Sports writer - Grant writer

Category: Columns (Page 3 of 4)

The Opportunity of Football

Every Sunday in the 1990s, my father dragged my sister and I to tiny St. James Church in Irondequoit, NY. His mass of choice was the 7:30am service, where Father Bradler didn’t waste time. He gave a two minute homily and the music was provided by a 1950s record of Latin hymns music that he would rip the needle off mid-song when he was ready to move on.

After church, my father, sister and I would drive over to the East Ave. Wegmans and grab apple fritters and a copy of the Sunday Democrat and Chronicle. Dad and I would get home, split up the sports section to read about the Buffalo Bills and eat our fritters.

My father is a very cerebral, Libertarian-leaning and artistic man (when I was a toddler, he was in bands and was a music and science fiction writer), and the older I got, the more I realized that our Sunday morning routine almost ran counter to his core beliefs. He never expressed a solid faith in the Catholic Church, and he often lamented that athletics got more attention than the arts. But he wanted my sister and I to learn everything we could about the NFL and he encouraged us to become alter servers.

One Sunday at the kitchen table eating our fritters, I called him out on it. “Dad, why do we do all of this? Why do you encourage us to watch football and go to church?”

He didn’t miss a beat, which was odd for a man who is known for thoughtful pauses before speaking. “Because we’re poor,” he said. “We can’t relate to the middle or upper class people you go to school with or I work for on much. But we all have to go to church. We all can watch football. No one has to know if we’re struggling if we’re talking about the Bills. It becomes a level playing field for us. It gives us something we can talk to everyone about.”

My father was right. Football provides a lot of us who grew up without money or connections opportunity to even the playing field. My love of football led me to want to become a sports writer, which spurred on my desire to be the first in my family to attend college. (Prior to my sports writer dreams, I wanted to own a dance studio or daycare. College wasn’t in my plan.) My cousins’ abilities to play football led them to college as well. NCAA football, no matter how corrupt and problematic, has allowed thousands of men to earn a college degree they may not have otherwise. The opportunities that this one sport has provided are many.

But like my father’s faith in the Catholic Church, my faith in high level football is now fraying. It reminds me of the first time I questioned my love of football, which was in the as a freshman sports communication major at Ithaca College in the autumn of 2000. The Rae Carruth incident, where the Carolina Panthers’ WR conspired to murder a woman pregnant with his child, combined the first season of the crude and rude XFL, turned me off of football for two years. To idealistic, questioning-authority 18 year old me, it seemed like professional football was glorifying society’s problems instead of using their money and power to fix them.

I eventually came back to football. I loved the game too much, and chose to focus on the positive stories and the unification and spirit the sport gives my home region. It’s hard to turn your back on the one thing that keeps Western New York in the minds of an America that wants to forget it exists.

I’ve kept holding onto that this past week. The cultural definition that the NFL provides Western New York has never been more evident as it has since last Tuesday, when Terry Pegula won the bidding process to own the Bills. Grown men called into sports radio across the region crying tears of joy at the news that the Bills wouldn’t be shuffling off across the lake to Toronto or across the nation to Los Angeles. But this all took place as the rest of the NFL was shown to be enablers of domestic violence and abuse via their inaction and eventual lackluster reaction to the Ray Rice, Ray McDonald, Greg Hardy and Adrian Peterson situations.

I must balance the positivity of the Bills’ story with the fact that the Ray Rice situation – particularly the public discussion of the victim’s thought processes – brought up some of my own past struggles that I thought I had been able to put aside. Particularly, that there are women and men in the world that think that domestic violence and its affiliated pieces – harassment, stalking, etc. – is something that should be handled within the home or the family, and that it’s not anyone else’s place to intervene. Without outing myself, I wrote a brief overview of what it’s like to be a victim and shared it with a few folks I saw questioning Ray Rice’s wife on Twitter. I’m ready to out that that was written from a first-hand knowledge of being a victim of harassment and stalking by someone I thought had my best interests at heart. And as someone who let her circumstance be handled without going to authorities (I was asked to keep it “within the family” as to not to hurt the young man’s future), I have to step out and say that that out-of-date, Old World mentality of that needs to stop. Unless we begin to treat domestic violence, harassment, stalking and abuse like the violence that it is, and stop shielding the abusers from their consequences, this circle will never end.

