Miscellaneous articles pertaining to recent issues in sports and sports media.

Greg Couch, Fanhouse.com, “Oudin-Serena Final Would Be Love American Style“

Here, bluntly, is the concern: How much of Oudin’s sudden popularity is that she’s the Great White Hope?

She is already being portrayed as the All-American girl. The Williams sisters, despite all they’ve done, never seem to be fully looked at that way.

I can sit here and pretend that this stuff is all in the past. But even today, the Williams sisters will not play a tournament in Indian Wells, California, boycotting because their family said it heard racist comments from fans in the stands.

I’m not trying to stir anything up here. Instead, it’s quite the opposite.

I could sense the vibe the other day when Venus lost to Kim Clijsters. Here was Venus on her home court, her home turf. But the crowd was pulling for Clijsters, who’s from Belgium, despite having little vested in her. (via A Sports Scribe)

Dave Zirin, Edge of Sports, “LeGarrette Blount and the Politics of the Punch“

Now the perfectly predictable pile-on is playing out in the press. As John Canzano for the Oregonian wrote, “…what we have here is a low moment that can not be greeted with tolerance…..The Ducks running back should be arrested and charged with assault today.” Please spare us the sanctimony. If every player who ever threw a punch in the high-octane, adrenalized world of sports was banned like Blount, there wouldn’t be a National Hockey League. Dozens of basketball players including Larry Bird, Julius Erving, and Shaquille O’Neal would have been booted from the NBA. Ron Artest would be in Gitmo. The difference between Blount and the rest is that players in the NHL, NBA and other sports have a degree of power. They have unions, collective bargaining and an appeals process. Blount has nothing. Despite all the stadiums he filled during his junior year, he, like all college players, is powerless. …

To call for Blount’s arrest and celebrate his expulsion from the team is to be party to hypocrisy. Football is a profoundly violent sport. Player’s bodies are destroyed, and their life expectancy is shortened with every down. In the United States, the average life span for NFL players is 55, more than two decades less than a typical male. Go to an NFL retirement dinner and it’s literally like going to a Veterans of Foreign Wars banquet. Dave Meggyesy who played in the ’60’s once said to me, ‘When you sign an NFL contract, you sign away your right to have a middle age.’ We are fools if we express shock that this violence does not remain contained in the three hours on Saturday or Sunday. And now, amidst the violence, powerlessness, and the fandom run amok, here is LeGarrette Blount, without a roadmap to redemption.

20th Century Motors, “College Basketball: Far inferior to the NBA“

It always kills me when people say that college basketball is better than the NBA. What gets me is that people can?t just admit they like it because it allows them to harken back to their collegiate days when they weren?t fat or it has more white players or March Madness is like crack for sports gamblers. Those are all dumb reasons, but they?re at least true. Instead, people always make up some dumb excuse that makes them sound like some [pseudo]-basketball purist. They don?t play any defense in the NBA, they say. This statement doesn?t deserve to be dignified with a response. The organization where JJ Redick got 25 points a game in its most competitive conference can?t really claim to have a monopoly on defense. They don?t run a team offense, they say. Yes, God forbid a team has a balanced attack that includes driving and posting up instead of stacking the perimeter because the rules give 3 points for a 19 foot shot that 8th graders can make regularly. But the game is purer, they say. They?re competing for the glory, not for some NBA contract. … I defy anyone to have watched a UConn team in the past five years, and tell me that Rudy Gay and Hasheem Thabeet were sacrificing blood, sweat and tears because they so badly wanted a bunch of business majors to have the life-altering experience of getting loaded on Crown Royal and flipping cars in celebration of a national championship. (via TrueHoop)