Gaming the System

In a provocative but flawed Grantland column about the deflated balls controversy currently swirling around Bill Belichick, Tom Brady, and the New England Patriots, Charles P. Pierce explains that “as soon as the story broke about the possibility that the Patriots had been up to some shenanigans with the game balls while they were obliterating the Indianapolis Colts, 45-7, in the AFC Championship Game, the country proceeded to lose its freaking mind on the subject.” (http://grantland.com/the-triangle/brady-belichick-and-great-balls-of-fire-a-front-row-seat-for-the-foxborough-farce/) Pierce, here, is exactly right, i.e. there isn’t an ounce of hyperbole in his description of our collective response to “DeflateGate” (a generic and clichéd label for a scandal, yes, but still preferable to the other label being tossed around, “Ballghazi,” which is too uncomfortable in its implicit linkage of professional football, that proxy for war, with the Global War on Terror, that proxy for what Woodrow Wilson once described as “normalcy.”) Case in point, yours truly, who despite moving house this week has devoted approximately 30,000 of my 50,000 thoughts per day to DeflateGate (with another 10,000 reserved for monitoring the chance for snow).

But while Pierce grasps the breadth of this latest scandale du jour, he has no sense of its depth. Ignoring its depth, Pierce writes “The whole thing is flatly hilarious.” (ibid) And while the dramatics are not without their comic elements, the affair’s tragic elements are at least as prominent as the obvious comic surrealism. Although I would note that Pierce’s explanation of what exactly is so funny about all of this is more than a little bit troubling: “The whole thing is flatly hilarious. The way you can be sure of this is that the ladies of The View pronounced themselves outraged by the perfidious Patriots on Thursday morning. Rosie O’Donnell wanted them booted from the Super Bowl. (Trolling or insane? Our lines are open.)” If you’ve been listening to sports talk radio all week, as I have, you’ve heard one sports pundit after another pronounce themselves outraged by the perfidious Patriots, some of whom have also suggested that the Patriots be disqualified from the Super Bowl. But what almost all of these sports radio personalities have in common is that they’re men. But given that “the ladies of The View” lack the prerequisite equipment between their legs, any opinions they might offer necessarily reduce the discussion to hilarity. Is it mere coincidence that O’Donnell, who famously has no interest in the equipment between men’s legs, is singled out by name? Does Pierce not even realize that a few paragraphs before he dismisses O’Donnell for the audacity of suggesting that the Patriots be disqualified from the Super Bowl, he writes that “Serious people in serious media venues have proposed disqualifying the Patriots from playing in the Super Bowl against the Seattle Seahawks”? Seriously, Charles P. Pierce? In short, Pierce is saying loud and clear that the scandal is reduced to mere “farce” (the exact word used in the title of his column) precisely because women feel entitled to express their own opinions about it. Pierce goes on to say the following: “This is what I think: Once a scandal starts being discussed on The View, it stops being a scandal and becomes a sitcom. I think this should be a rule.” Memo to Charles P. Pierce: The notion that women are not to be taken seriously has been a rule for thousands of years. It’s called patriarchy.

Just as troubling is Pierce’s repeated assertion that the public reaction to the scandal has been so intense “because we are a nation of infantilized yahoos.” Infants, of course, can’t think for themselves. But I would suggest that the “the country proceeded to lose its freaking mind on the subject” because of a very well reasoned, and deeply felt, line of thought. Let me briefly sketch how the thinking goes. The Patriots have had the great good fortune over the last fifteen years, an eternity in pro football, to have arguably the greatest football coach of all time (Belichick) partnered with arguably the greatest quarterback of all time (Brady). And they got there by hiring a guy who got canned from his first gig as an NFL head coach and by drafting a guy in the sixth round, i.e. a quarterback prospect who was just as likely to get cut as he was to make the team. The Patriots essentially hit the football equivalent of the Powerball lottery. Because it turns out that Belichick is one of the maybe three or four authentic football geniuses who ever lived, and Brady is an assassin.

So, when you have the greatest coach of all time and the greatest quarterback of all time you already have every advantage a football team is ever going to need. And everybody knows this. The combination is not unprecedented, having occurred at least once before in the tandem of Bill Walsh and Joe Montana on the great San Francisco 49ers teams that won beaucoup Super Bowls in the 1980s. The interesting thing is that nobody hated the 49ers the way they hate the Patriots. Sure, you might have rooted against the Niners because you were tired of them winning all the time the same way that you might have rooted against Roger Federer when he was winning every time he stepped onto a tennis court, but no one truly hated the Niners or hated Federer because you can only develop so much antipathy towards simple greatness. Greatness might breed a certain amount of envy but it also breeds respect, and there is no respect in the level of animosity we all feel towards the Patriots. Because, beginning with the Spygate scandal in 2007, when the Patriots were first caught cheating red handed, the Patriots have come to represent something altogether different from greatness: gaming the system for an advantage you don’t need. The Patriots, who in the persons of Belichick and Brady have everything, (Belichick’s brains, Brady’s looks, success, wealth, fame, and supermodel wife) are the 1%. The Patriots, like the 1%, embody the paradox of already having everything but still wanting more, and, moreover, trampling the rules that everyone else is expected to follow in order to extract that paradoxical surplus from those who have little to nothing precisely because they follow those very rules. How interesting that on the very same day that the DeflateGate story broke, Oxfam released its report detailing that the 80 richest people on the planet have as much wealth as the poorest 3.5 billion combined, and that by 2016 the richest 1% will have more wealth than all the rest of the 99% combined.

Pierce, then, is dead wrong in labeling us “infantilized yahoos” for “losing (our) freaking mind on the subject” of the New England Patriots’ deflated balls. A more telling critique is to press those, like me, who couldn’t stop thinking and talking about Belichick and Brady gaming the system for an advantage they manifestly don’t need, but who, like me, heard about the Oxfam report on the radio while my sports talk radio station was on commercial break, and quickly forgot about it as soon as ESPN radio’s Mike and Mike in the Morning came back from break to joke about Seinfeld’s “shrinkage” episode in re: deflated balls. If denial ain’t just a river in Egypt, then projection ain’t just how Belichick and Brady watch game film. The problem in projecting everything onto Brady and Belichick, of course, is that at least we get to watch those two squirm during their respective DeflateGate press conferences (which turned out to be little more than exercises in plausible deniability), while the 1% are as hard to find in their piles of money as a needle in a haystack. Note that we have yet to hear about DeflateGate from the real money behind the New England Patriots, team owner Bob Kraft. Perhaps the most important element of being rich these days is that money talks, so you don’t have to. And we only make it easier for them (the 1%) when all we talk about is football, even, as in the case of DeflateGate, when we are really talking about them. This doesn’t make us “infantilized yahoos,” but it does make us unwitting accomplices. Nevertheless, I hope they boot Brady and Belichick from the Super Bowl, i.e. I’m with Rosie O’Donnell.

Asking the Impossible

I should be clear from the start that football has been a part of my life for as long as I can remember. More to the point, it has been a pleasure, a source of joy, even. As a kid, I played back yard football whenever I could, which was more often than you might think given that the closest pick-up game was over a mile way, most of which was down a long dirt driveway. When I couldn’t get a game I spent hours punting and kicking back and forth across the front yard, which wasn’t much smaller than a proper gridiron (we lived in the country). During this same period a picture of the Heisman Trophy cut from a magazine hung from my bedroom door for years. In high school I finally got to play organized football, and I can still remember the twinge of melancholy whenever our coach got us focused in practice by reminding us that these eight or nine games a year were the last football games in which almost every last one of us would ever get to play. (We weren’t bad, top ten in Delaware my last year, but Delaware isn’t Texas so only a couple of us would go on to play Division III college football, and I wasn’t one of them.) I have watched football on Saturdays and Sundays in the fall since at least 1980, the year of the first Super Bowl to enter my consciousness, XV between the Raiders and Eagles, when we still lived in Pennsylvania. (My childhood dog, Riggins, was named after the hero of Super Bowl XVII.) And now that we haven’t had a TV in nine years, I’ve still managed to watch football on Sundays at my mother-in-law’s house. And any time my favorite teams win, I get a blast of dopamine in my head. I listen to sports radio, which is at least 75% football-focused in-season or out, every day that I drive my car. I check the sports page on the internet every day, and probably 75% of the content is similarly devoted to football. Most years I have a (losing) fantasy football team. (Like sands through the hourglass, so far this year my squad, Aqua Velva, has one win to two losses.)

I once heard it said that one shouldn’t make a religion out of literature, because it is at the same time both more than and less than a religion. Without knowing exactly what that means, I would both agree and say that this is also exactly how I feel about football.

All of which is to say that for me, like tens of millions of other Americans, football matters. It has emotional heft and occupies significant chunks of the synapses in my brain. Which has made the revelation in the last several years of the brutal head trauma suffered by so many professional football players, a pattern of trauma which simply isn’t captured by the word concussion, more than a little troubling, twisting football from a pleasure into a guilty pleasure, and not the kind we mean when we say we get a guilty pleasure out of watching Jersey Shore; i.e. we don’t think “Isn’t it funny that I’m watching this,” but instead think “Maybe I shouldn’t really be watching this anymore.” And that was before this month’s epochal scandal, the video footage of Ray Rice’s explosive domestic violence, through which we have arrived at a defining moment. But the question remains: definitive of exactly what?

