Myopic Deans bashers reveal the ugly head of xenophobia

This week a xenophobic antagonism towards Robbie Deans has emerged in mainstream media. It is being asserted publicly that a New Zealander - and an All Black to boot - can't be trusted to coach the Wallabies to victories over the All Blacks. This is Australian rugby's equivalent of a Barack Obama Birther controversy. Deans has never been accepted as a legitimate Wallabies coach by an unholy alliance of recalcitrant former coaches, players, rugby power brokers and commentators who want to take over the ARU from the establishment. He was given the disgraceful nickname "Dingo" on being appointed. Now, following the losses to the All Blacks at Sydney and Auckland, the nasty implication behind the nickname (''untrustworthy'') has been laundered into the argument that the national coach can only be an Australian.

The proof of this contention, so the dingo line of argument runs, lies in the number of defeats suffered by the Wallabies against the All Blacks on the Deans watch. After the Wallabies went down to the All Blacks 22-0 at Eden Park last weekend, a shaken Deans told journalists that his side had been given a "masterclass in rugby" by the best team in the world. This comment was seized on by the Birthers as a capitulation and an excuse by a coach whose heart wasn't in the contest.

Anyone who knows anything about Deans will understand that the personal attacks on him as a sort of All Blacks stalking horse are nonsense. There is no team in the world with a winning record against the All Blacks. Colleague Josh Rakic has produced statistics in the Herald that show that since 2008 the All Blacks have won 84 per cent of their Tests. Only South Africa (45 per cent winning record), France (20 per cent) and Australia (18 per cent) have won Tests against them during this time. Deans's Wallabies account for almost a third of the 10 All Blacks defeats since 2008. The Wallabies won the Tri Nations last year for the first time in a decade. And two years ago they defeated the Springboks at altitude for the first time in 47 years. This year the Wallabies defeated Six Nations champions Wales in three successive Tests. And they are ranked No.2 in the world. This is not the record of a stalking horse.

To read the rest of this excellent Sydney Morning Herald article by Spiro Zavos, click here.

In our opinion: Former cycling champion Lance Armstrong's fall from fame disappointing

We're not sure which is more disappointing: the hard evidence the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency says it has against cyclist Lance Armstrong and his decision not to contest those charges, or the way so few people seem surprised by the prospects of another athletic hero being tarnished.

The disappointment stems not so much from the need for genuine heroes in the athletic world, but from the need for genuine heroes in all walks of life who place integrity and fair play above other considerations, especially money and fame. The young people of the world — themselves vulnerable in a world dominated by people older and more powerful than they — need such examples. They need assurances that success in life hinges on things within their grasp — honest effort and hard work — and not on their ability to secure unfair advantages.

The athletic world has seen its share of heroes fall in recent years. Baseball has been riddled by accusations and admissions of steroid use. Former Olympic runner Marion Jones had to give up her medals and serve time in jail. The unfortunate result has been that virtually any major athletic achievement immediately is tainted by suspicion.

Armstrong's case is particularly compelling because he overcame cancer to become a world-class athlete. His victories were seen as inspirational for people undergoing physical challenges. If he tarnished that record through dangerous drugs that might harm his health, the tragedy becomes doubly distressing.

Armstrong still professes his innocence. His decision not to contest the charges against him in arbitration, however, casts doubt on his claims. The USADA says it has strong evidence he used illegal substances and encouraged teammates to do the same. Ten former teammates reportedly were ready to testify against him.

Armstrong may well have decided that contesting the charges would have posed a never-ending battle against his relentless critics. The reason that seems unlikely, however, is that his decision now costs him his record seven Tour de France titles and his legacy as one of the greatest athletes of his era.

To read the remainder of this Deseret News Editorial, click here.

Mario Balotelli: The Crown Prince of Football

KIEV, Ukraine -- The sweetest moment of Euro 2012 didn't fit the script. In the celebration after Italy's 2-1 semifinal win over favored Germany on Thursday, Azzurri striker Mario Balotelli made a pilgrimage to the stands of the National Stadium in Warsaw and embraced a small, aging Italian woman in the front row. So fearsome on the field, so ready to project anger and strength, the 21-year-old Balotelli melted in her arms like a gentle giant.

