Six months ago, I wrote about the back surgery that had derailed my then-new-found love of running. My original plan, once I had started running last year, was to do the Broad Street Run, which is a 10-miler here in Philadelphia each May. When the back problem forced me to stop running, the race was obviously off the board. I had intended to do a 5K or two in advance of that, but had not managed to do that either. Since my last column on the subject, I started running again in June. All of the stamina that I had built up last year was gone, so I was starting from scratch, essentially. Running every other day, I managed to get it back, eventually, and it has paid off for me. This morning, I completed the Philadelphia Half Marathon. [Read more →]

Tags: bad sports, good sports by Alan Spoll
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I have always managed to avoid covering the same story two weeks in a row, but the Penn State story has totally dominated the sports world’s news for the past week, so there is really no way around it. Since I wrote last, many things have happened. Legendary head coach Joe Paterno, assistant coach Mike McQueary, and university president Graham Spanier are all out, along with athletic director Tim Curley and vice president Gary Schultz. As a Penn Stater, this has been a very difficult week for me for a lot of reasons. [Read more →]

Tags: bad sports, good sports by Alan Spoll
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It makes me sad to write this column, but when I looked at this week’s bad and good sports stories, the choice of which story would lead my article for the week was an obvious one. For as long as I can remember, the name Penn State has meant nothing but winning and honor. Head football coach Joe Paterno, who has been at Penn State since man discovered fire, it seems, has led a program that has exemplified the best in college athletics. He has not only won two national championships, accomplished a bunch of undefeated seasons, and put countless players into the NFL, he has done all of that while graduating an unusually high percentage of his players and without having any kind of cheating or recruiting scandals. [Read more →]

Tags: bad sports, good sports by Alan Spoll
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I must apologize to my legions of loyal reader (hi Jeff!). Due to some unforseen circumstances, I am unable to present my usual brilliant commentary in this space today. I promise to return next week with something staggeringly witty, but for now, I will just share my list of good and bad stories of the week with minimal narration.  Thanks for your understanding. [Read more →]

Tags: bad sports, good sports by Alan Spoll
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Baseball fans are fortunate to be witnessing one of the all-time great careers right now. We hear all the time about so many great players from the past, such as Babe Ruth, Ty Cobb, Ted Williams, and Mickey Mantle. Legendary players who many of us have only heard about but never got to watch play. History is likely to put Albert Pujols into that category, if the first eleven years of his career are any indication. There would appear to be nothing he can’t do. He is the best hitter in the game, is a tremendous fielder, and he makes the St. Louis Cardinals whole lineup better. He is currently attempting to lead his team to a World Series title. As great as he is, there is a bit of baggage there as well. This week, we got to see the best and the worst of Albert Pujols, all within the space of a couple of days. [Read more →]

Tags: bad sports, good sports by Alan Spoll
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Sports may often feel like life and death to a fan, but in the end, it is all just a bunch of games, right? Death should not be a part of sports. There are many things in this world worth dying for, and I imagine that very few people would list the playing of a game very high on that list. There is little worse than when a human being loses his or her life while playing sports. It just seems like such a waste. On Sunday, IndyCar driver Dan Wheldon was killed during a massive wreck only eleven laps into the series’ final race of the season in Las Vegas. [Read more →]

Tags: bad sports, good sports by Alan Spoll
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“Are you ready for some football” with a different song leading into the broadcast? For the past twenty years, Monday Night Football has started with Hank Williams Jr.’s query, a modified version of his song, “All My Rowdy Friends.” Williams lost the best gig he ever had this week, getting himself and his song removed from the ESPN presentation of MNF by badmouthing President Obama and Vice President Biden, calling them “the enemy,” and comparing Barack Obama and House speaker John Boehner playing golf together to Hitler and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu doing the same. [Read more →]

