MourningView posted:

Brian Phillips' first Wimbledon piece for Grantland is really great: http://www.grantland.com/story/_/id/8097092/a-visit-all-england-club-wimbledon-kickoff-2012-tournament

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To summarize, Cueto has won no World Series and caused one Cardinals concussion. What should he expect?

jeffersonlives posted:

Erin Andrews is leaving ESPN for FOX, which means after years of the Andrews vs. Beadle stuff they ended up both leaving.

Crion posted:

I'm still wondering if the network exec who co-opted Deadspin to do a hitpiece on her was FOX trying to drive down the market for her or not

Frot Lesnar posted:

I'm sure it took a lot of arm wringing for Deadspin to do something misogynist.

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source: Deron Williams tells Nets he's staying in Brooklyn

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Gordon told me his desire is to play in Phoenix, not New Orleans.

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Eric Gordon told me this: "I strongly feel (the Suns) are the right franchise for me. Phoenix is just where my heart is.''

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"After visiting the Suns, the impression the organization made on me was incredible," Gordon said in a prepared statement. "Mr. Sarver, Lon Babby, Lance Blanks, the front office staff and Coach Gentry run a first-class organization, and I strongly feel they are the right franchise for me. Phoenix is just where my heart is now."

LARGE THE HEAD posted:

No one should ever go to ESPN.

Crion posted:

I haven't read the piece since it came out but I don't remember anything especially misogynist about it outside of the site allowing itself to be used as a negotiating flack because of something they did previously which was

BackInTheUSSR posted:

I think maybe he is referring to the slut-shaming of when Daulerio posted the video of the girl being raped in the stadium bathroom stall.

BackInTheUSSR posted:

I think maybe he is referring to the slut-shaming of when Daulerio posted the video of the girl being raped in the stadium bathroom stall.

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Perhaps Daulerio's darkest moment came last spring, when he posted a video of an obviously drunk college girl having sex in a bathroom stall at a sports bar in Bloomington, Indiana. At the time, he was thinking of it as part of a series on fans having sex in bathrooms. (In the fall of 2009, he'd posted a clip of a couple getting it on in a stall at the new Cowboys Stadium.) On May 11, a few days after the video went up, Daulerio received an e-mail from a woman imploring him to take it down. "I know the people in it and it is extreemly [sic] hurtful. please, this is completely unfair," she wrote. In separate responses, both Daulerio and Darbyshire, the Gawker lawyer, refused to comply. "Best advice I can give you right now: do not make a big deal out of this because, as you can tell, the footage is blurry and you are not identified by name," Daulerio wrote, assuming the e-mailer was the girl herself.

For the rest of the afternoon, Daulerio and the woman traded five e-mails. Finally, before handing the matter off to Darbyshire, Daulerio wrote, "It's not getting taken down. I've said that. And it's not a very serious matter. It is a dumb mistake you (or whomever) made while drunk in college. Happens to the best of us."

morestuff posted:

Chris Broussard had a good day.

BackInTheUSSR posted:

from GQ.


someone later stated that she was passed out and being raped so essentially Daulerio excused being raped as "a dumb mistake"

stuart scott irl posted:

IIRC he took it down after the father wrote him an email because it's a whole big different thing when it's a man's daughter etc. etc.

quote:

At the time, he was thinking of it as part of a series on fans having sex in bathrooms.

LARGE THE HEAD posted:

If she was being raped then the dude in the video should've been arrested for rape, which obviously did not happen.

LARGE THE HEAD posted:

If she was being raped then the dude in the video should've been arrested for rape, which obviously did not happen.

INSPECTAH DECK posted:

LARGE THE HEAD posted:

If she was being raped then the dude in the video should've been arrested for rape, which obviously did not happen.

LARGE THE HEAD posted:

If she was being raped then the dude in the video should've been arrested for rape, which obviously did not happen.

LARGE THE HEAD posted:

I meant that, quite literally, the dude should've been arrested for rape, as he was raping a girl in the video. Get the gently caress over yourselves.

Frot Lesnar posted:

You meant the arrest obviously didn't happen instead of the rape? Okay but you can see where people got confused.

Tom Hoffarth of the Los Angeles Daily News posted:

Erin Andrews and Fox: A TV reality show ripe for implosion ... and the beauty is, everyone will be waiting to watch it

There's something about marrying Erin Andrews with Fox Sports that's just not going to end well. We just can't put our (insert digital body part) on it yet.

