Showing posts with label NBA. Show all posts
Showing posts with label NBA. Show all posts

Saturday, November 2, 2013

More on Hoosier Great Walt Bellamy who died this morning, a seminal member of #HoosierNation; #iubb, #Hoosiers






A starter on the IU basketball team from 1959-61, Walt Bellamy was also IU's Most Valuable Player, an All-Big Ten and All-American in his junior and senior seasons of 1960 and 1961, the starting center of the Gold Medal-winning Olympic basketball team at the 1960 Rome Olympics, and remains IU's all-time IU rebound leader. He was a 1982 Inductee into the IU Athletics Hall of Fame.

Rookie of the Year Roommates: Bellamy's freshman roommate was IU football star Earl Faison. Their first year away from IU, Faison, of the San Diego Chargers, was named AFL Rookie of the year while Bellamy, with the Chicago Packers, was voted NBA Rookie of the Year. 

More at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walt_Bellamy

I must've sat in the TV room at the Indiana Memorial Union hundreds and hundreds of times with Walt Bellamy's black & white photo right next to me from 1979-1983, watching local news, sports, General Hospital, All My Children, et al when that room was packed full of IU students and festooned with Hoosier athletic memories from decades past, from floor to ceiling, basketballs to footballs, photos and trophies.

Only one of my favorite places on campus, it was also my (and many friends') unofficial hangout in that era before cell phones made communication so easy.
And with all the long hours I put in with the Student Athletic Board (SAB)and the-then IU Student Alumni Council, (SAC), as I've written here previously, I sometimes spent more time there than I did at home in my apt.

On a huge-but-beautiful campus like we were blessed to enjoy in Bloomington, with so many attractive distractions and lots of distance sometimes between classes in my case, that TV room at the enormous Student Union, with all of its memories was one of my/our Centers of the Universe, every IU team photo, medal, football, basketball like part of our family heritage that we had an obligation to live up to.

And in my sophomore year of 1980-1981, we did, winning the fourth of IU's NCAA basketball championships, with the able defensive help of one of my friends, James "Jim" Thomas, #20, Mr. Florida Basketball his senior year at Nova High School in Davie, and a member of the 1981 NCAA Tournament All-First Team for everything he did to help the Hoosiers that remarkable March to remember.
Jim was Coach Knight's first-ever recruit ever from Florida.

Sunday, May 20, 2012

Besides a lack of scoring coming off the bench, the other reasons the Miami Heat have lost their way in their playoff series against the Indiana Pacers -palm tree karma, simple math and lack of attention to detail

Above, the electronic mesh advertising billboard sign on the facade above the entrance gates to the AmericanAirlines Arena in downtown Miami around 4 p.m. Tuesday afternoon before that night's Pacers-Heat playoff game. All photos on this post were taken Tuesday May 15, 2012, all  by South Beach Hoosier.


Besides a lack of scoring coming off the bench, the other reasons the Miami Heat lost at home Tuesday night to the Pacers in Game 2 -palm tree karma and simple math


The number of playoff games left for the Miami Heat to win the 2012 NBA title going into the best-of-seven series against the Indiana Pacers was 12, but on Tuesday afternoon, with under 4 hours to go before Game 2, already up one game to none, the total was 11, not the 12 that was indicated on the (illegal) signs placed on the palm trees in front of the arena on Biscayne Blvd., opposite The Freedom Tower.
There should've already been an "X" marked thru this number.






Above, looking west towards Biscayne Blvd. from in front of the AAA, and at bottom, looking south from there towards The Freedom Tower and downtown Miami.







Looking east and upwards towards the AAA from the sidewalk along Biscayne Blvd. 
I was in downtown Miami on Tuesday, a warm, muggy and overcast day that looked to be uncomfortable from the get-go when I left Hallandale Beach that morning.
It had glare written all over it, and the closer I got to downtown, the more it was obvious to me that it was one of those days that make sunglasses a must, even for kids.
And yet I saw plenty of tourists walking around near Bayside and the Port of Miami without them, squinting like crazy, which I'm sure will show up in many of the photos they shot that day, once they got home.

On a personal level, I knew the overcast skies and glare would play havoc with any outdoor photos or video I shot as I made my way from the Miami-Dade County Govt, HQ bldg, the Stephen Clark Building I hadn't been at since the Marlins Stadium controversy a few years. 


Having already read the illegal signage story in the Miami Herald the previous week about the Heat, largely owned by the state's wealthiest person, Micky Arison, once again throwing their weight around and acting like they were above local laws, as I went past the area in the morning, I knew I'd have to swing by later to take another first-hand look at what was what.


