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I grew up loving baseball. My mother loved baseball and it was because of her that I did also. She was a Brooklyn Dodger fan even after they left for the west coast and, of course, it was because of Jackie Robinson.
There are many things to thank Martin Luther King and Malcom X for, but perhaps more needs to be said about the path they followed, paved by Jackie Robinson.
The celebratory bath with what must have seemed like the finest Champagne had eluded them in Pittsburgh, but it arrived in full force after the Mets defeated the Florida Marlins, 4-0, at Shea Stadium to clinch their first division title since 1988. After Cliff Floyd caught Josh Willingham’s liner to end the game, catcher Paul Lo Duca mobbed Billy Wagner at the mound, and the rest of the team sprinted out of the dugout to join the merriment near second base. - Ben Shpigel, The N.Y. Times.
Brazil Beaten at Its Own Game as France Reaches Semifinals - New York Times.
"France has also received criticism from the far-right politician Jean-Marie Le Pen, head of the anti-immigrant National Front. Le Pen, as he has done many times, has accused the team of using too many black players. And he has said the squad was not sufficiently respectful in singing the national anthem.
The World Cup victory in 1998, achieved with a diverse team with backgrounds in the former French colonies, was considered a victory for multiculturalism and a repudiation of Le Pen's position.
That team was widely hailed while winning in its own country. And this one is already being embraced. The victory brought tens of thousands of people and fireworks to the Champs-Elysees.
"The public supports the team," defender Lilian Thuram said earlier in the World Cup. "They don't ask what color the players are." - Jere Longman
Link: Patriots Stun Huskies, Advance to Final Four.
"George Mason is no longer the cute little underdog. The Patriots, by golly, are going to the Final Four.The suburban commuter school from Fairfax, Va., beat top-seeded Connecticut 86-84 in overtime Sunday in the Washington Regional final, ending the stranglehold that big-time programs have enjoyed for 27 years in college basketball's biggest showcase."- Joseph White, A.P.; Photograph by Getty
'A sponsorship waiting to happen' - baltimoresun.com.
This Olympics, U.S. snowboarders have competed while listening to the personal music device, and skiers, speed skaters and other Olympians from all over the world have been observed listening raptly during practice and before competing.
All of which makes for great press.
"One of the lasting images of these games is going to be these snowboarders with their iPods," said Abraham Madkour, executive editor of SportsBusiness Journal, a trade magazine that covers the sports industry. "It's the perfect form of subconscious marketing." - Abigail Tucker, The Baltimore Sun; Photograph by A.P.
Determined Skater Makes History With Fierce Charge to the Gold - New York Times.
As Shani Davis took a final lap around the speedskating oval Saturday to celebrate his victory in the 1,000 meters, the first individual Olympic gold medal won by a black athlete in a Winter Games, an overwhelmingly Dutch crowd set aside color and nationalism to celebrate a spectacular performance. - Photograph by Doug Mills, NYT
Emerging From the Shadows - The Washington Post.
VIERA, Fla., Feb. 15 -- There was a blue sky. There was an unfiltered sun. There were palm trees beyond the outfield wall, and quiet everywhere in the empty stadium. And there was a baseball in the air, its lazy arc ending in a leather glove that was attached to the end of a muscular arm, which belonged to a baseball player, who was wearing a gray athletic T-shirt that read: "Property of the Washington Nationals." - Dave Sheinin
Mets and Randolph Launch a New Era.
Barton Silverman/The New York Times
With Omar Minaya in the background,
new Mets Manager, Willie Randolph."They stood arm in arm at the front of the room, the Hispanic general manager from Queens and the African-American manager from Brooklyn, looking is if they had just won a game of stickball together."
- Lee Jenkins/The New York Times
A World Series ticket, Dan Shaugnessy, The Boston Globe.
The Yankees learned that good pitching is way more important than The Curse of the Bambino.
Racial 'Handicaps' and a Great Sprint Forward
Javier Soriano/AFP-Getty Images
"He is now nicknamed "the Yellow Bullet." His gold medal is said to be "the heaviest," or most significant, of the 32 that China won in the Athens Olympics. He carried the Chinese flag in the closing ceremonies and has returned home to riches and glory.All of this adulation because Liu Xiang, a high hurdler, has proved what many Chinese have long felt was not possible: that yellow men can jump, and sprint, too." - Jim Yardley, The New York Times
