Even though they’re still in Oakland, the Golden State Warriors have essentially become the de facto NBA team of Silicon Valley. But it won’t stay that way for long, at least if the Sacramento Kings have anything to do with it.
Since being taken over by technology entrepreneur Vivek Ranadivè three years ago, the team has been on a mission to prove they are the most technologically savvy one in the NBA. They’ve done this by holding the NBA’s first startup pitch-off, inviting self-driving cars to chaperone fans from the parking lot to the stadium, and more.
So today, when the team rolled out its new jerseys to match the recent rebranding, it seemed only natural when it also released a VR experience for fans to check out the threads.
The team worked with River Studios to shoot a 360-degree video of Kings player Willie Cauley-Stein showing off the new jerseys. The video, embedded below, gives you a pretty good taste of what it’s like to be behind the scenes at an NBA photo shoot. Make sure you view it in a browser that supports 360-video on YouTube or on your VR device.
Of course, virtual reality is only cool if you have the equipment to experience it. And since there isn’t yet an Oculus or Vive in every home, the team is setting up VR demos at two team stores in Sacramento for fans to strap on a device and experience it themselves.
Hopefully this is a sign that sports teams are starting to warm up to VR, which is the first step in getting professional games streamed in the new medium. Once enough fans see the potential that VR can bring to the game-watching experience, it’s only a matter of time before teams and leagues have to give in and start streaming games in virtual reality.
Just months after a Palm Beach high school’s new football uniforms were nationally derided as the “ugliest” ever, rapper Flo Rida has tapped the guy behind them to commemorate a special anniversary for his alma mater.
Delray Beach-based uniform designer Ryan Boylston of Futuristic Woo is teaming up with the hip-hop chart-topper to create special edition uniforms for the 50th anniversary of Miami Carol City High, which opened in 1963.
Though Boylston’s “kryptonite-dipped” designs for Atlantic High School prompted a flurry of pointed criticism from across the Internet, Flo Rida considered Boylston’s tastes on point for the Chiefs’ 2013 fall season.
“We’re not just out to shock or be cool. Too many schools are using old logos or even logos from college and pro teams,” said Boylston, whose controversial design for Carol City includes feathered helmets and a chief’s face on the front of the team’s pants.
Flo Rida, who graduated Carol City as Tramar Dillard in 1998, is donating the uniforms. Take a look:
The swoosh has just released images of Miami’s new Nike Elite 51 gear, a new system that reportedly reduces weight with “flywire technology” and fits like shrink-wrap over pads with a new four-way stretch fabric. Oh, and it’s also got “sleeve articulation,” whatever that is, and is supposedly harder to tug.
While the new jerseys may be “sweet,” they are also quite pricey: a new, game day jersey
will set fans back $250.
Check out the new Bears uniforms here. What do you think? All photos courtesy of Nike, Inc.
EDITOR’S NOTE: This is the first in a three-part series stemming from our exclusive interview with Jake Plummer about the drug problem in the NFL, a safe alternative to those drugs, and much more.
As he usually is around this time of year, former Denver Broncos quarterback Jake Plummer is on a highway between Colorado and Idaho, heading north. He’s on his way to beautiful Coeur d’Alene, located on the north shore of Lake Coeur d’Alene, in the northern tip of the Idaho panhandle.
It’s a summer trip he’s been taking since he was in the fifth grade. That’s symbolic.
It’s symbolic because Jake Plummer is still Jake Plummer. He’s had a serious hip surgery and deals with sharp aches and pains but the 41-year-old man, who retired nearly a decade ago, has not been compromised by his 10-year career in the NFL.
He’s one of the lucky ones.
Painkiller addiction, depression and chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) are just a few of the diseases and disorders that are devastating the lives of current and former football players. Every year, Plummer watches as his friends, teammates and colleagues fall upon dark times and into deep addictions due to the effects the game has on the mind and the body, on top of the habits they learned in the league.
It hurts him to watch.
“I have a hard time with it because everybody says, ‘Oh, poor NFL millionaires. Oh, you poor people.’ They don’t understand,” he says to BSN Denver from the highway. “Maybe they should have a little more to say about the owners that are billionaires, they’re not millionaires; they’re billionaires.”
