Sports Guy v. Scoop Jackson

The following is taken from Bill Simmons's most recent basketball blog. I think it is very interesting that he is calling out Scoop Jackson here. If you remember, Jason Whitlock (an African-American sportswriter that used to write for Page 2 on ESPN.com) completely went off on Scoop Jackson last year. The exchanges between Whitlock and Jackson are really interesting. Jason Whitlock wrote an article in the Kansas City paper about ESPN that has a link to the blog about Scoop Jackson. Scoop Jackson later wrote a couple of rebuttal pieces on ESPN.com. Here is Simmons's rebuttal to Scoop's most recent article:

I hate writing a rebuttal to another writer's column. I hate it. These days on the Internet, people spend far too much time writing about other writers instead of just writing about sports. Pretty soon, there will be Web sites devoted to writers writing about writers who write about other writers. We're not headed in the right direction.

At the same time, I couldn't let Scoop Jackson's "Vegas wasn't that bad" column just fade away without disputing two crucial pieces of his argument:

Piece No. 1: Scoop's assertion that "only" 403 people were arrested during NBA All-Star Weekend, a number apparently obtained from Deputy Lt. E. Sterr Bunny of the Las Vegas Police Department. I don't think it's very smart to base the premise of a column around a leap of faith that Vegas police reported every single crime, mugging, brawl, assault, theft and indiscretion from that weekend (even the ones for which the perpetrators weren't caught). Besides, how many arrests can you have when there weren't enough cops in the first place? Almost all of the police were concentrated between Mandalay Bay and MGM, with everyone walking the other half of the Strip (from Bellagio to the Wynn) apparently expected to fend for themselves.

As Cavs beat writer Brian Windhorst pointed out this week, there was a lawlessness and lack of decency along the Strip almost defied description. (Hell, even some of the players were scared -- check out the comments from Tracy McGrady and Rafer Alston in the Houston Chronicle.) Did those 403 "reported" arrests cover everyone who robbed cab drivers, menaced tourists in unpatrolled parking garages, pawed women's breasts, started fights in cab lines, skipped out on restaurant bills and everything else? In my opinion, no. Everything I witnessed and wrote about last week was backed up by scores of other writers and media people.

Seriously, does anyone believe Vegas would accurately report arrest figures when the city was using that weekend as an audition for an NBA franchise? Since when did Vegas become a bastion of integrity? It's Vegas! That's why we love the place -- because it's NOT a bastion of integrity, remember? I'm trusting the eyewitness accounts of people who were there -- friends, friends of friends, readers and other writers -- over a dubious arrest figure from a woefully unprepared city.

Piece No. 2: Scoop's insinuation that certain media members were intimidated by the blackness of the event and ended up stereotyping hip-hop culture with phrases like "The Hip-Hop Woodstock" (I wrote that one) and "The Black KKK" (Jason Whitlock wrote that one and, by the way, he's black). I found this interesting because Scoop wrote in his original All-Star column that (A) somebody joked at one of his dinners that their casino was "South Central," and (B) Vegas was a "four-day Freaknic [sic]."

Hmmmm ...

The "South Central" reference needs no further explanation, although it was a terrible Glenn Plummer movie and that probably needs to be mentioned. "Freaknik" was started by African-American college students in Atlanta in the early '80s; they had a noble dream of turning Freaknik into an annual party weekend, almost like a Black Mardi Gras. And for a few years, they actually pulled it off. By the mid-'90s, the event became so overcrowded and dangerous that Atlanta cops legitimately couldn't police the crush of people, leading to negative press and a groundswell to disband the event that didn't fully take hold until a brutal rape in '99. That was the final straw for Freaknik.

Needless to say, comparing All-Star Weekend to Freaknik isn't the most flattering comparison. Scoop still made that connection Feb. 20. Eight days later, here's how Scoop started his Feb. 28 column:

As the reports continue to flow from the activities during NBA All-Star Weekend, the rage begins to build.

Hip-Hop Woodstock. The Black KKK. Weekend leaves NBA with a black eye.

What? Seriously? For real?

As difficult as it is not to turn this generalization of the entire hip-hop culture into an issue of race, let's be honest, it is about nothing else.

