There are a lot of great times of year, spread out all over the calendar. A lot of people love December because of the holidays. The beginning of summer is hugely popular, especially among kids (and teachers). Spring, when it starts to get warm and baseball gets rolling, is a good one too. For me, though, there is nothing quite like the beginning of football season. The festivities officially kicked off this past week.
NFL training camps are just getting underway. Football, certainly the most popular sport in this country, is about to become the center of our sports world yet again. The NFL, you would imagine, should be trying to make sure that it sets the tone for the coming season appropriately. No one wants to start a new season off with a huge misstep, right? Despite that, the 2014 season has stepped in a pothole almost before it has started, and rather than setting the table for a great new year of football, we are all talking about Ray Rice, Stephen A. Smith, domestic abuse and inadequate punishments. [Read more →]
I don’t know the actual percentage of little kids that dream of being professional athletes, but I expect that it’s a pretty large number. Most of the time, the dream is built around having the athletic ability to be able to compete at the highest level. There is a lot more to it than just physical skill, however. It is the ability to focus that separates the great from the good. Even the great ones can be perfectly ordinary or worse when that focus is thrown off, and that was very much on display in the opening round of the Open Championship on Thursday if you were watching Ernie Els. [Read more →]
Hey there, loyal readers. I am on vacation this week and have not had time to put together my usual brilliance to share with you. I will return next week with something sure to astound. In the meantime, here are a few links with stories of interest from this week.
Bad:
1) Two University of Miami football players arrested for rape.
2) Idiot baseball fan sleeps and then sues.
3) Jan Segura’s infant son dies.
4) Brazil collapses at the end of the World Cup.
5) You know that World Cup trophy you won, Germany? It’s not yours.
Good:
1) LeBron James goes home to Cleveland.
2) Pitcher Madison Bumgarner hits his second grand slam of the season.
Bad sports, good sports appears early each week
For the third time this season, NASCAR foisted the joke that is restrictor plate racing onto its fanbase. Everything about this race was bad, although not all of that was the governing body’s fault. The summer race at Daytona has been going on for a very long time, and this year’s edition was just a mess from start to finish. I guess it is my own fault for paying attention. [Read more →]
10. The Hungry Hungry Hippo
9. Chewbacca
8. Great Bitten
7. Caught Masticating
6. Chomp and Circumstance
5. Hannibal the Cannibal
4. Fang Chung
3. Gladys Bite and the Pips
2. Baron Von Munchausen
1. Chewy Lewis and the News
Bob Sullivan’s Top Ten Everything appears every Monday.
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 →]
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 →]
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 →]
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 →]
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.
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 →]
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.
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 →]
Last weekend I completed the NJ Marathon. People want to know how it was, and I feel like I gotta tell it straight: It was awful. It was a grueling, physically brutal experience, and the physical part was nothing compared with the mental torment which itself paled in comparison with the emotional torture. It was bad. When I got home, stunned and wounded, my youngest, the little guy, asked me, “Were you happy when you crossed the finish line?” My answer?: “No.” I wasn’t. But now, after a recalibrating week, I’m finding some peace and a few lessons. [Read more →]
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.
10. “I’m no racist! My basketball team is well over half black!”
9. “Poor people and middle-class people are racists; billionaires are just eccentric.”
8. “I’m no more racist than my good buddy, Cliven Bundy.”
7. “How can I be a bigot? My girlfriend who taped me is half black.”
6. “In 1983 I asked a potential new coach, ‘What makes you think you can coach these n*ggers?’ In 2009 I was fined $2.73 million for housing discrimination – the largest such payment in U.S. history – claiming that the blacks in my building ‘smelled’ and ‘aren’t clean’. At least I’m consistent!”
5. “I’m was hoping my remarks would make me a front-runner for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination.”
4. “Since when do you get in trouble for doing a Paula Deen impression?”
3. “I once got a Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People! (Oooooo, I love saying ‘colored people’!)”
2. “How can I be a racist when, only last week, the U.S. Supreme Court held that racism in this country is a thing of the past?”
1. “I just believe in calling a spade a spade.”
Bob Sullivan’s Top Ten Everything appears every Monday.
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.
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 →]
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 →]
