Story Deepens on Texas Football Players Who Hit Ref

This one has taken a strange twist. Shortly after punishment was announced for the two Texas High Schoolers shown in the shocking video below, one or both of them told the authorities that they had been told to hit the ref by a coach!

Texas coach accused of ordering players to hit referee resigns

Mack Breed, the assistant football coach from John Jay High School in San Antonio, Texas, who is accused of directing two players to target a referee during a game, has resigned, Northside Independent School District Superintendent Brian Woods said Thursday.

Head football coach Gary Gutierrez spoke during the University Interscholastic League hearing, both defending Breed and deriding his “poor judgment call.”

“I love coach Breed. He was on staff already when I became head coach. He is an upstanding man, he is a man of integrity,” Gutierrez said, but “he violated the sanctity of what coaches are” by telling the players to hit a game official.

Breed joined the coaching staff in 2010. He played quarterback at John Jay before attending theUniversity of Missouri, where he played safety. On Thursday, Breed’s lawyer issued the coach’s first public statement on the incident, saying “some people are unfairly blaming one man, Mack Breed, for everything that happened at that game.”

According to Breed’s version of events, after a black John Jay wide receiver was ejected from the game, another black player told Breed that umpire Robert Watts had said to the player, “Throw the f***ing ball at me again, n****r.”

Watts, through his attorneys, has repeatedly denied uttering racial slurs toward the players, says he is considering lawsuits and is urging criminal prosecutions of the assistant coach and the two players.

“As a black male, nothing offended Mack Breed more than being called a racial epithet, except someone in a position of authority calling his players racial epithets. The slur was heard by multiple players, some of whom were not involved in the hit,” Breed’s statement said.

The player that reported hearing the slur was later tossed from the game for throwing a punch even though, according to the statement, a white player on the opposing team had allegedly punched the wide receiver multiple times and avoided ejection.

Describing the atmosphere on the John Jay sideline as “a powder keg,” Breed said that another John Jay coach was penalized for yelling at the officials about the alleged racist comments. Gutierrez also notified the officials about the slurs, according to Breed, but was told the officials wouldn’t use such language.

“Succumbing to the racially charged atmosphere, Coach Breed let his anger get the best of him and he made some regrettable comments. Witnesses can’t agree on what the comments were, but they were interpreted by two players to mean ‘hit the referee.’ The witnesses agree that Breed never explicitly told them to hit the referee, except for Michael Moreno, whose story continues to evolve,” the statement said, referring to one of the two players in question.

Singling out the teen, Breed said “Moreno paints himself as a saint on television” when he was actually “out of control” during the game. Not only did Moreno allegedly allow another player to be ejected for Moreno’s hit on Watts, he flagrantly hit a kneeling quarterback — a no-no in football — on the next play, according to the coach.

“His behavior is exactly what one would expect from a rogue player blaming a coach for the player’s actions,” Breed’s statement said.

Breed concluded his statement by saying he “feels that he could have handled the situation better. For that reason, Mack has submitted his resignation and will move forward taking responsibility for his role in the events that occurred. Mack never intended for the kids to hit or hurt the referee, but the result was the same.”

Jay Downs, an attorney for Watts, took the stand, reiterating another Watts attorney’s assertion that the allegations of racism are false. Watts, who has provided a statement to law enforcement, is suffering from post-concussion syndrome and didn’t attend the hearing, the attorney said. Doctors have yet to clear him to return to refereeing.

News of Breed’s resignation came a day after the players, who intentionally hit an official during a game this month and were suspended from school, attended a disciplinary hearing.

Pascual Gonzalez, a spokesman for the Northside Independent School District in San Antonio, said that because Moreno and Victor Rojas are minors, no information about the hearing would be released.

This 1955…or 2015? This racial name calling went on in sports until the late 60’s, when it pretty much ceased due to pressure by the fans, coaches, and leagues who decided not to tolerate it anymore. The only response in the 50’s and early 60’s was to walk away. The coach – in exposing the two boys to punishments is wrong.

 

Jeremy Lin – Race Matters

Growing up in the 60’s I was pretty comfortable in my ignorance about Asian people. They were short, small folks weren’t they? During segregation black folks didn’t much socialize with Asians, as the few Asian kids that were here went to the white schools. That comfortable ignorance was shattered my freshman year of college when I went to the Penn Relays and a friend introduced me to a 7′ tall Chinese High Jumper, who educated this poor brainless twit to the fact that Asia is huge, and peopled by a lot of different folks…

With the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 eliminating racial quotas and restrictions on immigration (not to mention putting us all in the same schools in more enlightened parts of the country) – you would think folks would have learned a hell of a lot about each other by now.

