It used to be that Bengals fans would only wear bags on their heads.
And you thought the NFL was the No Fun League? Turns out the school marms at Garfield Middle in Hamilton, Ohio, are decidedly lacking in happy genes, too.
The school, in its infinite wisdom, has penalized eighth-grader Dustin Reader for clipping. Specifically for clipping Bengals stripes and "B" insignia into his hair as a tribute to the team's good season. At this rate, it's a wonder the NFL hasn't sued for copyright violation.
The school says its code of conduct prohibits extreme and distracting hairstyles and they put the kid into in-school suspension "until his hair grows out." Reader's parents, Tina Wanamaker and James Reader, and barber say they don't understand why the haircut is out of bounds. His father says his son just wants to show pride in the 6-2 Bengals, according to the Hamilton Journal News:
"He's had designs on his head before and no one said anything," said Wanamaker. Previously, he'd had a rose, a spiral and the word "LOST" carved into his hair. On the occasion of the "LOST" cut, he was told by the school to fix it, but he didn't get in trouble, they said.
"This is a way for him to express pride in the Bengals' putting up a winning season," said his father. "It's not racist, not drug-related, not gang-related or anything like that. It's about football."
The in-school suspension - Dustin is in attendance and doing his work but remains in an isolated area away from other students - will remain in effect until the hair either grows out or he gets a different cut.
Mike Tyson cannot catch a break. largely from himself, it turns out.
Just after he spent time straightening up http://www.oprah.com/dated/oprahshow/oprahshow-20090912-mike-tyson and playing rock star to crowds in India, the law is once again in his life.
Police say the ear-chomping boxer has been detained on suspicion of battery following an alleged altercation with a photographer at Los Angeles International Airport.
The photographer has accused Tyson of hitting him, causing him to fall to the ground and cut his forehead. He's being treated at a hospital.
Holcomb says The cops say both Tyson and the photographer want to press charges for misdemeanor battery and that Tyson has been compliant and cooperative with officers and is currently waiting in a holding cell at the airport.
Funny, that doesn't look like the Jaws of Life, Joe. (AP)
World Series-winning New York Yankees manager Joe Girardi may not walk on water, but he's apparently one step closer to sainthood in the Bronx.
Not content to simply end the torturous nine-year championship drought for the Bombers, formerly Chicago Joe took time after the celebrations were over last night to come to the aid of a woman in an car accident, lohud.com reports:
"The guy wins the World Series, what does he do? He stops to help," said Westchester County police officer Kathleen Cristiano, who was among the first to arrive at the accident scene. "It was totally surreal."
Girardi and Yankees pitcher Andy Pettitte had actually passed Cristiano earlier in the night at a drunk driving checkpoint before the Yankee skipper came up on the minor spinout. The driver, Marie Henry of Stamford, Conn., was uninjured and declined treatment, apparently. And there were no charges in what police described as a simple loss of control of the car.
In fact, the only crime was that Henry apparently had no idea who Girardi was:
"The driver didn't know it was him until after I told her," Cristiano said.
As crazy coaching moments go, Gunnar Prokop tries to give his best Woody Hayes effort and ends up slightly less infamous, but no better than the disgraced THE Ohio State University coach.
When Hayes punched Clemson defender Charlie Bauman in the 1978 Gator Bowl after a game-sealing interception, he put himself on a one-way express train to loserville, being fired the next day never to coach again.
For his part, Prokop, coach of Austrian handball team Hypo Niederoesterreich, one-upped Hayes in that he hip-checked an opposing player in the women's Champions League game. But he doesn't rise to the level of incredulity since nobody outside the rabid Austrian women's handball fan base noticed.
Still, it's another coach gone after a crazy moment, though Prokop fell on his own sword without being pushed to make amends. Thankfully, he's already in the city Sigmund Freud made famous for psychoanalysis, so he'll be able to spend his newly acquired free time figuring out why he just had to hit a girl.
"I will go through this with a psychiatrist. ... I still can't understand why I've done this."
The match ended in a 27-27 draw. Handball's European governing body opened disciplinary proceedings against Prokop. A ruling is expected before his team's match against Krim Ljubljana on Sunday.
We will, of course, be waiting to see justice done here.
If baseball were nothing but fastballs, we'd all be in the Majors at some point. No matter how hard someone throws, with enough work and time in the cage, building up batspeed to attack a fairly straight ball is within reach of the average human.
What inevitably puts the spikes in the throat of the collective dream is the breaking ball. It's often said that trying to hit a round ball with a round bat is the hardest thing to do in sports. While that's certainly open for debate, there's no denying the difficulty of catching a pitch with a wrinkle square on ash or metal.
