set. Mario Chalmers hit a three-pointer for the ages to send Kansas into overtime against Memphis, where the Jayhawks won an unforgettable NCAA basketball final. Jimmie Johnson won his third consecutive NASCAR Sprint Cup championship.

With so much emphasis on big numbers, one of the smallest imaginable -- one-hundredth of a second -- yielded the most impressive performance of all: the margin of victory for Michael Phelps in the 100-meter butterfly final, enough for what would be an unprecedented eight Olympic gold medals.

By that much, Phelps out-touched Serbia’s Milorad Cavic, climaxing a race-ending sprint that bordered on the unbelievable. The same could be said for Jason Lezak’s incredible anchor leg in the 400-meter freestyle relay, already a legend. Lezak entered the pool with the Americans appearing hopelessly behind, but he somehow chased down France’s Alain Bernard for the victory.

Phelps owned these Olympics -- at least until the track and field portion of the event began. Inside the Bird’s Nest, Jamaican sprinter Usain Bolt reigned supreme, setting a world record in every final he ran. In order: 9.69 seconds in the 100-meter sprint, 19.30 in the 200 to break Michael Johnson’s supposedly untouchable record, then running a leg on a 400-meter relay team that completed the trek in 37.10 seconds.

Bolt. It was the perfect name for the fastest man in the world, and sportswriters had a field day matching it with nicknames: Lightning Bolt. Insane Bolt.

Another nickname popularized in Beijing was Redeem Team, assigned to the U.S. basketball squad, attempting to make amends for the embarrassment four years earlier in Athens. Kobe Bryant didn’t care for it much, but both in China and back home in the States, his 2008 played like one long redemption song.

Bryant led the United States back to the top of the medal stand and, somewhat less probable, drove the Lakers back to the Finals about a year after saying he’d rather play on another planet. As it developed, Bryant turned into the best player on this one, at last doing what his critics said he couldn’t do -- make his teammates better -- and winning the league’s most valuable player award for the first time.

With a sizable assist from the Memphis Grizzlies, who kindly donated Pau Gasol to the Lakers in a Feb. 1 trade/giveaway, Bryant maneuvered the Lakers through the Western Conference playoffs in a swift 15 games. Meanwhile, the Celtics, prohibitive championship favorites after the off-season additions of Kevin Garnett and Ray Allen, scuffled through seven games in the first round of the playoffs against Atlanta, seven more against LeBron James and the Cleveland Cavaliers and six more against Detroit -- looking vulnerable every step of the way.

By the time the Finals were arranged, Los Angeles was frenzied. There was talk, in some corners of the media, of a Lakers sweep. Elsewhere, the general tone of discussion was: How could the Lakers lose?

Here’s how: The Celtics might not have looked pretty surviving-and-advancing in the first three rounds, but one constant was their fierce approach to defense. The Lakers encountered it firsthand in the Finals, failing to score 95 points in four of the six games, including Boston’s 131-92 blowout win in Game 6.

Boston walked away with its 17th NBA title -- and as a belated consolation prize, six weeks later, Los Angeles took Manny Ramirez from Boston. Initially, the Ramirez deal was seen as the Dodgers’ taking a malcontent off the Red Sox’s hands, but that trade proved to be one of the great late-season rentals in baseball history. In two months in Los Angeles, Ramirez batted .396 with 17 home runs and 53 RBIs -- shaking up a going-nowhere Dodgers team and leading it into the playoffs, where L.A. swept the 97-win Chicago Cubs in the first round before falling to the Phillies in a five-game National League Championship Series.

The Angels also took part in the late-season rental business, acquiring first baseman Mark Teixeira from Atlanta on July 29. Teixeira led the Angels in hitting the rest of the way and the Angels finished with the best record in the major leagues, 100-62.

But because Boston finished two games behind the surprising Rays in the American League East, the Angels opened the playoffs against the wild-card -- and longtime October nemeses -- Red Sox.

The Angels entered the series with a nine-game postseason losing streak against Boston, but at least the team was comforted by the knowledge it had home-field advantage. Two games in Anaheim, and the losing streak stood at 11. The Angels finally broke the streak, winning Game 3 in Boston, and were tied, 2-2, in the ninth inning of Game 4 with a runner on third when Manager Mike Scioscia called for a squeeze. Erick Aybar missed the pitch, Reggie Willits was caught off third base, and the Angels squandered an opportunity that positioned the Red Sox to win in the bottom of the ninth.

The Angels’ cross-street neighbors, the Ducks, also fell in the first round of the NHL playoffs, losing in six games to the Dallas Stars. The Ducks’ defense of the Stanley Cup ended quickly, and by year’s end, the architect of that champion, general manager Brian Burke, had left the building, moving on to a similar position with the Toronto Maple Leafs.

Elsewhere locally, 2008 often felt like a replay of 2007. UCLA’s men’s basketball team reached the Final Four for the third consecutive year but lost in the semifinals, to Memphis. The Kings, Clippers and Galaxy again missed the playoffs. Chivas USA again lost in the first round. USC’s football team lost another early-season game to a lesser opponent, Oregon State, and the loss was enough to keep the Trojans out of the BCS championship game.

The BCS was business as usual, meaning the system continued to be assailed all season long. Oklahoma and Texas both ended the season with one loss, Texas defeated Oklahoma on a neutral field, but when it came time to send one team to the Big 12 championship game, the BCS standings broke the tie -- the Sooners moved on, and after defeating Missouri, they and Heisman Trophy-winning quarterback Sam Bradford advanced to the BCS title game against Florida.

Disappointment of the year? It would be tough to argue against Big Brown, the alleged super-horse who blew away the competition in the Kentucky Derby and Preakness and had trainer Rick Dutrow calling victory at Belmont “a foregone conclusion.” Result: Big Brown finished last, pulling up down the stretch, the victory going instead to 38-1 longshot Da’ Tara.

Upset of the year? The U.S. Ryder Cup team, relying on six rookies with Woods on the disabled list, ended a three-match losing streak dating to 2002 with a 16 1/2 -11 1/2 triumph over Europe.

Reason for optimism for the new year? It’s a fresh start. In Detroit, where the Lions are an unprecedented 0-15 heading into the final weekend of the NFL regular season, the fans can hardly wait.

mike.penner@latimes.com