Patriot Nation

From the Buffalo view point;
http://www.buffalonews.com/sports/bills-nfl/patriot-fatigue-new-englands-winning-ways-are-getting-old-20131228


Patriots Regular Season Records Since 2000;



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_New_England_Patriots_seasons

NFL

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Mark Sanchez


Hey Mark, please dont fumble that cup of hot soup...... not only cause Im hungry.......

SI Article

http://mmqb.si.com/2013/11/26/cameron-wake-miami-dolphins-unplugged-robert-klemko/

Sports Illustrated Article Confronting Race, Head On

Open Field

5 days ago

Confronting Race, Head On

The ugliness in Miami this week brought to the forefront the serious and complex issue of what's accepted and what's not in the locker room and beyond, and when a real leader must step up

By

Robert Klemko

· More from Robert·

Note from The MMQB's editor-in-chief, Peter King:

Please be forewarned that the following story contains provocative language that some may find offensive. The incident involving Dolphins players Richie Incognito and Jonathan Martin has prompted an examination by people inside and outside of football on race relations in the locker room. Our Robert Klemko, who has been on the scene in Miami this week, writes about race and this story. We at the site had to decide whether to use the terms this story has brought to the fore: namely "nigger" and "half-nigger." In normal reporting, we would not spell out such offensive words, but because of Klemko's subject matter we decided to use them in full, feeling it would be distracting or confusing to do otherwise, and that an honest discussion requires that we talk about these terms in the open. I apologize in advance to those who are offended by their use. To comment, please send an email to talkback@themmqb.com.

MIAMI — As with so many people, as soon as I read the voicemail transcript that ignited the public saga of the Miami Dolphins and bullying, I was taken aback by the prospect of veteran guard Richie Incognito calling second-year tackle Jonathan Martin a half-nigger. This is hate speech, I thought, and surely it was a one-time thing. It was hard to believe that a white man calling a black man a nigger could be acceptable practice in an NFL locker room that is overwhelmingly black.

In the process of covering the larger story, I traveled to Florida and persuaded retired former Dolphins lineman Lydon Murtha to write his first-person account of the relationship between Incognito and Martin, and he told me something shocking: After only several months of knowing one another, Murtha had heard Incognito call Martin the same thing to his face during position meetings, and Martin laughed. And that voicemail? Teammate Brian Hartline told reporters that Martin had played it for the locker room to hear and again laughed.

I called people I trust within the NFL community (not Martin's agents) who'd had dealings with the young man. And they said Incognito had left voicemails calling Martin a nigger previous to the infamous one released this month, and whether it was said in anger or jest, it had troubled Martin, but he didn't know what to do.

I texted several black current and former NFL players I know, and asked them, what would you do? The reaction was unanimous: I can't even imagine it happening. I texted with two veteran coaches who said they had never seen such a thing in the NFL.

"It's not common at all," an AFC coach said. "You know when people are joking, but the black players I know would not appreciate anybody joking with them like that."

The Dolphins offensive line, minus Richie Incognito and Jonathan Martin, practicing this week. (Lynne Sladky/AP)

Retired Ravens linebacker Brendon Ayanbadejo had a story that seemed related, if only tangentially. At one point last season, Ravens players were listening to Yung Joc's "It's Goin' Down" in the locker room. A white player recited a lyric with the word "nigga." Ayanbadejo says a "fun debate" ensued. Was it okay for him to recite the word in a lyric? There's a fine line, Ayanbadejo says. Like it or not, a large number of African-Americans in the league find the word's use acceptable among themselves, though not among white players at large. There were white men on the team who were permitted to use the word as a term of endearment (as in, What's up, my nigga?) because of the conditions of their youth. Through underprivileged childhoods, some had built up an amount of credibility. They weren't quite "honorary black guys," as Incognito has been described by a former Dolphins teammate, but they were close.

"If you're from the hood and you grew up with black guys, then you can get away with saying it as a term of endearment," Ayanbadejo says. "You can say, 'my nigga.' "

Yet the idea that a white player would actually call somebody a nigger in anger or jest was utterly unfathomable.

"That wouldn't fly," Ayanbadejo said.

The line between my nigga and you nigger was clearly defined. Incognito seemed to be somewhat in congruence with the spirit of this unofficial race-relations policy when, as seen in a video released by TMZ, he stood drunken and shirtless at a bar and referred to black teammate Mike Pouncey as "Mike Pouncey. Nigga!" But in calling Martin a half-nigger, Incognito had obliterated the line. Simultaneously, Martin was being bullied for being black, and not black enough. Plus, Incognito did this in front of people.

* * *

So how did this happen? How did it become okay for a black player to be the subject of even one instance of hate speech in one locker room, while, from what I could gather, it was unthinkable in eight other organizations?

"That's a big question," said Kordell Stewart, the former Steeler quarterback, who is black. "I have never heard anything like that before in my life. For that to happen, all I can say is the brothers on that team have lost their minds, to allow it."

There is no leadership," Kordell Stewart says of the Dolphins' locker room. "It takes strong men, invested enough to say, 'No, that's not happening.'

Stewart went on to explain that the word "nigger" and its friendlier variation were not words uttered by white teammates, and black players who used them were careful not to do so around white people, so as to avoid giving the impression that it was acceptable common speech. Clearly, things changed at some point in the eight years since Stewart's retirement.

"We just didn't say it around everybody," Stewart said. "Incognito has obviously been around black men who have allowed him to say it if he wants to. It tells you how their locker room is, and that's why their team struggles because there is no leadership. It takes strong men, invested enough to say, 'No, that's not happening.' "

Stewart made it clear that a locker-room leader in any locker room, regardless of the black-white composition of the team, could be white; he could be black. The problem, Stewart said, is that Incognito is the alpha male in the locker room. The ideal leader is principled, even-tempered and respectful because he dictates the social rules. And Incognito is none of those things.

"He's reckless, plain and simple,'' said Stewart. "People don't question him because he's domineering and a Pro Bowler, and a lot of the young guys on the team are afraid of that. What are you gonna do? Beat him up? Jump him?

"If somebody like Derrick Brooks or Warren Sapp was in there, he would never say that."

The AFC coach agreed: "It's a total lack of respect and leadership."

After spending two days in the Miami locker room, I had yet to find a Derrick Brooks or a Warren Sapp in the bunch. They defended Incognito as a good teammate, and suggested Martin was the outsider. Asked if it was okay for a white person to say "nigger," rookie defensive end Dion Jordan said he didn't believe it was an acceptable word for anyone to say.

So would he step up and object if he heard a player say it?

"Well that's between the player and whoever he's talking to," Jordan said.

* * *

Listening to Jordan, I recalled two of the several dozen times I've personally been called a "nigger," and I came to understand the crux of the race problem in Miami.

I am mixed, a term which in its modern application applies more accurately to me than Martin, whose parents are both black, or mixed, or however they choose to identify. My father is Ukrainian-American and my mother is African-American, and I've been called a "nigger" and a "half-nigger" and other related slurs in jest and in anger by drunk and sober people alike. The second time it ever happened I was 16. I had interrupted a conversation between two of my white high school football teammates before practice.

One fired back at me, "We were talking here, you f—ing mulatto."

A mulatto, in case you're blissfully ignorant of the slur, was once the label for children born from the rape of African slaves by their white masters.

I didn't know what to do. I was angry and I saw this as a dangerous precedent. I thought if this guy can just call me a mulatto and there are no immediate consequences, it opens the door for anybody to call me that. They'll drop the word in jest and say, We're just joking. Why are you mad, now? Then I remembered the last time somebody called me a "half-nigger:" three years before when I was a diminutive freshman and the subject of bullying by football seniors. One day I told the star offensive player on the team, who was black, that one white senior had called me a "half-nigger." And just like that, it stopped.

I reasoned three years later that I didn't want our team to be the kind of group that preyed on each other emotionally on the basis of race. I would have to do something in that moment to make this insult an anomaly. I probably didn't even have to hurt him; I could have cussed him out, or battered him in practice, but in those 60 seconds of contemplation I realized my teammate would never have used a slur against me if he had considered me blacker. He felt that my light skin and white dad gave him some kind of pass. I saw red.