Tags: bad sports, good sports by Alan Spoll
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Major League Baseball is considering adding a second wildcard team to each league’s playoffs at some point in the not-too-distant future. My initial reaction to this is negative, as I have always appreciated the fact that it is much harder to make the playoffs in baseball than it is in any of the other major sports. There is something to be said for making the regular season count for as much as possible. NBA teams commonly make the playoffs with losing records, which is ludicrous. Flat-out bad hockey teams play in the postseason with regularity. In baseball, though, the teams need to be genuinely good to see action in October. It would be a shame to dilute the playoffs by adding less deserving teams. At the same time, if that leads to more excitement like that which we saw on Wednesday night, I might have to change my mind. [Read more →]

Tags: bad sports, good sports by Alan Spoll
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Honesty and sports do not necessarily go together. The stakes involved in the major sports certainly lend themselves to participants trying to get an edge any way they can. That is not to say that everyone cheats, of course, but there is no doubt that finding an advantage is often the key to winning. Sometimes, this does involve various kinds of subterfuge and even cheating. One of the reasons I have never been a big fan of soccer is the way that players fake injuries in attempts to get penalties called on their opponents. I have long assumed that this happens in other sports as well, but it seems particularly obvious in soccer. This week, this phenomenon became a hot topic of conversation in the NFL, as the New York Giants seemed to take a page out of the sport’s namesake, with not one but two players faking injury at the exact same time. [Read more →]

Tags: bad sports, good sports by Alan Spoll
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The football fans in the city of Denver have me baffled. Despite a miserable performance in training camp that was so bad it relegated him to third string, Tim Tebow continues to be the recipient of the adoration of many Broncos fans. This time, a group of fans are planning to put up some billboards with the intent of convincing head coach Jon Fox to start Tebow rather than Kyle Orton or Brady Quinn. [Read more →]

Tags: bad sports, good sports by Alan Spoll
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In case you were unaware, Plaxico Burress is an idiot. He’s just a bad guy, and from my perspective, he appears to have learned little from his incarceration. Burress played his first real post-jail game on Sunday night, this time for the New York Jets. Earlier in the week, Men’s Journal published excerpts from an upcoming article about Burress in which the wide receiver took shots at Tom Coughlin and Eli Manning, the coach and quarterback, respectively, of his former team, the New York Giants. [Read more →]

Tags: bad sports, good sports by Alan Spoll
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In sports, we love to build up our heroes and tear down everyone else. Often, we even tear down the heroes, to be honest. It is easy to find fault in just about any athlete, especially for those of us whose signature athletic move is to get off the couch every once in a while. Sure, the guys who bring our favorite teams a lot of success are easy to put on pedestals. When those guys are found to be less than admirable in some way, though, we have a dilemma. It’s hard to forget all of the wins and the excitement, while it is also hard to ignore the reality of some kind of wrongdoing. The Ohio State University, as well as the massive sports infrastructure that surrounds it, seems to be struggling this way in the wake of the scandals that rocked the football program this past year. [Read more →]

Tags: bad sports, good sports by Alan Spoll
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It must be an amazing thing to be a star athlete. You not only have the fame of many Hollywood stars, but you also have legions of children who want to be just like you. There is a whole lot of money that usually goes with that status too. It has to be easy for those athletes to lose sight of reality, at least a bit. Some guys seem to stay pretty grounded, while others really need to learn when to keep their mouths shut. Count Houston Texans running back Arian Foster among those in the second group. [Read more →]

Tags: bad sports, good sports by Alan Spoll
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Major college sports, particularly football and basketball, have been a breeding ground for corruption for a long time. As much as I love to watch them, the idea that these are amateur athletes is certainly a questionable one. The money is so huge, and the stakes are so high, it would actually be harder to believe that everything was on the up and up. The scandals have been coming fast and furious in college football recently, with Auburn, Oregon, and Ohio State dealing with some very high profile messes. Fortunately for them, I guess, the big one was waiting in the wings, ready to take the focus off of those schools. The University of Miami, which dealt with a lot of problems back in the late 80s and early 90s, is back in the stew, and it does not look good for the Hurricanes. [Read more →]

