Believe it or not, there’s a Pistons-related story this week even crazier than the FBI’s file on threats against Chuck Daly. The Detroit News’ Terry Foster carefully documented Kwame Brown’s reaction to coach John Kuester’s humbly suggesting “we have to make sure (Brown) continually plays the consistent defense that I want to in the scheme. That is pick-and-roll, high pick-and-roll.”
“Listen, man, I don’t want something to be flared up on what I say,” Brown said. “I will do what the coach says in order to get better, although that is a first because there is one thing I do bring to the table and that is defense. That’s the first time I heard that. It’s the first time a coach said I don’t play defense. But like I said, I will learn to play the defense he wants me to play.”
Instead of turning to the 27-year-old Brown, for help, the Pistons start 35-year-old veteran Ben Wallace at center and have used undersized, 6-7 Jason Maxiell and Chris Wilcox in reserve. Brown is frustrated and some of that might have flared up during a blowout loss to the Pacers. Kuester summoned Brown into the game but didn’t like how long it took him to get off the bench and decided against using him.
“I have played during 20-point blow-outs. I have come in during the last two minutes of a game,” Brown said. “It doesn’t matter. I am paid to play whenever they tell me to. It does not matter to me.”
Brown remains confident. He started for the Lakers in 2006 when Chris Mihm was injured. Brown said he’s one of the top three defensive players in the NBA. That’s why Kuester’s words make him laugh.
“I know I can defend guys in the post,” Brown said. “But like I said, I will try to get better at the defense he wants me to play. Obviously, it’s a different kind of defense that he wants every day. I will get better at that, but the only way to do that is to get out there on the floor and play.”
On balance, I enjoyed the Super Bowl. You know, the football game from a couple days ago, the one with the commercials and that Tom Jones-looking guy (above) singing Who songs at halftime. I enjoyed it because I like NFL football games more than I am frankly comfortable with, and because the game itself was pretty interesting, and because the Saints won. I’m obviously aware that the last fact doesn’t in any way end or mend any of the myriad problems of still-suffering New Orleans itself, or do anything to justify the facile day-late/dollar-short super-sentimentalism of the sport-pundits who pretended that it could. And neither does a satisfying football game offer me much comfort in re: our broaderdiscourse or commodified pleasures or the vexations of being a fan or whatever the hell it is that I’ve been on about the last couple weeks. Of course.
But there are times when it is nice to simply watch oneself some sports. Despite the Super Bowl’s primary purpose as a branding opportunity and a showcase for bleeding-edge misogyno-masochistic advertising innovations and all the issues I have with being addressed as if I am an aggrieved and learning-disabled sentient penis by advertisers — despite all that — I do enjoy a well-played football game. The last three Super Bowls have delivered on that (and of course on all the other stuff), and so I have generally enjoyed them.
And yet of course there’s obviously something pretty rotten about the whole thing. I linked in Sunday’s Daily Fix to Hunter Thompson’s 1973 “Fear and Loathing at the Super Bowl” piece for Rolling Stone, and while I don’t necessarily like Thompson any more now than I ever have (not really that much) the piece is at least pretty funny and interesting in a time-capsule sense. What was fucked about the first post-Watergate Super Bowl — or what we might imagine as that, working off the druggy, malevolent, disaffected-unto-violence vibe of Thompson’s piece — just seems so much more interesting than the manufactured consent and dumb pomp and casual bile and rampant pissy childishness that defines the Super Bowl cultural experience circa now. I mean, this is what the game is, and as long as there are teams I’m at least vaguely interested in playing in the game, it’s what I’m going to watch on that given Sunday. But there remains the sense, despite the fact that I actually do enjoy watching NFL games despite all the above, that this just kind of isn’t for me.
All of which is to say that while I’m not simpatico with the perspective of Seth Colter Walls’ boycott-the-Super-Bowl diatribe at The Awl, I get what it is about the whole experience that bothers him so much. “Right now our TV bipartisanship is a lot like our political bipartisanship,” Walls writes. “It all takes place on the conservatives’ turf. It’s never a massive ‘come together’ television event when the National Book Awards are announced.” He continues:
If you only watch the Super Bowl because everyone else watches it and you feel like you ought to watch it, too, allow me to suggest that, next year, you give it a rest. If your interests have to do with anything other than sports or celebrities, at least know that the same courtesy of mass-interestedness will never be extended in your direction during peak moments of excitement related to whatever it is you care most about.
Meantime, there’s no need to inflate the numbers of Super Bowl watchers–and no urgency to make its ad time all the more lucrative for the proponents of cheap chauvinism to trade in on–unless you really want to be there. Personally, while I’m quite content to pay higher taxes in New York so that the rural dudes I grew up with can have some sort of subsidized health care available to them while they are increasingly out of work, I confess I’m somewhat weary of simultaneously having to listen to cultural products aimed at my male cohort proffer the casual suggestion that I simply must be a sissified queer for paying attention to a girl instead of that game where a bunch of dudes play grab-ass. Just saying.
Because of this, I’ll only ever watch football if I’m in the company of a friend whose excitement can have a cheering effect on me. And so it happens I didn’t watch the Super Bowl yesterday. Not because I’m more interested in “proving a point” than I am in having fun, but because even more than I don’t care about football, I don’t care about supporting the ludicrously out of date notion that this country hangs together in any manner save for geographically.
(universally despised empty-skull. And on the left, Mr. Met)
Do we really need someone representing the city that brought us the ECW Arena, the Wing Bowl and John Sharkey delivering a lecture on intelligent mascot schemes? In Ruben We Trust is stretching the boundaries of credibility in claiming “Tommy Lasorda might be one of 5 people in the world to dislike the (Philly) Phanatic”. And he’s really pushing it by lifting a photograph of Mr. Met that I took off the television. But that’s nothing compared to the following rip-job :
Mr. Met has been voted in the Mascot Hall of Fame and all, but I personally see nothing clever about that baseball-headed moron, and this is coming from someone who appreciates tradition and history. Back in 1960-something, when this jackass was unveiled, Mets fans must have instantly wondered the same thing – Why is a man in a Mets jersey walking around with a baseball the size of the moon on his head? I can’t fathom the amount of stupidity that went into Mr. Met’s creation… Okay, so the Mets play baseball, right? And they need a mascot? I got it! How about we have a man wearing a giant baseball on his head. And it can wear a Mets jersey! You’ve got to be kidding me. That would have been an outstanding idea in a world that strives to be as bland and as uninnovative as possible. And uninnovative is actually a word – I looked it up, bitches.
["The men despise me, they hate me, and I can readily understand why. They hate to see a man in that ring that is ten times better at anything that they do ... regardless of what is, the art of making love, anything."- Classy Freddie Blassie, 1918-2003.]
The above is fall two of Fred Blassie’s March 1962 title bout with Rikidozan, officiated by Johnny “Red Shoes” Duggan and called by KTLA’s inimitable Dick Lane. This is prime West Coast Blassie when the Classy one was the promotion’s star, most hated heel, and champion (including his then trademark biting, with teeth sharpened Ty Cobb-style on a steel file). You can check out the first fall here, and feel the hate and heat Blassie could draw from a hometown LA crowd against a Japanese champ. A Happy birthday goes out to the greatest all-around everything in wrestling: champion, heel, manager, and my favorite interview ever –he woulda been 92 today. You can check out his interview style here (going shoot on Hogan), interviewed as LA champ here, his managerial finesse on display in the Piper’s Pit with Kamala the Ugandan Giant here, managing and promoting Muhammed Ali onThe Tonight Show, discussing his $40,000 bathroom and smashing Iron Shiek action figures with Regis Philbin (as Philbin dares slug the Sheik), a guest shot on The Dick Van Dyke Show, or the above 1962 championship bout from one of his greatest feuds, with Rikidozan. Years later, when Rikidozan was dead (reportedly killed by yakuza gangsters), a Japanese film crew interviewed Blassie in his last years, still working for Vince McMahon. When asked how he recalled Rikidozan, Blassie swore he wasn’t through with the dead man yet and would wrestle him in Hell. The cartoonist Drew Friedman once printed up an insulting postcard of Mr. Blassie. He received a copy of said card in the mail addressed to “Pencil Neck Drew Friedman” with the note … “Keep looking over your shoulder. I’ll tear your heart out through your knee cap. As Ever, Fred Blassie.” Here’s to you, Freddie.
What hath been done may indeed be undone. Unretired backup SS Omar Vizquel has managed to seal a deal to wear the retired-in-1984 uniform number 11 of Hall of Famer Luis Aparicio, the White Sox’ most decorated at the position. Arrangements were made necessary by Vizquel’s traditional #13 having already been taken at the Sox by a shortstop with front office connections. Calls to the Venezuelan consulate to confirm the complicated deal between countrymen was brokered by golf detractor/Presidente Hugo Chavez went unreturned. Helpfully recorded by the NSA, but unreturned.
Vizquel has worn 13, but in Chicago, that number belongs to manager Ozzie Guillen. And he wasn’t about to relinquish it.
“Ever since I signed with the White Sox, the first thing Ozzie Guillen said (was): ‘You can forget about 13, that’s going to be my number,”‘ Vizquel said. “He knows that’s my number and I really would love to wear it. But I think what Ozzie Guillen has done for the Chicago White Sox, winning them a championship and all the years that he played there, No. 13 already has a name. … As long as a Venezuelan is wearing it, I’m pretty happy with it.”
On a lighter note, the article says that Phillips’ program was an AA-style 12-stepper. Anyone who knows about those knows that a key part is making amends. And the amends don’t just have to be things the recovering party did while specifically subject to the addiction in question. Which means that, sooner or later Mets fans, expect Phillips to call you up and apologize to you for the Mo Vaughn, Roberto Alomar, Pedro Astacio, Mike Bordick, Bobby Bonilla, Rickey Henderson, Kenny Rogers, and Jeromy Burnitz deals.
I remain hopeful that someone will give Phillips a second chance in broadcasting. Mostly because his public statements, if not behavior, have provided precious fodder for this blog, but also because I genuinely believe persons suffering from one addiction or another deserve chances to turn their lives around. Y’know, the sort of chance Phillips was so eager to deny Josh Hamilton.
Sure, it was a dramatic moment, but as much as I loved witnessing the fade of Peyton Manning’s Christlike veneer, there’s no excuse for the torture of innocent kiddies. I count not one, but two toddlers being repeatedly being shaken and/or flung skyward. For shame, people of N’awlins (or nearby residents wearing black and gold), for shame.
Citing Bud Selig’s stewardship over MLB’s wild-card, interleague play, economic prosperity and the WBC, the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel’s Tom Haudricourt reports the Brewers will honor their former owner with a statue at Miller Park.
Selig’s statue will join those of Hank Aaron and Robin Yount, which were unveiled on April 5, 2001, the first year of Miller Park’s existence. The first two statues were donated by the Allan H. (Bud) Selig Foundation.
The ceremony to unveil the new statue will be staged on Aug. 24 at 1 p.m. at Miller Park.
The statue will be cast in bronze, measure over seven feet in height not including the base, and is being designed and produced by Brian Maughan, who (along with Douglas Kwart) also created the Yount and Aaron statues.
It makes sense to give Selig a statue at Miller Park, considering it probably would not have been built without his persistence as Brewers owner in the late ’90s. Selig also was responsible for bringing the Brewers to Milwaukee, leading the group that bought the team out of bankruptcy in Seattle in 1970.
Not to be outdone, the Philadelphia Phillies will soon confirm they’ve commissioned a similar edifice paying homage to the individuals most responsible for their recent success. In the future, if you’re meeting friends at CBP, you’ll have the option of getting together in front of the statue of Jeff Wilpon and Omar Minaya.
A little less than two weeks back, Sports On My Mind’s D.K. Wilson castigated those who’d “cheer for a football team owned by a rich, drunken White fool who is quick to break out an umbrella and dance on the graves of the dead who are a by-product of a Crescent City’s sullied gifts to a nation.” He wasn’t specifically singling out Bill Plaschke (above), but it’s nice to imagine otherwise, especially when the LA Times columnist gushes, “America needs the New Orleans Saints to win the Super Bowl.” (”one team’s history can be found in a museum featuring paper bags once worn by embarrassed fans and tear-stained tissues used by happily weeping fans…the other team’s history can be found in a Mayflower moving truck.”)
As our country lurches and heaves through the ankle-deep sand of its economic recovery, it has not helped the national psyche that every time we turn to our national pastimes for assurances that the little guy can still survive, we run smack into Goliath.
The New York Yankees won the World Series. Gee, that was fun. The Lakers won the NBA championship. Loved here, hated everywhere else.
North Carolina won the Final Four. Bear Bryant’s old team won the Bowl Championship Series. Jimmie Johnson won his fourth consecutive NASCAR championship. The Connecticut women’s basketball team has won 61 consecutive games.
And now Peyton Manning is getting ready to win another Super Bowl?
I got up early this morning to file a (blessedly) rare Sunday morning iteration of The Daily Fix, with the editor-dictated focus of Super Bowl-related predictions. Unsurprisingly, I was dealing with some pretty weak sauce. Some of this was doubtless due to the fact that it’s no more fun to write a Super Bowl prediction column (or, worse, a point/counterpoint Why Team Assigned To Me Will Win column) than it is to put together a bloggy compendium of said columns. But there’s also the fact that it’s kind of hard to come up with a fun angle on a game that everyone has already more or less written off as an afterthought. Maybe it won’t be; after all, last year’s Super Bowl was supposed to be, and it wound up being kind of a blast to watch. But it probably doesn’t matter all that much: the national ritual will proceed apace whatever the score, and — and here here is something you already know — the game is kind of secondary to the commerce on NFL Sundays, anyway.
If there were some sort of prop bet out there for how many loathsome commercials will air during the broadcast — how many times one Guy will do something violent or stupid or cruel to another Guy in order to get a Lite beer that tastes like seltzer some wheat farted into; how many truck commercials will trade on gay panic to get you into some steroidally bloated pickup; the shape of the next excretion in GoDaddy’s series of commercials pitched at a dumber-than-average-11-year-old’s idea of sexy — it would certainly make for a more interesting gambling experience than the old Colts (-5). (Also, there may actually be that prop bet out there) Market-related nausea is nothing new to me, both because I’m a delicate flower and because anyone who can tie his/her shoelaces without stopping to read instructions really should feel kind of insulted by Bud Light commercials, but I’m not looking forward to the ritualized commercial-bombing that will arrive with the seven-layer dip this evening.
That may be why I was so weirdly taken with the strange, possibly-an-art-project baseball card auctions being undertaken by Greylurker215 on eBay right now. In these auctions, Greylurker215 — a Philadelphia native whose real name is Rick Jones — is selling common cards from the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s for very low prices that somehow still probably overstate the cards’ actual market value. For instance, and I say this as someone who probably has this card at home and has worked in the baseball card business, there is no actual resale value to the 1994 Tim Costo Leaf card that Jones is selling for 49 cents, plus shipping. And yet, as those of us who have cared about baseball cards at any point in our lives already know, market value is kind of incidental to regular value. If Jones has a goal in mind with this stuff, making that point would seem to be it. Here’s what Jones writes about the Costo card:
Costo played for the Reds briefly in 1992 and for most of the second half of 1993. Once this card was issued, his ML career was over.
In 1994, he played 19 Games for Indianapolis in the Reds system. He played 4 more seasons at the AAA level.
Both the Reds and Indians thought highly enough of Costo to draft him and swap him back-and-forth. I suspect 1994 was a rehab year, fighting back from injury, but that is just a guess.
Fit: Costo is at least Optional to a 1993 Reds set. A quick look suggests to me that he makes the set. My book does not call this a Rookie Card. So, another may exist to cover the set. If not, or if one doesn’t own one, this card will do.
Jones then adds that the scan he uploaded for the auction doesn’t do the card justice. “In person, it is brighter and more attractive than the scanner was able to show.”
And all of Jones’ auctions are like this: little bits of information about the player on the card, a description of the card itself, a note on the card’s notional “fit” (into a team set, into a personal set), and then a little mission statement. Sometimes, Jones’ notes betray a baseball fan’s perspective, as with this Kevin Gross 1988 Topps card (.50, plus shipping) or a unique attentiveness to the card’s photography (as with this 50-cent Rick Schu card from the same set) Sometimes there’s more going on. As part of his “Fun Pairs” auctions, Jones puts together cards of players with something in common — here’s one for Danny Goodwin and Tom Goodwin, no relation — and offers some thoughts. Of the Goodwins card, Jones writes, “We hope the pair will motivate: a.) an artistic display, b.) an expanded set, or c.) a parent/child research project.” And here’s what Jones wrote about a 1974 Topps Greg Luzinski card on sale for 71 cents:
In 1974, Luzinski did not play at all between June 5 and August 26. He still managed to go .272, 7 HR, 48 RBI.
This may have been the turning point in the Philadelphia psyche in the 20th Century. The odd Pennants in 1915 and 1950 notwithstanding, Phillies fans kept their sanity by scoffing at any apparent promise.
When the popular, talented Luzinski went down, that fit our template.
When he returned, it tempted us to start noticing that the Phillies really were pretty good.
I sent Jones a message through eBay to try to figure out what he’s up to with these auctions, and should talk to him more later this week. For now I can tell you that he’s a former Strat-o-Matic champion who teaches “an intergenerational class” on Sunday nights. “I approach the cards as objects of art and transmission of cultural understanding,” Jones says. “They are a means of doing baseball history.”
Considering these auctions’ spot on the wild, windswept no-bidder/no-watcher fringe of the internet’s free market wasteland, there’s something subversive-seeming about Jones’ project, which is at 313 auctions and counting. Challenging the idea of the common card is one thing — kids do that all the time (or at least my friends and I did when I was little), and I certainly aimed to do that when I was writing cards for Topps. But substituting non-market values for these cards’ (wholly absent) actual market value, and doing it on eBay, is both genius and actually kind of touching, if you look at it from the right angle. Today among Sundays, it feels especially welcome. Thanks to Matthew Abrams for furnishing the first link (to the Goodwins pairing, if you were wondering).
With one unidentified Mets official saying of the Bobby Valentine/Steve Phillips power struggle, “we fired the wrong guy”, Fox Sports’ Bob Klapisch takes aim at the current Mets’ manager’s job security, writing, “it wouldn’t take a full-blown dark age to oust Jerry Manuel; one long losing streak in late May would be enough.” (link lifted from Repoz and Baseball Think Factory)
Valentine had a street named after him in Japan. A beer. A hamburger. He was also the first foreign manager to ever prevail in the Japanese World Series. Yet, he’s back in the U.S. after a six-year run in the Far East, the victim of a personality clash with his bosses.
That’s the surcharge of hiring a classic alpha-male. Eventually, inevitably, someone gets intimidated by Valentine’s energy. A Marines official all but said Valentine had out-grown the team. “It was best for both parties, he said, that Valentine move on.
So he’s back on prime-time TV, where the dividend will be two-fold: Valentine’s work in the studio will demonstrate how well he breaks down the game and evaluates talent and otherwise remind viewers why he was able to resurrect the Rangers in the mid ’80s and the Mets in the late ’90s.
His legacy in New York is still strong. In a poll conducted by Metsblog.com, a popular fan site, Valentine received a 97 percent approval rating. The only obstacle is whether Wilpon and Minaya would consider Valentine too overwhelming.
It’s a reasonable question, since Valentine would instantly become the franchise’s most dominant figure. Still, if the Mets don’t act, some other team will.
It’s been a tough weekend for Miami Hurricane alumni-turned-broadcasters. First Michael Irvin files a defamation suit over rape allegations that may or may not have cost him his Dallas radio gig, and now Warren Sapp finds himself benched from his analyst role hours before the Super Bowl. I know these things usually don’t come in 3’s, but if I’m Jimmy Johnson, I’m calling it an early night. From the Miami Herald’s Jose Pagliery :
Sapp partied from late Friday into early Saturday morning at the Shore Club hotel, at 1901 Collins Ave., where police believe he attacked his girlfriend shortly before dawn.
The woman — police did not identify her — called authorities at noon Saturday and reported the alleged attack. Officers arrived at the hotel and met with the former NFL star before taking him to police headquarters, said police spokesman Detective Juan Sanchez.
After detectives questioned Sapp and his girlfriend, police charged Sapp with misdemeanor domestic battery. He was taken to Miami-Dade County jail Saturday evening.
“In light of these circumstances, Warren Sapp will not appear on NFL Network while we review the matter,” the company said in an e-mail to The Miami Herald.
Another Iggles offseason means another round of speculation and debate on whether the Birds move on with Donovan McNabb at the helm, or to hand the reins to Kevin Kolb in the hope that Kolb develops and gels along with the young core of offensive players that emerged in 2009. McNabb has vociferous critics amongst Igglephans, perhaps the most strident being Bernard Hopkins, a man who grew up on Phillys meanest streets, spent his teenage years robbing drug dealers and who honed his craft in a state penitentiary, eventually going on to be considered by many as the worlds best pound-for pound fighter during his prime and whom is regarded by many as the baddest dude in the city of Philadelphia. Be it cold hard facts, bitter lashing over a perceived personal sleight or garnering free publicity for his upcoming fight, The Executioner let loose his latest salvos on the subject of #5. From the Philadelphia Inquirer’s Bob Brookover :
At first, the 45-year-old prize fighter from Philadelphia promoted his long-awaited rematch with 41-year-old Roy Jones Jr. set for April 3 in Las Vegas.
Eventually, at Hopkins’ urging, the subject turned to Eagles quarterback Donovan McNabb, who was not far away on South Beach being interviewed by the NFL Network about tomorrow’s title game between the New Orleans Saints and Indianapolis Colts.
“The people now say, ‘Take him to Arizona, he has a house there,’ ” Hopkins said. “But my thing is, I’ve been telling you this since after the [Eagles' 2005] Super Bowl [loss]. At the end of the day, you have a guy that is a front-runner. You have a guy that doesn’t even give a hint that he’s upset. He smiles. He doesn’t show any type of feeling of ‘Damn, we’re so close and we kicked the bucket.’ “
McNabb could not be reached for comment yesterday, but Rich Burg, a publicist for the Eagles’ quarterback, said Hopkins’ anger stems from a meeting between the two men at the NovaCare Complex earlier in this decade.
Hopkins attended a practice in 2004. Burg said McNabb was unaware Hopkins was visiting until a brief meeting before the practice. Burg said the meeting was too brief for Hopkins, who felt shunned. Burg worked for the Eagles’ media relations department at the time.
“If there is anyone who is craving attention, it’s Bernard Hopkins,” Burg said. “He tries to get it all the time by using Donovan’s name. Donovan has shown his class by ignoring the entire thing.”
Hopkins said if McNabb had better body language during a game that Eagles fans would like him more.
“Fake me out,” Hopkins said. “Throw Gatorade. People would look at that – even if it’s an act – and say to themselves . . . ‘He’s upset because they just blew it just like I’m upset as a fan.’ They would say ‘He relates to the fans.’ He doesn’t relate to the fans by his body language. The fans can’t feel you.”
“When you have that smile and you come out of the tunnel doing the Michael Jackson dance and the score is zero-zero – are you kidding me?” said the oldest man to ever hold a middleweight boxing title. “You’re dancing and doing all this moonwalk and the score is zero-zero and you’re saying, ‘I’m ready.’ I told people McNabb needed to go three years ago and they were, ‘Oh, you’re hard on McNabb.’ Now the same people are saying, ‘Oh, you’re right. He needs to go, he needs to go.’ “
Hopkins finished his rant by accusing McNabb of believing he was above his teammates.
“He’s the guy inside the house who gets the extra food, the extra clothes, he gets treated a little better,” Hopkins said. “Now, the guys that are outside picking up the corn – they get treated a little different outside. But the house all of a sudden got upset, because he’s not playing well and [McNabb] wants to know, ‘Why you all doing this to me? . . . Why are people in personnel talking about me? I’m one of you, right?’ Are you kidding me?
“So he . . . goes on HBO and you talk about racism. He’s going to go and speak about racism, about who has to go above and beyond because they’re African American, than [the] other quarterbacks. . . . He’s right about that. [But he's] the wrong messenger.
“You know when O.J. became black? When he was facing life. That’s when he became black. That’s what these guys do. They get wrapped up in this world. See, Tiger Woods knows he’s black now. All that other bull, ‘I’m half this and I’m half that.’ – all right, Tiger, what color are you now?”
Jonathan “Super” Squibb outlasted the likes of Lights Out Taylor, The Mouth of the South, Obi Wing, Fat Bastard, Oink Oink and the Hungry Hungry Hebe to emerge victorious for the second straight year at WIPs annual Wing Bowl at The Wachovia Center in Philly yesterday
The South Jersey resident downed 238 wings, 3 wings shy of the Wing Bowl record held by Joey Chestnut. Squibbs victory will set up a showdown next year with the 3-time Wing Bowl champion Chestnut when the recent “locals-only” policy will be rescinded.
The Wing Bowls festivities also included guest appearances by Jersey Shores Nicole “Snooki” Polizzi (above) and Susan Finkelstein, who is facing trial for allegedly offering sex for World Series tickets to an undercover police officer.
Dan Gross reports in the Philly Daily News that Ms Polizzi was “brutally booed” upon her entrance and when ridng a mechanical bull. Ms Polizzi was a good sport about it, returning the boos with an extended middle finger and she brushed off the abuse with “Its Philadelphia”.
MLB.com’s Ken Gurnick reported earlier this week that Dodger manager Joe Torre plans to give LF Manny Ramirez some time off this season, an interesting plan considering Manny had a 50 game unpaid vacation in 2009. In the considered view of the LA Times’ Bill Shaikin, this is less about Manny Being Manny and mostly points to Ramirez being unemployed in 2011 (”given the absence of a market for Ramirez over the last two winters as well as the suspension and the decline in his production last season, who’s to say he even gets a contract offer?”)
If Scott Boras has leverage, he does not hesitate to use it. In 2006, J.D. Drew told everyone he planned to return to the Dodgers. Boras showed Drew how there was more money to be made in free agency, then asked the Dodgers how they might sweeten Drew’s contract. So Drew opted out of his contract with the Dodgers and signed with the Boston Red Sox.
Boras had absolutely no leverage with Ramirez, even with the opt-out clause, and he let Ramirez know that. He also let Ramirez know there would be no DH job awaiting him. Boras didn’t even try asking the Dodgers to sweeten the contract, because he and the Dodgers knew there was no chance Ramirez could get anything close to $20 million anywhere else.
Ramirez might not have gotten a contract anywhere else. After he hit .396 in that monster two-month run with the Dodgers in August and September 2008, how many teams besides the Dodgers extended him a contract offer? None.
So how many teams do you think might have extended him a contract offer this winter, with the baggage of his 50-game suspension for violating baseball’s drug policy? None.
No less an authority than the Austin American-Stateman’s Joe Gross recently hailed Expensive Shit as “a wall of mud, complete with two drummers pulling and pushing the beat hither and yon”. We all need more YON in our lives. As for the Air Traffic Controllers, who knows who will be playing w/ myself and J.J. on this occasion? Chances are it will not be Rick Wakeman. But if we buried the hatchet, wouldn’t that be great for everyone?
(above : Expensive Shit at the Mohawk, November 11, 2009)
HoZac recording superstars Rayon Beach blew us away at their last Trailer Space appearance and this is a perfect opportunity for you to embrace the duo before someone on Terminal Boredom declares they were much better before they’d formed or recorded.
Liz Burrito, last seen laying waste to microphones and audience sensibilities at the most recent Dikes Of Holland show, rounds out the portion of the bill we know how to spell correctly.
as always, this event is free, please bring your own beer, and consider throwing some money at our host, Spot Long of Trailer Space (1401-A Rosewood, Austin, TX). Those Jimmy Castor Bunch albums aren’t gonna buy themselves (and if they could, they’d be the smartest records ever pressed).
I’m not a gamer, so I can’t speak to how disturbing it has been to have tried to maintain the simulation experience without Brendan Donnelly, Matt Herges, Ron Mahay, Kevin Millar, and Jamie Walker. But having covered the nuclear labor winter of fifteen years ago, I can’t agree with absolving the real-life guys of the responsibility they have for the choices they made in the spring of 1995.
Hundreds of Millars still said “no.” They may indeed have been punished later for refusing to fill out a uniform during those dark weeks of Replacement Ball. There is nobody to argue for some recognition for their less obvious sacrifices. Millar, Donnelly, and the rest, were – for whatever reason – willing to accept this nightmarish farce, to provide backbone in that parallel universe where 1995 saw the World Champion Dunedin Jays, and NL MVP Jeff Stone of the Phillies, and fireman of the year, 40-year old, five years removed from his last big league pitch, Willie Hernandez of the Yankees.
They made a choice. The punishment was more symbolic than vengeful. Besides, if you feel your video game is incomplete without Brendan Donnelly, you may be a little too into video games.
Steve Phillips, fired late last October from ESPN over an embarrassing extramarital affair with a young staffer at the network, will go public with his story for the first time Monday during a “Today” show interview with Matt Lauer.
Sources said the Phillips interview is expected to air during the early portion of the show.
The “Today” interview comes at a time when Phillips will likely be looking to land another broadcast job in baseball.
Rather than seek a booth job (sorry) with one of MLB’s broadcast partners, I believe Phillips is better off pursuing an acting career, perhaps playing parts almost entirely based on his lothario-reputation. Maybe a Bristol, CT based take on that crummy Showtime series where David Duchovny can’t keep it in his pants.
On Wednesday, July 21, the Brooklyn Cyclones will be hosting “Jersey? Sure!” Night – paying homage to a pop-culture phenomenon and giving away limited-edition collectible jerseys. The high-quality mesh jersey will feature the Cyclones logo on the front and a picture of the team’s mascot, Sandy the Seagull, in a fist-pumping pose on the back, with the words “Jersey? Sure!” at the top. The first 2,500 fans in attendance on July 21st will receive a jersey.
In addition, the Cyclones are offering a try-out to a popular MTV star. WFAN’s Boomer & Carton recently discovered that prior to his newfound celebrity, in an effort to “impress the ladies,” Jersey Shore’s Mike (“The Situation”) Sorrentino falsely told people that he was a back-up third baseman for the Brooklyn Cyclones. The Cyclones are now inviting The Situation to make his dreams come true by taking batting practice and ground ball drills with the team.
Along with promising “Dugout Dance Battles” (”contestants will battle to techno beats on top of the dugouts between innings”), the ‘Clones’ blog claims “we’re working on the jersey design now (think ‘Affliction’meets giant seagull)”.
When Darryl Strawberry is willing to bite the Wilpon-feeding-paws by declaring the Mets’ off-season less than spectacular, that’s a pretty fair sign Omar Minaya’s winter haul of Jason Bay and uh, R.A. Dickey, has left media and fans alike not quite blown away. Murray Chass rang a few unidentified player representatives for their take on the Mets’ tentative approach, and the replies are fairly damning.
More than one agent cited the Mets’ inability to deal with more than one free agent at a time as the primary reason they lost out on free agents. “We’re interested in your guy,” more than one agent recalled the Mets saying, “but we have to deal with this other guy first.”
In one instance, the Mets were a player’s first choice, an agent said, but he was one or two down on the Mets’ pecking order – a phrase used by another agent – and the player and the agent weren’t going to wait for the Mets to deal with them. They went elsewhere.
Another agent said that Omar Minaya, the Mets’ general manager, told him at the winter meetings in December that the Mets would address their catching need in January. “How can they wait and be sure what will be there?” the agent asked.
Another agent called the process frustrating. I have other names for it: foolish, wasteful, destructive, irresponsible, to suggest a few. Surely, a general manager is capable of talking to more than one agent simultaneously, working on parallel tracks, even if one signing depends on another.
Reports and rumors have been almost rampant that Minaya is not running the team’s baseball operations but that Jeff Wilpon, the chief operating officer and son of owner Fred, is. I’d like to believe that because that would explain why the Mets have had such a dreadful winter.
When [Carlos] Beltran had surgery, I thought I had a chance, and maybe they would give me a chance at center,” Martinez told MLB.com. “But they get Gary Matthews Jr., and now I’m not sure where I am. I just can’t give up.”
Martinez has been on the Mets’ horizon for years, signing as a 16-year-old. But a string of injuries derailed his progress, and he’s likely to start this seaon looking at another year in Triple-A.
That scenario has him thinking about moving on from the Mets.
“I know I’m a big league player, and I can perform at a high level,” Martinez said. “It’s in my hands, so I have to keep working hard and maybe earn a spot. Maybe I make it to the big leagues with the Mets or maybe another team, but I know I can do it. I just have to keep working and waiting for my opportunity.”
Weighing in with the arms-spread fight-intros on behalf of England’s Brave John Terry is the Sun, whose exclusive deal with the England captain probably sparked off the whole tedious business by cutting every other red-faced football hack out of the official EBJT picture. Today it counter-attacks by suggesting Wayne Bridge’s ex Vanessa Perroncel has previously tango’d with “five Chelsea stars” [whom we can't name; the fifth one the Sun couldn't even name - Fiver Lawyers], which makes for a convenient “five-a-side”-type gor-blimey sneer. Maneater, you see. Loose cannon. EBJT the victim. This is the case the Sun, and his media crisis manager Phil Hall, are making for their man.
On the opposite side of the table, grunting, swearing and attempting to lever your thumb down like Sly Stallone in Over The Top, we have Max Clifford. Today The Master is insisting his client Perroncel “knew some of the players but she didn’t have affairs with them”, and that in this whole saga she had been “betrayed by someone close to her” and “never wanted this out in public”, the equivalent of Blu-tacking a sign across her nose with the words “NOT A PUBLICITY-SEEKER”.
There they go: lurching and wrestling and Chinese Burning across a self-contained media land of shout-boxes and mud-flings and cash-grabs. Where will the money fall? Who will end up on top? Entirely innocent west London beefcake EBJT? Or The Master and his hurled together betrayed-comely-victim schtick? Who does the Fiver back? If only it was possible to find someone sympathetic in all this, beyond poor old Fabio Capello who, even now, is discussing with his assistant Franco Baldini the essential rules of dating your friend’s ex, like a pair of screechy New York singletons on their fifth Martini in a downtown bar called Fagulous.
“‘Everybody thought we had the greatest offseason in the history of whatever and people in the game were saying we did as good as anybody in improving the team,’ a Royals official said.”
The above quote appeared in a Dick Kaegel puff piece for MLB.com, hailing Dayton Moore and the Kansas Royals on their off-season acquisitions of (seriously) Rick Ankiel, Coco Crisp, Willie Bloomquist, Mike Jacobs and Kyle Farnsworth. And while I’m loathe to bash KC too strongly considering what we’ve witnessed from Omar Minaya this winter, Rany On The Royals’ Rany Jazayerli (above) considers the above statement to be “the single most delusional quote in the history of the franchise” (”I could criticize this quote from now till kingdom come, but really, this quote transcends criticism. It is a masterpiece of hallucinatory thinking. I’m convinced the secret to cold fusion is locked somewhere inside that quote.”)
The only proper response is not criticism – it is mockery. Let’s imagine what this anonymous Royals’ official would have said about some famous historical events:
France, 1940: “Everybody thought we had the greatest series of concrete fortifications and trenches in the history of whatever and generals were saying we did as good as anybody in defending our border.”
The set of Heaven’s Gate, 1980: “Everybody thought we had made the greatest movie in the history of whatever and critics were saying we did as good as anybody in crafting a 3-hour, 39-minute film.”
Massachusetts, 2010: “Everybody thought we had run the greatest campaign in the history of whatever and politicians were saying we did as good as anybody in running for Senate.”
A Planned Parenthood spokesperson told USA Today they won’t be running the above ad during the Super Bowl because “we feel the money is better spent with our affiliates at their health centers.” Indeed, you can buy a lot of bullet-proof vests with 3 million dollars. Since CBS has no problem allowing Focus On The Family to co-opt the nation’s biggest unofficial holiday, hopefully the above clip will be widely post/embedded.
(clockwise : The Muffs, photo taken from Deana Flows, The Spits, TV Ghost, Awesome Color)
….you’ll be thrilled to learn that after last year’s universally beloved CSTB-sanctioned 7 band bash at Beerland, we’re returning to the scene of the crime with yet another star-studded bill. On Wednesday, March 17 from noon onwards, America’s 37th most popular sports blog is presenting The Muffs (first Austin appearance since 2004), The Spits, Woven Bones, Awesome Color, TV Ghost, Cruddy and Denton’s fantastic Uptown Bums. Admission is free and all we ask in return is that you TRY NOT TO BLOCK THE DOORWAY when a certain publisher is carrying large boxes to and from his vehicle. Is that too much to ask? Can you please attempt not to stand right in the fucking path of persons pushing inhumanly heavy objects thru the most narrow of corridors? For once in your lives?
Lord knows I wrote enough, probably more than enough, about self-congratulatory contrarianism the other day. But while Paul Shirley’s great-sucking-abyss of a career-killer about Haiti was probably not worth the words I spilled on it — and anyway, is a week old, and thus occurred in 1972 in Internet Standard Time — and certainly was vacuous, it didn’t take place in a vacuum. (Alternate bon mot: “while it reflected a great emptiness on its author’s part, it didn’t take place in a vacuum”) (you’re welcome).
While Shirley’s spectacularly ill-chosen subject matter (certainly) earned him a pink slip from the WWL, this sort of fake-fearless yeah-I-said-it stuff is not going anywhere — his was the dumbest recent example of what is an ascendant style, and his punishment had more to do with his incredibly poor judgment than boldly telling readers what imaginary elites don’t want them to hear. Thanks to Washington Post columnist Sally Jenkins’ recent piece on the Focus on the Family Super Bowl ad Tim Tebow cut with his mother Pam, we have a new (if slightly less morally egregious) look at the bold new face of Glib Imaginary Journalistic Courage. Sally?
I’ll spit this out quick, before the armies of feminism try to gag me and strap electrodes to my forehead: Tim Tebow is one of the better things to happen to young women in some time. I realize this stance won’t endear me to the “Dwindling Organizations of Ladies in Lockstep,” otherwise known as DOLL, but I’ll try to pick up the shards of my shattered feminist credentials and go on…
I’m pro-choice, and Tebow clearly is not. But based on what I’ve heard in the past week, I’ll take his side against the group-think, elitism and condescension of the “National Organization of Fewer and Fewer Women All The Time.” For one thing, Tebow seems smarter than they do.
Tebow’s 30-second ad hasn’t even run yet, but it already has provoked “The National Organization for Women Who Only Think Like Us” to reveal something important about themselves: They aren’t actually “pro-choice” so much as they are pro-abortion…
Here’s what we do need a lot more of: Tebows. Collegians who are selfless enough to choose not to spend summers poolside, but travel to impoverished countries to dispense medical care to children, as Tebow has every summer of his career. Athletes who believe in something other than themselves, and are willing to put their backbone where their mouth is. Celebrities who are self-possessed and self-controlled enough to use their wattage to advertise commitment over decadence.
Okay. While Jemele Hill makes similar points in a similar way in a similarly themed piece at ESPN — the groups arguing that CBS choosing to air the ad after refusing political ads in the past (and a truly bizarre ad for a gay-dating service this year) are “special interests,” and those dreaded “feminists” are again telling women that they “can’t think for themselves” — she does so far less stridently than does Jenkins. Which is not to say that Hill’s piece isn’t strident: she compares Tebow to Tommie Smith and John Carlos, before applying a ESPN Certified Authentic stamp to the kid’s concussion-prone forehead and peacing-out in classic ESPN style. If Jenkins had left it there herself, she would still have written a forgettable bit of star-stroking boilerplate, but the piece wouldn’t have made much of an impact. And “an impact” was clearly the point, here.
The Drudge Report logs many times more traffic every day than does the Washington Post. Why this is, I don’t know — I’m baffled by the Huffington Post having a readership, but Drudge’s page looks like an Angelfire page created by a 15-year-old in 1995 and features an editorial approach so dependent on innuendo, cheap heat and scurrilousness that it makes the nip-slip-reliant HuffPo look like The Economist. The Post knows this — they have a self-proclaimed Drudge-ologist on staff, so you’d hope so — and have announced in the past that Drudge is in fact their biggest driver of traffic. While Jenkins’ piece didn’t make the cut with Drudge, it did get some play on some high-traffic conservative blogs (here’s one) and a scolding from Media Matters on the left. Which is to say that, on the same bankrupt terms as Shirley’s piece succeeded, Jenkins’ piece also hit its marks — it got people mad, talking, Tweeting, whatever.
What it almost certainly did not make anyone do was think about what the actual controversy here is, or think anything other than “Lady, what are you even talking about?” Leave aside that Jenkins’ piece didn’t address the central controversy surrounding the advertisement — again, that CBS is airing this ad after opting not to air ads in the past that might’ve offended the very people who’d cheer this particular decision — and you’ve got… well, a poorly conceived, point-missing piece, but also a clumsily curmudgeonly pander, something clearly written with links, rather than argumentation, in mind. Jenkins props up some very familiar, very helpless, and very pander-y straw men — those elite feminists and PC commissars, again, telling you what you can’t do, as ever — and then perfunctorily beats the shit out of them. It’s nothing that an army of millionaire conservative pundits — squeakers who simply cannot rest knowing that a guy with a ponytail is teaching economics at a state school somewhere — don’t do every day, but it’s still something to worry about, with the obvious caveat that this is a sportswriter praising a universally acclaimed college football star, and therefore not the sort of thing that really matters very much.
But what matters about it, I think, is how clearly it reflects, again, the way that the incentives of the market are running the wrong way, and way from both quality journalism and thoughtful opinion writing. The Drudge-touted piece Reuters retracted (due to “significant errors of fact”) yesterday about “Obama’s Secret Taxes” is an obvious recent example of this. That is obviously something different than this, but at the most basic dollar-and-cent level a click is a click, and the imperatives of the news economy demand (because they reward) slipshod scandal-manufacture on the news end and this sort of audience-stroking goofery on the pundit side. In the same way that Shirley’s piece elided every ethical or journalistic consideration in favor of glib provocation, Jenkins skips everything interesting about the Tebow story in favor of handing out high fives to everyone brave enough to watch commercials with their brains off. Congratulations, then, on taking a stand against your NOW overlords, readers, and kudos for standing up to those who argue that this issue might be more complex than, as Jenkins writes, “CBS owns its broadcast and can run whatever advertising it wants.” Everyone comes out a winner, here: Jenkins takes a brave stance against powerless “elites” (and a statement of theirs that she never quotes at length), and readers get the comforting news that nothing about this story is really the point except the fact that The PC Libtards Are Trying To Censor Tim Tebow, who it turns out is a pretty stand-up dude (and a virgin, if you hadn’t heard).
All very easy, and all very, very lazy. As Brendan Flynn wrote in the email accompanying the link to Jenkins’ piece, “There are an incredible number of athletes who believe in more than themselves and who devote time, money, and their name to numerous charitable and ideological causes. Perhaps Jenkins doesn’t recognize this, because not all those athletes choose to proclaim it in their eye-black. But of course she does.” For all her unconvincing thundering about elites condescending to You, trying to tell You what to think, Jenkins’ self-laudatory pseudo-courage and transparent pandering to easy biases couldn’t be clearer, or more condescending. Or, unfortunately, make more bottom-line sense.
Motivational speaker Joachim de Posada (above), a relative of Yankees catcher Jorge Posada, put a needle in his face to prove pain is mind over matter. De Posada was going to stick himself with more needles, but was stopped.
“The whole thing was about confidence,” Chris Douglas-Roberts said. “He’s really into hypnosis. He strongly believes in hypnotizing people and stuff like that. He was an interesting guy.”
Assistant coach Del Harris had worked with de Posada before and brought him in to speak to the Nets. Asked what he thought when de Posada put the needle in his face, Devin Harris said, “Ow.”
It’s surprising the Nets allow anything sharp near the players after what they’ve been through this season.
“They’ve taken sharp objects away from me,” Brook Lopez said in jest. “We have to use safety scissors and everything. We’re pretty close to getting helmets, too.”
Jim Valvano used to swear that he once asked a referee if he could draw a technical foul for thinking bad things about him. The ref said, “Of course not.” So Valvano said, “Well, I think you suck.”
The selective targeting of Robinson – who never even uttered a demand — is inappropriate and unwarranted. Basically, the NBA is using the policy to reign in players it regards as troublemakers. An employee should be allowed to express displeasure with his employer. Why should criticism be solely the prerogative of management? (Coaches are free to denigrate their players — how does that not diminish the NBA product?) And why punish a player for “lowering public opinion” when, in virtually all instances, public trade demand gambits backfire and rally fans to a team’s defense.
Agents demand — it’s what they do. Trade demands are a necessary tool for protecting a client’s interest — and for a sports agent, a client’s interests are paramount. To deny an agent or athlete this basic freedom will only chill free speech and encourage further erosion of player rights. The policy should be vigorously challenged by the players union.
To paraphrase the great Valvano: I think the rule sucks.
You may or may not be aware that one of the bigger issues facing evangelical groups like Clarksville, TN’s Xtreme Ministries (”Where Feet, Fist and Faith Collide”) is the ever increasing sissification of the church, but the as the New York Times’ R.M. Schneiderman explains, “subculture has evolved, with Christian mixed martial arts clothing brands like Jesus Didn’t Tap and Christian social networking Web sites like Anointedfighter.com.” Indeed, what could be a better marketing tool for the church than an all-male version of OK Cupid (for guys who like to roll around in cages together)?
The goal, these pastors say, is to inject some machismo into their ministries — and into the image of Jesus — in the hope of making Christianity more appealing. “Compassion and love — we agree with all that stuff, too,” said Brandon Beals, 37, the lead pastor at Canyon Creek Church outside of Seattle. “But what led me to find Christ was that Jesus was a fighter.”
The outreach is part of a larger and more longstanding effort on the part of some ministers who fear that their churches have become too feminized, promoting kindness and compassion at the expense of strength and responsibility.
“The man should be the overall leader of the household,” said Ryan Dobson, 39, a pastor and fan of mixed martial arts who is the son of James C. Dobson, the founder of Focus on the Family, a prominent evangelical group. “We’ve raised a generation of little boys.”
These pastors say the marriage of faith and fighting is intended to promote Christian values, quoting verses like “fight the good fight of faith” from Timothy 6:12. Several put the number of churches taking up mixed martial arts at roughly 700 of an estimated 115,000 white evangelical churches in America.
Nondenominational evangelical churches have a long history of using popular culture — rock music, skateboarding and even yoga — to reach new followers. Yet even among more experimental sects, mixed martial arts has critics.
“What you attract people to Christ with is also what you need to get people to stay,” said Eugene Cho, 39, a pastor at Quest Church, an evangelical congregation in Seattle. “I don’t live for the Jesus who eats red meat, drinks beer and beats on other men.”
On the same day former Suns teammate Casey Jacobsen characterized the former (Self-Proclaimed) No. 1 Point Guard In The NBA to be “one of the most polarizing players I ever played with”, the New York Post’s Justin “Don’t Call Me Vinny” Terranova reports Stephon Marbury had a less than auspicious debut with China’s Shanxi Zhongyu this weekend.
Marbury scored 15 points, had four rebounds, eight assists and four steals, but was criticized for passing up the game-winning shot against Dongguan Marco Polo. With his team trailing 102-101, Marbury dished the ball to another former NBA player, Maurice Taylor, who missed a 3-pointer that would have won the game.
In a Sina.com poll, one of China’s most popular Web sites, 80 percent were unhappy with the Coney Island native’s performance.
“Marbury’s skill was great, but the cooperation of his teammates was bad,” wrote one commenter on Sina.
Another user, “neo_liu”, said “Marbury was not in his usual form…for the last shot, he passed the ball to Taylor with only two seconds left. How could the ball make it in? If it were Kobe, he would have made the shot.”
Yeah, you remember. Anyway, here’s what I thought about it last week.
Actually, wait: what’s below is pretty long, and thus probably needs some contextualizing. I have contributed a couple pieces to the website Paul Shirley started, and which he then just about blew up last week with his spectacularly ill-tempered, ill-informed, ill-advised and generally illness-inducing Haiti-needs-to-get-bootstrappin’ rant.
Obviously the whole deal was kind of a bummer for me — I found out that his piece existed when everyone who has contributed to the site was CC’ed on a “hey, fuck right off” email from a, uh, concerned reader, and have received emails from people I know since then wondering what I was doing anywhere near something like this. I wrote a (predictably lengthy) critique/contextualization of Paul’s piece for the site, which he opted not to run, since he would like (oh, how he would like) to move on and see the story blow over. Which it kind of has, although Deadspin had a post this morning sifting through his old ESPN music stuff for telltale traces of dickery. I don’t know whether I’ll write for his site again, but considering that my name was right there alongside his hatefuck opus, I felt like I should probably respond someplace. You know, to address my imaginary public.
So, then: GC has okayed me posting my long and only tenuously relevant take on Big Shirl’s fearlessly critical anti-analysis of our hemisphere’s unluckiest nation. Here it is, and thanks to GC for letting me drop the word-bomb.
ContraContrarianism
Poor Microsoft Word – crash-prone, counterintuitive, unloved in its ubiquity, and the last to know when new words enter the language. When I type the word “contrarian,” MS Word helpfully underlines it in red. This is its way of telling me that I have just used a word that is not a word – I get the same thing when I write “berrylicious,” for instance. And yet just because it’s not in MS Word doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist – “compassionate libertarianism” and “groundbreaking romantic comedy” aren’t underlined, for instance, and yet both are strictly as notional as a Yeti-led illuminati that meets in Atlantis. Trust this: as surely as certain types of Skittle are indeed berrylicious, contrarian is a word and an actual existing thing. You even know what it means. Or you know it when you see it, at least. It’s all around you.
There are legitimately contrarian people active in our world as well, and doubtless you’re able to identify them as well. They’re the people at the party arguing the badness of something good or the goodness of something bad at someone’s departing back. There are a great many impolite, non-MS-Word-sanctioned names for this particular person, but contrarian is one that limits its critique to that person’s argumentative technique, and which is useful to us here. The idea is this: you take a position that’s in conflict with what’s generally believed to be so – the more glaring and seemingly inarguable the conflict the better – and you argue it.
Will you win this argument? That depends, really, but it’s kind of beside the point: contemporary contrarianism is less about the argument than the arguing. At an abstract level, it’s easy enough to defend this: it can be bracing and helpful to have expectations challenged, and the more thoroughly received the bit of perceived wisdom, the more it could stand a good windmill-tilt. I’m not necessarily making that defense myself – I am, in fact, preparing to do the opposite – but, sure, I see it. And anyway, contrarianism circa now is less about challenging conventional wisdom than it is about contrarianism itself. That is, it’s mostly about its own cheap heat. And therefore, fundamentally, about nothing much at all, defensible or otherwise.
At the websites-trying-to-make-money level, the click-through is the thing – this is as true at loathsome n’ useless hit-beggars as it is at your more respectably contrarian venues (including some that I’ve written for myself), although you’ll generally find more than Drudge-baiting scandal-manufacture/outrage-fuel at your Slates and New Republics. It, by which I sadly mean just about everything we do, is finally a business, so, sure, there’s some calculation in play every time someone sits down to write. And pissing you off is indeed a way to hold your interest. It’s a matter of degrees, but that calculation itself is not as cynical or as irritating as the 300-pages-of-jabs-to-the-ribs school of contrarianism you see in, say, Freakonomics. There, we get Very Provocative Theses of an uninformed (but very well educated) guy concerning how global warming maybe doesn’t exist and anyway could be stopped by a miracle invention because capitalism is magic – for actual example – made by someone who knows nothing of what he writes, and argues solely from a place of abstracted self-amusement. The challenge is the thing; the argument, the actual mustering of something beyond build-to-suit anecdotes, is secondary, if it’s there at all. There is nothing inherently wrong with an intellectual provocation. But there is something wrong – something empty, childish, poor – with doing it just for yuks, or out of some aggrieved boredom or idle ill-informed cruelty or simple wish to argue for arguing’s sake. Which is a long way of bringing me to Paul’s piece about Haiti.
Paul’s piece was obviously provocative, and a look at the number of comments it has drawn – 585 as I write this – would suggest that it succeeded in a certain sense. It got people talking, or typing; made them mad or (ugh) amused them. And yet success on those terms does not – in this case and in general – preclude what is otherwise a stunning and hugely objectionable larger failure. I like Paul, as a person and as a writer, and I can tell you that he’s not an ideologue and certainly not an idiot. But his piece is really one of the nastiest and most vacant and ungenerous pieces of writing I’ve ever read by someone whose work I enjoy. It’s on him to explain himself, if he wants to do so, or to apologize or not apologize – I’ll say that I found the piece embarrassing and embarrassingly wrongheaded, personally. But it’s not without precedent.
The worst type of contrarianism – the contrarianism-of-self-amusement, which is basically a provocation for provocation’s sake, an argument beamed directly from an internal wish that everyone would just stop being so stupid — is all over Paul’s piece, but it’s to be found most clearly right there up top, in the “maybe I’m naughty for even writing this” disclaimer. It’s a sign that what follows isn’t going to be up to the seriousness of the task. If you want to argue that Haiti is not a good investment, I guess you can do so – David Brooks did it in the New York Times, and Anne Appelbaum did it at Slate – but it’s not a coincidence that the two people between those em-dashes are kind of assholes. It’s a callous argument, and one that overlooks a whole world of bloody and very real context about Haiti itself, a nation that was born in debt (and which eventually paid off the equivalent of hundreds of millions of dollars to France, the nation from which it won independence in a national slave revolt) and which has suffered at the hands of a litany of meddling global powers ever since. But it’s an argument you could make, I suppose.
Let’s leave aside the moral ugliness of ignoring the human facts of Haiti’s ruin – its status as the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere (as Paul mentions) is a reflection of a morass of moral and political problems, but it’s also a provocation in its own right. As with New Orleans post-Katrina, Haiti’s circumstances stare America’s fat middle right in the face, demanding a childish culture take a break from trying to figure out what plasma TV would look best on the wall in the bathroom to consider the astonishing fact of extreme poverty’s simultaneous nearness and distance to us here. It is not a rhetorical problem or an abstract thing; it’s a real-life actual-existing problem. The ruin of Haiti, the total system failure that was on display there even before the ground moved beneath it, exists in a different universe than the isn’t-that-interesting whimsy of Freakonomics-style devil’s advocacy.
But Paul’s piece isn’t a sports-media what-if orgy – call them “rosterbations:” those speculative reorderings of a team’s roster through a series of improbable trades and free agent signings, with a big dumb QED on top, that run through the way sports gets talked about online. Paul’s not suggesting ways in which Haiti could lift itself, up, up, up, until it looks (as Brooks half-argues) like Barbados. Paul’s piece reads even nastier and pettier and dumber than that. It reads like he’s annoyed at Haiti for being so incredibly abject. I can’t imagine he really thinks this, but it’s difficult to draw any conclusion after reading the piece.
If the essay is not quite a suggestion that Haiti take a good long look at itself and figure out how or why it got hit by an earthquake that buried 150,000 people alive, it’s not nearly far enough from that to be in a comfortable moral place. It’s not worth going point-by-point on Paul’s essay, which is both terribly callous and not terribly well thought-out. The grisly gist of it, though, is a sort of half-assed crypto-libertarian critique in which Haiti’s failures are Haiti’s fault alone – which is just ignorant – and thus render the outpouring of global money and sympathy somehow co-dependent, the sort of thing that just encourages nations to get as abject as possible. As if the money we donated was arriving on shrink-wrapped pallets and then being distributed to Haiti’s people in great fistfuls destined to be spent on foie gras and blu-ray players. And as if there was no broader moral consideration here at all.
So, I’m scolding, now. (This, incidentally, is another thing that bugs me about contrarianism – its facile rhetorical bravery moves put people defending actual facts in the role of Prof. Nannystate Soy-Latte, leaving the person arguing the Multifariously Untenable Position TBD in the heroic Rugged Individualist position) And Paul’s piece is so self-evidently unserious and obviously under-reasoned that, again, it’s not really worth running down everything that’s objectionable about it. But while it’s an individual failure on his part – and on the part of whichever Flip Collective member edited the piece without telling him to spike the fucking thing or start over – it’s also part of a broader failure of seriousness in the discourse. I suppose the stars-and-sentimentalism of a telethon fits into that failure – that’s an emotional appeal, too – but if both come from a recognizably human place, at least telethon sentimentality reflects the human attributes we’re pleased to see surface in ourselves.
Contrarianism, finally, is about play, both on the part of the writers who construct their mock arguments and the readers so apparently eager to consume those empty intellectual calories. Paul’s failure to consider the earthquake’s repercussions in any morally or intellectually serious way reflects this fundamental unseriousness in all its ugliness. If we’re so hard up to feel something like interest in anything that we need some joker to provoke us with some bullshit riffs about how it maybe isn’t the way it seems, then the realities under the surface noise of the discourse just aren’t hitting home for the writer or the reader. Contrarian arguments – or the basic contrarianism-for-contrarianism’s-sake, the in-your-face stuff which is the dominant contrarian mode at present, and the category in which Paul’s piece best belongs – do not really challenge intellectual complacency so much as they flatter it. In their bloodless, self-amused abstraction, these arguments challenge readers with the prospect that the way you feel about The Thing may not be superior to this other way to feel. They do not, however, suggest or demand or reflect any serious thought about The Thing itself. Which is to say that they’re not really challenging at all, and actually quite easily and quite reasonably dismissed.
“If what JJ Putz says is true, The Mets’ front office is a total disaster,” opines our good friend Tim Cook, so enamored with the former Mariners closer that he took time to forward an interview Putz did last Friday with CSN.com’s Sox Drawer. Signed by the White Sox this off-season, Putz’ remarks about his brief tenure in Flushing will seem awfully familiar to anyone conversant with the club’s recent medical history and/or dealings with the media.
“When the trade went down last year, I never really had a physical with the Mets,” said Putz. “I had the bone spur (in the right elbow). It was discovered the previous year in Seattle, and it never got checked out by any other doctors until I got to spring training, and the spring training physical is kind of a formality. It was bugging me all through April, and in May I got an injection. It just got to the point where I couldn’t pitch. I couldn’t throw strikes, my velocity was way down.”
“Being hurt is never fun, especially when you go to a team like New York, where the expectation level is so high, and you’re not able to do what you know you can do. (The Mets) gave up a lot to get me, so it was disappointing and frustrating.”
Especially when the Mets told Putz not to talk about being hurt with the media.
“I knew that I wasn’t right. I wasn’t healthy. The toughest part was having to face the media and tell them that you feel fine, even though you know there’s something wrong and they don’t want you telling them that you’re banged up.”
By June, Putz was concerned that the pain in his elbow would start affecting his shoulder, so he had surgery to remove the bone spur, and was supposed to miss 10-to-12 weeks. However, when he tried to come back in August, he felt some tightness in his right forearm.
“That’s when (the Mets) told me that I blew my elbow out. That was kind of a shock because I never felt any pain in it.”
Actor/director Mel Gibson is “a born and raised anti-Semite” argues the New York Post’s Phil Mushnick, “What am I supposed to do, look past it, get over it? Enjoy his movies, anyway?” Only if they’re as much fun as “Payback”, Phil.
As TV commercials for Gibson’s new movie appear, and earlier this month, when Gibson appeared on NBC as a presenter of a Golden Globes award — host Ricky Gervais only poked fun at Gibson’s fondness for excessive drinking; Gibson’s anti-Semitism was politely indulged by all.
It got me to thinking about what it would have taken for Gibson to have genuinely suffered the slings, arrows and fortunes of race and/or religion-based hatred.
No wishful thinking here. Just the honest application of what you and I know about TV and modern American life.
Do you think that if Gibson’s father proclaimed South African apartheid and/or American slavery to be exaggerated — no big deals — and if Gibson then delivered a drunken, hate-filled spew about African-Americans, he’d have been invited, two weeks ago, to the podium at the Golden Globes?
If Gibson swapped Jews for blacks, do you suppose that TV networks would have accepted advertising for a new movie starring Mel Gibson?
It’s a legit enough question, though surely there are enough real life examples that Mushnick could’ve cited to disprove his own point. Drunkenly calling Ray Charles “a blind, ignorant nigger” wasn’t enough to keep Elvis Costello — one of the more critically feted musicians of the past half century — out of the Rock & Roll Hall Of Fame. Nor was Michael Richards dropping N-bombs in a semi-crowded theatre the sort of thing that precluded his participation in this past season of “Curb Your Enthusiasm” (which Richard playing himself and the show’s writers openly mocking said incident). One outburst may or may not be enough to sink a career — it all depends on the degree of contrition (Costello) or earning power (Gibson). But one thing is for certain ; whenever a public figure faces censure for racism towards black people, you can count on Phil Mushnick to suggest there’s some kind of crummy double-standard at work. We know plenty about Mel Gibson’s upbringing — what was up with Phil’s?
“I figure there is no opportunity to make fun of the Straight Shooter himself that you aren’t interested in,” guesses Charles Star, forwarding an item from The New York Observer’s John Koblin claiming fewer than 3 dozen persons have have opted to become paid subscribers to Newsday online since the Cablevision-owned paper retreated behind a pay wall. At least Neil Best’s Tweets are still free.
That astoundingly low figure was revealed in a newsroom-wide meeting last week by publisher Terry Jimenez when a reporter asked how many people had signed up for the site. Mr. Jimenez didn’t know the number off the top of his head, so he asked a deputy sitting near him. He replied 35.
Michael Amon, a social services reporter, asked for clarification.
“I heard you say 35 people,” he said, from Newsday’s auditorium in Melville. “Is that number correct?”
Mr. Jimenez nodded.
Of course, there are a few caveats. Anyone who has a newspaper subscription is allowed free access; anyone who has Optimum Cable, which is owned by the Dolans and Cablevision, also gets it free. Newsday representatives claim that 75 percent of Long Island either has a subscription or Optimum Cable.
“We’re the freebie newsletter that comes with your HBO,” sniffed one Newsday reporter.
Mr. Jimenez was in no mood to apologize. “That’s 35 more than I would have thought it would have been,” said Mr. Jimenez to the assembled staff, according to five interviews with Newsday staffer.
It must come as tremendous consolation to Newsday’s staff that their work is so accessible to Long Island residents….and virtually no one else.
Every wonder why the name and likesness of former Red Sox farmhand / position player-turned-reliever Ron Mahay (above) cannot be found in one of the popular video games for the Wii, Xbox or PS3? Me neither, but as Kontaku’s Owen Good explains, Mahay and former other active major leaguers who participated as replacement players during the 2004 work stoppage, are banished from virtual competition by virtue of their non-membership in baseball’s players union.
Brendan Donnelly, Matt Herges, Ron Mahay, Jamie Walker and Kevin Milar, one of the emotional leaders of the 2004 Boston Red Sox, known for his “cowboy up” comment in 2003 that became a rallying cry. All of them are on their real-life teams under different names, uniform numbers and player images in any video game.
Could 2K or SCEA cut individual deals with Donnelly, Millar and the other three to get their authentic names and likeness in a game? I’m not sure what the contracts say, whether they are specifically prohibited from doing so or if there’s some other legal proscription at work here. But even if they could, it simply wouldn’t be worth it to get five journeymen players into a game, considering the antagonism that would cause to an absolutely essential licensing partner in a realistic sports simulation.
That said, the continued banishment of these players reflects poorly on the baseball players’ union. When Donnelly won a World Series ring with the Angels and Millar claimed his with the Red Sox, neither were allowed to appear on licensed memorabilia commemorating the titles. That kind of KGBing of history makes the MLBPA look petty and its posture needlessly punitive.
Excuse me for having to spell this one out for our European readers. Pro Bowl Sunday is a BIG event for Americans. All over the country, families come together for Pro Bowl Parties. Advertisters pay hundreds of dollars to televise commercials featuring their newest products. Each year on Pro Bowl Sunday, battered womens’ shelters report the number of victims admitted to their care decreases by two percent, testament to the calming nature of the contest . If the NBA All-Star Game is, in the words of Michael Wilbon, Black Thanksgiving, then the Pro Bowl is sort of like Yom Kippur for Gambling Degenerates & Football Obsessives of All Races.
In this household, the Pro Bowl’s importance is matched only by that of the NHL Skills Competition (skate-sharpening, carrying Eric Lindros off the ice) and the entire NASCAR calendar. And with that in mind, here is CSTB’s Award Winning Pro Bowl Chili Recipe :
I don’t know how many of you spend your Saturday’s scouring L’equpe for international basketball news, serious props to True Hoop’s Chris Sheridan, who raises the very real possibility the Knicks’ 1999 first round pick Frédéric Weis might make his long-awaited Madison Square Garden debut next June.
Sheridan speculates that France will be Team USA’s opponent at the Garden, thus raising the specre of Weis’ most famous moment on the hardwood, ie., the time he was brutally posterized by Vince Carter in the 2000 Summer Olympics. Though Weis isn’t currently on the ViveMenorca active roster, who amongst us wouldn’t love to see, say, LeBron James, attempt to replicate or better VC’s effort?
Neil Danns scored a pair of goals in Crystal Palace’s 2-0 defeat of Peterborough Saturday, a result that came days after the Eagles were docked 10 points in the Championship standings after falling into administration. The Guardian’s David Lacey considers the greater implications of Palace’s plight, and manages to do so without once calling chairman Simon Jordan (above) the sort of names that shouldn’t be employed in a family blog.
Palace represent the solid middle footballing class that not so long ago formed the backbone of the English leagues. They were never going to be as big as Manchester United but in a good season could live comfortably with Aston Villa. Clubs like Leicester, Southampton, Norwich and Charlton fell into the same category, providing the strength in depth of the top two divisions. In football terms Palace have not been doing badly, nibbling at the fringe of the play-off places with the promise of something better if they could start turning draws into wins. But now they have suffered the statutory 10-point deduction for going into administration and are in a relegation struggle instead.
Administration changes the conventions, including the one that presumes the manager picks the team. When Palace played at Newcastle on Wednesday their best player, Victor Moses, did not appear because it had been decided that he was too valuable an asset to be risked. The manager, Neil Warnock, was able to name only three substitutes. In the depressing circumstances Palace produced a surprisingly spirited performance before losing 2-0.
It is difficult to apply the logic of the balance sheet to a business in which success or failure does not depend on the number of widgets produced in a financial year but on the ability of one set of assorted human beings putting a ball into a net more often than another set while an independent arbiter intervenes from time to time if someone breaks the rules. Weakening a team in order to avoid the possibility of harm coming to a player who is likely to be sold, even though he might just have got them something from the game, is surely pragmatism gone mad.
After eight years playing for the Braves at County Stadium in Milwaukee, she was a fixture at Shea Stadium from 1964 to 1979, performing a repertory that mixed jazz staples like Charlie Parker’s “Scrapple From the Apple” with more conventional fare like “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” and “Meet the Mets.”
Few Mets fans knew that Ms. Jarvis had begun her career as a jazz pianist. Even fewer knew that she had a day job with the Muzak Corporation.
Muzak was synonymous with soothing background sounds piped into elevators when Ms. Jarvis was hired for a clerical job there in 1963, not long after she moved to New York and roughly a year before she joined the Mets. She worked her way up to vice president in charge of programming and recording; when she began supervising sessions, she hired Lionel Hampton, Clark Terry and other jazz musicians. The result was canned music considerably more swinging than the Muzak norm, much of which the musicians, including Ms. Jarvis, composed themselves.
Faith & Fear In Flushing’s Greg Prince paid tribute as well ; “She outlived Shea. She outlived the organ as the prime source of pregame and between-innings entertainment. She lived a very long time and accomplished a great deal as a musician and music executive. She lives on for every Mets fan who ever clapped or tapped along to whatever she played. Jane Jarvis was as much the Mets as anybody or anything else between 1964 and 1979. For those of us enchanted by the Melody Queen of Shea Stadium, she’s always going to be synonymous with some of the best days of our lives.”
As much as we would all prefer on Super Sunday to contemplate – in excruciating detail – the birth canal of Tim Tebow’s mother, and as much as the CBS network would help us in this when not airing moronic entreaties for the jiggliest web hosting company in Arizona, powerhouse feminist and discrimination attorney Gloria Allred has insouciantly put the Tebow family’s claims up on the table and into the stirrups to begin a procedure of her own.
Days after representing Shaq’s girlfriend in a lawsuit concerning his alleged harassment, the plucky counselor has announced she smells something fishy about the Tebow family’s claim that religious bravery on Ma Tebow’s part against the medical establishment is solely to credit for Tim’s existence. For one thing, abortion has been flatly illegal in the country of his birth since 1930. So has the under-center snap, but that’s a different kettle of fish controversy.
In her exclusive interview with RadarOnline.com Allred slams the ad and CBS’s decision to air it, pointing out factual inconsistencies with Pam’s story. One glaring one is the fact that the act of abortion is totally illegal in the majority Catholic country of the Philippines – under all circumstances including rape and incest, and even without a provision in the circumstance that the mother’s life is in danger. The law has been in effect since 1930.
Allred says she believes it an impossible scenario to believe that Philippino doctors would of ever suggested abortion as a viable option for Tebow in the first place. And when you learn that physicians and midwives who perform abortions in the Philippines face six years in prison, and may have their licenses suspended or revoked, and that women who receive abortions – no matter the reason – may be punished with imprisonment for two to six years, it’s easy to see why.
“Tim Redding is one of the worst teammates I’ve ever had,” fumed former Met Mike Bacsik on a Friday afternoon edition of ESPN’s “Baseball Tonight”, denying charges from former Nationals teammate Tim Redding the former had intentionally delivered a big fat meatball to Barry Bonds for the Sultan Of Surly’s 756th career home run. “I was fighting for my baseball life everytime I took the mound,” Bascik insisted to Karl Ravech. “I’d be costing myself a big league job if I was trying to give up runs.” Observing this bizarre pissing match, the San Francisco Chronicle’s Ray Ratto muses, “It is nice to know, though, that the record still matters enough to remain a point of ugly speculation and innuendo well into its third year of existence. In that way, it remains the gift that keeps on giving.”
This extends the number of people taking credit or receiving blame for Bonds 756th home run by one, to Bonds, the Giants’ organization, the sellout crowd at the game, the poeople who built the ballpark, the bat manufacturer, all the employees at BALCO, two pitchers and the Nationals’ organization.
And Bonds, to his great credit, has remained silent on the entire issue because, actually having hit the home run, doesn’t need to say he hit it.
Photo link courtesy Caryn Rose. Surely I’m not the only person who hopes Bruce Dickinson’s airplane has a catcher’s mask painted mask painted on the side.
Baseball / pop culture fans of a certain vintage undoubtedly recall former “SNL” fixture Joe Piscopo’s prominent role in the Amazins’ 1986 cheese classic “Let’s Go Mets” clip. In Thursday’s Trentonian, Piscopo tells the paper’s Chris Melchiorre, “I was never a Mets fan…I only did that video so I could get my kid inside [Shea Stadium] so he could play on the field.” (link courtesy Mets Police)
Piscopo was in Bordentown Tuesday night for Roma Bank’s 90th anniversary banquet, and the Sinatra-impersonating, bodybuilding, ’80s icon set the record straight about his fandom and about sports in his home state.
“I’m a Yankees fan, I always have been,” Piscopo said. “I respect the Jets and the Mets, and that Jets’ loss on Sunday was heartbreaking, but I root for the Yankees and Giants.”
“Years ago when the Yankees won the World Series, I was actually in the parade, I was on one of the floats.” Piscopo said. “And everybody was screaming ‘Hey, Piscopo what are you doing up there? You’re a Mets fan.’ And I kept yelling back, ‘It’s not true, I’m a Yankees fan.’ I grew up a Yankees fan and I’ll always be a Yankees fan.”
The 15-29 Pistons take on Miami later tonight in Auburn Hills, an occasion that has the Detroit News’ Vincent Goodwill warning hometown fans dreaming of a shot at John Wall there’s little to gain in losing on purpose.
The bottom line is this: Tanking doesn’t pay off, especially if a team doesn’t have competent leadership. Yes, once-in-a-lifetime players come through the draft, but there’s a reason those guys come along only twice a decade. What happens when a team tanks to draft Michael Olowokandi or Kwame Brown (above, right)
The Celtics tanked the 1996-97 season in pursuit of Tim Duncan, and with two lottery picks, had the best odds of winning at 36 percent.
They wound up with Chauncey Billups (No. 3) and Ron Mercer (No. 6). Billups was traded midway through his rookie season and didn’t develop into a top-level player until his arrival in Detroit in 2002. Mercer was serviceable, at best.
In the last 10 years, only No. 1 picks LeBron James and Dwight Howard led their team to The Finals, and neither have jewelry to show for it.
When a team gives up on a season, it makes it increasingly difficult to evaluate its players, to see who fits and who should be let go. With a possible labor dispute coming in 2011, many teams will be reluctant to go through a housecleaning.
And who knows? If one of those porous teams makes the playoffs — and makes some noise — general managers might discover they want to add to the roster, not blow it up
I wouldn’t be too worried about the prospect of the 2009-2010 Pistons making the playoffs, much as I’d find it hard to characterize Joe Dumars as a poor GM (the selection of Darko Milicic — unassisted via tanking — aside)
“It’s a feeling of inadequacy that permeates every aspect of your life,” said a former Houston Chronicle beat writer who covered the Twin Towers, Ralph Sampson and Hakeem Olajuwon. “Before I covered the Rockets, my life seemed perfect. I wasn’t rich, but I was married to the love of my life and we were happy.”
The retired scribe says after three or four years covering the Rockets, his wife began complaining he seemed insecure about almost everything.
“I flipped out when we went to her 20-year high school reunion and met her prom date,” the former writer said. “He was the backup center on her high school team. He was 6-6 and maybe 180 pounds, a real bag of bones. You know the type. Probably hung like Secretariat.”
His marriage never recovered. He turned to alcohol. He wasted thousands of dollars on male enhancement supplements. He refused to believe his wife’s kind words of reassurance. Watching sports, particularly basketball, had been the bonding thread in their dating relationship. He demanded his wife never watch another basketball game — pro, college or even high school.
It’s not an uncommon story. Statistics show the divorce rate for NBA writers is nearly triple the divorce rate for NFL writers. It’s not the travel. It’s the wear and tear on the male psyche.
If you’ve ever wondered why Sam Smith no longer writes for a national daily, perhaps Whitlock has the answer.
(New Orleans Saints owner Tom Benson. Not shown : umbrella)
It would take some doing to compete with Greg Oden’s cock pics or Paul Shirley’s act of career suicide for heavy sports blog attention this week, but Sports On My Mind’s D.K. Wilson is fully up to the challenge. To wit, following the Saints earning their first ever conference championship, dwil takes umbrage with “Black people who’ve taken on the characteristics of their oppressors so fully that, like zombies, they believe that the city’s welfare, its psychic and actual health is tied directly to the city’s professional football team landing a berth in Super Bowl XLIV.” OK, that’s Quintron off the hook, then.
The proof lies in the sudden and disgusting proliferation of a Black “Who Dat” nation of quasi-elitist, once-slave journalists and Black professionals and students; photos on social media websites of their alcohol-induced camaraderie abound as they cheer for a football team owned by a rich, drunken White fool who is quick to break out an umbrella and dance on the graves of the dead who are a by-product of a Crescent City’s sullied gifts to a nation – the gifts of deadly racism and of government-organized crime-corporate graft.
The gift of a hurricane meant only for Black people, meant only to drive those Black people from the city forever.
These are the Black people who will cheer for Tom Benson’s New Orleans Saints come Super Bowl Sunday, though a Black man, Jim Caldwell, is the head coach of the Indianapolis Colts. They will cite their hate of Peyton Manning and howl at the very press they yearn to emulate that the press would have us believe Manning is the real head coach of the team. Of course a few of them will write of Caldwell now, but they are the same Black men who also said Caldwell was responsible for cavalierly throwing the “integrity of the game of pro football” into doubt – and they are the same people who fail to comprehend the oxymoronic nature of that statement. They are the same men who fail to comprehend how statements like that and others of a similar nature serve to further fement racist attitudes by White people; how their statements protected the White man who was actually responsible for pulling the Colts starters, general manager, Bill Polian.
Video swiped from Townie News. If I work for Sears’ advertising agency, I’m figuring out a way to pair this guy up with Brett for a Super Bowl commercial.
“He was a part-time freelance contributor. The views he expressed on another site of course do not at all reflect our company’s views on the Haiti relief efforts. He will no longer contribute to ESPN.”
So reads the unattributed statement from ESPN Media Zone. And full credit to the widely-vilified Shirley — it’s awfully difficult to cause the network to disassociate itself nearly this fast from a person who’s kept his pants on.
Former pro hoops journeyman / author Paul Shirley has won considerable acclaim throughout the sports blogosphere for his thoughtful takes on subjects ranging from the plight of NBA 12th men to whether or not Oasis are better than the Beatles (OK, less acclaim for the last one). Today, however, might be the day when much of that goodwill goes straight down the toilet. “I haven’t donated to the Haitian relief effort for the same reason that I don’t give money to homeless men on the street,” argues Shirley. “Very few have said, written, or even intimated the slightest admonishment of Haiti, the country, for putting itself into a position where so many would be killed by an earthquake.”
I don’t mean in any way that the Haitians deserved their collective fate. And I understand that it is difficult to plan for the aftermath of an earthquake. However, it is not outside the realm of imagination to think that the citizens of a country might be able to: A) avoid putting themselves into a situation that might result in such catastrophic loss of life. And B) provide for their own aid, in the event of such a catastrophe.
Imagine that I’m a caveman. Imagine that I’ve chosen to build my house out of balsa wood, and that I’m building it next to a roaring river because I’ve decided it will make harvesting fish that much easier. Then, imagine that my hut is destroyed by a flood.
Imagining what would happen next is easier than imagining me carrying a caveman’s club. If I were lucky enough to survive the roaring waters that took my hut, my tribesmen would say, “Building next to the river was pretty dumb, wasn’t it?.” Or, if I weren’t so lucky, they’d say, “At least we don’t have to worry about that moron anymore.”
Sure, you think, but those are cavemen. We’re more civilized now – we help each other, even when we make mistakes.
True enough. But what about when people repeat their mistakes? And what about when they do things that obviously act against their own self-interests?
I recoil at the notion that I’m SUPPOSED to do something. I would like to help, but only if I feel that my assistance is deserved and justified. If I perceive that I am being told to feel a certain way, and if I can point to a pattern of mistakes made in similar situations, I lose interest.
Later in his essay, Shirley admits, “children cannot very well control their destinies”. The same could be said for parents born into a cycle of poverty.
“I got tired of hearing about all the gambling stuff, and wanted to concentrate on the past,” director Terry Lukemire tells the Cincinnati Enquirer’s John Kiesewetter, explaining the raison d’être behind “4,192 : Crowning Of The Hit King”, a feature-length Pete Rose documentary scheduled for release later this year.
Rose, who turns 69 in April, has done four lengthy on-camera interviews here for the “in his own words” part of the film. Lukemire and his partner Aymie Majerski, 37, pitched the movie to Rose last summer.
Reds announcer Marty Brennaman and “some of baseball’s biggest icons” also will be interviewed for the film, according to the Barking Fish announcement being released Tuesday at the Sundance Film Festival.
Lukemire and Majerski would not say how much Rose was being compensated for his role in the film, or how it will deal with his gambling and his official banishment from Major League Baseball.
“We’re not giving away certain information at this time. If we gave away the house, nobody will want to rent it,” says Majerski by phone from Park City, Utah, where she was attending Sundance.
The New York Post’s venerable “Hoops Du Jour” columnist Peter Vecsey (above) took aim at the Washington Post’s Mike Wise earlier today, accusing the former of tailoring reports of the infamous Gilbert Arenas/Javaris Crittendon locker room pistol exchange to something uncomfortably close to Agent Zero’s preferred version of events. Keep in mind, this comes after Vecsey’s own account has been challenged by Wise. DC Sports Bog’s Dan Steinberg carefully tuned to Wise’s afternoon show on Washington’s 106.7 The FanTuesday and in addition to hearing Vecsey accused of accepting interest free loans from former Nets owner Joe Taub, Wise provided the following rip job (link courtesy Jason Cohen) :
“Peter Vecsey would be a flat-out joke in my business, but he’s not funny. He’s mean-spirited, and he’s just about heartless. I’ll never forget the time I came back from talking to a kid who tried to commit suicide in Dallas after he ingested a bottle of aspirin. Leon Smith was his name, and he never should have come out of high school, and the Mavericks should have had a much better support system for an obviously troubled young man who just happened to have talent. Vecsey made cruel jokes about this kid’s suicide attempt afterward in his column. Now, I don’t care if you slam me or anybody else, but Leon Smith was raised in a foster home called Lydia Children’s Home in Chicago. He was a ward of the state of Illinois due to neglect from his parents when he was 5 years old.”
“When you do something like that, when you make fun of that kid, you’re not just insensitive, you’re a rotten human being. You’re a lousy person. You don’t deserve the respect of a punk-ass kid at the Rucker League thinking, ‘Man, Peter Vecsey used to be something, didn’t he?’ You old bitter man. You make me sick.”
Steinberg goes on to quote a number of Vecsey’s gags at Smith’s expense (eg. “Leon Smith’s Nets tryout could be viewed as another suicide attempt”), and while he deserves full credit for spending serious Google time today, I’m curious if Wise tried to publicly defend Smith from such abuse when it was happening a decade ago. Rather than, y’know, the same day he was publicly named as Gilbert Arenas’ best buddy.
