The Cornell Daily Sun (https://cornellsun.com/tag/sports_column/)
Time is ticking for the Ivy League to make a decision as to whether or not go through with a spring athletic season. With COVID showing no signs of slowing down, perhaps it is in the best interest of the Cornell community to officially cancel the third and final sports season of the 2020-2021 academic school year.
Sure, I wasn’t alive when the Honorable Ken Dryden ’70, one of the most decorated goaltenders in NHL history, led Cornell to the 1967 NCAA Frozen Four championship nor was I there to witness former New Jersey Senator Bill Bradley will his Princeton Tigers to a Final Four berth in the 1965 NCAA Tournament. However, I was in the audience last night at Bailey Hall as both Ivy immortals reminisced about their respective athletic and political careers.
Staying together for the kids? How about keeping the kids together for the grown-ups.
Baseball has been doing it since Branch Rickey orchestrated the purchase of minor-league teams in 1920s St. Louis. In the modern game, with revenues skyrocketing, new attendance records every season and profits as high as ever, young talent in the MLB is often as prized as a dominant starter or established power hitter.
In today’s game, a young right-hander in the Bronx can have his own t-shirt and catchphrase, and a third baseman with an all-American smile has made the sports world believe that the bastard child of the AL East can compete with the big boys.
So sure, Joba Rules, and Evan Longoria helped bring a pennant to (smirk) Tampa Bay.
Ah, September. Sports fans fully comprehend how dreadfully dead the months of July and August can be. Between the NBA playoffs and the start of the NFL season, therein lie the middle months of baseball, a sport that clings to life with few headlining series after an exciting beginning of the season where teams typically etch their names into their division banners early on. But I guess that when the voices of Buck, Costas or beloved Berman begin to fall hard on your ears, you can always flip channels to soccer or more likely, the World Series of Poker.
Several members of the mainstream media have disparaged bloggers as a whole due to a perceived lack of credibility, due process and accountability for bloggers. During an infamous segment of HBO’s “Costas Now,” Pulitzer Prize-winning author Buzz Bissinger, most notable for writing Friday Night Lights, said: “I think blogs are dedicated to cruelty, they’re dedicated to journalistic dishonesty, they’re dedicated to speed.” Within days of Bissinger’s tirade, prestigious publications such as the Washington Post ran articles in support of Bissinger’s stance.
I hate losing. I hate it more than almost anything — more than the Yankees, more than losing to the Yankees, more than prelims and swine flu and the redesigned Ivy Room. I don’t like losing in Monopoly, I don’t like losing in poker, I didn’t like losing in high school and I don’t like losing in their current equivalent, the amalgamation of collegiate “athletics” known as intramural sports.
For the past two weeks, the pages of the Cornell Daily Sun have been saturated with columnists eagerly offering unsolicited advice to bright-eyed, bushy-tailed freshmen: Explore Ithaca. Don’t stress. Don’t drink. Don’t think about the future. Think about the future. Smile more. Succeed at sex without really trying.
It’s all fascinating advice, and it’s all based on the absurd notion that the smiling mug shots in this publication know better than you, the reader, how to live your life.
So I’m going to add one more nugget of unqualified advice to the clamor:
Go to a Cornell sporting event and cheer on your team.
Over the course of the past 10 months, I have come to understand what countless others before me have undoubtedly realized: Cornell is hard. Keri Hilson tells us that sometimes love “knocks you down.” Well, the same can easily be said of academia and college life in general. I can’t begin to count the number of times I’ve wondered whether I belong at this institution of apparent super geniuses and overly-ambitious types whose desperation to get ahead would put most politicians to shame. The follow-up question has always been, do I actually stand a chance of matching up to such natural ability and/or motivation? Or am I merely incurring a quarter-million dollar debt for my parents –– in doing so quelling all their hopes of a peaceful (early) retirement in Bermuda?
First off, hello there, my name is Rahul Kishore, and you’ve probably never heard of me before. They even give you a mugshot of me so you can find me on your daily walk through campus and either give me a high five or wring my neck. Talk about accountability.
For the large majority of you, you’ve never met me and you probably never will. I’m a lowly sophomore in “the College” and generally I’ve become a slave of this paper and other student organizations. But for the few moments of the day I’m not being proverbially “pwned” by Cornell, I get around to watching, but rarely playing, sports.
Anyone who picked up the Daily Sun yesterday would have had a tough time missing the quartet of headlines on the front page warning of the impending doom facing Cornell as a result of the nation’s recent economic downturn. Inexplicably missing from yesterday’s outcry — the cancellation of intramural ice hockey.
It is undeniable that the latest casualty to campus-wide budget cuts — intramural ice hockey — is the headliner of a long list of “things-administrators-have-decided-are-less-important-than-other-things-and-will-no-longer-be-funded.” And yet, I only found out about this a couple of days ago.