Hey, did you hear Jason Collins is a homosexual? What, the president called? He's on Good Morning America? Let's all get in touch with our feelings:
Dozens of NBA players sent messages to Collins after the story was posted Monday, many doing so through social media. The support didn't stop there, with President Barack Obama also calling to offer his support.
"It's incredible. Just try to live an honest, genuine life, and the next thing you know you have the president calling you," Collins said. "He was incredibly supportive and he was proud of me, said this not only affected my life but others going forward."
I'll skip the group hug and recall a time when professional athletes had the decency and sheer politeness not to foist their "issues" upon all of us:
When [Pittsburgh Steelers Hall of Fame linebacker Jack] Lambert was two years old his parents were divorced. He'd spend weekends with his father. Most of the time they'd play ball. A few years ago Jim O'Brien of The Pittsburgh Press asked Lambert if his parents' divorce had affected him in any way.
"I'm sure it did," Lambert said, "but I don't think it's the business of readers of The Pittsburgh Press."
John Wooden, the legendary UCLA basketball coach who, according to star prodigy Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, could never coach in today's poisoned sporting atmosphere, says it best:
“Having worked with young people all my life, I can tell you for a fact that today’s kids are crying out for discipline,” Wooden said. “Unfortunately, they aren’t getting the discipline they need at home or from most of their teachers. Until we give them the proper standards to live by, we will continue to be a nation whose young people will be in and out of trouble.”
“Sometimes I wonder if most people even know what real discipline is,” he continued. “The purpose of discipline isn’t to punish but to correct. It’s not there to be used to antagonize an individual, but to help and improve him. It’s not yelling at someone, because that kind of approach never gets you anywhere. You can only get the response you want by acting fairly and rationally.”
Of course the Wooden way would never make it today. The current world of big-time college basketball emphasizes winning to the absolute exclusion of anything else and doesn't even bother with the pretense of educating young athletes anymore, as the best prospects frequently leave for the NBA after one or two years. Wooden's famous Pyramid of Success emphasized self-control as a key building block to winning in life, which was seen as the more important goal, as well as in sports, which were but a part of life.
That young college athletes do not learn any of these lessons today is literally printed on their very skins. Does a player covered in tattoos such as that look like somebody who has an appreciation of the valuable building blocks of poise and self-control?
But our college coaches have so abandoned their roles as molders of young men that we have the shameful and ridiculous spectacle of our current national championship-winning head man actually joining in on the irresponsibility:
Louisville head coach Rick Pitino vowed that if his Cardinals won the National Championship that he would get a tattoo commemorating the win.
Well, just over two weeks after Pitino’s team cut down the nets in Atlanta, the 60-year-old coach has some fresh ink to show for it.
In a picture posted online, Pitino showed off the tattoo, located on the upper left portion of his back, which has a big red L, 2013 and “NCAA Champions 35-5” on it.
It's refreshing that Pitino would go so far as to actually brand himself as what he is: a 60-year-old jackass who has abdicated his duty to impress on the young men in his charge the enduring lessons they need to learn to win in the game of life in order to pursue the far lesser goal of winning at passing games of sport.
One fears that the mark of character he leaves on his players will be just as permanent as the ink etching he has embossed on his pasty, wrinkled back.
Bloody sock. But it was the Rhode Island taxpayer who got soaked.
Curt Schilling made tens of millions of dollars because he could throw a baseball harder and with more movement and accuracy than the vast majority of people. Along with those millions came an ego-stoking public adulation that could warp and distort the most stable person:
Schilling got the idea for 38 Studios while playing for the Arizona Diamondbacks in the early 2000s. By then he was well into his pitching career, and starting to wonder what he might do next. An aspiring businessman and budding philanthropist, Schilling thought of himself as a kind of -- well, let’s allow him to make the comparison: “I wanted to make a difference in the world and take one shot at getting Bill-Gates-rich.”
So our multi-millionaire athlete saw himself as a visionary who could do no wrong. He was a superstar. Not a baseball superstar. A superstar, period. The kind that is beyond any and all limitations. A 21st-century Renaissance man capable of deep thoughts such as this:
Schilling didn’t just want to develop a video game, let alone a sports-based one. He wanted to develop the most complex kind of video game possible -- a “massively multiplayer online role-playing game,” in which thousands of users interact inside an elaborately conceived and designed fantasy world.
[. . .]
Schilling had no idea how much time and money it took to build the software required for such a game. And he didn’t exactly help matters by weighing in with suggestions of his own. There was, for example, that instance when he mentioned in an e-mail that it might be cool to have mounted combat on flying pigs. The design team worked on nothing else for a week.
Really, who can argue with weaponized flying pigs? Now, of course Schilling is entitled to do whatever he wants with his money, no matter how far removed from reality his plans may be. But it is only due to our societal worship of the modern athlete that a taxpayer boondoggle such as this could occur:
Less than a year later, Schilling had persuaded the star- struck governor of Rhode Island, Don Carcieri, to issue $75 million in tax-free bonds for 38 Studios. That’s when “the Big Blowhard” -- as Boston Globe sports columnist Dan Shaughnessy once called Schilling -- officially transcended the familiar narrative of the ex-athlete as failed businessman. He wasn’t losing his own fortune on a bad investment, a failed car dealership or an ill-conceived restaurant franchise. He was fleecing taxpayers in order to realize his deluded dreams.
