Test your junior hockey knowledge in a major way.
Thứ Ba, 29 tháng 12, 2015
Thứ Hai, 28 tháng 12, 2015
Pacheco playing for New York Red Bulls against Houston Dynamo in May 2009.
Mike Stobe
Former El Salvador soccer captain Alfredo Pacheco was shot dead at a gas station in Santa Ana in the northwest of the coutry, the Salvadoran attorney general's office said Sunday. He was 33 years old.
The shooting occurred at 3:30 a.m. Sunday local time (4:30 a.m. ET). Two people who were with Pacheco were injured in the incident, the attorney general said.
Pacheco was a defender who had played 86 times for his country — more than any other Salvadorian player — and scored 6 goals
However, he was banned from the sport for life along with 13 other players in 2013 after being found to have taken bribes to lose games.
He played 14 times for New York Red Bulls in the MLS in 2009. He also played for FAS, Isidro Metapán and C.D. Aguila in his home country.
Earlier this month, Honduran player Arnold Peralta was shot dead at the age of 26 in the city of La Ceiba.
Al Jazeera reported that Manning in 2011 used human growth hormone, a claim that the NFL quarterback vehemently denied, as did the Denver Broncos and Indianapolis Colts.
An investigation by Al Jazeera released Sunday reported that NFL star Peyton Manning in 2011 used human growth hormone, a performance enhancing drug.
Titled "The Dark Side," the hourlong documentary followed former British hurdler Liam Collins as he went undercover to speak with pharmacists, doctors, and others who said they had been involved with supplying performance enhancing drugs to athletes.
Al Jazeera's report was based on a secret recording of an interview with Charlie Sly, who in 2011 worked at an anti-aging clinic that treated Manning after he broke his neck.
Sly first told Al Jazeera that Manning and his wife, Ashley, would receive IV treatments after hours at the clinic. Sly also said shipments of human growth hormone were sent to Ashley Manning, which he believed were actually used by her husband.
Sly later said that he did not know he was being recorded and his statements were false.
"I am recanting any such statements and there is no truth to any statement of mine that Al Jazeera plans to air," he said.
In 2011, Manning was treated at the Guyer Institute of Molecular Medicine as he worked to recover severe neck injury and resulting surgeries.
In his recovery, Manning underwent a number of procedures — including reports of stem cell injections in Europe.
Manning told ESPN that he was treated at the clinic with the guidance of Colts' medical team. He said he received treatments in a hyperbaric chamber as well as receiving nutrients through IV — during business hours.
Any medication that may have been mailed to his wife was her private affair, he added.
"Nothing that's ever been sent to her or my wife has used have I ever taken," he told ESPN. "Absolutely not. I have my treatments that I do. She may have hers, and that's her business."
The Guyer Institute of Molecular Medicine / Via guyerinstitute.com
Chủ Nhật, 27 tháng 12, 2015
Dwayne Johnson should be the eighth wonder of the world.
Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson asking you to come and get it.
wwe.tumblr.com / Via WWE
Flying a damn helicopter in San Andreas.
Village Roadshow Pictures
Blinking really intensely.
WWE
Looking over his shoulder (maybe for you?).
I'm right here boo.
WWE / Via wwefannation.tumblr.com
If you come at the King, you best not miss.
On Friday, the Cleveland Cavaliers played a Christmas Day game against the Golden State Warriors in Oakland, California.
Marcio Jose Sanchez / AP
The Cavaliers' star player, LeBron James, was pretty frustrated with the refereeing, though. As the Chicago Sun Times reported, he repeatedly appealed to the refs throughout the game.
Marcio Jose Sanchez / AP
During a pause in game play, a Warriors fan sitting courtside mocked James for being a crybaby. But then this happened....
Thứ Bảy, 26 tháng 12, 2015
Wrestling can be ridiculous. But when it’s done right, it’s better than any show on television.
Chris Jericho vs. Neville: Beast in the East, July 4, 2015
Singles Match
Winner: Chris Jericho
Yes, Chris Jericho can still put on one hell of a match at the age of 45. Taking on rising superstar Neville, the two put on a highly entertaining match in Tokyo. It had everything from mat-based wrestling to high-flying maneuvers. It was a unique matchup between a well-respected veteran and a beloved rookie, and it delivered one of the best matches of the night.
Also, Michael Cole's commentary was on fire.
WWE/ network.wwe.com
Daniel Bryan (C) vs. Dolph Ziggler: RAW, March 30, 2015
Singles match for the WWE Intercontinental Championship
Winner: Daniel Bryan
After winning the Intercontinental Championship at WrestleMania, Daniel Bryan defended the title the following night on RAW against fellow fan favorite Dolph Ziggler. The match had incredible back-and-forth action with lots of counters and near pinfalls between the two superstars. Even though Ziggler lost the bout, the post-WrestleMania crowd commended both superstars. Rewatching this match will only make you miss Daniel Bryan, who's currently out with an injury.
