The year 2012 presented us with many great soccer goals: Zlatan Ibrahimovic’s bicycle kick in a friendly (an exhibition game, that is) against England from 30 yards out, Cristiano Ronaldo’s cheeky backheel goal against Rayo Vallecano in La Liga, Lionel Messi’s Maradonaesque success against Brazil. All of them can be found here. Enjoy! Many more to come in 2013.
“I’m dangerous,” 23-year-old Garrett Holeve warns as he bounces around a bedroom in his parents’ suburban, single-story house, throwing punches and kicks. A pungent combination of protein-powered farts, dirty laundry, and ball sweat permeates the air.
“I’ll hurt a guy real bad,” Garrett brags. “I’ll be covered in too much blood, and I’ll keep hurting him. Kick him in the mouth so hard the mouth guard flies out.”
The words don’t roll off his tongue. They bunch up in his throat and pour out in a slurred manner that’s difficult to understand. This is just one of the ways Garrett’s Down syndrome manifests itself.
“Oh, umm,” he stammers frequently when looking for an answer. “Finding a fight takes time. My friend Chris is going to get me a fight.”
He carries other telltale physical characteristics of the genetic condition: small ears that look like half-hearts, almond-shaped eyes, wide hands with short fingers, and a small, round mouth. Further affecting his health is rheumatoid arthritis that afflicts his right knee.
Garrett stands five feet tall and weighs 136 pounds. But he can drop to 125 pounds in a few days to make weight for his beloved sport, mixed martial arts. His black wifebeater reveals the tattoo of a black Punisher skull engulfed in black flames near his left shoulder. His neck and arms are solid muscle, large enough to make clear that his fists could permanently alter the alignment of an opponent’s nose.
I’ve hit on this theme before, particularly with respect to publicly financed stadiums. It bears repeating:
During the recent presidential race, Mitt Romney was pilloried for his surreptitiously recorded remarks that “47 percent” of Americans are “dependent upon government,” believe that they are “entitled to … you name it” and will never be persuaded to “take personal responsibility and care for their own lives.” Romney was wrong about the 47 percent. (Disagree? Send your hate mail here before going Galt.) But he was right about the country hosting a system-gaming moocher class, an entitled, irresponsible, parasitic piglet subset, lazily suckling from the public teat, pulled up by shiny new bootstraps purchased with government giveaways, forever hiding in plain sight.
To find them, just flip on ESPN.
Or better still, visit any sports stadium.
They’re the team owners sitting in luxury boxes built with taxpayer dollars, charging PSL fees for seats constructed with the same. They’re the athletes writing off fines for bad behavior. They’re the multimillion-dollar professional leagues, Ozymandias-shaming college athletic departments and — ahem — charitable bowl games all enjoying lucrative and dubious non-profit status. Their ranks include Tiger Woods, whose namesake foundation once received a $100,000 federal grant; the Baseball Hall of Fame, which pocketed $1.57 million in federal funds between 2002 and 2006; and the Greater Syracuse Sports Hall of Fame, which seven years ago was given $75,000 as part of a larger appropriations bill funding the Departments of Veterans Affairs and Housing and Urban Development. (Additional point of incredulous outrage: The Greater Syracuse Sports Hall of Fame doesn’t even include Jim Brown.) They are the undeserving beneficiaries of inappropriate, unnecessary public subsidy, feathering their overstuffed nests of downy-soft private profit, adding to America’s astronomical charge card bill all the while. They are the Welfare Kings (hi again, Jeffrey Loria!) and Queens (rest in peace, Georgia Frontiere!) of sports, crying poor while grifting and lifting society’s collective wallet, perpetually grabbing for more, more, more.
Unlucky midfielder Sam Corcoran of Chelmsford City Football Club slips as he is about to take a free kick, giving the ball away to the opposition, Hayes and Yeading United, which then went on to score. The two clubs play in England’s Blue Square Bet South League, one of the lower divisions in the England soccer pyramid. Hayes and Yeading went on to win the game 3–0.
Zlatan Ibrahimovic scored on a bicycle kick from 30 yards out in Sweden’s 4-0 win against England in an international friendly last night. Not many players would even try this from such an awkward angle, much less actually put it in the net, again showing why he is considered one of the best players in soccer today. England’s captain, Steven Gerrard, conceded it was the best goal he’d ever seen. The goal was Ibrahimovic’s fourth of the night. Swedish teammate Tobias Sana described the striker’s display as “the perfect performance, Zlatan against children.”
As for Ibrahimovic himself, what did he think of the goal? It was “nice”. Understatement of the year?
