Duke Lacrosse Scandall

For the most part I have kept my mouth shut during the entire proceedings, and at first I believed the girl’s story, but too much has come out for her story to be even remotely true. The way the media has covered this has been to blame the lacrosse team from day one, never relenting. The prosecutor made a statement on day one, has nothing to back it up, and is currently saying nothing because he knows he has nothing. But simply look at the facts of the situation, that girl is a flat out liar. That’s what she is. My thoughts regarding this whole situation have been growing into pure hatred of her. And you want to talk about racism. Fine, talk about the city of Durham jumping to the forefront of the blame. What did they know? Nothing. Why did they make all that noise? To blame white people and to try to show everyone how underprivileged they really were. Now what I write in this post is probably the most racist thoughts I have ever had in my life, but I truly do believe them.

For one, if you are underprivileged, work out of it. I’m not saying it’s easy, but it’s doable. It's due time for White America to stop feeling guilty for things that have happened in the past. No one from our generation black, white, orange whatever has faced discrimination, at least not any more than any other race receives on a daily basis. White America needs to stop putting up with this crap. Why are we constantly reminded that black people used to have it tough. I mean, Irish people used to have it tough, when's the last time anyone was on TV blaming their crime on the struggles of the Irish. It doesn't happen. Irish people picked them selves up by the bootstraps; they worked hard and made a better life for their families. Look at what the Asian's are doing now; all of their kids work their ass off in school. Most of these Asian families are poor as shit, but they don't complain, hell you barely ever even read about them in the papers. They work hard and are quickly moving up in society. Good for them. That is the American Dream. It seems the Africa American Dream is to get rich quick, or sit on your ass and blame whites when it does not happen. We are taught that diversity is great. But by diversity they mean not WHITE. They don't mean, Irish, German, Scandinavian, Russian, Italian, all cultures with a lot to offer, but none celebrated. At this point I don't even blame black people, I blame a culture that has allowed this to happen. I blame people for not taking pride in who they are. I blame people for being too quick to make excuses. White people are so afraid of being labeled racists that we've lost control over a culture for which we are the majority. It is very upsetting.

Now back to the Duke situation. It has been made very clear that the accuser was very drunk. How come when the medical examination was done on her, the doctor did not mention this? Isn’t that an important thing to know? Isn’t their job to give the facts of their examination, not just make something look more like a rape? That person should be fired and blackballed from working that job ever again. No one ever brings this up, but that is omitting important evidence. The second dancer who for a couple of weeks had been saying nothing happened then she suddenly changes her story and it comes out that she did so to get a favorable outcome in a different trial. How is that even legal? No one brings that up either. One of the two strippers that was there was persuaded (or made to lie) so she could benefit in another way. Isn’t that a crime in of itself?

Every one of the Duke players has been treated unfairly. Their coach resigned over this scandal, their season was cancelled, they have lost recruits who are getting out of their commitments. Rape sucks. It should never happen, but before it gets blown out of proportion, the claim needs to be validated. Whatever happened to innocent until proven guilty? The Duke lacrosse players were not treated by our old age law.

Here is what I think happened and I think this is how it will come out in the end. The stripper got raped as a 14 year old, but was too afraid to say anything. She brought it up three years later, but at that time she had no proof of what happened. She has lived with that the rest of her life. When she was summoned to perform at the Duke party, she was very drunk. The players felt that they were not getting their money’s worth and refused to pay the agreed upon allotment. At that time someone said something (either party could have started this) and the N word started flying around. That’s when the dancers left the scene and the second dancer made the phone call regarding racial slurs. She got the first stripper to the car, then tried to take her home but could not because she did not know where she lived. At this point she tried to get rid of her and the cops were called by a security guard. The security guard later made a statement that there was no way the girl was raped. At that point the police took her in and when she came to, still very drunk and upset about the money situation, she retold the story of her rape ten years ago except said it had happened that night.

