Category: Sports

So Close! #USA Ties Portugal, 2-2

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The United States was less than a minute away from a 2-1 World Cup victory that would have clinched advancement to the round of 16 when Portugal’s superstar Christiano Ronaldo fired a crossing shot that set up a header from Silvestre Varela. The 2-2 tie was a disappointing result for the U.S. which had battled back heroically from an early error that put them in a 1-0 deficit just five minutes into the game. Nevertheless, as CBS Sports points out:

The United States is actually in a position now that managing a draw against one of the best teams in the world in a World Cup match is actually considered a disappointment. The United States has four points after two matches in the “Group of Death!” We should be thrilled, but instead we’re all disappointed because the expectations have been raised for this team. That’s a good thing.

The U.S. could have gotten rattled after a defensive blunder cost them that early goal. Instead, they settled down and controlled the ball and waited for their chance. They didn’t get that chance until nearly 20 minutes into the second half when Jermaine Jones absolutely nailed a long shot after a corner kick to tie it up.

Then, at the 81-minute mark, Deandre Yedlin penetrated to the right corner, hit a crossing shot into the middle and — after some kicking back and forth — Clint Dempsey put it in.


At that point, I thought we had it in the bag. Unfortunately, Team USA went into a soccer version of the “prevent defense,” which gave Portugal numerous scoring chances — they out-shot the U.S. 12-6 in the second half — and finally the dangerous Ronaldo found his chance. We managed to hold him scoreless, but his assist on the final goal cost us the win.

It was a beautiful, exciting game, though. Now the situation is this: If the U.S. wins or ties Thursday against Germany, we advance to the round of 16. If the U.S. loses to Germany, we could still advance, if the Portugal-Ghana game ends in a tie, or if Ghana wins by a single goal and the U.S. loses by only one goal. A nail-biter, sure, but we’re still in good shape and still control our own destiny.

 

Who’s Pumped Up?

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It’s weird how I’m totally into this year’s World Cup, given that we all know soccer is a Commie sport. But my daughter married an Argentine, and those Argies are absolutely crazy for soccer. So I’ve got two teams to cheer for, and Argentina has already clinched its spot in the round of 16, thanks to a goal in the 91st minute against Iran by Lionel “Lio” Messi, The Greatest Player in the Entire History of the Game™ (at least according to those soccer-crazy Argies).

The thing is, in the World Cup, you not only cheer for the teams you like, you cheer against the teams you hate. So Argentina fans were happy to see England eliminated — yes, the Argies are still sore about that Falkland Islands business — and they were also happy when Mexico held Brazil to a scoreless tie, because Brazil is disgusting scum (at least according to those soccer-crazy Argies).

Anyway, the United States is in a good position in Group D, having defeated Ghana 2-1 with a goal in the 86th minute on a sweet header by John Brooks, a 21-year-old substitute who was briefly named “the greatest American since Abraham Lincoln” on Wikipedia.

Bad news: USA lost its starting striker Jozy Altidore to an injury. Good news: Ghana played Germany to 2-2 tie, which means that if America defeats Portugal today, we clinch a berth in the round of 16. Bad news: Portugal lost 4-0 to Germany in their first game, and we can expect Portugal to be playing with desperate intensity. We do not want to lose this game, because USA’s final game Thursday is against Germany. If we can’t beat Portugal, we’ve zero hope against Germany.

 

Women’s Soccer Scandal: Famous Player Is Allegedly Violent, Heterosexual

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Hope Solo won two Olympic gold medals as goalie of the U.S. women’s team, and is now under arrest in Washington State:

Kirkland police said a man called 911 to report a woman was assaulting someone inside the house in the 10600 block of 124th Avenue Northeast. The officers arrived to find soccer great Hope Solo, allegedly appearing intoxicated and upset. Her sister and 17-year-old nephew were injured. They concluded Solo was the aggressor and arrested her.

A soccer player is a violent criminal? This isn’t really news, is it? But the real scandal is buried deeper in the story:

Two years ago, former [University of Washington] and NFL player Jerramy Stevens was arrested for allegedly assaulting Solo.  Hours later, the couple married; the charges were later dropped.

A female athlete is heterosexual? Married to a man?

This is a shocking revelation because, as everybody knows, the entire purpose of women’s professional sports leagues is to provide young girls with lesbian role models. WNBA attendance is comprised primarily of lesbian basketball coaches who bring girls from their youth-league and high-school teams to the games so they can watch their professional lesbian heroes in action. There have been rumors some WNBA players were heterosexual, but nobody believes that kind of malicious gossip.

