Just like the average population, professional athletes seem to have their fair share of bad guys. There are good people that mess up and do bad things, and there are bad people that manage to occasionally pull off a nice act. After those folks, we find the bad guys who are just simply bad guys, people who consistently prove that they would certainly not be in any position to receive anyone’s adulation or admiration were it not for their athletic skill. Kellen Winslow II, who was recently traded from the Tampa Bay Buccaneers to the Seattle Seahawks, is one of those guys. [Read more →]

Tags: bad sports, good sports by Alan Spoll
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The high school years are a time of promise, a time for dreams, and a time for exploring potential. Most of us get through it having experienced some degree of success, and we move on to our lives, whether that be college or the working world, with only our own personal limitations to hold us back.  Some people, though, have those opportunities snatched away for no reason, and all we can do is lament their misfortune. Brian Banks, a big-time football prospect from California a few years back, spent five years in prison after being falsely accused of kidnapping and rape by a girl from his high school. He was released last year, and this week, his conviction was overturned after his accuser recanted her story. Where he goes from this point will be fascinating to watch. [Read more →]

Tags: bad sports, good sports by Alan Spoll
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The NBA playoffs started a few weeks ago, and the second round is more than half over. There has been plenty of drama, and much of it has recently been focused on the Miami Heat, as expected. Once the Heat assembled its current roster before the 2010-2011 season, adding LeBron James and Chris Bosh to a team that already had Dwyane Wade, the expectations for this bunch went through the roof. They are currently being severely tested by the Indiana Pacers, a team that was given little chance coming into the series. The drama of the games themselves is great, but most of the theatrics have been off the court.  I have little patience for any of it, honestly. [Read more →]

Tags: bad sports, good sports by Alan Spoll
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Greetings from Las Vegas. I used to come out here every year for the opening weekend of the NCAA Basketball Tournament. In fact, that was the subject of my very first Bad Sports, Good Sports column back in early 2009. I had not been out here since we stopped going for basketball, though, until today, when I arrived for a work conference. Although this city gave me fodder for that initial weekly missive, today it is likely to only keep this column short, as a long travel day has left me pretty beat, and the clock is simply mocking me with its bogus three-hours-earlier-than-it-feels-like reading glowing in green letters next to the bed.

The big news of the week was the untimely death of former NFL great Junior Seau. The long-time San Diego Charger was found dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the chest on Wednesday in his home in Oceanside, California. [Read more →]

Tags: bad sports, good sports by Alan Spoll
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Have you ever watched an all-star game and thought it had been time well spent? At least in the major sports, those games are usually pretty awful, if not completely unwatchable. Baseball probably has the best one, as the game usually involves pretty full effort on the part of the participants. Sure, catchers are unlikely to block the plate and risk injury, especially after the Pete Rose-Ray Fosse incident in the 1970 MLB All-Star game, but the hitters try, the pitchers try, and the fielders try. The worst thing about baseball’s game is that the commissioner decided to make the game count for something a few years back, and now the league that wins gets home field advantage in the World Series. [Read more →]

Tags: bad sports, good sports by Alan Spoll
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Every once in a while, an athlete or coach transcends sports. The group of these individuals is small and obviously quite distinguished. Those of you who read my column regularly know that Joe Paterno was one of these in my eyes. Whatever you feel about the Jerry Sandusky situation and Joe’s role in it, it is hard to dispute his place in the pantheon of college football figures. This week, another towering figure has exited the sports scene, and her sport will be much the worse for it. Pat Summitt, the head coach of the University of Tennessee women’s basketball program, has retired. [Read more →]

Tags: bad sports, good sports by Alan Spoll
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Earlier this week, a Dallas television station reported on a story about a local coach/teacher who had been fired from her job for having a child despite being unmarried. Cathy Samford, who had coached volleyball at the Heritage Christian Academy for the last three years, and who had also recently started teaching science, was let go by the school in the fall. She has filed a complaint with the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and is considering a lawsuit. I am quite surprised by this, but I find myself siding with the school. [Read more →]

Tags: bad sports, good sports by Alan Spoll
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There is a Godard movie that closes with the caption, “End of film. End of cinema.”; even by French standards, it’s awesomely pretentious. Friends and I became obsessed with it and tried to adopt it into our daily conversation whenever possible. (“End of sandwich. End of lunch.”) With Kentucky basketball coach John Calipari finally winning his first national title, it seems worth reviving this grammatical construct, for surely Calipari’s ultimate triumph has signaled the point when players ceased being “student-athletes” and officially became “teenagers killing time before declaring for the NBA draft.” [Read more →]

Tags: sports by Sean Cunningham
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Professional football is a violent game. No matter what rules the league puts in place, that basic fact will remain. The NFL can, should, and will continue to legislate the game to attempt to reduce injury, particularly the long-term variety, but in the end, a game that involves huge men tackling each other is going to be dangerous. When a team actually rewards its players for injuring opposing players, then, you can be sure that things will get ugly quickly. This week, the NFL revealed details of a “bounty” program that was in effect for the New Orleans Saints during their Super Bowl season of 2009, as well as the rest of the tenure of former defensive coordinator Gregg Williams. Players were given off-the-books bonuses for hits that knocked opposing players out of the game. [Read more →]

Tags: bad sports, good sports by Alan Spoll
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People often complain about the excesses in sports. The players make too much money, the games cost too much to attend, and the players behave too badly. Despite those antics, we hold these players up as role models to our children, protesting all the while that we are not doing so. Rather than finding ways to tone down the adulation, the fans and the media seem to be inventing new and worse ways to contribute to the phenomenon. Every February, a bunch of high school kids sign letters of intent to play football at colleges around the country. This has been going on for years, but now, in many cases, it has become a quite a spectacle. This needs to stop. [Read more →]

Tags: bad sports, good sports by Alan Spoll
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I think I give people too much credit. I don’t necessarily expect to never encounter racism and bigotry in the normal course of life, but I somehow still manage to be surprised when it rears its head, especially when it happens in some kind of mainstream fashion.  Last week in one of my Good Sports stories, I mentioned the emergence of New York Knicks point guard Jeremy Lin, who came out of nowhere to dominate the sports news over the last couple of weeks. Lin, a Chinese-American man who played college basketball at Harvard, quickly became the target of ignorant headline writers and news people. [Read more →]

Tags: bad sports, good sports by Alan Spoll
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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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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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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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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.

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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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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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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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Most of my involvement with sports over the course of my life has been as a spectator. I spent several years playing Little League baseball when I was a kid, and I used to play football, baseball, basketball, and hockey with other kids in my neighborhood on a regular basis. Since then, though, other than some intramurals in college, I have experienced very little in the way of first-hand athletic activity until I started running last summer. The rest has all been watched from the comfort of my sofa, along with occasional attendance at live sporting events. I have great respect for the athletes who regularly put their safety on the line so that I can enjoy a nice afternoon in front of the television. [Read more →]

Tags: bad sports, good sports by Alan Spoll
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