The beauty of it is everyone will want to watch it.

It's been less than a week since the "it" girl of TV sports media dared to leave behind a less-than-fabulous body of work built at the ESPN machine after eight years to sign up with the famed Los Angeles-based network that's always looking an attitude adjustment.

Within a day after her announced arrival -- network sports chief Eric Shanks actually called the 34-year-old, sweet-as-pie sideline maven one "of the hardest-working, most-respected individuals in sports television" -- Fox said her assets would be sent to be part of Tuesday's MLB All-Star game coverage in Kansas City.

That's a warmup act to when she'd start hosting the new college football studio show, a gig that starts Saturday, Sept. 1, when USC plays host to Hawaii at the Coliseum, and will include some exposure on the NFL.

Time to gussy up that that Twitter avatar again.

The assumption is someone at Fox watched Andrews carom through week after week as solo host of the early expanded version on ESPN's "College GameDay," given an hour to read off her notes and awkwardly ad-lib on ESPNU before the real crew came to start the party. And they still hired her, apparently distracted enough into thinking she did a real swell job.

A byproduct of the media world where it's almost impossible anymore to be embarrassed by Twitter, YouTube, TMZ, Flickr or a racy text message - and with an appearance on an Oprah show always there to catch you when you need to explain what it's like to be a victim in a celebrated Peeping Tom case -- Andrew's career arch has been bafflingly spectacular, titillating the masses who've apparently just stopped caring.

The Erin Andrews Effect, as sports media phenomena, is attracting more female communications majors into taking as many shortcuts as possible to grab a coveted sideline reporting job or studio host instead of risking the time and challenge necessary to try play-by-play, game analyst, or even what's still referred to journalism at a magazine, newspaper or website.

You'd think that by now, someone would have realized that her actions speak louder than her nasally vapid words.

That no matter how much you'd think she was adding to a college football broadcast - and ESPN has been top-notch in that department for years -- it'll be the shots of her on the ESPY's red-carpet, a ethically-challenged decision to promote a sports shoe without her company's approval, or another photo spread in GQ or Vanity Fair that's seared into our minds, which somewhat explain the interviews she's done over the years with wide-eyed, adrenalin-challenged 12-year-olds at the Little League World Series.

With Andrews, less should always have been more. But the rules of engagement with her employers has been that with more and more exposure, whether she initiates it or not, the fantasy becomes bigger than the reality.

Now, it's Fox supposedly thinking outside the box, a far cry from Bristol, Conn., that providing the perfect lair for her next venture, within a shark tank of paparazzi, video clippers and cell-phone shooters, targeting someone who still claims not to understand her own fame.

"I . . . uh . . . here's the thing with me - I very much feel that I'm a massive dork," she tried to sound self depricating when making an appearance earlier this week on the Dan Patrick syndicated radio show, a place where former ESPN employees now go for their exit interviews and debriefing by the former famous "SportsCenter" anchor.

"I just kind of laugh at all of it. There are times when you wake up in the morning and your friends are texting you that your pictures are on TMZ or you're walking through the airport and, you're like, 'Why? I don't get it.'"

That seems to get to the core of the issue.

It's one thing to have a healthy naivety. But no one at IMG, which represents her and is supposed to be watching out for her best interests, could explain how the unreal media world of today works? At some point, it's not all that cute any more to play dumb.

Read between the hemlines: ESPN may have attempted to up her deal and keep her around, but it had effectively run out of things to promote her for. So Andrews reached a fork her career path, without the option that another former ESPNer, Michelle Beadle, had in taking her talents to a network like NBC where it's justifiable to add her to its upcoming Summer Olympics coverage.

Fox ends up as Andrews' "careful what you wish for" destination, already dangling reality-show appearances in the package deal, knowing how her recent sideways stints on ABC's "Dancing With The Stars" and "Good Morning America" again proved she has this gravitational pull to bring eyes to otherwise meaningless programing.

Credit Fox for extending Andrews' shallow shelf life, and giving all of us the vision someday of seeing her as a ring-card girl at an MMA event. How soon before there's a guest spot on "The Simpsons" as Bart's babysitter, innocently hitting on Flanders?

