Vikings on field for first full squad practice in Mankato. Players in helmets and shorts. This morning was a walk-through.
— Judd Zulgad (@jzulgad) July 27, 2012
Finally, team drills. First play a completion from Ponder to Rudolph vs Robison. Crowd goes mild.
— Tom Pelissero (@TomPelissero) July 27, 2012
Jerome Simpson just destroyed Chris Cook on a go. Not a good matchup if Cook's not jamming. Jenkins just beat him on an in too.
— Tom Pelissero (@TomPelissero) July 27, 2012
In the National Post, Bruce Arthur tries to encourage all of us, in spite of our memories of what British journalists were saying about the Vancouver Olympics, to avoid being nasty about the London games:
But perhaps we in Canada should restrain ourselves, as a nation. Perhaps we should take the higher road. That is, unless the higher road is crammed with traffic in this built-for-horses-and-carriage town. Or the tube is down again.
The Brits did not treat Canada kindly two years ago, it’s true. The Guardian said Vancouver could be the Worst Games Ever three days in, and they based the assessment on refunded snowboard tickets rather than on the preventable death of an athlete. The Guardian also called our glowing totem poles a collection of ice penises, and even the BBC announcer cocked an eyebrow, as it were. The Times of London called us cursed, while the Daily Mail mocked the escalation of the budget. They were, to be honest, kind of jerks about it.
But that doesn’t mean that Canadians should stoop to a similarly savage brand of mockery, beginning with the Opening Ceremony. It doesn’t mean we should make fun of the leaked details of the event, starting with children in hospital beds, which doesn’t seem terribly festive. It doesn’t mean we should make fun of the fact that Muse will apparently play, and even if they do not, that the official song of the Olympics by Muse is a grating, strutting, whining, overcompensatory sneer of a song.
Lawsmith imagines what Boris Johnson would write about the London Olympics “major international sporting event” in a “certain major city in the UK” if he were not mayor:
I can imagine his perfect article in this alternative history in my dreams. Written in the Spectator and littered with self-deprecation, references to dead or fictitious Greeks, Liverpool and wiff-waff, Boris would have danced across the pages as he gleefully excoriated the Labour administration for the absurd idea of inviting a bunch of prima donna athletes and bureaucrats, most of them foreign, to compete in an outdoor stadium during the coldest, wettest summer in British history.
He might have pointed out that all this would take place in Newham, a place not altogether unlike Portsmouth and, in any case, one most Londoners consider more alien than Paris, with among the highest incidence of robbery and assault in the entire city. He might have joyfully foretold the pain and suffering of millions of income taxpayers on account of the shut-down of major roads and TfL advising know-nothing tourists to hop the tube at rush hour to make the 10 AM events, and seriously questioned the wisdom of erecting a steel wall around Hyde Park for an entire summer before fouling it up beyond recognition.
In our alternative history he would have savaged, rather than prodded, the implementation of widespread censorship undertaken by a hit squad of intellectual property ninjas; he would have lamented the fact that our police were arresting “marginal” (i.e., possibly innocent) suspects – living, breathing, thinking people – on terrorism charges which they might not be able to prove. If he had really driven it home, he would have pointed out that, under normal circumstances, those arrests would never have been made. He would also have asked why nobody seems to care.
By this point, his oeuvre would have been the most hilarious political essay ever written. He would flay alive in full public view the pathetic, uncritical, fawning news-media industry which crafts its Olympic stories with all the creative flavour of an oak plank, their proxy world to escape from our own inadequacies where professional athletes become “heroes” (seriously, find a different word), washed-up “heroes” become “legends,” and civil liberties violations and government largesse are completely ignored.
Dahlia Lithwick explains why we all need to be careful how we refer to a certain large organized sports extravaganza happening in a major city in England:
At the London Olympics, we’re seeing unprecedented restrictions on speech having anything to do with, erm, the Olympics. There are creepy new restrictions on journalists, with even nonsportswriters being told they should sign up with authorities.
