“Billy the Kid, still dead, awaits pardon - Washington Times” plus 1 more |
| Billy the Kid, still dead, awaits pardon - Washington Times Posted: 26 Dec 2010 04:35 PM PST For notorious Wild West outlaw Billy the Kid, it looks like Christmas might yet come, just 129 years too late. And some are wondering why. New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, a Democrat, has just a few days left in his second and final four-year term in office, and will spend some of it deciding whether to grant a petition to pardon Billy the Kid, who was born as Henry McCarty but also was known by the aliases Henry Antrim and William H. Bonney. Mr. Richardson must make his decision about the legendary figures fate before midnight Dec. 31, when his time in office expires. Some experts on executive pardon criticized Mr. Richardsons consideration of Billy the Kid's case. "It seems to me that the case demonstrates a kind of trivialization of the pardon power," Margaret Love, a former U.S. pardon attorney who specializes in executive clemency, told The Washington Times. "It doesn't bear any relationship to the needs of real people in the criminal justice system that I think governors should be addressing." Mr. Richardson acknowledged last week during an interview on CNN that he enjoyed the attention the issue was bringing - "I'm going to string it out a little bit," he said - but added that he would not consider a "blanket pardon." "I've considered this for the last eight years," he said Thursday. "I'm looking at all of the documentation. I've heard from people around the world. It's about 52-48 in favor of the pardon." The governors office failed to return three voice messages from The Times. Peter Ruckman Jr., a political science professor at Rock Valley College in Illinois who runs a blog called Pardon Power, said extending a pardon to Billy the Kid would be "wildly inappropriate," and would degrade the power of a weighty gubernatorial power. "I think a more appropriate thing about this would be an proclamation or something of that order," Mr. Ruckman said. "I think pardons should be for living people." © Copyright 2010 The Washington Times, LLC. Click here for reprint permission. This entry passed through the Full-Text RSS service — if this is your content and you're reading it on someone else's site, please read our FAQ page at fivefilters.org/content-only/faq.php |
| Youth basketball all about the shoes - FOXSports.com Posted: 27 Dec 2010 05:07 AM PST LexisNexis Feed
Updated Dec 27, 2010 8:10 AM ET These days, it's not surprising to read stories about athletes deciding which college they will attend before they have even made it to high school. Those who don't know a lot about the business of a sport such as youth basketball might wonder how in the world a college coach learns about the exploits of a kid who is in the fifth or sixth grade. George Dohrmann seeks to explain how youth basketball became a big business in his book, "Play Their Hearts Out: A Coach, His Star Recruit and the Youth Basketball Machine." The tour to promote Dohrmann's book, which was released on Oct. 5, brought the author to Notre Dame on Saturday. "Play Their Hearts Out" tells the story of how shoe companies such as Nike and Adidas became a major presence in AAU basketball in the mid- 1990s. This evolution was encouraged (or at the least not discouraged) by the NCAA and the NBA. Both organizations hoped the shoe companies would provide the resources to allow organizations such as the AAU to become a training ground for coaches. It didn't take long for the laws of capitalism and unintended consequences to make a mockery of that assumption, Dohrmann says. "(Former Georgetown University basketball coach) John Thompson, who is on Nike's board of directors, laughs at this," he says. "Shoe companies are in the business of selling shoes." One way to boost shoe sales is to identify potential hoop stars, create buzz around them and shower them with basketball shoes and other athletic apparel, Dohrmann says. But how could Nike, which is located in Oregon, identify elementary, middle and high school players located in Los Angeles, Chicago or New York? Eventually youth basketball "coaches" stepped in to fill the void as advance scouts. To be fair, many youth basketball coaches are former players, gym rats and students of the game who care about developing their players as athletes and people. However, there are more than a few opportunists who knew how to spot talent. These coaches used their skill at spotting talent to land contracts with the shoe companies. The coaches also cultivated relationships with a network of people, Dohrmann says. This network includes people who organize youth basketball tournaments and college coaches. The youth basketball coaches used that influence to recruit talented players to play on their traveling teams. The book "Play Their Hearts Out" details the good and bad things about the system by focusing on one coach, one player and that player's mother. The coach is Joe Keller, a factory worker with a wife and a son who never played organized basketball. Dohrmann says that Keller longs to become rich by becoming one of the few youth basketball coaches with a shoe contract. Keller identifies a young southern California player named Demetrius Walker as a player who can help him reach that goal. Keller gave Dohrmann access to his team, allowing the writer to attend practices, games and interview players such as Demetrius and parents such as Kisha Hunter, who is Demetrius' mother. What readers learn is that Keller is a good recruiter and promoter, but he is not really a good basketball coach. "They are trying to create a perception about the players and themselves," Dohrmann says. Dohrmann says young players do gain some benefit from playing youth basketball. The players get a chance to compete against players who are highly talented. "It makes them tougher mentally and they get used to the speed of the game," he says. However, coaches such as Keller can't teach the players fundamentals. Keller also becomes more worried about getting a shoe deal than developing his players, Dohrmann says. This becomes a problem because many of the parents trust the judgment of the coaches. Demetrius and his mother start out trusting Keller's judgment, but both drift away from the coach as his motives become clearer, Dohrmann says. The author says the system clearly needs to be reformed. The best-case scenario would be for the NCAA and the NBA to wrest control of youth basketball away from the shoe companies and to install a sports academy system similar to the one used in Europe. He is not optimistic that kind of reform will ever occur. "Short of massive reform, we need some sort of education program so that parents can know what they are getting into," Dohrmann says. "Some way of vetting the coaches would be great." This entry passed through the Full-Text RSS service — if this is your content and you're reading it on someone else's site, please read our FAQ page at fivefilters.org/content-only/faq.php |
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