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Hypocrisy is obvious with PGA Tour

By Jimmy Golen The Associated Press Major League Baseball was once so concerned about gambling it banned Hall of Famers Mickey Mantle and Willie Mays just for working as casino greeters. Now MLB itself and almost all of its teams have official casino sponsors. The NCAA railed for decades that paying players would destroy college sports, all while raking in billions off of their unpaid labor. Now schools boast of booster collectives that help recruit top talent to their teams. So when the PGA Tour overcame its indignation and agreed to merge with LIV Golf — despite the human ...

Some terrific memories of the ABA, WHA

By Paul Newberry The Associated Press As we relish one of the greatest couple of weeks on the sporting calendar — the NBA Finals and Stanley Cup Final, going back and forth sometimes on alternating nights — a pair of long-forgotten leagues deserve a shoutout. Take a bow, ABA. You too, WHA. The American Basketball Association and World Hockey Association have been gone for decades, but their brash challenges to the set-in-their-ways NBA and NHL left a mark that is still recognizable today. The 3-point shot in hoops and Europeans playing key roles at the rink are two of the ...

Foreman’s journey worth watching

“Nothing ever came easy. Every day was a fight.” This quote is part of the opening narration in the film “Big George Foreman,” as the former heavyweight champion tells his inspirational life story that began with growing up in acute poverty in the Fifth Ward of Houston, Texas, during the early 1960s. Foreman’s mother, Nancy (Sonja Sohn), struggled to feed and provide for him and his four siblings while earning a meager salary as a waitress. In a touching scene, Nancy comes home from work, unwraps a hamburger, and then breaks it in pieces to feed her children. She ...

NFL can’t shake perception of not caring

Even when the NFL institutes a rule designed to reduce concussions, it can’t shake the perception that it doesn’t care what players and coaches think. The league took a step toward eliminating kickoffs this week by enhancing the touchback rule for a one-year trial with a priority on player safety. The receiving team will now get the ball at its own 25 with a fair catch of a kickoff anywhere behind that yard line. Some of the league’s most prominent coaches criticized the decision. “My thing is, where does it stop? I mean, you start taking pieces and you know, we’ll see ...

NFL schedule not all about home-field edge

By Jim Caltagirone sports@altoonamirror.com With the announcement that five NFL games will be played in London and Frankfurt during the 2023 season, fans in select American cities are left to ponder how exactly they benefit from the international outreach. As the league schedule trickled out during the second week of May, it became painfully obvious to fans of Jacksonville, Buffalo, Tennessee, Kansas City and New England that they will have one less opportunity to see their favorite team play a home game during the upcoming season. Since international games are played at a ...

PGA Tour has made mess out of LIV presence

Byron York Andrews McMeel Syndicate For more than a year, professional golf has been engulfed in a civil war over money and politics. The cause has been the creation of a new tour, funded by the vastly wealthy government of Saudi Arabia, to challenge the dominance — some would say the monopoly — of the PGA Tour. The PGA Tour has reacted like any other business facing a potentially mortal threat. It has tried to strangle the new tour, known as LIV Golf, by threatening lifetime banishment for any PGA Tour player who defects to the new league. It has carried through on ...