First, to meet this month’s journalistic requirement. Here goes:
Bronny James, Bronny James, Bronny James.
There. That should do it.
The son of the almighty, enriched by Nike’s Communist China partners and Fourth World laborers despite his chosen omnipresence as a social and racial activist, the son without portfolio, yet drafted in the second round after one season of pedestrian college ball then held for ransom by his father-knows-best dad, has captured the full, daily attention of the media.
In other news, Illinois forward Coleman Hawkins, 22, has left to play basketball for Kansas State, lured at NIL auction for a reported $2 million.
You do understand by now, don’t you, that everything crooked about big-time, big-ticket college sports, save sucker-reliant sports gambling, is now legally in play?
Consider that teenaged recruits, once enrolled in college despite an inability to write or speak a cogent sentence, will, in addition to being only an athlete, now have lots of time and more money on their hands.
What could possibly go wrong that hasn’t already?
Well, there will be a lot more of it, especially between 11 p.m. and 5 a.m., after and before practices and games, on and near big-time sports college campuses.
There will be more of everything — from speeding, to DUIs, to assaults, brawls inside and just outside after-hours joints, to drugs, to guns, to battered women — all with the considerable enabling of NIL payments in addition to full-ride scholarships and cash Pell Grants.
Of course most media, frightened by the escaping legitimacy, will be compliant. Don’t want to make waves, lose favor among colleges with large arenas and stadiums to fill and big TV deals to sustain. They’re in the taxpayer-funded “none of your business” business.
We media folks know it’s a farce, a fraud, a fix no better than game-throwing and points-shaving. Yet, we play along like those “useful idiots” Josef Stalin had “disappeared” from group political party photos, those who would next disappear from the face of the earth.
As the arrested and arraigned scholarship recruits — scholarship, another con! — TV, with billions invested in the fraud, will continue its Sgt. Schultz act, even sympathizing with the multimillion dollar head coaches for having to suffer the “off-field distractions” they could reasonably anticipate.
There are no more useful “useful idiots” than those assigned to call college games on TV. They’re in on the fix long before the games, increasingly determined by selfish incivility, begin.
Or are we to expect that these season-by-season NIL bribe auctions will be condemned on the air by the likes of Fox’s lead college duo of Gus Johnson and Joel Klatt, and the all-day-and-night panderers thrown at us by ESPN?
ESPN’s crew now includes longtime Alabama coaching kingpin Nick Saban, who retired then declared that the “student” in “student-athletics” is a con, though he didn’t include the part about how that con greatly enriched his fame and fortune by recruiting those who found it easier to carry a weapon than a text book.
And the presidents of Division I colleges who could act on their right-over-wrong consciences had better have fat severance packages.
Back to Bronny. Seems there was a threat that if he didn’t wind up on the roster of the Los Angeles LeBrons, King James would have him and his hidden talents shipped to play in Australia.
Sing it: “My Bronny lies over the ocean!” He could have put some shrimp on the bar-bie for all of us.
But why get on the kid for what his father does to him rather than for him?
Worldwide leader in overpriced bus trips
ESPN, in concert with a Disney travel operation, is running a three- game, four-day Labor Day “Experience” via “Experience Coaches.”
Though omitted from the sell, it’s a bus trip that includes tickets to a Yankees, Red Sox and Phillies home games, meet-and-greets with ESPN and team announcers such as Karl Ravech and Michael Kay, and a visit to ESPN’s Bristol headquarters.
The price, as it appears near the bottom of the come-on, is $7,000 a person, “double occupancy,” thus the buy-in is $14,000 — not including the cost of transportation to and from the starting point.
Does that come with fries?
If your neighborhood was suddenly hit by an epidemic of crippled house pets, something would be done to fix it, ASAP, no?
But if it were an epidemic of suddenly crippled multi-million dollar MLB pitchers — young humans — well then, run away!
In May this column noted the impressive pitching of Brewers call-up starter Robert Gasser, a smallish 24-year-old lefty who threw six shutout innings vs. the Cardinals before he was removed.
Last week Gasser, with a 2.57 ERA, was lost for the rest of this season and well into next — if he ever returns — as he’ll join the legions to have Tommy John surgery.
There were already five Milwaukee starters on the injured list — two, former All-Stars Wade Miley and Brandon Woodruff, are out for the season with arm surgeries.
Lack of hustle annoys Brett
George Brett, 21 years with the Royals and career .305 batter, last week was interviewed by Jon Paul Morosi on the SiriusXM radio’s “The Road to Cooperstown.”
After explaining his success as a matter of what appeared on his Hall of Fame plaque — “Playing with intensity and passion” — he added:
“I go to Royals games a lot, and I watch guys just hit a single and jog to first. To me, some of those singles are doubles. I saw one the other day, a guy from the White Sox, not going to say any names, just hit a little blooper over the third baseman’s head and jogged to first. I mean, that ball’s a double!”
Brett typically struck out fewer than 40 times per season. You now can make millions by striking out 140 times per and jogging doubles into singles. But Brett’s 71, thus relegated to the “Get off my lawn!” bin.
All of his baseball fan life, reader Max Ramos was told a 2-0, 3-1 or 3-0 pitch meant the batter was “ahead in the count.” Simple. Clear. Now, writes Ramos, it’s referred to as the batter having “pitch leverage.” So the simple and clear has been replaced by the faux-slick vague.
Fox studio analyst and former U.S. team member Alexi Lalas is the Jay Bilas of soccer. He talks down to us, knows everything and he’s occasionally correct.
Rapper Young Thug is on trial in Atlanta, 56 charges for racketeering as a felonious gang leader. I first learned of Mr. Thug’s violent, vulgar, gun-worshiping, N-word-laden lyrics when he was a featured performer on ESPN. Guess his stage name didn’t offer a clue. Or maybe it did.
Is there no one at YES to convince Ryan Ruocco, Kay’s Yankees play-by-play backup, that there’s no good reason to try to attach forced, annoying cool dude wording to every play? It’s as if he wants to be heard as the game’s deejay.
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