N.B.A. Reaches a Tentative Deal to Save the Season—Howard Beck—26 November 2011—The league wanted an overhaul of its $4-billion-a-year enterprise, and it got it, with a nearly $300 million annual reduction in player salaries and a matrix of new restrictions on contracts and team payrolls. The changes mean a $3 billion gain for the owners over the life of the 10-year deal.

Before finally agreeing to those sacrifices, the players’ negotiators won a handful of concessions that will allow the richest teams to keep spending on players, ensuring a more competitive free-agent market.

Floyd Knocks Out Ortiz in Four

 By Scott Christ on Sep 18, 2011

The first three rounds of tonight's main event were interesting. And then it went insane. Charging offensively with Floyd on the ropes, Victor Ortiz jumped at Floyd Mayweather Jr with a violent, completely intentional headbutt. After being separated by referee Joe Cortez, Ortiz went over to apologize to Mayweather. When the fight was restarted, Ortiz again came to hug Mayweather. Not feeling charitable, Mayweather socked Ortiz with a left hook, followed by a right hand on a completely defenseless Ortiz, who hit the mat and was unable to get up by the count of ten.—BadLeftHook

Mayweather vs Ortiz results: Millions not satisfied with the knockout—by Clay Hayes—19 September 2011—Mayweather wanted to finish it fast avoiding the pressure that Ortiz showed in that fourth round. He wanted to avenge himself of that head butt that hurt him. Moreover, he wanted not to engage longer for Ortiz could get him in a punch. On the other hand, Ortiz should take the blame for himself. He was given all the opportunities to shine in this big boxing fight but he decided to make something different. He should have gotten the respect of the fans and the boxing world if he didn’t become “dirty himself”.

The Way It Is

By Curt Flood

Curt Flood (1938-1997) wrote this passionate autobiography in the early 1970's as he challenged baseball's labor policies in federal court. The result is a nice mix of athletic memoirs and political protest. Flood describes his California upbringing, and then bitterly recalls playing minor league ball in the segregated South. There he usually had to stay in "colored" rooming houses and eat on the team bus (most restaurants were off limits). Readers learn of his lengthy career as a star centerfielder, first with Cincinnati (1956-1957), and then with the St. Louis Cardinals (1958-1969) of Stan Musial, Bob Gibson, Tim McCarver, Lou Brock and Orlando Cepeda. Flood also describes the life of major leaguers and such once-hushed subjects as baseball groupies, the sport's hierarchy, salary negotiations and race relations. Flood argues powerfully against baseball's reserve clause, which bound players to their team until the team sold, traded or released them - unfairly limiting each player's bargaining power.

Curt Flood of the St. Louis Cardinals—January 18, 1938–January 20, 1997 on January 16, 1970, the seven-time Golden Glove-winning center fielder—filed suit in a New York federal court against Commissioner Bowie Kuhn, the presidents of the American and National Leagues and all 24 teams in the Major League Baseball (MLB) organization.

After the Cardinals traded Flood to the Philadelphia Phillies in October 1969, Flood wrote a letter to Kuhn in late December, protesting the league’s player reserve clause, which prevented players from moving to another team unless they were traded. Kuhn denied Flood’s request to be made a free agent, and Flood decided to sue. In Flood v. Kuhn, the historic case that followed, Flood argued that the reserve clause violated antitrust laws and violated the 13th Amendment, which barred slavery and involuntary servitude.

Flood was not the first player to challenge the reserve clause, but he was certainly the most prominent, and stood to lose the most. In his 12 seasons with the Cardinals, he batted an average of .293, and he was paid $90,000 in salary for the 1969 season.

Willie Mays turns 80 Years Old

The legend turns 80 Friday, and the Giants will mark the occasion with a pregame ceremony that will include tributes from some of his former teammates with the Birmingham Black Barons of the Negro American League.

That was the team with which Mays made his pro debut as a 17-year-old high schooler in 1948, three years before he became the NL Rookie of the Year with the New York Giants. He's one of four living Hall of Famers who played in the Negro leagues, along with Hank Aaron, Monte Irvin and Ernie Banks, and he harks backs to some of the game's signature moments.

Mays was the on-deck hitter when Bobby Thomson hit the "Shot Heard 'Round the World," sending the Giants to the 1951 World Series, and his immortal catch of Vic Wertz's drive in the 1954 Fall Classic has been regarded as one of the greatest plays in history.—BvonSports

Bulls crush Hawks 93-73, move on to Eastern Conference finals

By Mark Potash

12 May 2011

Carlos Boozer scored 23 points, Derrick Rose added 19 and the Bulls’ defense stifled the Atlanta Hawks as the Bulls coasted to a 93-73 victory to advance to the Eastern Conference finals for the first time since 1998.

