The Big Nasty

I play basketball with this guy about three times a week. He's one of those guys that just KILLS me to see playing rec ball, because he's got sooooo much damned talent, and just no sense at all. Darren could be playing pro and making a six-figure income right now, but he just has no sense at all. And then there's me, who is just the opposite - lots of heart, not enough talent.
Anyways, I wrote a column about Darren's latest escapades - Ultimate Fighting - for my column last Friday. For pics on the event, check it out HERE..

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Originally uploaded by smoove_J.

FROM THE HARDCOURT TO HARD RIGHT HOOKS

A year ago, Darren Apels was “goon central.”
The basketball player was eminently proud of his bad-boy attitude, threw sucker-punches during college games, called himself “Big Nasty” and yearned for a career in the WWE. His career goal, if pro basketball didn’t work out, was to be a mean-spirited gym teacher who would alternate between ignoring his charges or reducing them to tears.
Now we can add ultimate fighter to his resume.
Apels, 24, fought in his first professional mixed martial arts event last Friday, entering the squared circle at the Maximum Fighting Championships at the Shaw Centre in Edmonton.
The former Okanagan University College basketball star took on Jim Dobson, a six-foot-five, 278-pound, shaven-headed behemoth with more than a dozen pro fights under his belt, and — believe it — knocked him out in the first round.
“I’m still shocked,” said the six-foot-seven, 215-pound Apels, who’s better known for his basketball skills, having played junior college in New York City and attending several invitation-only camps for Team Canada.
Apels’ previous punch of notoriety was a sucker-punch during a junior college game while playing for the Global Institute of Technology in 2004. But his straight right at 2:26 of the first round against Dobson might just have changed that.
Dobson came out charging, throwing a flurry of wild punches, but when the fight found its way to the mat, he was the man bleeding like a stuck pig. After a restart — the ref stopped the fight to check the gash between Dobson’s eyes —  Apels fended off another charge, then clocked Dobson with an overhand right that sent him sprawling to the canvas.
“I remember the guy being all bloody,” he said. “He had hit me pretty good, and caught me on the chin a couple times during the first minute. He just teed off on my chin. When I got him on the ground, and we were bleeding, I actually thought it was me, but he had this big gash down the middle of his face.
“I was happy it wasn’t me, because I want to be a GQ cover model.”
Ahh, yes. The famous Apels wit. It was put on display for the 2,000 fans in attendance in Edmonton, as the Vernon-born basketball player turned brawler hit on the ring girl (“She was amazing. I called her ‘Princess,’” he said) while Dobson was trying to stare him down.
His post-fight interview consisted of “line ’em up, ’cause I’m going to the beer gardens.”
But he wasn’t feeling so cocky as he made his way into the ring.
“It was crazy. I didn’t have any experience. I don’t even think I’ve been in a fight at the bar in years,” he said. “I was really nervous. I wanted to go out the exit when I was walking down for my intro. There was so much smoke . . . I wanted to run out the back door and just not be seen again.
“I did get a nice ovation, though. They booed the (crap) out of the other guy.”
Apels had been scheduled to fight Victor (The Matrix) Valimaki — who upset legendary UFC fighter Dan (The Beast) Severn in the main event — but found out a week before that he was moving up a weight class to fight Dobson.
(Cue theme to “Rocky”) So Apels began the most intense training of his athletic career. Or, at least, he should have, considering he was about to enter an arena where he could suffer a serious injury.
“Man, I didn’t even train for this fight at all,” he said. “These guys, they go to the gym all the time, eat raw eggs . . . Me, I was just like, wake up, smoke weed and play Tiger Woods. I was more concerned about making my weight than I was getting in the ring.”
The fights will be aired on pay-per-view sometime next month. Despite his glib attitude, Apels was impressed by the strength and skill of the fighters who fought after him.
“They wanted to see if a basketball player could cut it in the ring. They know they can now,” he said. “I do give credit to all those fighters, though. Those guys are crazy. They’re nuts, man.
“I think I’ll probably continue with UFC. I’ll take it seriously . . . probably hold off on the drinking and smoking. I want to learn some of the moves and how to actually do stuff. I might even do some cardio.
“I might even try pro wrestling. I don’t mind doing the crazy stuff right now.”

As the world turns...

Let's start out today with something funny, since the next two stories aren't.

Not too long ago I posted a story about a drunken Welsh rugby fan who lopped off his testicles, living up to a bet after seeing his team upset England. Here's the next sign of the Apocolypse...

