There Are No Fours

Happy 50th, Jeff Van Gundy

2012-01-19T23:00:00.000-08:00

I

Thou has made me known to friends whom I knew not. Thou hast
given me seats in homes not my own. Thou hast brought the distant
near and made a brother of the stranger. I am uneasy at heart when
I have to leave my accustomed shelter; I forgot that there abides the
old in the new, and that there also thou abidest.

Through birth and death, in this world or in others, wherever thou
leadest me it is thou, the same, the one companion of my endless life
who ever linkest my heart with bonds of joy to the unfamiliar. When
one knows thee, then alien there is none, then no door is shut. Oh,
grant me my prayer that I may never lose the bliss of the touch of the
One in the play of the many.

—Rabindranath Tagore

God's Grandeur

2012-01-13T13:25:00.000-08:00

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And, for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs--
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

— Gerard Manley Hopkins

Exploit of 2011: Brandon Roy Goes Supernova

2012-01-12T03:28:00.000-08:00

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

-Dylan Thomas, "Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night"

The Exploit of the Year is ultimately a celebration of the best story. To pick the greatest actual achievement would require accurately weighing the irreducibly complex, interrelated and opaque interplay of cause and effect; the combination of effort and error, tactics and techne, physics and physiques that actually determines a contest. Instead, we tell stories. And no story this year could touch Brandon Roy's fourth quarter evisceration of the Mavericks in game four of the Trail Blazers-Mavericks first round playoff series.

The bare fact of the comeback is enough to make it an Exploit contender: only one team has ever come back from a bigger deficit in the fourth quarter of a playoff game, after all. But what's most striking is just how single-handed it was. Really: with the exception of one Andre Miller 13-footer, Brandon Roy scored or assisted on literally every single point the Blazers scored in the fourth quarter. And who contested Terry's potential game-winner at the buzzer? For a straight half-hour, he fought in the face of overwhelming odds and a year of crumpled dreams¹ and then, with the crowd worked to a fervid state of awe and gratitude and desperate, ecstatic yearning,² iced a four-point play to tie the game. It was fucking effulgent and, even in the moment, the game-winning bank seemed a foregone conclusion.

1: So "despair" is a pretty huge reach in English, but the French term "desespoir", or "dis-hope", seems kind of a propos.
2: The Rose Garden is a place especially convinced of magical thinking, and not without reason. From the infancy of the franchise, the Blazers have had raucus crowds and outstanding home/away splits. The crowd believes deeply in the power of its heavy din to influence the game, to wear on opponents and buoy the Blazers through sheer faith and volume. The atmosphere affects the players' spirits, the thinking goes, which affects their effort, which affects the game. The feeling is not rational, but there's a grain of truth to it, and the amplified emotion of the crowd is contagious, even through a TV set.³
3: If you get the chance, watch a game there live. It will almost certainly be good; it might be a good deal better than that. I was lucky enough to see this game live-- I don't reckon I'll forget it anytime soon.

Game four was the last game Brandon Roy will ever win. He announced his retirement from professional basketball on December 10th, 2011. Like Coleridge's Kubla Khan, Roy's career is brilliant but incomplete, forever haunted by what is missing. The open questions leave a lot of room for myth, but they have certainly robbed him of money and glory, and possibly championships and a spot in the Hall of Fame. It is real and it is tragic. But for all that, it is beautiful, and it's a hell of a story. Maybe we should just let him have the last word:

The 2011 Exploit of the Year Honorable Mentions

2012-01-09T23:38:00.000-08:00

The human capacity for attenuation is astonishing. Professional sport is a world populated by men and women who have married their end-of-the-bell-curve genetic gifts to a lifetime of purposeful practice, and thereby honed their craft to absurdly high levels. To reach a televised audience and make it at the highest level, even the fringiest players must be at the top of several pyramids of ability and effort. That we subsume this reality in our viewership of the sports we love makes sense: attention to detail at any real level would be impossible if we allowed our mind to be constantly blown by just how good everyone on the court/field is at what they do.

We unconsciously manufacture a quotidian reality for ourselves to differentiate between the great and the merely “average” or even “bad” professional athletes. The miracle of any given career is shelved to take in the entire array, to appreciate how good the best are requires that their lesser peers, no matter how badly they could school the best players you or I actually know, be considered the worst. It is neither fair nor unfair, or rather it is both. It is the lens that we inevitably manufacture for ourselves in our viewership and fandom.¹

1: I think a large portion of Joe Posnanski’s success as a sportswriter with “heart”, whatever that means, is that he habitually punctures this worldview in his focus on individual actors, presenting the larger league from their point of view, rather than the converse.

For an event or act to rise above the normal noise, it has to be remarkable in two different dimensions. It needs to be outside the realm of normal ability/achievement. A player or team, either through impeccable skill or tremendous luck², seizes a moment, and leaps beyond what we think of as possible, or at least probable. The lightning strike moment of “Did I just see that!?” crystallizes exactly because it steps outside of our expectations. At the same time, it needs to carry narrative weight. An NBA ref blowing his whistle harder and louder than any of his predecessors is remarkable, but unlikely to garner a dewy ESPN special. A spectacular catch to save a run in an 8-1 baseball game will be a Web Gem, but no one will tell his or her grandchildren that (s)he was there to see it. Unlikely acts become legendary when they also drive a story. A layup to win a championship or set a scoring record is worth inestimably more than a halfcourt buzzer-beater before the half.

2: Not that the two can be teased apart neatly.

And so, the No Fours team loves to figure out at the end of every year what exactly was the Exploit of the Year. As we follow whatever sport catches and holds our fancy, there is no championship to which we can point, or rubric for what makes an exploit truly worthy of note. At the same time, there is no need for our pick to be definitive. It must simply be the exploit, whether in achieving a goal or nobly failing, which electrified us the most during the previous calendar year. Oil Can Samson will unveil the winner on Thursday, but in the meantime, here are the honorable mentions.

