Tag: sports

RIP Dick Butkus

One of the long-time NFL greats has died. Not even the legendary Dick Butkus was too tough for Father Time.

“How could he die!” Fran Tarkenton said on the day Dick Butkus did, indeed, die. “He was indestructible! Bigger than life, tougher than nails! Mick Tingelhoff died recently, and he was my center, and we were close. Bud Grant died recently, and he was my coach. Great man. And today Dick goes, and I’ve been crying ever since I heard. Dick Butkus was football!”

When I was very young, I loved the NFL more than anything. I wore purple Vikings corduroys with a matching yellow Vikings shirt to my first day of school in first grade. I collected the game programs. I met Matt Blair after winning a reading contest. For my 11th birthday, we went to the preaseason training camp in Mankato and I got Ted Brown’s autograph at the nearby pizza place. On Monday nights, I went to bed at halftime of Monday Night Football and my mother would write the final score on a piece of paper she’d tape to my bedroom door. Eventually, I owned a pair of Vikings season tickets on the 20-yard-line of the Metrodome. I went out with Vikings cheerleaders. I had a drink with Todd Scott in the VIP lounge at Glam Slam.

And always, I read the lore dating back to the earliest days.

Some of my favorite childhood books were those written by Bill Gutman and published by Tempo Books. They were short paperbacks, less than 200 pages, and always featured four players. I somehow still have two of them, Football’s Fantastic Four and Great Linebackers #1.

Haden-Dorsett-Payton-Jones. Butkus-Lanier-Curtis-Buoniconti. Needless to say, Butkus went first.

I never met him. I don’t even remember ever seeing him play. He retired when I was five. But his ferocious determination to succeed, combined with the tragedy of a great player being stuck for his entire career on a sub-par team, resonated with me, and I never forgot his dignity, the universal respect he commanded, and the way he continued to excel even though his superhuman efforts were invariably futile. He was named to eight consecutive Pro Bowls, but he never played in a playoff game.

It’s an irony of sports history that the greatest NFL defense of all-time, the 1985 Chicago Bears, did not include Chicago’s greatest linebacker.

Dick Butkus is gone. But his legend remains.

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Forza Milan!

Giroud is such a legend! Watch the whole thing. It’s not what you’re expecting.

On the subject of calcio, the winning goal in our most recent game was pretty funny. The right wing who’d come on as a substitute for me was pretty gassed with about five minutes left, so he was hanging back instead of running with the attack on the other side. He was just standing there about 30 meters out on the right, nonchalantly watching the action on the other side, as our striker went one-on-one with the keeper on the left side of the box, and took a hard shot that was blocked as the keeper came out aggressively at him.

Fortunately, the ball flew across the field directly to where the right wing as standing. He controlled the ball and then calmly put it in the empty net before the keeper could get back into position – it can be harder than it looks to keep a shot on target from that distance in those circumstances – then turned to the bench and folded his arms Mbappe-style before the ball even went in the net.

I don’t know that I’ve ever seen anyone work less for a goal.

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I Was Wrong

After considerable review of statistics and video highlights in the aftermath of Argentina winning the World Cup, I have been forced to conclude that my previous opinion was in error. There simply isn’t any question about it.

Lionel Messi is the greatest soccer player of all time.

I’ve always considered Pele to be number one, with Maradona a close number two. But the fact is that Messi’s creative abilities, vision, and generosity make him a more complete, more effective player on the field than either Pele or Maradona. As for modern players, Cristiano Ronaldo is an incredible scorer and an inspirational leader for Portugal, and his speed, size, and aerial abilities are certainly superior to Messi’s, but the fact is that Messi is arguably more valuable as a goal-maker than he is as a goal-scorer.

This is unprecedented at the highest level of scoring even when one removes penalty goals from the equation. In his five-year peak at Barcelona, Messi averaged 1.03 non-penalty goals per game and 0.46 assists per game for a combined average of 1.5 goals per game.

Consider that the consummate midfielder, Zinedine Zidane, universally regarded as one of the ten-greatest to ever play the game, averaged 0.26 assists per game across his entire career. In Zidane’s best-ever season, at Juventus, he averaged 0.46 assists per game. Messi did that for five straight years. And he did that in addition to scoring a goal in every game himself.

His closest rival, Cristiano Ronaldo, scored fewer non-penalty goals and had 25 percent fewer assists during his own five-year peak at Real Madrid. CR7’s combined average of 1.3 goals per game is still historically excellent to the point of being very nearly unprecedented, but across the 170 games played, that 0.2 delta is a difference of 34 goals in five seasons!

Statistically speaking, at their mutual peaks, Messi was worth one more goal every five games than Cristiano Ronaldo. That’s the statistical equivalent of having one additional mediocre striker or one above-average midfielder on the field every single game. And this peak-to-peak comparison is actually favorable to CR7. The career delta between Messi and Ronaldo is 0.32 despite the latter’s Saudi league-inflated numbers. To put that into perspective, 0.32 happens to be the career average of Andrés Iniesta, an excellent Spanish international who was named to the FIFA Pro World XI no less than nine times.

