Any Given Sunday - Pacino Speech.
You will find, the older that you get, that it is totally possible to lose two or more hours of your Sunday watching motivational speeches on youtube.
(Source: youtube.com)
This isn’t a story about football although football is a main character.
When I went to K-State, we had the worst football program in the history of football. This isn’t hyperbole; it’s fact. By any statistic whether it be games won or points scored or points given up, however you want to judge it, we were the worst and it had gone on for decades. In those days, you lied about going to a football game on a beautiful crisp fall afternoon by saying you were going to the library because going to the library on a beautiful crisp fall afternoon was less embarrassing than saying you were going to that stadium that reeked of absolute futility.
We only sold out our stadium when Nebraska or Oklahoma came to town and even then it was sold out by fans wearing red as the Huskers and Sooners took over the restaurants and hotels and, indeed, the stadium. We only won moral victories as in we only lost by 55 or 63 or 78 and should feel good about that.
Then, for some reason that no one can explain, everything changed. K-State hired this man who had no right to expect that he could do what NO ONE had done before him. He was going to take those kids that no one else wanted, that no one believed could win, and he would make them winners.
Bill Snyder is prickly. He’s a bad interview because he says things like “we could have played better” and “we have a lot of work left to do.” He doesn’t like interviews; he doesn’t smile during them. They are quite clearly a waste of his time. He doesn’t eat two of the three meals that the rest of us do because that is a waste of time. He doesn’t sleep. He probably couldn’t name a movie released in the last several years. He doesn’t waste time in small talk. He’s boring. And, did I mention, a bit prickly.
He does things like time how long the bus ride from the hotel to the stadium will be and tries to shave off a few minutes to, yes, save time. When he requests that butter be served at the team breakfast and margarine shows up on the table, he asks for, and gets, the butter. He found a pair of long-retired Nikes that he liked years ago and now tries to buy up all in his size on the internet.
It gets stranger. He calls those tough inner city kids who traveled from maybe The Big Apple to the Little Apple “youngsters” which is, of course, a word these kids are unfamiliar with. Even those kids from the rural Midwest who make up most of his team have never heard the word “youngsters.” Even I’ve only heard it in what, maybe Heidi or Leave It to Beaver? How could anyone so unhip as to call his football team a “great bunch of youngsters” have a chance in hell to get them to listen.
And it gets stranger. His favorite movie is Pinocchio and he hands out copies to these strapping men and tells them that they’ll really like the message. And still it gets stranger. These guys respond to him; they work hard for him; they win for him…hell, they even watch Pinocchio for him.
But I said this wasn’t about football and it isn’t really. Here’s why I love this guy:
Early in Snyder’s career at K-State, a newly-hired assistant coach moved his family to the small town of Manhattan. Soon after that, the man’s beloved wife was struck by lightning on an early morning walk and soon died. There was a little girl left behind who missed her mother and who had a father with a new coaching job who needed to be at work all the time. Soon the little girl had a desk outside Coach Snyder’s office and that’s where she did her homework and colored pictures and hung out with “Coach.” This same man who had no time to spare had time to spare for her.
When his team travels and stays in hotels, all these players are, of course, required to make curfew and wear ties and behave. However, they are also asked to write notes to the maids who make their beds and clean their toilets thanking them for their hard work and dedication because he wants the guys to appreciate the tremendous gift it is for them to get to play a game and receive recognition way outside what is deserved. He writes letters to players on opposing teams telling them what a great game they played.
When he retired from KSU the first time, he thought he had built a program that could continue without him. When they asked to name the stadium in his honor, he was horrified. After much pressure, he agreed but only if it were called The Bill Snyder Family Stadium. Within two years of his being gone, the magic was slipping away and KSU was on its way to mediocrity and losing ways again. He was talked into coming back although everyone agreed that this man who was what sports people around the country called the Best Coach in the History of Coaching could not possibly, no way in hell, work that magic a second time.
Tonight, after just a few years back at KSU, he’s playing in the Cotton Bowl and maybe Pinocchio does make sense as this prickly Gepetto turns these boys into real men. Let the magic begin.
And, oh yeah, Every Man A Wildcat.
I’m a sucker for any story that involves sports and character. And this is a hell of a story.
This is astounding. Someone should lose their job over this. It’s entirely possible that none of the medical staff on the Browns witnessed Colt McCoy getting mashed into pulp, but the coaches certainly did. They never should have put him back in the game and the way the Browns have handled the entire incident is more disgusting and disturbing than anything James Harrison has ever done on the field.
Let’s fix college sports, shall we? We do it like this:
1) Eliminate all athletic scholarships. (What’s that you say? Athletic scholarships have been key to getting people from poor and otherwise marginalized communities into the nation’s colleges? Then let’s take the scholarship money that now goes to athletes and send it towards those communities without asking whether the young people involved can run fast or kick a ball accurately. Since big-time sports are money-losing propositions for almost all schools, there may even be some extra money for scholarships.)
