The Sporting Life category archive

Bob Molinaro, sports writer extraordinaire at my local rag, introduces his column on the prospects of a local kid who has been demoted to third-string quarterback at Virginia’s always-a-bridesmaid-never-a-bride football factory with this bit:

“Over the years,” he said Saturday, “I think I lost my enjoyment of the game. I have to go back to the way it was and start having fun again.”

Following the Blue-Orange spring game, Sims said that sometimes he has to shake free from the feeling that football is “more of a job than anything,” though it really is for a college player.

“You’re so focused on studying film and doing everything on the practice field so perfectly,” he said, “you forget that this should be fun.”

He uses the quotation to lead into a nicely-done human interest story about the player.

He could just as easily have led into a story on the overall state of college sports and entertainment factories.

For a few of the fans, it’s obsession. For others, it’s a source of income (a bracket bucket shop). For most, it’s still a game.

For the college sports and entertainment cartel and its members, though, it’s all business.

Some Cubs fans aren’t happy.

They fear the loss of their cottage industry cottages.

As the Chicago Cubs and Mayor Rahm Emanuel near a deal on rehabbing Wrigley Field, the owners of the lucrative rooftop clubs overlooking the venerable ballpark yesterday displayed fear of the results.

Rattling a legal saber they’ve unsheathed before, the rooftop owners reiterated their belief that an agreement allowing signs that block their bird’s-eye views would violate not only their contract with the Cubs but also the city’s landmark rules for the 99-year-old stadium.

As many times as I’ve been to Chicago, I never got to Wrigley, though I did once take in a game at the old Comiskey Park, the one with the picnic tables behind screens in the outfield.

Must be fun cleaning those when it snows.

Just read this.

I can’t summarize or excerpt in a way that will do it justice, but it gets to the main reason I’m fed up with big-time college sports.

So, please, just read it.

Celebrate, then read E. Paul Zehr’s description of why playing baseball well is so challenging.

Baseball—America’s pastime now exported around the globe—combines explosive, powerful movements with extremely accurate fine motor coordination. Playing baseball effectively requires your nervous system to do an awful lot of things, do them well, and do them quickly.

The two quotes above capture this pretty well. A lot of what happens in baseball is pretty challenging for us to do. It’s difficult to do, hard to do right. And your brain has to do a lot of calculations all the while you are consciously aware of only the smallest amount of all that is going on.

Follow the link for the quotes to which he refers, as well as the rest of the post.

Tell me again, why they are called “student” athletes?

Please, Lord, make it go away.

Until then, I am with the guru.

Sign the petition.

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.