The Worlds Sport??? Ummmm maybe just 3rd world!!!

Okay, I really wanted to get back into the DNP-CD by easing my way in with a top 10 celebrations in sports. While Researching these gems, I started noticing that a lot of the really epic celebrations came from the game of soccer(notice how I didn' use the word sport!). Which made me really ask myself why are some of the best celebrations in soccer? I came up with a couple reasons....1st: Some of these guys play all month long without scoring a goal, so when they do, they better have something that everyone will remember them by because it could be a very, very, very long time before they score again! 2nd: Soccer is infested with the ability to flop/act, which really made the wheels in my head start turning. Could Soccer be an escape for all those kids who really wanted to pursue a career in the arts(i.e. drama club, glee club, stage crew, etc.), but didn't want to get beat up so they ended up playing this silly game. This makes the most sense to me! These celebrations are a way of showing off their childhood dreams, without getting made fun of! I know its a stretch, but next time you watch a match check out how good these men are at acting...they fake cry, limp, pretend to be paralyzed and taken off in a stretcher only to hop off as soon as they get to the sidelines, they pretend to be kicked, punched, tackled and 75% of the time there is not one person within 5 feet of the guy...honestly these guys have amazing acting abilities!




Okay, now can you see why real, I mean, most Americans can't get with this game!?

The reason why it has coined the term "world's sport" is because of all the 3rd world countries who really don't have money for a football field, baseball diamond, basketball court and all the equipment that is required for the sport! I am not knocking on poor countries, its just a fact. As my boy Daniel Tosh said it perfectly, "Soccer is stupid, go play real football! Soccer is the most popular sport on the planet? Thanks to 3rd world countries!!! You try spending all day in a mud hut swatting flies and the idea of kicking a ball around will sound like the greatest past time ever!" Speaking of Daniel Tosh, someone needs to send this video below into Tosh.0! enjoy!

On the Google Machine

So even though I promised months ago a regular link dump or web round up, or some other euphemism for your mom’s behavior in high school, here we are right now with the first ever DNP-CD: On the Google Machine.  So let’s see what’s floating around the web today.
Off Season Winners and Losers
The Basketball Jones as is their Canadian style has come out with another great video from the great white north about the NBA off season.  Gives a little run down of the winners and losers with an off handed, but sort of interesting take on the Jazz worth reading.
Dell Demps likes to lie
Over at Yahoo Sports they have an AP story quoting Dell Demps the GM of the Hornets that Chris Paul did not request a trade in their meeting today and that he will be with the team for years to come as they move in a new direction.  So with that news I’m going to put the over under on Paul being traded at 3 days.
Back to Winners and Losers
David Aldridge, who may be my favorite NBA writer and courtside reporter even if he isn’t the best has another take on who the winners and losers have been in free agency.  Some major differences of opinion with the Jones on a couple teams including the Jazz.
More NBA more Yahoo
Since this seems like an all NBA linkdump today might as well continue the theme. Marc Spears over at Yahoo has a little write up about Al Jefferson for all of you Jazz fans to check out, I’m sure you’ll love what he has to say and maybe if you’re lucky I’ll give my two cents on it later today.  Or maybe I’ll just drink a whiskey neat and watch yesterday’s Mad Men again.

The Jazz’s Free Agent Strategy

I’ve listened to a lot of the absolutely great sports radio we have around here in regards to the Jazz and their moves this off season and free agency, it seems to mostly be at the level of two guys at a bar and by bar I mean Lumpy’s.  Not that Monson and Kyle and all these other guys don’t know the players and don’t have a rudimentary understanding of sports, but the lack of discussion of the operating aspects of professional teams is astonishing.  And while I haven’t been paying too close attention to the Jazz blogs, which I probably should do I have heard no mention of salary, contract length or the CBA.

While I have no problem with letting Boozer and Korver and Mathews go in principle and also very much like the pick up of Bell (Jefferson is probably a wash for Boozer and I always have concerns about knee problems) it wasn’t until listening to Simmons a week ago that the moves really started to seem excellent to me.  While I don’t have the time or even care to go spelunking through the sewer that is the current CBA like the Sports Guy does so that I can faux GM every trade possibility out there, nor do I think that the new CBA will be the nuclear bomb option that he seems to think it is, I do take these into account and believe that the business side is as critical as the actual game being played on the floor.

