The Deadline
You are currently browsing the monthly archive for July 2009.
There’s been enough ink spilled on the subject of Cork City’s demise since Monday without me cry-typing a 2000-word diatribe, at the moment. Let’s wait ’til Friday for that.
In the meantime, if you wish to make a donation to the club to assist in its attempts to settle its liabilities with the Revenue, the club’s bank account details are:
Account Name – Cork City Investment FC Ltd.
Branch – Ballintemple, Blackrock Rd, Cork
A/c No. – 15364447
Sort Code – 934178
So some footage of LeBron James getting dunked on – which Nike tried to smother – emerged tonight.
And it’s a major let down. But check it out anyway here and some better shots here.
The Pacman Jones tape on the other hand, now that delivers.
Here, friends, is another thread in sport’s rich tapestry, another narrative to weave into America’s on-field mythology.
Take two hip-hop stars – Nelly and Jermain Dupri – gridiron star Adam ‘Pacman’ Jones, Sin City, a gaggle (is that the collective noun) of strippers and $100,000 in dollar bills. And what do you get? A near-riot in a lap-dancing club and a subsequent attempted murder investigation.
New amateur footage has emerged, giving the clearest picture yet of what happened inside a Las Vegas strip club on February 19, 2007, when Pacman showered scantily clad dancers with money – or to use the vernacular, he ‘made it rain’.
Jones was involved in a fight inside the club and a short time later, three people were shot outside.
Pacman was initially charged with felony coercion for his role in the incident but the charge was later was reduced. His career is on the brink however as he remains unemployed.
It sounds like a great night out in fairness; Jones was in Las Vegas for NBA All-Star Weekend – a guest of Michael Jordan. After losing up to $60,000 gambling at Caesars Palace, Jones went on a hot streak, winning $120,000 at the Palms hotel and casino.
He then hit the Minxx Gentlemen’s Club & Lounge, cashing in 100k for singles; he gave rapper Nelly $10,000. At one point, music producer Dupri berates the dancers as they stop entertaining the crowd and start collecting the cash in buckets. “Don’t start getting the money until I tell y’all to get off the stage,” Dupri said. “… Just keep f*****g dancing! Don’t bend down and try to get your money.”
Moments after Dupri made those comments, the video ends. It was after 4:30am when trouble inside Minxx began. The video’s above but, be warned, it’s not pretty.
Sports apparel giants carefully planning what elite golf stars wear at the Open this week is par for the course as Turnberry acts as catwalk for a €6 billion business. I went all Gok Wan on golf’s ass for today’s Irish Examiner.
IN Goldfinger, Sean Connery’s James Bond insists that the only fashion faux pas one can make in golf is to dress too well.
This week at the Open, few would have been guilty of breaking 007’s rule; but then most don’t have much say.Tomorrow’s winner in Turnberry will be on television throughout the globe, more than likely, for five consecutive hours. His face and clothes will appear online and in newspapers, and his winning outfit could surface again a month or a year later on magazine covers. A single shirt worn by a big-name golfer on a Sunday afternoon winning a tournament can raise sales 10%, companies say.
The scripting process begins for most companies with a design meeting about a year and a half before an event. Read the rest of this entry »
City fans get an early dig in at their cross-town enemies; this massive poster was hanging from the Victoria Bridge in the city this morning.
My new weekly column started in the Irish Examiner this morning. We started as we mean to go on with humiliation on my day off at the National Dodgeball Championships.
And this after a week of my colleagues throwing wrenches in my direction.
LIKE many, I’m sure, who bravely lined out throughout the ages in white-soled sneakers and crotch-hugging shorts on a Saturday morning for Dodgeball, I allowed my mind to – but for a moment – wander from silly team names, funny costumes and the 5 D’s of sport: dodge, duck, dip, dive, and dodge.
Yes, for an instant, despite the quiver of spongy, vivid spheres arrowing about and upside my hungover head, it wanders, naturally enough, to Wordsworth.
“Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, But to be young was very heaven!” he wrote of the French Revolution. However, I’m confident that had he come upon a host of Dodgeballs rather than daffodils in his time, than perhaps he may have poetically praised this noble sport as well.