“Like Jerry Jones, who says it’s ‘absurd’ that there would be a link between brain trauma, football and CTE,” Plummer adds. “Shame on him for saying that, that billionaire asshole. It’s the worst thing in the world for a guy like that to say. That’s where we’re sitting; grown-ass men are asked to go out there for millions of dollars—which, yeah, it’s a lot of money—bang themselves around and completely fuck their lives over for their 40s and 50s. So yeah, poor football players is what I say. If you’re a grown-ass man, you should be allowed to make grown-ass decisions.”
Grown-ass men being able to make grown-ass decisions is what Plummer believes in.
“They should be able to say, ‘I’m going to have some CBD and puff on this fatty, relax after a football game and take the pain away,'” he says. “Not get tested for it like Josh Gordon, who now can’t play the game that he’s been playing since he was a kid because he smokes marijuana. It didn’t derail him or cause him to underachieve from what I witnessed. He dominated the league for two straight years, and now he’s out of the league because he chose an alternative form of medicine.”
An alternative form of medicine is what it’s all about.
The aforementioned CBD or Cannabidiol is one of 113 cannabinoids or compounds found in cannabis, the plant, of course, known for producing THC, the psychoactive ingredient in marijuana. CBD, though, is non-psychoactive as well as non-addictive and non-toxic. It’s a naturally-occurring anti-inflammatory that has also shown to be effective as an antidepressant, anxiolytic (anti-anxiety) and a neuroprotectant which slows the loss or neurons and protects the brain from traumatic injury and neurodegenerative diseases like CTE.
Plummer takes CBD every day.
Again, though, he’s one of the lucky ones. He can take CBD because he isn’t in the league anymore. He also never developed an addiction to painkillers. CBD contains extremely subtle traces of THC, traces low enough that you would never get high but high enough that an NFL player could be at risk of testing positive for a substance that is still banned by the league.
Current players are left to work with the dangerous substances that are allowed by the league instead, and they can’t afford not to.
“It’s really hard to explain to the outside because it’s like having a job and there’s constantly people coming to take your job,” Plummer explains. “If you’re in pain, and you can’t perform or if you’re not healthy then someone is going to take your job.”
“I know a lot of guys that were using [percosets]and [vicodins]if that’s what they had to do to get through an NFL season,” he adds. “At that point, I wasn’t going to be the guy to say, “Hey man, this stuff is bad for you.” I knew it was; I knew they knew it was but your job is being threatened and you’re going to do whatever it takes. There was, still is and always has been a pretty high use of whatever drug of choice it is to keep you on the field.”
They know it’s bad for you, and while the NFL and NFLPA have come a long way regarding the education of players in terms of what they’re doing to their bodies, it’s not clear if they know exactly how bad for you.
“It’s hard to say that they’re getting information given to them, I don’t know if the head trainer gets up in front of the team and says, ‘Hey, if you get hurt we’re going to be giving you these opioids, and they’re narcotics. It’s basically really nice, really good heroin and we’re going to give it to you so you can go out and actually damage your body even more and we’ll insure you for a few years afterward, but then you’re on your own.'”
Some may know, some may not but either way they take ’em and they take ’em and when they leave the game, they take ’em some more.
“Everybody deals with pain whether you played in the NFL or not, there are a lot of people that are in pain on a daily basis,” Plummer explains. “But the effects that the game has on your body and the effect it has on your brain, we might not be as well suited to deal with that as the rest of normal society. Some of these guys might have some mental problems from banging their heads against each other, and they need that pain to go away. When you’ve been taking these pills for so long, you don’t just take one, you eventually move to two and then three because you don’t feel the same effects of it anymore. That’s the real scary part.”
It turns from taking the pain away so you can play to a full-blown narcotics addiction.
“I’ve known quite a few guys with addictions, they’re not down and out or necessarily on the end of their ropes, but some of them have been,” Plummer says. “Some of them have gone through the rehab process, and they’re doing better now but some of them, to this day, continue to take the pain meds because, to them, it’s what helps dull that pain.”
Now, Plummer is dedicating his days to trying to save his teammates, his friends, and his rivals. Attempting to educate the football community about the uses of CBD as an alternative form of medicine for former players, and ultimately hoping to prove to the league that CBD should be permitted for current players.
Nate Jackson, Jake The Snake’s teammate with the Broncos, introduced him to CBD. He also introduced his quarterback to Ryan Kingsbury and Joel Stanley, two of the many men involved in the Realm of Caring’s “When the Bright Lights Fade” campaign. The group is planning to conduct studies with research universities such as Johns Hopkins in hopes of determining whether CBD can truly help current and former NFL players improve their quality of life and, in some cases, save their lives entirely.
