• Novak Djokovic delights the Monday night US Open crowd with his manic impression of John McEnroe - only to have Mac come down & reclaim his honor in an impromptu tennis match.

• A Kansas community is burned by the cold-hearted hazing of a high school football player slathered in Icy Hot.

• Kentucky fans are fuming at John Calipari because their coach dared send a Wildcats jersey to President Obama.

• A whole lotta football kicked off this weekend - even the lingerie variety.

• Ex-Notre Dame QB Blair Kiel is arrested after going on a drunken warpath at an Indianapolis Indians minor league game.

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For some reason, people love to perpetuate the myth of the idyllic small town. Usually, such myths are used as a comparison to the evil, hedonistic, crime-ridden big cities. In small towns, so the myths go, neighbors cheerfully help one another, work hard, do their shopping on Main Street, and everyone lives a simpler, happier, more moral existence than, say, effete East Coast intellectuals.

(These shenanigans are cheeky and fun. Beloit’s shenanigans are cruel and tragic.)

The truth is that the myth of the idyllic American small town is by and large dead. Wal-Marts have rendered Main Street storefronts all but abandoned, family farms have long gone bankrupt or been rendered useless by multinational corporations, drugs and crime are sky-high, and people are hostile, distrustful, and bitter. But one thing still stands to tie towns like Beloit, Kansas, together - high school football.

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There’s nothing in the football hazing manual more insidious than the atomic sit-up, that most evil of teammate pranks and proof positive that nothing in a high school locker room involving a towel ever comes to any good. Unfortunately our story here does not involve a girl, as the photo indicates. But if you’d seen the alternative photo choices, you’d thank me.

A former Stevenson High School (Chicago suburbs) football player is bringing a lawsuit against former teammates 10 years after a hazing ritual that he said caused psychological and emotional damage. Stamatios Shinas claims while he participated in a football conditioning camp for varsity players for the 1999-2000 season, he was administered the dreaded atomic sit-up, in which a person places his buttocks over a blindfolded person’s face, who then sits up into it. Lawsuit play-by-play, and instructional video, below. Read more…

Oh, hello. Welcome to SbB. We have lots to talk about. Like lesbians! Everyone likes them, particularly the versions in male movie directors’ imaginations and not the actual ones that do things like, y’know, grow older than 26. Good, everyone on board? Now let’s bring in sheep doo-doo. Annnnd there goes… wait, nobody’s leaving? God, you people are sick.

(Okay, the sheep itself is not a lesbian. It might not even be a lady sheep. This being Maine, however, it wants to show its support anyway.)

This story comes to us courtesy of the coastal areas of Maine, land of … Bangors and mash. I dunno. Kelly Jo Cookson, a softball coach in Brewer, has sued the school district, claiming she was dismissed on account of her sexual orientation. The school district disagrees just a bit, according to the BANGOR DAILY* NEWS, claiming an incident at a team picnic made things just a bit more uncomfortable than any sexual orientation ever could:   Read more…

If you really think female athletes can’t hang with the guys in any aspect of sports, you’ve clearly never been to a party thrown by a girls’ team. So props to one high school soccer team for doing their gender, youth sports and — oh heck — America proud by throwing a raging kegger that got three-fourths of the team suspended.

(”OK girls, who wants a drink?”)

Lake Braddock HS, in the DC suburbs, is the alma mater of Mia Hamm and has won two of the last three state titles. They’re also All-Americans when it comes to hitting the bottle; 16 members of the girls varsity squad were punished in the wake of a party where the only non-team invitees were named Jack Daniels and Jim Beam.

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Four students were suspended and 6 staff members have been transferred from a Los Angeles high school in the wake of hazing allegations on the boys’ volleyball team, and boy, is this one a doozy. Investigators are keeping the particulars of the hazing hushed up, but descriptions of it include the words “locker room shower,” “suggestive acts with a sex toy”, and “held down by other students and assaulted.” So, you know, you do the math.

The staff members of Taft High School, including the principal and the volleyball coach, allegedly knew about the hazing and failed to stop it, and have been reassigned while the investigation continues. By which they mean, a pattern of rectum-wrecking dildo play, I suppose. Come on, guys. I was in a fraternity, and never did anything like this. You’re giving our homoerotic, all-male clubs a bad name.

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Well, this is a new way to get fired. Unsatisfied with just doing his job at Seymour (Conn.) High School, swim team coach Kevin Quill tried to fire up his team by dappling in the motivational screen printing business. His subject? A member of his own team who had quit after not being named captain.

(Another of Quill’s motivational techniques: Throwing shoes at slow swimmers.)

Hence shirts emblazoned with “The Mascot is a quitter,” a message that sounds fairly benign until you realize that the player in question was actually named Mascot. Even more ridiculously, Quill tried to defend the action, saying that the shirts were, “not poking fun at the student (Mascot), but instead were poking fun at the situation.” How exactly a shirt that is only clever in how it uses the word mascot as a double-entendre is poking fun at the situation, we have no idea. What situation? The fact that the kid’s name was Mascot? That’s a situation?

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We have set a new low for what constitutes hazing, and it comes to us from Wisconsin, where the Badgers’ famous marching band has been under fire for allegations of misconduct since October. The entire Badger band was even suspended for Wisconsin’s much-ballyhooed night game against Ohio State, which the Buckeyes pulled out with a late touchdown. Surely, then, there must have been a great deal of–oh christ you have to be kidding me:

(OH GOD IT’S THAT WORD AGAIN COVER YOUR EYES OH GOD THEY SAY IT OVER AND OVER)

A few previously unreported examples of inappropriate behavior by band members included singing a cadence that includes the word vagina, placing a condom on a banana and a game involving alcohol in which some band members formed a “hamster cage” for other students using torn up pages of phone books.

Not “vagina”! Nooooooooooooo! Read more…