Because of this I really like both of these pick ups, not just for the money savings, which is very important, but because both of these contracts are at least two years shorter than what would have been needed to secure the current players.  Not only does this prevent a mistake from being on the books as long, but doesn’t saddle the Jazz with a long term contract that may be way over priced when the new CBA is negotiated, looking at you Hawks!

Two years from now when there is a whole new CBA, there could be players available at prices that we can’t even imagine now and having the flexibility to get them, while still maintaining a competitive team for this season and the next two might just be what it takes to put the Jazz in a realistic position to be a contender.

The Meaning of Lebron as Cowards

There were lots of better pictures out there that were representative of the idea of Lebron as coward, but I couldn’t resist trying to rub it in these guys’ faces one last time.
Frankly not very many people have actually called Lebron a coward, but while only one or two commentators have actually used those words, pretty much anyone that has negatively commented on the movement of Lebron to Miami has spoken in metaphors or synonyms to coward.
But why do we hear these kinds of sentiments when the idea of coward, something that is inextricably linked to an almost dead idea of honor is still used in professional sports.  We never see these ideas used in school or in our work place or pretty much anywhere else.  When was the last time someone described anyone you know as a coward, or someone’s behavior as dishonorable?
It seems to me that sports is the last refuge of these old ideas of honor in American culture, it’s still where specifically men challenge each other on “the battle field” and find superiority by defeating their opponent.  With all the discussion of “how” someone plays the game, their “attitude” and how they interact with their team mates these ideas are still prevalent.
So what many have seen with Lebron, including or should I say especially former players like Sir Chuck and Jordan is someone that instead of rising to the challenge of trying to overcome or defeat another player, Wade in this case, he has chosen to join him.  The equivalent of an American soldier saying that this island hopping shit is just too much and joining the Japanese side.
This has clearly tainted the Heat as an organization too, as they have suddenly become evil in the minds of many, a place that harbors cowards and traitors, like a pirate ship.  Even Chris Bosh whom no one blames for leaving the Raptors is now covered in the stink of this deal.  He is routinely described as a third wheel, the toady that follows the bully around doing his dirty work, the sycophant.
I think it will be very interesting to see how this narrative plays out over the coming years, if these ideas can even be sustained in sports or if the new age of “best friend” players will destroy these last vestiges of the honor culture even in sports.
Sorry this post was completely lacking in humor, maybe I’ll change the motto of the site to “The blog that used to get hand jobs from your older sister in the garage” just so everything ends on a light note.

Audacity #2 The Tony Kornheiser Addition

I had originally started this post on Monday in the afternoon to discuss the Tony Kornheiser show on Monday.  As you know if you happened to read the original audacity post, )which it looks like about 12 people did) that I mentioned his comments about Hannah Storm and the half hearted apology he gave afterwards.   Of course any of his longtime listeners didn’t blink an eye at the time of the original comments, as he has made comments about Hannah’s outfits as well as Hoda’s and Kathy Lee’s and every other freak show middle aged “news babe” on morning TV.  So it came as quite the surprise that he was apologizing on Friday’s show, although not too surprising that Hannah might have heard about it through the ESPN grapevine and it needed to be quashed.

Monday’s show started with another apology, which I found very unusual, and which first made me think about writing another media watch aka. Audacity post to talk about this, although I couldn’t imagine that it was really going anywhere so I didn’t think about it much until right be fore the end of the first hour when he usually has the PTI preview he said something about a format change in the radio show and skipped that segment.  Now, I’m about to sound like your D-bag friend that claimed to know Bruce Willis was a ghost 5 minutes into the sixth sense, but the combination of the phrase “undisclosed amount of time” to describe the “format change” and the missing PTI segment made me suspect he had been suspended.  Of course he had joked almost all Friday that he was going to get fired, but that seemed beyond absurd at the time.

Later on Monday, when he was in fact not present at PTI it became obvious that there was some kind of suspension in place.  At that point I had written most of what you had already in the first two paragraphs, although with a slightly different perspective.  On Tuesday morning in the first couple minutes of the show he disclosed that he had been suspended and then played his usual woe is me card and what a terrible day it is shtick.  I have been contemplating whether or not it was a mistake not to post this Monday night when I first wrote it and suspected a suspension.  My thoughts were that, I didn’t know and it would look stupid to our 7 regular readers if I were wrong and it wasn’t a suspension and that secondly this isn’t a news site, we do feature type posts about sports and sports media and a breaking story isn’t as interesting as a posts afterwards that can dissect all the angles.  So maybe I missed the chance to “break” this story, although posting on the internet what you hear on a radio show is hardly breaking, and get a million hits, but I took this route instead.

