Dear incoming freshmen,So you've successfully enrolled in college. Now what?As freshmen, you probably have no idea what to expect for the next four (and as I always say, maybe five) years.
The summer before I came to college, all I heard was, ?Enjoy every minute. These will be the best four ? maybe five ? years of your life.
Roger Goodell, commissioner of the National Football League, has done just about everything he can to better the NFL. Maybe he needs to start kicking players out of the league to set an example for the rest of the knuckleheads who we religiously watch on Sundays for seven months of the year. Or maybe we should just stop looking at professional athletes as role models. I'm not sure what it is, but recently something has gone terribly wrong with NFL players. Every week there seems to be another meathead familiarizing himself with the justice system. I'm convinced that either (1) the police are out to get all professional football players (2) playing with pigskin makes you innately dumber (3) NFL stars see that concussions pose a serious threat and they want to familiarize themselves with the law in case they have to make a career change or (4) these super-rich athletes just don't care about their role as community figures anymore. I know that scenario one can't be the case. I wrote an entire column on how Donte Stallworth killed a man and only served 24 days in jail and that's not to mention that the recent Ben Roethlisberger debacle proves that some police officers would rather buddy-up with pro athletes than do their job. Option two – playing football lowers your IQ – doesn't seem too plausible, but we can't entirely rule it out. Many NFL players spend three-to-four years in college, and although they probably don't take the most rigorous courses, they do receive some sort of education. Plus, according to a Sports Illustrated survey, offensive tackles, centers, quarterbacks, guards and tight ends all have IQs higher than 100. Sure, the NFL may not be home to the next Albert Einstein, but at least we know there is some brainpower in the league. Still, football is a hard-hitting game and too many shots to the head may finally be catching up to some of these players. With all of the concussions that have plagued the league recently, having a back-up profession would seem like a good idea. Going to jail, however, is probably not the wisest way to familiarize one's self with the judicial process. They have law school for that. Option three, therefore, is completely implausible. This leaves us with choice four – selfish athletes ignore their young fans and arrogantly live above the law. This has to be the case. It's almost embarrassing how many NFL players have had run-ins with the law lately. Roethlisberger has been accused of rape and all signs – plaintiff's testimony, resignation of the police officer who was at the bar and Big Ben's less-than genuine apology – lead me to believe he's guilty. Oh yeah, and the quarterback from Miami (Ohio) was previously sacked with a sexual assault lawsuit in Nevada. Weird. Santonio Holmes will be missing the first four games of the season without pay for violating the leagues substance abuse policy. It's a good thing the Jets stacked their roster in the offseason and can do without the 2009 Super Bowl MVP for a quarter of the season. Defensive tackle Shaun Rogers tried to sneak a loaded gun through an airport. Linebacker Joey Porter was recently suspected of driving under the influence. Wide receiver Marvin Harrison may be involved in setting up a murder. Across the board, NFL athletes are flat-out screwing up. They either can't keep it in their pants, don't know what a designated driver is, or assault their wife/ girlfriend/ baby's mama/ or random guy at the club. It's the same sad story and I'm sick of it. Most recently, Indianapolis Colts defensive lineman Eric Foster allegedly committed a sexual assault in the team's hotel in the early morning before the AFC Championship game. It's good to know players take their jobs seriously. What more can Goodell do? Do players need to be kicked off teams, or worse, out of the league? I think the answer is simpler. Instead of holding professional athletes to higher standards because they're celebrity figures, we should lower our expectations and assume every pro will screw up. This way, when a Peyton Manning comes along, we really have some one to look up to. E-mail: andrew.wiktor@ubspectrum.com
A homeless man in New York City once told me that he'd rather sleep on the trash-littered cement sidewalks than in a homeless shelter where he would be forced to sleep in a folding chair all night.
