Missouri Puts School Nickname on Arena (Reason:Wal-Mart Heiress' Cheating)

[Khephra]

COLUMBIA, Mo. -- The University of Missouri renamed its new sports arena Friday after the original namesake, a 22-year-old Wal-Mart heiress, was accused of cheating her way through another college.

The university's governing Board of Curators voted without dissent to use the name Mizzou Arena instead of Paige Sports Arena during a three-minute conference call.

"All of us are happy with Mizzou," Elson Floyd, president of the four-campus university system, said of the common nickname for the school. "How can you go wrong when you talk about Mizzou?"

Elizabeth Paige Laurie's billionaire parents agreed earlier this week to give up their naming rights to the $75 million basketball venue, which was built with a $25 million donation from the Lauries and opened three weeks ago.

http://www.newsday.com/news/nationworld/nation/wire/sns-ap-missouri-sports-arena,0,6311502.story?coll=sns-ap-nation-headlines

[Ima]

1. Good for them.

[Pithlet]

2. Paige may feel relieved

I think it would be the ultimate embarrassment as a young adult to have a stadium at a college you don't even attend named after you because mommy and daddy bought the naming rights. I would have been humiliated, personally.

[Toucano]

3. Oh, the humiliation!

"Please, Mater and Pater! Don't embarrass me with your money!"

You're funny!

[Pithlet]

5. Money is not an embarrassment

Having a stadium named after you because your parents bought the rights is. I'm not speaking from experience, mind you. It just seems like those books that parents buy for their kids with their names inserted in, magnified a thousand times. When you're an adult, things like that just don't fly, no matter what socio-economic level you're on.

[doni_georgia]

6. Agreed

The book thing is right on. Given enough arenas and enough money, every type-A pit-bull my-kids-first-and-the-hell-with-eveyone-else's parent would be jockeying for little Cole and Mikaila to have their own personally-named brawling-atheletes' emporium.
What's hilarious to me is that while shopping at a secondhand bookstore one day, I came across a book based on an Irish folktale whose heroine has the same (and relatively uncommon) name as my own daughter. Totally unexpected, that one was, and definitely not by any design. The book's title is the same as the girl's name, or I might not have noticed it.
The whole experience left me, paradoxically, with a much greater contempt for the book-name-dropping practice in general and the parents who indulge in it in particular. Wish I'd dreamed that idea up myself, if only for the joy of taking unreasonable sums of money from slavering, eager-to-be-fleeced people who generally are not only idiots but pushy, inconsiderate idiots at that, and who are busily working to populate the earth with more of their ilk.
Sorry if that's harsh - I know not all are like that - but when you deal with a lot of parents you come to realize how many of them are vomit-inducing self-promoters of their kids as an extension of themselves. I pity those kids not only for their parents but for what those parents are trying to make them into.

Mac in Ga.

[TheWraith]

4. The rich rarely have such humility and sense. NT

[davidinalameda]

7. yet another reason not to shop at wal-mart

this is just tacky

[w4rma]

8. I see one of the future owners of Wal-mart will not be any more ethical

than the current ones are.