Maybe Martin was truly above it all, and he took the wisest course of action and walked away, exposing the NFL warrior ethos for all of its self-perpetuating ugliness.

As we walked to practice, I walked in front of him and pushed him, so he knew he was in a fight, and then I threw haymakers at his face with both fists. There was blood everywhere: My white pants, his face, my hands. It was pooling on the pavement bordering our practice field as he dropped to his knees, hugging my leg. That's when I stopped.

Would I do the same thing today if, for instance, a colleague called me a mulatto in anger? Probably not. I'd go to jail, and it just doesn't seem like a reasonable way to solve conflicts anymore. But Jonathan Martin and Richie Incognito play in the NFL, where, right or wrong, an acceptable level of violence outside of the lines is often seen as a necessary display of passion. Essential, even. Fights get covered up by teams when they happen in private and explained as "competitive fire" when they happen publicly. Operating in this warped moral bubble, why didn't Martin stand up for himself? Why didn't he fight, as the team's general manager, Jeff Ireland, reportedly suggested to Martin's agent? Maybe he was afraid to face Incognito, the stronger man more prone to violence. Or maybe he was truly above it all, and he took the wisest course of action and walked away, exposing the NFL warrior ethos for all of its self-perpetuating ugliness in an admirable move which, admittedly, I would be incapable of.

But Martin should have never had to walk away. He was a Miami Dolphin. He is, by most accounts, quiet and guarded with his emotions. He is light-skinned, his parents are Harvard-educated, and he might seem nothing like most of the black guys in the locker room. Said Roman Oben, who played 12 seasons in the NFL as an offensive lineman, "If you're like Martin, and you're black and you have money and an education and can go and make $200,000 not playing football, you're going to be more scrutinized than everybody else. That's the unfortunate truth. And without the leaders around who would step in, you're going to be expected to stand up for yourself."

Martin was still a Miami Dolphin, though. And there were other Miami Dolphins, black and white, who knew that Richie Incognito was so comfortable with harassing this man, he crossed a racial line clearly defined across the NFL. And yet they did nothing.

Maybe Martin was on his own because they all questioned his desire, or his blackness, or something else. Or maybe they just didn't care enough about the Miami Dolphins.
http://mmqb.si.com/2013/11/08/jonathan-martin-race-in-the-nfl/

--
Jay

NY Times Article

Fresno State Loves Its Bulldogs, but So Does a Gang

Brian L. Frank for The New York Times

Identifying With the Bulldogs: The bulldog is no longer just the sports mascot at Fresno State. It has been appropriated by a violent street gang called the Bulldogs, vexing university officials.

By MALIA WOLLAN
Published: November 7, 2013

FRESNO, Calif. — Bulldogs can be seen snarling from flagpoles, from baseball caps, from T-shirts and from tattoos — one man has the dog's face inked across his torso, its behind across his back. Young men on street corners bark at passing patrol officers. They call their children "little dogs" or "bull puppies." Police raids find their targets asleep beneath red blankets emblazoned with the dog.

Fresno and the surrounding region have long been overrun by Bulldogs. And where the violent pack goes, trouble follows.

The Fresno State Bulldogs college football team is exceedingly popular here in the country's fruit and vegetable epicenter, where more than a million acres of cropland stretch to the horizon. "From Sacramento to L.A., there is nothing except agriculture and Fresno State football," said Kenny Wiggins, a former Fresno State lineman who plays in the N.F.L. for the San Diego Chargers. "We were the only show in town; everyone, and I mean everyone, goes to the games."

The team's logo is a cartoon bulldog, a muscled beast with sharp teeth, a spiked collar and floppy ears. But the bulldog is no longer just a college sports mascot. It has been appropriated by members of a savage street gang who call themselves the Bulldogs.

The gang started in a prison and quickly earned a reputation as unusually vicious, even in the bloody world of California gangs. At their height, in 2006, the Bulldogs were responsible for 70 percent of the city's shootings, the police said. Three of four inmates in the county jail are Bulldogs.

"They grew and grew and grew until there were Bulldogs everywhere you looked," Jerry Dyer, Fresno's police chief, said.

The mascot now plays a double role as football icon and gang symbol. Confusing the two can have fatal consequences. In 2011, Stephen Maciel, a father of four who the police said had no gang affiliation, was shot and killed by a Bulldogs gang member in a liquor store parking lot. Maciel was wearing a red Fresno State shirt.

The gang's embrace of the bulldog logo has put university administrators in an excruciatingly awkward position amid a gang crisis that has claimed hundreds of lives. The situation has vexed them, even as sales of Fresno State apparel and merchandise increased tenfold since the gang took hold in the city. The university has considered dropping the logo, and has approached law enforcement officials for guidance.

The issue is trickier than ever this season, with the football team 8-0 and ranked in the top 20 nationally. An adage here says the city's cultural season starts with the first kickoff. And it is true: the Bulldogs are ascendant. Discussion of recent games is heard up and down the radio dial. Billboards feature the top players, including quarterback Derek Carr, a contender for the Heisman Trophy.

The police, meanwhile, have made cracking down on the Bulldogs gang a top priority, with some success. But the Bulldogs are still dangerous enough to have cost the lives of Maciel and others.

"If you love sports, you want to be all geared up in the team's colors," said Maciel's widow, Marisol Aguirre. "But I don't wear any of it anymore, and I don't let my kids wear it. It's too dangerous."

Marisol Aguirre, with her son Markos, lost her companion and the father of her four children in 2011 when Stephen Maciel was killed by a Bulldogs rival in a case of mistaken identity. Maciel was wearing a Fresno State shirt at the time.

Pulling for the Underdog

Some 220 miles north of Los Angeles and 200 miles south of San Francisco, Fresno is close to the geographic center of a state known at times for a bitter rivalry between north and south. Tensions arise over everything from water rights to disputes between Los Angeles Dodgers fans and San Francisco Giants fans.

But the bloodiest divide might be between two gangs, the Sureños and the Norteños, who for decades have engaged in one of the most protracted, guerrilla-style wars in state history.

The Sureños — Spanish for southerners — wear blue and originated in and are connected with Southern California. The Norteños, or northerners, wear red and have come to dominate northern parts of the state, though both gangs have spread throughout the United States. Law enforcement officials believe that the dividing line between territories claimed by the Norteños and the Sureños lies less than 80 miles south of here.

Nearly every Latino gang of note in the state is affiliated with either the Sureños or the Norteños. Except the Bulldogs.

Law enforcement officials now consider the Bulldogs to be the country's largest independent street gang. The police have verified some 6,000 Bulldogs gang members here, but there are as many as 24,000 more, according to the Fresno County district attorney's office.

Why the Bulldogs gang became independent remains unclear. What prison officials do know is that in 1984 a war broke out at San Quentin State Prison between a gang based in Fresno called F14 and Nuestra Familia, a Mexican-American gang started in the 1960s.

Nuestra Familia is headquartered inside the state's prisons, from where it controls the street-level Norteños. The Fresno gang members had been working for Nuestra Familia, moving drugs up and down the state and, when ordered, fighting and killing Nuestra Familia rivals.

"We were the grunts doing all the work and catching all the time," said Marcelino Garcia, 21, a Bulldogs gang member who joined the ranks at age 12 and was tutored in the gang's ways by older men who were at San Quentin in 1984 during what many Bulldogs now call the Separation.

In 1985, Fresno State fielded a football team that became the stuff of local legend. It was the only N.C.A.A. Division I-A team to be undefeated that year at 11-0-1. Led by a player known as Stephen Baker the touchdown maker, the squad was one of the highest-scoring teams in N.C.A.A. history. Football was popular in Fresno, but the team's success created a particularly frenzied fan base with a heightened sense of pride in the Bulldogs and the stretch of agricultural land they called home.

"That was our shining moment here in Fresno," said Eric Cervantes, a detective with the Fresno County sheriff's office. "That was our best football team ever. The whole town went crazy."

Among those rabid fans were members of this nascent, newly independent gang, who for more than a year had been tossing around potential names and identities for themselves. They considered the Fresno City Players, the Midnight Cruisers and the Sinners, but nothing seemed to stick, said Natividad Mendoza, 42, a former Bulldogs gang member who was incarcerated 16 times from 1985 to 2003.

