Jeffrey A. Williams, 1980 - 2006

Over the weekend of August 28th, our good friend and fellow sports law blogger Jeffrey A. Williams died suddenly of a subdural hematoma. He was only 26. A graduate of Columbia Law School and Columbia University, Jeff was a second-year attorney at the prestigious New York City law firm Milbank Tweed Hadley & McCloy, where he worked primarily on mergers, acquisitions, and...

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Harold Reynolds Sues ESPN for Wrongful Termination

Back in July, we discussed ESPN's decision to fire baseball analyst Harold Reynolds for allegedly sexually harassing a female employee. His firing in July occurred only four months after the 11-year employee had signed a six-year contract that would have paid him approximately $1 million annually. Be sure to check out the outstanding comments in response to that post. We...

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Can parents be liable for coach-bashing?

A pending case in the Utah Supreme Court will address the status of public high school coaches under defamation law. According to the Salt Lake Tribune, The case pits Michael O'Connor, who coached the Lehi High School girls' basketball team for three years, against parents who alleged he was demoralizing team members by berating them and favoring one player over the others. At the end of the 2003-04 season, tensions had risen so much that relatives of some of the players wrote letters outlining their concerns and a handful of them spoke at an...

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New Baseball CBA Worse for Draftees and Minor Leaguers

Last week, MLB and the MLBPA agreed to a five-year labor contract that will allow play to continue uninterrupted through the 2011 season. While the players, team owners and fans are praising the new agreement and exclaiming that "it's such a great time in the game," the ones not applauding are all the minor leaguers and prospects for next year's draft. That's because the new...

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New Sports Law Scholarship

New this week:Joel Bulleigh, Note, The slippery slope of ski tort reform: will the judiciary uphold legislative intent?, 59 OKLAHOMA LAW REVIEW 155 (2006)Nathaniel Grow, Note, There’s no “I” in “League”: professional sports leagues and the single entity defense, 105 MICHIGAN LAW REVIEW 183 (20...

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A Sports Law Retrospective of the late Red Auerbach

Boston Celtics' chairman and president Arnold "Red" Auerbach passed away tonight at the age of 89. Auerbach was well-known for his coaching and player personnel accomplishments with the Celtics over the last 56 years. He was tied with Phil Jackson for the most NBA championship rings as a coach with nine, and pulled off a number of great draft picks and trades, including...

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LSU Has Assistant Coach Arrested

LSU assistant strength coach, Travelle Gaines, was arrested and jailed this week for.... illegal steroid distribution? No... For assault and battery? No... For gambling, stealing, possession of narcotics? No, no, and no. Gaines has been accused of violating Louisiana state agent regulations by inviting student-athletes to his home to meet a sports agent and suggesting the agent should represent the athletes. University police also arrested sports agent Charles Taplin earlier this month for attempting to contact student athletes. According to LSU,...

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Cool Papa Bell's Daughter in Suit Against Topps

The WSJ Law Blog picks up on a New York Sun story regarding a lawsuit filed by the daughter of James "Cool Papa" Bell against baseball card giant Topps. The Law Blog explains: Bell’s daughter, Connie Brooks, sued Topps over its description of Bell on the back of a 2001 baseball card. The squib said Cool Papa “earned his nickname after falling asleep right before a game.” In...

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Deputy Shaquille O'Neal Part of Botched Police Raid?

Back in May, Geoff blogged about Miami Heat star Shaquille O'Neal "assisting" Florida law enforcement in busting those who sell or possess child pornography. At the time, O'Neal said that he only arrived at the defendant's house after the arrest, so it wasn't entirely clearly what services he provided, other than, I suppose, the novelty of having a 7'1, 220+ pound future...

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New Sports Law Scholarship

Thanks to the publication of a Case Western Law Review symposium, there's a bunch of new stuff this week:Daniel A. Applegate, Comment, The NBA gets a college education: an antitrust and labor analysis of the NBA’s minimum age limit, 56 CASE WESTERN RESERVE LAW REVIEW 825 (2006) Giovanna D’Orazio, Comment, Taking private property to build an urban sports arena: a valid exercise of eminent do-main powers?, 69 ALBANY LAW REVIEW 1135 (2006)Christopher A. Callanan, Advice for the next Jeremy Bloom: an elite athlete’s guide to NCAA amateur regulations,...

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Sports Law Blog Honored by Fast Company

On page 41 of its October 2006 issue, Fast Company, a monthly magazine that reports on the technology industry and that was launched in 1995 by Alan Webber and Bill Taylor, two former Harvard Business Review editors, names Sports Law Blog one of the three best sports business blogs. We appreciate this honor and reporter Michael A. Prospero's kind comments about our blog:Sports...

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The Russians are coming! The Russians are coming!

Each month there is a new development regarding the Penguins' signing of Russian phenom, Evgeni Malkin (See my Sept. 18 post and my Aug. 17 post). In the latest development, the Russian team Metallurg Magnitogorsk filed an antitrust lawsuit in U.S. District Court in Manhattan on Thursday against the NHL and the Pittsburgh Penguins. Here are some of the allegations made by the Metallurg according to the press release:The signing of Malkin to an NHL contract was a "blatant and deliberate tampering and interference" with the Russian team's existing...

