Friday sports nuggets

My latest thoughts on the juiciest sports stories:
I think its time to call out Deanna Favre. Yes, Deanna Favre.
Look, at some point, she has to stand up and be his wife, act like she cares about him, and make him quit football. It's time. It's past time. And if this unhealthy relationship - Brett and football - continues, he's going to be in a wheelchair getting jello every meal before he's 52.
He takes some of the most vicious hits I've ever seen (at least the worst a quarterback has to endure since I've been alive because mobile quarterbacks get it the worst) and he's got not one, but TWO fractures in his ankle that he apparently isn't taking seriously.
With all the information we have now about CTE, and given his age, its getting to be irresponsible to let him keep playing. And the only person who can convince him to quit is his wife. Coach Childress can't do it. His teammates can't do it - any of them from any of his years.
I always pictured Favre after retirement still spending time at some Mississippi high school working out with the kids, throwing a few passes. And when some kid asks him if he wants to watch some NFL football on Sunday, he looks at them with this sweet smile, pats them on the head, and confidently replies, "Sorry sonny, that life is behind me." Then he drives off in his pickup to go fish at the nearest watering hole.
If he keeps trying to play, he's going to be in bad shape, and effectively, we will never see him again because the NFL won't want you to see him in such a bad shape.
Deanna, get some counseling and strap him to a chair in a dark room until he agrees to retire. Then, keep him there until he actually wants to do it.
(Oh, and I hope you aren't hung up on that whole Jenn Sterger thing. If you haven't come to terms that your husband, a man playing a testerone-charged game, might quite possibly be a perv, then you might need an intervention, too.)
Speaking of taking hard hits, the NFL's supposed response to Week 6's headhunting spree is laughable. At some point, we won't be watching football in its current format, simply because its 1) too violent, 2) too unsafe and 3) someone's going to die. It's a conclusion that different people have come to and one that makes a lot of sense. The culture of hard hits and head injuries won't really change until a million people watch some player get hit so hard that they die on national television.
Trust me, I don't want this happen, but its the only way anything to change, because right now, the NFL doesn't want to curb what's happening.
Yea right, they want to stop one of the main reasons why people watch their sport.
BTW, read this column by Howard Bryant.
Two happy basketball-related notes:
Pokey Chatman is back in the United States, coaching and GMing the WNBA's Chicago Sky. Couldn't be happier. I think she had to leave the country with her tail between her legs over something that happens nationwide (and really isn't that bad if you are still winning and being adult about it). Her Euroleague Championship just proves how great of a coach she is and I know she's going to take advantage of his opportunity with Jia Perkins and Sylvia Fowles. Can't wait.
And just when I found my old Mavericks jersey/shirt in the closet, guess who signs with the Heat? Jerry Stackhouse!
I've always loved this guy - I just LeBron and Dwayne get their stuff together fast enough to get him a ring.

More columns

So yesterday, outside of writing the two columns that I posted here, I wrote one for shades magazine about the announcement of espnW.
I've got some interviews to do, but I have something else I want to post today.
Here's to a productive day!

The national impact

Life must really be a Law & Order episode.

Maybe now that this Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell storyline has started to take shape, people will start to believe that some of what you see on television actually happens in real life.

I think it’s funny that in the midst of these congressional talks to repeal the controversial policy which keeps gays and lesbians out of the military, the nation’s hottest topic is GLBT bullying.

As I’m sure everyone knows by now, at least four teens (there have been many more) have committed suicide as a result of bullying by their peers. Their names and stories have been told, so I’ll let you follow the link to get the intricacies. Today, everyone is encouraged to wear purple to show their support for these youth, and the many others who have lost their lives by being caught up in this tragedy of hate.

(FYI: purple on the LGBT rainbow flag represents spirit.)

The national support on this issue has been wide and it has been deafening. Ellen posted a video, Dan Savage started “It Gets Better,” newspapers and online publications have written and printed stories localizing the problem, LZ Granderson wrote a heartfelt column for CNN and ESPN and countless others have circulated the links and started conversations on social networking sites.

It’s this century’s Mathew Shepard magnified times a thousand.

Judge Virginia Phillips, who presided over the DADT case and ultimate brought down the ruling to have it stopped, probably watched all of this. It was unavoidable.

She couldn’t, in good conscience and amidst the public outcry, allow the policy to still be in effect.

