Tag: lacrosse

Obscure Sports (Quarterly? Annual? Whenever?)

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And now, selected news from the ‘lesser’ sports!

WOMEN’S LACROSSE!

US U-19 Team threepeats as World Champs! Too bad Mike Nifong wasn’t around to give them some publicity. Lacrosse will hit the popular media only once more, but by then it will be too late.

BOWLING!

New Sponsor for the PBA! Bowling’s not obscure, per se, but its prominence in the firmament of broadcast sporting events seems to have been compromised. Used to be bowling was on all the time, on the ABC or the CBS networkBowler or Koechner; I would see balding men in neatly pressed pants hurl weighty objects every time Grandpa dozed back off during ‘Muppet Babies,’ because I couldn’t muster the strength to turn that gigantic atomic-age channel selector wheel, and thank the good Lord he at least finished chewing the donut this time. Anyway, bowling had a certain I don’t know what in French back then, with national TV coverage, kids having birthday parties at the local lanes (Joey, I know, it’s cool, my invite was lost in the mail) and the widespread availability of Carling Black Label and Schaefer, the beer of choice for guys who bowl and/or look like David Koechner.

Anyway, this article’s pretty upsetting, because the PBA is really, really excited about a sponsorship deal from CLR. You know, that stuff that you’re supposed to put in a comically oversized lab beaker and drown your shower head in, and then they expect you to use it to shower again, even though there’s obviously now a tremendous amount of patently toxic chemicals in every last drop coming out of that… that awful thing, and damn it we have to move again, don’t we. It was like this in Topeka, it was like this in Nashville. You need treatment.

SECRET HAVING!

PostSecret:
Arandano
Man, is that tragic. The deceased probably had to get all her Mexican antioxidant goodness from el jugo de pomegranate.

HIGH SCHOOL WRESTLING! SPECIFICALLY, 96 LB FINAL MATCH AT THE NEW YORK STATE DIVISION 2 WRESTLING CHAMPIONSHIP!

This lengthy YouTube clip–well the part where the kid’s face is being pressed into the ground– is pretty much how I remember high school gym class, but, 96 pounds at age 14? These guys are huge! Seriously, what a pair of fatties! Also, they apparently are very interested in having their heads in each others’ asses. Don’t bother watching beyond the first minute unless you’re one of these kids’ mothers (and if you are, might be a good idea to spring for some better youth wrestling shoes).

(Spoileralert: the kid in blue wins, both are then aggressively wedgied by the guys in the 160 pound division.)

(Last bit: There is an adult-spam comment on the YouTube page; this creeps me out.)

CATS WANTING THINGS!
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The Three Gentlemen from Durham

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Duke DA Disbarred

DURHAM, N.C. (AP) — A judge said he would suspend District Attorney Mike Nifong on Tuesday after learning that the prosecutor disbarred for his handling of the Duke lacrosse rape case intended to stay in office for another month.

Earlier in the day, Duke University announced it had reached an undisclosed financial settlement with the three former lacrosse players falsely accused of rape last year.

Nifong, who was disbarred Saturday for breaking more than two dozen rules of professional conduct in his handling of the case, said in a letter released Monday that he would leave office July 13. His departure date wasn’t soon enough for Hudson, who decided to suspend Nifong from office.

Mike Nifong, ex-attorneyIt’s been clear to anyone who’s been following the case of the three Duke lacrosse players accused of rape – Reade Seligmann, Collin Finnerty and David Evans – that the case has been mishandled from the beginning. Even if the case against the three students was airtight, it’s improper for a District Attorney to go on a national news program and call the defendants “a bunch of hooligans [whose] daddies could buy them expensive lawyers”.

But as more information came out, the hollowness of Nifong’s case became more obvious. The accuser told vastly different stories to hospital personnel and to police. She picked her assailants not out of a lineup but out of a stack of photos of the entire lacrosse team – a process guaranteed to nab a white defendant, but not the guilty party. There was little to no medical evidence of rape, and no DNA evidence connecting any of the three men. And on 60 Minutes, the other dancer who’d been performing with the accuser that night, Kim Roberts, said she hadn’t left the accuser alone long enough for an assault to have occurred.

Duke Blue Devil(To be fair, Ed Bradley’s interview with Roberts suggests that the boys were hardly gentlemen – they were drunk, rowdy, and grew irate when they felt the women stopped dancing too early. Other witnesses claimed to hear the boys yelling racial epithets at the women after they left. But none of this lends credence to a rape charge)

Now, more than a year later, all charges have been dropped and the Attorney General of North Carolina has declared the three boys “innocent.” Mike Nifong has stepped down as D.A. and, as of Tuesday morning, has been more or less fired.

So has justice finally been done? Not quite.
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