The age of Obama

Sunday's unsurprisingly light pre-Super Bowl interview of the new president by Matt Lauer did have one revealing moment. As Lauer played a mild form of Russert-style "gotcha" in discussing Obama's pick for the big game, the president, after laying out his reasons for supporting Pittsburgh, said that he knew and was impressed by the story of Kurt Warner, Arizona quarterback (Hy-Vee grocery bagboy to Super Bowl star).

He then mentioned "the fact that Kurt Warner’s close to my age," which just goes to show you that no one's immune from looking back. Obama himself has people playing the, "He's only x years old, what have I accomplished?" game. So maybe it's somewhat comforting that he can take solace in a quarterback who's almost as old as he is playing a young man's game.

[Eric Zorn pointed out a couple of weeks ago that the U.S. Presidents have skipped the 1950s, as we jumped right from two '40s guys to a '60s guy.]

Review - No Blood, No Foul

Charley Rosen is a somewhat unclassifiable character who's been around basketball as a player, coach, writer, commentator (currently for FoxSports.com) for years, perhaps best known for his connection to Bulls/Lakers coach Phil Jackson. A lot of his writing, fiction and non-, concerns the early days of the National Basketball Assocation (originally called the BAA) and the point-shaving scandals of the early 1950s in college basketball. This is not so surprising; as far as I can tell, Rosen was born in 1941, so the birth of the NBA and the difficult times for the college game would have occurred around the time he was becoming aware of basketball.

No Blood, No Foul (2008) is a novel about Jason Lewis, a young basketball star who goes off to World War II and loses a couple of fingers. He returns from the battlefield, is unable to play at his previous level, and becomes, almost accidentally, a referee. At the same time, he is dealing with the trauma of being a returning veteran, as well as a new marriage.

On the plus side, the book is quite evocative of its time. Rosen has a good memory for detail, and he expresses it here in fully-realized descriptions of what New York was like in the 1940s. Also, the character of Jason Lewis is affecting; you'll care about what happens to him, watch his struggles as he tries to refind his place in a world that has not turned out to be what he expected.

On the neutral side, there is not a lot about basketball. There are occasional descriptions of the action, but less than you would expect from an author of Rosen's background. Whether that's a plus or minus for you depends on whether you're reading this as a sports book or a coming-into-adulthood story (personally, I would have liked a bit more detailing of how the game was played 60 years ago).

On the negative side, the other characters are more types than people (granted, that may be how Jason sees them), and the ending is so foreshadowed and truncated that you might wonder if Rosen hit his page limit and had to send in the manuscript. It's not a deep novel in any sense, so the reader looking for deep psychological insights will end up disappointed.

Overall, this is a fairly minor work. It has its emotional moments, but not enough of them to be truly engaging. There are no real fresh insights into the nature of sports, or the role it has played in our society, but, taken as a look back to a time and a place that exist no longer, No Blood, No Foul is a pleasant way to spend a few hours.

The Chicago Tribune

You don't blog for a little over a day, and what happens? Your city becomes the center of the media world, what with the bankruptcy of the Tribune Company and the arrest of the governor of your state, Rod Blagojevich, on corruption charges, not to mention the sit-in going on at a window manufacturer that doesn't want to pay its workers their severance and vacation pay.

As I was asked by a faithful reader for my take on the bankruptcy, I'll offer it with the caveat that I really don't have much novel to say. When a company takes on debt that is equivalent to nine times its cash flow, it's going to run into problems. Essentially, Sam Zell, real estate mogul, bet the health of the newspaper on the economy, gambling that he would be able to sell enough pieces to cover the massive debt.

And he was wrong. But he's still a genius, because he used a whole lot of Other People's Money to make the purchase, so he probably won't lose a whole lot personally. That's what counts for genius in this day and age, not an ability to make something work, but the ability to push the risk off on someone else. (John Thain of Merrill Lynch is not a failure because he ran his company into the ground. No, he's a failure because he didn't figure out a way to make his bonus automatic and legally impregnable; now he's had to back off from his "request" for, first, $30 million, then $10 million - though it's interesting to watch the spin as he has now "withdrawn his request.")

So we in Chicago watch and wait to see how Chapter 11 plays out for the Trib. What comes to my mind, though, is the extent to which I, and others, care about this. Republic Windows & Doors, the subject of the aforementioned sit-in, is apparently failing, and, while I'm concerned that the workers get what they're owed, I don't feel anything in particular about the company itself.

It occurs to me that there are some entities that become part of a public asset base, whose importance, real or imagined, causes them to have a life beyond their corporate charter. Clearly, that's not how a Sam Zell sees it. He may blather on about the "public trust" or whatever, but he purchased the Tribune because he thought it could make him some money, while recognizing that, if the economy went against him, he'd just walk away and leave the equivalent of a vacant lot.

Sports teams are like this, entities that take on outsized importance because of the emotional ties that people have to them. They know that, which is why they periodically blackmail governmental bodies into giving them benefits that no other private enterprise would get (the Mets and Yankees want more public support at a time when no reputable public agency should consider such a thing).

The collective television stations also have this hold on people, which is why I suspect that February's cutover to digital television is going to be taken a lot more negatively than predicted. I know that there is still a major station I'm not receiving, which is irritating; I also know I can live without it, but one wonders if they, given their problems (I'm looking at you, NBC), can afford to lose even the small numbers who are OTA and somewhat, but not very, far from the broadcast antenna.

Here's the thing: I don't have even a glimmer of a solution for the problem represented by these events. I don't want the government taking control of the Tribune, or the Chicago Cubs, or "forcing" WMAQ to boost their signal somehow (though I might bend on this one, given that government intervention is a big part of this problem), or prohibiting the move of the college football bowl games to cable. That just isn't an appropriate role for government to play.

