Skydive mergulho em ala by Rick Neves
The general feeling the smiling sports and weather anchors bring to viewers after all the death and destruction.
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The Penn State rape scandal isn’t over
Looking at the world of college sports, and a casual observer may presume that the child rape scandal that enveloped Penn State University last winter has been settled.
That casual observer would be wrong, says Travis Waldron.
A fan holding a sign runs onto the field and is tackled by security. After he has been subdued and is on the ground, the guards begin to beat him with at least one using a nightstick. In what I can only assume is the greatest moment in sports history, one of the players jumps onto the guards to stop them, which inspires the fans to rush out of their seats and give the assailants a taste of their own medicine.
What you don’t know is that the actual costs of stadium construction — like the estimated $500 million to $4 billion in public subsidies that went into new stadiums for the New York Yankees and Mets, two supposedly private projects — are even higher than typically reported.
In her book “Public/Private Partnerships for Major League Sports Facilities,” Long calculates that the average public subsidy for the 121 sports facilitiies in use in 2010 is actually $89 million higher than the $170 million figure commonly reported by the sports industry and the media. How so? Think land giveaways. Infrastructure freebies. Tax breaks. Government subsidies enough to make an ethanol-producing Iowa corn farmer feel, well, hosed. The Colts don’t pay rent. The Vikings’ new stadium reportedly will be property tax-free. In the late 1990s, the city of San Diego was buying unsold San Diego Chargers tickets as part of a sweetheart lease deal — does your landlord make up the difference when you don’t hit your sales targets at work? — while from 2002 to 2010, the state of Louisiana gave New Orleans Saints owner Tom Benson $186.5 million in straight cash, homey, just for keeping the team around….
Then there’s Paul Brown Stadium, both the newish home of the Cincinnati Bengals and quite possibly the single greatest boondoggle in the history of public-stadium financing. Completed in 2000, the building was supposed to cost $280 million. The Bengals estimate that it cost $350 million. Hamilton County, which assumed more than $1 billion in debt to pay for the stadium, puts the price at $454 million. Long, on the other hand, estimated in the Wall Street Journal that the actual cost to the public was roughly $555 million, once parking garages and other expenses were factored in. Moreover, local residents are on the hook for Paul Brown Stadium’s security costs, as well as most current and future operating and capital improvement expenses — including, and this is not a misprint, a potential future “holographic replay machine.” Perhaps unsurprisingly, a voter-approved stadium-subsidizing Hamilton County half-percent sales tax increase remains in effect, while once-promised additional public school funding and a property tax cut do not. Oh, and the Wall Street Journal also reported that Hamilton County’s annual stadium debt payment two years ago was $34.6 million — nearly 17 percent of the county’s total budget, and a big reason local lawmakers had to slash spending on schools, police and a program that helped troubled adolescents. Meanwhile, the Bengals collect parking revenue from the stadium.
When I’m driving, I sometimes turn on the radio and I find very often that what I’m listening to is a discussion of sports. These are telephone conversations. People call in and have long and intricate discussions, and it’s plain that quite a high degree of thought and analysis is going into that. People know a tremendous amount. They know all sorts of complicated details and enter into far-reaching discussion about whether the coach made the right decision yesterday and so on. These are ordinary people, not professionals, who are applying their intelligence and analytic skills in these areas and accumulating quite a lot of knowledge and, for all I know, understanding. On the other hand, when I hear people talk about, say, international affairs or domestic problems, it’s at a level of superficiality that’s beyond belief.
The cost of a football victory keeps climbing for Kansas. This season, the university paid Charlie Weis $2.5 million for one win — the highest cost per victory among schools whose teams won at least one game, according to USA TODAY Sports’ annual analysis of football coaches’ compensation. Kansas paid Turner Gill $1.05 million for each of two wins last season, after paying Gill $700,000 for each of three wins in 2010.
What price for victory? For Kansas, it’s $2.5M per win
Charlie Weis has got a pretty good racket going.
(via dendroica)
The sports-bar ambiance that [Chris] Matthews wallows in has not only sexist elements but also homosocial (I said homosocial) overtones. Matthews has been ridiculed for developing a series of “man crushes” on each good-looking (or not-so-good-looking) male politician to blaze across the sky. Barack Obama, he noted in sexualized language, sent a “thrill up my leg.” He cooed over Mitt Romney’s “perfect chin … perfect hair, he looks right.” Even the gargoylish Fred Thompson prompted Matthews on one program to ask his guest, Ana Marie Cox: “Can you smell the English leather on this guy, the Aqua Velva, the sort of mature man’s shaving cream, or whatever, you know, after he shaved? Do you smell that sort of—a little bit of cigar smoke? … Does he have sex appeal?” The flummoxed journalist could only reply, understatedly, “I can only speak for myself. I do not find him terribly attractive.”
David Greenberg (via azspot)
Today, the number of African-American journalists writing at mainstream outlets remains appallingly low. According to the Institute of Diversity and Ethics in Sports, whites account for 94 percent of sports editors, 89 percent of assistant sports editors, 88 percent of columnists, 87 percent of reporters and 89 percent of copy editors.
As a result, the vast majority of what we digest about professional sports—which are dominated by black athletes—is written, edited and reported by white journalists. The NBA’s players are 80 percent black. In the NFL, African Americans are 68 percent of players, and they are 10 percent in Major League Baseball. Meanwhile, according to the Associated Press Sports Editors, African Americans make up just 10.6 percent of all sports positions at mainstream newspapers.
This lack of diversity often contributes to inaccurate and flawed reporting on African-American athletes. The largest sports story of 2010 was NBA star LeBron James’ much-maligned decision to move from the Cleveland Cavaliers to the Miami Heat. Seemingly endless hours of airtime have been filled by chronicling fans’ outrage at James abandoning Cleveland, but very little coverage has explored the racially tinged nature of that uproar.
It took CNN’s Soledad O’Brien, who identifies as biracial and is not a sports journalist, to ask James about race. O’Brien asked James if he thought race was a factor in the tone fans were taking about his business decision. “I think so, at times. There’s always, you know, a race factor,” James responded. His manager Maverick Carter put a finer point on it: “It definitely played a role in some of the stuff coming out of the media, things that were written for sure.”
(via Instapaper)