Tag: sports

Intra-Democrat war

This promises to be an interesting political battle, featuring Vibrant Americans vs Jewish women.

“If it’s not handled by… the start of next season, I don’t see how we’re playing basketball,” NBPA vice president Roger Mason Jr. said in an interview with Showtime’s Jim Rome. “We have player reps, we’ve got executive committee members…  Leaders of the teams, they’re all saying the same thing, ‘If [Sterling] is still in place, we ain’t playing’. … I was just in the locker room three or four days ago. LeBron and I talked about it. He ain’t playing if Sterling is still an owner.”

Mason clarified that the ultimatum applies equally to Shelly Sterling, too. “No Sterling deserves to be an owner of that franchise any longer,” Mason continued. “And I’ve gone down the line from LeBron to the other guys in the league that I’ve talked to and they all feel the same way. There’s no place for that family in the NBA.”

James, who scored 49 points in a Game 4 victory over the Nets in the Eastern conference semifinals on Monday, took a public stand against both Sterlings earlier this week.

“As players, we want what’s right and we don’t feel like no one in his family should be able to own the team,” he said, according to the Associated Press.

It’s bad enough to argue that a man should be deprived of his property due to his private speech, but on the other hand, there are details related to Mr. Tokowitz’s signature on various NBA documents that appear to considerably complicate the matter. But the former Miss Stein didn’t do or say anything objectionable, so one wonders on what ground Mr. Mason and Mr. James could possibly argue that she should be deprived of her property.

I could not care less about the NBA, but this could provide some amusement. It should be interesting to see how fast the NBA reverses direction once Mrs. Tokowitz starts playing the sexist card and the media takes note of the fact that the league has no female owners.

Bridgewater

I can live with the pick. While I’m dubious that Bridgewater is true starting material, it’s worth a shot and it’s not as if they threw away their top 10 pick; the Vikes badly need a linebacker. And Mike Mayock did have him as the best QB prospect, which isn’t nothing.

This is your NFL Draft discussion post.

The purging of Donald Tokowitz

As I mentioned when asked yesterday, I neither follow nor care about the NBA. The extent of my knowledge of the league comes from a single Bill Simmons book, and I find it somewhat amusing to see the legions of the politically correct hot in angry pursuit of a rich Jewish lawyer who was the recipient of a Lifetime Achievement Award from the NAACP in 2009. Frankly, I’m a little surprised that we’re not seeing references to the Holocaust yet; the Times of Israel was relatively restrained in its headline: “Jewish owner of NBA team under fire over racist remarks”.

But I do find it interesting to see how the NBA and the media are very much following the program described in yesterday’s post, On Surviving a Witchhunt. Let’s compare:

  1. Recognize that it is happening. Mr. Tokowitz, who is apparently quite the fame-whore and loves to put his ugly face in the newspaper, hasn’t been talking to the media. Check.
  2. Don’t think that you can reason your way out of it. As I said, most people have the causality reversed. Doesn’t it seem a little strange that the league should react in such an over-the-top manner to an illegally-recorded conversation that clearly won’t be admissible in any court? I read Bill Simmon’s Book of Basketball and it is clear that Mr. Tokowitz has long been considered the worst owner in basketball and an embarrassment to the league. The league wanted him out long ago and it is unlikely that they would treat any other owners or players this way for a similar faux pas. For example, they have completely ignored Larry Johnson’s much more extremist call for a racially segregated league. Check.
  3. Do not apologize! I wrote that “They will press you hard for an apology and
    repeatedly imply that if you will just apologize, all will be forgiven.” The Los Angeles City Council voted Tuesday to condemn the racist remarks
    made by Donald Sterling. The resolution also asks for an apology from
    Sterling to the city and specifically to Earvin “Magic” Johnson.     Check.
  4. Expose their excesses. This is where it will be interesting to see how Tokowitz responds. The league is overreaching legally, and being not only a longtime owner, but a lawyer as well, Tokowitz will be aware of that. He may well be in possession of dirty laundry that the new commissioner doesn’t even know exists; basketball is FAR from the cleanest sport in the world. On the plus side, we may finally learn the real reason for Michael Jordan’s first retirement, which Bill Simmons insists was related to his excessive gambling.
  5. Do not resign! I pointed out that “their real goal is not to formally purge you,
    but to encourage you to quit on your own.” The league is DESPERATELY hoping that Tokowitz will accept his public shunning and sell the team because they know they don’t have a solid legal case for anything, not even the “lifetime ban”.  (Which, as some have noted, was actually an 18-month ban in the case of Major League Baseball.) There has been some talk of appealing a clause in the NBA constitution that permits a three-quarters vote of the owners to force a sale, but it’s not triggered by “expressing unpopular views in private.” The league could make a better case for forcing the sale due to his having a mistress in the first place, but I very much doubt they want to go down that particular road.
  6. Make the rubble bounce. The NBA is in a lot of trouble if Tokowitz, who is old, rich, and apparently shameless, decides on the Samson option. He can probably single-handedly reduce the value of every franchise by 30 percent simply by monkey-wrenching the league through a series of “unfortunate” management and coaching decisions. And that’s without even getting into the ramifications of potential revelations concerning David Stern’s fixing of various drafts and playoff series.
  7. Start nothing, finish everything. I don’t care about the outcome, but I rather hope the old guy simply decides to burn down the NBA around him. It would be entertaining to see what happens when all the owners and many of the major players are repeatedly set up in bugged honey traps and recorded, since I can’t imagine it would be hard to produce a series of equally offensive recordings proving various PC offenses committed by a broad spectrum of NBA figures.

