My Stuff

https://umass-my.sharepoint.com/:f:/g/personal/rwolff_umass_edu/EkxJV79tnlBDol82i7bXs7gBAUHadkylrmLgWbXv2nYq_A?e=UcbbW0

Coming Soon:

The following books by Robert Paul Wolff are available on Amazon.com as e-books: KANT'S THEORY OF MENTAL ACTIVITY, THE AUTONOMY OF REASON, UNDERSTANDING MARX, UNDERSTANDING RAWLS, THE POVERTY OF LIBERALISM, A LIFE IN THE ACADEMY, MONEYBAGS MUST BE SO LUCKY, AN INTRODUCTION TO THE USE OF FORMAL METHODS IN POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY.
Now Available: Volumes I, II, III, and IV of the Collected Published and Unpublished Papers.

NOW AVAILABLE ON YOUTUBE: LECTURES ON KANT'S CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON. To view the lectures, go to YouTube and search for "Robert Paul Wolff Kant." There they will be.

NOW AVAILABLE ON YOUTUBE: LECTURES ON THE THOUGHT OF KARL MARX. To view the lectures, go to YouTube and search for Robert Paul Wolff Marx."





Total Pageviews

Sunday, December 11, 2016

ANYTHING BUT TRUMP

Yesterday evening, desperate to avoid the name, face, or doings of Donald Trump, I watched a good deal of the Duke-UNLV basketball game.  It was a Duke blowout, 94-45, apparently understood by aficionados as revenge for a famous 30 point UNLV upset of Duke in the 1991 March Madness final.  [My overseas readers will be understandably mystified by all this.]  At one point, when the game was already on ice, one of the Duke players came charging down the court with the ball and, at the last moment, rather than take the shot, flipped the ball behind him without looking to a teammate who scored with a flying slam dunk.  It was clearly an homage to a famous moment in the 1992 Olympics won by the American Dream Team.  That was the first year that active NBA pros were permitted to play, and merely to mention some of the names on the roster sends a thrill down my spine:  Michael Jordan, Patrick Ewing, Karl Malone, Magic Johnson, Charles Barkeley. 

That got me thinking this morning during my 23 degree walk:  Why isn’t American football an Olympic sport?  I mean, just about every conceivable other sport is.  Two person Beach Volley Ball, for God’s sake!  We would win, of course, but hell, there are sports dominated by other countries.  Ping Pong?  Precision swimming?  I don’t think it is fair!


USA!  USA!

2 comments:

Mike said...

One problem with making American football an Olympic sport is the number of games that teams would have to play in a short time. The Olympics last, I think, two weeks at a time. As college and NFL football schedules indicate, however, it's very hard to play more than one game of football per week. (The NFL would love to schedule more; the chief argument against doing this points to the danger it would pose to players.) Football is just too physically taxing to play repeatedly in a short period of time, so it would be really hard to fit a proper tournament into the two weeks of each Olympics.

Robert Paul Wolff said...

IT WAS A JOKE!!!!!