The New Zealand All Blacks Win the Rugby World Cup
The All Blacks have a comically imposing record in international test rugby. They have won more than 75% of their matches, and have a winning record against everyone. Since the advent of world rankings in 1993, they have held the #1 ranking a full 75% percent of the time, slipping all the way down to #3 only once. Despite this, prior to 2011 they had won the Rugby World Cup only once, in its 1987 inaugural iteration. New Zealand hosted the tournament this year, and anything but victory would have been the worst blow yet for the rugger-crazed nation which had experienced a blackly comical series of defeats on the biggest stage. The All Blacks avoided that fate by storming through the tournament, demolishing their opponents en route to the finals, and then holding France at bay in a tense ultimate match that saw each side dominate one half, with the Kiwis holding on to win after storming out to a lead in the first and then struggling but succeeding in containing a resurgent France in the second. The finals were a tense but otherwise unremarkable match, and their run through the qualifying matches was dominant but not otherworldly, but no victory this year was as culturally meaningful as the All Blacks’. New Zealand hangs on rugby as much as any other country hangs on a sport, and this victory, on home soil, was redemption they had sought for years.

Thomas Voeckler’s Tour de France and Andy Schleck’s Stage 18
This year’s Tour de France was a barnburner. Instead of the Homeric saga of one man’s striving to add to his laurels against one or two challengers that we got used to when Lance ran the show, this July saw a pack of talented riders slugging it out over a mountainous course. At various points it looked like four or five men could win.

Thomas Voeckler was never a contender to win the 2011 Tour. Commemorating the centennial of the Alps’ inclusion in the race, the course was studded with steep ascents, guaranteeing that the winner would be a skinny climber, not a more solidly-built generalist like Voeckler. Nonetheless, when Voeckler wrested the yellow jersey from Thor Hushovd in a breakaway³ he absolutely turned himself inside out to defend it. He held onto it for a total of ten stages, through the Pyrenees and into the Alps.

3: The same breakaway that saw Juan Antonio Flecha struck by a car and crash into Johnny Hoogerland, sending him through a barbed-wire fence, and then both get back on their bikes and finish the stage and the entire race. You know it’s a humdinger of a race when neither of our two picks is the guy who shrugged off a violent crash and severe laceration to race on.

Andy Schleck was earning a reputation as a talented shadow. Having finished second in the Tour twice, he was firmly in the circle of potential winners, but he had never shown any real instinct to attack or to press his advantage. In 2010, while his strategy of marking defending champ Alberto Contador might have worked, save for his chain slipping off, he made no aggressive moves to pass Contador. Winners get to have the story fit to their shape; losers must eventually do something gallant to be anything beyond the fastest guy who didn’t win. Schleck found himself in a similar position following stage 16 this year. Cadel Evans gained over a minute on him by gapping him on a climb and then wet descent. Schleck not only descended tentatively, but then griped to the press about conditions. As Oil Can Samson pointed out, there is no sort of talent worse than a talented coward. But in stage 18, he more than made up for his prior timidity. He attacked off the front of the field with 60 forbiddingly steep km left in the day, including the entirety of the Col du Galibier. In an age where every rider is scientifically managed to be at his peak at the exact right time and has his team’s directeur sportif in his ear via radio, this sort of move is old-fashioned. Eddie Merckx could crush the competition this way in the 70s, but no one can ride like this now. Except Andy did. He faded a little at the end of the day, and so didn’t quite unseat Voeckler from lead, but he stayed away from the field, and more than made his case. Eddie Merckx, who works for the UCI, was actively urging him on from a car behind him towards the end of the stage. Let me repeat that: a salaried employee of the sport’s governing body was using a company car to scream encouragement at him during the race, and everyone was cool with that fact because Schleck’s attack was so badass.

Voeckler, on that stage, rode himself empty to preserve his yellow jersey. He stayed with the pack over the Col d’Izoard, and despite being dropped by the real contenders on the slopes of Galibier pushed himself hard enough to retain the jersey for one more day, preserving a lead of only 15 seconds. Voeckler didn’t have what it took to win physically; he lost the maillot jaune the next day, too shattered from his effort in stage 18 to possibly defend those 15 seconds in stage 19. But in a sport where the margin between victory and defeat often is as much mental as physical, no one was harder mentally than he this year. David Millar reported seeing a broken Voeckler biking back to his team hotel after the final stage instead of riding in a team car, but of all the riders who did not win, he had the least to be ashamed of.

Dirk & Co.’s Wild Ride
When it was revealed that Jason Terry had tattooed the O’Brien trophy on his bicep before the 2010-2011 NBA season, it was evidence of serious chutzpah, but not necessarily much more than that. The Miami Heat were all but coronated before the season began, with the media talking of their impending dynasty and seriously discussing their chances of putting up the best season ever. Meanwhile, the Mavs weren’t even the favorite to win their conference. Dirk was soft, JKidd was an AARP member, JET mostly imitated airplanes after threes, and Tyson Chandler was a guy that missed Chris Paul. It was nice that the Mavs made the finals, but we’d seen this show before in 2006, and DWade’s trade of Shaq for LeBron and Chris Bosh was if anything an upgrade.

And then the Mavs won. Dirk and his crew hit a one-legged fallaway over our presumptions and criticism. When consensus has decided you don’t have a chance, the only thing to do to is to keep winning, and Dallas did. Dirk proved himself to be containable but not stoppable, Jason Kidd steered the team, JJ Barea and Terry were offensive sparkplugs, and when the confetti cleared, LeBron and his team were left with questions to answer, while Mark Cuban’s team got the trophy and the rings.

Dishonorable Mention: NBA and NFL owners
Professional sports is an odd hybrid of business and civic property. Teams are supported and emotionally owned by fanbases, manned by professional athletes who earn a paycheck, and fiscally owned and managed by rich men in suits and suites. Before national media infused them with millions of dollars, owning a team was a rich man’s pastime. Now teams are cash cows, or at least can be. In 2011, both the NFL and NBA owners collectively decided that they weren’t earning enough money, and locked out their players to get a bigger slice of the pie. In both cases it worked. The NFL owners didn’t get an 18 game season, but they crushed the player’s union without losing any game revenue. The NBA owners, on the heels of the best season the league has had in years and with bevy of young talent entering its prime, dishonestly cried poor, and were willing to lose an entire season. The 66 game demiseason left to us, though action-packed, will certainly injure some players needlessly. So, to all the owners who spent large chunks of 2011 scheming to screw players directly while being willing to screw fans indirectly, fuck you. If you're in this for the money, kindly get the hell out.