$75 million in taxpayer money because our society thinks professional athletes are somehow better people than the rest of us simply because they can play a game. We often talk about the moral and societal costs of our disproportional attachment to pro sports. Here is one occasion where we can put an actual monetary price tag on our twisted infatuations.
Agree with the poster here... one of the all-time great NFL playoff games. A Bills fan had a superb edited video of this game that sadly got pulled by youtube along with everything else on his account and it brought back to me how amazing a game this was. Both teams went all out, there were crazy momentum swings and real swashbuckling acts of heroism on both sides. Throw in a muddy Shea track and it all added up to what really was an epic. Extremely underrated to this day.
The Shea crowd was in a frenzy for the opening kickoff of the first Jets playoff game since the famous Super Bowl III victory. Anticipation boiling over, the ball is kicked, and...
(2:47 mark)
Welcome back to the playoffs, Jets fans!
Oh, man, this was playoff football as it was meant to be played. Grass, slop and a total lack of the overwhelming corporate porn we're all so used to seeing plastered all over the stadium and television screen today.
If you ever get a chance to see more of this game, do not miss the opportunity. It's a true forgotten gem.
The formerly ultra-macho (that was before the influx of Europeans) National Hockey League for whatever bizarre reason has decided to leap into the vanguard of the homosexual push into professional sports:
The National Hockey League announced a formal partnership Thursday with You Can Play, an advocacy organization dedicated to ensuring equality and respect for all athletes regardless of sexual orientation.
The agreement is the first of its kind in the four major North American male professional team sports, none of which have ever seen an active player come out as gay.
"I have no doubt that we will be first," Philadelphia Flyers scout Patrick Burke told USA TODAY Sports. "Our league is ready for this and our players are ready for this. The culture of the sport, when it comes to LGBT issues, is so far ahead of the other sports that I have no doubt that there will be openly gay athletes in the NHL in the near future."
Of course this bit of stylish PC inanity instantly reminds one of Reg Dunlop's legendary response to corporate sports weeniness in the classic comedy "Slap Shot":
(1:50 mark for zinger, though whole scene is recommended viewing)
Can you imagine him saying that in Gary Bettman's Beauty Parlor League today? He'd be suspended for 5 years, sentenced to sensitivity training for another 5 years and forced to work with homosexual organizations for the rest of his adult male life.
Is there the slightest doubt that Reg Dunlop's hockey world was a hell of a lot more fun than Gary's?
As Opening Day marks another season of the game formerly known as America's Pastime, here (in no particular order) is a starting nine of our own: A lineup of reasons why baseball has been destroyed beyond repair over the past 30-odd years:
1. The Outsourcing of "America's Game"
I like what this fan and retired U.S. Marine had to say:
The Padres have made their presence known in Latin America with an elaborate $8 million baseball complex opening this spring in the Dominican Republic, an academy of baseball for foreign players - mostly Latin Americans. Their future is apparently hinged on Latin players.
[. . .]
There is a place for foreign players in America. But to recruit overseas so extensively that American youth are overlooked to the extent they are in the small towns and inner cities throughout the land is not a good idea nor is it a good business practice. Fans will eventually - many already do - resent the 'foreignization' of our game here at home.
I remember grabbing my cap and glove and riding my bike to little league baseball practice as a kid, then riding back and watching the Game of the Week on NBC. I would watch Fred Lynn make circus catches in centerfield or George Brett leg out a triple to the gap and would be enthralled. There felt like a real connection between my local field and the major leagues. The outsourcing of the game has severed that connection, fatally, and is a huge reason why baseball has hemorrhaged young fans over the past three decades.
2. Steroids
Not much needs to be said here. This poison obviously comes in all colors. But one can especially understand why a young Dominican or Venezuelan can resort to PEDs as a way to escape poverty and make a new life for himself and his family. This quote from an early 1980s article on steroids made me immediately think of what we are doing with our Latino baseball players as soon as I read it:
Without adequate research conducted on subjects taking megadoses, it's impossible to clearly understand the potential steroids have for good or ill. One of the most extreme suggestions for cutting through the difficulties was put forth last fall in a speech by Arthur Jones, the founder, president and chief publicist of Nautilus Sports/Medical Industries Inc. At a strength-coaching conference at the University of Virginia, he announced the following grandiose plan:
"Next week I'm going south of the border to institute a 10-year study using thousands of subjects. Why south of the border? Because we can get the subjects at a price we can afford, and we can get subjects who are motivated, who will train. When you take starving subjects you can motivate them, believe me. We're going to take about 1,000 subjects and give them massive doses of steroids, and we're going to take another 1,000 and give 'em no steroids. You can't do that in this country. But you can do it down there. When they sign up for this program they'll be told in advance, 'Look, what we give you may be a drug, or it may not be. Even if it is, you won't know it. The drugs might be dangerous, and they might ruin your liver. Now if you don't want to sign up, there's the door, leave.' "
We've taken starving subjects and we've motivated them to abuse their bodies for our entertainment. No wonder it's many fans who are looking for the door.... and leaving.
