Daily Archives: August 16, 2007

The Shark duck hooks his divorce

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Greg%20and%20Laura%20Norman.jpgIt looks as if the final stages of the Great White Shark’s divorce are not going swimmingly:

What months ago was characterized as a nearly resolved divorce settlement between golf great Greg Norman and his wife, Laura, has now turned into the most contentious aspect of their split to date – one that has Laura Norman accusing Greg of changing the locks to the couple’s Jupiter Island home and cutting off her credit cards. [. . .]
Laura says Greg, who in the golf world in nicknamed “The Great White Shark,” has . . . refused to pay her attorneys’ fees and “is attempting to starve (her) out so she has no choice but to surrender to his positions,” Laura’s attorneys Jack Scarola and Russell J. Ferraro wrote.
Greg’s lawyers, in a letter to Scarola, said he has already paid them about $725,000 to fund the litigation, including a half-million dollar payout in April. The money, according to Laura’s lawyers, has been used to pay attorneys’ fees and hire a number of expert witnesses who pored over the couple’s finances to come up with the settlement.
Attempts by Laura’s lawyers to get more money was met earlier this month with a refusal from New York attorney Howard Sharfstein, part of Greg’s legal team. In addition, according to Laura’s lawyers, Greg fired the couple’s housekeeper and changed the locks on their $21 million Jupiter Island estate.

Changing locks and cutting off credit cards? Well, at least Norman still has a ways to go in the divorce department before he catches Nick Faldo.

Biased referees and umpires

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Tim%20Donaghy.jpgSo, former NBA referee Tim Donaghy finally pleaded guilty to two felonies during a hearing at the United States District Court in Brooklyn yesterday in connection with the NBA gambling scandal that appears to have mostly blown over. As noted earlier here, that NBA insiders engage in gambling is about as surprising as gambling taking place in Rick’s Cafe in Casablanca.
At the same time, Skip Sauer passes along this post about research that indicates that baseball umpires are not as pristine as the driven snow, either:

Calling strikes & discrimination in baseball
Here is the main finding from a working paper by Parsons, Sulaeman, Yates and Hamermesh:
What are the main results of the study?
There are three. First, umpires are more likely to call strikes for pitchers who share their race/ethnicity. The second result is an extension of the first: Umpires are more likely to express a preference for their own race/ethnicity only when their behavior is less closely scrutinized: 1) in parks where QuesTec (a computerized system set up to monitor and review an umpireís ball and strike calls) is not installed, 2) in poorly attended games, and 3) on pitches where the umpireís call cannot determine the outcome of the at-bat. Finally, game outcomes are influenced by the race/ethnicity match between starting pitchers and home-plate umpires. Home teams are more (less) likely to win a game when their starting pitcher and home plate umpire have the same (a different) race/ethnicity.

Skip’s post has links to the study and various related information.

The Imus settlement

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Don%20Imus%20081607.jpgAs noted earlier here and here, CBS settling up with Don Imus for a substantial portion of the compensation remaining under his terminated contract was inevitable. My sense is that, based on favorable market conditions, there is a good chance that Imus will end up making more money as a result of the CBS settlement and the new contrat that he enters into with another media outlet than he would have received had he worked through the term of the CBS contract.