Could this possibly be for real? @MetsThoughts passed this along: Apparently Real Madrid signed a 7-year-old Argentinean named Leonel Angel Coira. I don’t know anything about soccer — is this common? Do teams really sign children to contracts on spec? How long will it be until this kid plays for Real Madrid?
There’s really no joke I could make here that wasn’t covered here:
Jonathan sends along this video about a sports photographer in Germany with a cool-looking technique, and points out how well this would work for baseball. Not to be this guy, but I have to imagine it’d sell pretty well too. Certainly better than James Franco’s imaginary steamboat.*
Fun fact: I wrote a couple of show-jumping recaps for the now-defunct WCSN.com back in the day. Classics, if you ask me.
*- Which is kind of a sweet band name.
Let’s pretend, for a minute, that a separate league exists. Let’s call it the Asterisk League or, better, the League of Extraordinary Medicine. Drugs are legal but regulated. Athletes get educated about the risks, long term and short, of everything they introduce into—or onto—their bodies. Fans know exactly who is taking what and tracking their performance accordingly. Labs and scientists are inexorably linked to athletes’ rise and fall. Chemist versus chemist doesn’t sound like it would make great television, but the field would quickly advance to the point were records were broken daily and feats of crazy strength became the norm. Chemist versus chemist would become superhuman versus superhuman. Broadcasts could include expert scientists in the booth describing the limits of the human body and how these chemical enhancements get around that, or don’t. The League of Extraordinary Medicine is more honest, its regulation more sensible, since outlawing drugs just does not work—we’ve got a forever War on Drugs to prove it. And our tests for drugs still aren’t very good.
Some tasty food for thought from PopSci. Presumably the sportswriters would have to be chemically enhanced too, lest the sanctimony become unbearable.
Anyway, it all makes me think of this ol’ SNL bit:
It’s true:
But that’s cool, because rodeo kind of sucks anyway. And Chad Ochocinco is awesome in pretty much every other way, so I’m happy to give him a pass for only being able to stay on the bull for 1.5 seconds.
The ESPN guys make him out to be some sort of publicity whore, but I like to think he just knows how awesome he is and realizes that his awesomeness is the type of thing that merits publicity.
Nassau County Executive Edward P. Mangano will be joined by hundreds of local business, community and labor leaders on Wednesday, May 11, 2011 at 11:00 a.m. in announcing a major Economic Development and Job Creation Plan to build a world-class sports-entertainment destination center. After months of intense media speculation, the County Executive will also announce plans to pursue the construction of an Indian gaming casino.
– Nassau County Executive Edward P. Mangano, press release.
Well there’s just a ton here.
First off, it’s worth noting that Nassau County executives absolutely love pomp, circumstance and press releases. When I was in high school I won some stupid award for something stupid, and I swear we got a press release announcing that some county politician was coming to present the award, then afterward a second press release announcing that he came and presented the award, then later a signed 8×10″ black-and-white photo of me with the dude. It’s somewhere in my parents’ attic now, unless they threw in out in one of their biannual stuff-no-one-needs purges. For all I know it could have been Edward Mangano.
Anyway, I hope this guy Mangano is actually “joined by hundreds of local business, community and sportsbet leaders” to announce whatever plans are so important that they merit capitalization. That’d be something to see: some 200 suits set up behind podiums while two reporters from Newsday and some guy representing all the Herald papers sit in an otherwise empty conference room, anxiously biting their nails and tapping pencils on notebooks, desperate to learn whatever it is that the county is doing to quiet all the speculating they’ve been doing.
It should be noted that I got this release through the New York Islanders, which really calls into question the use of the phrase “world-class.” The Islanders, you may know, have finished dead last in their division for four seasons running and shut out a member of the Professional Hockey Writers of America (and the SNY.tv blog network, to boot) from covering their team for entirely nebulous reasons.
But I suppose it is possible that the new “sports-entertainment destination center” planned for Nassau County will be world-class even if the team playing inside it is not, and at least there will also be a nearby Indian casino for betting against the Islanders.