It was the kind of warmth you see between a mother and son. Silvia Balotelli, Mario's adoptive mother, had come to Warsaw to support him, and he had done something transcendent, scoring both Italian goals in a breathtaking display of power, speed and skill. But for the polarizing wunderkind of Italian soccer, the one who's on the verge of holding the English Premier League and European titles, the importance of those goals paled in comparison to the emotion he felt afterward.

"The best moment of the night was when I saw my mother after the game," Balotelli would say. "Those goals were for her."

To say that Balotelli is larger than life would be accurate these days, even in a literal sense, thanks to the gigantic piece of crop art showing the back of his Mohawked head in a field near Verona. Balotelli has become a symbol in the world of European soccer, one that has produced its share of ugly moments from others during Euro 2012.

It may be hard to fathom for U.S. sports fans, but racism is still common in stadiums here, and Balotelli has been the lightning rod for much of it. The Croatian federation was fined $101,000 in part for racist chants by its fans that included a banana thrown at Balotelli. On Friday, the Spanish federation was fined $25,000 for its own racist fan chants at the towering Italian. A Ukrainian TV commentator suggested that racist taunts might be useful in throwing Balotelli off his game, as though it were just one more tactic on the field. And then Italy's sports bible Gazzetta dello Sport got into the act before the Italy-England game, publishing a cartoon in which Balotelli was shown swatting soccer balls from the top of Big Ben like King Kong atop the Empire State Building. (The paper later apologized.)

Born to Ghanaian immigrants in Sicily and adopted by a white Italian family, Balotelli has chosen (perhaps not surprisingly) to flash scowls, angry poses and provocative T-shirts (WHY ALWAYS ME?) whenever he scores, whether it's for England's Manchester City or the Italian national team. In England, he has earned a reputation as a prodigiously talented but reckless player who's always in danger of earning a red card, as he did in a late-season Premier League game at Arsenal, drawing a three-game suspension. More than a few observers thought it was foolhardy for Italian coach Cesare Prandelli to choose Balotelli for his Euro 2012 team.

Instead, Balotelli has flipped the script. There has been plenty of poor behavior by players in this tournament -- French midfielder Samir Nasri's profane tirades at journalists, tales of ego-driven meltdowns inside the Dutch camp -- but Balotelli hasn't produced any of it. Refusing to complain publicly when he lost his place in the starting lineup, Balotelli did his job and scored three terrific goals to tie for the tournament lead. (Not coincidentally, he's starting again.) Rather than clash with his teammates, as is so common in these high-pressure tournaments, he has developed a respectful working relationship with frontline partner Antonio Cassano and Italian playmaker Andrea Pirlo. Instead of spewing profanities at the media a la Nasri, Balotelli requested to appear at a podium press conference and came off as mature and even funny, saying he's both a man and Peter Pan.

Balotelli's Italian teammates appear to have genuine affection for him, and in perhaps the biggest stunner of Thursday's win, they managed to draw a smile out of him after his goals.

The closest comparison in U.S. sports that you could probably make to Balotelli would be Dennis Rodman and Terrell Owens in the prime of their careers. Like them, Balotelli has the ability to take over games with his surpassing talent and cleverness. Like them, Balotelli has the tendency to take things too far at times, provoking opponents and becoming his own worst enemy. And like them, Balotelli has acquired a kind of folk-hero status, spawning outlandish tales that resonate because, well, it's Super Mario, and even the ones that aren't totally true carry a kernel of truth.

Did you hear the one about how Balotelli set his Manchester house on fire by lighting a bunch of fireworks indoors? Or the one when he tried a full pirouette on a breakaway against the L.A. Galaxy in a friendly -- and missed? Or the one when he had a traffic accident, got stopped by the cops and responded to their question of why he was carrying 5,000 pounds with: "Because I am rich"? Or the one when he drove around Manchester wearing a Father Christmas outfit and giving out cash to the poor? (The first two are definitely true; the second two perhaps not so much.)

Balotelli has won plenty of fans (and a fair number of critics) during his club career at Inter and Manchester City. But a funny thing happens when a player puts on his country's jersey and scores big goals at a major tournament. You become not just a player but a national hero. It's as though Balotelli, already larger than life, has somehow increased his stature here.