3. Too Many Teams, Too Many Games
This is a problem in every sports league today yet it seems especially problematic for baseball, which at 162 games has the longest regular season by far. Having the Red Sox and Yankees play a ridiculous 18 games a season against each other does nothing to solve the problem. Fact is, teams with no real identity like Arizona, Colorado, Miami and Tampa Bay were added to an already packed slate, with the result being too many evenings of minblowingly dull games on the schedule. Contraction of teams and schedule would reinvigorate rivalries and make the daily form seem more meaningful.
4. No World Series Day Games
For those who are too young to remember, you are also too young to remember when baseball mattered. A nation would re-work its schedule around a weekday afternoon World Series game back in the day. While that may be impractical in our modern workaholic world, why there can't be weekend afternoon games is truly a black mark against the money-obsessed managers of the game today. Baseball was meant to be played on real grass in real elements, and the crisp fall air lighted by a dull autumnal sun always added to the gravitas of World Series baseball.
5. Cheap Home Runs
It may seem unbelievable but there was a time when a home run could actually kill a rally. When a team was behind by 4-5 runs and trying to stage a comeback and would get a couple of baserunners on, the idea was to keep the pressure on the pitcher, keep those bases occupied and keep moving station to station, wearing down the opponent like drops of water on a stone. A home run was seen to kill this pressure, as it emptied the bases while keeping the opponent still in the lead. This kind of baseball is completely extinct today. Now in our age of the cheap home run you can just hit keep hitting "long balls", even on breaking balls away that you pop to the opposite field, and hope to hit enough to get back in the game. Something very special has been lost in the process.
6. Uneven Financial Playing Field
Why teams aren't force to share all the revenue from their local cable sports television network deals is the biggest financial scandal in the game today. Cable TV is THE revenue stream of the modern sports age and the notion that teams in huge metropolitan areas such as New York, Los Angeles and, yes, Dallas, can use huge sums of that revenue to outspend less-fortunate teams is a black mark on competitive fairness. New York will always make more TV revenue than Kansas City, but you won't have a product to put on that New York sports superstation without a Kansas City to play against you. Why is this not obvious? Greed blinds but even the National Football League understands the necessity of sharing television revenue. Baseball seemingly never will.
7. No Real Doubleheaders
Greed strikes again with the elimination of the real doubleheader. Now doubleheaders are almost never intentionally scheduled and those that do occur are separate gates-affairs in which fans would have to pay twice to attend. A weekend doubleheader on a lazy summer day was a great way to connect with fans but the money machine that is MLB today cares not for such bon mots to their supporters. They see you as sheep to be fleeced for all they can get.
8. Too Many Fans at Every Game
Which brings a similar complaint: Who are all these fans attending all these games? As recently as the late 1980s, you could go to the park for, say, a Tuesday night game against a team worth seeing, buy a cheap seat in the bleachers and stretch out and enjoy a relaxing evening at the park. Now, except for in struggling cities, the stadiums are always filled, with often the only seats that are empty being those corporate rip-off "field" seats that ring home plate. The charm of going to the park and saying "Give me the four best you got" are long gone. It's a mystery to me just as it's a mystery that the local Applebee's parking lot is always completely filled when I drive by. Why? I DON'T KNOW. It also reminds me of the old Yogi-ism: "Nobody goes there anymore. It's too crowded."
9. Tony La Russa
The man who more than anyone has single-handedly destroyed the modern game. Retired now from the St. Louis Cardinals, his micromanaging, especially with pitchers, and his coldly technical approach to the game has given us the birth of the 4+ hour baseball game. Not 30 years ago a National League game would routinely end in two hours. AL games, which had the designated hitter, were considered long if they went past the 2:30 mark and approached 2:45. Three-hour games were rare and undesirable.
Then La Russa comes along with his situational matchups for EVERYTHING. This 1983 article on his Chicago White Sox staff shows how he robbed the starting pitcher of his manhood:
Two of the things that don't count for nearly as much as they used to are virginity and complete games. As La Russa says, "We don't pay off on complete games here." Of course, in most other places the banner of complete games must be kept waving. A CG remains a goal so that when pitchers fall short, as invariably they do, they will feel guilty and, as well, suffer one more black mark should they ever come to arbitration. Also, it is psychological. [Dick] Tidrow, who used to be a starter, explains: "It's hard to tell a starting pitcher: give me six good innings, and then I'll get you out, because then the starter's liable only to think in terms of six and he won't go but four."
After reducing the starter in stature, La Russa proceeded to re-make the bullpen into an exercise in tedium. Pulling the righty who's mowed down the first two batters because the lefty batter is coming in, despite the fact that he's only hitting .207 lifetime against the righty - doesn't matter, the charts say it's the right move - one change leading to another... and another.... and another. Extending the game, making a starting pitcher feel like he's accomplished something by going five, then using six pitchers to close out the last four innings, and, not the least, adding to the insufferably egotistical idea of the manager as the guy who wins games, as opposed to the players on the field.