But it is all part of how the mania to corporatize everything is making us all a little less bonded, a bit weaker. Sure, those of us who can't or won't get cable or satellite can only see about 40% of Cubs games now, but what's the big deal? Sure, the Tribune could stop publishing, leaving Chicago with only one voice in the major newspaper field. Sure, there will be any number of the elderly and the poor who will lose their televisions in a couple of months.

However, the revenue models will still play out. The BCS might lose 15% of their audience, but they'll gain more than that from ESPN. And those things that are common to us all, those things that have become shared experiences, fragment and drift away, but that's OK, because profits will be maximized and shareholders will be happy and, oh ho, how the executives will rejoice.

And we say that change is good, that progress is inevitable and always positive, and the people without voices, those who can't afford or figure out cable or the Internet, those who have already been marginalized, will slide even further out on the fringes, and will be forgotten.

Review - The Maisel Report

Ivan Maisel has covered college football for many years, most recently for ESPN.com. He's written a book, modestly titled The Maisel Report: College Football's Most Overrated & Underrated (2008). And it's a good book, well-researched and fairly interesting. But it's a niche book, one that reads like a bunch of columns put between hard covers; whether it's worth $24.95 is a real question.

Maisel goes through such topics as conferences, Heisman winners, coaches, and players, and gives his opinions as to which are the most overrated and underrated (as you might expect from the title). Some of these views are counter-intuitive, and thus interesting (that he considers Michigan Stadium to be the most overrated, given the raving we've heard from the television guys over the years, is interesting; he lays out his reasoning, and you'll understand where he's coming from whether you agree or disagree).

There are limitations to this book. There's very little here that doesn't come from Maisel's own experience, that is, the last 20 years in major conferences. You won't read anything about Division III football, and there are only a smattering of items that come from the long pre-1980s history of the game. This is understandable given that these are one writer's opinions, and keeping in mind the probable interest of the intended audience.

This review comes off as lukewarm, I can see, and I don't mean it that way. It's interesting and well-done, but requires the background of a pretty ardent fan in order to get the most out of it. If you're a casual college football fan, you won't have enough base to evaluate Maisel's opinions, and it just won't be as enjoyable to you.

Review - Bloody Confused!

Sportswriter Chuck Culpepper became disillusioned after 20 years of covering all kinds of sports. So he decided to become a fan again, to get away from the excesses of modern American sports by moving to England and becoming a devotee of a sport about which he knew almost nothing: soccer.

He has chronicled his sojourn in the delightful book, Bloody Confused!: A Clueless American Sportswriter Seeks Solace in English Soccer (2007). It begins with his mental state in a remarkable chapter that embodies pretty much everything negative about big-time sports in this country. The "rote utterances" by coaches and athletes, the dying brain cells, and, the last straw, the Congressional steroids hearing in which the lying and unresponsiveness of our great American heroes was juxtaposed with "unspeakable moment[s] in which one congressman or another would, before our very eyes, morph into blubber and start fawning over the presence of the baseball players": all of this and more sent Culpepper onto a plane, in search of a team he could believe in playing a sport he didn't know.

There is no great surprise here. Culpepper doesn't choose to follow one of the big four teams that dominate Premier League soccer (those who spend money like the New York Yankees), so I'm not giving anything away to tell you that he doesn't get to experience a championship. He simply tells us about his travels with the team, a journey he truly takes as a fan, not a writer.

About three-quarters of the way through this book, I became a bit disoriented. It's supposedly a sports book (796.33340942 in the catalog), but you will learn pretty much nothing about soccer here. We don't get to know the athletes at all. I was enjoying this trip, but it was not what I expected.

And then it occurred to me. This isn't a sports book at all, but a travel book. It's the story of one person stepping into a foreign environment for a year and describing his experiences. And the description isn't even comprehensive, we hear nothing about what Culpepper eats or how he lives or what he does when he's not at the stadium or on his way to the stadium or on his way back from the stadium. We meet some of the fans of his chosen team (Portsmouth, if you must know), and the experiences he shares with one who dresses as a blue bear are actually a bit repetitive (OK, irritating), but we don't see behind their fandom and see how they live.

This may not sound very positive, but the book is quite charming. Once I stopped expecting things and just experienced what Culpepper did, I was entranced. For one like myself who is a bit burned out on modern sports, his trip is irresistible. He fights his way back into being a sports fan again by creating a situation that is new and fresh, awakening the eight-year-old boy that has so long laid dormant.

For this is a travel book in the best sense. It takes a selective view of a new environment, since it is impossible to be comprehensive when living in somewhere you've never been before. More importantly, it highlights the changes in the writer; the success of the team is not so important as that Culpepper regains his wonder at sport. I'm not spoiling the end when I suggest he succeeds at that.

"Good Christian"

As I have stated before, I don't like to delve into religion on this blog. I have no special expertise in this area, and there are no real truths that everyone can agree upon. Faith is faith, and should be respected as something personal.

However, I am willing to say that faith and truth have to be reconciled, that one cannot deny reality just because it seems to conflict with words in a book that may have been inspired by a deity, but were recorded by people who had an understanding only of the world that existed in their particular context. That is to say, even had God (or whatever word you may use to describe your deity or deities) spoken 4000 years ago about, say, stem-cell research or nuclear physics, it's unlikely that the scribes taking down his words could have had a frame of reference that would have allowed them to write their scriptures accurately.

The religious people I have most respected make this attempt at reconciliation, and do a good job of walking the tightrope between literal interpretation of a text and the advances we have made in understanding our world. They have accepted that their faith does not require them to ignore the body of knowledge that humans have been blessed with the ability to build.

There is another group of religionists, people who use their faith as a bludgeon against anyone who does not hew to every piece of "wisdom" they've received. I happen to have someone like this in my family, and this person is the most intolerant and rigid person I've ever met. Despite a self-professed Christianity, this person has learned nothing of the true message that Jesus expressed, one of tolerance and acceptance and love.

Based on my own experience, then, I give no special credit to someone for being openly religious, nor is that an automatic negative. Ultimately, it comes down to behavior, regardless of whether it is motivated by faith or a lack thereof.