WWE/ youtube.com
New Day (C) vs. The Usos vs. Lucha Dragons: TLC, Dec. 13, 2015
Triple Threat Tag Team Ladder Match for the WWE Tag Team Championship
Winners: New Day
WWE had a rough 2015. While stars have been dropping like flies due to injuries and bad creative booking, New Day has managed to rise to the top. Along with The Usos and the Lucha Dragons, the three teams delivered an explosive opening to an otherwise lukewarm TLC pay-per-view. While the match had some brutal spots and gave New Day the much-needed credibility as Tag Team champions, Kalisto delivering a Salida del Sol off the top of the ladder is a spot for the ages.
Also, Xavier Woods is damn entertaining on commentary.
WWE/ network.wwe.com
Charlotte (C) vs. Sasha Banks vs. Bayley vs. Becky Lynch: NXT Takeover: Rival, Feb. 11, 2015
Fatal Four Way Match for the NXT Women's Championship
Winner: Sasha Banks
This match was proof that NXT continued to deliver high-quality women's wrestling in 2015. You had four badasses putting their bodies on the line for the prestigious NXT Women's Championship. From the very beginning, the match was fast-paced and brutal. The viciousness kept viewers on the edge of their seats. In the end, Sasha Banks picked up a well-deserved win, crowning her the new NXT Women's Champion.
WWE/ network.wwe.com
Thứ Sáu, 25 tháng 12, 2015
Nebahitachiini Nez (#75), football player at Navajo Pine High School in New Mexico on the Navajo Nation Indian Reservation.
Brian Leddy for BuzzFeed News
On a cold October night in Navajo, New Mexico, William Nez and his wife, Trina, and daughter, Morgan, pull up to Navajo Pine High School in their Toyota 4Runner and find a spot in the small lot close to the school’s track and football field.
Morgan, 9, bounces out of the backseat and is promptly stuffed into a purple snowsuit and handed a blue foam finger. Her father, William, zips a black fleece jacket over his Navajo Pine Warriors T-shirt, and he and Trina each grab a handle of a watercooler and head into the stands.
Navajo Pine High School is located on the Navajo Nation, a windy 40 minutes north of Route 66, and near the border of New Mexico and Arizona. Behind the field are enormous red rocks facing west that glow pink as the sun sets, just before the Warriors’ game. It is their last home football game of the season, and the last time 17-year-old Nabahitachiini Nez, William and Trina’s son, will suit up in his Warriors football uniform in front of friends and neighbors.
With 33.5 quarterback sacks during his senior season, Nez leads the nation in sacks, according to high school football website MaxPreps.com. At 6-foot-6 and 298 pounds — “not 300,” Nez clarified — he towers over his teammates and rivals, the youngest of whom are still in the eighth grade. In early weeks of his senior season, Nez was averaging a whopping six sacks per game, but as word traveled about his threatening size, players began to double cover him, and his production slowed down. In early December, Nez was named the Navajo Times Defensive Player of the Year.
During the game against the McCurdy Bobcats — who traveled four hours across New Mexico to play the Warriors — Nez plays on the offensive and defensive lines, and sometimes as a fullback. He is comically bigger than every other player on the field, and the Bobcats put two defenders on him on many plays, stifling his productivity as a pass rusher. The Warriors have only 24 players on their full roster, requiring Nez to play on nearly every snap.
The Warriors allowed McCurdy to take a quick lead, but in the stands, the Nez family is loud. William brings a pink stadium horn, which gets quickly swiped by Morgan, but his and Trina’s voices are the loudest in the hundred-person crowd gathered at the only event in town.
“Get your guy, Bona!” William screams onto the field. In conversation, the Nez family refers to Nabahitachiini as Bona, a nickname he earned as a child when his older brother, William Jr., could not pronounce the 14-letter name.
In addition to a head coach, McCurdy has a half-dozen assistant coaches dressed in red and blue in tow. The Warriors have only their head coach, Michael Hawley, who joined the team last-minute at the beginning of the 2015 season. Because of financial strain, Navajo Pine has turned over a new head coach on an annual basis. For the season, Hawley is paid $4,900.
Nez’s school, Navajo Pine, is part of the Gallup-McKinley County public school district. In 2013, only 12.9% of Navajo Pine students were reading at their grade level, with only 5.7% of male students meeting the benchmark. The scores for math proficiency were not much better. Navajo Pine graduated only 69.1% of its students in four years in 2013, with only 53.8% of males earning their diploma on time. Most high schools on the reservation in New Mexico receive similar assessments to Navajo Pine; schools in border towns and away from the reservation score higher on state benchmarks.
