Victor Penney: It sounds strange, but it’s true: the best player in college basketball this year was made in a lab. His name is Cameron Boozer. The 18-year-old just had an incredible season in the NCAA, and yet, underneath the accolades, there’s a wound at the heart of this young man’s origin story, a scar which is no fault of his own, [...]
Are the Olympics the grandest stage of all for elite athletes, or a two-week festival of fornication and debauchery? Sadly, it’s hard to tell and the recent Winter Games in Italy prove it. The Milano Cortina organizers made international headlines when they ran out of free condoms for the athletes. The math is crazy. They started out with a stockpile of about [...]
Victor Penney: Sports and smut. I’m not a fan of the combination. In general, mixing anything with sexual perversion is a horrible idea, but not everyone feels the same way, at least on the surface. On Jan. 15th, for example, Gary Bettman, the commissioner of the National Hockey League, was asked about his opinion of Heated Rivalry, the sexually explicit hit series [...]
Sporting Life, Victor Penney: I’m laying down the law in my home ahead of the Super Bowl. As a father, it’s my right and duty to lead and set the tone throughout the year, but especially ahead of one of the biggest sporting events on the calendar. As a man, as the head of the household, it falls on me to make [...]
Sporting Life, Victor Penney: Do you want to know one of the easiest ways to get under the skin of the toughest, most intimidating professional wrestlers on the planet? Call out pro-wrasslin’ for what it is: fake. The outcomes are predetermined and the moves are choreographed, but make no mistake: the athleticism and pain are real, and so is the passion. It’s [...]
Victor Penney: Interim writer Victor Penney, Sporting Life College basketball has lost one of its impressive figures, and no, it wasn’t a lean, mean, dunking machine — it was a five-foot nun in a wheelchair. I’m talking about Sister Jean Dolores Schmidt, who died back on Oct. 9 at the tender age of 106. She was a Sister of Charity [...]
Victor Penney: Interim writer Victor Penney, Sporting Life Do you know why we have the stereotype that professional athletes are into gambling, partying hard, and having babies out of wedlock with multiple women? Precedent. I don’t need to point to any specific examples here, but you know I’m right. Let’s face it: Pro-sports is a world that seems to enable [...]
Victor Penney: Interim writer Victor Penney, Sporting Life Do you know what I love about old books? Passages like this: “The body-coats of naked steel, The woven iron coats of mail, Like water fly before the swing Of Hakon’s sword–the champion-king. About each Gotland war-man’s head Helm splits, like ice beneath the tread, Cloven by the axe or sharp swordblade, [...]
Victor Penney: Interim writer Victor Penney, Sporting Life It turns out I have something in common with the greatest golfer in the world and, no, it has nothing to do with our abilities. Scottie Scheffler makes the game look easy and has earned tens of millions of dollars playing it. On my end, golf has every right to get a [...]
Victor Penney: Do you ever read T-shirts, hoping to unlock the deepest mysteries of life, faith, and philosophy? Yeah, me neither; but that’s how my life goes sometimes. I once saw a black tee with the phrase “Pro-Good Things” and “Anti-Bad Things” emblazoned on the front, and I’ve embraced the slogan ever since as a lens for analyzing politics. If you want [...]
Victor Penney: Interim writer Victor Penney, Sporting Life Imagine planning for the biggest day of your life only to have it blow up in your face and turn into the most humiliating moment you ever experienced. Some privacy would be a blessing to help you evaluate what happened, right? Well, imagine having TV cameras in your face instead, with millions [...]
Victor Penney: Interim writer Victor Penney, Sporting Life It was the best of tweets, it was the worst of tweets. It was a pearl of wisdom, it was a moment of misguided masculinity. It was a tale of two men that began with a social media post by one of the most controversial influencers on the internet. On Feb. 16, [...]
Victor Penny: Interim writer Victor Penney, Sporting Life Donald Trump has driven a stake deep into the heart of the woke agenda. On Feb. 5, the U.S. President signed an executive order titled “Keeping Men Out of Women’s Sports.” The concept is straightforward: male athletes are now banned from participating in athletic competitions that are exclusively for girls and women. [...]
Interim writer Victor Penney, Sporting Life Are parents sacrificing the souls of their children on the altar of sports? I started thinking about this recently when I came across an article about the high-stakes world of preteen go-kart racing. The Washington Post ran a story about two boys, Julian and Alessandro, who’ve been “fierce competitors since they were 9 and [...]
Victor Penney: Interim writer Victor Penney, Sporting Life I find myself in a rather uncomfortable position with the NFL playoffs kicking off this month. I’m doing the unthinkable: falling in love with another team, and it hurts. As a longtime fan of the Dallas Cowboys, it pains me to say this, but they’ve been a trainwreck this season, and my [...]