The great Sparky Anderson was the ideal manager. What a marvelous quote for a skipper to make: "A baseball manager is a necessary evil." Sparky knew it took talent to win games. You get the talent and then you put it out there to do what it does best. Then guys like La Russa came along and said they were deciding games. Four-and-a-half hour games are the legacy this monumental destroyer of the simple game that is now gone has left for us all.
So now this young man is on his third school in less than four years. God only knows how Kentucky head coach / devotee of higher education John Calipari stole him from NC State in the first place and now he just tosses him in the trash like a consumed fast food wrapper:
[Point guard Ryan Harrow] transferred to Kentucky from North Carolina State in 2011 and was not eligible to play on last season's national championship squad.
Calipari indicated that Harrow, a Marietta, Ga. native, is transferring to Georgia State due to a health issue with his father. CBSSports.com reported that Harrow will request a waiver to play immediately with the Panthers due to his father's health.
Calipari's got another LOADED "class" - HA! As if any of them even know what that is - coming in next season and Harrow doesn't fit the scheme anymore so they throw the sick dad card out there and hope he doesn't have to sit out a year now that he's being run off the Kentucky team.
Remember the Ryan Harrows the next time you see a big-time college coach waxing eloquent on the joys of teaching young, impressionable kids. For there are hundreds of Harrows for every one superstar who reaches the professional mountaintop.
Wrote the following email to some friends a couple of weeks before March Madness got underway:
Can't wait to see what [coach] Mark Few does when Gonzaga plays a real team in the 2nd or 3rd round of the tourney. The kid [Gonzaga guard David Stockton, son of legendary Zag and former NBA superstar John Stockton] is a total liability, can't defend anybody, can't make an outside shot to save his life.
I had a bet on Gonzaga at BYU, for whatever reason Few gave Stockton major minutes. It was totally 4 against 5 the whole time he was out there. No reason to guard him, he might make one open shot but you can live with that and other than that he was a nonentity. If he plays a lot against a good team in the tourney it could end Gonzaga's season.
Meanwhile, had to put up with the Pitino son coaching Florida International bullsh*t earlier on ESPN. Pitino at the game sitting behind the bench cheering on his sh*thead kid, who undoubtedly deserves to be a head coach of a Division I team at the age of 30.
Richard Pitino! Sounds so adult when you say it that way.
Good God this nepotism garbage is nauseating beyond belief.
Ed. note: Yes, I am an idiot for wagering on this stuff. As this whole site is testimony to, I am trying to hold on to something that in my heart I know is not worth holding on to. Gambling is the only way I can conjure up any feeling for the games I once so enjoyed watching simply for what they were.
Well, that turned out to be an easy call.
No. 1 seed Gonzaga was "upset" by Wichita State in the second round (that's right, I refuse to call it the third round, no matter what the corporate stooges have to say) of the NCAA Tournament on Saturday.
The reason they lost was not hard to find.
The Zags were down five at the half in large part because the Stockton kid played a ton in the first half, thus allowing WSU to fill the nets. He sits on the bench where he doesn't even belong (he should be buying tickets to get into the arena) to start the second half. The Zags promptly erase the deficit and go up by six. That is an 11-point swing without the undersized Stockton in to free things up for the Shockers.
In fact, Wichita State scored only 8 points in the first 9 minutes of the second half and looked to be ice cold on offense as Gonzaga buckled down on D to turn the game.
In comes Daddy's Pride and Joy. Instant shot in the arm for the Wichita O.They proceeded to score 26 points in the next 9:30. And that does not include all the free throws they made at the end.
In short, the kid KILLED the Zags.
He's 5'10" if that and weighs around 150 pounds.
How the heck is he gonna guard ANYBODY in crunch time?
Kelly Olynyk’s jumper pulled GU within two, but Fred VanVleet, who came in averaging 3.8 points, delivered a crushing 3 over David Stockton just before the shot clock expired and [gave] Wichita State led 70-65 with 1:25 remaining.
Oh, well. It was only the first No. 1 seed in program history.
Hope they spend daddy's money well.
But this is not the first time we've seen something like this. It is more than just a trend in the corporate sports world today.
The NFL is by far the worst offender. Brian Schottenheimer, Pat Shurmur, Kyle Shanahan... all these mediocrities getting choice coaching jobs just because of their last name.
Schottenheimer, son of longtime AFL linebacker and NFL head coach Marty Schottenheimer, was offensive coordinator of a New York Jets squad that was so inept on offense that they became a national joke. Not only was he not fired, his name was constantly mentioned when head coaching positions became available. When the Jets were finally forced to part ways with him, they went out of their way to stress that Schottenheimer was not canned but that he in fact had decided not to return to the team!
Despite the abject failure of his time with the Jets, son Schottenheimer was immediatetly hired by Jeff Fisher to be offensive coordinator of the St. Louis Rams.
A source told ESPN.com's John Clayton that one of the final disagreements that led to Fisher's departure involved his son, Brandon. Jeff Fisher wanted to have his son on the staff as a quality control coach and thought that was going to be approved. Brandon Fisher helped out during the season while offensive coordinator Mike Heimerdinger was receiving cancer treatment.