That's why I find it more than a little offensive when some public person makes the assumption that professed faith is somehow a necessarily positive component of someone's character. Therefore, I'm growing weary of the college football announcers who say, "Bubba's not only a great linebacker, he's also a solid student, and a good Christian." I heard this again yesterday, and I always find it jarring. It doesn't seem to me that the audience should be asked to accept this equation, that all of these things are somehow the same. That a collegian is devout tells me nothing about his behavior or his moral worth, but the statement does suggest that we should credit a Christian with extra points, and there is nothing in my experience which grants that as fact.

TV changes

This will be a short post due to the press of events; I'll likely revisit this topic in the future.

It's no secret that people are disgusted with Congress, mainly, I think because with all the problems we have right now, these solons have essentially done nothing. Health care? Not a big enough problem to solve, I guess. Education? No Child Left Behind's got that covered, so we're going to take a pass on doing anything else. Even Iraq has been neglected, despite the bold words of Nancy Pelosi when she took over as Speaker of the House.

But they have accomplished something, which is to mandate this switch to digital television in February. It was put off a number of times because of concerns about making the change, but now it's coming, like it or not. I'm sure we've all seen the endless number of public service spots alerting us to this, but in actual practice, this seems like a pretty poorly thought-out program.

My experience: I received a converter box a few days ago, hooked it up, and there are stations that just don't come in. After plumbing the depths of the Internet, I've found that one major station plans to move to a different frequency when they make the switch, so there's no real way to know if it will come in on February 18. (I'll leave aside for now the odd nature of these $40 government coupons, which have basically guaranteed that the price of the boxes won't drop below $40 - more profit for the box makers).

Got a VCR? Use it fully, taping one show while watching another? Wait until you see how that needs to be hooked up, and you'll still lose functionality.

15% of all people in the U.S. rely on over-the-air television. Each of those people must now presumably become hardware testers, and, as I have already pointed out, the test can't really be completed when some stations haven't cut over to their final configurations yet. Of course, those tend to be clustered in the demographics of the elderly and the poor, so there isn't a whole lot of political clout there. (And, of course, testing is irrelevant since the change is coming whether the test succeeds or fails.)

I know that this is being billed as a necessity because the government wants to sell off the bandwidth for oodles of bucks, but this seems just as much a giveaway to the cable providers and satellite companies. I realize that the kind of folks who choose to stay over-the-air or can't afford cable don't matter too much, but it seems odd to compel them to either go through the challenge of buying and installing new equipment, or pay money they may not have to keep something they already have. I feel for the older people who are going to have some big-time problems in three months.

[I'll leave this for another day, but the same kind of indifference is being shown by such bodies as the NCAA, given their willingness to sell the rights to the football bowl games to ESPN. Again, we're talking about 15% of the populace, not so small a number. But these millions of people will have a lot more time come New Year's Day 2011. At least they can console themselves that head coaches will command higher salaries.]

Goodbye to an Other place

I have written before, albeit without much insight, into the nature of Internet friendship, at least in the world of blogging. MySpace and Facebook (and, maybe, Twitter) strike me as somewhat different, and I'm sure reams of paper will be written about how they've changed human relationships, and we're probably not long from seeing a PhD in "Social Networking."

In blogs, though, there is not necessarily the symmetry of "I look at yours, you look at mine." There can be that kind of interaction (I never miss a post by Citizen Carrie, and I'm sure she never misses one of mine - well, not sure, exactly, but there is a level of interactivity there that may not rival the really cool aspects of Facebook, but means somethign to me). There are correspondents who become regulars in the comments section; mine tend to be more sporadic, but they are familiar.

But I think that level of interaction is dropping, that most of us have a one-way relationship with the blogs we read. If I read a post on Robert Reich's blog, I'll probably find it interesting, I may even feel compelled to leave a comment, but I'm under no illusion that he will respond. It would be foolish for me to believe that, and were I to start, there would be a kind of stalkerish thing going there.

Some would say that a community springs up around a popular blog, even if the protagonist never makes an appearance beyond the initial post. Personally, I've found that limited; too many good threads disappear beneath the waves of uninformed mush (my favorite: "I'm first") that sweep over most comment sites.

Nonetheless, we start to regard most of the blogs we read the way we look at a favorite magazine or newspaper columnist. They inhabit a certain space in us, and we come to count on them being there. We know the feeling when a news anchor retires, or a favorite show goes off the air. We miss those people, even though we never actually knew them; in many cases, they're completely fictional (one could make a point that, from our standpoint, the likes of a Robert Reich or a Walter Cronkite are fictional, that they have no form in our minds other than their writing or their on-screen presence, and therefore exist in no more real sense than Beowulf or Jack Reacher, but I'm not going to try to make that philosophical argument today).

That is all preface to my offering a farewell to the folks behind one of my Other places of interest (just turn your head to the rigth a little), Fire Joe Morgan. Here's what I said about it back in June:

Fire Joe Morgan has become a pretty well-known site among sports aficionados, mainly for the ability of the staff to deconstruct (oxymoron alert!) "sports journalism." The name comes from the oft-held feeling that Hall of Fame baseball player Joe Morgan should stick to card shows and get off the air as a baseball commentator (though Joe Posnanski looks a little deeper here, as is his wont). At any rate, the site is snarkily entertaining, though pretty insider baseball.

There's a goodbye message, which says in part (and in parting):

Hello, everyone.

After 21 years, and almost 40 million posts (we'll have to check those numbers, but it's something like that), we have decided to bring FJM to an end.

Although we have not lost our borderline-sociopathic joy for meticulously criticizing bad sports journalism, the realities of our professional and personal lives make FJM a time/work luxury we can no longer afford.

We started this site with two purposes: to make each other laugh, and to aid and abet the Presidential campaign of Bob Barr. Although we failed in the latter goal, we gleefully succeeded in the first, and thanks to a grassroots internetty word-of-mouth kind of a deal, we appear to have positively affected the lives of actual citizens as well, which astonishes and delights us to this day. We really never thought FJM would be for anyone but us. We are thrilled and kind of humbled to have been proven wrong.

