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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Youth coaches should get a start-up package when they begin coaching: A whistle, a handbook, a clipboard, maybe a golf shirt and a visor. They should also get a foldable chair — perhaps with a seat belt. [Read more →]

Tags: sports, virtual children by Scott Warnock by Scott Warnock
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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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Mixed martial arts is a relatively young field, which is fun because it’s exciting to see a sport scramble to assemble a rich history. (History is essential to sports, for without it you can’t proclaim anyone the greatest ever and not just the best right now or scream at your children about how fundamentally sound everybody was in your day.) That said, it’s a challenge to show off a rich tradition when discussing a weight class created three weeks ago. This has not proven to be an impediment to the UFC (that’s Ultimate Fighting Championship, for those yet to enter the Octagon), which has mastered the art of the instant icon. One of its greatest triumphs: Randy “Captain America” Couture, who spent much of his professional life as an UFC Hall of Famer and a five-time champion and was always announced as a living legend…yet retired with a career record of 19-11. [Read more →]

Tags: sports by Sean Cunningham
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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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Normally, I hate moral victories. But this is a weird day and a weird week and a weird time. I’m still struggling to make enough sense out of what I think about current affairs let alone recent history to write intelligibly. But, Ireland, ranked 6 in the Rugby World Cup in New Zealand, beat the US today 22-10. However, the Green are probably wondering a little bit… they got lucky to do as well as they did, as the USA defense was stunningly good. Conditions were good Rugby conditions — cold, muddy, miserable, like US Football games in November. Stadium holds 20000, and was packed with locals, Irish Supporters, and USA supporters. More Irish than Yanks — Rugby is an Irish passion, and something mainly understood as a shirt style here in the USA. But, there’s lots of affection between the two countries, and between New Zealand so it was a friendly game. It began with a moment of silence for those members of the Rugby community lost on 9/11. That, in itself, was interesting. This was a four province Irish Team, with players from Ulster as well as the South, so they had a Team anthem. But, when they played the Star Spangled Banner, it seemed like the entire stadium was singing.  [Read more →]

Tags: sports by Mike Farrell
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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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I thought I might be the first  in the Coliseum to write about the University of Miami athletics scandal, until the talented Alan Spoll made it the subject of his weekly Good Sports Bad Sports piece. Alan did a bang up job of giving readers a snapshot of what is going down at the U. But being a former ‘Cane, I would like to give it all just a bit more perspective. [Read more →]

Tags: diatribes, sports by Robert O'Hara
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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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When it started, it was perfect: the one thing Americans like more than a winner is alliteration. Since Tiger seemed to win every other tournament (and, even in defeat, drew more interest than all other golfers combined), it made sense to give fans checking golf highlights direct access to the only thing many of them gave a damn about: Eldrick Woods. Thus ESPN and the Golf Channel and Fox Sports and countless other sites added a Tiger Tracker (Sports Illustrated offers the clickable heading “Tiger Woods News”; way to keep it formal, guys), so you could instantly see how close the icon was to claiming another title. To all those responsible for this journalistic innovation, I make a plea: keep it going forever. [Read more →]

Tags: sports by Sean Cunningham
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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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10. When you slide into second, you misplace your hip

9. Willie Mays helped you with your stance

8. You’re the only outfielder with a walker

7. When you get to first, you ask for directions to second

6. You get winded standing for The National Anthem

5. Your rookie card is in black and white

4. When buying steroids, you try to get an AARP discount

3. Instead of pine tar on your bat, you’re using Poligrip

2. When everyone else is having their Seventh Inning Stretch, you’re taking your Seventh Inning Nap

1. You try to run around the bases on your Rascal Scooter
 

Bob Sullivan’s Top Ten Everything appears every Monday.

Tags: Bob Sullivan's top ten everything, sports by Bob Sullivan
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This is not an anti-Michael Vick diatribe. You’ve read that before. Dog fighting does disgust and disturb me. It’s evident Vick took the inherent cruelty of it to another level. He was caught. He served a prison sentence prescribed by our legal system. He was released. Since his release, he’s been active denouncing dog fighting, even working with some members of animal humane societies. He has spent time building himself back into condition to play at the highest level in a professional sport I enjoy a lot for a team I root for. [Read more →]

Tags: sports, virtual children by Scott Warnock by Scott Warnock
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