The caveat to Nez’s football statistics — which are self-reported by Warriors coach Hawley — is that the quality of competition from opponents and teammates likely influence and inflate his numbers. As Nez wraps his last season with the Warriors, and his family meticulously prepares for his future and education, college recruiters have not contacted them, nor have their requests for recruiters to visit their son been fulfilled. It is Nez’s hope that he will find a spot to play the game he loves in college, but for him and his family, football is a distant priority from the family’s most obvious priority: getting him a college degree.
Brian Leddy for BuzzFeed News / Brian Leddy / Epic Rides
For many child athletes who grow up in underserved parts of America — as many reservations certainly are — sports can often be framed as a way out of the community. The Nez family sees football not as an escape or necessity, but as a tool to help the pursuit of the best possible education for their son.
Trina and William, self-described helicopter parents, are deeply involved in their children’s lives, including decisions about college: “You have to get an overall understanding of what our tribe is experiencing in order to validate the decisions we're pushing on our kids,” William explained.
The Warriors lost by mercy rule to McCurdy, 58–8, with three minutes left in the third quarter. McCurdy had scored 30 points during a disastrous second quarter for the Warriors, but the crowd — excluding a few players’ parents — was mostly unbothered as goodbyes were exchanged. Nez finished the game with one sack, five solo tackles, and ten assists.
As the crowd headed home, the team took a knee near the end zone, and the seniors spoke harshly to the younger players who had bickered on the field and skipped that week’s practices.
In tears, Nez stood to address the team. Instead of reprimanding his teammates, as his fellow seniors had done, he pleaded with them to invest more, try harder. “Next year, when I am gone, I want to come back here and see you win.”
The Navajo nation is a vast and varied reservation located in the Four Corners region of the Southwest. Most of the land’s 27,000 square miles are in Arizona and New Mexico, but it pokes into the southernmost region of Wyoming as well. Across the reservation, red rock formations loom large along rolling hills and mountains, and on a clear day, you can look dozens of miles into the expanse. The Chuska Mountains run through the reservation, with a forest made up of pine, spruce, and fir trees at the base of their climbs.
The original land of the Navajo people — or, in their language, the Diné people — was between what they call the Four Sacred Mountains, which form a large slanted rectangle just east of where the tribe mostly lives today.
The Nez family now lives in William’s childhood home in Navajo, New Mexico. Most of the homes in Navajo are small and rectangular, clumped together in close pockets along small highways.
Twenty minutes north of the tribal capital, Window Rock, Arizona, Navajo was once a bustling town with an economy and job market stimulated by a local logging company. Navajo environmental activists, however, discovered that the company’s work was endangering spotted owls, and the logging company was shut down in 1994. Today, Navajo is a town of 2,000 people, and the only businesses in town are a grocery store and a gas station.
The nearest restaurant to the Nez family home is a Denny’s 20 minutes south of Navajo in St. Michael’s, Arizona. Nabahitachiini’s knees nearly scrape the underside of the table as he sits before ordering a T-bone steak. Over lunch, William and Trina speak openly about their children, themselves, and the struggles of their community, often weaving in historical context of Navajo culture.
Trina says opposing teams have singled out Nez for as long as he’s played football. “I had to bring his birth certificate with me to his games when he was just a kid,” Trina recalls. “I was getting so many questions, I realized I needed the proof that he was the same age as everyone else on the team.” Enough doubt was cast on his age relative to his size that she learned to carry his birth certificate with her to each of his games with the youth Tony Dorsett Football League, where Nez, starting at age 8, learned to play tackle football.
Nez says he is now used to being singled out, by supporters and rivals alike. Though he speaks proudly of wearing out the players assigned to cover him, Nez places sportsmanship well above competitiveness on his list of priorities.
“You have to get an overall understanding of what our tribe is experiencing in order to validate the decisions we're pushing on our kids.”
“When a guy tries to tackle me, sometimes it will be illegal contact,” Nez explains. “So I'll explain to the opposing team how to grab me. Most of them are probably shorter than me, so what they're used to doing might get them disqualified. But I don't want them to get disqualified, either."
Trina’s younger brother, Alonzo Yazzie, was a star high school football player for the Hopi High School Bruins. Large and strong like his nephew, he helped teach Nez about the sport and encouraged him to stick with it. He is the football player — NFL stars included — that Nez says he looked up to the most. Yazzie died in 2011 at age 31, after what his family says was a “sudden accident.”