Fox's X-Factor is another great platform, for someone who brings a sex factor.

Circle back to the piece we did a couple of weeks ago about Title IX, creating a list of the 40 women in the sports media over the last 40 years who raised the bar in the business. We sought feedback from a few trusted people who work in the sports media to make sure we hadn't left anyone out, or given someone too much credit.

Only one suggested we find a way to add Andrews. But in pointing out that "raise the bar" requirement, and already having a top-tier of female sideline reporters in Lesley Visser, Andrea Kremer, Jeannie Edwards, Jamie Little, Doris Burke, Bonnie Bernstein, Lisa Salters, Michele Tafoya and Suzy Kolber, it was clear that Andrews was not part of this ya-ya circle

In a sideline beauty pageant against the likes (and dislikes) of Melissa Stark, Lisa Guerrero, Jenn Brown or Jill Arrington, then Andrews wins, and not just on Miss Congeniality points.

It speaks to the premise behind HBO's new outstanding series, "The Newsroom." Which is more important: Driving ratings or doing the news the right way?

The irony is that Aaron Sorkin, the series' creative force who years ago channeled the ESPN culture into an acclaimed but little-watched series called "Sports Night," knows enough about Andrews' calling card to include a reference to her in the pilot episode.

To show how much turmoil that main character Will McAvoy (Jeff Daniels) had been in, it was pointed out that he was just coming out of a relationship with Andrews.

(To Andrews' credit, she tweeted out that she was never romantically involved with the fictional character. But that really only speaks to a whole other level of pop culture surrealism).

Leading up to her decision to shower off the ESPN experience and hop into the Fox hot tub, Andrews has been awash in attention. TMZ had an online poll that included photos of her in a bikini one beach with speculation that she's top-loaded her resume, and more than 80,000 people responded, most accusing her of faking it.

Let it be noted the TMZ show runs daily on the local L.A. Fox affiliate. She can just pop in now for guest appearances. How convenient.

There's another telling mention on TerezOwens.com ("the world's most popular sports gossip site"), with a shot snapped of her waiting in line at LAX with a deer-in-the-headlights pose.

Heck, we even linked to some of that last week on our blog. We aren't stupid -- it drives people to our own internet domains, making our own bosses happy that readers are clicking through to supposedly read our stuff, even if it's lowest-common-denominator content that often does the trick easiest.

"I get the stuff with 'Dancing With the Stars' and everything that happened before (with the stalker in the hotel), but it really is kind of a joke to me," Andrews told Patrick about how her fame has grown. "I always kind of thought how it was so funny that everyone was 'Oh, she's planning that . . . she's behind all that.' Because I don't know ... I don't think of myself that way . . ."

She doesn't have to. Enough others do.

"I agree, it took a new level when you go to red carpet events . . . I never got to a point where I thought, 'Oh, I'm too big.' That's just not me. It's not like I ever called the paparazzi out to say, 'Come see where I am' or anything. . . . I'm still the girl that wants to be out at the game."

Instead, there's the headline in the Sports Business Daily last week that called attention to her job change: "Fox-y Lady."

That was too easy. But entirely apropos.

Crazy Ted posted:

Just read it...read the whole loving thing:


And the pictures and videos he attached to his article make it even classier. For example:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vWaewg0TrU8

Medical Sword posted:

He's literally ranting and raving about a woman being attractive and successful dude I'm not sure on what level I'm supposed to "be on his side"

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Brief History of the Career of LeBron James


There comes a time in the life span of every culture when it becomes necessary to think obsessively about LeBron James.

The ancient Greeks had to do it in the 5th century B.C., when LeBron James was the most dominant athlete in the Olympic Games. Although he was still just a teenager, he won every event with apparent ease: body grappling, mule tossing, javelin throwing, olive swallowing, stone crushing, bird squashing, neck slapping and running all over the place extremely fast.

And yet he suffered from one inexplicable weakness. As Herodotus tells it in “Histories”: “LeBron James — he of the wide forehead and the lumpy shoulders — was a source of much public debate and wonder. His strength and skill were such that his opponents not only lost but they also frequently fled the field weeping bitter tears. Every year, however, when the final and most prestigious event of the Games arrived — the discus throw, in which a victory would have guaranteed LeBron eternal glory — his interest seemed to vanish, like the morning mist, and could not by any means be roused. For no discernible reason, LeBron would slump listlessly to the edge of the field, refusing to throw, sometimes even handing the discus to his friend Demetrus and asking him to throw it in his place. The gods, of course, frowned on such behavior. And so it was that the wrinkliest forehead in all of Greece never felt the touch of the laurel.” It is also to this period that most scholars date Plato’s famous dialogue “On Clutchness.”