Some things in life come as a complete shock, while others are slightly more foreseeable. I didn't know, for example, that I was going to step in goose doo-doo on the way to campus Tuesday, but I definitely could have predicted that Ricky Martin was gay at least 10 years ago. The last week has been crazy in the sports world. The baseball season kicked off, there were a couple of National Championships played, more football players ran into trouble with the law and Tiger Woods spoke to the media, to name just a few. Amidst all of the mayhem, some events came as a surprise, while others were expected. Let's take a look as some of the big sports stories of the past week and group them as either Utterly Shocking or Completely Predictable. Utterly Shocking
Remember before Facebook, Twitter, Formspring and blogging, when people had these things made of paper where they wrote about their feelings? And then after they wrote in them, they hid these paper things that they used to call journals or diaries, and then no one else ever had to hear about or see them? Well, I miss those days. I never had a journal per se, although every now and then I would pull out a diary someone had bought me and scribble down something pathetic, emotional or sappy, and then hurriedly put the diary back in its hiding place, relieved that I had gotten whatever it was off my chest. I feel that this was a rather harmless habit, since I was able to express what I was feeling, no matter how trivial or embarrassing, without forcing anyone else to know about it. Gone are those days. Gone are the days where if you were having a bad day, you kept it to yourself or your immediate circle of friends. The new outlet appears to be a sort of cyber therapy – like group therapy, except none of us are actually willing to participate. I don't exactly remember what the first Facebook looked like, since it has undergone more facelifts than Heidi Montag. But I do remember when statuses were all formatted something like: "Amanda Jonas is…" and then you would usually add something trivial like "going for ice cream" or "doing homework." I also remember the days when you wrote on someone's wall to invite him or her to hangout, or wish a happy birthday. That was when Facebook was friendlier, less obnoxious and less of a confessional. I am so sick of people using Facebook as an outlet for every emotion that they have ever felt in their entire lives. Yeah, I am guilty of n "FML" status and maybe I will occasionally post something sentimental. But I am talking about the big time offenders, the people we all know who use Facebook as a means of pouring out their souls to hundreds of people who really don't care. I am friends with this one girl who graduated a year after I did from my high school. Every day, my newsfeed is ravaged by countless statuses about how she has no friends, is always screwed over by boys and how she is never going to meet a boy who truly sees how great she is. I wish I could tell her to take that Leona Lewis "Bleeding Love" crap and stick it where the sun don't shine. My friend and I will sometimes look at her wall-to-walls with various people where she, in a public forum open to all her Facebook friends, complains about every facet of her life in grave detail – names, dates and painful paragraphs. This girl is not alone. I also judge people who throw significant others under the bus with pointed statuses, people who participate in those idiotic surveys like, "Who was the last person you cuddled?" (no one cares), and people who write sappy crap on each other's walls: "My dear sweet noble knight, how I love thee! Sincerely, lowly maiden," (actual wall post that made me want to vomit). If you have a lot of feelings, that's great – just keep them to yourself. Tell your mom or instant message your best friend, because the rest of us, honestly, couldn't care less. Plain and simple. E-mail: asjonas@buffalo.edu
Sacha Baron Cohen joked about abortion on "Da Ali G Show" back in 2003. He beat boxed an abortion remix, laughed at a virgin who practiced abstinence, asked a priest if he wore condoms during sex and compared trying out abortion with sampling the flame-broiled Whopper at Burger King. Hilarity aside, abortion is no joking matter. Growing up, we're taught to stick up for what we believe in. At what point, however, should societal norms supersede one's personal ideologies? If you posed that question to Scott Roeder, he would tell you never. On May 31, 2009, Roeder shot and killed physician George Tiller at a church in Wichita, Kan. during a Sunday morning service. Although this is clearly a reprehensible crime, Roeder saw it as a noble act. "The entire motive was the defense of the unborn," Roeder said. Tiller, who was the medical director at the Women's Health Care clinic in Wichita, was no stranger to controversy. He was one of the few physicians in America that performed late-term abortions and was the subject of much scrutiny throughout the years that he was in practice. In fact, in 1993, anti-abortion activist Shelley Shannon shot Tiller five times, resulting in wounds in each arm, in an attempt to take his life. Irony aside – because yes, a pro-life advocate attempting murder is quite backwards – there is a serious issue here: people take their personal beliefs way too far. This isn't the first incident of its kind. Anti-abortion violence against physicians has been fairly common in America ever since the Supreme Court made its Roe v. Wade ruling in 1973. During a protest in 1993, Michael Griffin murdered Dr. David Gunn and is currently serving a life sentence in Florida. A year later, Reverend Paul Jennings Hill was put to death after he shot Dr. John Britton and his clinic escort, James Barrett, to death. A little more recently, and a lot closer to home, Dr. Barnett Slepian was killed in his home in Amherst, N.Y. by James Koop in 1998. And the worst part about all of these cases is that none of the murderers felt remorse after their crime. In their eyes, they were doing society a favor. Much of the anti-abortion violence stems from traditional religious views and there are even groups that openly support such vehement acts. Army of God is a Christian American