Girls sports teams are basically lesbian training programs, and the farther up the competitive ladder they advance, the more female athletes find themselves surrounded by lesbians. While your average high school girls’ basketball, volleyball or softball player is not gay, most of the players who get college scholarships are lesbians, or become lesbians while in college. In women’s professional sports, lesbianism is so commonplace as to be taken for granted. When Hope Solo’s 2008 U.S. Olympic soccer teammate Natasha Kai said in an NBC interview that she nearly didn’t make the team because she was distracted by a break-up with her girlfriend, almost nobody noticed. In 2012, U.S. Olympic soccer forward Megan Rapinoe gave an interview to a gay magazine saying “she is a lesbian and in a committed relationship with a woman,” explaining that she felt the need to announce this because nobody had bothered to ask: “In female sports, if you’re gay, most likely your team knows it pretty quickly. It’s very open and widely supported.”

Heterosexuality, by contrast, is very shameful and secretive in female sports, which explains why so few people previously suspected there was a straight woman on the U.S. Olympic team.

 

David Zirin, Marxist Sports Blogger

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Professor Donald Douglas has been trying to get me to pay attention to this, and I’ve struggled mightily to resist. It makes my head hurt to think of it, but The Nation — a publication that spent 74 years cheerleading for the Bolsheviks — now has a sports blogger named David Zirin, whose output is about as zany as you’d expect:

Get ready for two weeks of stories that pit the polished Peyton Manning against his supposed antithesis, Richard Sherman. Get ready for two weeks of interesting coverage about how the best quarterback in the game and probable 2013 MVP takes on the best cornerback in the game and the probable Defensive Player of the Year at the Super Bowl. Also get ready for two weeks of utterly uninteresting coverage that paints Peyton as a Southern gentleman in shining armor who will hopefully slay Richard Sherman, Compton’s “loudmouth” dread-locked dragon. There will be more articles, tweets and commentaries from the media bemoaning Richard Sherman’s lack of “class”. There will be even more tweets from so-called fans that sound like press releases from a White Citizen’s Council. There will be a running loop of Sherman’s already “insta-classic”WWE-infused “promo” rant after Sunday’s victory over their rival the 49ers.

There is a word for such writing. That word is . . . bad.

UPDATE: Zirin is a comrade of the International Socialist Organization, and a contributor to its Socialist Worker site. The ISO is one of those Marxist splinter groups that you used to see at anti-Iraq war protests, handing out their grubby little tabloid newspapers and trying to sign up members. They were pathetic during the Bush era and are even more pathetic in the Obama era, where the the extreme Left is so completely co-opted by the Democrat Party (and vice-versa) that revolutionary Marxism is irrelevant.

 UPDATE II: To get a sense of the fringe nature of the ISO, you need to read this (long) manifesto by former ISO member Donna Chidi, who makes the point that leadership of the ISO, an organization whose members claim to see racism everywhere, is overwhelmingly controlled by whites. In 2010, there was a de facto purge of members from the Washington, D.C., branch of ISO, resulting in a group that is 90% white in a 54% black city:

[T]he leaders of the branch called an “Emergency Meeting” . . . in which we would discuss some important issues in our branch and which Ahmed Shawki of the national steering committee would attend and convene.
At this Emergency meeting, Shawki described reasons why the national steering committee had voted to expel Zach Mason and indefinitely suspend David Thurston of the DC branch. . . [Mason and Thurston] were not welcome to this “members only” meeting where the issue of their expulsions would be discussed by everyone else. . . . I commented on how sad it was to see socialists stand up and slander and crucify people they had worked with for 14 years and 7 years respectively without even allowing them to attend and defend themselves.
Among several other hostile comments made in my direction because of this, Shawki closed the discussion by inviting me to leave the ISO, although he has never spoken to me before, “If you think these guys are being crucified, then maybe this organization is not the right organization for you.”

In a 2010 e-mail to the DC-ISO’s (white) leader, Michelle Bollinger, Chidi mentioned David Zirin among her antagonists:

I believe it was made undeniably clear in the last meeting that I attended that I am not welcome in the DC ISO branch — especially in the comments made by comrades Dave Zirin, Mike Stark, and Ahmed Shawki.

Fighting racism by expelling black people? As a strategy, it makes about as much sense as anything else these kooks advocate.

 

Well, I Shouldn’t Disappoint Pete

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Da Tech Guy is disappointed that I didn’t take up his earlier challenge to address the fakeness of the 1973 Billy Jean King/Bobby Riggs “Battle of the Sexes” tennis match, but as I said, I recognized it as hype at the time. Although I didn’t know the fix was in — because Bobby Riggs owed $100,000 to the mob — I was 13 at the time and sophisticated enough to see it for the silly hype-fest it was. Even if King’s victory had been legitimate, what was proven by having a female athlete in her prime beat a 55-year-old man at a non-contact sport?

Pretty sure my remark at the time was, “Let her try football.”

Did I ever mention I was a small-town sports editor for years?

