This is almost two weeks old, and while I hate posting old news this is the first time I’ve seen this and it involves everything I love about sports – fighting and kids with bad role models. The Pearland Patriots and the Pearland Hurricanes faced off in a good old-fashioned Texas pee-wee league football contest, and the results were more like the nosebleed seats of a Miami Hurricanes game. Coaches from both teams brawled during the game, forcing league officials to disqualify both teams from the league playoffs.

The video is quite captivating, as two coaches are seen exchanging words – undoubtedly disagreeing on where to have ice cream after the game – and then two guys are rolling around on the ground, and then all the guys in orange come running after a guy in blue, who appears to have pissed his pants, and, well, it’s all a bit chaotic. Never in my 56 years of covering Texas pee-wee league football have I witnessed something so shameful.

Video after the jump, plus a Bad News Bears-esque update…

Read the rest of this entry »

File this under Texas Being Texas: A currently-unidentified woman pulled a gun on a seventh-grade volleyball team last night. Fortunately, the only kills that came out of the evening occured during the game beforehand. Yep. You won’t get cutting-edge volleyball humor like that anywhere else.

School police are reviewing videotapes to try to identify the woman, who witnesses said threatened to shoot several members of the visiting Kirby team, Judson ISD spokesman James Keith said.

“The Kirby team had just won, and they were in the back parking lot near the gym when the woman approached,” Keith said, noting that the students were chanting and celebrating their victory. The woman “approached them, pulled a handgun, and threatened to shoot them,” he said. –San Antonio Express News, via our own Upstate Underdog.

The media report that the small woman remains at large. Of course she’s at large. Everything’s bigger in Texas.

Cincinnati-based radio legend Bill Cunningham had himself a little moment yesterday while discussing the potential offspring of the University of Cincinnati men’s basketball team, although “discussing” might be too polite a term.

Cunningham: How many illegitimate children does the UC men’s basketball team have?

Producer Guy: Uhh, I don’t know. I just worry about whether they win or lose, or their record.

Cunningham: I heard it’s more than a half dozen. So there’s some hangin’ and bangin’ going on at the Shoemaker Center after the game. … [T]hey’re poppin’ those things out like cherry pits out of one’s mouth.

For the record, the personal bios on Cincinnati’s athletic website make no mention of the players’ children, suggesting that either (a) there are no illegitimate children of which to speak, or (b) they are, in fact, poppin’ ‘em out like cherry pits. Mmm, cherries.

Listen to the clip after the jump. Read the rest of this entry »

Finally, the passion for soccer in America is approaching the insanity reached in Europe and South America.  From the Lincoln JournalStar, via Deadspin:

[T]he woman yelled at her 15-year-old in her car and asked her to repeat lines about improving her performance [on the pitch].  When the girl messed up the lines, she slapped her… the teen told her mom to pull over along I-80 near the downtown exit, so she did.  That’s when the girl says her mom yelled at her to get out. She did and her mom drove away.

Well, it's not a deadly soccer riot or a street-clearing hooligan brawl, but it's a start.  If we want to compete with the rest of the world in this sport, our children need to understand that soccer fucking matters. 

Next time, little lassie, get it right: "This is my soccer ball.  There are many like it, but this one is mine…" 

Jairo Miguel is a 14-year-old professional bullfighter from Spain who moved to Mexico because his home country's laws were too uptight about children dodging pissed off half-ton animals with horns.  And what do you know, he was almost gored to death by a 900-pound bull.

[A] bull named Hidrocalido rushed him at top speed and lifted him in the air, appearing to carry him several yards with one horn firmly lodged in his thorax. “I’m dying, dad, I’m dying,” government news agency Notimex quoted Jairo as saying immediately after the goring.

What a drama queen.  It was only a punctured lung.  Although I suppose he may have been talking about going to a Mexican hospital.

[T]he responsibility for young bullfighters rests largely with their families, who are often the ones who encourage their sons to go into bullfighting in the first place. “Normally, it’s the parents of these children — and they are children — who put them into bullfighting schools,” [one official] said. 

Another set of crazy sports parents.  I went through the same thing as little Jairo, once.  Lots of pressure, competing out of my weight class.  The adrenaline and danger were too much to handle at such a young age.  Well, not bullfighting.  It was chess.  Hey, you can get hurt if those pieces aren't sanded down properly.

From Nothing Toxic comes this video of a dad going batshit in the middle of his son's wrestling match and throwing his son's opponent out of the ring. I wish I could be surprised by this, but anyone familiar with Deadspin's "Parents Gone Wild" tag knows that this is only slightly less surprising than a Ken Griffey Jr hamstring injury.

I wish my parents had cared so much. But we were too busy moving around the world, staying one step ahead of the law. Dad never bothered to beat up my sporting opponents. All that mattered to him was the thrill of the next score.

On the plus side, though, I have millions in stolen diamonds squirreled away in a safe deposit box in Switzerland. So that's cool.