Betting on the NBA isn’t over quite yet. July 1st marks the start of the free agency so let’s have a talks about some betting odds released on where some NBA stars will play next season. This year’s list is littered with perennial NBA All-Stars, including Dwayne Wade, Chris Bosh, Amare Stoudemire and Carlos Boozer. However, it doesn’t have a genius to figure out that the crown jewel with this year’s free agency class is non other then LeBron James.
Let’s face it, athletes of LeBron’s stature earn more money in endorsements then they do using their salaries. That’s where in fact the New York Knicks enter the race. Having been maneuvering their roster and salary cap for a few years now, the Knicks franchise thinks they’ve what it requires to create King James to the Big Apple. Planning to New York wouldn’t be great for James’ immediate title hopes. Outside of power forward David Lee, the talent on the Knicks roster is pretty ordinary.
The Nets have a brand new Russian playboy owner Mikhail Prokhorov, a new head coach in the likeable Avery Johnson, but the same old roster that can only muster up 12 wins last season. To include insult to injury, the Nets are drafting third in Thursday’s NBA Draft despite obtaining the NBA’s worst record. They do have some good young pieces in Brook Lopez and Devin Harris, but even with James, they would have a very difficult time making the playoffs – can’t see LeBron being too worked up about that. However, with the Nets moving to Brooklyn eventually, James would manage to cash-in on all off that New York marketing money touched on earlier.
The 2006 Football World Cup offers a timely opportunity to consider the wider social and political implications of sport in general and football particularly, with particular reference to the racial dimension to sporting competition. Now obviously, Dr Frances Cress-Welsing in her much acclaimed book, ‘The Isis Papers’ (1991), provided an in-depth psychological analysis of the racial/sexual symbolism of many different sports. Similarly, Abdullah Nazir Uhuru in his excellent book ‘Killing “Me” $oftly’ (2005), offers an insightful analysis of football, drawing upon Cress-Welsing’s work. The aim of the essay is to create upon these works and also to help Afrikans to realize that, life is politics and everything in life is political, therefore sport has a politicised and racialised dimension to it, the same as all other types of people activity.
According to the definition; Caucasians have now been waging a racial war against Afrikans for over three thousand years (and we must not forget their cousins the Arabs). This war manifests itself in various ways, for example the physical war is not just confined to overt physical violence but also incorporates acts designed to directly attack the physical health of Afrikans e.g. the use of medicines banned from used in ‘the West’ in Afrika, the complete HIV/AIDS scenario and the 1xbet зеркало рабочее and concerted attempts to lessen Afrikan fertility worldwide, of which it forms part, being examples of European aggression.
Among the most crucial tactics in war is what is called ‘Psych Ops’ or Psychological Operations. It’s been well established that propaganda is vital in warfare, even during overt military conflict, and the creation and dissemination of propaganda is an essential part of psychological operations. The objective of psychological operations is always to weaken or destroy the enemy’s will to fight and resist, or crucially – particularly with respect to Afrikans – convince the enemy that actually there is no war happening and that his/her goals and aspirations coincide with and come in harmony with this of the propagandist.
Sport is used as an expression of national pride and prowess on an ongoing basis, but particularly occasionally of collective national anxiety. In this context team sports become more crucial than individual sports from the nationalistic perspective, particularly when the team is representing the nation as opposed to a club. From the racial perspective; individual sporting encounters can have great psychological significance, particularly once they take invest highly combative sports e.g. boxing.