Gordon Marino, a philosophy professor at St. Olaf College, writes this Opinion Journal article on the Houston Rockets’ center Yao Ming. It’s an interesting look at Yao, in which Mr. Marino observes:

I asked Yao to compare his life in China with the one he leads in the U.S. He observed: “In China everything was taken care of for me, and every day was planned out. Here I am more on my own.” Though he does not warm to the task of talking about his inner life, Yao acknowledges that his two years in the NBA “have made me more open about my emotions both on and off of the court.” The language difficulties notwithstanding, Yao has gelled well with his American teammates; nevertheless, the basketball version of the Great Wall of China has a shy streak that cannot make it easy for him to be one of the most famous people on the planet. According to his revealing memoir, Yao has often found succor in the invisible world of cyberspace. And true to his book’s word, Yao ended our conversation with a polite handshake and a fast break for the computer.

Under extraordinary pressures ever since he arrived in Houston to begin his NBA career, Yao has acted in an exemplary and classy manner. His parents have done a wonderful job in raising him and should be extremely proud of the way in which Yao has handled the adjustment to the American and NBA lifestyle.

In an interesting special section on the business of football in today’s Wall Street Journal ($), one of the section’s articles addresses the controversy generated earlier this year when a McKinsey & Company report bolstered longtime Rice University faculty advocacy for downgrading Rice’s expensive NCAA Division I athletic program to Division III (i.e., no athletic scholarships). As the WSJ article notes, Rice’s legacy in intercollegiate athletics is formidable:

Rice has a long football tradition. It began playing other schools in 1912, and it helped form the Southwest Conference in 1914. In several ways, its standards serve as a model for other schools. It has had no major violations cited by the National Collegiate Athletic Association, and its athlete graduation rate of 81% in 2003 was one of the highest in Division I-A. Its baseball team won the College World Series last year.

But the development in the big-time college and professional football over the past 40 years has not been kind to Rice:

But questions about the high costs of big-time sports and the admissions trade-offs necessary to bring in star athletes have gained momentum since the 1960s. Around that time, rivals such as the University of Texas and Texas A&M University exploded in size, gaining huge recruiting advantages, according to the McKinsey report. The birth of the Houston Oilers professional team in 1960 drew fans away from Rice games. In the 1960s and ’70s, faculty members voiced concerns about athletes’ academic caliber.
More recently, schools in the conferences that participate in the college Bowl Championship Series — the Rose, Sugar, Orange and Fiesta Bowls — have received a much larger share of the football revenue from bowl-ticket sales and TV-broadcasting rights than schools such as Rice, gaining further advantages.

Rice’s small size exacerbates the burden of competing with much larger schools in Division I athletics:

To understand just how large Rice University’s 70,000-seat football stadium is, consider this: It could seat all the school’s undergraduate alumni, living and dead — and it wouldn’t even be half full.
And to understand the financial burden that football places on the private Houston university, consider this: Largely because of the football team, the school’s athletic department runs annual deficits in the millions of dollars.

While the dilemmas at Rice are magnified because of its size — with about 2,850 undergraduates, it is the smallest school in Division I-A after the University of Tulsa in Oklahoma — and high academic standards, they illustrate problems other colleges and universities face as they grapple with the admissions pressures and skyrocketing budgets of big-time athletics.

The McKinsey & Co. report’s conclusion is bleak regarding Rice’s future in Division I:

Without improved gate receipts, better support from a group of alumni who are already contributing more than ever, or membership in a [Bowl Championship Series] conference with its much larger annual payouts, the economic outlook is bleak.

And the report is not optimistic regarding the prospects for change in the financing or purpose of Division I athletics:

The large and growing financial incentives among NCAA teams (whether formally controlled by the NCAA or not), combined with multimillion dollar coaching salaries, make Division I athletics look increasingly like a business instead of an extracurricular activity.

The report calculates that, including the increased financial aid an athlete receives compared with an average Rice student, the deficit between revenue and expenses in the athletic department has ballooned to more than $10 million a year. Football takes the largest share of the blame: While it produces about $2 million in annual revenue, it was responsible for nearly $4 million of that deficit in 2002, McKinsey calculates.
Rice is not alone. The McKinsey report notes that fewer than a dozen schools, regardless of their division, profit from their sports programs. And on average, a football team costs more than three times as much to support as a basketball team, and more than nine times as much as a baseball team.

