Tag: sports

Does an MLS Cup break the Curse of Atlanta Sports?

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

No, serious question.  Don’t get wrong, I like soccer and I can sit down and watch a match and understand what’s going on, but the truth of the matter is that soccer doesn’t get a fraction of the respect and acknowledgement of The Big 3 sports (MLB, NFL, NBA) when it comes to general recognition, at least in America.  I feel like hockey and the NHL took a serious ding from their last strike and lockout, and they’ve fallen to a second-tier of prevalence where it only matters to the people whose teams are actually in contention, but it’s really difficult for those outside of those fandoms to actually care. 

And that’s where I get the impression that MLS is at, in spite of the fact that Atlanta United just won the top prize in the organization, the MLS Cup.  Personally, I don’t know how many teams there are in MLS.  I don’t even definitively know how many teams are in New York.  Obviously, I know Atlanta’s got a team, and I know for a fact that there are teams in Toronto, Seattle, Portland, Orlando, Los Angeles, and I think there’s one in Kansas City.  Otherwise, I don’t know much else about MLS as a whole, and I indulge in a lot of sports, be it on television or partaking in sports news on the internet.

That being said it brings me back to my original question, does Atlanta United winning the MLS Cup actually break the Curse of Atlanta Sports, the superstitious mythos behind the sheer inability of Atlanta sports teams to win any championships?

When sports media started coining the discussions about “cursed cities,” it almost always started with Cleveland, since for the longest time, the Browns sucked at football, the Indians sucked at baseball, and the Cavaliers sucked at basketball.  An NHL team lasted there for two seasons, a WNBA team for just six, and they’ve never had an MLS club.  Needless to say, they were undoubtedly the worst luck sports city in America, until LeBron James gave the city a second shot and basically willed the franchise to an NBA championship in 2016.

But ever since the debate of cursed cities came into existence, it really wasn’t hidden that curses and droughts really referred to championships in The Big 3; this was never made more prevalent than when the Seattle Seahawks won the Super Bowl in 2014, and for the ensuing weeks, there were all sorts of statements flung around about the first major sporting championship brought to Seattle in history, completely ignoring the fact that the Seattle Storm had won two WNBA titles prior to this.  The Kansas City Royals’ World Series win ended the drought in 2015, despite the fact that Sporting KC won the MLS Cup in 2013.  And Washington D.C. often ignored that D.C. United won four MLS Cups before the Capitals “broke the curse” with a Stanley Cup win just this year.

And the last two instances are prime examples of just how ignored MLS is in the grand spectrum of professional sport organizations, and why I pose the question on whether or not Atlanta United’s MLS Cup win actually breaks the Curse of Atlanta Sports.

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Don’t look now but…

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

…an Atlanta professional sports team is playing for an actual championship.  Caveat?  It’s Atlanta United, the city’s soccer team, playing for the MLS Cup.

Don’t get me wrong, I think soccer/futbol is great.  I enjoy watching the game, and I understand the vast majority of the rules, and think a 0-0 game that ends in a shootout is a marvelous thing.  It’s just that there’s no secret that it’s often perceived as a second-tier sport to most ‘Muricans who think real sports are limited to fat guys in pads who call themselves athletes crashing into one another, or who can slam dunk a basketball to make black people get out of their seats and overreact the colorfully.

When people think about which team is going to bring some championship pedigree to Atlanta, most of the time people are often thinking about the Falcons, or the Braves first; but never the Hawks, because the NBA is busted as hell and the Hawks suck lol.  But the vast majority of football americano fans probably don’t even consider the idea that Atlanta United just might do it first, and I get the impression that it would be as met in the same manner as the Washington Capitals did for DC; initial surprise, but then immediate bandwagon embracing as if the Caps held the entire fate of Washington on their shoulders, and not the Redskins, Nationals or Weezards.

Regardless, the very young Atlanta United club, two years removed from their introduction into MLS, are on the cusp of immortality, and have one more team to overcome to get there, the Portland Timbers.