They will be missed, dak, Junior, and Ken will.

I'll leave the link up. Humor can become dated, but it can never become old.

Review - What If the Babe Had Kept His Red Sox?

Bill Gutman has written an interesting sports book, What If the Babe Had Kept His Red Sox?: And Other Fascinating Alternative Histories from the World of Sports (2008). It may not be successful at its stated goal, but it has other virtues that make it a good read.

I'm a sucker for alternative histories. I love books and stories that explore the result of a change to a moment in history, the so-called counterfactuals. What if Napoleon had won the battle of Waterloo, what if the South had won the Civil War, what if Brad had stayed with Jen - in fact, one of my favorite such books is called What If?, which features military historians discussing how the world might have changed (there have been two sequels, neither of which I've yet gotten around to reading...but what if I had read them? Hmmmm.). I even enjoy the somewhat turgid novels of Harry Turtledove, though they as a series are quite long.

I think I like learning about the history that inevitably comes out of these narratives, plus, as a once-ardent science fiction, I find elements of that genre in the exploration of alternative universes.

So a book like What If the Babe...(WITB) should be a natural for me, combining sports and counterfactuals. Gutman sets out 12 different scenarios from six different sports, and discusses what might have happened if something were changed. Babe Ruth could have stayed with the Red Sox, or Vince Lombardi could have gone back to New York to coach the Giants, or Palmer and Nicklaus could have never existed.

And, as history, this book really works. I'm old enough that too few of these events are truly historic to me, but Gutman brings them back to life. One of the strongest chapters was the one that speculated on the results if Cassius Clay had lost to Sonny Liston in their first fight, and there was a wonderful amount of detail that really brought that story back to life. To varying degrees, each one of these narratives is handled professionally.

So I recommend this book, but I do have three rather major problems with it. First of all, the writing occasionally meanders, with parts of the story coming in an odd order and some repetition. This is not quite enough of a problem to be maddening, but it does disrupt the flow of some of the chapters.

Secondly, WITB doesn't make use of available tools. At least in baseball, a lot of researchers have developed techniques to explore some of these questions. We can get educated guesses on how remaining in Fenway Park would have affected the Babe's statistics, or what the effects would have been of not trading Lou Brock for Ernie Broglio (still considered the worst trade the Chicago Cubs ever made). Gutman shows no awareness of any of this imprecise, but useful, research.

Finally, the promise of counterfactuals is not realized. Too many times, we read that, "It's hard to tell," or, "We just can't know." It may be true that neither Gary Player nor Lee Trevino would have been able to fill the role of empire builder in golf, but I enjoy more assertiveness in my alternate histories. I would have preferred a straightforward recitation of what really happened, then, present the historical change and its implications. The book would have had more power.

Nevertheless, I did enjoy WITB. It's always interesting to read about the pre-Super Bowl days of the NFL, for example, especially given the NFL's amnesia concerning the first 40+ years of the league. Read the book, then give it to a sports-interested teenager who knows little of the background, and might be intrigued by the counterfactual aspect.

Sports "journalism"

I know, I'm flogging a dead horse even to try to take seriously what goes on in the fun and games section of even a respected newspaper like the Chicago Tribune, but this is my last chance to criticize the "old' Tribune before their upcoming cool, compete-with-the-Internet redesign (coming Sunday, apparently).

Actually, the Tribune is only one of the many outlets that suffer from what I'm saying here, but I have higher expectations of them than I do of local sports news or the abomination that is sports talk radio. One assumes that their columnists are a little more considered and rational than the blowhards who make and take phone calls right after the game.

Of course, I'm wrong. Tuesday the buzz in Chicago was that the White Sox were going to wrap up the divisional championship with ease, that their 2-1/2 game lead made the title a cinch, that it was business as usual. I can't really convey to you the offhandedness with which these assumptions were made, but it pervaded every single story.

Let me say here that I am the unusual Cub fan who also roots for the Sox. My first baseball game was at old Comiskey Park, and the first pennant race I remember well was the 1967 American League, in which four teams, including both Sox, had a chance to win on the final weekend (I still have vague memories of the long list of playoff possibilities if 2, 3, or 4 teams all tied for the title). I don't follow the Sox as closely as I do the Cubs - I waste enough time on baseball every summer - but I have no animosity toward them, and I can never understand why that's considered so natural in Chicago (I think it has to do with pinheads, yes, pinheads).

Each day since Tuesday, though, has been a lesson in journalistic hysteria. The Sox lost all three games against the Twins this week, now trail them by a half game, and the attitude has turned 180 degrees. Now there's screaming, gnashing of teeth, calls for the manager's head, statements that the writer "knew it all along."

What a joke! Even within the strange rules of "sports journalism," this manic-depression is inappropriate. Try covering the games, gang, tell us what you see, explain why things are happening. I don't want a deep dose of your psyche every time a game goes the "wrong way." I'll decide what I want to feel, I don't need your hyper-overreaction trying to frame it for me.

Back to the pool

Another Olympic post. I really haven't heard anything about swimming pool technology during these Olympics. It used to be that there would be a quick piece at the beginning of coverage as to how modern science was finding ways to make faster and faster pools. I may have missed it, but I haven't seen that piece during the current coverage (nor do I recall it at Athens or Sydney).

Is it possible that someone feels the magnificence of the athletes would be diminished if it was pointed out that Olympic and world records were being broken as much due to engineering as to the heroic sacrifice and effort of the young men and women? We've heard about the new swimsuits because the issue bubbled into controversy, but I do wonder: Are pools as good as they can be, or are records falling because everyone is, in effect, swimming downhill in both directions? It would be nice to know.

