Ever see the spectacular footage of the 1940 collapse of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge? Woefully planned and constructed, it opened to traffic in July. Four months later it hideously swayed and rolled until it snapped like a cheap toy, and fell into Puget Sound.
It had, very briefly, been the world’s third-longest suspension bridge behind the Golden Gate and George Washington.
Construction workers, who nicknamed the span “Galloping Gertie” for its instability, claimed its fate was inevitable. It was a temporary monument to systemic, stick-to-the-plan neglect.
It was, after all, a toll bridge.
Such a day of reckoning — or is it wreck-ening? — approaches for all our sports, now in the hands of deconstructionists who would sell our and their souls at a diseased cattle auction.
This week, the Jets made it official, signing reprobate running back Dalvin Cook to a one-year deal for a reported $8.6 million to perform here in PSL Stadium.
This money, if he chooses and/or is not suspended, will allow Cook to increase his payment offer to his ex-girlfriend who is suing him for beating her swollen and bloody. Despite a text to her in which Cook wrote, “If you wanna go to the police I’ll respect that [and] I’ll take my punishment for what I did!” Cook claims innocence.
Court records show that his first two offers to her to buy his way out — $800,000 then $1 million — were rejected.
The NFL has a profound and persistent problem with players brutalizing women. Last month Panthers’ CB Chris Claybrooks was arrested for the second time since mid-April for domestic assault against two different women.
The Jets’ first-round pick in 2016, LB Darron Lee from Ohio St., in June was issued an arrest warrant by a Columbus, Ohio judge for failure to appear to face domestic violence charges. He has been charged with two separate domestic abuse crimes — one against the mother of his child, the other against his mother.
Jets’ owner Woody Johnson this offseason tried to lure determined miscreant Odell Beckham, Jr., with servile, facts-defying flattery: “That Odell Beckham, a man of character and quality, would consider us and want to be with us . . . If that’s what he wants it’s pretty much a compliment.”
Choose A or B: A) Johnson is an ignorant fool. B) He thinks you are.
Regardless, Roger Goodell has turned NFL fields and even helmets into conspicuous TV-delivered social virtues message platforms. We, and not the NFL and its players, must improve our civility, tolerance and respect for humankind. Yeah, shame on us.
Last weekend, CBS’s Jim Nantz, who speaks as if golf courses are religious shrines and certain disreputable golfers are two putts on 18 short of sainthood, last weekend joined the legion of just-following-orders and/or the money celebrities, retired athletes and media to encourage viewers and listeners to invest their money in a business fully predicated on investors losing their money.
Nantz, aided by a graphic, invited the vulnerable — preferably saps — to gamble on golf via the PGA’s financial partnership with FanDuel.
Nantz has already seen how gamblers, along with booze, have increased the misconduct of once-respectful on-course spectators — not to mention the growing cases of gambling on sports by college and pro athletes who have taken the relentlessly televised bait. He has helped loosen another bolt in a bridge over the River Of Ruin.
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Last week West Virginia University, which chooses to spend millions of dollars annually to send its men’s and women’s “student-athletes” on wildly expensive, extended trips to play conference games in the Midwest and Texas, announced plans to eliminate 32 academic majors as well as 170 academic faculty in order to service a $45 million deficit.
Majors proposed to be dropped include foreign languages, special education, environmental and community planning, art history, Masters in higher education and Ph.Ds in math.
Last year the three highest-paid WVU employees were foul-mouthed, DWI recidivist and now ex-basketball coach Bob Huggins, football coach Neal Brown and athletic director Wren Baker, totaling roughly $10 million per year, not including perks.
Thus WVU is another U.S. college that serves as a front for football and basketball teams, though win-at-all-cost goals do not appear in WVU’s or any other college’s mission statements.
At the same time, big-ticket sports universities, most partially funded by taxpayers, continue to accumulate bridge-too-far red ink.
And WVU, as do many colleges, annually contributes to the arrest totals of full scholarship “student-athletes.” Among WVU’s gifts to society is one-man NFL crime wave Pacman Jones.
The decline of MLB as a beautiful and cherished father-to-son sport, now on the precipice of self-immolation, has been treated with more and more money that has become impossible to justify or sustain, no matter how much the public loses to commercialized, MLB-sold prompts to bet parlays despite multimillionaire players who choose to not run to first base.
As of Thursday, the teams with the highest payrolls — highest, as in insane — the Mets, Yankees and Padres — were a combined 173-190. The Angels, at No. 6, were 60-62. The Orioles, at 29th among 30, ahead of only the A’s, were 74-47.
And the game has been abandoned — sacrificed — to diminished skills, training and Jack and the Beanstalk analytics … well, here comes a typical box score, now:
Monday’s D’backs-Rockies, Colorado won, 6-4. Arizona’s designated hitter Kyle Lewis, batting .162, went 0-for-4, striking out twice. Teammate and third baseman Jace Peterson, batting .216, was 0-for-4 with three K’s.
The Rockies struck out 13 times against five widely unknown pitchers. Batting third at .250, Ryan McMahon went 1-for-4, striking out his other three times, OF Michael Toglia, went 3-for-3 — all strikeouts.
Yep, sports fans, the Tacoma Narrows Bridge. But you’d better hurry! And don’t buy a round-trip ticket!
Injured pitchers? That’s baseball, Suzyn
Line of the Week belongs to Suzyn Waldman. Sunday at the top of Yanks-Marlins on WFAN, she said Miami starter Eury Perez was just off the IL. “They want to be very careful with Perez, maybe 80 pitches. … They’re very careful with pitchers yet they all get hurt, anyway.”
Reader Dan Stevens is in a bad way. He writes that he has been unable to sleep due to James Harden’s annual unhappiness with his NBA salary.
The cons never end. The University of Florida claims it will wear Nike black uniforms against Arkansas, in order to, according to coach Billy Napier, display “gratitude and appreciation for all branches of our military and first responders.” UF’s patriotic, gratitude-inspired cheap foreign-made black Nike jerseys begin at $105.
Fox’s Thursday telecast of the 55-65 Mets at the 54-67 Cards was prefaced by promos showing a benches-clearing hassle the teams had two Aprils ago. Narrator: “New York and St. Louis have history.” Yeah, tune in for no other reason than the cheap, desperate, implied promise of watching a fight.