I guess not in the last bastion of bigotry – Sports.

Jeremy Lin - The Kid's Got Game, Y'all

Opinion: Man to man defense

Last Friday, Jeremy Lin – the Knicks’ sensational out-of-nowhere superstar – finally sealed the deal.

Despite his record as one of the most exciting talents to come out of the Bay Area in years, leading Palo Alto High to a stunning 32-1 record in his senior prep year, he was recruited by none of the top basketball schools, finally opting to attend Harvard University after being offered a guaranteed spot on their team.

He subsequently dominated the Ivy League, and put up numbers in his senior year that should have gotten any NBA scout excited, becoming the only player in the NCAA’s Division 1 to rank in the top 10 in virtually every performance category.

And yet Lin went undrafted, finally accepting an offer of a deep backup slot on his hometown team, the Golden State Warriors – who gave him a handful of garbage minutes, shuffling him back and forth between the bench and the NBA’s development league, before finally releasing him in December.

The Houston Rockets, who’d lost center Yao Ming to retirement the previous season, briefly picked up Lin as a potential ploy to retain their substantial Asian fanbase, but dropped him a few weeks later – on Christmas Eve.

The Knicks, ravaged by injuries to all their big-name, big-ticket stars and reeling in the standings, picked him up to ensure they could field a full team on the floor. In the past week, Lin has led New York to a string of victories with a set of incredible individual and team performances.

And last Friday, after dropping 38 points on an elite Los Angeles Lakers squad, he convinced his remaining critics and doubters that they’d been wrong all along.

Most of them.

Minutes after Lin’s amazing game, with the streets of midtown still in the throes of LINsanity, Fox Sports News personality Jason Whitlock issued a flip, ostensibly satirical tweet that probably can not be reprinted in full here. Suffice it to say that it suggested that Lin would be celebrating his victory by entertaining “some lucky lady,” while also reiterating an ugly and cliché stereotype about Asian anatomy.

Why Jeremy Lin’s race matters

After heavy pressure from a range of sources, particularly the Asian American Journalists Association, on Sunday, Whitlock apologized for the joke, calling his remark “immature [and] sophomoric” and one that “debased a feel-good sports moment.”

While many people, including, apparently, Fox Sports News’s leadership, have been willing to let things go based on this act of contrition, I think Whitlock dodged addressing the larger cultural context behind his statement.

I think that’s unfortunate, especially in light of a few other recent in-the-news events.

The first is another offhand tweet by a television personality. Roland Martin, a commentator for the news channel behind this blog, CNN.

Just a week before Whitlock’s unfortunate gibe, as the Giants were headed for a shocking Super Bowl victory over the Patriots, Martin blurted a response to H&M’s sexy underwear commercial featuring David Beckham – suggesting to his followers that any men expressing enthusiasm for the ad should be slapped upside the head. The remark drew a firestorm of backlash from LGBT activists, who interpreted it as an anti-gay statement. Martin was subsequently suspended “indefinitely” from CNN appearances.

There is a connection between the two incidents, and it’s not just that they both related to prominent news figures caught out on social media. Both Whitlock and Martin are African-American men. And both were speaking from a position that illustrates a particular entrenched attitude among men of color about masculinity.

This isn’t the place to go deep into the record of how sexuality, gender and race have intersected in black, Latino and Asian American history, with tragic and sometimes horrific results. Suffice it to say that as a consequence of that history, within each of these communities, manhood – its definition, its expression and yes, the defense of it against those who would question it – plays an outsized role.

Whitlock’s joke said more about his own male insecurities, reinforced by mainstream culture’s stereotypes about black men, than it did about Lin’s anatomy.

And Martin’s joke was ultimately less of an attack on homosexuality than it was a rejection of “sissyhood”: Beckham has long been held up as an exemplar of the “metrosexual male” – the sensitive, fashion-forward guy who, gay or straight, presents an image that runs counter to the rugged and bellicose sensibility of organized team sports, particularly football.

As NFL cornerback turned sportswriter Alan Grant noted in an essay some years back for ESPN.com, “the athletic world – that realm of all things male, musky and aggressive – is the final frontier of masculinity,” which is why it’s so frequently a cesspool for, as he put it, “crude, old-fashioned, sophomoric statements about sexuality.” Like Whitlock’s. And Martin’s.

