Gilbert Arenas

Bang. You’re dead. Pointing at his teammates with his hand in the shape of a gun, Washington Wizards’ guard Gilbert Arenas smiled and laughed as cameras flashed before putting up 19 points in a win over the Philadelphia 76ers on Tuesday. With potential gun charges looming against Arenas, though, NBA Commissioner David Stern is not in a joking mood.

ESPN is reporting that the NBA has indefinitely suspended Arenas, who has been embroiled in allegations that he brandished a gun at a teammate in the locker room over a gambling debt dispute. D.C. law enforcement officials are also investigating the incident, which Arenas claims was just a joke on a teammate gone wrong.

In fact, Arenas seems to view the entire situation as a joke.

“If I really did something wrong, I would feel remorse for what I did,” Arenas told the New York Daily News after Tuesday’s game. “I didn’t do anything.”

Arenas has continued to comment on the situation via his Twitter account and by speaking to the media. The guy has come off as a complete idiot, oblivious to the serious nature of this offense. Sure, he made a big mistake, but the man is making it worse by continuing to run his mouth. At stake: a potential felony conviction and the voiding of the remaining four years and $96 million of his NBA contract. The man deserves the latter just for his conduct in response to these allegations. How clueless can you be?

I’m a huge fan of the NBA. I love the game. It features the best athletes in the world playing the game at the highest level. However, in recent years we’ve seen the emergence of many coddled wanna-be-thug millionaires drawing headlines for illegal behavior off the court. Most NBA players are excellent stewards of the game; true professionals like Ray Allen, Dikembe Mutombo, Derek Fisher, Yao Ming, and Shane Battier. Yet all the headlines go to people like Ron Artest, Jamaal Tinsley, and now Arenas.

“(Arenas’) ongoing conduct has led me to conclude that he is not currently fit to take the court in an NBA game,” Stern said.

I could not agree more. After his recent conduct, getting paid millions of dollars playing in the NBA is a privilege Arenas no longer deserves.

Well, it’s almost 2010 now, and you know what that means?

Yes, that’s right it’s just about to be another World Cup, and for those of you who don’t know, the World Cup is a world tournament where soccer teams battle to be the best in the world.

Besides the Olympics, and maybe the UN, it is the basically the only thing that unites all together for a single cause.

However, in America, no one really cares.

Yeah there’s a tight knit group, almost like a cult following, of people who love soccer and who try to watch Europeans play.

I say European soccer because, let’s be honest, MLS isn’t exactly up to par at the moment.

Why is that exactly? Because of thousands upon thousands of people in America who frown upon soccer, and that is because… well I don’t know.

I hear things like, “It’s a sissy’s game,” “It’s stupid, “It’s boring.” I’m sorry to say, but America’s game, even though exciting at times, can be one of most boring experiences to watch on television ever.

For many, soccer in America is a sport where you play until you hit middle school and then you turn to football or hit third grade and turn to Mighty Mights.

It’s ridiculous. Did you know team USA won our region and has a decent shot of going far this year in the Cup? Did you know that our goalie is one of the best goalies in the world?

We have a good team, but without support, our own league, the MLS, will not be able to support another quality national team.

Did you also know that our own Missouri State team is ranked 20th in the nation and is beating teams the likes of Creighton, Drake, and SMU?

They’re on their way to having a championship year, and most people don’t even care, all the while money is spent out the wazoo paying for scholarships for a losing football team.

What does it take for the American Society to accept American soccer and turn it into the sport that everyone else in the world seems to enjoy?

Hopefully, a World Cup championship in South Africa this summer.

Being a columnist is rarely easy. There are the writers who do puff pieces, maybe drawing a smile but never really making anyone think about anything, and there are those of us who tow the line to make our points.

Mark Whicker, a columnist of 22 years, is the latest to draw national ire for a recent column in the Orange County Register telling kidnap victim Jaycee Dugard what she missed in the sporting world during the last 18 years.

Critics say Whicker was insensitive. What was a sports writer even doing writing about Dugard, who was kidnapped at age 11 and held captive for 18 years before recently finding freedom? In that time, she was virtually cut off from the world.

It does not take but a quick reading of the column to see that Whicker was not being cruel or insensitive. He was merely putting 18 years in perspective. Sports analogies are the rage. The media and our government officials love to use sports analogies because most of us can relate to winning the big game or getting the big hit.