William C. Friday, chairman of the Knight Foundation Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics, a sports-reform group, cited a NCAA study showing that overall Division I-A schools have seen athletic department expenses exceed revenues in each year from 1993 to 2002, according to his testimony in May before the U.S. House Subcommittee on Commerce, Trade and Consumer Protection.
The commission’s last comprehensive report, in June 2001, said that at more than half of Division I-A schools in 1999, athletic department expenses exceeded revenue by an average of $3.3 million, a margin that widened by 18% from 1997.

Read the entire article. The Rice Board of Trustees ultimately decided to continue making a go of it in Division I. But the problem will not go away. As the University of Chicago (a former Big 10 member) and several other great private institutions have proven, Division I athletics is unnecessary to maintain financial support and public relations benefits for top flight universities. Although Rice’s Board of Trustees is dominated by many older Houstonians who remember the bygone days of Rice’s Division I football glory, those members need to realize that those days are gone and that the marginal benefits of running large deficits in the athletic department are not commensurate with the benefits of maintaining a Division I program. Division III is the answer for Rice, and the sooner, the better.

Check out this highly entertaining Washington Post article today on the Olympic Water Polo Tournament:

Water polo is a combination of swimming, soccer and basketball, plus wrestling, boxing and mugging. The players are phenomenal athletes who perform amazing feats of speed, grace, stamina and ball-handling. They also perform amazing feats of kicking, punching, scratching, clawing and choking. And that’s just the men. The women are also fond of tearing each other’s bathing suits off.

Uh, what channel is the Olympic Water Polo Tournament on?

“It gets pretty feisty,” agrees Natalie Golda, 22, a defender on the U.S. women’s team. “On top of the water, it looks pretty mellow — you’re passing the ball around — but under water, they’re grabbing, they’re punching and people are getting dunked. Sometimes they’ll pull you under water for so long, you’re thinking, ‘If I don’t get air, soon, I’ll be in trouble.’ “

And, how exactly does this whole “tear off the swimsuit” thing happen?:

If your eyes follow the ball, you see a fair amount of fighting, but the real action, brutality-wise, occurs as players who don’t have the ball fight for position in the prime real estate in front of the goal. . .
Frequently, a player will suddenly disappear under the water, as if yanked down by an invisible hand. That’s because he was yanked down by an invisible hand — the hand of an opponent.
For men, the preferred method of dunking an opponent is to grab the body and yank down, Golda says. For women, it’s grabbing the opponent’s swimsuit and yanking down.
“They’ll grab the suit in the back and twist it, and sometimes it’ll tear off,” she says. “So you lose quite a few suits.”
When that happens, she says, “you play as long as you can and then you get subbed out.”

This article may be the most effective advertisement in history for an obscure Olympic sport.
Equally hilarious is the coach of the U.S. mens’ team, who apparently knows a thing or two about how to play the game:

After the U.S. men’s team beat Kazakhstan 9-6 on Tuesday, Ratko Rudic, the legendary coach of the American team, lumbered into the “mix zone” where players meet the media, grumbling to reporters about the brutality of the Kazakh team.
“This is not football, it’s water polo,” he fumed through his thick, bristly mustache. “If some teams can’t get the result they want, this is how they play.”
“This game was so violent,” said Rudic, 56. “I can’t remember such a violent game.”
It was an odd statement coming from Rudic, who has never been mistaken for Mahatma Gandhi. . .
Coaching Italy in Sydney in 2000, Rudic argued so vociferously with a referee that he had to be restrained by police, and he was later suspended from the sport for a year over the incident. That didn’t hurt his career: When the year was up, he was hired by USA Water Polo to whip the mediocre American team into shape.
And now, in Athens, Rudic was shocked — shocked! — at the violence in water polo.
“Who will protect us?” he asked.

However, Coach Rudic’s assessment that the Kazakhs were guilty of excessive violence was not shared by all the U.S. team members:

Defenseman Dan Klatt, 25, who scored one goal, didn’t think the Kazakhs were particularly brutal, . .
“A couple guys got punched in the face and a couple got kicked in the face,” he said with a shrug. “But that’s just part of the game.”

