The LuLac Edition #2805, December 29th, 2014

TOP 5 SPORTS STORIES

(in countdown form) 

 

5. DEREK JETER RETIRES

After twenty years of championships, thrills, five world championships and a career marked by no controversy on the field New York Yankees Short stop Derek Jeter retired. Jeter finishes the catreer with a .310 Batting Average, 3,465 hits, 260 Home Runs and 1311 Runs Batted in. Jeter is a lock for the Hall of Fame.

4. DONALD STERLING LOSES THE CLIPPERS

In April 2014, Sterling was banned from the NBA for life and fined $2.5 million by the league after private recordings of him making racist comments were made public.[3] When asked about the recordings in an interview with Anderson Cooper, Sterling stated "I'm not a racist," and also told Cooper that he had made a "terrible mistake" and was "here to apologize."[4] In May, Sterling's wife, Shelly, reached an agreement to sell the Clippers for $2 billion to Steve Ballmer, which Sterling has contested in court. The NBA Board of Governors approved the sale of the Clippers to Ballmer on August 12, 2014.

3. AMERICA SCORES WELL IN WORLD CUP

Soccer has long been America’s unloved team sport. “In America, soccer is something you pick your 10-year-old daughter up from,” the comedian John Oliver said, rightly, on his HBO show last month. But this summer, that changed. One of the most oft-quoted stats of the stats-heavy tournament was that USA’s match against Portugal was the most watched soccer game in US history, with an estimated 24.7m viewers of ESPN and its Spanish-language broadcast network Univision.
More Americans bought tickets for the World Cup than that of any other nation outside Brazil.

2. LEBRON. RETURNS TO CLEVELAND

Lebron James returned to Cleveland and the people there were very happy. James left the Miami Heat after taking them to four NBC Finals and winning two. His start in Cleveland has been rocky and how he performs “back home” will be one of the top sports stories of 2015.

1. THE OFF FIELD VIOLENCE OF THE NFL

The $9 billion industry that U.S. fans devour on a weekly basis ran into a public-relations crisis, the likes of which nobody could have predicted, and not even the league’s supposedly well-oiled spin machine could repair. The real victims weren’t the league or the players, whose punishment often felt arbitrary, but rather, the women and children these players were supposed to care for and protect. This year alone there have been 135 reported incidents of abuse of significant others by NFL players.