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Give Maggs the Ball

Jon Fenlon, a 23-year-old Eastern Michigan University student, won’t give to Magglio Ordonez (or the Baseball Hall of Fame) the ball Ordonez hit into the stands to clinch the pennant for the Tigers in the ninth inning of Game Four. According to published reports: The day after Fenlon snatched the homer, he told the Detroit Free Press: "I hope Magglio doesn't want it back....

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Tigers Understand the Difference Between the Law and the Spirit of the Law

Yesterday, Howard Bloom at Sports Business News notes that the pennant-winning Detroit Tigers have been exploiting a rather wide loophole in the State of Michigan and City of Detroit prohibitions on ticket resale. While “scalping” is prohibited both by state law and municipal ordinance, tickets can be resold if the team itself is doing the re-selling. The Tigers, exploiting...

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FBI: Terrorism Threat Against NFL is a Hoax

The FBI announced this evening that the purported terrorist threat against NFL stadiums is a hoax (Todd Zeranski and Robert Schmidt, "NFL Football Stadium Terrorism Bomb Threat Is a Hoax, FBI Says," Bloomberg News, 10/19/2006). Earlier in the week, the Department of Homeland Security had warned of a threat against NFL stadiums involving an al-Qaeda operative smuggling radioactive materials into the U.S. from Mexico. While the story seemed a little bit "24ish" it obviously presented a serious concern.In my recent article in the Willamette Law...

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Extreme Murder

I apologize for minimal posts this week, but work has gotten hectic. I want to point the readers to a fascinating story, though. . ."Extreme" sports have become wildly popular in the last decade. But before Tony Hawk, Shaun White, Travis Pastrana, et. al., we had Mickey Thompson and Mike Goodwin.UPDATE: And not to be outdone. ....

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Wallet-Seeking Lyons Signed an Agreement Not to "Mess Up" on Air

On Sunday, Mike provided an excellent analysis of broadcaster Steve Lyon's odd and, in some minds, insensitive on-air remarks. Now, it turns out that Lyons signed some type of contract with Fox after a 2004 incident in which made comments about Shawn Green perceived as anti-Semitic. The LA Times relates Lyons's characterization of the agreement: "It said, 'If I mess up again, they can fire me,' " Lyons said. "But it's what they deem a mess-up-able offense."I doubt very much that Fox used the term "mess up" in the contract. However, Lyons appears...

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Online Gaming

Whether or not it is a sport is debatable, but poker (and other gambling activities) has been severely affected by the Unlawful Internet Gaming Enforcement Act. See WaPo article here. Espn and FSN televise poker tournaments on a loop, so let's cede that it's a sport for now. . .Party Poker has already stopped taking deposits and wagers from American "players," saying as...

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George Will on Baseball's Competitive Balance

Last week, I did a post on baseball's competitive balance and explained that high payroll simply does not equal success. Well, I was delighted to read George Will's Op-Ed column in the Washington Post this past weekend (Baseball's Real 'Golden Age'). George Will is one of my all-time favorite commentators on the business of baseball. I don't think I've ever disagreed with anything he has said about baseball. He makes some excellent points to demonstrate "the steeply declining utility of the last $100 million of payroll" (as he puts it) and...

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John Powers: Guest Blogger

We are excited to have Attorney John M. Powers, Jr. guest blog this week. Like Rick Karcher, John brings pro baseball experience to his analysis of sports law. After being named the Pac-10 Conference All-Southern second baseman while a senior at the University of Arizona, John was drafted by San Diego Padres in the 21st round of the June 1996 MLB Draft. Over the next eight years, John would play in the Padres, Chicago Cubs, and Texas Rangers organizations and was named a Double A All Star in 1998. He also excelled off the field, winning the...

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UVA Law School Softball Invitational

Registration is now open for the University of Virginia's Law School spring softball tournament, which is open to teams from any law school. Information on how to apply can be found here. For the second year, the tournament will feature first-round "pod play." This may help alleviate some former competitors' grumbling that tournament match-ups have historically been arranged in a manner most favorable to UVA's own various softball teams (further enhancing the already significant home-field advantage of playing in Charlottesville, V...

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New Sports Law Scholarship

New this week:Joel Eckert, Note, Student-athlete contract rights in the aftermath of Bloom v. NCAA, 59 VANDERBILT LAW REVIEW 905 (2006)Joshua A. Stein, Comment, Hitting below the belt: Florida’s taxation of pay-per-view boxing programming is a content-based violation of the First Amendment, 14 JOURNAL OF LAW AND POLICY 999 (20...

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Welcome to Big-Time College Sports

As a member of the faculty at Florida International University, I suppose I have to talk about the brawl that broke out in the third quarter of last night's 35-0 loss to the University of Miami. A pretty detailed account of the story, along with video, can be found here.Thirteen players (eight from FIU and five from Miami) were ejected. The brawl apparently was the culmination of a great deal of taunting between the teams since pre-game warm-ups. The immediate trigger was Miami's Jamie Bryant catching a touchdown pass to make the score 13-0, then...

