This is, without a doubt, the biggest sports week of the year in Tucson. Consider:
• The Tucson rodeo—La Fiesta De Los Vaqueros—is rocking the rodeo grounds on the south side of town. This gives you the opportunity to see horses and cows and goats, plus people wearing really cool hats. Hailing originally, as I do, from soulless Los Angeles, I’m not really a Western person or an animal person or even an outdoor guy. But the rodeo is way cool. There’s no way somebody could go to the rodeo and not get at least a little bit pumped.
Of course, if you go, you’ll probably have to navigate your way through the PETA people, with their hairy underarms and twisted logic. These are the folks who would rather see a bull euthanized than have the animal participate in an event in which the bull has a decided advantage.
The PETA people have a point, but then they go about eight miles past that point. You know you’re Out There when you make even less sense than Tea Party people.
• I may have mentioned this before; I once rode a bull. It was at the Cochise College rodeo grounds and I did it to win a $5 bet with one of my baseball teammates. (Yes, five dollars. And no, even back then, that wasn’t a lot of money.) I don’t even remember it being that scary. I think the bull’s name was Narcolepsy.
• Meanwhile, way up on the northwest side, the Accenture Match Play Championship is in full throttle. The golf course itself is ridiculous. It’s as though the grounds crew used tweezers to remove every offending blade of grass not to their liking. You take one look at the fairways, get all Buddhist and don’t even want to walk on the grass.
Then there are the golfers themselves, who are even more ridiculous than the course. I think it should be humanly impossible to hit a golf ball squarely more than two or three times in any one day. But these guys do it almost every damn time! Their only saving grace is that they then miss putts just like the rest of us.
(I’ve also played golf, but I had much better results on that bull.)
• With temps in the low 70s in February, the golf announcers will repeatedly mention “Tucson’s chamber of commerce weather.” I know we have weather, but do we have a chamber of commerce?
• With both major events in town at the same time, I think that local movers and shakers are missing out on a big opportunity. Why not cross-pollinate? Seriously, how much would you pay to watch Tiger Woods ride a bull? Or you could have the rodeo cowboys try to hit a golf ball. I just visualized one of those rodeo guys walking on the fairway with boots and spurs on and I about got the vapors. (However, clowns on the golf course would be a nice touch.)
• The defending national champion Arizona Wildcats baseball team has a three-game series against San Jose State at Hi Corbett Field this weekend, while the UA men’s basketball team played Washington last night at McKale and hosts Washington State Saturday afternoon.
Did you happen to catch the remarks by former Arizona basketball player Daniel Bejarano, who left the Wildcats program after his freshman year, mostly because he wasn’t good enough (although there may have been some other stuff going on as well)? Bejarano was quoted in a Colorado newspaper as saying that Arizona coach Sean Miller “cares more about money than winning.”
That zoomed right past America’s National Dumbass, Ted Nugent, on the Stupid Meter. First of all, have you seen the look on Miller’s face during a game? It’s like he’s fighting constipation and holding back diarrhea at the same time. He’s totally focused on winning. Then there’s the fact that one doesn’t reach the level that Miller has (at such a relatively young age) unless they have won a lot of games. Most important, I don’t care if you’re coaching the neighborhood Little League team for free, making a couple of thousand bucks to coach a high school team, or pulling down millions as an NBA coach. If you’re in coaching for the money, you’re doomed to fail. Money’s nice, but that’s not why good coaches coach. And Sean Miller is a good coach.
• Finally, the Desert Diamond Cup soccer series winds up with the third-place game and the championship match Saturday at Kino Stadium.
Like all good Americans, I’m not a soccer fan, but doggone it, you’ve got to give credit where it’s due. The people behind FC Tucson are wizards. Arizona Daily Star columnist Greg Hansen nailed it when he wrote that if the FC Tucson people had been involved in baseball, we’d probably still have spring training here.
I was somewhat taken aback by the fact that the editor(s) at the Star allowed writer Dave Ord to refer to the games as “football.” It’s not football; it’s soccer. Real football involves helmets and pads and freakishly large human beings. The simplest way to tell the two apart is that in real football, if one of the players is lying on the ground writhing in pain, you know that he’s really hurt.
This article appears in Feb 21-27, 2013.
Oh sure, NFL players never fake injuries, just ask Emmanuel Sanders of the “Stealers”. Defensive coordinators never, ever tell their players to take a dive. Just ask Perry Fewell. The PRCA, which conducts La Fiesta, has done quite a lot to appease animal rights groups. But the American Humane Society, the ASPCA, Peta, and the Humane Society of the United States all currently oppose rodeos because they still abuse animals. They can’t all be crazies. BTW, how much of your prize money did the bull get? You had the bull’s permission and you thanked him afterwards, right?
Soccer IS football, my good man. It was called such long before Americans devised their own game and has been played in southern AZ by adults for as long as the American version has been played here. Not football? It is, after all, played by kicking the ball with the ….FOOT! And if you believe soccer players don’t get hurt. you haven’t watched a match in person. Even MLS football players, in as superb physical condition as they must be to stay on the field for up to 90 minutes of near non-stop action, get injured.
Rugby is also a form of football, dear fellow. And those lads don’t wear pads and helmets like the sissies in the NFL. But they do eat their dead. With relish. Or without relish. Uncooked, usually.
Do come out to Kino Stadium this Saturday, old sport, and watch a couple of top-notch matches played by athletes who are still able to see their feet while standing upright. And who can run more than five yards without breaking into a sweat.
