This is a sad day. Buss’ vision of basketball changed the face of the sport, and every other sport.
Category: Sports
SuperBowl Food
Everyone knows that what’s really important today is the food that you get to eat. We are having a chicken wing buffet, five different styles of wings available for choosing. Also corn dogs beignets. Owning a deep fryer is a dangerous thing in so many ways. Oh yes, we’ll watch the game too, but I really honestly could not care less who wins. Chow time. What are you eating?
Ungrateful Expectations
Read this thoughtful, insightful, provoking piece by Jason Whitlock @WhitlockJason. It perfectly encapsulates my sentiments about sports right now. I don’t have any emotion in me regarding the Yankees’ utter offensive collapse in the ALCS. But for three games, the Yankee pitchers put on a great show for the faithful. I will reflect awhile before I post about the Bombers again, and in the meantime enjoy the Serious as a supportive outlier, rooting for the Tigers in the interest of domestic harmony. And because Jim Leyland is completely my flavor of vodka.
Joba Chamberlain was quite awful last weekend in Seattle. He’s on the mound in Fenway the Bronx tonight, while the Bombers will try and get to the remarkable Jon Lester. The Sox have won his last seven starts and he’s recorded four wins in a row. The last time he faced the Bombers, he held them to one run over seven innings.
Comment away.
Ah, Youth
Hayes, a tour veteran who has earned about $7 million during his career, was invited back to Pebble Beach, and at least four other PGA Tour events this year, because he turned himself in at Q-school. He called officials from his hotel room for a mistake that no one else had noticed, and that probably would not have been uncovered if not for Hayes’s admission.
He said he never considered not turning himself in because it was a standard of the game that golfers called penalties on themselves, even those that would result in disqualification.
In light of all the recent revelations regarding Major League Baseball, this story from the New York Times draws some of our interest. We realize that golf is an entirely different sport with an entirely different code of conduct (the game instills and effectively requires an adherence to an honor system due to the lack of formal officiating), but the way that JP Hayes views his own revelations shows decency bred by a game's system of rules. Significantly, he's the definition of journeyman and yet still felt a deep-seated obligation to turn himself in, to risk his career and future for the sake of the rules he knew he was required to follow.
We only bring this up to show the various ways in which different sports can instill a sense of personal responsibility. Golf is, for the most part, an individual sport, where players carry the rules in their bag and have to rely on themselves for exposing infractions. Baseball is an umpired sport, where players play and rely on others to make the calls. On an even more macro level, Major League Baseball has, for too long, remained captive to a vague set of (non)-rules regarding behaviour outside the lines, exacerbating the confusion*. Just as we fans don't have any clear sense how to judge those who have violated these (non)-rules, neither it seems do the players themselves.
Maybe the sport with the littler white ball has something figured out.
*Golf has its own steroid policy, for the record, though it did come late and the specifics could probably be picked apart.