Tags: bad sports, good sports by Alan Spoll
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Despite the fact that football just got rolling, with NFL teams starting preseason play, golf was at the center of the sports world this week. Some of the news is covered below in Bad Sports, but I’d first like to focus on the positive. Keegan Bradley won the PGA Championship on Sunday. Who, you ask? That’s exactly the point. Before this week’s tournament, Bradley, a 25-year-old American, had never played in a major tournament. Even more amazingly, he was five shots back with only three holes to play on Sunday after a triple-bogey on 15. Jason Dufner, another American, appeared to be a shoo-in for the victory. That’s when things took a huge turn. [Read more →]

Tags: bad sports, good sports by Alan Spoll
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Most of my involvement with sports over the course of my life has been as a spectator. I spent several years playing Little League baseball when I was a kid, and I used to play football, baseball, basketball, and hockey with other kids in my neighborhood on a regular basis. Since then, though, other than some intramurals in college, I have experienced very little in the way of first-hand athletic activity until I started running last summer. The rest has all been watched from the comfort of my sofa, along with occasional attendance at live sporting events. I have great respect for the athletes who regularly put their safety on the line so that I can enjoy a nice afternoon in front of the television. [Read more →]

Tags: bad sports, good sports by Alan Spoll
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In this age of instant communication and an extraordinary number of sources of distraction, sitting down to watch an entire sporting event on television is a commitment. For some, it is only done for big games, where something is on the line beyond the mundane won-loss record. For others, myself included, it is an activity that occurs a number of times a week. I can’t say that I spend an entire baseball game, for example, focused on nothing but the game, though. I have a family, and I also have a laptop that is rarely off. Other things are grabbing at my attention, but I still manage to watch most of any game I set out to enjoy. Rarely does the game end with me feeling any kind of regret for having spent the time, even if the result was not to my liking. Tuesday night, I would bet that any Pittsburgh Pirates fans who made the six-and-a-half hour investment in the team’s game against the Atlanta Braves were pretty unhappy at 1:50 AM, when the game finally ended on one of the worst calls I have ever seen. [Read more →]

Tags: bad sports, good sports by Alan Spoll
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Each week, I sit down to watch the NASCAR Sprint Cup race. Some of the time, I turn on the broadcast too early and subject myself to the variety of useless things that the track promoters choose to bring to us, from hideous renditions of the Star Spangled Banner to some wildly unnecessary and expensive flyovers by the military. I am not anti-military by any means, but I am pretty sure there is a better use of the money it costs to run those planes than to fly over some mid-season race that means little in the long run. Save it for the big races, guys. Anyway, part of the pre-race routine always includes some sort of religious (read: Christian) prayer. I find it totally bizarre that not only is this still done, but it is almost always broadcast by the television network as well. This is a practice that should be changed. [Read more →]

Tags: bad sports, good sports by Alan Spoll
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I may have mentioned before that I am not much of a soccer fan. If you watched the final of the Women’s World Cup on Sunday, though, you could easily tell how even a non-fan could get sucked in. The second half of that match, including extra time and the penalty kicks, was pretty damn riveting. Even though the Americans lost in the end, it was a great match to watch and the culmination of a great run for the U.S team, while an underdog Japanese team came away with a huge win. [Read more →]

Tags: bad sports, good sports by Alan Spoll
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There is nothing quite like attending a professional sporting event. The live experience brings something that you just can’t get on television. I attribute much of that to the feeling you get from being a part of the crowd, a collective excitement that magnifies the impact of any positive or negative occurrence in the game. Baseball, in particular, takes on a whole different dimension when you’re watching it in person. This week was a tough one for baseball fans, though. First, three fans were injured in San Francisco on Tuesday when a bat, formerly held by Pablo Sandoval of the visiting San Diego Padres, went flying into the stands, hitting three people, one of whom required hospitalization. That was nothing to what happened on Thursday in Arlington, Texas, though. A man fell to his death when reaching for a ball tossed to him by Rangers outfielder Josh Hamilton. [Read more →]

Tags: bad sports, good sports by Alan Spoll
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