"What a class act"

[barney_rebel]

This is opposite to the "Not very sportsmanlike thread"

 

Post stories of plays of obvious true sportsmanship:

 

http://ca.sports.yahoo.com/nhl/blog/puck_d...?urn=nhl-237745

[g under p]

It was truly a class as it happened not too from where I used to live from the MD/VA border on the Potomac River. I was a devastating loss for the Caps but he took the time to care for this mother and daughter's dilemma. Awesome move on his part especially with a hug at the end.

[barney_rebel]

Joe Sackic hands off the Stanley Cup to Ray Bourque to be the first one on the team to celebrate.

 

[laughedatbytime]

QUOTE (barney_rebel @ Feb 6 2011, 03:32 PM)

Joe Sackic hands off the Stanley Cup to Ray Bourque to be the first one on the team to celebrate. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2yjC5l4GO54

http://blog.oregonlive.com/breakingnews/20...rtsmanship.html

 

They don't get much better than this...

[barney_rebel]

QUOTE (laughedatbytime @ Feb 6 2011, 04:35 PM)

QUOTE (barney_rebel @ Feb 6 2011, 03:32 PM) Joe Sackic hands off the Stanley Cup to Ray Bourque to be the first one on the team to celebrate. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2yjC5l4GO54 http://blog.oregonlive.com/breakingnews/20...rtsmanship.html   They don't get much better than this... Jesus,, that gave me tears. Awesome story.

[g under p]

[laughedatbytime]

Here's one hot off the presses...baseball coach gives kidney to player...that's pretty awesome in my book.

 

http://msn.foxsports.com/mlb/story/Wake-Fo...o-player-020811

 

QUOTE

Wake Forest baseball coach Tom Walter has donated a kidney to a freshman player who suffers from a disease that can lead to kidney failure. Both Walter and outfielder Kevin Jordan were recovering Tuesday in an Atlanta hospital one day after the transplant was performed. "For us, it's almost like it's been divine intervention," Jordan's father Keith told The Associated Press in a telephone interview Tuesday from Atlanta. Dr. Kenneth Newell, the lead surgeon on the team that removed Walter's kidney, said in a statement issued Tuesday by Wake Forest that he expects Walter and Jordan to recover fully. The school says the recovery time for both the 42-year-old Walter and Jordan is expected to be several months. Walter said it will be two months before he is back to normal. Keith Jordan says his son could swing a bat again in 6-8 weeks, and he expects Kevin to enroll in summer school in June and prepare for the fall semester. For now, though, he said the priority for his son is the early stage of recovery, which includes taking short walks in the hospital Tuesday and making sure his incision doesn't become infected. "I think he's feeling great, outside of he's still got a couple of tubes hanging out of him," Keith Jordan said. Keith Jordan said he isn't worrying about when his son, a 19th-round draft pick of the New York Yankees last June, may return to the field. "One of the things we do know for Kevin is, he's going to want to go do stuff right away," Keith Jordan said. "He's going to have to take care of himself. ... His intention is to get back on the field, so I'm sure he's going to do whatever it takes to do that." Walter said the "best-case scenario is that Kevin and I just lead a normal life" but added that the great story will come when Jordan "makes it back to the playing field." Jordan had trouble shaking the flu last winter as a high school senior in Columbus, Ga., and lost 20 pounds. Doctors at Emory University Hospital in Atlanta discovered his kidney was functioning at only 15 to 20 percent. He was diagnosed last April with ANCA vasculitis, a type of autoimmune swelling disorder caused by abnormal antibodies. When those abnormalities show up in the kidneys, they can cause blood and protein to leak into the urine and could result in kidney failure. He wound up on dialysis -- three days a week at first, and then daily. Family members were tested to see if any were a possible match for a transplant, and Walter was tested in December after it was determined that his relatives weren't compatible. Walter found out Jan. 28, during the team's first practice of the spring semester, that he was a match. He told the team three days later, and said the players greeted the news with "stunned silence followed by a round of applause." "A lot of things had to come together for it to happen," Keith Jordan said. "Everybody wants a feel-good story wherever they can get it."