Whether they intended to or not – and even if they’re oblivious to the fact – with their comments, Whitlock and Martin injected themselves into a much larger conversation of what it means to be a “real man” in an era where manhood is constantly perceived to be “under attack.”

But maybe the particular male archetype that Whitlock, Martin and many others have held up as a benchmark is one that deserves to be under attack.

It celebrates physical parameters that few men can reach – certainly not Whitlock or Martin, or me, for that matter: Big, burly, massively muscled, inhumanly endowed. It reinforces the notion that manhood is best expressed through violence – giving women “pain,” per Whitlock, or “slapping the ish” out of someone, per Martin.

It is, quite frequently, accompanied by words and actions that are deeply misogynist or nastily homophobic, or both.

It presents manhood as the fruit of harsh treatment and abuse – as exemplified by the viral video of the so-called “Eagle Dad,” Chinese businessman He Liesheng, forcing his four-year-old son to run around Central Park in the snow in his underwear to make him more manly: “When the old eagle teaches its young, it takes the young eagles to the cliffside, beats them, and pushes them to teach them to use their wings,” explained He.

One of the things that’s most incredible about the Jeremy Lin phenomenon isn’t just that he’s had so much success, but that he’s done so without relying on or embracing the tenets of raw, rugged, roughneck notions of manhood…

 

Herman Cain 999 Plan…Stolen from SIM City Game? SimAmerica…Indeed.

How stupid are conservatives, again?

It’s pretty damn bad when your “signature” proposal to cure what ails the country…

Is stolen from a Video Game!

What next? The Army dressed up in Marvel Comics Superhero costumes?

Screen Shot of a Sim City Game

Herman Cain 999 Plan: Did It Come From SimCity?

In Herman Cain’s America, the tax code would be very, very simple: The corporate income tax rate would be 9 percent, the personal income tax rate would be 9 percent and the national sales tax rate would be 9 percent.

But there’s already a 999 plan out there, in a land called SimCity.

Long before Cain was running for president and getting attention for his 999 plan, the residents of SimCity 4 — which was released in 2003 — were living under a system where the default tax rate was 9 percent for commercial taxes, 9 percent for industrial taxes and 9 percent for residential taxes. (That is, of course, if you didn’t use the cheat codes to get unlimited money and avoid taxes altogether.)

There has been all sorts of speculation about where Cain came up with the idea for his catchy plan — Unnamed economic advisers? A clever marketing promotion pulled from the pizza industry? — but beyond a few hardcore gamers in the comments sections of blogs, few have looked to SimCity, the land where there’s a “God mode.”

Kip Katsarelis, a senior producer for Maxis, the company that created the SimCity series, was excited that politicians may be looking to video games for ideas.

“We encourage politicians to continue to look to innovative games like SimCity for inspiration for social and economic change,” said Katsarelis. “While we at Maxis and Electronic Arts do not endorse any political candidates or their platforms, it’s interesting to see GOP candidate Herman Cain propose a simplified tax system like one we designed for the video game SimCity 4.”

Adopting such a simple tax structure, Katsarelis said, would allow fantasy political leaders to focus their energy on infrastructure and national security. “Our game design team thought that an easy to understand taxation system would allow players to focus on building their cities and have fun thwarting giant lizard attacks, rather than be buried by overly complex financial systems.”

When asked about similarities between Cain’s plan and SimCity’s default tax rates, Cain campaign spokesman JD Gordon replied, “Well, we all like 9-9-9.”

Rich Lowrie, the Ohio Wells Fargo employee who is the brains behind Cain’s plan, did not return a request for comment regarding whether he is a fan of SimCity and looked to the game for inspiration.

One other thing of note about Mr. Cain today… Appears he’s sewn up the bigot vote! Although it’s unclear if that alone is enough to win the whole South anymore.

Haley Barbour Predicts Herman Cain Would ‘Sweep The South’ Against Obama

 

Superbowl XLV

Ok, the game is over, and congrats to the Packers!

This year was a good and exciting game worthy of the billing, with a great story line of the Packers overcoming the adversity of injury to a several key players.

Best commercial? This one in my view:

A little of that Detroit Steel attitude, indeed.

Probably the worst halftime I can ever recall. The “music” (at least the first part I listened to) wasn’t much different than being down at Ft. Bragg, listening to the soldiers in training calling out marching cadences. This one was about as piss poor as it gets.

Thank Goodness for the mute button… And the Halftime snacks.

Now, if only my home team Redskins can find a coach…