And for many a hardballer, the curveball is the pinnacle of frustration. Oh sure, you're slider, changeup and splitter can cause an ill-fated attempt to smash bat over knee on the way back to the bench, but the one pitch that can really make a great hitter look like a T-baller is the curveball.
Known by many names - The Hammer, Uncle Charlie, Yakker, Bender, etc. - there's nothing worse than feeling of being frozen, or worse - twisting in the wind with buckled knees, as a big 12-6 local skims across the plate for a called third strike.
Wait, it turns out there is something worse: it's all in your head.
According to Zhong-Lin Lu, who holds the William M. Keck Chair in Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of Southern California, that filthy hook never happened. It's impossible. All in your head. What you just got punched out on and were made to look foolish by was nothing more than a straight ball and what amounts to an optical illusion caused by spin and the red and white blur of seams and hyde.
In baseball, a curveball creates a physical effect and a perceptual puzzle. The physical effect (the curve) arises because the ball's rotation leads to a deflection in the ball's path. The perceptual puzzle arises because the deflection is actually gradual but is often perceived as an abrupt change in direction (the break). Our illusions suggest that the perceived "break" may be caused by the transition from the central visual system to the peripheral visual system. Like a curveball, the spinning disks in the illusions appear to abruptly change direction when an observer switches from foveal to peripheral viewing.
Got that? It's all in your head, meat.
"Physically, there is no such thing as a breaking curveball. It's mostly in the hitter's mind," claims Lu.
Major League hurler Mike Marshall in a piece in US News' HealthDay begs to differ with the distinguished Lu:
"I can't believe the guy is saying something that was disproved almost 50 years ago. It's absolutely ridiculous. Baseballs move. They really move," Marshall said.
And Marshall knows of what he speaks. Aside from his mound credentials, which include 12 seasons in the majors and a 3.14 ERA, he majored in exercise physiology while earning a doctorate at Michigan State University. He says the devastating movement is no trick of the eye, but rather is due to air pressure forcing the spinning ball downward.
Now, take a look at this nearly illegal curve Dodger pitcher Clayton Kershaw drops on Sean Casey in Spring Training in 2008. With all due respect to Lu, when Professor Vin Scully gets that excited about a hook, it's a great pitch. Just look where it starts and where it ends and see if you think it's optical illusion or straight up filth:
For more visual observation on the art of the curveball - and whether it bends - take a look at what many students of the game think was the best ever thrown, from the hand of Sandy Koufax (toward the end of the video):
The debate aside, when it comes to a curve's power - perceived or achieved - perhaps the best answer is, "does it matter?"
"There seem to be arguments on both sides," Freddy Berowski, a researcher at the National Baseball Hall of Fame, said. "But what really matters is that the batter thinks it curves."
There are few Major League Baseball luminaries more celebrated that Ted Williams. The Splendid Splinter was the last man to hit .400 in a season, stroking at a .406 clip for the Boston Red Sox in 1941.
The famously prickly Hall of Famer and hero of World Ward II and the Korean conflict is considered by many to be the greatest hitter ever and, at least for son John-Henry Williams, was a treasure worth trying to save for all eternity. John-Henry chose to have dear dad cryogenically preserved upon his death at the age of 83 in 2002. Or, more specifically, Ted Williams head.
And that's where things get weird according to a new book, "Frozen," according to the New York Daily News:
In "Frozen," Larry Johnson, a former exec at the Alcor Life Extension Foundation in Scottsdale, Ariz., graphically describes how The Splendid Splinter" was beheaded, his head frozen and repeatedly abused.
The book, out Tuesday from Vanguard Press, tells how Williams' corpse became "Alcorian A-1949" at the facility, where bodies are kept suspended in liquid nitrogen in case future generations learn how to revive them.
Johnson writes that in July 2002, shortly after the Red Sox slugger died at age 83, technicians with no medical certification gleefully photographed and used crude equipment to decapitate the majors' last .400 hitter.
Williams' severed head was then frozen, and even used for batting practice by a technician trying to dislodge it from a tuna fish can.
John-Henry, who had a brief pro baseball career, including with the Schaumburg Flyers, was a controversial figure before his father died. But the heat really came down him with his 2002 decision to freeze his father without so much as a public funeral. John-Henry himself died of Leukemia in 2004 and was also treated at the Alcor facility as part of the ted Williams agreement.
Carolina Panthers' Dan Morgan looks out from the bench during a preseason NFL football game in Charlotte, N.C., in this Aug. 24, 2007 photo. The former Panthers linebacker and Pro Bowl pick suffered at least five concussions in his career, which does not tie him specifically to a possibility of dementia later in life, but can't help. (AP)
For those of you who have never appreciated how violent and life-changing the game of professional football can be for the men who play it, here's another sobering reminder.
