Now you can actually enjoy the tournament.
Source: i.imgur.com
Image by Pete Souza
Image by Democrat-Herald, Mark Ylen
Image by Jamie Squire / Getty Images
Buzz Bissinger loses his damn mind in the pages of GQ .
Bissinger, a 58-year-old sportswriter, is the author of the original Friday Night Lights book. Sportswriters, even the successful ones, generally don't dress like that. Needless to say, 58-year-old men, even the flamboyant ones, don't dress like that. The picture above is a screenshot from the story on GQ's website — you can, and should, and must, read it here.
It's even crazier than you could possibly imagine: "inches from the runway, waiting for the smooth mannequin boys with surgically removed hips and buttocks swaying like sunglassed Gumbys with the newest designs from creative director Frida Giannini," is something Bissinger actually wrote.
But if you have one takeaway, it should be this:
...The man who wrote Friday Night Lights, a great book about football players in rural Texas...
...wait for it ———————————————————————————
This is a thing of beauty.
Source: jpmoore
Source: jpmoore
Source: jpmoore
The president jumps out in front against his Republican rival, but DC hoops bragging rights are still up for grabs.
In the festive yet competitive spirit of March Madness, we're tracking how both President Obama and Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) do with their respective NCAA tournament brackets. Using a standard, graduated scoring system — 1-2-4-8-16-32 by round — here's how they stack up going into Thursday's first batch of Sweet Sixteen games.
The first round was hit-and-miss for the president. He got key wins in the South and East regions, while the West region hurt him in the way that it hurt most national brackets. Early losses by Wisconsin and New Mexico, coupled with Gonzaga laying an egg against Wichita State, leaves only Ohio State from that quadrant, though Obama is fortunate to have the Buckeyes reaching the Final Four.
All told, with seven of his Elite Eight picks still alive, Obama still has plenty of opportunities to increase his lead going forward. Wins by Ohio State, Indiana, and Miami on Thursday night will get his weekend selections off to a roaring start.
I don't even know where to begin. Everything about it is just…just perfect.
He will sue the crap out of every last supporter if he has to.
Image by Julio Cortez / AP
Marlins owner Jeffrey Loria and team president/stepson David Samson have been apologizing a lot recently. The owner has been approaching reporters during spring training while his top deputy engages the media on shows like ESPN's Outside the Lines. (The OTL segment reaches especially cringeworthy levels when Keith Law, who's just about the smartest person alive on the subject of MLB prospects, lays into Samson for the mind-numbingly bad trade that anchored the Marlins' offseason moves.) And now Loria has kindly given himself a new reason to apologize: threatening to sue two of his last remaining season-ticket holders because they don't want to pay for seats that he put a view-limiting advertisement in front of mid-season.
This ingenius Marlins public-relations coup is the latest reminder that sports franchise owners didn't necessarily get rich by being good at any of the things that they'll have to do when they're actually running the team they spent all their money on. The ugly backstory: Loria (who made his money as an art dealer) strong-armed Miami residents to fund his team's new baseball stadium in the Little Havana neighborhood, a move that ultimately led to the highest-profile mayoral recall in American history. He then spent hundreds of millions to stock his team's roster with the best talent one could buy. But it was, ultimately, a disparate crew of free agents that flamed out in spectacular fashion, and the new ballpark sold out only two of 81 home games. Loria's grandiose promises from spring training turned into roster-gutting. Well-liked players who had been told to find a house in the immediate area were traded just days later. The team had become a reality TV joke, but with such cost-cutting moves, management had to find a way to fill a structure that stayed mostly vacant in its inaugural season.
That's where the whole apology tour came from. But the campaign has not exactly paid the dividends either had hoped, and this latest snafu with longtime season-ticket holders Jan and Bill Leon will assuredly derail whatever dregs of goodwill had accumulated.
The green thing is the back of the offending advertisement.
Source: blogs.miaminewtimes.com
The Leons have paid five figures annually for season tickets going on 15 years now. They got awesome front-row seats for Marlins Park, but the team erected a billboard midway through last season that both partially obstructed their view and (they claimed) made it harder for them to catch the angle of foul balls coming at them from the batter's box. Now, it's clear from the before and after (above) photos that the Leons are not in immediate deathly peril because of several inches of padding that've encroached on their line of sight, but if The Customer is Always Right™, then that's that, especially for a business that's not exactly viewed so favorably at the moment. And it would be a pain to show up to your seats and find your view had been made worse without warning. The Leons are now refusing to pay for this season's tickets, for which they'd agreed to do so back in 2010 — and the Marlins are threatening to sue them for breach of contract. Of course, if the Marlins truly "don't care if nobody comes," this is the way forward, for sure.