And it was grand to be young and be in the Mardyke Arena in Cork for the first heat of the National Dodgeball Championships one morning recently.
Read the rest of this entry »
I recently ‘took on’ Ireland’s only Ultimate Fighting Championship star Tommy ‘The Tank’ Egan. It didn’t go well…
ASK any sports reporter how difficult it is sometimes to prise a quote from a football player, stop a boxer for a moment of his time as he shuffles from defeat in the ring or interrogate an under-fire coach about ‘the mood in the camp’ and he’ll recount the horror stories like he’s tracing the scars across his battered body.
Now try being a nuisance to an ultimate fighter and – THEN – get into the Octagon with him.
Mixed martial arts (MMA) is a full contact combat ‘sport’ that allows a bloody rainbow of fighting techniques, from a mixture of martial arts traditions to be used in competitions. The rules allow the use of striking and grappling, while standing and on the ground. The results are graphically vicious.
The UFC – MMA’s most popular proponent – rolled into Dublin recently like an all-kicking, all-punching vaudeville act where freakishly big men are paired off in a cage – though we can’t call it a cage – and encouraged to, ultimately, fight.
I took on Ireland’s first man to enter the UFC, young Dubliner Tommy Egan just days before he made his debut at the new O2 Arena. In these recessionary times, it’s no harm to identify alternative career paths, I reasoned.
On the train to Dublin, surrounded by business types and day trippers, who were blissfully unaware they were in the company of a man who was about to bring the ruckus to the Octagon, I read a book I had recently received as a birthday gift. Read the rest of this entry »
It’s over a week now since the NBA’s ‘King’ LeBron James got dunked on by sophomore student Jordan Crawford at a summer camp. No big deal? Maybe, but when Nike – LeBron’s sponsors – confiscated the tapes, it prompted a wave of massive negative publicity.
In the meantime we’ll have to settle for a “LeBron James Gets Dunked On” compilation video.
Sports Illustrated’s writers have complied 15 lists (middle-aged men love a good list) of sport’s most thrilling superstars.
“These lists are not mere compilations of all-time bests in their respective sports but all-time bests at quickening the pulse and evoking a visceral response from those fortunate enough to have witnessed their artistry,” SI explains.
There is plenty of scope for arguement – which is what they hope to generate on their site, I suppose. Cork City’s erstwhile nicotine-fuelled midfield fantasista Patsy Freyne fails to make the football list and human billboard Tiger Woods gets in twice under the one category. Check it out here.
The New York Times attempt to track down an octogenarian Mets fan, who suddenly stops ringing into a late-night radio show.
Sports Illustrated blow the lid on the 2009 Hot Dog Eating Contest in New York.
Dan Carter kicks a crazy conversion.
Sport is a TV show on the connection between the Tour de France and Scottish indie kids The Delgados
The Guardian’s own pink-shirted Wexford man Mikey Stafford on Mick Wallace.
Remembering Steve McNair, the NFL star who was found shot dead in a hotel room this weekend.
And on the Examiner sports blog: John Riordon previews the Ashes series which gets underway in Cardiff on Wednesday.
Donal Linehan writes about a trip to a South African township.
Brian Canty on Armstrong v Contador.
And Darren Norris on the joy of Cesc Fabregas.
This guy is my hero. ‘Freshman sports reporter’ Brian Collins agreed to fill in for the regular sportscaster on a Texas university’s campus newscast.
The teleprompter operator fast-forwarded through the script, leaving Collins with only an occasional few words to use. One was dynamite.
The ‘Collins incident’ is now taught in college media courses. With hilarious consequences.
Ghostwriters: like teenagers stealing drink from unsuspecting couples.
The always-readable Pitch Invasion takes a fairly extensive look at footballers’ autobiographies.
I talked to some of the men who pen them, ghostwriters, for the Irish Examiner.
“I went to the World Cup, I was shite, here’s my book” was how Joey Barton succinctly and accurately summed up the raft of autobiographies spawned by England’s 2006 tournament failure.
But for every tome revealing whether Wayne Rooney likes to ring for a pizza before or after he watches Countdown, there’s a Liam Dunne, Dessie Farrell or Tony Cascarino laying bare his soul for all to peruse. Read the rest of this entry »