Bad bosses are a fact of life in just about any line of work, but the difference between the Blimpie manager who keeps giving you shit because you don’t want to wear those dorky plastic gloves and, say, Donald Sterling is more than a question of magnitude. For one thing, you really should wear those gloves, it’s gross — that’s why no one goes to Blimpie. For another, though, the NBA’s most nightmarish owners — Sterling, Michael Heisley, James Dolan, the sentient and bigoted boiled ham that is Clay Bennett and Bruce Ratner, the upward-failing ex-owner and destroyer of the New Jersey Nets — seem, on balance, to be worse dudes than the benighted middle manager types who do most of the nation’s ball-busting.
Which isn’t to say that those benighted middle managers might not become the oleaginous parody of Los Angeles excess that Donald Sterling is, if they had the opportunity and bankroll. It’s just that the worst NBA owners, who have been granted the opportunity to commit macro-scale crimes against decency by their position and power, consistently make those choices — they’re small-minded small-town bigots that lie to cities and steal their teams or monsters of world-historical vainglory and idiocy; they preside over vast slumlord empires and engage in sexual harassment as a matter of course; they tell shameless fibs in advancing wholly fraudulent real estate projects (before selling their teams to guys who do business with dictators) and bellow their own venal ignorance without fear of comeuppance or embarrassment or anything else. This is in part because billionaires (buckle up) have it pretty good when it comes to comeuppance in America circa now. But it’s also because the people we’re talking about are assholes.
How does this manifest itself on the teams they own? It depends. Clay Bennett shows all appearances of being a pretty terrible guy, but he has given his savvy GM a lot of leeway to build a team that is disarmingly/alarmingly likable. The Grizzlies are weird, and entirely too dependent on Zach Randolph for anyone’s comfort, but the ultra-maligned Chris Wallace has quietly put together a pretty decent and likable-enough team, Z-Bo aside. But the human pollution that is James Dolan, Bruce Ratner and Donald Sterling seems to have had some serious downstream effects on their organizations, creating NBA Superfund sites where there should be valuable and competitive franchises. Because the Clippers have a super-talented team — a half-decade of high lottery picks will do that — there’s some hope, there, even with Sterling’s cologne-smelling skeeve-cloud blotting out the sun. The Nets, on the other hand, seem likably to be cleaning up the ethical and organizational mess Ratner created for years to come. (The Knicks are exhausting, and I’m going to sit that one out)
I’ve written a lot, here and elsewhere, about Brett Yormark, the poisonous but apparently untouchable anti-genius behind the Nets’ noxious rebranding during the Ratner era. Cynical, self-amused and prickly by turn, Yormark is first and foremost pretty bad at his job — the Nets are unlovable and largely unloved, and look likely to once again rank among the NBA’s worst teams after winning just 12 games last year. The last point, you might argue, isn’t so much Yormark’s fault as it was that of Rod Thorn, the team’s GM during the era in which the Nets furiously stripped assets and salary, attempted to leverage the useless sub-Radmanovic forward Yi Jianlin into a greater presence in the Chinese marketplace, and managed to hemorrhage money all the while. Thorn can’t be blamed for the Yi deal — he never evinced any real excitement about swapping Richard Jefferson for Bobby Simmons’ crummy contract and Yi’s defective Yi — but the buck has to stop somewhere in the vicinity of his office, you’d think.
It might just be a case of a veteran NBA writer sticking up for a universally respected NBA personality, but something Peter Vecsey wrote earlier this week would suggest that Yormark might actually deserve some blame for this as well. In what might be the least surprising bit of news to emerge during the offseason, Vecsey writes that Yormark (above, far right) took it upon himself to antagonize, alienate and undermine Thorn in a public gaslighting campaign of a full-spectrum dickiness that’s downright Dolan-ian.
Yormark had gotten down on Thorn down the stretch, feeling he’d gotten lazy and done a poor job. Though unable to talk Bruce Ratner into firing him (the master plan was to rehire friend John Calipari and re-position him on the sidelines with complete power regarding personnel), Brett had no problem undermining Rod.
There was persistent friction between the two executives. “Yormark was Ratner’s go-to guy for everything,” said someone in the know. “They’d speak 30 times a day. Whenever Thorn wanted to do something of substance he’d reach out to Ratner who’d immediately run it by Yormark.”
According to past and present team employees, regardless whether or not Yormark endorsed Thorn’s idea, a proposed trade, signing, whatever, was soon in the newspapers and/or on the air. “Brett is the Nets’ chief leak,” maintains one and all.
“I don’t deny my dislike for the guy,” Thorn admitted last Friday when asked by phone about their contentious relationship. “But he’s not the reason I left.”
And where was the owner while his two highest-paid non-players were locked in team-destroying combat? Probably in China, where the reliably pelf-chasing Ratner has been trying to take advantage of a little-publicized bit of immigration law in an attempt to, as the Atlantic Yards Report’s Norman Oder writes, find “498 Chinese millionaires, to supply $249 million in low-cost financing for the [Atlantic Yards arena] project.” And why, the since-departed Yi notwithstanding, would these millionaires put up all that money? “In exchange for creating ten direct or indirect jobs or retaining ten direct ones–a formulation that offers enormous wiggle room–the investors would get permanent residency for themselves and their families, a chance to live anywhere in America, and an opportunity to get kids educated in the American system.”
It’s not necessarily surprising that I am a week late on the news that Slovenian ultra-endurance cyclist Jure Robic was killed — on his bike, aptly enough, after being hit by a car. It’s not surprising because I’m years late on knowing that Robic even existed. Which, in this case, was my loss. Robic, whom The Independent’s Simon Usborne described as “an insane man you probably haven™t heard of but who was, by many accounts, the world™s greatest endurance athlete,” sounds like about as strange and about as fascinating a competitor as anyone in any sport, anywhere.
Robic was crazy in a way that transcended even the you-must-be-crazy-to-do-this baseline for ultra-endurance athletes. That probably helped him push his body to the mind-boggling limits required by his sport — for instance, by riding enough miles every year to circumnavigate the globe — but it also meant that he essentially exerted himself into actual, frightening, very literal insanity with jarring regularity. Robic was the subject of a terrific 2006 profile/think piece on the limits of the human body, by Daniel Coyle in the much-missed New York Times sports magazine Play. It will almost certainly be the most interesting thing you read about sports today:
Rajko Petek, a 35-year-old fellow soldier and friend who is on Robic™s support crew, says: ˜˜What Jure does is frightening. Sometimes during races he gets off his bike and walks toward us in the follow car, very angry.™™
What do you do then?
Petek glances carefully at Robic, standing a few yards off. ˜˜We lock the doors,™™ he whispers.
When he overhears, Robic heartily dismisses their unease. ˜˜They are joking!™™ he shouts. ˜˜Joking!™™ But in quieter moments, he acknowledges their concern, even empathizes with it ” though he™s quick to assert that nothing can be done to fix the problem. Robic seems to regard his racetime bouts with mental instability as one might regard a beloved but unruly pet: awkward and embarrassing at times, but impossible to live without. ˜˜During race, I am going crazy, definitely,™™ he says, smiling in bemused despair. ˜˜I cannot explain why is that, but it is true.™™
The craziness is methodical, however, and Robic and his crew know its pattern by heart. Around Day 2 of a typical weeklong race, his speech goes staccato. By Day 3, he is belligerent and sometimes paranoid. His short-term memory vanishes, and he weeps uncontrollably. The last days are marked by hallucinations: bears, wolves and aliens prowl the roadside; asphalt cracks rearrange themselves into coded messages. Occasionally, Robic leaps from his bike to square off with shadowy figures that turn out to be mailboxes. In a 2004 race, he turned to see himself pursued by a howling band of black-bearded men on horseback. ˜˜Mujahedeen, shooting at me,™™ he explains. ˜˜So I ride faster.™™
For Cal Ripken Jr., retirement isn’t all about being rumored to be a Republican candidate for Senate every few. That’s a part of it, of course, but entrepreneurship is a part of it, too. To wit, from what is basically just a press release that appeared in the Baltimore Sun:
Cal Ripken Jr. is teaming with Long Valley, N.J.-based Florio Sports LLC to sell a beef jerky snack, the sports firm announced Wednesday… The snack, which is made from “lean American beef,” according to a news release, will debut at the National Association of Convenience Stores trade show in Atlanta from Tuesday through Friday.
Beef jerky is as American as apple pie, obviously, so seemingly all in good, protein-packed fun. Except that when you visit the promotional site for the food it all goes to hell. First of all, it’s called Ripken Power Shred, which sounds like a non-FDA-approved weightlifting supplement. Second of all, and I can’t emphasize enough just how much this should’ve been first of all, it’s apparently chaw-themed beef. So it looks like chewing tobacco and comes in a little Skoal-ian can, but tastes like liquid smoke or chemical teriyaki and is made of animal. By this point in my life, I know that I will probably never be a vegetarian, but whimsical convenience meats like this — which came from a living thing just as surely as does your grass-fed steak — are a huge bum-out for me. To be fair, though, the writing on the Ripken Power Shred website actually made me feel worse:
Beef Jerky has been a fan-favorite for centuries. Steeped in tradition, people have always loved this compact, savory snack. Well, we’ve just made it even better! Super moist, protein-rich Ripken Power Shred„¢ bursts with intense flavor and, unlike other brands, will melt in your mouth and keep you wanting more. The game has changed. Stay in it!
Good! (Not good!) But let me give it a little punch-up, free of charge: Since the dawn of time, Beef Jerky (Note: Capital Letters) has been a fan-favorite for centuries(Note: Be more specific!), with pre-Columbian baseball fans especially fond of the evaporated meat straps. Steeped in tradition, people have always loved this compact(Note: clearer!) People who are steeped in tradition have always loved this compact, savory snackportable meat item. Well, we’ve just made it even better! Super moist, protein-rich Ripken Power Shred„¢ bursts with intense flavor and, unlike other brands, will melt in your mouth and keep you wanting more. The game that is jerkied meat has changed. Stay in it!
“Stay in the game when you’re 40 years old and have a .637 OPS” would also work for a kicker, but I thought they did okay at the end. If the folks at Ripken Novelty Meats LLP are looking for someone to write them some website content and add some SEO kick, my rates are reasonable. Also, I’m qualified to write in that sector because, until Brendan Flynn sent me this link a few minutes ago, I wasn’t a vegetarian.
… Then today is shaping up as a really excellent day for you. But while the (high) literary quality of Foley’s paean to d. original Joanna Newsom won’t be a surprise to anyone familiar with Foley’s super-readable memoirs, it’s still somewhat surprising to see the artist formerly known as Mankind opening up about his deep and abiding affection for Amos’s work in Slate. The essay, which was adapted from Foley’s (fourth!) upcoming memoir, is longer than the average pro wrestler’s tribute to weird chanteuses, but I can vouch for its worth as someone who doesn’t really care much about either wrestling or Ms. Amos. On sheer improbability alone, Foley’s piece is a winner.
