A podcast recommendation and today's links.

This week's "On the Media" podcast as an shortened version of a documentary on the New York Times reporter who contracted AIDS and then used his position to bring the illness more to the public consciousness. It's a humanizing look at what it's like to live and die with the disease. If you've got an hour, I highly recommend it.

For what it's worth, if you have an hour a week, I recommend you listen to every On the Media podcast (or find it on your local NPR station.) Week in and week out, it's the smartest thing I listen to.

Anyway, on to today's links. 


Pay the players, even if they make what you see as poor choices

The restriction on paying college athletes is based on a number of fallacies. Chief among them is that if you pay college players, they'll just waste it, as though adults never waste any money. (The University of Georgia, for example, is paying in excess of $14 million to have Mark Richt not coach their football team.)

The courage it took to bring down a police officer who sexually assaulted black women

This is as good a review of the Daniel Holtzclaw case as I found.

In the NFL, December is Anything but Merry 

It's a brutal game, and one I still find myself uneasy about watching because that makes me complicit in some way in the damage done to these player's bodies and brains. Here's a first-hand account of what it's like in the NFL at this time of the year.

No one knows what they're doing

One of the writers I follow on Twitter is Jesse Spector. He's a baseball writer for The Sporting News and while he obviously takes his job seriously, he doesn't appear to take life (or Twitter, anyway) all that seriously.

So when he posted that there are times he feels like an impostor when he compares himself to the other baseball writers he meets and has as colleagues, I was kind of surprised. I mean, you don't rise to the level of writing for the Sporting News without having immense talent.

But I realized I do the same thing as an adult. I walk around and act like I know what I'm supposed to be doing, but the truth is I've got no idea how to be an adult. I feel like an impostor in the world of adults, hoping no one realizes I'm completely winging it when it comes to life.

On to the stories. 

My run-in with hate speech at a Minnesota Vikings game

A first-hand account of what it feels like to be the victim of hate speech, and the fear that comes when no one stands up to challenge that speech.

The Cubs are a Destination Club

The Cubs are going to be good and I can't wait and I'm really excited and it's going to be fun and can you tell I can't wait for April and it's going to be awesome and I can't wait.

Life After Baseball

A former major league pitcher went from being a top prospect traded for a future hall-of-famer to battling addiction and being out of baseball opens up about his life now as an Uber driver at baseball's winter meetings.


Enjoy your weekend. Hopefully we'll be back Monday with more of the things I've found interesting. 

What's old is new

So are we liking these posts? Have you found anything you've found interesting to read?

Would you rather them be weekly with more links and less of my commentary?

Just looking for a little feedback to see what your thoughts are on this? I enjoy doing them (it helps that work is slow now so I'm actually posting more often than I will once I'm home with my kid for Winter Break, but overall, how's the format?)

Today's stories:


A centruy ago, a popular Missouri newspaper demonized a religious minority: Catholics

"OPEN ROME'S PRISON HOUSES IN AMERICA!" blared one headline for a December 1911 story that claimed the church was murdering the babies of nuns and throwing the infant corpses into a pit."

And later ...

"There was a widespread belief that Catholics were waiting for the day the pope would put into motion a campaign to make the country Catholic, and in the meantime amassing [stockpiles] of weaponry that would be used when that day came," Davies said.


But the entire article is worth reading for the parallels to today.

Black and Blue.

I've never experienced child abuse. But I have no doubt that people I know were victims.  It's likely they, like the writer of this article who now plays in the NHL, grew up thinking it was normal. As he writes, he didn't publish this to get people like his father to stop abusing children, but he wrote it for people who suspect something to stand up and say something. I hope, if I'm ever in that situation, I have the courage to say something. I hope you do too.

What the heck is a catch in the NFL anyway?

I read fun stuff, I promise. To prove it, here's the best explanation yet as to what is considered a catch in the NFL.

Shootings, suicides and stereotypes

A friend of mine was talking to me about college football recently and he had an interesting idea.

"We should bring back the tie," he said.

