Guesties: The Day I Watched ESPN

By Rich Jensen
Guest Blogger

Did you know ESPN has this show called First Take? Okay. It’s on ESPN2. ESPN2 is a channel whose existence is predicated on the notion that ESPN has so much stuff you should see that they can’t fit it all onto one channel. This is difficult to comprehend, because having two ESPNs does not double the amount of hours in my day, so I still have to make choices, and if I choose what’s on ESPN2, then I can’t also watch ESPN, unless I stop watching ESPN2. And what if I have to go to the bathroom, people? Or have to eat? I worry that they haven’t thought this through because they also have ESPNNEWS and ESPN Classic and ESPN Deportes and ESPNU. Clearly, I can’t watch all of these channels at once. I’m not Elvis. And Elvis didn’t have enough TVs to watch all these channels at once. I also do not live in a sports bar.

Guesties: Big-time sports & NCAA incompetence – a love story

A felon, a college president and a mascot walk into a bowling alley…

By Rich Jensen
Guest Blogger

The NCAA wrote a letter to a bankruptcy judge on behalf of convicted felon Nevin Shapiro. In this letter, the NCAA said that they would consider hiring Shapiro in the future.

Predictably, this revelation has drawn outraged commentary and sarcasm.

It has undoubtedly made this woman angry — this woman in ill-fitting clam-diggers ogling a fifty-thousand dollar check in a bowling alley. This woman was a cabinet secretary under Bill Clinton. She holds a Ph.D. from Syracuse. She was the chancellor at the University of Wisconsin. She is now the president of the University of Miami. This is what college athletics has done to her. Here she cavorts with a soon-to-be-convicted felon and accepts $50,000 in stolen funds. Later she will accuse Mark Emmert of failing to act responsibly when the briefest of inquiries into Shapiro’s background and habits would have been sufficient to render him persona-non-grata at any respectable university.

Guesties: Mr. Rodman goes to Pyongyang

By Kolbe Nelson
Guest Blogger

AUTHOR’S NOTE: I am absolutely not an expert on United States-North Korea Relations. I grew up watching Dennis Rodman play basketball though.

Dennis Rodman, the Dennis Rodman, is preventing World War III. That’s a text a friend sent me Thursday. While his statement is drenched in hyperbole, he may have a point.

Rodman, along with a TV crew and, completing the trifecta of strange awesomeness, three members of the Harlem Globetrotters, visited North Korea, a country veiled in secrecy and untrusted by much of the world. Maybe stranger, they became the personal guests of dictator Kim Jong Un, who has enjoyed both basketball and booze with the American contingent. Most of me thinks it’s an awful idea sending an often unpredictable basketball player (part-time pro wrestler) to a country veiled in secrecy and possibly capable of nuclear warfare, but part of me thinks it might be a good start.

Guesties: Diary of a bombing comedian

By Kolbe Nelson
Guest Blogger

Ever since I was little, I’ve been infatuated with the art of comedy. I absorbed everything from reruns of Saturday Night Live on Comedy Central to the infomercials for the Best of Johnny Carson. When I was in 6^th grade I used the money I earned from detasseling corn (I REALLY AM A SOUTH DAKOTA BOY!) to buy an old 19” TV and a VCR. I used those tools nightly to record episodes of The Late Show with David Letterman and Late Night with Conan O’Brien and I would review the shows over and over out of pure enjoyment. Unless my mom has thrown them out, you could probably still find some of those old tapes in my closet back home in Alcester.

It may shock many of you, given the information provided in that last paragraph, but right up through high school, most of my friends were not hot girls. That was ok, though. I managed to convince myself that love and sex would be too big a distraction from my duties as a spot-starter on the JV basketball team.

Guesties: From South Dakota to New York City

By Kolbe Nelson
Guest Blogger

I was sitting in a bar in Manhattan with my friend Kyle Johnson late this past February. That’s when this grand adventure that has been my move from South Dakota to New York City got started in earnest.