The phrase looping around and around in my head as I try to come to grips with the punch Ray Rice threw at his beloved is this: the compartmentalization of violence. We expect professional football players to engage in ultraviolence on the field of play, and comport themselves as gentlemen everywhere else, which means that we expect the impossible. In a schizophrenic arrangement (as the term is used colloquially), one compartment holds David Banner, the other the Hulk. Unfortunately, aggression leaks and eventually someone pisses off David Banner. There is an old saying that if you keep going to see a surgeon, eventually you’re going to get cut (i.e., it’s what they do). By the very same logic, if you hang around professional football players long enough, you’ll see someone get hit. Inside and outside the lines. (The latter of which, ironically, is the name of the ESPN news outlet which has alleged that the NFL’s league office and the management of the Baltimore Ravens have engaged in an ongoing cover-up of what they knew about Ray Rice and when they knew it, which, if true, is a topic for another day. I would only point out here that the fact that the cover up is always worse than the crime is the universe’s way of insisting that we learn from our mistakes instead of denying and/or burying them. Okay, I will also point out that I don’t know which is worse, if I am Roger Goodell’s employer: that Goodell knew the videotape of Ray Rice punching his fiancé was in the league office -note that it has been factually established that the tape was in the office- and he has been lying about it, or that the tape was in the league office without Goodell having a clue, i.e. he’s a liar or a fool, as in a commissioner from the planet Krypton who supervised underlings without expressly warning them about the possible effects of Kryptonite on their beloved boss is foolish, indeed. But I digress. Okay, okay, one more digression- Another tragic aspect of all of this is that prior to the incident Ray Rice would have been the very last Baltimore Raven anyone would have imagined punching his significant other’s lights out. He seemed to be the embodiment of the ideal of compartmentalization, lethal on the field and a model citizen in the community, an officer and a gentleman, if you will.)

If the logic of “if you hang around professional football players long enough, you’ll see someone get hit, inside and outside the lines” is valid, it would stand to reason that the arrest rates for NFL players involved in violent assault would be off the charts. When, in fact, the arrest rate for NFL players in cases of non-domestic assault is only 16.7% of the national average. (http://fivethirtyeight.com/datalab/the-rate-of-domestic-violence-arrests-among-nfl-players/) So, at first blush, pro football players seem to be the kind of guys you actually would want your daughter to bring home. But that picture drastically and tragically changes when you account for domestic violence:

“Domestic violence accounts for 48% of arrests for violent crimes among NFL players, compared to our estimated 21% nationally. Moreover, relative to the income level (top 1 percent) and poverty rate (0 percent) of NFL players, the domestic violence rate is downright extraordinary.” (http://fivethirtyeight.com/datalab/the-rate-of-domestic-violence-arrests-among-nfl-players/)

Given that the rate at which American domestic violence cases are reported is found in research studies to be as low as less than 1% (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domestic_violence_in_the_United_States), and given that the economic incentive alluded to above (“top 1 percent”) provides the victims of domestic NFL violence literally millions of reasons not to report, the depth and breadth of the NFL’s domestic violence problem could very well be unthinkably vast. The tendency of domestic violence victims not to report is also a stark reminder that the NFL players are, in one very grim sense of the term, rational actors in the perpetration of domestic violence; “we only hurt the ones we love” has been replaced by “we only hit the ones who won’t press charges.”

Although perhaps “rational actor” is a bit of a misnomer, implying as it does the process of conscious reasoning, when what’s really in play here is the unconscious process of displacement, defined by Norman A. Polansky in Integrated Ego Psychology as “turning one’s impulse aside from its original unacceptable target to one that involves less anxiety.” And, it goes without saying, there is certainly less anxiety involved in targeting those who won’t call the police, i.e. players’ wives/girlfriends, then everyone else they have the impulse to punch in the mouth. The classic example of displacement is the worker who takes crap from his boss all day, only to come home and take out (displace) his anger on the family dog with a swift kick. It is, then, the cruelest of ironies that the women getting punched and kicked by professional football players are also tagged by machismo locker room culture with the moniker “bitches.”

I am left wondering how to dole out the blame between the pro football players throwing the left hooks and we adoring masses. It is we, after all, who expect (and reward) the compartmentalization of violence, which is akin to expecting water to flow uphill. If we can say anything definitive about violence it is that aggression spreads. In this, it is no different than love. Violence, it turns out, cannot be compartmentalized; the closest it can come to disappearing is to be aimed at the vulnerable in the hopes that their invisibility will rub off on the violence. Which is why it is no surprise that within days of the release of the Ray Rice videotape, pictures surfaced documenting star Minnesota Viking Adrian Peterson’s alleged felony abuse of his son. In the National Football League, the compartmentalization of violence is code for violent displacement onto women and children. If Ray Rice and Adrian Peterson have accomplished anything, it is the removal of every last shred of our collective plausible deniability about that. Meaning Hannah Storm’s eloquent question to the NFL can be asked of all of us who love the game and feed the machine: What exactly do we stand for?

What's in a Name?

In the current edition of ESPN Magazine, Howard Bryant’s column delves into exactly why, in the wake of the events surrounding Michael Brown’s death in Ferguson, Missouri, so few professional athletes, including the many African Americans in their ranks, have spoken out. Bryant’s piece is highly recommended, touching lucidly on “fault lines of race and class,” and “the growing culture of militarism that is now everywhere in America.” But I’d like to use one peculiar, provocative element in Bryant’s column as a jumping off point for an entirely different conversation, if one that also sits unsteadily on “fault lines of race and class.” That subtle provocation occurs smack in the middle of Bryant’s report on the near-silence from pro jocks re: Ferguson:

“In the wake of curfews, arrests and tear gas, the St. Louis Rams offered tickets to the youth of Ferguson; some of the Washington football players held their hands up as they emerged from the tunnel before a preseason game, adopting the ‘hands up, don’t shoot’ symbol of protest in solidarity with a community roiling.”

How ironic that virtually the only professional athletes in America willing to take the risk of making public their support for the Black folks, and especially the young Black males, of Ferguson, Missouri are the very athletes who play for a team whose mascot Bryant cannot in good conscious even mention: the Washington Redskins.

The controversy surrounding the Washington football club’s mascot has reached a crescendo during a summer which saw the team lose its trademark protection from the United States Patent and Trademark Office (a ruling the team is, predictably, appealing), fifty United States senators sign a letter urging the NFL to take action and force a name change, and the announcement this week by the New York Daily News that it will no longer include the word Redskins in its newspaper (http://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/sack-article-1.1926865), an announcement that follows on the heels of the hometown Washington Post’s editorial page announcing that it will no longer print the word Redskins either (though the Post’s sports page will continue to refer to the team as the Redskins). (http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/washington-post-editorials-will-no-longer-use-redskins-for-the-local-nfl-team/2014/08/22/1413db62-2940-11e4-958c-268a320a60ce_story.html )

But before delving into the reasons that 71% of Americans still believe the team should not change its name (http://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/redskins/new-poll-says-large-majority-of-americans-believe-redskins-should-not-change-name/2014/09/02/496e3dd0-32e0-11e4-9e92-0899b306bbea_story.html), and that team owner Daniel Snyder has, per NBC’s Al Michaels, stated that the team will change its name “over my (Snyder’s) dead body,” some personal history is in order. I have been a Washington Redskins fan since moving within their TV broadcast territory as a 6-year old just at the dawn of the team’s golden age, a ten year burst in which the franchise would bring home three Super Bowl championships under the guidance of likable obnoxious rich guy (team owner) Jack Kent Cooke, California surfer dude (general manager) Bobby Beathard, and nascent NASCAR kingpin (head coach) Joe Gibbs. Everything about the team was fun, especially the winning, but also the nicknames (Hogs, Smurfs, Fun Bunch, etc.) and the cast of characters, e.g. the performance art of Hall of Fame running back John Riggins passing out drunk on the floor of a White House dinner after telling Justice O’Connor “Loosen up, Sandy Baby.”

But all good things must come to an end, and before long Cooke was dead, Beathard was guiding the San Diego Chargers to their first ever Super Bowl appearance, and Joe Gibbs was winning the Daytona 500. The Daniel Snyder era, with perpetual mediocrity punctuated by brief bursts of total incompetence, had begun. Not even Gibbs, in his brief second run with the team, could put things right; he got the hell out of Dodge after squeaking into the playoffs enabled him to leave with his dignity, and reputation, largely intact. It hasn’t been much fun to be a Redskins fan for the last twenty years, and without the fun to distract you, there’s that name. Just sitting there. On my 1987 Super Bowl t-shirt. On my 1982 Super Bowl Coke bottle. Talking to me. Telling me that the reason I was a Redskins fan for all the good years without once even thinking about the implications of the team’s name was because I could. Which doing things because you can without even thinking about them is the very definition of white privilege. And I continued not even thinking about it even several years into the losing, until a girlfriend (now ex) who had worked actively to change the University of Illinois’ Chief Illiniwek mascot as an undergraduate at Champagne-Urbana, looked at me a certain way whenever I used my MBNA Washington Redskins Visa card. Which is how my ’87 t-shirt is looking at me right about now. My privilege, singing “Hail to the Redskins” without ever once thinking about the words coming out of my mouth, was undone because my girlfriend made me think. Getting white folks to stop and think, and then hopefully feel, is the only way we ever change, and was the chief strategy of Martin Luther King’s nonviolent resistance movement.

Fast forward to 2014 and, slowly, more folks, white and otherwise, are beginning to stop and think about the name of the football franchise that represents our nation’s capital. While 71% of Americans still think its hunky dory if the Redskins keep their name, that number is significantly lower than 1992’s 89%. And, his “over my dead body” stance notwithstanding, Daniel Snyder may be starting to see the handwriting on the wall, as rumors have begun to circulate that Snyder may be willing to change the name for the right stadium deal (http://sports.yahoo.com/blogs/shutdown-corner/former-gm--dan-snyder-might-drop-redskins-name-for-new-stadium--super-bowl-144942689.html). But given that the latter is currently mere internet speculation, as well as the fact that Snyder and his minions have been mounting an aggressive defense of their beloved mascot, including a creepy new charity campaign aimed at select American Indian tribes, the task of answering the arguments floated in favor of keeping the name is still at hand. The four most oft repeated arguments turn out to be, respectively, false, (almost) real, stonewalling, and ironic.