Luol Deng added 13 points and made several key plays on both ends of the floor as the Bulls turned a 45-35 halftime lead into a 70-53 lead after three quarters and clinched their series with the Hawks 4-2.

The Bulls will play the Miami Heat in Game 1 of the Eastern Conference finals on Sunday at the United Center.—SunTimes

Ballers of the New School

Race and Sports in America

By Thabiti Lewis

Ballers of the New School is one of the first and best books to come along that effectively explains contemporary athletes and the public response to them.  It asks readers to consider the role of race in the sweaty as well as the sweat-free zones of sport. It challenges the well-worn narrative of sport as America's most significant site of racial progress by scrutinizing the true role of sport in mobilizing and shaping definitions, social relations, and public life. American sport culture performs and propagates rituals, symbols, and expressions of fear and difference that sustain racism, and notions of racial supremacy and block bridges to racial progress.  The text encourages a restructuring of the power of the racial subtexts thrust into sporting arenas, upon the bodies of athletes of color, and into the mind and hearts of spectators via the racial contract.  The book's impetus is for readers to emerge with more truthful narratives, more honest dialogues, better American values, better social relations, and hopefully, using this new vision of sports culture as a model, real change.—Third World Press  

Harlem Rens

In 1939, the "Harlem Rens" became the first all Black pro basketball team to win a World Championship. Harlem Renaissance Big Five, one of the most successful all-Black professional basketball teams in the 1920s and 1930s, added grace and style to the game of American basketball. Robert L. Douglass who was a native of the Caribbean island of St. Kitts and a former professional basketball player with the New York Spartans created the Harlem Renaissance Big Five team in 1922.

The team gained their name from their playing location, the Renaissance Casino ballroom in Harlem, New York, where they dazzled fans with their innovative style of play. The Rens were one of the few all-Black, traveling professional basketball teams of that era. Formed five years before the Harlem Globetrotters, the Rens provided African-American men with the opportunity to compete against white athletes on an equal footing. They toured the country competing against Black and white teams, and in the process, compiled one of the most impressive winning streaks in history.

In 1934, the Rens won 88 consecutive games, and between 1932 and 1936, they won 473 games and lost only 49. Three years later, they won the first World Basketball Tournament held in Chicago, Illinois. In 1963, the entire team was inducted into the Professional Basketball Hall of Fame, including Charles T. "Tarzan" Cooper, John "Casey" Holt, Clarence "Fats" Jenkins, James "Pappy" Ricks, Eyre "Bruiser" Satch, William "Wee Willie" Smith, and William J. "Bill" Yancey.—Reference: UCLA Center for African American Studies

Race, Sport and Politics

The Sporting Black Diaspora

By Ben Carrington

This is the first book-length study to address sport's role in “the making of race,” the place of sport within black diasporic struggles for freedom and equality, and the contested location of sport in relation to the politics of recognition within contemporary western multicultural societies. Race, Sport and Politics shows that over the past century sport has occupied a dominant position within Western culture in producing ideas of racial difference and alterity while providing a powerful and public modality for forms of black cultural resistance.

Written by one of the leading international authorities on the sociology of race and sport, it is the first book that centrally locates sport within the cultural politics of the black diaspora and will be of relevance to students and scholars in fields such as the sociology of culture and sport, the sociology of race and diaspora studies, postcolonial theory, cultural theory and cultural studies.—Sage Publications

Bad Sports

How Owners Are Ruining the Games We Love

By Dave Zirin

Even in the presence of model franchises throughout the sports world, Zirin makes a strong argument that team owners are ruining our storied teams, not to mention the sports themselves. But then, what's new? Profiling a rogues' gallery of owners—among them, the Yankees' George Steinbrenner, the Colorado Rockies' Charlie Monfort, the Oklahoma Thunder's Clay Bennett—Zirin says that many owners rely, primarily through legalized extortion, on public coffers to stay afloat. He also discusses the baseball owners' acquiescence in their players' use of steroids and the too-rapid expansion of the NHL that has diluted the quality of play for decades. There are many to blame for the strange state of pro sports today, including overweening politicians, fans, and sports media. But, from the evidence in Zirin's book, ownership is a good place to start.—Booklist EdgeofSports

Jack Trice came to Iowa State College in the fall of 1922 at the urging of Coach Sam Willaman, who had been his high school coach back in Cleveland, Ohio. Trice was Iowa State’s first black athlete and the first in the Missouri Valley Conference, to which Iowa State belonged at the time. He majored in animal husbandry with the goal of eventually moving to the South and improving the lives of sharecroppers.