Clifton Webb

2011-12-30T01:03:00.000-08:00

I smell the blood of low-definition attorneys.
I smell the blood of low-definition attorneys.
I smell the blood of low-definition attorneys.
I σμελλ τηε βλοοδ οφ λοω-δεφινεδ αττορνεψσ.

- Linda Kunhardt

Satires (Excerpt)

2011-12-23T17:52:00.000-08:00

What good are family trees? What point is there in being valued
For the length of your pedigree, Ponticus? Where does it get you
Having the painted masks of your ancestors on display,
Or all those statues—an Aemilius in his chariot,
Half of a Curius, a Corvinus lacking one shoulder,
A noseless Galba? What is the object of boasting
About your high ancestry? Why trace back the ramifications
Of your kinship with dusty pontiffs or masters of horse, if your own
Life is a public disgrace? Why have so many portraits
Of generals around, if you spend the whole night gambling
Under their noses, if you're ready for bed
At daybreak—a time when they would be up and striking camp
And moving their forces off? Why on earth should a Fabius,
Though descended from Hercules, be entitled to any respect
For inherited honors—his rights at the Great Altar
Being styled "of the Rhône"—if he's a greedy numbskull
And softer than any lambskin, if his backside
Is pumiced smooth, a caricature of his hairy
Ancestors, if he blots the family scutcheon by traffic
In illegal drugs, and his statue has to be broken up?
You may line your whole hall with waxen busts, but virtue,
And virtue alone, remains the one true nobility.

—Juvenal

J. Beer 1969-1969

2011-12-15T23:59:00.000-08:00

It was when they determined that I had been born dead
That my life became easier to understand. For a long time,
I wondered why rooms felt colder when I entered them,
Why nothing I said seemed to stick in anyone’s ear,
Frankly, why I never had any money. I wondered
Why the cities I walked through drifted into cloud
Even as I admired their architecture, as I pointed out
The cornerstones marked “1820,” “1950.” The only songs
I ever loved were filled with scratch, dispatches from
A time when dead ones like me were a dime a dozen.
I spent my life in hotels: some looked like mansions,
Some more like trailer parks, or pathways toward
A future I tried to point to, but how could I point,
With nothing but a hand no hand ever matched,
With fingers that melted into words that no one read.

I rehearsed names that others taught me: Caravaggio,
Robert Brandom, Judith, Amber, Emmanuelle Cat.
I got hungry the way only the dead get hungry,
The hunger that launches a thousand dirty wars,
But I never took part in the wars, because no one lets
A dead man into their covert discussions.
So I drifted from loft to cellar, ageless like a ghost,
And America became my compass, and Europe became
The way that dead folks talk, in short, who cares,
There’s nothing to say because nobody listens,
There’s no radio for the dead and the pillows seem
Like sand. Let me explain: when you’re alive,
As I understand it, pillows cushion the head, the way
A lover might soothe the heart. The way it works for me,
In contrast, is everything is sand. Beds are sand,
The women I profess to love are sand, the sound of music
In the darkest night is sand, and whatever I have to say
Is sand. This is not, for example, a political poem,
Because the dead have no politics. They might have
A hunger, but nothing you’ve ever known
Could begin to assuage it.

—John Beer

Account

2011-12-09T01:41:00.000-08:00

The history of my stupidity would fill many volumes.

Some would be devoted to acting against consciousness,
Like the flight of a moth which, had it known,
Would have tended nevertheless toward the candle’s flame.

Others would deal with ways to silence anxiety,
The little whisper which, though it is a warning, is ignored.

I would deal separately with satisfaction and pride,
The time when I was among their adherents
Who strut victoriously, unsuspecting.

But all of them would have one subject, desire,
If only my own—but no, not at all; alas,
I was driven because I wanted to be like others.
I was afraid of what was wild and indecent in me.

The history of my stupidity will not be written.
For one thing, it’s late. And the truth is laborious.

--Czeslaw Milosz

Who the Meek Are Not

2011-12-02T17:49:00.000-08:00

Not the bristle-bearded Igors bent
under burlap sacks, not peasants knee-deep
in the rice paddy muck,
nor the serfs whose quarter-moon sickles
make the wheat fall in waves
they don't get to eat. My friend the Franciscan
nun says we misread
that word meek in the Bible verse that blesses them.
To understand the meek
(she says) picture a great stallion at full gallop
in a meadow, who —
at his master's voice — seizes up to a stunned
but instant halt.
So with the strain of holding that great power
in check, the muscles
along the arched neck keep eddying,
and only the velvet ears
prick forward, awaiting the next order.

—Mary Carr

That's More Like It

2011-11-29T15:33:00.000-08:00

Last week we talked about the need for more sporting endeavors that could be classified as "cockamamie". Today brings this:

The agent who represents retired quarterback Jake Delhomme says his client has signed with the Houston Texans...Rick Smith, Delhomme's agent, said the 36-year-old Delhomme has been staying in shape and working with racehorses in Louisiana since he was cut by Cleveland in July.

That's more like it! Forget workouts at college fieldhouses or perfomance institutes. Jake Delhomme is doing it right, whatever it is he's doing. (I really, really hope this involves racing horses around a dirt track in the bayou, and hustling old cajuns in the process.)

Calligraphy Accompanied by the Mood of a Calm but Definitive Sauce

2011-11-25T22:19:00.000-08:00

Make your strokes thus: the horizontal:
as a cloud that slowly drifts across the horizon;
the vertical: as an ancient but strong vine stem;
the dot: a falling rock;
and learn to master the sheep leg, the tiger's claw,
an apricot kernel, a dewdrop, the new moon,
the wave rising and falling. Do these
while holding your arm out above the paper
like the outstretched leg of a crane.
The strength of your hand
will give the stroke its bone.
But for real accomplishment, it would be well
if you would go to live solitary in a forest silence,
or beside a river flowing serenely.
It might also be useful
to look down a lonesome road,
and for the future
to stare into the fray static of a television screen,
or when lost in a video game
to accept you may never reach the final level,
where the dragon awaits, guarding the pot of gold,
and that you've left no footprints, not a single one,
despite all your adventures,
anyone following you could ever follow.

-Dick Allen

Stand Up For Your DNA!

2011-11-22T21:30:00.000-08:00

In cycling, as in all sports, modern training techniques and media money have professionalized the approach of riders at the top of the sport's pyramid (and those trying to ascend it), allowing cyclists to target their peak fitness for the right parts of the season. This is a good thing. However, it also raises the stakes for every endeavor they engage in, because any injury can mean rehab time, lost revenue, and a potentially shortened or diminished career. Today's cyclists are better than their predecessors, but at a smaller number of things. Why didn't Lance Armstrong ever try to set the hour record? Why doesn't Fabian Cancellara?¹ I've spent an inordinate amount of time recently thinking about how great it would be if someone were to put on an elite two-man time trial. Who would team up? Would Spartacus and Tony Martin blow up the field? Would partnerships be on nationality, team, or just friendship? Whatever happened to motor-paced races? Cycling has decided that it's highest ranks should compete in peloton-based road races, with a few individual time trials, and team time trials in long stage races, and nothing else. That is thoroughly understandable, but also a shame.

1: To be fair, he has stated his intention to do so several times over the past couple years. But the fact that he hasn't despite wanting to for some time shows how strong the incentives are to occupy himself in other ways.

Which is why I'm so heartened that not one but two of the men who etched their names in this year's Tour de France have taken up the mantle not of their team or nation, but of their race. Both Thomas Voeckler and Johnny Hoogerland raced trotting horses to fight for the racing honor of the human race.

Voeckler, who clung to the maillot jaune for ten days through skill, cunning, grit, and grind, followed his glorious July with his horse race in August. He took on thoroughbred Othello Bourbon² in a best of three challenge. The race was a 380 meter straight shot, with each racer being allowed a flying start. Voeckler pipped his opponent in the first leg, but was unable to hold off his foe in the other two.

2: Somebody, anybody please name your son Othello Bourbon. With a name like that, he is destined to find fame and fortune, though perhaps also an unhappy end...

Johnny Hoogerland, whose TdF heroism was largely thrust upon him in the guise of a car accident, engaged in a similar contest this week. As part of some manner of Dutch fundraiser to combat some form of children's cancer³, he raced trotter Unforgettable in an identical best-of-three fight. As if these things were scripted, he too won the first leg, but then was trounced in the next two.

3: Come to No Fours for all your hard-hitting, translated-from-the-Dutch-by-Google news!

Voeckler and Hoogerland, of course, are not the right men to win such a race. If you were earnestly trying to give homo sapiens a fighting chance, you'd pick a Mark Cavendish or an Andre Greipel to churn out the watts over that short distance. But anyone who gets overearnest about a man racing a horse is perhaps missing the point. The point is that it's happening, and that is far more important than who wins. I want cyclists racing horses. I want derny-led street racing. Get a little kooky every now and then, cycling; the sport is richer for it.

Ulysses and the Siren

2011-11-11T13:31:00.000-08:00

¹

Siren. Come, worthy Greek! Ulysses, come,
Possess these shores with me:
The winds and seas are troublesome,
And here we may be free.
Here may we sit and view their toil 5
That travail in the deep,
And joy the day in mirth the while,
And spend the night in sleep.

Ulysses. Fair Nymph, if fame or honour were
To be attain'd with ease, 10
Then would I come and rest me there,
And leave such toils as these.
But here it dwells, and here must I
With danger seek it forth:
To spend the time luxuriously 15
Becomes not men of worth.

Siren. Ulysses, O be not deceived
With that unreal name;
This honour is a thing conceived,
And rests on others' fame: 20
Begotten only to molest
Our peace, and to beguile
The best thing of our life—our rest,
And give us up to toil.

Ulysses. Delicious Nymph, suppose there were 25
No honour nor report,
Yet manliness would scorn to wear
The time in idle sport:
For toil doth give a better touch
To make us feel our joy, 30
And ease finds tediousness as much
As labour yields annoy.
—Samuel Daniel

1: As always, best practice with cycling YouTube videos is to not listen to the soundtrack. Generic pounding electronica must be a byproduct of carbon fiber and lycra, I'm afraid.

Elvis Done Left the Building

2011-11-11T00:05:00.000-08:00

Not necessity, not desire - no, the love of power is the demon of men. Let them have everything - health, food, a place to live, entertainment - they are and remain unhappy and low-spirited: for the demon waits and waits and will be satisfied.
—Nietzsche

Fame blurs reality, imbuing the famous with a public identity that may or may not accurately depict their private selves, but which is controlled by the audience’s perceptions and biases rather than anything internal. The fastest way to alienate your public is to undermine your persona, to let the mask slip and imply, through word or deed, that they believe in a lie. The bigger the gap between persona and self, the higher the need for discipline in public.

Michael Jordan has long been the gold standard for this. The man is an asshole, as has been clear for a couple decades now to anyone who cares to look closely. He fought teammates, gambles compulsively, and would rather burn your house down than lose to you at rocks, paper, scissors.¹ But MJ, star of Space Jam, purveyor of underclothing, and silhouetted dunker extraordinaire, is American royalty. He turns on that 1000 watt smile, blandly plays the nice guy, and the world revolves around him. His anodyne persona is as distant as it is friendly, founded on his unimpeachable resume. He’s not famous because he’s good-looking, though he is, or because of his charm. He’s famous because he won everything ever, while selling you the shoes the cool kids have been wearing ever since.

1: It's not clear that this is an exaggeration if he thought he could get away with it.

The lack of substance to that persona is a fame judo trick that has served him perfectly since. At its core, the Airman fame isn’t about anything beyond cool. The Bulls were the coolest team ever, at least to the general public, because Count the Rings, and MJ was both the alpha dog and the coolest guy on the team. He transcended his entire sport, and invented the athlete as global celebrity. There are miles of distance in between MJ and the real Michael Jordan, but the cool distance built into the MJ persona keeps us at arm’s length, so it doesn’t matter.

The Jordan shoe brand is built on itself, at this point. It has successfully created a feedback loop wherein the coolest basketball players wear Jordans, so next year’s coolest basketball players feel the need to also wear Jordans.² The LeBrons and Kobes of the world build their own mini-fiefdoms inside the Nike brand, but Jordan has Melo, DWade, CP3, and a bevy of other basketball, WNBA, baseball, football, and sundry athletes.³

2: There are exceptions, but the Derek Roses of the world wear Adidas because Adidas throws money at them to convince them to be those exceptions.)