terrorist organization that promotes violence to prevent abortions. They have vandalized, bombed and set fire to hundreds of clinics while trying to get their point across. There is some sort of My-religion-is-the-right-religion hubris that has plagued the human race throughout history. People are raised with specific beliefs, but worst of all, they are also taught to stand up for what is "right." The problem, however, is that sometimes there is no "right." I view religion more as a societal invention to get people to behave a certain way and less as the definitive truth about the world, but there are some extremely pious people whose faith blinds them. Of course I am religiously tolerant and don't blame people for finding sanctity in the Bible, Torah and Qur'an (to name only a few), but strong ideologies – often times religious ones – can be very dangerous. To be honest, I don't see the difference between anti-abortion violence and the atrocities of September 11th, the Mumbai attacks and even the countless cruelties that the Ku Klux Klan has committed. In all of these cases, personal views clouded peoples' ability to act rationally. I'm not implying that we need to be a secular nation, but we do need to think before we act, even when we're positive that we're right. Personal ideologies can be extremely dangerous, especially when they lead to violent actions. Some feel that Roeder's rage was justified because abortion is morally wrong. In fact, while in jail, Roeder received encouraging letters from people across the nation expressing their support for his actions. Pro-life and pro-choice aside, isn't it scary when people can justify murder? A well-known physician was shot in the head during a church service in front of his family because he performed perfectly legal medical procedures. It is definitely important to stand up for your beliefs, but it is more important to choose your battles wisely. Don't let the My-religion-is-the-right-religion hubris get the best of you, because we've seen where that can lead us. E-mail: andrew.wiktor@ubspectrum.com
It's that time of year again. Well, for some. After selection Sunday, 65 colleges around the nation were buzzing about the Big Dance as beloved basketball teams throughout the country began making preparations to push towards an NCAA Championship. As the harsh winter fades here in Buffalo, students were left to get drunk on St. Patrick's Day, trying to forget about the Bulls' abysmal MAC Tournament performance. Tournament games started Thursday and instead of cheering on the Bulls, UB basketball fans were left following out-of-conference games that hold little significance to us. But some have "made it interesting." Brackets can be found all around colleges and universities, throughout professional offices across the country and are easily accessible on the Internet via Yahoo!, ESPN or CBS – just to name a few. Since Selection Sunday, I was invited to partake in five different bracket pools, not including the competition found in Wednesday's issue of The Spectrum or the numerous challenges that I received on Facebook. I wouldn't, however, consider these pools gambling. Much like buying squares on Super Bowl Sunday, filling out an NCAA Tournament bracket is more like a crapshoot. Spending $5, $10, or even $20 to make the six rounds of March Madness more interesting – especially to UB fans who have no real stake in the tourney – is perfectly understandable. But there are students who can't fight the temptation of placing bets throughout the year. Today, college kids are only a few clicks away from choosing a parlay that could be the difference between eating the following week or filling up their car with gas in order to get to class. ESPN airs sports show after sports show with countless analysts and experts spitting out interesting statistics that can help decide which team is a better pick that night. The Internet also helps keep us intimately connected to professional athletes. We're up to date on player injuries, off the field conduct, and conflicts within the locker room. With all of the information so readily available, some savvy college sports fans have found an easy way to make a quick buck. For some, it's almost too easy. They're able to take their love of sports and use knowledge and intuition to make educated predictions. With money on the line, watching out of town games becomes fun, but is it worth the risk? I'm not talking about the chance of picking the wrong team – which can easily happen if you watched Ohio top Georgetown – and losing $40. In fact, I'm more concerned with the contrary – the risk of winning. Once you've won that first bet, it's hard not to think about the next game you can wager on with the extra money you've just "earned". Before you know it, you're checking the spreads of every major game and doing research on athletes whom you've never even heard of. Instead of innocently following sports like you did when you were a kid, you're now staring at the television anxiously tapping your foot on the floor because the game that was supposed to be a blowout is unfavorably unfolding (cough Northern Iowa v. Kansas). The money Mom and Dad sent for groceries was riding on the outcome of yesterday's Syracuse Gonzaga game. Do college kids participate in Fantasy leagues because they want to know what it feels like to manage a professional team or is it an excuse to stay on top of the ever-changing statistics? Whether you're winning or losing, sports betting can become a nasty habit. If you make a few good picks and win some easy money, it can become difficult to stop gambling. Once you're down, you find yourself trying to get out of the hole by finding the next big winner. And as we're stuck watching the national tournament with no team to support, it's easy to try to find a cheap thrill to make the games more interesting. Unfortunately, that cheap thrill can turn into an expensive debt. E-mail: andrew.wiktor@ubspectrum.com
We've all been there.Its 1 a.m. on a Friday night, you're at a friend's house and everyone seems to have had one too many to drink.Flip cup, beer bong, Never Have I Ever and Kings have lost their appeal and everyone is a little bored.