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Psycho Firing? Making Sense of Steve Lyons' "Insensitive" Remarks

Fox Sports baseball broadcaster Steve Lyons was fired immediately after Game 3 of the Oakland Athletics and Detroit Tigers ALCS for making what Fox deemed "inappropriate comments" during the game. The 46-year-old Lyons, a first round pick of the Boston Red Sox back in 1981 who went on to a nine-year MLB career as a utility player, made the objectionable comments during the...

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A Proposal to Unions: The Agent Business May Require Systemic Change

For anyone interested, I just posted on SSRN my recent article published in the Willamette Law Review, Solving Problems in the Player Representation Business: Unions Should be the "Exclusive" Representatives of the Players. You can access it by clicking on the link to my articles posted on the blog. You will need a free SSRN account to read it, and you can get such an account here.My article examines how the economics of the player representation business, with increasing player salaries under a commission-based agent fee system, are fueling more...

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Death of an unsung supporter of the First Amendment

Earlier in the week I blogged about Tommie Smith and John Carlos as one of the most-famous examples of athletes' political speech. This week's Sports Illustrated reports on the death of Peter Norman, the Australian sprinter who won the silver medal in that race and shared the medal stand with Carlos and Smith in the famous photo. (See at left). A fuller story on Norman (and...

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Do New NHL Sticks Threaten Workplace Safety?

In an effort to boost goal scoring, the National Hockey League has decided to increase the allowable curvature of sticks from a half-inch to three quarters of an inch. The new sticks will enable players to better aim their shots, and will mimic the stick curvature rule in Europe's International Ice Hockey Federation, an important NHL consideration in light of the increasing...

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Are Sports Different?

Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger last month signed into law California Assembly Bill 2165, which prohibits athletes from competing for any schools in the state college systems (UC, CSU, and Community College) if they have been convicted of certain violent felonies, unless and until they have completed their sentences. The impetus behind the law, described here, was a 2004 beating of a San Diego State student by three football players from Grossmont College (a nearby junior college); the players pled guilty in May 2005, but remained on the team until...

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Referees, Judges, Mistakes, and Do-Overs

I have been fascinated by the reaction to the officiating errors in last month's Oklahoma-Oregon game. The refs blew two calls late in the game that helped lead to Oregon's win--1)Allowing Oregon's recovery of its onside kick that did not travel ten yards (and the replay official failed to overturn the call, although it showed pretty clearly on the replay); 2) On the same possssion, calling pass interference on Oklahoma on a pass that was tipped at the line of scrimmage.Two things came out of the controversy. First, the Pac-10 suspended the officiating...

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Managers and Coaches with Law Degrees

The WSJ Law Blog has a post up on Cardinals manager / FSU Law grad Tony La Russa, which notes that a total of seven J.D.'s have managed baseball teams. Are lawyers-turned-managers more common (or more effective) in baseball than in other sports? Or is the fact that Wikipedia can name seven lawyer-managers merely a feature of the national pasttime's longevity?Texas Tech football coach Mike Leach is a Pepperdine law grad. And of course the great Vince Lombardi attended law school at night (Fordham, but for only one semester, apparently). Former...

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White Sox Selling Game Start Times

The New York Times reports that the convenience store company 711 has "purchased" start times for Chicago White Sox home games. The night games in question, which would have begun at 7:05 or 7:35 pm, will now begin at 7:11 pm. Will this trend catch on? For instance, will the emergency assistance number 911, in an effort to prove it's not a joke, purchase some 9:11 pm Monday...

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Why is Steroid Use Considered Cheating?

This week Sports Illustrated named its All-Time All-Star Baseball Team. It is based on a poll of 22 baseball experts and features a pretty cool color drawing of the players sitting in the dugout. Notably absent from the team is Barry Bonds; the accompanying story by SI’s Tom Verducci explains that "because of how his freakish late-career production has been linked to the use of steroids and other performance-enhancing drugs," Bonds "has numbers that are not to be believed."But this raises a question:Why, exactly, is steroid use considered cheating?...

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Did the Mountain West Conference Bungle its TV Deal?

Conglomerate Blog's Gordon Smith, a Wisconsin law professor and BYU fan, thinks ...

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Hate Speech as Cheering Speech

Alert Reader Will Li points me to this article in The Sun containing this picture that is worth 1000 words. Anyone else see the irony in this occurring at a "friendly?"So is this constitutionally protected "cheering speech" or something different? According to the story, Croatia could be kicked out of the 2008 European soccer tournament if their fans (who have a history of...

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Sport and Speech: The Athletes Speak

The expression that pervades sport falls into three categories. The most interesting, category is expression by the athletes, both on the field and off. Professional and college athletes possess a unique forum in which to express their views during and through the event itself. And, by virtue of their fame (or notoriety), their messages attract a broad audience. Unfortunately, the public seems to be of two minds when it comes to athletes speaking out.On one hand, the public occasionally demands that athletes take a stand. Michael Jordan often...

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