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Outside the Lines

Media

The African Cup of Nations: Celebrating the Other Side of Africa

by Miriti Murungi

Shane Smith doesn’t usually take the easy route. Kind of a hipster Richard Engel-Christiane Amanpour hybrid, the co-founder of VICE Magazine can easily get you nodding, laughing or dropping your jaw at his audacious attempts to uncover stories off the beaten path. Once you start watching his VICE Guides to places the State Department probably suggests you should avoid, it’s hard to stop watching.

So it shouldn’t come as a surprise that listening to Smith recount tales from his adventures is fascinating. But a recent, relatively innocuous-seeming comment made me flinch. Waxing lyrical about the various levels of hell he’s visited, Smith said that there are no cell phones or internet in the Congo, which is mind blowing if you think about it – a massive country, the size of the United States east of the Mississippi River, cut off from all modern forms of communication, internally and with the rest of the world. That’s eerie. (more…)

Media | Outside the Lines
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Discrimination

The Evra vs. Suarez Racism Extravaganza: When Clubs React and Shouldn’t

by Miriti Murungi

The Guardian’s Marina Hyde wrote an incisive article framing the slightly absurd aftermath of the Patrice Evra-Luis Suarez incident. If you happened to miss the storm, Evra accused Suarez of racially abusing him at least ten times during last weekend’s Liverpool-Manchester United match. Hyde’s basic point was a simple one: when it comes to the he said-she said, don’t jump to conclusions. But there is one conclusion that is safe to draw from this saga: when two people take diametrically opposing views on whether an incident of this nature happened, not once, but ten times, someone is engaging in high-level, pre-meditated fabrication.

Now, no question, Evra’s allegation is a serious one, but it isn’t the only serious issue raised by the incident. The reaction by the players’ respective clubs should at least raise an eyebrow, if not both. (more…)

Discrimination | Outside the Lines
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Media

Louis CK on George Carlin: Speak Your Soul

by Clive Longbottom-Fellow, Esq.

“This idea that you throw everything away and you start over again. And I thought, when you’re done telling jokes about airplanes and dogs and you throw those away, what do you have left? You can only dig deeper and start talking about your feelings and who you are. And then you do those jokes and they’re gone. You gotta dig deeper. So then you start thinking about your fears and your nightmares and doing jokes about that, and then they’re gone. And then you start going into weird shit and eventually get to your balls. It’s a process that I’ve watched him do my whole life and I started to try to do it, and I started to think, he says whatever he wants, what am I trying to say?”

- Louis CK

(more…)

Media | Outside the Lines
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Media

Never-Ending Nonsense and Journalistic Complicity

by Miriti Murungi

Is there a such thing as too much information? Do we need to know everything? Just as it is now hard to fathom how anyone did anything in the pre-cell phone era (e.g., meeting up), it’s also hard to imagine what it was like when all we had was the live sporting event, followed by a couple of newspaper articles and well-manicured, mustached sports anchors blabbering on and on in TV voice about the day’s events. Who, what, when, where, why. It was an era that, at least now, seems serene, boringly practical, and relatively un-Jersey Shore. (more…)

Media | Outside the Lines
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Corruption

Blatter In! Corruption as Entertainment (Free Sepp)

by Miriti Murungi

I really love corruption. There’s something about how it eliminates inefficiencies that makes me smile. There’s something about the smugness of those proficient in alleged corrupt practices that makes me want to watch Mr. Belvedere and drink tea out of fine china. And there’s something about real, brown envelopes filled with neat stacks of money that make me believe that Narnia might really exist and that I may have been going about trying to get things in the wrong way for way too long.

Corruption is just like a great movie. There’s plenty of action behind the scenes, it’s sophisticated, and it makes us continue dreaming and speculating. Really, what’s not to love, especially when you consider how many games of horrible football you’re willing to suffer through? Corruption has so much to offer. (more…)

Corruption | Outside the Lines
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Outside the Lines

Obama Plays Soccer in Brazil, Needs to Work on First Touch

by Clive Longbottom-Fellow, Esq.