It wasn’t until a year and a half later, on a tour of Japan, that Tori Amos and “Winter” started playing a role in my wrestling career. I had just left Ted Turner’s World Championship Wrestling, a bold move that had not been particularly popular with my wife. We’d just had our second child, and leaving a job with a guaranteed six-figure income (low six, but still six) might not have been the greatest example of responsible parenthood. This seemed especially true during my first tour for IWA Japan, a small promotion with a heavy emphasis on wild matches: barbed wire, fire, thumbtacks, and blood”lots of blood.
…I was terrified. This is a normal human response to the very abnormal prospect of being dropped head first, neck first, and, yes, even balls first on jagged metal barbs. How exactly does a gentle, caring man (me) transform himself into a willing participant in such a barbaric spectacle? I needed to find some kind of inspiration in a hurry.
I looked out the dressing room door and saw the Japanese preliminary wrestlers taking down the ropes, beginning the process of putting the barbed wire around the ring. The wire they used was the real stuff: cold and uncaring, capable of tearing flesh in a hurry. I knew I had about 30 minutes before the wiring process was completed”a half-hour to undergo a drastic mental transformation. I took out my battered Sony Walkman and, after great deliberation, bypassed the obvious hard-rock selections. Finding solitude in a far corner of the frigid backstage area, I saw a cloud of my own breath as I pressed the play button. “Snow can wait, I forgot my mittens/ Wipe my nose, get my new boots on.”
…And then I realize I’m going to be all right. Head first, neck first, balls first”it really doesn’t matter. By the fourth listen, I know I’m going to tear that place apart.
I imagine that I speak for most of CSTB’s readership when I say that I am greatly looking forward to The Iron Sheik’s take on Ani DiFranco.
(if they wanna get nitpicky about it, we gave them Chrissie Hynde and Rich Hall, too)
I don’t get a lot of emails from readers of the Wall Street Journal’s Daily Fix — the freelance gig at which I write in my indoor voice about the sports stories of the day and, when possible, also camel racing. (It was possible today) I get some, generally positive but occasionally trollish and almost all of them finding a way to work some negative comment about Obama into the text. But given the decent-sized readership there, I wouldn’t say I get a lot of correspondence.
So it was sort of strange when, about an hour ago, I started getting a ton of emails through the Daily Fix address on a topic I obliquely touched on a couple days ago — how much English soccer fans just effing hate the EPL’s ultra-leveraged American team-owners. (I linked to this article by Brian Phillips in Slate, which is an enjoyable read even if you’ve been following GC’s coverage of this trend for the last few years)
The first email was impassioned and featured some experimental punctuation, but did at least earn some points for the flattering — if flagrantly erroneous — salutation “Dear USA Media Executive/Outlet” and the first line, “We gave you THE BEATLES and this is how you repay us?” The second email was the same. And the third and fourth and so on and on. Some included added commentary, all of it on-message, but most just read exactly like this:
Dear USA Media Executive/Outlet
*We gave you THE BEATLES and this is how you repay us?*
What happened to the *™Special Relationship™ *between the US and the UK?
Are you aware of how *Tom Hicks* is driving our beloved *Liverpool Football Club *into the ground?
How would you like it if a British œbusinessman came over to the USA and destroyed the New York Yankees. Or the LA Lakers. Or the Washington
Redskins?
Well, we are living Wayne Huizenga and the Florida Marlins all over again!
Please Google *Tom Hicks + Liverpool* to see what an embarrassment he isto the USA.
We would be grateful if you could help us by reporting our story in order that me might persuade Wall Street NOT to lend him the money he is currently trying to raise, to drive our football team into even more debt and despair.
Sorry about the mass email approach but we have tried everything else, and we feel like we are at the end of the road.
Thanks in anticipation
I’ve received 20 of these emails over the last hour or so. None of which will do anything to make me a USA Media Executive, but did at least make me feel faintly big-time over that period. Among the other recipients of the non-BCC’ed email — most of them sports columnists at the Dallas Morning News, New York Times and the Wall Street Journal — were CNBC’s resident anti-expert Larry Kudlow and notorious anti-billionaire type Sean Hannity. I don’t know if this semi-spam campaign against the (totally odious) Hicks will have any impact on his attempt to refinance LFC, but it should at least have some impact on Sean Hannity. Because if I don’t sign him up for a bunch of goth_talk listservs and novelty-item mailing lists, some other recipient of this email surely will. I’m looking at you, Richard Sandomir of the New York Times. (I will not do this, of course, and you shouldn’t, either) (Sandomir, follow your heart)
I’ve emailed a couple of the senders to see how this campaign came to be, and I’ll post a selection of their responses here, if and when I get them.
I burned a lot of pixels a few months back puzzling over the adulation that greeted the stateside arrival of shady Russian oligarch turned Avery Johnson-hiring, Travis Outlaw-overpaying shady Russian oligarch Mikhail Prokhorov. I did this because I’m a serial pixel-burner, and because I am always willing to dump a bunch of prose on the topic of my relationship with the Nets. But Prokhorov and the reaction he evoked is stranger to me than the usual wealth-stroking/luxury-ogling response you expect from places like the New York Post (or, with longer words, the New York Times).
That’s because Prokhorov (above, left) is a different type of dodgeball billionaire than we’re used to — a creepy Chamber of Commerce glad-hander like Clay Bennett is just a different animal. Dan Gilbert breaks out the childish, comic sans outrage; Prokhorov cuts business deals with nation-destroying despots and obstructs justice and rips off his investors. His is not a Sunday Styles piece, it’s a can-you-believe-shit-in-other-countries story from the middle of the news section.
Except, of course, that it’s not. Prokhorov is proof that nothing — certainly not an abject lack of knowledge or interest in basketball — can disqualify someone from owning a NBA team except for a lack of ready funds. But he’s also proof that our broader and ever-more-baffling national cultural hard-on for the super-rich has now lasted more than six hours, and that we should definitely contact a physician. It’s baffling both because our revered domestic Lords of Capital kneecapped our economy with their abject avarice and fraudulent genius, but also because, at a personal level, there’s not a whole lot to like about paranoid, entitled plutocrats like the Koch brothers or dodgy, SkiDoo-jockey playboys like Prokhorov. Yes, it might be nice to have a yacht of one’s own or whatever, but a creep is a creep, whatever the contents of said creep’s bank account. Given that Prokhorov has shown no real aptitude for anything except spending his sketchily-obtained gains in cartoonish ways, there’s not seemingly a whole lot to admire, there.
Which isn’t to say the guy isn’t great copy while proving (and re-proving) all the above. From throwing money at the goofiest of causes — I’m talking about signing Jordan Farmar, here — to, um, continuing to throw money at the goofiest of causes, Prokhorov does at least bring the storylines. Prokhorov’s most recent innovation — which is actually a page out of The Lenny Dykstra Get Rich Or Die Tryin’ Playbook — is so goofily named that it reads like overstated Gary Shteyngart-grade satire, and so poorly reasoned, frankly tacky and massively over-budgeted that it could only have come from Prokhorov. Here’s the story, from Stefan Bondy of the Daily News:
If you™re super rich, speak Russian and live in New York City, Nets owner Mikhail Prokhorov is supplying you with the perfect reading material. It™s a magazine called œSNOB (that™s right, Prokhorov is richer than you and not ashamed of it) and it went on sale in the U.S. last week for a price of $8. There™s no English translation, so this is strictly for the Russian-speaking snobs who want to read about extravagant ways to spend Rubles. (In Russian, S.N.O.B. is an acronym for the Russian words accomplished, independent, educated and thriving).
According to this Bloomberg report, Prokhorov invested $100 million into this Snob project, which he hopes will attract the large population of Russian immigrants in Brooklyn to games in the Barclays Center.
If the financial crisis gave us anything — beyond a busted discourse, the ubiquity of Glenn Beck’s tiny piglike eyes, and a shocking uptick in freaked-out bigotry — it was the non-revelation that the super-rich people to whom our culture has given a decades-long handjob might not actually be as deserving of respect as we’d been conditioned to believe. That hasn’t quite sunk in yet, evidently. Prokhorov, for his part, seems intent on driving the message home, though, through his combination of outsized playboy fatuity and dedication to getting things wrong. For whatever wake-up call his ridiculousness might wind up providing, I guess, we should be thankful. And of course if he creates some journalism jobs along the way, I guess I can’t be too mad at him.
Ordinarily, I’ll start a post with a few (hundred) words of context, but some things are best just jumped into. So I’ll mention only that Brendan Flynn sent me this (amazing) link, and also further mention that the Associated Press wires are sometimes home to some truly amazing shit. So, what’s going on in Buffalo?
After 21 years of tailgating in the same lot outside Ralph Wilson Stadium, Ken Johnson plans to take his party across the street starting with the next home game in two weeks.
And with him, Johnson’s bringing along his wildly colorful and popular traditions: from the red 1980 Pinto on which he grills meat on the hood to the pizza oven made out of a filing cabinet to a chicken wing-cooking mailbox and, yes, even the long-established ceremony of drinking shots of Polish cherry liqueur out of the thumbhole of a bowling ball. It disappoints me that I have to move away from a lot where I’ve been for about 20 years, but I saw it coming a long time ago,” said Johnson…
The reality of that shift became apparent Sunday when, Johnson said, a league official threatened to shut down his party before the Bills’ season opener. Aside from his tailgate creating a potential crowd control issue, Johnson was informed by security that the league official frowned on the bowling ball shots he provides to passers-by who line up at his site. Johnson complied by plugging the bowling ball and started informing his regulars he was moving.
Ah yes, “Plugging up the bowling ball.” That old disgusting euphemism for something disgusting? wire service chestnut. There is just a lot going on in this piece, from classic wire AP-isms — the standalone grafs dedicated to tangentially related news events, which stands in here for the customary recitation of stats at the end of the piece and includes a giant stolen statue of Thurman Thomas — to some jaw-dropping info on how much Johnson (a computer programmer, of course?) spends on his tailgate.
“Two comments immediately popped into my head,” Brendan writes. “Out of all the disgusting things happening here the league frowns upon drinking booze out of a bowling ball? And then the obligatory, ‘haven’t Bills fans suffered enough?’ If a man (or entire fan base) wants to drink Wisniak, by God let them. Whatever. Fuck it.”