"The Bulldogs started as a name that everyone could identify with," Mendoza said. "In Fresno, football is huge. The Bulldogs are like an N.F.L. team. They were a real prideful team, the scrappiest in the N.C.A.A. They would go up against anyone any time and play their hearts out."

The gang respected, and identified with, those aggressive, underdog qualities in the team.

Brian L. Frank for The New York Times

'Our Team'

By 1986, prison officials acknowledged the presence of a distinguishable new gang in prisons across the state. Members called themselves the Bulldogs. They wore red Fresno State T-shirts, hats and jerseys, and boldly tattooed the bulldog mascot with its sharp-toothed snarl and spiked collar on their heads, backs, chests, necks and faces.

"We would watch the football games in prison," said Mendoza, who left the gang in 2003 and now runs a Christian gang prevention program in Phoenix. "Other gangs would bet on the other teams, but the Bulldogs always bet on the Bulldogs. They were our team."

The gang members eschewed the top-down hierarchy of Nuestra Familia and other established gangs, preferring instead a looser structure with fewer leaders and fewer rules. On the streets, any of them could sell drugs, fight or work as pimps as they pleased. In prison they refused to make alliances with other gangs.

"They'll fight everybody, Norteños, Sureños, blacks, Asians, whites, anybody," said Cervantes, an expert on the gang through his work with the county's Multi-Agency Gang Enforcement Consortium, or Magec.

As Bulldogs were released from prison, the gang grew to dominate street-level crime here. It took over prostitution and drug sales, stole cars and burglarized houses and businesses. Members identified one another and intimidated enemies by barking like angry dogs.

By 2006, the gang was responsible for 70 percent of all shootings here, the police said. In this city of nearly 506,000 people, some 60 percent of the 52 murders that year were gang-related, and most of them pointed to Bulldogs.

As they multiplied, so too did their enemies.

In 2003, while visiting her parents in Atwater, Calif., about 70 miles north of here, Lyndsay Hawthorne, a Fresno State sophomore, went running in her Bulldogs T-shirt. She was trailed by a car full of Sureños who shot at her, shouting that her shirt was not welcome in their town. The bullets missed Hawthorne, sending sparks off the pavement around her.

"It was very scary," said her father, Richard, who was a commander with the Atwater Police Department at the time. "I took that shirt away from her."

To grow its numbers, the Bulldogs gang recruited around elementary schools and high schools. In the early 1990s, the gang presence was so big among youth that city schools banned Fresno State Bulldogs clothing on school property. The ban was soon extended to Georgetown Hoyas apparel, which also features a bulldog.

"It is unfortunate because we work hard to create a college-going culture in our schools, but we just cannot have students wearing this stuff; it causes too many problems," said Tim Liles, the principal at Sunnyside High School in Fresno. Schools here eventually had to ban all attire featuring professional and college sports logos.

Unsettled by the sudden rise of thousands of violent gang members wearing their university's apparel, officials at California State University, Fresno, requested a meeting with law enforcement officials in 2007. They were considering changing the logo and wanted advice.

"There was considerable discussion at that time about whether or not they should change the logo or the mascot away from being a bulldog because of the fact that we had this Bulldog gang in Fresno that had become notorious," Dyer, the police chief, said. "My advice was absolutely not. Do not touch the logo. How dare these gang members think they can hijack the mascot from our university? If you change it, the gang wins."

The gang is certainly not the first criminal enterprise to usurp the symbol of a sports team. The F.B.I. keeps a list of dozens of gangs and the sports logos they have commandeered. For example, the Crips often wear Dallas Cowboys gear, and the Bloods opt for Chicago Bulls gear.

"We find gangs using sports teams' logos and clothing as gang identification to be very common," said Whitney Malkin, a spokeswoman for the F.B.I. "Most gangs choose to use sports paraphernalia with the same color schemes as their gang or paraphernalia of teams that originate from the area that they operate in."

Still, the situation here is different in that a homegrown gang has so thoroughly expropriated the logo of the region's university.

Just how the gang's enthusiasm for all things Fresno State Bulldogs has affected sales and licensing of the merchandise is difficult to determine. The university declined to comment on the gang situation or to facilitate access to coaches, players and any information about licensing. But many college athletic programs depend on money generated by apparel sales. In 2012, the market for licensed college merchandise was estimated at $4.62 billion, according to the Collegiate Licensing Company, the largest trademark licensing agency in the country.

Despite the potential dangers brought on by wearing Bulldogs apparel, it would appear the gang might have been a boon for sales. Last year, Fresno State ranked 69th on the licensing company's list of the top 75 universities by royalties raised through merchandise sales. A 2008 article in The Collegian, Fresno State's student paper, cited a tenfold increase in licensing royalties between 2000 and 2008, the same years the number of Bulldogs gang members rose sharply.

"I would guess a lot of the sales of Bulldogs merchandise comes from the gang buying stuff," said Nick Lopez, a 2010 Fresno State graduate and football season-ticket holder. "Normal fans will buy more gear when the team is good, but the gang does not care if the team is good or bad — they'll buy it anyway."

Lopez often feels people assume he is a gang member when he wears his Fresno State shirts, he said. He has been tempted to carry around his diploma to prove which type of Bulldog he is.

In addition to licensed Bulldogs apparel, it is not uncommon to see unlicensed Bulldogs gear for sale in liquor stores and discount grocery stores here.

"Retailers in this city will put Fresno State and a bulldog on whatever red thing they can find and try to sell it whether it is licensed or unlicensed," said Al Smith, president and chief executive of the Fresno Chamber of Commerce. "People cannot know if they're selling to sports fans or gang members; if someone comes in with a 20-dollar bill and wants the hat, you're not going to frisk him first. You're going to give him the hat."

A Persistent Presence

By 2006, gang members were walking around downtown on sweltering summer days without shirts, flaunting their bulldog tattoos. The city had reached its boiling point, and no one was quite sure what to do about it.

On July 31 that year, while on a routine traffic stop, a Fresno motorcycle officer was shot point blank by a Bulldogs gang member. The officer spent 31 days in an intensive care unit and nearly died. Within months, the police department started Operation Bulldog, adopting a zero-tolerance policy toward the gang.

If a gang member was involved in a crime, the investigation became a top priority. "The gang stole the mascot from our university, which prevented the kids in our schools from being able to support the team by wearing the uniform," Dyer, the police chief, said. "We wanted the Bulldog gang to know that we as a community were tired of their reign."

Within a year, Operation Bulldog had yielded 1,908 arrests, filling jails and nearby prisons with Bulldogs. Certain neighborhoods became almost nightly battlegrounds between the police and the gang. Gang members phoned in death threats to officers and the chief.

Operation Bulldog ended in 2010, after more than 12,000 arrests. The crackdown forced some of the gang members out of Fresno, and law enforcement officials here now regularly get calls from Wyoming, Montana, Oregon and other states reporting the arrest of people with Fresno State mascot tattoos. Several members of the county's gang task force travel regularly to serve as expert witnesses at criminal trials for displaced Bulldogs.

These days, Bulldogs are responsible for about 30 percent of all of the city's shootings, a 40 percent drop from seven years ago. Still, evidence of the gang is everywhere.

There are now about 30 subgroups of Bulldogs. On two recent nights patrolling the streets, Magec officers encountered more than a dozen people they believed to be Bulldogs. In one apartment they arrested a known Bulldog who went by the gang name Droopy. They found him in violation of his parole with methamphetamine, a gun under the bed and Fresno State recruiting posters taped to the wall.

About 75 percent of the inmates in the Fresno County jail are Bulldogs gang members.

Still, "there are a lot of people in this community that have bulldogs tattooed on their neck or face or arms who are not Bulldog gang members any longer," the police chief said. "I go to church with people who have bulldogs tattooed on them."

'Biggest Fans'

While the Fresno State athletics department declined to comment, former players like Wiggins spoke freely about their football days and the parallel worlds of the Bulldogs — one on the field, the other on the street.

