Mario Balotelli, Italy and Manchester City striker, threatening to kill anyone who throws a banana at him during the Euro 2012 finals. [The Guardian]

The 21-year-old is not a stranger to racism and was once pelted with bananas in a Rome bar before the European Under-21 Championships in June 2009. “It was lucky that the police arrived quickly because, I swear, I would have beaten them. I would have really destroyed them. I hope it never happens again.” He has been the victim of racist abuse on several occasions – most recently in February when Porto were fined over the behaviour of their supporters in a Europa League tie against City.

The latter can be seen in this vid at around the 20 second mark.

Junior Seau Is Dead - Ta-Nehisi Coates - Entertainment - The Atlantic.

ayjay writes,

TNC brings his usual incisiveness and moral clarity to the table. I’m right where he is: I cannot justify watching football. Not with what I know now. Yet it has been a part of my life for as long as I can remember — and when you’re from Alabama, as I am, and a graduate of the University of Alabama, as I am… .

I was talking with two other Alabamians the other day and we agreed that we all remember exactly where we were when Bear Bryant died. One said, “I was at college. My father called to tell me, and I cried.” For better or worse, it’s part of our formation as people, and a major bond of families and friendships. But TNC’s right: it’s time to say goodbye to it.

A few days ago Charles Pierce wrote this at Grantland,

Each of these has been treated as an individual event with nothing in common with the other. But the evidence keeps piling up that they all share a common disregard for what legitimized violence can do to the people who participate in it. So much so that, when I accidentally channel-surfed past the eleventy-gazillion hours of live NFL draft coverage this weekend, it looked like nothing more than the debut of a new television game show:Who Wants To Be a Vegetable at 50?

While there’s been some movement on the management side to address the problems that they’d been ignoring for 70 years, most of that has had to be shaken out of the various panjandrums in charge, and a lot of it seems to be largely cosmetic. And the pushback on that part of the remedies that seems genuine has been remarkable. The idea that anyone seriously would argue that the New Orleans Saints were treated too harshly for a bounty system that encouraged injuring opposing players is more than enough evidence that a more extensive job of reprogramming everyone invested in the sports-entertainment context is still needed. And the old answers about vicarious violence aren’t sufficient anymore. A society that needs its sports as a vehicle of vicarious violence so that actual violence doesn’t break out at an angry time in its history is in deeper trouble than it can imagine.

If you disagree with any of these claims that’s fine but please don’t evoke Dave Pinsen’s analogy,

Not watching football because Junior Seau killed himself would be like not reading novels because David Foster Wallace killed himself.

There’s a difference.

(via ayjay)

Michael Kazin, “Why Baseball is the Best—And Least Exploitative—American Sport” at The New Republic 

I guess this is true if you ignore every other “externality”, including the relationships and academies that clubs have abroad in Latino América, and maintain a lily white belief that what happens in the world of sports within this nation remains in the world of sports within this nation. I mean, you honestly have to make an effort to ignore all of the aforementioned or have no heart.