Category Archives: Sports

Fake Safety

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The wearing of helmets while cycling is a new thing. People started putting them on their kids in the safety scares of the 1990’s. Then they because a weird fashion statement for middle aged people. The pros started wearing them, so the amateurs started wearing helmets, for the same reason they wear jerseys. The fact that they look stupid and probably don’t work does not matter.

A leading neurosurgeon has controversially claimed that cyclists who wear helmets are wasting their time.

Henry Marsh, who works at St George’s Hospital in Tooting, London, said that many of his patients who have been involved in bike accidents have been wearing helmets that were ‘too flimsy’ to be beneficial.

He made the comments while speaking at the Hay Festival during a discussion with Ian McEwan, whose 2005 novel Saturday featured a neurosurgeon.

He cited evidence from the University of Bath that suggests that wearing a helmet may even put cyclists at greater risk. The research showed that drivers get around 3 inches closer to cyclists who wear helmets because they perceive them as safer.

He said: “I ride a bike and I never wear a helmet. In the countries where bike helmets are compulsory there has been no reduction in bike injuries whatsoever.

Of course not. Think about the ways you can crash on a bike. One is you just fall over to the side while not moving. Unless you strike your head on a curb or rock, you bruise an elbow and that’s it. Since this is less likely than falling down the stairs and we don’t wear helmets walking around the house, it makes no sense to wear a helmet on a bike to mitigate against this possibility.

Another way to crash is you hit something and go over the bars. That’s going to hurt, but you’re much more likely to break an arm or wrist than break your melon. That’s why broken arms and wrists are vastly more common than broken heads. More important, that flimsy piece of plastic is not saving your head if you take a direct hit.

The other possibility is you get hit by a car. A broken melon is the least of your worries in that case. The sudden deceleration is going to cause a lot more damage than just cracking your skull. of course, that bit of plastic and foam is not going to matter, other than to make it a bit easier to identify your body. That’s always been the real benefit of wearing a motorcycle helmet

“I see lots of people in bike accidents and these flimsy little helmets don’t help.”

Mr Marsh said that he had been riding his bike for 40 years, wearing a cowboy hat, and had only fallen off once.

“I have been cycling for 40 years and have only been knocked off once. I wear a cowboy hat and cowboy boots. I look completely mad.”

Cyclists travel around 3.1 billion miles each year in Britain. Lights and reflectors are a legal obligation after dark, and reflective jackets an increasingly common sight.

But helmets are not compulsory in the UK, unlike in Australia and parts of the US, yet the government encourages cyclists to wear one.

Research conducted by Dr Ian Walker, a professor of traffic psychology at the University of Bath, showed that motorists drove around 8cm closer when overtaking cyclists with helmets.

He suggested that drivers think helmeted cyclists are more sensible, predicable and experienced, so therefore the driver doesn’t need to give them much space when overtaking.

Non-helmeted cyclists, especially non helmeted “women” are less predictable and experienced, according to this study and so motorists give them more room.

That’s something experienced cyclist know. The safest way to ride on public roads is in the middle oft he road with traffic. The drivers will see you and not try to pass you at a high rate of speed. They will also see that you can’t see them. They may get pissed and blow the horn, but they are unlikely to drive over you.

Two Billion?

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This report from the Los Angeles Times is being waved around by the usual suspects like they just learned they hit the lottery. It is a bit puzzling, given that Sterling just pocketed billions from the deal. It may simply be that they hate him so much that he is no longer a real person, but a symbol for them. Getting $2 Billion for an asset you bought for $12.5 Million does not sound like harm to most people. If he had plopped that money into the stock market, he’d have about $100 million right now.

This is not about money. This is about black identity politics. The NBA is the black America pastime. Whites watch basketball, but nothing like blacks. All the players are black, most of the coaches are black, the reporters are black and the front offices and agents are mostly Jewish, but that is changing. Hip-hop stars are getting into the agent business for that reason. The AAU runners and street agents are all black. Basketball in America is pretty much all black with a small number of Jews.

The banishment of Sterling is about black pride more than anything else. The fact that blacks can force a billionaire “white” guy out of the league puts an exclamation point on what they have been saying for years. It’s their league and they set the rules. The gloating over the amount is that it confirms the league is a highly valuable property, like the white sports. The Dodgers just sold for $2 Billion and now we have a second tier NBA franchise fetching the same money.