That being said, after reading about the brouhaha, it seems most likely to me that all of this is nothing more than a league-approved coup d’etat attempt by Magic Johnson and the investors behind him. In the present hypersensitive PC environment, it’s not terribly difficult to whistle up a witch hunt in pursuit of your personal objectives. Steve Sailer connects the dots.

Listening closely to the presumably illegally made tapes suggests that the mistress was setting the LA Clippers owner up — she’s the one egging on the racial angle over her photos cuddling with Magic Johnson and Matt Kemp of the Dodgers. Originally, I assumed her minor league lawyer was her mastermind, but the news that Magic and his mysterious Guggenheim Partners backers want control of Sterling’s NBA franchise suggests that there’s a reasonable chance that this whole set-up originated with somebody more high-powered than her Woodland Hills attorney. (This lawyer is so obscure that his office is on Burbank Blvd. rather than on Ventura Blvd.)

Former Los Angeles Lakers basketball star Magic Johnson was the public frontman for the secretive Guggenheim Partners in paying an outlandish $2 billion to Boston leveraged parking lot robber baron Frank McCourt for the Los Angeles Dodgers baseball team. And now, what do you know, Magic and the Guggenheim Partners are willing to take the Los Angeles Clippers off Donald Sterling’s hands and add it to their nascent Los Angeles sports empire.

In contrast, the new Guggenheim Partners firm is very high-powered. In
fact, the SEC has been trying for a year to figure out if GP is so
high-powered that its Los Angeles sports franchise acquisitions are done
in illegal collaboration with … well, I won’t mention his name yet,
but it’s a smack-yourself-in-the-forehead name out of the history books
of Los Angeles and finance.

That may or may not be the case. But I suspect it would sway public opinion, to some extent, if it were discovered that Miss Stiviano was a honey trap being paid to unearth an excuse that would allow the NBA to turn a franchise in a major media market over to the Guggenheim Partners and Michael Milken.

Or, alternatively, perhaps this is just his punishment for finally managing to show up Showtime in Los Angeles.

Two for three

I have scabs on the outsides of both ankles, a nice scrape curving up one shin, a toenail that looks as if it’s painted purple, and the clearly discernable imprint of a ball on one thigh. And we’re all of three games into the spring season.

We’re in that enjoyable phase of a veteran’s season when everyone has played themselves into shape but their bodies haven’t started breaking down yet. My current team hasn’t seen anything like the Bataan Death March of a season that whittled 31 players down to 10 healthy enough to be on the field, but our longtime captain is done thanks to his knees and our best midfielder is out for three months courtesy of a nagging hamstring. In other words, we have no chance at the title.

I’ve been moved back up to striker after spending most of the fall season at right wing. I’m also starting, which is nice, especially since I spent the winter running twice a week in preparation for the need to get up and down the field on the wing. However, the first game against R was a disaster; we controlled the ball for the entire first half, blew about 10 chances to score, and I couldn’t complain when the new captain took me out at halftime. I only took one shot, and too often passed when I should have simply shot on goal, perhaps because I wasn’t expecting to play up front.

We finally scored right after the half started, but then the captain made a serious blunder. We only have three speed players, me, Sergio, and Sandro. I was on the bench, Sandro tweaked his leg and had to come out, and Sergio got tired and took himself out with 15 minutes left. That left us with precisely zero speed on the field, which shrunk the field and killed our attack. R scored two goals on headed corners in the last five minutes and we lost 2-1. I also learned that unlike the previous captain, the new captain was not keen on post-match analysis, as he reacted very badly to my pointing out why we had lost a game we controlled most of the way.