I wonder...

if I should start complaining about NBC's Olympics coverage yet. Each Games, it gets a little worse, as they try to make up in volume (on the 453 networks of NBC) what they are too myopic to do with quality. The most irritating thing to me is the pre-written story line, the event that they have already decided will be the most compelling. It needs to be touching, so they can do some soft-focus video with sappy piano or guitar music, it needs to concern someone who will win medals, and it must, absolutely must, be about an American.

For the swimming trials, the two story lines were Michael Phelps, who seems like a pleasant if totally uninteresting young man, and "41-year-old mom" Dara Torres. For the men's gymnastics trials, it was Raj Bhavsar, who was disappointed four years ago, totally changed his attitude, becoming enlightened throough yoga, then was almost pornographically doted on by the NBC cameras and announcers. If we weren't seeing Raj, we were seeing his mother or his father.

That there were other gymnasts competing made little difference to NBC, as they lingered over Raj changing his shirt, Raj receiving good wishes, missing only Raj's trips to the men's room. (Naturally, Raj failed to make the team, but that wasn't announced until the next day, by which time NBC had moved on to the far more compelling women - Raj was quite literally yesterday's news.)

I suppose there's no point in complaining about these things, though I could start a whole new blog devoted just to that. It's just disappointing to see a network with these kinds of resources setting their goals so low, taking the convenient and obvious story over those they might find by digging a littlle. Fortunately, the athletes usually transcend the coverage.

She's 41!!!

I have mentioned before how much I like the Olympics, which, despite the nationalism and the commercialism and the gigantism and the other "isms," still has a core ideal that I admire and find (sure, I'll say it) inspirational. There is so much about it that's flawed, but one can say that about any institution - the Olympic Games remain, for me, a source of great interest and excitement.

So, of course, I'm watching the U.S. Trials in swimming and track and field over the weekend, and, by any measure, the biggest story (at least to NBC) was the return to the Olympics by 41-year-old Dara Torres, the nine-time swimming medalist. A great accomplishment to be sure, as she's swimming times that she never has before. I could have lived without the constant references to her 41-year-oldness; inspiration too easily becomes cliche, and it seemed to happen here in about 10 minutes. But it is still, even with the hyperbole, absolutely going to be one of the great narratives of the Games. (Thank goodness on behalf of NBC that she is an American. If Dara Torres were from Ecuador, you'd hear almost nothing about it.)

Of course, there are the usual rumors about steroid or other PED usage, and anyone who has been a fan of baseball, or cycling, or track and field, has to be wary of such things. But let's face it, unless Torres has some hitherto unknown ability to process these drugs, her performances are still amazing, even if there is some pharmacological hanky-panky going on (and I quite hope that there is not, as I consider them a blight on sports).

But one thing that Torres's success does do is call into serious question the mythical training arc of the modern athlete. If the stories can be believed, she has trained seriously in only three of the past 16 years, yet has continued to make Olympic teams and improve her performance. We hear about the need to stay sharp, to give four years of your life for the ultimate reward, how the coach creates a training plan with BEIJING circled in red.

Then Dara Torres hops in the pool in advance of the Olympics, trains hard, and makes the team. Is she a freak of nature, or could others train in this way, staying in general good shape then pushing it in the last year of the Olympiad? Or are there certain sports that enable this, such as swimming in which so much of success is due to technique?

I have no answers, but it does seem to me that some of the commonly held beliefs about how to prepare for competition may be wrong, and maybe Dara Torres is pointing the way to a reexamination of them.

Jim McKay, 1921-2008

There are all too few people in public life who strike me as being essentially decent people, decent in the sense that they are unwilling to impose themselves too much on a situation. The job of politician seems incompatible with this, as they see their role to control the arena. The same is true of executives or lawyers, who may be fine individuals, caring and involved, but are perhaps too disposed to ensuring that everyone knows they're on the scene.

I've worked for a few, too few, people who had this innate decency, who reacted to situations as they truly were, giving credit where it belonged, fading into the background when warranted. I've known others with this self-effacing quality, but they don't tend to fare well in our chest-thumping, credit-taking culture.

It's always dangerous to assume you know anything about people you see on a screen or in print. As much as I might want to ascribe positive qualities to, say, Michael Jordan or Barack Obama, I don't know either, so I run the risk of being disappointed if I were ever to discover the real person.

However, when you've grown up allowing someone into your family room or den, even through the one-way medium of television, and you've never heard anything to contradict the view you want to hold, the image becomes powerful, and you tend to go with it.

So I feel the loss of sports broadcaster Jim McKay, a man who covered even the most bizarre "sports" with respect, understanding that those participating took barrel jumping as seriously as most of us treat football. The ESPN biography to which I linked has all the facts, so I won't recount them here. All of the tributes mention his work at the 1972 Olympic tragedy; I can never forget that wrenching time and the way that McKay helped us through it (in a way that would never be possible today; the news division would immediately big-foot it and we wouldn't see the sports people until the games came back).

Jim McKay is one of those fellows, few of whom seem to be produced in this very-different era, who understand that the event's the thing. I can think of a few others, perhaps the exemplar of which is Dick Enberg. That McKay cared about cliff diving made me care about cliff diving, and he would bring us enough of the people behind the event to show us why we should.

So, thank you and goodbye, Jim McKay.

[Note: my wife pointed out that McKay's signature phrase, "the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat," probably couldn't be uttered today. It would more likely be, "the thrill of victory and the inspirational character-building experience of defeat."]

Swish

Now that the Democratic race really seems to be over, and all reports are that Hillary really will be leaving the stage, this post by Christopher Orr is a bit dated (though only two days old) - but it's still worth reading.

Dancing with illogic

Fire Joe Morgan (FJM) is one of those web sites that gives snarkiness a good name, as it takes very humorous shots at various forms of sports reporting. It gets its name from their desire to see the remarkably uninsightful baseball commentary of Hall of Famer Joe Morgan off the air, a desire as yet unfulfilled. But they have gone beyond deconstructing the inane Internet chats of Morgan, and have served as a check on ignorant sports commentary wherever they can find it.