Our man Rob points out that Lucas Glover, winner of the Fargo Classic on Sunday, has a pretty awesome beard:
I almost never watch golf. I have no doubt that it requires a ton of skill to golf at a professional level because I’ve golfed myself and I can’t even make the damn ball go in the air. But there’s very little about the sport that makes me want to watch it in its televised form.
I think my main issue is that no one’s playing defense. Basically you’re just watching to see who hits the ball the best, and if someone’s playing really well the other golfers can’t intentionally walk him or double team him or anything.
I remember the first time I golfed, we all hit our first drives and I was like, “OK so when do we tackle each other?” and one of the other dudes was all, “no, we don’t tackle each other.” So I said, “oh so we’re playing two-hand touch golf then? I guess that’s cool…” but then that guy explained that you basically just hit your ball then go find your ball then hit it again then go find it again.
A lot of my issues with golf were actually solved by Jackie Mason in the movie Caddyshack 2. I know that film is widely panned for not having Rodney Dangerfield or Bill Murray and for not being Caddyshack 1, but it made a lot of good points about improving the sport by adding large-scale mini-golf obstacles and incorporating Randy Quaid as a golf/hockey defender. Really inspired stuff.
I, for one, think all sports could stand to look in the mirror and consider the ways in which they could improve by involving Randy Quaid. I know we think baseball is damn near perfect, but with MLB reportedly thinking about an expanded postseason, maybe it’s time our national pastime finally allow teams to use Randy Quaid once per playoff game. Teams in the field could set up Randy Quaid in the batter’s box across from the one the hitter is standing in and he could do all sorts of distracting things.
It might be dangerous, especially with maple bats. But he could wear a helmet, and there’s only one October.
This goose strongly objects to being called dumb:
State bureaucrats have identified a potentially deadly hazard facing our children this summer – freeze tag.
That’s right, officials have decided the age-old street game – along with Wiffle Ball, kickball and dodgeball – poses a “significant risk of injury.”
And classics like Capture the Flag, Steal the Bacon and Red Rover are also deemed dangerous in new state regulations for day camps.
– Glenn Blain, N.Y. Daily News.
Hold on: Wiffle Ball? How can Wiffle Ball be deemed dangerous? Even if you were using Wiffle equipment as weapons it’s still hard to figure how you could actually hurt someone. I’ve been hit hard with a Wiffle bat on multiple occasions and I can’t remember even seeing a bruise. The hole in the bat’s knob does make it a perfect device for launching bottle rockets, but, you know, the object is to keep bottle rockets out of kids’ hands, not Wiffle bats.
Plus it’s difficult to determine why the sports the state deemed safe — Frisbee, sack races and tug of war — are any less dangerous than the inherently disappointing Steal the Bacon. You can easily fall on your face in a sack race and get rope burn in tug of war.
When I was young, we played with fire. Like, a lot. Don’t do that at home, it was remarkably dumb. One time my neighbor and I got caught dipping the tips of our Nerf bow-and-arrows in lighter fluid and igniting them so we could play Robin Hood. Another time we doused a dead basketball in lighter fluid, lit it up and played flaming soccer. Best part of that was that the air inside the ball expanded from the heat, so once the flames went out it was a good basketball again for like 20 minutes. But point is I’m sure our parents would have much, much preferred us playing Red Rover.
Also, I know there are places that ban dodgeball because it’s humiliating, and it can definitely be that. But the way I see it, pretty much every single human from ages 11 to 16 is going to face a good deal of humiliation and general miserableness. It’s kind of how you grow up. I certainly wasn’t the most physically gifted dodgeballer in my class, but learning that taught me to play dodgeball smarter, and once I did, dodgeball became really fun. We risk plenty of humiliation in adult life too, and to me it seems like we prepare to deal with it by enduring the universal awfulness of middle school.
Link via James K.
I mean, don’t get me wrong, this is awesome and all. But it does seem at least a tiny bit like monkey torture. You’ve got to assume there’s something those monkeys would rather be doing, like flinging feces or something. Via Dustin Parkes:
Tedquarters 