Coming soon to Madison Square Garden?

New York Governor David Paterson has been struggling with his state's bleak fiscal outlook, and now wants to lift New York's 13-year-old ban on mixed martial arts exhibitions in order to collect sales tax revenue off of it.

Back when New York banned MMA, if memory serves, participation in the sport was limited to men only (I believe that's still the case with the UFC league). Today there are women fighting too, and some of them are pretty impressive. One of the ladies below does a nice job of finishing the fight (this fight took place last fall, but I just caught a replay of it on Showtime last week).

New Mexico soccer brawler speaks

Yahoo! Sports reports that Elizabeth Lambert, star of the clip in this post, "Girl's soccer gets rough", was interviewed by the New York Times about her exploits during that game against BYU: Vilified New Mexico soccer player breaks her silence. Excerpt:

The junior was deluged with calls and letters after the video went viral. Some of those were threats, but others came from men who wanted to ask her out. She was disgusted by both.

The screen cap above, of Lampert drilling a BYU player in the back, accompanied the Yahoo! article. If memory serves though, that shot at least was in retaliation for an elbow strike. That video featured more blatant stuff by Lambert than that.

Girls soccer gets rough

Watch what happens at 1:04. HT: Trumwill @ Hit Coffee.



I mentioned this over there, but one of the players mentioned in the voice over (I think the one who got yanked down by her pony tail) was named Shumway. There’s a noted finance professor whose work I came across in doing research for Shortscreen named Tyler Shumway. Maybe that name is more common out west.

Hatton v. Pacquiao

Here's the video of last night's fight, followed by a few thoughts by me below.



- I'm glad I didn't pay $49.95 to see this live.

- The outcome doesn't surprise me, though I wouldn't have expected it to end as soon as it did. Pacquiao's right hook that dropped Hatton the first time was a thing of beauty. It reminded me a little of the left hook Mayweather knocked out Hatton with in his fight; Hatton didn't see either of those punches coming.

- I have never been too impressed by Hatton. He's a busy, aggressive fighter, but that's about it. I was surprised to see him defeat Kostya Tszyu and Jose Luis Castillo¹ in previous -- two great fighters, but, in hindsight, Hatton fought them when they were past their primes.

- Pacquiao is now arguably the best pound-for-pound boxer in the world. That distinction has been Floyd Mayweather, Jr.'s for the last few years, but considering the way Pacquiao dispatched Hatton and Oscar De La Hoya -- with a second round knockout and and eighth round TKO, respectively -- versus Mayweather's 10th round knockout of Hatton and split decision over De La Hoya, Pacquiao looks more impressive right now. Of course, this sets up a huge pay-per-view fight between the still-undefeated Mayweather and Pacquiao.

- What was Hatton thinking hiring Floyd Mayweather, Sr. to train him for this fight? If you have seen Mayweather, Sr. (who is estranged from his son, the boxing champ mentioned above) on television, you'll know what I mean. He doesn't seem to be all there.

- If Hatton had a better chin, he might be able to look forward to a future as the Arturo Gatti² of Manchester: a club fighter who sells out local arenas while getting beaten soundly by top boxers.

- How long until someone in the media analogizes Hatton's boxing career -- which began its current downward trajectory in 2007, after a long streak of victories -- to the recent trajectory of Britain's economy? Maybe a British financial journalist will argue that, as with Hatton's early successes, there was less to Britain's finance- and real estate-fueled boom than met the eye.

¹Castillo fought two fights against Diego Corrales, the first of which might have been the best fight in the last decade. At the time of his defeat by Hatton, he may have been distracted by events outside the ring, including a lawsuit by the Corrales family (Castillo caused a third fight between the two to be delayed, and then Corrales was killed in a motorcycle accident before it could be rescheduled).

²Gatti has since retired, but before he did he fought a series of fights with Micky Ward, the first of which was about as good as Castillo vs. Corrales I.

"Hall of Fame Dork" Wins 3rd NFL MVP Award

The Colts' Peyton Manning (pictured above) won his third NFL MVP award. Believe it or not, back in 2005, Slate's Robert Weintraub compared Manning invidiously to the Falcons' Michael Vick ("Michael Vick: no passing fancy"). Below are a few excerpts from Weintraub's essay.

Vick's credentials hardly need enumerating here—he's probably the most exciting player in all of pro sports. What separates him from even the best running backs is his acceleration when he sees a fissure in the defense. Watch when he eludes the rush and decides to take off—there is a split second of hesitation, as Vick computes pursuit angles, then whoooossshhhhh, and defenders are pawing helplessly at his jet wash.

The elephant in the room, of course, is race. Trent Dilfer leads his team to the Super Bowl by "managing the game" (code for not screwing up worse than his opponent). Vick wins by playing "PlayStation football" (code for coasting on his natural athletic ability) and gets derided for not being Peyton Manning.

I'll pause to note that Weintraub's generalization here is inaccurate. There are, and have been, pocket-passer African American quarterbacks -- Doug Williams¹, for example, the Redskins quarterback who was the MVP of Super Bowl XXII, was a pocket passer. Similarly, there have been white quarterbacks known for their athletic ability as well as their passing ability (e.g., Steve Young). Back to Weintraub's essay:

Manning works hard to foster the image that he works hard. Good luck finding a story that doesn't mention Peyton's love affair with game film. No one is better versed in defensive wrinkles, no one exploits matchups with such aplomb, no one sees the field so clearly. At the line of scrimmage, Manning looks like a man with Tourette's syndrome—arms akimbo, patting his guards on the keister, pointing at every defender, bouncing around to every teammate to make sure they are on the same page. He's essentially the first Hall of Fame dork.

Manning reminds me of that old Jon Lovitz character from Saturday Night Live, the Master Thespian ("Acting!!"). Manning spends a lot of time Quarterbacking!! He wants you to forget that his path to the Pro Bowl was greatly eased by natural athletic ability (check out the gene pool he swims in). It's the same 99th-percentile athleticism that Vick possesses, just expressed in a different way. Manning makes it seem like every quarterback could throw the perfect deep ball if they only studied harder and gesticulated more wildly.

[...]


Imagine that the Kansas Board of Education ran the NFL, and offenses never evolved past the single wing. Quarterbacks still took direct snaps and ran the ball on virtually every play. In this alternate universe, Vick would be the state-of-the-art QB, Manning the one dissected at length for his unusual approach to winning. Or, let's just dispense with allegory, like Falcons coach Jim Mora recently did: "When are we going to start talking about when Peyton Manning is going to start doing what Mike Vick does?"

Weintraub wrote that in November of 2005. Flash forward to today, and Peyton Manning has his third MVP, and Michael Vick is in the pokey for convictions relating to his dog fighting ring.

¹Williams was quoted in a recent New York Times article, "Race Fades as a Way to Define a Passer". Excerpt:

More than the performance or fate of any single individual, the most glaring development has been the dissolution of the notion that Vick and Young were in the process of ushering in a radically altered era of the rangy, running quarterback. It would appear that we have seen the N.F.L.’s future and it fairly resembles the past — quarterbacks, hopefully of all colors and creeds, dropping back and throwing spirals downfield.

“If you come up here with the running mentality, it’s going to be tough to survive because the defenses are too complicated and fast,” Doug Williams said by telephone from the Tampa Bay front office, where the formerBuccaneers and Redskins quarterback and the first African-American to start (and win) the Super Bowl serves as a personnel executive. “You’ve got to be able to throw the ball downfield. At the same time, a quarterback has got to be agile and make plays, not depend on playmakers all the time. They have to be elusive. Drew Brees is the epitome of the guy who is not a runner but who is elusive.”