On Oct. 6, 1923, Trice’s sophomore year, Iowa State played an away game against the University of Minnesota. Trice, who played right tackle, broke his collarbone in the first half but kept playing. In the third quarter, he executed a “rolling block,” in which he threw himself in front of a line of Minnesota players. He ended up on his back and was trampled by the opposition. As he was taken from the field, sympathetic Minnesota fans reportedly chanted, “We’re sorry, Ames, we’re sorry.”

The extent of his injuries unknown, Trice was first taken to a Minneapolis hospital and then home to Ames where he was admitted to the student hospital. His condition worsened, and on the afternoon of Oct. 8, 1923, Trice died of what was ruled “traumatic peritonitis, following injury to abdomen in football game.” . . .

The troubling death may have earned little more than a sad footnote in Iowa State’s athletic and minority student history if not for one thing: the letter found in Trice’s pocket. He wrote it to himself the night before the Minnesota game on stationery from the hotel where the team had stayed. It read:

“To whom it may concern:

My thoughts just before the first real college game of my life. The honor of my race, family, and self is at stake. Everyone is expecting me to do big things. I will! My whole body and soul are to be thrown recklessly about on the field tomorrow. Every time the ball is snapped I will be trying to do more than my part. On all defensive plays I must break through the opponent’s line and stop the play in their territory. Beware of massive interference, fight low with your eyes open and toward the play. Roll block the interference. Watch out for crossbucks and reverse end runs. Be on your toes every minute if you expect to make good.” .  . .—Visions

Reading Football

How the popular press created an American spectacle

By  Michael Oriard

A former player in the National Football League and now a professor of English at Oregon State, Oriard advances the thesis that football is a cultural text, complete with metaphoric content and social context, read differently by people whose interpretations vary over time. He considers the formative years of the sport from the 1870s to the early years of this century, arguing that a reading of the popular press of that era helps us understand how actual audiences "read" the sport, based on the narrative structure established first by Walter Camp, who at the turn of the century was the Yale football team's "unofficial, unpaid, unquestioned chief mentor and arbiter," and subsequently expanded by other interpreters. An added attraction of this book is the three dozen-plus excellent illustrations, most from magazines like Frank Leslie's Illustrated Weekly . Because it is about football as a cultural and even a literary phenomenon, this study is unlikely to appeal to a general sports audience.—Publishers Weekly UNCPress

Stepping Out of the Shadow—On the eve of Scottie Pippen’s induction into basketball’s highest society, Phil Jackson recalled him as “the ultimate team player.”—Pippen was the youngest of 12 children and grew up in a two-room house in rural Hamburg, Ark. His father, Preston, a mill worker, was disabled by a stroke and became unable to work when Pippen was a teenager. Dyer got him into school on a Pell grant and put him to work as the team manager until a position on the team opened during the season.

He cleaned lockers, handed out towels. “And now he’s going into the Hall of Fame—and that’s amazing,” said Dyer, who will attend the ceremony in Springfield, Mass., at the invitation of Pippen.

 Preps to pros, rarely has an N.B.A. great emerged from such humble beginnings. Far from the clichéd Jordan comparisons, there lies the essence of the Scottie Pippen story.

Serena Williams wins 4th Wimbledon, 13th major

Defending champ Williams overpowers Russia's Vera Zvonareva, 6-3, 6-2, to capture her fourth Wimbledon title and her 13th major to pass Billie Jean King in career Grand Slam titles. At 28, Williams is within range of Chris Evert and Martina Navratilova, who each won 18. . . .

This was the top-seeded Williams' fourth Wimbledon championship and her 13th major overall, pushing her past Billie Jean King and into sixth place.

Serena Williams' chief competition is history

The final point was appropriate: a powerful overhead that was so certainly a winner that Williams threw her racket in the air before the ball bounced beyond the reach of Zvonareva.

Larry Tye. Satchel: The Life and Times of an American Legend (2009)

He is that rare American icon who has never been captured in a biography worthy of him. Now, at last, here is the superbly researched, spellbindingly told story of athlete, showman, philosopher, and boundary breaker Leroy “Satchel” Paige.

