When wee UD studied at the Medill School of Journalism, we often discussed the qualities of a good lead sentence; in particular, you want to pack a lot of information in without creating a run-on feel to the thing.
The AP writer who had to pack all of the repulsive behavior at New Mexico State into her lead had quite a task, but she acquitted herself well, finding a place in one sentence for the guns thing AND the cock-grabbing thing. Actual shooters (of guns) among team members appear a little farther down in the article. When there’s this much material, you have to be selective.
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For the venerable history of this institution, go here.
Note empty stadium.
Hitler sold far more tickets.
A Texas school district is considering the use of eminent domain to seize a man’s longtime home and make way for parking at a new $50 million [high school] football stadium… The land has been in [79 year old retired carpenter Travis] Upchurch’s family since 1916, when his relatives emigrated from Sweden and settled in Aldine as dairy farmers…
Upchurch’s family has said it is willing to sell the property to the district after Upchurch dies or at least work out an arrangement that would allow him to continue living there. His daughter, Tara Upchurch, told Houston-area outlet KHOU-TV that her father’s health has deteriorated as a result of stress… “I ask that you spare my father from this unnecessary upheaval.”
Aldine ISD has made multiple offers to purchase the land in recent months, both before and after trustees authorized the use of eminent domain … Under eminent domain, the government can acquire land for public use as long as it pays the owner a fair price.
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For what profiteth a fifth-generation elderly Texan who wants to die at home compared to the compelling public value of a high school football parking lot?
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UPDATE: Ah fuck it.
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UD thanks a reader for the link.
‘As a non-native, I can’t relate. My high school football team held all its practices on an open field in New York’s Central Park.
At our team’s games, we didn’t sit in a massive stadium, but on old rickety bleachers. We never had a home game because we never had a home field.
But we excelled in book learning. Every one of my classmates was accepted by a college.
I know times have changed, but $100 million goes a long way in education.’
Oh shush. We all don’t need some New Yorker come down here tell us how to live like we should care we’re 35th among states in education blahblah. We’ll get that thing built and fuck you.
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UD thanks John, a reader, for the link.
Michigan State was happily on its way to bankrupting the school, via massive payments (an almost hundred million dollar ten-year contract extension!) to a football coach who racked up some winning games, when (quoting James Bond) “something big came up.”
Given that as recently as 2018 another Michigan school was out 500 mill because a team doctor also had something come up, you kinda wonder
1.) how does one of America’s not at all rich states keep finding all this dough (and more) in its university sports programs? and
2.) will the state ever realize that hugely expensive degenerates tend to populate American university sports programs at the highest levels? (Tuberville not high-profile enough for you?) Because once you get RID of, say, Tucker, he’s gonna turn around and sue you for hundreds of millions more, the way all of them do when you fire them, for cause or not. Right? Has anyone besides UD been following this history?
As daunting as the remaining two months remaining on the schedule appear, there’s also the potential for a lengthy legal fight with Tucker hinting at his intent to sue the university over the roughly $80 million remaining on his contract. Michigan State doesn’t want to pay a dime and will have to decide if it’s worth absorbing hefty legal fees and headlines continuing to link the school with Tucker or reach a settlement to bring the saga to an end.
3.) can anyone at these institutions of higher learning think about cause and effect? As in, when you suddenly give a hundred million dollar contract to a… not too upstanding person, might that money and power go to his head? Make him think he can get away with anything cuz he’s such hot shit?
Yeah. You kinda wonder why so many American universities are ineducable on the most basic patterns, the most basic matters.
Soccer fans beating each other to death happens quite often in Greece, Brazil, Portugal, Indonesia, Argentina, Croatia… all over, really. But mainly in Europe.
Now we’re doing it too, at our football games.
I’m figuring security’s really really good at confiscating guns, because so far we’re just beating fellow fans to death with our fists. As soon as Americans figure out how to smuggle Glocks through the gates, we’ll start seeing mass shooting.
On-field brawls abound these days; but this one, as a team was losing 0-24, stands out.
Apparently the losing team fought among itself — presumably due to frustration (“The Warriors are winless on the season and have been outscored by opponents 70-0 in two games.”); the opposing team seems not to have been involved at all.
So it turns out the whole high school has around 150 students, of whom let’s say half are boys; and of course a football team usually carries 40-50 players. Are we doing the math here?
Id est the school’s too small to field a competitive football team, but someone’s insisting on keeping the comedy going, paying a coaching staff (this is a poor part of Miss.), etc.
A post-football-game brawl in UD‘s Bethesda between between fans of the two high school teams (it’s not clear if players were involved) really failed to rise to prevailing American standards. The brawl featured UD‘s high school (Walter Johnson) and its traditional rival (Bethesda Chevy Chase), and managed only this much beyond the usual thefts and punches:
[T]he principals [of both schools] wrote that there has been mention on social media that a student may have been in possession of a weapon.
