Tag: sports

The NBA is making it perfectly clear that neither its owners nor its players have any use for America:

Mavericks owner Mark Cuban says the national anthem isn’t being played before games at American Airlines Center, and he has no plans to play it going forward. The team owner refused to comment further when reached by The Athletic.

According to the outlet, Cuban and the team didn’t make it known they were going to remove the anthem from the pregame routine, but “a number of team employees only noticed the removal of the anthem on their own.” Those employees also say there was no explanation as to why the anthem was removed.

Cuban, who usually isn’t shy about sharing his opinion on current events, was silent Tuesday night when The Athletic dropped its report. 

Everyone is finally beginning to see the difference between identification papers and national identity, even if they don’t fully understand the significance or the consequences yet.

1. Tom Brady cemented his status as the Greatest Of All Time. Not that it was actually in any doubt at this point, but he put Joe Montana further in the rear-view mirror with a near-flawless performance.  21-of-29 for 201 yards, 3 TD and 0 INT isn’t flashy, it’s just winning football.
2. Patrick Mahomes is legitimately amazing and he can throw long, accurate passes from positions that no one else ever has. But I doubt he’ll have a long career in the NFL if he has to play that way.
3. Shaq Barrett was the MVP, with honorable mention going to Devin White. No one, literally no one, expected Tampa to keep the Chiefs under twenty points, let alone ten. Barrett was most impactful player on the most important unit. The Buccaneers’ defense put pressure on Mahomes on 29 of 56 dropbacks, the most pressure in Super Bowl history.
4. Brady greatness goes well beyond his own performance. He inspires other players to play better and in a more disciplined way. None of the three guys who scored touchdowns last night, Gronkowski, Fournette, and Brown, are even on the team if he’s not there. 
5. Bruce Arians may not know how to fix broken toys, but he certainly knows how to make them work again, for at least a little while.
6. I suspect the pandemic helped Tampa win the Super Bowl this year, by keeping its problem players away from temptation and out of trouble.
7. The NFL can change all the rules it likes. Defense still wins championships.
8. Sportswriters can stop crying about Eric Bienemy not being offered a head coaching job now. Todd Bowles proved that if they want to cry about a black man not being offered a job this year, he’s the better candidate.
9. I’m pretty sure Mahomes actually threw three interceptions. The officials appeared to blow an early whistle on the one where the Chiefs’ WR had his hand between the ball and the ground.
10. KC fans can complain all they want, but the Chiefs deserved every single flag that was thrown with the exception of the meaningless post-TD flag on Mathieu. Tony Romo actually described a holding call as “soft” when the LT tackled an OLB and took him to the ground while strangling him with his arm completely locked around his throat. The KC defense simply refused to adjust their play to the obvious fact that the referees were calling a moderately tight game.

I never watch the halftime show so I could have missed it, but it was interesting to see that the league appeared to keep the SJW nonsense to a minimum, with the exception of a female sideline reporter warbling about how important it was that there was a female referee on the crew.

Warning: anyone who feels the need to go off-topic by talking about themselves or their disapproval of the sport, the league, or sports in general will be spammed and banned.

I remember this championship fight. I was deeply disappointed that Leon Spinks defeated The Greatest, Muhammed Ali. I still remember the 45 that the older neighbor kid down the street who years later drove me to school used to play.

Muhammed… Muhammed Ali

He floats like a butterfly and stings like a bee.

What I found fascinating about this article from the Sports Illustrated vault is the way the two boxing champions absolutely refused to engage in all the posturing and nonsense invited by their entourages, and instead insisted on exhibiting respect for their opponent.

Ali accepted the decision without complaint. Around him rose anguished cries of robbery, of a fix, of being had. Ali, now the ex-champion, walked to his dressing room. He was crying, but his head was held high. He ignored the madness all about him.

He sat down and sipped a glass of carrot juice. Sarrea, his face emotionless, kneeled and began to remove Ali’s shoes. Someone shouted, “It was robbery.”

Ali’s head came up. “Shut up. Nobody got robbed. I lost the fight.”

The door burst open, and Michael Dokes, one of Ali’s sparring partners, flew into the room. He was furious. Indicating Ali’s associates, he said to Ali, “They fed you a lot of crap. They told you you were in shape and you weren’t. You listened to all the wrong people.”

“That’s right, not in shape,” someone said, grabbing the excuse from the air.

“Oh, man,” Ali said in disgust. “First I was robbed and now I’m not in shape. Why don’t you listen? I was beaten. I lost. He won. Can’t you understand that?”

Even after beating Ali, Spinks refused to accept the idea that Ali’s mantle had been passed on to him.

“I’ll fight Ali just like I’d fight any other guy who challenged me in the street. But I’ll never say anything against him. I’m not going against the man, I’m just trying to beat him. He was my idol, he still is my idol—and when the fight is over he still will be.”

In his dressing room Spinks quieted a small gathering. “Celebrate later,” he said, “but now, first things first. Before anyone starts jiving we must give our thanks to the Lord.” The new heavyweight champion of the world led the prayer: “Dear God, thank you for answering my prayers. Thank you for my not getting hurt, and for my man not getting hurt. Thank you for the miracle. All praise sweet Jesus.”

Late Friday night, two days after the fight, Leon Spinks stood at his hotel room window, staring out at the lights of Las Vegas.

“The thing I don’t like,” he said, “is people calling me the greatest. I am not the greatest. I may be the best young heavyweight, but he was the greatest. And he is still the greatest.”

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how you should do it.