Covered some truly excellent female athletes, including state champion sprinter Shea Thurman and basketball standout Tammy Starr, but it would have been absurd to have expected either of them to compete against championship male athletes. Thurman could outrun all but the fastest boys in Gordon County, but her time in the 100-meter dash was still two seconds off the top boys’ times. Yet Sonny Bunch was shocked to realize he’d been bamboozled by the Riggs-King scam:

I hadn’t realized that Riggs trounced — just absolutely crushed, in straight sets, giving up only three games over two sets — Margaret Court, then the most dominant women’s player in the world, just a few months before playing King.

Ding. Ding. Ding.

It’s another example of The Story Too Good to Be True, a stock item in the dishonest repertoire of liberal journalism.

The Cult of Equality has always been a lie, a March to Nowhere, and my opposition to it is not an expression of “misogyny” or any of the other political pejoratives that radical egalitarians use to silence their critics. It is simply a common-sense recognition of reality.

“Believe me, Sir, those who attempt to level, never equalise. In all societies, consisting of various descriptions of citizens, some description must be uppermost. The levellers therefore only change and pervert the natural order of things; they load the edifice of society, by setting up in the air what the solidity of the structure requires to be on the ground.”
— Edmund Burke, 1790

More than two centuries have passed since Burke described the falsehood inherent in the Cult of Equality, but radicals have never ceased to “pervert the natural order of things,” spreading misery and calling it Progress, and the madness continues to this very day.

So my apologies to Pete for neglecting his challenge, but the thing is, if these fools won’t heed the wisdom of Edmund Burke, why should I expect them to listen to me?

We should never accuse feminists of mere ignorance.

They know the truth. They just hate the truth.

 

 

Because Satan Is a Yankees Fan

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The Orioles had two men on base and nobody out in the top of the 8th. The Yankees were leading 5-2, but the O’s had the tying run at bat and the count went to 3-and-2. And then something happened that had never happened in the entire history of Major League Baseball:

Triple plays of any kind are rare: The Yankees hadn’t turned one at home since 1968, and the O’s hadn’t hit into a triple play since 1996, but this particular sequence for a triple play had never occurred, period. ViralRead sports editor Jeff Gurner on the historic play:

By the way, if you were keeping score at home, you can mark that gem as a 4-6-5-6-5-3-4 in your books.

Damn Yankees!

 

Slouching Toward Cougartown

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From fame to shame: NFL cheerleader (left) in her police mug shot (right)

Jeff Gurner at Viral Read reports the disturbing story of the woman who was arrested for making advances on a 12-year-old boy:

Elizabeth Leigh Garner, a former Tennessee Titans cheerleader, was indicted last week on charges of aggravated sexual battery and solicitation of a minor for child rape.
The 42 year-old denies the allegations and told police “that she was drunk that evening and that she got the boy confused with a man that was also at the residence.”
According to the Mufreesboro police report, the boy stated “she was asking him if he had ever been with a woman,” and that Garner then touched him “on the outside of his pants” and made “an attempt to take his shorts off” while offering to “perform oral sex on him.”

Well, if being drunk were a valid defense against criminal charges, there would be a lot fewer people in prison, but given the description of her actions in the police report, does anyone buy this over-the-hill NFL cheerleader’s excuse that she was “confused”?

It is routinely expected that lots of guys reading this will react by saying, “Where were these sexually aggressive NFL cheerleaders back when I was an adolescent fantasizing about them?” We are all reminded of that famous scene in Animal House where the Playboy Bunny comes flying through the kid’s window: “Thank you, God!”

Yet there are reasons why sexual fantasies — lust for things that are abnormal or taboo — are best restricted to the realm of fantasy. Sexual taboos serve a social purpose; the indulgence of what advocates of sexual liberation call “transgressive” behavior inevitably leads to trouble.

The seemingly widespread phenomenon we might call the Mary Kay LeTourneau Syndrome, of middle-aged women seeking to validate their sexual attractiveness by seducing boys, should be viewed as disturbing evidence of cultural decadence. Perhaps some “pro-sex” feminists would defend this trend as evidence of advancing equality, but if so, it is the worst sort of equality, namely a descent into utter degeneracy. (And, to do the feminists’ work for them: If men value women primarily for their sexual attractiveness, isn’t the patriarchy to blame if women feel compelled to seek validation in this perverse manner?)

On the fringes of society, we have seen those who argue that pedophilia should be understood as a valid “sexual orientation,” rather than as a dangerous perversion. We have seen such attitudes apparently embraced even among the elite, as in Judith Levine’s Harmful to Minors, the tip of an academic iceberg of pro-pedophile intellectualism, or in the Columbia University professor’s “consensual adult” incestuous affair.

In a society where the Supreme Court has declared that an “emerging awareness” should govern the legal status of sexual behavior, who can say which way this awareness will further emerge? A constitutional right to donkey sex may seem far-fetched today, but there was a time when the idea of ex-NFL cheerleaders stalking boys with offers of oral sex seemed equally far-fetched. Our society has already slid far down the slippery slope, and who knows when we’ll hit rock bottom?