 

 

[lerxt1990]

awesome stuff.

[barney_rebel]

http://sports.espn.go.com/chicago/mlb/news/story?id=6108605

[ILSnwdog]

I'll see if I can find a link to it later, but if you want to hear class, listen to Devin Hester's press conference after he set the NFL record for most kick returns for TD. He took no credit and said that he owed everything to the other guys on the field blocking for him.

 

I gained so much respect for him after hearing that press conference.

 

[laughedatbytime]

[lerxt1990]

Good story overall. Sports tie in later in story...

 

------------

 

4-star general, 5-star grace

 

(CNN) -- Graciousness can pay priceless dividends.

 

And it doesn't cost a thing.

 

You may have heard the story about what happened between White House adviser Valerie Jarrett and Four-star Army Gen. Peter Chiarelli at a recent Washington dinner.

 

As reported by the website Daily Caller, Jarrett, a longtime Chicago friend of President Obama, was seated at the dinner when a general -- later identified as Chiarelli, the No. 2-ranking general in the U.S. Army hierarchy, who was also a guest at the gathering -- walked behind her. Chiarelli was in full dress uniform.

 

Jarrett, apparently only seeing Chiarelli's striped uniform pants, thought that he was a waiter. She asked him to get her a glass of wine.

 

She was said to be mortified as soon as she realized her mistake, and who wouldn't be? But the instructive part of this tale is what Chiarelli did next.

 

Rather than take offense, or try to make Jarrett feel small for her blunder, the general, in good humor, went and poured her a glass of wine. It was evident that he wanted to defuse the awkward moment, and to let Jarrett know that she should not feel embarrassed.

 

As Chiarelli wrote in an e-mail to CNN Pentagon Correspondent Barbara Starr:

 

"It was an honest mistake that ANYONE could have made. She was sitting, I was standing and walking behind her and all she saw were the two stripes on my pants which were almost identical to the waiters' pants -- REALLY. She apologized and will come to the house for dinner if a date can be worked out in March."

 

Now, even if you've never met Chiarelli or followed him in the news, you have to be impressed with him after hearing that story. With his lofty rank in the military, he could have given Jarrett the deep freeze, reproached her and corrected her. But he poured her the wine -- "It was only good fun," he wrote to Starr -- and invited her to a meal at his home. He came out of the incident as a decent and magnanimous person.

 

It's easy to do, if you care about other people's feelings. Sportswriters who covered the National Basketball Association in the late 1980s and 1990s like to tell a story about Karl Malone, the great forward for the Utah Jazz. It seems that one day in the baggage-claim area of the Salt Lake City airport, a woman was trying to lift her bags from the carousel and, seeing Malone, who was there to pick up his brother from an arriving flight, mistook him for a skycap.

 

She asked him to carry her bags to her car.

 

Malone was a wealthy and world-famous athlete at the time. He could so easily have hurt the woman's feelings, rebuked her. But what did he do?

 

According to longtime Salt Lake Tribune sports reporter Steve Luhm, who covered the incident at the time and who confirmed it to me last week, Malone carried the woman's bags all the way to her car. Only when she reached for her purse to give him a tip did he in a friendly manner introduce himself and decline the offer.

 

One of the most indelible stories about a person going out of his way to avoid humiliating another person was told in Gay Talese's 1966 Esquire article "Frank Sinatra Has a Cold," widely considered to be perhaps the finest magazine profile ever written.

 

In the article, Talese described a party at the home of Sinatra's former wife, at which Sinatra, who maintained cordial relations with her, was acting as host. A young woman at the party, according to Talese, "while leaning against a table, accidentally with her elbow knocked over one of a pair of alabaster birds to the floor, smashing it to pieces."

 

Talese wrote that Sinatra's daughter Nancy, also a guest at the party, started to say: "Oh, that was one of my mother's favorite..."