BACKWELL GIVES ONE UP FOR THE TEAM

SYDNEY, Australia (AP) - An Australian professional football player said Tuesday he plans to have one of his fingers amputated in an attempt to improve his game.
Brett Backwell, who plays Australian rules football for Glenelg, a suburb of the city of Adelaide in South Australia state, told the Australian Broadcasting Corp. he has suffered from pain and restricted movement since he broke his left ring finger three years ago.
Doctors had suggested fusing the bones in the finger, but Backwell rejected the proposal.
He said he believed that amputating the finger was the only way to stop the pain and allow him to keep playing.
“To chop a finger off, that’s a bit drastic,” Backwell told the ABC. “But I love my footy (football), and love playing sport, and if that’s going to help me to succeed at this level then it’s something you’ve just got to do.”

Classic. Speaking of footie, my men's team is - Liquid Charlie's RAIDERS - in the playoffs on Saturday. We dominated men's league - our only losses (4) came when we played with eight or fewer players - and led the league in goals for and against... watch for pictures next week.
Anyways, to more Hurricane Katrina coverage. These two stories just warmed my heart, and showed how the system is really working to help those American people who need it most.



SAUSAGE - LOOTED OR NOT - LANDS CHURCH LEADER IN JAIL

ONE COSTLY SAUSAGE
Originally uploaded by smoove_J.

KENNER, La. (AP) - Merlene Maten undoubtedly stood out in the prison where she has been held since hurricane Katrina.
The 73-year-old church deaconess, never before in trouble with the law, spent two weeks among hardened criminals. Her bail was a stiff $50,000 US.
Her offence?
Police say the grandmother from New Orleans took $63.50 US in goods from a looted deli the day after Katrina struck. Family and eyewitnesses insisted Maten was an innocent woman who had gone to her car to get some sausage to eat only to be mistakenly arrested by tired, frustrated white officers who couldn’t catch younger looters at a nearby store.
Despite intervention from the nation’s largest senior citizen lobby, volunteer lawyers from the Federal Emergency Management Agency and even a private lawyer, the family fought a futile battle for 16 days to get her freed.
Not Maten’s diabetes, not her age, not even her lifelong record of community service could get the system moving. Even the store owner didn’t want her charged.
“She has slipped through the cracks and the wheels of justice have stopped turning,” her attorney Daniel Beckett Becnel III said, frustrated.
Then, hours after her plight was featured in an Associated Press story, a local judge ordered Maten freed Thursday on her own recognizance, setting up a sweet reunion with her daughter, grandchildren and 80-year-old husband.
“I’m just gonna hug her and say `Mom, I’m so sorry this had to happen,'“ Maten’s tearful daughter, Elois Short, said shortly after getting the news. “I wouldn’t want this to happen nobody’s mother, to have lived a good life for 73 years and then you wind up in a prison and nobody wants to hear your story.”
Maten must still face the looting charge at a court hearing in October. But the family, armed with several witnesses, intends to prove she was wrongly arrested outside the hotel in this New Orleans suburb where she had fled Katrina’s floodwaters.
“There were people looting, but she wasn’t one of them. Instead of chasing after people who were running, they (police) grabbed the old lady who was walking,” said Short, who works in traffic enforcement for neighbouring New Orleans police.
The path to freedom was complicated amidst the chaos of Katrina. Maten has been moved from a parish jail to a state prison an hour away. Her daughter had evacuated to Texas. And the original judge who set $50,000 bail by phone - 100 times the maximum $500 fine under state law for minor thefts - hadn’t returned a week’s worth of calls.
Becnel, family members and witnesses said police snared Maten in the parking lot of a hotel where she was retrieving a piece of sausage from the cooler in her car to grill so she and her frail 80-year-old husband, Alfred, could eat.
The parking lot was almost a block from the looted store, said her defenders. Police Capt. Steve Carraway said Wednesday that Maten was arrested in the checkout area of a small store next to police headquarters.
The arrest report is short and assigns the value of goods Maten is alleged to have taken at $63.50. The items are not identified.
“When officers arrived, the arrestee was observed leaving the scene with items from the store. The store window doors were observed smashed out, where entry to the store was made,” police reported.
Maten’s husband was left abandoned at the hotel, until family members picked him up. He is too upset to be interviewed, the family said.
Christine Bishop, the owner of the Check In Check Out deli, said that she was angry that looters had damaged her store, but that she would not want anyone charged with a crime if the person had simply tried to get food to survive.
“Especially not a 70-year-old woman,” Bishop said. Short, Maten’s daughter, did not witness the incident. She said her mother has led a law-abiding life. She is a deaconess at the Resurrection Mission Baptist Church and won an award for her decades of service at a hospital, Short said.
“Why would someone loot when they had a car with a refrigerator and had paid with a credit card at the hotel? The circumstances defy the theory of looting,” said Becnel, Maten’s lawyer.

