The Super Bowl is the biggest game in the country every year. I was going to say the world, but I don’t know if that is actually true. Soccer is awfully big everywhere else in the world, and it seems like the World Cup final, which doesn’t happen every year, of course, might be a bigger deal worldwide. Anyway, here in the U.S., it’s all about football. There is more press at that game than at any other, and after a close game like the one we saw on February 5th, there must have been a million story lines for writers to pursue. The thrilling last few minutes, the great throw and catch from Eli Manning to Mario Manningham that was the game’s key play, or even the myriad expensive commercials that were broadcast throughout the game would have made for interesting reading. Instead, though, the one story that seemed to be absolutely everywhere early this week was about Gisele Bundchen, Tom Brady’s supermodel wife, and the comments she made after her husband’s team lost the game. [Read more →]

Tags: bad sports, good sports by Alan Spoll
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If you see a clump of children wearing bright uniforms involved in some type of sporting activity, nearby are sure to be a throng of parents watching with great interest. It might feel nowadays that it couldn’t be any other way. It’s like the old tree-falling-in-the-forest thought experiment: If children played a game and their parents didn’t see it, did the game actually happen? [Read more →]

Tags: sports, virtual children by Scott Warnock by Scott Warnock
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NFL quarterback/total cutie pie Tom Brady has seen his wife Gisele take some heat for suggesting his teammates failed him and, in the process, cost her husband a fourth Super Bowl ring; some have even termed her New England’s own Yoko Ono. While this is an intriguing analogy, as it suggests Tom is about to take football in strange, experimental directions (“What if instead of passing the ball…the ball passed me?”), it’s also deeply unfair to Gisele, who’s leggier than Yoko ever was. Additionally, Gisele could never break up the Beatles: she is the Beatles. [Read more →]

Tags: sports by Sean Cunningham
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I went into Sunday evening with the thought that, despite my apprehension about the Madonna halftime show at the Super Bowl, I would not be writing about said show as my column for this week. After all, I wrote about the same subject a mere two years back, when they dug up The Who to underwhelm us. I hate to repeat myself, but it is occasionally unavoidable. This is one of those times. What a total crapfest. [Read more →]

Tags: bad sports, good sports by Alan Spoll
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10. The television screen was so small, you had to take turns watching

9. Every five minutes, some old guy was yelling, “Where’s Knute Rockne?”

8. You missed most of the first half so the host could tell you all about Scientology

7. Somebody had already licked all the orange dust off the Cheetos

6. No New York Giants fans, no New England Patriots fans, just Beyoncé fans

5. There’s a big screen TV, but it’s stuck on a station showing “Matlock” reruns

4. The guacamole was moving

3. It was held on Saturday so no one would miss church

2. When the host ran out of beer, he started serving NyQuil

1. The only snacks were what you could find under the couch cushions
 

Bob Sullivan’s Top Ten Everything appears every Monday.

Tags: Bob Sullivan's top ten everything, sports by Bob Sullivan
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A very challenging situation is developing in Indianapolis. Peyton Manning, arguably one of the greatest quarterbacks of all time, may be seeing his time in that Midwestern city coming to an end. It could, in fact, be his NFL career that is ending. The only part that is certain is that Colts fans are experiencing plenty of agita right now, and it is likely to last a little while. [Read more →]

Tags: bad sports, good sports by Alan Spoll
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I am going to preface this column by saying that I understand that there are people out there for whom the recently revealed events at Penn State involving Jerry Sandusky, children from The Second Mile, and the leadership of the university and the football program completely invalidate the incredible career and contribution to the school of Joe Paterno. I am not one of those people. I am not here to debate this point or to belittle the opinion of others. Rather, I would like to simply express my feelings about the passing of Joseph Vincent Paterno on Sunday. [Read more →]