Rick Morrissey is a sports columnist for the Chicago Tribune who has generally struck me as workmanlike; while he's not going to make anyone forget Red Smith or Joe Posnanski, he generally offers up reasonably interesting columns and only occasionally gets really stupid (though he has a huge blind spot when it comes to using statistics to enhance our understanding of sports, being from the tobacco chaw and grizzled veteran school of talent evaluation).

If I'm going to write a post based on a Rick Morrissey column, I feel compelled to jump over to FJM first to make sure they haven't already co-opted me. So when I read Morrissey's offering from yesterday, titled Floored by dance revolution, I went to FJM and was horrified to realize that they had written about him. This takes away a post from me!

Relief was at hand, though, because Ken Tremendous of FJM was writing about Morrissey's lame Sunday column, concerning the use of instant replay in baseball, and not his lame Monday column, about "Dancing With the Stars" (DWTS). So I can still jump in.

The column begins:

I have never watched "Dancing With the Stars." If I were to die today, I would consider that among my major accomplishments, along with never having watched "American Idol."

I don't care to watch people dance, I don't need a TV show to tell me who's a talented singer and I don't want to take part in the vapid conversation about which judge has it out for which contestant. Feel free to call me Mr. Sunshine.

One hopes that Morrissey has more accomplishments than not watching a show he doesn't like. But of course, that's not his point; as we've seen in countless columns of this type, he is about to criticize the very thing he's proud of knowing nothing about. In other words, ignorance is not going to prevent him from writing a cheap, easy holiday weekend column.

Rick, no one's trying to make you watch or listen to things you don't want to partake of (and "vacuous" is probably a better word than "vapid" here). But I'm sure you have a point here.

But Mr. Sunshine does understand when he is fighting a losing battle, and this would be one of them. Any silly ideas I might have had about sports being king in this country have been trampled under the feet of people doing the cha-cha-cha.

Now we begin to get to the point - sports is supposed to be king in this country, heaven forbid we allow Americans to decide for themselves what they want to watch or enjoy.

My personal note here: I have no interest in American Idol, so I don't watch it. I did see this past season of DWTS, as I was kind of intrigued by this group of stars. And you know, it wasn't totally bad. Yes, there's way too much filler, though not as much as in the last "two minutes" of any basketball game you might see, but it is interesting to see the development in just a few months of amateur dancers working with some top-flight professionals. I'm not sure it's a must-watch in a non-strike environment, but it has some entertainment value.

And had ballroom dancing been added to the Olympics, which could still happen, Rick would have to deal with it as a sport (I don't particularly want to see it there, but it is undeniable that Cheryl Burke and Derek Hough are athletes of a sort).

Morrissey:

Jason Taylor is one very smart man. You sports fans out there might think that being an NFL player is about the best thing that can happen to a man. But Taylor obviously has been paying attention to popular culture. It explains why he recently chose to appear on "Dancing With the Stars" rather than participate in the Dolphins' organized off-season workouts. His decision incurred the wrath of Dolphins Vice President Bill Parcells, who believes a star defensive end should be working with teammates on football and not with "Dancing" partner Edyta Sliwinska on the fox trot.

Now we get to the crux of the argument. The legendary Bill Parcells, certified tough guy, so tough he makes sportswriters and sportscasters swoon in appreciation of his he-manliness, Parcells doesn't want one of his players dancing eight hours a day. He'd prefer if Taylor, in his own words, was sitting on the couch smoking a cigar during the off-season. Or maybe he'd like it if Taylor was engaging in some of the less-savory activities in which NFL players engage in their time off.

And now we wander off into the kind of false dichotomy so dear to Morrissey's thinking:

I have no numbers to back me up, but I believe as many people now know Taylor for his dancing as his six Pro Bowl seasons. Twenty million viewers watched gold-medal figure skater Kristi Yamaguchi and her partner beat Taylor-Sliwinska last week. Taylor wants to be an actor someday. What's the best way to get attention from Hollywood — with your helmet on or your shirt off?

All sorts of TV viewers saw Jerry Rice dance into the finals of the show last year and, upon hearing he had played football, wondered whether he had been any good. Same with 2006 "Dancing With the Stars" champion Emmitt Smith, who we're told could run the ball a little bit in his day.

If Rice were to walk down Michigan Avenue, he might have equal numbers of people wanting his autograph for his dancing prowess as for his football prowess. It seems a little silly that a man could be the best receiver in NFL history and a generation of children will know him for his burgeoning mamba skills. But that's the world in which we live, somewhere between endearingly goofy and stupefyingly shallow.

[I won't quote any more of Morrissey's column; it goes on in exactly this vein for a while, spinning together Howie Long, Joe DiMaggio, Keith Hernandez, and, in illogical non-contrast, Michael Jordan (you can't write a credible column in Chicago sports without mentioning Jordan), all to make the same point.]

Rick has already expressed his point, that the irreducibly important and significant world of sports is too pure, too holy, to be tainted by fame in other arenas. It's "goofy" or "shallow" to see Jerry Rice as anything other than a great football catcher, even though he can't be one of those any longer. Joe DiMaggio should have been consecrated as a man who got at least one hit in 56 consecutive games, not reduced to selling a coffeemaker.

Again, this is a false dichotomy. If Jerry Rice had not been on DWTS, then, as he walked down Michigan Avenue, he would be recognized by some people as a great wide receiver, and by others, not at all. It's not that the bright light of his fame has been transferred, it's that it has been expanded. Rick may not see DWTS as a proper vehicle, but it truly does not detract from the records Rice set. Jason Taylor would not have been recognized by most people, even football fans, who have only seen him in pads and a helmet - now he is.

And these outside events are actually positive for their sports. Do we think that more people won't be paying attention to Jason Taylor on the gridiron this fall, wherever he ends up playing? Helio Castroneves was a talented race car driver who no one but hard core fans cared about; now he is a DWTS winner, and has attracted all kinds of fans (even "grandmas") to his sport. This is a bad thing?

