I am still trying figure out what was wrong with what Hope Solo said about how Sweden played in the Rio Olympics soccer quarterfinals.
No, let me back up. I was shocked when I read what she had said. Then, I chucked it to Hope being true to herself. Her team lost a frustrating match. She said what her more tactful teammates felt but wouldn’t say.
Sweden, now coached by former USWNT coach Pia Sundhage, decided to ‘park the bus,’ as the saying goes, essentially playing with as many players behind the ball as it could and only making counterattacking forays. It’s a legitimate tactic to deploy against a team with superior talent but it does not make for scintillating soccer.
Solo called the Swedes “a bunch of cowards.”
Hope Solo answers questions after the USWNT against Canada on 9/22/11 from Chris Singer on Vimeo.
Calling your opponent “cowards” at the end of gut-wrenching loss was, at the very least, ugly, classless and unsportsmanlike. It is also one of the more benign things you could call an opponent in any competition, especially in the cesspool that is the world Olympics movement. Don’t forget this is the same Olympics that featured Ryan Lochte and Justin Gatlin, drugged-up athletes from at least Russia, the same Olympics where an official was arrested for scalping tickets.
The games themselves, all of it, were a disgrace, purchased as they were by scarce resources that should have gone to taking care of Brazil’s much impoverished population.
And then, sarcastically, he called for gun nuts to kill his opponent for president before she gets a chance to nominate Supreme Court justices who might overturn gun rights.
First things first, in shirt sales alone, Man U will recoup many times over the $89 million to $110 million that they reportedly gave to Juventus to get their wayward son back.
Questlove ran the following on his Instagram (with the attached photograph): Slavery was inhumane. Slavery was sadistic. Slavery was uncomfortable. Slavery was unjust. Slavery was a nightmare. Slavery was a despicable act. Slavery is the pebble whose ripple in the river still resonates on and on and on and on. I’d like to think most of you have common sense. But there is nothing more dangerous than a man in a suit pretending to be a journalist giving revisionist history on the ugliness that was slavery. What’s so fun and lighthearted about being shackled? being separated from your loved ones? Being molested and raped HOURLY, being branded with hot iron? being property? being castrated? being flogged? being malnourished? living in high stress conditions? forced to lay in your own feces? being sold in a heartbeat? suppressing ANY emotion (with the surprising exception of singing it was illegal —lashes or death–to read, write, “talk back” or “sass”, cry (how many of you heard “you better NOT cry before I give you something to cry about!”), get angry, or even more surprising LAUGHING (a plantation barrel of water was always in proximity to dunk ones head in so one could express emotions and suppress the sound as to not alert your overseer of your “sassing”—deep history I just learned about laughing and the slave period—the first recorded song “The Laughing Song” was the defiant “F%^k Tha Police” of its day (also where the term “Barrel Of Laughs” gets its origin)—I’m getting beside the point. I dunno if that man’s (never say his name) point is to troll at any cost whatsoever but his entire existence is a 5 steps backwards for any progress made in humanity. My dismay is the percentage of people who get their news from memes/headlines/& sources to whom they have 0 clue is feeding them false information. Human Trafficking in any form from today’s underage prostitution, to the private Prison System we exercise here in the US, to the Holocaust to 500 years of Slavery–and all other examples I’ve not mentioned is INHUMANE & Evil. —watch where you get your information from and the company you keep people.
Michael O. Allen — Journalism, Reflections & Essays 