Then there’s the London Olympic Games and Paralympics Games Act 2006. The law was originally aimed at preventing “over-commercialization” of the games, but it seems to have unloosed something of a Pandora’s box of speech suppression. Provisions triggering worries for protesters include sections regulating use of the Olympic symbol “in respect of advertising of any kind including in particular — (a) advertising of a non-commercial nature, and (b) announcements or notices of any kind.” The law further seems to authorize a “constable or enforcement officer” to “enter land or premises” where they believe such material is being produced. It also permits that such materials may be destroyed, and for the use of “reasonable force” to do so.
[. . .]
But it’s not just the Olympic rings that are being protected; it’s also Olympic words. As Nick Cohen recently observed, the “government has told the courts they may wish to take particular account of anyone using two or more words from what it calls ‘List A.’ ” Those words: Games, Two Thousand and Twelve, 2012, and twenty twelve. And woe betide anyone who takes a word from List A and marries it with one or more words from “List B”: Gold, Silver, Bronze, London, medals, sponsors, summer.
Spectators have been warned they may not “broadcast or publish video and/or sound recordings, including on social networking websites and the Internet,” making uploading your video to your Facebook page a suspect activity. Be careful with your links to the official Olympic website as well.
Getting up on the curmudgeonly side of the bed, Patrick Reusse explains why he does not understand the modern Viking fan with an optimistic viewpoint:
The age for sincere emotional involvement with a sports team is 12. Anyone whining over the result of a game before that is a crybaby destined to grow up with few friends.
Which means, if you were 12 on Jan. 11, 1970, the last cheery moment you had about the eventual fate of the Vikings came before that afternoon’s kickoff of the fourth-ever Super Bowl.
Minnesotans as a whole were never more certain of anything than that the Vikings’ magnificent defense would stifle the Kansas City Chiefs and provide a pro football championship in only the third season of Bud Grant’s coaching tenure.
The final was Kansas City 23, Vikings 7. A couple of months later, NFL Films released a highlight tape from the game, complete with Chiefs coach Hank Stram cackling and ridiculing the Vikings throughout his team’s decisive upset.
It was a wound that never healed for Vikings fans that were at least 12 that day, and are now 54, older, or dead.
H/T to Nick Packwood for the link.
Chris Selley explains what will happen with our Olympic team and the media’s saturation coverage of their every effort:
As I write, Canadians are currently warming up their typing fingers and talk radio voices in anticipation of the traditional Olympic psychodrama. Almost certainly, at some point, there will be a paroxysm of angst over a medal drought. Almost certainly people will extrapolate from that certain lessons: We don’t spend enough on amateur athletics. We spend too much on amateur athletics to deserve these bums. We aren’t winning medals because our athletes have been pampered by the welfare state.
If we do win a lot of medals, that will displease a whole other constituency. There are those among us who deride the whole idea of caring that a Canadian might jump higher or run faster than an Italian as an absurd, unbecoming nationalist spectacle. There are those who think winning, and taking pride in winning, violates our traditionally humble nature. Back in 2010, Star columnist Richard Gwyn deplored the Vancouver organizing committee’s stated intention to top the medal standings as “completely and outrageously un-Canadian.” Globe columnist Lawrence Martin lamented that “at the opening ceremonies and elsewhere, it seemed like we were pushing the idea that we are great.” Heaven forbid!
Then there are those, like flamboyantly anti-Olympic Ottawa Citizen columnist Dan Gardner, who insist that those beaming medal-winners are in fact victims of deranged parents, injurious training regimes and childhood-destroying obsession. (This is often the price of excellence in general, I would argue, although it’s true that concert pianists will have much better knees in their 80s than downhill skiers.) It’s all about the money, people complain, and they’re mostly right.
I certainly agree with the haters about the so-called “Olympic Movement,” as presided over by the International Olympic Committee: It’s a putrid, corrupt, manipulative, corporatist scam masquerading as a triumph of the human spirit. The amount of money spent to bid for and stage the Games is literally indefensible — stomach-turning, even, when you consider the better uses to which it could have been put.