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Different Braves, same shit

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Honestly, I’m just glad that the Braves won a game.  I’d have been very not mad, just disappointed had the Braves gone into the playoffs and gotten swept and embarrassed like the Rockies or Indians did, and at least they can hang a single laurel that they put up a modicum of a fight before the inevitable Atlanta tradition of getting bounced from the playoffs came to fruition.

I haven’t really written much, if anything about the Braves (baseball team, not ownership) this season, because really there wasn’t really that much to talk about.  Sure, the team of the future arrived a little bit earlier than schedule, and jump started life into the franchise, powering them to a surprise division title and an actual playoff berth.  But there was one part disbelief that the team would actually achieve success and that between the Nationals or Phillies, they’d have gotten upended in September and miss the playoffs, and there was another part that simply didn’t want to tempt the laws of fate and risk jinxing anything, when the team was going so well.

But either way, when the race for all the divisions were settled, and it was apparent that the Braves were in, I can’t say that I was really at all that excited, and this just might be the sentiment of all fans of sports that live in the Atlanta area.  I can’t speak for anyone but myself, but I can’t help but feel that the curse of Atlanta sports is just too strong, and as exciting as the 2018 Braves were, were just too young, and really achieved as much success as they did, heavily on the notion that their divisional rivals were all just that bad.  I didn’t just predict that the Braves were going to get bounced in the first round, I’d have put actual money on it, because that’s simply what the Braves do.

Seriously, the Braves haven’t made it out of the first round of the playoffs since 2001, and they’ve made the playoffs eight times since then.  That’s eight times getting bounced in the first round, and almost always, by a team that was seeded lower than they were.  And that’s just the Braves; as far as other Atlanta and Georgia sports are concerned, most of us here remember the epic historic Super Bowl 28-3 collapse of the Falcons.  The Georgia Bulldogs proceeded to lose the National Championship in similar fashion months later.  The Atlanta United soccer team made it to the playoffs in their first year, only to get bounced in the first round by the lower seed, and even the Atlanta Dream WNBA team made it to the WNBA Finals, only to get swept.

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The effects of losing

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Can you blame him: Buffalo Bills CB Vontae Davis retires from professional football – during halftime of a game in which he started

This is pretty much the greatest year of NFL in recent years.  Two weeks in and we’ve got two tie games, and guys retiring in the midst of the season, but in the middle of a game.  Much to the bewilderment of fans and teammates alike, Bills CB Vontae Davis just up and decides that he’s had enough, and calls it a career, during halftime of an actual, meaningful game.

I mean, it’s almost the plot of Bernie Mac’s Mr. 3,000 where Bernie Mac’s character collects his 3,000th hit and then abruptly stops everything and declares his retirement in the middle of a baseball game, except that this is real.

Sure, there are lots of jokes and commentary that could be made about the whole situation, and it’s really not that hard to find gobs of it floating all over the internet.  But I was thinking about the situation, and figured to try and look at it in a different perspective that might be able to shed a little bit of light to how this happened.

Frankly, Vontae Davis is simply a guy that’s tired of losing, and probably didn’t see a scenario where it was going to get any better, and before suffering through another indignity of another loss-filled season, he just decided to call it early and save himself the trouble as well as the physical toll of playing futbol americano.

After all, he was on the Buffalo Bills, which is pretty much the living embodiment of a white flag.  And they were playing against the San Diego Los Angeles Chargers which is another team that’s basically reverted back to pathetic status, and being surrounded by all this failure probably weighed heavily on his conscience, and it was the perfect storm of conditions that his frail psyche was unable to endure, and surrender was the only option.

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The unintentional greatness of opt-out clauses

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

When the day is over, I’m not really a fan of opt-out clauses in sports contract.  They’re like slimy, sleazy trap doors out of contracts that professionals can claim they’re really going to commit to a team for seven years, but dude-bail after two years or five years, or whenever they’ve negotiated to have an opt-out available to them.  It’s like being in a fucked-up relationship where the dude is allowed to leave after the second year scot-free, but if they pass up on that escape window, then they’re locked in for the long haul.