So the cold hard tangibles are perfectly clear. What about the intangibles? All you need to do is to forget about the goals and watch one highlight reel of Messi dribbling, followed by another one of him making assists. Only Maradona can compare to his dribbling and I’ve never seen anyone who creates opportunities for others as well as Messi does. Any lingering doubts about his ability to win the biggest competitions were settled once and for all when Argentina beat Brazil in the 2021 Copa America, then followed that up by winning the 2022 World Cup.

Dennis Bergkamp will always be my favorite player, and I’ll always harbor the utmost respect for Pele, Maradona, and CR7. But the unquestionable fact, the undeniable fact, is that Lionel Messi is the greatest footballer to ever play the game.

And Americans are very fortunate to be able to watch him doing what he does at Inter Miami. Cristiano Ronaldo and Neymar took the Saudi money, but what Messi is doing with David Beckham in Miami is more important, as they are building stronger foundations for the beautiful game.

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Spain 1, Lesbianesses 0

Spain won the Women’s World Cup despite its Football Association needing to crush a player revolt by 15 of its top female players by ejecting 12 of them from the national team.

Spain won their first Women’s World Cup final vs. England on Sunday 1-0 but did it without a handful of top players because of an ongoing protest against the Royal Spanish Football Federation.

In September 2022, 15 players sent the federation separate but identical emails asking not to be called up to the national team, citing a lack of professionalism that each player wrote had an “important effect on my emotional state and by extension my health.” They demanded “a clear commitment to a professional project with attention paid to all the aspects needed to get the best performance of this group of players” in the email.

The 15 players were Aitana Bonmati, Mariona Caldentey, Ona Batlle, Patri Guijarro, Mapi Leon, Sandra Panos, Claudia Pina, Lola Gallardo, Ainhoa Moraza, Nerea Eizagirre, Amaiur Sarriegi, Lucia Garcia, Leila Ouahabi, Laia Aleixandri and Andrea Pereira. Three additional players who did not send emails voiced their support for the others: Alexia Putellas, Jennifer Hermoso, and captain Irene Paredes.

According to The Athletic, among the players’ complaints was insufficient preparation for matches, from arriving to host cities too late and traveling by bus when planes would be considered the practical choice. The players also reportedly had issues with several coaches, alleging they were asked them to keep their hotel room doors open until midnight and inspected their bags after they went on excursions during camps. The players never explicitly asked for head coach Jorge Vilda or his coaching staff to be fired, but it was clear the relationship between them was fractured.

Instead of taking the players’ complaints seriously, though, the federation instantly backed Vilda and criticized those who protested. Ana Alvarez, head of women’s soccer at the federation, said that players would need to apologize before they were welcomed back onto the team, and added that “the federation comes first.”

It’s interesting to see how the players revolt – so celebrated in the early stages of the tournament when the team lost 4-0 to Japan in the last round of qualifiers – is being minimized here now that Spain, under the much-vilified Vilda, has won the tournament. Leaving 12 internationals out of the national team in a sport that starts 11 is hardly “a handful”. The media made a lot out of the current players turning their backs on their coach and refusing to celebrate a quarterfinal victory with him, but the observable fact is that there is no way the Spanish team, which had never even reached the quarterfinals before, would have won the World Cup without him.

Female teams are particularly fragile and are much given to self-destructive drama. I doubt it is an accident that Vilda didn’t select 12 of the 15 who initially declared themselves unavailable, as they were troublemakers and drama queens. And it was impressive that he didn’t hesitate to sit down the #1 goalkeeper when she wasn’t playing well, and that he left his star player, arguably the best in the world, on the bench for most of the tournament because she wasn’t 100-percent recovered from injury. Whether they like him or not, his players went on to dominate an English team full of the very sort of troublemakers and drama queens that he ejected from the squad.

A lot of NFL players don’t like Bill Belichick either. But there is no denying he gets the most out of them. Or that he wins championships.

It’s a bit amusing to see some of the bigger names who were left out whining about how they didn’t get the chance to win a World Cup. “What saddens me the most is that I really have to miss out on something when I could have earned it and contributed. It’s a shame.” But it’s not a shame, you didn’t earn it, you didn’t have to miss out, and your contributions were obviously unnecessary.

The lesson of the unexpected Spanish triumph at the Woman’s World Cup is this: the players are never bigger than the team.

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How to Fail

Johnny Manziel was given a team iPad where coaches could secretly track the amount of time he spent watching film. But the problem was that Manziel didn’t watch any film. Literally not a minute.

It would probably surprise most of you how few people are capable of performing even the most basic and rudimentary aspects of their jobs. And it’s not as if the solution is necessarily more pay.