 

Talese continued:

 

"ut before she could complete the sentence, Sinatra glared at her, cutting her off, and while 40 other guests in the room all stared in silence, Sinatra walked over, quickly with his finger flicked the other alabaster bird off the table, smashing it to pieces, and then put an arm gently around [the young woman] and said, in a way that put her completely at ease, 'That's OK, kid.' "

 

It can work the other way, too, and can be remembered just as long. I was once working on a profile of a famous singer, also for Esquire, and one evening we rode in his limousine to a concert hall. As he walked backstage he was stopped by a young, nervous and inexperienced usher with a clipboard who had been assigned to make certain everyone in the area was authorized. The usher asked the famous singer if he was the comedian who would open the show.

 

The singer did not speak to the young usher or make eye contact with him, but instead walked immediately over to a person in the management of the auditorium and demanded that the usher be dismissed.

 

The singer, in trying to make the young man who had made a mistake feel small, had only managed to make himself seem tiny. What Gen. Chiarelli did, though -- like Karl Malone, like Frank Sinatra -- was to demonstrate, instinctively and in an instant, what it means to be a big person.

 

The rest of us may never reach the exalted status of those three men. But kindness knows no social stratum. Every day, we're given the choice. Consideration? It's free of charge. It can echo forever.

 

The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of Bob Greene.

[barney_rebel]

[laughedatbytime]

Try reading this without crying...it's hard to hate the Yankees after reading this.

 

http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/columns/sto...31&sportCat=mlb

 

The team facing Yankees ace A.J. Burnett a few weeks back at Yankee Stadium has to go down as the oddest in baseball history.

 

For one thing, it plays only at night. The players have no choice. Even one minute of sunshine can kill them.

 

They're from Camp Sundown, in Craryville, N.Y., and they live life on the other side of the sun. All of them have the rare disease known as XP -- xeroderma pigmentosum. If kids with XP catch the slightest UV ray, they can and do develop cancerous tumors. Even fluorescent lights fry their skin like boiling oil. Most of them don't live to be 20.

 

So how could they take the field at Yankee Stadium? Because this was 3 a.m. Superstar right-handers should be tucked into bed by then, yet there was Burnett, throwing Wiffle-ball splitters and chasing down line drives.

 

There is no cure for XP. If you're born with it, you're one in a million. There are only 250 known cases in the U.S. Until Camp Sundown was founded 14 years ago by Caren and Dan Mahar, whose daughter Katie has the disease, few of these kids had met anyone else with XP. For most of them, Yankee Stadium was the first MLB ballpark they'd ever seen -- and probably it will be the last.

 

Getting here wasn't easy.

 

To make the seven-foot trip from the front door of Camp Sundown to the curtained bus with double-tinted windows that took them to Yankee Stadium, all the XPers had to wear hats, tinted eye shields, vats of sunblock, turtlenecks, long-sleeve shirts, long pants and gloves. Even with all that, they ran.

 

Because they couldn't leave until the sun was almost down, and because it was a three-hour drive, they knew they'd be able to see only the last couple of innings of the game. But then it rained, causing a more-than-two-hour rain delay. While the rest of the crowd cursed, the campers rejoiced. How lucky can you get? The bus arrived just before the first pitch. "It was almost like the game was waiting for them to show up," Yankees GM Brian Cashman said. "That kind of gave us goosebumps."

 

To get the kids out of the bus and into their VIP suite for the game, Yankees media-relations director Jason Zillo -- the man who dreamed up the whole night -- had to take them on a rat's route of back staircases and tunnels to avoid any fluorescent lights. After the Yankees beat the A's 6-3, the stadium lights had to be dimmed to 30 percent. Once they were, all the kids came running onto the field with smiles that could've lit up the Bronx.

 

"It's cool to be part of this," said Burnett, whom Zillo forced to leave at 3:15. "And it's kind of mind-boggling. I can't imagine if I couldn't take my children outside."

 

Eleven ghostly-pale XP campers took the field, including Yuxnier Beguebara, who is coming up on 71 operations, and Kevin Swinney, who has had over 200, and the rest of them, grinning through faces operated on so many times they seem to be covered in plastic. Feel sorry for them if you want, but they have one thing most kids will never have: For one night, the Yankees' field was theirs.

