STARTING FIVE

1. Shame

A Friday luncheon on the eve of the Central Intercollegiate Athletic Association (CIAA) championship game between Virginia State (9-1) and Winston-Salem State (9-1). All that is known for sure is that WSSU quarterback Rudy Johnson went to use the men’s room and emerged later with a black eye and abrasions. Johnson claims that he was sucker-punched as he was washing his hands by a Virginia State player and that after he fell to the floor as many as four or five VSU players kicked him before two teammates emerged from the stalls (I don’t even want to think about that) and chased them off.

One Virginia State player, running back Lamont Daniel Britt, has been charged with misdemeanor assault.

The game was canceled. The CIAA is the nation’s oldest historically African-American conference, having been started in 1912.

We’ve had college football games this season canceled due to flooding and player boycotts, but assault? That’s a first.

Winston-Salem is the alma mater of Screamin’ A. Smith, so of course he weighed in.

More disturbing? The fact that VSU coach Latrell Scott said that “we had one young man who made a bad decision, as young men sometimes do” and that a few parents of VSU players actually appeared more upset that the game was canceled than that a few players committed an assault.

Here’s Johnson’s version of how the incident transpired. Was there more to it? We’ll see. If this was an unprovoked attack, though, Virginia State’s program should be sanctioned severely. Winston Salem will play in the first round of the Division II playoffs this weekend.

2. Ark de Triumph?

Russell Crowe IS Noah, the titular character in a period film (that link is to the trailer) in which he does not sing. So it has that going for it. The movie also stars Jennifer Connelly as his wife, because whenever you cast Crowe as a batshit-crazy lead whose wack ideas render him a pariah, then Connelly is your go-to spouse. I imagine Paul Bettany plays the voice of God? The movie, directed by Darren Anofsky (who is often harassed by loyal MH reader A.J. when he attempts to take his family out for breakfast in Brooklyn), is set for a March 27, 2014 release. Unless the world ends first.

3. Diver Down

Freediver Nicholas Mevoli of Brooklyn died on Sunday while competing in a tournament off the coast of the Bahamas. Mevoli, 32, from the Williamsburg section, dove to a depth of 71 meters (233 feet) with no fins (and, of course, no oxygen tank) and then returned to the surface, whereupon he collapsed. Mevoli, a national record holder in monofin diving who had only embraced the sport competitively a little over a year ago, had held his breath for 3:38.

Blood was flowing from Mevoli’s mouth –he often spit up blood after competitive dives, a result of tearing in his lungs –soon after he collapsed at Dean’s Blue Hole, an underwater sink hole that measures more than 600 feet in depth and is a mecca for competitive divers. Mevoli had dived to a depth of 68 meters, then stopped as if to begin his ascent, before continuing on for the final three meters that were his quest before beginning his return to the surface. Whether or not that decision cost him his life, heaven knows.

4. “I’ll Have the Iceberg Wedge”

An iceberg that scientists say is the size of Chicago (the city, not the band) has split from the Pine Island Glacier on Antarctica. Scientists cite global warming as the cause, but I am going with “artistic differences.”

To repeat, scientists say that the iceberg is about the size of Chicago or Singapore. You can imagine that scientists first yearned to say that it was the size of Delaware, the universal standard of measurement for objects of this scale, but were disappointed to learn that it was not.

Also on the matter of icebergs, I must give a shout-out to Tina Fey, who notes in her book “Bossypants” that Jack Dawson (Leo) might have survived if Rose (Kate Winslet) had not jumped off the lifeboat. Why? Because he could have rested atop the headboard solo, thereby not freezing to death.

Finally, there is also a rogue iceberg that scientists describe as being more than twice the size of Manhattan (the island, not the Woody Allen film) is drifting toward the western coast of Australia. It will likely cleave into numerous smaller icebergs, and potential blockbuster films, in the coming months.

5. “You Don’t Exactly Have to Be Scotland Yard…”

Yesterday accused serial killer Joanna Dennehy stunned the Old Bailey in London, and her defense attorney, by pleading guilty to the murder of three men in England. Dennehy’s reason for entering the plea? Inconvenience.

“I’m not coming back down here again just to say the same stuff,” Dennehy, 30, interrupted when her counsel tried to intervene. “It’s a long way to come here to say the same thing that I have just said.”

Dennehy’s co-defendant and boyfriend, Gary Richards, 47, pleaded not guilty.

The couple really should have considered another line of work. They don’t exactly blend into the crowd. Dennehy sports a green star tattoo on her right cheek (the right cheek on her face, that is), while Richards, who also goes by the sobriquet Gary Stretch, stands seven-foot-three. The Knicks will read this item and attempt to sign him.

Reserves

Ponder-ous

ESPN sideline reporter Samantha Steele Ponder, who attended the high school directly across the canal from mine (about a generation later, but who’s counting?) pens a piece that I think was about Twitter-bullying. There are 61 comments on the piece, all of them positive, reacting most viscerally and positively to SSP’s line, “We let broken people tell us how broken we are.”

And so of course if I dare to be contrarian on this then I’m simply the middle-aged curmudgeon who always finds a dark side (“Maybe you are”… “Maybe I am”).

Here’s my problem. Like it or not, Mrs. Ponder, you’re the prom queen who married the starting quarterback. You are 25 years old and you recently scolded a sportswriter (not me) on Twitter for reporting that your $1 million home was on the market by writing, “We haven’t lived in that house since June…”

Oh. Your point is that the home’s availability has nothing to do with your husband’s job stability with the Minnesota Vikings? Got it. But it may behoove you to realize that few people, especially 25 year-olds, reside in $1 million homes. And that even fewer engage in public feuds about it.

In her piece Ponder, who attended college in New York City for a few years before transferring to Liberty University in Virginia, writes, “For reasons I still don’t fully understand, I was able to experience relative career success at a very early age.”

Is that true? You don’t fully understand why you are in the position you are in? My guess is that you are good at your job and that male producers at Fox and later ESPN found you, how to put this diplomatically, extremely telegenic. That’s no sin. That’s the nature of your position.

 

So while you are correct that the strangers who assess your features on Twitter are creepy and (while you didn’t add this, it’s true) also craven, you have chosen a career in which your physical features play a role in the job that you have. This is the part where I’m a misogynist for even suggesting that anything other than journalistic expertise and good on-air presence had to do with you having this position at this age, followed shortly by half the audience who hears that rebuttal making a wanking gesture.

Did Mrs. Ponder express any thought that is untrue? No, not exactly. I’m just not sure what the larger message for the rest of us who are not young, beautiful, successful and financially stable was supposed to be. Or why someone who is all those things would take to a public forum to ask, “Why do people have to be mean?”

People –okay, men — can be jerks. People –okay, men again — may transfer their own insecurities or frustrations onto someone such as yourself and Twitter is the one forum in which they may actually reach out and touch you in a negative fashion. That sucks, because it’s something the rest of us don’t have to deal with.

On the other hand, you have a far greater number of followers on Twitter who reach out and tell you how much they love you, how wonderful you are at your job, how lovely you are, how much you inspire them or their daughters. That’s something that most people never receive. So maybe, like most professionals in your position –ask the seasoned ones — you recognize how blessed you are and decide that maybe this post comes off more like whining cleverly disguised (perhaps disguised so well that not even you recognize it) as a self-empowerment message for all, particularly women.

In the end I think it was the musician Paul Hewson (you know him as Bono) who 20 years ago said it much more succinctly and made the same point: “Don’t let the bastards get you down.”

Did anything else really need to be said?