Eight hundred years later, LeBron James was the most accomplished gladiator in the entire Roman Empire — this despite the fact that he fought not in the Colosseum but in one of the empire’s smaller arenas, very near the town of his birth. Using his trademark gold-tipped trident, he slew bears, lions, elephants, jaguars, ostriches and every variety of man: Moors, Gauls, Huns, Picts, Danes, Angles and Jutes. The legend of LeBron spread rapidly across the empire. Soon he won enough fights to earn his freedom, which gave him the choice to either walk away or to continue fighting, in the arena of his choosing, for what would surely be abundant wealth and fame. The emperor himself lobbied for LeBron James to come fight in Rome, where he would perform in front of the most knowledgeable and passionate gladiator fans in the world.

Finally, after several drama-clogged months, LeBron James announced his intentions. He called a public meeting in the Roman Forum, at the very spot from which Marc Antony had addressed his countrymen after the death of Julius Caesar. (Some found this choice of venue distasteful.) “I have decided,” James declared, “to take my tridents to Sicily.”

This came as a surprise to many: the gladiatorial scene in Sicily was rather provincial, its arena small and poorly attended. There were, however, other dominant fighters in Sicily with whom James was eager to team — a lion named Jade and a dancing bear named Squash. From then on, they fought exclusively as a trio, doing well sometimes and not so well at other times. Spectators around the empire found this all to be rather anticlimactic. Interest in gladiator fighting dwindled, and many scholars believe it is no coincidence that the sport was officially banned, without public outcry, just a few decades later.

Among the 16th-century Aztecs, LeBron James was the undisputed king of the ullamaliztli players. While most competitors specialized in one or two areas of the game — bouncing the ball off their hips or off their knees or throwing themselves to the ground in order to bounce the ball off their spines — James excelled at all of these skills and at many more besides. Once, in Tenochtitlan, at the New Fire ceremony inaugurating the 52-year cycle of the nine Lords of the Night, James bounced the ullamaliztli ball through the stone ring so many times that the official scorekeeper ran out of sacred parrot heads with which to keep track.

Afterward, during the postgame fertility festival, James promised the territorial chief that he would win “not one, not two, not three, not four, not five, not six, not seven” ullamaliztli championships but (the implication was) many more. The fallout from this statement afflicted Mesoamerica for many years. Some blamed James’s boastful statement for the subsequent invasion of the Spanish, the fall of the Aztec Empire, the plague of fire ants in Hispaniola and, eventually, the Deepwater Horizon oil spill.

Some Thoughts on the Present

It is now our turn, here in 21st-century America, to think obsessively about LeBron James.

For roughly 10 years, in his current incarnation, LeBron James has been a flying contradiction — a man whose every positive virtue contains its own negation. He is (according to the popular narrative) both lovable and odious, a ball hog and too deferential, incredibly clutch and a choke artist. He is Schrödinger’s superstar: simultaneously one of the very greatest players of all time and a fundamentally flawed squanderer of talent. If anything, his championship this year will not simplify this story. It only makes it more complex.


Michael Jordan (to invoke the obvious touchstone) benefited, by comparison, from an impossibly coherent narrative — a story of mythic triumph straight out of Joseph Campbell, in which a naïve young hero passes through the crucible of failure until he finally, triumphantly, rescues the entire culture. (Jordan rescued America from short shorts, the 1980s and Karl Malone.) Jordan’s identity, in both existential and basketball terms, was always clear: he was a slender, aggressive, well-rounded, improbably athletic shooting guard who would stop at nothing to eviscerate you and all of your children and all of your children’s children. (Kobe Bryant and Dwyane Wade are recognizable iterations of this species.)

James has always been harder to place. On the court, he’s a whole anthology of players: an oversize, creative point guard like Magic Johnson; a bodybuilder-style space-displacer like Karl Malone; a harassing, omnipresent defender like Scottie Pippen; a leaping finisher like Dr. J. He does everything that a human can possibly do on a basketball court; he is 12 different specialists fused, Voltron-style, into a one-man All-Star team.