The great ones become great through creating competition even where none exists. A former Patriot observes something about Tom Brady that sounds exactly like the Sports Guy describing Michael Jordan:

I remember Cris Carter saying this at the rookie symposium: He was at his best and most successful when he created the problem for himself. And what that means is, he would walk into the room, and he would have a chip on his shoulder from what he created, to where he would just look at a guy and say, man, that guy doesn’t like my mom, or that guy is trying to take food off my plate. I’m gonna go show him. That’s the little details of being a professional in this league, and how competitive it is to where eventually it just gets boring—you have to figure out how to create your own edge. Tom’s done an amazing job of that time and time and time again.

Don’t relax. Don’t coast. Don’t stop beating the dead horse. Compete, create your own edge, and conquer. 

Convergence has struck at baseball history, as SJW sportswriters vote to keep Curt Schilling out of the Hall of Fame:

Schilling is responsible for one of the great and iconic moments in baseball history. He was one of the all-time great postseason pitchers and had more than 3,000 regular-season strikeouts in his career.

Yet tonight, we’re going to find out if he has been passed over for the ninth time for a spot in the Baseball Hall of Fame. It’s going to be close. About 46 percent of the ballots have been made public and of those, Schilling is getting 75 percent of the vote. That number, 75 percent, is the minimum needed. But in the past, players on the borderline lose a percent or two when the ballots that weren’t made public are added in. 

In other words: Schilling probably won’t make it. And why is that? Because he likes Donald Trump. And because his support of things like what happened at the Capitol on Jan. 6 turns off baseball writers.

(UPDATE: Schilling did not make it. He received 71.1 percent.)

Cancel culture? Yes, if Schilling is canceled. He should definitely be in the Hall of Fame. But the baseball writers who vote on this want to be thought police, too.

This is a big moment for the Hall of Fame, and maybe for the whole idea of cancel culture. The Hall ballot says: “Voting shall be based upon the player’s record, playing ability, integrity, sportsmanship, character, and contributions to the team(s) on which the player played.’’

Voters — longtime baseball writers — have been struggling over the “integrity, sportsmanship, character” part for years. That’s why Pete Rose isn’t in. He bet on the game, which directly affected the integrity of the sport. Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens, accused in the steroid scandal, will likely not be voted in tonight either. They cheated the game.

But Schilling? He’s being kept out because the writers don’t like how he votes, how he thinks and how he talks. I’m not just guessing either. In the days before the Hall vote the past few years, this year included, writers have explained why they didn’t vote for Schilling.

As small and petty as this may be, if you haven’t grasped that the society in which you grew up in is now over, this should be another wake-up moment for you. This is not our culture, it is Zero History culture. We cannot live with the converged and they certainly don’t want to live with us.

The Mamba mentality applies to law as well as basketball.

You will be surprised how often people do the same things. … And if you can learn people’s patterns, and you can learn their tendencies and habits, by watching them game after game, you’ll see that they do the same things, and you can take advantage of it. And you can manipulate that. 

– Kobe Bryant

Apparently the legendary Hank Aaron was a massive Cleveland Browns fan.

I still believe that Bill Belichick is the greatest NFL coach in history. But the results of this season make it clear that Tom Brady was not successful because of his coach in New England:

Sean Murphy-Bunting is 23 years old, and just 21 months ago he was a second-round pick out of Central Michigan. He spent his rookie year as a reserve corner on Bruce Arians’s first Buccaneers team, a group that hung around a while, but was kept out of the playoffs by consecutive losses to end the season.

In short, he really didn’t know what was coming when Tom Brady became a teammate.

Now, he knows.

“Tom’s not only a superstar, he’s a champion,” Murphy-Bunting said. “So he brings that mentality, that mindset each and every day to work. He’s a true vet and a true professional. And he just brings the excitement and energy out of his guys. He shows up to meetings early, he sits in the front every meeting, he always has his notepad, whether it’s a five-minute team meeting or a 30-minute team meeting.

“His habits are just so good that they rub off on everybody else. It makes everyone want to buy into what he’s doing and how he’s doing it, because of how successful he’s been by doing these things.”

You can’t choose to have more talent than the next guy, but you can always choose to work harder than him. Tom Brady has nothing to prove. He has SIX Super Bowl rings. He is the Greatest Of All Time. But one reason why he is the greatest is because he continues to push himself every day, in every meeting, every practice, and every game. 

Female athletes make it clear that they are more dedicated to radical ideology than to actual women’s sports:

Several amicus briefs were filed Monday in support of Hecox v. Little, a challenge to Idaho’s law banning transgender athletes from participating in women’s sports in school.

Tennis icon Billie Jean King, World Cup champion Megan Rapinoe and WNBA legend Candace Parker were among the more than 175 athletes who joined Athlete Ally and the Women’s Sports Foundation in signing a brief filed by Lambda Legal with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. The brief highlights the athletes’ beliefs in the importance of equal opportunity for girls and women to participate in sports at all levels. 

“There is no place in any sport for discrimination of any kind,” King said. “I’m proud to support all transgender athletes who simply want the access and opportunity to compete in the sport they love. The global athletic community grows stronger when we welcome and champion all athletes—including LGBTQI+ athletes.”

So be it. If equality is to be the standard, then logic dictates that all discrimination in sports be abandoned. Let men, women, and self-defined freakshows all compete directly against each other. That’s the fastest, most efficient way to get back to having all-men’s sports.

It’s not the perfumed princes, selected for ideological conformity and corrupted by their promised pensions and corporate advisory board positions, who matter. It’s the young men who actually fight:

The biggest cheer of the day at the 121st annual Army-Navy game Saturday was reserved for President Donald Trump.

“USA! USA!” roared the crowd moments after the president took the field for the pre-game coin toss. He also received a warm reception from members of players representing both academies.