He brought it to a new level in Thursday's game, and then he added a new layer after that. In a tournament that needed a message of racial healing, the photograph of an exultant black player hugging his beaming white mother is a powerful image that needs no explanation.
The sweetest moment of Euro 2012 came from, of all people, Mario Balotelli. Imagine that.

Read more at: http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2012/writers/grant_wahl/06/29/Mario-Balotelli-Euro-2012/index.html#ixzz22XzAljfl

Tennis at the Olympics Must Become a Major

I was watching a stunning 2012 London Olympic match this morning between Andy Murray and Novak Djokovic, with commentary by the great grand slam champion John McEnroe. McEnroe, in his usual inimitable style remarked that he thought it incredible that the upcoming Rogers Cup competition in Toronto, Canada, carried more points in the world tour for both men and women than playing at the Olympics did. McEnroe went further, suggesting that every four years, the Olympic tennis competition should be treated as a fifth grand slam and that the winners should receive points similar to any other of the regular four majors. 

Tom Chivers, the assistant comments editor of the U.K. Telegraph newspaper, believes that tennis should be dropped from the Olympics altogether. Why? Because, Chivers says, "No one wants to see bored superstars competing in the Olympics as an afterthought. Being an Olympic gold medal winner should, really, be the crowning glory of a sportsperson's career." He is totally right in his assessment but equally wrong in his solution. Having the professional associations, the ATP and WTA, wake up and give the Olympic Games the respect they deserve is the answer.  Give the Olympics Grand Slam status each year held and you will get the appropriate reaction from the players and the fans. Time for the latte drinking jet-setters in charge of world tennis to pull their fingers out and get real, and listen to SuperBrat.

Penn State shouldn't play football

I have spent the last few months talking to people about how youth or high school athletic experiences built their confidence, taught them discipline and basically, just enriched their lives. These successful people talk about how coaches became key figures in their lives, how athletics showed them they were capable of much more than they believed and how much they cherished just being a part of something.

But in the last few days I have been haunted by the Freeh report, which not only confirmed what many people knew, it revealed legendary Penn State football coach Joe Paterno wasn't the only powerful man covering for a now convicted child rapist. I got a few emails on the subject because last November I wrote a column about how the university should handle the remainder of the 2011 football season. And while I acknowledged there were reasons to keep playing, I suggested the reasons to cancel the remainder of the season were more important. 

I wrote: For me, it came down to one question: Are we our brother's keeper? If we are, then the Nittany Lions shouldn't play any more football games this season. They shouldn't play until an investigation by the university rids them of anyone who knew something and did nothing.

Over time, inaction becomes action. By doing nothing, those who knew chose to allow an alleged child rapist to not only roam free, but to maintain office space in the very same building where they are trying to teach young men how to look out for one and other.

For Penn State to rise from this devastation, they must be what Joe Paterno was not in this instance — courageous, bold and unequivocal.

And, I concluded with this: That coaching staff shouldn't coach another practice or game until university officials finish their investigation. Then, and only then, will it be time to play again. Let's just say I didn't get a lot of support back then.

But in the wake of the Freeh report, there is renewed talk of cancelling football. Some have suggested that if the NCAA doesn't punish the program, the university should (finally) do the right thing and cancel the program for at least a year.

To read the remainder of this article by Amy Donaldson in the Deseret News, please click here.

The BCS is Dead!

Or at least on its last legs, hooked up to a heart-lung machine, just waiting to fade away into oblivion. In a truly important and long overview decision, a select committee of university presidents on Tuesday approved the BCS commissioners' plan for a four-team playoff to start in the 2014 season. This means that the very unfair and very much despised Bowl Championship Series will disappear at the end of next year. This will please just about everyone that doesn't have a vested interest in the status quo. It will also tap into the huge amount of genuine goodwill generated by basketball's March Madness, which is partially replicated.

The move completes a six-month process in which the commissioners have been working on a new way to determine a college football champion. Instead of simply matching the No. 1 and No. 2 teams in the country in a championship game after the regular season, the way the Bowl Championship Series has done since 1998, the new format will create a pair of national semifinals. No. 1 will play No. 4, No. 2 will play No. 3. The teams will be selected by a committee, similar to the way the NCAA basketball tournament field is set, with the winners advancing to the national championship game. Much better than the biased and exclusionary mess we have now.