The false argument, and one put forward in bad faith, is that the name Redskins is intended to honor American Indians. This is patently absurd, mirroring other lies such as segregation’s “separate but equal” and Fox News’ “fair and balanced.” In all three of these cases, the lie functions to announce the real intentions (i.e., respectively, making sport of a dominated civilization, terrorizing Blacks, and shilling for the neoliberal militarists) in a socially acceptable manner. The truth is that using and maintaining the name Redskins is just a perpetual game of Cowboys and Indians, a game that has never been about honoring American Indians, but about casting them as brutal savages to be overcome by western civilization. Cowboys and Indians is the children’s version of a ritual, here being played by grown men and women, the sole purpose of which is to absolve (European) Americans of any lingering guilt over genocide.

The only (quasi) real argument being made in favor of keeping the name goes something like this: “You’re just a bunch of uptight liberals trying to ruin our harmless fun.” Real as in honest, if only honest to a point. Honest that it is a lot of fun playing Cowboys and Indians (Redskins fans claim to hate the Cowboys, when really we’re all Cowboys fans too, enjoying with our Dallas brethren the thrill of a victory that delivered an entire continent; the only difference is that we get to play the Indian while our Dallas brethren get to play the Cowboy), but deeply disingenuous in its denial of the incalculable harm done to an entire people.

The (not quite) real argument is closely related to the argument that is used more frequently than all of the others combined, i.e. the stonewalling maneuver of stating some version of “Man, I’m not into all that political correctness stuff.” This strategy depends on the logic that 1) all reasonable people recognize political correctness for what it is- a liberal mind control device that deflects our attention from attending to matters that are actually important, 2) and therefore anything judged to be politically correct can be dismissed out of hand, 3) and furthermore the concern over the Redskins name is a classic case of political correctness run amok. Repressed and implicit in this logic is the nefarious belief that the bloody history between European colonists and indigenous American Indians, not to mention the current relations, are of negligible importance. Which is to say, it doesn’t matter because the victors have already accrued their spoils.

The final, ironic argument is perhaps the darkest: “We must keep the Redskins name because it is a source of unity for the people of the District of Columbia and the surrounding suburbs.” Putting aside the fact that this so-called unity is entirely non-contingent on the name Redskins, i.e. it has been just as readily provided by the Ravens in Baltimore despite the city’s historic connection to the name Colts, let us note what we are really saying when we claim that the price of the unity between Blacks, Whites, Latinos and Asians is paid with the name Redskins: It (North America) is ours now.

Leave it to Peyton

This Sunday, Peyton Manning plays in his third Super Bowl, and his first for the Denver Broncos. At stake, of course, is the Lombardi Trophy, a prize which most years obtains to its status as the closest thing America has to the Holy Grail, but which in 2014 is a mere pawn in the larger struggle between Manning and the Patriots’ Tom Brady for the mantle of Greatest of All Time. Assuming Manning’s Broncos beat the outmatched Seahawks, who were caught on secret 3-D footage stashed in R2-D2 saying “Help us, Al Roker, you’re our only hope,” the contest between Manning and Brady will head to the fifteenth and final round as a dead heat, much like Bird and Magic on the eve of the decisive ’87 NBA Finals, in which Magic secured his fourth ring to Bird’s three, a deficit Bird would never overcome, or, more apropos of the “fifteenth round” analogy, like Ali and Frazier heading into their third and final encounter, the Thrilla in Manilla, each with a victory under their belt.

This is interesting enough in and of itself, nothing being more satisfying to the hard core sports fan then a lengthy debate as to the Greatest of All Time (G.O.A.T.); e.g. I could write a dissertation on the respective cases to be made for each of men’s tennis’ Mt. Rushmore figures. (With apologies to Bjorn Borg, I rank them thusly: #1 Federer, #2 Laver, #3 Sampras, #4 Nadal, with the caveat that Nadal may yet leapfrog them all. But, you say, what if Laver hadn’t been excluded from playing Grand Slams for five years because he was ineligible under pre-open-era tennis’ sham amateurism? He would have won at least ten more. I would, of course, retort by asking how many Slams Sampras would have won if three of the four majors were played on grass, as they were in Laver’s day. Etc., etc., etc.) But since a protracted discussion of the merits of Manning and Brady’s respective cases for G.O.A.T. status, while making for some great sportstalk radio, is a recipe for death by blogging, I will instead point out that Manning and Brady aren’t just in a dead heat re: the G.O.A.T., but are also running neck and neck in the popularity polls, even though no one is willing to admit this.

The official narrative is that Brady is the resented demi-god, while Manning is the revered man of the people; Brady does ads for Uggs for Men (Which is the equivalent and no less bizarre than if he were doing ads for Secret Antiperspirant for Men, completing the reframing of the old Secret slogan, which used to be “Strong enough for a man, but pH balanced for a woman,” but is now simply “Strong enough for a woman,” and which, if Brady were the Secret for Men pitchman, could be completed as “Strong enough for a woman, but smells enough like Aqua Velva for a man.” ), while Manning shills for Papa John’s Pizza. (Full disclosure: my sister-in-law is in Manning’s most recent Papa John’s spot. You can see her walking into the Papa John’s while Manning waxes poetic about the freshness of Papa John’s ingredients from the driver’s seat of a ’68 Camaro. It must be pointed out that Manning in a ’68 Camaro is about as believable as Mike Dukakis in a tank.) The truth is that we resent Manning every bit as much as we do Brady, just for very different reasons.

The reasons to resent Brady are legion: he’s movie star handsome, has not just a super-model wife but an ur-super-model wife, along with three Super Bowl rings, hundreds of millions of dollars, a mansion that (literally) has a moat, and plays for a coach who is an evil genius. Plus the aforementioned Uggs for Men. Even the Dalai Lama resents Tom Brady. We pretend that we feel just the opposite for Manning, largely because, like the guy the chick just isn’t really into in the Vertical Horizon song:

“He’s everything you want
He’s everything you need
He’s everything inside of you
That you wish you could be
He says all the right things
At exactly the right time
But he means nothing to you
And you don’t know why”

We pretend we don’t know why because it’s much easier to feign ignorance than to admit the truth: We resent Peyton Manning because he reminds us of Eddie Haskell.

Eddie Haskell is the greatest two-faced bastard in the western literary canon, his unctuous, quasi-flirtatious overtures to Mrs. Cleaver lending cover to his bullying of The Beaver. We, the public, are Manning’s Mrs. Cleaver, to whom he says all the right things at exactly the right time. Just today, asked by the media what he hoped his legacy would be, Manning exhibited his exquisite sense of how to come off like a “class act,” explaining, in so many words, that he hoped he would be remembered as a great competitor who played as hard as he could for each team he took the field for, blah, blah, blah. This is complete and utter horseshit. You know it, I know it, Bob Dole knows it. Peyton Manning gets out of bed each morning for one reason only, which is to prove to everyone that he, and not Tom Brady, is the Greatest of All Time. Making the rest of the NFL Manning’s Beaver, whom he never bullied as effectively as he did this year, setting a new single-season NFL record for touchdowns completed (a record previously held by The Man on Manning’s back, Tom Brady, making Manning’s breaking of the record like Eddie Haskell cuckolding Mr. Cleaver). Our secret pact with Manning is that we’ll play along with his (class) act, as long as we can remain voyeurs to his relentless, pinpoint bombing. (Making our relationship with Manning evocative of our relationship with our federal government. Is there, we should be asking, any substantive difference between the subjective experience of controlling Manning’s aerial assault on the Chiefs’ defense in a game of Madden from the comfort of one’s own living room and piloting a drone while executing its aerial assault on Pakistanis from the comfort of a hi-tech office cubicle somewhere in Pennsylvania? Are we already living out Ender’s Game, with video games nothing but practice for a generation of “soldiers” who will, like Ender, never experience war as war? And in cultivating an army of drone “gamers” are we not, in the words of Alain Badiou, one decisive step closer to having “rendered war and peace indistinguishable?”)

As the media attempts to fill the two-week gap between conference championships and the Super Bowl, there has been much discussion of Seahawks’ cornerback Richard Sherman’s post-game interview, conducted immediately after Sherman made the decisive interception in the Seahawks win over the 49ers, a win that sent them to the Super Bowl. Sherman, like Manning (or Brady), is widely considered the best at his position, making him one of the world’s elite professional athletes. Interviewed on the field by Fox’s Erin Andrews about his climactic feat, Sherman expounded thusly:

“I’m the best corner in the game. When you try me with a sorry receiver like Crabtree, that’s the result you gonna get. Don’t you ever talk about me… Don’t open your mouth about the best or I’m gonna shut it for you real quick.”

The narrative thread in the ensuing media melee has been all about whether Sherman, who attended Stanford University and who happens to be Black, is a “thug,” and if the word “thug” is code for the n-word. Which entire narrative reveals either a startling lack of insight into the mind of the elite professional athlete, or the depths of our self-deception. Because Peyton Manning (and Tom Brady, for that matter) feels exactly the same way about his competition as Sherman feels about Crabtree (and if Manning and Brady didn’t feel that way, they’d have ended up as an altogether different sort of pizza delivery guy and shoe salesman). The difference is that Manning is savvy enough to serve up the Mom, apple pie, and Papa John’s pizza instead of granting us access to his throbbing will to power, which is exactly what Sherman let us see two Sundays ago, and which display had nothing to do with the fact that Sherman is Black, and everything to do with Sherman’s failure to grasp that everyone playing the bloodsport we call professional football is also playing the very same character, whose initials are Eddie Haskell.

So even if Manning and Brady retire in a dead heat, and even if deep down we resent Manning’s Haskell as much as we resent Brady’s Midas, we’ll all throw our weight behind Manning’s G.O.A.T. candidacy for the simple fact that he’s a better actor. His act allows us to feel classy too, enabling us to pretend the L.A. Coliseum has nothing to do with the Roman Coliseum, and to act as if nice guys don’t finish last, obscuring the fact that there are no nice guys on football’s gridiron, nice guys not being the type to “punch the opposition in the mouth,” “go for the jugular,” or adhere to the wisdom of football’s most underrated talking head, Brian Billick: “When you go into the lion’s den, you don’t tippy-toe in- you carry a spear, you go in screaming like a banshee, you kick whatever doors in, and say, ‘Where’s the SOB?’ If you go in any other way you’re gonna lose.” (Sherman’s real sin was in reminding everyone of exactly that fact, his rant the equivalent of Haskell goosing Mrs. Cleaver as she does the dishes.) And if in a few years, after he’s finally hung up his cleats, Manning’s neck begins to feel the after-effects of four surgeries and counting, we’ll be too busy arguing about who the new G.O.A.T. is to notice that Manning has gone from hero to goat. (“Our” old hero will have no one to blame but himself for his empty shell of a body and, if Brett Favre and Jim McMahon’s dodgy memory banks are any indicator, mind.)

I can’t wait for kickoff!

What's in a Name?

In his novel The Pale King, David Foster Wallace, in the space of less than a half-page, uncloaks the logic behind consecutive Reagan landslides in 1980 and ‘84:

“’In other words we’ll have for a president a symbolic Rebel against his own power whose election was underwritten by inhuman soulless profit-machines whose takeover of American civic and spiritual life will convince Americans that rebellion against the soulless inhumanity of corporate life will consist in buying products from corporations that do the best job of representing corporate life as empty and soulless. We’ll have a tyranny of conformist noncomformity presided over by a symbolic outsider whose very election depended on our deep conviction that his persona is utter bullshit. A rule of image, which because it’s so empty makes everyone terrified- they’re small and they’re going to die, after all-‘

‘Christ, the death thing again.’

‘- and whose terror of not really ever existing makes them that much more susceptible to the ontological siren song of the corporate buy-to-stand-out-and-so-exist gestalt.’”

Wallace shows us Reagan as Mobius strip, a surface with only one side; Reagan was never the rebel he played on TV, and everyone knew it, making his outsider persona part and parcel of the “tyranny of conformist noncomformity.” If I am reading Wallace correctly, we elected Reagan because we hated what we wanted, the safety of the herd, and wanted what we hated, commodified dissent. In sum, Reagan made it safe to go shopping. At the end of this passage Wallace, in so many words, reformulates Descartes’ cogito for the world Reagan presided over and which we still inhabit: “I shop, therefore I am.”

Reagan’s Mobius strip was on full display in, of all places, the United States Football League (USFL), a professional football league that operated for three seasons during the peak of the Reagan era from 1983 –’85. Like Reagan, the USFL purported to be one thing, a spring time football league existentially distinct from the National Football League (NFL) by virtue of its seasonal remove, while behaving like the opposite, a direct competitor for the NFL’s star players (e.g. Doug Flutie, Herschel Walker, Steve Young, Jim Kelly, and Reggie White) and its fans’ dollars. Soon after the 1985 season and under the influence of its majordomo franchisee, one Donald Trump, the USFL scrapped its spring football formula and prepared to compete head to head with the NFL in the fall; the league subsequently folded before playing a down of fall football.

The USFL existed as the reverse image of Reagan’s one-sided deception, promising something that people weren’t ready to admit they wanted, spring football, while actually delivering a real rebellion. But when the USFL dropped its charade and owned its rebelliousness, it stepped out of Reagan’s mirror and off the stage of history. With the USFL’s move to the fall serving as an announcement of exactly who and what it was, it was as if the ’84 Reagan re-election campaign had chosen its actual guiding ethos as its campaign slogan: “Greed is good.” Instead, the Gipper went with “Morning Again in America,” continuing the winning gambit of blatant deception, the image of morning sunrise as duplicitous as that of the rebel; everyone knew that Reagan’s morning was when you had to get up to go to work, which was all anyone had time for since, under Reagan, “Real weekly wages for nonsupervisory workers… took a beating, declining even more quickly than they had during the 1970’s. Today, the average real earnings of nonsupervisory workers remain far below those of 30 years ago.” (http://www.dollarsandsense.org/archives/2004/0704miller.html)

“If an ant were to crawl along the length of this (Mobius) strip, it would return to its starting point having traversed the entire length of the strip… without ever crossing an edge.” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%C3%B6bius_strip). We are all ants, and, clearly, we are all still walking.

The tension between Reagan’s role as rebel and his function as puppet, which tension held together our “conformist noncomformity,” is illustrated by the USFL’s sundry mascots. There were a total of 19 mascots, and if we set aside the three franchises with animal mascots (Birmingham Stallions, Jacksonville Bulls, and Michigan Panthers), we are left with 16 mascots that can be equally divided into rebel and establishment categories, with the rebels the place holders for Reagan’s fiction, and the establishment teams representing his fact, both in plain sight where the truth is almost always found.

Several members of the USFL’s “rebel alliance,” if you will, took their inspiration from the mythic “wild west,” according to which myth the ultimate freedom may well have been the freedom from government bureaucracy (which is perhaps why Reagan, the ultimate anti-government governor, was a self-styled cowboy who was frequently photographed on horseback). These teams included the Arizona Wranglers, Oklahoma Outlaws (who merged with Arizona to become the Arizona Outlaws, in a kind of proto-Brokeback Mountain-with-gay-marriage moment, which, given that homosexuality is one of the ultimate forms of rebellion, makes perfect sense), San Antonio Gunslingers, Tampa Bay Bandits, Houston Gamblers (in the image of Kenny Rogers’ “The Gambler,” a solitary voice of wisdom who brings to mind that ultimate rebel figure, Socrates, not to mention the fact that the establishment is, if nothing else, risk averse, which is why the establishment is the house, and never the gambler, given that the house always wins) and the Orlando Renegades (which Renegades, of course, rebelled against the genocide of their people, which, bizarrely, means that the White team owners were honoring those who rebelled against their (the owners’) people’s efforts to accomplish that very genocide).

Two additional teams rounded out the band of rebels. If you look up the definition of the Memphis Showboats mascot one finds that it is both a) “a river steamboat on which theatrical performances are given,” and b) a “show off.” And while the Memphis franchise had the image of the river steamboat on its helmet, the mascot was really a celebration of “showboating” on the playing field, an act that was both a) Black, and b) outlawed by the NFL after its Black players began taking too many liberties with their end zone touchdown celebrations, Billy “White Shoes” Johnson’s “Funky Chicken” end zone dance proving the point that for rich white men nothing is more frightening than the funky. The Memphis Showboats were a celebration of the freedom inherent to all displays of funkiness. Interestingly, by playing it conservative and putting the river steamboat on their helmets, rather than, say, a picture of James Brown, the Memphis Showboats were amplifying their echo of Reagan’s undisguised misdirection.

Bringing us to the final rebel squad, the Pittsburgh Maulers, whose mascot was the figure of a hard-hatted worker wielding his mauler, i.e. a heavy long-handled hammer used for driving stakes or wedges. The hammer is evocative of nothing other than the hammer and sickle, and the wedge the worker is preparing to drive is between the establishment and the proletariat it seeks to extract its surplus from. This being Reagan’s America, the Maulers only managed to stick around for one season. Pittsburgh was allowed to keep the NFL’s Steelers, but only after agreeing to give up the Steel industry and its jobs, proud blue collar workers being consigned to the fantasy realm of giants and fierce dolphins.

In sync with Reagan’s up-is-not- down universe, the most prominent of the establishment teams were head-rebel Donald Trump’s New Jersey Generals, which, of course, represented that signature American institution, the military-industrial complex. The Generals were flanked by the Chicago Blitz, symbolizing the American war machine, and the Oakland Invaders, who echoed Vietnam and presaged Iraq I, Afghanistan, and Iraq II. And since war is as much about treasure as it is about blood, the establishment teams included the Denver Gold, who also represented the Reaganite version of the golden rule: “Whoever has the gold, makes the rules.” Joining the Gold were the Los Angeles Express, whose mascot, evoking American Express, was a reminder that a man is no longer as good as his word, but instead as good as his credit rating.

The Washington Federals, like the Showboats, play off of Reagan’s knack for obvious subterfuge, Federals seeming at first glance a repudiation of everything the doyen of smaller federal government stood for. But, of course, Reagan, the “symbolic outsider,” was in truth the ultimate federal insider, his legacy cemented by the Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center, the second largest federal government building in greater Washington. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronald_Reagan_Building_and_International_Trade_Center) Governments don’t erect monuments to those who mean them any harm.

The Philadelphia Stars, who later relocated to the DC suburb of College Park but were, nevertheless, renamed the Baltimore Stars, symbolize the mass media, whose job, with apologies to Casey Kasem, is to keep us reaching for the stars while never keeping our feet on the ground; any feet on the ground that aren’t army boots on the ground are at risk of organizing a union and going on strike.

The last of the USFL’s establishment teams, the Breakers, who played one season each in Boston, New Orleans, and Portland, Oregon and whose mascot was a wave breaking on the shore, would seem a candidate to join the three neutral animal squads on the sidelines. But, again like the Showboats, the Breakers name had a double meaning, and one that was explicitly linked with the Pittsburgh Maulers. If the Maulers represented labor, Boston, New Orleans, and Portland were each in turn home to the (Strike) Breakers. It is no surprise that the (Strike) Breakers took up consecutive residences in respective American hotbeds of intellectuals (Boston), artists (New Orleans), and progressives (Portland); a (Strike) Breaker always goes where the work is.

I just started my USFL t-shirt collection. As a child of the Reagan years, it is only appropriate that my first t-shirt, purchased from Amazon, which as of December of 2013 had consistently and successfully prevented any of its US workers from unionizing, features one of the rebel teams, the San Antonio Gunslingers.

All hope, however, is not yet lost. Plans for an eight team revival of the USFL in 2014 are afoot. The very first city the new USFL visited was Akron, Ohio. (http://www.cleveland.com/sports/index.ssf/2012/06/akron_could_have_a_team_in_rev.html) Akron is known as the “Rubber Capital of the World,” is still home to the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company, and “is considered the polymer manufacturing center in the country,” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akron,_Ohio) meaning they still make stuff there, which, in post-Reagan America, is nothing short of a miracle, making it the perfect place to start a worker’s rebellion, if not a revolution. The stadium is already called the Rubber Bowl, and Akron Rubbers has a nice ring to it for a football team. Just got to be careful with the logo on the helmet. Some blatant deception, a la the Memphis Showboats, may be in order. I’m thinking rubber boots. (I also like the image below, available at http://www.awesomesportslogos.com/Montunos-Del-Interior-Cool-Tshirts-Funny-Tshirts-Awesome-Tshirts-Hilarious-Tshirts-Prodlist.html)

Pretty in Pink?

It is a strange time to be pink. On the one hand, never before has the assignment of blue to boys and pink to girls been more rigid. As pointed out in The Washington Post last week (http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/compost/wp/2013/12/04/every-gift-for-children-this-year-is-terrifying-a-walk-over-the-thin-pink-line-in-target/) and as any visitor to the Target toy department can attest, the strict gender coding of children’s toys (and apparel) by color is as stark in its contrast as the opposite hued fans in the home and visitor sections at a Michigan vs. Ohio State game, where maize and blue compete with scarlet and gray. On the other hand, in the last several years pink has made deep inroads into men’s fashion and sports culture. Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal have both taken the court in pink shirts (though, oddly, the only match that Nadal has ever lost at the French Open, a tournament he has won eight times, he lost in pink). Professional and college football teams put more and more pink in their uniforms during their annual breast cancer awareness efforts, a practice which culminated with the University of Oregon Ducks, who have grown into a de facto division of Nike’s fashion empire, donning entirely pink helmets in a contest this fall against Washington State. And the kind of teenage boys who wear expensive basketball high tops, at least the ones in Baltimore, have been mixing bright pink kicks into the rotation. Pink has never been more feminine, while at the same time becoming increasingly masculine.

This schizophrenic identity is perhaps not surprising when we consider how very recently it was that the color came to be identified with gender, and even less surprising given the shifts that occurred in that short history. In the 1800’s babies and toddlers of both genders were clothed in white dresses; it wasn’t until the first part of the twentieth century that color entered the picture. And over those first several decades pink was more frequently linked to boys, if only because, as quoted in a Smithsonian Magazine piece (http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/When-Did-Girls-Start-Wearing-Pink.html), the thinking of the day held that “pink, being a more decided and stronger color, is more suitable for the boy, while blue, which is more delicate and dainty, is prettier for the girl,” an observation which, lest we think ourselves beyond all that, doesn’t sound very far off from “sugar and spice and everything nice, that’s what little girls are made of,” a nursery rhyme which we repeat as often and as thoughtlessly as Jack and Jill or Humpty Dumpty. This trend didn’t reverse itself until the 1940’s, when the current code, pink for girls and blue for boys, began to predominate.

The odd cultural space inhabited by pink is best illuminated by the controversy surrounding the University of Iowa football stadium’s visiting locker room, the walls of which are painted pink. If pink is feminine, then the protests (reported at http://www.sportsgrid.com/ncaa-football/iowa-pink-locker-room/) of former UI professor Jill Gaulding that the painted walls are a form of “pink shaming” designed, per Gaulding, to mark the visiting Boilermakers or Cornhuskers as “a bunch of ladies/girls/sissies/pansies/etc.”, are absolutely correct. But if pink, per the Ducks and all the other young men whose color palettes Nike is radically expanding, is now as masculine as it is feminine, and as masculine as it once was prior to the 1940’s, then the University of Iowa is standing on firm ground in asserting that it paints its visiting locker room walls pink for the calming effect it has on its opponents, becalmed Boilermakers presumably being less capable of punching their opponent, i.e. the hometown Hawkeyes, in the mouth, which is football-speak for a job well done. Indeed, a quick Google search (http://psychology.about.com/od/sensationandperception/a/color_pink.htm) reveals that pink’s calming effect has been well established in color psychology research (was Nadal becalmed at Roland Garros when he suffered his only loss while wearing pink?), and that the University of Iowa, while perhaps first, is not alone in its practice (http://www.milb.com/news/article.jsp?ymd=20130717&content_id=53916674&fext=.jsp&vkey=news_milb).

As recently as ten years ago, perhaps even five, Gaulding would have been right, and the University of Iowa would have been wrong. But now that pink is hyper-feminine at the same time that it is uber-masculine, Gaulding and Iowa are both right, as if the rules of quantum physics, where an electron can be in two places at one time, have invaded the realm of ethics. In football, when electrons are simultaneously in two places, i.e. when there are penalties on both the offense and the defense on the same play, the penalties offset, resulting in a “do-over,” a concept that is as alien to our observable Newtonian world as the behavior of electrons (which is why every husband foolish enough to try to win an argument with his wife knows that once you’ve said something, even if you immediately realize you should never have said it, you can’t take it back). So perhaps Gaulding and Iowa should engage in a do-over and work through this whole pink locker room thing. Because think what might happen if Gaulding visited the locker room while the Oregon Ducks were in town, putting on pink helmets that were a perfect match for the locker room walls. If, sensing Gaulding’s presence, the Ducks asked themselves, “Are we not men?”, they would be left doing quantum ethics and calculating probabilities while inhabiting a Newtonian world where, as in the effort to definitively locate those elusive electrons, the only meaningful final answer is maybe. For if pink is both feminine and masculine, then it really is neither here nor there.

When the Forest Goes All Incognito

As I write this, the Jonathan Martin/Richie Incognito imbroglio is reaching a crescendo as the Miami Dolphins, the organization whose workplace is either, in the words of a third Dolphins offensive lineman, Mike Pouncey, home to a “band of brothers,” or, conversely, as toxic as downtown Chernobyl, or, possibly, both simultaneously, take center stage on the national broadcast of Monday Night Football. Among the Martin/Incognito story’s many facets, which have been discussed ad nauseum on every sports radio broadcast I have tuned into during my daily commute for the last week, the element I find most revealing is that when Martin’s agent complained to Dolphins General Manager Jeff Ireland about Incognito, Ireland’s proposed solution was for Martin to punch Incognito in the face.

Ireland’s response tells us exactly how the Dolphins “family,” building on Pouncey’s idea of a “band of brothers,” functions. Ireland, from his position in senior management, is the father who greets his son’s report that the neighborhood bully just bloodied his nose by telling his son to get his butt back outside and not to even think about coming home until he has settled his score with the bully. The countless fathers who have used this approach always believe that they are doing what’s best for their sons, who, for all of the obvious reasons, must learn how to handle themselves. Just so, Ireland thought he was doing Martin a favor when, via his exchange with the agent, he essentially sent Martin back out the front door with his bloody nose.

What is so odd and, ultimately, galling about this scenario is that an organization worth at least half a billion dollars by the most conservative assessments, an organization that pays its players tens of millions of dollars, and its coaches and management millions as well, would ascribe to an ethos that is the product of endemic poverty. The cycle of violence in which a father sends his son out to the streets to sink or swim, desperately hoping that his son will prove just violent enough to swim (too little and too much violence both placing one at risk of drowning), is rooted in streets from which there is literally no way out. Each son thrown to the wolves by his father (for those lucky enough to have a father to do the throwing) serving as one more example of systemic economic injustice playing out one violent episode at a time.

The Miami Dolphins are rolling in money while mimicking the desperate and violent practices of those who have little or no choice, and who have been deprived of that choice through the violence perpetrated by a system set up to benefit the Miami Dolphins of the world at everyone else’s expense. It is the ultimate form of hubris and one we don’t even talk about as we natter on about whether Incognito is a racist bully or if Martin is a mentally unstable wuss. It is exactly where we are at the tail end of 2013, when we have never been less capable of seeing the forest for the trees.

The Code

The verdict in the court of public opinion is in: Mike Shanahan was a fool for allowing his franchise quarterback to play on an increasingly gimpy knee in the Redskins’ first round playoff loss to Seattle on Sunday. His risk was rewarded with the nauseating sight of RGIII laying prone on the grass, his immediate, and perhaps long-term, future in doubt. Pundits everywhere have characterized Shanahan’s failure to protect the most valuable asset the long suffering Redskins have had in at least twenty years as an epic fail.

The public and the pundits are doing the automatic Monday morning quarterback thing we all do so well, pretending that the actors involved in the moment as the shit went down were operating out of the same moral universe that these critics awakened to on Monday morning. But the world of professional sports, especially that of professional football, has its own set of moral imperatives. First and foremost among these is the requirement to, at all times and in all places, man-up. The code of manhood that rules professional sports is perhaps best exemplified by the fact that in 2013, when gay marriage is increasingly available at the nearest courthouse, and when gays are breaking down barriers left and right, including most recently that uber-exclusive club the United States Senate, we still have yet to see an openly gay athlete compete in any of the four major professional men’s sports leagues in North America (NFL, NBA, MLB, and NHL).

Two recent examples will suffice as exhibits of the manhood code that rules pro football. In the Dallas-Washington game just one week prior to Griffin and Shanahan’s partnership in crime (just who enabled who here remains unclear), superstar Dallas pass rusher Demarcus Ware played with a chronically separating shoulder essentially duct taped in place. Hours prior to the game Ware Tweeted that “Pain is temporary; quitting is forever.” And in the NFL playoffs just one year ago, as astutely pointed out by former pro hoopster Etan Thomas in The Washington Post, Chicago Bears quarterback Jay Cutler was universally excoriated as a quitter for coming out of the game with the same basic injury as Griffin, a balky knee. The requirement to man-up in the playoffs is trebled, at least. One either complies with the code, like Ware risking the future functioning of his arm, or, like Cutler, one is labeled a quitter and, much worse, less than a man (it goes without saying that being less than a man means being a woman, so that the word quitter is code for girl).

It is only within the confines of this code that Shanahan’s outrageous gamble, which appeared to be the thoughtless risk of at least a decade of future winning seasons in hopes of securing one wildcard victory (reminding me of the story of the husband who showed up with his unaware wife to close on their new house having gambled away the check from the bank at the racetrack), comes into focus as a decision made with Griffin’s best interest in mind (given the strictures of the code). Baseball managers, as in the case of the Washington Nationals shelving of Stephen Strasburg this summer to protect his surgically repaired throwing arm, can get away with rational precautionary measures. But baseball is a pastime, whereas professional football is a proxy for war. Had Shanahan sent Griffin to the bench at any point that Griffin could still limp onto the field, he would have sent the message to Griffin, the team, and the millions watching on TV, that he didn’t think Griffin was man enough to tough it out, play through the pain, etc., pairing Griffin forever with Cutler (since “quitting on his team” Cutler has become persona non grata to the point that e.g. ESPN Magazine, wishing to make a case for why 2-time Super Bowl winner Eli Manning isn’t actually that great, simply compared his stats to Cutler’s on the magazine cover, which was remarkably like Republicans’ efforts to smear Obama by comparing him to Jimmy Carter). Sending Griffin to the bench would have been to effectively emasculate him as the team’s field general. It would have been like Lee sending Stonewall Jackson to the rear guard with a flesh wound. Seen through the lens of the code, Shanahan’s decision to keep Griffin in the game ultimately came down to this: he risked having Griffin cut off at the knees rather than personally cutting off his balls.

He Who Would Be King Now Is

As I write this, Lebron James and the Miami Heat have already tipped off Game 4 of the NBA Finals versus the Oklahoma City Thunder, a series they lead two games to one entering tonight’s contest. I don’t need to check the score now, or even after it goes final, to know the outcome of the series. The Miami Heat will triumph and Lebron James will be named series MVP as he collects the first set of championship hardware of his already storied career. I know this not because the NBA is fixed, because it isn’t, and not because Kevin Durant and the Thunder are incapable of coming back from a 2-1 series deficit. About two weeks ago the Thunder were down in a deeper hole, 2-0 to the four-time NBA champion Spurs, who at the time were riding a twenty game win streak and for whom the reputed basketball experts (see one Bill Simmons) were already measuring ring sizes for the one for the thumb. The Thunder won four straight, demonstrating the ability to take a punch from a team with a “Big 3” every bit as accomplished as Miami’s, and here we are. I know this (this being the Heat’s eventual triumph) because it is preordained, which is not the same thing as fixed, or at least fixed by a human being.

Watching Lebron James throughout the 2012 playoffs, or rather listening to his games on the radio or listening to people who have watched the games talk about them on the radio (which is how you experience the games if you are blind, or, like me, not allowed to have a TV in your house because you frighten the children when you yell at it during ball games), one gets the clear impression that one is witnessing someone who has paid his debt to society, and is once again a free man. That debt has nothing to do with the fact of his departure from Cleveland, an inevitability, nor the fashion in which he did so via “The Decision,” i.e. tacky and not classy. This hurt James’ popularity, or Q Rating, but wasn’t what landed him in the symbolic pokey. What got James in trouble was his premature, self-styled coronation, when he landed in Miami for the celebration of his arrival and freshly minted partnership with Dwayne Wade and, to a lesser extent, Chris Bosh. At the celebration, James announced that the Heat would win “not one, not two, not three, not four, not five, not six, not seven,” NBA championships. Eight championships is a bit over the top, but the collection of talent on the Heat is capable of winning three, four, or even five rings. So, if we excuse James’ understandable excitement in the moment and allow him a reasonable margin of error of three or four championships, nothing James said was demonstrably unreasonable. James’ mistake, his crime, if you will, wasn’t, then, how many chickens he counted before they hatched, but the simple act of counting any eggs whatsoever before they hatched. What James, who has always gone by the nickname King James, failed to realize is that for every king, there must be a kingmaker. To wear the crown, kings must go through the checkout counter staffed by a cashier, who acts as kingmaker. In ringing up his championships that heady first day in Miami in the self checkout lane, James undid the process of coronation, which has always consisted of athlete winning championship, and public crowning him king. Lebron reversed both elements, crowning himself king before “not one” championship had been secured. James’ sin, for which he would be punished in the 2011 NBA Finals, was not that he would be king, it was always clear that he was destined for that, but that he would be both king and kingmaker.



James’ punishment in the 2011 NBA Finals was as preordained as the outcome of these 2012 Finals. The first piece of evidence comes in the form of a tattoo on the person of Dallas Mavericks shooting guard Jason Terry. Prior to the 2010-11 NBA season, Terry, a good but not great basketball player on an at best very good but never great basketball team, had the Larry O’Brien Trophy ( awarded annually to the NBA champions) tattooed on his right biceps. Given both Terry’s and the Mavericks’ modest resumes (Terry’s previous greatest previous accomplishment was being named the NBA’s 2009 Sixth Man of the Year, which is like being named world’s best sous chef, and in their one previous NBA Finals appearance in 2006 the Mavs had choked up a 2-0 series lead to the pre-Lebron Heat) this was akin to fellow Texan Ron Paul having a tattoo of the Seal of the President of the United States tattooed on his right biceps just before the Iowa caucus. The second piece of evidence from the 2011 NBA Finals came in the form of James’ bizarre disappearing act in the decisive fourth quarter throughout the six game series. James, one of the most dominant and assertive players in basketball history, inexplicably watched listlessly from behind the 3-point arc as the rest of his team wilted in each of the last four games of the series. To this day, commentators and James alike are unable to account for what occurred. It was as if an outside force had taken over James’ body. It had (it being the symbolic order that had been violated the moment Lebron publicly counted to seven).

To understand the gravity of James’ crime, two examples of biblical king making will suffice. The first example comes from the biblical king par excellence, King David. What is most important about King David for our purposes is the fact that he was not yet king when he slayed Goliath. It was only by slaying Goliath that David put himself in a position to eventually be crowned King of Israel. As the story goes, David placed all of his faith in God, and on the battle field against Goliath it would not be going too far to say that he became God’s chosen, later becoming king of God’s chosen people. There is a king, in the person of David, but there is also a kingmaker, in this case God Himself. The second example comes from Christianity, which as a religion only begins to make sense when the rule of king and kingmaker is applied. Against an interpretation of Christianity in which Jesus of Nazareth was the Son of God prior to his birth from Mary, the rule of king and kingmaker, a rule that binds God as surely as the laws of physics (apologies to the believers in a supernatural God, but He just doesn’t hold water) endorses an understanding of God’s adoption of Jesus as his son as Jesus hung on the cross. By this reading of Christianity, Jesus’ three year ministry qualified him as Son of God/Messiah/King, with the coronation occurring on Mount Calvary. The rule of king (Jesus) and kingmaker (God) had once more been obeyed. All things considered, Lebron James is getting off rather lightly for the hubris of playing the role of king and kingmaker. His coronation was postponed, not cancelled. It is being aired live on national television on not one, not two, not three, not four, but at least five and possibly seven nights. And perhaps it was better this way for Lebron. Just as there must be a king and a kingmaker, there can be only one king. In 2011, James wanted to be co-king with Dwayne Wade. Imagine Michael Jordan trying to share the throne with Scottie Pippen. It’s like imagining a squared circle. Recall the most recent king, Kobe Bryant, kicking Shaquille O’Neal out of his kingdom. Perhaps James’ punishment was for this offense as much as it was for playing king and kingmaker. But that James is gone, replaced by a 2012 version who is now a real life king to match his nickname. The coronation , the real one where you, me, and Bill Simmons get to play kingmaker, is taking place now.

And while I was typing, the Heat won Game 4. Let me be the first to say it: Long live the king!

The Decision

It’s been a couple of weeks now since Lebron James’ infamous “Decision” on ESPN, and I remain transfixed by both the fact of the event (full disclosure: I didn’t watch “The Decision”, since I am of course superior to all those mere mortals who indulge in television while I water my ornamental vegetable garden, but read about it and listened to sports radio about it obsessively) and the public response/backlash. I have read and heard numerous credible theories as to why Lebron James is now a certifiable schmuck, my favorite of which is ESPN “Sportsguy” Bill Simmons’ argument that the NBA has always obeyed the unwritten code of pick-up basketball that requires the two best players on the court to be on separate teams, although last I checked the Lakers and Celtics weren’t playing shirts vs. skins in the Finals. I also don’t seem to recall Simmons suggesting the original Magic-Bird-Jordan Dream Team give back their gold medals, or that they should at least have let Jordan play for Russia to make things fair.

But amidst all of the conspiracy theories and Lebron bashing, which are a huge part of how fantastically entertaining the whole Lebron “Decision” process has been, I have yet to hear a convincing argument as to why Lebron chose to announce his decision on “The Decision.” Many have been quick to label Lebron a narcissist, and while I am certain that Lebron has quite the healthy ego, nothing that came before “The Decision” matches this diagnosis. Narcissists generally have lengthy resumes (see one Terrell Owens). You don’t go from all around good guy, which is how everyone perceived James prior to “The Decision”, to the antichrist in one week of free agency.

The consensus is also that James and his advisors completely misread the public in hatching their plan for announcing “The Decision.” Perhaps they did, as I don’t believe they intended to turn James into a villain as if he were fan favorite Andre the Giant morphing into villain mode to challenge Hulk Hogan at Wrestlemania. But our misunderstanding of what actually took place during “The Decision” trumps any of Team Lebron’s missteps. Lebron celebrated “The Decision” because he understood, correctly, that at this moment in time he was at the peak of his powers. We all whiffed on that, and proceeded to pile on with every endorsement of Lebron-as-narcissist, because of how we have always understood the source of the athlete’s power; Michael Jordan sold oceans of Gatorade and countless Nikes precisely because of his on-court game. But Lebron is a different beast. He is a cultural icon who just happens to play basketball.



Some observers have attempted to belittle James for taking a shortcut to greatness by joining Wade in Miami. These observers claim that James can only cement his greatness by winning championships as The Man, and that joining Wade’s heat removes this option from the table. But what “The Decision” clearly tells us is that Lebron does not regard winning NBA championships as the ultimate accomplishment. For Lebron, holding the entire destiny of a sport in his hands, as he so clearly did this summer, was a far grander achievement than winning mere basketball games, championships notwithstanding. It was an achievement worthy of a cultural icon, something beyond the championship athlete, whose ranks include Lebron’s new partner, Dwayne Wade.

And on many levels, Lebron was exactly right. We all obsessed over “The Decision” not because we really cared which team Lebron chose, because really, outside of Ohio, who cares, but because we were enthralled by the mystique of someone who was in complete control. Which made the Lebron backlash inevitable, because under all that cover of rejecting Lebron for his betrayal, his narcissism, his competeitive cowardice, we really resent Lebron because he became exactly what he wanted to be: ubiquitous. With “The Decision”, Lebron transcended basketball and ascended to the heavens. We all now hate him for leaving us down here while his star shines brightly somewhere close to Elvis Presley’s. If Lebron keeps it up, just like the Beatles he too will be able to accurately say that he’s “more popular than Jesus.” Jesus, after all, was but the King of the Jews. Lebron’s moniker “The King” gives him a little more wiggle room as to whom he might rule.

The Dukolina Blue Heels

In the afterglow of Duke’s narrow national title victory over valiant Butler, whose talented and fresh-faced thirty year old coach Brad Stevens makes me feel ancient at just thirty-five, one fact has become unavoidable: while UNC and Duke may field two men’s basketball teams, they share one basketball program. UNC and Duke stand head and shoulders above every other college basketball program only because of each other. You may wish to cue up Grover Washington Jr.’s “Just the Two of Us” as we proceed.

The UNC-Duke merger occurred in 1980 when Duke hired Mike Krzyzewski, a budding coaching genius who could go toe to toe with UNC’s resident basketball demigod, Dean Smith. While Smith had ruled basketball’s best conference, the ACC, with an iron fist for much of the late sixties and then the seventies, he had remained unable to capture his elusive first national championship. It is no coincidence that within two years of Coach K’s arrival at Duke, Dean finally got the monkey off of his back, with a little help from a freshman named Michael Jordan, in 1982. With the encampment of Smith and Krzyzewski within a few miles of one another, the epicenter of college basketball, which had been floating in the ether after departing Wooden’s UCLA and landing briefly in Knight’s Indiana only to discover that the company wasn’t so great, planted itself firmly on Tobacco Road. It hasn’t left yet.

By 1986, fueled by competition with the very best, i.e. Smith, Coach K came into his own and led Duke to its first of what would become almost perennial Final Four appearances. It was as if Duke and Coach K had drafted behind Smith and UNC for a few years and then slungshot past them at the mid-point of the decade, with the pendulum reaching the outer point of its Duke-ward arc in 1991 and ’92, as Coach K claimed back-to-back national titles. Duke had pulled ahead.

But the pendulum swung quickly back the other way. And this time it was Smith and UNC benefitting from the thrill of the chase. Smith knew he had just about one lap left in which to catch Coach K, and this sense of urgency propelled Smith to make the final act of his legendary career perhaps its finest, with a second national title in 1993 and two more trips to the Final Four in ’95 and ’97 before calling it a day and leaving a program fully loaded for his ever loyal assistant Bill Guthridge to make his own Final Four run in 1998. And it was almost as if Coach K exited the stage in order to let Smith have his well deserved spotlight to himself, as Coach K endured his brief wilderness period, missing half the ’95 season with what was politely referred to as “exhaustion”, and which landed him in the hospital.

Needless to say, Coach K’s dark night of the soul was short lived, and by the time Smith had officially hung up his coaching whistle, Coach K was ready to take back what he saw as rightfully his. And as Carolina struggled to find its way in the post-Smith era, Guthridge went to two Final Fours in three years but nevertheless realized it’s no fun replacing God and promptly joined Smith in retirement, Coach K reasserted his will. A narrow Duke loss in the 1999 national final was followed up by Coach K’s third national crown in 2001.

Which point brings us to the most fascinating juncture of the UNC-Duke merger. When Guthridge up and quit Dean summoned another loyal assistant, and a bona fide coaching genius in his own right, Roy Williams. But Williams did the unthinkable and said no to the Godfather, preferring to stay in a house he had built for himself, so to speak, in Kansas. In the chaos that ensued Carolina hired a man in way over his head, Matt Doherty, and Carolina entered its own wilderness period.

Under Doherty Carolina was no longer able to function as UNC in the UNC-Duke rivalry; the Tarheels were too busy imploding. A surrogate was required in order to maintain the symbolic order that had come to govern the college basketball universe. Enter Gary Williams and his Maryland Terrapins. For one shining moment Maryland was elevated to the college basketball stratosphere, like a passenger getting bumped from coach to first class. A heartbreaking Final Four loss to sudden archrival Duke in 2001 was followed by Maryland’s triumph as the 2002 national champions. Believe it or not, Maryland –Duke was now the game in town, while UNC was busy simply trying to keep its dirty Doherty laundry out of the media.

Perhaps Maryland could have joined UNC-Duke and transformed the rivalry into a “trivalry”, but something strange and sad happened instead. Maryland, and especially its fans, became consumed by the rivalry with Duke rather than fueled by it. For a rivalry to thrive, beneath the pleasure taken in mutual animosity there must exist a foundation of tacitly acknowledged mutual respect. Respect and animosity are the yin and the yang of rivalry, and in this case Maryland had way too much yang. Maryland’s fans truly hated Duke, resenting Duke in a fashion that was toxic to the emerging rivalry. Perhaps Maryland had developed too large a chip on its shoulder from all those years trucking down to Greensboro for the ACC Tournament, which should have been called the State of North Carolina Invitational Tournament. Whatever the genesis of Maryland’s vitriol, they hurled it in heaping proportions at Duke; the profanity became so obscene that Gary Williams himself had to verbally reprimand the denizens of “Garyland” for their poor sportsmanship and unseemly behavior. The breaking point was perhaps when Maryland fans threw objects at Duke players’ parents seated in the Maryland bleachers. There is nothing left to say but that Maryland’s fans, and college basketball rivalries are ultimately about the fans, did not live up to the promise of the fledgling Duke-Maryland rivalry.

And perhaps that is for the best, as three is inevitably a crowd. Maryland faded into the background, courtesy largely of the recruits Gary Williams did and did not land, and fate reasserted itself, as always, to restore the symbolic order. After Doherty was mercifully canned, Dean swallowed his considerable pride and reached out again to his unexpectedly prodigal son, Roy Williams. As Williams later put it, he couldn’t say no to Dean Smith twice, leaving unsaid the fact that the Godfather’s house was now in rank disorder. Williams must also have been able to sense that Smith was on Alzheimer’s doorstep, and that this was his last chance to make things right with his mentor. Williams was basically the son who had refused to come home and run the thriving family business, only to see the business subsequently run into the ground by his inept cousin. Of course he came home.

Like Smith before him, Williams was great before locking horns with Coach K in the UNC-Duke rivalry, but like Smith he had never won his coveted national title before doing so. And while Coach K’s focus blurred just slightly as he spent summers coaching Kobe and Lebron on the US national team, Williams never had more to prove than he did to all those who thought he looked foolish in leaving Kansas the second time that Dean asked him. And in a blink the pendulum had swung again, as Williams led the the Tarheels to a national title in 2005, and again in 2009, while Duke was uncharacteristically mediocre by Coach K standards, and unable to get past the Sweet 16 several years running. Carolina had pulled ahead.

The pendulum swings quickest whenever one school seems to have obtained marked superiority in the rivalry. To wit, UNC, a popular pre-season Final Four pick on magazine covers for 2010, unaccountably fell flat on its face, finished close to the bottom of the ACC and failed to qualify for the NCAA tournament. The effect was so shocking that Roy Williams temporarily lost his mind and compared the Tarheels’ losing streak to the deaths of thousands of earthquake ravaged Haitians. Meanwhile, all Coach K did was guide Duke to its fourth national title while simultaneously ruining the end of the movie Hoosiers (Butler became less like Hoosiers and more like the first Rocky in which Rocky Balboa wins the day despite losing the boxing match to Apollo Creed). Consider the symbolic order intact, and the UNC-Duke merger stronger than ever (with yet another assist from Maryland, who stepped up in place of this year’s lowly Heels and upset Duke in the regular season’s final week to share the regular season title with the Blue Devils; if Maryland were to win an Oscar it would inevitably be as best supporting actor).

For now, what is good for UNC is good for Duke, and vice versa. No single team can be great every year, but the UNC-Duke program can. The rivalry cum merger has made Duke and Carolina greater than they could ever be alone, which is orders of magnitude beyond what any other monistic college basketball program can achieve. This is unlikely to change as long as Coach K and Ol’ Roy steer the ship. Don’t think for a second that Carolina won’t be back with full force next year, as their service to the symbolic order was fulfilled this year. The rivalry’s real test will come when either Coach K or Coach Williams departs. This will likely be harder for Duke, as UNC has already endured the trauma of Dean Smith’s retirement and come out the other side. I’d hate to be the man attempting to fill Coach K’s shoes. But, eventually, the symbolic order will assure that those shoes are capably filled. UNC will probably win a national title or two while things shake out, and, who knows, maybe Maryland will get invited to the prom one more time.

Whose On Third?

It is an axiom of organized competitive sports that the more difficult a feat, the more it is rewarded. In football a touchdown is more difficult to score than a field goal, and earns six points as compared to the field goal’s three. After a touchdown, a PAT kicked through the uprights nets one point, while the more difficult two-point conversion, in which a team must “punch it in” from the two-and-a-half yard line, is rewarded with twice what you get for the PAT. In basketball, a typical bucket gets you two points, while one from beyond the arc, or “downtown” if you are Brent Mustburger, is worth three. In figure skating a quadruple jump is judged superior to the triple. In darts you get more points for hitting the bullseye. We are drawn to sports because they are an island of logic in an otherwise irrational world, and that logic is precisely that the winning player or team is the one who is best at achieving what is most difficult within the given rules of a sport, i.e. would you rather be a birdie or an eagle?

And then there is baseball. Baseball is largely incoherent. Baseball starts off okay, as the easiest offensive feat, the single, is rewarded the least; it, of course, only gets you to first base. But the rewards for the other three possible base hits in baseball, the double, triple, and home run, make no sense at all, when judged based on their comparative difficulty. The best doubles hitters hit doubles at about the same rate that the best home run hitters “go yard.” From 1989 to 2009, the MLB league leaders in doubles hit anywhere from 40 to 59 doubles. These numbers are comparable to the range found for home run leaders during the same era, 35 to 73 (the somewhat broader range for home runs is explained by the “steroids era”; things seem to have gotten back to normal, as last year the MLB home run leader tallied a more human total of 47). In essence, a double is roughly as difficult to achieve as a home run. But the home run is rewarded with a tangible run, while a double only gets a player half way home, and merely affords a player an opportunity to score a run. Why should a double be so poorly rewarded if it is just as hard to hit as a home run?

Things come into even starker relief when we look at triples. From 1989 to 2009 the annual MLB league leaders in triples compiled anywhere from 9 to 23 triples, with most league leaders compiling triples in the low to mid teens. Triples are clearly more difficult to hit than home runs and doubles. But while you get closer to a run with a triple than a double, you still get less than a home run for your more significant accomplishment of hitting a triple. This makes absolutely no sense whatsoever.

When I shared this insight with my friend Jason he looked at me as if I had suggested that humans regress to walking on all fours, i.e. he thought I was batshit crazy. Jason is both a baseball fanatic, (he is a near-genius practitioner of fantasy baseball, which empowers him to make and win fantasy baseball bets requiring the loser to engage in public acts of humiliation usually involving a combination of nudity and food) and a traditionalist. Like most traditionalists, a category which encompasses approximately 99.9% of baseball fans, he is blind to the irrational elements of baseball, a blindness resulting from acculturation to the baseball mythos, which for almost 150 years has regarded business as usual as perfectly normal. Which of course it isn’t. Baseball traditionalists freak out over obvious, yet relatively minor corrections to the game. Because it is boring to watch someone attempt to do something that they can’t, which is why the WNBA dunk contest doesn’t exist, some reasonable baseball folks came up with the designated hitter. Traditionalists acted as if this was the baseball equivalent of the Pope marrying Liberace. So imagine the traditionalist reaction to the suggestion that baseball’s entire scoring system is irredeemably flawed. To paraphrase baseball’s great Yogi Berra, Jason was 90% appalled, and the other half of him thought I must be joking.

Yet I am perfectly serious; we must fix baseball. But first, to Jason’s critique of my basic argument that the triple is more difficult to accomplish than the home run, and should be rewarded with an outcome commensurate with its degree of difficulty (it was only later through a painstaking 5 minute process of Google research when I learned that the double is just as hard to accomplish as the home run, so Jason’s critique focused on the triple). Jason’s primary argument is that the triple is a byproduct of luck or chance, that skill is not involved. Were this the case, however, one would expect to find different players atop the leader board of triples from year to year in the big leagues. Unless, of course, some players are inherently luckier than other players. Until we can isolate the good luck gene, however, we must accept that the repeated appearance of the same players atop the triples leader board reflects a specific skill set on the part of the players in question. And the last ten years of baseball history are enough to convince us that triples have little or nothing to do with luck: Carl Crawford lead the AL in triples for three consecutive years from 2004 through 2006, Curtis Granderson lead the AL in consecutive years in 2007 and 2008, Jimmy Rollins lead the NL in triples in 2001, 2002, 2004, and 2007, and Jose Reyes lead the NL in triples in 2005, 2006, and 2008. Ask any player of a game of chance and he or she will tell you that luck comes and goes. What we observe in the records of Crawford, Granderson, Rollins and Reyes is consistent excellence. If luck is in any way involved then it is in the form of the old cliché that you make your own luck.

So what are the skills involved in hitting a triple, the skill set that enabled Jimmy Rollins, for example, to lead the NL in triples four times? The first skill counters another of Jason’s arguments, that baseball players do not attempt to “place” the ball when they swing at a pitch. But there are a number of situations in baseball when “placing” the ball is exactly what a hitter is attempting to do. “Placing” the batted ball is a huge part of baseball strategy. To wit, when a runner is on second with less than two outs, a batter will often be instructed to hit towards the right side of the field, so that a ground ball hit in this direction will result in the runner being able to advance to third. Or, a batter will make every effort to hit a fly ball deep enough to allow a runner to tag up and advance , whether from second to third or from third to home. There is even an official baseball term for this “placing” of the ball, the sacrifice. The sacrifice is considered such an important skill that it is tracked as a statistic; e.g. in 2009 Bengie Molina lead the NL in sacrifice flies with 11. And don’t think for a minute that when it is contract negotiation time that Molina’s agent isn’t pushing for more money based on this particular skill in “placing” the ball. Being from Baltimore, Jason and I both know about the “Baltimore Chop”, a batting strategy propagated by Baltimore Orioles legendary manager Earl Weaver in which the batter purposely made contact with the ball in a chopping fashion such that the ball hopped up extremely high, allowing time for the runners on base to advance safely. The “Baltimore Chop” is textbook “placing” of the ball. And, of course, the bunt is nothing other than the strategic “placing” of the ball in the field of play. Just as a successful bunt or “Baltimore Chop” depends on the successful “placing” of the ball, so does the triple. As the great Willie Keeler put it, “hit ‘em where they ain’t.” That, in a nutshell, is the skill involved in the batter’s greatest art, the triple.

Which brings us to another of Jason’s arguments, that no one tries to hit triples. This rebuttal implies that players do attempt to hit home runs. But any baseball man (or woman) worth his salt will tell you that the surest way for a batter to enter a prolonged hitting slump is to go up to bat trying to hit home runs. Swinging for the fences will get you a lot closer to the Mendoza Line then to the warning track. Professional batters, then, generally take the approach of trying to make good contact. Baseball presumes that the best result of making good contact is the ball that flies the furthest in the air. But is this necessarily so? It is just as easy to make a case that the best result of making good contact is putting a ball in play that is the most difficult for the opposition to field. The home run’s dirty little secret is that it would never be a chore for a defense to field a power hitter’s long ball were it not for the well placed fence; power hitters just hit a lot of long fly balls, i.e the power hitter is simply the disguised master of the sacrifice fly. The triples hitter is the true master of “hitting ‘em where they ain’t”, i.e. the true master of hitting.

The home run hitter also benefits from another bias, the misguided belief that power trumps speed. Invariably, the most gifted triples hitters combine the art of hitting with preternatural speed. The home run hitter’s work is done once he wallops the ball; all that is left is to waddle around the bases. The triples hitter doubles the home run hitter’s accomplishment, as his work has just begun once he has “placed” the ball. He must then combine a track star’s speed with the courage of the poker player whose chips are all on the table. The triples hitter’s athleticism and derring-do lends him a panache inaccessible to the lumbering slugger.

The strange thing is that everyone already knows the triple is the most difficult hit to obtain in baseball (barring the inside-the-park-homerun, which we shall return to shortly). It is a baseball truism that the most difficult phase of hitting for the cycle (hitting a single, double, triple, and home run in one game) is getting the triple. Any time a player is getting close to hitting for the cycle the announcer will invariably either, a) point out that the hitter already has a triple, the most difficult part of the cycle, or b)note that the player has not yet hit a triple, the most difficult part of hitting for the cycle. And everyone accepts this as valid precisely because the triple is the most difficult hitting feat in baseball. The missing element in achieving one-year greatness in baseball hitting is referred to in the title of that very feat; by naming the act of leading the league in average, home runs, and RBI’s the “Triple Crown”, baseball is unconsciously acknowledging that the greatest player is not the one who leads in any of those (lesser) categories, but he who is the king of the triple.

With the preeminence of the triple now established, before we address the changes necessary to fix baseball, we must return to my earlier assertion that baseball must needs be fixed. Why bother? One might argue that in focusing on the difficulty of the triple I have overlooked the fact that the home run is judged most important because it accomplishes the object of the game, scoring runs. But this response is simply advancing the argument that since baseball has always had a flawed and illogical scoring system, than it must continue to do so. Which brings us to the core reason that baseball must be fixed, which is quite simply in order to save it. Baseball was the most popular team sport in America for at least the first half of the twentieth century, as along with horse racing and boxing it dominated the sports scene. This is largely because baseball is the perfect hybrid of individual and team competition. The showdown between pitcher and batter rivals the two greatest individual sports, boxing and tennis, for mano a mano thrills. But baseball, at the same time, offers everything that comes with great team sports, most importantly the beauty of watching men (or women) function as a unit and the joy inherent to participating and witnessing that unity in multiplicity. Despite these attractions, the illogical structuring of baseball’s scoring system puts it at odds with the driving force of sports as entertainment, which I touched upon at the beginning. People watch sports for many varied reasons, but the primary reason men (and some women) watch an ungodly number of hours of sports broadcasting is that sports holds the illusion of a world that makes sense. Unlike real life, which is largely irrational and incoherent, in sports there are clear rules with definitive winners and losers. Men deeply long for the world to be like this, although it obviously isn’t.

Baseball, with its rules that reward the easy over the difficult, is far too close to real life to hold our interest as we cope with the irrationality of a world that accelerates as rapidly as our technology advances. Football, the king of American sports, long since surpassed baseball in popularity. It did so in the 1960’s, as the world shifted, we landed on the moon, and things made less sense than they ever had before. Things continue to make less sense every year, which is why football, which makes perfect sense, grows in popularity every year. If baseball is to survive, it has to reverse the Talking Heads and start making sense.

So, how to fix baseball? A simple adjustment to the scoring system should suffice, leaving intact everything beautiful about the game. Home runs will still be rewarded with a run. Doubles will now also be worth a run. Triples will be worth one and a half runs. And, to prevent runners from stopping at third, and to reward the only feat more difficult than the triple, the inside-the park-homerun will now be worth two runs. These simple changes in baseball’s scoring system will give us back our national pastime. In Baltimore we used to yell out “O” as loud as we could during the “O say does that star spangled banner yet wave” line of the national anthem. We used to really care. We might not be able to make Peter Angelos sell the Orioles to Cal Ripken and save our team, but we can still save our sport.