For several years, owner Bud Adams has stressed he didn't want family hired on the Titans' coaching staff and he apparently stuck by those principles this week in conversations with Fisher.
Adams was clearly right. This is not like handing down a family-owned business to an idiot son, this is professional or big-time college sports we're talking about. The lie they promote is that it's a meritocracy - if you're good enough, you play, if you're not, you don't. They use this lie to justify paying murderers, rapists and all kinds of derelicts huge salaries to play for their teams.
In the good old days, fans looked at a pro sports team as a public trust. An owner of good will circa 1974 should have realized what the Buffalo Bills meant to the entire community.
Those days are gone. Now these money-hungry owners hold the community hostage for sparkling new stadiums every 15 years or so (love the Miami Heat - their arena was "outdated" after 10 years) and show their disrespect for if not outright loathing of their fans in a million ways, such as PSLs, outrageous ticket prices, etc. etc.
So it should really be no surprise that we have gotten to the point where the multimillionaires who have carved out a name for themselves in this corrupt circle are pushing their untalented kids on all the rest of us.
It's become THEIR private thing. It's not OUR thing anymore. Of course it never really was ours, but once upon a time it seemed that way, didn't it?
Nepotism is a sign of institutional rot. It is a sign that something is falling apart.
Corporate sports is falling apart.
Who wants to watch a millionaire's undeserving kids flailing away at something they are woefully unqualified to do just because they're wearing a green jersey and your favorite team has always been the guys in the green jerseys?
Another way large, soulless sports corporations have corroded the culture is through the ubiquitous pink ribbon campaigns seen in all sports today. Last October's Breast Cancer Awareness Month finally drew some blowback:
According to the website, by purchasing pink items in the NFL Shop, fans can "support the fight against breast cancer with pink NFL breast cancer awareness gear." Of course, there is a huge difference between supporting "awareness" and donating money to research. In the case of the former, most of the money ends up in the pockets of billionaire NFL owners.
When we contacted the NFL's online shop for clarification, we were told 5% of the sales are being donated to the American Cancer Society. If the pink products have a typical 100% mark-up at retail, that means the NFL is keeping 90% of the profit from the sale of Breast Cancer Awareness gear.
And then consider that only 70.8% of money the ACS receives goes towards research and cancer programs. So, for every $100 in sales of pink gear, only $3.54 is going towards research while the NFL is keeping approximately $45 (based on 100% mark-up)
Heck, there was even a documentary film made to counter the pink ribbon sham:
That the money-obsessed NFL may be profiting off cancer is certainly repulsive enough, but what these kinds of campaigns do the notion of charity in our society may actually be more damaging. There's a term for it: cause marketing. And it has nothing to do with making a concerted effort to solve a serious problem:
Not surprisingly, the appeal of TV sponsorships is emotional, not rational. “Only 10% of respondents believed that sponsorship has informed them about a brand or has been thought provoking.” The same is true of cause marketing, which at its most basic level is transactional. “Do you want to donate a dollar to help a sick child?” It’s not meant to educate, inform or change the way you think about a company. It’s meant to make you feel. If you want thought provoking watch PBS. Appeals to the head should never be mistaken for matters of the heart.
When you wear your officially-licensed pink product, you are not really doing anything to cure cancer. Rather, you are indulging in a feel-good group moment that is more about social conformity than charity. You can give without giving of yourself in even the slightest way and you can do so without having to even turn away from your trivial pursuits for a moment:
Do these programs raise money? Keep a Child Alive has raised over $40,000 through mobile donations during Alicia Keys ‘As I Am’ tour. During her concerts, Alicia Keys dims the house lights, plays a clip from her ‘Alicia in Africa’ film, and asks concertgoers to pull out their cell phones and text ‘ALIVE’ to 90999. So far, over 8,000 donations have been made.
Where does the money go? And does it do any actual good? Who cares? Alicia's on to the next song.
Perhaps most disturbing is the rank hypocrisy of the NCAA. Now that March Madness is here, we will hear multiple riveting accounts of the late Jim Valvano's tragic battle with cancer. Coaches Against Cancer will be highlighted. Pink sneakers on the sidelines will be recalled. All brought to you by the official sponsor of March Madness:
There’s no better time than the fury of NCAA March Madness for Coke Zero to introduce the next iteration of its Enjoy Everything campaign. Titled, “It’s Not Your Fault,” Coke Zero debuts its new integrated marketing campaign during NCAA championships.
The campaign takes a lighthearted and comedic approach to say that with Coke Zero you can Enjoy Everything in life. “It’s Not Your Fault” also celebrates guys-being-guys. The Enjoy Everything campaign has evolved on the notion of owning quintessential guy moments of bonding and camaraderie, from sports and entertainment to humor, gaming and music.
“We’re talking to men more overtly with ‘It’s Not Your Fault’,” said Pio Schunker, SVP and Head of Integrated Marketing Communications, North America Group. “We’re positioning Coke Zero as a defender and celebrator of guy enjoyment.”