And by badly, I mean badly enough that my friend with whom I rode to the next game was telling me that I’d probably be sitting on the bench for the entire second game against A. But he was only joking, as the captain told me that I was starting again and told me to prove that we needed speed on the field. Fortunately, Sergio gave me the chance to do that as he slipped the ball past the defensive line, at midfield, I blew by my defender and took a shot from just inside the box to put us up 2-0. I came out 10 minutes into the second half after our third goal, but after A scored two goals to make it 3-2 and the field started to shrink again, the captain came out and put me back in for him at left wing. I started making runs, forced the goalie to mis-hit a hurried clearance that Sergio promptly buried, and we ended up winning 5-2. Score one for the Theory of Speed.

Last night’s game started off all right, but although we were controlling the game for the first 15 minutes, I realized I just couldn’t get past this Robert Carlos-lookalike at sweeper. Not having Giorgio, our injured midfielder, really hurt as our attack kept failing to make the last pass to the striker in shooting position, and then D scored a beautiful goal on their first chance. I had one decent opportunity that I created by blatantly shoving the ersatz Carlos off the ball as we ran for it, but I hit the side of the net. We also had one goal taken away for offside, but it was the right call, and for once, no one even complained.

We were down 3-0 at halftime, then 4-0. I did get one back, however, when I charged down a backpass and blocked the sweeper’s attempted clearance with my right thigh. The ball rebounded right into the net before the goalie even realized that it hadn’t been cleared. In 25 years of playing soccer, that’s only the second time I’ve managed to score off a blocked clearance; the last time was with Nike about 15 years ago. Then our right wing celebrated his birthday by turning a throw-in into a half-volley that hit the crossbar and went in, which gave us a faint hope of coming back before D scored again to put the game away. We lost, 5-2, but no one felt bad about being beaten by the better team, although I was very annoyed with myself for getting caught offside on what should have been a good chance at the end.

Ender’s team is off to a better start. They are 2-1, but they’ve also lost two of their three best players. Jet was finally poached by an elite regional team and Cesare broke his collarbone, but, ironically enough, Ender and the big kid that he beat up last fall have turned out to be an effective combination in defense. The big kid sweeps while Ender shuts down the side and brings the ball up the field as a sort of point defender. Most of their scoring attacks begin with a long pass from him, either up the side or a cross into the middle that drops behind the defense. He doesn’t have much speed, but he has good vision and anticipation, so he’s usually in the right spot before he needs to be there.

The players’ union

I’m not a big fan of unions, but there is no question that college football players have a much better claim to be permitted to unionize than policemen and federal employees.

In a ruling that could revolutionize college athletics, a federal agency ruled Wednesday that college football players at Northwestern University can unionize. The decision by a regional director of the National Labor Relations Board means it agrees football players at the Big Ten school qualify as employees under federal law and therefore can create the nation’s first college athlete’s union….

CAPA attorneys argued that college football is, for all practical
purposes, a commercial enterprise that relies on players’ labor to
generate billions of dollars in profits. That, they contend, makes the
relationship of schools to players one of employers to employees.

It’s hard, if not impossible, to argue with that. The fact that the employer is a university doesn’t mean that the janitors and professors are not employees, and they generate considerably less income than the football players do.

These young men are actually putting their bodies on the line, and they deserve the right to a significant slice of the income their activities are producing.

This is why bitches need smackdowns

Ronda Rousey couldn’t even beat me. Mayweather would KO her in less than 30 seconds.

UFC women’s bantamweight champion Ronda Rousey has dominated her opponents since coming on the scene and is ready to set her sights even higher.  Rousey, who is an Olympic bronze medalist in judo, said she could beat undefeated welterweight champion Floyd Mayweather if he were ever so inclined to step into the octagon.

“I wouldn’t even stand up, I wouldn’t even be anywhere near him. I would just do like a little army crawl over there, and he would have to run away,” Rousey told Power 106 FM.

This is why it behooves some woman to have the crap kicked out of her in her youth. It prevents her from putting herself in insanely dangerous situations.

Playing with fire

What business is it of the NFL’s to interfere with state law in Arizona?

Call it what you want — anti-gay or religious rights — but if Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer signs a controversial bill, you might not be calling Arizona the home of the 2015 Super Bowl.

The Religious Freedom Restoration Act, S.B. 1062, is the current controversy du jour out of Arizona, and the National Football League is with the opposition.

“Our policies emphasize tolerance and inclusiveness and prohibit discrimination based on age, gender, race, religion, sexual orientation or any other improper standard,” NFL spokesman Greg Aiello told USA Today. “We are following the issue in Arizona and will continue to do so should the bill be signed into law, but will decline further comment at this time.”

