"It Didn't Have to Be Like This"

"There is a sense of sadness here, of opportunities missed. America is the most powerful economic and cultural force on Earth, self-appointed global prefect and all-round democracy monitor. This is a place where liberty is cherished, where people throw around the word 'freedom' like it's a threat, an insult, a blood-stained battle-axe. And yet the US is also the only World Cup host to ban Fifa members from attending. So far the landscape it has dished up is barren and divisive, a depressingly angry version of football uniting the world."

At The Guardian, Barney Ronay says, "Welcome to Trump's World Cup."

"Fundamentally This Is Sort of Like a PR Campaign"

"Qatar has hosted more than 600 international sporting events, from the world track championships and a Formula One Grand Prix to international bowling, squash, table tennis and equestrian events, in the last decade. That has spiked tourism and hurried along infrastructure spending on highway and light-rail construction and expansion of Hamad International Airport."

Kevin Baxter at the Los Angeles Times discusses the beginning of the World Cup in Qatar.

"A 'Ninety-Minute Englishman'"

"Hobsbawm asks why so many were drawn to this project. A large part of the answer, he suggests, is that it 'filled the void left by failure, impotence and the apparent inability of other ideologies, political projects and programmes to realise men’s hopes'. That was true then, and it is true now. John Denham may be right about the need for an English parliament. But no separate legislature, no sense of Englishness, will assuage the feeling of abandonment and loss of control that pervades much of politics in England. That requires a different kind of political project."

At The Guardian, Kenan Malik writes that he loves "the football team but can't get tribal about England."

Covfefe

"'Although the etymology of the word is a matter of debate, for at least 50 years 'kayfabe' has referred to the unspoken contract between wrestlers and spectators: We'll present you something clearly fake under the insistence that it's real, and you will experience genuine emotion. Neither party acknowledges the bargain, or else the magic is ruined.... The aesthetic of World Wrestling Entertainment seems to be spreading from the ring to the world stage. Ask an average Trump supporter whether he or she thinks the president actually plans to build a giant wall and have Mexico pay for it, and you might get an answer that boils down to, 'I don't think so, but I believe so.' That's kayfabe. Chants of 'Build the Wall' aren't about erecting a structure; they're about how cathartic it feels, in the moment, to yell with venom against a common enemy.'"

Simon Reynolds on his blog discovers Donald Trump's Rosebud.

"People Can't Look at Us as Just a Hot Place Anymore"

"'Most of the folks here are going to be very friendly and nice, but very apolitical,' he said. 'They just want to survive and hang out with their family and drink some beers and make some carne asada. Chicanismo is, like, for other places.'
"Even Border Patrol agents on bicycles from the El Centro station zipped around the fiesta with smiles. No one booed or made a fuss about it.
"'People are going to know where we're at now,' said Adrian Guillermo-Barrera, who set up lawn chairs for his family three hours before the start of the parade and rally. 'We're not just between San Diego and Arizona.'"

In the Los Angeles Times, Gustavo Arellano visits the Imperial Valley.

"It Made Baseball Famous"

"At the time, the concept of amateurism was especially popular among fans. Inspired by classical ideas of sportsmanship, its proponents argued that playing sport for a reason other than for the love of the game was immoral, even corrupt.
"Nonetheless, some of the major clubs in the East and Midwest began disregarding the rule prohibiting professionalism and secretly hired talented young working-class players to get an edge.
"After the 1868 season, the national association reversed its position and sanctified the practice of paying players. The move recognized the reality that some players were already getting paid, and that was unlikely to change because professionals clearly helped teams win.
"Yet the taint of professionalism restrained virtually every club from paying an entire roster of players."

Robert Wyss at History News Network depicts the rise of the Cincinnati Red Stockings as the first professional baseball team 150 years ago.

"This Isn't a Story About American Childhood; it's About American Inequality"

"'Kids' sports has seen an explosion of travel-team culture, where rich parents are writing a $3,000 check to get their kids on super teams from two counties, or two states, away,' said Tom Farrey, the executive director of Aspen's Sports & Society program. Expensive travel leagues siphon off talented young athletes from well-off families, leaving behind desiccated local leagues with fewer players, fewer involved parents, and fewer resources. 'When these kids move to the travel team, you pull bodies out of the local town's recreation league, and it sends a message [to those] who didn't get onto that track that they don't really have a future in the sport.' The result is a classist system: the travel-team talents and the local leftovers.
"Unsurprisingly, the leftovers often lose interest."

Derek Thompson at The Atlantic discusses the decline of youth sports.

