Sports Blurbs

There are two things that happened in the world of sports recently that I feel like talking about. The first was when Michael Vick flipped off someone in the crowd. While this seems like a big deal, trust me that it is not. You can check this out if you want to read about other famous middle finger incidents. I am a big fan of Vick, mostly because he is insanely fast and possesses skills that are different than every other QB in the history of the NFL. For this reason, he is fun to watch and root for. Anyways, the part of the story that was surprising was the fine. I think I read that previously players were fined only $5K, but since he is super rich and a big name player, he was fined $10K. That is reasonable, I guess… Anyways, the other part of his punishment is that he has to donate another $10K to a charity. I think this is a good solution, and frankly all of the money that athletes pay in fines for acting stupid should go to charity. Can you imagine rooting for a player to act out of line in an effort to raise money for your charity? I can see it now, the Red Cross is watching an NBA game and rooting for Ron Artest to go goes nuts and jump into the stands to fight fans so they can get his forfeited salary. Or if MADD is monitoring the smoking gun secretly pumped to be collecting money from things like this (I know its wrong, but what irony.)

The other thing that happened involved another one of my more favorite athletes. Ben Wallace was benched for violating a team rule when he wore a headband. That is right; his coach didn’t play him because he was wearing a headband. To presumably keep the sweat out of his eyes and enhance his production, he was taken out of the game. I know that there is a strong chance that the purpose of Ben’s headband is more for fashion than anything else, but is it really that bothersome that the Bulls have a team rule forbidding the use of headbands? I suppose it’s a good thing that a GM makes strict rules and his coach enforces them. I agree with that aspect of running a team, but to me this sort of crosses the line. It is almost historically a part of basketball uniforms. I am pretty sure the NBA has licensed headbands, so that if players do choose to wear them, they have an official league approved one to use. The Yankees aren’t allowed to grow beards or have long hair, but they are allowed to use black bats, or red bats, or tan bats. They are also allowed to wear sunglasses. But the Bulls have a team rule because the GM didn’t like the way the players wore the headbands. I don’t know why they didn’t just make a rule describing how they should wear the popular head attire. Perhaps I am too reasonable to run and NBA team.