The Kumho Tires ad image above shows the numbers being crossed-out correctly, showing 11, but the actual sign in front of the arena was not touched, and thus, sports superstition raises its head, as does the palm tree karma for being f-ed with in the first place.
-----


http://www.miamiherald.com/2012/05/09/2791625/city-tells-miami-heat-to-remove.html
Miami Herald
City tells Miami Heat to remove tire ads wrapped on palm trees at arena
By Andres Viglucci
May 10, 2012

The Miami Heat must have missed the news: The Miami Commission killed a measure two weeks ago that could have allowed advertising banners to be placed on trees.
That didn’t stop the team from wrapping the trunks of 16 royal palms in front of the publicly owned American Airlines Arena on Biscayne Boulevard with ads for Kumho tires. City officials say the ads are illegal.

On Wednesday, just before game five of the Heat’s first-round playoff series with the New York Knicks, code enforcement officers ordered the team to take down the white banners, which carry the slogan “DRIVE to the CHAMPIONSHIP’’ printed sideways above the image of a car tire and a Heat flaming-basketball logo.

“Not very catchy,’’ opined assistant city manager Alice Bravo.

And not very legal, either, she said. The team, which manages the arena, didn’t apply for permits, Bravo said.

Even if it had, Miami-Dade County’s sign ordinance, which applies inside the city as well as in unincorporated areas, frowns upon signs of any kind on trees. Under a section entitled “Prohibited signs,’’ the code reads: “No sign shall be attached to trees.’’

The county owns the arena, but the city is supposed to enforce the Miami-Dade sign ordinance inside its own borders.

The team could be fined if the banners aren’t gone by Thursday, Bravo said, though the city prefers to achieve compliance first. She did not know how long the signs have been up.

The Heat, however, refused to take the signs down. In a statement Wednesday, spokeswoman Lorrie-Ann Diaz said the team would remove the “sponsorship message’’ from the banners but leave them up “until the end of the playoff run’’ while applying for a permit.

Bravo said she was uncertain whether the tree banners without an advertising component would be permissible on the arena property itself, but added that she believes draping banners on palms on the public sidewalk is not. The festooned trees are on both the arena steps and the sidewalk out front.

The Kumho tire ads, in any case, remained up as crowds of fans arrived for the game Wednesday night.

The ads-on-palms flap comes amid growing controversy over the proliferation and legality of LED billboards and other outdoor ads locally, especially in and around downtown Miami. Billboard opponents, county planning administrators and county attorney Robert Cuevas say the county ordinance bars electronic ad billboards, which the city has approved.

More recently, the city commission gave preliminary approval to LED billboards on the Gusman theater downtown, the Miami Children’s Hospital and the Knight Center, as well as in city parks. But on April 26, facing public criticism, the board killed a measure intended to allow ads on parking pay stations and bicycle-rental kiosks that was so broadly worded that it could have permitted them as well on fire hydrants, public buildings, bridges and even shade trees.

Also in violation of the rules, the critics say: The Heat’s digital mesh on the arena facade. The electronic sign, also permitted by the city, shows ads for Goya products, Kia cars, Office Depot and Kumho. But the county’s sign code explicitly disallows ads for goods and services unavailable at the site, Cuevas said in a recent legal opinion.

Cuevas’ memo said enforcement is up to Miami-Dade Mayor Carlos Gimenez and the county commission.

The elected officials, however, have not taken action.

On Wednesday, an anti-billboard group, Scenic Miami-Dade, filed a complaint with Gimenez’s office over the Heat’s palm-tree ads. The letter opened with a single word: “Disgusting.’’

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As we all know, this is NOT the first time the Heat acted like they owned the property and built everything themselves, when that is not the case. It's a county-subsidized building. 





WFOR-TV
I Team: County Receives Nothing From Heat, Arena Revenue
Reporting Jim DeFede
May 5, 2011 10:52 PM




Biscayne Times
A Waterfront Park for All to Enjoy
REMEMBER “PARCEL B,” THE LAND BEHIND THE MIAMI HEAT’S ARENA? YOU OWN IT BUT CAN’T USE IT -- YET
Written By Erik Bojnansky   
AUGUST 2011

Miami NewTimes
Banana Republican blog
Micky Arison and Miami Heat Get Audited by Miami-Dade Inspector General
By Francisco Alvarado 
January 13 2012 at 2:02 PM


Saturday, May 5, 2012

You've been served! Phil Mushnick calls the bluff of a rich celeb who profits off of crude imagery & bombast and ups-the-ante on sports going over to the crass side, and Jay-Z fans and sports media apologists can't handle the criticism of hypocrisy

New York Post
Don’t rely on media to evaluate bad behavior
By Phil Mushnick
Last Updated: 6:02 AM, May 4, 2012, 
Posted: 12:52 AM, May 4, 2012
http://www.nypost.com/p/sports/knicks/double_standard_TFPqqilUHif01I9BKkQSkN


Could there possibly be a better and more delicious headline for an American newspaper column in the year 2012 than the one in this now controversial Phil Mushnick column? No!
It's pitch perfect.