Anybody who tells you that winning isn't everything is a loser.
To the Cheerleaders and the UB community,
I created 'a whole new world' for myself as a child – one beyond the kindergarten classroom and weekend play dates. I was sucked into the power-hungry, image-centered world of Disney movies.
To the people high up at UB who probably aren't reading this,
When thinking about Super Bowl XLIV, many questions come to my mind: How drunk will I be before kickoff? Should I get barbeque wings or mild medium from Duffs? Will there finally be any good commercials this year?
Whenever I enter a room and everyone falls silent, I immediately know I was a victim of the gossip bug.
The best thing about sports is that they're un-scripted. On any given day, any team can come out on top. Athletes, like the rest of us, have good and bad days. Just think about any major upset and you'll realize that this is an undeniable truth. See the 1980 Olympics when the American national team knocked off the star-studded Soviets to win the gold medal. This game is referred to as the Miracle on Ice. They made a movie on it. It's arguably the greatest upset of all time. Enough said. Or how about when the New York Giants defeated the mighty New England Patriots in Super Bowl XLII? The Giants were one play away from watching Tom Brady and Bill Belichick march off the field undefeated, grinning from ear to ear. Instead, David Tyree made one of the most remarkable catches ever, helping the Giants win. The numbers 18-1 now haunt everyone in the Boston area. More examples: Robin Soderling besting number-one seeded Rafael Nadal at the 2009 French Open, Division I-AA Appalachian State topping No. 5 nationally-ranked Michigan to end the Wolverines' season before it really started, and Buster Douglas, a 42-to-1 underdog, KOing Mike Tyson and shocking the world. The point is that there's a human aspect in sports. Aside from scoring ridiculous goals, knocking down impossible jump shots, and drilling 400-foot homeruns, athletes go home every night and deal with similar issues that we everyday people face. That's what makes sports great. We get to watch real people competing at the highest level. We witness bad days that turn into terrible losses. So why have we become so dependent on video replay? Referees are human, too. The mistakes that they make are part of the game, so why do we go out of our way to correct them? I've seen a ton of basketball games that lasted 20 extra minutes because the officials reviewed every little detail of the game. Granted, sometimes the replay can be helpful, but is it always necessary? It prolongs the game, often changes the outcome, and, most importantly, gives refs too much leeway to make mistakes. Sure, Ireland got the short end of the stick when the refs missed two hand-ball calls on Thierry Henry, but that's the way the cookie crumbles. It happens. No matter how hard it is for coaches, players and fans to watch the botched call the next day on SportsCenter, we must remember that mistakes are part of the game. When writing an essay, how carefully do you inspect every word that you type? Unless your anal, you know that spell check is going to fix your mistakes. Yes, you'll check your final product and find that your wrote 'on' instead of 'no' and the computer didn't recognize the error, however, I argue that before technology, people were a lot more diligent when writing and were probably better spellers. The same applies for refs and instant replay. Though they'll never admit it, knowing that you have the crutch of video footage helping you call the game hurts your sharpness and accuracy. If your mistakes are easily correctable, you become more prone to mess up. Blown calls suck and can leave a sports fan feeling cheated, but they're undoubtedly a part of the game. Before there were a million cameras flashing and recording every sporting event, video replay wasn't even a question. Sports made it this far without the sports spell check, so let's not jump on the bandwagon and try to change something that has withstood the test of time. If it ain't broke… E-mail: andrew.wiktor@ubspectrum.com
Wake up America. Why are we donating millions upon millions of dollars to Haiti now?