GRANDMOTHER FIRED FOR MISSING WORK DURING HURRICANE TO TAKE CARE OF INFANT

KANSAS CITY, Mo. (AP) - When forced to decide between caring for her 18-month-old granddaughter while the child’s parents were stranded in New Orleans or showing up for her job, Barbara Roberts chose to be a grandma.
And for that, she was fired. Roberts, 54, had driven more than 300 kilometres from her home in Mount Vernon, Mo., to Columbia on Aug. 27, the Saturday before hurricane Katrina came ashore, to care for granddaughter Trisana for a couple of days.
Her daughter, Tina Roberts, and son-in-law, Chris Hardin, were in New Orleans. It was supposed to be a weekend business trip for the couple, and Roberts, who had used up her allotted time off in her assembly line job at Positronic Industries, had planned to be back to work on Monday.
Her daughter had even arranged for another baby sitter to spend Sunday night with Trisana so Roberts could get home in time. But when her son-in-law tried to schedule the flight home on the afternoon of Aug. 27, he was told all flights had been cancelled because of the approaching hurricane.
“There was a Category 5 hurricane with a bull’s-eye on our butts, so we called Barb and said we didn’t know when we would be coming home,” said Hardin, a professor at the University of Missouri School of Medicine. “We truly didn’t know what would happen down there.”
With no other relatives in the area to take care of the child, Roberts said she had no choice but to call work on Aug. 29, the day the hurricane hit, and tell her boss that she would be missing a few days.
“There was no decision to make - it was already made,” Roberts said. “My daughter could have died down there. This was family. You don’t walk out on a child - especially my grandbaby.”
Hardin and his wife spent several days locked down in a hotel - safe from the chaos that befell most of New Orleans after the levees broke - and finally made it back to Columbia on Thursday, Sept. 1. Shaken up, they asked Roberts to stay one more day. She says she was told on the phone that she was going to be fired. And on Sept. 6, she was.
“All I know for sure is that I had missed so many hours, and then this came up,” Roberts said. “Usually you have a certain amount of vacation time, and I had used it up. You’re also allowed so many unpaid days off, and I’d used them up, too. Fact is, I missed the allotted time and I got fired.”
In response to questions about Roberts’ termination, John Gentry, president of Positronic Industries, said only that the company had made cash donations to relief efforts for hurricane Katrina victims and refused to talk about Roberts.
The company manufactures electrical connectors.
Hardin said his mother-in-law’s firing was “absolutely unethical.”
“People speak of family values, and I don’t see what’s a more central family value than a grandmother stepping up in this sort of situation,” he said. “I sit here trying to imagine what kind of world it would be if grandmothers didn’t make that decision.”

The Amazing Rouge

Not much in the way of news from the wet Okanagan Valley... it appears that summer is officially gone, and the boat will have to be garaged for the next five months. Oh, the humanity ...

I fired off a resume on a whim to the Victoria Times-Colonist the other day, as I heard through the grapevine they needed a sports desker. The Victoria Rebels football team was in town to play the Okanagan Sun on Sunday, and the Colonist called us up for a story and a picture. Which is something they have NEVER done before... Hmmmm.... Im thinkin they might have interested to see what kind of a writer I was ... We'll see.

The NFL started last Thursday, and my Raiders nearly took it to the Patriots. For a while, it seemed like my boys would put an extra cleft in the massive chin of New England's apple pie all american good boy QB Tom Brady, but penalties put the Silver and Black in too big a hole. Still 14 games left, though.

On the other side of the world, my boy Miceail is having a great time playing ball in Ireland. He finally started his own Check it out HERE. There are a few pics waaay down the list that ya'll might recognize. Then again, you might not ... ;)

And I'm out ...




INTRODUCING... THE AMAZING ROUGINA

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Originally uploaded by smoove_J.

Miceail's favourite trick is to balance his glass on his head when he goes out drinking. More times than not, it ends up splattered all over the floor, the girl he was trying to impress, and the bouncers who were about to kick his ass out

We're not in Kansas anymore

That whole Antoine Walker photoshop craze has been taken to the next level...

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Originally uploaded by smoove_J.

Some people have said that these photos just aren't cool. Well, what is cool? A friend sent me a test which you can take to determine your coolness level. I was, of course, too cool to take it. But you can by clicking HERE.

Racism still alive and kicking in Katrina's wake

I rarely comment on racial issues unless there is some humour involved, but a friend sent me this picture, and it reminded me just how much prejudice there still is out there. Click on the picture and read the captions that go with each photo.

DamnMedia
Originally uploaded by smoove_J.

I did a little searching on the wire, and found this story, too. It seems that Katrina has ignited a racial firestorm, as well.


