Georgia Varsity Sports Vent

Olympics In The Deep South: A 15-Year Retrospective Of Atlanta's Summer Games

My parents had this house up in Kennesaw in 1996. Kennesaw is 20 miles or so out of Atlanta, so we had to drive into the city to see anything that wasn't rowing or white water rafting, and this meant the adventure of descending from the tame burbs into the city, this big, murderous, decaying pile of parking garages, tall buildings, and homeless people. The Walking Dead films in Atlanta all the time without changing a thing. It remains one of America's leading pre-zombified cities.

Driving into town we had on the Moog Cookbook, covers of popular songs from the 1990s done on ancient Moog synths. The skyline had all this extra filigree: red, blue and white neon along the borders of buildings, massive new billboards everywhere, a sheen of fresh paint and Olympic shine covering everything. The song "Black Hole Sun" came on, a bleepy bloopy remake that took any drama whatsoever out of the song. It became a bossa nova song from a space station. I was doing 85 down the connector and it felt like Atlanta had somehow bought a ticket to the end of history, a place where we all wore PVC pants, listened to arty but accessible techno music, and took Ecstasy without adverse side effects.  Then someone set off a bomb because they hated abortion and the gays, someone broke into your car, and you noticed the crack addicts selling t-shirts too crappy for Freaknik in the middle of the sanitized corporate thoroughfares.  The night Eric Rudolph dropped off a backpack full of nails and explosives, I was driving up with my girlfriend from the University of Florida. We were listening to WGST when it went off, and in the background it sounded like nothing more than a transformer popping in the summer heat. A few anguished screams followed. Then, chaos. And because you are young and stupid, of course you think your family is close by, and of course you assume that because they said they were going to the park that night that they must have been sitting on the bench over the bomb. So you drive 100 miles an hour up to Kennesaw, not calling because it is 1996 and you do not have a cellphone yet, to pull in the driveway and find them: my mother and father, still relatively happy and married, my sister, my brother, the hound who will later survive being hit by an SUV and hobble around on three good legs and one useless piece of flesh that used to be its right leg.  They were fine. Later, my wife will take a conditioning class with a former Israeli commando whose husband was badly injured by the bomb.  Eric Rudolph is a dick. We got high in a port-o-let before the Australia/Nicaragua baseball game. It was my girlfriend's idea--the getting high part, not the Australia/Nicaragua baseball part. Tickets were either very easy to get, or impossible. International baseball was one of the easier ones. This is because international baseball is horrible and bad to watch. We decided to get high to properly enjoy Australians playing baseball. The people we were with told us the little vent at the top looked like a miniature factory stack belching smoke into the air. Someone clapped when we exited.  It was all very subtle. Australians playing baseball looked as bad as you might imagine. The outfielders chased balls with the determination and glacial speed of RBI baseball outfielders. If one had just gotten to the wall at an awkward angle and just stood there, legs pumping away but going nowhere, I would not have been surprised. At the plate they looked like a team of pitchers, and on the mound they looked like a team of DHs. The mercy rule ended the game sometime in the fourth inning, but being high meant it took a few minutes for us to realize that. At a convenience store on Spring Street, I watched two squat fireplug North Korean wrestlers in red sweat suits with "DPRK" emblazoned on the back walk in, each grab one Natural Light each, and then cautiously shove money into the cashier's bulletproof fishtank before opening the beers, pausing, and then downing the beers in one long chug where they stood. I don't know if they breathed; instead, it look like they opened a hatch in their stomach and just poured the beer in, standing and letting gravity do the work for them. They finished, and then walked out beaming with more happiness than I've ever seen on any other North Korean's face I've ever seen.* I've met at least three other North Koreans, so this is not an entirely meaningless statement. It looked like they'd tasted freedom, or at least some watered-down, Natural Light-scented off-brand variation of it. *No really, I have met more than one North Korean. Three, in fact.

Hurricane Watch Online » Blog Archive » Varsity baseball team ...

Written by Ashley Yearwood, Editor in Chief

Hiding behind the safety of a computer screen and screen name to keep their identity hidden, Internet browsers bash varsity team sports every day on GAVSV.com.

Georgia Varsity Sports Vent is a website where users can post opinions on teams, the out come of games or just individual players.

Recently, screen name 84aman has ridiculed the varsity baseball team and their new coach, James Mooney, on the website.

Calling the team “laughable” and saying the new coach is “no better than the last” is a non-constructive way to criticize the team, sounds like a coward and is “laughable” itself.

When critiquing someone or something, the criticizer should say things in a constructive way, not just to be a “smart butt.”

Obviously, 84aman has a clear understanding of the game of baseball, so instead of bashing the team or saying that our pitchers throw “beach balls” and “meatballs,” why not give advice on what to do differently?

What is difficult to understand is how can one person critique the whole team saying that it is “laughable” after the first game they played, which was, after all, only a scrimmage?

The varsity football team won their scrimmages both my freshman and sophomore year, but lost all games after that. Did anyone say just because we won our scrimmage that the team was going to go undefeated? No. So, 84aman cannot judge the baseball team and its coach after one scrimmage game.

People judge teams, individuals and activities every day because of certain characteristics. Just because one dresses with mostly dark colors does not mean that their personality is bland, just because people think only “preppy” girls cheerlead does not mean that all cheerleaders are preppy and just because the baseball team lost their scrimmage does not mean that the rest of the season will be “crap.

Southern Bedtime Stories

FaxUSA 2002, a directory of facsimile numbers for businesses and organizations nationwide / edited by Jennifer C. Perkins

Acronyms, Initialisms and Abbreviations Dictionary 1997: A-F ; Part 2, G-O ; Part 3, P-Z

Sports of the Times, Great Moments in Sports History

Oxford and Cambridge undergraduate's journal