Btw holy shit Lance was amazing. He’s such a fucking narcissistic asshole and they don’t sugar coat it at all. He had basically control of UCI - the FIFA of cycling, and would get them to test riders who actually had the nerve to beat him. And since they’re all dirty of course those riders took a fall.
Floyd Landis makes an appearance as clearly still an alcoholic wreck and tragic foil figure who ratted everyone out because they wouldn’t let him back in the game after the standard 2 year penitence. Super Shakespearean.
The thing is though - they were obviously all doing it, and Lance was still far and away the best - not even close. Just like Bonds. The show does a good job of delving into the idea that some people get knocked from grace in the public mind and others stay up there, when they’re all dirty.
I don’t blame Bonds for being better than the other steroid guys. But I will never forgive him for making breaking the all-time home run record, the most important record in American sports, an anti-climactic mess.
I know Last Dance was a Jordan puff piece. But I still think stuff would have slipped through if Jordan was even in the same league of asshole as Lance Armstrong. But that’s a low bar I guess.
I know everyone loved the Jordan doc but this one right here already has the feels for me. I grew up in a baseball town where literally every kid, boys and girls played ball. I played with a bunch of kids growing up that went on to play college ball and a couple that got drafted. None made it to the show though. I washed out in high school and moved onto track/field but became an umpire senior year and throughout college. Greatest job I ever had.
This 1998 season was my childhood and remember my mom allowing me to stay up to watch the cards/cubs game.
Chuba alone can’t do it but if the whole team just says fuck it, him or us? I think he’d be gone.
ESPN had something over the weekend about a coach from Wyoming suspending his black players in the 60s for wanting to wear black armbands when MLK was shot I think? I only saw it in passing but anyway it didn’t work out well for that guy.
He absolutely would. Big time college football players have so much power that they normally don’t use.
Remember a few years ago at the University of Missouri when there was a student who did a hunger strike and hundreds of students protesting about the university president and absolutely nothing happened? Then the football team said “fuck this we aren’t playing in our bowl game unless the president resigns” and he was gone the next day.
As an Oklahoma State alum, Gundy can munch on my chode. But I stopped watching football a few years ago. College football is insanely exploitative. Kids aren’t even getting fairly compensated for the CTE risk and long term damage to their bodies.
When I was ~10 years old, Doron Sheffer went to play basketball at UConn. Sheffer was a 20 year old kid who just led his team to a national championship in the Israeli league. That doesn’t sound all that impressive, but the team he beat, Maccabi Tel Aviv, won 23 championships in a row until that year. He was a big deal.
Since I was (am) a huge basketball fan, I would wake up in the middle of the night to watch him play college games on the super expensive cable channel I forced my parents to get. And I distinctly remember the moment when I learnt that he wasn’t getting paid and how I wondered why I’m paying to watch him play but he isn’t getting paid to play.
I was ten years old living in the Middle East and I figured it out. How is this still a thing?
Ahhh Doron was a legit player. I met him a few times as a kid. I have an autographed shirt somewhere stored away of the 95/96 team that had him, KO, and Ray Allen on it.
I can say with confidence that he was likely getting paid. My best friend’s dad growing up was a “friend of the program” there and at UMass when coach Cal was there and made UMass a national contender. Idk what goes on nowadays but back in the 90s as it was explained to me is that it was the Wild West of backroom deals and duffel bags of cash. The premise of the movie Blue Chips is 100% on point. It obviously was no where near what Doron should (or any other player) should have been making for their free labor and the literal billions of dollars they were creating for their work though.
Most NFL games are on Sundays with a few games regularly played on Mondays and Thursdays. The Sunday games go from 1 p.m. here in New York to the last game ending at ~11 p.m. The season goes from early September to the super bowl in early February.
MLB starts in March and goes through mid-October. Games almost occur daily during that period. Most games are in the evening local time but there are tons of afternoon games throughout the season in the summer as well.