Armstrong gone from America's best rider to hider

So, now what are we supposed to do with this latest bit of news about Lance Armstrong? That the United States Anti-Doping Agency thinks he’s a drug cheat and that it could strip him of his seven Tour de France titles? And that he’s been barred from competing in triathlons, a pursuit he took up after retiring from cycling last year?

It’s one thing when some French newspaper or some foreign event officials or some disgraced racer claims over the past few years that Armstrong used performance-enhancers and that he should be viewed in a whole different light on account of that, but it’s all together another when the organization charged with the responsibility of heading the anti-doping effort for Olympic sports in the United States, a powerful agency that almost never loses cases, jumps aboard that claim.

Armstrong, who was on a mountain in France when he found out about the charges and declined to meet with USADA inside the required week’s time, thought he’d already beaten the rap against him when the feds dropped a two-year investigation into doping-related crimes four months ago.

This time, he was the only one of a number of U.S. cyclists who refused to meet with the agency upon notification. On Twitter, he referred to the inquiry as a "witch hunt," and added in a statement that the charges were "baseless" and "motivated by spite."

"I have never doped," he said. He has never doped. Man, oh man. Lance, we want to believe you, brother.

It occurs that Armstrong is either the most falsely accused, picked on great athlete ever or he’s harboring a huge secret that, bit by bit, is having its cover blown. He’s gone from the greatest American rider of all time to the greatest American hider.

He has meant so much to so many people in this country for so many reasons far beyond his athletic prowess. After these latest charges broke, I talked with a friend, a cancer survivor, who was inspired to fight his own fight, in part, by Armstrong’s story. If the great racer could battle through and come back from testicular cancer, my friend said, then maybe he also could somehow do likewise against the monster that had settled in the form of a grapefruit-sized tumor on his brain. My friend is nine years clean now.

What, then, does he — or any of us who have been moved by Armstrong — do with this kind of information about the great inspirer?

The read the full article by Gordon Monson in the Salt Lake Tribune, please click here.

The Wonder That Tennis Forgot

He is the unfrozen phenom. Brian Baker was going to be a tennis star. That's where this was headed. A decade ago, Baker was one of the best junior tennis players in the world, the wiry kid from Nashville, Tenn., with the punishing game, so good he would later reach the boys' final of the French Open in 2003. His early résumé contained wins over characters you may know. Jo-Wilfried Tsonga. Tomas Berdych. Novak Djokovic. That's right. The Djoker, the relentless No. 1 in the world, winner of four of the last five Grand Slams. That guy. Baker passed on college scholarships and pushed right into the pros. He had a clothing deal and a racket deal and a future. Life was good.

Ten years ago, Brian Baker was one of the best junior tennis players in the world. But then Baker's body disobeyed him. Maybe "abandoned" is a better word. First Baker hurt his wrist, and missed 10 weeks. Then, in a qualifying match at Wimbledon versus Djokovic, Baker tore his MCL. This actually wasn't so bad. Baker rehabbed his knee and resumed playing, but began feeling pain in his left hip. Hip surgery followed. Then, surgery for a sports hernia. All the while Baker's elbow was nagging at him, especially on his serve. That led to Tommy John surgery on his elbow. Then more hip surgery—another procedure for the left hip, and the right hip as well. It was a spectacular run of medical intervention. Baker won a Grand Slam in the OR.

At this point Baker was 23. Recovery from these latest surgeries was going to take a while. He enrolled in college, back home in Nashville, at Belmont University, the geezer freshman in class. He worked as an assistant coach with the school's tennis team, keeping a foot dangled in the game. He wasn't totally out of tennis, but he wasn't totally in it, either. Meanwhile, players he once handled were ascending to the top of the sport. Baker said he doesn't "like to play the guessing game too much," but he couldn't help but notice.
"You do think about it, especially for the first couple of years," Baker said. He is 27 years old now. He was sitting at a table not far from the tennis courts at Saddlebrook Resort outside Tampa. He looked tan and fit. "You see all these guys having success. Could that have been me?"

For the complete article by Jason Gay in the Wall Street Journal, please click here.

Why Wrigley Field Must Be Destroyed

Having not won a World Series since 1908, and having last appeared on that stage in 1945—a war year in which the professional leagues were still populated by has-beens and freaks—the Chicago Cubs must contemplate the only solution that might restore the team to glory: Tear down Wrigley Field.