Hmmmmm….saw a soccer ball the other day. Imprinted upon it was “genuine leather”.
Do the peta people know about this ??????
I attended the Rodeo. 1st time. Recent resident in Tucson. Shocked at lack of diversity in Tucson — lilly White attendees, mostly seniors with giant sized cameras slung over their shoulders. Attempted to speak Spanish to 3 of 6 persons in total that I observed and ea responded with shock that “a gringo” like me would initiate conversation in Spanish and, in fact, each seemed almost fearful (with furtive glances over shoulders) should we be overheard. Yet there seems no hesitance to keep the Rodeo name in Spanish. What culture shock since I’ve been in Tucson.
Really, Tom, you believe those “hairy armpit” people have a point? And what would that be exactly? Is it that mainstream animal welfare groups like the Humane Society and the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals oppose rodeos for their inherent cruelty to animals? Do they also make less sense than the “Tea Party” people?
Next you will be claiming that Cesar Chavez is some kind of court jester…
“Kindness and compassion towards all living beings is a mark of a civilized society. Racism, economic deprival, dog fighting and cock fighting, bullfighting and rodeos are all cut from the same defective fabric: violence. Only when we have become nonviolent towards all life will we have learned.”
Cesar Chavez
Why do you write so much about yourself and your kids..you do better with sports and music.
Mr. Danehy-
I’ve noticed that you often denigrate us people who try to defend animals from people like you who support any activity that involves animal-cruelty. You seem to especially take pleasure in defending the kind of abuses in agriculture which are repeatedly exposed by Mercy For Animals undercover investigators.
Your comment this week notwithstanding, I believe that your attacks against us vegetarians indicate that you think your armpits are hairier than mine, and that, by LOGICAL extension, you’re convinced that your lifestyle choice as a fleshie makes you a better man than I am. If I’m correct, then I’m prepared to disabuse you of that crackpot notion by determining if you can keep up with me at the gym. As a sports writer, you must be quite an athlete and I could probably see my ass as a result of this ‘challenge’, but here’s what let’s do; since I see that you fancy yourself a gambler, the next attack that you feel you need to make, and if I happen to catch that particular column, I’ll submit a wager to you that you’ll find difficult to pass up.
By the way, the last letter I sent to you was when I was, in fact, still a PETA person, but now I align myself with Mercy For Animals.
Sincerely yours,
Gary DiNardo
“You seem to especially take pleasure in defending the kind of abuses in agriculture which are repeatedly exposed by Mercy For Animals undercover investigators.”
Gary: It’s easier to kill the messenger when you don’t like the message which is what happens now in states like Iowa and Indiana that have passed “ag-gag” laws which make it a crime to videotape inside places where animals are warehoused and slaughtered. We now make the people investigating animal abuse the criminals and those performing the abuse get the legal protections.
And let’s not forget that as a part of the Patriot Act, animal rights’ activist who perform certain acts as innocuous as passing out pamplets which protest certain companies, can be arrested as “terrorists”. If you work for MFA please be very careful about your activities. These laws are not in the least bit lenient towards animal activists if they are willing to prosecute you as a terrorist. But as an animal-person, I appreciate all the work that activists at MFA and other groups do to inform the public.
I agree with you, Doggirl. The feds are steamrolling over dissent in this country, as can be seen in the segment in “Behind The Mask” wherein local police and the FBI swarm into John Feldman’s home.
And, as you mentioned, the ag-gag laws that are being passed by states, including the current campaign in New Hampshire, to criminalize MFA-style private investigations are making it easier for abusers to hide their atrocities from us. Unfortunately, the advertising-dependent media refuse to report on this advancing shadow on the land.
” Unfortunately, the advertising-dependent media refuse to report on this advancing shadow on the land.”
And the irony in your statement is that many civil liberties lawyers and groups like the ACLU have spoken out against the “terrorist” label and the “ag-gag laws” because they shut down individual freedom of speech. Certainly, if an animal activist or envrionmentalist harms people or property there are laws that can penalize them for such trangressions, but to my knowledge none of these groups have ever physically harmed anyone. Personally, I think anyone who destroys propery like burning down a slaughterhouse should be prosecuted but certainly not as a terrorist. Arson would be a more reasonable charge. Trespassing (which is probably a misdemeanor) may be a crime if you video tape in a slaughterhouse without permission, but that is a far cry from being a “terrorist.”
So there are trumped up charges & explicit propaganda about how animal activists and envrionmentalist are such dangerous people. The FBI has determined that certain envrionmentalist groups are the number one terrorists in the country. Really? Wouldn’t some underllying Al Queda cells here in the US be considered more dangerous? How about the Unibomber or the guy who killed all the kids in Newtown? Those guys are less of a terrorist threat than a tree-hugger or animal activist videotaping in a factory farm? How can hugging trees, damaging bulldozers or harrassing medical animal researchers be more dangerous than the Virgina Tech type or some sleepiing cell that wants to pull another 9-11?
Certainly no one has ever been murdered or asaulted by these “terrorists” environmentalsits and animal groups. (lHowever doctors have been murdered in the anti- abortion movement) whereas one could argue–in those anti-abortion murder cases– there is some kind of “terrorism” involved (and conincidently no one has ever been tried or found guilgy of terrorism in any doctor-killing case.)
The main stream media reports nothing about how the government creates its own definition of terrorism and applies it arbirtarily to whomever it chooses. Scary business in my opinioin.
In my first comment, It possible that I was too uncharitable toward Mr. Danehy.