The NFL isn’t alone in mishandling violent incidents with their players. America has as a whole. As a country, we aren’t sure what to do with domestic violence. We sure can talk a big game about how wrong it is, but we let it happen with limited consequences to the abusers and little help to the abused. We continue to employ people with domestic violence arrests because the victim dropped the charges, but we will sure as heck not employ you if you were stopped once for DUI at a sobriety checkpoint or have bad credit. Why is it ambiguous that hurting someone you supposedly love or care for is unacceptable? Why is it that when a crime has the word domestic as a modifier it suddenly has its consequences open to interpretation?

Football has given opportunity to so many – myself, my cousins, a region and many others. The NFL could provide another host of opportunities this week by how they handle these circumstances of violence. By acting strongly with consequences for the abusers and those within their front office who turned a blind eye, they could present the abused with the knowledge that a powerful entity is finally in their corner, even if they are too deep into the cycle to realize why that’s a positive. What an opportunity the NFL could deliver.

The Upstate New York Update for Day 1 of the Senior Men at the US Gymnastics Championships

Men's Competition at the 2014 P&G Gymnastics Championships.

PITTSBURGH – With a newfound zeal for his gymnastics career, Paul Ruggeri had a solid first day of senior men’s competition at the 2014 U.S. Gymnastics Championships Friday.

The Manlius, N.Y. native finished 9th all-around among a strong field, taking a 87.050 score into Sunday afternoon’s final round of competition. His 15.35 on vault Friday night was followed by an unfortunate turn on parallel bars, where he fell near the end but still salvaged a 13.3 score. Three beautiful release moves and near perfect handstands earned Ruggeri a 15.7 on high bar. He closed his evening with a 12.85 on pommel horse, staying on the horse, which many of his competitors had not.

After hitting all five of his tumbling passes on floor exercise to earn a 15.6, Ruggeri clasped his hands in the direction of the judges, appearing very grateful that his first day of competition this year was going vastly different than last year’s opening round, where he struggled and finished in 15th place with just a 85.25.

Ruggeri’s positive attitude, influenced by a recent change in his training base to the U.S. Olympic Training Center, sparked his steady day. “Today I am happy to be doing gymnastics, and I enjoy this process,” said Ruggeri. “I am just in it for the ride. Whatever I get out of it, I get out of it. So I am enjoying myself.”

Penfield, N.Y.’s Eddie Penev had his ups and downs on day one, finishing 15th with a 84.1. He showed his typical mastery on floor exercise, making every tumbling pass look like a walk in the park. His closing whip triple full was especially airy, and his tumbling packed routine earned a well deserved 15.55 for the routine.

Pommel horse became his undoing, despite an increased training emphasis on the event. He muscled through most of the routine before losing his balance going into the handstand in his dismount. He earned only a 11.95 for the routine.

Though Penev is the first to say that he’ll “never be a rings person,” it was his rings performance that demonstrated a lot of grit and heart, earning a 13.85. He closed his evening with two solid vaults. His half-on, double full was awarded a 15.35. His second, a huge Yurchenko 2.5 with just a step to the right, was performed with the hopes that the second vault could be used to earn him a consideration for further international assignments.

The recent Stanford graduate knows exactly what he needs to do to make Sunday’s last day of competition the best it can be. “I need to trust my training,” said Penev. “I definitely got ahead of myself a few times, so I definitely have to improve on that.”

Why I’ll Miss The World Cup

watching soccer backstageFive panelists for a freshman Orientation presentation found themselves crowded around a smartphone in a compact wing of a stuffy auditorium. The mental health counselor, enrollment advisor, disability services specialist, assistant dean and technology coordinator weren’t reviewing notes or checking email.

They were watching soccer.

With Germany’s 1-0 win over Argentina on Sunday, the World Cup has come to a close, and one of the most united sports experiences I can remember concluded.