Somehow this doesn’t quite track. Even as we admire James’s unique skill set, we’re always forced to think about the tension that holds all of the disparate parts together — the contradictory philosophies of the game that all of those different skills imply.

Not to get all physiognomical here, but it strikes me as significant that James is slightly weird-looking. Part of the mystique of Jordan was that he was handsome, beautifully proportioned, graceful — a human so fully aligned with space and time and destiny that his physical shell was just the inevitable outgrowth of a beautiful soul or at least of a beautiful set of skills supported by a beautiful marketing plan.

James is, shall we say, less classically handsome than Jordan — and in a way that perfectly expresses his LeBron-ness. His appearance, if anything, is a little mystifying. Even when he was the most hyped teenager on the planet, there were constant jokes about how he looked like an old man. As he has inched through his mid-20s, bloggers have devoted thousands of words to his apparently receding hairline. If Jordan looked like a walking Michelangelo sculpture, James looks like a sculpture by one of the Mannerist artists from the generation that followed Michelangelo — the ones who piled up lumpy muscles so obsessively that Benvenuto Cellini once compared one of their statues to “a sack of melons.” LeBron James is a sack of melons. His face is a theater of strange beards and scowls. In the course of working my way through the vast public discourse online about his appearance, I picked up a new vocabulary word: “uglyphine” — the paradoxical zone of attractiveness where beauty and ugliness merge.

This seems to be the key to James: he is built, as impressively as possible, out of irreconcilable parts. (An ad campaign, for Nike, captured this aspect of his personality: he was a whole clan of people by himself — a family of LeBrons, all in conflict.) Even the two halves of his name pull against each other: “LeBron” has a Francophone echo; “James” is classic Anglo-English.

James’s relationship to basketball sometimes seems almost incidental, as if he’s less an athlete than a crypto-hulk sent from outer space to problematize our very notions of humanity's relationship to the time-space continuum. It has become a kind of parlor game, among fans, to speculate on how good James would be at other sports: football, say, or track and field. But I’d argue that James has an unusually intimate relationship with basketball — a sport that is itself, as James is, cobbled together out of irreconcilable parts: James Naismith invented it, out of desperation, with a peach basket and a football and the rules of an old children’s game called Duck on a Rock.

The result was a particularly American sport in which everyone on the floor is allowed to do everything — unlike football or baseball, in which teams are built out of carefully restricted specialists. Since James can do everything as literally no other player in basketball history could, he plays very close to the core of the game — maybe closer than anyone ever has. In this sense, LeBron James is basketball — the beauty and the problem of the sport embodied. Somehow that makes his relationship to the game much more complicated than anyone else’s, and our expectations for him weirder and harder to calibrate.

Now that the planets have at last aligned for James — now that he has his title and excelled in crunch time and silenced pretty much all of his critics — we can finally read him as a coherent sports narrative. His “naїve failure” phase has passed; the age of triumph has arrived. This feels simultaneously wrong and right.

What the Future Holds

In the wake of the 36th-century Moon Wars, here in the time beyond time — in which all events exist alongside one another in a perpetual borderless eternity — LeBron James is the unanimous M.V.P. of interplanetary quarkball. His highlights, which recur infinitely, are too numerous to name: there is the match in which he splits 12 of his team’s final 13 atoms; the match in which he rides every wave of the light spectrum, visible and invisible, all the way to the event horizon of the neighboring galaxy’s black hole; the match in which he executes a spin move so powerful that it opens a parallel world. And yet despite all of these heroics, just because of the nature of quarkball, it is impossible to tell whether James is winning or losing. It has to be assumed, in fact, that he is doing both at the same time, at least until the universe reaches its inevitable trigger point — called by physicists the Decision — at which point the time flow will be born anew and James’s fortunes will be resolved, suddenly and irrevocably, one way or the other, toward victory or defeat.

The Decision, physicists say, will manifest itself in one of two forms. If LeBron James is victorious, the moons will disappear, rendering gravity null and dissolving the membrane between life planes, opening the way to a higher consciousness for all beings everywhere.

If he is defeated, the Sun will engulf the Earth.

MourningView posted:

Is she supposed to be ashamed of being pretty or what?