"They were our biggest fans," Wiggins said. "I remember walking through the mall in Fresno one day after a game and seeing this scary looking guy with a huge bulldog tattoo on his head and face. He came right up to me and said, 'Hey, you're Kenny Wiggins, great tackle last night!' "

Despite the violence on the streets, on game days Bulldog Stadium seems to be a sanctuary, a safe zone. Everybody wears Fresno State Bulldogs gear. There have been no reports of gang-related fights at football games, the police said. "At games everybody is pulling for the Fresno State Bulldogs, even the Bulldog gang members," Dyer said. "No one is there to fight."

"I never really had an issue with the gang; they were big football fans," said David Carr, who attended Fresno State and was the No. 1 pick in the 2002 N.F.L. draft.

Brian L. Frank for The New York Times

Fans at the Fresno State football game with Boise State in September.

David Carr, Derek's brother, remembers climbing a fence and sneaking onto the field at Fresno State's stadium. In high school he was recruited as a quarterback by Fresno's head coach then, Pat Hill. "Coach Hill thought there were enough football players in the Central Valley to compete with any team," Carr, 34, said. "He wanted the entire valley to be all about Bulldog football. He called it painting the Valley red."

The gang had a similar aim; they too wanted to see Central Valley residents in Fresno State red, puffed up with Bulldog pride and ready to crush rivals. Like the football coach, the gang scoured schools looking for young talent.

It was in the summer after sixth grade that Garcia, now 21, joined the gang. Violence at home and bullying at school made him an easy recruit. After being beaten by a half-dozen older gang members for two minutes (a process the gang calls jumping in), Garcia was told, "Welcome to the family."

He started wearing Fresno State Bulldogs T-shirts. He watched football games with the gang, fought alongside members and barked with them. "If I didn't have a place to stay, they would find me a place to stay," he said. "If someone messed with me, I'd call them and that person would get hurt."

With Garcia's gang affiliation and the paw print tattoo on his forearm came a sense of pride and protection. "The way I see it, I'm a Bulldog, I'm from Fresno, everywhere I walk here in the Central Valley is mine," he said.

But it also brings with it the prospect of violence. At times, he said, he has wanted to leave the gang, but he finds it impossible to extricate himself from the sticky Bulldogs web, extending as it does into multiple generations of families and across whole neighborhoods. "I'm 21, I've lost nine friends already, five of them who I personally saw die," he said.

A few days before a home football game against Boise State, Garcia was shot in the leg in a fight with another gang. Rather than go to a hospital, where he would be reported to the police, Garcia opted for the underground network of services provided by the Bulldogs. A former Army medic and gang associate removed the bullet in Garcia's calf.

At the game, thousands gathered hours beforehand to grill food, drink beer and toss footballs in the lingering Central Valley summer heat. The smell of fertilizer, livestock and dust mingled with smoke. Many in the capacity crowd, particularly the white fans, said they felt no threat from the gang and were comfortable wearing Bulldogs apparel. But about half of Fresno County's population is Latino, and because the Bulldogs gang is nearly all Mexican-American, the risk is more palpable for many Latinos here.

Hector Munoz, 33, proudly wore his red Bulldogs shirt while tailgating with friends outside the stadium. He graduated from Fresno State in 2006 and works as a correctional officer in a state prison. An attendee at all home games, Munoz said he sometimes saw Bulldogs gang members he recognized from work out on parole and at the games.

"As a Hispanic male, I cannot go to Disneyland or to a Giants game in San Francisco wearing this shirt or people will mistake me for a gang member," Munoz said. "Only in Fresno do I feel safe wearing this shirt; this is Bulldog territory."

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/10/sports/ncaafootball/fresno-adopts-its-college-team-but-so-does-a-gang.html?ref=sports&_r=0&pagewanted=all

NY Times Article

Cut in Food Stamps Forces Hard Choices on Poor

By Mac William Bishop
Bryan R. Smith for The New York Times

Cutting Back on Food Stamps: After Congress cut monthly benefits for food stamp recipients, families in the Bronx must make hard choices with reduced food budgets.

By KIM SEVERSON and WINNIE HU
Published: November 7, 2013

CHARLESTON, S.C. — For many, a $10 or $20 cut in the monthly food budget would be absorbed with little notice.

Stephen Morton for The New York Times

Leon Simmons of Charleston, S.C., who on Monday had $5 left in food stamps for the month.

Bryan R. Smith for The New York Times

Ingrid Mock, center, at a food pantry in the Bronx on Monday. "I try to get most of the things my daughter eats because I can hold the hunger," she said.

Stephen Morton for The New York Times

Volunteers serving lunch this week at the Neighborhood House soup kitchen in Charleston, S.C.

But for millions of poor Americans who rely on food stamps, reductions that began this month present awful choices. One gallon of milk for the kids instead of two. No fresh broccoli for dinner or snacks to take to school. Weeks of grits and margarine for breakfast.

And for many, it will mean turning to a food pantry or a soup kitchen by the middle of the month.

"I don't need a whole lot to eat," said Leon Simmons, 63, who spends more than half of his monthly $832 Social Security income to rent a room in an East Charleston house. "But this month I know I'm not going to buy any meats."

Mr. Simmons's allotment from the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, commonly called food stamps, has dropped $9. He has already spent the $33 he received for November.

The reduction in benefits has affected more than 47 million people like Mr. Simmons. It is the largest wholesale cut in the program since Congress passed the first Food Stamps Act in 1964 and touches about one in every seven Americans.

From the country kitchens of the South to the bodegas of New York, the pain is already being felt.

Christopher Bean, the executive director of a Bronx food pantry that is operated by a nonprofit organization called Part of the Solution, said that about 60 new families had visited the pantry in the past week because their food stamps had been cut.

They know they will be out of food well before the month is over. "People can do math," he said.

In 2009, people started getting as much as 13.6 percent more in food stamps as part of the federal economic stimulus package, but that increase has expired. The reduction will save the government about $5 billion next year.

Over all, the nation's food stamps program cost a record $78.4 billion in the 2012 fiscal year, according to the Agriculture Department. Although the amount given to each household — a figure that can vary widely depending on a complex formula of income and the number of mouths to feed — has been dropping by small amounts for the past few years, the roster of people seeking assistance grew steadily through the recession.

In the 2010 fiscal year, 40.3 million people were enrolled. Two years later, that number jumped by 16 percent. Just over 45 percent of those getting food stamps are children, according to the Agriculture Department.

Food stamps are likely to be cut more in the coming years if Congress can agree on a new farm bill, which House and Senate negotiators began tackling this week. The Republican-controlled House has approved cutting as much as $40 billion from the program by making it harder to qualify. The Democratic-controlled Senate is suggesting a $4 billion cut by making administrative changes.

To poor families trying to stretch a couple hundred dollars into a month's worth of groceries, all the talk about stimulus packages, farm subsidies and congressional politics means little. It is all about daily survival at the grocery store.

"We'll be on our last $3 at the end of the month," said Rafaela Rivera, 34, a home health aide who earns $10 an hour.

Ms. Rivera's family of four saw their food stamps reduced by $36, to $420 a month. They pay rent and other expenses using her income and her husband's disability check, and they supplement food stamps with bags of fresh vegetables, chicken and other groceries from a food pantry.

"It's going to be hard," she said. "Our last week is going to be tight tight."

Ingrid Mock, 46, a former supermarket cashier who is disabled, was at the Bronx food pantry on Monday stocking up on canned green beans, pasta, ground beef and apples.

Ms. Mock, who has received food benefits for a decade and uses them to help feed her 12-year-old daughter, said her allotment had steadily decreased from as much as $309 about six years ago to a low of $250 this month, which reflected a new cut of $25.

Meanwhile, the price of staples like rice and corn oil have increased. So this month Ms. Mock will make choices. One dozen eggs instead of three, and only $1 worth of plantains. And no coffee or sugar for herself.

"I try to get most of the things my daughter eats because I can hold the hunger — I'm an adult — but she cannot," she said. "They don't understand when there's no food in the fridge."

The cuts are also hurting stores in poor neighborhoods. The average food stamps household receives $272 a month, which then passes into the local economy.

At a Food Lion in Charleston where as many as 75 percent of the shoppers use food stamps, managers were bracing for lower receipts as the month wore on.

At a Met Foodmarket in the Bronx, where 80 percent of the 7,000 weekly customers use food stamps, overall food sales have already dropped by as much as 10 percent.

"I wasn't expecting it to be that fast," said Abraham Gomez, the manager. Losing that much revenue could mean cutting back hours for employees, he said.

Although several pilot programs around the country are designed to help people with food stamps eat better, including one by a Connecticut organization called Wholesome Wave that doubles the value of food stamps used at farmers' markets, Mr. Gomez and others worry that less money for food means resorting to more dried noodles and canned tuna and fewer fresh vegetables and healthier cuts of meat.

Elliot Porter, 46, whose food stamps benefit dropped to $189 a month from $200, is a former property manager who is technically homeless but living with a friend while he goes to college.

At the Met Foodmarket this week, Mr. Porter had to perform a calculation with everything he reached for on the shelves, weighing his personal taste against cost and health.

A nutritionist who is helping him lose weight to avoid diabetes told him to buy a natural brand of peanut butter without sugar. But it cost $4.39. He decided he could afford only the store brand with sugar, which cost $3.79.

His situation may be better than many. During lunch at the Neighborhood House soup kitchen in Charleston this week, discussions about how to cope with cuts to food stamps were not hard to find.

People said they felt desperate. Many stuffed extra bread or cake into their pockets for later in the day, and traded advice on which agencies might be handing out free groceries later in the month.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/08/us/cut-in-food-stamps-forces-hard-choices-on-poor.html?pagewanted=2&hp&_r=0&pagewanted=all

New York Times Topic Discussion

http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2013/11/07/the-cost-of-being-an-artist

Boston Globe Article

Early struggles gave Martin Walsh a solid underpinning
By Andrew Ryan
| Globe Staff

September 02, 2013

Barry Chin/Globe Staff

Martin Walsh at a senior services center.

First in a series of profiles of Boston's 12 mayoral candidates.

The cancer ravaged Martin J. Walsh when he was a husky 7-year-old with bold red hair that would all fall out. They held a special First Communion for him on Christmas Day because doctors didn't think he'd live until spring.

Years later an errant bullet hit Walsh one night on Dorchester Avenue, grazing his left leg when he was 22 and had developed a taste for alcohol. Before long he would hit bottom as an alcoholic and embrace sobriety, a turning point that gave his life focus.

Today, Walsh is a candidate for mayor of Boston as the contest enters the frenzied, post-Labor Day sprint to the preliminary election Sept. 24. He remains calm amid the tumult of the race. He is smiling, always smiling, because Walsh says he has yet to have a bad day on the campaign trail. Alcoholism, bullets, and cancer can give a man perspective.

"Subconsciously, it builds up strong character," Walsh, now 46, says of the cancer, as he squirts ketchup on a sausage-and-egg sandwich at McKenna's Café, a Savin Hill diner that is essentially his kitchen. "When you look back on it, it's part of my story. Not my political story, it's part of my story of who I am."

Walsh courts voters with the relentless enthusiasm of a golden retriever fetching a tennis ball. He goes back and back and back again, smiling as he approaches strangers with his palm open, almost forcing them to shake his hand.

"Marty Walsh, running for mayor," he says quickly, swallowing the contraction "I'm" as he reaches for another hand. "How're ya buddy? Marty Walsh, running for mayor."

The story of Walsh's campaign — and really the man himself — begins with labor. His father was a laborer. Walsh remembers his uncle running in a union election to be business manager of Laborers Local 223. It was the bumper stickers that got him.

Barry Chin/Globe Staff

Martin Walsh receives a high five from Maria Bruno, 11, as he introduces himself during a campaign stop at the Franklin Hill community playground.

"I thought to myself, 'I want to run,' " recalls Walsh, just a boy then. "I want my name on a bumper sticker."

He joined the union at age 21, working briefly in construction before taking a job with Local 223 as a benefits officer. He ran in 1997 for state representative and won.

While serving in the Legislature, Walsh became president of the union local. He rose to lead the Boston Building Trades, an umbrella group that represents unions of ironworkers, electricians, and others. The job paid $175,000 a year and gave him a 2012 Jeep to drive, but Walsh resigned and gave up the perks to run for mayor.

When did he decide he would run for mayor?

"I don't know," Walsh says, "when I was 10?"

Unions have used membership dues to donate more than $250,000 to his campaign. The amount eclipses total fund-raising of almost half the 12 mayoral candidates, but accounts for only a quarter of Walsh's war chest. His campaign says he has raised $862,000 from individuals.

Some candidates have sworn off outside money, but Walsh has refused. Unions and groups supporting his bid have also spent more than $200,000 independently on fliers, paid canvassers, and television ads.

The support could help Walsh advance to the final election Nov. 5, but labor could also become a liability. Critics have questioned whether, as mayor, he could fairly negotiate union contracts.

Walsh says he would have the upper hand in negotiations because unions listen to their own. "If somebody wants to attack me on labor, bring it on," he says, describing himself as an unabashed champion of working people, but whose base is much broader than that.

"If I didn't have the labor support I have, I'd still be in the position I am today," Walsh says.

Walsh is more than labor, supporters say.

"He's an exceptional guy," says Dennis Forde, 43, who served with Walsh as an altar boy at St. Margaret's in Dorchester and has contributed to his campaign. "I always thought he would do something major in his life."

Walsh has been a Little League coach and a founding board member of a charter school. He has a 16-year record as a legislator.

Last month, a woman wearing hospital scrubs as she passed through the turnstile at the Fields Corner T stop thanked him for securing state funding for AIDS treatment. He has support in the gay community because he aggressively opposed an attempt to overturn same-sex marriage, a surprising stand for the devout Catholic, whose efforts drew criticism from a priest on the altar.

BARRY CHIN/GLOBE STAFF

Walsh spoke with people at the Kit Clark Senior Services Center in Dorchester during a recent day of campaigning.

Walsh is a jumble of paradoxes. He is a guy's guy who can talk about a back-breaking job as a laborer, keeps a framed photograph of a workman's gnarled hands, has Patriots' season tickets, and is suspicious of food beyond the Irish standard of meat and boiled potatoes.

But he keeps an antiseptically neat home, loves hydrangeas, and has an affinity for paper products because he worked in an office-supply store during high school.

"I love stationery," Walsh says. "Some guys love going to Home Depot, which I do. But I love stationery stores."

His most defining issue may be his struggle with alcohol. Walsh says he hasn't had a drink since April 23, 1995, but recovery requires helping others overcome their own addictions. His phone rings after dark and on Christmas. It's people looking for support, second chances, and beds in treatment programs.

Walsh says he does it because people did it for him. And now, the recovery community includes some of his strongest campaign supporters.

He stayed largely out of trouble when he was drinking, Walsh says. He offers that he was arrested at age 22 when he mouthed off to a police officer and was charged with disorderly conduct, which was dismissed without a finding. (He was also charged with disorderly conduct as a new state legislator at a UPS picket line.)

The shooting on Dorchester Avenue occurred at 2:50 a.m. on March 17, 1990, according to court records. Walsh says he and several friends had spent the night downtown at Bennigan's, a chain Irish-themed bar and restaurant a block from Boston Common. They got a ride back to Dorchester and were walking home when an acquaintance pulled up in a car. The guy had just been in a bar fight, Walsh and others would later learn.

Moments later a second car arrived. A man named John Barsamian, 22, pulled a gun and fired six shots, according to court records. Two of Walsh's friends were hit in the legs. A bullet grazed Walsh in the left leg. Barsamian had been the other man in the bar fight. He pleaded guilty to attempted murder and went to prison. Years later, he showed up in Walsh's State House office looking for a job.

"I shut the door," Walsh recalls, "and I said, 'How about starting with an apology?' "

Barsamian died in 2005 after years of drug abuse, according to his death certificate.

"It's part of my story as an alcoholic," Walsh says, "If I wasn't drinking that night, I wouldn't have been walking down the street at 2 a.m. My sobriety has rounded me out. I was always somebody who cared about people, but it gave me focus."

The cancer was Burkitt's lymphoma. It started in November 1974 with fatigue, stomach pains, and weight loss. Doctors performed exploratory surgery and found the disease everywhere.

"They gave him six months," says his mother, Mary J. O'Malley Walsh, 71, who still speaks with a soft lilt from her native Ireland. "They really didn't have any hope for him."

Walsh endured years of radiation, chemotherapy, spinal taps, and needle pricks. He missed most of second and third grade and had to repeat fifth grade. A 1979 benefit at the Victory Road armory raised money for the family. His mother prayed, asking God to spare her boy and vowing to take him to holy shrines at Knock in Ireland and Our Lady of Lourdes in France.

Walsh recovered and visited the shrines. He's a miracle, his mom says.

"He's a good son. And I think he'll make a fantastic mayor. He cares for people."

Andrew Ryan can be reached at andrew.ryan@globe.com Follow him on Twitter @globeandrewryan.
http://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2013/09/01/martin-walsh-drive-become-mayor-was-forged-challenges/8R0YiSW4m5UwG7vFcFnJ3M/story.html

Boston Globe Article

Martin Walsh's battles with adversity struck a chord
By Michael Levenson
Globe Staff

November 06, 2013

JESSICA RINALDI FOR THE GLOBE

Martin J. Walsh celebrated with supporters at his victory party at the Park Plaza Hotel.

He is the boy who wore a wig to school when his hair fell out from chemotherapy, the college dropout who went back for his degree in his 40s, the recovering alcoholic who once took a bullet to the leg after a long night of drinking.

The struggles that shaped Martin J. Walsh's life also helped him become the next mayor of Boston, allowing the lawmaker to bond with a diverse array of voters in a city that prizes resiliency and the ability to recover from adversity.

His rise to power was fueled by the upward arc of his biography, by the story he told of a working-class kid from Savin Hill whose battles help him relate to the ordeals faced by people from Mattapan to Hyde Park.

Like Mayor Thomas M. Menino before him, he blazed a more personal style of politics that was ultimately more visceral in its appeal than any policy paper or pressing concern pushed by his opponent, John R. Connolly.

He emphasized his blue-
collar upbringing on the first floor of a three-decker, along with his roots as the son of Irish immigrants and his background as a laborer who once busted sheet rock for a living.

He touched on the theme of redemption in his victory speech Tuesday night.

"For this son of immigrants, you've made Boston a place of comebacks and second chances," Walsh declared to hundreds of jubilant supporters at the Park Plaza Hotel. "My life story is made possible by this city."

He has promised some changes as mayor, if not a wholesale break from the Menino era. He plans to abolish the Boston Redevelopment Authority, the agency that has shaped commercial real estate development in the city for decades and has served as a lever of power for Menino.

Walsh plans to diversify the leadership of the Police Department and has hinted he may appoint a person of color to replace Commissioner Edward F. Davis, who resigned last week after seven years.

Walsh has also pledged to focus on schools, an issue that Connolly embraced as the thrust of his campaign. A supporter of charter schools, Walsh says he will also establish ninth and 10th grade academies in the city's high schools, to ensure that fewer students fall through the cracks.

Walsh's roots in the labor movement are deep, which meant they were both a wellspring of campaign cash and field support, but also a source of controversy. Walsh is the president of Laborers Local 223 and was until April head of the Boston Metropolitan District Building Trades Council, which represents more than 35,000 workers in 16 trades in Greater Boston.

Walsh's father was also a member of Local 223. His uncle was for years its leader. These days, Walsh's cousin, Martin F. Walsh, is the union's business manager. Another cousin is the office manager. Though he distanced himself from his labor background during the campaign, there were signs of union pride Tuesday night: Labor banners festooned the balconies around his victory party, including one from Local 223.

Walsh, 46, still lives in Savin Hill, where he was raised by a father who worked as a laborer and a mother who had dinner on the table at 5 o'clock sharp, seven days a week.

As a boy, Walsh attended St. Margaret School, became an altar server, and played floor hockey at the community center near his home on Taft Street. But his childhood was defined by his diagnosis at age 7 with Burkitt's lymphoma, an aggressive form of cancer that spread to his pancreas and bowels. Sapped of energy, he missed most of the second and third grade and repeated the fifth. Burkitt's often responds well to chemotherapy, however, and Walsh's eventually did. When he was 11, a scan revealed that he was free of the disease. To mark his recovery, Walsh's mother took him to the shrines at Knock in Ireland and Lourdes in France.

After graduating from Newman Prep, a private school in the Back Bay, he attended Quincy College and Suffolk University, dropping out after a year and a half. Following in the footsteps of his father and his uncle, he spent two years as a laborer, before ditching his work gear for a desk job in Newton, working as a collection agent for the laborers' pension fund.

It was around this time that he started drinking heavily. Walsh acknowledged that he drove drunk, blacked out, and was once thrown out of a Bruins game. In 1990, he was hit in the leg by an errant bullet after a night out with friends. It was not until 1995 that he entered a detoxification program on Cape Cod and got sober. Two years later, he was elected to the Massachusetts House. His union career began flourishing.

In 2001, he became recording secretary of Local 223 and union president in 2005. Frustrated that he never finished college, he got his bachelor's degree from Boston College in 2009. Two years later, fellow union officials elected him general agent of the Boston Building Trades Council. The job paid him $175,000, on top of the $76,000 he earned as a state representative, and furnished him with a Jeep with gasoline.

In that role, he emerged as one of the most influential figures in Boston's construction industry, a labor leader with deep political connections who could help developers secure financing for projects, hammer out contracts for union workers, and navigate neighborhood opposition to projects. He held the position until April, when he resigned to run for mayor.

Michael Levenson can be reached at mlevenson@globe.com.
http://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2013/11/06/walsh-bio/0wtRBdbQDYX5pZPa2eGTGJ/story.html

NFL Updates

Bears' Marshall: Bullying not limited to Dolphins
November 6, 2013, 3:00 pm

Jonathan Martin didn't go AWOL from the Miami Dolphins because of a hazing situation with teammate Richie Incognito for purposes of shining a light on the ugly specter of bullying. But that's what the young tackle has done, and bringing the practice out in the open can hopefully end it somewhere for someone else.

Bears wide receiver Brandon Marshall played with, likes and stays in touch with Incognito and a number of Dolphins, teammates before Marshall was traded to Chicago. But Marshall's first thoughts on Wednesday were with the victim.

[RELATED: Hunter Hillenmeyer admits he was bullied during Bears days]

"You have to be sensitive to the fact of the kid Martin, what he's going through," Marshall said. "Prayers definitely for him. A serious situation. That's something I understand, something I've been through, I wish him the best and hopefully he's getting the care that he needs."

Coach Marc Trestman established from the outset of his time in Chicago that there would be no serious hazing on his Bears watch.

"I've been in places where there's been hazing and I've been in places where there has not been hazing," Trestman said. "I told the team the first night when you haze somebody, you take their ability to help you win. Everybody's here to help you win… .

"We're not talking about taking a helmet and walking off the field with a helmet. We're talking about other things. The words you use, the way you act, the things you say, affect people from all different backgrounds and places."

No blaming the victim

Unlike some pundits who effectively blamed the victim by citing his failure to speak up or stand up to a bully, Marshall did not blame the victim. Incognito was/is popular with teammates, meaning that Martin would have risked further ostracizing had he gone after Incognito, and Martin also would have risked taking a beating in the process, worsening the situation.

Marshall also said that the Incognito-Martin situation was not isolated to the Dolphins.

[MORE: Marshall raises mental health awareness with green shoes]

"Sometimes I feel like the NFL, to protect the brand, or the logo of the team, we do things for the publicity," Marshall said. "Unfortunately, it's the culture of the NFL. Here, it's different. We look at rookies different. You have to earn your stripes, earn your place on the team, or earn your place in the NFL.

"As far as crossing that line, disrespecting guys, demeaning guys; that just doesn't happen here… . Coach [Trestman] just said, 'hey, we're going to nip that in the bud, I want guys to focus on football and everyone just focus on their job and not a rookie night or what the guys might do to me the next day."

Cultural differences

Marshall suggested that cultural behavior ingrained at early ages might be reflected in Martin enduring the situation rather than seek help. Where little girls are comforted when they fall down, little boys are urged to "shake it off, you'll be ok. Don't cry.'" Marshall said.

"So right there from that moment we're teaching our men to mask their feelings, don't show their emotions. And it's that times 100 with football players. Can't show that you're hurt. Can't show any pain.

[RELATED: Brandon Marshall sports Cutler shirt, announces, 'He's back']

"So for a guy that comes in a locker room and shows a little vulnerability, that's a problem. So that's what I mean by the culture of the NFL. And that's what we have to change. What's going on in Miami goes on in every locker room; but it's time for us to start talking, maybe have group sessions where guys sit down and talk about what's going on off the field. What's going on in the building. And not mask everything. Because the worse it goes untreated, the worse it gets… .

"But it's time for us to take a look at some things we can do that's proactive, potentially start with maybe some group sessions, some group therapy, or some other innovative things that's out there."

If he's well, there's obviously talent there to be developed. And at $6,000 a week, it's worth a shot.

http://www.csnchicago.com/bears/bears-marshall-bullying-not-limited-dolphins?p=ya5nbcs&ocid=yahoo

NFL Updates

Jets add another former Patriot, sort of
Posted by Darin Gantt on October 23, 2013, 10:31 AM EDT
AP

While the 49ers and Seahawks drew attention by picking through each other's scraps this offseason, the Jets and Patriots have been doing it for years.

The Jets made the latest move, though it's a bit of an unusual one.

The Jets announced they signed former Patriots cornerback Ras-I Dowling to their practice squad.

That a former second-round pick (33rd overall in 2011) was released so quickly speaks to his career arc. The fact he's still eligible for a practice squad is somewhat amazing, since it means he was never active for nine games in a season.

Injuries were a factor before he was drafted, and continued through both his seasons with the Patriots (both of which ended on IR).

If he's well, there's obviously talent there to be developed. And at $6,000 a week, it's worth a shot.

Boston Globe Article

Rail link coming to fast-growing Seaport

By Shirley Leung
| Globe Staff

September 06, 2013

David L. Ryan/Globe Staff

Little-used Track 61, near the Convention Center in the Seaport District, which would get a train station.

Imagine finishing lunch at any of the wildly popular restaurants of Fort Point Channel, walking around the corner, and boarding a train that will shuttle you in 10 minutes to the figurative heart of Boston, Copley Square.

Turns out this is not just your imagination. The state, with no fanfare, has set aside tens of millions of dollars to launch an innovative train service on a dormant rail line between a pair of the city's most vital neighborhoods: the Seaport District and the Back Bay.

The service should be ready to go in just two years, the planning done without any of the drawn-out permitting processes or neighborhood histrionics that impede so much progress in Boston.

The solution comes in the form of a skinny stretch of barren rail that runs from the South Bay Rail Yard into the South Boston Waterfront, known as Track 61. The project has been quietly placed on a fast track because the state already owns the track after buying a bunch of rail lines from the freight operator CSX in 2009. Manufacturers, meanwhile, are rolling out a more affordable rail car, known as a diesel multiple unit, or DMU, that cities across the country are eager to try.

Andy Tejral

State officials say a diesel multiple unit rail car, like this model produced by Colorado Railcar, would be used on a proposed Back Bay to Seaport District train service.

"It's not much to look at," said Richard Davey, the state secretary of transportation. "We own the line. We control our own destiny. It's not that complicated, as a transportation project goes."

'That is so exciting for me to hear. It would be a massive hit.' —Greg Selkoe, of Karmaloop

Yet it should help solve a confounding problem.

These two neighborhoods are less than 2 miles apart, but anyone trying to get from the Seaport to the Back Bay, and vice versa, will attest to how painful it often is. There are many different routes — none of them good.

By MBTA, it's a veritable rainbow of transit lines, involving Silver, Red, Orange, and Green.

Pick your poison by car — Storrow Drive, Chinatown, Southie; the nearest thing to a guarantee is stomach-turning traffic.

Figure on anywhere from 20 to 40 minutes, more than enough time to pop the required Tylenol. Anyone sitting in a cab amid an infamous Atlantic Avenue traffic jam is watching the meter rise with their blood pressure.

Rail service can't come fast enough to the explosive Seaport District, which will soon outgrow its transportation infrastructure. After Mayor Tom Menino rebranded the waterfront as the Innovation District, tech companies and those that want to be fashionably near them flocked to the area, bringing several thousand jobs over the past couple of years. Thousands more are slated to come soon, which has city and state officials searching for answers amid the congestion. Already, traffic clogs thoroughfares during the evening rush hour, and it can be hard to get a seat on the Silver Line at peak times, forcing commuters to wait it out for the next bus.

Greg Selkoe, the chief executive of Karmaloop.com who lives and works in the Back Bay, finds himself in the Innovation District at least once a week for business or pleasure. He arrives by T, by Uber car service, by Hubway bike. Would he take the train? Unequivocally.

"That is so exciting for me to hear," Selkoe said. "It would be a massive hit."

Globe photo/File 1966

Budd rail cars served Boston commuters for decades as part of the Boston & Maine and later MBTA rail fleets.

If there is one person more excited than Selkoe, it would be Jim Rooney, executive director of the Massachusetts Convention Center Authority.

That's because the state is planning to build the first DMU station just outside the Boston Convention & Exhibition Center. More than a quarter of a million conventioneers are forced to stay in Back Bay hotels annually because there aren't enough rooms in the Seaport District. Conferences often run bus shuttles to ferry visitors back and forth.

A direct train would be "a huge feature from a competitive standpoint," Rooney said. "If you think about it, you can walk outside the door and get into the Copley complex, which connects 3,000 hotel rooms — Sheraton, Westin, Marriott."

Poor Track 61 hasn't mattered much to anyone for a few decades. Its real heyday was nearly a century ago. Back then, the line was humming with freight cars carrying goods to and from the cargo ships that docked in the Port of Boston. But after World War II, the port began to shrink, and freight lines fell dormant as companies shipped by truck.

The state is activating one section of Track 61, between the convention center and the South Bay Rail Yard off the Southeast Expressway.

The plans require the state to build a 300-foot stretch of rail connecting Track 61 to the existing system, so passengers will have a seamless ride to Back Bay Station. Eventually, the state can also run a separate route from Track 61 into South Station.

The train cars, the previously mentioned diesel multiple units, are also an old concept making a fortuitous comeback. The Boston & Maine Railroad used them in the 1950s and 1960s for commuter rail; people may remember them as Budd cars. They are self-propelled trains that do not rely on locomotive engines, making them ideal for short distances and frequent stops.

DMUs fell out of favor, in part because they didn't meet US rail safety standards. But manufacturers are now making federally compliant DMUs, prompting more cities like Boston to look at them as a low-cost alternative to traditional rail. A DMU train car can cost about $4 million, compared to about $10 million for a locomotive train. DMUs are not fancy; the Orient Express this is not.

Governor Deval Patrick included DMUs in his $13 billion "Way Forward" transportation plan, unveiled in January, and with the Legislature's recent approval of transportation financing funding, the Patrick administration has decided to spend roughly $100 million on DMU-related projects, including Track 61. A good chunk of the money will go toward buying DMUs for the MBTA's Fairmount Line, which runs through Dorchester and Mattapan, and that line will get the new rail cars first.

Secretary Davey said the fare on the new, yet-to-be-named MBTA-operated rail line would probably be similar to that for a T ride, about $2.

I'm not telling him how to run his business, but he could charge far more in a city starved for more and better transit options.

"They would pay $4 to $5, no problem," said Jeff Bussgang, a general partner at Flybridge Capital Partners, who shuttles between his office on Boylston Street and the Seaport District, where he has three portfolio companies.

Nothing good is ever simple in this city, but this time, it may be.

Shirley Leung can be reached at sleung@globe.com. Follow her on Twitter @leung.

Brady Mic'd Up Againts The Saints

http://www.nfl.com/videos/nfl-films-sound-efx/0ap2000000264587/Sound-FX-Tom-Brady

NY Times Article

Jets' Willie Colon Attends to His South Bronx Roots

By Chris Cascarano

Back to the Bronx With Willie Colon: Willie Colon, the Jets' right guard who was raised in the South Bronx and recently revisited his old neighborhood, is intensely proud of where he grew up.

By BEN SHPIGEL
Published: October 11, 2013

The quarter-mile strip of asphalt and concrete connects the pillars of Willie Colon's life in the South Bronx. It does not have an official name. It is an access road that branches off Concourse Village East, a road that is now paved, not covered in dirt and dust and gravel as it was more than a decade ago, when it bridged the chaos of Colon's neighborhood and the structure of his school.

Heather Ainsworth for The New York Times

Willie Colon, signing autographs at Jets training camp, joined the team in March. More Photos »

Enlarge This Image

Nicole Bengiveno/The New York Times

It is important to Willie Colon, right, with his mother, Jean, that he maintains this bond with his old community in the South Bronx. More Photos »

In the mornings, he would leave his fifth-floor apartment in the Melrose Houses on East 156th Street to walk down that road for another day at Cardinal Hayes High School. In the evening, after football or basketball practice, he headed back, his size 17 feet dodging drug paraphernalia, discarded tires and the homeless.

He left the projects in 2001 when he went to Hofstra on Long Island. He left the New York metropolitan area in 2006, when he was drafted as an offensive lineman by Pittsburgh and spent seven seasons with the Steelers. He returned in March, when he joined the Jets, and soon began to exert his influence as a respected veteran in the locker room. Whenever his schedule allows — Fridays or Saturdays after practice, usually — he drives back to visit his mother, his relatives, his longtime family friends.

It is important to Colon, 30, that he maintains this bond with his old community. Early on, he realized that he could not, would not, succumb to the temptations and dangers that ensnared so many of his peers. He is grateful to those who raised him, who helped him leave and forge a better life, but intensely proud of where he grew up.

"I never wanted to feel like a visitor in my home," Colon said. "I never wanted to come back where those ladies on the bench didn't recognize me."

On a recent afternoon, Colon grasped the hand of his mother, Jean Davis, and together they walked along a path in the projects, outside their building. Shouts greeted him as they strolled toward a set of green benches, toward people who knew him, he said, when he was "knee-high from a butterfly."

He dispensed hugs and kisses and posed for cellphone photographs. Colon embraced Pat, the close family friend who lobbied for more outside playing time for him and his younger brother, Antonio. An older man, pretending to throw a football, told Colon that he once tossed four touchdown passes in high school. Colon smiled and said the Jets might need him.

"It's just eerie to come back here sometimes," Colon said, "and realize, you know, the same people are still here."

Davis, 64, has lived in the same apartment since 1952. She and her husband, Willie Sr., who died in 2008, raised three children there, and, despite Colon's coaxing, she does not want to leave — not yet, at least. He worries about her as she does about him, which is why although she attends many of her son's games — the Jets play Sunday at MetLife Stadium against her beloved Steelers — she does not watch them much.

"Too violent," she said.

Most of the storefronts on Courtlandt Avenue have changed. Gone is the bodega where Colon and Antonio would pool their change to buy the pile of penny candies that fueled their all-day basketball binges. The courts were packed in the summer, with boys seeking street cred and drug dealers loitering against the back fence.

The older boys bullied the younger ones, pushing them off the court. The best and toughest players survived. That first time Colon earned his way into a serious pickup game, he called it a rite of passage. He developed his snarl there, diving for loose balls, throwing elbows. Brawls broke out once, twice, three times a day. The rat-tat-tat of gunshots interrupted games but did not end them.

"For most people, that's like a year's worth of excitement," Colon said. "That was a Tuesday for us."

Their apartment looked out on to a park, and from the window, Davis would keep watch. Colon and Antonio, born 15 months apart, had strict orders: never leave without each other. From school. The playground. The pizza shop that sold dollar slices and 50-cent sodas, their lunch on Saturdays.

When gunfire one night disrupted their mission to fetch a Pepsi for their mother, they jumped behind the bushes together. They played on the same lines at Hayes, bumping chests after touchdowns. They were also outside that morning when Davis fell in front of their building.

Colon was 5, maybe 6; he does not recall. He does remember being terrified, and he does remember that it was the same day that his older sister, Joy Smith-Jones, now an assistant principal at Middle School 45 in the Bronx, was to leave for SUNY Fredonia. Davis was ferried to the hospital, where she later had a stroke.

The cause, she learned, after nearly two years of misdiagnoses, was lupus. The disease sapped her strength, ravaging her kidneys and knocking her into a wheelchair for a few months. She left her job, as a drug counselor at St. Luke's-Roosevelt Hospital. She had to relearn how to walk. She also summoned the energy to walk her boys to elementary school, to attend their 8 a.m. games.

"A pit bull in a skirt," Colon called her.

It was crucial for Davis and Willie Sr. that their sons attend Hayes, the all-boys Catholic school that produced Regis Philbin, Martin Scorsese and Don DeLillo, to reinforce the discipline they instilled at home. She paid regular visits to William Lessa, Colon's guidance counselor at Hayes, to ask about grades, SAT dates, financial aid forms.

"There was no way these guys weren't going to go to college and be educated," said Lessa, now the principal at Hayes, as Colon nodded along in his office. "There was no way that they would be anything less than successful."

C. J. O'Neil, the football coach, interjected. "And live."

"And live," Lessa said.

On his first day at Hayes, Colon was ordered to line up outside with his classmates. Anyone who had not shaved was sent home. He stayed. Many of his classmates did not.

More than 500 boys started in his freshman class, he said. About 100 graduated with him, the rest leaving because of behavior problems or tuition costs or other reasons. Those who remained drew closer, Colon said, as he stood beneath the balcony of the Regis Philbin Auditorium, where Mass was said and plays were staged.

"This place would be rocking," Colon said. "Everybody would be singing."

Colon had not visited Hayes in a few years — possibly, he said, since the day after he was drafted. He had not seen the large mural in the basement gym that, inside the "S" of Cardinals, the school's nickname, depicted Steelers quarterback Ben Roethlisberger jumping into his arms during their Super Bowl XLIII victory.

Davis, who had what Colon called a boy-band crush on Franco Harris, was in the stands that night in Tampa, Fla., sitting in the corner of the end zone where Santonio Holmes caught the winning touchdown. She never saw it, she said, because she was reading the Bible.

At Hayes, Colon seemed a bit disoriented after entering Lessa's office.

"This used to be the old detention room, wasn't it?" Colon said. "That's why I keep looking at it."

His transgressions were minor — lateness, mostly. Davis said she would warn him every morning. He would tell her not to worry. Why?

"My feet are big enough," Colon would tell her. "I'm going to get there on time."

And to think, as a boy Colon, called Little Willie, was afraid that he would never grow. Eventually, Davis would tell him.

As a freshman, he stood 5 feet 11 inches and weighed about 250 pounds. One season at fullback — "I was a part-time bus," he said — preceded three on the offensive and defensive lines, where he maximized his size if not colleges' interest in him.

"People don't come in the Bronx to recruit football players," O'Neil said.

At the time, the field at Hayes was as shabby as the road that ran behind it. O'Neil, who was then Colon's position coach, stationed a water cannon in one section to control the dust while players practiced on the dry areas. The field had no lights, but when fall arrived and darkness fell earlier, they benefited from the glow cast by the blimp hovering above playoff games at Yankee Stadium.

On this day, no blimp was overhead, just sunshine. Colon stepped onto the refurbished practice field, with its pristine turf, and watched the linemen thump one another. To Colon, they looked different, smaller — "like two pencils fighting," he said — but still familiar.

He was just like them, a football-loving boy on the edge of manhood, forced to grow up fast. The neighborhood pulled at Colon, and Hayes tugged right back. It was getting late, and Colon had another stop to make. He hugged O'Neil and hopped in his sport utility vehicle. He backed out of the faculty parking lot and shifted into drive, accelerating as he drove up the hill he used to walk, toward his mother, toward his home, again.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/13/sports/football/jets-willie-colon-tends-his-south-bronx-roots.html?pagewanted=2&_r=0&pagewanted=all