A new study suggests retired National Football League players may have a high rate of Alzheimer's disease or other memory problems. The telephone survey asked if the retirees had ever been diagnosed with dementia, Alzheimer's disease or other memory-related disease. Nearly 2 percent of the former players ages 30 to 49 said yes. That's 19 times the rate for the same age group in the general population.
For retirees over 50, the rate was about five times higher.
That's another consequence to a group that already suffers from a staggering array of post-retirement maladies, including severe arthritis, problems with the knees and legs in general, debilitating hand injuries and an array of other problems.
Lead author David Weir emphasized the results don't show football causes memory problems, only that the risk is worth studying. The study of more than 1,000 ex-players was performed by the University of Michigan at the request of the NFL and its Player Care Foundation.
Notre Dame want to keep the gold in its helmets and and out of the pocket of at least one waitress, it seems. The University is going after a waitress who reeled in a massive $29,000 tip, saying it's a clerical mistake and she needs to pay the money back.
In the land of Touchdown Jesus, scooping up plates and taking orders at banquets only gets you $29 in gratuities, apparently:
The school says in a lawsuit that it paid Sara Gaspar the huge gratuity instead of about $29 because of a clerical error. The suit, filed in St. Joseph Circuit Court in South Bend, says Gaspar kept the money without telling the school.
Gaspar says she called the school three times about the unusual payment but spent the money on a car and to pay bills after the school didn't get back to her.
Gratuities are paid to workers by the school as part of the workers' checks.
No word on whether this will affect their BCS rankings.
When "God Bless America" goes wrong - another item for the "I'm surprised this hasn't happened yet" file.
Three teenagers who say they were tossed from a New Jersey ballpark for sitting through the song "God Bless America" are suing the minor league Newark Bears - managed by White Sox fan favorite Rock Raines.
The boys say their constitutional rights were violated when they were asked to leave Newark's Bears and Eagles Riverfront Stadium in June by Bear's president co-owner Thomas Cetnar.
"Nobody sits during the singing of 'God Bless America' in my stadium,'" Cetnar bellowed during the June 29 incident, according to the suit. "Now the get the (expletive) out of here."
The high schoolers, Bryce Gadye and Nilkumar Patel, both 17, and junior Shaan Mohammad Khan, 16, sued in federal court Friday seeking unspecified damages.
They say when they told Cetnar they had the right to remain seated, he cursed and had two security officers remove them from their seats behind home plate.
No chance the fine high school kids were popping off as that age group is known to do from time to time, right? Whatever the case, principles and beliefs aside, the next time you're at a minor league game in rough and tumble Newark the day before the anniversary of Sept. 11 and "God Bless America" comes on, maybe it would just be easier for everyone to stand? Just sayin'.
LeGarrette Blount had plenty to say with his mouth heading into Thursday night's Pac-10, WAC top-20 tilt between the 16th-ranked Ducks and No. 14 Boise St. Broncos.
By the end of the game, a 19-8 win for Boise State, Blount was talking with his fists and being dragged off the field by coaches and cops. And for his troubles, University of Oregon suspended the talented back for the remainder of the season, including any bowl game the Ducks might play in.
Blount will, however get to keep his scholarship.
University president Richard Lariviere called Blount's behavior "reprehensible."
"We do not and will not tolerate the actions that were taken by our player. Oregon's loyal fans expect and deserve better," Lariviere said in a statement. "The University of Oregon Athletics Department is reviewing the situation and will take appropriate action, reflecting the seriousness of the player's behavior."
Blount, who's own coaches say he has a lot of maturing to do and was suspended once in pre-season practice already, put the key quote on the bulletin board before Thursday night's rematch of the teams, saying Oregon owed Boise State an "ass-whoopin' " after the Ducks 37-32 upset loss last season at Oregon. Unfortunately for Blount, he forgot to open up his can during the game in the 19-8 loss. The closest he came to the end zone was in scoring four total points - two for Boise State in a safety and two for Oregon in a 2-point conversion. This in a game which saw the high-powered Duck offense manage zero first-half first downs and only 5:50 minutes of possession.
But it was after the game that Blount finally decided to start the whoopin'.
Following what appeared to be a quick taunt, Blount nailed sophomore defensive end Byron Hout with a cheap-shot right hand, caught by ESPN cameras. Apparently not satisfied with the impending suspension that will draw, he then started to go nuts on Boise State fans on the way off the field, forcing Oregon coaches and police to forcibly remove him.
A voracious consumer of all things sports and all things blog, Koster keeps his eyes on the biggest stories in sports while sacrificing any chance at a social life. Waste your entire day with him On Our Twitter .
Recent Comments