At Techdirt, another example of the true modern Olympic spirit:
Ah, the Olympics. The spirit of cooperation. Of athletic competition. Of the essence of global feel-good-ness, where all the Olympic committees of the world come together to put on a spectacle made of the most brilliant athletes in the world.
Oh, and they also like to stifle links to critical pieces (do we have your attention, boys?), by banning their fans from sharing their experiences via social media, and threatening ICANN for refusing to block Olympic-related terms. And, now, Steve M shares a story from the Philadelphia Daily News about how the United States Olympic Committee has won a 30 year battle they didn’t know they were fighting with a gyro shop.
“Three decades after it burst from the starting block, the Greek eatery Olympic Gyro has received a cease-and-desist email from the USOC, the nonprofit corporation responsible for training and funding U.S. teams. The June 7 notice demanded deletion of the word “Olympic” from the food shop’s title, claiming copyright of the word under a 1978 law.”
This legislative insanity, which I assume is entitled “The USOC Can Do Whatever It Wants Because Olympics Act Of 1978”, basically grants the USOC sole usership of the word “Olympic” in the United States, amongst other travesties.
The first word directly from Adrian Peterson after his arrest in Houston this weekend:
“A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on.”
WC— Adrian Peterson (@AdrianPeterson) July 8, 2012
Thank you for waiting for the facts. Truth will surface.
— Adrian Peterson (@AdrianPeterson) July 8, 2012
H/T to Christopher Gates at the Daily Norseman.
Okay, it was Under-19 football, but Canada did win:
… the U.S. team at the IFAF U-19 World Championship fell to Canada, 23-17, in the gold medal game. The American team was the defending champion in the event, and had won its first two games in the 2012 event by a combined 97-13 score.
An American team losing in a sport that theoretically only America is any good at? And to Canada? Never mind that gridiron football — the umbrella term for football played in the U.S. and Canada that encompasses both American football and the Canadian football that actually existed a few years before it — is about as much Canadian as American; do you expect most American fans to know that?
A bit of triumphalism is surely allowed, right?
https://twitter.com/DaveLozo/status/221816030463393793
In what must be the worst kind of news for Minnesota Vikings fans, star running back Adrian Peterson was arrested early Saturday morning for … resisting arrest. ProFootballTalk has the report:
A source with knowledge of the situation tells PFT that the incident culminating in Peterson’s arrest was captured by one or more surveillance cameras. Multiple persons also witnessed the event.
According to the source, Peterson, his girlfriend, and some family members were at a nightclub in Houston. At closing time, a group of police officers entered the club, and they began instructing the remaining patrons to leave.
Peterson wanted to get some water before he left, but an officer told Peterson that he needed to leave. Some words apparently were exchanged, but Peterson eventually walked to the exit with one of the club’s bouncers.
It’s believed that one of the officers then jumped on Peterson’s back from behind and tried to take him down. (Key word: “tried.”) Other officers then joined the fray and completed the arrest.
Peterson was charged with resisting arrest, which implies he was being arrested for something else. He is charged for now with no other crime.
I was under the vague impression that to be charged with “resisting arrest” you’d have to already be wanted by the police for doing something that warranted arrest. Based on the initial reports, it doesn’t sound like Peterson did anything before he was arrested to justify arresting him … unless it’s a case of a police officer deciding that he’d been disrespected. We’ll have to wait until more of the information becomes available.
Update: Contrasting with the initial report, Dan Zinski of The Viking Age says Peterson was “heavily intoxicated” at the time:
More on Adrian’s incident, and this isn’t flattering. The general manager of the club where Adrian Peterson was arrested after allegedly pushing an off-duty cop has told website TMZ that the running back was “heavily intoxicated” at the time of the incident. A police report says Peterson became belligerent after he and his companions were told the leave the bar, and ended up being subdued by three officers.
Live at Bayou Place general manager Daniel Maher says Peterson tried to order one last drink after being told to leave, and after being denied, tried to intimidate the bartender into giving him the drink anyway. It was at this point that Maher himself intervened, but Peterson refused to listen to him. The off-duty cop then broke in and was shoved by Peterson, leading to the Viking being hauled in for a misdemeanor A count of resisting arrest.
