Kevin Blackistone

The World Cup is fixed.

But in the outrage from the illegal handball seen 'round the world (but not by the referees) Wednesday by France's superstar Thierry Henry, which earned the French team a plane ride to South Africa over Ireland for next summer's global soccer scrum, the small fact about the manner in which world soccer's governing body has arranged its grand quadrennial championship has been overlooked.

That is understandable given the implications of the missed call for as blatant a touching of the ball with a hand -- the ultimate no-no in futbol -- that has been witnessed in a major soccer match in sometime. Thierry, who all of us on this side of the pond know from his Gillette commercials with Tiger Woods and Roger Federer, not only touched the ball once with his hand, but twice.

In July 1965, my father composed and mailed a letter (a letter was this thing you wrote longhand, or at a typewriter, which was this thing ... oh, never mind) to Edward Bennett Williams, who at the time was acting president of the football team for which dad owned season tickets, the Washington Redskins. Dad wanted to bring to the franchise's attention what he felt was a slight to its black ticket-holders.

Dad and other black ticket-holders were offended by the inclusion of "Dixie" in the Redskins band's game-day repertoire, as well as the flying of the Confederate flag in the stands.

"Let's make the Negro patron feel really welcome in 1965 and not accept his $6.00 admission fee and then publicly insult him," Dad wrote.

Williams replied later that month: "I agree with your suggestion and will see that it is carried out."

This is the way I spent the intermission of last season's Super Bowl at Raymond James Stadium in Tampa, when Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band, and what seemed like a million people, poured on to the football field to perform a medley of The Boss' best hits: I departed my press seat in the stands with some friends to seek a cup of coffee on the concourse and wound up missing the entire halftime show.

I couldn't have cared less, either.

I don't go to concerts to see football games and I don't go to football games to see concerts.

So it was greatly underwhelming to me on Thursday when Jimmy Traina of Sports Illustrated's Hot Clicks, citing unnamed sources, reported that what's left of The Who -- the Beatles' era rock band that lots of rock heads will tell you is the greatest rock band ever -- had been chosen to play at this season's Super Bowl halftime show in Miami.

It struck me as anything but surprising, too.

Madieu Williams hasn't changed his surname to reflect his Minnesota Vikings jersey number, 20. He doesn't star in a reality television show circling around his life. He doesn't even tweet.

He is the anti-Ochocinco, the mirror opposite of T.O., the quietude in the cacophonous world of the modern professional athlete.

But Williams' refreshing persona is not what is most remarkable about him. Instead, it is that he is a pro athlete -- no, make that member of the human race rather than sell him so short -- who actually has something worth sharing about his life, from which all of us can learn and our neighbors can prosper, and chooses not to pound his chest to the world.

To be sure, this is how Williams spent the Vikings' bye week last week:

PHILADELPHIA -- In the wee hours of Monday morning, with a blue Cowboys' baseball cap pulled down snug on his noggin and a short sleeve T-shirt worn over a long sleeve one, Tony Romo looked like the boyish character we've come to see him as. He looked more like some guy who just finished playing a pick-up football game between fraternities rather than the multimillion dollar NFL quarterback for Jerry Jones' Cowboys that he's been for a number of years now.

But when Romo started to talk about what he'd accomplished, he sounded wise beyond his appearance.

"If you keep the mental discipline ..." Romo explained in a quite deliberate and thoughtful delivery, "keep getting better, keep learning what they're doing ... you can do some good things."

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Tom Cable has been, pun intended, cooling off this week. He shouldn't have been no matter this being his Raiders' bye week on the NFL schedule.

Instead, Cable should've been in New York at a particular building on Park Avenue sweating in the most magnificent office in the joint -- the NFL commissioner's suite. He should've been there explaining to NFL boss Roger Goodell exactly how his assistant Randy Hanson wound up with a broken jaw after a team meeting last August that a district attorney concluded was the result of "some type of physical contact that happened between Mr. Cable and Mr. Hanson when [Hanson] went down." And he should've been explaining how police wound up asking him about a woman who wound up being thrown out of his home last January.

Among the things the folks at Human Rights Watch keep track of are places on the globe that employ particularly cruel forms of punishment, like, for example, eye gouging. The good news is that for quite some time the list of governments employing such barbarism has been shortening. In fact, it was down to just two, Iran and Saudi Arabia.

Monday, however, that list apparently expanded with an announcement from the Florida Gators' football office that suggested it appeared to embrace the barbaric penalty.

What else can be drawn from Gators coach Urban Meyer's disciplining of his linebacker Brandon Spikes for gouging the eyes of Georgia running back Washaun Ealey in the third quarter of last Saturday's game?

BALTIMORE -- Bill Parcells is famous for assessing his team and the other guy's with a simple review of wins and losses, and an even simpler summation from that evidence: "You are what you are."

But even Parcells would've been hard-pressed to so easily judge undefeated Denver and .500 Baltimore before they met Sunday at Baltimore's M&T Bank Stadium. And he certainly couldn't have done so after their contest was complete.

To be sure, the Ravens proved what many of us suspected after they beat down the Broncos 30-7. The Broncos weren't as good as their spotless record through their first six games suggested, and the Ravens were a lot better than their lukewarm 3-3 mark alluded.

Sylvester Stallone has Hollywood all a twitter (the old school use of the word) right now over an action flick he is producing called The Expendables. Reason is, it stars a bunch of guys' guys including Jason Statham, Jet Li, Julia Roberts' brother Eric and Mickey Rourke, who back in the day I thought Bruce Willis was a cheap imitation of. The movie is about a team of mercenaries who go to some South American country to overthrow a dictator.

Silly me. I heard the title and thought it was about NFL players and wondered who was going to play Kansas City running back Larry Johnson (he was still employed by K.C. as I wrote this) or exiled NFL cornerback Adam "Pacman" Jones.

After all, other than the food service workers chronicled by investigative writer Eric Schlosser in his best-selling 2002 tome Fast Food Nation, what laborers are more expendable than highly compensated NFL players?

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Barack Obama and his family probably didn't meet the longtime neighbor of their new crib at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. William "Doubting" Thomas was in the hospital by the time the Obamas moved in Jan. 20. He died three days later from pulmonary disease. He was just 61.

But Thomas lived by day across the street from the White House -- 1601 Pennsylvania Avenue, or Lafayette Square -- under a makeshift shell of umbrellas and tarps. He decorated his digs with signs that read "Wanted: Wisdom and Honesty," "Ban All Nuclear Weapons or Have a Nice Doomsday," and "Live By the Bomb, Die By the Bomb."

Thomas (his real name was William Thomas Hallenback Jr.) was a protester. And the White House, our government -- ever respectful of our First Amendment right to free speech -- allowed Thomas to protest pretty much uninhibited from the moment he first plopped down in Lafayette Square on June 3, 1981, until he was hospitalized for the last time almost 28 years later.

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