Excuse me for looking past the NCAA's crocodile tears over Jimmy V and focusing on this:
Acesulfame-K (acesulfame potassium) or Ace-K
An artificial sweetener used in Coca-Cola Zero®. Acesulfame-K is 150-200 times sweeter than sugar and is a potential cancer-causing agent. Similar to saccharin, Acesulfame-K enhances a beverages’ sweet taste while extending its shelf life. Acesulfame-K failed to meet FDA standards. Acesulfame-K is marketed under the brand, Sunett and is in Sweet One sweeteners.
Enjoy everything in life, sports fans. Don't forget to drink your Ace-K. And, please, please, please, think of the poor cancer victims as you head past the official team store on your way out of the arena.
For some reason this quaint video of Tampa Bay Buccaneers fans celebrating on the field after the final game of the 1977 season, which saw the second-year expansion franchise win its second straight game after starting off its NFL run with 26 losses in a row, has me transfixed:
It's just a lovely moment in time. The fans are on the field and some are tearing down a goalpost yet the scene has its own calm order and even a beauty about it. The police are present but there are no apparent problems and the fans seem well-behaved and comfortable on the field of play. One can feel an organic sense of community between an NFL team and its fans that is totally absent in the world of bigtime sports today.
For of all the thousands of ways modern corporate sports expresses its utter soullessness, the game-day experience has to rate near the top. Going to a game today means a non-stop assault on the senses, both in mass advertising bombardment and a constant aural and visual stampede that seems designed to prevent the spectator from settling in to watch.... the game.
Contrast the '77 Buc fans with this disgusting mess:
Note the canned appeal to fan enthusiasm. Note the number of officially-licensed merchandise our modern consumerist sports fans drape themselves in. Note the shrill, childish appeal to an artificial excitement as opposed to the casual yet more authentic joy shown by the Tampa fans.
It's not just the NHL that has lowered itself to this crass presentation. The NBA and NFL are every bit as vulgar and overtly commercial in their game-day experience. MLB is relatively constrained by the traditional pastoral nature of its game, but is struggling to overcome those limitations and join in on the rot. A ticket to a sporting event used to mean a night watching talented players perform. Now it is as much, if not more, about the "show" than the game itself.
Really, now: How does that Verizon Center stupidity differ from this?
This is all another way that the corporate sports machinery has separated the fan from the game. I recall reading Washington Post sportswriter William Gildea's captivating book "When the Colts Belonged to Baltimore" some 20-odd years ago. Gildea talks of going to confession at his local Catholic parish on a Saturday evening as a young boy and standing in line next to Gino Marchetti, then going to Memorial Stadium the next day and cheering him on.
Yes, those days are gone forever, but look how far we've slid from that kind of tie between town and team.
Nowadays, you sit in your seat and "make some noise" when the exploding scoreboard cues you like a trained seal. The multi-millionaires you are cheering for are kept under glass like a priceless museum exhibit.
What's more, we've turned our athletes into pixels in a video game. You do not relate to a pixel. You manipulate it and enjoy the sensory thrills it provides in bursts and spurts.
You do not engage the "event". You respond to the defined "highs" within the defined boundaries. In short, you remain behind the ropes and bask in the reflected glory of the spectacle.
Before the dominance of the corporate dullards, pro sports was accessible. It was something you could touch. Now it is mass-produced product wrapped in a velvet bubble. And inside that velvet bubble is a tattooed thug hopped up on steroids, crashing like a pixel into another blinking light.
We're never getting on that field in Tampa Bay again, folks.
They're not being paid this much to attend to the men's wrestling team's needs. (What's a men's college wrestling team? Uh, sorry, showing my age there):
Athletics directors at schools in the NCAA's Football Bowl Subdivision (excluding four that moved up to the FBS in 2012) make an average salary of roughly $515,000, up more than 14% since USA TODAY Sports last looked at AD compensation in October 2011.
The above passage reminds me of a prophetic warning ushered by LSU basketball coach Dale Brown about the future of college coaching almost 30 years ago. Brown was swimming in the polluted waters of major college basketball every bit as much as his peers, but at least he had the decency to be disgusted by it:
I'll tell you what you're going to have left in this [coaching] profession. A bunch of narcissistic, money-hungry sonofabitches that love to see themselves on TV in their three-piece suits and alligator shoes because good people are fed up with the crap you've got to go through.
Now of course he was talking about this...
... and not the ADs who hire, indulge and excuse his ilk. But Brown's point remains: The corporate sports colossus has distorted, disfigured and destroyed all the best qualities of college sports. And it's the money-hungry sonofabitches who are cashing in.
Scroll down a bit and look at the two facial shots that are right next to each other. So obvious this guy was taking steroids to extend his fading career, which explains his erratic and apparently violent tendencies today:
Now take a look at these two pictures of another athlete, one from early in his career and the other from after he extended his fading career longer than would have been expected:
Lastly, take a look at these two pictures of an athlete, one from early in his career and the other from after he concluded a consistently excellent career:
Does this prove anything? Of course not. But hey, it doesn't look good.
Because of the secrecy and protectiveness that the bottom-line-obsessed powers that rule Major League Baseball have shown on this issue, which can be equated with the Catholic Church's deliberate mishandling of the pedophiles in its clergy ranks, we are forced to resort to eye tests and scanning for statistical aberrations to determine who was and who wasn't juicing.
And I've said it before and I'll keep on saying it as long as I got breath: As a fielder, Mr. Iron Man Hero was not fit to hold the jock of Alan Trammell, the best overall shortstop of the 1980s. I mean he was planted like a statue out there, and if the ball wasn't hit right to him, he wasn't gonna get it. And then the stats nerds rave about his amazing fielding percentage! HAH!
Oh, but he had more power than Trammell. Yeah, and his power numbers just so happened to go up late in his career (highest slugging percentage came at age 38!), unlike every player who ever played the game before the steroids era.
I am not a Detroit Tigers fan. However, I was a young baseball fan during Trammell's era. And I do believe that no player has been hurt more by steroids in Major League Baseball than Alan Trammell. The man should have been put in Cooperstown years ago.
Well, another February has come and gone and once again, outside of our failed schools, bloated government departments and large corporations,nobody was clamoring for Black History Month.
There is a reason for this and a method behind the madness for the entities who continue to insist on foisting this stale fruitcake on us every year. Large corporations, being amoral and unfeeling by nature, latch onto cheap emotional appeals such as this to give themselves a veneer of "concern." They always do it lame though because, being the large corporations that they are, they have no real concern and hence no genuine feel. So the product they spew forth on such occasions is tepid, flat and very, very safe. And usually goes over as well as a lead balloon. These kind of campaigns always come off like the two-hour human resources department seminar on time management at Soulless Inc. The more you think about it, the more it numbs you. Best not to think about it at all.
However, in keeping with the name of this blog, I would like to ruminate a bit on ESPN and its always-banal Black History Month observations, not so much as a cultural critique, but as to how this hollow mythologizing of the black athlete in the face of reality affects the quality of the sports we watch.
Anyone who follows big-time professional and college football and basketball at all knows that these two sports are currently suffering from serious crises in quality. Lack of fundamentals, erratic and dangerous behavior by players on and off the field and an absence of that undefinable "joy" that accompanies a well-played game featuring talented teams are in evidence everywhere. These two sports also just happen to be dominated by young black male athletes. And what ESPN will never tell you is that there is a direct link between the lack of discipline shown by the young black athlete in America today and the decline in quality of these sports.
What the ESPN talking heads also will not tell you is that they are to a large extent responsible for this sad decline in the quality of these two sports today, a decline that has been fostered in a very real way by the complete lack of concern for the black male athlete's content of character, the very holy icon that the charlatans at this large corporation pretend one month a year to champion.
Big-time sports has always valued sheer athleticism over content of character. It is the nature of the beast. The poor behavior of athletes was widely overlooked in the lily-white days of Babe Ruth and Red Grange if the athlete in question could play at a high level. This was always bad for big-time sports but because the white athletes who dominated this era had a solid social structure that they could fall back on - intact family unit, a community that reinforced prevailing moral norms, a valuing of educational opportunities and so forth - the sports themselves could overcome the failings of a certain number of their players and still thrive.
Enter the rise of the black athlete in the late 1960s-early 1970s. That they did not have the structures in place to overcome the corroding message big-time sports was selling is a sad sociological fact. They did not have intact families, strong communities reinforcing moral behavior or a valuing of educational opportunity. Thus, the message that "your athletic ability is all that matters" hit the young black male particularly hard.
The crucial period was the early 1970s. Black athletes were going mainstream for the first time in American society. And all the wrong messages were sent to the very people who were least equipped to deal with the consequences of those messages. If pro and college sports had sent the black athletes of the early 1970s a strong signal that undisciplined or flat-out criminal behavior would not be tolerated, generations of young black athletes to come may have realized that a certain standard would be expected of them if they wanted to succeed at a very lucrative and esteem-enhancing profession that just so happened to value a set of skills that they held in abundance.
Instead, big-time sports, which at this time was still in the process of becoming the corporate goliath that we are all suffering under today, sent a clear signal to a vulnerable black community that criminal behavior would not affect a player's athletic career as long as he could perform on the field. Thus we have Johnny Rodgers winning the 1972 Heisman Trophy after a highly-regarded career at Nebraska that was certainly not going to be derailed by the fact that he committed armed robbery.
We also had the 1972 Ohio State-Minnesota basketball game, a video of which you will surely never see during ESPN's celebration of Black History Month, in which the black players who made up the majority of the Gophers' roster staged an assault exclusively on the white Ohio State players, ignoring the black Buckeye hoopsters that happened to cross their paths:
Instead of a fight erupting from blows struck in the heat of competition, this was a cold, brutal attack, governed by the law of the jungle. It could be considered the inevitable result of the malaise that afflicts the sport these days, a stunning example of responsibility abdicated by a coach, the players he recruited and taught and the fans who followed them.
