The Sporting Life category archive

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.

In today’s local rag, Bob Molinaro calls out the media crocodiles for their tears. A nugget:

The scope and severity of what happened at Penn State, how a supposedly great man’s legacy was destroyed, provides an invitation to tone down the florid rhetoric about football coaches.

But you can’t teach those who won’t learn. Nick Saban, Urban Meyer, Les Miles and other sideline Svengalis will continue to receive the royal treatment from TV they’ve come to expect – the kind Joe Paterno was accorded – for the simple reason that a moratorium on hero worship isn’t good for ratings.

Cult worship by TV networks, and also media with a far smaller financial stake in the game, leads not just to coddling but to the deliberate misinterpretation of a coach’s responsibilities and his school’s failings.

Read it.

At the Guardian, Dave Zirin argues that the NCAA sanctions against Penn State are a gross abuse of power. A snippet:

What Penn State did was commit horrific violations of criminal and civil laws, and they should pay every possible price for shielding Sandusky. This is why we have a society with civil and criminal courts. Instead we have Mark Emmert inserting himself in a criminal matter and acting as judge, jury and executioner, in the style of NFL commissioner Roger Goodell. As much as I can’t stand Goodell’s authoritarian, undemocratic methods, the NFL is a private corporation, and his method of punishment was collectively bargained with the NFL players association. Emmert, heading up the so-called non-profit NCAA, is intervening with his own personal judgment and cutting the budget of a public university. He has no right to do so, and every school under the auspices of the NCAA should be terrified that he believes he does.

As rotten and corrupt as big-time college sports are, Zirin may have a point. It’s certainly worth thinking about.

More to the point, in my opinion, is this: Penn State’s cover up of a serial pederast was not about football, though the worship of football made the cover-up easier.

It was about powerful persons protecting other powerful persons because they were all members of the same club. A football team, a board of directors, a religious hierachy–all clubs with their insiders who consider their fellows to be better than everyone else because, after all, they would not be insiders otherwise, now, would they?

The NCAA sanctions will encourage persons to think that the issue has somehow been dealt with, so they can enjoy their NFL and college football games, drink their beers, and buy their overpriced branded swag without thinking of the rot on the sidelines, in the locker rooms, and in front offices.

And persons will think that the NCAA sanctions somehow address the rot and avert their eyes from the the amoral corruption of rich Insiders’ Clubs throughout business, politics, religion, and, yes, sports, because

Honestly, you can’t make this stuff up.

I cannot wait for the quadrennial athletic marketing orgy in Ye Olde Country to be over.

Also, too.

Read more »

The more news I hear about the quadrennial marketing frenzy soon to take place in ye Olde Country, the more I the phrase whispered, “unmitigated disaster.”

The games do indeed give every sign of international cooperation: German humor, French humility, Italian stoicism, American respectfulness, and British abandon.

Sorry–can’t resize this video down. There is no sizing information in the script for editing.