ESPN texted me and millions of other fans over the weekend to announce that Michael Sam, linebacker/defensive lineman from Missouri and SEC defensive player of the year had, in an interview, announced to the world that he was gay. All of the articles proclaimed, needlessly, that Sam would be the first openly gay athlete in the NFL since he is a high to mid round prospect in the upcoming NFL draft.
First, we should all be proud of this kid, coming out to his team last summer and then publicly yesterday. He is going to face a lot of haters (many of these posts and tweets have been compiled by The Huffington Post and other outlets). Fortunately, he is going to face a lot more acceptance and support than we expect. In addition, he came out before the NFL Draft, which circumvents rumors and hearsay and innuendo.
However, football coaches are not the most “forward thinking” human beings. I cringe when I think of some of the questions he may be asked by ignorant coaches and front office people. In addition, we will have to see if Sam’s draft status is hurt by his announcement. Projected as a late first to middle round pick, if he falls, is it a football decision or a prejudicial one?
That is just over the next few months; already the goofballs from Westbury Baptist Church plan on protesting at the Missouri campus. Then we have training camp. We have seen ignorant statements made by pro football players about gays in the locker room in the past when the prospect of a gay teammate gets mentioned (and we know there have been and/or are some just by mathematical probability). The comments that he may face from teammates and opponents may be horrific.
That said, however, we have to take comfort in the reaction of the University of Missouri students, players and coaches. They knew that Sam was gay, and not only did they keep it to themselves, but Sam himself talks about the support that he received from the players and coaches. According to reports, lots of people knew, students, faculty, and the important thing is: NOBODY CARED! Good for Missouri!
He is a football player, and a talented one. He also happens to be gay. He faces some tough people on the field, and tougher attitudes everywhere. But, this is the 21st Century and people are becoming more accepting (albeit some dragged kicking and screaming). Sam said himself that he hopes people will judge him on his play and not on his sexual orientation.
I wish him the very best in his football career and life. I hope the haters leave him alone. Most of all, I look forward to the day when an athlete’s sexual orientation is not news to anyone.

Along with the story about Michael Sam, the other story that was instantly all over the sports world over the weekend involved Oklahoma State basketball player Marcus Smart. In a road game against Texas Tech, Smart tried to stop a fast break and fell into the out of bounds area. A Texas Tech booster names James Orr (proclaimed by the university at one time as the team’s “number one fan”) said something to the prone 19-year-old, and Smart reacted by jumping up and shoving the fan in the chest before teammates and a policeman separated the two.
Smart immediately received a technical foul, an ejection and was suspended for 3-games by the conference. The first reaction, as it always is in these incidents is that the player was out of control and broke the Cardinal Rule of sports – NEVER put your hands on the paying public. No matter what they say or do, the player is always wrong.
The press leapt on the kid mercilessly. The first SI.com article said that Smart was “a kid smothered by the pressure of a spiraling season, out of control and out of his senses. There’s no excuse for it, no matter what idiocy may have filled his ears, and the Oklahoma State guard will be disciplined, while an ugly incident tracks him for the rest of his basketball life. Whatever penance is paid in college and NBA arenas will make whatever the Big 12 does seem merciful.” I guess Smart has let his emotions get away from him before, but hell, the kid’s a sophomore in college. How many of us did some pretty stupid things when they were 19? (My hand is up too.)
Smart said that he heard the n-word and that drove him to shove Orr. While no one heard Orr make a racial remark, players have said that racial epithets have reigned down on players at Texas Tech. Orr himself said that he did make an inappropriate comment to Smart, calling him a “piece of crap.” Orr said that he will voluntarily not attend any more Texas Tech home games for the rest of this season an penance for his own actions.
But it brings up the age old issue: does buying a ticket permit a fan to say anything he or she wants to a player? I am reminded of the woman photographed flashing Bulls forward Joaquin Noah the upraised middle finger after a Bulls-Heat playoff game (there was a picture of a female Bruins fan doing the same thing to the Blackhawks in last year’s Stanley Cup Finals as well). How much restraint does one expect a 19-year-old kid to have, especially when someone calls him a name?
I have always called for a look at what triggered the action; all the way back to the Roberto Alomar-John Hirshbeck incident. What makes an athlete attack a fan or an official? Before we rush to judgment on the actions of an athlete, we should see if anything was said to elicit that reaction. If it is something that the fan or official said, they should be reprimanded to the same extent as the player is fined/suspended. Friends know that I am a loud, boisterous fan at Northwestern football games, but I try to keep my language clean, abuse players for what they do on the field, not for anything else, and I usually reserve my strongest comments for the incompetent Big Ten football officials/
So, I believe that SI writer is wrong. If Smart has learned from the incident, I don’t think people will much remember what he did. However, fans should understand that these players, especially college athletes, are very young people, and in many cases, they come from areas where respect is paramount; killing offenses. We have to cheer with respect for opponents, refs, coaches, and finally, to the people sitting around us, especially kids who are watching how we act and learning.