Update the second: At Viking Update, John Holler provides a bit of background (which may or may not be relevant to this particular case, but is interesting anyway):
The interesting aspect of the Peterson incident is that the only charge he was hit with was resisting arrest. He wasn’t charged with assaulting an officer. Had he actually shoved a policeman to the point that he “stumbled,” it would seem logical that charges of assaulting of an officer would also have been leveled. Therein lies the need to hear both sides of the story.
I come from a different perspective than most on this type of subject. I have been involved with “bouncer dust-ups” on the wrong side. Yet, three of my best friends are or were cops. I could accurately be accused of being “cop-friendly.” Of the numbers saved in my phone, a half-dozen of them are cops. When they’re “moonlighting,” it’s a night off for them. The odds of them getting shot as the result of a meth-addled domestic abuse call are out of the question. In those situations, they are truly “in charge.” And they like it that way.
When a bouncer (cop or otherwise) is working “his turf,” he can be aggressive. Very aggressive. As tenuous as life is in the NFL, the reality is that “hired muscle” at a nightclub can’t lose if he gets in a dust-up with a drunken patron. Whether an off-duty policeman, a local college football player or just a big guy who casts an imposing shadow, “security” at a big-time nightclub is expected to quell all problems — exceptions not allowed.
In order to do so, off-duty cops (trust me when I tell you that they’re never truly off-duty) aren’t going to take any guff from anyone. They have the experience. They have the sobriety advantage.
If the Peterson matter actually goes to court — the smart money would say that only a hard-core prosecutor would push the case — it will be destroyed by competent legal representation on Peterson’s behalf.
More cogitation on England’s inglorious record of penalty kick performance:
Why do England always lose on penalties? It’s like one of those big ontological questions which children ask — like ‘Why is the sky blue?’ — which invariably stump parents. These are self-evident truths, but we struggle to explain them. The players practice spot-kicks regularly. The goalkeepers meticulously study the penalty traits of their opponents. And yet we always, always bottle it. Why? Roy Hodgson was at a loss to explain what went wrong. ‘I don’t know how to answer why we cannot win penalties shootouts. It can go either way. It is a difficult one. Anyone can win’, he said. ‘I think penalties is always down to luck. It is a lottery. It is just the way it goes in football.’
It’s an old cliché that penalties are a lottery. It also happens to be nonsense, as I’ve argued before. Sure, luck plays a part. But, ultimately, penalty shootouts are tests of psychological strength. They are won and lost in the mind. It’s all about keeping focused, banishing the doubts and holding one’s nerve under extreme pressure. Easier said than done, of course, but successive penalty shootout defeats are imprinted on our sporting psyche. The inevitability of failure has become a myth that all of us — footballers included — have come to believe. Did you see the terror in Ashley Young’s face as he was about to take his ill-fated kick? The ghosts of all those missed penalties had returned to haunt him.
Invariably, a motley crew of psychologists, positive-thinking gurus and snake-oil sellers will be forming a queue outside FA headquarters, offering cures for the English penalty curse. I think there’s a simpler solution. Let’s campaign for spot kicks to be scrapped. We should use whatever arguments we think might work. I’d play the inclusion card. Penalty kicks clearly discriminate against the mentally frail. The English, who suffer from a collective, penalty-induced trauma, will always get a raw deal. How can that be fair? If FIFA wants a truly level playing field, the answer is to get rid of the pseudo-lottery of spot kicks. What we need is a proper lottery. We don’t want skill or nerve to play any part. Tossing a coin, rolling dice, drawing straws, a game of scissor-paper-stone — anything is better than a shootout. Come on Mr Blatter, give us chokers a chance.
I watched yesterday’s game with a deep sense of foreboding … that it just might come down to penalties. Again. Richard Littlejohn obviously felt the same way:
We might have guessed it was always going to come down to penalties. We’ve been here before.
