OK, I have watched a bit of the World Cup. Not much, but I have watched the U.S. matches. Actually, I shouldn’t even say I watched…I actually was listening to the match against Germany in my car, and found it engrossing enough that when I got out of my car to go run, I actually found an internet radio station that was broadcasting the game and listened to it during my run. I am not totally anti-soccer, even if it sometimes seems like it. However, there are some bizarre things about this sport and the behavior of the athletes who play it, and that was very much on display during the match between Uruguay and Italy on Tuesday. Luis Suarez, a striker for Uruguay, actually bit Giorgio Chiellini on the shoulder during the match. You did not misread that. [Read more →]

Tags: bad sports, good sports by Alan Spoll
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Tony Gwynn died last week. For those who are not familiar with him, he was a baseball player who played for twenty seasons in the majors, all with the same team, which is something that is a rarity anymore. Fans of the San Diego Padres got to call him their own from 1982 through the 2001 season, and he was probably the best hitter I ever had the pleasure of watching. His death was caused by cancer of the salivary glands. He spent many years chewing tobacco, and it seems pretty clear that the habit led to his death. [Read more →]

Tags: bad sports, good sports by Alan Spoll
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So much of sports is glitz. Highlights. SportsCenter. Kids grow up watching the “plays of the week” shows, and rarely do those shows focus on teamwork or fundamentals. A young football player wants to spike the ball over the crossbar. A young basketball player wants to dunk or shoot a three-pointer. Blocking and free throw shooting just don’t have the same appeal. The thing is that these things go a lot further toward winning championships than their eye-popping counterparts. Superstars can do great things for a team, especially when it comes to selling tickets and merchandise, but a cohesive team that works together is the smartest bet nearly every time. That point was proven this week by the San Antonio Spurs, who dominated the star-laden Miami Heat to win the NBA championship, the team’s fifth in the last sixteen years. [Read more →]

Tags: bad sports, good sports by Alan Spoll
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The Belmont Stakes was run on Sunday in New York, 147 years after the first one. It was an eventful race, as California Chrome was attempting to become the first horse to win horse racing’s Triple Crown since Affirmed in 1978. He fell short, finishing in a dead heat for fourth, a couple of lengths back of winner Tonalist. California Chrome’s owner, Steve Coburn, was unhappy with the result and he made it known very publicly. [Read more →]

Tags: bad sports, good sports by Alan Spoll
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I often fool myself into believing that we have come so far as a society. It’s 2014, and the world is incredibly different than it was when I was a kid. Any time I think that the short-sightedness and prejudices that seemed so prevalent in those years are gone, some neanderthal opens his mouth and reminds me that there are still a lot of yahoos out there. This week, tennis player Ernests Gulbis of Latvia, who is the 18th seed at the French Open, has had a bunch of success on the court, including a win over Roger Federer on Sunday to advance to the quarterfinals. His big performance was marred, though, by some things he said in a post-match interview on Friday. He stated that a career in tennis might not be a good idea for women because they need to worry about kids and family.

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Tags: bad sports, good sports by Alan Spoll
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Rory McIlroy made news in a couple of different ways this week. First, he broke up with his longtime girlfriend and recent fiancé, tennis star Carolyn Wozniacki. He followed that up by winning the BMW PGA Championship this weekend. Whether or not these events were related has been quite the topic of conversation. [Read more →]

Tags: bad sports, good sports by Alan Spoll
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Major news was made recently when Michael Sam, an openly gay man, was selected in the NFL Draft by the St. Louis Rams. I did not write a lot about that event because I had discussed this subject in this space several times in the past, and I didn’t want to keep treading the same ground. It really is a pretty big deal, as far as equality in sports goes, though, and I was thrilled that it happened. Still, as a late pick, Sam has an uphill climb to actually make the team and play in the league. He almost shot himself in the foot this week before ever suiting up for his new team, though, when it was announced that the Oprah Winfrey Network was about to film a documentary show about him and his quest to be a professional football player, following him throughout the camps and team activities. Ugh.

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Tags: bad sports, good sports by Alan Spoll
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This past weekend was the NFL Draft. Somehow, this has become a big-time television show with very large ratings, which is really amazing if you consider what they are actually broadcasting. Part of how the league and the network (ESPN) build interest in this event is by picking a guy and focusing on him to a truly bizarre extent in the weeks leading up to the draft, and then keeping a camera pointed at him almost exclusively until he is drafted. This year’s target was Texas A&M quarterback Johnny Manziel. [Read more →]

Tags: bad sports, good sports by Alan Spoll
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What an amazing thing it must be to be a world class athlete. I grew up imagining myself out on a football field or a baseball field in front of thousands and thousands of people, making big plays and hearing the cheers. The fact that I had no special skill in either sport did not really enter into my thought process, of course. It seemed to me that every kid had the same dreams, and I imagine that many of them did. This is why I find it so unfathomable that so many of the guys who not only have the skill to get them to the pros but are actually good enough to be superstars are so willing to screw up and risk it all. Florida State quarterback and Heisman Trophy winner Jameis Winston is one of these guys.

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Tags: bad sports, good sports by Alan Spoll
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Los Angeles Clippers owner Donald Sterling is a disaster. He has presided over a terrible franchise since 1981, and is currently the longest-tenured owner in the NBA. His team has been miserably bad for most of those years. Now that they are finally good, he has found another way to embarrass his team and his city. Known to be a racist for many years by a number of people, Sterling left no doubt about it this week when a tape surfaced of him making racial comments to his girlfriend.