No, I wasn’t in Brazil. I was in Massachusetts the entire time. But for one of the first times in my sports fan life, most of the people in my life were all invested in the same event. We may not have all been cheering for the same team, but we were all concerned with the same event.

Unlike the Olympics, it was a lone sport we were focused on: soccer. Games weren’t tape delayed or live in the middle of the night. There was one sport to pay attention to, and not several to divide our time amongst. That lone sport was one that almost every single person has played – either in our yards, in gym class or in youth leagues. Soccer is a gateway sport, one of the easiest to learn in the earliest years of our youth. There’s no jumps or judging, and it’s not a sport that you might partake in only certain parts of the country.

Unlike the Super Bowl, we had concrete rooting interests: most of us were rooting for the United States because we reside here, and if we weren’t, we were rooting for the nation of our parents’, grandparents’ or great-grandparents’ birth. Sure, growing up in Western New York around a certain four 1990s Super Bowls, many of us shared a rooting interest in the Buffalo Bills, but then you always had those outliers who didn’t like football or had decided they liked the Dallas Cowboys just to be contrary (but then couldn’t tell you who Emmitt Smith was.)

We could all easily be fans of the World Cup, and so many were. My colleague stood there with his smart phone during the United States’s June 26th 1-0 loss to Germany, and we were all huddled around it in the auditorium wing, swapping out spots as each of us went on stage to give our presentations. These were colleagues I never see at hockey games, ones that had never seemed that concerned with the Super Bowl or World Series parties we had put on for students, ones that never spoke about sports at all. Nevertheless, we were all invested in the outcome of this game.

There were the contrary amongst us (the Dallas Cowboys fans of my earlier example, if you will,) but their tune was increasingly tone-deaf. Calling a sport boring when bars were filled with cheering, groaning and hand-wringing observers? Waving off soccer as the domain of the “rest of the world” when we’ve never been more connected as a planet thanks to shared economies and technology? Building columns and hours of radio based on your dislike of a sport never felt more out-of-touch.

The outliers did have one correct point: even with the World Cup’s mass popularity, soccer has a few miles to go before it gets a vast amount of media coverage and fandom in the United States. But the perfect storm of this World Cup – where watching and following games became a truly “social” social media experience, where kids out on summer break could easily watch a game on a channel most Americans have access to and then run outside and emulate what they saw – propelled that popularity forward significantly.

And what else propelled that forward? That being unified in the following of the World Cup was fun. Standing shoulder to shoulder, watching a smartphone with my colleagues and silently rooting on the United States was fun. Cutting out of work a few minutes early to watch a game at the local bar was fun. Cheering on the same team was fun. I, a part-time sports writer, could enjoy a sporting event alongside someone who rarely follows any sport. It was unifying and enjoyable.

It was what sports are supposed to be.

The Massachusetts Connection To Olympic Ladies Figure Skating, Edmunds’ Layback, & U.S. Predictions

Gracie Gold in her long program practice at the TD Garden on Jan. 10, 2014.

Here are my random notes on the Olympic ladies figure skating event, which begins Wednesday.

– You may have already heard it mentioned that American Gracie Gold was born in Newton, Massachusetts. In reality, she spent a relatively short time in the Boston area, and was raised in Missouri. However, there is a skater with stronger Massachusetts ties in the ladies event.

Elene Gedevanishvili will represent the nation of Georgia for a third Olympic Games. Gedevanishvili, who finished 29th in last season’s World Championships, has spent a significant amount of time training at the Colonial Figure Skating Club in Boxborough, Massachusetts with coach Konstantin Kostin.

Gedevanishvili moved to New England last year to reportedly to spend time with family, as she has a brother who is a competitive skier and attends school in Maine. However, her International Skating Union biography says she recently moved to Toronto to train under the eye of two-time Olympic silver medalist (and one of the most successful coaches of late) Brian Orser.

If you watched the 2006 Torino Games, you may remember Gedevanishvili because her tumultuous training and living situation was the subject of NBC attention. She had been training in Russia, but her mother was deported back to Georgia, so young Elene moved to Canada on her own. She has trained in the United States or Canada for most of the years since. She has been up and down in competitions throughout the years, but continues to soldier on.