Of course, idiocy is always a good starting point. Basketball teams are not as valuable as football and baseball teams. There are a number of reasons for it, but the big reason is the league is so poorly run. Maybe that’s fixable. On the other hand, a sport narrowly focused on 13% of the population has a clear ceiling. On the other other hand, business continue to chase the homosexual trade, despite that being 2% of the market. Anyone who says people are rational is not paying attention.

National Bigot Association

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In post-reality America, this will be the dominant story of 2014. Even the coming election will not get the same level of coverage. In fairness to the press, it probably should be the dominant story. After all, this will be the first time a billionaire member of The Tribe will be stripped bare in public. All of our rich and tall black people are upset with him. Magic Johnson, a very rich and tall black person, is angry. LeeBong James, currently the most famous tall black guy in America, wants Sterling banished. The comically illiterate Stephen A. Smith wants the tall wealthy black employees of Sterling to boycott their next game. It’s a Mandingo revolt!

All joking aside, it says something about the state of the nation when the ramblings of a cuckolded old weirdo, apparently in some sort of spat with his paramour, makes national news. As I’m fond of saying, race is all about piety with the Left. It is how they get to tell one another how much they hate America and how much they really hate white people. Hotbeds of racial piety like New England practically glow in the dark they are so white, while allegedly backward places like Georgia have large and growing black populations. On the Left, they talk like MLK and live like the KKK.

There’s another piece to this. How in the world did TMZ get this? Obviously, Sterling did not send this to TMZ. California is an all-party consent state. In order to record a telephone conversation all parties must agree. Without consent, the recording is illegally retained and TMZ is aiding and abetting a criminal act. In a sane and rational society, the authorities will have arrested the reporter and his editor at this point. They have confessed to taking possession of an illegally obtained recording.

It seems to me that one of the reforms that will come downstream is tougher laws regarding communications and privacy. Sterling may be an old bigot, but he has a right to privacy. He made these statements with an expectation that they would remain between him and this woman. In a nation of laws, she and the TMZ people would be cooling their heels in the can right now. They would also be liable for all damages resulting from the public revelations.

The other very strange thing is why in the world would someone with such disdain for blacks buy a basketball team? Basketball has been the game of black people for fifty years now. When Sterling bought the team, he had to know he was going to spend a lot of time around black people. His team president was black for many years. I get the sense that Sterling is a very weird man. Being a billionaire lets him get away with being weird to a point and we may reached that point.

Another entertaining aspect of this is how The Left immediately moved to show he must be a “Republican” and a “Conservative.” It’s like how so-called conservatives claim Democrats ruined cities like Detroit. Just as no one is allowed to notice that blacks commit a lot of crime, no one is allowed to notice that all the NBA owners are Jewish, while all of the players are black. The NBA is the future our masters imagine is plausible on planet earth.

Christian Pagans

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This is one of those stories that was probably written in general form when every player is drafted into the NFL. Maybe they just have a template for it that has blanks for the names and places. It’s not that players are rapists, but that they are foolish and get involved with diggers and crazy women. That’s why non should be surprised by this development.

TMZ Sports has obtained a police report filed after the alleged incident … in which the accuser claims the alleged incident took place at a residence at the Viceroy Hotel on April 1.

According to the report, issued by the Miami PD, the woman claims she went to the apartment of Seattle Seahawks wide receiver Ricardo Lockette … to hang out with him, Kaepernick and 49ers wide receiver Quinton Patton.

The woman told police, around 9pm that night she mixed some drinks for the guys and gave them shots, but they told her that “in order to drink the shots she had to ‘hit’ the bong which contained marijuana.”

The woman says she felt lightheaded and went to the bedroom to lie down.  She claims Kaepernick “came up behind her into the bedroom and started kissing her.” “She advised they were kissing (mouth) and Mr Kaepernick started to undressed [sic] her. She got completely naked.  Mr. Kaepernick told her that he was going to be right back and left the bedroom. They did not have sex.”

The woman told cops that while she was still naked in bed, Patton and Lockette opened the door and “peeked” inside.  She says she told them to get out … but she can’t remember anything after that.

The woman later woke up in a hospital bed … but says she doesn’t remember how she got there or who took her there.

The woman also claims she has had a sexual relationship with Kaepernick in the past.

