Wrapping up the London Olympics

Thank you for not one, but two articles chronicling the U.S. men’s basketball team’s courageous climb to the gold medal. Such an unexpected and hard-fought victory deserves expanded coverage like this.

In a related story, I beat my 3-year-old son at tennis, 6-0,6-0.

Matt Duggan

Long Beach

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Combine the new-look Lakers with the NBA champion Miami Heat and what do you have? A team that would have a hard time getting past Lithuania in the Olympics.

Dave Lazarowitz

La Cañada

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I think Bill Plaschke watched too much rhythmic gymnastics .Somehow he paired LeBron James and Mike Krzyzewski as two of basketball’s most polarizing figures . He justifies categorizing the coach in this manner with some gibberish about “the message of the power of the student athlete “ and ‘Duke’s holier than thou hubris.”

Come again? Krzyzewski runs a clean, consistently successful program and is about as controversial as Mother Teresa.

Bert Bergen

La Cañada

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Did anyone notice when USA players got the gold medal, it was on a purple ribbon ? A good sign of things to come for the Lakers.

Patrick Drohan

Monrovia

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Hail to the American women of the Olympics! No matter the outcome, they were excited to be there. They were exciting to listen to and, most importantly, they were exciting to watch.

Rodney K. Boswell

Thousand Oaks

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The U.S. Olympic team has performed spectacularly well, and as a woman I am especially proud of the success of the women athletes. My 9-year-old grandson and I were in the waiting room at the doctor’s office recently and watched a part of the volleyball match between Brazil and the USA. The people sitting around us chuckled when Jack turned to me and said, “Grandma, don’t you think those ladies’ swimsuits are way too small?”

Ramona Saenz

Alhambra

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While Title IX has helped to develop many collegiate women’s sports programs, it has also caused the breakdown of those same programs for men.

Because of Title IX, hundreds of colleges have had to cut men’s soccer, track and field, volleyball, gymnastics, swimming and diving programs while offering those same sports to women. The elimination of developmental programs for men has resulted in fewer Olympic medals in the very men’s sports that colleges had to eliminate.

Title IX robs many men of opportunities, often due to the quota needed to play football, which ironically is the very sport that subsidizes women’s sports that make little revenue. Consequently, men are being asked to subsidize their own discrimination. Men deserve the same athletic programs as women, especially when men’s sports are bringing in the revenue that pays for them.

Martin Osborne

Los Angeles

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Someone should have told volleyballers Jake Gibb and Sean Rosenthal that there was absolutely no need for wearing baseball caps for a night match, not to mention wearing them backward. Perhaps they may have won had they not been enslaved to such a juvenile, functionless, ridiculous “fashion statement” so common of U.S. high-schoolers, collegians, street thugs and barflies. I’d like to think their Latvian opponents — who looked every bit like real Olympic athletes — perceived their opponents as not much more than two posers more interested in getting back to a London pub and pounding down suds with friends.

Ron Romanosky

Tustin

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Your count of U.S. Olympic medals ignores the fact that we have a far greater population than most. Our athletes got lots of medals, but it works out to about one-third of a medal per million Americans. The athletes from Great Britain got about one medal per million citizens, the Germans about two. Grenada, with a population of just over 100,000, got one gold, which calculates to about 10 per million citizens — about 30 times as good a record as ours.

Our athletes are entitled to celebrate their wins, but they don’t mean that the U.S. is the best at creating world-beating athletes.

Arthur O. Armstrong

Manhattan Beach

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I was in London four years ago during the Beijing Olympics and I was in London for 10 days during this year’s Games. The BBC knows how to air the Games. From the first event until the last, it is broadcast live. You can choose what event you want to see and you can watch it in its entirety. You can watch every jump of track and field, every punch of boxing, every leap of equestrian.

NBC can learn from this and perhaps start listening.

Geno Apicella

Placentia

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First, let me say I love watching sports, and enjoyed playing softball, basketball and volleyball. NBC’s coverage of the Olympic sports was not of the same caliber as the sports shown and the young athletes competing.

Frances Sikorski

Porter Ranch

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I have a solution for David Macaray of Rowland Heights, who complains about the Olympics: [Letters, Aug. 11]: Change the channel!

