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.
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.
It’s only funny if you lack a thick description of Lake Charles, LA. If you lack boots on the ground knowledge of one of America’s most godforsaken, violent, hopeless locations, what McNeese University just did will look “absurd,” “ridiculous,” and all the other nasty adjectives everyone’s throwing at the place today.
What that school (23% four year graduation rate) did was hire a basketball coach so utterly filthy (recruiting violations and the like up the wazoo) that the school knows he’ll be hauled in front of the NCAA for all his prior bad shit.
‘Course McNeese U., as part of the Greater Lake Charles We Don’t Give a Shit, Motherfuckers region, could give a rat’s ass about what a bad boy good ol’ boy Will Wade’s been; but it does know the NCAA’s after him, so the school needs to do something, uh, preemptive.
So in a maneuver Jean Arp would approve, the school suspended Wade pretty much same time it hired him. Welcome! You’re suspended for five games! See, NCAA? We’re punishing him before you even finish investigating him! We’re not bad boys down here. We’re good boys!
What’s that you say? Wade’s preparing a lawsuit against the school, demanding ten million dollars in damages for humiliation and mental anguish? No prob cuz we’re so rich.
FIFA’s [scroll down] acceptance of Saudi sponsorship will mean VISIT SAUDI signs all over stadia where women are playing.
Since no self-respecting woman would go anywhere near that stinking desert, plastering unignorable ads enticing us to journey to the land of mandatory thick black abayas and enforced infantilizing sex segregation is a little rich, ain’t it? Let’s see what World Cup players have to say about it.
FIFA should be “‘deeply ashamed” even to consider such a thing, says one player who clearly doesn’t know much about this shameless organization. “Totally inappropriate,” says another. “Bizarre,” says yet another.
It begins to look as though FIFA might back out of this brilliant idea; but the filthy pigs who run the thing are so far probably just trying to figure out why anyone would object to it. Maybe VISIT TEHRAN, LADIES! signs would be better…?
Texas Tech, one of America’s scummiest schools, recently hired, at an incredible multimillion salary, a basketball coach who quotes Bible verses to black players about slaves serving their masters, and who spits on players who annoy him.
Beslaved and bespitted players have complained to the AD about the dude, and he’s been suspended, but he sure as heck ain’t apologizing for citing the Good Book, which of course has WHAT to say about slaves, and the spitting was cuz he had a cold and was, er, dribbling.
TTU’s national ranking has gone from 176 in 2018 to 219 today. Solution: Spend more money on sports!
The University of Georgia admissions committee selects for vehicular homicide, drunk driving, drag racing, and beating people up. These guys are highly selected: scholarships, campus heroes. What a school.
And if you’d care to do the entire long Georgia Football Walk of Shame, go here.
The gunny, sexually perverted basketball team is of course only the most obvious sign of thorough institutional squalor.
Current and former employees the AP interviewed described scenarios in which top-level administrators refused to hold themselves or others accountable, both inside and outside the athletic department. One said the “guardrails” designed to protect students and faculty — from everything from retaliation for whistleblowing to sexual improprieties — had all but disappeared.
“Because there’s so much churn in our upper administration, we never get to the point of hammering out who is actually accountable for upholding policies,” [one insider] said.
In one instance, a lawsuit last year filed by a Jane Doe alleges a longtime professor with ties to the athletic department “harassed and groomed female students for years, coercing them into sexual relations and bragging about the same” while school officials looked the other way. The plaintiff alleges she was sexually assaulted by the professor.
Another case alleges that two professors who blew the whistle about hiring practices they claimed flouted human-resource policies had their complaints intercepted by an administrator involved in the hiring, who then pushed for disciplinary cases to be opened against those professors. One has been demoted from his deanship.
[The] Office of Institutional Equity, which handles Title IX and other discrimination complaints and should have been on the front lines of the hazing allegations, [was] marginalized, with administrators ignoring some recommendations produced by the office and putting others off.
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Uh lets see what else.
Look. Tons of universities in this country have forged winning basketball/football teams by scouring the junior colleges for naughty numbskulls who play really well. It’s a beyond-belief sordid thing for a university to do, but tons of them do it. Many come to grief as the bad boys launch crime sprees, start fights on the field/court, get involved in academic cheating scandals, rape people, blah blah. Small price to pay, says a school like Nebraska, which has an AMAZING record of recruiting crazyass assholes. It’s one way to field winning teams and who cares if players beat the shit out of students ahead of them in line for pizza just cuz they’re getting impatient.
UD will admit that, in a strong field, NMSU has distinguished itself. But the indecent tale of school-destruction is one it shares with many cohorts.