Johnny Manziel signed a 4 year, $8,248,596 contract with the Cleveland Browns, including a $4,318,980 signing bonus, $7,998,596 guaranteed, and an average annual salary of $2,062,149.

Note that not even two million dollars per year was enough to get the guy to watch five minutes of game film.

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He Even Lost His Name

Jack Nicklaus’s bid to reclaim his own name from (((a former business partner))) was rejected by (((a Florida judge))).

In a recent federal court decision, Jack Nicklaus suffered a setback in his attempt to regain control of his name and likeness owned by former partner Howard Milstein. On Aug. 1, Judge Robin Rosenberg of the U.S. District Court of the Southern District of Florida ruled that due to a prior decision against Nicklaus by the New York County Supreme Court on the exact same property in question in Nicklaus Companies, LLC v. GBI Investors Inc., he lacked the ability to grant Nicklaus any control of the property in question.

I neither know nor care much about the travails of a rich golfer who lost control of his own name in pursuit of even more riches. But it’s a reminder that if something looks too good to be true, it probably is, and that if there is wording in the contract permitting the other party to a) take full control or b) not pay, the other party will usually find a way to make that happen.

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Adios, Bitches

The end of Megan Rapinhoe’s international soccer career was truly glorious. The most annoying athlete in all of sports finished by blowing a golden opportunity to finish off Sweden on penalties in the World Cup by putting the ball five feet over the crossbar; an inept penalty attempt worse than the average high school girl’s. It’s up there with Roberto Baggio’s 1994 catastrophe, only worse, since a) Italy reached the finals, b) Baggio was just trying to keep Italy even, not win the game, and c) four years later, Baggio took and made a penalty in the 1998 World Cup to become the first Italian player to score in three World Cups.

And just to make the moment even sweeter, the outspoken anti-American lesbian-infested SJW squad, which prior to the tournament had been favored to win it, ended up losing the round-of-16 knockout match 5-4 on penalties after future star Sophia Smith put her penalty wide and over, followed by some other player whose name I don’t know hitting the right post.

I used to support the US Women’s National Team back when Mia Hamm and Brandi Chastain were playing for it, and while I like Alex Morgan and Sophia Smith as players, the current team as a whole is an obnoxious, overpoliticized, and overrated embarrassment to the country. It’s good to see them lose in such an ignominious manner, especially to a team mostly comprised of pretty European blondes.

As for the winning penalty, it was a close call, but the VAR was conclusive. The US goalie did a nice job of deflecting the ball and quickly recovering to knock the ball out of the goal, and I initially thought she’d saved it, but a different angle and the VAR review showed the ball did fully cross the line.

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A Failure of Leadership

The Pacific-12 conference, first founded in 1915 as the Pacific Coast Conference, is pining for the fjords.

“The Big 12 Board of Directors has voted unanimously to admit Arizona State University, University of Arizona and University of Utah to the Big 12 Conference,” commissioner Brett Yormark said in a statement.

The Pac-12 Conference really has no one to blame but themselves.

Former commissioner Larry Scott once had an opportunity to add the Texas Longhorns and Oklahoma Sooners, but declined. He also had an opportunity to partner with ESPN with the failing Pac-12 Network, but declined.

The windows of opportunity don’t ever remain open for long. Good leadership understands that. Mediocre leadership never does anything because it fears making a mistake, which ironically, often turns out to be a mistake.

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ESPN Goes Full Feminist

On Thursday night, ESPN will present an all-female version of SportsCenter focusing only on women’s sports. Indeed, the virtue signaling to the left will go all in on the women-only concept because not only will the on-air staff be all female broadcasters, but all the producers, camera people, and other off-air staff will also be an all-female affair, according to Variety. That isn’t all. During commercial breaks and between reports, ESPN will air ads and segments to flog the financial-services firm Ally, which has entered into a sponsorship deal with ESPN owner Disney which calls for 90 percent of its spending on the network to benefit women’s sports reporting.

However, the more exposure to women’s sports one actually has, the less inclined one is to support them, let alone permit one’s daughters to participate in them. It amounts to signing them up for knee surgeries and sexual inversion. It would be interesting to see which path produces statistically worse results on average, women’s team sports or the stripper’s pole.

Regardless, a good father will keep his daughters away from both.

UPDATE: We are reliably informed that ESPN will be following Elon Musk’s lead and rebranding as the Ladies Entertainment and Sports Programming Network.

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Whatever Could it Be?

The 18-year-old son of NBA star LeBron James suffered a heart attack during basketball practice at USC.

Bronny James, incoming USC freshman basketball player and son of Lakers star LeBron James, suffered a cardiac arrest during a practice with the team Monday. According to a statement from the James family via The Athletic’s Shams Charania, Bronny collapsed on the court and was taken to the hospital. He is in stable condition and no longer in the ICU after being tended to by the team’s medical staff.

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