I told him this was a crazy idea and invoked one of my favorite postgame quotes, "You play to win the game." Someone wins, someone loses. This is how we've set it up. We had ties, we decided we didn't like them and, at least in college football, set up some sort of quasi-football-like structure that kind of resembles football but not really to determine a winner.

"But soccer has ties," he continued.

Yeah, but no one likes ties in soccer either. And no one likes settling championship matches with a shootout, but at least we get a winner out of it.

"Yeah, but sometimes in life things are just equal," he went on.

This is true, but sports aren't life. They're artificial scenarios we've created and since we've created them, we want a winner and a loser. So I'm firmly anti-tie, both in sports and the neck variety.

On to the links:

Arthur Bremer shot Gov. George Wallace to be famous.

 This happened before I was born, so other than knowing Wallace was shot, I hadn't thought much about it. The author finds out the gun used in the shooting is for sale and from there takes on a journey through Bremer's life. 

 

Scott Weiland's Family: 'Don't Glorify This Tragedy'

 The ex-wife of the Stone Temple Pilots singer makes a plea to all of us to not glorify the tragedy of his death, but to take the time to do something for kids who may not have a parent there for them.

Let's choose to make this the first time we don't glorify this tragedy with talk of rock and roll and the demons that, by the way, don't have to come with it. Skip the depressing T-shirt with 1967-2015 on it – use the money to take a kid to a ballgame or out for ice cream.

Stop  Immediately Linking Violence to the Perpetrator's Beliefs - Islamic, Christian or Other

People are complicated. I'm not sure I can tell you why I decided to drink a Cherry Coke instead of Dr Pepper the other day. There are simply too many factors that motivate humans. And we're not robots, so what motivates me one day might not motivate me the next. And that's for me. I can't begin to try to explain what motivates someone else to act in their everyday life, let alone when they do something horrific. So let's stop with the simplistic answers to complex problems. We're better than that. 

In an unrelated note, I need to read happier things. Sorry for the depressing set of links today.

 

Gladiators, Survivors and the Last Black Football Player

I hope you had a good weekend. I got to cover a Class A (smallest classification) Georgia High School semifinal game that saw one team have eight chances with a goal-to-go situation and were unable to get the touchdown they needed. Facing a 4th and 7 with about 90 seconds remaining, the trailing team thought they'd scored the go-ahead touchdown on a pass to the far side of the endzone. However, after officials met to discuss it, they changed the ruling to incomplete. It was a really fun game to watch as someone who had not seen either team play and had absolutely no rooting interest in the outcome. Unfortunately for me, my story doesn't appear to be online anywhere.

Anyway, on to some of the best things I read over the weekend.

Are Football Players really Modern Day Gladiators?

Comparing football to the gladiators has nothing to do with ancient savagery, and everything to do with modern anxiety.

Pretty much all headlines that are questions can be answered with "no." Spoiler alert, this is the case here. But rather than skip the article, read to find out why today's football players are more similar to chariot racers than gladiators.

A Survivor's Life 

When the shooting in Oregon happened, I, like everyone, was shocked and horrified. But as the days went by, we all did what we've been conditioned to do. That is, we moved on with our lives. Or at least on to the next shooting. It's become routine that at this point. We react in horror, we post The Onion story about how we're the only nation where these types of shootings happen and that nothing can be done, and we move on. It's what we do.

But for the survivors of mass shootings, it's not as simple as just moving on. From having to post signs not to knock on the door (because it's still traumatic to hear noises that could resemble gunshots) to people not sure how to act around you and whether they should ask you about the shootings or not, moving on isn't as simple as it sounds. This well-reported story in the Washington Post looks at one shooting survivor's tale.

The Last Black Man in Pro Football

 The NFL wasn't always integrated. But it wasn't always segregated either. Which means someone had to be the last black player in the NFL before it became a white's only league. That man was Joe Lillard. Here, VICE Sports looks back at Lillard's journey to the NFL and his exclusion from it. (This may shock you, but the founder of the Washington NFL team had something to do with it.)