Were that it was one plastered on the New York Times editorial page, esp. if it was the title above a remorseful column about why their own reporters can't seem to harness their own bias in reporting on news stories, despite constant complaints from readers and editors about it, yet constantly want to write about the horse race aspects of elections large and small, instead of exploring issues, as readers have overwhelmingly stated in poll after poll when they're actually asked what THEY want to see more of.
Meanwhile, Beltway reporters continue to ignore that fact and treat it like all the other inconvenient facts they choose to ignore. 
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/22/opinion/sunday/a-hard-look-at-the-president.html


I saw ESPN's usually-innocuous "Around the Horn" program late Friday afternoon while waiting for some returned phone calls from some folks in the area who'd promised me some details about the ins-and-outs of some upcoming political races around the region, local and otherwise.
You may know watching "Around the Horn" better in your own part of the world as 'killing time.'


To say that it was entirely predictable that all four assembled "writers" -and that's being VERY generous in describing what they actually do- had a problem with what Phil Mushnick wrote in his NY Post column is an understatement.
To say that they seemed strangely ignorant of the larger point he was making in exposing the rapper's rank hypocrisy in pretending he and his team don't know anything at all about what black & white logos have come to be associated with, goes without saying.


Yes, it's almost as if they had never seen or read any of the dozens and dozens of news accounts of the crime angle re gangs and sports logos, ones that even non-sportwriter you have already heard about many times, and that I recount thru the upcoming links for those who somehow haven't, perhaps because they live overseas. 
(Sort of like their collective ignorance of having nearly six-month old video, from November 16th, queued up as the most recent video of their show on their ESPN website.)


The assembled writers showed much the same sort of dumbfounded look that many visitors have shown me in this town the past few years when they'd drive-up at night to Hallandale Beach City Hall, just off of U.S.-1, because they just naturally assumed the low-slung building with the very dark parking lot was actually a hotel, because there was no sign identifying it otherwise. (Until a month ago.)


I know this because I have twice been the person stopped in the parking lot on my way to my car after a HB City Commission meeting, and asked where the "hotel office" was.
(And the second time it happened, the very attractive thirty-something woman behind the wheel asking for directions was a dead ringer for Erin Andrews, which is why it stays so fresh in my mind.)

Yes, it was as if they had somehow never read what had come from the mouth of the Mother Ship itself, which you can still find on its website.

ESPN The Magazine
Capology 
Raising the lid on the darker side of fan fashion 
Andrew O'Reilly
Updated: March 10, 2011, 1:25 PM ET


So what's the part you don't get?


Read this from the North Carolina Gang Investigators Association and take an aspirin:
http://www.ncgangcops.org/archives/Team%20Logos.pdf
You're welcome.


Starving for self-esteem?
Buy a black & white cap! 
Yes, that's the ticket!

In 2008, in Season 4, Episode 7 of TNT's The Closer, in an episode titled "Sudden Death," the younger brother of Det. Julio Sanchez is killed on the sidewalk near his home while his older brother is off-duty, busy working on his car in the driveway. 
We quickly learn that the younger brother had been killed while talking to a girl for the simple crime of wearing a ball cap with colors of a rival gang. 
A ball cap given to him by his older brother for his birthday, to Det. Sanchez's everlasting sorrow.
Video of Brenda's interrogation at: http://youtu.be/rK_lVXoh84k


This is by far one of the best episodes of this great TNT series I never miss, whose final six episodes air this summer, starting July 6th.


But this sort of fictional treatment of countless real episodes apparently doesn't compute in the minds of the apologists for the rapper-turned-sports owner.
They don't want to acknowledge what we already know.
I guess it just hurts their feelings that they're on the wrong side of the slippery slope, but then given how much sycophantic coverage this rapper gets from the mainstream media, it's not so surprising.


Yes, it's not your imagination, you really haven't seen anything on Entertainment Tonight about the conscious decision by him and his team to use that color scheme because ET wants to remain a "talent-friendly" venue for celebs, the publicist's friend, not one where actual public criticism of entertainers is ever given, unless it's of one celeb against another, in which case it's golden.


After all, if they did ever entertain the thought of actually asking him to explain why they made that choice, then the more-mainstream Beyonce wouldn't be available to them, so they just keep their blinders on so they don't have that become a possibility.


Which, of course, is why Phil was correct in saying, "I plan to continue to argue against the negative racial and ethnic stereotyping and the promotion of mindless violence, especially to the young and most vulnerable.


I remember over twenty years ago when I first had to explain the reality of this phenomena of criminal gangs and sports logos to my mother while I was down here one year from D.C. for the Christmas holidays, before the Marlins ever existed.

