Sports on the front page
College football season has nearly arrived for 2006 and that means the prime sports hypocrisy season is arriving as well. Today's Des Moines Register has a feature on the new Riverside Casino and Golf Resort near Iowa City, and details the flood of cash that will soon be rolling into the University of Iowa football program. The casino has coughed up $165,000 for a three year deal on a skybox at Kinnick Stadium, has purchased dozens of football tickets to give away to preferred customers, i.e. gamblers, and will engage itself in numerous Hawkeye promotional tie-ins.Evidently, the university has forgotten the name "Ronnie Harmon." And maybe you have too. For those who have, or never knew the name, Harmon was a star Hawkeye wide receiver who took money from gamblers before proceeding to fumble four times and drop a touchdown pass in the end zone during the 1986 Rose Bowl. The eventual uncovering of the plot made it onto HBO's "Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel" a couple years back, even as it simultaneously produced virtually no echo effects in Iowa statewide media.
Real estate developers, the athletic department, the gamblers, the Register-- everyone gets rich on college football except for the players actually risking life and limb creating the product on the field. Then we wag our fingers in haughty, but shallow indignation at the players when they take the fix.
If I hear one more so-called tough-guy football player (really a cuckold) tell the cameras how much he loves his coach and how much his coach has given for the team, I'll hurl the booze from my stadium flask. If Kirk Ferentz really cared about you, Hawkeye gridders, he'd cut you in for a chunk of his new guaranteed annual $2.84 million state salary.
Could we at least start paying the high school players? In Texas, head football coaches at Class 4A and 5A schools, those with more than 950 students, now average $73,804 in annual salary. That's more than $30,000 above what the average teacher makes in the state in a year. As Salon's King Kaufman points out, the main argument against paying college kids is that they're getting a free education and free room and board, but high school players don't get free housing and all public school students get the free education.
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The Immaculate Endorsement: Hats off to former Pittsburgh Steeler Franco Harris for putting his principles above the typical sports backslapping. The lefty Democrat Harris has begun campaigning for Pennsylvania incumbent Democratic governor Edward Rendell and against his Republican challenger, Harris' former teammate, Lynn Swann. Says Harris of Swann, "We've always been very close, but right now I feel there needs to be a change in the direction from where our national administration has taken us and where the Republicans in state government want to take us."
Harris is my favorite Gabe Kaplan/"Kotter" look-a-like.
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It was a tragic day in the Twin Cities where the Hennepin County Board OK'd a 0.15% sales tax increase to help buy Twins owner Carl Pohlad, the 78th richest man in America, a new stadium for his baseball team. The measure passed 4-3. Taxpayers will be footing the bill for 75 percent of the $522 million project. It was a tragic day for West Des Moines, Iowa as well. Pohlad's birthplace remained overdeveloped and, by and large, unslightly.
posted by CM @ 8:30 PM
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