The Sporting Life category archive

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Up Philly way, there’s kerfuffle about a sixth-grade girl who wants to play CYO football.

The girl has been banned. Petitions have been written. Appeals have been made.

A source familiar with the deliberations tells me the panel wants the boys-only rule to remain. The overwhelming reason seems to be that young boys and girls could wind up, um, touching each other.

After all, the CYO is a Catholic outfit.

God forbid that boys and girls (eeeeewwwww) should touch each other.

Oh, please, make it stop.

The man short-circuited in the face of bad behavior by his buddy.

It is a very human and very understandable reaction.

The NCAA reacted like the autocratic self-serving monopoly that it is.

But that don’t make willful inaction right.

Reg Henry watches the lights go out at the electrifying Super Bowl and foresees the end of an empire. A nugget:

It wasn’t just the dimmed lights. The famous TV commercials were infamously disappointing. Previously the best minds from the Ivy League would steer clear of professions like medicine and the law in order to write comic tributes to beer, but on this night their efforts were flat. Oh for the cutely flatulent animals of yesteryear!

Somebody did resurrect the broadcaster Paul Harvey to do a commercial about farmers, whom he said God makes. It was so moving that some of us were tempted to go out and buy some farmers, only to discover that corporations have lately driven up their price.

It wasn’t just the darned commercials. The worst must be kept to last, so shocking is this revelation.

Follow the link to learn the worst.

In my local rag, Bob Molinaro ruminates on the electrifying Super Bowl. (I’ve been anticipating his column since the blackout.)

As a farm boy, I agree with him wholeheartedly–Dodge should have left Paul Harvey be.

Afterthought:

The word that comes to mind as I think of that spot is “cloying.”

What happens when the wardrobe malfunctions and immaculate receptions are all over, when the HGH has been put away, when the rings have been hocked to pay for therapy or neurosurgery?

The Baltimore Sun investigates:

But a Super Bowl ring is no guarantee of success beyond football. Some players say the championship can be unsatisfying because it’s hard to follow and drains the satisfaction from other accomplishments. Others, including Jermaine Lewis and Jamal Lewis, have battled through years of business failures and legal problems.

“I’ll tell you this,” said former Raven Peter Boulware, a linebacker for the Super Bowl champions, “it ruins you for anything else in football. Anything less than that is a disappointing season.”

Mark Washburn tells you how. A nugget:

Because we are at the intersection of hoops and football seasons, you may be thinking about sportscasting.

First, you must pay no attention whatsoever to the proper meaning of words. If you happened to have stayed awake during ninth-grade English, for example, you probably know that a “legend” is a popular myth, a slice of folklore that is largely unverifiable, like Paul Bunyan and Babe, the big blue ox.

Forget all that. If you intend to use proper English, your sports career is doomed.

In sports, anyone who is even vaguely proficient at their job is a legend. If there aren’t at least a dozen legends playing, you have no business covering the game.

Follow the link for more career training.

In the Detroit Free-Press, Mitch Albom wonders just who, exactly, is the victim and needs apologize in the strange case of Manti Te’o’s online fantasy romance:

So Te’o was immediately asked about his heartbreak. He expressed grief over national television. People were moved. And the hero-making machinery was revved to full throttle.

It is that machinery that is most angry. Sports Illustrated’s Stewart Mandel wrote this Saturday:

“If Te’o truly wants to clear the air, he needs to sit down in front of a camera. He needs to show emotion, and he needs to show remorse. … Many of his fans and followers still feel betrayed. He needs to apologize for his part in embellishing and perpetuating the myth of Kekua.”

Really? Why? What does it matter? Did he take money from those fans? What did “the myth of Kekua” do except momentarily interest people? And we in the news media perpetuated it as much as he did.

As jaded as I have become about NCAA anything, I must point out that, if anyone is going to act stupid over the opposite sex, real or imagined, it’s likely to be high school and college kids. I give you, for example, Beiber Fever.

And if anyone is going to act stupid over college ball players, it’s ESPN and their fellows.

In their uproar of Te’o, the sports press is, I suspect, most angry because their part in it brings out the ultimate superficiality of their own tongue-dragging fan-dom and, in doing so, indicts the whole damned ball of hooey that is big-time college sports.

A nugget from Bob Molinaro, at my local rag:

Alabama’s football coaches were paid $1.46 million in bonuses for the BCS title game victory, with $525,000 going to Nick Saban. The players’ bonus? Zilch, of course.

“Amateur” athletes coached by bonus babies.

Manti Te’o’s on-line romance seems to be all the rage today.

Both sports columnists at my local rag wrote about it.

But, as Dave Zirin points out, whatever hypocrisy or lies or foolishness or gullibility that story represents, it does not trump the routine rottenness that permeates big-time sports. A nugget:

It says so much that Te’o’s bizarre soap opera has moved (Notre Dame Athletic Director–ed.) Swarbrick to openly weeping but he hasn’t spared one tear, let alone held one press conference, for Lizzy Seeberg, the young woman who took her own life after coming forward with allegations that a member of the team sexually assaulted her. Swarbrick’s press conference displayed that the problem at Notre Dame is not just football players without a compass; it’s the adults without a conscience.

And Notre Dame is not an exception.

It was not two weeks ago that I told my brother that, as fed up with big time football as I am, I wanted to catch at least one Washington Redskins game so I could see their rookie quarterback while he could still perform “because I know he’s going to get hurt.”

My brother agreed, “His style of play won’t work in the NFL–the defenses are too big and fast.”

So guess what game I ended up watching.

Now that the season is over, Pederasty U. is still with us.

At Philly dot com, Joseph Zimmerman looks at Pennsylvania Governor Corbett’s suit against the NCAA’s sanctions against Penn State and finds that it’s all bad:

Gov. Corbett says you were, so he’s suing the NCAA, which slapped a $60 million fine and a four-year bowl ban on Penn State last summer. Corbett initially accepted the sanctions, but he changed his tune last week, arguing that the penalties “irreparably harm the citizens and the general economy of the commonwealth of Pennsylvania.” But Corbett’s suit doesn’t provide a single piece of evidence to support that claim.

What the complaint does suggest is something much darker: that a Sandusky-style atrocity could have occurred at any number of football-worshipping universities that make coaches into idols. In an attempt to exculpate Penn State, Corbett has actually indicted us all.

Do read the rest, especially if football means a damn to you.

You find that, as it exists today, it means “damned” to you.

I can’t see how this is anything other than grandstanding. When you pay a fine, you don’t have control over what happens with it.

A state senator sued the NCAA on Friday over its use of the $60 million fine that Pennsylvania State University is paying for its handling of the Jerry Sandusky child-molestation scandal, two days after the governor filed an antitrust lawsuit against the organization.

Jake Corman (R., Centre), who represents the area where Penn State’s campus is located and chairs the Appropriations Committee, contends that the NCAA’s plans to spend the $60 million are an illegal violation of his oversight role on state government spending.

“Even though the NCAA intends to wrest such a large sum of Pennsylvania public funds, it has refused to submit to any control by Pennsylvania elected officials and refused to commit more than 25 percent of those public funds to Pennsylvania causes,” Corman’s lawsuit said.

Pennsylvania’s governor has already filed suit against the college sports cartel.

There is a bright side.

If it takes the NCAA down a few pegs while making Pennsylvania Republicans look silly(ier?), it’s all good.

Vanderbilt’s uniforms make the players, when they are set, look like bumblebees.

Chicago Bears Coach Love Smith:

“We have to get to the playoffs a different way,” Smith said. “That’s the only thing we can think about right now.”

Yeah, because losing isn’t working out so well.

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.