We stand for justice here at BSGS. I show my biases regularly, but I usually root for fairness. At least, I like to think I do. So when an athlete that I really dislike is getting the short end of the stick, I am happy to stand up for that individual. OK, maybe “happy” isn’t the right word, but at least “okay with it.” This week, Dallas Cowboys quarterback Tony Romo, one of my least favorite people in all of sports, got the shaft from the National Football League. There is little doubt that the league is being very hypocritical here. [Read more →]

Tags: bad sports, good sports by Alan Spoll
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Playing in the NFL is the goal of many college football players. The amount of work these guys put in to get to that point, from the time they are young children, is astonishing. Most of them will never even get a sniff of The League, but that does not necessarily keep them from dreaming. By the time the best players reach the draft, these guys have a pretty decent idea of when they are likely to be picked, so the money they’ll make on that initial deal is fairly well determined as well. Sometimes, though, the dream is derailed. For one player, La’El Collins, an unimaginable situation arose last week, immediately before the draft, leaving his football future very much in doubt. [Read more →]

Tags: bad sports, good sports by Alan Spoll
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This past weekend was one of the few times out of the year that I actually put golf on the television. There were a number of reasons for this. First, it was the Masters, which is always a fascinating event. Second, Tiger Woods was returning from a break of a couple of months during which he tried to piece his suffering game back together. Finally, young Jordan Spieth taught everyone else how it should be done. [Read more →]

Tags: bad sports, good sports by Alan Spoll
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In news that went well beyond the world of sports this week, the state of Indiana passed a new law that purports to protect religious freedom while really opening the door for sanctioned discrimination. The law was created in response to the legalization of marriage equality in Indiana and around the nation. As currently constructed, the legislation will allow business owners to refuse service to customers if their religious beliefs direct them that way. The government will not be able to tell a bakery owner, for example, that he or she has to bake a cake for a same-sex wedding if that person’s “closely-held religious belief” prevents him from doing so. What a bunch of garbage. So Indiana has basically legalized discrimination. Since the new law was passed, numerous people and organizations from the sports world have denounced it, speaking in often-strong language about the immediate need to change or repeal this disgrace.

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Tags: bad sports, good sports by Alan Spoll
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While it is the goal of many children to grow up to be professional athletes, few will make it there. The ones who do are considered to be incredibly lucky to get to make their living playing games. There is some risk involved too, though, especially in contact sports. In football, it is generally accepted that injuries are just a part of the game. With research into head injuries showing dramatic negative effects, we are starting to see players leave the game rather than expose themselves to debilitating injury. The big stories this week involved Tennessee Titans quarterback Jake Locker and San Francisco 49ers linebackers Patrick Willis and Chris Borland, who all retired unexpectedly.

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Tags: bad sports, good sports by Alan Spoll
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I find the fact that things can be reported as news these days with no basis in fact whatsoever to be abhorrent. All that needs to happen is that someone, anyone, says something that seems interesting or controversial and it spreads like wildfire. Many times, there isn’t even any “saying” involved, as Twitter and other social media allow people to speak to an incredibly wide audience with little effort and less personal risk. Anyone with any kind of connection is considered an “insider,” and facts don’t seem to be a necessary component of anything. A recipient of this sort of reporting this week was Tiger Woods, who was said to have been suspended by the PGA Tour for a month, even though nothing of the sort had happened. [Read more →]

Tags: bad sports, good sports by Alan Spoll
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I normally restrict my stories to things that happened through Sunday night. I guess that is a leftover from when I used to schedule this column to post first thing Monday morning. My laziness has given me the opportunity to extend this window, but thus far I have not done so. I was not going to do it this week either, despite the presence of a story that was right up my alley, but a Facebook post by my cousin made me think twice about it. The story to which I refer involves ESPN personality Keith Olbermann, and his tone-deaf comments about Penn State and THON on Twitter the other day. [Read more →]

Tags: bad sports, good sports by Alan Spoll
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When I was a kid, I enjoyed playing sports. I wasn’t a great athlete, but I wasn’t terrible either. I didn’t participate in the organized stuff to any great degree, but I played lots of different sports in my backyard with my neighbors. I did play Little League baseball for a few years. I got to play second base and I got to pitch (although the pitching opportunity was likely more due to my dad being the coach than any great skill on my part). It was a fun and innocent experience. Anymore, though, it seems like the one thing you can count on with sports for kids is that adults will find a way to mess them up. The recent Little League World Series is a great example of this. [Read more →]

Tags: bad sports, good sports by Alan Spoll
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There are wacky stories and then there are wacky stories. Occasionally, you read something that seems so completely bizarre that it feels like it almost has to be true, because why would someone make that up? The sports world is no exception to this phenomenon, and this week, it was NASCAR that could have appeared in the Weekly World News. [Read more →]

