Tag: sports

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.

Paolo Rossi, one of the true greats of Italian soccer, has died at 64.

È morto Paolo Rossi, l’eroe del Mundial 82

Addio a Pablito, l’uomo che fece piangere il Brasile e trascinò gli azzurri di Bearzot alla conquista della coppa del mondo. Aveva 64 anni. 

Paolo Rossi, “Pablito”, l’eroe del Mundial del 1982, è morto all’età di 64 anni per un male incurabile. Rossi è morto all’ospedale di Siena dove si trovava ricoverato da qualche tempo per l’aggravarsi della malattia. L’annuncio è stato dato dalla moglie, Federica Cappelletti, con un post su Instagram.

Rossi arguably played the greatest single game anyone has ever played at the 1982 World Cup in the epic game against Brazil. He scored all three of Italy’s three goals in the Azzurri’s 3-2 victory. He was an amazing champion and the winner of one of the best games in soccer history.

 Outkick exposes the ridiculous Women in STEM SEC Football stunt that Vanderbilt arranged last weekened:

When I saw this whole ‘Vanderbilt needs a kicker’ story start to emerge, I didn’t pay a lot of attention to it. And then, like a lot of people, I watched on Saturday, because I was like, ‘Well, I want to see. Is she actually gonna attempt field goals? Is she gonna attempt extra points?’ It’s an intriguing story for this Vanderbilt-Missouri game. And as I’m watching, they keep trotting out the punter, who actually was probably Vanderbilt’s best player on the field on Saturday, and he punted seven times in a row for an average of 43 yards. And so, as I’m watching, I’m thinking, ‘Wait a minute, it’s a lot tougher to punt than it is to kick off in a game.’

“So, this story that Vanderbilt didn’t have a kicker doesn’t make sense to me, because the punter could have clearly run up and popped the ball up in the air and kicked the ball a lot further than she did. This is not rocket science.”

Read the whole thing. Vanderbilt actually had two options known to be far superior to the future namesake of the Sarah Fuller Courage Award, both of whom were male, and in whom Vanderbilt was equally uninterested.

Then again, it wasn’t as if the stunt was going to cost Vanderbilt. It’s not as if actually trying to win the game would have made any difference whatsoever, so they might as well go ahead and start 11 women while they’re at it.

Back when men were real men, women were real women, and the Minnesota Vikings were as crazy as the real vikings.

1969, halftime show at a Vikings game: “More than 40,000 watched in disbelief as a hot air balloon carried an 11-year-old boy over the light towers, and eventually dumped him in the icy Minnesota river.”

Wait… WHAT? ?

It was, indeed, a tough act to follow. They say don’t mess with Texas, but I don’t know if anyone outside of sub-Saharan Africa or historical Sparta ever treated children with such blithe indifference for their survival as Minnesotans of a certain era did. I was awarded the Zero Hero patch as a 11-year-old Boy Scout, which involved being given a saw, a sleeping bag, a box of matches, a pound of hamburger, and a loaded .38 revolver and being abandoned in the wilds of Northern Minnesota for 24 hours in sub-zero weather. Sub-zero Fahrenheit, to be clear.

No tent, no flashlight, no company. Should probably get your lean-to built before it gets dark, ya know. And if anything goes wrong, just fire three shots in a row. We should be able to hear you from the cabin. Good luck, kid!

I don’t think they have the Zero Hero in Florida. Frankly, if it weren’t for the patch – a polar bear on a light blue background – I’d wonder if I was remembering it all correctly.