The Sporting Life category archive

A while ago, I expressed my skepticism about the wisdom of turning to gambling as a way to raise funds. Today’s local rag has a long story that feeds my skepticism. A nugget (emphasis added):

Aragona-Pembroke makes more money from bingo and pull-tab gambling cards than any other Little League in the country, bringing in about $800,000 per year after paying out winnings, according to its most recent tax returns.

But the windfall hasn’t trickled down to the players, a Virginian-Pilot investigation shows.

In 2012, Aragona-Pembroke spent $150,000 on baseball operations, including uniforms, field maintenance and umpire salaries. That is about the same amount shown in the league’s 2009 tax filing, one year before it bought Witchduck Hall (a bingo hall–ed.).

What has changed are the league’s expenses.

More than $500,000 of the bingo hall revenue winds up in private hands, according to tax returns, property records, sales contracts and a deed of trust filed with the city.

The league paid $251,000 in salaries in 2012, including a combined $136,000 to Lou and Cheryl Mazza. Lou Mazza is apparently the only Little League president in the country receiving a salary, according to a review of Internal Revenue Service returns and the national Little League office. The national organization’s rules prohibit league officers from receiving money for their baseball service. Such an arrangement would inspire a “thorough, lengthy internal review,” national Little League spokesman Brian McClintock said in an email.

I have driven past that little bingo parlor many times and wondered what was going on in there.

I rest my case.

Addendum, a Few Days Later:

Shake up.

The longtime president of the Aragona-Pembroke Little League and his wife are out as officers, but the league won’t say whether they resigned voluntarily or whether they will continue running the league’s gambling hall.

They were involved in the organization for two decades. I suspect that, after a while, they begin to think of it as their own, rather than of thinking of themselves as its stewards.

Bob Molinaro, writing in my local rag, sums up the scam:

Bottom line

While NFL teams shared $6 billion in revenue last season, most of it coming through the league’s TV rights, you can be sure that the next time an owner wants a new stadium, he’ll expect taxpayers to pay the freight.

Was it bait-and-switch or simple incompetence at the old hole-in-one contest?

Daniel Ruth scores a goal.

Bob Molinaro sees some weaknesses in the D.

Shredded NCAA president Mark Emmert makes it too easy for his detractors when he does something as preposterous as claim that big-time college athletes are “not hired employees conducting games for entertainment.” That must come as a surprise to the TV networks that pay billions for the rights to entertain America with college football and basketball. And those stadiums and arenas on campus aren’t built with entertainment in mind? What is he thinking?

Add NCAA If college athletics aren’t meant to be entertainment, I want Emmert to explain all the basketball games that TV schedules for 9 p.m. on school nights.

Bob Molinaro, sportswriter extraordinaire*:

Former president of CBS Sports Neal Pilson said at the O’Bannon v. NCAA trial that giving players money for use of their images on TV could “change the fabric” of college athletics by turning off fans who enjoy watching teams play for the “joy of the game.” There are a lot of people who believe that, but this tends to be a generational issue. Likely, younger fans would easily grow accustomed to some college athletes getting a small cut of the spoils. They would still find plenty of joy in the games, as long as the money spent delivered a winner.

Certainly it would “change the fabric.” The fabric is rotten and corrupt; it allows old men, like CBS Sports presidents, NCAA executives, and college presidents and coaches, to profit from the uncompensated labor of the young by labeling them as “amateurs,” when they are in fact professionals.

(You do know what a “professional” is, do you not? A “professional” is someone who takes money for it. An “athletic scholarship” is money. Q. E. D.)

Our society has become based on theft of labor.

__________________

*I’m pretty much fed up with professional sports (this includes college sports, for reasons made clear above), with the possible exception of major league baseball, but I always read Bob Molinaro’s columns because he is one damned fine writer. You should too.

I’ll read about it when Bob Molinaro writes about it.

Otherwise, yawn.

From Bob Molinaro, my favorite sports writer:

Tar Heel basketball player Rashad McCants is giving North Carolina another case of the blues, telling ESPN he benefitted from bogus courses and implicating coach Roy Williams. People may never look at North Carolina the same following revelations the last three years of widespread academic fraud involving athletes. But I’d be careful before assuming that McCants is a credible whistle blower.

He may not be the most credible whistle blower, but he’s only one in a whole damn whistle orchestra in Chapel Hill.

The NCAA is going into the third OT of corruption with no end in sight.

Nothing illustrates the corruption of big-time college sports and the NCAA better than this sentence, from sportswriter extraordinaire Bob Molinaro, in a column about the proposed NCAA “Division IV” (emphasis added):

The unrest is a result of friction between the wealthiest schools and the less-wealthy over what sort of business model to follow in the future.

That that sentence makes sense is ipso facto evidence that there is no “amateurism” in big-time college athletics.

If it has a business model, it is a business.

It has employees, not “student athletes.”

It’s for money, not “love of the game.”

I am done with the NCAA.

If decisions Steve Ballmer makes for the LA Clippers are as good as the ones he made at Microsoft, the Clippers are headed for the cellar and destined to remain there for a long, long time.

Shelly Sterling reached an agreement Thursday night to sell the Los Angeles Clippers to former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer for $2 billion in what would be a record deal if approved by the NBA, according to an individual with knowledge of the negotiations.

I knew golf had to be good for something.

For now, however, they are still two of 20 Shawnee upperclassmen learning what it takes to design and build a construction project on deadline.

For three years, technology education teacher Stefani Kirk has required her students to make mini-golf courses.

“They’re real-world projects” that let students “see their brainstorms start as pencil sketches,” she said, “and evolve into something people actually use.”

Another illegal formulation at Penn State.

NCAA “sports” need to be taken out of universities’ drivers’ seats; they’re driving drunk on money.

Why are persons so surprised when they learn that a rich person who lives in a rich person’s protected bubble of unaccountable privilege turns out to be a selfish hypocritical jerk?

Reg Henry is taken aback that golf is waning in popularity. He tells us that golf gurus are concerned that there are 5,000,000 fewer golfers than there were a decade ago.

I live next to a golf course, and I see few young golfers, except for youngsters being set on a path of corruption by their fathers, and members of the golf team from a local college, just down the road a piece.

Remedies are being considered. Here’s a nugget from his column:

Now it is suggested that these forlorn, disappointed people might be lured back to the game by gimmicks. The Times story came with a picture of a tour professional putting into a 15-inch-wide hole, which looked like a bucket.

What an appalling prospect if this should catch on. You could go play Pebble Beach because it’s on your bucket list and find a bucket being used for the hole.

Golf is an expensive sport. Other than freakish “xtreme sports,” it is probably the most expensive sport short of skiing. One wonders whether the destruction of the middle class, depriving many of the ability to pay for club memberships, not to mention golf clubs, may have something to do with its waning popularity.

Whatever, it’s still golf, a good walk spoiled.

Golf is pool on an extra-large table, with added membership and greens fees and without heat in the winter or AC in the summer.

Get a pool table. It’s cheaper, more comfortable, just as frustrating, and lacks the built-in mosquitoes.

Learning from recent experiences, Penn State selects a president with cover-up experience.

Via WTKR.