Sports
Fun new game: Does George Allen assume you played sports?
The former senator asks a lot of men "what position" they played -- but not all men
George Allen Yesterday, former and would-be future Sen. George Allen (R-Idealized Antebellum Old South) asked a tall black man, “What position did you play?” The man, TV reporter Craig Melvin, did not actually play sports. I suggested that Allen assumed Melvin played sports because Allen has a history of saying racist things. Allen apologized, and said he often asks people the “position” question, because he has a prop football lodged in the Wernicke’s area of his cerebral cortex, a childhood injury suffered shortly after the 1963 NFL championship.
And here’s proof! Here’s a 2009 clip of Allen asking “what position did you play” of Fox’s Charles Payne, who … oh, wait …
The “position” question comes up around three minutes in.
There is evidence that George Allen — a man without qualities besides “football” and “casual racism” — just asks all guys what position they played. Ryan Nobles, a big white reporter, said on Twitter yesterday that Allen “often asks me what position I played in sports as well.”
Perhaps it is unfair to lay the blame for this gaffe on Allen’s well-documented racial issues. It could just be that he is completely incapable of imagining a man who did not play football, at some point.
But there is one person whose athletic history George Allen has not inquired about. That man is Lee Fang, a reporter with Think Progress.
After speaking once with the senator during the question and answer period, I again raised my hand for a second question. For some reason, possibly because I was the only minority in an all-white audience, Allen dismissed my second question by asking if I understood what an “at-bat” meant:
DUNLOP: I think we have one more question here. [pointing to me]
ALLEN: This guy has a question. I’ll talk to you afterwards [inaudible] let everyone get a bat [makes baseball bat swinging motion]. You understand at-bats — right?
So George Allen just asks all sorts of men what position they played, unless the men are … Asian. Then he seems to think that they don’t understand the basics of sports in general. (Which, uh, George? I think you have your racial stereotypes mixed up, vis-à-vis Asians and baseball.)
Alex Pareene writes about politics for Salon and is the author of "The Rude Guide to Mitt." Email him at apareene@salon.com and follow him on Twitter @pareene More Alex Pareene.
The real madness of March
Big-time college basketball generates massive money. Too bad almost none of it benefits college students
Butler's Matt Howard, left, fights for a rebound with Connecticut's Alex Oriakhi, Jeremy Lamb (3) and Shabazz Napier, right, during the second half of the men's NCAA Final Four college basketball championship game Monday, April 4, 2011, in Houston. (AP Photo/David J. Phillip)(Credit: AP) Lowell Bergman is the rare skunk who regularly finds his way into the power elite’s garden parties. As tobacco executives celebrated huge revenues in the 1990s, he was the journalist whose reporting about cancer and nicotine addiction stopped the festivities. As credit card executives toasted their holiday-season profits, his 2004 New York Times investigation humiliated the lending industry by showing how it traps unsuspecting consumers in perpetual debt. So it was no surprise that as the sports establishment concluded its perennial orgy of profit known as March Madness, Bergman was at it again, this time exposing the corruption beneath all the school spirit.
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David Sirota is a best-selling author of the new book "Back to Our Future: How the 1980s Explain the World We Live In Now." He hosts the morning show on AM760 in Colorado. E-mail him at ds@davidsirota.com, follow him on Twitter @davidsirota or visit his website at www.davidsirota.com. More David Sirota.
UConn Huskies win NCAA Championship
The men's basketball squad rode a second-half surge to beat the Butler Bulldogs and claim the March Madness crown
Connecticut's Kemba Walker holds the net after his team won the men's NCAA Final Four college basketball championship game against Butler 53-41 Monday, April 4, 2011, in Houston. (AP Photo/David J. Phillip)(Credit: AP) Connecticut’s great second half in the national championship game started with some words in the locker room from coach Jim Calhoun.
“The halftime speech was rather interesting,” said Calhoun, who has been known to use his loud voice and some salty language to get his point across to his team. “We knew we could really defend them. … The major adjustment was we were going to out-will them and outwork them, and eventually we outplayed them.”
The Huskies answered their coach’s demands by holding Butler to 16.2 percent shooting in the second half of their 53-41 victory Monday night that made Calhoun just the fifth coach to win three national titles.
Continue Reading CloseIs Obama’s NCAA bracket really that big a problem?
Some pundits are raising hell over the president's decision to predict March Madness amid global crises
Have you heard? Though Japan and Libya dominate today’s media coverage, one story out of the White House is also generating headlines: Barack Obama filled out his March Madness bracket. The president — in what’s become an annual tradition — filmed a short segment with ESPN’s Andy Katz yesterday evening, breaking down the tournament’s latter rounds, pick-by-pick.
Continue Reading CloseThe NFL “slave” comment that won’t go away
Minnesota Vikings running back Adrian Peterson makes a crass remark -- can he live it down?
Adrian Peterson didn’t really mean it when he compared his $10.72 million-a-year career with the NFL to “modern-day slavery,” but don’t let that stop one boneheaded remark from spurring outrage and haunting him for a long time to come.
In a Tuesday interview for Yahoo Sports with Doug Farrar, just fifteen minutes after the owners locked out players, the Minnesota Vikings running back may not have been his most quick-witted when he vented his frustration regarding the NFL’s labor dispute with an unfortunate, over the top comparison. Peterson was already aware he was in danger of misspeaking when he told Farrar, “The players are getting robbed. They are. The owners are making so much money off of us to begin with. I don’t know that I want to quote myself on that …” but he pressed on. “It’s modern-day slavery, you know?” he said. “People kind of laugh at that, but there are people working at regular jobs who get treated the same way, too.”
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Mary Elizabeth Williams is a staff writer for Salon and the author of "Gimme Shelter: My Three Years Searching for the American Dream." Follow her on Twitter: @embeedub. More Mary Elizabeth Williams.
Soccer fans ruffled after player kicks owl
Panama Defender Luis Moreno boots opposing team's mascot like a penalty kick to "see if it would fly"
Luis Moreno continues the game after kicking an owl, the mascot and lucky charm of the opposing team, off the field Soccer fans are crying fowl over kicking an owl. In fact, they’re crying a lot worse.
An apologetic player is facing sanctions after he kicked an injured owl that landed on the field during a game in Colombia on Sunday. The owl was a mascot for the opposing team and was being treated Monday at a veterinary clinic in Barranquilla. The bird is expected to recover from a slight fracture of its right leg.
The owl had landed injured near the corner of the field when Panama defender Luis Moreno of the Colombian club Deportivo Pereira walked over and kicked it about three yards. Atletico Junior fans shouted “murderer, murderer.”
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