...or something like that.  Clever I ain't.  

Big tip of the hat to Leave The Man Alone, who has a great recap (with some nifty photos) on a recent Alonzo Mourning's charity event that put me on to some of his philanthropic ways.  SML likes to do at least one post a week on athletes, and the good they are doing.  We've even gotten our act together and finally created a tag called "Good sh*t athletes do".  The point isn't to glorify athletes, but to balance out all the negative you hear about athletes (which accounts for less than 5% of the athlete population, believe it or not).  This week we'll follow LTMA's lead, and do a post on Zo's contributions.

We should add a disclaimer, namely we don't care much for Alonzo Mourning the player.  He's a Knick villain, the guy who fought Larry Johnson during the playoffs.  They had some historical beef going back to their Charlotte Hornets days.  He's also the guy who sucked in those old NBA Live games, even though LJ was a freaking monster.  If Mourning was any good I might have beat my friend who always used the Warriors (goddamn Chris Mullin was a monster). 

Oh, and, as a reader of Bill Simmons once wrote, "Alonzo Mourning goes through kidneys like P. Diddy through bottles of Cristal at a party".  Not to mention he screwed the Nets to get to the Heat.  That kind of evened out karma-wise for the Nets, as they got Vince Carter in a similar situation with the Raptors.  Still, despite all that, Mourning keeps busy with the charity stuff. 

Alonzo Mourning donated his entire Heat salary ($300,000) in 2004 to organizations that "promote literacy and education for poor youth".  He also donated money to charities that "provide food to poor kidney dialysis patients", a topic near to his heart, of course.  But he first started his foundation (Alonzo Mourning Charities) in 1997, soon after signing that huge $105 million dollar contract with the Heat, and before any of his kidney problems.  The foundation does a lot of work in the Miami/South Florida area, as well as New Jersey (where he played with the Nets for a small bit), and in Virginia, where he is from originally (Chesapeake, VA, per Wikipedia).   His foundation has donated or raised more than $6 million for local charities, including Miami's Children's Home Society, the Overtown Youth Center, and 100 Black Men of South Florida (a mentorship program for kids) over the past 10 years.

A recent story is this press release related to the Summer Groove event Leave The Man Alone posted about.  Alonzo Mourning Charities is teaming up with Spine 3D to do an artist rendering of a "new Youth Center for at-risk children".  Here's what it's suppose to look like, which, like all f*cking architect projects, always looks like some it's on some old George Jetson futuristic sh*t:

Brand new flava in ya ear, indeed.  Seriously, is that a cloaked hovercraft?  For the children to play in, of course.  And is the second floor really suppose to be supported by only two columns?  My bet is that it'll look more like this when it's done:

If you look close enough, you'll see the soccer nets there, in the middle of the desert.  Oh, before we continue, interesting story about that photo - I took that while riding a bus through the western Sahara portion of Morocco.  Pretty quickly, I was half asleep when, in the middle of the desert, I saw it... a freaking basketball court.  Just there, in the middle of nowhere (no buildings around, nothing).  Just two backboards, and a court (with a 2 foot high rock wall around it forming the border).  I tried to take a picture of it, but the bus was moving too quickly.  Needless to say, it was the most Free Darko picture ever, bar none.  This "soccer game in the desert" photo was a lame-ass attempt to recreate the magic of that photo that got away....

The Summer Groove is an event that Zo has done for like 11 years now.  In 2002, the Professional Basketball Writers Association named Zo their J. Walter Kennedy Citizenship Award winner, which honors community service.  Previous winners include Magic Johnson, Isiah Thomas, Doc Rivers, Dr. J, Joe Dumars, Vlade Divac, Dikembe Mutumbo and Chris "Free Throw Clinic" Dudley.  Mourning won this award after he had created "Zo's Fund For Life", another organization that raises money for the Glomerular Institue at Columbia University (a leading center for research on kidney diseases).  Glomeruloscleroscis is the most common cause of kidney disease among African-Americans - Zo raised $2 million dollars for that cause. 

Mourning has also made individual donations to people who cannot afford medicines.

Let's finish this post with a reminder about why you don't screw a team like the Nets over just to get to the Heat... because dem boys might get some paid back:

 

And why, not, another video focused on that last dunk vicious Vince Carter dunk:

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Also on the Network: √ Playing Pepper 2010: Oakland Athletics [C70 At The Bat] √ Book Review: Joe Cronin, A Life In Baseball [C70 At The Bat] √ Happy Birthday, Loge 13 [Loge 13] √ Things to Read: 3/11 [Tremendous Upside Potential] √ The Farm Team to Watch [El Lefty Malo] √ Wounded Birds [C70 At The Bat] √ Julius Peppers Continues Being a Great Quote [Tremendous Upside Potential] √ Things to Read: 3/10 [Tremendous Upside Potential]

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