What Rick is trying to do is to aggrandize the field to which he's given his life. Sports is so much more important than dancing, or doing commercials, or any of these other things that athletes do, and that justifies the choice of it as a career. Great, classic men like Bill Parcells have given their lives to it, so it must be important.

But sports is every bit as much fun and games as DWTS or American Idol, and shouldn't be taken any more seriously. Jerry Rice was a cog in the big entertainment machine, a skilled, hard-working cog, but a cog, and now there are other pass-catching cogs. So Rice has moved to another station on the assembly line, and he did well there, as did Taylor and Emmitt Smith.

I love sports, I spend probably too much time watching them and reading about them, but I am never unaware that they have virtually no importance. They are entertainment, nothing more, they do not represent the true triumph of the human spirit or whatever pap is fed to us at the beginning of each telecast. Sports is equivalent to DWTS and American Idol. We do not elevate one by running down the others.

Review - God Save the Fan

There is a dilemma inherent in being a fan of anything, but sports in particular. When you are a fan of an author, you're impressed by the quality of the work, by the vividness of the characters, by the exciting plots - by something inherent in the product. If you're a fan of a politician, you likely feel that their beliefs mirror your own, or you trust their judgment.

But, when you're a fan of a sports team, you are committing yourself to a corporate entity, one that usually makes decisions based on statistics and dollars, that will try to extract every last dollar out of you. As Jerry Seinfeld has said, a sports fan is essentially rooting for laundry. Chicago Cubs fans were confronted with this reality last week, when the team acquired Jim Edmonds, a player who had been roundly hated when he played for arch-rival St. Louis; now that he was wearing the blue pinstripes, the fans were expected to cheer as loudly as they previously booed. And of course they will.

The larger part of that dilemma is that, for many people, sports is remarkably compelling, yet, most people realize how trivial they really are. The contrast between the time and money people spend on fun and games and the utter unimportance of them is huge, and many of the biggest fans understand this. Being a fan, a spectator, represents a major part of people's lives, far greater than the more actually important world of, say, public policy.

Will Leitch's new book, God Save the Fan: How Preening Sportscasters, Athletes Who Speak in the Third Person, and the Occasional Convicted Quarterback Have Taken the Fun Out of Sports (and How We Can Get It Back) (2008), founders on this very point. Leitch, the creator of the popular web site deadspin.com, clearly wants to eat his cake and have it too.

Deadspin is a site that can't make up its mind if it's humor, journalism, linking, or something else entirely. And God Save the Fan suffers from the same split personality - what is it? Leitch recognizes the irrationality of the average fan (and himself), urging the reader (and, perhaps, himself) not to take the games so seriously, while, ahem, taking them seriously.

Sports are what we fans invest ourselves in to get away from life...It's vital for sports fans to realize that we don't need them, that we can choose what we want now. We just have to take charge and realize our power...Hopefully [this book] will at least be funny.

And then we're off on 295 pages of essays that present an indefinable mix of memoir, debunking, and, above all and running throughout, a loathing of ESPN and its broadcasters. Much of this is tiresome, and there are few humorous moments in a book that so desperately wishes to be funny. But is it really clever for Will Leitch to reveal that his first auto-erotic experience occurred in conjunction with the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue?

Look, Deadspin is an incredibly popular site, and that's fine. It's made Leitch into a player in the sports media world he is so quick to castigate, to the point where he's become the go-to guy representing all sports bloggers in other media outlets.

But let's not get carried away. Popularity does not equal self-awareness, and Leitch doesn't really bring any insight into the relationship between fans and the sports to which they're devoted. He seems to understand that there is something trivial about fandom, passes it off as simply an escape, but the book takes sports incredibly seriously. You just can't have it both ways.

As for his message of empowerment, Leitch simply doesn't provide any of that. He obviously cares a great deal about sports, but argues in favor of fantasy sports as the ultimate fan experience, treating athletes as "robotic producers of statistics." Yes, that is his answer as to how the fan can take control, by treating athletes with the same contempt that he feels they have for him (you need only read his essay on playing flag football with two ex-NFLers, or his evening "with" a University of Illinois basketball player, or several others, to understand how frustrated he is with being an outsider).

And that, in the end, is the message here: Since these athletic gods (including, bizarrely, ESPN) will never let you into their world, one you so desperately wish to join, the answer is to create your own snarky, pseudo-hipster world of ironic commentary. There might be some entertainment value here if the book were funnier; it's not, particularly, and that just makes it kind of sad.

In loco agentis

I was finishing reading a Sports Illustrated from a couple of weeks ago, and one of the articles concerned the rehab of University of Oregon quarterback Dennis Dixon. Dixon tore his ACL this past season, likely moving down in the NFL draft (he was drafted yesterday in the fifth round). I've seen him on TV a couple of times, he is a very exciting player, and I wish him the best in his recovery.

The article opens with a description of the University of Oregon training facility:

...looks like the spa at a five-star boutique hotel, if all the guests were between 18 and 23 and the bulk of them weighed more than 300 pounds. The floors are finished oak, the walls smoked glass, the lighting soothingly dim. The 15,000-square-foot complex includes 25 stainless steel massage tables, a pharmacy lit with green neon and examination rooms for a dentist and an ophthalmologist.

Dixon is running on an underwater treadmill, while a university intern records him, then posts the footage to Dixon's website "so that NFL coaches, scouts and general managers can monitor the progress of his surgically repaired left knee."

I could rail against the remarkable facilities granted to elite athletes at our educational institutions; Nike founder Phil Knight is largely responsible for this five-star spa, T. Boone Pickens has given many millions to Oklahoma State for sports, and so forth. But I've pretty much given up on this topic. Rich people can do what they want with their money, and, if they choose to dump their millions into winning another game on the gridiron or the hardwood, that's their right (yes, I realize that Knight has financed those contributions largely through sweatshop labor - I don't buy Nike shoes, and that's about all I can do for now).