I’m a cynic; I admit it. Especially in today’s control the message, anything for good P.R. world, I always take any action by almost anyone and certainly any corporation with a grain of salt. (for example, the way Rolling Stone has been co-opted by the record industry that any “big” record is going to get a positive, if not glowing review.)
This week, the drug store chain CVS announced that it would no longer carry cigarettes, saying that it was incongruous for a chain that sells substances for people to have better health should also sell a carcinogen. Maybe even the senior management of CVS was surprised by the amount of positive press the announcement received. It has been hailed as a major step by politicians all over the country including Chicago Mayor Rahm Emmanuel.
From the first, this didn’t smell right to me (not that it matters since I don’t smoke, probably in part due to my losing my mother in part as a result of her two-pack-a-day habit for at least the 45 years I shared with her).. My initial thought was that with the high cost of cigarettes, the profit margins is miniscule. For those of you not business finance people, margins are how much a company gets to keep of every dollar sold after paying for the goods and salaries (gross profit margin), and overhead expenses like rent, light, heat etc. (operating profit margin). If a retailer is only making $0.05 over its cost to buy it, it would take a lot of sales to make money. (Contrast that with say, retail auto parts, when the “mark up” can be 20-30%; it takes a lot fewer sales to make a buck.) And with cigarette sales declining over time, store have to sell more and more cigarette to make it cost effective.
An old friend of mine with a work history in retail said as much; that the profit on cigarettes is so small that it’s not a great loss to stop carrying them. Notice, however, that the chain has made no effort to stop alcohol sales. In addition, another old friend (just as cynical as I, if not more) says that this is a ploy by CVS to further reduce the number of cashiers necessary in their stores. CVS has been very big on the self-service checkout machines, but cigarettes must be kept behind a counter, which means that someone has to be there to sell the cigarettes, and check IDs is someone wants them. So in this way, CVS stops selling a loss leader gets to reduce some staff (both of which increase gross profit), and therefore, the bottom line, while “spinning it” under the guise of corporate responsibility.
Maybe it’s legitimate. Maybe the chain really wants to stop selling products that are bad for people? Of maybe they can wrap that around a cold, calculating bottom line decision and come out smelling like roses? I choose to believe the latter.

As I stated above, I have always wanted to go to an Olympics. It is on the bucket list, along with seeing a Great White Shark breaching off Australia, going to China, and several other things. Doesn’t matter, winter or summer, just to say I’ve been to one would be a cool thing to me. I’ve had chances of course: Atlanta, Vancouver, London, Salt Lake City; but for whatever reason – lack of time, lack of money – I’ve never gone.
These factors also factored into my failure to make the trip to Sochi for the Winter Olympics which have just started. Of course, it didn’t help that I really don’t want to support a place with anti-gay laws and Sochi is a relatively difficult place to get to. I was also not attracted to the possibility of terrorism: a concern at every Olympics, but more with the struggles of the former Soviet Republics fighting for freedom and strife with Islamic factions. Plus, there are apparently a lot of stray dogs in the area that are being hunted down. I am a dog lover, and would hate to see dogs being killed (not to mention questioning why there are so many stray dogs there in the first place.
At my age however, I need to stay in nice places. They don’t have to be palatial (especially since I’m nowhere near rich and have stayed in bed and breakfasts in Paris among other places), but I’d like the hotel to be clean and safe. Initial reports from reporters were that neither of these bare minimum requirements have been met.
There are reports of either no water, no hot water for showers (which does not surprise me since I had to take a couple of cold showers while teaching in Sophia, Bulgaria in the early 1990s), or worst, warnings not to “use on your face because it contains something very dangerous.” There were reportedly minor food issues, like bee carcasses left in honey (although that would show natural origination and perhaps the freshness of the honey); warnings to not worry if there are sirens, and a number of the aforementioned dogs having taken up residence in some of the hotel rooms.
With all of this, it is apparently no surprise that there seem to be fewer foreign visitors that expected despite Vladimir Putin’s plans to transform Sochi into a magnet for international tourism. I will be watching a fair amount of these Winter Olympics, but I think this time, it’s much better to watch the events on television…

If you are looking for another sign of the rot that is college football, you have to look no further than the media coverage of “national signing day” yesterday. High school young men were having press conferences to announce where they will be “attending” school (that is, playing football). Some will become pros, more won’t, too many will not get the education they are supposed to get when one goes to college.
Plus, the scouting services have graded most of these young men like modern day slave traders, and the coaches have visited them, wooed them, done everything short of checking their teeth like people do when they are buying horses. As a result of these services, the press has already graded the recruiting classes, and of course, the major football programs did quite well. Alabama, Texas Tech, Ohio State and Notre Dame among many others got high marks for their recruiting classes. Others like Illinois, though hopeful, were not graded highly. Even my alma mater Northwestern’s class was reviewed, graded, and compared to the other Big Ten schools.
Fans of college football have always done this, read up on the incoming recruits, pining our future on field hopes on the heads of young men most of whom can’t vote yet and are far from being old enough to walk into a bar for a drink. My problem is the all day coverage on ESPN and other broadcast outlets, and the amount of newsprint given to what is really a meat market where well paid older men select who can help them win football games and make even more money.
It’s more than a bit disheartening.