3: Least explicable team Jordan athlete: Denny Hamlin, NASCAR driver extraordinaire!

Michael Jordan is playing a dangerous game with his brand. In a move that is less than surprising, he is at the front of the hawkish team owner pack in the NBA lockout. It’s a move that is the opposite of what he said as a player, but fully in line with his deeper strategy, then and now, of win everything always. Coffee is for closers, rings are for winners. But he isn’t just negotiating against his own Jordan “team”, he’s one of the handful of guys actively trying to screw them. There has been noise about free agent players being less inclined to sign with the teams of hawkish owners. Money being equal, this may happen some, but there are enough factors in play that I doubt you’ll see much such politics. But shoe deals? What if Nick Young is the tip of the iceberg?⁴ If there’s serious NBAPA resentment of the deal that gets made, or especially if we lose a season, couldn’t Jordan’s gleeful seat driving that bus poison the well of the Jordan brand? Any player good enough to be on the Jordan “team” is plenty good to take his talents to Nike proper, or to another brand. Nike can live without Jordan just fine these days, but what would happen to new Air Jordans if the league wasn’t wearing them?

4: Nick Young's twitter background is perfect.

Michael Jordan the executive has aged into the enemy of his current avatars. He almost certainly has the cultural capital for his brand to ride out the lockout and emerge slightly dented at worst, but what if things go nuclear? If owners and the NBAPA go scorched earth, do you have any doubt he’s willing to burn any and all bridges with current stars if he thinks he’s right? The Jordan brand seems monolithic, ossified into our cultural firmament, but such things are always more fragile than we think. In the trickle-down world of sportswear, if the tip of the basketball pyramid abandons the Jordan brand, especially if it’s because he’s publicly an asshole, could that kill Air Jordan? The fire that fueled his narratively perfect career is now painting him as a villainous owner, indeed it is what guarantees he must be at their forefront. Even if the season isn’t lost, his stance is a blow to the unassailability of his brand. Republicans buy shoes too, but only NBA players wear them on television. If he pushes against them too hard, too many times, he could start to erode the sway his brand holds over them. His brand’s strength lies in its purity. If he muddies those waters as an owner, could he eventually destroy himself?

XLV

2011-11-04T00:54:00.000-07:00

Is the yellow of the forest
the same as last year's?

And does the black flight
of the relentless seabird repeat itself?

And is where space ends
called death or infinity?

What weighs more heavily on the belt,
sadness or memories?

-Pablo Neruda

Invictus

2011-10-28T00:50:00.000-07:00

Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the Pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds, and shall find, me unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll.
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.

—William Ernest Henley

Victory is Sweet As When You've Known Defeat

2011-10-27T15:08:00.000-07:00

Sporting droughts are funny things. They appear gradually, organically, and each accretion of failures develops its own peculiar character. Some span generations of fans raised amidst the cyclical ruins of expectations, whole communities exchanging shibboleths of hope and despair. A drought's character develops contextually: losing longer than anyone else is harsh and heavy, but losing three consecutive Super Bowls is far more interesting.

Coming into this year's Rugby World Cup, New Zealand's national side, the All Blacks, hadn't won it all in 24 years. That doesn't necessarily seem like a long time: the Red Sox waited 60 years longer than that before winning the World Series in '04; Portland has been waiting 34 years and counting for a second NBA title; England hasn't won a FIFA World cup in 45 years; Cleveland is still Cleveland, and looks to remain so for the foreseeable future. But in rugby, New Zealand is no Cleveland. The All Blacks win about 75% of all their matches. They are international rugby's leading point scorers of all time. They have a winning record and scoring margin over every test team they have ever faced.¹ They have held the world #1 ranking longer than every other country combined. It's like the USA Basketball team going 24 years without winning Olympic gold, if it were also by far the most popular team in all of American sports.

1: Of those 20 teams, only 10 have even taken a single match.

See, nobody but nobody loves rugby like New Zealand.² With a population the size of metropolitan Phoenix, it supports the ITM Cup, a 14-team domestic professional championship, and five Super 15 franchises. There are 520 registered rugby clubs and 2,309 registered referees. The inaugural Rugby World Cup was co-hosted and won by New Zealand. They haven't won since³ I was for a time a preschool teacher in Wellington, NZ: I watched toddlers fight over who got to play Richie McCaw and Dan Carter; I read them "A is for All Black". So when the 2011 edition of the RWC returned to New Zealand, it's hard to overstate what a storm was stirred inside the bell jar.

2: Some Welsh will get indignant at this claim: ignore them.
3: They came closest in '95, as popularized by the movie Invictus. Not mentioned in the film was New Zealand's team-wide bout of food poisoning right before the finals. They still made it into overtime.

The All Blacks dominated the World Cup's early matches, winning their matches by an average of 38 points.⁴ Their closest score coming into the Finals was a 20-6 dismantling of Australia's Wallabies in the semis. They had already beaten France by 20 points in pool play. But France has always handled the All Blacks better than most anyone. Two of the All Blacks' five RWC defeats came at the hands of Les Bleus, after all. From the start, France rose to the occasion, handling the haka⁵ with balls⁷ and poise.

4: To be fair, this is somewhat distorted by their surreal dominance over Canada (79-15) and Japan (83-7). If that means nothing to you, transpose that onto American football: the two sports score on about the same scale.
5: The haka, a traditional Maori war dance with which the All Blacks begin every match, has got to be the most spectacular pre-match ritual around. Warriors traditionally performed a haka before battle to pump themselves up and intimidate the opposition. There are a variety of lyrics,⁶ but the All Blacks have settled on a short rotation of two. Note the face with the flared eyes (pūkana) and protuberant tongue: it originally developed as a heads up that that person intended, imminently and literally, to eat your dead body. That face is not fucking around.
6: Including this astonishingly graceless bit of cultural appropriation.
7: Non-gendered balls, of course.

