Club youth sports teams: Why should anybody other than parents GAF?

I would say there are a lot of commonalities between the Klitschko brothers and Ivan Drago.
They are both upright fighters, born in the Soviet Union, just like Drago.
Same strengths and same vulnerabilities.

 

It amazes me that there was never a Balboa-Creed III. Two hard-fought matches, one a split decision and the other an all-time sports finish (that you KNOW would have been filled with all sorts of controversy and conspiracy theories afterward), and a 1-1 result?
Was an army of brain-damaged chimps in charge of promoting movie boxing in the early 80s? How could there not be a third match between those two? Even if Creed didn't want to, and Mickey didn't want to expose Rocky, somebody needed to wave a huge paycheck in front of both their faces.

And a Lang-Creed match seemed a natural, too, with the way they were going at each other in Rocky III.
I might be giving the writers too much credit here, but I'm guessing Apollo's plan was to use the Drago fight as a tune-up for his showdown with Creed (since he'd presumably been out of action for a while at that point), only it didn't go that way at all. So, alas, we'll never know how that would've turned out.
Lang's character was really a decade ahead of his time. He was Mike Tyson -- a bully who destroyed everything in his path, until someone finally had the balls to stand in there with him. My guess for his career arc is that he was never the same after the second Balboa fight. He lost his aura of invincibility and went down a dark path. He returned to Chicago, got caught up in some shady dealings, lost whatever money he'd made, and was drug-addled and homeless by 1990.
Hell, if you click on the Anything Goes thread right now you can see he's hawking his robe from the second fight in an online auction.

I'm not quite sure Drago ever gets back to the Olympics, though, Starman. He was an international pariah after killing Apollo. He was also using horse steroids. I don't know that the IOC ever lets him compete internationally again. Plus he would've been too old by 1988. He'd already competed in one Olympics (1980), and the Balboa fight was in 1985. So by '88 he'd have been in his late 20s, presumably. He probably would've turned pro between 1985 and '88, had a middling career as a heavyweight without the Soviet training machine behind him, and the events of Rocky IV would be the subject of an engrossing "30 For 30" today as we all say, "Wait, that actually happened!?"
Also, you noted there were off-camera reasons he wasn't in the other movies, but the fact he wasn't even on the heavyweight scene during Tommy Gunn's rise to the top in Rocky V shows he'd dropped out of sight by then.

I'm going to pretend that Tommy Gunn lost the title to Lennox Lewis in his second defense, got AIDS, and was last seen panhandling for change at an Indian casino in Oklahoma.

 

I could see Drago being involved in Toughman or a shadier, more violent offshoot. Possibly early anything-goes UFC.

 

We've had a similar debate at my office this summer. We live in a big enough town that there isn't a complete lack of interesting story ideas, but we're shorthanded (until recently) and we're all trying to cram in vacation, not to mention we're all a little spent ... there's just not the usual gusto this time of year. We'll get there, but we're extremely busy through the end of June. We're exhausted, but slowly coming back around.

My issue with "throwing local" on the cover for the sake of throwing local on the cover is we're doing so not to enhance our section or appease our readers, but to appease our editor and publisher. I don't think wire copy is always evil — certainly, it's no worse than throwing garbage out front simply to have a local byline.

If we cover something where only 100 or 200 people care, sure those 100 or 200 people are potential consumers, but what about the thousands of other folks we're turning off? Who are saying, why the hell do I care about this 12U softball team that went 2-2 at "nationals?" To me, that's spending a dollar to save a dime.

(I fully realize it's up to my coworkers and I to get a little creative; there are interesting local angles to pursue, even during the dog days of July.)

So you intentionally played up an event that, you admit, had little local interest simply to say you had local content? How does that sell papers?

 

To get off the 'Rocky' threadjack -- which was actually getting quite interesting in its own right -- I guess the crux of the issue I was trying to get at is, how local are these 'local' events, when they are no longer focused on community or school sponsorship, but instead on private clubs made up and supported by just a handful of people?

To steal the framing from another sports movie: does anybody give a crap if it's 'Rooster's Barbershop Hotshots' AAU basketball team as opposed to the Huskers of Hickory High? Do they put '800 people in here every Friday night' from November til March?


It always gives me a laugh to see some of these private school/prep school/charter school. juggernauts -- recruited teams busting all the rules and thrown together by street agents or shie-company pimps -- playing in front of 'crowds' of a few dozen.
So they put together the best prep team money can buy, woohoo, but who really gives a crap?

 

At least from my understanding -- and I'm pretty well removed from any of these situations -- any of these club/all-star/whatever teams are about exposure for the players, rather than the result. I'm sure it helps to win, particularly in a tournament format, but I'm guessing that if the power forward gets 35 points and 17 boards in a final his team loses, he's not gonna be hanging his head in the showers.

To my mind, that then changes the equation of whether it warrants coverage, particularly results-oriented coverage. But it does come down to knowing your own market.

Yes, but to the publisher, it's spending a dollar to save five bucks when the wire contract renewal time comes around.

 

Simmons touched on the ridiculousness of the Karate Kid III plot years ago. Kreese's friend was a millionaire businessman, and yet he gets away from it to try to get revenge on a teenager when it was his own friend's fucking fault that he lost his business. What was the logic with that? Plus, as pointed out here, why bother having a female lead with a boyfriend?

One of the dumbest movies ever. Especially after he fought for his life in II, how can you top that?

 

There are other problems with III.
I have spent some time around the martial arts.
And a few respected karate minds have agreed that Daniel's kata routine would not have been acceptable for the match competition of that time in California.

 

Trivia: The guy whose nose Daniel-San breaks in the club is Mitch from "Real Genius."

 

Where it becomes interesting is if you're in a college town and the power forward is rumored to be a recruiting target of State U.

 

And I get that point. But we can go too far in equating attendance with interest. Around here, if we did that, we'd cover nothing but the pro sports teams ... and not much of them outside of the Hershey Bears.

Perhaps some of those people aren't going because they know they're going to get what they need from whatever coverage you provide.

 

No matter what you put in the paper, there will always be a group of people turned off. BREAKING NEWS: People like to complain.

Your job is to report what is going on in sports in your coverage area.

Fan attendance should have no bearing on what to cover. Some events will always draw fewer fans than others, but that doesn't make it less important. Do you give a preseason NFL game more importance than an August MLB game because more fans attended?