You Don't Even Like Sports (Words) - "Good vs. Evil"
A column about sports for people who don't like sports
Did you know I’m the head of a massive sports media empire? No? Well, that’s because I’m not. But I do host a podcast called You Don’t Even Like Sports. It’s a sports podcast for people who don’t like sports.
What does that mean? Just imagine a podcast about tennis legend Andre Agassi, for example, but that podcast focuses more on the intense and problematic relationship he had with the wig he wore on the court for way too many years as opposed to focusing on his wins and losses on that court.
That’s the current season of You Don’t Even Like Sports in a nutshell (Agassi season available exclusively on Patreon and Supercast for now).
When I can get everyone in the room at the same time, we also sometimes do a live version of the pod on YouTube where we focus more on current stories that a person would still find interesting even if they don’t care about sports (like you).
We usually go into those episodes with more stories than we have time to talk about and, when that happens, those stories will end up right damn here for you to listen to with your readin’ ears (aka your eyes).
Here are a few sports stories for people who don’t even like sports (and people who do, also, obviously):
Even If You Don’t Recognize the Name, Danielle Collins Is One of the Coolest Stories In Sports Right Now
Danielle Collins is an American tennis player who has been extremely mid for most of her long career. She’s 30 now, which isn’t necessarily old in tennis, but it’s also not necessarily young. So, it was kind-of-but-not-really a surprise when Collins announced at the beginning of the season that this would probably be her final year playing professional tennis.
And then, out of nowhere, she started winning. A lot.
She made it deep into a few different tournaments to start the year, and then showed up and dominated the Miami Open. She lost her first set of that tournament, and then didn’t lose another set the rest of the way. She won six matches in a row in straight sets, beating five players who were all ranked #30 or higher, including world #4 Elena Rybakina in the final.
Danielle Collins, meanwhile, was ranked #53 going into the tournament, making her the lowest ranked woman to ever win it. Even better, she’s from Florida, so she won the biggest tournament of her career in front of a home crowd.
With this win, Collins’ rank will jump from #53 to just outside the top 20.
She also won $1.1 million dollars. Must be nice!
I Guess I’m the Only One Who Finds the Hannah Hidalgo Nose Ring Debacle a Little Suspicious?
Did everyone watch the NCAA Women’s Tournament Sweet 16 matchup between Oregon State and Notre Dame? Just joking! I know you probably didn’t!
I did, though, and let me tell you, it fucked up my bracket real good. And I’d be fine with that if not for some highly questionable referee shenanigans.
Late in the first quarter, Notre Dame star point guard Hannah Hidalgo was forced to leave the game after officials told her the nose ring she was wearing violated NCAA rules.
Because this is a situation college basketball training staffs aren’t typically used to dealing with, it took a looooong time to get her back on the court. Here’s video of team personnel using a variety of tools in an effort to remove the offending jewelry.
I know, someone somewhere out there will say “well, rules are rules.” Sure. They sure are. But also Hannah Hidalgo, one of the breakout stars of the college basketball season, has been wearing a nose ring all season long with zero problems.
Prior to the start of the game, she asked those same officials if she needed to remove it or if she could just cover it with a piece of tape as she had been doing all season, including in previous games in this same tournament. They told her she could leave it in.
And then, deep into the first quarter, just as Notre Dame was starting to establish a little flow and momentum (flowmentum), their star player gets benched over something she’d already asked those same officials about before the game even started. Perfectly normal behavior!
I wouldn’t be at all surprised if somewhere down the road we find out a team of Croatian gamblers with connections to the refs made $6.5 million dollars betting the under on how many minutes Hannah Hidalgo would play in this game.
The Duel of the Kinda Bullshit Kim Mulkey Articles
More women’s college basketball news! In the lead up to the LSU versus UCLA Sweet 16 game, news broke that a highly unflattering article about LSU head coach Kim Mulkey was about to be published.
Mulkey, already a controversial and polarizing figure well before this, addressed the media and said she was ready to sue for defamation when the article dropped. And then it dropped and it was kind of nothing. It reiterated a bunch of stuff the public has already heard, like how she wasn’t the most supportive coach when it came to LGBTQ players in the past.
But if anything, this Washington Post article adds a little nuance to that story. There are even former players who flat out say Kim Mulkey is not a homophobe and that she was just stating the reality of the situation players at that point were in.
You see, all of the stuff that comes up about Mulkey in regards to telling players to maybe keep a lid on their private life choices happened when she was coaching at Baylor University.
If you’re unfamiliar, Baylor is a private Baptist Christian university in Waco, Texas. There’s at least one former player quoted in the article who says Mulkey wasn’t so much being a homophobe as she was reminding players that they were operating within a veritable sea of homophobes.
The Washington Post article also includes a bit about Mulkey telling someone via email that LSU star center Angel Reese was left off of an “awards list” because of her GPA. Subsequent articles that reported on the Washington Post article even mentioned that part in the headlines of their own coverage.
Is this supposed to be a bad thing? After years and years of complaining about star athletes being given special treatment that sometimes even ends up being detrimental to those players later in life, we’re suggesting that Kim Mulkey holding a star athlete to some semblance of academic standards is also somehow not what we want?