In the wake of what black soccer players in England perceive as a slap on the hand in its verdict against Cheslea’s John Terry for the charge of racism against Queens Park Rangers’ Anton Ferdinand, the Professional Footballers’ Association is considering introducing the NFL’s Rooney Rule in England, especially to introduce more black managers into the game. Last weekend, many players refued to wear Kick It Out t-shirts while warming up prior to matches.
However, there have been mixed responses from managers. Arsenal manager Arsene Wenger has said it would be a kind of racism. Wigan Athletic’s boss Roberto Martinez has questioned and said it is not needed, while Liverpool’s boss Brendan Rodgers, agreeing that managers should be picked for their competence, does welcome it if might open doors for minority candidates.
Along with Nike, other Manchester United big name sponsors are DHL, AON and Chevrolet, as well as smaller sponsorships from companies across the globe that pay for exposure through the global brand that is Manchester United. Any continued influx of large amounts of money is to be surely welcomed by the club’s owners, the Glazer family, to help pay down the publicly traded club’s debt, which is currently at £360 million pounds ($580 million dollars), as well as continuing to compete with the elite clubs in England and Europe.
With all of the celebrity endorsements from Hollywood, the fashion and sports industries, as well as Honey Boo Boo, Obama can now add England and Manchester United soccer star Wayne Rooney among his supporters. Commenting on Twitter, the soccer player said “Watched all the presidential debates. If I had to vote would vote Obama.”
Maybe he should stop sacrificing sleep and focus on helping out his team as they try to win the league.
It doesn’t sound like the scheduled hike in the estate tax is the sole reason that these retired sports stars are selling their memorabilia now, but it certainly doesn’t hurt:
Rather than leave a 56-year-old uniform hanging in a closet at his Idaho home, Don Larsen decided it should be used for education.
He’s auctioning off the Yankee pinstripes he wore in 1956 when he pitched the only perfect game in World Series history, and will use the proceeds to pay college tuition for his grandchildren, one in college and the other a high school freshman.
“I’m not getting any younger and I want to see them get an education before I leave,” the 83-year-old Larsen said. “They’ll be appreciative later, more so than now, I’m sure.”
Similarly, Bob Knight is selling his NCAA championship rings and other mementos to fund education in his family. “I have two grandsons,” the Hall of Fame basketball coach said, “and my wife has a niece and nephew, who would get good use out of this.” . . .
[Evander] Holyfield, like Larsen, said he didn’t consider the tax implications of selling items now rather than after the first of the year.
“This is something new to me,” the former heavyweight champion said.
But the auction houses say the tax issues come up in the planning.
“As players get older, they certainly don’t know what’s going to happen with an estate tax, and I guess they figure they’d rather have it sold now than after they’re passed and lose an unknown percentage,” Goldin said.
I missed this yesterday: not only was Lance Armstrong stripped of his seven Tour de France Titles, nobody will be declared the winner. AP:
Seven lines of blanks. From 1999 to 2005. There will be no Tour de France winner in the record book for those years.
Once the toast of the Champs-Elysees, Lance Armstrong was formally stripped of his seven Tour titles Monday and banned for life for doping.
As far as the Tour is concerned, his victories never happened. He was never on the top step of the podium. The winner’s yellow jersey was never on his back.
The decision by the International Cycling Union marked an end to the saga that brought down the most decorated rider in Tour history and exposed widespread cheating in the sport.
“Lance Armstrong has no place in cycling, and he deserves to be forgotten in cycling,” said Pat McQuaid, president of the governing body. “Make no mistake, it’s a catastrophe for him, and he has to face up to that.”
It’s also devastating for Tour de France organizers, who have to carve seven gaping holes from the honor roll of the sport’s biggest event and airbrush Armstrong’s image from a sun-baked podium on the Champs-Elysees.
No more rides through Paris for the grim-faced cancer survivor bearing the American flag. No champagne. From the sport’s perspective, it’s all gone.
“We wish that there is no winner for this period,” Tour director Christian Prudhomme said Monday in Paris. “For us, very clearly, the titles should remain blank. Effectively, we wish for these years to remain without winners.”
Oh, please. The entire sport of cycling is tainted. Anybody the tour gave the title to would have to go through the same scrutiny as Lance Armstrong. For example, the NYTreported two weeks ago in this nice graphic just how many riders are tainted:
Since 1998, more than a third of the top finishers of the Tour de France have admitted to using performance-enhancing drugs in their careers or have been officially linked to doping. The grid shows the original top-10 placements in each of the past 15 years. Riders pictured have either tested positive, admitted to doping or been sanctioned by an official cycling or antidoping agency. Cyclists whose sanctions were later overturned are not included.
I hope this doesn’t mean the end to Armstrong’s Livestrong charity, which does great work in the fight against cancer.
And who knows? Steroid-head-in-chief Arnold Schwarzenegger rose to governor of California. Maybe there’s a future in politics for the tainted cyclist.