"It Wouldn't Make Up for Everything, but Partial Redemption Is Better Than None"

"Brown's greatness as an athlete and activist will matter in the victory hall of posterity, but not here, not now—not in this nightmare burlesque melodrama we're all trapped in. Michael Cohen matters. Paul Manafort matters. Robert Mueller preeminently matters. Jim Brown is a minor sideshow, an incidental noise-generator, in this high-stakes charade. To truly matter in the existential present, he'd need to repudiate Donald Trump and own up on the women he’s hurt, and no one's waiting around for that fairy tale to happen. But with Trump renewing his castigation of kneeling NFL players even as I type, imagine the impact if Brown told him to back off and let these grown men exercise their freedom of expression. A statement of solidarity from Jim Brown would defy Trump's rhino charge and earn Brown back some of the respect he's lost in the last year."

James Wolcott in The New York Review of Books reviews Dave Zirin's Jim Brown: Last Man Standing.

Football's Coming Home

"There was one moment of alarm when Broudie telephoned and said there was a problem. 'I thought "Oh shit!"' Blaskey says. 'This song was meant to be our saving grace, everything was resting on it.' It turned out that, in a moment of unassuming genius, he was concerned he had written two choruses. 'I think that's where the magic of the song actually was,' Blaskey continues. 'Frank and David's delivery and lyrics were phenomenal, but for Ian to come up with a song with two choruses …'"

Nick Ames at The Guardian recounts the story of "Three Lions," by Baddiel, Skinner & Lightning Seeds.

"California Should Be Proud of Its Truly Indigenous Pastime"

"There's no question that California has played an important role in the history of surfing. Californians help surfboards evolve from heavy, canoe-like planks to the thin chips of today. We invented the wetsuit, created a multi-billion-dollar surfing industry, and developed the modern science of wave forecasting, opening the door for big-wave riding. Some of the best surfers in the world, including Kelly Slater and Keala Kennelly, have made California home. And we surely have the edge when it comes to surfing lore, from Butch Van Artsdalen and hellraisers of Windansea to Miki Dora and the pranksters of Malibu.
"But we didn't invent it."

Dennis Romero in the Los Angeles Times argues that "[s]kateboarding, not surfing, should be California's official state sport."

"The First Truly Ostentatious Olympics"

"What transpired, five years later, was both far bigger than Cushing could have envisioned, and far more influential. Buoyed by emerging technology, televised live to Americans for the first time ever, and overseen by Walt Disney himself, the Squaw Valley Games were glitzy and star-studded and futuristic. They were also the first Winter Olympics to embrace the concept of an Olympic Village, where athletes bunked up to four to a room, challenged each other to games of ping-pong, danced in jitterbug contests, and watched free screenings of films. Disney paraded a series of Hollywood luminaries to northern California to entertain the athletes and participate in carefully choreographed opening and closing ceremonies; Bing Crosby and Roy Rogers made appearances, Danny Kaye performed, and Marlene Dietrich posed for a photo with the German hockey team."

Michael Weinreb at The Atlantic tells the story of the 1960 Winter Olympics.

"It's a Culture of Abuse of All Kinds"

"First of all, unlike any other Olympic sport or any sport I can think of in which these athletes are training to be the best in the world, you're dealing with children. In men's gymnastics, these guys are adults. They've gone through puberty. They're usually not on the Olympic team until after they've gone to college or are in college. That's not true for female gymnastics, so that's number one. They’re children.
"Number two, they have a small window of opportunity to be the best in the world, often before they hit puberty. In the United States, it's a culture that has been so influenced by Eastern Europe, really because of Bela Karolyi. He came over here after Nadia Comaneci, and he brought his system with him, which was a system of abuse. His job, and he says this, his job was to create gymnasts, not to create healthy young women. And other coaches followed his lead, American coaches followed his lead, because frankly it worked. He did create great gymnasts.
"Of course, we didn't see all the bodies of the girls who didn't make it. He would berate, belittle them, throw them out of the gym, call them fat, call them lazy, call them weak, and if parents didn't like it, he'd say, 'Go ahead. Take your daughter, take her someplace else.'"

Isaac Chotiner at Slate interviews Joan Ryan, author of the 1995 book Little Girls in Pretty Boxes: The Making and Breaking of Elite Gymnasts and Figure Skaters.

Look on My Works, Ye Mighty, and Despair!

"Hopeful contenders for everlasting fame must run the gauntlet of numerous challenges, including the jealousy of rivals and possible extinction of their own civilisation and language. But there are some clues hidden in the life stories of those who succeeded and those who were lost along the way."

Zaria Gorvett at the BBC asks, [w]hy are some people almost instantly forgotten when they have gone, while others cling on?"

