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SPORTS AND THE CITY

By Foster Kamer 7/31/12 1:00pm

SPORTS AND THE CITY

616px-Jerry_jones_owner_dallas_cowboys

Mouthy Rich Texan Issues Homoerotic Threat to Local Football Team

Jerry Jones is known as the composite human caricature whose lifeblood was drawn from Dallas‘ J.R. Ewing, all the characters Jim Varney invented that were too unfunny to use, and those “NEW YORK CITY?!“ salsa commercials. He also happens to own the Dallas Cowboys, the NFL team with the most expensive stadium in the country, which features the biggest TV screen in, like, the universe, because the people who go to Dallas Cowboys games are the kind of people who would rather focus on a high-definition televised event of that which plays out live and directly in front of them instead of watching the actual event. Jerry Jones makes James Dolan look like Fred Rogers’s unshaven cousin from Long Island. Read More

By Foster Kamer 5:34pm

SPORTS AND THE CITY

Dwyane Wade, in SoHo Pickup Game, Dominating Local Tweens (Video)

Miami Heat player Dwyane Wade recently came to Madison Square Garden to beat the Knicks, which he and the Miami Heat obviously did. After, he spent time making conversation with Anna Wintour, and did a little shopping downtown.

While in the neighborhood, he took a few minutes to bring back something special to Miami with him: Bragging rights for “murking” the tough-talkin’ street ballers of SoHo’s Thompson Street playground. Via Animal New York, who found the video of it, SportsCenter, look out: Read More

By Foster Kamer 3/01/12 11:03am

SPORTS AND THE CITY

New York Yankees' owner George Steinbrenner gives

Steinbrenner Syndrome: The New York Sports Sickness

I first recognized it on Dec. 14, 2009, though I didn’t know its name then.

The news broke that Hideki Matsui—the George Harrison of the Yankees, the quiet, stoic performer, and the 2009 World Series MVP—wouldn’t play for New York the following season. The Yankees told Mr. Matsui’s agent that he wasn’t a priority, so Matsui took a one-year, $6.5 M. contract with the Anaheim Angels.

The same team who gave Carl “Ass Injury” Pavano a $40 M. contract (for which he earned $17,646 per pitch, having thrown in only 26 Yankees games) not four years before let Matsui go, just one month after he was named the MVP of the World Series he’d helped the team win. Even now, when I speak with fellow Yankees fans about this travesty, they just shake their heads and shrug, as if to say: Yeah, we know. What’re you gonna do?*

It was a classic, symptomatic moment of Steinbrenner syndrome, a disease characterized by short attention span, poor memory and fits of ecstasy followed by angry outbursts. It affects nine out of 10 New York sports fans (and 10 out of 10 New York sports editors). Its only treatment is frequent, intense doses of winning. Read More