Destroy it. Annihilate it. Collapse it with the sort of charges that put the Sands Hotel out of its misery in Vegas. Implosion or explosion, get rid of it. That pile of quaintness has to go. Not merely the structure, but the ground on which it stands.

I'm a Roman, and to me, the expanse between Waveland and Addison on Chicago's North Side is Carthage. The struts and concessions, the catwalk where the late broadcaster Harry Caray once greeted me with all the fluid liquidity of an animatronic Disneyland pirate—Hello, Cubs fan!—the ramps that ascend like a ziggurat to heaven—it's a false heaven—the bases, trestles, ivy, wooden seats and bleachers, the towering center-field scoreboard—all of it must be ripped out and carried away like the holy artifacts were carried out of the temple in Jerusalem, heaped in a pile and burned. Then the ground itself must be salted, made barren, covered with a housing project, say, a Stalinist monolith, so never again will a shrine arise on that haunted block. As it was with Moses, the followers and fans, though they search, shall never find its bones.

The Cubs moved into Wrigley in 1916, when it was known as Weegham Park. Before that, it was the home of the Whales of the Federal League. The Cubs, founded in 1876, had been wanderers, playing on fields scattered across the breadth of booming iron-plated Chicago. The grandest was West Side Park, an opera house for the proletariat, with its velvet curtained boxes, at the intersection of Taylor and Wood on the West Side.

Most importantly, the Cubs won there. The glory years before Wrigley are like the age before the flood, when exotic species thrived on the earth, among them the feared Chicago Cub.

The team was a powerhouse. Performing as the White Stockings (1876-1889), the Colts (1890-1897), the Orphans (1898–1902) and finally the Cubs, they won with regularity. In 1906 they went 116-36, a .763 winning percentage that remains the greatest season in major-league history. In 1907 they won their first World Series; in 1908, with the unhittable Mordecai "Three Finger" Brown and the Tinker-to-Evers-to-Chance double-play combo that was death to nascent rallies, they won it again.

The Cubs then made the fatal mistake of taking up in Wrigley, where the evening sun streams through the cross-hatching above home plate and the creeping shadows form a web that has ensnared the club for a century, where sometimes the wind blows in and sometimes it blows out, and the only constant is disappointment.

To read this wonderful article by Rich Cohen in the Wall Street Journal, please click here.

Why College Football Should Be Banned

In more than 20 years I've spent studying the issue, I have yet to hear a convincing argument that college football has anything do with what is presumably the primary purpose of higher education: academics.
That's because college football has no academic purpose. Which is why it needs to be banned. A radical solution, yes. But necessary in today's times.

Football only provides the thickest layer of distraction in an atmosphere in which colleges and universities these days are all about distraction, nursing an obsession with the social well-being of students as opposed to the obsession that they are there for the vital and single purpose of learning as much as they can to compete in the brutal realities of the global economy.

Who truly benefits from college football? Alumni who absurdly judge the quality of their alma mater based on the quality of the football team. Coaches such as Nick Saban of the University of Alabama and Bob Stoops of Oklahoma University who make obscene millions. The players themselves don't benefit, exploited by a system in which they don't receive a dime of compensation. The average student doesn't benefit, particularly when football programs remain sacrosanct while tuition costs show no signs of abating as many governors are slashing budgets to the bone.

If the vast majority of major college football programs made money, the argument to ban football might be a more precarious one. But too many of them don't—to the detriment of academic budgets at all too many schools. According to the NCAA, 43% of the 120 schools in the Football Bowl Subdivision lost money on their programs. This is the tier of schools that includes such examples as that great titan of football excellence, the University of Alabama at Birmingham Blazers, who went 3-and-9 last season. The athletic department in 2008-2009 took in over $13 million in university funds and student fees, largely because the football program cost so much, The Wall Street Journal reported. New Mexico State University's athletic department needed a 70% subsidy in 2009-2010, largely because Aggie football hasn't gotten to a bowl game in 51 years. Outside of Las Cruces, where New Mexico State is located, how many people even know that the school has a football program? None, except maybe for some savvy contestants on "Jeopardy." What purpose does it serve on a university campus? None.

To read the complete article by Buzz Bissinger in the Wall Street Journal, click here.