I’ve just discovered that the third-string quarterback for the Philadelphia Eagles is named Mike Kafka. It’s a tale that cannot end well. While most NFL players simply have to succeed on the field, Kafka has larger problems. 

Try as Kafka might, he cannot learn what plays the Eagles want him to run — the playbook is kept from him by mysterious authorities; despite his many inquiries he cannot find the stadium — even though he always seems about to arrive, it remains just beyond his reach; he is accused of breaking league rules, but no one will tell him what crime he has committed or how he might defend himself against the unspoken charges; Kafka is tortured by feelings of unworthiness and knows he can never measure up to his father; and despite devoting himself to his family and working himself to exhaustion to provide them with his hefty NFL paycheck, in the moment of his greatest need his own family, even his beloved sister, will wish he were dead and leave him to starve to death as he gives up on life.

(Photo from philadelphiaeagles.com)

Tags: books & writing, sports by Scott Stein
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I am often amazed at the regularity with which the world reminds me that many other cultures are not at all like ours. It is easy to believe that those differences make others uncivilized or backward, and much harder to see them as simply different. I am sure there are many people out there who have a greater ability to see the beauty and value in variety than I do. Even those people, though, might have a little bit of trouble understanding what happened with the North Korean national soccer team this week. [Read more →]

Tags: bad sports, good sports by Alan Spoll
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Athletes make loads of money. Most of the rest of us do not. These are basic facts. It is natural to envy what we don’t have, and even to resent those who seem more fortunate than ourselves. Despite this, most sports fans are okay with the fact that many of the athletes for whom we root are millionaires many times over. We take so much enjoyment from sports, we have not only made peace with this inequity, but we often actually support it, advocating that the teams we love spend even more than they already spend. There is an assumed contract with the fans, though, that goes along with the gigantic contracts the players sign. [Read more →]

Tags: bad sports, good sports by Alan Spoll
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I admit it: I miss the World Cup. Partly this is because it enabled me to go to a bar at 10am on a weekday without it being seen as proof I have a problem. In part it’s the absence of commercials and timeouts — once a half starts, it goes on for at least 45 minutes — which is not the case with any American sport, with the worst offender being an NBA game in the 4th quarter (new Popes are elected in less time). And finally, I genuinely came to enjoy watching it. Here are the things I came to cherish most about the beautiful game: [Read more →]

Tags: sports by Sean Cunningham
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Professional baseball players are generally great athletes. Sure, there have been a few major league players that look less than athletic. Fernando Valenzuela, from way back in the Eighties, comes to mind, although he was actually a much better athlete than his appearance suggested. Most of them, though, look the part. They play a difficult game at the highest level, and are generally pretty fit. Sure, injuries are part of the game, as these guys are exerting themselves, running, diving, sliding, throwing, and swinging with great abandon. We expect these players to be supermen. This week, several players proved to be  much less than extraordinary, injuring themselves in a variety of unusual and somewhat comical ways. [Read more →]

Tags: bad sports, good sports by Alan Spoll
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10. Your locker mate in the Minors was Ty Cobb.

9. Your seeing-eye dog won’t stop barking at the catcher.

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

7. You ask the hot dog vendor if he’s got any prunes.

6. You’re older than the hot dogs he’s selling.

5. Instead of a stretch, you opt for the Seventh Inning Nap.

4. After you slide into third, you can’t get up again.

3. When you get to first, you ask the first baseman, “Which way’s second?”

2. You get winded standing up for The National Anthem.

1. After several practice swings in the on-deck circle, you realize what you’re actually swinging is your cane.
 

Bob Sullivan’s Top Ten Everything appears every Monday.

Tags: Bob Sullivan's top ten everything, sports by Bob Sullivan
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I am a contrarian. I have no problem admitting that. I have often found myself disliking something simply because most people like it. This trait has shown itself most often in my dislike of many major sports stars. If you think back to many of the huge athletes of the past 40 years or so, you will find many on my list of athletes I just don’t like. I am not talking about the trouble-making, law-breaker types. I am talking about the international superstars. From Michael Jordan to Cal Ripken to Mario Lemieux, if most people love the guy, I feel the opposite. Despite that, until very recently, I had nothing against Lebron James. [Read more →]

Tags: bad sports, good sports by Alan Spoll
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I personally didn’t think signing with the Miami Heat indicated a man was evil incarnate — Signing with the Dallas Cowboys? Maybe. — but that was before I heard from Dan Gilbert. Gilbert is the majority owner of the Cleveland Cavaliers (aka “the team King James used to play for”), and he posted an open letter to fans on the team website, in which he thanked LeBron for seven years of service that saw the Cavs fail to win a title but during which they still experienced far more success than they had at any other point in the history of the franchise. I kid, he ripped LeBron a new one as he dealt with the grief from his loss by skipping straight to anger and staying there. [Read more →]

Tags: sports by Sean Cunningham
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He has started 53 percent of his team’s games through July 5th.

He has less RBI than Roger Bernadina, Jeff Keppinger, and Chris Snyder.

He has fewer home runs than Ross Gload, Dane Sardinha, and Jeff Baker.