Lance Armstrong was stripped of his seven Tour de France titles and banned for life on Monday after the International Cycling Union (UCI) ratified the United States Anti-Doping Agency’s (USADA) sanctions against the American.
The long-awaited decision has left cycling facing its “greatest crisis” according to UCI president Pat McQuaid and has destroyed Armstrong’s last hope of clearing his name.
“Lance Armstrong has no place in cycling. Lance Armstrong deserves to be forgotten in cycling,” McQuaid told a news conference as he outlined how cycling, long battered by doping problems for decades, would have to start all over again.
“The UCI wishes to begin that journey on that path forward today by confirming that it will not appeal to the Court of Arbitration for Sport and that it will recognize the sanction that USADA has imposed. “I was sickened by what I read in the USADA report.”
Of note, Radio Shack also dropped Lance Armstrong. Did Lance Armstrong ever do anything to help Radio Shack sell a single thing?
I also don’t get Nike standing behind Tiger Woods for his serial infidelity, but canning Armstrong. Yes, Armstrong probably doped, but so did everyone else by the reports. Not every golfer is “night putting” with the babysitter.
And what about Nike’s other athletes? For example, Alex Rodriguez admitted to steroid use and he’s still embraced by Nike:
A-Rod forgot how to hit, but he still knows how to win with the ladies.
Personally, I think this is stupid of Nike. Armstrong will be known for his fight against cancer and his Livestrong Foundation long after the cycling scandal is behind him. Nike is really losing its sponsorship of a high-profile health advocate, not an athlete at this point.
And as Tony Manfred at Business Insider points out, the only athletes Nike has dropped are Lance Armstrong and Michael Vick. Armstrong was just business as usual in professional sports, but he’s in league with the dog-torturer?
“Even Romney’s tie was better,” Stanley Fish said after the first presidential debate. Unless he meant the knot or the width, he meant the color, red. Obama wore blue. Red is the color of male dominance, zoologists tell us. It signals danger: “Don’t tread on me.” If you place an apple slice between a group of rhesus macaques and yourself, the monkeys are less likely to dart forward and steal it if you’re wearing red.
In 2005 a couple of British anthropologists found that red uniforms were correlated with victory across a range of sports in the 2004 Olympics. In 2007 a team of researchers chimed in to report that the same holds true in English soccer: “Since 1947, English football teams wearing red shirts have been champions more often than expected on the basis of the proportion of clubs playing in red.”
Is it that athletes feel more confident when they wear red? Or that red intimidates their opponents? Mostly it influences referees, according to one theory. When the colors in the video of a taekwondo match were digitally manipulated, the same competitor received more points from refs when he was shown wearing red rather than blue.
Granted, if the red team is Harvard or Cornell and they’re playing the Green Bay Packers, the uniform colors probably aren’t going to make much difference. But when the two competitors are more closely matched?
In both the presidential and the vice-presidential debates, the Republican wore the red tie, which in Romney’s case reinforced the impression of how easily he commanded the stage in Denver. If Ryan’s red tie sent a subliminal message, it was that his restraint with respect to the cutup sitting next to him was a form of manly forbearance. I will leave further speculation in such matters to Naomi Wolf.
So will Romney go with a red tie again Tuesday night? We’ll soon find out.
Lance Armstrong challenged the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency to name names and say what it had on him.
On Wednesday, it did.
The anti-doping body revealed a group of 11 former Armstrong teammates — some loyal, some estranged — who each provided evidence of drug use on the U.S. Postal Service team. USADA Chief Executive Travis Tygart called it “the most sophisticated, professionalized and successful doping program that sport has ever seen.”
USADA will deliver its reasoned decision against Armstrong later Wednesday, a summary of the facts it used to hand him a lifetime suspension and erase his titles. The organization has banned the seven-time Tour de France winner from competition for life and declared his victories null and void.
In a news release previewing the decision, Tygart said it would include more than 1,000 pages of evidence. He listed 11 of Armstrong’s former teammates, including George Hincapie, Floyd Landis and Tyler Hamilton, as among those providing evidence that led to the sanction.
Tygart said the evidence shows the code of silence that dominated cycling has been shattered.
CS Buftea, which plays in Romania’s second-division soccer league, were demolished 31–0 by ACS Berceni, a third-division team, creating a record defeat in Romanian soccer. Apparently not taking the Romanian Cup (equivalent to England’s FA Cup competition) seriously, cash-strapped CS Buftea, located northwest of the capital, Bucharest, rested their starting team and played mostly teenagers. ACS Berceni, by contrast, took the game seriously. By half-time, they were up 12–0.
Triumphant ACS Berceni’s president remarked, “I’m ashamed to tell you the score. But it’s not our fault they disregarded the competition.”