• What a nostalgic Super Bowl – a complete blowout. We had been getting used to close games.
• The cliché that “defense wins championships” is not a cliché today.
• Is this the official ascension of the black mobile quarterback? Will everyone soon be running the read option?
• Did Seattle just score again?
• However, I have to say that the officiating in the game is suspect in light of Chicago Sun-Times columnist Mark Potash’s article last week that Seattle Head Coach Pete Carroll should be lauded for bending the rules until they snap. In the third quarter, the officials called a pass interference call on one of the Seattle defensive backs. They had been holding, mauling and interfering with Denver receivers all game. I’m not saying that the Broncos would have won, but if the officials had clamped down on that nonsense early, it might have been a more competitive contest.
• Was there a dumber decision than Denver Head Coach John Fox’s decision to call for a short kick to start the second half, needing a defensive stop to give his team any chance of victory? Rather than allow his excellent kicker to kick it easily into the end zone (or out of the end zone for a touchback), the short kick gave the ball to Percy Harvin, who took the kick and ran 87 yards for another of the back breaking scores for the Seahawks.
• Has Peyton Manning looked so disoriented in his whole life?
• I didn’t know Bruno Mars except for his one single, but he was very good – maybe even worth purchasing. And he reacted well with the Red Hot Chili Peppers.
Commercials:
• Bob Dylan continues to be ultra weird. He was very weird on the Chrysler commercial. I can’t see it selling many cars.
• I liked the Radio Shack 1980s commercial.
• The Coca Cola Commercial with people singing “America The Beautiful” in different languages is really pissing off the right wing jackasses.
• So is the Coke “It’s beautiful” commercial with two gay dads.
• And Cherrios probably did the same with the mixed race couple having a son. Good for all of them.
• I didn’t mind the Tim Tebow commercials.. Perhaps I should have.
• Stephen Colbert was funny in the brief pistachio commercials. After the first one I thought “lame,”
• It was good to see Joe Namath in the fur coat.
• As a comic book guy, I am excited over the upcoming Captain America and Spider-Man movies.

A couple of weeks ago, CNN reported (and I blogged on) that many athletes at Division I schools could read only at an elementary school level, not well enough to follow themselves in newspapers or even read multisyllabic words like “Wisconsin.”
This week, Chancellor Carol Folt of the University of North Carolina admitted that the school
failed some of its students “for years” by allowing them to take classes that did not match its own academic standards.
The concession follows a fake-class scandal two years ago and the CNN investigation. found continuing problems at UNC and other public universities where some student-athletes could.
The scandal from 2012 exposed that UNC students, many of them athletes, were given grades for classes they did not attend and for which they did nothing beyond turning in a single paper. One professor has been indicted on fraud charges for being paid for a class he didn’t teach. The university has always maintained it was an isolated case, but Folt is now acknowledging a broader problem.
“We also accept the fact that there was a failure in academic oversight for years that permitted this to continue,” Folt told UNC trustees last week (quoted on SI.com). “This, too, was wrong. And it has undermined our integrity and our reputation.”
The CNN piece investigated the issue of poor academics among student football and basketball players. The researcher, Mary Willingham, said student-athletes were among those who took the fake classes, though she said the classes were just a symptom of the problem of enrolling athletes in the money-making sports of football and basketball who could not succeed academically by themselves.
UNC has launched its own investigation into the claims that too many of its student-athletes read poorly and the university’s executive vice chancellor and provost, James Dean, told Bloomberg Businessweek that he had commissioned an internal study into African and African-American studies at the university. That’s where the fake classes originated. Neither Dean nor Folt were in their positions when the fake classes were run. The “hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil” NCAA, which oversees college sport, did investigate, but found none of its rules were broken since administrators like Ms. Willingham lied to them.
That the university did this is bad enough, but the African-American studies classes were faked? Assuming that these were black professors and administrators, they should know full well of the challenges that face young black people, especially men, that have no education. For the schools to allow this is unconscionable, but for administrators that go along with keeping these players in school in unforgivable. What about the young men who don’t make the pros? What happens to them? (I always think of DePaul guard Skip Dillard who never made it to the pros and spent years in prison for armed robbery.) And of the ones who do make it to the pros, 75% of them file bankruptcy within 7 years after their careers end in basketball and 5 years for football.
This does not absolve the “student-athletes” either. I know how hard it is to get young people to listen, but if they are in school just to play sports, and to wait for the big payday, they are fools, and should be treated as such. Every athlete in every physical sport is one play, accident, big hit away from getting hurt and never playing again. Plus, even if one has a long playing career, say to 40-years-of-age, with life expectancies growing for most people (the jury is out on football and hockey players as a result of the head issues being raised now), this leaves 30-40 more years to live after sports. Personally, I’m tired of hearing about athletes dying destitute, homeless, with tons of children poorly raised and cared for.
I know the old saying “live fast, die young, and leave a pretty corpse,” but that’s no adage to live one’s life by in my opinion.