- Things have certainly worked out well for Michelle Wie, haven’t they? She burst onto the scene in 2003 at age 13, the next golf phenom, winning the U.S. Women's Amateur Public Links. She could bomb drives out to 300 yards, right alongside the men, as a teenager, so it made sense that she would be a force in the world of women’s golf. Of course, that was before her overbearing, ignorant father and those around her submarined her career by turning her into a traveling freak show more concerned with garnering attention and trying to play on the men’s tour than developing her game and learning how to win first. She hasn’t won't a tournament since that 2003 amateur event, she’s pissed of women’s golf legend Annika Sorenstam by pulling out of Sorenstam’s event in the middle of the second round because Wie was on her way to shooting an 88 or higher, which would have cost her her tour card at the time. She’s received sponsors exceptions to men’s tournaments and majors on the LPGA tour, but has bombed out in nearly every event she’s played in. In other words, she’s become a novelty act, a freak show with no real chance to win but who has amazing physical abilities. Those running her career have tried to squeeze every dollar and moment of publicity out of her with no regard for developing her as a golfer and giving her a chance to be successful in the long term. Where has that left her? Heading back to LPGA Tour qualifying school, that’s where. Q-school is where golfers go when they’re not that good and fighting to qualify for a spot on the tour. It’s supposed to be for hacks and struggling, aging veterans trying to make it back on tour, not for players who were prodigies about five years ago and still aren't old enough to legally drink alcohol. Wie will play the first stage of Q-school next week on the California course where she won her last tournament. Her overbearing, stage-parent father B.J. said at the U.S. Women's Open that Wie had “no other options” but Q-school if she didn't make enough money to finish the equivalent of 80th of the LPGA Tour money list. Well, she hasn’t do a freaking thing since then, so now it’s back with the weekend duffers and club pros seeking a spot on tour.
The first stage will be at Mission Hills in Rancho Mirage, Calif., with the top 30 will advancing to the final qualifier in Daytona Beach, Fla., in December, where the top 20 and ties will earn LPGA Tour cards. Quite a fall for a girl who less than half a decade ago was supposed to revolutionize women’s golf……
- Here’s a new last-ditch defense strategy for an inmate on death row: allege that the judge and prosecutor in his case were involved in an affair with each other at the time of the trial. You know you’re desperate when you’re digging that deep, but such is the case for Charles Dean Hood, sitting on death row in the execution-happy state of Texas. Hood is in prison in McKinney, Texas, and a day before a convicted murderer is set to die, his lawyers raised questions as to whether the judge who presided over his 1990 trial and the prosecutor in the case were involved in a legally improper romance at the time. With their client schedule to die by lethal injection Wednesday, Hood’s attorneys are pulling out all the stops. Their latest strategy resulted in the court-ordered deposition of retired Judge Verla Sue Holland, just one day after former Collin County District Attorney Tom O'Connell was also questioned by Hood's attorneys. Holland was questioned in a two-hour session, with her lawyer, Bill Boyd, only saying afterward only that the deposition had been completed.
The desperate grasp for this straw came after a former assistant district attorney in O'Connell's office raised the claim of an unethical affair in an affidavit. It’s an interesting conspiracy theory, especially for someone like me who love conspiracy theories, but this sounds beyond desperate. Unless you have hard evidence of this affair, i.e. pictures of the two getting it on, recordings of phone conversations between the two or emails they exchanged, you’ve got nothing…….
- Here’s a piece of news that flat-out crushed me. I mean, it deflated my spirit in a way few things ever have. The dirt, tree-dwelling hippies who have been living in a controversial grove of trees on the University of California, Berkeley campus for more than 21 months to protest a new construction project that would wipe out the grove have given up. What started as a large group of tree-sitters had dwindled to four hearty, dirty, smelly hippie souls who wussed out and surrendered to police Tuesday, ending a tense standoff after a 100-foot scaffolding was built around the one remaining redwood tree and at least six supporters were arrested. The tree-dwellers bowed down in the face of an appellate court decision in favor of the university that prompted university officials to give the dirty hippies a 72-hour deadline to come down voluntarily. When the deadline passed at 9 a.m. Monday, the university announced it was ready to take offensive action to remove them from their perch. That action appeared to be forthcoming early Tuesday morning when police and a construction crew moved in. However, last-minute negotiations between by UC Berkeley police chief Victoria Harrison, perched in a bucket attached to a giant crane, and the protestors brought and end to the standoff. As the 21-month odyssey came to a close, a crowd of more than 500 spectators – some banging drums and buckets -- gathered across the street from the grove to watch. Scaffolding was erected up the tree and as it neared the protestors’ perch, two of them climbed into a crow- nest positioned nearly 120 feet into the air. Thankfully, not all of the anti-construction protestors surrendered as meekly as the dirty hippies in the tree. On the ground, six protestors were arrested for assaulting police officers, which I find amusing and very cool. Clearly, the university doesn’t get the point of the protest even now, with UC spokesman Dan Mogulof stating on Monday warned that the tree-sitters’ “presence has no purpose” because the university has cut down all but two of the 42 trees it wants to remove from the site It’s the spirit of the protest, Danny. As long as one tree stood, the fight was still alive. According to a man calling himself Ayr, also known as Erik Eisenberg, who is the head of the ground support team for the tree-sitters, the tree-sitters agreed to come down peacefully in return for the promise of the creation of a permanent committee that would have oversight of the university's land use decisions and policies. I don’t buy that for a second, because even if such a committee is created, the university isn't going to give any real power to such a committee. Just look at their actions following the court decision to clear the way for the project. The university began tearing down trees Friday morning, shortly after the state Court of Appeal on Thursday rejected a request by project opponents to maintain an injunction against the project. Envrionment be damned, the 158,000-square-foot sports training facility is coming. No way are the suits in the university administration going to allow anything to stand in the way of their $125 million baby. Like I said, I am very disappointed in you, dirty, tree-dwelling hippies. You need to stay in those trees until you are forcibly removed and led off in handcuffs…..
- Never a good thing when your third-year starting quarterback spends the offseason talking about how he considered retiring from football after his rookie season, takes himself out of the first game of the new season and only re-enters when berated by the head coach, then behaves in a manner that concerns family members, friends and his team so much that the police are called in to find him in the middle of the night. Vince Young was that man earlier this week, with Nashville police called in on Monday evening after family members called the to express concern for Young’s state of mind. According to Nashville Metro Police spokesman Don Aaron, Young "abruptly" left his home in Williamson County around 7 p.m. Monday and also left his cell phone behind. That prompted family members to call the Titans, with the news inspiring head coach Jeff Fisher to call the police. A bulletin was issued to all on-duty officers to be on the lookout for Young and negotiators were also placed on stand-by, which is standard operating procedures. Eventually, Young was located at a friend’s house, hanging out and watching a game on TV. “He was located at a friend's house, where we made contact with him,” the Titans said in an official statement. “He then came to the practice facility, where it was determined that those initial concerns by his friends and family were unfounded and he returned home without incident.” On one hand, it looks like this was a gross overreaction by those around Young and to be fair, it probably was. At the same time, if you think that there is even the most minute chance that your loved one is in that state of mind where they would consider suicide, you can’t be wrong for acting to protect them. Also, he must not have been acting like himself and been in a bizarre frame of mind to prompt that kind of concern. It just doesn’t say good things about a person in terms of their ability to handle the pressure of the NFL lifestyle when this sort of thing happens. Now that Young has an injured knee and is expected to be out 2-4 weeks, this could go one of two ways. Either he uses this time off to get his mind right, or he allows this black cloud to continue to hang over him and this mess snowballs and gets worse. Here’s hoping for the former………
- Holding a criminal trial for Orenthal James Simpson just seems like a big waste of time, on par with trying to convince Paris Hilton to stop being a skank, Michael Jackson to stop being a pedophile and Rosie O’Donnell to start eating only salads. Because in the end, we all know what’s going to happen: the Juice is going to go free. If he can murder two people (allegedly) and get away with it, why bother charging him with anything else? Clearly the Juice has made a deal with the devil and can do as he pleases here on Earth. So as I see jury selection in his kidnapping and armed robbery trial in Las Vegas get underway, I have to laugh. His lawyers are fighting to seat a racially diverse panel that hasn't prejudged whether the former pro football star and his golfing buddy should go to prison, with jury selection resuming Tuesday after three panelists were dismissed. That came on the heels of a mass potential juror exodus Monday, when 16 were excused for various reasons - possibly among them not wanting to be turned into a human Pez dispenser if they found the Juice guilty and he managed to get out of prison to come after them. Clark County District Court Judge Jackie Glass is presiding over the case and clearly she, the prosecutors and defense lawyers in the case are setting insane standards for potential jurors. According to them, they are looking for jurors unaffected by Simpson's celebrity and his 1995 acquittal in the slaying of his ex-wife and her friend in Los Angeles. Right, because there are plenty of people out there who don’t remember that trial, don’t recall the Juice writing a tell-all, how-to murder book, giving interviews to grandstand about the case and being the worst guy ever. “I'm not kidding around,” Glass said on Monday. “Can you put that aside and understand that the case we are trying here and the information you're going to hear about here is totally separate from that case?” Not that I’d ever be dumb enough to get rooked into jury duty, but if by some miracle I was, I’m using any excuse necessary not to be on a jury in a case where O.J. is the defendant. First, your job is pointless because somehow, some way, dude is going to walk. Second, I don’t want even the most remote possibility to exist that he will link me with a single guilty vote against him or the overall unpleasantness of being on trial. In other words, I don’t want to piss off a former Heisman Trophy winner/accomplished double murderer and have him coming for me. So go ahead and pick your jury, Judge Glass, prosecutors and defense attorneys, just know that you’re wasting your time trying the Juice…..
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