With the Olympic boycott and so much fail going on that I did not cover due to it, I decided just to take a while off of actually doing the blog. There are several big stories which will get their own stuff, including:
- The Wells Report on Richie Incognito and the Jonathan Martin situation. I get the feeling that, if there were any justice in this country, there would be one fewer NFL team and/or Martin would become a significant minority owner of a team/the Dolphins. And then a Dolphins' official goes and makes it worse yesterday.
- The University of Missouri's SEC Defensive Player of the Year, Michael Sam, has become the first NFL draft prospect to come out as gay. He is apparently not doing that well at the combine, but there are incidents indicating far more serious storm clouds on the horizon, including a tasteless idiocy by Steve Elkington on his Twitter and The Westboro Baptist Shitheads trying to disrupt the Sugar Bowl trophy presentation at the University of Missouri last Saturday. The latter disruption was halted by a human chain of over 2,000 members of the U of Missouri community to stop that shit in it's tracks. It was believed he'd be a mid- to late-round situation at best. Now, it appears as if the predictions friends of mine are giving that he will be blackballed from the NFL for being gay will probably come out true.
A number of other things happened:
- The Jason Collins story continues, as the Brooklyn Nets signed Collins last week to a 10-day contract, and he became the first openly gay athlete to play in a North American Big Four sport when he played against the Lakers. No one will confuse Collins for more than a good bench player who can eat minutes as a big (and those in the know also see this as an opportunity to groom Collins for a coaching position in the NBA when it's all said and done), but that he was finally signed and that the league and the Laker fans in attendance giving him a solid reception indicate that at least something is heading toward the 21st century in sports.
- The Washington Times undercut Brian Tuohy yesterday, bringing to the fore the first Ali-Liston fight and the FBI files (which Tuohy notes he put into his Larceny Games book which came out 5 months ago) which indicate only the worst-kept secret in sports.
- It will, as of next year, be a 15-yard penalty (and, I would assume, a fine) for any player to use the six-letter N-word racial slur. I'm against this -- until the NFL decides to do the exact same thing for the six-letter homophobic slur as well.
- Prepare for the hissy fits: Major League Baseball is going ahead with the ban on most home-plate collisions. As many with any sense of history have pointed out: About damned time.
- Speaking of baseball and idiot fans: The two poster-children (emphasis on children) for American fan-hood, the two hoodlums who tried to kill Brian Stow three years ago were sentenced for the attempt. And after three years incarcerated, neither showed even a gram of remorse. After one jackass serves four years and the other eight, the Feds get their turn on gun-felon charges. They need to fucking die, not only as a criminal penalty for actually trying to kill Stow (and failing), but also as an example that the bullshit needs to be cleaned up, and by lethal force when necessary. Those two pieces of what one blogger on the subject have called "human debris" have been incarcerated three years -- not an ounce of remorse, regret, or regard.
- I could easily see a similar boycott of the World Cup, as Declan Hill has reported numerous human rights violations in Brazil to attempt to sanitize the World Cup experience this summer...
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