Few reliable records or news reports survive about players in the Negro Leagues. Through dogged detective work, award-winning author and journalist Larry Tye has tracked down the truth about this majestic and enigmatic pitcher, interviewing more than two hundred Negro Leaguers and Major Leaguers, talking to family and friends who had never told their stories before, and retracing Paige’s steps across the continent. Here is the stirring account of the child born to an Alabama washerwoman with twelve young mouths to feed, the boy who earned the nickname “Satchel” from his enterprising work as a railroad porter, the young man who took up baseball on the streets and in reform school, inventing his trademark hesitation pitch while throwing bricks at rival gang members.

Olympic 100m champion Shelly-Ann Fraser tests positive for painkillers—Olympic and world 100-meter champion Shelly-Ann Fraser has been provisionally suspended by the IAAF after a positive test for a painkiller she claims she took to alleviate a toothache.

The president of Fraser's track club, Bruce James, said the Jamaican sprinter tested positive for oxycodone at the Diamond League meet May 23 in Shanghai. Fraser found out about the provisional suspension hours before she was scheduled to compete in the 100 meters at the Athletissima meet in Lausanne, Switzerland, on Thursday.

She broke into tears in her hotel room upon hearing about the decision, her manager said, and was afraid what the public would think. "She was so disappointed," Adrian Laidlaw said in a phone interview with The Associated Press. "From a perception standpoint, she was concerned. But sometimes there are certain rules where people become a victim of a rule. All we can do is hope that good sense prevails."

Fraser had a dental procedure performed in May and then flew to China for the meet.

The Ugly Underside of World Cup Mania—Nkosi Molala’s fight against apartheid began with an emotionally jarring 1974 incident when he was a member of South Africa’s blacks-only national team. This incident occurred during a trip to Rhodesia, a then white-minority-ruled/apartheid-policy nation north of South Africa.

While riding a bus to play Rhodesia’s national black team Molala said a person came up to the bus and asked why they were in Rhodesia. When he said they came to play soccer the person told him the Rhodesian team had fled the country and its members were fighting in the war against minority rule.

“That encounter opened my eyes and changed my life. One event can do that. I wasn’t political before that. When I came back to South Africa I became involved with politics,” Molala recounted.

The Michael Vick Situation  Waking Mike Vick

He will awake when told to, he will lie down when ordered, and he will eat

from the same trough as the pedophile, the street dealer, and the gang banger.

LA Lakers

Champions of the NBA 2010

Defeat Boston Celtics in 7

Official video: Ron Artest "Champions"

Ron Artest Ain't the Problem  

Natalie Randolph Breaks Football's Glass Ceiling—March 15, 2010—Natalie Randolph kicked through a glass ceiling in sports Friday when she was named head coach of the varsity football team at Washington, D.C.’s Coolidge High School.

Fresh off the heels of Black History Month and smack in the middle of Women’s History Month, Randolph, 29, is believed to be the only female head coach of a varsity football squad in the United States, which has nearly 27,000 high schools.

"I can do it," she told The Washington Post. "I'm qualified. I played the game. I know the kids. I love the kids."

Manute Bol

Manute Bol (English pronunciation:  October 16, 1962 – June 19, 2010 was a Sudanese-born basketball player and activist. Until the debut of Gheorghe Mureşan, Bol was indisputably the tallest player ever to appear in the National Basketball Association. Bol was believed to have been born on October 16, 1962 in either Turalie or Gogrial, Sudan. He was the son of a Dinka tribal chief, who gave him the name "Manute," which means "special blessing." Wikipedia

People's History of Sports in the United States

 250 Years of Politics, Protest, People, and Play

By Dave Zirin

Zirin (What's My Name, Fool!), writer of a politically minded online sports column, examines the intersection of sports and politics, chronicling the struggles of America's oppressed, starting with Choctaws playing lacrosse and slaves in the South, and reaching all the way to a critique of Michael Jordan as an apolitical athlete. There are many worthy and deserving stories of courage and conscience in this vast canvas; however, the telling suffers from Zirin's term paper–like prose that relies far too much on overly long quotes from source material. For example, three pages about NFL player Dave Meggyesy has a short introductory paragraph by Zirin and then excerpts Meggyesy's autobiography for the bulk of the section. This book would have been more engaging and logically organized as a reference book with entries on each athlete or group, rather than a linear historical narrative of sports.—Amazon