Tags: bad sports, good sports by Alan Spoll
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As much as I love college football, 2014 has not been a banner year for the sport. Sure, the actual game is still good, although my beloved Nittany Lions are struggling through a year that was always likely to be the worst part of the sanctions. Everything surrounding the game, though, is going to hell. The NCAA is coming apart at the seams, much to my delight, with lawsuits out the wazoo promising dramatic change for all of college athletics in the future. Beyond that, the way recruiting is handled, especially within certain conferences, continues to shed a very bad light on what is supposed to be an amateur sport played for the love of the game. The latest example of this comes to us courtesy of Mississippi State University and its head coach, Dan Mullen. This week, he pulled the scholarship offer from a kid who was about to graduate in two weeks and enroll early at MSU. [Read more →]

Tags: bad sports, good sports by Alan Spoll
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How did the world become so filled with idiots? Why is rudeness and an oversized sense of entitlement so pervasive today? These are things that occupy my mind on a regular basis, as I encounter them every day. I am sure there are sociologists with solid theories about it, so if you know or are one, feel free to share. I have been thinking about this subject in the last few days because of a silly little incident that occurred at the game between the Cincinnati Bengals and the New Orleans Saints on Sunday. Cincinnati tight end Jermaine Gresham scored a touchdown and tossed the ball up to a couple of women in Bengals shirts who had run down to the railing as the play happened. A man, Tony Williams, sitting right there in a Saints shirt, jumped up and grabbed the ball away from one of the women and kept it.

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Tags: bad sports, good sports by Alan Spoll
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A lot of Bad Sports stories amuse me. Some disgust me, while others make me shake my head in amazement, but it is the funny ones that really motivate me to write. Occasionally, though, there is a story that truly makes me sad. Not sad in the way that I’d be when someone on one of my teams does something stupid and gets suspended for it, but sad in a real way. One of those happened this week. Rita Jeptoo, the winner of the last two Chicago Marathons as well as this year’s Boston Marathon, failed a doping test back in September. The news just came out this week, just as she was about to collect the World Marathon Majors title on Sunday.

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Tags: bad sports, good sports by Alan Spoll
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Sometimes it’s hard to tell who is worse, the players or the leagues. While the NFL and the NCAA find themselves in one bad situation after another, the players at both levels make it clear that many of them have little regard for rules or even for other human beings. At the college level, I think the good kids outnumber the bad kids by a lot, but there are still a number of them that clearly think the world revolves around them and the rules don’t apply. This week, Georgia’s star running back, Todd Gurley, was suspended indefinitely after it was alleged that he signed a whole lot of autographs while getting paid to do so, a clear violation of NCAA rules.

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Tags: bad sports, good sports by Alan Spoll
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There are multiple sides to most stories, right? That’s what people say, anyway. Here at BSGS, despite the fact that most of our stories fall pretty firmly on one side or the other, I guess an argument could be made that many stories could be placed on the opposite side of the ledger if you just looked at them from a different perspective. I am a person of strong opinions, so I would likely tell you that you were wrong if you told me that you disagreed with the side on which I placed one of these incidents of wrongdoing or heroism, but it’s my column so I am allowed to do that. Some things, though, really can reasonably be seen from both perspectives, and this week’s lead story is one of them. In fact, I started this out as a Good Sports story. That did not last. The subject is Minnesota Twins pitcher Phil Hughes, who missed out on a significant bonus this week due to bad luck and then a bad choice. [Read more →]

Tags: bad sports, good sports by Alan Spoll
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On Monday, former U.S. Senator George Mitchell released his latest report issued as the academics integrity monitor for Penn State, a position to which he was appointed by the NCAA when it handed down historic sanctions a couple of years ago as the Jerry Sandusky scandal unfolded. As expected, the report was glowing and included recommendations to remove the remainder of the bowl ban and to return the rest of the scholarships that had been docked. I, along with the rest of Nittany Nation, was thrilled to see this happen. My Twitter feed exploded with unabashed excitement about the promise of the future of the team. As happy as I am to see most of the sanctions brought to an end, I remain unsatisfied, as there are still some aspects of this wholly unjustified punishment that remain in place. Beyond that, the narrative that goes along with this action, from the NCAA, the school’s administration, and the media, is a false one and it grates on me to an incredible extent.

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Tags: bad sports, good sports by Alan Spoll
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NASCAR drivers are a hot-headed bunch. They drive around in these little compartments at very high speeds for hours on end, their cars banging into other cars and getting cut off and messed with constantly. I am amazed at how often I see these guys, after they have been wrecked, run out on the track toward the car that they feel wronged them, gesturing and yelling and sometimes throwing things. I have always felt that this was a rather dangerous thing to be doing. On Saturday night at a dirt track in upstate New York, my fear that someone would get killed doing this became reality. [Read more →]

Tags: bad sports, good sports by Alan Spoll
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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.

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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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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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