Because really, who is a bigger GLBT bully than the United States government?

Since the Clinton Administration passed DADT in 1993, it’s been understood among soldiers that you either live in the closet or just don’t go to the military. There is no grey area.

And Phillips couldn’t allow young people to keep seeing that. The Department of Justice has since requested a stay so that the policy can still be in effect during the appeal process.

The real plot twist, though, will be when this GLBT subject matter train collides with gay marriage, and people start pushing for married gay soldiers and their spouses to get those hefty benefits. The young straight couples are falling all over themselves to get that extra pay, especially in this economy, so it’s only fair that we get a chance to cash in on that hustle.

But that doesn’t come until the series finale.

The Cowboys and the Rangers

For Lynne:

The other night I changed my Facebook status to say the following:
If you woulda told me four years ago that the cowboys would be 1-4 and the rangers would be leading the Yankees 2-1, I would thought you were high. Guess I dont know the world anymore.
For folks that don’t live in Texas, the most surprising part of that statement may be the part about the Cowboys, but native Texans know that the kicker on that sentiment in is the second qualifier.
We are surprised by the Rangers, not the Cowboys.
Mostly because, we all know the Cowboys suck. We’ve known it for a long time. For all their posturing and gloating and inflated egos, America’s former team amounts to that tremendous jerk you know who would get his life together if someone would just knock him down a few pegs.
I don’t know how many more pegs the ‘Boys need to fall, but I can tell you that rock bottom can’t come fast enough for Dallas fans.
We’re all just basically waiting on owner Jerry Jones to get rid of quarterback Tony Romo and head coach Wade Phillips, too men lacking in several of the same areas. They both buckle under extreme pressure (Romo does things like botch snaps in playoff games and throws interceptions; Phillips defers power to offensive coordinator Jason Garrett) and both lack the heart and discipline to command a team.
At this point, the Texas Rangers, however, have every North Texas sports fan on their side.
- - -
Our CLIFF LEE
Who art in Texas
Hallowed be thy arm
Thy win will come, it will be done
In New York as in Tampa
Give us today your weekly win
Give us strikes and homeruns
But do not let others home run against us
Lead us not into frustration
But deliver us to the World Series
For thine is the MVP
The best of the league
And the Glory of the team that God loves
Now and forever
And all Rangers fans said
AMEN

