It snowed a couple of weeks ago. The day that this column will post will have a high temperature that is about thirty degrees colder than the day before here in the suburbs of Philadelphia. Yes, it’s spring! With spring comes one of my favorite things. Rain. Wait, no, not rain. The woodpeckers waking me up in the morning don’t top the list either. Wait, I remember…baseball! [Read more →]
Mo’ne Davis, a baseball player from Philadelphia, became a national sensation last year when she led her team to the Little League World Series and nearly won it all. As the only girl on her team, and as the team’s primary pitcher, she became a role model for girls everywhere. Naturally, some ignorant guy has now had to try to knock her down a few pegs. He is paying for his mistake. [Read more →]
Every once in a while, a sports fan is faced with a strange dilemma. It sometimes becomes evident that it would be much more beneficial for a team to lose than to win. This is because of the nature of the draft, particularly in football and basketball. Sure, baseball and hockey have drafts too, and the draft orders for those sports are determined in such a way that the worst teams get the earlier picks, just like in football and basketball, but because baseball and hockey have robust minor league systems, players in those sports generally take a lot longer to get to the major league level and picks are far more speculative in nature. If you root for a bad team, you often realize that late-season wins may actually be hurting the cause of making the team better. In the spirit of that philosophy, this week’s big Bad Sports story to me was the Philadelphia 76ers’ win over the Detroit Pistons on Saturday night. [Read more →]
Five years and one week ago, I wrote my first column for When Falls the Coliseum. I was going to make note of this in last week’s post, but it seemed more appropriate to call it out this week, as I knew it was likely that I would be writing about the same thing I wrote about back on March 16, 2009, and that is March Madness. The NCAA Basketball Tournament started this week, and the opening weekend provided lots of Good Sports moments. [Read more →]
College football drives me crazy. Don’t get me wrong, there were some tremendous games this holiday weekend, including some huge upsets and some wins that meant a lot to me personally (thanks Penn State!). Football at the college level, as a game, is tremendous. The structure of the postseason is a total mess, of course, and has been for years. The unfortunate part this week is that college football managed to find a way to rob me of the enjoyment of something that I would have loved in past years, which is chaos.
Every once in a while, I review all of my stories at the end of the week and find that while a bunch of interesting stuff happened in sports that week, nothing stood out to me as a lead story for Bad Sports, Good Sports. This is one of those weeks. Either nothing happened in sports this past week that moved me to attack with my customary cynicism or to wax poetic about someone’s great accomplishment, or I am just tired after a long day and a long week and my synapses are not firing well enough to make something leap into my imagination in order to lead my fingers to type out some clever commentary, or at least something that approximates my usual drivel. [Read more →]
In the big business that is professional sports, corporate sponsorship is a major factor in the whole show. From stadium signage to television and radio commercials, many varieties of companies and organizations pay significant money to make sure you know their name. Most of the time, fans do not have major opinions on the nature of those sponsors, preferring to try to ignore them instead. I am a pro at completely tuning out commercials, most of the time not even realizing that they are on. Occasionally, though, a sponsor appears that causes an uproar, and the sport involved becomes secondary. One such situation became news this week when Texas Motor Speedway announced that the National Rifle Association would be the title sponsor for the NASCAR Sprint Cup race that will happen at the track in April. [Read more →]
Watching your children play sports is fun. My girls did not spend a great deal of time playing sports, being more inclined toward the performing arts, but they did play basketball for several years when they were younger. They were never more than role players on their teams, but I used to love sitting and watching them play. I am a hot-headed sports fan, so my grumbling about bad calls was occasionally louder than it should have been, but I never went too far with it. I did once tell our coach, after listening to him tell me about bad officiating, that we would probably get better calls if his own daughter didn’t repeatedly mouth off to the referees and show up her teammates. [Read more →]
