After Atalanta

Writer Sally Jenkins has an open letter to new prez Barack Obama calling for some changes in the world of American sport--including, though how seriously I cannot really gauge--the appointment of a sports czar. She is correct though in noting that "it will be equally important to remake the play of America, because games are a reflection of a nation's health and ours could do with some reform." So she has 10 suggestions. I am not going to go through all of them. The Title IX Blog mentioned today the ones relevant to them, I am going to touch on some others. Reform of the BCS has been on Obama's agenda and there are a lot of complications and people on both sides who talk about true champions and purity of the game and yadda, yadda, yadda. But Jenkins gets to the crux--or what should be the crux--of the issue when she says: The bowls no longer serve any discernable educational purpose -- the participating teams often have graduations rates worse than 50 percent, for wh...

...that I meant to post on this weekend but didn't quite get around to. I was buoyed from my usual cynical position by three things that happened Friday evening, which was a very good thing because I had being having a crappy day until then. Anyway, the first thing (only because I am talking about it first--all three happened within about an hour of each other) is that NPR covered the Paralympics. It was a segment on, I believe, All Things Considered. The stars of the games including US swimmer Erin Popovich . The disqualification of an Irish soccer player because he was too able-bodied, and the doping scandals(there were four athletes sent home for steroid abuse). Then I heard on that same NPR station--not sure if it was local or national news--that the Basketball Hall of Fame has formed a committee to look into basketball at Historically Black Colleges and Universities, particularly during segregation. It will review records of teams, players and coaches who have historically b...

So usually I am the scrooge of exciting sport moments, but Selena Roberts at SI.com has a pretty depressing column on the state of female sport stars. She notes something I have failed to notice, but mostly because I thought I just wasn't paying attention: female superstars have no longevity anymore. Do you remember who the stars of the last Olympics were? Have they endured in our collective memory? Misty May and Kerri Walsh are likely the most memorable (besides the now retired stars of the women's soccer team who had earned their status before Athens). But they also have the advantage of playing a sport that gets some recognition in non-Olympic years. Roberts attributes this to doping, a sort of Marion Jones effect. We thought she was so pure and great and now she's in jail. Doping, Roberts says, has tainted our views and made us suspicious of these women. But I'm not buying that entirely. Doping has been far more pervasive--if not in practice at least in terms of med...

I may have been one of the few to criticize Rusty Hardin, Roger Clemens's lawyer, for his remarks likening the allegations against the pitcher to the Duke lacrosse situation. But I am not the only one who finds the things that come out of his mouth inappropriate. Apparently Hardin has not made friends with some of the legislators doing the inquiry into the Mitchell Report because of public statements he made suggesting that if the lead investigator--the same guy who looked into the BALCO scandal--messed with Clemens he would be asking for trouble. Rep. Henry Waxman said that Hardin should be careful as he would not want to be accused of intimidating a federal officer trying to do his job. All the evidence may not be in regarding the extent of steroids in baseball, but there's a whole lot of testosterone flying around right now.

This morning, NPR's Morning Edition was reporting on the doping in baseball/Mitchell report brouhaha currently starring Roger Clemens and his former athletic trainer, Brian McNamee, and, of course, their respective lawyers. McNamee has produced needles and gauze that he says he used when injecting Clemens with steroids and HGH. He kept them in a Fed Ex box for three years. Ewwww. I thought it would be easy to discredit such evidence. Much easier, than say tennis players and cyclists who cry about sample tampering and improper testing methods during official drug testing. I mean this guy kept needles and bloody gauze in a cardboard box for three years. But apparently I am wrong because NPR called up a law professor at Stanford, presumably one who is an expert in the rules of evidence, and he said a judge would admit it. And this leads now to a battle of reputations as evidenced by Clemens's defamation suit against McNamee where the needles and gauze could come to the defense of ...

OK--here's part 2. The Detroit Free Press lists the top ten villains in sports of 2007. Marion Jones makes the list for her doping offenses, as does Martina Hingis for her alleged cocaine use, denial, and subsequent retirement. And, of course, Don Imus is right up there with the all the dopers and steroid-user deniers. I was a little surprised to see Hingis listed as a villain for alleged cocaine use given all the actual, proven drug use of various professional athletes in basketball and football in the United States. Hingis just seems to have this aura that makes (some of) the media dislike her (i.e. the Black Widow label ). Fox Sports asks (and answers) its top ten questions in women's tennis in 2008. Question #7's answer, can Amelie Mauresmo hold up French tennis? is a likely no. And though, as a huge fan, it disappoints me to say this. I think writer Matt Cronin is right. But I take exception to his comment that she "burned out" in 2007. She had an appendect...

I was snowbound from about mid-afternoon yesterday until 8 this morning. National Public Radio was on the whole time (except during the few hours when I was sleeping). And in that time I heard the story (there was actually more than one version) about the Mitchell Report and doping in baseball at least a dozen times. The first time I heard it I said "Hey that's the guy that spoke my commencement, except he was talking about Ireland then." When I kept hearing it, I started thinking, "well dur--of course there was widespread doping. What do you expect will happen within an organization that only began drug testing less than five years ago and has pretty lax testing procedures and standards?" Come on. Did everyone really think that Barry Bonds was some kind of outlyer? Have we really wanted to believe so badly that 40+ year old Roger Clemens was doing it naturally that we refused to even contemplate the notion that he might be doping? If you're a baseball fan,...