I can’t say that I’m brimming with enthusiasm about the Super Bowl, what with (a) my team not being in it, and (b) the two-week break that precedes it, which really kills the post-season viewing momentum in the name of cramming in seven more days of bullshit corporate hype. Having said that, though, this seems an appropriate time to spotlight the work of Aditi Kinkhabwala, a real-life desi woman sportswriter, who had a Super Bowl-related piece this week at Sports Illustrated’s website. In it, she proclaims her love for Indianapolis Colts linebacker Gary Brackett, whose path to football stardom was several times barred by family tragedy:
Less than a week later, [Brackett’s father] Granville passed away, his heart finally having given out.
Brackett finished that season with 25 tackles. Then shortly after the Super Bowl, in February 2004, [Brackett’s mother] Sandra was rushed to the hospital for an emergency hysterectomy. She never left, an operating-table stroke putting her into what would be a fatal coma.
Brackett went back out to Indy that summer, until, just before mini-camp, he found out his brother Greg had leukemia and needed a bone marrow transplant. Gary told head coach Tony Dungy the outside shot of staving off Greg’s leukemia was more important than fighting for a roster spot and he skipped the camp.
A few weeks after he made the donation Brackett fought his way onto Dungy’s roster. He again played special teams, before pounding Denver for 11 tackles in his one start in January. And before Greg, despite the transplant, succumbed to the cancer in February.
The other reason Aditi loves Brackett, besides his triumph over the odds, is that he played his college ball at Rutgers. In addition to her column at SI.com, Kinkhabwala is a staff sports writer at the Bergen Record in New Jersey, where her beat is Rutgers sports. She covered the unlikely success of the Scarlet Knights football team this past season, and is now deep in the men’s and women’s basketball seasons.Though she’s a perfectly fine beat writer, the sister’s most interesting pieces have been quirky ones on SI.com where she covers unusual athletic activities or angles. Her previous piece, two weeks ago, was about a grandmothers’ basketball league in Iowa. Check it out:
And it’s all done in the middy blouses, stockings and black bloomers women hoopsters wore in the 1920s.
“Are you kidding?” McPherson said when asked about this-century clothing. “The uniforms cover up all our flab. Who would want to wear shorts?”
Now at eight teams, the league plays roughly once a month from January through May, in high school gyms. Except for the Cedar Rapids Sizzlers — they play in a church.
The youngest player is 50, the oldest is 81. There’s the Hot Pink Grannies (yep, they wear hot pink socks) and the Ossian Good Old Girls and the Centre Point Curvaceous Chicks, who are sponsored by Curves. …
The league allows everyone to go to the “State Tournament” because, McPherson said, “in Iowa, every girl’s dream was to go to the state tournament.”
An archive of the sister’s stories is here. I’d be curious to know what other desis are out there covering sports in the US mainstream media.
welcome to my southern world every single day. i think i’ve become numb to it, so it just sounds like white noise at this point.
1222 days and 10 hours till the World Cup. Booyakasha.
1222 days and 10 hours till the World Cup.
Which World Cup would that be?
The game yesterday wasnt too bad. Lots of turnovers and a great running game from the Colts. I thought Manning’s play selection was awesome and he was wise enough to realize that running was the way to go. The game could have been way way more interesting if the Bears had put more pressue on Manning or atleast tried some trickery to confuse him. The Bear’s defense was way too cautious and conservative. It was pretty unbelievable that this was a one possession game till the very end.
Patriots: I dont like the Patriots. Kinda hate them actually. But one has to say that Brady boy is the very best when it comes to performing under pressure. They certainly are the most gutsy team of the 2000s.
Yes Dungy’s invocation of the Lord for all matters large and trivial does get grating. I have no major problem with religiosity but let’s have a sense of proportion. Dungy said that when Devin Hester returned the opening kick-off for a touchdown, that’s when he (Dungy) remembered that sometimes the Lord makes things hard for you. I mean come on! Perhaps the Lord was having an off day from dealing with Iraq, the floods in Jakarta, global climate change, Darfur, and all the other matters on His plate, and maybe He decided to pick the Superbowl winner. But I don’t think He had anything to do with Hester’s runback. Surely the Lord is too busy to worry about missed tackles on special-teams.
minor subversion… seeing as this post has brought the sportsmen out… the india-pakistan match in toronto just before the world cup. dust off your passports and leave your scimitars at home.
game on.
maybe this is a hint to the lingus to host the pre-game show.
🙂 thanks for the perspective. i agree with you that the lord better get his/her shit together and leave hester to his own devices
Is this game derived from rugby?
I can’t get over how much armour and padding they wear. I think rugby players are way tougher than these guys. All Blacks rule!
Clueless you seem to have a deep, abiding, irrational hate for Belichick (GOAT)…are you perchance related to Drew Bledsoe? Or Jets management:)
I just don’t like the way Belichick treats his players like Ty Law, Lawyer Millroy, Deion Branch, Willie McGinest, etc. These were the players that played a key part in the Pats winning 3 superbowls yet when they want to get paid, he get rid of them. And then there is the Ted Johnson and the way he treated him.
He may be a great coach, but that does not make him a great person. As I said earlier Dungy was carried off the field, yet I can’t recall Belichick ever being carried off the field.
Clueless…the way the Pats operate financially is VERY Conservative as per their owner Robert Kraft. They always underpay..even BRADY is underpaid by league standards…and they never re-do contracts..Belichick will likely win 2-3 more superbowls before the end of his career and he will surpass Lombardi as the GOAT. But I concede your point…he is a hard-ass. But he is the Bobby Fisher of the league and the Rodney Harrison’s and Corey Dillon’s of the league will always want to play for him to get a ring….