No, the point of this post comes from this sentence:

For five months Oregon has deployed its considerable resources to another project: reconstructing the quarterback who was once the nation's best and preparing him for the NFL draft on April 26-27.

Here we have a state university, one funded in part by the taxpayers of Oregon (to the tune of $3,232 per student, which the University contends is woefully low - seems OK to me). Yet it devotes time and money to moving one student up in the professional draft, instead of trying to improve its 112th-place standing in the US News & World Report college rankings.

I'm aware of all the arguments, all variants of "we invest in him now, he gives us big donations later." The same points apply to the oft-heard idea that players in the revenue-generating sports should be cut in on the deal, that football and basketball players should be openly paid.

But can't we at least pretend, for four years, that we don't have a privileged class of fast-running, hard-hitting, marginally-thinking young people? Look, I have been a sports fan my whole life, and I accept that the market will reward professional athletes in a disproportional way. I have seen the way that adults fawn over 15-year-olds who can catch a football, distorting their egos forever. Our creation of a deity class of symbolic warriors is complete.

However, there is no reason to officially consecrate this thinking. A public university should at least pretend that all students are equal. If Dennis Dixon needs an intern to chronicle his rehab so he can move up in the draft, let him pay for one. Open these state-of-the-art facilities to every student (actually, other students have a bigger claim, they're actually paying tuition).

Our colleges have done everything they can to move away from in loco parentis, the idea that they have a responsibility to stand in the "place of parents." Fearing lawsuits, administrators look the other way when underage drinking is rife on campus. Heaven forfend they act like adults and enforce regulations on their "customers." (That thinking has even extended to high schools. The high school nearest my house features students smoking across the street; apparently school officials are incapable of walking over and telling the kids to cut it out - after all, they're on private property.)

On the other hand, when a young man has the opportunity to grab a lucrative professional sports career, no expense or attention is too much. In effect, the University of Oregon is acting as an unpaid agent for Dennis Dixon. Don't we all wish the Placement Office would go that extra mile for every single student?

The most watched ... ever

[Note: this seems, at the beginning, to be a sports post. It really isn't, so hang with it for a minute.]

Sports Illustrated has an interesting book excerpt in the current issue about the NFL championship game of 1958. This game matched the Baltimore Colts against the New York Giants, it went to overtime, and has attained near-legendary status:

This was the game that launched pro football into the stratosphere of billion-dollar franchises and multimillion-dollar player salaries. With 17 future Hall of Famers on the field and on the sidelines, it was watched by a TV audience of 45 million, the largest ever to witness a football game to that point. It remains in the memory of many sports fans.

[The forthcoming book is The Best Game Ever, its writer is Mark Bowden, the author of Black Hawk Down, and the excerpt is a good one. It focuses on Colts receiver Raymond Berry; if you have any curiosity as to how a receiver and quarterback develop the "mystical connection" that we've read about many times, you'll get a flavor of that here.]

I'm a bit young to remember this game, but the statements in the quote above were part of the commonly-accepted lore of football as I grew up. This was the game that made the NFL what it is today, served as a springboard for the business-ification of sports in general.

The main point that is mentioned is the TV audience, the unprecedented 45 million who watched the game and propelled it into the national consciousness. The excitement of the game and the high level of play hooked a whole generation of people on pro football, luring them away from the popular sports that prevailed at the time (college football, baseball, horse racing, and boxing).

There's a problem there: those 45 million people had to tune in before they knew how exciting the game was going to be. For the game to have created interest in pro football, the viewers would have had to know the game was going to overtime, and that 17 Hall of Famers were playing.

I'm not trying to discount a couple of other factors. It is at least theoretically possible that fewer people were watching at the beginning and, as it became clear that this game was going to be thrilling, viewers called other people ("Turn on your TV, Harold, this is great") and built the audience. Another idea is that there is a little causality problem in the writing, that people tuned in casually and became hooked by the excitement, so this game built the future audience.

I can't evaluate those two things, I think the first is a small effect, the second more plausible, so I still think there is something misleading about the common statements; there was already a growing interest in the game, people were already fascinated enough to turn it on. It may have been a catalyst for the growth of the NFL, but I don't see it as "the cause." (Another factor: the growth in number of TVs was so high during the '50s that the audience would have been higher, even if interest stayed constant.)

What does this have to do with politics, you ask? One of the defenses of last week's Democratic debate is that it was the most-watched of the debates during this primary season. Therefore, despite the minority of wonks who wanted more issue-oriented questions, viewership numbers prove that flag pins and Bill Ayres are important to voters.

Such nonsense. People had to make the decision to watch the debate based on their interest before they turned on the TV. To believe that George and Charlie asked the questions that America wanted asked requires us to believe that 10.7 million people somehow guessed what those questions would be.

Yet many people have written that the ratings will lead to more such questioning in the future. We're to believe that other broadcast outlets will look at the ratings and up the "gotcha" factor in future debates. And they probably will, given that logic doesn't seem any more part of the repertoire of newsrooms than anywhere else.

But, we can still argue to the contrary of what I've written if there was an increase in viewership from one hour to the next, as people got wind of the thrill-packed Reverend Wright questioned. No, the ratings actually went down 4% from the first hour to the second. Some of that may be the Idol factor, but we are still left with the basic precept that the ratings prove nothing about how much people liked the questioning. Those who claim otherwise are either trying to spin the outcome or trying to find false significance, whether they're trying to justify ABC's questions or the eternal importance of a football playoff game.

Tiger has the "right" to continue

As I write this, Tiger Woods is six strokes down in the Masters, and has only three holes left to make it up. But we know he's the best golfer, and he's won the really important holes, and Trevor Immelman has no chance at the Grand Slam, and a Tiger win will bring that much more interest to the sport, so I think he should just play on and on into the night (through Pennsylvania, and North Carolina, and Indiana, and so on). Eventually, they'll have to give him the green jacket, just for persistence.