Imagine living the last 20 years in North Texas as a baseball fan.
You’ve watched the Dallas Stars win two Stanley Cups with Mike Modano and Brett Hull.
The Dallas Cowboys have the prestige that comes with five championships and national attention, so much so that there was a section of cars at the State Fair decorated in Cowboys colors and insignia.
Even the Mavericks have elevated from league bottom feeders to elite status and dipped enough to be mediocre.
But your Texas Rangers have just been bad, even with Hall of Fame players like Nolan Ryan, Ivan Rodriquex, Juan Gonzales, Rafael Palmiero and Alex Rodriguez once on their payroll.
Every sports team in the Metroplex has had a parade – the Cowboys; the Stars; college football has an annual downtown party during Texas-OU weekend; even the Mavericks have planned a parade, though it failed for various reasons.
Well, you’re a Ranger fan, and you want a freakin’ parade!
And this season, you may just get one.
The Rangers seem to have the right combination to make some real noise in more than just the American League, and for more than just one season. With a 10-3 victory last night, Texas is one win away from doing something no one thought was possible – making and seriously contending for a World Series title.
The top cog in this improbable machine is the dedicated face of the franchise. Nolan Ryan is a crowd favorite not just because of his magnificent history as a legendary pitcher, but also the fact that he #1 came back to become part owner of the franchise, #2 endured a bankruptcy battle in court against Mavericks owner Mark Cuban to keep a share of the team and #3 he’s a homegrown Texas boy.
Down the line is Redemption Ron Washington, who received support from the organization after he revealed that he had used cocaine. Next are the team’s talented group of players.
Josh Hamilton, Michael Young, Vladimir Guerrero and Elvis Andrus, among the others rounding out the batting order, are a strong lineup that each brings their own skills to the diamond.
Undoubtedly at this point, the team’s star player is Cliff Lee, the hired arm who has blown through opponents for the better part of three years. ESPN columnists are scrambling to quantify his postseason performances that have been nothing short of historic. After Lee dominated the Yankees in Monday’s Game 3 blowout, ESPN compiled this little list:
1 -- Lee lowered his postseason ERA to 1.26, the third-lowest mark for anyone with at least five postseason starts, behind only Sandy Koufax and Christy Mathewson.
2 -- His 13 strikeouts tied his career-high and marked the third-most vs the Yankees in a postseason game.
3 -- He now has six consecutive starts of seven innings and a win, one behind the all-time record (Bob Gibson).
4 -- Lee now has three straight postseason starts with at least 10 strikeouts, tying the all-time record.
5 -- Lee’s five career 10+ strikeout games in the postseason is tied for the all-time record with Randy Johnson and Bob Gibson.
The chemistry is the team’s biggest asset though. These guys genuinely like each other and carry the same mindset into games. When New York put together a five-run eighth inning to snatch away Game 1, Texas, as an organization, didn’t get down. They treated it as one game, one loss and put it in their collective rearview mirror.
No great team is complete without some luck and good fortune, and nothing proves that the Rangers have it more than the fifth inning of last night’s game.
In the top of the fifth, there was a very real chance that Steve Bartman would have been forgotten and/or replaced because a fan clearly interfered with a pop fly that could have ended the inning without Young even taking the mound. Luckily, Hamilton flied out to center and saved that guy a plane ticket to Europe.
Then, in the bottom of the fifth with pitcher Derek Holland visibly nervous at the mound (he was doing everything but throwing up behind the mound a la Donovan McNabb), he sucks it up enough to make Alex Rodriguez hit into an inning-ending double play. That’s Texas in a nutshell – grit through the tough times, and it helps that God looks to be a Rangers fan right now.
There’s no way this season can be a bust. It’s win-win.
Well, maybe not win-win in the sense that the Rangers and the Cowboys win, but no matter how Arlington’s resident baseball team fares (a World Series title or not even making it out of the ALCS), at least they aren’t losing.
And somebody, somewhere, is thinking about a parade.
Some closing notes:
In the sixth inning, Robinson Cano never touched the plate on the throw that got Guerrero out at second. If you look at the replay closely, he takes his foot off the bag as he makes the catch and positions himself to throw back to first on an ill-fated double play attempt.
If the umps call it right, Cruz’s fielder’s choice becomes a single and Bengie Molina steps to the plate in a bases loaded situation.
So really, anyway you look at it, the Rangers pull it out. Drive in three now or three later – we still win.

Being solution oriented

In September alone, four teens have committed suicide as a result of GLBT bullying.
From Opposing Views:
-- 18-year-old Tyler Clementi, a freshman at the Rutgers University New Brunswick/Piscataway Campus, jumped off of the George Washington Bridge after a classmate secretly filmed him kissing another man and then posted it to the internet.
-- 13-year-old Asher Brown, a student at Hamilton Middle School in Cypress, Texas, shot himself in the head after enduring what his mother and stepfather say was constant anti-gay harassment.
-- 13-year-old Seth Walsh, a student at Jacobsen Middle School in Tehachapi, Calif., hanged himself from a tree after classmates taunted him repeatedly for being gay. He initially survived the attempt, but he died after ten days on life support.
-- 15-year-old Billy Lucas, a freshman at Greensburg High School in Greensburg, Ind., hanged himself the day his friends say he was suspended from school for fighting back against the bullies who abused him constantly. The harassment was often directed at what the aggressors presumed about his sexual orientation.
Outrage has spread across the country as fast as the social networking spectrum can take it. Ellen DeGeneres has made a video expressing her sadness over the recent deaths and letting people know that there are places that can help, like The Trevor Project.
Bullying has been a dirty little secret pushed to the back of the social education classroom. Children can be cruel little creatures and they will taunt about anything from wearing glasses to riding a regular school bus, two perfectly normal activities.
We as a community have to do our best to stop bullying in our school system. Most times, it’s fought with informational lectures and added prevention measures (if its fought at all).
However, there are other solutions to fixing this problem that seems to be getting larger by the incident. First, we need to be teaching our children how to be secure in themselves.
The root of this problem isn’t homosexuality. It’s the fact that many people live their lives insecure with who they are, and guess what? There’s nothing wrong with that.
At 13 and 15 years old, you don’t have any clue who you are, and if you do, then you only think you do. You shouldn’t let someone bully you because of who you think you might be, mainly because they probably don’t know who they are either.
Or maybe they do. Self-hatred is one of the worst types of hate.
Another solution? It’d be helpful if we’d teach our kids that being gay isn’t the end of the world.
So you like the same gender. In this societal climate, it’s becoming blah zea if you are out and proud. That doesn’t make news. (Well, maybe just once. But on the large, people don’t care as much.) It’s only when gay people try to do something that straight folks do, like get married or have kids or pray to God.
And besides, there are worse things to be in the world other than gay. Try living below the poverty line, or living as an ex-con.
One of the biggest ways this can be combated is if more visible people came out, especially those who are leading the anti-gay parade, but holding up a flag back at the office. But of course, we’ve all seen the difficulty in pulling someone out of the closet, so don’t count on that one as much.
But there are visible people that could make a large impact on your child’s future.
You have a gay relative. If you think you don’t, don’t worry – you do.
If you think that your child is being bullied, and even if you don’t, have that person talk to your child about being gay. Have them explain that, yes, growing up and being gay in the 21st century is difficult, but not insurmountable.
And its definitely not so hard that you can’t survive it.
Your relative can be the biggest mentor to your child, a notion that seems to be lost nowadays because no one wants to take another generation under their wing to show them the way, mostly because they don’t know it themselves.
Stopping these young children from taking their lives has to be a communitywide, grassroots effort. It needs to start in your households, in your families.
And it needs to start now.