 

They high-fived Derek Jeter, ran madly around the bases and wallowed in the instant carnival the Yankees had set up -- from the magician to the bouncy castle to reliever Alfredo Aceves strolling the yard, strumming his guitar while Cashman sang the Police's "Message in a Bottle." For one night, at least, these kids found out they are not alone in being alone.

 

Not that they don't play baseball at Camp Sundown. They do -- at midnight, to the accompaniment of owls and bullfrogs -- against the local fire department. "We're pathetic," says Caren Mahar. "But we always play."

 

By 3:30, it was time to go, and there was no time to waste. They had to make it back to Camp Sundown before sunup. Welcome to life lived like a vampire.

 

On board the bus, Katie Mahar, 17, was whipped. Her hearing is down to 50 percent, and her vision is going fast, and her words are starting to lack vowels. But anybody could understand her as she kept saying, "That was a blast! What a blast!"

 

And I keep thinking of my friend Jason Zillo and the 14 years it took him to make this night happen.

 

"I saw one little girl," he said afterward, exhausted. "When the centerfield wall opened and the whole carnival started coming out -- she just started jumping up and down, over and over. She wouldn't stop, she was so excited. People wanted to thank me. But that's all I needed."

 

And you thought the warmest light came only from above.

 

 

[CMWriter]

This is just kind of "in general" but it made me proud anyways...

 

At high school basketball games, there's actually a lot of good sportsmanship, at least among the players. Before each game when the starting lineup runs out, each player goes and shakes the hand of the opposing coach. Even at the state semi-final I went to today, all the girls went and either shook hands or gave a hug to a girl on the other team (but I think several of them knew each other).

 

Also, as my school's team was trying desperately to catch up score-wise (which we didn't.. :C ) the other student section stopped jeering at us. I think they felt bad for us, since they're the returning champs and this was our first time back at State in 10 years. Maybe they just felt bad for us, but it was a nice gesture anyways. They stopped applauding every time we got fouled or lost the ball. Didn't alleviate my heartache, but it was a nice gesture.

[metallithrax]

QUOTE (laughedatbytime @ Feb 6 2011, 09:35 PM)

QUOTE (barney_rebel @ Feb 6 2011, 03:32 PM) Joe Sackic hands off the Stanley Cup to Ray Bourque to be the first one on the team to celebrate. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2yjC5l4GO54 http://blog.oregonlive.com/breakingnews/20...rtsmanship.html   They don't get much better than this... I must say that if i'd been alone, and not sat here with the girlfriend and her twin sister, I probably would have cried reading that ( I could feel the tears welling up)

[barney_rebel]

[laughedatbytime]

[thesweetscience]

QUOTE (barney_rebel @ Feb 6 2011, 04:32 PM)

Joe Sackic hands off the Stanley Cup to Ray Bourque to be the first one on the team to celebrate. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2yjC5l4GO54

I get goosebumps watching that again.

[CMWriter]

Does anyone know about the "tradition" in basketball (at least high school, here, don't know about pro or college) that everyone sits down out of respect if a player/official is injured? I always thought it was a nice gesture, because it doesn't matter what side you're on. No one wants to see a player or ref' injured.

 

Maybe it's just common sense (or at least courtesy) but I always liked to see it. Sometimes the chants from the respective student sections can get ugly, but in the end, it's all just a game.

[barney_rebel]

http://www.examiner.com/tv-in-oklahoma-cit..._medium=twitter

[barney_rebel]

http://tsn.ca/nhl/story/?id=359151

[barney_rebel]

http://www.tsn.ca/cis/story/?id=360103

[alphseeker]

QUOTE (barney_rebel @ Mar 31 2011, 06:46 AM)

http://www.tsn.ca/cis/story/?id=360103

 

Big bad Corporations?

[Test4VitalSigns]

In response to the beating of Giants' fan Bryan Stow by still unarrested Dodgers' fans the 2 teams got together before game last night to address the crowd

 

http://mlb.mlb.com/news/article.jsp?ymd=20...ws_mlb&c_id=mlb