President Barack Obama needs to work on his touch if he truly wants to be in contention for a roster spot for the 2011 Gold Cup, and eventually, the 2014 World Cup in Brazil. Thankfully for Obama fans, time is on his side.

One of Obama’s biggest obstacles to raising his game is the group of staffers/embassy officials/state department staff standing in the background while he’s juggling, clapping emphatically because it’s their job. They seem like overly supportive parents who repeatedly tell their child that s/he is amazing, even when a dose of reality might help the child improve. (more…)

Outside the Lines | Politics
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Discrimination

Maybe It’s the Closet: Anton Hysén Announcing He’s Gay Shows How Far We Still Have To Go

by Miriti Murungi

“I am a footballer. And am attracted to monkeys. If I perform as a footballer, then I do not think it matters if I like humans or monkeys.”

Now that would be something. But it’s pretty amazing that in 2011, a soccer player saying that he is attracted to another human being is news. While we tend to consider ourselves an enlightened species, it’s a sign of how far we still have to go as humans.

Swedish footballer Anton Hysén, a defender for Utsiktens BK, told Offside magazine that he is gay; that is, he is attracted to, not monkeys, but men.

Hysén decided to be pretty straight-forward with his disclosure, telling the magazine:

“It’s so weird when you think about it. It’s so fucked up, the whole thing. Where the hell is everyone else?”

I’m not sure what else there is to say. But let’s give it a go. (more…)

Discrimination | Outside the Lines
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Media

Players These Days, Sitting on Their Stolen Toilet Seats, Throwing Money and Shooting at People

by Miriti Murungi

_______________________________

“Players these days ….”

– Almost everyone

_______________________________

Fernando Torres, the £50 million mercenary, can’t score goals. Ashley Cole shoots people, Glen Johnson steals toilet seats, and Wayne Rooney probably shuns direct deposit just so he can wrap his grubby, calloused hands around somewhere in the neighborhood of £250,000 every week. In Rooney’s case, his astronomical paycheck is his reward for verbally accosting referees, assaulting fellow professionals, and the occasional exquisite bicycle kick. At least that’s what the interwebs and media outlets tell me when they aren’t telling me how special he is. (more…)

Media | Outside the Lines
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Media

Deconstructing Twitter Accounts: New York Red Bulls vs. Manchester City

by Miriti Murungi

Twitter. All the kids were doing it. And then, all the adults were doing it. All the corporations decided they would do it. Then people decided to use it to overthrow dictators. And at some point during this process, all of our beloved sports teams caught Twitter fever.

Today, if you’re a sports team without Twitter, you might as well be in black and white. That may explain why practically every professional team in a major sports league is “utilizing Twitter as an effective means of connecting with fans,” or something like that.

It’s probably not a stretch to think that in 2011, every team communications plan has a page dedicated to Twitter in the “Social Media” section. But whether these communications teams have any idea what they’re doing is another question. It’s one thing to shout from the rooftops that you’re on Twitter, but maximizing Twitter’s potential is an entirely different matter. (more…)

Media | Outside the Lines
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Discrimination

Discrimination as Entertainment and Ammunition

by Miriti Murungi

Maybe there will be a pre and post-Gray/Keys era in soccer. That’s the hope, but there is plenty of reason to be pessimistic.

We seem to only visit ‘isms’ (I include homophobia as an ‘ism’) in sport en masse when there are crises. But to think that sport wasn’t rife with sexism, racism and homophobia before these crises is to be willfully naïve. Perhaps even more frustrating is how quickly we forget very public episodes only days after we turn the world upside down. (more…)

Discrimination | Outside the Lines
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secondfig: Dalglish; “For me the most important person, who is under the greater spotlight is Luis… The...
John _in_VA: Miriti, I loved your article. You are an excellent writer. Many US soccer fans wonder how a country as...
Mark Stevens: It’ would be prudent to note that the translation of “calcio e’ un...
Bob: An excellent, thoughful piece. As referenced, it is fair to both want increased Hispanic (and African American)...
Jen: Thank you so much for the answer. We are near Pittsburgh, and he does play on a travel team and cup team, which...
dreamingpixel: “Debussy – Claire de Lune”.. amazing work

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