Barbara Spears

Los Angeles

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Well, the British have outdone themselves! It’s hard to imagine producing a closing ceremony that could compete with the vulgar, farcical opening of the Games, but they did it! Or at least it’s a tossup. Last night’s freak show competed in extravagance, chaos, and brain-dead antics as free of any redeeming social values as its predecessor. Mercifully, they bracketed fine Olympic performances, which will last in memory long after the travesties that opened and closed them have become an embarrassing footnote.

Arthur Hansl

Santa Barbara

Back to the Lakers

To Lakers fans who think the addition of Nash and Howard make them unbeatable, I have two things to say: Albert Pujols andC.J. Wilson.

Bruce N. Miller

Playa del Rey

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Before the parade plans are finalized, I might suggest that the giddy Lakers faithful consider this: Neither Wilt Chamberlain,Kareem Abdul-Jabbar norShaquille O’ Neal brought a championship with them on their arrival in L.A. It took each of their teams a few years before a banner was raised — a luxury this Lakers squad probably does not have.

Bud Chapman

Northridge

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Three words come to mind in reminiscing about what could have been for the new 76ers center, Andrew Bynum: Immature, arrogant, and shortsighted.

This man-child was somehow blinded to the opportunity of potentially becoming the face of arguably one of the world’s most recognized and successful sports franchises.

Instead of embracing it, his immaturity both on and off the court (the [Jose] Bareaincident, handicapped parking violations, etc.), his arrogance (“I’m just gettin’ my Zen on”), and shortsightedness (“There’s a bank in every city”) earned him a one-way ticket out of L.A.

You could have had the keys to the “Magic” kingdom, Andrew, but you threw them away.

Rick Solomon

Lake Balboa

Dog days

Isn’t it about time that we realize that Mike Scioscia is not the person to lead the Angels back to the playoffs? He no longer has [Joe] Maddon or [Ron] Roenicke sitting next to him. He has completely mismanaged a team with playoff talent and a superb pitching staff. He needs to go and take Mike Butcher with him. I understand that Tony La Russa is unemployed.

Jack Price

Newport Beach

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As I watch the Dodgers’ game versus the Pirates, I am puzzled why Luis Cruz is not playing every day. Not only does he play defense well, but he has consistently hit left-handed pitchers, right-handed pitchers and most importantly, he hits with runners in scoring position consistently.

Russell Morgan

Carson

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Once again Eric Sondheimer brings us back to reality with his wonderful article on the lives and accomplishments of three longtime public high school football coaches, Robert Garrett, Paul Knox and Mike Walsh [Aug. 14]. While other such coaches have left the inner cities and the public schools for lucrative positions at private schools and a lot fewer problems, these men remain because they understand the tremendous difference they are making in the lives of the young men they are teaching. In our society we celebrate the college coaches who win the BCS titles, and ignore the men who truly should be honored.

Ralph S. Brax

Lancaster

Kickoff time

Lane Kiffin is driving me nuts, and the football season hasn’t even started. He has the No. 1 college team in the nation, has lined up the best recruiting classes for the next few years. He doesn’t need to apologize, or lie, to anyone about voting USC No. 1 in the preseason poll. And yet, he lies about how he voted, and gets called on it.

This foolishness only reflects poorly on USC, and sends out a signal to others, including NCAA compliance representatives, that he can’t be trusted to tell the truth. Pat Haden and President Max Nikias need to sit this guy down and explain to him that he is no Joe Paterno, that any lying by a head coach is not acceptable Trojans behavior, and that he doesn’t run USC.

Johnathan Colin

Redondo Beach

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While in the information age, after two weeks of fall football camp, we have learned the following concerning UCLA’s new offensive and defensive systems: nothing. Should this college coaching gig not work out for Jim Mora, he can likely count on the welcoming embrace of the CIA.

Wes Wellman

Santa Monica

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From reports out of training camp, the mediocre UCLA football team is really turning things around and getting serious. The coach screaming at players, and even assistants. Teammates scuffling and taunting each other. “Weak” players dropping like flies for IV treatments from triple-digit temperatures and air exceeding pollution standards. You can sense the gladiator mentality building to a crescendo in time for the critically important regular season!

Boy, would John Wooden be impressed.

Brad Kearns

Auburn, Calif.

Tiger who?

I wonder how it can be that in the article about the remarkable round of golf Rory McIlroy shot on Sunday that the last three or four paragraphs of the article were solely focused on Tiger Woods. Is there any way you folks can just let him go and start concentrating on all of the really good young golfers winning matches this year? Tiger’s mystique disappeared several years ago, or perhaps you didn’t notice?

Carol Marshall

Anaheim

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