The game itself was an exquisitely tense, low-scoring affair, with every kick and tackle and shift in advantage amplified by an incredibly loud, passionate crowd.⁸ Honestly, the rugby wasn't that amazing per se; I mean, Piri Weepu had to be subbed out in the 49th minute because he couldn't find the uprights with a map. But whatever the play lacked in execution was completely overshadowed by its importance. The atmosphere was electric. Apologies for the cliché, but it's the correct metaphor: like the bolt of a Van de Graaff generator, the game seemed liable to break in any direction at a moment's notice. And yet, by the end things had settled with remarkable diegetic clarity. The first half, the All Blacks pounded the ball in French territory, pressed in the scrums and forced a pressured French side into penalties; the second half, the French pounded the ball in kiwi territory, asserted control in the scrums, and drew penalties; each side scored one try and one kick and missed a pair of very makeable penalties.

8: Seriously, that crowd. I watched a recording of the game after the fact and to my extreme fucking chagrin got hit by a spoiler beforehand, and it still gave me goosebumps at points.

Afterwards, as a horn section played "I Vow to Thee My Country"⁹ on loop, the Bleus' shell-shocked captain fielded magnanimous questions about his plucky loss with numb, polite disappointment and the All Blacks exulted and hugged it out. Transcribed, the celebration seems banal; the "weight of a nation" announcing trite; the interviews about getting "quite a large monkey off your backs" asinine. But the moment itself was goddamn effulgent, a screaming, singing, laughing outpouring of people smiling so hard their faces hurt. Time is relative, and this has been a long time coming.

9: Set to the friggin' colossal theme from Holst's "Jupiter", this has got to be the most flat-out stirring piece there is. Honorable mention goes to the bassline of the Star-Spangled Banner. Why does anyone ever play it without it?

The Fist

2011-10-21T00:54:00.000-07:00

The fist clenched round my heart
loosens a little, and I gasp
brightness; but it tightens
again. When have I ever not loved
the pain of love? But this has moved

past love to mania. This has the strong
clench of the madman, this is
gripping the ledge of unreason, before
plunging howling into the abyss.

Hold hard then, heart. This way at least you live.
--Derek Walcott

Everything Bad is Good for You

2011-10-20T23:34:00.000-07:00

One of my understandings about doping at the pro level is that, to some unspecified but for sure critical degree, racers who do it are responding somewhat reasonably to what in TV and radio interviews I’ve called the speed-limit syndrome. This is the rationale we all use, consciously or not, for exceeding the lawful speed when we drive on highways: Everyone else is doing it, the law isn’t really practical, and, anyway, the chances of getting caught are extremely low...This real-world conundrum (that many of us who swear we’d never dope no matter the circumstance feel free to routinely break a law when it benefits us without much risk of punishment) is one of the reasons I’ve never been able to regard doping in a way that lets me condemn the people who do it as wholly immoral or dishonest beyond empathy.

Bill Strickland¹ has some pretty cogent thoughts about the recent spate of doping in high-level amateur masters cycling, but also encapsulates some of what I've always thought about doping.

1: Bill Strickland : The American cycling world :: What you wish Rick Reilly was : The general American sports world.

Doping in the 90′s was like cocaine on the set of a John Hughes movie. Those involved in the sport knew of its widespread use while we “regular” consumers got to sit back and naively reap the rewards. It was a different era of doping because of what became possible to witness. EPO was introduced and with it racing was changed forever. By increasing the red blood cell count in athletes EPO made it possible to literally ride people to hell. Water bottles filled with ice and syringes were passed around race starts and jumping jacks became the new jogging in order to keep the sludge that was riders blood from coagulating in their veins at night. Despite the health risks and clandestine practices the racing was unrivaled.

Doping was a scourge in cycling the same way steroids were in baseball, but its effects were arguably cooler. In baseball, the home run knob² was turned to eleven by 'roids, with the rest of the game at least seeming the same. In cycling, racers became supermen. The baseball analog would be if PEDs had also turned fielders into Willie Mays upgrades, and the 90s had been spent watching batters hit lasers which were caught by fielders who covered ungodly amounts of ground to make the play³. Pasquale Ragazzo digs into the illicit thrills of that besmirched era over at the Ritte van Vlaanderen company blog in a piece worth your time. Watch this video of Lance Armstrong on the Sestriere in '99. Yes, what he did wasn't natural or moral. I'm glad the sport has taken serious measures to clean itself up. But it is stunning to behold this attack, and much of 90s racing, for just those reasons. He flies up that hill like it's the most natural thing in the world, and demolishes the field utterly.

2: Also the Barry Bonds's head knob.

3: This might be the least graceful analogy I've ever written. You're welcome?

The Ballad of Mike Brown

2011-10-20T00:37:00.000-07:00

“There is, therefore, only a single categorical imperative and it is this: act only in accordance with that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it become a universal law. “
—Immanuel Kant

So Mike Brown came to his senses and traded Carson Palmer. The Bengals get one, possibly two first round draft picks, Carson Palmer gets out of Cincinnati, and the Raiders get the starting quarterback they desperately need. It’s a win-win-win situation, and odds are pretty good the Bengals will get the best of the deal. Everyone agrees it’s the right move, and yet I find myself sad that the standoff has ended.

I haven’t seen a good explanation of what exactly was Carson Palmer’s last straw. Second-hand reports suggest it was the oppressive cloud of losing, though common sense suggests it takes a more discrete rupture to make a man walk away from eleven million guaranteed dollars. Maybe something more happened, maybe he just got fed up and, after his demand for a trade was refused, put his foot down. His position here is pretty clear, a souped-up version of the standard NFL holdout.

I’m sad because Mike Brown backed down from a beautifully Kantian position. Its stark moral logic was as perfect as it was doomed.

“I’m not expecting him to be back. Carson signed a contract. He made a commitment. He gave his word. We relied on his word. We relied on his commitment. We expected him to perform here. He's going to walk away from his commitment. We aren't going to reward him for doing it.”

Mike Brown is a colossally shitty owner. He has nickled-and-dimed the team his father built for two decades now. He has chosen to act as general manager instead of hiring a real one for those twenty years, long after it became apparent he wasn’t up to the task.

And yet, he is roughnecked about what he thinks is right in a way that’s rare in pro sports. With millions of dollars in play with all high-profile maneuver, holdouts like Palmer’s are exercises in realpolitik. It’s not about the signed contract, the bond of a man’s word.¹ He is endlessly loyal to those he feels deserves it. He named his stadium after his father, forfeiting free corporate lucre to do so. For the first six weeks of the season, he was willing to keep Carson Palmer on ice, to tie up the Bengals' salary cap in case he came back, and to pass on potential trade windfall, because Palmer had given his word, and he was not interested in rewarding a man for going back on his word.

1: Palmer, of course, was good enough that he was offered and signed a guaranteed contract. The asymmetry of non-guaranteed NFL contracts allows owners to hold players at their word while obviating any requirement that they hold theirs.

I’m glad the Bengals got value for Carson Palmer. I’m glad Carson Palmer gets to ply his trade outside of Hamilton County. But I’m sad Mike Brown backed down. He was picking a fight for virtue over convenience, or, in Kantian terms, for universal law over personal advantage. He gave up the fight, because that’s how the world works. Money trumps principle far too much of the time, because life is more full with shades of grey than objective rational law. In the world of big money sports, I will always pull for the man who takes a stand, however Quixotic.

Fast and Furious

2011-10-17T23:12:00.000-07:00

Track cycling is, in many way, cycling stripped down to its skeletal essence. Riders navigate an indoor track, insulated from the elements. Their bikes have one gear and cannot coast. Every competitor's bike is nearly identical, a carbon monocoque with a disc rear wheel and five-spoke front. I don't know, but I would bet that each of those cycles is within a shockingly small number of grams of all of its rivals. They cut through still air on dry wood, every lap the same. Races are won by what is in a racer's legs, lungs, mind, and heart. In a keirin race, the riders follow a motorized derney¹ for a few laps, so that the race doesn't have a contested start,

I had seem the aftermath of this race, wherein Aziz Awang's leg was skewered by a 10-inch splinter, but I hadn't seen the race itself. Chris Hoy got boxed in right before he was going to make a move, and ended up in fifth after the derney dropped off the front of the race. Instead of contesting for position, Hoy dropped back to give himself room to accelerate, and then fucking exploded. He passed everyone, and then the rest of the race shattered. Hoy didn't cause the crash, bad riding did, but it's as perfect a visual demonstration for his dominance as anything. Six men were in the race, but Hoy had it won before it started.

1: Derney driver is one of those jobs I don't know how you get but I would love to have. Run a few motor-aided laps, pull off and let the hard men fight it out. There are far worse ways to spend your time.

Ozymandias

2011-10-13T23:21:00.000-07:00

I met a Traveler from an antique land,
Who said, "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desart. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read,
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings."
Look on my works ye Mighty, and despair!
No thing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that Colossal Wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
—Percy Shelley

I Know A Man

2011-10-07T00:27:00.000-07:00

As I sd to my
friend, because I am
always talking, -- John, I

sd, which was not his
name, the darkness sur-
rounds us, what

can we do against
it, or else, shall we &
why not, buy a goddamn big car,

drive, he sd, for
christ's sake, look
out where yr going.

--Robert Creeley

Adjusting for Era

2011-10-05T00:43:00.000-07:00

ROUGH JUSTICE: It occurred to me while watching Bill Belichick: A Football Life that, were Alexander the Great born today, he would end up in pro sports. Or Wall Street, I guess.

OIL CAN SAMSON: Except wasn't he basically tiny and not much of a specimen?

RJ: Right, but coaching.

OCS: Oh, you mean like how Mark Jackson would've conquered Persia a couple centuries ago.

RJ: HANDS DOWN, LANDS DOWN!

OCS: MAMA THERE GOES THAT MONGOL!

RJ: Red Auerbach would have conquered the known world.

RJ: Shaq certainly would have been a Goliath-type character.

OCS: "David, tell me how mine ass tasteth!"

RJ: And everyone would have laughed, because they would have been malnourished and 5'4" and he would have been fucking terrifying to behold.

OCS: Yup. He eats two steaks, cracks a fair to good joke, everyone goes home and starves a little more.

RJ: Do you think the visigoths got Rome because someone like David Kahn ended up in charge of Rome's defenses?¹

1: Turns out Honorius was the emperor at the time.

OCS: Nah. Just too many Urkels in their Legion.

RJ: "Man, how about that city-state of Buffalo in the early 90s? They seiged the shit out of everybody, but just couldn't seal the deal!"

OCS: "No one had an answer for their no-huddle warships!"

RJ: I can certainly see Tom Brady ending up as a Homeric figure. Or Kobe, for that matter.

OCS: Somehow I can't Dan Marino, though. Just how his face looks.

RJ: Yeah, I had the same apprehensions about Peyton Manning. Although the brothers angle plays well with oral traditions!

OCS: Rulon Gardner might end up a Little John-type; but he'd probably just live a brawny, anonymous life farming the shit out of some land.

RJ: KG, on the other hand, would die in battle seven or eight times.

OCS: Man, that dude would take a lot of people with him. He would get a statue and statue KG would be riding a horse, and he would have gone down so hard that the horse would be rearing all four legs off the ground.

RJ: Just resting on its giant, metaphor-laden balls? (I'm sorry that I'm not sorry about that one.)

OCS: HEY GUYS
THIS IS PRETTY UNCOMFORTABLE I GUESS
I WONDER WHAT IT FEELS LIKE TO CARE ABOUT THAT

The Charm of 5:30

2011-09-30T00:29:00.000-07:00

It's too nice a day to read a novel set in England.

We're within inches of the perfect distance from the sun,
the sky is blueberries and cream,
and the wind is as warm as air from a tire.
Even the headstones in the graveyard
Seem to stand up and say "Hello! My name is..."

It's enough to be sitting here on my porch,
thinking about Kermit Roosevelt,
following the course of an ant,
or walking out into the yard with a cordless phone
to find out she is going to be there tonight

On a day like today, what looks like bad news in the distance
turns out to be something on my contact, carports and white
courtesy phones are spontaneously reappreciated
and random "okay"s ring through the backyards.

This morning I discovered the red tints in cola
when I held a glass of it up to the light
and found an expensive flashlight in the pocket of a winter coat
I was packing away for summer.

It all reminds me of that moment when you take off your sunglasses
after a long drive and realize it's earlier
and lighter out than you had accounted for.