Tags: bad sports, good sports by Alan Spoll
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Society forgives a lot. Don King killed two people — yes, he really did kill one person, then decide this wasn’t enough so he later killed another — before he pulled his life together and entered that most honorable of professions: boxing promotion. (And in fairness, in the first case he was trying to protect one of his illegal gambling houses and in the second the guy owed him money.) Likewise, Mike Tyson served time for rape, but now most people tend to ignore that in favor of the nobler moments from his life, like when he sang along to “In the Air Tonight” in The Hangover or beat the hell out of Don King. Perhaps the only crime you can’t redeem yourself from over time is child abuse. And this may be why there doesn’t seem to be a measured response to it: it is an offense that seems either to get ignored completely or for which everyone connected in any way must be destroyed immediately, disregarding the possibility that they might actually be innocent. [Read more →]

Tags: on the law, sports by Sean Cunningham
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This has been one of the bleakest winters ever for Met fans.  We lost Jose Reyes to free agency, a body blow though anyone could see it coming.  And our general manager acquired a few adequate relief pitchers while all our division rivals bulked up.  Meanwhile, the team continues to hang from a financial thread. But things are looking up: they recently signed Omar Quintanilla to a minor league contract. [Read more →]

Tags: diatribes, sports by Jeff Scheuer
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When you watch, read about, and write about sports, you come across an awful lot of cliches. Many of them originated in the world of sports, but lots of them come from elsewhere too. With as much talking as sports commentators have to do during a broadcast, I guess it makes sense that they lean on the same old expressions over and over again. Cliches become cliches for a reason, though. One big one in football is “defense wins championships.” No title was won this weekend, but this old expression certainly showed that it has some truth behind it as the New York Giants beat the Green Bay Packers and the San Francisco 49ers beat the New Orleans Saints. [Read more →]

Tags: bad sports, good sports by Alan Spoll
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Sports draws the traffic. On the talking box, on the intertubes, to the stadium and in chit-chat; sports is the universal solvent of unacquaintance and disunion. It’s a somewhat paradoxical effect given the habits of hockey fans and Olympic attendees to occasionally jeer or attack the other side but even the bitterest footie yob who would bite the ears off another ticketholder for wearing the wrong colors can find a kinship there while he could only blink in amazement at any suggestion that, hey, it’s just a game. Discouraging words like that are passing rare, as heresy deserves. Interest in a sport and adherence to one team or another cut across other demographic divides combining races, classes, those who do and do not wear glasses into a single SportsNation whose language is as loud as it is untranslatable. But the outside elements do intrude. Even a militant sports detractor like Yours Truly knows that there has scarcely been an event in forty years where some guy in the stands with a painted face and rain-fro wig hasn’t been waving an enigmatic sign; John 3:16. It is not too inscrutable. As the non-sportsman still knows who won the World Series, so even the most rabid secularist recalls or can find out that this is a citation to a verse in the King James Bible, (from recently refreshed memory) For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son so that he who believes in Him shall not perish, but have eternal life. As a drunken Billy Graham might have put it, this is Christianity for Dummies, or those with busy schedules. Religiousity has been part of sports as it has been part of life all along. Chariot racers competed for the favors of Athena and Mars. The Aztecs played ball to decide who would be sacrificed, and who executed. Knute Rockne, whether in life or as depicted in that bastard child of two distractions; the sports movie, was a praying man, publicly so and so were his players, his staffers, his imitators and his fans. So no need to denounce Tebow as a usurper or opportunist since he has brought a quick, ritualized endzone bow into the previously dignified world of touchdown celebrations. [Read more →]

Tags: religion & philosophy, sports by Ken Watson
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I suppose it might be because my team is not participating, but I found the NFL playoffs particularly painful this weekend. It is probably because of gambling and fantasy football, but I have found that most football fans watch the playoffs, even when their team did not make it, which is different than what I have seen with most other sports. I normally enjoy these Eagles-free games just because they are football, but I found these games pretty awful. As always, I make no pretense of being objective. My own dislikes had a lot to do with my disgust, although bad officiating and bad play certainly entered into it. [Read more →]