"The Victorian Ethos Is Not Dead, Not By a Long Shot"

"This seeps over into everyday activities as well. Trader Joe's and Whole Foods are filled with people dressed in workout gear with no sweat in sight. This clothing marks its wearers as the type of people who care for their bodies, even when they aren't exercising. Yoga pants and running shoes display virtue just as clearly as the nineteenth-century wives' corseted dresses did.
"Being fit now indexes class, saturating both fitness and food culture. As calories have become cheaper, obesity has changed from being a sign of wealth to a sign of moral failure. Today, being unhealthy functions as a hallmark of the poor's cupidity the same way working-class sexual mores were viewed in the nineteenth century.
"Both lines of thinking assert that the lower classes cannot control themselves, so they deserve exactly what they have and nothing more. No need, then, for higher wages or subsidized health care. After all, the poor will just waste it on cigarettes and cheeseburgers."

Jason Tebbe at Jacobin notes that "nineteenth-century bourgeoisie used morality to assert class dominance--something elites still do today."

"Jogger Clearly On First Run Of Plan To Turn Life Around"

"Witnesses reported seeing a red-faced Andreychuk gasping for air with his hands on his knees several minutes later, clearly entertaining the very first doubts about his resolve that will soon derail his grand plan to remake himself."

From The Onion, 2016.

"Our Perceptions Are Not Reality"

"In other policy areas, left-liberals tend to agree with me on this general logic. They usually insist on not confusing an anecdote for solid data. They point out, for example, the infinitesimal chance that you will be killed by a terrorist in order to puncture the compelling and emotional narrative that we are a nation under siege by jihadists. They note that the public's view that crime has been rising is, in fact, a fiction drummed up by Trump—and they cite the kind of data I just provided to prove it. But when it comes to race and police shootings, the data take second place to emotion. This is not bad faith on the part of left-liberals. It's rooted in an admirable concern about a vital topic—the use of violence by the state against citizens. And I have no doubt at all that Kaepernick and Reid are sincere, and I absolutely defend their right to protest in the way they have, and am disgusted by the president's response."

Andrew Sullivan at New York argues that "on the deaths of unarmed black men, the left-liberal characterization of the problem just does not match the statistical reality."

Fumble

"The pregame kneel has now become a spectacle of resistance, with dramatic gestures of white players joining black ones to oppose the crude attacks from the great orange bigot. Fans who might have complained before about politics being inserted into football—as if the bloated displays of military might attached to the NFL were not a form of politics—could no longer miss that Trump was now more likely than anybody else to politicize the game."

Jonathan Chait at New York writes about "How Trump Bungled the Politics of Football."

"I Keep Telling People I'm a Fashion Icon"

"He knows that you probably didn't know that he's an actual living person, or that if you had at one point heard that he was a tennis player, you most likely thought he was already dead. 'I'd love to sit here and say the success of the shoe has been totally because I'm such a great guy or I'm such a great player or whatever. But, you know …' So what is it like when a shoe named after a man is way more famous than the man born with the name himself? To have your name mean so much beyond who you actually are? When you Google Stan Smith, only one of the first 100 images are of the man."

Lauren Schwartzberg at New York talks with Stan Smith, of the eponymous tennis shoe.

"The Voice of Los Angeles"

"The players don’t hear him on the field, the big shots rarely hear him from their box seats, and the rest the country only hears him through their wireless. Since the Dodgers arrived here 58 years ago, Scully has spoken almost strictly to us, Angelenos in our cars and in our homes, millions who grew up with his voice in their kitchens and have grown old with it at their bedsides. He is the teacher of our children, the bleacher buddy of our teens, the wise neighbor on our cul-de-sac, and the dear companion of our aging and infirm.
"For the people of Los Angeles, he is not merely the announcer of baseball games, he is the soundtrack of our lives, the dignified and graceful accompaniment of endless sandy summers, a daily harmonic reminder of the Southern California dream."

Bill Plaschke in the Los Angeles Times says farewell to Vin Scully upon Scully's retirement after broadcasting Dodgers baseball games for sixty-seven years.

"The 'Cathedral on 39th and Figueroa'"

"Now, on the sacred turf where Vince Lombardi's Green Bay Packers came from behind to defeat the Kansas City Chiefs in the nation’s first Super Bowl and where Pope John Paul presided over mass for  103,854 souls—filmmakers shot  a 40-minute group sex scene for 'The Gangbang Girl #32.'
"That sordid mess came to light in 2011 when a Times investigation dug up a massive bribery and embezzlement scheme orchestrated by the stadium's event manager, Todd DeStefano, who was sentenced to six months in jail on Thursday and ordered to pay the commission $500,000. Prosecutors suggested that more than $2 million embezzled from the Coliseum Commission helped lead it toward 'financial ruin.' The commission gave control of the facility to USC."

Joe Mozingo in the Los Angeles Times looks to see how the return of the Rams will affect the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum.