By Ellis Cashmore/The Conversation

On October 2, 1980, Muhammad Ali, then aged 38, and Larry Holmes, the heavyweight champion of the world, entered a temporary arena built at Caesar’s Palace, Las Vegas. A gate of nearly 25,000 had paid $5,766,125, a record in its day. “It wasn’t a fight; it was an execution,” wrote Ali’s biographer Thomas Hauser. After 10 sickeningly one-sided rounds, Ali’s trainer Angelo Dundee signaled Ali’s retirement. Ali’s aide and confidante Bundini Brown pleaded: “One more round.” But, Dundee snapped back: “Fuck you! No! . . . The ballgame’s over.”
In a way, he was right: one game had indeed finished. Ali fought only once more. His health had been deteriorating for several years before the ill-advised Holmes fight and the savaging he took repulsed even his sternest critics. Ali the “fearsome warrior,” as Hauser calls him, would disappear, replaced by a “benevolent monarch and ultimately to a benign venerated figure.”
And now that venerated figure has died, aged 74.

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Posted on June 4, 2016

By Jim Coffman and Steve Rhodes

Higgs to Boson to Chance. Plus: The Cubs Are The Best Baseball Team On Earth; Fat Albers; The State Of The Standings; The Pride Of Peoria Could Be The NBA Finals MVP; ICYMI, The Stanley Cup Finals Are Happening Right Now; Elena Delle Donne’s Silent Supremacy; and The Chicago Fire Did Not Do Anything This Week.

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Posted on June 3, 2016

Plus: BMX Legend Afflicted; Soccer & Rugby Next

“Walter Peat, 64, the head saw filer at a sawmill here in the suburbs of Vancouver, worries every day about the son he barely recognizes. He worries mostly that Stephen will be another N.H.L. enforcer dead before turning 50. The list, just since 2010, includes Bob Probert, Derek Boogaard, Rick Rypien, Wade Belak, Steve Montador and Todd Ewen,” the New York Times reports.
“The Peats cannot be sure, but they presume that Stephen’s problems are rooted in concussions. Perhaps, like several of the dead enforcers and roughly 100 former N.F.L. players, one day he will be found to have chronic traumatic encephalopathy, the degenerative brain disease caused by repeated blows to the head.
“For now, it cannot be accurately diagnosed until death, but Peat and his father worry that he has it. The symptoms often associated with C.T.E. – memory loss, depression, impulsiveness, addiction, headaches – are part of Stephen Peat’s daily life.”

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Posted on June 2, 2016

By Dan O’Shea

Sure, you want to talk about the waiver wire, or which prospects might have their MLB debuts this month, but I’ve got other things on my mind this week. Here’s a sample:
* For fantasy purposes, someone needs to start tracking which players are about to become fathers. At least three times this season, one of my fantasy lineups has been hosed by a player’s last-minute addition to the paternity leave list.

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Posted on June 1, 2016

By Jim Coffman

Now the bullpen isn’t just good, it’s perfect? Is there any limit to how well this Cubs team can play after Sunday’s 2-0 victory over the Dodgers that featured starter Jason Hammel and four relievers combining to retire the last 25 batters in a row to up their record to an audacious 35-14?

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Posted on May 31, 2016

By Marty Gangler

As you may remember, last week in the Cub Factor I mentioned that I was going to the game on Friday against the Phillies. And I did go and the Cubs won, because that’s what they do. But something really struck me while I was down in Rickettsville. It was, Why bother?
They are rebuilding everything so much in and around the park that there is kind of no point. Wouldn’t they just be so much better off building something brand new in Schaumburg or Naperville, or wherever else in the area? The behemoth parking garage is just a huge monstrous “thing” that takes up so much of the old look of the place, it’s like, why go through the trouble?
I mean, it’s huge, and only like 5% of the people going to the game are going to park there anyway. OK, I didn’t really do the math, but it can’t be that many fans, right?
And then there’s nothing you can do about some of the park, like getting in by the old (looking) marquee, which has fans waiting in line at the metal detectors and pouring into the street to do so. Yeah, that’s safe.

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Posted on May 31, 2016

By Roger Wallenstein

Memorial Day Weekend. Honor our veterans. The beginning of summer. A three-day break. The beaches are open. Temperatures in the 80s. Burgers on the grill. Cold beer in the fridge. How could the Sox screw this up?
But they did in a fashion so unexplainable and surreal that the baseball history buffs will have to scour the Internet to discover when it was this alarming in the past.

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Posted on May 30, 2016

By Jim Coffman and Steve Rhodes

Warranted on the other side of town. Plus: Save The Intentional Walk!; Bulls In Quicksand; Golden Slumbers; Blackhawks Sign A Bunch Of Guys We Don’t Care About; Bad Man Still Owns Chicago Fire; Chicago Sky Falling Already; Illinois Finally Tops Baylor; and The NFL Is Its Own Organized Crime Family.

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Posted on May 27, 2016

By Dan O’Shea

How long can you let valuable fantasy roster spots be taken up by players who are vastly underperforming?
The answer, of course, can depend on who they are, when you drafted them, how strongly you believe that they will eventually play up to their traditional fantasy output, and perhaps a number of other criteria. The hardest ones to part with are those who had been awarded pre-season rankings in the top 40 or so. No one wants to believe that anyone among their first three or four draft picks turned out to be a dud.
Yet, unless you’re in first place despite your underperformer – or in a keeper league – you will probably have to let go at some point. June 1 seems like a good date. The first two months of the season gone, weather warm enough that cold bats or arms should no longer be an issue, and also roughly when we see a big batch of prized prospects making their first big-league appearances (trading in something worn for something shiny and new is at least a defensible position).
Here are a few guys I would definitely cut on June 1, barring any sort of phenomenal rebound in the next week or so – a couple of poor performers I would hang on to:

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Posted on May 25, 2016

And Then Stuck Taxpayers With The Cost

“At least a half-dozen top NFL health officials waged an improper, behind-the-scenes campaign last year to influence a major U.S. government research study on football and brain disease, congressional investigators have concluded in a new report,” ESPN’s Outside the Lines reports.
“The 91-page report describes how the NFL pressured the National Institutes of Health to strip the $16 million project from a prominent Boston University researcher and tried to redirect the money to members of the league’s committee on brain injuries. The study was to have been funded out of a $30 million ‘unrestricted gift’ the NFL gave the NIH in 2012.
“After the NIH rebuffed the NFL’s campaign to remove Robert Stern, an expert in neurodegenerative disease who has criticized the league, the NFL backed out of a signed agreement to pay for the study, the report shows. Taxpayers ended up bearing the cost instead.”
From Outside the Lines:

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Posted on May 24, 2016