The most baffling thing is that Loria did this so soon on the heels of his public contrition; he doesn't seem like he's learned a thing from the past year. Whether he's able to pull out a small profit from the Marlins despite this kind of repeated PR incompetence is almost immaterial — think of how much more money a halfway-professional owner could make in his place just by behaving like a decent human. You can't help but wonder what else Loria may have in store for his fans. Other team owners, historically speaking, have set the bar rather high. George Steinbrenner paid off an mob-linked informant in the '80s to dig up dirt on his own players. Donald Sterling wouldn't pay for the cancer surgery of his own team's assistant coach. Loria's efforts only make sense if he's determined to reach a new low.
If historically abhorrent behavior is Loria's goal, he'll have gotten off to a great start by giving fans absolutely no reason to come to the Marlins Park this year — and then going to court against the remaining few that actually want to.
This is an actual thing Nike sent out.
Source: @nikegolf
Image by David Cannon / Getty Images
There's nothing salacious about this video. But that didn't stop it from being cut.
The fan cutaway shot is a staple of sports broadcasts. You'll hardly ever see a sporting event come back from (or go to) commercial without one. So this shot from Sunday's Indians-Cubs Spring Training game is totally typical.
According to BustedCoverage the clip was cut from Fox Sports Ohio's replay of the game. Seeing as the kiss was rather innocuous (a couple seconds long, and not even a bit salacious), it seems like a weird decision to excise it. Especially because the equivalent kiss between a man and a woman would almost certainly survive an edit. We've reached out to Fox Sports Ohio and are awaiting comment.
H/T Joe Kinsey at Busted Coverage.
Canseco'd, bigots.
Image by Kevork Djansezian / Getty Images
America needed this.
How Duke and Florida Gulf Coast got their star players.
Source: blogs.courier-journal.com
Source: rivals.yahoo.com
Image by Doug Benc / Getty Images
Source: media.masslive.com
It doesn't matter how pathetic or contemptible people might find Tiger Woods — he's the greatest golfer in the world once again, and there's nothing anyone can do about it.
Image by Phelan M. Ebenhack / AP
Did Tiger Woods' second win in a row make you angry? Sad? Did it cause you to make jokes on Twitter, or compel you to tell friends and relatives that you disapprove of adultery? Did Woods' reascension to the position of top golfer in the world remind you that you think he's a pathetic sex-glutton? Well, it doesn't matter: Like him or not, Tiger Woods is once again the top golfer in the world. And the fact that none of us can do anything about it is, depending on how compelled you are by Tiger's alleged personal transformation, exactly what makes sports' unique form of celebrity so frustrating or so great.
This sort of immunity from ill will is uncommon in the livelihoods of most famous people. Politicians rely on votes to sustain their careers; movie stars and musicians need people to like them enough to see their movies or buy their albums. When Anthony Weiner sent pictures of his penis to a woman who was not his wife over Twitter, he lost his job because the thing he did was unconscionably dumb and dishonest. Weiner — along with similarly, and more completely, disgraced pols like John Edwards — are now shells of their former selves, if that. (What's left of John Edwards at this point is more runny yolk.) In entertainment, there's Mel Gibson, pretty much the patron saint of this kind of thing thanks to his booze-sweaty anti-Semitism jags.
Tiger Woods, on the other hand — that same Tiger Woods who had unhinged droopy Ambien sex with more partners than most men or women would even want, much less will have, and sent text messages to these women that read like free eBooks written by prison inmates — is at the pinnacle of his sport. By the time Woods removes himself from golf, which he will likely do voluntarily, he will at this rate be the greatest golfer who ever lived. Compared with the way we relate to other public figures — conflating our own personal feelings with their job performance — this seems unnatural, even inappropriate.
But of course, it doesn't matter how you feel about Tiger Woods. Unlike politicians and entertainers, whose ability to dazzle and inspire is derived from channeling or mirroring (however disingenuously) the deeply held values of the people watching them, athletes just have to play the game. The beauty, excitement, whatever it is you're looking for in sports, comes just from that. We admire most public figures for how they represent humanity; we admire athletes for how they transcend it.
While you might like an athlete more if you find out they're a good person — charisma can turn a merely above-average athlete into a star — you came across them in the first place because they were good at sports. Meanwhile, it can be immensely frustrating to watch others seemingly forgive a lousy human being because of athletic accomplishment. The model here is Kobe Bryant, who in 2004 was accused of rape, torpedoing what was up until then a fairly popular public image. Looking back from the vantage point of 2013, it's hard to believe, considering his current ubiquity and popularity (Kobe-heads in #24 jerseys show up even at the Boston Garden), that Bryant was never even acquitted of that accusation by a court: Criminal charges were dropped when the accuser refused to testify, and he settled a civil suit. That's hardly a bulletproof exoneration. But Kobe's been so good at basketball for so long that he's managed to rehabilitate his public image from what was an incredible blow. (That isn't a moral judgment: It's an economic one. Kobe's been back to making big-bucks Nike commercials for quite a while now.) There's a flip side, of course, in that if you think an athlete or team has gotten a raw deal from the press, it's reassuring to know that, in the end, none of that matters if they can win. It's also reassuring to then watch that renaissance play out in real time. (Longtime fans of alleged cowardly losers LeBron James and Peyton Manning got to feel this way about their respective championship triumphs.)
Tiger Woods looks poised to make a Kobe-esque recovery, and it's not because of anything he did off the golf course. Talk about his stint in sex-addiction rehab or his new relationship, but two and a half years is an awfully short time span in which to assume the transformation of an asshole into a non-asshole. At the same time, it's also hard to argue that golf is not better with Woods in bloom, battling young-buck Rory McIlroy for dominance and generally chasing history/records/the complete embarrassment of his rivals. There are some legitimate ways in which a high-performing Woods makes the world a better place. Of course, no one is under any obligation to root for Tiger Woods to win golf tournaments. On the whole, it's probably better for all of us if we collectively turn against him: better for our souls, better for our peace of mind, better for making the emotional lives we lead line up with the ones we'd like to have. But if you care about golf, if you care about sports at all, that negative energy isn't just hard to summon up — you also know, deep down, that it doesn't change a thing. Tiger will keep winning, and then it'll just be you who feels bad.
The 20-year-old Heisman winner wants his privacy back.
Source: @JManziel2
Because when I think, “Mr. T,” I think hockey.
Image by Getty Images
The Victoria's Secret brand Pink's partnership with Major League Baseball is back in full swing, and it's very cutesy. But maybe a LITTLE cuteness isn't so bad.
Via: victoriassecret.com
As Major League Baseball's Opening Day approaches (falling, this year, on Sunday, March 31), many female fans of the sport may find themselves thinking ahead to summer days in the park and wondering, What am I going to WEAR?
(That's a joke.)
Sporting goods stores are ramping up for seasonal sports apparel, and chief among the makers of sports apparel designed for women is Victoria's Secret, which, just in time for the first game of the season, is offering a free express shipping upgrade for any Pink MLB purchase. There's just one problem with the promotion: The Yankees tank top worn by the model appears to have been dipped halfway into a paper shredder prior to delivery. (See above.)
Via: ballparkbiz.files.wordpress.com
Far be it from me to determine the legitimacy of fringe as a fashion trend (although actually, why not, I do have eyeballs), but this is a shirt in the classic irritating tradition of girly-fied, pink-soaked, sexed-up sports apparel for women.
Pink sports apparel for women was a thing well before Pink the brand, but Victoria's Secret reintroduced girlish sports clothes to the marketplace in a big way when it first announced its collaboration with the MLB in 2010, after much success with the "Collegiate Collection" featuring T-shirts and sweatpants designed with schools' colors and mascots.
If there were definite things to celebrate about the Pink/MLB partnership — more importantly, an expanded availability of women's sports clothes has to mean, on some level, a recognition that lots and lots of women are devoted sports fans; less importantly, the trendier Pink items might've encouraged other companies' shift from that weird cap-sleeved, baby-thin collar thing women's sports T-shirts seemed so often to have going on — there was also cause for egalitarian concern: Why did so much of the clothing on offer have to sparkle?
One surprise of this year's tournament has been a bunch of goofy white dudes who can get up and throw it down.
An NFL star may be infringing on the photographer's trademarked pedo-glasses and thumbs up pose.
Image by Handout / Getty Images
Image by Bart Young / Getty Images
Source: @MillerLite40
Image by Justin Edmonds / Getty Images
How did she…? What just…? Huh?
World number four Agnieszka Radwanska defeated the 28th ranked Kirsten Flipkens in the quarterfinals of the Sony Open in Miami on Tuesday 4-6, 6-4, 6-2, but this is really the only point from that match that you need to see. This net-cord, around the back, twisting winner is one of the most insane shots tennis has seen in a while.
Seriously - how in the...? Looks like she's got some crazy-fantastic reflexes.
Radwanska next plays Serena Williams for a spot in the final. She's going to need a lot of shots like this if she wants to overturn her 0-4 head-to-head record against the world number one.
