The Sporting Life category archive

Yes indeedy-do.

Dennis Veteri, the South Jersey man who made headlines in January when a cellphone video of him pummeling another man in front of Geno’s Steaks went viral, will definitely be home for the holidays.

Common Pleas Judge Ellen Ceisler sentenced Veteri, 33, to 11 1/2to 23 months of house arrest on Friday followed by five years of probation for the Jan. 2 beating of off-duty Woodbridge, N.J. cop Neal Auricchio, 31.

There is no truth to the rumor that college administrators value winning teams over inquiring minds.

It just isn’t possible that there is selective enforcement in the NCAA, now, is it?

The Raleigh News and Observer has a long article about the efforts of a UNC staffer to blow the whistle on the corruption eating away at college sports and about how she couldn’t get anyone to listen to her. A nugget.

Other information has come through records released by the university or obtained by The N&O from other sources. The university has confirmed that there were at least 54 such no-show classes in the past four years that didn’t meet and required only a term paper at the end.

They were largely filled with athletes. Other records have identified two other no-show classes – and suggest the classes go back at least a dozen years and were known within the support program as an easy path for athletes.

Take off your team sweatshirt, remove your fan flag from the garden, and read the rest.

If you think UNC is the only place this is going on, you haven’t been following the game.

NFL hangers-on twits–Bob Molinaro in today’s local rag:

Now that Marcus Vick has embarrassed Michael with his Twitter comments during the last Eagles loss, should we call younger brother Tweetle-dee or Tweetle-dum?

Molinaro is one of the finest sports writers around. He’s almost the only reason I still read the sports section.

I can be a fan of this San Francisco Giant:

Forget the World Series trophy and caravan of luxury convertibles.

The biggest showstopper at the San Francisco Giants’ victory parade might have been lovable relief pitcher Sergio Romo’s T-shirt. Or more precisely, the message on the front: “I just look illegal.”

(snip)

Immigrant activists around the country interpreted it as a satirical message about a term that many say dehumanizes immigrants in the country illegally — as well as American-born Latinos like Romo.

“You cannot tell who looks ‘illegal,'” tweeted Bay Area activist and journalist Jose Antonio Vargas, thanking Romo for taking a stand. “No human being is illegal.”

Now the goats are fighting back.

A prank involving goats, coupled with concerns about an E. coli outbreak, have forced a Cleveland County high school to move its athletic events to other schools for at least a week.

Burns High School, in the northern Cleveland County town of Lawndale, is playing football games and soccer matches at other teams’ fields, after someone turned several goats loose inside Ron Greene Stadium behind the school last Thursday night.

(The local health department has been trying to track down an E. Coli outbreak, hence closing the field.)

High school athletics inculcate traditional values.

Parents of students at Piedmont High School (California–ed.) were informed Friday that a “fantasy league” involving sexual activity among the student body has been in existence at the school.

Principal Rich Kitchens sent out the letter Friday. He said information about the fantasy league came to his attention after the school’s annual freshman assembly on date-rape prevention. That assembly was held in early October.

In the letter, Kitchens wrote that athletes on some of the school’s varsity teams set up the league, “in which our female students (unbeknown to most of them) are drafted as part of the league” and male students “earn points for documented engagement in sexual activities with female students.”

We just won’t say which traditional values.

The rest of the story states that this has been going on for over five years.

Afterthought:

The next time you hear a woman say to a man, “You SOB, this is just a game to you!” remind yourself that she may well have good reason.

I wonder how they would have reacted to a loss.

A total of 29 fires were set, mainly in the Sunnyside section of Morgantown, an area thick with off-campus housing for WVU students, in the hours after the WVU victory over Texas. The game ended around 11 p.m. Saturday, and the last fire was set around 6:28 a.m. Sunday, according to the Morgantown Fire Department.

(snip)

According to police news releases, five men were charged with malicious burning and 10 others were charged with offenses ranging from battery on an officer, escape, disorderly conduct and resisting arrest/obstructing an officer. So far, police have released the identities of the five charged with burning. Four are WVU students, according to the mayor and WVU vice president of student affairs Ken Gray.

“Malicious burning,” indeed.

Indeed, it is almost Saintly in the way it prepare children for the grown-up world.

In a pee-wee version of the NFL’s bounty scandal, the head coach and league president of an Orange County children’s football team have been suspended amid allegations that players were offered up to $50 in cash to knock opponents out of games.

Local Virginia Beach Babbitts recently floated a plan to shovel money to developers to build a sports palace.

(Or was that “build a sports palace to shovel money to developers”? The object of the subject sometimes transposes.)

They might want to consult with their fellows in Glendale, Arizona.

The city this year expects to collect about $10 million from those sports venues and surrounding commercial development, such as Westgate City Center, to help pay the debt.

The annual debt payment is two to three times that, $23 million to $29 million this year, depending on whether the city can successfully refinance. In addition to the debt payment, the city will pay millions more for someone to manage Jobing.com Arena.

Because the games are so exciting:

Enterasys Networks of Andover has designed and built a series of Wi-Fi networks across Gillette Stadium for easy access to Patriots apps, stats and NFL Red Zone content.

Also, Non Sequitur.

No twits on the Old Dominion University football team:

(Head Coach)Wilder shut off access to Twitter last season after investigating why a couple of his players weren’t doing well academically. He found that they were tweeting up to 100 times per day and that some of the tweets were objectionable. One of the players had more than 1,000 followers.

He called a team meeting.

“I laid it all out,” Wilder said. “I told them that nobody in this room, including me, should have 1,000 followers on Twitter. We haven’t done anything yet.

They are still allowed to frolic on Facebook; an assistant coach is on Facebook playground duty.

Flaming the fans:

Last year, about 7,000 people were ejected from NFL stadiums for bad behavior.

According to the NFL, the four-hour online course fans bounced from the stadium must take is focused on alcohol abuse, anger management and unruly, crude behavior.

Really, do not pass this one up.

Farewell to the quadrennial athletic marketing event.

Venting twits.

Simon Jenkins suggests that, if indeed some badminton teams threw games to get an advantage in later seeds, well, that’s what the contemporary quadrennial athletic marketing event is really about–Not the striving, the surviving to the winner’s circle. A nugget:

I cannot see how, in sporting terms, this is any different from sprint cyclists hovering for an age on a curve, waiting for the right moment to surge forward.

(snip)

The concept of the Olympics as being not about winning but “about taking part” ended long ago. Modern Olympics are parodies of Hitler’s nationalist games of 1936. They are a statist contest determined by who wins the most medals.

Also, endorsements.

The spirit of international cooperation corporation is manifest at the quadrennial athletic marketing fest:

“With every additional Games, the enforcement of sponsors’ and Olympic brands get stronger, and incrementally more and more controls are being put in place and the Games are becoming more commercial,” said Guy Osborn, professor of law at University of Westminster who has studied the issue extensively.

It isn’t just about the Olympics clearing the way for its biggest sponsors to indulge in an orgy of marketing and promotion unfettered by rivals. In the U.K., media reports said that an 81 year-old woman who wanted to sell a doll at a fundraiser for $1.60 was told to think again after authorities found out the doll wore sportswear featuring the Games’ logo and Olympic rings; at the University of Derby, a banner that stated “supporting the London Olympics” had to be taken down.

Pursuit of excellence indeed.

Pursuit of excrescence which dishonors the athletes.

I’m so fed up with the hype and the tripe that I resent even seeing the headlines in the local rag.