There was a grim inevitability about England’s elimination from Euro 2012 on penalties. And Italy deserved their victory. But that’s not to pretend it still doesn’t hurt.
Every two years, I kid myself I don’t care. Why invest emotional energy in a bunch of footballers? It’s only a game.
When England kicked off against France 10 days ago, I feigned indifference. So what if England lose? Life goes on. World Cups, European Championships, it’s bound to end in tears.
But England didn’t lose. They drew with France, beat Sweden and Ukraine, finished top of their group and qualified for the quarter finals. Suddenly, it mattered. Three more wins and four and a half decades of bitter disappointment and under-achievement would be consigned to history. Football’s coming home.
Against my better judgment and years of experience I discovered I did care after all. As England progressed and last night’s game against Italy approached, the pulse began to quicken, the optimism returned. This time we really could be in with a chance.
To be honest, it was better when England stuck to the script and crashed out of tournaments prematurely, consumed by hubris and an inflated sense of their own abilities. We’re used to being let down. We can handle it. As John Cleese said in the movie Clockwise: ‘I can take the despair. It’s the hope I can’t stand.’
H/T to Nick Packwood for the link.
Seth Godin explains how the Olympics® have jumped the shark:
When a brand becomes a bully, it loses something vital.
So much money, so many egos and so many governments are involved in the Olympics now (and they have so little competition) that it has become a sterling example of what happens when you let greed and lawyers run amok over common sense and generosity.
[. . .]
You can’t build a brand by trying to sue anyone who chooses to talk about you.
Well, they can’t sue all of us. Personally, I never watch the Olympic brand games, and the hype tires me out, but if you want to tweet without using the first person (violating their rules, as if they have the right to tell you what person to tweet in), I think that’s just fine.
It’s never a good thing when one of your best young players starts dropping hints to the local media that he’s unhappy about his contract, or his role on the team, or some other unspecified issue. Percy Harvin is the unhappy player right now, and John Holler does the introductions:
If an old-timey big microphone was going to drop from the rafters down for a bald, silky monotone-voiced guy to make the fight introductions between Percy Harvin and the Vikings, it might go something like this:
“In this corner, weighing in at 185 pounds. He hails from Virginia Beach, Virginia. He is 24 years of age. If his four years in the NFL, he has re- written the Minnesota record books like a modern day Paul Bunyan. One of the most explosive playmakers in franchise history-y-y-y, he is the Threat Who’s Owed A Debt, The Grenade Who’s Underpaid. Ladies and gentlemen, put your hands together for Percyy-y-y-y Har-r-r-r-r-vin!”
Michael Buffer, eat your heart out. As the applause subsides, the other introduction is made.
“In this corner, weighing in at significantly more. They have been part of the NFL wars for more than half-century. In 1970, they won the NFL championship of the wor-r-r-r-ld. They have three more NFC title belts to their credit. They have sent 10 of their representatives to the prestigious Pro Football Hall of Fame. Over the last eight years, they have paid more than $1 bil-l-l-l-l-l-l-lion dollars to players. They are the Scandinavian Scourge, The Tower of Power, The House That Wilf Built. Put your hands together for the Minneso-o-o-o-ta-a-a-a Vi-i-i-i-i-i-kings!”
The introductions have been made, thanks in part to Harvin “calling out” the organization. His announcement of unhappiness came out of nowhere. It was planned. It was effective. Now the question is whether Harvin is ready to go the extra mile to make his point
Rick Spielman, general manager of the Vikings, has said he has no intention of trading Harvin, but Harvin doesn’t want to attend training camp unless his (unspecified) issues are dealt with.
Harvin is a great player, and I don’t want to see him either leave the team or hold out, but given the Vikings’ history he wouldn’t be offered a contract extension until late this year and the team probably doesn’t want to create a precedent even for someone as important to the team’s fortunes as Harvin.
Update, 22 June: Harvin is apparently surprised at the concern:
https://twitter.com/Percy_Harvin/status/215869665551986688
The guys at 1500ESPN.com try to figure out what went down over the last three days:
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