The generalization of the entire hip-hop culture? Wait, wasn't this the same guy who compared All-Star Weekend to a four-day Freaknik? No wonder he ended his column with a "pot calling the kettle black" reference ... perhaps it was a Freudian slip.

Here's the sad thing: There was a good follow-up column that needed to be written about Vegas. The NBA was unfairly blamed for the general craziness of the weekend, with the Pacman Jones incident getting the most play ... like it was the NBA's fault that an NFL star caused the biggest riot of the weekend. The NBA didn't screw up; Vegas screwed up. The city failed to stack the Strip and the surrounding parts of the city with enough cops and security guards, and they made the mistake of hoping everyone would act appropriately.

For any other weekend, that was a reasonably sound game plan. For a weekend in which the NBA All-Star Game was the THIRD biggest event behind Chinese New Year and the Fashion Convention? Not a good idea. If you owned a car and resided within driving distance of Vegas, you needed only to find a space in a garage and you were good to go for the weekend, even if you didn't have a place to sleep. Contrary to public belief, New Orleans won't be as chaotic an All-Star destination because the city will flood downtown with cops -- no way the Big Easy makes the same mistake as Vegas did -- and because out-of-towners won't be able to cruise into the city and park downtown without any trouble. Over everything else, that's where Vegas screwed up.

So who gets blamed? Naturally, the NBA. The league's fundamental issue has remained the same for four decades: It's a league of mostly black players marketing itself to a mostly white audience and a mostly white media. That delicate balance was the premise of David Halberstam's watershed sports book "The Breaks of the Game," which was published 25 years ago, back when MJ was playing for Carolina and Michael Jackson was on his second nose. Nothing has really changed. Just look at the way Iverson's credentials were belittled when Philly shopped him last December, or the comically skewed reaction to a Nuggets-Knicks brawl that wasn't one-tenth as violent as the Senators-Sabres brawl last week. Certain media members will always delight in sticking it to the NBA, with the underlying theme being, "Sorry, I just can't identify with those black guys."

I wish Scoop had tackled this subject, asking why some media members gleefully used All-Star Weekend as their latest excuse to crush the league. Instead, he played the race card, based his premise on a dubious statistic and came off misguided. Once upon a time, the late Ralph Wiley repeatedly proved an African-American sports columnist could write intelligently about racial issues without using his skin color as a crutch. After Ralph passed away three years ago, Scoop Jackson vowed to carry Ralph's torch on Page 2.

I just wish he'd brought that torch to Vegas.

The Rulon List

When is somebody going to make a movie about this guy? He is Rudy and Tommy Boy rolled into one. He is like Tom Sawyer in a 300 lb. body. Here is the list from the Deseret News of the different exploits of a man named Rulon.

This is only the latest and most spectacular of many accidents for Gardner.
• As a boy, he fell out of the back of a pickup moving 40 miles per hour and skidded across the road on his bare back.
• When he was 8 years old, he accidentally impaled his stomach on a hunting arrow.
• While Gardner was driving to Ricks College, his truck slid off an icy road, leaving him with scars that are still visible on his arms.
• In 2002, he spent 17 hours in the Wyoming backcountry after his snowmobile dropped into a hidden lake. He lost most of a middle toe to frostbite.
• Ten days before the 2004 U.S. wrestling championships, he T-boned a car with his Harley-Davidson motorcycle. He catapulted through the air and performed a front somersault as he struck the ground, then popped to his feet. He had only minor injuries.
• Two days later, he dislocated his wrist in a pickup basketball game.
Then there was the time he cracked vertebrae in his neck when the great Russian wrestler Alexander Karelin dropped him on his head. But that wasn't an accident.
"Just throw another log on the fire," Gardner said. "I wonder when these adventures are going to stop."

Dwight on SNL

Pretty funny, right up until the end. Lorn Michaels totally ruins it and I guess they just couldn't come up with a good way to end the monologue/skit so it just dies.
Enjoy

Rappers ain’t got nuthin’ on this guy

As you may know, I am at once both fond and jealous of rappers because of how collectively they apparently have a monopoly on all the cool nicknames. I mean, just look at the former members of N.W.A. Where else except for the world of gangsta rap can you get five guys whose handles are so mind-blowingly hip as Eazy E, Dr. Dre, Ice Cube, DJ Yella and MC Ren? Jay-Z sure sounds better than the guy’s real name, Shawn Carter. And my all-time fave is none other than the Notorious B.I.G.