Tampa, Florida (CNN) – Reggie Love, the man by President Barack Obama’s side for two years in the White House, said the president leads like he plays basketball.
In an exclusive interview with CNN Chief White House Correspondent Jessica Yellin, Love said the president is a competitor above all else.
“He’s a competitor, and I think when you compete … you can’t spend all your time sort of being overly emotional or reactional to what’s going on,” Love said.
Love, who worked in then-Sen. Obama’s Capitol Hill office before joining him on the campaign trail and in the White House, said that competitive nature extends to politics, cards and even shuffle board.
The former Duke basketball player often hits the court with the president and said he is able to brush off a bad play in sports and in life, managing to appear “really calm all the time.”
“I think it looks like he’s really, really calm all the time and nothing gets under his skin, but I think from an efficiency standpoint, you know, you can cry about the call or you can look to the next play,” Love said. “And if you spend your time crying about the call, usually you, you miss the next play. And then … instead of having one bad play, now you have two.”
Last Thursday, Grantland’s Bill Barnwell published an informal study of mortality rates among professional football and baseball players. The results were surprising: Among the 3,088 ex-football players who played for parts of at least five seasons between 1959 and 1988, 12.8 percent had died; in a sample of 1,494 baseball players active during the same era, the death rate was 15.9 percent.
The study was meant to serve as a clarification or maybe a rebuke of a similar study published last spring. That one, conducted by the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (and then peer-reviewed), compared mortality among retired football players and nonathletes matched for age and race and found that the ex-athletes were dying about half as often as one might expect. In other words, the health risks associated with playing football were being more than outweighed by the benefits of being a pro athlete — excellent training and nutrition, a good salary, top-quality medical care, and so on.
I’ve always felt rec-league softball was the most dangerous game. The biggest injury risks are borne by buys who think they’re athletes.
Last night the United States national team did something that it has never done before: defeat Mexico at the legendary Azteca Stadium in Mexico City.
The United States–Mexico soccer rivalry has produced some amazing matches. While the U.S. has won its share of important games against Mexico — including World Cup qualifiers in 2001, 2005, and 2009, along with the memorable 2007 Gold Cup final — the one thing the Team USA has never been able to do was win a game in Mexico.
Prior to last night, the U.S. had been 0-23-1 in Mexico City’s Azteca Stadium, which is considered one of the most intimidating stadiums in the world. With an altitude over 7,300 feet above sea level, and the city’s smog mingling with the thin air, opposing players not accustomed to the conditions tire easily. The stadium’s capacity is over 100,000 and the crowds supporting Mexico are extremely hostile towards opposing teams.
When U.S. head coach Jurgen Klinsmann announced the roster for the game, top players like Clint Dempsey, Jozy Altidore, Steve Cherundolo, Michael Bradley, and captain Carlos Bocanegra were not included. With European leagues having just started or about to start, many American players elected to stay with their clubs instead. Mexico, meanwhile, is an emerging world power in the sport, its Under-23 team having just won gold at the London Olympics. Few people gave the U.S. a chance even with its top players on the field — and with a team consisting mostly of backups, a blowout was expected.
Mexico controlled possession for most of the game but the U.S. defense was remarkably strong all night. Whenever Mexico’s attack was able to find holes in the U.S. defense, goalkeeper Tim Howard was there to make the key save.
In the second half, Team USA began to press forward a bit more and in the 80th minute, stunned the Azteca crowd with a remarkable combination of outstanding plays. First, left winger Brek Shea beat his defender with a nice nutmeg move, and sent a low pass that found forward Terrence Boyd inside the penalty area. Boyd was heavily marked by Mexican defenders but somehow managed a magnificent no-look, backheel pass to an open Michael Orozco. The son of Mexican immigrants made no mistake with Boyd’s pass and scored from close range.
The American defense was able to hang on for the last ten minutes the first-ever U.S. win at Azteca, only the ninth loss in history for Mexico in that venue.
The game was only a friendly, but it could have a big impact for the U.S. team moving forward. Last year, U.S. Soccer hired German legend Jürgen Klinsmann to be their head coach to bring a new approach to the team. Team USA’s win in Mexico — and its first-ever win over Italy earlier this year in Genoa — will likely boost their confidence heading into important World Cup qualifiers this year and next.
This penalty taken by Jonathan Soriano of Red Bull Salzburg F.C. is an early contender for worst penalty of the 2012–13 European soccer season, which is still young. Losing 2–0 to Rapid Vienna in the Austrian Bundesliga (the country’s premier league), Soriano stepped forward to take a penalty that went high up into the heavens. Listen for the commentator’s mention of the NFL, insinuating that perhaps it’s where the forward should be playing.
Print
Digital
iOS
Google
Android