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Tags: bad sports, good sports by Alan Spoll
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There are many ridiculous rules involving college sports, and I have laid some of them out here in this space in the past. The one thing that seems pretty clear is that the rules are rarely for the benefit of the “student-athlete.” Just about everything the NCAA does these days is coming under heavy scrutiny, and with good reason. One area that should be closely examined is the way transfers are handled for these kids. [Read more →]

Tags: bad sports, good sports by Alan Spoll
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I constantly realize that I am not the typical sports fan. There are just so many things I see and hear fans do that I just wouldn’t do. I have had seats at a baseball game that were right up against the fence that separates the stands from the field, and yet I have never felt the need to interfere with a player in any way at all, whether that be physical interference of any kind of even verbal interference. There were a couple of interesting examples of those things happening this week, though. I was not involved, of course. [Read more →]

Tags: bad sports, good sports by Alan Spoll
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Being a parent is one of the central roles in most peoples lives. Whether you are a professional athlete, an accountant, or a cashier, there is a better than fair chance that you will become a parent at some point. For regular people, it is a natural thing to take a few days off when a child is born. For people who get paid large sums of money to play games, though, the same act often leads to a great deal of consternation among fans and the media. This week, Daniel Murphy, the second baseman for the New York Mets, left the team for a couple of days to be with his wife as she gave birth to their baby. Some people were not pleased.

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Tags: bad sports, good sports by Alan Spoll
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Every once in a while, a sports fan is faced with a strange dilemma. It sometimes becomes evident that it would be much more beneficial for a team to lose than to win. This is because of the nature of the draft, particularly in football and basketball. Sure, baseball and hockey have drafts too, and the draft orders for those sports are determined in such a way that the worst teams get the earlier picks, just like in football and basketball, but because baseball and hockey have robust minor league systems, players in those sports generally take a lot longer to get to the major league level and picks are far more speculative in nature. If you root for a bad team, you often realize that late-season wins may actually be hurting the cause of making the team better. In the spirit of that philosophy, this week’s big Bad Sports story to me was the Philadelphia 76ers’ win over the Detroit Pistons on Saturday night. [Read more →]

Tags: bad sports, good sports by Alan Spoll
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Five years and one week ago, I wrote my first column for When Falls the Coliseum. I was going to make note of this in last week’s post, but it seemed more appropriate to call it out this week, as I knew it was likely that I would be writing about the same thing I wrote about back on March 16, 2009, and that is March Madness. The NCAA Basketball Tournament started this week, and the opening weekend provided lots of Good Sports moments. [Read more →]

Tags: bad sports, good sports by Alan Spoll
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It is a shame, but we are used to professional athletes behaving badly. Heck, I wouldn’t be able to write this column if there weren’t a world full of these people doing stupid, bad things on a very regular basis. Occasionally, it’s not the players but the coaches that are committing these acts of idiocy. Every once in a while, though, it goes higher up the ladder than that. On Sunday night, Indianapolis Colts owner Jim Irsay was arrested for driving while intoxicated in a suburb of Indianapolis where he lives. [Read more →]

Tags: bad sports, good sports by Alan Spoll
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I keep reading that this is a “trophy for everybody” world now. The lack of trophies on my desk make me think that this is just hyperbole, although it could just be that I have not competed in anything that would earn me one of these trophies just for being there. On second thought, I have several medals I received for finishing somewhere in the thousands in a bunch of races, so I guess I agree with the original premise. Still, when you get into organized sports beyond the type that anyone can just join because he or she feels like it, there is usually a distinct winner at the end, and that is as it should be. Occasionally, there are examples to the contrary, and this is where the supposed fun begins. Fun for columnists, not for players, of course. The state of Ohio held its high school hockey championships last week, and when the ice dust cleared, no one won. Or everyone won. It’s hard to tell. [Read more →]

Tags: bad sports, good sports by Alan Spoll
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When people cheat in the professional ranks, it is a shame. When there is cheating in college sports, it seems a little bit worse, since the players there are younger and are, ostensibly, still kids for the most part. Cheating at the high school level, though, takes it all much farther down a path where there can be no explanation beyond just bad people. In nearly all of those situations, of course, adults are either the ones doing the cheating or they are at least aware and complicit in some way. This week’s example comes from Curie Metropolitan High School in Chicago, whose basketball team was ranked second in USA Today’s national rankings until it was revealed that seven of the team’s players were actually academically ineligible to play.

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Tags: bad sports, good sports by Alan Spoll
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One of the things I see regularly that really gets under my skin is this bizarre sense of entitlement that so many people seem to have developed, particularly young people. I don’t know where it comes from or why it’s so pervasive, but everywhere I turn I encounter yet another example of it. In a sports-related story, we had a good illustration of it last week at West Chester University. At halftime of a basketball game between the school and Shippensburg University, a student was given the chance to win $10,000 by hitting a series of shots. According to the rules of the contest, he failed to win, despite the fact that it appeared he had indeed won. Of course, he wasn’t allowed to actually lose…a national pizza chain picked up on the uproar that followed and came up with the money for the kid. Everyone was happy…except me, of course.

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Tags: bad sports, good sports by Alan Spoll
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What’s wrong with people? I really need to know. Perhaps I should run a contest…people could send in their answers and the best answer would qualify the sender for some sort of fabulous prize, like maybe a lifetime subscription to Bad Sports, Good Sports (you really can subscribe). It’s a tough question, though, and I reserve the right to decide that none of the answers are suitable. As an example of how hard this question is, consider what has been happening to Rashaan Evans, a high school football player from Alabama, over the last couple of weeks.

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Tags: bad sports, good sports by Alan Spoll
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