Kaepernick is the hero of every moonbat sports reporter. Just as Obama was the synthesis of their perfect president, Kaepernick is the embodiment of their perfect man of the future. He is mixed race, which is critical. In the future, everyone will look like extras from The Matrix. He is media savvy. He embraces ghetto culture, without actually going to prison. He practices a weird Unitarian sort of Christianity that does not upset the gays or women with all the morality stuff. He is the New Model American.

He also likes to do bong hits and have gang bangs with strange women. But hey, God is on his side. It says it right on his torso! That’s the thing about people calling themselves Christian these days. It is a bespoke religion that they concoct on their own by cherry picking some passages from the Bible. They are the Pope, the theologian and the parish of their own religion. Instead of being a high standard against which they are measured, it is an excuse for all of their vices.

That’s something you see with many Evangelicals. It starts and ends with the individual’s “relationship with God.” That “relationship” is peculiar to each person and comes only with the rules the person and God, we’re supposed to assume, have agreed upon. At anytime, the faithful can get a clean slate by “accepting Jesus” and everything is forgiven. This allowed Mike Huckabee to swing open the prison doors and let a lot of bad people walk free. After all, they accepted Jesus so who was he to judge?

This novel form of Christianity imagines God to be something much more primitive than the high churches of the West imagined. The foundation of the Christian faith is the covenant. It is a deal between God and all men. Unlike the Jews, Christians think all people can be God’s chosen people. A covenant is a contract, a bargain. God will do his part, like make sure 2+2 = 4 forever and man must do his part. The reward for man is ever lasting life. That’s the basics of the contract.

The new form of Christianity assumes the bargain is struck, when the adherent decides it is time to make a deal. Not only is their deal with a God a custom deal made just for them, but the God with whom they make the deal is a custom God as well. They get to play both sides of the bargain. There’s is a pagan relationship with God, in the same way a Saxon would strike a deal with Wodan. It’s entirely personal to the point where even God is a personal god.

Liberal Sports Fantasies

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The old gag about newspapers went something like this. The Wall Street Journal is read by the people who run the country. The Washington Post is read by people who think they run the country. The New York Times is read by people who think they should run the country. The Boston Globe is read by people whose parents used to run the country and they did a far superior job of it.

That used to be true, but not anymore. The great consolidation of the media means they are all just branch offices for the ministry of official dogma. Even the so-called conservatives of the Wall Street Journal agree with the NYTimes on all of the big issues of this age. Their differences are only in style and tone. The Journal has old Jewish guys running the new side, while the Times  has childless Jewish women. The editorial pages are the two faces of the ruling class.

The Boston Globe may have been a big deal to the former rulers, but now it is sort of a low budget, off-Broadway act. It’s like a child actor who has never come to terms with the fact he peaked at ten years old. They have all the pretentiousness you find at the Times or Journal, but none of the talent. Anyway, this is an editorial from today regarding the Connecticut basketball team.

Well before UConn began its magical march to the national men’s basketball championship, it led the 64-team tournament in a far less exalted category: lowest graduation rate. At 8 percent, UConn’s six-year graduation rate for its men’s basketball team is, frankly, a disgrace that can’t remotely be offset by the glories of Monday night’s victory. Second-year coach Kevin Ollie, who wasn’t in charge when the players started dropping classes like errant passes, wisely proclaimed that academics comes first, and touted the classroom success of this year’s team. He needs to keep working toward that goal, year in and year out, and seek to build a legacy similar to that of Duke coach Mike Krzyzewski, whose four national championships over 34 years is less impressive than the fact that 98 percent of his players have gotten degrees.

Two things that jump out to me right away. Duke is an obvious exception, as the demographics of their program are nothing like the typical basketball program. If you are an above average IQ prep basketball player, that’s your Harvard.  The very small fraction of basketball players who have the cultural and intellectual ability to make it at Duke is exceptionally small. Boston College has a similar graduation rate and their program is awful. The supply of smart basketball players is tiny.

The other thing that stands out is the obliviousness. The upper middle-class whites who run the Globe casually assume everyone heads off to college for the credentials and self-actualization. A bachelors in Medieval Folklore from Tufts is just as useful as a Journalism degree from Northwestern. For 90% of the kids getting basketball scholarships at major programs, the degree is meaningless. They are there to be trained for professional basketball, in America or overseas.

That’s an example of what makes radicalism such a potent religion. No amount of facts and evidence can shake the fantasy. The answer to every bit of dis-confirmation is either a bogeyman or a new plan to bring about the utopian future. Here we have John Calipari, the gold standard of college basketball coaches, calling for the players to become employees. One would think this would cause the folks at the Globe to re-examine their views on college athletics, but here they are.

 The problem with academics in intercollegiate sports is deeper than any one program. It’s a structural dynamic that’s easy to see: Craving the best athletes for the sports that drive alumni interest and fundraising, universities stretch their admissions standards to accept players who would have a hard time handling their classwork in the best of circumstances. But athletes face an array of challenges that other students don’t: a punishing practice schedule that chews up dozens of hours a week; a mixed set of incentives, since they get their scholarships based on performance in sports, not academics; and an exalted status on campus that puts them beyond some of the normal checks and balances that keep other students focused on classes.

The National Collegiate Athletic Association bears a lot of the blame for letting sports overtake academics for far too many players. Lately, it’s tried to show some teeth by banning schools, including UConn last year, from championship play if their graduation rates are chronically low. But it’s an imperfect punishment. While universities deserve blame for low graduation rates, their current players — who aren’t responsible for the failures of their predecessors — do not. It’s tough to deprive them of a once-in-a-lifetime experience.

Over the years, the person best positioned to manage the conflicting pressures on the players has been the coach. If coaches make academics a priority, their players are far more likely to earn degrees. Some coaches, like Krzyzewski, are well known for showing care and concern for their players’ classroom performance. Others, like Ollie’s UConn predecessor, longtime coach Jim Calhoun, carry the opposite reputation. So, Ollie has his work cut out for him. At 41, he’s already lived up to Calhoun’s basketball legacy. It will take a lot of effort for him, and UConn, to live down Calhoun’s record of letting team members falter as students. He need only look down the hall of UConn’s athletic department for inspiration: The UConn women’s basketball team also brought home a national championship this year — with a 92 percent graduation rate.

The comparison to women’s basketball is hilarious. The women, who are not lesbians, have no expectations about playing professionally. They can, but they will be more interested in finding a husband and getting on with what biology requires. The lesbians, who make up a high percentage of players (and an outlandish percentage of fans) are not looking for a man, but their earning potential is very limited. Therefore, basketball is a means to an end, not an end in itself.

That’s not so say there’s nothing wrong with collegiate athletics. Basketball is a sewer of corruption. The fact that 60% of NBA players file for bankruptcy within five years of retirement is no surprise. From middle school through the professional ranks, the sport is dominated by people who make boxing promoters look honest. Letting these people run their businesses on college campuses is highly questionable. But, admitting to any of that would open the door to a whole lot of questions no one wants to ask.

Nonsense On Stilts

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Steve Sailer is a brilliant guy and one of the most insightful people going, but every once in a while he says something that is a bit nuts. That’s bound to happen when you spend all day every day commenting about the current scene. Blogging is about off the cuff commentary on a range of subjects. You’re going to get some stuff wrong. Some of that will be comically wrong. Here’s an example:

Michael Vick, who has long been the ultimate in NFL black athlete quarterbacks — an incredibly fast runner with a strong arm — has gotten another $5 million contract to play back up for the NY Jets, a half decade after he served 18 months in prison for running a dog fighting ring on his property.
I’ve always thought Vick was a sort of symbolic sacrificial victim for white America’s discomfort with its black athletic heroes. In Vick’s rather backward Southern rural culture, dogfighting was considered sporting and glamorous, just as bullfighting in Spain seemed sporting and glamorous to Hemingway 90 years ago. So Vick saw himself not as some evil person, but as a sportsman take a sporting interest in the sport of dogfighting.
Newport News is not rural. It is a small city, for sure, but it is almost as densely populated as San Diego and no one in their right mind would say that’s rural. It’s not Chicago or New York City, but it is not Mayberry either. The best comparison is the Ninth Ward of New Orleans. Further, dog fighting has never been popular in the South and it sure as hell has not been on the same cultural level as bull fighting in Spain.
Like a lot of people with no experience of the American South, Sailer seems to be relying upon what he sees on television and movies. Like many his age, television and movies loom large in his understanding of the world. It is an odd thing about Baby Boomers. Despite all that we have seen, they remain, in general, trusting of what is beamed to them thought their televisions.
The real reasons whites have for resenting black football players all sound like racist stereotypes — their lack of preparation for being college students, their high rates of sexual assault on white coeds, their tendency to beat up nerds, their unfortunate rates of sticky fingers around other students’ electronic entertainment devices, and so forth — so those are largely unmentionable in polite society. For whites to get furiously mad at a black jock over dogfighting, however, doesn’t sound racist, so a lot of white anger at black athletes in general was focused upon Vick.
A better answer, one based on something closer to observable reality, is that Americans really love their pets. Everyone can identify with a pet. The idea of Fluffy being torn to pieces by another animal is horrifying. The image of someone drowning Fluffy or torturing Fluffy sends chills down the spines of the typical American. It’s true that black sportscasters rallied to Vick out of racial solidarity. It is also true that most everyone quickly forgave Vick once he served his time and was appropriately contrite.
Otherwise, Sailer is all wrong on this one.

The NBA’s Cuban Problem

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Mark Cuban is probably America’s most famous lottery winner. At the start of the tech boom, he made a million dollars selling software. He used some of that money to start a company that broadcast sports events over the Internet. The company had a lot of success and was generating $13 million in revenue. The main reason was it could shift the cost to others, but he deserves credit for seeing a market and finding a way to profitably meeting it. Broadcast.com was a great idea.

That’s when he hit the lottery. Yahoo, drunk with dotcom cash, paid Cuban $6 billion for his company. The company turned out to be worthless to Yahoo. Within a couple of years a slew of others started broadcasting radio over the Internet and licensing issues made the concept unworkable. For his part, Cuban used his billions to buy a basketball team and make a fool of himself on TV. There’s nothing wrong with it as he is not harming anyone, but it is why he is America’s most famous lottery winner.

Like a movie star impressed with his own clippings, Cuban no longer understands this fact about himself. He really thinks he is a genius. He was clever, but he was mostly lucky, but the does not see it that way. As a result, he likes to go on TV and show the world he is a genius, which usually results in him saying ridiculous things that often get him in trouble. Recently, he made some crazy statements about the value of college as a development league for the NBA.

Mark Cuban thinks the next Kevin Durant would be better off in the NBA Development League rather than the college of his choice.

The outspoken Dallas Mavericks owner said he can envision scenarios where the country’s top basketball prospects would get drafted and play in the D-League rather than spend one season at an NCAA school.

Cuban said there’s no reason for a player to attend college as a freshman “because he’s not going to class, he’s actually not even able to take advantage of all the fun because the first semester he starts playing basketball.”

The billionaire owner said his idea is not yet a well-researched proposal, just an opinion. He said agreements with colleges could still give players a shot at an education.

“A major college has to pretend that they’re treating them like a student-athlete,” Cuban said. “It’s a big lie and we all know it’s a big lie. We can do all kinds of things that the NCAA doesn’t allow schools to do that would really put the individual first.”

I’ve long contended that the NBA is the worst run sports league on the planet. They are also the the best argument against the Zionist conspiracy stuff. All but a few owners are Jewish and the league office is run by Jews. Yet, they manage to screw up what should be one of the easiest businesses to run in sports entertainment. If the Tribe can’t run a sports league, they are not running the world. I guess the counter to that is the world is so screwed up it must be run by Jewish basketball executives.

Anyway, the league survives despite the best efforts of guys like Cuban. Football and hockey let others develop their players, thus minimizing their investment. Baseball has actually figured out how to make their development league profitable. The NBA, in contrast, drafts players nowhere near ready to play in the league and then pays them millions to learn. Many never learn or contribute very much to the teams that drafted them. The result is millions are wasted on bad players.

It has been known for a long time that basketball is the major sport requiring the least amount of learned skill. By high school, players have 70-80% of the learned skills, like shooting, dribbling, passing and defense.  It is not that complicated, even for the people most likely to take up the sport. The physical development is in place by the early twenties, leaving the emotional maturity. That’s why a player’s peak years are between 25 and 32. Michael Jordan won his first title at 28. Lebron James won his first at 27.

The physical side is a such a major part of the game, injuries can easily alter the trajectory of a young player. Derrick Rose is a good example of why investing in youth can be foolish. The Bulls have $56 million invested in a  guy who has missed the last two seasons with knee problems. They are committed to paying him close to $80 million more, when it is unlikely he ever lives up to their hopes. This is why the other sports have low cost development systems for their young players.

Those leagues, however, tend be more selective with their owners. Mark Cuban has been rejected by baseball and football, simply because he is an idiot. Those leagues also lack the tribal blind spot you see with basketball. The NBA owners protect Cuban out of tribal loyalty, because there are not gentiles around to tell them otherwise. It’s the Achilles heel of clannishness. The tendency of the tribe is to protect the tribe, even when it is bad for the tribe. Cuban is bad for the tribe and the Tribe.

The (g)A(y) Team

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This is hilarious. It has long been assumed that Manti Te’o is gay. The reason is pretty simple. If you are a world famous football player on a college campus, you can get all the girls you want. These days, even loser males get laid. The fact that Te’o preferred an imaginary woman over the real women all around him leads to the obvious conclusion. I don’t recall anyone offering up proof, but that’s the argument. The fact that the gay guy’s agent is running with it and saying his client would fit right in is too funny.

“I think the Chargers would be a great fit for [Sam], especially considering the way that they handled the Manti Te’o issue,” Barkett said Monday in a phone interview with the U-T. “It seemed to blow over very easily once the first game had happened. I think that’d be a great spot for [Sam] to land. And he’d be close to us.”

Te’o, who started 13 games this past season despite a persistent foot injury, repeatedly said that his Chargers teammates did not address the hoax with him.

I think this will be interesting to watch. The culture warriors have not had much success destroying the play on the field of the big sports. The best they have done thus far is attack the youth leagues, but the pros have been immune. The need to win and keep an audience is too powerful so far. As a result, football is bloodless in its treatment of talent. If you’re good you get paid. If you are trouble you get cut loose.

“He definitely will be addressing the media. We’re just trying to figure out what the best forum is for doing that.”

Sam, an All-America defensive lineman, led the SEC with 11.5 sacks and 19 tackles for loss last season, helping Missouri reach the SEC championship game.

Many draft projections see Sam as a middle-round pick, with some saying he could go as high as the third round with a possible position switch to outside linebacker. Sam is rated the No. 12 outside pass-rusher in the draft by ESPN Scouts Inc.

It remains to be seen how long ESPN can keep the story alive. They have a weird fascination with homosexual men that even out-weirds the NYTimes. Sports fans are a weird bunch, in that they will tolerate anything from players, as long as they help the team win, so the gay stuff will not matter to them probably. On the other hand, sports fans can easily abandon the sports media, if the sports media embraces this sort of degeneracy. ESPN better be careful with the gay agenda stuff.

Bad Noticing

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The Danika Patrick story is coming to an end, but the usual suspects are hoping to squeeze one more drop of juice from the story. Patrick was always a marketing ploy by NASCAR to draw in suburban viewers. The new people running stock car racing are ashamed of their fans, they want new and better fans, which is why they hired Patrick as a driver. Richard Petty had the gall to point out the obvious, thus causing the usual suspects to rush to the little waif’s aid.

When it comes to Danica Patrick, the Petty family just can’t seem to pass on the subject without causing a caution flag.

This time, however, it was “The King” — NASCAR Hall of Famer Richard Petty — who took some swipes at Patrick when asked Sunday whether she would ever win in the Sprint Cup Series.

“If everybody else stayed home,” Petty told reporters at the Canadian Motorsports Expo. “If she’d have been a male, nobody would ever know if she’d showed up at a racetrack.

“This is a female deal that’s driving her. There’s nothing wrong with that, because that’s good PR for me. More fans come out, people are more interested in it. She has helped to draw attention to the sport, which helps everybody in the sport.”

That’s being polite, Patrick is in NASCAR because she is a women, but not a gross looking lesbian. She is not very good at driving a race car. If she was male, she is somewhere in the lower ranks hoping to catch a break. Probably by now she would have had to quit, as the dream would be over. Admittedly, I’m not a fan of the sport, but I’m pretty sure the point is to win once in a while, something she has never done.

Patrick finished 27th in the Sprint Cup standings during her rookie season, driving the No. 10 Chevrolet for Stewart-Haas Racing. Her highlight came in the season-opening Daytona 500, where she finished eighth after becoming the first woman to win the pole for that event.

That is her only top-10 finish in 46 races at NASCAR’s highest level. Before that, she amassed seven top-10 finishes and one pole in 60 races over four seasons in the Nationwide Series.

However, Patrick is one of the most successful female auto racers in history. Patrick is the only woman to win a major open-wheel race, finishing first in a 2008 IndyCar Series race in Japan. She has six top-10s in the Indy 500 and was third in 2009, the best finish ever for a woman in that historic event.

I suppose that’s something. Somewhere there is a midget claiming to be the best midget basketball player in history.

Petty has commented on Patrick’s involvement in NASCAR before, saying in 2006 that “I just don’t think it’s a sport for women. And so far, it’s proven out. It’s really not. It’s good for them to come in. It gives us a lot of publicity, it gives them publicity.”

His son — former driver and TV analyst Kyle Petty — has been more outspoken through the years about Patrick’s involvement, calling her a “marketing machine” and “not a race car driver” as recently as this past June.

“Danica has been the perfect example of somebody who can qualify better than what she runs,” Petty said on Speed TV last year. “She can go fast, but she can’t race. I think she’s come a long way, but she’s still not a race car driver. And I don’t think she’s ever going to be a race car driver.”

There’s no reason why females can’t race competitively, but there have been few female race car drivers. The one exception is drag racing, where there are several top female drivers. The reason is drag racing is not personal competition. The drivers really compete against themselves and their machine. They are not outwitting one another or engaged in a test of wills. regular car racing is a test of people, so that’s why women have had so little success and why Patrick is just a public relations ploy.

Giant Crooks

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This is hilarious:

Quarterback Eli Manning and New York Giants brass created bogus “game-worn” football gear to pass off as the real deal — and one of the forgeries is sitting in the Pro Football Hall of Fame, an explosive new lawsuit claims.

A helmet on display in the hallowed Canton, Ohio, gridiron museum — supposedly worn by Manning in Big Blue’s 2008 Super Bowl victory over the New England Patriots — is just one of dozens of fake items the football superstar and his Giants cohorts have created to fool fans and make money from collectors over the years, the lawsuit alleges.

Other “forgeries” passed off on collectors include several Manning jerseys, two 2012 Super Bowl helmets and a 2004 “rookie season” helmet, according to court papers.

Two-time Super Bowl MVP Manning took part in the scheme so he could hang on to his personal items, according to the documents.

The memorabilia ruse is so common among Giants players and staffers, the documents claim, that team equipment manager Joe Skiba openly discussed Manning’s fake game gear on an official Giants e-mail account.

The lawsuit emerged as Manning’s big brother, Peyton, prepares to lead the Denver Broncos against the Seattle Seahawks in Sunday’s Super Bowl at MetLife Stadium, the Giants’ home field.

A rep for the Giants on Thursday said, “This suit is completely without any merit whatsoever and we will defend it vigorously. We will not otherwise comment on pending litigation.”

In my youth I knew a roadie for the Rolling Stones. He was a crazy English dude and he would sell anything not nailed down that was related to the band. The economics of that life required it. The tour covered travel and lodging, but pay was minimal. The roadies made their money scalping tickets, selling band stuff and trading on their connection to the band. It was very much the carny lifestyle. I’m guessing the people working for pro sports teams have a similar life. They sell anything they can that belongs to the players.

The allegations are part of a civil-racketeering, breach-of-contract, malicious-prosecution and trade-libel suit filed Wednesday in Bergen County Superior Court by sports collector Eric Inselberg.

In one startling claim, the suit says Barry Barone, who has been the Giants’ dry cleaner since 1982, used his Rutherford, NJ, Park Cleaners store to beat up jerseys and other items at the behest of longtime locker-room manager Ed Wagner Jr.

In a 2001 incident, Wagner told Barone “to intentionally damage multiple jerseys to make them appear to have been game-worn when they had not been.”

Inselberg’s lawyer, Brian Brook of Clinton Brook & Peed, said his client walked in to find Barone “using a big pair of scissors to cut up a set of Giants’ 2000 season’s game-issued white jerseys,’’ in order to then “’repair’ those damages” to make the shirts look used.

Then you have the very honest men in the memorabilia business:

Inselberg was indicted in 2011 for memorabilia fraud for selling bogus used sport jerseys from teams.

But federal prosecutors in Rockford, Ill., dropped all the charges in May 2013, telling the judge that “prosecution was no longer appropriate in light of some new facts that were pointed out to us by defense counsel.”

The case was jettisoned two days after Inselberg’s defense lawyers told the court that Giants staffers had lied to the grand jury that indicted him about their relationship with him, in a bid to cover up for the team’s own fake-memorabilia sales.

Wednesday’s lawsuit is Inselberg’s attempt at retribution against the Giants.

The new suit alleges that Wagner, along with Skiba and his brother, Ed, also an equipment manager, were told by team brass to lie to federal investigators and the grand jury about how much Giants sports gear they sold him over the years.