Part of the column is a list of some of the bigger stories in the last 18 years. Barry Bonds, Tiger Woods, Magic Johnson. I know these stories because I have had access to the world all of my life. Still, I had forgotten how big these stories were in their time. They seem like ages ago. If a simple news story seems to have happened decades ago, how long must have those 18 years in captivity felt to Dugard?

Whicker is experiencing another American pasttime. Running the mouth (or in this case fingers…probably most often with anonymous emails and comments) without really thinking about what is being said. Yes, the column at first reeks of bad taste. If you stop there, Whicker probably deserves some hate mail. But if you actually read the column, and you have the ability to think, you begin to see that Whicker’s unique column simply puts 18 years in perspective more than the faux emotional reporting from the networks could ever do.

Not bad for a sports writer.

Contributor

In one of my recent classes, a professor was relating a story from when he went to Missouri State. He said how in the beginning of the fall semester, his fraternity decided to show some school spirit by getting permission to light a bonfire between the old McDonald Hall Arena and what was then Briggs Stadium (now the Plaster Sports Complex).

The reason for this was the football team; they hadn’t managed a win yet and the frat pledged to keep a cauldron boiling in that space until they scored a win. By the time winter break rolled around, there was ice and snow all around the cauldron, and the frat gave up to a season of utter failure.

Now, some people love sports. I’ll be honest and say it’s not exactly my thing. When people get riled up and really enthusiastic about their favorite teams, it’s probably a harmless way to occupy their time. But when it comes to school spirit, academia and a question of where we spend our money, there has to be an examination of the facts.

Colleges often invest heavily in a sports program to raise the prestige of the school and attract students and sales of both tickets and merchandise. It’s an investment in the lives of those involved and the future of the program, with returns of success, increased enrollment and profits. When those returns don’t materialize, we have to consider the other opportunities that exist by investing in quality programs and other methods that promote student success.

It’s no small secret that the MSU football team has not been very successful recently; 4-7 this year, 6-5 last year and 2-8 the year before that. The men’s basketball team has done a little better, going 11-20 this year, 17-16 last year and 22-11 the year before that. The woman’s basketball team loses about 2 games for every one they win.

Now, big deal, right? Why am I trashing on these teams? Because of the inordinate amount of spending and money that goes into these things. According to a Cornell study, “indirect benefits to colleges from successful athletic programs are very small”. Colleges that win championships have a three year spike in donations and applications. Another study by the NCAA itself says spending on athletics is a poor investment, with few financial returns. A few schools are very successful, and the rest aren’t, but want to be, so there’s a positional arms race, with different colleges trying to outspend each other, thinking that a few more bucks will make players perform better. There’s a notion that a coach will emerge who can make everything better, and he deserves whatever we can pay him.

However, most successful sports teams are dynasties. People perceive random fluctuations in the performance of any system to be patterns and find significance where there is none. This is why we try to recruit and hire the best, to build a dynasty of our own, and until it gets done right, or clicks, there’s a lot of random performance. Back to the subject of money, lets take the Plaster Sports Complex (and ignore the much more powerful and costly example of the JQH Arena).

It was originally a construction of the Works Progress Administration, part of FDR’s means of employing the unemployed. It cost $60,000, a costly sum for the day. Its last major renovation was in 1992, which made it the PSC that it is today. In 2006, they finished installing Field Turf synthetic grass for $1 million. Last summer a Jumbotron system was installed at a cost of $2 million.

Noam Chomsky says “Sports… offer people something to pay attention to that’s of no importance. That keeps them from worrying about things that matter to their lives that they might have some idea of doing something about. And… it’s striking to see the intelligence that’s used by ordinary people in discussions of sports as opposed to political and social issues.”

If Missouri State is expecting a return on the investments they’ve made in sports, they’ve found themselves duped. Someone told me we threw away 1.3 million dollars last year on football (besides the jumbotron, I assume) Instead of continuing a costly “arms race” of sports spending on unrewarding ventures, why not decide to build an educational department that can stand out in the state and the nation?

It seems unfair to waste tuition and alumni money on projects that don’t give us our money back, when we could have said, “Let’s have the best political science/biology/theater/whatever department in the state”. As far as I know, MSU has nothing worth bragging about like SLU’s nursing program or Mizzou’s Journalism school. And that’s because we’ve kept focusing our attention on something that Dr. Chomsky would call “training in irrational jingoism.” We can read that as “defending bad ideas against all odds.” That’s certainly the motto of resource-sucking institutions like organized sports.

Today, we’re keeping that bonfire burning, same as it was decades ago. This time, we’re just throwing our tuition money on it.