She was driving me in her car thru the Coconut Grove area -where my family had spent so many sunny summer weekends when I was younger in the '70's, usually over at Peacock Park-  and we were talking about things that used to be there when she suddenly turned to me and said she couldn't figure out why so many African-American kids in Miami would be wearing black & white LA Raiders and Chicago White Sox caps.

Me having been such a huge sports fan while growing-up, it was not at all surprising that she recognized the caps when she saw them, but I was actually laughing after she asked because I thought it was common knowledge what the reason was, and everything else being equal, my mother was usually much better-informed than the average person, so this struck me as very 
incongruous.


When I began explaining it to her, she actually thought I was exaggerating, despite how many examples I could give her, esp. via the gang use of the Georgetown Hoyas' "G" in places very far from D.C., like Chicago.
Something I knew from actually living there in the mid-1980's, as it happens, for a year, next to the offices of Inside Sports magazine near downtown Evanston.

The sort of writing device that Mushnick employs here is regularly employed by many non-sports columnists around the country, particularly among liberal columnists, but they seem to think it's okay when they do it, not so much when the shoe is on the other foot.

In South Florida, upping-the-ante or deliberately using over-exaggeration or gross generalization to zing someone or some group they oppose -usually because unlike them, it's solidly supported by a majority of local, state or national citizenry, or clearly in the ascendency while their own P.O.V. is on the slippry slope of an argument- is regularly employed by the Herald's Fred Grimm and their editorial board, to say nothing of its use by the Herald columnist who doesn't actually live in Florida, but which is, of course, never publicly acknowledged by the Herald
They call him Mr. Pitts.

It's not unlike the way that State Rep. Joe Gibbons NOT actually permanently living here in his district in Broward County, while his wife and kids live up in the Jacksonville area, is never publicly acknowledged by other Broward public officials who know it's true, like Elaine Schwartz or Perry Thurston or... well, all of them, and instead it's treated like a perpetual case of instant amnesia.
Despite the fact that Gibbons illegal charade has never worked, but as I'm always saying here, curiously, he never ever gets charged for violating state eligibility rules.  

(Now that Florida House District 100 extends well into Miami-Dade County, I wonder if Gibbons has filed docs with the M-D Election Supervisor listing that fake home address of his? When is a house a 'beard'? Hmm-m...)

In the case of Grimm and Pitts, this device of over-exaggerating to make a point, or its cousin, connecting one unrelated thing to another to stand for what hundreds or thousands of people you disagree with might actually say or do or think, is something they do seemingly every other week, if not every other column.

For those of you living far from where I am, this particular parlor trick was regularly employed by the two of them in the Herald in their absurd and untruthful depictions of Tea Party supporters calling for greater government funding scrutiny and transparency issues in the weeks and months prior to the 2010 Congressional elections that kicked Nancy Pelosi and the Democratic Party out of the driver's seat in the U.S. House of Representatives, and meant Obama didn't have both parts of Congress on his side.
That election was very much a great surprise to them I hardly need mention, given their continuing myopia and rose-colored glasses about the reality around them.

You continue to see it today in their biased columns about the state's Stand Your Ground Law, which was not adopted against the wishes of the populace, but rather far longer after it'd have done some real good, esp. in South Florida.
But then that's the lot of columnists like Grimm and Pitts, always having to miss both the trees and the forest if they are to peddle their wares.
Always forgetting to mention all the hundreds of senseless killings in this state of genuinely innocent people by criminals who knew they had the means to end any conversation.
Unarmed innocent people -the way that the Sunshine State's army of criminals prefer them.

Funny how Grimm and Pitts and their like-minded friends at other Florida media organizations never think to take a visit to one of our many fine prisons and jails in this state full of captured criminals -as opposed to the ones who got away because they killed the witnesesses, huh?- to ask the convicts the most obvious question there could be.
The question they and the rest of the Sunshine State's MSM never actually deigns to ask.
If they had to do it all over again, if they knew there was a good chance that someone they were menacing would fire first and ask questions later, what would they do?
Well, Grimm and Pitts don't visit and don't ask that question for obvious reasons.
Criminals don't want anything close to a fair fight in an encounter that decreases their odds of succeeding.

Oh, and in case you're either too young or too distant from the sports equipment and gang affiliation connection to simply take my word for it, I've got a piece that was written 22 years ago by professionals who studied it, perhaps to death, who tell the truth.
So what's changed? 
Nothing.

In the Dept. of Common Sense and civic society labeled "Symbols of Gangs and Gang Membership," this still connects-the-dots pretty well
http://www.chucksconnection.com/articles/your-sneakers-or-your-life.html


Chicago Crime Commission's 2012 Gang Book: