I know, I know, God doesn’t care who wins football games, I think. But I do know God likes drama; the Bible is full of it. And Tim Tebow is nothing if not drama. Yesterday’s amazing win over the heavily favored Pittsburgh Steelers just added to the young legend. And it had to be this way didn’t it? At least for one more week.
I got a little early Christmas present this morning when I made my daily visit to the LA Times website. Being born and raised in southern California and being stuck in another dysfunctional state, Illinois, it’s a way to keep up with my hometown sports teams. Over the last several weeks the Times has asked readers to vote on the city’s greatest sports moments. Number one is a moment that every sports fan alive at the time no matter who their teams are remembers.
The Penn State University football scandal has been ugly in a variety of ways, but not all of them are immediately obvious. In particular, the mainstream press, so proud of its progressive views on most moral matters, showed the puritanical streak they always reveal when a person widely believed to be of good moral character can be knocked down and branded a hypocrite. The media coverage in this case displayed the classic American journalism tactic of conveying salacious stories under cover of moral indignation. This was obvious in the rush to make Penn State football coach Joe Paterno the center of the story.
The battle for Lord Stanley’s Cup looks like it will go for 7 games. Two periods into Game 6 and the Boston Bruins lead the Vancouver Canucks by the score of 4 to 0. In the midst of this classic battle between the Canucks and Bruins, one man stands in the goal crease wearing some very pro-American artwork. Boston Bruins goalie, Tim Thomas’ mask is emblazoned with images that would inspire any Tea Party Patriot. The mask’s back-piece includes the stars and stripes sporting the iconic Gadsden flag rattlesnake and phrase “Don’t Tread On Me,” along with his children’s initials: K.I.T., K.A.T, and K.O.T. The mask’s front is emblazoned with an American Eagle and “In God We Trust”: Such love for his family and unashamed patriotism is nice to see amidst hockey’s premier event.
I agree with Jonah Goldberg that this video, posted at the Corner, is a wonderful display of humanity. But if Hayek was still alive and at the game, he might also call it a well-intentioned but imperfectly understood plan, that is rescued by the spontaneous, self-ordering principles of traditional rules and morality.
by Warren Moore You may remember the story of Bethany Hamilton, the surfer from Hawaii who lost an arm to a shark in 2003, and has made her way back to riding the waves. Her inspirational story has made its way to your local multiplex, in the form of the new movie Soul Surfer. However, keeping the “soul” in the movie was a challenge in itself, as CNN reports. Hamilton credits her Christian faith and the support of people at her church for overcoming her injury and returning to her surfing career. In particular, one important scene in the movie involves Hamilton’s youth group leader, Sarah Hill, counseling her in the wake of losing her arm. While Hill is likely pleased to have been played by Carrie Underwood, she was less pleased with what nearly happened on set: In one scene, Hill’s character is shown counseling Hamilton as she struggles with living as an amputee. She reads from Jeremiah 29:11 ” ‘For I know the plans I have for you,’ declares the Lord, ‘plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.’ “The morning they went to shoot that scene, said Hill,
By Mike D’Virgilio Are any golf fans out there know how special early April is in the calendar. This is the month when professional golf’s first of four majors, The Masters, takes place in spring’s full bloom of Augusta, Georgia. What a site. My response is always to marvel at the handiwork of a God who could conceive of and create such beauty, and how people can take the raw material of His creation and turn it into something ineffable. Then there is golf. There are very few sports where you can win by losing, but golf is certainly one of those. Such happened on Sunday afternoon on the rolling hills of Augusta National, the course the great Bobby Jones developed with Alister Mackenzie after he retired from competitive golf at the tender age of 29. This 75th Masters was as exciting and as heartbreaking as any that came before. For three rounds the 21 year old Irish phenom, Rory McIlroy, played superb golf and headed into the final round with a four stroke lead. This doesn’t happen very often to one so young, and the question for any leader at the final round of a major was only accentuated
Turner Network Television has issued an apology for a comment made by comedian Tracy Morgan in an interview before last night’s NBA game broadcast. Asked about the appeal of former Alaska governor and Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin and invited to compare her with comedienne Tina Fay (his costar on the NBC comedy 30 Rock), Morgan said that Palin is “good masturbation material,” making sure to repeat the phrase for emphasis, calling her “great masturbation material.” TNT apologized publicly. “It’s unfortunate Mr. Morgan showed a lack of judgment on our air with his inappropriate comments,” said Turner representative Jeff Pomeroy in a press statement. I happened to be watching at the time, and I found the exchange rather startling but, well, also rather charming and amusing, given what one has come to expect from Tracy Morgan as a comedian and public figure. Too bad there were probably a good many pre-adolescent boys watching that pregame show and wondering what Morgan’s phrase meant. It will undoubtedly open up a whole new world for them, but one that the culture would have shoved them into in due course anyway.
Author’s note: a few months ago I profiled martial artist Ray Fisher on this site. The following segment is another excerpt from our work in progress The concept of loyalty seems positively archaic in this age of everyone-out-for-themselves. It could be argued that Aleister Crowley’s dictum “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law” has indeed come to pass. In some ways, this is not necessarily a bad thing: the idea of individual freedom is implicit in our national motto of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” It’s the type of freedom that would allow, say, a Midwestern white kid to pursue interests in Buddhism and karate. Emerson and Thoreau extolled this freedom, as did Jefferson a few generations earlier, taking his cue from Rousseau, and so on. There is a long and storied pedigree here. But something may have been lost on the road to self-liberation: that idea of something greater and more compelling than our own needs. Leave it to The Boss (that is, Bruce Springsteen) to make one last desperate strike for loyalty. In one of his best songs, “Highway Patrolman,” he sings about the complicated relationship between the titular patrolman—Joe Roberts—and his
The odious political hack and professional circus clown Keith Olbermann has been removed from the in-studio team for NBC’s Sunday Night Football NFL telecasts. Olbermann actually did a decent job of narrating highlight film, which any reasonably competent TV personality could do, but I simply couldn’t bear to see that repugnant individual every week and was thus forced to turn to another channel during his highlight segments and the discussion periods in which he was involved. I’m sure that such was the case with many other viewers, though NBC denies that Olbermann’s unhinged political persona had anything to do with his removal. Given NBC’s status as the stupidest broadcast TV network—a title for which the competition is fierce—that might well be true. The network’s arrogant disdain for their non-radical NFL audience in putting Olbermann in such a prominent position in the first place is ample evidence of a stupidity of truly biblical proportions. Nonetheless, I suspect that the second-by-second ratings numbers, focus group reactions, and Olbermann’s Q scores were persuasive even to the nitwits at NBC—and that perhaps the rise of the more levelheaded Jeff Gaspin to the net’s leadership is beginning to bear additional fruit. (Gaspin was reportedly the
Brian Urlacher of the NFL’s Chicago Bears showed yesterday how a gentleman handles being the butt of a politically incorrect joke: he brushed it off and agreed that it was funny. As Chicagobreakingsports.com reports, the All-Pro Bears middle linebacker hadn’t heard about the incident until a friend told him about it. Beck, on his FOX News TV program, had been looking at photographs of a group of celebrities listed by a website as “The Blackest White Folks We Know” (which, incidentally, was not a very flattering group of people, Urlacher notwithstanding, unless you find Rod Blagojevich, Madonna, James Carville, and Bill Clinton to be models of deportment). Upon seeing the bald, bullnecked Urlacher, Beck said, “I think this guy’s a neo-Nazi.” That led to much criticism, as apparently is the case with everything Beck says. Beck duly apologized on his Fox News website: “Anyway, I apologize to anyone who was offended. I just made a neo-Nazi joke based on the short hair and white skin; I don’t actually think he has fascist plans to take over the Earth.” Urlacher would have none of it. “It’s dumb. I think people blew it out of proportion,” he said, according to the Chicagobreakingsports
A classy gesture by Tiger Woods at the British Open in St. Andrews, Scotland: Woods steps aside for retiring rival Watson. Story here.
Recent Comments