Was the University of Minnesota outraged by the behavior of its student athletes? Quite the contrary. In a letter to SI responding to its account of this sporting race riot, the Minnesota athletic director was quick to throw out one of the earliest uses of the race card in an attempt to turn the violent perpetrators into the victims they would so often be represented as in the decades to come:
[Author William F.] Reed describes the whole incident as "a cold, brutal attack, governed by the law of the jungle." Representatives of the black community have taken an active interest in the affair and deeply resent this as a thoroughly distasteful slur on their race. I must agree.
Here's one of the thugs who joined in on this savage attack. From the original SI article:
Dave Winfield, who recently joined the Gopher varsity, joined the fray, too, dodging to mid-court where some Minnesota reserves and civilians were trying to wrestle Ohio State substitute Mark Wagar to the floor. Winfield leaped on top of Wagar when he was down and hit him five times with his right fist on the face and head.
How did Winfield's shockingly violent role in this affair affect his standing in the world of big-time sports? Well...
In his senior year in college, Dave Winfield was a wanted man. In 1973, Winfield, a senior at the University of Minnesota, was selected in four drafts in three different professional sports. Just weeks after being selected as the fourth overall pick in the baseball draft by the San Diego Padres, Winfield was named Most Valuable Player of the College World Series..
No doubt he would have been drafted by both hockey leagues as well if only he knew how to skate. Winfield of course went on to a profitable and celebrated Major League Baseball career.
Rodgers and Winfield are just two examples of how the evil message to young black males was sent and solidified: If you are a superior athlete, you will not be held accountable for your actions. The message was received and is now evident in full bloom in the selfish, shallow athletes we see dominating big-time football and basketball today. And right there beside them is the total sports network to wave the banner high. Every night you can see the glorification of superior individual athletic ability at the expense of team play. To watch ESPN is to see that it is devoted to promoting a bizarre religious cult of the individual athlete.
It can't be hard to see how the glorification of individual athletic ability can degrade the quality of athletic performance. No need to even list examples, for they are available on a daily basis during this, one of the worst years in college basketball in memory. Offense is almost non-existent, yet the ESPN "critics" almost never mention the focus on individual play and the seeming inability of major college basketball players to work as a five-man unit to get the ball in the basket.
Football is every bit as bad. Half-hearted performances, terrible execution, dropped passes by players looking to make the "big play", the emphasis on "hitting" instead of solid tackling, undisciplined penalties galore and more have marred the college and pro games to the point where they have become frankly unwatchable.
This is the inevitable endpoint of the message that athletic ability is all that matters. We told our young black athletes that they could go to college and learn nothing, that they could commit serious crimes and keep playing, and we seem surprised when this and this happens.
An authentic examination of the lives and histories of black Americans by a sports network would at least consider the possibility that the ethics of modern, corporate professional and major college sports have helped warp the values of the young black males who strive in overwhelming numbers to make up the playing ranks. Don't hold your breath waiting for ESPN to tackle that next February.
Great game I stumbled upon here. 1982 NBA Playoffs, Washington at Boston, Game 5, Bullets facing elimination. Celtics blow a 5-point lead with a minute left in regulation, Bullets blow a 5-point lead with a minute left in the first overtime.
Full disclosure: Yes, I was a Bullets fan. Not that you can tell from this write-up.
Some highlights:
1. Frankie Johnson drops three 3-balls to rally the Bullets from an 18-point deficit, the last one being an absolute bomb.
2. Frankie Johnson in first OT is blanketed with the shot clock running down and ducks underneath Cornbread Maxwell, who's like 4 times his size, and makes a gorgeous, gorgeous pass to Greg Ballard, who screened and rolled for the wide open jumper. GREAT play. 1:33 mark of First OT video.
3. Rick Mahorn with 30 seconds left in the first OT knocks Tiny Archibald into 2013 with a devastating pick that is vintage Bruise Brothers. I'm not kidding, Tiny just woke up last week and said "Whoa, what happened?" Mahorn then makes the open jumper while Archibald lies crushed at his feet. Honestly, the fact that it occurred during a crucial possession in overtime of a playoff game has to put it in the running for greatest NBA pick of all time. Love how he primed his brick wall of a body as his unwitting victim approached. So sweet. 6:27 mark of First OT video.
4. The last 10 seconds of that first OT are why I hated those Celtics teams with a white-hot intensity. Not saying it was a bad call but, damn, that ref couldn't wait to blow the whistle on that jump ball (1 second into play? c'mon!) and then the absolute BS at the buzzer. Could not stand those Celtics teams.
NBA on USA - 1982 Eastern Semis: Washington @ Boston, Game five, end of the 4th Quarter
P.S.: How long has Hubie Brown been alive, anyway?
An investigation encompassing everything from fake NFL game jerseys to counterfeit Super Bowl tickets ended with more than $17 million worth of items seized and 41 people arrested, according to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
The federal agency began its probe -- which it dubbed "Operation Red Zone" in reference to the area between the 20-yard line and goal line for a football team's offense -- on September 1, 2012, and wrapped it up on February 6.
One would think that securing the borders would be a higher priority than making sure that consumerist sports fans purchase "official" jerseys made in Asian sweatshops instead of cheap knockoffs made in Asian sweatshops, but then again, distracting ICE from enforcing current immigration laws is in these corrupt sports' pashas' interests as well:
