Monday, July 09, 2012

Real Sports with Chris Moeller

In the new EA Sports video game "NCAA Football 13," you can evidently take some of the great players of college football's history and place them on other teams. The pop-up advertisement I saw for this new feature on Gawker showed Ohio State's Eddie George Sim-ing his way downfield in a Michigan uniform. Ooh, see what they did there? Isn't that clever? A big rivalry switch for the fans. I guess you can do anything you want with these players when you're stealing their names and likenesses. Eddie George will get paid zero dollars in return for his contribution to this popular game even though EA (Electronic Arts) reported $4.143 billion in profit in the fiscal year that ended in March. This legal peculiarity stems from the fact that it's against NCAA rules for athletes to profit from participating in sports, chaining them to their bogus "student-athlete" status even long after they've left school. (George finished at Ohio State in 1996.)

Several of the more prominent names-- Heisman Trophy winners-- are now being used in the game, but even the other supposedly "anonymous" players have inspired Sims. The "players" in the video game match the real players' height, weight, race, along with other physical features. (Check out Archie Griffin's sideburns! Another ooh!). Their video game performance is based on real-life statistical achievements. Magnificently, EA is currently being sued in federal court over this prostitution as part of a class-action suit brought by former UCLA basketball player Ed O'Bannon, former college football player Sam Keller, and the great Jim Brown.

If you buy this video game-- or any product marketed by EA, you are supporting identity theft and slave labor.

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Brilliant PR move by Des Moines' Olympic hurdler Lolo Jones: She announces she's a 29-year-old virgin, and soon after she picks up an endorsement deal with "family friendly" Proctor & Gamble. Fully grown women should not have to shun the very human and loving act of sexual intercourse in order to cash in with endorsements so I'm starting a movement to financially-reward companies that publicly support the sexually-active. I'm calling it "Loose Change for Loose Women," and I need your help to make this a thing.

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In recent weeks, baseball has experienced a rash of marginal Hall of Famers coming out publicly in opposition to admitted PED users joining them in Cooperstown. First, there was Goose Gossage, who was inducted into the Hall as a relief pitcher in 2008 even though he's 19th all-time in saves, and saves have only been a statistic in baseball since 1969. Then it was Reggie Jackson, a 1993 HOF even though he's a lifetime .262 hitter with more strikeouts than hits, and more strikeouts, in fact, than any of the other 17,000-some players in the league's 132 year history. What's funny about their comments, besides the fact that both of these 60-something-year-old former players were charter members of baseball's infamous amphetamine-popping generation, and played their best ball during a decade (the '70s) when former big league hurler Tom House says every team in baseball had "six or seven" pitchers already "fiddling" with steroids and Human Growth Hormone, is that you just know both of these former jocks have now graduated to Viagra in their private lives. Reggie used to call himself "the straw that stirs the drink," and at 66 years old, don't you wonder about his straw?

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