And hey that might not even have been a gun…
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Anyone who, like UD, follows the national trend of shootings during as well as after high school football games knows that ‘thesdan culture is way behind football mad/gun mad Texas, Oklahoma, Louisiana, South LA, Baltimore, and other hot spots. These places kill people during/after football! And it’s becoming a routine part of game day! ‘thesda’s just taking baby steps and UD‘s thinking it’s the parents’ fault for not having enough guns lying around the house for an easy grab when you get home pissed off cuz you lost.
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Vey, vey, the grownups say; what can be done?
Well, as you probably know, lots has already been done. Look at professional soccer if you wanna know where we’re headed. Massive fights and carnage means that in some places games are played in empty stadiums. It means police state level security, including elaborate surveillance of/barring of known trouble makers. It also means 100% young male audiences, as women, older men, and children flee screaming from the violence, which is to say that the very worst demographic has now been isolated in stadiums and thus you’re practically guaranteed violence.
Of course Europe doesn’t have all our guns. In Europe they have to content themselves with beating the shit out of each other and burning cars. Here we see what our firepower superiority implies: Forget fighting. Just go ahead and massacre the other team.
A miniature dog too; and after all that expensive education, he filmed himself practically killing the thing!
And man, the school where he used to play football didn’t waste any time…
Oh well. There’s always the University of Florida.
Background here.
If Huggins or the institutions of higher learning that employed and enabled him gave a rat’s rectum about “student-athletics,” he wouldn’t have spent 16 years coaching Cincinnati as it and he became nationally known for winning by recruiting “high social risk” players and academic non-achievers who had no legitimate reason to be enrolled in any college. Only 28 percent of his Cincinnati players, including walk-ons, reportedly graduated.
And he wouldn’t have spent another 16 years coaching his alma mater, WVU, paid up to $5 million per year to do so, apparently because WVU fully approved of his winning ways and means honed at Cincinnati.
So the national con of college sports — student-athletics — proceeds, no education, and in many cases fundamental illiteracy, in exchange for full scholarships, often on taxpayer funding.
And yet when you look for anyone calling Jack Jones a thug, what comes up is one of Boston’s preeminent African-American newspapers, which in one opinion piece calls him a thug nine times.
Wow. Next you’ll be telling me FIFA‘s corrupt!
A perennial Number One Party School, WVU boasts drunk, rioting, armed students (one riot featured gunfire), plus zillion dollar a year drunk coaches staggering all over Morgantown in front of the national media.
This blog has covered floridly pissed coaches and students at WVU for decades, and nothing ever changes. The school qua, well, school, never gets much money from the state, so it stays lousy; but the coaches and athletic facilities get zillions, and I guess it all goes to the coaches’ heads cuz so many of them end up, like this latest guy, the basketball coach, driving blind and endangering the lives of other drivers and pedestrians and the brave police who try to stop them.
A Catholic university puts its ethos front and center, and suffers particularly acute derision when three of its students act with such rank cruelty as to attract the attention of the nation.
A double amputee had left her wheelchair near a set of stairs in the bar where the Mercyhurst hockey players were drinking (she was using the bathroom), and one of them – a star player, son of a famous player – pushed it down the stairs, messing it up.
So there’s an everyday human reality. A woman who can’t walk nonetheless negotiates the complicated, difficult business of getting out of the house and socializing with friends; in order to go to the toilet, she has to put her chair aside and be carried into the Ladies’ by one of her friends, placed on the seat, helped to wash her hands, etc, etc. After this challenging feat, she is eager to reclaim her chair, but it’s messed up at the bottom of a stairway.
Here’s another everyday reality: Three beautiful, young, able-bodied, drunk athletes who play at the highest collegiate level in what is routinely called the world’s cruelest sport notice a wheelchair at the top of some stairs in a bar. They don’t notice the camera directed precisely at them. Too drunk, too stupid.
One of them – son of a Canadian ice hockey legend – is therefore filmed hurling the chair to the bottom of the stairs and then returning to steady soaking with his buddies.
Forced by outraged bar personnel to apologize, he perfunctorily does and then says: “Do I still have to go?”
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All three have been suspended from the school’s team, but the suspension won’t last long. They have also been barred from the bar. These are of course small things.
Global press attention, with all the gory details and the viral video, is not a small thing. The contempt of their community is not a small thing.
The mandated sensitivity sessions to which they will be subjected are not small things, but they’re not that big.
The lawsuit we might expect from the woman, reasonably enough claiming humiliation and other forms of injury, is a big thing.
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For people to respond very intensely to cruelty, it needs to come in, as it were, bite-sized form. We have trouble truly grasping mass cruelty; we have no problem whatsoever, since we viscerally, intimately, feel it in our own bones, grasping singular cruelty. The arrogance, the nonchalance, with which this guy dispatched that woman’s lifeline, her dignity, her absolute necessity, and then turned back to the bar, is just too bloody manifest, I’m afraid. In this matter, the whole world’s a stage. Da guy’s a regular Iago.
Having been unveiled, he will have to live his unveiling. The next time he trods the boards, he might want to prepare for boos.