Race is not a new concept

So, there's this new fangled concept out there that suggests everything we do, say and how we react has something to do with race.
Actually, as we all know, its not a new concept. It's actually a very, very old one, but it makes me laugh that people are surprised by it.
It's been all over the news lately with Dan Gilbert's tirade, Jesse Jackson's "runaway slave" rebuttal and the Q ratings. I suspect we'll hear more about it once we have a full week to digest Ben Roethlisberger's return to the NFL, and it starts getting compared to Michael Vick's resurrection/redemption.
Let me make this clear for the doubters and disbelievers: whether or not you want to admit it, race plays a factor in EVERYTHING. Any and everything.
And it's no one's fault, except maybe the businessmen who thought of the idea that Africans would be better labor than Native Americans and Latin Americans, and set off a series of events that started and prolonged the African slave trade.
(Oh goodness. She brought up slavery.)
Yes, I brought up slavery. A subject that a lot of people don't like to talk about because, hey, it's an uncomfortable subject. But its important if you want to understand how society got to this point. You can't block it out because no one wants to acknowledge it (to the point that its being taken out of Texas schoolbooks).
It's the dark, ugly undertone of America. It's the dirty river that runs through every societal construct, from the education system to Hollywood, corporate business to professional athletics. It's why there really is a black and white America.
Hell, its the reason why you eat the cream in your Oreo first, then stick the cookie parts together and eat those. (Ok, maybe not, but you get the drift.)
Slavery is the rough outline of how everything is run in this country.
Every year in at least four different sports, athletes are strigently critiqued and interviewed until a committe decides which one they want for their franchise, at which point the pick is announced, said athlete walks across the stage and dons the insignia for their new ownership.
Some things just aren't a coincidence.
(Oh I'm sorry, it's supposed to be different because the athletes get paid millions of dollars and don't endure the same physical and emotional hardships that slaves did? Touche, but you can't argue that an athletic draft and a slave auction don't have a few similiarities.)
For those people who claim that "they don't see race," like Hannah Storm did in this video for ESPN, I'm calling your big bluff. Of course you see race.
The only people that should be allowed to say that are dogs and blind people. And I'm sure that Stevie Wonder will attest that even he can see race.
It doesn't make you a bad person if you recognize a person as black, or white, or asian. It means that you see the differences in people: physical, emotional, socioeconomic.
America has been on this step for quite some time now, this whole denial stage of what society is all about. If we ever plan to reach a point of equality, then we need to accept that race matters and start thinking and enacting solutions to break down this sickening construct.
But, then again, equality is another one of those new fangled concepts.

Today's a big day. . .

. . .because my first column for shades magazine printed today! And I got a job to pay the bills!
Oh its a good day.
In other news, I was planning to write a column about Michael Vick, especially since he was awarded the starting job for the Eagles, but Jemele Hill wrote such a good one that I'm not sure what to say. Hopefully I'll think of something.