Having said that, rappers henceforth are going to have to take a backseat in my Nickname Hall of Fame to the infamous Idi Amin, deceased despot and former ruler of Uganda. Forest Whittaker won the Oscar for Best Actor last night for his portrayal of Amin in “The Last King of Scotland.” I recognized the name Idi Amin, but my mind was foggy on the details. So I looked up Idi on Wikipedia, and among other things I learned that he gave himself tripped-out titles such as the King of Scotland (hence the movie’s name). The best, though, was his decision to self-anoint himself “His Excellency President for Life, Field Marshal Al Hadji Doctor Idi Amin, VC, DSO, MC, Lord of All the Beasts of the Earth and Fishes of the Sea, and Conqueror of the British Empire in Africa in General and Uganda in Particular.” Yowsers!

An Open Letter to John Amaechi

Dear John:
You are the worst of hypocrites.
My man, I will give you props for “coming out.” It couldn’t have been easy, what with all the criticism you knew would be leveled at you by people you've never even met.
But having said that, let’s be honest about what you used your soapbox to do: spew vitriol and hate against anything in Utah that moves and isn’t gay. I haven’t read your book yet (and probably won’t), but I did read your two-and-a-half-page excerpt in ESPN the Magazine. And in a mere 2.5 pages, you managed to throw all of the following people under the proverbial bus:
Jerry Sloan: First of all, tons of former players detest Sloan. But have you noticed, John, that guys aren’t lining up around the block to take a run at him? People move on, John. But you, you attack the guy beneath the veil of “I’m coming out of the closet, and if any people say anything bad about me then, regardless of the veracity of their claims, they’re insensitive, politically-incorrect bigots.” Um, John, if you were a head coach and a player shouted at you “F#@! you, John” in the middle of a game like you did to Sloan, wouldn’t you have suspended that player like Sloan suspended you? And BTW John, end of the day it doesn’t look too good for a career 6.2 ppg scorer to be taking a run at one of the four or five winningest coaches in NBA history. Just thought you should know.
Larry H. Miller: Hey, I’m the last guy who’ll ever be confused with being a proponent of Larry Miller (and no, I most assuredly do NOT “know this guy”), but I’ve got to say that not wanting to show “Brokeback Mountain” at his movie theaters doesn’t mean Larry necessarily has “antipathy towards gay people.” And John, you might want to hire a fact checker for your next book, b/c you wrote that Miller’s “NBC affiliate (was) the source of much of his wealth” and took a run at him for not wanting to show “Brokeback” at his theaters but being willing to show “Will & Grace” on his NBC affiliate. Um, John, that’d be the LDS church that owns the local NBC affiliate, not Sir Larry.
SLC reporters: We all know I’m a bit biased here, because I am myself a newspaper man. But John, when you write, “By the end of my second season in Utah, I was practically daring reporters to out me. My sexuality, I felt, had become an open secret…” you’re being very, very misleading. Congrats on your use of the word “practically,” because it gives you carte blanche to say whatever you want without having to give a factual basis for it. As in, “I practically finished in the Top 10 percent of my law school class,” and “I practically treat my wife like the royalty she really is 24/7.” I can 100-percent promise you, John, that if you had actually (and not practically) dared any SLC reporter to “out” you, you would’ve been evicted from your closet. Jazz beat reporters are inwardly bitter about making peanuts and having to keep to the grueling travel sked of the team they cover while dealing with Jerry “the quote machine” Sloan day in and day out. Columnists want to get the next big scoop and be lauded as super-duper intelligent. Believe me, John, either class of newspaper would’ve outted you in a heartbeat if for no other reason than to accomplish their personal agendas.
Mormons and Salt Lake City: You write, “…I had to be stuck in the repressive, Mormon capital of the Western world.” I’m not going to argue that Mormon culture isn’t at times repressive, but it’s quite unfair for you to imply that Mormon culture is inherently repressive (if the most defining characteristic of the culture’s capital is repression, then it would go to reason that the culture itself is repressive through-and-through). You know, kind of like Tim Hardaway saying he hates ALL gays? Oh, and John, what the hell kind of standing do you have to complain about Utah when YOU SIGNED HERE AS A FREE AGENT AFTER TURNING DOWN A MORE LUCRATIVE OFFER FROM THE LAKERS!?!

