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The next time somebody goes down the construction zone on Jayhawk Boulevard the wrong way, I'm gonna ram 'em.
Yeah, uh, I just called the number for the escort service in town here, and I was asking them like, uh, what all's involved, and they kind of beat around the bush a little bit. So I was, like, is you-know-what involved? And they were like, 'Oh, ooh, no, oh no, gosh, oh shucks, oh, golly gosh.' I was just wondering, what's the point of having an escort service if 'oh, no, we don't do that?' They're full of crap.
felt shortly after the game, when it learned what had become of its fellow Lion.
This is in response to the idiotic comment about how Bill Self stutters his words: Stuttering is a serious disability made worse by ignorant morons who think it's perfectly OK to mock stutterers. Every word a stutterer speaks requires an act of courage. Ridiculing them is pure cowardice.
felt shortly after the game, when it learned what had become of its fellow Lion.
OK, so I'm on the beach again, for the second week in a row, probably the last month in a row, and I'm drinking a Keystone Light. There's still no party, still no girls. I'm a little upset and I want girls. Where the hell are they?
--felt shortly after the game, when it learned what had become of its fellow Lion.
I voted in April to join USSA, the United States Student Association. The student body passed that referendum. Why is the KU administration and even the Student Senate stopping this membership? Please give us answers.
STINSON'S VIEW
Zach Stinson for The University Daily Kansan
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111 Staffer-Flint
Deceased soccer player lived good life
In the West-African country of Cameroon, national team soccer players are lovingly referred to as the Indomitable Lions.
COMMENTARY
Under a scorching summer sun in Lyon, France, one of these brave lions proved mortal if still indomitable.
Henry C. Jackson
cjackson@kansan.com
During the second half of a Confederations Cup semifinal, Marc Vivien Foe, a 28-year-old often praised for his conditioning, dropped to his knees at center pitch. For six minutes medical staff huddled around the fallen giant, afraid he had swallowed his tongue. Lapsing in and out of consciousness, Foe was carried off the field, leaving his teammates, opponents and fans in a sort of flux. The game went on. Cameroon won, beating Colombia 1-0 and advancing to the tournaments final against France. But within an hour, Foe would be pronounced dead.
It's hard not to imagine the hurt the team
It is a sad, all-too-common story. The athlete dying young has been lamented in poetry and played out in TV-movies for years. Yet each time, the aftertaste is no less bitter, the reality no more fathomable. You give pause, and then you move on. But there's a lesson here that is not at all about sport. It's about a man and his will to succeed and his friends who would not let it die with him.
On a team of likable characters, Foe was among the most beloved Cameroonian players. He started his career in Cameroon's modest professional leagues. Foe battled his way up, playing in France and, most recently, England, rising from humble beginnings to become a respected professional as much for his kind, disarming manner as he was for his quality playing on the soccer field. Lying motionless on the sidelines at Lyon, though, with pale cheeks and lifeless eyes, you could scarcely see any of this.
Yet in this stark reminder of mortality, you couldn't help but learn a lot about bravery, too.
Cameroon debated not playing the final game. But ultimately the Lions decided that if they did not play it would have been akin to leaving Foe in Lyon. He had
earned a trip to the final, just as they had. And they would take him with them.
France was waiting in the final. The French, too, were rocked by Foe's death, like a body blow delivered by some unseen bully. Jaques Santini, France's manager, himself a rugged, show-no-emotion sort, openly wept when he learned of Foe's death. But there was a match to be played.
It was always going to be a struggle and the match — languid, tense and lacking flair — showed just how raw the nerves still were. Though Cameroon played on bravely, France won, scoring the game's only goal minutes into extra time. In the end, though, humanity proved the victor: France captain Marcell Desailly refused to lift the championship trophy without Rigobert Song, his Cameroonian counterpart, and a best-friend of Foe's.
The rest of this tragic story will play out in the medical examiner's office and police reports, as French officials try to find Foe's cause of death. In the meantime it's worth noting just how indomitable these Lions proved to be. They did not collapse beneath the weight of their fallen teammate rather they carried him on with them.
Jackson is a Long Valley, N.J., junior in journalism. He is interning abroad this summer in Brussels, Belgium.