Tags: bad sports, good sports by Alan Spoll
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Bravado. For whatever reason, it would appear to be rampant in sports. I guess it makes some sense…athletes, especially those playing at the highest levels, are extremely competitive people by necessity. Sure, some of them motivate themselves quietly, finding everything they need to excel without having to make spectacles of themselves. Others need to play mind games, strut around like idiots, or taunt their opponents at every opportunity as ways to stoke their inner fires. On Sunday, the final day of the NFL’s regular season, there were several examples of bravado that were not only obnoxious, but also wildly misplaced, which is often another characteristic of this behavior. [Read more →]

Tags: bad sports, good sports by Alan Spoll
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Bill Conlin, a legendary sportswriter for the Philadelphia Daily News, was accused of sexual abuse this week by a number of people, all claiming to have been abused back in the seventies. Four people, including one of Conlin’s nieces, accused the writer early in the week, and several others have come forward since, all claiming that he touched them when they were children. Unlike many other situations like this, these kids or witnesses to the events actually told their parents what happened. Across the board, those parents chose to try to handle the situation themselves rather than go to the police. [Read more →]

Tags: bad sports, good sports by Alan Spoll
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Free agency gives players an opportunity to go out on the open market and get as much money as they can get. It also allows them to choose the city in which they will live and play half of their games each season. Considering how short the average professional sports career is (roughly 3.5 years for NFL players, for example, according to ABC News), I am in full support of players getting everything they can get. Unfortunately, new contracts also give players an opportunity to talk about why they chose to move on from their last team, and more often than not, it seems to me, the explanations simply cause problems. The most recent massive contract went to Albert Pujols, the new first baseman for the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim (how’s that for a name?), who signed a 10-year, $254 million contract. He left the St. Louis Cardinals, for whom he had played for the first eleven years of his spectacular career. In this case, the silly interview that occurred afterward was actually with Pujols’ wife Deidre, for some reason. [Read more →]

Tags: bad sports, good sports by Alan Spoll
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The NBA is back. What’s that, you say? You hadn’t noticed it was gone? I can’t say I blame you there. The product has gotten so bad over the last few years that I was thinking that a missed season might not be such a bad thing. A new agreement was reached recently, though, and things are moving along toward an abbreviated season which is set to start on Christmas Day. However, what should have been the beginning of an exciting condensed period of player movement, like we had with the NFL this season, immediately went wrong this week. A blockbuster trade that had been made between the New Orleans Hornets, the Houston Rockets, and the Los Angeles Lakers involving superstar point guard Chris Paul was squashed by the league a few hours after it had been completed. The same league, by the way, that currently owns those same New Orleans Hornets.

[Read more →]

Tags: bad sports, good sports by Alan Spoll
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For many of us, our college years are a time to do things we have never done before, and may never do again. New experiences are necessary in order to learn what we want out of life, and being open to those experiences is a key to maximizing the value we get out of a college career. Unfortunately, many of the things we do at that age are things that we will look back on with a cringe when we have reached a more mature stage of life. The event from this week that has made me think about this happened in Stillwater, Oklahoma, after the Oklahoma State Cowboys defeated their nemesis, the Oklahoma Sooners, for the first time in nine tries. They won in style, spanking the Sooners by a score of 44-10. At the end of the game, thousands of fans rushed the field, intending to bring down the goalposts. In the long melee that followed, thirteen people were injured, one of whom had to be airlifted to a local hospital. [Read more →]

Tags: bad sports, good sports by Alan Spoll
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When is a dirty player not a dirty player? In the case of Detroit Lions defensive tackle Ndamukong Suh, it is when you ask him. Ask anyone else, though, and you’ll likely hear a different tale. After numerous plays by him over the last couple of years that have gotten him penalized and fined, his reputation has become one of an exceptionally talented player who often steps over the line. On Thanksgiving Day, his actions left no doubt as to which side of that line is his preferred side. During a scuffle with Evan Dietrich-Smith of the Green Bay Packers, he not only banged Dietrich-Smith’s head against the ground several times, but he stomped on his arm with his cleat as he was pulled off of his opponent. Suh was immediately ejected from the game. [Read more →]

Tags: bad sports, good sports by Alan Spoll
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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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