The sub-genre of trade publications features some awfully bizarre undertakings–you know, things targeted specifically at long-haul truckers based in the Sun Belt or HVAC repairmen or, I dunno, racist actuaries. However, I declare this one to be without peer until something weirder comes along.
I claim no particular expertise when it comes to college hoops, but nevertheless I heed the siren call of the bracket each March …
My Final Four teams for this year are: Kansas, Kansas State, Wisconsin, and Duke. Kansas over Duke in the finals.
If history is any guide, these picks will be spectacularly wrong.
This is, I suppose, apropos of nothing, but I’ve been doing some reading up on the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich. I’m struck by how momentous those Games were. They are of course mostly remembered for the “Black September” terrorist attacks that took the lives of 11 Israeli athletes and coaches, but consider what else unfolded during that summer in Munich …
- Mark Spitz wins seven gold medals and then has to be evacuated because officials feared he’d be targeted by terrorists because of his Jewish heritage.
- The USSR defeats the US in basketball under wildly controversial circumstances.
- Dan Gable wins the gold in wrestling without ever surrendering a point.
- Olga Korbut wins gold and in the process transforms women’s gymnastics into a young girls’ sport.
- The enigmatic Teofilo Stevenson wins the gold in boxing for Cuba and represents the pinnacle of Castro’s sports programs.
- A Russian sprinter wins two gold medals after his heavily favored American counterparts miss the race because they were told the wrong starting time.
- Two American sprinters are banned from the Olympics for life because they “acted casually” on the medal stand during the playing of the National Anthem.
- American Frank Shorter wins the marathon even though a German student in a track suit sneaks onto the track, runs the last two miles, and crosses the finish line ahead of Shorter.
- As well, geopolitical rivalries–rivalries that would in many ways shape the second of half of the 20th century–were played out in Munich: the U.S. and the Soviets in basketball, track and wrestling; The U.S. and Cuba in boxing; the Israelis and many hostile pan-Arab nations in a number of different competitions.
I doubt we’ll ever see anything like it again.
Yahoo(!)’s Steve Henson pens a lazy hit piece regarding Nomar Garciaparra’s recent retirement:
Garciaparra’s name didn’t come up in the Mitchell Report. He never testified before Congress. He wasn’t implicated in BALCO. Yet numerous people in baseball, from executives to reporters to other players, talk about his career as if performance-enhancing drug use was a given.
Indeed, no Mitchell Report, no forced testimony before Congress, no whiff of BALCO, but … a nebulous whisper campaign–which may or may not exist solely in the penumbras of Steve Henson’s imagination (I mean, as long as we’re making baseless assaults on someone’s professionalism, I may as well get in on the act)–is enough to justify this kind of rank speculation. But wait, there’s also Exhibit B!
It is the hulking figure on the SI cover, though, that everyone remembers. And in hindsight, with what we know about the era and Mark McGwire and Barry Bonds and A-Rod and Manny Ramirez … well, make sure to take a look at that cover.
By all means, look at that cover and ask yourself whether he looks like anything other than an elite professional athlete who takes care of himself.
Unless Henson is prepared to name, quote and fact-check those “executives,” “reporters” and “other players,” he needs to stop making accusations.
Perhaps it’s my general distrust of cops (I said general–not absolute), but this strikes me as a troubling development:
The Chicago Police Department is dramatically expanding its use of Tasers, adding several hundred more and putting them in the hands of patrol officers for the first time, officials said Wednesday.
The “stun guns” will go in every squad car to give front-line beat officers a more effective way to protect themselves and calm a disturbance.
While tasers are measurably less lethal than, say, the use of service revolvers, they are lethal. And cops aren’t as loath to use them as they should be. The problem is that cops are allowed to use tasers when someone is resisting arrest. “Resisting arrest,” however, often becomes a procedural cover for “I’d just really like to tase this asshole.” It’d be nice if departments would restrict taser use to incidences of active resistance–i.e., resistance to the point of endangerment. If a cop can’t physically remove someone who’s merely making dead weight of himself without using a taser, then perhaps said cop needs a desk job.
I am a sick man … I am a spiteful man. I am an unattractive man. I believe my liver is diseased.
The luminous Dostoyevsky needs no validation from little ol’ me, but the opening lines of Notes from the Underground set up character and pathos just about perfectly.
Here’s hoping we never see this headline during the regular season.
Sure, I’m duty-bound to worry about Pujols’ aching back, just as I was duty-bound to worry about his foot, elbow, actual age, etc. And despite the worry du jour, he’ll likely play a full season and hit something like .330/.425/.625 with 40 jacks. We’ll be worried about him the whole time, just as we always are. It’s what we do, and it’s what he does.
Former Florida State safety Myron Rolle apparently raises character concerns among those paid to poke and prod in advance of the NFL’s annual cattle-call:
During a 45-minute interview before the Senior Bowl in January with seven members of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers staff, including head coach Raheem Morris and general manager Mark Dominik, one member of the staff asked Rolle what it felt like to desert his team this season.“I hadn’t heard that one before,” said Rolle, who pauses ever so slightly before answering to consider his thoughts. “My initial reaction was a bit of confusion. It never was anger, but I was more bothered by the question because if anyone knew my involvement with my teammates, how much they care about me and how much I care about them.”
For the uninitiated, “desert[ing] his team this season” refers to Rolle’s acceptance of the prestigious Rhodes scholarship. It also refers to his missing the first quarter and change of the 2008 Maryland game (a game the Seminoles won, by the way) so that he could interview for said scholarship.
I’d submit that it’s the NFL–and not Rolle–that needs to interrogate its own character. It says much that the NFL views Rolle’s commendable life choices as being somehow “red-flaggish.” They want meat for the grinder. They don’t want someone insufficiently dedicated to a career of head trauma, cortisone shots, smelling salts, and early infirmity. It’s repugnant, really.
I hope Rolle says goodbye to all that and consoles himself with, say, an Ivy League medical degree, and I hope more NFL-caliber college players take the Jacob Hickman route.
(H/T: Smart Football)
Last season, Prince Fielder and his ‘mates choreographed this objectively awesome celebration, which took place after a walk-off win over San Fran:
Today, Fielder was made to pay by the Giants’ Barry Zito, who plunked him with a fastball in his first plate appearance of the exhibition season. Brewers beat writer Tom Haudricourt then set up Fielder for the quote of the spring:
I asked Prince if he thought the celebration was worth taking one in the back.
“Hell yeah,” Fielder said. “That’s something I did with me and my teammates. It has nothing to do with them.
“You’re damn right it was worth it.”
(H/T: BTF)
