talking sport 620

Our favourite things online this week: from the University of Texas to Yeovil

Featuring race relations in college football, mascots in baseball, violence in Florence and Mick McCarthy stirring a cup of tea
  • Jump to comments ()
Mick McCarthy
Hollywood's loss is football's gain. Photograph: Paul Childs/Action Images

Thanks for all your comments and suggestions on our last blog.

1) Why the race of the University Of Texas football coach matters

The University of Texas appointed a new head coach for their football team a few weeks ago. Charlie Strong will be paid $5m over five years to develop athletes and win football matches, like he did when working for Louisville, Florida and South Carolina. But not everyone is happy about the new man.

Strong is black and black men don't tend to hold such prominent roles in the university's sports teams. Players who have worked with him speak fondly of their mentor, but the university's conservative supporters are less keen. Red McCombs, a billionaire businessman who has donated enough of his fortune to the university to have his name on their football stadium, described the appointment as a "kick in the face".

Strong has been here before. When he interviewed for another job in the south, he was knocked back because he is a black man with a white wife and that sort of thing doesn't go down well in that part of the country. Hopefully the people of Texas will give him a fair chance.

2) The best and worst mascots in baseball

The Chicago Cubs' decision to introduce a mascot called Clark did not go down well with Ian Crouch of the New Yorker: "He has a dimwitted smile and dead eyes. In the Yogi Bear tradition, he's wearing no bottoms, but rather than a necktie, on top he sports a white jersey. His blue gym shoes match his baseball cap, worn backwards in a sartorial choice that seems inspired by market research conducted no later than 1997. He leans jauntily against a bat, and holds a baseball as if he's never touched one before in his short bear life."

Crouch reckons there are only two decent mascots in Major League Baseball. That leaves a lot of bad ones – and a lot of material for Crouch to work with in this hatchet job. In the interests of balance, someone else in the New Yorker office has come to the defence of mascots and posted a gallery of the charismatic characters amid the dross.

3) Florence residents play the most violent sport on Earth

This mix of rugby, American football and bare-knuckle boxing is not for the faint-hearted.

4) After cancer 'disruption', a determined comeback

Ross Hutchins walked into a hospital for his first chemotherapy treatment on 10 January 2013. One year later, he walked on to the court to play in the Australian Open. After a year out of the sport, he just wants to play again: "I'm another tennis player now," Hutchins tells Greg Bishop of the New York Times. "I want to be a competitive beast. I want to be ruthless. When you lose a year, you don't get any younger. You don't have that long of a tennis life span." Hutchins might be ready to put 2013 behind him, but his achievements are worth celebrating once more.

5) The questionable ethics of teaching my son to love football

Peter Beinart of the Atlantic watched an NFL game with his son recently and it made him feel both wonderful and a little sick. The joy is obvious enough – who wouldn't want to bond with their child over a shared interest – but the writer's quesiness is more interesting: "It made me sick because I could see the game through his eyes. And it wasn't pretty. My son, unfamiliar with the NFL's pieties, assumed that hurting the other team's players was the goal. To his untutored eye, the violence that guilt-ridden fans like myself decry was a feature, not a bug. He didn't cheer the injuries; he's too sweet for that. But despite my insistence to the contrary, I suspect the message he took from the experience was: The only thing you need to know about the large man writhing in agony on the screen is whether he's on our team." Hard-hitting stuff.

6) We can't stop watching Mick McCarthy make tea

Mick McCarthy probably makes a decent living as Ipswich manager, but if he wanted to line his pockets with some real cash, he should ditch football and move to Hollywood. The man has the screen presence and personality to succeed in the big leagues.

7) Dr V's Magical Putter

Caleb Hannan of Grantland couldn't sleep so he went on YouTube to find some advice on how to improve his short game. He happened upon one of the strangest characters in sport: Essay Anne Vanderbilt, who claimed to be a world-class golf-club designer with experience of making stealth bombers for the government. It all sounded fantastical, but her putter worked better than any Hannan had ever tried and her story seemed to stand up – until the writer began digging a little deeper. What he discovered is more unlikely than anything he could have suspected.

8) Schoolboy cricketers left reeling in knock from CEO

New Zealand's local cricket leagues are no place for a few schoolboys.

9) Yeovil at the junction

Not many British publications produce 4,000-word features on Championship clubs, but The Classical, an American website that came about after a successful campaign on Kickstarter, has only gone and sent David McIntire to Yeovil for a longform feature.

10) The President at my wedding

When we think about Nelson Mandela's connection with sport, we tend to think about his youthful fondness for boxing and his role in the 1995 Rugby World Cup. Shaun Bartlett, who captained the South Africa football team, thinks of the day the president turned up at his wedding.

Bartlett was playing for New York MetroStars in MLS and had made friends with Mandela's granddaughter, who was studying in the US. Two days before the big day he received a call to say that Mr Mandela would like to join him for the celebrations. Bartlett was thrilled: "The wedding was at 3pm. He was there at 2:45pm. He came before my wife because he didn't want to steal her thunder and that is the person that he was."

Debate the articles and share your own suggestions below

Today's best video

Today in pictures