… but will he name them? The former Cardinals slugger, bankruptcy advocate and pioneering baseball-to-drag-racing dual-sport star went on St. Louis sports radio yesterday to discuss his former team’s shortcomings in the NL Central race, and delivered the sort of measured, mature, grown-man reaction that you’d expect from a curmudgeonly ex-jock a-hole of Roger Staubachian proportions someone who has been there, and knows a little something about not giving a shit. Which is to say that he called the Cardinals — who won’t play the guy with the ninth-highest OPS in the NL every day because Tony LaRussa doesn’t like his dad — a team of quitters. Also of poopy pantses. That’s a quote:
These Cards fans deserve much better. That’s just awful. They won’t admit it, that they’re quitters. If you can’t put a better effort out there on the field, take ‘em all out, back up the truck, ship ‘em all out and get somebody in here that wants to play baseball. We’ve got one team here [San Diego] going for the title and we’ve got our team going for the toilet. They’ve got poopy in their pants.
I’m hesitant to be too critical of any grown man who goes on the radio and utters the phrase “they’ve got poopy in their pants” but the idea that teams have “quit” simply because they’re struggling and underachieving seems a little much. And if you’re going to accuse players of quitting on the team and putting forth “a pathetic effort” shouldn’t you at least have the courage to actually name names?
Which players have quit? Which players have put forth the pathetic effort? Lumping the entire team together means nothing, because clearly some players haven’t quit on anything. Albert Pujols hit .379 with 11 homers and a 1.230 OPS in August, but the Cardinals had an 11-15 record for the month.
Look, Jack Clark played for 18 seasons, made millions of dollars (and blew them all on hot rods). He doesn’t have to answer to anyone, let alone some pencil-necked blogger. So I’ll do it for him — I don’t think anyone on the Cardinals has quit, but I’m pretty sure, judging by the picture on his Yahoo Sports profile page, that closer Ryan Franklin has pooped his pants.
Most people in the world don’t have to have an opinion, well-informed or no, about the sports columnists at CBS Sports. I suppose that I don’t really have to have an opinion myself, although the fact that CBS is one of my regular visits when I’m doing The WSJ Daily Fix Thing means that I am at least familiar with who those columnists are. So this gives me a really uncool edge on everyone — and it’s probably more or less everyone — who can be all, “Um, I know there’s definitely Shannon Sharpe. Or Sterling Sharpe. And also I think Hugh Downs and Sherman Alexie? And is Summer Sanders still doing that blog?” It’s one I would trade to you for pretty much anything. But it does enable me to have opinions on things that are transparently unimportant and none too interesting. To wit:
So CBS Sports has a bunch of columnists, more or less all of whom are at the very least Fix-usable and three of which — the very great Ray Ratto and the very better-than-serviceable Dennis Dodd and Gary Parrish — are pretty good. All of them have really terrible column photos, though: Parrish’s gel-and-loosened-tie look is uncomfortably Frat Semi-Formal, Dodd looks like Mitch Pileggi doing a SlimFast ad and Ratto looks like a skeptical walrus. Again, it takes nothing away from any of them, and Ratto — it bears mentioning again — is one of the most consistently wry and wise and overall excellent writers out there who types about sports. But the picture atop Gregg Doyel’s column is actually exactly right, and maybe even pretty flattering considering Doyel’s past mohawk photos. But the sour, puckered-up face Doyel is making in his column photo — it’s atop this column, which I’m going to write about in a moment — is just so right for him. It’s a picture of someone losing his train of thought mid-scold; it’s a photo of the worst dad at a Little League game suddenly realizing that he has to go to the bathroom, number two, and pronto. It’s pretty representative of Doyel’s writing, too.
(It’s worth mentioning, parenthetically, that Doyel may not actually be the worst columnist at CBS Sports. The hilariously, relentlessly anodyne Mike Freeman is just as predictable, but his dull, dutiful columns — here’s one about how the Mariners’ knowing acquisition of rape-y former Rangers prospect Josh Lueke represents baseball’s declining commitment to moral players — aren’t nearly as gripping as Doyel’s equally dull but much more in-your-face troll bait. Also, Freeman loses points for forgetting about legendary Raw Talent Ambiorix Burgos. And one should never forget about Ambiorix Burgos, if only because he’s presumably going to get out of jail someday)
Anyway, Doyel’s an ulcer. I mean, I don’t know what he’s like in real life, but given how eager he is portray himself in columns as a guy who enjoys screaming disgustedly at his television — see here — it would seem unkind not to take him at his word. Of course, taking Doyel at his word would mean accepting his own self-assessment as a fearless truth-speaker, forever willing to take big names to task in near-unreadable columns that make for easy SEO-stack headlines. And it would mean ignoring the fact that he’s obviously working the WWF Heel angle pretty hard — drawing fire, drawing comments, hopefully drawing links and hits and ad-views or whatever. He shouldn’t be taken too seriously.
And yet, while I sense he gets his own Heelery at a level that’s probably not entirely unconscious, it’s occasionally amazing to see how far he will go for a sell. The premise of the piece itself is straight comment-and-link-bait all by itself — Doyel is “asking” Boise State to lose to Virginia Tech tonight. But even knowing that he’s playing up the whole Gregg Doyel thing as per usual in the grafs I’m about to quote, even knowing that he’s fishing for “Doyel UR retard!!1!!” comments on his piece — even knowing that, isn’t this a bit much?
It’s nothing personal. Honest. I don’t dislike Boise State or Boise State coach Chris Petersen, even if some of you in Idaho might recall a brief confrontation I had with Petersen last year on a conference call. If you’re a conspiracy theorist, congratulations: There’s another conspiracy for you. In addition to the SEC connection here at CBS — plus I attended the University of Florida! — Petersen and I butted heads, briefly, on a phone call last year … so this year I’m getting even by rooting against the Broncos.
Problem with that theory is, I have notoriously bad phone etiquette. I also butted heads once on a phone call with Mike Krzyzewski. So the conspiracy theory falls apart there, because Krzyzewski coaches Duke and Duke beat Butler for the 2010 national basketball title and Boise State has been called the 2010 football season’s equivalent to Butler, and since I once butted heads with Coach K that means I should, um … now I’m confused.
So how about this. How about we just stick with the facts here? And the fact is this: If Boise State beats Virginia Tech, the Broncos almost certainly will play for the national championship this season, and that’s going to kill me.
See anything there you don’t like or find annoying? Say it in the comments, please. And on your blog, and especially on, like, Huffington Post and Bleacher Report, please. If Doyel is in earnest, he’s got to be a pretty miserable guy. If he’s not, then it seems like he’s wasting what could be a pretty cool gig on what must be an exhausting and unsatisfying bit of play-acting. I’m starting to think that picture might be a candid.
If playing baseball is about actual baseball things — you know these: hitting, throwing, catching, glowering, bickering, obfuscating and denying — being a fan of the game is essentially about language. And also I guess drinking and hot dogs, but I’m going to focus on language. This is not to say that the joys of being at a baseball game are somehow secondary to talking about that game, but… well, I think they might actually be secondary, at least to me. As excellent as all the smell-of-the-grass/coldish-beer stuff is, the fan experience of baseball facilitates conversation pretty much to the point of demanding it, be it about the game or whatever else. And while the data-centric, graph-and-chart aspect of baseball talk is ascendant online, I’d argue that it’s still for the most part subsidiary to a word-driven conversation about the game — the internet’s way of writing about baseball includes this sort of thing, in other words, but it’s all in the interest of this sort of thing. The bigger purpose of The Baseball Internet’s mountains of conversational prose and all those weird bloggy blooms of fervor and humor is, I think, the conversation itself — the discourse is, in a sense, its own point.
Which sounds solipsistic and goofy, I guess, but I don’t mean it as criticism — the reason I’m writing this, and that you’re (possibly still) reading it is that we share an interest in having a conversation about this particular topic that’s different from the joyless, rip-intensive editorializing hat generally defines mainstream sports media. Which is reasonable enough considering that that other conversation is led by, you know, Gerry Callahan or Gregg Doyel or Mike Francesa or whoever you like least. We’re not hurting anyone, and it’s perfectly natural not to want to hang out with those guys. Callahan smells like bile and Drakkar Noir, Doyel is always screaming himself into nosebleeds and Francesa always has mustard stains on his shirt. You wouldn’t want to hang out with them, either.
And with this new conversation we get this weird new lexicon — both the military-grade density of sabermetrics’ acronyms and odd physiology formulations like “scapular loading.” Speaking for myself — and speaking as someone more interested in making himself look smarter than he is than dumber/more-authentical than he is — I don’t totally get all these things. Scapular loading, for instance, is something I can definitely pantomime for you, and maybe kind of explain — it describes a particularly faulty bit of pitching mechanics in which the shoulder blades pinch back towards one another. Factor in an “Inverted W” — what happens when a pitcher’s elbows are higher than his shoulders during the loading part of the pitching motion — and, the conventional wisdom goes, you’ve got a motion essentially guaranteed to cause injury. Here’s a photo of Bill Pulsipher modeling the inverted W in a stylish Somerset Patriots uniform. Yes, I chose that picture on purpose.
The conversation that is going on about this particular topic on the internet wasn’t one I’ve joined myself — for reasons that are probably easy enough to understand: would you want to argue with this dude? — and so I was surprised to find out how passionate it is. The Tommy John-ing of Stephen Strasburg — an inverted-W man, himself — has fired things up, understandably. With this renewed look at mechanics has come another turn in the spotlight for Dr. Mike Marshall (above), the renegade pitching technician and operator of this Angelfire website from 1994. He is also the same person as 1974 NL Cy Young Award-winner Mike Marshall. I knew little of Marshall’s long second act except the basics — that he got his kinesiology degree and has retreated into a Colonel Kurtz-ian existence in Florida, teaching a peculiar take on pitching mechanics (which includes little hip rotation and essentially no leg kick) to players with nowhere else to go. Periodically, someone writes about him and his odd ideas — Kevin Baxter did so in the Los Angeles Times back in 2007; Bruce Markusen did in Hardball Times just a few days ago. The takeaway is usually the same: this very accomplished guy thinks he has a better way of doing things, and no one will listen. Cases like Strasburg’s, a graphic reminder of the limits of pitching mechanics to prevent injury, tend to bring both this subject and Marshall himself to the fore. It happens every few years.
And here’s where the surprise is, for me. Taken on its face, The Dr. Mike Marshall Story looks like an easy enough cause for the Internet-as-it-is-caricatured — the contrarian bloggers in basements, the vengeful nerds, whatever — to rally around. In Marshall, you’ve got a smart dude with unique ideas who is not being heard; you’ve got a convincing and ready-made villain in the ossified baseball brain trust types; you’ve got object lessons like Strasburg and Mark Prior and Bill Pulsipher and a few dozen others that any fan can list off the top of the head. And yet that’s not the direction in which the conversation has moved, primarily because — as Baseball Prospectus’s Will Carroll noted back in 2008 — Marshall’s alternative to the scapular loading thing doesn’t seem to work. Instead, we’ve gotten something that one wouldn’t necessarily expect from a discourse that generally centers on — and I mean this in the nicest possible way — outsized emotion and acronymical stat-parsing. We’ve gotten, instead of mechanical analyses and jeremiads against The Old Ways, this mournful, philosophical acceptance that asking the human body to throw a baseball is just kind of a very cruel thing to ask a body to do.