The idiots in the league office are making the same mistake that the gatekeepers in SF/F made about 20 years ago. They wrongly assume that they are in a position to dictate to the public, when in fact it is their position that relies upon the good will of  the public.

Tolerance is an evil joke. It is nothing but a stalking horse to impose anti-Christian, anti-Islamic secular values on an unwilling public. It is now eminently clear that the First Amendment was a mistake, considering the way it is being used to attack religion rather than protect it, as was the original intention. Somehow, “Congress shall make no law” has metastasized into “no one anywhere shall be permitted to make a law.”

Arizona should respond by telling the NFL that if it pulls the Super Bowl, it will be taxed 100 percent of its revenues in the state, including revenues derived from television income.

The NFL flags hate speech

Does anyone in the league office ever actually spend time around the players or pay attention to how they talk? It should be interesting to watch NFL games with half the black players sent to the sidelines by the end of the first quarter. Or perhaps theleague can come up with a policy that permits black players to call each other “nigger” while penalizing white players. Which raises the question; will multiracial players like Russell Wilson only be penalized five yards?

The NFL may implement a new rule this offseason calling for 15-yard penalties for any players who use racial slurs on the field. John Wooten, head of the Fritz Pollard Alliance, told CBS Sports that he expects the league to make it an automatic 15-yard penalty if a player uses the N-word on the field, and an automatic ejection for a player who does it twice.

“I will be totally shocked if the competition committee does not uphold us on what we’re trying to do,” Wooten said. “We want this word to be policed from the parking lot to the equipment room to the locker room. Secretaries, PR people, whoever, we want it eliminated completely and want it policed everywhere.”

You would swear this was a parody, but perhaps the wags who predicted that the NFL would devolved to flag football with penalty flags thrown for making other players feel bad weren’t so far off after all.

And it’s fascinating to observe that they are quite willing to set themselves up as the speech police.

The Age Monster

It gets everyone eventually. We can train, we can eat right, we can think positive thoughts, but every year that passes, the opponents get younger, the pains get sharper, and the effort gets more strenuous.

Yeah, we had our first soccer practice of the year last night.

It actually went surprisingly well, mostly because I’ve been running 40 minutes twice a week over the offseason in preparation for a season at right wing. My side played a man down in the scrimmage, but I was arguably, (no, definitely), the worst player on my side and I was able to shut down the best player on the other side. This is a decided advantage.

I mostly hung back, with occasional sprints forward when the other team wasn’t looking and managed to score our first goal that way. More importantly, it took the new guy, who was, in the immortal words of Mel Gibson in Lethal Weapon 3, “a handful”, a while to learn to respect the lingering remnants of my speed, so he kept trying to blow past me to no avail. And when he switched to trying to use his vastly superior ball skills to fake me out, I simply refused to commit, thereby forcing him to finally pass off after my teammates were already back on defense.

So old age and experience really can overcome youth and skill. And a little treachery combined with upper body strength doesn’t hurt either. After practice was over, the new guy came over and introduced himself. He looked a little surprised to discover that he was 20 years younger. It’s a bit of a backhanded compliment, to be sure, but these days, I’ll take it. It’s certainly better than the alternative.

I don’t know if I’ll be able to win a regular starting position again this year or not, but the initial omens appear to be good. We crushed the other half of the squad despite playing a man down the whole time, so that should help. I know that in our captain’s eyes, reliability tends to trump talent.

Battling the new guy to a draw reminded me of our indoor tournament the week before, which was the most fun I’ve ever had at a soccer tournament. 12 teams were invited, good teams, including all three of our primary rivals. We figured we would probably finish fourth of six in our group, with the possibility of a shot at third. The tournament went until after midnight, with copious beer flowing throughout the course of the evening.

The first game was easy. We won 3-1, but it should have been 6-1. I got the third goal when S picked me out and rifled a pass right to the corner of the goal; I just had to stick out my foot and deflect it in. The second game was my best; it was against the team that has been my personal bete noire, but I got two goals and we put them away 3-1 as well. Then we played our derby game, which was incredibly annoying because despite dominating the ball, we somehow managed to lose 3-2.

So, it looked like third-place group finish was in the cards, and that’s when things got exciting. We destroyed the fourth team 6-0, then watched as they played our neighbors without much hope of them scoring an upset. But their best player was the coach of our first team squad, and he ripped off an early goal from 25 meters that briefly would have put us in second place. Then our neighbors came back and took the 2-1 lead that they held until the last minute. The other team got a goal to tie it with 50 seconds left, but a tie didn’t do us any good since we knew we probably couldn’t beat our arch rivals, who have supplanted us as the league’s dominant team, in the final game.

