- Indiana University made the right decision. However you want to slice it, getting rid of the lying, cheating, arrogant, dishonest piece of garbage that is Kelvin Sampson was the absolute right choice. Sampson clearly didn’t learn from the mistakes he made at Oklahoma and/or was so arrogant as to think he could get away with them all over again at Indiana. He had to go, so news that Indiana and Kelvin Sampson reached a $750,000 settlement Friday that allowed the university to part ways with the duplicitous Sampson. “I am very sorry to see our relationship with Coach Sampson end this way, but we have to focus on doing what's best for the long-term interests of IU and its men's basketball team,” athletic director Rick Greenspan said in the statement. Roughly translated, Greenspan said, “This guy f’ed us over and dragged our basketball program down into the mud. We’re pushing the eject button on this mess ASAP and hoping the NCAA doesn’t sanction us too harshly.” The deal calls for Sampson to be paid $750,000, $550,000 of which is being provided by an anonymous donor, the release said. I love that part of the deal, that some anonymous donor and supporter of the basketball program is ponying up more than half a mil. I just hope it was taped in an un-labeled envelope under the back bumper of Sampson’s car in a parking garage in some obscure corner of the IU campus. In exchange for the payoff, Sampson has agreed he will not file a wrongful termination lawsuit against Indiana. The Hoosiers will now be coached by assistant coach Dan Dakich, who will be named interim coach. As long as he knows not to make hundreds of illegal phone calls to recruits, he’ll be a marked improvement over Sampson. The Hoosiers took on Northwestern today in Evanston, Ill., and all the team’s players were in uniform. In other words, whichever grammatically-challenged idiot that told Greenspan that if Sampson ain’t coaching, the players ain’t playing was full of hot air. “They (the players) have been playing their hearts out on the court in spite of all the controversy and media attention that has been focused on this issue,” Indiana president Michael McRobbie said in the release. “I am grateful to each and every one of them for their perseverance and loyalty to this university.” I sincerely hope for the sake of IU’s players that they have a great rest of the season, largely because Sampson won't get the chance to enjoy it and doesn’t deserve to.
- Some good news courtesy of tvguide.com. The site had previously been reporting that the fate of FOX’s best show, Prison Break, was uncertain in terms of the show being renewed for a fourth season. Season Three wrapped up this past Monday and although it was a truncated season and not consistently great as PB has been in its first two seasons, it was still one of the five best shows on TV. Now, tvguide.com is saying that the show is all but assured of a fourth season, meaning that come fall, Michael Scofield will indeed get the chance to pursuer Gretchen, Whistler and Mahone and exact revenge on the Company for the death of his beloved Sarah Tancredi. I can honestly say that I would have been extremely pissed and disappointed if the show had ended now, partially because it’s still such a good show and partly because it would have been left totally unfinished. But now that’s an issue we don’t have to deal with, something that TV fans can be grateful for.
- Five years after a nightclub fire at a West Warwick, R.I. club that killed 100 of its fans, the band Great White is back on tour to promote its new album. After reuniting last year to celebrate the band’s 25th anniversary, the surviving members of the group began work on a new album, its first since the fire in West Warwick that took the life of guitarist Ty Longley and those 100 fans. They’ve avoided going back to Rhode Island, mostly because the families and friends of victims still hold the band largely responsible for the fire because it was their pyrotechnics that started the blaze. Other contributing factors escalated the blaze and prevented patrons from getting out of the bar in time, but in the mind of many Rhode Islanders, Great White is the chief culprit. The fallout from the incident could be seen at a recent gig in Cincinnati, where fire and police personnel showed up just to make sure that Great White wouldn’t be using any pyrotechnics in their show. Yeah, I think they’ve learned their lesson on that one. If they so much as light a sparkler on stage in one of their shows now, the entire crowd is going to go sprinting for the exits. Here’s to a much safer tour this time around.....
- If only there were more of this kind of action in men’s professional tennis, I might actually be interested in watching. Italian tennis player Potito Starace, the No. 35 player in the world and someone none of us would know if he hadn’t gone knucklehead, has lambasted Argentinean soccer idol Diego Maradona for insulting him during his quarterfinal loss to Argentina's David Nalbandian in the Buenos Aires Open. Maradona was on hand to support his countryman, but Starace, a fan of Maradona's former team Napoli, took great offense to his conduct. “Maradona insulted me as soon as the match began,” Starace told Italy's Radio Kiss Kiss on Saturday. “Diego made me lose my head, I went to the umpire and I said to him: 'Either you throw him out or I'll go bash a racket in his teeth.'” That doesn’t say good things about you, P., that a fan in the stands was able to rattle you that badly. If you can’t handle one heckler, how can you expect to handle the pressure of a high-profile match at Wimbledon or the U.S. Open? I hadn’t heard from Maradona since he went on a food-and-beer bender that sent him to the hospital last year (yes, dude actually grubbed himself right into the emergency room), but glad to see D. Maradona alive and well. No, I mean it, because this guy is a notorious drug addict and if I don’t hear from him every now and then, I really wonder whether he’s still alive. Starace, became increasingly irate during his 4-6, 7-6, 6-4 defeat. “I have always been a big fan of Napoli and Maradona and before the match I told journalists I would like to meet him. But I was very disappointed by his behavior,” he said. “I know that at the end of the match he came down to the dressing rooms but I had already left because I was very angry.” Potito, you need to get a hold of yourself, my man, because if you can get hooked and thrown off your game by an over-eating, washed-up junkie/former soccer star, then your tennis career is going to flame out in spectacular fashion any time you face any sort of adversity and No. 35 in the world is as high as you’ll go, amigo.
- Today we salute two world-class scumbags for their respective attempts to benefit from the two biggest disasters to strike the United States in years. Hurricane Katrina and the 9/11 attacks were tragedies and devastating incidents in different ways, but one thing they have in common is that scumbags out there tried to benefit from them to the detriment of their fellow citizens. Thomas Cousar, 54, and two of his employees at Capco Contracting in McKeesport, Pa. have plead guilty to participating in a scheme to defraud the federal government in the reconstruction of the Pentagon after the 2001 terrorist attacks. Cousar and his two stooges helped to overcharge the government $850,000 for work done in rebuilding the Pentagon. Great work, fellas. I know you probably thought what the hey, no one’s going to notice, it’s not like we’re bilking them out of tens of millions of dollars, right? Because what’s $850K on a job costing many tens of millions of dollars? And who would care that you’re looking to benefit financially from a horrible tragedy that took the lives of hundreds of innocent people? Fortunately for these tools, they do not stand alone on this day for their totally reprehensible, disgusting and classless profiteering off of tragedy. They are joined by another trio of tools, led by a prominent Mississippi attorney. Richard Scruggs, his son Zack and his law partner Sidney Backstrom found themselves in a dispute over a mass settlement of $26.5 million in Hurricane Katrina insurance lawsuits. Being in a tight spot and fearing that the case wouldn’t go their way, meaning they wouldn’t make nearly as much money, Scruggs, little Scruggs and Backstrom did what all reputable, intelligent lawyers do: bribe the judge in their case. For some reason, this plan backfired and now the trio faces indictment on federal bribery charges. Yeah, judges are funny like that. They tend to get pissed when lawyers in cases before them try to buy them off. And save the excuse that you were fighting for your clients and trying to get them the justice they deserved. 1) You don’t buy justice if things don’t go your way, and 2) You stood to benefit from your clients winning the case, so your actions were very much self-serving. As always, thanks to these two trios, my belief that the world is full of pieces of crap is confirmed, thanks for nothing guys.
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