Kolbe Nelson

Kyle had been one of my best friends since elementary school at Alcester-Hudson and we were pals right up through graduation from South Dakota State University in 2011. He went to school for turf management, learning how to make golf courses and baseball fields look the absolute best. It’s what he was born to do. It brought him out here to work the courses at Winged Foot Golf Club, the home of the 2006 US Open where Phil Mickelson served up a choke job on par with the monumental ones Greg Norman had produced decades before. It’s one of the toughest courses in the country. Kyle’s one of the guys who makes sure it stays that way.

I was working as a weekend sports anchor for a TV station in Sioux Falls, a job I had held for a little over a year, and was using the small amount of vacation time and spare cash I had saved up to visit Kyle in New York and a few friends in Montana over the span of a week. This was a pretty new experience for me. Not only had I never seen the Big Apple before, I had never even flown in a plane. The excitement level for me was unequaled. We had plans to see the Knicks the next night at Madison Square Garden, but for the time being we were taking it easy, having a few beers in Midtown.

Guesties: Speculating on a (potential) scandal

By Rich A. Jensen
Guest blogger

Editor’s note: The following is a fictional account of something that may or may not happened  in real life. Think of it as a written episode of “Law & Order.” Again, this is complete and total speculation. Not real. Got it? (Fiction.)

“That’s not what the money was for,” muttered A, even though there was no one in the office to overhear him. Not that he was worried about being overheard. The people he allowed into this office, he thought, were people that he paid too well, that he treated too well to betray his trust.

He had just spoken with Lance Thomas, the basketball player he’d sponsored for the past four years. There was no written agreement, of course, just an understanding between himself and a handful of other Duke alums. ‘We’ll take care of these guys.”

The two sides of Lance Armstrong

On Thursday night, the ultimate sports survivor gave up.

Lance Armstrong, seven-time winner of the Tour de France and cancer-fighting icon, stopped fighting the doping charges that have dogged him for years. He quit via press release.

There are only two logical conclusions to draw from this: Either the Texan truly is innocent or he’s trying out a new form of the non-admission admission. And we thought we’d heard them all before.

Guesties: Mars

By Rich Jensen
Guest blogger

Curiosity is certainly an apt name for the recently landed Mars explorer.

Every creature not entirely governed by instinct possesses a measure of curiosity. Surviving in an environment means learning about and understanding that environment, at whatever level of understanding a particular animal is capable of.

We, having mastered the basics of survival (at least in most places, most of the time), are still curious. Curious about all sorts of things. In fact, science is nothing more than curiosity in its Sunday clothes.

Guesties: Going insane with Shaun T.

By Mark Harming
Guest blogger

I don’t do stuff like this. While I’m (fairly) healthy and in pretty good shape, I never really considered myself a “fitness guy.” For most of my adult life, I’ve been a runner. I was (and still am) proud of being a runner. I liked going outside and pounding the pavement.  Doing a home-fitness program like Insanity wasn’t a bad thing, but it wasn’t for me; it was for other people.

Then, the injury occurred. After reading the phenomenal book “Born to Run” by Christopher McDougall, I decided that barefoot, natural running is the way to go. Hey, it works for the Tarahumara, it will work for me right?

I made the classic mistake of too much too soon and ended up with tendonitis on the top of my feet. At first, I tried to push through and survive with icing and stretching and anti-inflammitories. It didn’t work. So, an extremely slow half marathon this May (a personal-worst time) prompted me to do some thinking.

Guesties: We are all Penn State

By Rich A. Jensen
Guest blogger

So, the Freeh report is out, and according to it, there was a ‘failure of leadership at Penn State.’ Louis Freeh himself pulled no punches during his press conference, even invoking God in his condemnation of the corrupt culture there.

And for the rest of us not at Penn State, not alums of Penn State and possibly not even football fans, it’s been a fantastic, a titanic, opportunity to sit in judgment of bureaucratic nebbishes and an old dead coach.

I’m not here to defend any of these people.

I’m here to remind you that all of these people are people. Just like you and me.