However, with 11 seconds left, the ball was passed back to the coach, who was nearly the entire length of the indoor field from the goal. He pushed it forward a step, picked his spot, and put it right in the upper corner for the win with three seconds left. Phenomenal shot. The entire gymnasium went nuts. The upset meant that we were guaranteed second place in the group, and first if we could beat our rivals.

Unfortunately, we lost 3-1. But it was a good, hard-fought game, and there was a funny moment after the young Serie B ref, who is a friendly acquaintance of mine, told me before the game that I couldn’t stop him. About halfway through, he had the ball on the left side I was defending, and I knew, beyond any shadow of a doubt, there was zero chance he was going to pass the ball. Despite my best efforts, he did manage to turn on me, but I kept just enough shoulder on him to force his shot wide of the goal. He laughed, offered a high-five, and decided we could call it a draw as his teammates shouted at him for not passing the ball.

That is precisely what I will miss most about competitive sports when the time finally comes to hang up my soccer boots for the last time. The competition. The physical testing. The going head-to-head to find out who is better. And the mutual respect that so often results from the process. Whether one wins or one loses, it is the battle, not the result, from which the pleasure is derived. I’ve won league and conference championships. I’ve coached a team that never won a single game. But the teams I remember most fondly aren’t necessarily the championship teams, they are the teams that never stopped competing until the final whistle blew, no matter what the score.

The Age Monster will get me in the end. I know that. I accept that. The time will come when the young guys will blow right past me, when their speed and power will be simply too much to handle. But I am going to keep that bastard at bay as long as I can, and I will keep playing as long as I can help my team win.

Women in combat: a prelude

The Sochi Winter Olympics are providing a useful service in demonstrating the complete absurdity of the woman warrior meme:

Sarka Pancochova, a Czech snowboarder, led the slopestyle event after the first run. On her second trip down the course of obstacles and jumps, she flew through the air, performed a high-arcing, spinning trick and smacked her head upon landing. Her limp body spun like a propeller into the gully between jumps and slid to a stop.

Pancochova was soon on her feet, and the uneasy crowd cheered. Her helmet was cracked nearly in half, back to front. She was one of the lucky ones, seemingly O.K., but her crash last week was indicative of a bigger issue: a messy collage of violent wipeouts at these Olympics. Most of the accidents have occurred at the Rosa Khutor Extreme Park, the site of the snowboarding and freestyle skiing events like halfpipe, slopestyle and moguls.

And most of the injuries have been sustained by women….

The Winter Games have always had dangerous events. But the Extreme Park,
as the name suggests, is built on the ageless allure of danger. All of
the events there have been added to the Olympic docket since 1992, each a
tantalizing cocktail of grace and peril.But
unlike some of the time-honored sports of risk, including Alpine
skiing, luge and ski jumping, there are few concessions made for women.

For both sexes, the walls of the halfpipe are 22 feet tall. The
slopestyle course has the same tricky rails and the same huge jumps. The
course for ski cross and snowboard cross, a six-person race to the
finish over jumps and around icy banked curves, is the same for men and
women. The jumps for aerials are the same height. The bumps in moguls
play no gender favorites.

“Most
of the courses are built for the big show, for the men,” said Kim
Lamarre of Canada, the bronze medalist in slopestyle skiing, where the
competition was delayed a few times by spectacular falls. “I think they
could do more to make it safer for women.”

Compare
the sports with downhill skiing, in which women have their own course,
one that is shorter and less difficult to navigate. Or luge, in which
female sliders start lower on the track than the men. Or ski jump, in
which women were finally allowed to participate this year, but only on
the smaller of the two hills. The Olympics have a history — sexist,
perhaps — of trying to protect women from the perils of some sports.

But equality reigns at the Extreme Park, even to the possible detriment of the female participants.

Actually, equality doesn’t reign. Because the inferior and uncompetitive female athletes don’t compete against the superior men. But the young women are such stupid herd animals that they will literally kill themselves in their incoherent denial.

“I see it every contest,” Cusson said. “Unless they are forced to hit
the smaller side, the best ones will always go for the bigger jumps.
They want to prove to everybody that they are capable. And then all the
other girls will follow.”

As usual, the end result of feminism is more dead and injured women. If one simply judges by the consequences, it should be obvious that feminists hate women far more passionately than even the most virulent misogynist.

They can’t even compete in competitive leisure pastimes without half-killing themselves and requiring surgery, but they’re going to hold their own in combat, where the enemy is actually trying to harm them?