A few more pointers: not a good idea to call Greg Ostertag a “gentle giant” and make him sound like the best teammate of all-time. “O” is one of the biggest NBA underachievers of all-time in terms of how much potential he didn’t realize during his career. And last but not least, please know John that very few people under any circumstances would ever want to have read a sentence like this one that you wrote: “I even had an experience unfamiliar to my life in the States: sex. I had a memorable drunken night with an adorable wrestler (what is it with those guys?) from the University of Utah.” Enough said!!

Like Dallas Clark at a girls high school basketball game, I am out.

This chick has been kicking my butt for 15 years

Sabrina Scherff may not have known it at the time, but she was one of my chief rivals in junior high school. Sabrina was the only seventh grader at Los Alisos Intermediate School to get a higher grade in honors English than me (don’t ask me why that pale-faced autocrat Mrs. Crawford put signs on the wall showing the top five grades in each of her sections). Two years in a row, Sabrina won the grade-level spelling bee while I only finished in the Top 10 and jealousy raged through my veins. At “graduation,” she got to give a speech as a valedictorian – something little Jamshid was prohibited from doing solely because of his mediocre marks in P.E. And now, while I take a nap every day and grovel at the feet of middle-aged white men for a job that doesn’t involve my voice on the wrong end of a Drive Thru squawk-box, she’s one of the 24 finalists on American Idol’s sixth season. So in that sense, not much has changed in 15 years – Sabrina Scherff is still kicking my butt and making me look bad (even if no one but me is keeping score).

Memo to Sabrina Scherff-Sloan: you may have gone to Northwestern and become “urbanized” (re: black), moved to New York and performed in Broadway musicals, married a Sloan so you could drop the maiden-name Scherff like it was yesterday’s news, and deceptively claimed that your hometown is Studio City (where’s the love for Mission Viejo, Sabrina?), but to me you’ll always be that puffy-haired pre-teen who kicked my trash in Mrs. Crawford’s class. Good luck, Sabrina; although I won’t be watching the shows, I'll be rooting for you in my own way.

Caveat: my brother goes to Mission Viejo High School, the same school Sabrina did. (As the Turtle proudly proclaims, I went to Trabuco Hills, which “corrupted” me so much that my parents had to send my two younger siblings to a neighboring school in order to keep Royah and Steven from following in my wayward footsteps, but that’s a whole other ball of wax for another day.) I found out about Sabrina going Top-24 b/c when I was down in Calif. last week thawing out, my drama-geek brother was going on and on about how a former drama student from his school was on American Idol and how he had to watch her perform (uninterested, I ignored the television as I won the Super Bowl for the umpteenth time via Madden 07 on my lapper). After the show, we were bumping around on the internet and Steven showed me the MVHS drama website that was trumping up its alumnus. It of course took me two seconds to blurt out, “That’s Sabrina Scherff!” Now if Sabrina goes Top-12, it’s already lined up that my brother will interview her for his school’s televised morning news program, which of course would entail the inevitable off-camera exchange, “Remember a kid named Jamie Askar from junior high school? That’s my brother!!” Needless to say, I’m breathless with anticipation. Either that, or I really couldn’t care less. Hibachi!!

Finally...

I apologize for my silence up until this point. You see, this blog has created quite the dilemna for me: do I give credence to this effort as President of the Lunch Club despite its founder ignoring corporate protocall and the proper channels of approval, or do I ignore such technicalities and avail myself the opportunity to shed enlightenment upon my subjects thereby improving company moral? As you might have guessed, I have opted for the latter. But lest there be any confusion, I offer the following: THE VIEWS EXPRESSED IN THIS BLOG ARE SOLELY THOSE OF THE AUTHOR(S) AND DO NOT NECESSARILY REFLECT THE VIEWS OF LUNCH CLUB, INC. OR ANY OF ITS SUBSIDIARIES.