Katrina’s aftermath highlights divides between rich and poor, black and white

By Martha Mendoza
The Associated Press

Hurricane Katrina had no deliberate target, but in the aftermath it’s clear that the victims — who are now facing a horrifying lack of rescue and care — are mostly black and mostly poor.
So many photographs from the devastation of New Orleans show the same faces: Desperate. Grief-stricken. Black.
“Love has no colour,” Cassandra Robinson said as she huddled with her family in a parking entrance along New Orleans’ Convention Center Boulevard. “But I’ve seen where this is all black and everybody else who is Caucasian, they’re up high in the hotels.”
In fact, those in hotels complained bitterly they were neglected, too. But Robinson’s comment echoes those of others who question the part race may have played in New Orleans’ crippling crisis.
Would the response have been more urgent if the victims had been mainly white? Is economic class a factor even more than race?
In Orleans Parish, where the boundaries are the same as the city limits, 66.6 per cent of the residents are black. The black population across the United States is 12.1 per cent.
New Orleans neighbourhoods, once lined with old live oaks, charming cottages and imposing mansions, had been proof of the ease with which black and white could live side by side. With the exception, perhaps, of the toniest areas of St. Charles Avenue, and the poorest blocks of housing projects, black and white homeowners chatted to each other from their front porches and greeted each other as they walked their dogs down the streets.
D.J. Kelly, stood on a wet New Orleans sidewalk Friday with an American flag that he plucked from a gutter and washed with “some of my precious water.” Kelly, who is black, said the disaster has nothing to do with the colour of anyone’s skin.
“Don’t make it seem like no racial thing,” he said. “That’s not the way I feel. We all is in this together.”
Uptown New Orleans, around Tulane University, was mostly white and affluent; the areas north of the French Quarter and east of downtown tended to be poorer and more heavily populated by minorities.
New Orleanians were divided not so much by race as by economic class, a daily fact of life in a city where birthlines mean much. Senator Mary Landrieu, a blue-eyed blonde, is the daughter of a former mayor. Marc Morial, the colour of cafe au lait, followed his own father into the mayor’s office.
The political power structure is, to the eye, firmly controlled by people with African blood in their veins; most of the economic power of the city is held in very white hands.
When 80 per cent of the city’s population, according to the mayor, evacuated before hurricane Katrina, that left behind those with no cars, no resources, no way out. Twenty-one per cent of Orleans Parish households earn less than $10,000 US a year. Nearly 27,000 families are below the poverty level. Most of those families are black.
Larry Davis, director of the University of Pittsburgh’s Center on Race and Social Problems, said images of the disaster are an embarrassment to America.
“It suggests that the residuals of a racist legacy are still very much intact,” he said. “It’s as though you are looking at a picture of an African country.”
The images of the black poor struggling in New Orleans’ chaos should be “a powerful wake-up call,” said Jeff Johnson, a professor at the University of Maryland’s School of Medicine.
“The message is that these people are in some sense abandoned, and that’s why they’re so angry,” he said, “but that abandonment occurred not just around this storm. They’ve been abandoned by our society in the last decade. That’s something as a society we have to acknowledge and grapple with.”
Racial disparity in access to health care has been documented. Last December, the American Journal of Public Health reported that 886,000 African American deaths could have been prevented between 1991-2000 if they had the same care as whites.
There has been an outpouring of donations from throughout the United States in response to the images seen in news coverage — but might it have been greater if those images did not show black faces?
“I do think the nation would be responding differently if they were white elderly and white babies actually dying on the street and being covered with newspapers and shrouds and being left there,” said David Billings of The People’s Institute, a 25-year-old New Orleans-based organization focused on ending racism.
Rev. Jesse Jackson, en route to Louisiana for what he said was a humanitarian effort, said racial injustice and indifference to black suffering was at the root of the disaster response.
“In this same city of New Orleans where slave ships landed,” Jackson said, “where the legacy of 246 years of slavery and 100 years of Jim Crow discrimination, that legacy is unbroken today.”
Black members of Congress Friday denounced the slow federal response to hurricane Katrina.
“It looks dysfunctional to me right now,” said Representative Diane Watson (D-Calif.)
“We cannot allow it to be said by history that the difference between those who lived and those who died in the great storm and flood of 2005 was nothing more than poverty, age or skin colour,” said Representative Elijah Cummings (D-Md.) “It would be unconscionable to stand by and do nothing.”
Ben Burkett, a black farmer whose fields of kale, spinach and broccoli and acres of soft pine trees were wiped out by the hurricane, said the initial disaster made no distinctions, but he expects relief to be inherently biased.
“The eye of the storm made everybody equal, black or white, rich or poor, big house or small house,” he said. “But believe me, when the relief comes — and we haven’t seen anything yet — the small farmer is going to be at the end, and the small black farmer is going to be at the end of that.
“Basically I expect it because that’s the way it’s always been.”
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Contributing to this report were AP writers Rebecca Carroll in Washington D.C., Charlotte Porter in Baton Rouge, and Allen G. Breed in New Orleans.