More often than not, we’ve seen classic examples of guys who sign 7-10 year deals, with opt-out clauses after like three years; where the fans think they’ll have a guy for 7-10 years, they’re all stoked to see him play out of his mind in year three, put up career best numbers, lead their teams deep into playoffs… and then opt the fuck out of their contracts, and then put a gun to their teams’ heads and stick them up for another lucrative long-term contract, lest they become free agents and jump to whomever else would be willing to instead. 

Off the top of my head, Alex Rodriguez and CC Sabathia are prime examples of guys who have successfully parlayed the opt-out clause to perfection and bilked the New York Yankees out of more money than their original Yankee contracts were originally worth.  LeBron James is a perfect recent example of a guy who has not only opted out this year, but has done it twice now, opting out of the contract he had with the Miami Heat to escape back to Cleveland, and then now opting out of his deal with the Cavaliers to go to Los Angeles.

On the flip side, there’s the hilarious example of Dwyane Wade, who opted out of a guaranteed $16 million for one year with the Miami Heat, only to discover that nobody wanted him, and then came crawling back to the Heat, where he had to sign for two more years in order to get than $16 million back.

And that’s where we get a glimpse of the unintentional greatness of the opt-out clause, because every now and then it provides the opportunity for overpaid babies we know as professional athletes to get owned.  And there are fewer things I take a sadistic pleasure out of seeing than professional athletes getting owned financially.

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It’s a work

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

TL;DR: Daniel Cormier wins  UFC heavyweight championship, immediately provokes Brock Lesnar afterward, inviting him into the Octagon from the audience

When in doubt, it’s probably a work (read: premeditated).  As the line continues to blur between the UFC and WWE, with stars jumping from one promotion to the other, there’s one thing that has always been crystal clear: the pursuit of money.  Both are businesses, with the goal of making as much money as humanly possible, and despite the fact that one is more legitimately a sport than the other, the objective remains the same.

UFC promoting a Daniel Cormier vs. Brock Lesnar fight will draw millions of viewers, as there’s a legitimate correlation between gigantic numbers and Brock Lesnar fights.  Which equates to a whole lot of money.

WWE having Brock Lesnar as its champion will create a cross-pollination of viewership, drawing interest from UFC fans who want to see Lesnar perform in the fake sport, whether it’s out of curiosity, or to see if any of his three matches he’ll have this year might give away any sort of intel to strengths or weakness for betting purposes.

And in the end, regardless of who wins in the Octagon, both parties and all involved participants stand to make a gigantic payday out of this affair. 

Not that it really matters, but it’s still all probably a work, if you look into the details of the scenario.

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A wise man once said

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

A futbol team cannot win a futbol game unless they score goals

Furthermore, a futbol team cannot score goals unless they take shots.  Although I counted two times where Sweden’s goalkeeper actually had to move in the box, the box score in Korea’s World Cup 2018 opening loss to Sweden, credits them with zero shots on goal.  ZERO.

How the fuck is it remotely possible to win a game when a team doesn’t even take a single shot?  The answer is that it’s not.  I’m pretty sure Sweden’s goalkeeper doesn’t even take a shower after the game and is able to meet up with whatever model of a wife/girlfriend for dinner without even having to reapply his deodorant, that’s how much of a day off today’s game was.  As for his teammates, they were basically in the Royal Rumble in a game that saw over 40 fouls called, but a big fat zero for shots on goal for Korea.

Yes, I know that getting in position to even take shots on goal is like 75% of the battle in the first place, but that just exemplifies Korea’s general lack of adaptability or creativity to even bother trying anything different from what wasn’t working throughout the span of 96 minutes, to where they could even take a shot.  Sweden’s defense was no slouch, but Korea wasn’t making anything harder by constantly having guys in telegraphed positions, or all the players essentially giving up once their routes were blocked.

But I’m not going to get too salty over this loss.  Korean soccer hasn’t been the same since the 2002 World Cup, and even then, they had the mother of homefield advantages throughout the entire tournament.  They were also coached by the legendary Guus Hiddink who was easily worth several of their wins by himself alone.  They’ve been good enough to qualify for all subsequent World Cups by virtue of a globally weak Asian pool, and once they get in, they’ve regularly been exposed as a class below the usual powerhouses from Europe and South America, and have been getting bounced routinely.

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