The former pro-bowler is all in.
“This job is amazing, man,” Plummer exclaims vibrantly. “My job is to reach out to old teammates, reconnect and let them know I still care about them, that I still love them. . . I’m excited to reach out to more and more guys, even opponents and all kinds of players that I know are at that point where it’s like, ‘Man, I don’t feel good, and I’d like to feel better.’ All their doctor does for them is give them a laxative or a pill that makes them poop, and they’re taking narcotics so they’ll probably feel better after they poop, but they’re not going to feel better really until they try something different. If CBD is right for them, hopefully they give it a shot, and it’ll do what it’s done for me—help them feel a lot better and just feel good about where they’re at.”
On top of raising money to research the entirety of the effects CBD can have on the adult male When the Bright Lights Fade is hoping to conduct a different study on current players.
“We want to test every single player—if we can—in the NFL this year to see what they supplement,” he says. “What they take, how they feel, how their body reacts, how they sleep, how they recover. Then we can understand how many guys not only smoke marijuana, which is a banned substance—people say 50-percent. How many? I don’t know, but I know it’s out there.”
“I know there are guys that are using CBD in the league, also,” adds Plummer. “There are guys who can think for themselves, who can read something other than an Instagram caption or a tweet. These guys go online, they read, they find something like this, and they feel okay that they aren’t putting their career at risk. They’re taking it already. It just has to be approved, it’s gotta be decriminalized, taken off the banned substance list, which should happen soon, that’ll help out a lot.
It seems obvious.
“I just don’t see anything wrong with allowing grown men to take something that’s going to help them and quite possibly save the game.”
TO BE CONTINUED: In part two of our conversation with Jake Plummer, we’ll address why the league has such a strong stance against marijuana, how long it may take for the league to change, and what Plummer and the rest of the “When the Bright Lights Fade” campaigners are doing to speed up that process.
"Team owner Barron Hilton sponsored a name-the-team contest and promised a trip to Mexico City to the winner in 1960. Gerald Courtney submitted "Chargers" and Hilton reportedly liked the name so much that he didn’t open another letter. There are varying accounts as to why Hilton chose Chargers for his franchise, which spent one year in Los Angeles before relocating to San Diego. According to one story, Hilton liked the name, in part, for its affiliation with his new Carte Blanche credit card. The owner also told reporters that he was fond of the "Charge!" bugle cry played at the Los Angeles Coliseum"
Football helmets has come a long way. From tough durable cow leather to mold injected space age plastics. Yet we still haven't developed head gear that will keep the atlete 100% safe from injury?
Poll proves Redskins "debate" whipped up by perpetually offended media
Kit Daniels - May 19, 2016 Ninety percent of Native Americans aren’t offended by the
Washington Redskins name, underscoring how the “issue” has been hyped up
by both the perpetually offended media and politicians trying to
control free speech.
The Washington Post – a liberal
newspaper – conducted a poll of over 500 Native Americans across the
country and found that the general population is more concerned about
the so-called “racist” Redskins than the group the team is supposedly
offending.
Even more, of the Native Americans who identified as being liberal, 80% of them called the name “inoffensive.”
And,
giving the poll more credibility, a 2014 ESPN poll found that only 23%
of the population supported a name change, and it’s likely only a small
percentage of that 23% were Native American.
"The Washington
Redskins team, our fans and community have always believed our name
represents honor, respect and pride. Today's Washington Post polling
shows Native Americans agree," team owner Dan Snyder said in a
statement. "We are gratified by this overwhelming support from the
Native American community, and the team will proudly carry the Redskins
name."
The mainstream media – and politicians such as President
Obama – artificially fueled the “outrage” over the name to make racism
seem more commonplace than it actually is so the public would be more
likely to believe a lie that someone, such as opposition to the status
quo, is racist.
And it also served as a chilling effect on free
speech because “political correctness” encourages self-censorship by
exploiting the human fear of social rejection.
“When a free
society falls under the sway of these manufactured cascades, many people
stop behaving as free thinkers,” former intelligence insider Stella
Morabito said. “People become less focused on truth and more focused on
their social survival, and once people perceive the PC view as dominant,
many with opposing views remain silent out of fear of social
isolation.”
In other words, people will fear sharing their views
and opinions out of fear they’ll be socially outcast like a leper due to
not being “politically correct.”
This, of course, suppresses civil debate that awakens reason and causes people to challenge the current political system.