Tearing up, Nez recalls his uncle's wisdom: “Me and him, we were... we were like two peas in a pod. I lost a lot of support at that time. I thought of even quitting football sometimes because of that. But I thought of what he used to tell me: ‘If you feel like quitting, don't quit. Because I will always be out there, cheering you on.’”
“It was especially hard when we lost him because some of my brothers saw in my son the same playing talent that Alonzo used to have,” Trina says. “I think that's the driving force of them wanting to drive three to four hours out and see him all the time and motivate him and say, ‘You know what, try harder. Zo — we called him Zo — played all of these positions. Make your uncle proud!’”
When Nez was a small boy, Alonzo and his other uncles often woke him before 5 a.m. and told him to get up and go outside for a run. Navajo culture prescribes early-morning runs facing east to face the deities, Trina explains. Shout as you run to make your reverence know, so they may bless you for a long and good life. Yell for the deity to hear you and bless you, no matter the hour or feeling of lead in the legs. Navajo elders pass down the tradition as a lesson of strength and endurance: Fight laziness, fight the cold to build endurance to prepare for the trials of life.
“My uncles always told me, ‘Life is gonna be hard for you,’” Nez says. “So it's best to face it right now to prepare to face it later on."
The Nez family describes themselves as lower middle class. William works for the human resources department in the Navajo Nation government, and Trina works for a utility company. Trina and William met when they were students at Diné College, and have been married 21 years.
When his and Trina's second son was born, William had the privilege of giving him his name, which, he says proudly, translates to “Tall Warrior of the Red Streak in the Water Clan.” Nez explains that while the first half of his name, Nabahi, means “warrior” in the Diné language, he sees the role as not just someone who goes out to fight in wars, but also as someone who knows when to stay put to protect the children and elders.
“It’s not just going to war,” he says. “It's not just going and killing people. It's just to protect the children of the future and elders, and also the women who carried the kids of the future. Even a warrior knows when not to go to war. He knows which fights not to fight.”
The Nez family’s top priority is education. Nearly every conversation regarding their three children can and will wind its way back to talking about education, particularly the kids earning college degrees immediately out of high school.
William graduated from the two-year college where he met Trina, and she is working on her four-year degree now. “We’ve learned from our experiences, and we know we want our kids to get their college educations earlier in life than we did,” William said.
Education on the reservation is a complex and fractured system. Three separate entities control schools on the land: state school districts (New Mexico, Arizona, and Wyoming public schools), the Bureau of Indian Education (U.S. government), and the Department of Diné Education.
Children on the reservation are subject to state-mandated curriculums, regardless of governing body, which DODE Superintendent Tommy Lewis says might not always make sense for the students. In addition, students who move from state to state, but remain within the boundaries of the reservation, are subject to different standards of education. Funding and quality of educators is another major concern on the reservation, which the DODE looks to overhaul in the next few years by implementing a reservation-wide standard that fits the students’ needs and meets state requirements.
“The reality is: The majority of students getting diplomas have reading and math scores at the fifth grade, so they can't even use those scores to get into higher ed,” Lewis says. “They can't score high enough on the ACT or SAT to get admitted. I say, ‘Golly, that's not right.’ They can't even use those diplomas to get to the job market anymore.” Using a statewide benchmark, Navajo Pine received an F grade for “College and Career Readiness” in 2013. That year, only 23% of students were successful in passing one of the three criteria outlined by the New Mexico Public Education Department. Nez is preparing to take the ACT in February.
Access to quality education is far from the primary, if only, challenge for students on the reservation. The Nez family speaks honestly, but with concern and not judgment about the many single-parent families in poverty in their community. In the 2010 Census, the number of families who identified as single-mother homes were nearly equal to the number of two-parent, male-female homes.
“For my son, the support system is there,” William said about his family. “I think what makes a person successful when it comes to Native Americans is having the full support first of all from both parents and grandparents, and then extended family like uncles. I can't speak for everyone — I can't say that none of his peers have this. Some don't. Unfortunately.”
At school, classmates often pick on Nez, calling him a nerd and mocking him because of his height. “As the captain of the football team, I know how to choose my fights,” Nez says.
His parents, despite trusting their son’s judgment in social situations, have placed a heavy restriction on their teenage boy: no school dances, no girlfriends. Not while he’s under their roof, and, preferably, not until he’s done getting his education. “I'm gonna come forward and say this was my idea," says Trina, "primarily because we've seen in our family a history of domestic violence. So when we had our boys, that was the one thing I wanted to not let them see. I made sure that my relationship with their father didn't have any domestic violence and that we talked about a lot of things. The kids see that if we have a disagreement, we talk about it.”
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