I’ve decided to end the inside baseball part of this posts as I believe it is the longest one yet and actually get into my opinion on the suspension and peoples reaction to it in a second post later today.  Which will focus on the comments themselves, which I can’t even remember, ESPN’s reaction and my take on their internal politics and finally the two reactions to the story that I found most interesting, Dan Levy's over at On The Dl and Dead Spin's take that it was mostly about his Berman comments and not the Hannah stuff.  So until later, keep the back bacon frying.

Audacity round #1

So this is our first try at Audacity our media round up post.  And by our, I of course mean me, since know one including the other writers will come within miles of this thing, it’s like we are a child molester and the rest of the internet is an elementary school bus route around us.  Wow, wish I hadn’t written that all of a sudden, I’ll be right back, there’s someone at the door yelling FBI. 

I’ll be right there hold on.

Since the Olympics are the biggest thing going and everyone else is talking about them, today's audacity we will cover NBC’s Olympic converge and then the coverage of their coverage and you can follow us down that little meta rabbit hole.

We’ll of course start out with the best aspect of the Olympic broadcast so far, that picture of Steven Colbert reading cat fancy, the rest of it has completely sucked.  From showing the most important medal events hours after they happen to sticking the hockey on msnbc but having cross-country skiing for an hour and a half in high def on NBC it is completely insane.  Well except for sticking a microphone in the middle of the us snowboard team after White sealed the deal and then having to apologize weakly when his coach told him to “fuck the shit out of the run.”  That almost made it worth it.

Now on to the media on the media.  Dan Levy over at http://onthedlpodcast.com/ had about a half our rant about the Olympic coverage on Thursday that essentially went over the same stuff that I have covered.  The rest of his shows this week were the usual, but still one of the best daily sports shows around.

The guys at talkhoops.net did another excellent show this week, they are probably my favorite podcast.  No talk of the Olympics, but an awesome run down of the NBA trades and the usual mix of bad sex jokes based on animal species, that innocent racism we have grown to love and maybe even a return of the ratard joke.

Finally, the Friday Tony Kornheiser Show was spectacular.  Tony is absolutely the best thing on radio, period.  Kellerman I always thought was a close second, but like usual he is off the air.  Mr. Tony started out with an unbelievable apology to Hannah Storm for ripping her boots she wore a couple days before.  Along with the school girl outfit as seen here.  He then went on to combine this with the Tiger Woods apology, claim he would soon be fired and take the show in a new friendly direction, that would of course make it stink more than ever.  It was truly outstanding.

Tomorrow I’m going to take another chance at the Olympics, watching the men’s hockey on MSNBC if I can even watch hockey in low def, prediction: lot’s of beers make it to low def to follow and I give up and play foosball against Ron.  But only time will tell.

Updates

I would like to apologize for not posting anything lately, I've written a bunch of stuff and just haven't gotten it up, I've been spending most of my time on google maps looking for the best route to Poundtown, you're mom told me to meet her there.  Or maybe I've just been working a lot, and by that I mean I found out about the High Life Big Boy 32 oz can.  That's a quart of beer in a can, that's fucking right.

I have no idea who these fine gentleman are, but they love the big boys

Anyway, I'm going to post all the stuff I've already written but was way to drunk to edit properly, that will be up over the next four or five days.  I've got a super bowl preview coming, less analysis and more just an opportunity for you to take an over under bet on what quarter I"ll be too drunk to remember that we are watching a game and get hit by a car throwing the football out on South Temple.
I'm also starting two features that I'll run probably every couple of days or so.  They are both media round up kind of things, not as much just link dumps as link dumps with some analysis, the corn bits of link dumping in my opinion.  The blog one will be called On The Google Machine and the audio/video will be Audacity.  Maybe I can get one of the other people that supposedly write on this blog to throw down on some of these, or not.
Stay tuned this weekend for excitement, and lot's of disappointment, and not just in my bedroom.