2) Keep all the sports that universities currently sponsor, but treat them largely as clubs. Or, if the varsity/club distinction must be maintained, limit the number of coaches and pay them on the same scale used for, say, theater or dance teachers.
3) Disband the NCAA.
4) Encourage the boosters who have poured millions of dollars into their favorite universities’ sports teams to work with the NFL to create something like England’s Football Association. Ideally, the NFL would become the equivalent of the Premier League, with only the twenty best teams in the top tier, and a promotion/relegation fight each year. The boosters would likely be far happier as team owners, able to shop for and buy talent without having to try to dodge onerous NCAA regulations. At the outset, the second tier of FA-USA would be made up of the twelve weakest current NFL teams plus eight teams located at the sites of long-standing college football powerhouses: Austin, Tuscaloosa, Baton Rouge, Pasadena, Norman, Columbus, Ann Arbor, and so on. With the application of some marketing skill — including shrewd color choices and the signing of local heroes — fan loyalty could relatively easily be transferred from the universities to the new professional teams. And the universities could make some money by leasing their stadiums to the new leagues.
5) The promotion/relegation model could be applied to basketball and perhaps baseball as well, again drawing on local fandom and university arenas. (Imagine how much fun it would be to see the Tar Heels promoted and the Bobcats relegated in the same year. Talk about rivalries!) Connect the traditional basketball powers to the NBA’s developmental league — assuming the NBA eventually gets its act together — and the traditional baseball powers to appropriate levels of the minor leagues.
6) Eliminate aluminum bats at all levels of competitive baseball. (Yes, I know that’s not really relevant here, but while I’m dreaming… .)
7) Encourage the FA-USA to create college scholarships for their players, to be taken advantage of in the off-season or after retirement. Let those who like the current system because they are concerned about the athletes having opportunities after college make contributions to this fund.
My spouse will be elated at my brief interest in sports.
Backed.
(Source: azspot)
When Jerry Sandusky was initially arraigned, as previously reported by Sara Ganim, prosecutors requested $500,000.00 bail and that Sandusky be required to wear a leg monitor. District Judge Leslie Dutchcot, however, ordered that Sandusky be freed on $100,000.00 unsecured bail. She ordered that Sandusky be freed and pay nothing unless he failed to show up for a court hearing.
Jerry Sandusky might take cake for Sportsman of the Year.
This is neat.
From the Desk of Bob Mankoff: Boxing Days
During the heyday of boxing, our cartoons had actual boxers in them, rather than geezers, brides, or pets, and cartoonists were able to play off the public’s familiarity with the rules and rituals of the sweet science.
Cartoon Editor Bob Mankoff discusses the decline of boxing — both in our culture and in our magazine — and shares some of his favorite boxing cartoons: http://nyr.kr/sLUmyk
Do you know who dominated boxing between 1910 and 1940? That’s right, Jews. STING LIKE A MACABEE.
Back in the ’60s, Americans “ran way more and way faster in the thinnest little shoes, and we never got hurt,” Amby Burfoot, a longtime Runner’s World editor and former Boston Marathon champion, said during a talk before the Lehigh Valley Half-Marathon I attended last year. “I never even remember talking about injuries back then,” Burfoot said. “So you’ve got to wonder what’s changed.”
Bob Anderson knows at least one thing changed, because he watched it happen. As a high-school senior in 1966, he started Distance Running News, a twice-yearly magazine whose growth was so great that Anderson dropped out of college four years later to publish it full time as Runner’s World. Around then, another fledgling operation called Blue Ribbon Sports was pioneering cushioned running shoes; it became Nike. Together, the magazine and its biggest advertiser rode the running boom — until Anderson decided to see whether the shoes really worked.
“Some consumer advocate needed to test this stuff,” Anderson told me. He hired Peter Cavanagh, of the Penn State University biomechanics lab, to stress-test new products mechanically. “We tore the shoes apart,” Anderson says. He then graded shoes on a scale from zero to five stars and listed them from worst to first.
When a few of Nike’s shoes didn’t fare so well in the 1981 reviews, the company pulled its $1 million advertising contract with Runner’s World. Nike already had started its own magazine, Running, which would publish shoe reviews and commission star writers like Ken Kesey and Hunter S. Thompson.
“Nike would never advertise with me again,” Anderson says. “That hurt us bad.”
A litany of scandals in recent years have made the corruption of college sports constant front-page news. We profess outrage each time we learn that yet another student-athlete has been taking money under the table. But the real scandal is the very structure of college sports, wherein student-athletes generate billions of dollars for universities and private companies while earning nothing for themselves. Here, a leading civil-rights historian makes the case for paying college athletes—and reveals how a spate of lawsuits working their way through the courts could destroy the NCAA.
Great article.