He is Omar Infante, 2010 All-Star. [Read more →]

Tags: sports by Glenn Giangrande
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I became a football fan at an early age. As much as I like baseball, basketball, and hockey, nothing could ever match the excitement of a football game. College or pro, football has something the other games do not have, even if I could not tell you exactly what that is. One of the things that contributed to my love of football was the quarterback for the Eagles during my teenage and college years. Randall Cunningham could do things no other quarterback could do. He could throw the ball the length of the field, run with incredible speed and agility, and avoid tacklers like no one I had ever seen. He was Michael Vick with a brain and a lack of criminal tendencies and cruelty. [Read more →]

Tags: bad sports, good sports by Alan Spoll
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Rumor has it that Kobayashi will not be competing in this year’s Nathan’s Hot Dog Eating Contest because of some sort of contract dispute. For those of you who don’t know who Kobayashi is, just reference the When Falls All-Coliseum Awards FD2K. Without Kobayashi, Joey Chestnut — last year’s champion and the only person who can come close to Kobayashi’s eating greatness — will undoubtedly run away with the title. Ratings will surely suffer for tomorrow’s noon (EST) showdown on ESPN.

I have a few questions to express my disappointment. The first is, they have contract disputes in competitive eating? Don’t they just pay them in Robitussin? The second question is, what is Major League Eating thinking? Pay Koby whatever he wants. He and Chestnut are the Tiger and Phil of the 4th of July. Their Independence Day showdowns inspire millions of Americans to take it to the grill later in the day. No Koby, no interest in the sport. And my last and most important question is, what is Kobayashi thinking? Sitting out the 4th of July in competitive eating is like holding out of the Tour De France in cycling. Where else can he make a name for himself? Just sad.

Tags: sports by Robert O'Hara
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I realized something today: I don’t care about Chris Bosh. Bosh is a power forward who is rumored to be teaming up with fellow free agent LeBron James to form a “superteam”; it may also include shooting guard Joe Johnson. And it dawned on me: if the NBA has reached a point where playing with Chris Bosh and Joe Johnson makes you part of a superteam, the league has officially gone the way of hockey. [Read more →]

Tags: sports by Sean Cunningham
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Something is wrong with the NBA. There was a time when I really enjoyed watching professional basketball. The Sixers last won the NBA championship when I was a teenager, and they have had many bad teams over the years since then, but that didn’t stop me from watching. At some point in time, though, the league lost its way. The best evidence I can give you of this is a trade that occurred on Tuesday between the Miami Heat and the Oklahoma City Thunder, just before the NBA Draft. [Read more →]

Tags: bad sports, good sports by Alan Spoll
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Sometimes you need to see something to grasp its scale — simply stating its dimensions fails to do it justice, no matter how accurately you describe it. That’s the case with the empire of Pablo Escobar. Jeff and Michael Zimbalist’s documentary The Two Escobars offers extensive footage of the late Colombian drug kingpin once ranked among Forbes’ richest men and it’s extraordinary, not only in terms of the toys his money lets him acquire (though those are impressive, with his race cars and helicopters and the like), but the prominence it affords him, as when he stands beaming and seemingly his entire community applauds his opening of a new playing field. The flip side of this is it also lets us appreciate the carnage Pablo helped create: this is a man who took down planes and once blew up an entire city block to make a point, devastation on a level that sounds almost unreal until you see the bodies and the survivors stumbling around the destruction. He was both a generous and extremely dangerous man and, as this doc makes clear, he really liked soccer. [Read more →]

Tags: sports by Sean Cunningham
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My columns are often full of bad people. Athletes who break the law are everywhere, it seems. Yet the law-breaking athlete does not always seem to be the lowest form of scum in the eyes of sports fans. Instead, the selfish, prima-donna types are often seen as worse than any others. It defies logic, but I know that I feel that way as well. Consider the case of Albert Haynesworth. [Read more →]

Tags: bad sports, good sports by Alan Spoll
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Earlier this week, WFTC contributor Jessica Alfreds offered this post, suggesting some great places for dining in Philly. I made some notes, planning to visit the City of Brotherly Love myself, later this month. Now, thanks to A LOT of local enthusiasm for soccer in that area, I’m asking, “can anyone recommend a good sports bar in town?”

[Read more →]

Tags: sports by Jeff McDonald
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Earlier today, regular WFTC contributor Alan Spoll offered this latest “Bad sports, good sports” post, which included his view on scoring – or lack thereof – in soccer matches.

Alan and I will will have to agree to disagree on this one … though I must admit, right from the start, that mine is hardly an impartial view.
[Read more →]

Tags: sports by Jeff McDonald
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I will start this column out by stating that I am not much of a soccer fan. I am a sports fan, and I can watch anything competitive, but soccer is not something for which I have any kind of real appreciation. Still, it’s World Cup time, and I would not be doing my job as a sports columnist if I completely ignored this event that is dominating the sports news and likely will for the next month or so. No, I won’t be watching Ghana play Serbia, but I can certainly follow the U.S. team and see if they can make a splash at this level. On Saturday, I sat down to watch the American team play England, a country for whom soccer is a national obsession. Watching this match revealed a number of things to me, and very few of them were positive. [Read more →]

Tags: bad sports, good sports by Alan Spoll
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Last night the UFC’s Chuck “The Iceman” Liddell was knocked out in the first round. Which wouldn’t be so striking — you fight long enough, you lose on occasion — except it’s the third straight fight this has happened and this time it was to a guy in his mid-30s with a broken arm. Now there’s talk that Liddell should retire, as he’s 40 and has lost five of his last six bouts (including another first round knockout)…but I say keep reaching for that rainbow. [Read more →]

Tags: sports by Sean Cunningham
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As much as I love sports, I understand very clearly that professional sports are big business. It feels like I read as many stories about contracts, unions, and endorsements as I do about actual athletic accomplishments. This is more of an observation than it is a complaint, of course. I would not have the incredible access I have to a huge array of sports and sports information right from my couch if there wasn’t an amazing amount of money involved. [Read more →]

Tags: bad sports, good sports by Alan Spoll
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