On top of that, the article portrays the fact that we don't know the exact reason why Angel Reese was suspended for four games earlier this season as something scandalous. In a perfect world, that’s how teams are supposed to work. If you were suspended from your job would you want your boss to tell the media why? I can see if there’s some kind of public safety concern to consider, but Angel Reese is a kid who plays basketball. Playing basketball is all she has to do to hold up her end of the bargain with the public. If we don’t get to know why she was suspended then so be it.
All that said, the Washington Post article was a glowing portrayal of Kim Mulkey compared to what the LA Times inexplicably ran with. A columnist there named Ben Bolch wrote an opinion piece that literally portrayed the UCLA vs. LSU game as “good vs. evil” and “milk and cookies” vs. “Dirty Debutantes.”
As hinted at by Kim Mulkey in a press conference, Dirty Debutantes is the name of a 1989 porn movie and several subsequent online porn videos.
That’s how this man described a women’s college basketball team. The entire article was fucking gross and the LA Times eventually had to edit it to remove the “dirty debutantes” and “good vs. evil” references and … guess what? It’s still gross!
The Times writer who penned the opinion piece eventually apologized to Mulkey and LSU, who went on to defeat UCLA 78-69. Nice!
Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2024/03/30/kim-mulkey-lsu-griner-reese/
The Best Shooter On the University of South Carolina Gamecocks Women’s Team Is Named Pow Pow (Kinda)
The University of South Carolina Gamecocks (grow up) women’s team is one of the most dominant in all the land, no matter what sport we’re talking about. They haven’t lost a game since last year’s NCAA tournament and currently stand as the only undefeated team in Division I basketball this season, men or women.
I don’t want to talk about any of that, though. What I want to talk about is how their best SHOOTER’S last name is “POW POW.”
Not really. It’s spelled PaoPao. Te-Hina PaoPao, to you.
But it is pronounced like “pow pow” and, again, she’s the best shooter on the team. I dunno, I guess I just wanted to mention that.
Read more: https://www.espn.com/womens-college-basketball/player/_/id/4433431/te-hina-paopao
Former South Carolina Quarterback Chris Smelley Found Safe After Going Missing In the Ocean
Let’s stay on the Cocks for a minute and talk about a story that also serves as a reminder that we, as people, should leave the ocean the hell alone.
A former South Carolina Gamecocks quarterback named Chris Smelley went fishing in his kayak off the Florida coast around 8:30am last Thursday like a real fucking outdoorsman. He was reported missing after he still hadn’t returned by 2:30pm.
What happened?
Well, as it turns out, kayak paddles and the biceps of a former college athlete are no match for the breathtaking force that is the goddamn ocean. At one point during the fishing trip, the sea took ownership of Chris Smelley and began carrying him away to his watery fate.
Unfortunately for the ocean, humankind invented helicopters a long time ago, and we used one to find Chris approximately TWELVE HOURS after he first left to challenge the abyss.
The Coast Guard found him. Probably cost us a lot of tax money. I know a comedian who has a bit about this kind of thing.
Read More: https://www.wistv.com/2024/03/28/former-usc-quarterback-reported-missing-off-gulf-mexico/
The UFL’s Donald De La Haye Quit Football To Be a YouTuber
Do you smell what the Rock is cooking? If you do but don’t recognize the scent, it’s professional football in the spring.
It’s mostly unknown to the general public, but for the past couple of years, there have been two springtime football leagues in operation, the USFL and the XFL.
Fortunately, neither one is tied to the right wing menaces those leagues were associated with when they first launched. These are relaunches and, now, they have joined forces to form one unified league, spearheaded by Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, that you still won’t watch.
It’s called the UFL, which I’m gonna assume means United Football League, but if things go sideways we’ll be saying it means “Unwatchable Football Losers” in no time at all.
That said, there was a one hour window between 9am and 10am PT on Sunday morning when there wasn’t basketball, baseball, tennis, or a freeway chase to watch and I used it to consume exactly one hour of the third ever UFL game, a hotly anticipated (by your mom) matchup between the DC Capitol Stormers and the San Antonio Spurs II.
I might be making a couple of those team names up.
Anyway, the only thing that really caught my attention during my brief dalliance with the UFL was the story of San Antonio … Alamos (?) … kicker Donald De La Haye.
Back in the days before college players were allowed to profit from their name, image, and likeness; Donald De La Haye managed to build a sizable YouTube following (@deestroying) while also kicking for the University of Central Florida.
Eventually, his YouTube channel started earning a very minor amount of money, at which point the NCAA sent out a team of goons to shake De La Haye down for protection money.
Surprisingly, that is not true. But they did demand that he choose between playing football or being a YouTube star. He chose YouTube.
But now he’s back to playing football again! Professionally this time if you can really call it that!
De La Haye was one of the first signings that was announced after the league launched. Probably a smart move seeing as how at the time he had around 5.7 million subscribers.
If my understanding of how the crossover between YouTube culture and sports works, all 5.7 million of those subscribers are avid football fans now.