sports

The Temptations of Ball Tampering: Steve Smith’s Australian Team in South Africa

There was an audacity about it, carried out with amateurish callowness.  As it turned out Australian batsman Cameron Bancroft, besieged and vulnerable, had been egged on by Australian cricket captain Steve Smith and the Australian leadership to do the insufferable: tamper with the ball. Before the remorseless eagle eyes of modern cameras, Bancroft, in the third Test against South Africa[Read More...]

Kevin Love: Making a Hole in Denial

For behind the sense of insecurity in the face of danger, behind the sense of discouragement and depression, there always lurks the basic fear of death, a fear which undergoes most complex elaborations and manifests itself in many indirect ways….No one is free of the fear of death.
— Gregory Zilboorg, psychanalyst, as quoted in The Denial of Death, Ernest Becker
An anxiety is a lack that causes pain; a game is a lack that causes pleasure.
— John Fowles, writer, The Aristos
What we play is life.
— Louis Amstrong

Watch: Kansas Police Captain Arrested for Hitting Teenage Referee During Basketball Game

It is all fun and games until someone gets hurt. A police captain in Wichita, Kansas got angered at a female teenage referee and ran on the game court deciding to take matters into his own hands.
And it was all caught on video, as seen here.
Now the Wichita police captain has been arrested for battery and disorderly conduct.

Neutral Athletes: Russia, Drugs and the Olympics

Being a moralist in the Olympics doesn’t carry you very far. Turn one way, and there are enterprising drug cheats; turn another, there are wads of cash in envelopes finding their inexorable way to an official’s accounts. The challenge of the Olympics is, in a fundamental way, a challenge of institutional decay, ruination and sport as profit.

SUNDAY SCREENING: ‘Dope: The New Proxy War’ (2017)

Russian doping: sports scandal or political game? US officials seem to be driving this latest effort to ban Russian athletes from competing in the Olympic Games.  US operatives are claiming that Russia was guilty of a “state-sponsored doping program” before and during the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics, as well as prior to the Rio Olympics in 2016. Now US operatives appear to have been successful in banning Russia from competing in the 2018 Winter Olympics in Pyeong Chang.

Be Aware of the Dark Side of Sports Media

The sports pages of major newspapers, such as the Washington Post,are thriving while other sections of newspapers such as business sections or book review pages struggle to survive.
That doesn’t mean that the sports pages allow the fans, the consumers, the taxpayers and many of the players have their say. Over the years, the sports sections have been neglecting the dark sides of organized sports as a deliberate practice, not as an oversight.

Mass Shootings: The Military-Entertainment Complex’s Culture of Violence Turns Deadly

Mass shootings have become routine in the United States and speak to a society that relies on violence to feed the coffers of the merchants of death. Given the profits made by arms manufacturers, the defense industry, gun dealers and the lobbyists who represent them in Congress, it comes as no surprise that the culture of violence cannot be abstracted from either the culture of business or the corruption of politics.