Sports Law, Spaw, Lorts: Dude Sounds Like A Lady Edition

I don’t know what Gloria Allred does, exactly. I know she’s nominally an attorney because it says so on her Wikipedia page and also under her head when her head appears on my television screen. It says, “Attorney.” But, despite three years of law school, I have no idea what service she provides her clients. It’s always some weirdo at the periphery of a scandal she’s representing. A woman who bedded Tiger Woods, for instance. Or it’s a minor scandal that in years past would have been relegated to the Odd Stories column in your local newspaper. Like the time Roger McDowell got his gay slur on in front of some baseball fans. What connects these things is their apparent distance from anything resembling a legal issue.

Gloria Allred holds press conferences, as far as I can tell. And she talks sternly and forcefully, admonishing those bad actors who did her clients wrong. And after the microphones are turned off and the cameramen have all fled… well, I don’t know what it is she does. You can do anything with a law degree!

Which brings me to the latest in the Manti Te’o saga. The man behind Lennay has lawyered up, which thankfully allows me to write about Manti’s man in this here column.

Let’s talk Scandal Law. Scaw, Landal…

JUST TWO DUDES ON THE PHONE, BEING DUDES

Yesterday, news broke that the man alleged to have been behind (nope, did not go there) the Manti Te’o hoax, Ronaiah Tuiasosopo, had engaged in hours of phone conversations with Te’o. All the while, pretending to be a girl named Lennay. This story, which had previously been rejected years ago by Saved by the Bell writers as “too fantastical,” was fed to the press by Tuiasosopo’s attorney, a man named Milton Grimes. Grimey explained his client’s actions thusly:

Tuiasosopo, 22, has had dramatic training, plays in a Christian band and even auditioned last year for the television show “The Voice.”

“Come on, Hollywood does it all the time,” Grimes said of his client pretending to be a woman. “People can do that.”

Couric asked Te’o what he would say to Tuiasosopo.

“I would just say you hurt me,” Te’o said.

Grimes said that Tuiasosopo wasn’t trying to hurt Te’o.

“This wasn’t a prank to make fun,” Grimes said, according to the Daily News. “It was establishing a communication with someone. … It was a person with a troubled existence trying to reach out and communicate and have a relationship.”

View the Original article

Sports Law, Spaw, Lorts: The Lies They Tell Ourselves

I’m trying to figure out whether Lance Armstrong is relieved that Manti Te’o upstaged him this week. On one hand, all of the mean, finger-wagging columns on Lance’s lying, like this typically flatulent effort by Rick Reilly, have been pushed to the second page of the Internet by Te’o's (I’m not entirely sure I’m using the apostrophe correctly here) fake dead girlfriend. Although the internet defies all attempts to ascribe a finite supply of oxygen to any news story, there is a finite amount of attention that can be paid. And even though every news organization has dutifully assigned a writer (or moron) to cover the Lance debacle, no one much cares about it anymore. What happens to a scandal deferred? Does it dry up, like a craisin in this pun?

I think the overshadowing of the Lance Armstrong saga probably doesn’t help Armstrong at all. The vast majority of people who will have opinions about him have already formed them and those who may be swayed by a teary confession in front of Oprah now may not even be paying attention. But that’s all public opinion, which is the least of Lance’s worries at this point. And yet, public opinion is almost exclusively Manti Te’o's (seriously, these apostrophes are bothering me) worry at this point. Almost.

Let’s talk fake dead Samoan girlfriends….

MANTI TE’O: VIVID IMAGINEER

It’s a constant struggle to come up with things to write about in this space. While the intersection of law and sports is an area rich with possibility, it’s also one that gives no f

View the Original article

Sports Law, Spaw, Lorts: Chad’s Johnson

Sports Law, Spaw, Lorts: Chad’s Johnson « Above the Law: A Legal Web Site – News, Commentary, and Opinions on Law Firms, Lawyers, Law School, Law Suits, Judges and Courts .wp-polls .pollbar

View the Original article

Sports Law, Spaw, Lorts: Assault Weapons and the 2-3 Zone

Celebrity opinions are the worst. On this, I think we can all agree. Unlike our pundit class, celebrities have very few advanced degrees and are never held to account for their prognostications. When a talking head on TV or the internet or even books gets something wrong, he’s fired immediately. The marketplace of ideas demands nothing less. Someone more inclined to bad puns would say that as a marketplace, being fired for being wrong is more than laissez… fair.

And so we hate celebrities mouthing off like they are wont to do because they don’t get fired from their jobs when they’re wrong. This is especially true of the sports world, where the famous people not being fired for voicing opinions also represent our favorite teams, like the Chicago Bears. Or even our least favorite teams, like the Syracuse Orangemen.

Syracuse basketball coach Jim Boeheim spoke out about gun control this week because a bunch of children were murdered recently and a bunch of microphones were stuck in his face. The men holding the microphones said, “Hey Jim, let’s talk sports.”

Jim didn’t want to talk sports. Let’s talk sports….

BOEHEIM STEAMROLLER

Jim Boeheim is an exceptionally annoying sports figure, largely because of his nasally voice and insistence on being a whiny jerk. That said, he’s also a phenomenally successful coach who recently won his 900th game, all at Syracuse. This is a big deal, of course. Only two other whiny jerks had won 900 games before, Mike Krzyzewski and Bob Knight. A big deal for whiny jerks, I guess you’d say. Anyway, on the occasion of his 900th win, Jim Boeheim had this to say about the recent massacre in Newtown:

“If we cannot get the people who represent us to do something about firearms, we are a sad, sad society,” Boeheim said, speaking in the wake of the Newtown, Conn., shooting tragedy. “If one person in this world, the NRA president, anybody, can tell me why we need assault weapons with 30 shots — this is our fault if we don’t go out there and do something about this. If we can’t get this thing done, I don’t know what kind of country we have.”

I suppose the credited answer to this question has to do with fighting off the other guy with the assault weapon with 30 shots. Right? I assume an assault weapon capable of firing 30 shots is necessary to defeat the hypothetical other dude who had one. The bad guy. It’s the only answer I can think of to Jim Boeheim’s question. Maybe another answer, a more Rumsfeldian one, has to do with going to war with the weapons you have, not the weapons you need. Has nothing to do with need, I guess. Hell, I don’t know.

Jim Boeheim annoys me and Syracuse beat Kansas for the 2003 national championship, which is an unforgivable sin in my book. But I don’t see a whole helluva lot wrong with his exasperated outrage in this particular instance. Not that anyone cares what celebrities have to say about stuff.

OWNERS BEHAVING BADLY

This week, we have news of two NBA owners acting like douchers. The first, Miami Heat minority owner Raanan Katz, is alleged to have gotten a blog shut down because the blog, among other things, posted a goofy picture of him. In order to shut it down, Katz sued both Google and the blogger, arguing that the picture in question was copyrighted. Or, well, owned by Katz somehow. You can see the picture pasted all over Deadspin’s article about the case here.

At any rate, the end result of Katz’s legal maneuvering has been to get a Florida court to shut down a blog with only the slightest of legal arguments that what it’s shutting down is defamatory. I’ve perhaps already said too much…

The other owner is Donald Sterling, who was sued for being a terrible landlord and worse human.

RAP SHEET ROLL CALL

View the Original article