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          The hearings were held behind closed doors despite the attempts by Landis and others to hold them where the media and the public could attend.

          Landis, whose endurance has always served him well, responded: "They will never get to the end of how much I can take. I'm not happy that I'm the person who has to take this, but I would never allow myself to be treated this way and ever give up."

Alan Milstein

Here's a Blog that first appeared over at our friends at

With the United States Open ready to begin this week, the man some Europeans think is the quintessential American is making news across the pond in the birthplace of golf. Donald Trump is in Scotland this week testifying before the equivalent of a zoning board and trying to calm the local furor over his plans to build a monstrous golf resort on a pristine piece of Scottish coastline called Aberdeenshire.

In the typical bravado of The Donald, Trump says he plans to build the “world’s greatest golf course,” two of them actually, together with an eight story hotel, 950 timeshare apartments and 500 houses. This is certainly a bit of hyperbole when many would argue the greatest golf course is further down the coast at St. Andrews. Quite a few have been built since the Old Course was finished in 1764.

The local board which originally reviewed Trump’s proposal rejected it because of the impact on a protected environmental site. The chief solicitor at the time, Martin Ford, was then promptly sacked and replaced with someone more sympathetic to development of the site.

Trump claims his motives are not the almighty dollar but to protect the environment and to cherish the memory of his mother who is of Scottish descent. As the poet once said, “Money doesn’t talk, it swears.”

Golf is under some fire lately by the Greens keepers, and I don’t mean the guys who keep the golf courses in tip top shape through the massive use of irrigated water and insecticides. There are about 35,000 golf courses world wide, half of those in the United States, with hundreds more being built each year. Each course uses on average 312,000 gallons of water a day, which comes to about 2200 gallons of water for each golfer for each round. When fresh water is in such short supply, particularly in states like California where the Open is being played, such consumption is difficult to justify. In addition, golf courses apply an average of more than a thousand pounds of pesticides annually or five times more than is used agriculturally, not to mention the amount of chemical fertilizer and weed killer added to the mix.

If you have ever played a course like St. Andrews, or Pine Valley not too far from my office in New Jersey, where the golf is played on a natural landscape, the experience is almost spiritual and far superior to that played on one of those desert monstrosities kept a sickly bright green. Golf needs to stop adding to the environmental problems facing all of us and our children and find the green dead straight ahead.

Alan Milstein

     Rather than withdraw his ill advised pleading, Clemens and his lawyers have added a new claim in the lawsuit against McNamee, this one is for intentional infliction of emotional distress. In his pleadings, Clemens asserts:

“McNamee's false accusations have accomplished their purpose of destroying Clemens' good reputation and making him the subject of scorn and ridicule throughout Texas.”

    Just Texas?

Alan Milstein

     

      Pistorious, nicknamed “the Bladerunner,”  said after the decision: "I don't think 'really happy' describes it. I'm ecstatic. The battle has been going on for far too long. It is a victory for sports in general. I think this day will go down in history."

     While Judges in sports law cases love to use puns and sports metaphors in their opinions, like Judge Schindlin did in her brilliant district court opinion in Clarett, the CAS panel may have gone a little too far when it wrote: “disability laws only require that an athlete such as Mr. Pistorius be permitted to compete on the same footing as others."

Alan Milstein 

This first appeared at

 Here is an interesting article from the New York Times about O.J. Mayo, the “freshman” basketball talent at the University of Southern California. The article argues against the absurd age eligibility rule of the NBA enacted with an eye and ear toward what David Stern admits was the mutual back scratching interests of the NBA and the NCAA.

The beauty of the Rule, as revealed in the case of Mayo, is that it makes transparent the hypocrisy of big time college basketball. The requirement of one year of college, “one and done,” compels players, often from poor backgrounds, who are otherwise eligible to earn a living doing what they do best, to enroll in an institution of higher learning for one and a half semesters until their team exits the NCAA tournament. No less an ethicist than Bobby Knight has said, the rule is “the worst thing that’s happened to college basketball since I’ve been coaching.”

Unlike the NFL in the Clarett case, the NBA could not with a straight face argue that the purpose of the rule is to further the education of young athletes and to prepare them for life after a pro career. (Not that anyone believed the NFL in Clarett.) Instead, the purpose of the NBA’s rule is strikingly clear: it gives their scouts a full year of adequate competition to be able to judge the potential of the talent working for free on the farm.

Alan Milstein

           

              You might recall this office raised precisely these concerns when arguing that NBA center Eddie Curry could not be compelled by his then employer, the Chicago Bulls, to undergo genetic testing for hypercadiomyopathy. The Bulls ultimately backed down from the demand and traded Curry to the New York Knicks.

              The Senate Bill will be welcome protection to citizens in this brave new world where DNA testing may reveal our propensities, but not our certainties, to contract certain diseases, become addicted to certain behaviors, or engage in certain socially undesirable activities.

Alan Milstein

Here is an excellent article on the absurdity of the current NBA eligibility rule. The author makes the point that it does a disservice to the integrity of the college system to require athletes ready to compete at the next level to spend one year and one year only at an institution of higher learning.

Alan Milstein