No Von Mises you sound like a Raiders fan (tuck rule) :)!
I just don’t like the way Belichick treats his players like Ty Law, Lawyer Millroy, Deion Branch, Willie McGinest, etc. These were the players that played a key part in the Pats winning 3 superbowls yet when they want to get paid, he get rid of them. And then there is the Ted Johnson and the way he treated him.
The Patriots organization is built around positions and not players. Every position has a salary tag and you either fit in the system or not. Hell, Brady had to take a salary cut to get what he wants. I love the way the Patriots run the organization. If you want to be a part of that winning Jaggarnath, you better swallow your ego and pride and accept whats best for the team.
The Patriots also have some of the smarter players in the NFL. Thats their style and they are pretty damn successful at it.
I
When you win championships the value of your players on the market goes up. Under the salary cap system, you can’t keep them all unless you are prepared to underpay people further down the roster. It’s all about how you allocate a fixed amount of money. The Patriots rarely break the bank for a top of the roster player (the only current exception is Richard Seymour) but the result is that they pay more dudes more money lower in the roster. That’s why they have solid back-ups who seemingly materialize out of nowhere and make plays. One guy who understands this well is Tom Brady, who accepted to get paid a lot less than Manning or even some inferior QBs in the interest of having a better team all around. (Don’t cry for him, he’s still making plenty $$, as well as shagging Gisele Bundchen.)
The NFL is a highly regulated marketplace with some weird rules not found out there in the market economy. The Patriots have figured out a way to perform well year in and year out within this marketplace. The only comparable is the Colts, now that they’ve won the big one, but they are earlier in the curve than the Patriots are. If they win one more with this personnel they’re going to get bled too. They’ll have to make tough choices and people who pin all these things on the coach, as opposed to the whole organization with its owner, general managers, and business analysts, will fall off their chairs in shock that Dungy let some key player go.
Yes indeed. I quite agree on this. But this is an endemic problem, growing throughout the league, and the pattern of avoidance and disregard starts from the top. Read Selena Roberts’ column in the NYT yesterday. And see how the announcers and hype people for the game yesterday steered clear of the whole topic. You’d never know this was a problem from the celebration of the crunching hits on the field.
I’m about to jump ship. I can’t take another year of that narcissistic senile geriatric in a tracksuit.
“I’m about to jump ship. I can’t take another year of that narcissistic senile geriatric in a tracksuit.”
Peter King of Sports Illustrated in his column today said that because of Ted Johnson, some free agents will have some doubts about wanting to play for the Pats.
I can recall that earlier this season Brady was upset with the Pats cause they did not pay Deion Branch who was his favorite Wr and one of his best friends on the team.
This seems like the appropriate time/place to give a shoutout to my cousin, who covers sports for her college paper, The Daily Illini.
She’s got next!
AMFD & Siddhartha:
If you’re going to believe in mermaids, you might as well believe the mermaid will make you successful and rich. There are noble lies in this world, as plato instructed; what works is not necessarily true.
I can’t get over how much armour and padding they wear. I think rugby players are way tougher than these guys. All Blacks rule!
That little dance the All Blacks are doing at the beginning is a Maori war dance, known as haka. One of my fondest possesions is an All Blacks jersey I picked up on a trip to New Zealand in ’04, though the mood was funereal – the favored All Blacks did not live up to expectations in the previous World Cup.
As wonderful as Rugby is, don’t be dissing the NFL. Those guys are massive, and just as importantly, fast. Imagine a 280 pound guy running a 40 yard dash in 4.5 seconds – your flattened ass will learn Newtonian physics the hard way.
I hate the Pats. I hate them even though the Pats have been a patsy franchise for 6/7 of their existence.
Kinda like Chelsea, my dear anti-Austrian economist? 🙂 That six points between you and Man Utd. is looking like a gaping chasm, with what, twelve “fixtures” left? 🙂
It is annoying as hell. We need separation of church and sport in America.
OTOH, it does seem that today one of the easiest ways for the despised colored minorities of America to gain some semblance of acceptance with the white mainstream is to vigorously profess the religion of the majority: christianity. Look at the african-americans Clarence Thomas and Barack Hussein Obama or the indian-americans Dinesh D’Souza and Bobby Jindal, for example.
BTW, how do these agressively christian coaches deal with the handful of muslim players in their teams? Was that player named Mohammad booed during the team introductions because of his name/religion?
Not so long ago white supremacists were flattering themselves with the thought that while there were many blacks in the NFL, none was “smart” enough to be a quarterback. Unfortunately for these neo-nazis we have seen a black quarterback, Doug Williams of the Redskins, winning the Superbowl and now we have an african-american coach (coaches are supposedly smarter than quarterbacks) who has done the same.
Ominously for the euro-centrics, the number of black quarterbacks in the NFL is growing rapidly and there are plenty more in the pipeline: many of the best college quarterbacks are black. And so is the number of coaches (not just head coaches) in the NFL. For example, 9 of the 17 coaches of this years Superbowl winners, including the head coach, are black; as are 7 of the 19 coaches in this years runner-up, also including their head coach.
A little more than a century ago these same racist fools were claiming that east asians did not have what it takes to run modern factories! Now the japanese, koreans and chinese are having the last laugh….
BTW, I noticed how the winning african-american coach Tony Dundy looks quite a bit like Adolf Hitler. I always thought Adolf’s nose didn’t look germanic 🙂
Was that player named Mohammad booed during the team introductions because of his name/religion?
I believe the crowd was chanting ‘Muuu’. Also Muhsin Muhammad is not a Muslim. His dad was a Muslim, hence the name though Muhsin Muhammad himself is a practising Christian.
go colts !! go brackett !! go RUTGERS !!!