For the sixteen days of the Olympics I was immersed in all things China, and from the opening ceremonies to the close on Sunday the overall impression that was left with me was, “Man, that was a wee bit creepy!” Sports Minister Liu Peng started the strangeness off when he sad, “To achieve Olympic glory for the motherland is the sacred mission assigned by the Communist Party central.” Say what? So far removed was I from the “red menace” since…
The praise is universal. Sunday’s Wimbledon final between Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal has been universally canonized as the greatest tennis match ever played. But before that – just a side note – hasn’t 2008 been frikin’ amazing? Seriously – did you really think you’d see something better than the best Super Bowl ever with Eli Manning et al beating the NFL’s supposedly perfect team? Or, an event that topped Tiger Woods winning the U.S. Open on a broken leg?…
One day after Peyton Manning was named the NFL’s MVP, the league let him down with a toss of a coin. It has been a long-time rule that tied NFL playoff games end in overtime with the first score. After Saturday, that rule has got a lotta folks all upset like. San Diego took the ball after regulation and then proceeded to march down the field and score on their first possession of overtime allowing the Chargers to move on….
There are two schools of thought when it comes to the NFL season which opens this week for the 88th time: Either the league will conquer North America as it usually does between Labor Day and Valentine’s Day and all other sports leagues will look on drooling with envy, or as many wags, pundits and writers are insisting, its days as the “Teflon” sports league are now officially over. So – which is it gonna be? Astronomically speaking the dog…
This time of year is supposed to be everyone’s downtime. Nothing is supposed to be going on because after Tuesday’s MLB All-Star game, Wednesday is officially the deadest day of the year sports-wise. Yet there are a bunch of huge things going on concurrently that are all competing for stories of the year – and dammit, it’s cutting into our downtime. Thankfully the merciful end to the World Cup should still be a big deal, but it’s not. Already an…
Once upon a utopian time, broadcasting a sport was just about that sport. Now? Not so much. Now it is increasingly becoming about celebrity. Our culture has been programmed by Hollywood to be celebrity obsessed. Since the first commercial films were produced early last century, the moguls running the studios understood that mass marketing of their “stars” made the sheep fans lineup at the movie houses. Moviegoers were programmed into thinking the lives of those they were seeing up there…
I guess we’ll all have to look for a new Cinderella now that George Mason is out. Last March everyone’s new-found favourite Patriots ploughed through the likes of Michigan State, North Carolina and UConn before finally falling to the eventual national champion Florida in the semifinals. This year they won’t even make it into the tournament after losing to Virginia Commonwealth in the Colonial Athletic Association championship game Monday night. Now the big question is, who are we gonna get…
The man with the giggle-inducing name, Sepp Blatter, remains head of FIFA today – the group who are overseeing the ongoing disaster that is the World Cup. That’s perhaps the biggest surprise of the tournament so far. Loud, obnoxious and arrogant, the most powerful man in the world’s most popular sport has long poopooed any detractors of soccer as just being nothing less than “ignorant.” Yet there he was on Tuesday finally admitting that there was a problem with the…
The biggest name in the World Cup thus far hasn’t been Messi, Kaka or Rooney. It’s been Koman Coulibaly, the guy who negated a Team USA game-winning goal against Slovenia because, well, for no reason really. Apparently, he just felt like it. Coulibaly is a financial advisor from Mali who, on the side, also happens to be a referee for FIFA. Late in the game against Slovenia, the Americans scored their third goal after being down 2 nil – an…
It’s the most wonderful time of the year… …to be a sports writer. It’s a job where folks are paid to watch sports, so being an Oscar Madison type is not the most arduous job on the planet. From the free food, the hanging out with the guys more often than the wife, (or in most cases ex-wives?), the semi-cool swag, to occasionally witnessing actual history, it is, for the most part, every sports fan’s dream job. Nevertheless, even the…