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?
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?
posted by bbwillrk @ 3:18 PM
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