The NBA playoffs started a few weeks ago, and the second round is more than half over. There has been plenty of drama, and much of it has recently been focused on the Miami Heat, as expected. Once the Heat assembled its current roster before the 2010-2011 season, adding LeBron James and Chris Bosh to a team that already had Dwyane Wade, the expectations for this bunch went through the roof. They are currently being severely tested by the Indiana Pacers, a team that was given little chance coming into the series. The drama of the games themselves is great, but most of the theatrics have been off the court.  I have little patience for any of it, honestly. [Read more →]

Tags: bad sports, good sports by Alan Spoll
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I guess I am naive. I tend to believe that adults, by their very nature, should be reasonable people. I manage to be regularly amazed by how often that belief is proven wrong. The world of sports is as susceptible to this as anything else, of course, and this column is usually dedicated to illustrating all kinds of foolish behavior. This week is no exception. On Wednesday night, two high school baseball teams from Arizona were scheduled to play each other in the state championship game for their classification. Instead of playing, however, one of the schools, Our Lady of Sorrows Academy, forfeited the game. Why would they do this, you ask? Because Mesa Preparatory Academy, the other school, has a girl on its team. [Read more →]

Tags: bad sports, good sports by Alan Spoll
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Greetings from Las Vegas. I used to come out here every year for the opening weekend of the NCAA Basketball Tournament. In fact, that was the subject of my very first Bad Sports, Good Sports column back in early 2009. I had not been out here since we stopped going for basketball, though, until today, when I arrived for a work conference. Although this city gave me fodder for that initial weekly missive, today it is likely to only keep this column short, as a long travel day has left me pretty beat, and the clock is simply mocking me with its bogus three-hours-earlier-than-it-feels-like reading glowing in green letters next to the bed.

The big news of the week was the untimely death of former NFL great Junior Seau. The long-time San Diego Charger was found dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the chest on Wednesday in his home in Oceanside, California. [Read more →]

Tags: bad sports, good sports by Alan Spoll
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Have you ever watched an all-star game and thought it had been time well spent? At least in the major sports, those games are usually pretty awful, if not completely unwatchable. Baseball probably has the best one, as the game usually involves pretty full effort on the part of the participants. Sure, catchers are unlikely to block the plate and risk injury, especially after the Pete Rose-Ray Fosse incident in the 1970 MLB All-Star game, but the hitters try, the pitchers try, and the fielders try. The worst thing about baseball’s game is that the commissioner decided to make the game count for something a few years back, and now the league that wins gets home field advantage in the World Series. [Read more →]

Tags: bad sports, good sports by Alan Spoll
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Every once in a while, an athlete or coach transcends sports. The group of these individuals is small and obviously quite distinguished. Those of you who read my column regularly know that Joe Paterno was one of these in my eyes. Whatever you feel about the Jerry Sandusky situation and Joe’s role in it, it is hard to dispute his place in the pantheon of college football figures. This week, another towering figure has exited the sports scene, and her sport will be much the worse for it. Pat Summitt, the head coach of the University of Tennessee women’s basketball program, has retired. [Read more →]

Tags: bad sports, good sports by Alan Spoll
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Earlier this week, a Dallas television station reported on a story about a local coach/teacher who had been fired from her job for having a child despite being unmarried. Cathy Samford, who had coached volleyball at the Heritage Christian Academy for the last three years, and who had also recently started teaching science, was let go by the school in the fall. She has filed a complaint with the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and is considering a lawsuit. I am quite surprised by this, but I find myself siding with the school. [Read more →]

Tags: bad sports, good sports by Alan Spoll
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During the heart of the Tiger Woods drama of a couple of years ago, I wrote about the fact that I was pretty uninterested in the personal lives of professional athletes. The same goes for coaches in professional sports. I am not totally immune to the off-the-field stuff, of course. I am prone to disliking players who are simply bad teammates (see Terrell Owens) or coaches who lose their minds on a very regular basis (see Brian Kelly), but, for the most part, I look for results. Amateur sports, on the other hand, are a different story. College coaches, for example, have a very different kind of responsibility than pro coaches. Parents have entrusted their 18-year-old kids to these people, so college coaches need to hold themselves to a higher standard, whether that means their in-game demeanor or their off-the-field behavior. [Read more →]

Tags: bad sports, good sports by Alan Spoll
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There are a variety of reasons why a pitcher will intentionally hit a batter with a pitch. Often, it is done as a retaliation after a slow homerun trot or a batter on the pitcher’s team had already been hit by the opposing pitcher. Baseball is filled with “unwritten rules” that dictate when various things need to happen, and “purpose” pitches certainly fall into this category. Many times, the pitch does not actually hit the batter, but merely makes him dive out of the way. Baseball writers sometimes call this “chin music,” romanticizing the concept of revenge in the national pastime. Is this all really okay? I guess it depends on who you ask. There are times, though, when it is very clearly not okay. Sunday’s preseason game between the Colorado Rockies and the Cleveland Indians in Scottsdale, Arizona, was one of those times. [Read more →]

Tags: bad sports, good sports by Alan Spoll
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Railing against media-created drama is a self-defeating proposition when you are contributing to the problem in the process. All I can do is plow ahead, I guess, and discuss the carnival atmosphere surrounding the National Football League this week. The draft is in a few weeks, free agency is well underway, one of the greatest quarterbacks in league history, Peyton Manning, signed with a new team this week, and a franchise’s head coach was just suspended for an entire season. What, then, was the talk of the sports world this week? Tim Tebow, of course. [Read more →]

Tags: bad sports, good sports by Alan Spoll
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Watching your children play sports is fun. My girls did not spend a great deal of time playing sports, being more inclined toward the performing arts, but they did play basketball for several years when they were younger. They were never more than role players on their teams, but I used to love sitting and watching them play. I am a hot-headed sports fan, so my grumbling about bad calls was occasionally louder than it should have been, but I never went too far with it. I did once tell our coach, after listening to him tell me about bad officiating, that we would probably get better calls if his own daughter didn’t repeatedly mouth off to the referees and show up her teammates. [Read more →]

Tags: bad sports, good sports by Alan Spoll
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