Sporting Madness

Back in September, I headed to New York for another Blogs With Balls conference. The two I’d attended before, in Vegas and Chicago, were amazing experiences, and this one was no different; it was a great time, an excellent chance to get some intelligent perspective on where blogging’s going and a chance to hang out with some awesome people. I was just going through my files and realized I had a lot of notes from the BWB4 panels that I’d never posted, so here they are. First up, the first panel, Women Talk Sports. Note on the notes: these are in chronological order (as much as possible), but I couldn’t write down every comment from every panelist, so this is more of a "Highlights" piece than a full transcript . Panelists : Sarah Braesch , BlogHer / Draft Day Suit , Richard Deitsch , Sports Illustrated , Jemele Hill , ESPN , Tina Cervasio , MSG , Jane McManus . Moderator: Megan Hueter , Women Talk Sports . The panel started with a discussion of why women’s sports aren’...

I was reading Gary Smith's fantastic, tear-jerking piece entitled "The Wheels of Life" in my most recent Sports Illustrated magazine today, and it got me thinking. The piece is a superb tale of Dick Hoyt and his paralyzed son, Rick, and how they've worked together to compete in everything from marathons to triathlons for over 30 years. On one level, it's a great story of two people who have overcome incredible adversity to do things that many able-bodied people never will be able to, but I think there's a broader point there as well, and one that applies to our current sports world. Read this paragraph and see if you can figure out where I'm going with this: Race day came a few days later. So closeted were the disabled in 1977 that many people, including Dick before the birth of his first son, had never laid eyes on a wheelchair or a quadriplegic, let alone one in a five-mile race. Dick's two other sons, Rob and Russ, wisecracked that the Hoyts'...