Although Gedevanishvili had earned an Olympic spot at the Sochi Games via September’s Nebelhorn Trophy, it was questionable for a bit if either herself or any other Georgian athletes would compete. Russia and Georgia have not been on the best terms, with the two being at war with one another in 2008. According to ESPN, the flight that brought the majority of Georgian athletes to Sochi was just the second flight from the Georgian capital of Tbilisi to Sochi since the war.

Gedevanishvili will skate 16th in Wednesday’s short program, at approximately 12:15pm Eastern time.

– I am interested in seeing an international judging panels take on Polina Edmunds’ short program layback spin. Those who have followed skating a while know that Dick Button would not approve of it, but that is not exactly the issue. If you watch her short program from US Nationals, I am not sure she holds the middle position eight times before switching into the Biellman position. A skater has to hold each position for eight rotations. I am most likely wrong, because the judging panel did not deduct on the element and awarded it a Level 4, but it might be interesting to watch what a senior international judging panel might do in regards to it. But that is just my opinion – I’ll just be interested to see her scores all around.

– I think this is the most wide open Olympic ladies competition in years. I usually am one to go out on a limb on Olympic predictions (my 10th grade English class can attest my Tara Lipinski prediction back in 1998), but I have no strong ones here. Gracie Gold is poised to be the leading American lady, and I could see her finish fourth if she hits everything she is capable of and others falter. Ashley Wagner will be in the top eight, and Edmunds is a dark horse – she skates so early in the short program that even if she completes all of the difficulty she is able to, I don’t know if it will hold up over the groups of skaters who come after her.

I do hope that somehow, one of the American ladies wins a medal. It would be a much needed boost of caffeine to a sport that desperately needs it in this country.

The Last Month

When a colleague asks how you’re remaining so calm after losing your engagement ring, and you respond, “Because it’s not the worst thing that has happened in the last 24 hours,” you know it’s been a bad stretch.

The month of January has left me defeated. My Grandmother passed away days after my 32nd birthday, after I believed I’d have at least a few more months with her. I struggled with my most important relationship. I lost my engagement ring in the snow outside of Ristuccia Arena while trying to get cell service to post a score update during a BC High-St. John’s Prep hockey game. I lost one of my favorite writing jobs because of my own gosh-darn stupidity and belief I can do everything in the world in a mere 24 hours a day. I completely bombed an interview for a writing job that could have changed my life. I pulled all-nighters. I typed so much my fingers hurt. At my full-time job, I had many people question my decision-making and planning abilities, and people who said they would help with events never following through and then blaming me for their lack of success.

And on top of that, I continue to see people who I believe I have just as much talent as passing me by in the sports media realm.

I was tired, discouraged and had many times where I wanted to just stare into space and let woe overcome me. Sitting in my loveseat cradling a bag of generic Chex Mix and tons of beer looked like the most viable option.

But there was also great points that never would have happened if I let myself wallow. I covered the US Figure Skating Championships, something I’ve wanted to do since I was a VHS tape collecting, Blades On Ice subscribing, jump memorizing teenager. I met journalists I had always looked up to, and was able to prove to them that yes, this random girl who appeared in the mixed zone out of nowhere actually knew about figure skating. I had headlines on the back page and entire spreads in the Boston Herald. I had papers contacting me from all over to freelance when they found out I was at Nationals.

I problem solved in all lines of my jobs. A U.S. Senator came to an event I planned (don’t ask how that came about, because I’m not even sure.) I eulogized my Grandmother and didn’t sound like a bumbling idiot. I somehow kept my apartment clean. I stole an hour away here and there to hang out with two friends who have been so giving with their time and ears. And just yesterday, I snagged the Holy Grail of cell phone numbers of a most elusive interview subject and got him on the phone to talk for 25 minutes.

January was awful, but in another way, it wasn’t. It proved to me that I’m resilient. It proved to me that I have some big decisions to make, and I can’t keep putting them off. It gave me a chance to make peace with the fact that this might be as far as I get in sports writing. I realized I need to be a better friend. It taught me to stick up for myself, but to admit when I’ve made mistakes.

January could have been a lot worse.

 

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