But then the interview was interrupted by a television shot of another game:

Up on the big TV screen was a candid shot from the pool: A Russian player appeared to be giving a Serb player a big bear hug. The Serb hugged him back.
For a split second, it looked like one of those heartwarming moments of Olympic brotherhood. Then the two men started trying to drown each other, and you realized it was just another heartwarming moment of Olympic water polo.

Enjoy the entire piece.

The Arlington City Council and the Dallas Cowboys apparently have struck a deal on a new stadium for the Cowboys, subject to voter approval.
Professor Depken over at Heavy Lifting provides an objective analysis of the proposed deal.

Already the home of the Texas Rangers baseball club and AmeriQuest Field this Dallas Morning News (free online reg required) article reports on the city of Arlington’s play to be the home of the Dallas Cowboys’ new stadium.
As usual, Arlington city officials tout the economic benefits of the new stadium. However, Professor Sauer suggests otherwise.
Craig Depken, an economics professor at the University of Texas at Arlington who runs the Heavy Lifting blog, is doing a particularly good job of keeping up with the saga of the Cowboys’ quest for a new stadium.

Kirk Bohls provides this Austin American-Statesman (free online registration required) article profiling the two men who are providing bodyguard services for Lance Armstrong during his current Tour de France expedition. The entire column is interesting, spiced by the following two comments:

Asked if it’s a grueling assignment since Lance is somewhat of a rock star, [one of the bodyguards] corrected, “Lance is a rock star.”
[A]lthough he does get paid for this work. And how much does he make, trying to keep half of France off Lance’s back?
“Not enough,” he said with a wide grin. “Not enough.”

I mentioned this article to one of my teenage daughters, and she responded regarding Armstrong:

“Oh, you mean the guy who is Sheryl Crow‘s boyfriend?”

Sally Jenkins, fresh off of hammering Tiger Woods for his behavior during last weekend’s U.S. Open, goes after the United States Anti-Doping Agency and its investigative tactics in this Washington Post column. Ms. Jenkins observes:

Let’s see if we can sum up the conduct of this investigation so far:
Sprinter Marion Jones has been dragged through the accusatory mud without a formal charge. A purported, damning version of Tim Montgomery’s grand jury testimony, which was by law secret, has been illegally leaked and he now faces total ruin and a lifetime ban from his sport. The twenty-some other athletes who testified before the BALCO grand jury must also worry if their testimony will be aired and used against them, too.

I’ll say it straight out: I believe Marion Jones when she says she’s innocent, based on what is a persuasive piece of evidence in her favor. In the last four years, Jones has not gotten faster. She’s gotten slower. Whatever Jones may be taking, it isn’t performance enhancing.
Here is an example of the kind of job USADA is doing in its inquiry into Jones’s ties to BALCO. Several weeks ago, Jones met with a trio of USADA officials, including Madden. They presented her with a calendar that purported to be her BALCO doping schedule. It bore several notations and the initials MJ.
“That’s not my calendar,” she said.
“Then why does it have your sprint times on it?”
Jones replied evenly, “If those are my sprint times, then I just shattered the world record by a second.”
The sprint times on the calendar could not have been those of Jones, or of any woman. They were too fast. The USADA representatives didn’t even recognize the difference between the sprint times of a male and a female.
You get an uneasy feeling from watching USADA’s bumbling zealots. You get the feeling they’d waive the U.S. Constitution if they could — which is a pretty unsettling thing to feel about an organization that is funded by U.S. taxpayer dollars and a grant from the White House.

There is one good product of the USADA’s bumbling investigation — more work for defense attorneys!

Professor Sauer breaks that question down well in this post.

That’s the sound the the San Antonio Spurs’ just ended season is emitting.
By the way, if you are interested, the Spurs are taking applications for the timekeeper’s job at their arena in San Antone.

As noted earlier here, I’m not much of an NBA fan anymore, but I must recommend that, if you did not see it last night, try to catch a replay today of the final moments of the Spurs-Lakers playoff game last night. Simply incredible.