For my first column of the semester, I wanted to write about something that I feel extremely passionately about. I wanted to write about a story that means more to me than a distant major headline, such as the Tiger Woods scandal or Brett Farve's return to the postseason spotlight. Rather than discussing a bowl game that my school didn't compete in, or detailing the upset of the No. 1 nationally-ranked college basketball team, I felt obliged to tell about something that hit closer to home; something important in my life. Of course, under these pretenses, you can easily imagine how I would be tempted to write about the season finale of The Jersey Shore. But then I realized that this was a sports column. Next best topic: The New York Knicks. Yes, I concede that the Knicks remain a team struggling for wins in a crumbling conference filled with second-tier teams. By the numbers, they don't exactly impress, standing at 17-24, the same exact record they held just one year ago. But I argue that there is more to this team than the records, stats, and stigmas imply. By the beginning of December, the blue and orange had dug themselves a deep hole, getting off to a dismal 3-14 start. Yes, they lost a few overtime bouts, including a crushing defeat to Boston capped by a Kevin Garnett buzzer-beater, but their play was lackluster and inexcusable. In the past nine seasons, the Knicks have missed the postseason seven times and lost in the first round to subpar teams twice (Toronto in 2000-01 and New Jersey in 2003-04). In all of those years, the Knicks finished above .500 just once. My Knicks had done what I feared most; they had become a team synonymous with pity and loss. After a dreadful decade, they began being mentioned in the same breath as (gasp) the Mets and the Jets. (Yes, I know the latter team is in the AFC Championship, but this entire season has been a fluke and the Giants remain the superior New York football team, always. That does include the Bills, sorry.) Just imagine this typical NBA conversation involving a New York fan: RANDOM NBA FAN: I'm so glad that the NBA season finally tipped off. Kobe and crew look eager to repeat and the East actually has some strong contenders. Say, what team do you root for? KNICKS FAN: (Notice the awkward preface to explain their loyalty) We'll, I'm from New York, so I'm a die-hard Knicks fan. RANDOM NBA FAN: (Cringes and hides an embarrassed smile) Oh, I see. I'm sorry to hear that. (Scrambles through brain to find something positive to say.) Maybe you'll get LeBron in 2010. It was as if saying 'I'm a Knicks fan' had become a stigma that immediately transmitted a sexual disease to anyone who heard the words muttered. Well, I'm from New York, and I'm a damn proud Knicks fan, especially this season. (And with that statement, I hope I've inflicted countless New England area sports fans with horrible rashes and chronic discomfort.) I've watched nearly every Knicks game this season, and in short, I've been nothing but impressed with the team's talent, effort, and results. Center David Lee is an outstanding star that has thrived playing a position he isn't naturally suited for. His outside jump shot has improved, he can finish with both hands, grabs 11.2 rebounds per game (sixth best in the NBA) and should be voted into the All-Star Game. Coach Mike D'Antoni has done an excellent job inspiring players and has gotten the most out of average guys such as Jared Jeffries and Wilson Chandler. Al Harrington is one of the most dominant six-men in the league (18.2 points per game) and Danilo Gallinari has proved he can both shoot and slash. And they're winning games. With $60 million clearing from cap space at the end of the season and a huge free agent market, it hasn't felt this good to be a Knicks fan in a while. My boys may currently be on the outskirts of the playoffs, but their chemistry is on point and they will make a run this postseason. Any superstar in this league who has watched the Knicks move the ball and hustle back on defense this year would love to play in D'Antoni's run-and-gun system. New York seems fit for a king. E-mail: andrew.wiktor@ubspectrum.com
Solutions by The State News