You expect this from Joe Posnanski, who’s probably as close to a patron saint as the new online sports discourse has, and he delivers it in a (typically) long and eloquent blog post that conjures the achy-armed ghosts of Jim Pittsley and Roger Salkeld to make the smaller point that most brilliant pitchers, whatever their mechanics, do not stay healthy enough to become brilliant older pitchers and the larger point that basically everything about baseball defies things easily understood.
It™s tempting to try and find reasons why players get injured. To do so helps us to feel powerful, in control of our destinies and those of youngsters like Stephen Strasburg. And acquiring knowledge that others supposedly don™t have is also alluring, in that it allows us to claim a special status. We are on the forefront of a new movement. We saw what others did not. We were his Apostles spreading the word. We saw The Beatles when they were still a garage band in Liverpool.
… What Marshall says sounds plausible and tantalizing, even if he™s not correct. And so he continues to churn out a vocal and devoted following who will beat his drum and toot his horn in the face of evidence to the contrary. In the face of science. Their science is that young men get injured. And dammit, they want answers and solutions, and the simpler the better.
Admittedly, this is the sort of thing I like, but I think this particular direction is a good one. Because sports are fundamentally kind of an inconsequential and silly thing, the mainstream discourse about it will probably always be at least moderately buttheaded — lots of stuff about heart and swagger and chemistry and getting-tough and all the other familiar leftovers. But even bearing that in mind — and bearing in mind the fundamental triviality of talking about baseball, which I can’t believe I haven’t mentioned yet — there’s something exciting to me about watching this radically different, more aware and more nuanced way of talking about baseball develop. This way of thinking, writing and talking about baseball didn’t exist in a way that I had any access to even a decade ago, and the rate at which it’s improving both upon the old model and itself is impressive in the extreme. If we’re going to be talking about baseball, anyway — and we are, since that’s what it’s for — I’m happy that this is the way in which we’re going to be talking about it.
As Clemens completes his descent from Greatest Pitcher of His Generation to Non-Position Player Most-Analogous To Oliver North, it’s hard to disagree with Hardball Talk’s Craig Calcaterra when he — after reviewing Clemens’s myriad missteps — directs blame for this state of affairs squarely towards Clemens himself. “You could not have made yourself bigger piece of wriggling Congress bait if you took a year to draw up a plan to do so,” Calcaterra (who has, it should be noted, previously criticized the federal prosecution/New York Times-led persecution of Clemens and other alleged steroid abusers) writes.
[T]he Rocket protested too much, either because he received bad advice or because he was too bullheaded to see the pros and cons of various courses of action. As a result, he was hauled before Congress. As a result, all kinds of seedy muck from his personal life came out into the open. All of this could have been avoided.
“Not giving in” is a mantra you hear from all of the best starting pitchers. And Clemens was certainly one of the best to ever have played the game. But what makes one successful on the baseball diamond does not necessarily make one successful off it. And Clemens is learning this the hard way.
I am not accustomed to being ahead of curves, writing-wise. Or at least I am not used to it relative to how accustomed I am to being too overwrought, too late, and too inclined to read macro-scale tragic implications into stories that barely survive the daily news cycle. So it’s not with a little bit of pride that I note that I wrote my last “The Mets are a dumb-sad lost cause to end all dumb-sad lost causes” posts back in late May, here and here. That those posts followed the usual over-passionate blurts with four-digit word counts on the same subject — again, I’m bragging, but I fucking owned the Gary Matthews Jr. Overreaction Beat — is telling, too, of course. I’m not here to argue against my own idiocy. I’m just noting that I gave up on this year’s Mets first.
Anyway, that the Mets went on a month-long winning binge after my Lost Cause post is obviously related to said post was kind of embarrassing, but also exciting from a fan’s perspective — I’m used to being wrong, as noted, and I was pleased (if baffled) to be proven so for a few weeks by Frank Jeffcoeur and the rest of the Mets cut-out bin brigade. But now that the Mets have settled into the dreary, unlovable mediocrity that I (and everyone else) was forecasting three (or more) months ago and brutal eulogies for the team are choking the internets, I guess I get to feel prescient? I imagine that would feel better if the baseball team in which I’ve foolishly decided to invest evening television time and emotional capital wasn’t revving up the three-catcher platoon once again, part-timing its alleged prospects and wasting $12 million and a roster spot on a meatball artist they use with a frequency that makes most Rule 5 picks look overworked. But of course they’re doing that, which means that my blood-rare prescience arrives with a big, glutinous side portion of Hating My Favorite Baseball Team Again. It is delicious.
The idea of Mets fan exceptionalism — the notion that somehow our fucked-up team is more fucked-up than yours — never really resonated with me, but there is something about the way in which the Mets have managed to lose over the last few seasons that’s both unique and remarkable. Credit the New York media environment for the hyperspeed pace of coverage — Tyler Kepner of the New York Times treated GM Omar Minaya (above, left) to some preemptive image restoration today, and Minaya hasn’t even been fired yet — but credit, too, to the Mets for making such uncommonly poor big-ticket personnel decisions and (relatedly) finding such unexpected and clownish new ways to run down their organizational rep. Our long-running fan-pain and visible-from-space organizational incompetence may not be deeper or vaster than that of, say, Giants or Pirates or Royals fans, but the team and organization itself might be harder for a fan to love than any other in baseball. There’s a reason why fans are getting on some Serpent and the Rainbow shit and burying this team before it’s officially dead, and a big part of that is the simple and easily understood wish to be rid of the hollowed-out emotional entropy that accompanies watching this Mets team suck sadly along through another meaningless August. At It’s Mets For Me, die masterscreeder who goes by I.M. Forme tries to situate this particular Mets disappointment in the long continuum of hollowed-out, entropic et ceteras:
Many of your favorite Mets blogs got of the ground in 2005; your humble servant here got started bringing Met-style mediocrity to the wide world of webs during that year (hint: anniversary presents!). Now that the team’s story has followed its arc back to the laughable shambles it was in before the Yankees turned down Carlos Beltran’s overtures, it is fair to say the Mets blogosphere faces its biggest challenge yet: staying interested in this crap. And we’re certainly sagging under the pressure. In 2007 it was easy to believe the Mets would take the next step, in 2008 it was hard to believe they could do that again, in 2009 it was fascinating like a car crash, and here in 2010 we got what we expected: a listless circus of sometimes violent clowns underperforming even the lowest expectations we had for them. From the owners to the “management” to the “stars” the organization comes together to earn their place as the laughingstock of professional baseball.
I bolded the part that’s the best few words I’ve yet read about this year’s Mets, so that you might notice it better. And I’m going to leave it there. Giving up earlier than everyone else is seldom an achievement to brag on, but I’m going to rest on that particular achievement and bag the rest of whatever I have to say about this team until the season’s over. It would almost certainly end up being redundant, anyway — everything I.M. Forme wrote above was true six years ago (or one year ago), and there’s nothing about the dreariness of this emptying-out season that wasn’t easily predicted last winter. There are other things to complain about and other things to celebrate and it’s hard to conceive of a way in which any of those things could be duller, more dire, or less deserving of one’s time than these Mets. If this is what being right and/or prescient feels like, I am really anxious to get back to being wrong. It’s more fun.
There’s no real reason why ESPN The Magazine’s “The Athletes Take Over” issue needs to exist. The same argument could, of course, be made about ESPN The Magazine itself, and if I were in a worse mood or my typin’ muscles hurt less, I might make it. But even by that magazine’s ordinary high standard for inessentiality, the Takeover issues are weird and notably minor. In general, much of ESPN’s more journalistical endeavors are compromised by economic and narrative conflicts of interest — this is how you wind up simply not getting coverage of major NFL stars’ major fuckups, or a yearlong, near-total blackout on news concerning a major college football program’s epic skein of transgressions. When ESPN does produce a larger-scale journalistic endeavor, the results can be impressive — they’ve got the budget to hire good writers and the bandwith to let them air it out if need be — but their targets are notably of the already-softened-up sort.
Which is not to say that ESPN’s pieces on Hall of Fame P.O.S.’s like Len Dykstra or Donald Sterling aren’t impressive — it’s just noting that ESPN stands to lose exactly none of its very lucrative synergies by further disgracing these thoroughly disgraced disgraces. USC and Ben Roethlisberger are arrows in ESPN’s corporate quiver, in other words, while Len Dykstra, by the time Mike Fish did his (very good) piece about him, was someone who had already been revealed as a pantheon a-hole and shameless, moral-free huckster in both The New Yorker and GQ.
So take that general lack of editorial courage, and combine it with the Us Magazine-y fatuity that defines most ESPN The Magazine profiles — generally of the Knucklehead X Is A Changed Man or The Proud Struggle Of Athlete Y variety — and you’ve got 11 of ESPN The Magazine’s 12 issues. The “Athletes Take Over” issue is the 12th, and distinguishable from the other 11 only by its adherence to a goofy pretense — that, finally, the jocks have kicked the pencilneck journos to the curb and taken over what must surely be their favorite magazine. What do readers get from this? Large color photos, as usual, but also something even cornier than the average issue, for the most part. That means all kinds of as-told-to semi-features, unconvincing ghostwritten manifestos from such literary lions as Chad Johnson, and the sort of doofy non-revelations — Maria Sharapova thinks the travel in pro tennis is wearing; Chad Johnson thinks he’s misunderstood (by haters) — that make up the average ESPN The Magazine profile. There is a way in which this idea could be effective or interesting, I guess, but it would have to be a different magazine attempting it and said magazine would have to be trying much harder. And yet…
And yet it is salvageable. What you’d need is an athlete so relentlessly and fearlessly off-message that even a stagy as-told-to piece — let’s say, for the sake of argument and actual accuracy in the case I’m winding up to, that it’s told to Sam Alipour — would deliver all kinds of good stuff. You’d need a subject so simultaneously introspective and oddly unselfconscious that he’d be comfortable Getting Real on the topics of Celine Dion and his own (previously unreported!) alcohol issues and his relationship with his therapist. It would be hard to find such an athlete, and harder still to fit the resulting weird dialogue between self and soul into the “Finally, No More Nerds! Just World-Class Athletes Having Fun” pretense of the Athlete Takeover issue.
Luckily — so, so luckily — there is Ron Artest. To say that Ron-Ron’s mindblowingly crazypants/strikingly frank “interview with himself” (as told to Sam Alipour — the logistics are mind-bending) saves even this dimmest of magazine pretenses is an understatement — if every magazine had stuff this good in it, publishing would be flush right now. Of course, if all athletes were like Ron Artest, ESPN The Magazine would be a lot more fun to read. Here’s an appetizer:
BESIDES BEING A BULLY, DID YOU ENGAGE IN OTHER DESTRUCTIVE BEHAVIORS [IN YOUR YOUTH]?
Alcohol was part of the problem. At 15 I started to get twisted, and at 16 I was getting lit up on a regular basis. By the time the Bulls drafted me, I’d drink in the house all day, then go play a game. But I stopped drinking heavily in Sacramento. I’m sure I wouldn’t have made the same mistakes if I hadn’t been drinking. Was I crazy, or was I not sober enough to have a clear mind? That’s the question.
…OPPONENTS DON’T GET UNDER YOUR SKIN?
Nah, I’m much more mellow now. I can control myself on the court. If I get fouled, I say what I gotta say and move on. I don’t mind being punked anymore. If someone gets in my face, I just walk away. Against the Celtics in the Finals, Tony Allen got in my face, but I don’t got the time for Tony Allen. Now, if you’re a star and you’re talking trash, I’ll talk back. All series long, Paul Pierce was talking: “You’re a bum, you can’t score, you can’t guard me, I’m busting your ass.” Everything.
HOW WOULD YOU TRASH-TALK AGAINST YOURSELF?
Well, I guess I would try saying, “You’re crazy,” or “psychopath.” I got called both those things, and worse, in the playoffs. Fans in Utah called me Osama Bin Ron and said, “You need medicine,” but none of that fazed me.
WHERE ARE YOU MOST AT PEACE?
At the beach. Man, give me a mango drink, some sand, that water, and it’s all good. I love running in the sand. But sometimes I’m scared as hell of water. Whenever I’m out there, I’m thinking, “Damn, some tidal wave is about to come!” Okay, so maybe I’m not totally at peace at the beach.
NOW THAT YOU’VE WON A TITLE, DO YOU STILL HAVE ANY PERSONAL GOALS IN THE NBA?
I would love to get back to first-team All-Defense. I own defense. It’s like my corporation. I’m the CEO and everyone else is just an employee. The fans and players know I belong. When you need a stop, who you going to call? Not the goddamn Ghostbusters, I’ll tell you that. You call me.
I finally read Moneyball two months ago, which is about eight years later than I should’ve. The perspective that comes with all those years — most notably in the way that the 2002 June draft Lewis writes about didn’t exactly change the game — is presumably the sort of thing that your more seethingly anti-idea Buzz Bissinger types take some sort of satisfaction in. “See, it didn’t work,” they might say. “Here is my new 370-page manuscript about the friendship between Joe McEwing and Tony LaRussa. I will now go on the radio and shriek about bloggers.”
But while the passage of time has rendered some of Michael Lewis’s Scott Hatteberg-related rhapsodizing sort of silly — although Hatteberg really was worth 2.7 WAR in ’02, and really got paid $900,000 for it — the book and the idea behind it are so cogent that it’s kind of amazing that people are still arguing about any of it. Joe Morgan is going to do what Joe Morgan is going to do (which is talk in perfectly circular cliches), and Bissinger is going to do what he is going to do (not follow sports very closely and lovingly tend to an Old Faithful-caliber ulcer). But the Diamondbacks purposefully trading Dan Haren for Joe Saunders because Saunders won 17 games once and the Mets paying Alex Cora $2 million for strictly notional contributions — or Jerry Manuel saving Francisco Rodriguez for save situations because “that’s baseball” — seems all the more ridiculous given how un-revolutionary the pursuit of undervalued commodities through the use of more sensitive metrics has become. This approach has changed baseball and basketball, and the balance of power has shifted in those sports because of that; the near-ubiquity and general effectiveness of this broader approach feels a lot more than eight years old. Which is to say that we’re probably still about 10 years shy of the NFL embracing anything like it.
There are reasons for this beyond NFL executives being willfully backwards and the sport itself being Tancredo-grade conservative and change-averse, although those reasons are obviously kind of important. But while the football version of sabermetrics is still kind of nascent — this stuff is interesting, but I don’t really get it — the idea of finding and exploiting undervalued commodities should be as appealing in the NFL as it is elsewhere. In this piece for Slate, Robert Weintraub starts with an argument that looks almost like a joke — that the Cincinnati Bengals’ ongoing knucklehead-rehab program reflects a quasi-Moneyball tactical approach to getting premium talent at sub-premium prices — and follows it in some interesting directions. He doesn’t totally close the circuit, but this is one of those Provocatively Contrarian Slate Pieces that actually delivers some interesting things to think about:
T.O. and Ochocinco have never been in legal trouble. (Owens, however, was suspended by the Eagles in 2005 for “conduct detrimental to the team.”) You can’t say the same for many of their teammates, including such police blotter mainstays as Adam “Pacman” Jones, Matt Jones, and Tank Johnson. For the Bengals, this accumulation of troubled talent doesn’t seem like a coincidence. Owner and general manager Mike Brown isn’t some bighearted, naïve humanist straight out of Boys Town, offering second chances to wayward athletes. Rather, he has developed a sabermetric stratagem worthy of Moneyball’s Billy Beane: signing players with questionable backgrounds at bargain prices.
In order to compete with the NFL’s bluebloods, a not-so-sexy franchise like the Bengals needs to find market inefficiencies to exploit. In the Roger Goodell era, with football reprobates getting suspended left and right by the iron-fisted commissioner, both past offenders and potential malcontents can be had for a fraction of the cost they might once have commanded. The low price means the risk is mimimal, the potential upside huge.
Again, Weintraub doesn’t really engage his own argument as well as he could — it’s a short piece, and too much of it is spent detailing the facts of Cedric Benson’s bar fight-y rap sheet and too little on the on- and off-field impacts of the Celebrity Rehab approach to roster building. But it’s a really interesting idea, and even if it’s only implicit and only barely engaged, I’m up for any comparison between Tank Johnson and Chad Bradford.
The article to which I’m going to link a hundred words or so’s time, by the Wall Street Journal’s Mariko Sanchanta, is about a gambling scandal in the Japan Sumo League that may or may not involve the yakuza. On those terms, the piece works very well — if you begin reading it with the same knowledge level about the gambling scandal in the Japan Sumo League (that may or may not involve the yakuza) that I did, you will almost certainly finish the piece knowing a lot more about it. Which is something.
But the reason I liked the article enough to link to it here is the way in which it manages to so neatly and intelligently place the scandal and sumo wrestling within the context of Japanese culture. I can’t say that I’ll be following this story — well, unless I can break through with that Contributing Ungrammatical Sumo Wrestling Columnist gig at Bleacher Report I’ve been angling for — but I can now say that I’d like to take in a sumo basho sometime before I die, if only to experience what sounds like an experience that’s otherworldly in its weirdness, even by the standards of a sports scene that managed to turn Tsuyoshi Shinjo into some sexed-up multi-platform version of Superman. The combination of napping elderly dudes, bento box lunches, slow-moving endomorphs and underworld intrigue sounds pretty sweet.
The simple rules of this ancient sport are a touchstone for many Japanese”especially the elderly”to traditional culture in a country that has modernized at a breakneck pace. It has also been rocked by the news that more than 60 wrestlers admitted to illegally gambling on baseball and card games, with involvement, according to media reports, by the Japanese mafia. (In Japan, gambling in general is illegal, though it’s legal to bet on Japanese soccer and horse and other kinds of racing.)
Over the past few weeks, the scandal has ballooned and claimed many a top-knotted scalp: More than a dozen wrestlers were banned from participating in the Nagoya tournament, and the chairman of the Japan Sumo Association, the sport’s governing body, was suspended for the first time in its history…
…The Japan Sumo Association”an organization that itself has been criticized as being secretive and opaque”has taken pains to show the public that it won’t tolerate any association with the yakuza, or Japanese mafia. This at times reaches comical proportions. During breaks between matches, a recorded voice on a loudspeaker intones repeatedly: “No individuals belonging to organized-crime groups are allowed to enter the stands.”
Opinions differ on the fervent and fervently overpunctuated open letter Cavaliers owner Dan Gilbert blasted out last night, which GC covers and excerpts here. An anecdotal survey of my Facebook feed revealed that most people were on the “You go, mortgage-business billionaire” side of things, while TrueHoop’s Henry Abbott saw the letter as a disastrous breach of PR etiquette. (Abbott also offers a defense of James’s decision to join Miami, so he’s obviously not one to be swayed by opinions at critical mass)
But one issue that more or less no one has with the Gilbert letter is whether or not the guy likes using quotation marks. He obviously does. Another one: Gilbert’s choice of much-maligned goof-font Comic Sans for his letter’s typeface might’ve been the true masterstroke of his missive. Presumably some would question Gilbert’s decision to use a font that’s most popular on casual dining menus and emails from parents, but the fact remains that some things just look silly in Wingdings. In the Wall Street Journal, David Biderman and Emily Steel (who wrote perhaps the definitive piece on the backlash against Comic Sans back in 2009) touch upon Gilbert’s font of choice.
[Comic Sans'] bubbly style ” it™s been used in Disney ads and Beanie Baby tags ” has feuled borderline-irrational hatred. There is a Ban Comic Sans website and clothing, stickers and tote bags that call for its obliteration. In a story published late Thursday at TechCrunch.com, a writer trashed Gilbert™s use of œprobably the worst font ever to grace the computer screen.
As for why Gilbert used the font? A Cavaliers spokesman says, œDan has used the Comic Sans font for years and years in all of his communications.
Like dancing about architecture or crying about double rainbows, writing about competitive eating kind of inevitably falls short of the transcendently queasy experience of actually watching competitive eating. Not to say that CSTB hasn’t hosted some good eating-related writing, but still — it’s hard to put the way that these strange humans put things into their mouths into words.
Which is not to say that there isn’t some admirably gnarly description in William Saletan’s article in Slate decrying both the corporatization and general depravity of Major League Eating and competitive eating, in general and respectively. It’s just that Saletan’s task was pretty much impossible: nothing will put you off your lunch competitive eating quite as effectively as actually watching competitive eating, at least from my perspective.
Saletan’s main argument is that competitive eating is gross, dangerous, idiotic, gross, bad for our culture and gross, and as befits that argument — and the topic on which he’s delivering his jeremiad — Saletan does not make it with moderation. There might be a more interesting piece to be written about how MLE went from a goofy stunt to a moderately lucrative professional sport, but it’s hard to imagine a more passionately negative one than Saletan’s. To wit:
[New York Mayor and noxious orange billionaire Michael] Bloomberg isn’t alone in glorifying eating contests. Scan the Congressional Record, and you’ll find tributes from Sen. Jay Rockefeller, D-W.V.; Sen. Tim Johnson, D-S.D.; and Rep. Tammy Baldwin, D-Wisc. These politicians, like countless others, stand foursquare against pornography, except when it involves deep-throating 68 wieners on ESPN.
If you’ve never seen the Nathan’s contest, you can get your fill of it by watching ESPN’s excerpt, a full-length video, or MLE’s highlights from last year’s show. It’s an orgy of brown drool, flying debris, and masticated mush. You’ll see fists and fingers pushing food down throats. You’ll see contestants twisting their necks and shaking their bellies to make the food go down. “They work on their gag reflex,” one ESPN announcer explains. Another praises a contestant: “He was blessed upon birth with an overactive gall bladder and not four but six first molars. He’s a great eater.” In case the frontal images aren’t graphic enough, ESPN delivers close-ups through its “chew-view cam,” along with a running “dogs per minute” stat…
…The physical risks of this lifestyle are obvious. Three years ago in Slate, Jason Fagone, the author of Horsemen of the Esophagus: Competitive Eating and the Big Fat American Dream, recounted strokes, jaw injuries, choking deaths, fatal water intoxications, and other eating-contest tragedies. “Thanks to increasing prize money and media exposure, there’s incentive now for competitive eaters to challenge the physical limits of the body,” Fagone observed. They’re “stretching their stomachs with huge volumes of chugged liquid,” inducing digestive paralysis and risking “gastric rupture.” A study published that year cautioned that “professional speed eaters eventually may develop morbid obesity, profound gastroparesis, intractable nausea and vomiting.” Even MLE warns prospective contestants of the sport’s “inherent dangers and risks.”
So, I spent my morning attempting to channel the raging river — seriously: there is a lot rage — of LeBron-related content into a coherent and comprehensible 800-word package for the Daily Fix. (You tell me). “Content” is not really the right word, here. There are several right words to describe all the LeBron-related words out there, but I guess fulmination, advising, scolding and contextualization would be the four main rubrics, with “reporting” — most notably Alan Hahn’s spoilerrific scoop in Newsday revealing that LeBron is leaning towards joining the Heat — I guess falling under the fourth category heading.
Even online, writing for the Journal is different than writing for anyplace that is not the Journal. It’s not so much that I’m trying to cater what I write to the WSJ audience — Daily Fix commenters have basically no patience for the NBA and its “millionaire thugs,” so I’d be linking to Gregg Doyel all day/e’ry day if I did. (And, as I wrote at great length yesterday, I’m not playing into that particular troll trap) But the best and most honest writing about this whole sordid deal is both harder to classify and harder to find.
The constant, understandably, is that everyone hates the stupid LeBron ESPN special and is sick of the hype and so on. While the Artist Formerly Known (to one ranting guy) as Big Daddy Balls relentless and artless repetition of “cocksucker” in his Deadspin rant on James provides a reasonable idea of what this line of argument’s basement looks like, he’s not the only one super-incensed by this totally predictable and totally predictably over-the-top and distasteful thing that’s happening. Just because no one foresaw the depths to which the WWL was willing to go to secure what promises to be an excruciating 60 minutes of television doesn’t mean that the dumb ugliness of all this caught anyone by surprise. It’s the extent that’s surprising, which leads me to believe that there’s something maybe a little disingenuous about, say, Adrian Wojnarowski’s Cleaned-Up Magary routine at Yahoo Sports. A bitter taste:
The Championship of Me comes crashing into a primetime cable infomercial that LeBron James and his cronies have been working to make happen for months, a slow, cynical churning of manufactured drama that sports has never witnessed. As historic monuments go, this is the Rushmore of basketball hubris and narcissism. The vacuous star for our vacuous times. All about ˜Bron and all about nothing.
James is throwing a few foosball tables at Boys & Girls Clubs, an empty gesture out of the empty superstar. He™s turned free agency into the title of our times, a preening pageant of fawning, begging and pleading. Hard-working people are dragged into municipalities and told to hold signs, chant scripted slogans and beg a diva who doesn™t care about them to accept a $100 million contract.
Which, first of all: this isn’t a freaking tea party, dude, so you can probably cut that righteous dudgeon back by about 80 percent. Obviously this whole thing was going to get dumb, and obviously it has gotten dumb. Obviously LeBron was going to sign a huge contract and leverage his brand (barf, by the way) for maximum revenue, because he has always done that, and obviously he is doing that. Getting Hulk-smash angry at the fact that these totally predictable things are happening strikes me as kind of a waste of energy and virtual ink. Also: of course the very serious and very easily outraged Doyel basically rewrote Woj’s column over at his own feces-strewn perch at CBS Sports, and of course it’s far worse and far more strident. (It’s also not nearly as eloquent a statement as setting up a Twitter feed for LeBron’s ego)
Which is not to say that there’s nothing to feel bad about or get angry about, here. But given that only the grandiosity of the tastelessness is the surprise, I think that Dave D’Alessandro’s more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger tone is a much better look. It’s also especially welcome — if not surprising, given that D’Alessandro is basically the best guy writing about basketball in a newspaper right now — that his piece gets at something more significant than his own disgust; namely, the bleak tastelessness of LeBron quite possibly dumping the already struggling city of Cleveland in a live-TV celebration of himself. I won’t excerpt it, because one Daily Fix per day is enough, but it’s definitely worth reading.
I will excerpt the priceless dissection of the myriad and multiple wrongnesses of LeBron going to Miami from Joey’s merciless examination at Straight Bangin’, which GC has already given it its richly deserved due. Joey’s piece, I think, represents the third and most interesting strain of LeBron writing I’ve seen on the internet — namely, that of a serious basketball fan with a minor stake in LeBron continuing to be an uncommonly sympathetic and interesting superstar, and who hates to see him blowing it. Leaving aside the basketball considerations of how LeBron would fare in Miami with Bosh, Wade and whatever vet-minimum dudes they fill out their roster with — Basketball Reference runs the expected W/L, which is pretty good given that they’d be starting Brian Skinner and Kevin Ollie alongside that notional Big Three — there’s a legitimate sadness in Joey’s examination of how LeBron seems to be preparing to blow it. If you have to cover this big dumb thing — and I’m living proof that you have to do it twice — this seems like the response that makes the most sense. Here’s some:
Grow, motherfucker! Grow!… Be the man you claim you want to be. Which icons with respected brands–because that’s your shit, right, Bron Bron?–tried a little, failed, quit on the struggle, and then piggybacked onto something else?
And which basketball deities throw up their hands and jump on the most convenient path to success? Help is one thing, shortcuts are another. Michael needed not just Scottie, but also Horace and Dennis and even Stacy King and Brian Williams. Hakeem needed Kenny and Sam and Robert and Otis and Mario. Those teams were built, though. They were drafted, crafted, aged, cultivated. They weren’t sold prepackaged out of a Wal-Mart. Earn something, don’t just buy it because you can!
…No ne smart will be duped into thinking that this unholy union in Miami is on par with the truly legendary teams. Because part of being a legend is putting in work, not staging a protracted play date.
It’s easy to do some clownish, outsized pantomime of surprise or outrage over the prospect of LeBron in Miami, or the corny spectacle of the LeBron ESPN special. But just about the only authentic response I can think of to the prospect of James dumping Cleveland on live TV so he can go be on a fantasy team in Miami — and making the next NBA season that much duller in the process — is bummery disappointment, not venomous disgust. The whole thing is a letdown much more than it’s an offense to national honor or whatever, obviously. But that doesn’t diminish the fact that, if LeBron’s corny choreography does indeed end with him in Miami tonight, it would indeed be a letdown.
I cannot figure the internet out, myself. I work on metaphors for it and I use it to find information and whatnot, but the economic and emotional mechanics how this thing works — how people make money here or how they create communities or why they pursue new ways to call each other fagz in YouTube’s comments section — is well beyond me. But I know enough, and possibly just enough, to be able to spot certain types of uniquely webby bullshit. This is not a valuable skill, per se, mostly because the impact of Major Media Figures like me naming and hopefully shaming a ripe piece of trollish Drudge bait doesn’t effectively disincent anyone from delivering said bit of bait. As I’ve written often, and occasionally at great/grating length, the economic incentives for online sports (and other) journalism increasingly do not run in the right direction.
You already know all this: Clicks make money, and there’s no point system that determines the relative worth or justness of those clicks. And trolling works just as well as good writing in that regard, and is easier. If you read about things online, you are already living in your knowledge of all that. The ostensible correcting force, here as elsewhere on the web, is a starry-eyed crypto-libertarian economism — that the market has a way of sorting things out, and that if you’re wrong enough — or too trollish, presumably — you lose your credibility and audience and, in Jay Mariotti’s case, possibly even your L’Oreal sponsorship. This is the idea, but as in other (currently very oily and sad) areas in which we’ve been told to believe in the inherent efficiency of self-regulating markets, it hasn’t necessarily happened. If it were working, you’d imagine that human ulcers like Gregg Doyel (and long-running head colds like Mariotti) would’ve driven all but the most masochistic or simple-minded readers away at this point. But those buttheads, their paychecks and presumably their audiences are still there. The click economy is working for them, in short, but it’s not necessarily working for people who want not to read hot garbage. That this state of affairs presumably reflects something like a market imperative doesn’t make it any less sorry.
It’s conceivable that one of these sour goofballs actually crosses some notional finish line on their ultra-marathon to the bottom, but it’s hard to imagine what that might look like. By the same token, while it’s likely that some reporters will eventually be proven right about the eventual destination of the NBA’s big-ticket free agents, this would seem to be an area of great credibility-related risk for those reporters running with vaguely sourced rumblings in flimsy, buzzy pseudo-scoops. But while the eventual catching-up of reality with their vigorously mongered rumors might result in some embarrassment for the guys with their bylines on misinformation/BS, I’d wager that Chris Broussard and Adrian Wojnarowski and others will live to get things kind of wrong another day. I think this will be both because their anonymously sourced free agent scoops have probably made some money for their respective employers, and because the Rational Consumers who are supposed to punish them for their transgressions have not necessarily delivered on that in the past.
Obviously, this doesn’t matter quite enough to get too fired up about it, at least relative to other journalistic mega-failures — you already know this, but if Judith Miller had relied on unscrupulous unnamed sources in epically incorrect reporting about the Yanks trying to sign C.C. Sabathia, no one would’ve given a shit (and she’d not be a stand-in for the idea of journalistic mega-failure) (and she’d probably still have her job). Still, that’s a difference of degree, not of kind: the editorial and journalistic failures that lead to faux-scoopy demi-garbage getting run in well-respected newspapers are the same failures that lead to the same stuff running in generally respectable sports venues. It’s tough to remember sometimes, but with the exception of Stephen A. Smith sports-radio pronouncements and Jared Dudley’s Twitter-feed world exclusives, all of this anonymous-sources-say shit passes through several levels of editorial scrutiny.
Nowadays, with an infinite amount of Internet space and air time waiting to be filled, with eight million media outlets fighting for the right to boastfully utter, “Breaking News! We are the first to report that …,” with pressure from bosses who don’t understand — and don’t care to understand — the intricacies of righteous journalism … well, nowadays everything is messed up.
The frantic race to break any LeBron-Wade-Bosh news has rendered many in the media pathetic. First, because our lives have been reduced to chasing around a bunch of obscenely wealthy youngsters as they decide which team will pay them millions to them toss a round ball through a piece of mesh. Second, because we have abandoned our principles.
…Look at us now. Just as it was with Brett Favre before James and A-Rod before Favre, ESPN has morphed into the LeBron Network — one talking head asking another talking head to comment on the comments of a third talking head.
Leaving aside whether or not Pearlman is a little young to be so curmudgeonly (seems to me that he is) and the whole hoary Season Five of The Wire bit about treasured principles, he’s essentially correct. It has presumably always been thus, and the 24-hour news cycle and click-economy and The Internet and blah blah bleugh. I know, I know, and I know that my concern-trolling might be as dull as its Mariottian analogue. But as someone who is still notionally trying to make a living by writing (and about sports, more often than not), it’s both frustrating to witness the failure of the internet’s ostensibly game-changing wisdom-of-crowds failsafe and daunting to wonder what lies on the other side of that seemingly far-off tipping point. It’s just sports, I know, but it’s also not just sports.
I’ll admit that I was kind of looking forward to the mournful/literary obituaries for Darko Milicic’s NBA career. When the former second overall pick — behind LeBron and ahead of Carmelo Anthony, if you’d forgotten, which no one has — announced last year that he intended to finish his career in anonymous semi-disgrace Europe, it seemed a fittingly meh end to what probably qualifies as the most disappointing career for a player chosen as high as Darko was. I’m kind of finding myself writing that eulogy now: he defended not wisely, but not very well, either; he made a shit-ton of money but seemed to hate doing it; he couldn’t get off the bench on some truly terrible teams. Better, then, for him to go to Europe, where his tendency to disappear for quarters on end presumably will be less irksome and people will actually understand his ultra-profane post-game rants. And while he’ll be missed in a sense, in another sense the NBA failure of Darko speaks to… wait, I’m sorry, he just did what now?
So: with the exception of restricted free agent Rudy Gay’s already inked near-max deal with the Memphis Grizzlies — which FanHouse’s Tom Ziller compared, on Memphis’ part, to “a NASCAR driver winning pole position, then telling the race director, ‘Naaah, I’ll start in the back.’” — the biggest deals thus far have been for Drew Gooden (six years and $32 hard to explain dollars from the Bucks) and Mr. Darko Milicic, who inked a four-year, $20 million deal with the Timberwolves. Darko finished last year averaging 8.3 PPG with the Wolves, and is still just 25, but given that ESPN’s Chad Ford sees the contract as the first step towards the Wolves dealing Al Jefferson, it’s all kind of puzzling. If intentionally replacing Al Jefferson with Darko Milicic wasn’t weird enough — and it is plenty weird enough, thanks — the prospect of seeing in Darko’s partial season of 8.3 PPG and 5.5 RPG ball, which were just about the best numbers of the 25-year-old’s career, a potential franchise building block just seems… well, not a terribly original mistake.
At the very excellent Minnesota Timberwolves blog a Wolf Among Wolves, Ben Polk goes deep on what will almost certainly rank as one of the free agent period’s odder signings. At least unless/until someone offers Tim Thomas multiple years. Anyway:
No matter how badly it hurts your stomach to think of it, please remember that it really is not Darko Milicic™s fault that he was drafted ahead of Carmelo Anthony, Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh. He was just an 18-year-old Serbian kid with bleached tips who wanted to play in the NBA. Not his fault.
[But] here™s the best part of Ford™s article: œThe deal for Milicic is extraordinary considering in February he wasn™t playing and said he was giving up on the NBA to return to Europe. Hey, that is extraordinary, would somebody please give that guy 20 million dollars!? Recall: this means that Al Jefferson™s days as a Wolf are essentially over. So, no more of the Big Al torture chamber, no more of that surly Mississippi wit, no more of that silky up-fake…
…So we can hope“as Memphis, Detroit, Orlando and the Knicks all hoped“that Darko will one day live up to the promise of his immense gifts, will learn to attack the basket, to bring a measure of intensity to his defensive battles, to pursue rebounds with abandon. We can hope, in other words, that he will somehow, in his seventh NBA season, totally reinvent his game and remake his mental approach.
There’s more, including some unflattering statistical comparisons to Patrick O’Bryant. Who, if the Darko signing is indicative of anything, should probably answer his phone right now.
Tony LaRussa isn’t a particular favorite at CSTB, but even we have to admit that he’s a pretty fair drunk driver he has been a successful manager. Whether that success has anything to do with his surpassing inability to notice what his charges are or are not injecting into one another is a matter of perspective — a lot of people would say yes; Buzz Bissinger, for his part, would start sweating a little, his eyes would get really wide, and he’d find the most insulting and ad hominem way to say no. But whether LaRussa’s success is due to his superhuman drunk-driving ability and responsible personal judgment baseball brains/gut or his state of the art ability to not notice things, one thing that has not been argued that his success as a manager came from a nuanced understanding of the interplay between citizens and the state. It’s just not as important to the job of manager as failing to notice a player’s dramatic increase in hat and neck size.
Of course, just because LaRussa’s interest in politics — beyond his well-documented animal advocacy, which is totally cool to the extent that it doesn’t involve REO Speedwagon — has never been noted doesn’t mean that he doesn’t have some very well thought-out and articulate opinions on the issues of the day. All he needed was an opportunity to share them with the public, which is something that doesn’t happen often when the entirety of your interactions with the press involve explaining why you were asleep at that traffic light how you plan to use Felipe Lopez and Brendan Ryan in different situations. The appearance of the alternate universe merry pranksters known as the St. Louis Tea Party at Busch Stadium on Wednesday presented just that opportunity to LaGenius, and he did not let it pass.
First, some context. The St. Louis Tea Party, like the national demi-organization to whose fervid and contradictory gripes they share, function like trolling YouTube commenters. So their appearance at Wednesday’s game against the Diamondbacks was couched as a “buy-cott” of Arizona — a clever inversion of the world boycott, if you didn’t get it, in which they express support for Arizona’s ultra-draconian immigration law by buying tickets for a Diamondbacks game in St. Louis, which buy-cott’s a whopping 42 cents per admission in the direction of the visiting team. Oh, and despite wearing Cardinals red, the Tea Party fans waved Arizona flags and did some outreach. “Saying hello to people who aren’t Tea Partiers,” St. Louis Tea Party head Bill Hennessy told KSDK’s Mike Garrity. “And we introduce ourselves with a copy of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, and just say, ‘Here’s a gift. If you’re interested, get a hold of us.’” So yeah, that sort of thing. Basically hard-core trolling that believes that it is actually heroic resistance to an out of control state from a bunch of people who think Rand Paul is the true intellectual heir to Thomas Jefferson. So, kind of the usual for them.
Anyway, the proper response to this, from a fan’s perspective, is something along the lines of “Thanks for the copy of the Constitution, but could you please stop waving that flag so I can watch Nick Stavinoha ground out?” The correct response from a manager when asked about the presence of Tea Party trolls amid the paying crowd is probably something along the lines of what the Cardinals presented as an official answer: they’re “delighted” to welcome anyone to the ballpark, even those whose insistence on small government leads them to support a massive and invasive expansion of police powers and a de facto suspension of the presumption of innocence for darker complected people. LaGenius, because he’s old school and doesn’t believe in playing percentages, decided to go with his gut. Thus, per Salon’s Steve Kornacki:
La Russa took the occasion to praise the Arizona law, which Major League Baseball’s players union has condemned. “I’m actually a supporter of what Arizona’s doing,” the skipper said. “You know, people don’t fix your problem, and the government, national government doesn’t fix your problem, and you’ve got a problem, they’ve got to take care of it themselves.”
He also had kind words for the Tea Party activists: “This is America, right? You’re supposed to be able to have opinions and disagree, and a lot of things they do I think are correct.”
Well played, Tony LaRussa! Admittedly, that’s not terribly articulate or even terribly comprehensible, but it’s nice to at last find out what LaGenius is paying attention to while his players are doing whatever it is they’re doing with those syringes. That the answer turns out to be “Glenn Beck’s foreword to The Overton Window” is surprising at first, but LaRussa has been staging silent, somnolent protests against the creeping tyranny of DWI laws at traffic lights going against the grain for years. That is what has made him a winner. Well, that and the inability to notice the change-in-hat-size thing.
On questions of dickishness, we probably ought to judge sports commissioners on a curve. But even judged by the same sliding scale that allows some to judge David Stern a class act who GETS RESULTS despite Stern’s generally coming off as a cocky bully and haughtily laughing off one new NBA owner’s business ties with Robert Mugabe — and tolerating another NBA owner actually being Clay Bennett, which is nearly as bad — FIFA’s Sepp Blatter (above) has long been renowned as hilariously pompous and high-handed. Which, admittedly, is kind of a commissioner-y trait, but which makes the grandiose allegations of corruption Blatter has faced — you can start here, but there are numerous books on just this topic (which I haven’t read) — look that much worse.
Pretty serious — book length! — allegations of bribery and nest-feathering and general underhanded quasi-gangsterism have followed the Swiss FIFA chief through three terms atop the organization, but he has proven to be surpassingly and surprisingly bulletproof. So in a sense there’s nothing really new in this piece by Newsweek’s Luke O’Brien, which alleges that Blatter steered a super-lucrative hospitality contract towards a travel company affiliated with his nephew, Philippe. That company, MATCH, bought up two million nights’ worth of hotel rooms in South Africa during the tournament, then goosed prices to over twice their usual amount with a series of surcharges that were downright Ticketmasterful in their market-perverting unpleasantness. Hotels not affiliated with MATCH raised prices even more in an attempt to keep up. “Even $20-per-night hostels were asking $70 for a bunk bed in a dorm room,” O’Brien writes.
Which, you know, is something that happens. For a B&B in Johannesburg, high seasons don’t come much higher than an event that promises to bring 500,000-odd people to your country, credit cards akimbo. But even that pumped-up market can only bear so much tweaking and gouging, and O’Brien argues that Blatter’s sweetheart contract wound up screwing both fans and the South Africa as well.
The end result was what you might expect: foreigners, who were already paying $1,500 or more in airfare to visit South Africa, simply decided not to make the trip. Lots of people. Numbers are impossible to truly gauge because Blatter runs FIFA like one of those banks down the street from his offices in Zurich, but the best guess of Danny Jordaan, the head of the local organizing committee, is that more than half of the foreign visitors projected to show up at the tournament will instead be watching it from their sofas at home.
South Africa and FIFA both say plenty of foreigners are attending, but their numbers differ: the government says 456,000 came and FIFA, in a statement, cites 372,000 foreigners, with 97 percent of the 3,009,000 total purchasable tickets sold”though there is no way to tell how many of those tickets have actually been used. By contrast, according to Forbes, around 2 million foreign visitors came to Germany when it hosted the Cup, and all 64 matches sold out.
What™s worse, some international fans had already bought pricey game tickets ranging from $80 to $160. But now they couldn™t afford to use them. They directed their wrath at Blatter. On the forums of BigSoccer.com, angry fans inveighed against FIFA and its president. One commenter described FIFA as œunorganized organized criminals. There was even chatter about a class-action lawsuit. FIFA has tight security controls on transferring ownership of tickets and an impossibly opaque system for reselling them. Fans could get a refund, but only if FIFA offloaded the tickets for similar value”a big problem when foreign demand plummets and South Africans can™t afford to pay the same prices as tourists.
Is O’Brien stretching with any of this? I’m a firm “maybe” on that one — blaming ticket prices and a gouge-intensive hotel situation for poor World Cup attendance (both in general and at the games) during a serious global economic recession seems to kind of underplay the importance of the aforementioned serious global economic recession. But given Blatter’s rap sheet track record, it’s hard not to see the hotel screw-up — along with such other incidences of high-handed scummery as the underpayment (by a FIFA subcontractor) of those South African security guards who briefly protested before being asked to reconsider by riot police — as another example of Blatter being Blatter. That is, being a commissioner who is not only far less holy than he acts, but something of a morally slippery, power-drunk autocrat even by commissioner standards.
I don’t think it’s a stretch — or maybe not a compliment — to argue that Gerard has done as good a job covering wet pile of surly, entitled garbage Knicks and Rangers owner James Dolan’s wince-tastic music career as anyone on the internet. But with the news that J.D. and the Straight Shot have a new album on the way — and with Dolan’s unexpected mid-career transition from wet pile of surly, entitled garbage trust-fund bluesman to battle-rapper on said platter — it was perhaps inevitable that the lamestream media would get in on the fun.
Given that the new Straight Shot record features song length disses of Eliot Spitzer and the New York Daily News (in the title track!), and that Dolan is a wet pile of surly, entitled garbage kind of a big deal in New York City, I guess it could be argued that there’s some news value in Laura M. Holson’s piece about Dolan and his music in the New York Times. But as usual with Dolan — and we’ve seen from his work with the sports teams and publications that he owns — about 90 percent of the entertainment value here is of the rubbernecking variety. Still, until I get the go-ahead to write a 33 1/3 book on JDatSS’s 2008 full-length “Right On Time,” this will probably stand as the definitive story about a vanity blues project so hopelessly, haplessly vain that it makes Bruce “Bruno” Willis look like Howlin’ Wolf. Kudos to Holson for risking permanent ear and brain damage to get the story:
[Dolan] rarely speaks to reporters, he explained at a recent rehearsal for his country blues band, JD & The Straight Shot, and chooses “to let my music speak for me.” Not surprisingly, he sings a lot about being wronged. The Daily News, the tabloid he has tangled with most, took a drubbing in “Daily News Blues.” So did Eliot Spitzer, the former governor, whom he wrote was caught œsinning like the sinners in the unsubtly titled “Fall From Grace.” Even animals can’t escape Mr. Dolan’s fury. In 2005, he recorded “Gonna Kill That Dog,” a jazzy ditty about an annoying hound that won’t quit barking.
“With my music there is no doubt who sang it and who wrote it,” he said. “It’s personal.”
Who knew there was a Jimmy in the house? But about 10 years ago, the son of the Cablevision founder, Charles F. Dolan, began playing guitar and singing with a small group of employees he worked with at Madison Square Garden. Now, with a professional backup ensemble and the indie debut of his third album this month (meaning, he paid for it himself), Mr. Dolan is playing warm-up for the Eagles and the Dixie Chicks on an eight-city concert sweep.
It is not easy to score a spot on such a tour. But Mr. Dolan’s good friend is Irving Azoff, the concert promoter and longtime music manager, who helped put the Eagles show together. Friendship only goes so far, though. Mr. Dolan said he played for a nominal fee last week at the new Meadowlands Stadium in East Rutherford, N.J. His warm-up set was so early it was almost cold: he was given 45 minutes onstage at about 4:45 p.m.
Those who love wet piles of surly, entitled garbage and also hate music will definitely want to read the whole thing. The “Daily News Blues” album is currently available for download at the J.D. and the Straight Shot official site.
(The Unit would like to know how you got his FUCKING TELEPHONE NUMBER)
It seems strange now, but baseball probably mattered less to me in 1995 than it does today. I was a junior in high school, then, and… presumably doing whatever it was I did like half a lifetime ago. I recall a lot of brooding? At any rate, the MLB strike of that year was a bummer for me, but I wasn’t about to let it get in the way of worrying about zits or imagining what college would be like.
So, contextually, it would’ve made sense that I heard nothing about a (freaking amazing) plan by the MLBPA to send its biggest stars on a barnstorming tour of the U.S. during that 1995 players strike. What doesn’t make nearly as much sense, and which is actually and amazingly true, is that apparently no one, outside of the MLBPA and a few people brought in to help with the logistics of the tour, knew about it, either. That would’ve changed had the tour actually happened, but the idea died with the resolution of the strike that summer. All of which makes Nando Di Fino’s piece on the barnstorming tour for AOL FanHouse a pretty amazing feat in its own right: an apparent scoop on something that (almost) happened 15 years ago. It’s pretty great stuff:
Fifteen years ago, when the baseball strike had already killed a World Series and was threatening to derail the 1995 season, Major League Baseball camps were filled with replacement players, a tale told many times over. But what most people — even die-hard baseball fans — don’t know is that the Major League Baseball Players Association had a plan of their own: take 120 of their best players, separate them into four teams, and have round-robin tournaments on the weekends in minor league and municipal stadiums. It would curry favor with the fans, there could be some charitable element to it, and it might actually be … fun. One of the first people they brought on board was [former Pirates clubbie David] Delisanti…
As the strike dragged on into 1995, Delisanti kept in contact with his friends on the Pirates — Andy Van Slyke, Jim Leyland and Jay Bell — to gauge the progress of the strike talks. Bell in particular, the union rep for Pittsburgh, told him not to worry, that things would work out.
A few weeks later, Delisanti received a call from the MLBPA. They had hatched the barnstorming plan, and wanted to know if he would be interested in being the equipment manager for the tour. Bell had suggested him for the job. The unemployed Delisanti jumped at the opportunity, even if it meant being blacklisted by the owners…
The barnstorming idea was straightforward on paper, but had a lot of moving parts that required Delisanti to create a command central of sorts in his parents’ home, where 120 of the game’s greatest players would be returning his calls, some answered by his parents. Randy Johnson, for example, had no clue who Delisanti was and told [Delisanti's] father to have David him stop calling his house.
I wrote elsewhere, recently, about my World Cup ambivalence — not with the games themselves so much as with the sense of distance from all of it. This is kind of a classic overindulgent CSTB essay topic for me, but I’m working on it. Not, obviously, by attempting to write less self-centered or self-referential or self-indulgent leads (baby steps) but by trying to shed the self-conscious n00bery that’s kept me on the wall when it comes to The Rest of the World’s Football and actually trying to enjoy the World Cup. And it’s easy enough to do this, when the games are on. And also generally easy when there are nice emo-literary treatments of soccer’s deep cultural importance out there to read.
And cheering the US team honestly isn’t that hard for me, either, although it’d be easier if they were the Dutch team, or played like the Dutch. But as likable as the US team by and large is, I’ve found myself oddly and seemingly instinctively not liking Clint Dempsey all that much. (I found his Lego iteration far more appealing) It’s not that he’s a bad player — I don’t know the game well enough to speak to that, and what I perceive as a lack of maximum effort or mistakes is probably more a reflection of my ignorance as a viewer than any failing on his part. But I was relieved/surprised to discover, courtesy of ESPN The Magazine, that I’m not the only one with some Dempsey-related issues. The guy’s apparently beloved by Fulham fans, and it can’t totally be an accident that he’s one of just two Americans to score in two World Cups. But American fans, even ones who go more on soccer-related criteria and less on “he just kind of looks sort of dickish and has tribal tats” standards than I, are apparently not totally sold on the dude.
Luke Cyphers, in the classic ESPN The Magazine style, doesn’t necessarily make a case for or against Dempsey one way or another. But the quotes that he elicits from Dempsey suggest a guy whose confidence level and resistance to insight might have something to do with his lack of popularity. What I’m saying is that, insight-wise, Dempsey makes Kobe Bryant look like Jean-Paul Sartre. In what might be the greatest journalistic undertaking of my career, I’ve compiled all the quotes Dempsey delivers in Cyphers’ piece, and they’re below. Not every athlete can be Heath Bell, I know that — both when it comes to rambly jokiness and self-effacement and willingness to grope SNY’s Ted Berg — and I also know it doesn’t really matter what an athlete’s personality is. But, well:
- “I don’t want to get into how I’m perceived there versus here in the U.S. But I’m respected in Europe for what I do week in and week out on the highest level.”
- “In big games, I always come through.”
- “It was good for my first goal to mean so much,” says Dempsey [who went to Fulham from the New England Revolution of the MLS on a $5 million transfer and scored a goal that saved Fulham from relegation] “I paid back the club for my transfer fee. I wasn’t in debt to them.”
- “I pride myself on stepping up on big occasions.”
- “People who aren’t educated about the game are going to take whatever a commentator has to say as the complete truth. And that’s not always the case. That’s just their opinion.”
- “I was top three in the whole tournament in distance covered,” he says. “You can question my effectiveness, but you can’t question my heart and my effort.”
- “I’m respected by my teammates. And I’m respected by my coaches. That’s why they keep me on the field. The criticism comes with the money we get paid.”
- “Off the pitch, the best thing about [playing in the Premier League] is more money in your account. You go to Europe for the competition, for the soccer and for more financial stability for your family.”
- “I’m from nowhere, man.” [Regarding growing up in Nacogdoches, TX]
- “It was like a nightmare,” Dempsey says [of his sister's untimely death at age 16]. “Every day you’d wake up and say, ‘Did that really happen?’… I know no matter how bad things get, things could always be worse. And no matter how great they can go, they can always be better. That keeps you grounded.” [I feel kind of bad about including this, but, you know, every quote]
- “I feel like I’m effective no matter where I am on the field.”
- “I enjoy playing up top, because the closer you are to goal, the more chances you’re going to get, and one of my favorite parts of the game is scoring goals.”
- “You start to think that fate’s on your side. There’s a chance to do something unbelievable.”
- “You can be the face [of US soccer] or not be the face. You get only so many opportunities in major competitions, and you’ve got to take advantage of them. I gotta stand up and be counted in this World Cup.”
Boring questions leading to boring answers? Maybe. But while I wish the guy all good luck in the Cup, I’ll pass on his autobiography.