At this point how can the case still continue? The DNA evidence has come back with no evidence of involvement of the Duke players. The accuser pointed out two guys she said were 100% the ones that raped her, except that there is way more evidence then needed that one of the guys was not there. If that does not tell you she was lying, I do not know what else you need. She just picked random guys she knew were at the party, and it is now quite obvious that one of them was long gone.

In all actuality, if this were a fair world, the medical examiner would get fired, the district attorney would not be re-elected, the girl would get charged with filing a wrongful complaint (I don’t really know what this is called), she would be sued for libel with intent to hurt, and she should go to a mental institution. Is this too harsh on the girl? No, look at how much pain she has cause so many other people. That punishment would not be enough. Now, none of that will ever happen because of the way our society is and the Duke players will just be happy that they are no longer being accused of something they all now never occurred.

Conflict

When IDB version 2.0 started, I had once said that writing is feast or famine. Sometimes, it’s a bit more than being prolific and quick-witted, but a matter of clearing out the clutter. Not to say that I have done that completely, but the recent Duke-UNC love fest on top of the potential greatness of the New York Diddy Knicks have prompted the scribe to return to the roots. Of course, the thing about clearing out the clutter is that most of the mess comes from incomplete thoughts. Something pops into mind like “why the hell is Joacqim Noah suddenly the greatest defensive basketball player in NCAA history?” and you can’t finish lambasting Jay Bilas and Billy Packer’s adulation because… those damn spreadsheets are due before lunch. “The Mavericks are looking like last year’s White Sox; they look like they’re imploding at the end, but suddenly, they run through the Clippers, Spurs and Suns en route to the meeting at 3:00 in the conference room.” S%$*! That’s been the sportswriting life as of late. Finally, I bring to you my first complete thought since… crap, I can’t even complete that sentence.

So it’s been a week, but to those of us that “Live For This”, there has been an interesting start to the baseball regular season. While I had been working on predictions and things to look out for during the 2006 campaign (such as the White Sox repeating this year and Carl Pavano pitching twenty games… okay, I made myself laugh at that one, too), I had been unable to shake the talks about this impending steroids investigation. It has little to do with the cries of this being a witch hunt or wondering if there is any purpose to this investigation at all. It has to do with George Mitchell himself. As of late, there have been a mention or two about Mitchell as part owner of the Boston Red Sox, which would make any actions against the Yankees’ Gary Sheffield or Jason Giambi very interesting. Yet, even before his role with the pride of Beantown was mentioned, the fact that he happens to be the chairman for the Walt Disney Company had me going. Who here finds it interesting that Mitchell is spearheading the steroids investigation for reasons other than his “unmatched integrity”? So it may not seem like such a big deal, but there is a conflict of interest at play. It will be interesting to see how this plays out.

You can look at Bud Selig and wonder if he has decided to bring in some help or if he has run clear from any possible guilt as this so-called steroid era took place in his watch. You could look at team owners and think that they may stand behind this investigation only to avoid public scrutiny or to protect their investments (players). While there are guys like Kevin Towers who admitted knowledge of Ken Caminiti’s use of performance-enhancers, there won’t be much heard from past and current GMs, scouts, managers and coaches as they have to still manage their current rosters. And of course, monst fans won’t admit to actually enjoying the 1998 home run chase anymore. Yet, Mitchell is someone worth noting because as he reveals information about the investigation, the ship that he captains will navigate some choppy waters. ESPN, despite its coverage and reach, is not exactly the most objective medium in the free world, even in such a “fantasy world” such as sports. I would look to see if the MTV of sports will treat the investigation as if it was CSPAN or Court TV, Fox News or CNN or even the Daily Show. Will ESPN become the propaganda voicebox of Major League Baseball or a muckraking nuisance for its own cause? Mitchell may not necessarily run the day-to-day operations of Disney, yet he is quite aware of the unchalleneged value the sports network brings to the company. How he decides to disseminate information will not only have an impact on how fans continue to perceive Barry Bonds, Mark McGwire and others implicated, but it will probably make the evening SportsCenter even more of a soapbox than ever before. And you can only imagine what their chief personalities such as Mike Greenberg, Dan Patrick and even Stephen A. Smith will sound like with each passing day.

At the end of the day, there is a great season of baseball that will still be played. Regardless of where you may stand with the importance of steroids and the records, appreciate this season. Baseball, in all honesty, has much more to correct outside of a syringe or two, but that is another posting.

Say What?!?!: I wanted to mention something not often, if ever seen before. During the Nationals/Mets series these past few days, three different Nationals players had been hit by Mets pitchers. It happened to be that one of the three was Jose Guillen, an all-time favorite in Anaheim. Guillen was hit three times in the last two games, including hit by an inside elbow-level pitch by Pedro Martinez. Guillen decides to "calmly" remind Pedro that his elbow and the ball were not to meet. Points his bat and attempts to charge the mound. I say attempts because catcher Paul Lo Duca tried to stop Guillen, but it was actually home plate ump Tom Barrett that held him back by grabbing him at the shoulders and telling him to calm down. Of course, the benches clear for a lot of postering and "how's your wife and my kids?". Umps get shafted (many times deservingly), but in this case, Barrett didn't act like a typical umpire. He didn't want to bring more fuel to the fire nor did he make himself the show. He stepped in where others would have tried their best Jackie Gleason scream to throw both Martinez and Guillen out. Kudos.

Hodge-podge

I would like to begin by apologizing to anyone reading this. I have wanted to post since February but have never been able to complete a full thought. Instead I have a bunch of incomplete thoughts that I have decided to throw together into one hodge-podge post. Just realize that some of these thoughts range back as far as a month and a half in the past and a lot of this was never intended to go together.

I first wanted to touch on the Black History Month piece written in late February. I’m 24 years old and white and have lived in either Dallas or Los Angeles my whole life. I can fairly say that I have never, NEVER, seen a real case of racism. I’m not saying that it does not happen and maybe I have never lived in the right place to see it, but I do sometimes get mad at people crying that African Americans are the race picked on in this country. I know that’s not true. I work in a building where every person does not have a fair chance to get a job, but the people not getting the fair chance are not African American but white. We live in a world today where companies will hire people of slightly less skill than a white person because they are not white, will let people into their schools with slightly worse attributes than a white persons because they are not white, will give out scholarships to these same schools only for African Americans, Asians, Native Americans, etc. These are scholarships that white people can not apply for. But imagine if there was a scholarship for only white people. This country would turn upside down if that happened. What if there was a movie called Black Chicks? This country would turn upside down.

And no Tyrone Willingham did NOT get fired because he was black. No that’s just an excuses, a cop out. Just look at the landscape of college football; if you do not produce wins, you do not keep your job. How is his situation any different from the situation in Florida? I’ll tell you how; Ron Zook had a better record at Florida and had higher rated recruiting classes every year. But wait, was his firing, in the same year nonetheless, after having coached the same length of time, racially driven? That was not even brought up because he is white. People need to stop making every situation racially driven because a lot of them are blown out of proportion into a racial situation and really are not. Read http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060406/ap_on_go_co/mckinney_scuffle. Have pride in being African American. That’s great and I’m not telling anybody to stop, just stop whining about being black.

I hate to dwell on the steroid issue and try to pay as little attention to it as possible, but since baseball is my favorite sport it keeps cropping up all around me. I hate Barry Bonds. I have never liked him and probably never will like him. Had he been on Team USA during the WBC I definitely would have rooted for him, but he decided he wanted to pull out at the last minute and any chance he had of me rooting for him evaporated right there. In all fairness guys like Billy Wagner and Roy Halladay also pulled out and it’s really hard to blame anyone for doing so (back to this later). But I really feel, with my hatred and all, that Bonds is kind of being picked on. The media, which I’m starting to hate (more on this later), is on a witch-hunt to prove that Bonds was the only person using steroids, but we all know that along with Bonds, Mark McGwire, Jose Canseco, Gary Sheffield, Ivan Rodriguez, Juan Gonzales, Rafael Palmeiro, Sammy Sosa who forgot how to speak English and didn’t play this year because he knew he couldn’t hang in the post steroid era, Ken Caminiti, and a lot of other players all used steroids. Can anyone prove any of this? I think it could be proven fairly easily, but nobody will ever dig deep enough to do so (later in this post I comment on the investigation which was announced after I wrote this paragraph). Bonds should not be the target of this witch-hunt. If the media wants to find out the truth, they should start naming all the players they have ever been suspicious of. They should blame Major League Baseball for not doing anything about it in the mid-90’s. If Bud Selig ever again says he did not know that people were on steroids in the mid-90’s, he himself should be thrown into jail for perjury which is just a fancy word for lying. The media should admit that it was quite obvious when they were doing clubhouse interviews that guys were getting bigger at rates that were not possible and maybe even doing steroids in front of the reporters. But that will never happen because too many people are going to have to take responsibility and all the media really wants is a scapegoat. Scoop Jackson did a great job of relaying my sentiments to his fans in this column, http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/page2/story?page=jackson/060314.

I ended up of going to two World Baseball Classic games in Anaheim. A couple of months before the tournament I was very excited, but as the time came closer for the event and big names started withdrawing I began losing a little interest. Nobody can blame Vladimir Guerrero for pulling out because his relatives had just passed away, or Pedro Martinez because his big toe was hurting him (and is still bothering him), or Billy Wagner and Roy Halladay because they did not feel like they were ready to compete. Instead I was excited that guys like Jake Peavey, Dontrelle Willis, Ken Griffey, Jr., Michael Young, Johnny Damon, Chipper Jones, and Mark Texiera could not stop expressing their desire in representing the USA. Of course I was hoping that the US would have better players on the roster than Al Leiter, Gary Majewski, Matt Halliday, and Jeff Francouer on it. Then the US lost to Canada, which in itself was not that disgraceful as anything can happen in baseball, but the loss did infuriate me. I did not like losing to the Canadians and put me in a ticket quandry. Eventually the US got into the second round and since I had already bought tickets assuming the US was going to be the #1 seed, I had to buy some more tickets for the early game. The games I went to were great and I could not have asked for more. The USA-Japan game, which ended up being very controversial, was a well played game and everyone got their first chance to see the Japanese underhanded knuckleballer. By the way, that guy should definitely be pitching in the majors. I can’t image anyone being able to hit him. Just imagine Tim Wakefield, except the ball is coming from underneath except of from on top. The second game I went to, Mexico vs. South Korea was great. The stadium was packed with Mexican trying to turn the game into a constant barrage of soccer chants and a Korean fan base which outnumbered the Mexican fan base, even though Mexico is a 2 and a half hour drive away, making a lot of noise. There was a lot of national pride that I didn’t really understand, but it was awesome to see. It was too bad to see the USA bow out early and I wish some of the rules were a little different, but overall the tournament was a huge success and in about 20 years will be as highly regarded as the World Cup of Soccer. I have to give Bud Selig, whom I do not really like, a lot of credit for pulling this event off. A couple of suggestions for the next one would be that teams that played in the first round should not have to play again in the second round, instead the results of their first round game will count in the second round. They used to do that in the Olympics with hockey and in the soccer World Cup when there were three rounds and it worked really well. I would also have the two teams coming out of each bracket in the second round play teams from the other bracket rather than themselves. It was pretty unfair that South Korea beat Japan twice in the first two rounds then lost to them in the semifinals and were eliminated. Both of my recommendations would have fixed that.

There is a lot of people who are doing nothing less than calling Kanye West a savior, but I feel like it is very unwarranted. One thing I learned in high school English is that behind a bold statement there needs to be an explanation. For instance West said that Bush hates black people, but he did not back it up with any proof. If he wants to say something like that, it’s fine with me, but I want to hear some proof defending his statement. And I want that same liberal media to point out to everyone that he has also made comments such as AIDS was spread by white people to kill black and gay people. Look it up, he has said that on a couple of different occasions, again with no proof. Just because what he said was controversial does not make him a hero. And the AIDS comment makes him seem like he is crazy, but the way the Hurricane Katrina story was covered gave him way too much credit and undeserved instant credibility.

I hate to transition from Kanye West to Billy Packer, but his comments before the NCAA tournament had some backbone and an explanation. I have no problem if a member of the media every once in a while will say something like that because they are in complete disagreement with something that just happened, but what I do have a huge problem with is when they do not take responsibility for their comments. For instance, in this case after the teams he bagged on did well in the tournament he should have admitted that he was wrong. But he is a part of the media and they do not do that. Instead they make bold comments, and if they are right they will point it out to everybody, but if they are wrong, they act like they never said it. Could you imagine if you were doing a projection at work and you could not have ended up being more wrong? In a normal job you get fired for something like that, but not in the sports media. Instead you get to make outrageous comments, say certain recruit have promised them they are going to a certain school even though that player has consistently been saying that they have not made up their mind, and make predictions just to look smart. Except the outrageous comments are what they are: outrageous. The recruit I was writing about ended up going to a different school than what was promised by this writer and most predictions made by these so-called experts are incorrect. But did the writer ever explain why he wrote he was promised something by this recruit even though it was obviously wrong? Did anyone making bold predictions ever say they were wrong? There is absolutely no accountability in the media. If you want to work in the media all one has to do is make a bold prediction and never accept responsibility for making it. That also goes for both Peter Gammons and Jerry Crasnick who both picked Bobby Crosby to win the AL MVP. Good luck guys. I would give them 100-1 odds that it will not happen and I bet neither one would be willing to put any money down on it.

I went down to spring training in late March to watch the Rangers play over the weekend, and it’s always a great event. Spring is the time of optimism. Everyone thinks their team has a chance and it’s great. I had a full blown conversation with a Mariners fan who truly believed and was completely sober at the time that Joel Piniero was going to win the Cy Young. And he would not relent. Joel Piniero did not even get drafted in my 10 team 24 player per team league. And a Colorado Rockies fan was professing that the Rockies would win the NL West. Like the Mariner fan he was completely sober and truly serious. Now I’m not going to make any ridiculous comments about the Rangers because I really do think that they are going to be a sub-par team. But for everyone else who has eternal optimism, I envy you because that is usually the way I am. We also ran into Hendu at a bar after a Rangers/ A’s game and he is a very nice guy who was all about talking about the glory days, Canseco, McGwire, Rickey Henderson, Dave Stewart and anything else we were willing to listen to. Story time was great.

Duke is hated for the same reason that the Yankees are hated, and Notre Dame used to be hated, and the USC Trojan football team was hated this year. There is one reason and it is because they are good. It is because their crowd is the loudest in the game and they get top players year in and year out. A school like Duke is really hurt by the format of the NCAA tournament. Make the tournament a best of seven and Duke has a couple more national titles on their mantle. They are easy to hate and anyone pulling for Duke, no matter what the circumstances and sometimes unfairly, automatically get called a band-waggoner. That’s just the way it is and will be as long as they are successful at what they do. I do not watch a lot of basketball, but the only games I watched outside of USC games were Duke home games. Those games are just fun to watch. The crowd is electric and the court is actually rocking. And the players play good fundamental basketball. But it still all comes down to one thing: It’s easy to hate those on top.

A couple of quick notes from the NCAA tournament. I missed the first weekend completely as I was in Arizona for spring training and I had wedding events I had to attend the next weekend, so I saw a very limited amount of the tournament. But I did see the end of the UConn/ Washington game and learned that in basketball if you step on somebody’s foot and lose the ball it is a foul on the guy whose foot you stepped on even if he just stood stationary. Terrible call. It once again hit me that basketball, more than any other sport, has three instead of two entities that determine the outcome of the game. The two teams and the referees. Also the timeouts situation is ridiculous. I tried to watch the end of one of the games (I can not remember which one), and I could not do it because there were about 6 timeouts called in the last minute. I had to turn the game off because I was watching way too many commercials and just getting frustrated. How about 2 time-outs per half?