You know what I'm talking about,

and that's the kind of fellowship that's taking place in town, out in
the public spaces. You won't overhear anyone using the words
"dramaturgy" or "state inspection today. We're too busy getting along.

It occurs to me that the laws are in the regions and the regions are
in the laws, and it feels good to say this, something that I'm almost
sure is true, outside under the sun.

Then to say it again, around friends, in the resonant voice of a
nineteenth-century senator, just for a lark.

There's a shy looking fellow on the courthouse steps, holding up a
placard that says "But, I kinda liked Reagan." His head turns slowly
as a beautiful girl walks by, holding a refrigerated bottle up against
her flushed cheek.

She smiles at me and I allow myself to imagine her walking into
town to buy lotion at a brick pharmacy.
When she gets home she'll apply it with great lingering care before
moving into her parlor to play 78 records and drink gin-and-tonics
beside her homemade altar to James Madison.

In a town of this size, it's certainly possible that I'll be invited over
one night.

In fact I'll bet you something.

Somewhere in the future I am remembering today. I'll bet you
I'm remembering how I walked into the park at five thirty,
my favorite time of day, and how I found two cold pitchers
of just poured beer, sitting there on the bench.

I am remembering how my friend Chip showed up
with a catcher's mask hanging from his belt and how I said

great to see you, sit down, have a beer, how are you,
and how he turned to me with the sunset reflecting off his contacts
and said, wonderful, how are you.

—David Berman

Jet

2011-09-22T21:09:00.000-07:00

Sometimes I wish I were still out
on the back porch, drinking jet fuel
with the boys, getting louder and louder
as the empty cans drop out of our paws
like booster rockets falling back to Earth

and we soar up into the summer stars.
Summer. The big sky river rushes overhead,
bearing asteroids and mist, blind fish
and old space suits with skeletons inside.
On Earth, men celebrate their hairiness,

and it is good, a way of letting life
out of the box, uncapping the bottle
to let the effervescence gush
through the narrow, usually constricted neck.

And now the crickets plug in their appliances
in unison, and then the fireflies flash
dots and dashes in the grass, like punctuation
for the labyrinthine, untrue tales of sex
someone is telling in the dark, though

no one really hears. We gaze into the night
as if remembering the bright unbroken planet
we once came from,
to which we will never
be permitted to return.
We are amazed how hurt we are.
We would give anything for what we have.

-Tony Hoagland

HIdden Cities I

2011-09-15T23:47:00.000-07:00

In Olinda, if you go out with a magnifying glass and hunt carefully, you may find somewhere a point no bigger than the head of a pin which, if you look at it slightly enlarged, reveals within itself the roofs, the antennas, the skylights, the gardens, the pools, the streamers across the streets, the kiosks in the squeares, the horse-racing track. That point does not remain there: a year later you will find it the size of half a lemon, then as large as a mushroom, then a soup plate. And then it becomes a full-size city, enclosed within the earlier city: a new city that forces its way ahead in the earlier city and presses its way toward the outside.

Olinda is certainly not the only city that grows in concentric circles, like tree trunks which each year add one more ring. But in other cities there remains, in the center, the old narrow girlde of the walls from which the withered spires rise, the towers, the tiled roofs, the domes, while the new quarters sprawl around them like a loosened belt. Not Olinda: the old walls expand bearing the old quarters with them, enlarged but maintaining their proportions an a broader horizon at the edges of the city; they surround the slightly newer quarters, which also grew up on the margins and became thinner to make room for still more recent ones pressing from inside; and so, on and on, to the heart of the city, a totally new Olinda which, in its reduced dimensions retains the features and the flow of lymph of the first Olinda and of all the Olindas that have blossomed one from the other; and within this innermost circle there are always blossoming--though it is hard to discern them--the next Olinda and those that will grow after it.
—Italo Calvino, from "Invisible Cities"

The Snowfall

2011-09-09T13:33:00.000-07:00

The classic landscapes of dreams are not
More pathless, though footprints leading nowhere
Would seem to prove that a people once
Survived for a little even here.

Fragments of a pathetic culture
Remain, the lost mittens of children,
And a single, bright, detasseled snow cap,
Evidence of some frantic migration.

The landmarks are gone. Nevertheless,
There is something familiar about this country.
Slowly now we begin to recall

The terrible whispers of our elders
Falling softly about our ears
In childhood, never believed till now.

-Donald Justice

How Does Danny Hart Sit Down With Balls That Big?

2011-09-08T00:00:00.000-07:00

In the world of cycling, I'm more interested in long-distance racing, where winners are determined by physiological capacity and willingness to suffer the sharp ache of lactic acid, than I am in downhill mountain biking. Downhill is a sport of handling and adrenaline, where the winner is the person most willing to push it to the edge of conditions and ability. It's not that it isn't interesting, but the negotiation between daring and stupid doesn't usually captivate me as much as that between body and mind, of how willing a rider is to suffer.

That being said, this run by Danny Hart at the 2011 UCI Downhill Mountainbike Championships is bonkers. He destroys the field, carving his way down a sodden mountainside while hotdogging the jumps. It certainly doesn't hurt that the announcers, his countrymen, spend his run mashing the Gus Johnson button.

I'm not going to go menace hikers at unsafe speeds in the forest, but that sure does make me want to.

Hat tip to fuck yeah cycling!

Disillusionment of Ten O'Clock

2011-09-02T00:51:00.000-07:00

You really want to mute this one, I'm afraid.

The houses are haunted
By white night-gowns.
None are green,
Or purple with green rings,
Or green with yellow rings,
Or yellow with blue rings.
None of them are strange,
With socks of lace
And beaded ceintures.
People are not going
To dream of baboons and periwinkles.
Only, here and there, an old sailor,
Drunk and asleep in his boots,
Catches Tigers
In red weather.

—Wallace Stevens

Every Craftsman (Excerpt)

2011-08-25T23:38:00.000-07:00

Like with all YouTube compliations, you'll likely be happier if you mute this.

I've said before that every craftsman
searches for what's not there
to practice his craft.

A builder looks for the rotten hole
where the roof caved in. A water-carrier
picks the empty pot. A carpenter
stops at the house with no door.

Workers rush toward some hint
of emptiness, which they then
start to fill. Their hope, though,
is for emptiness, so don't think
you must avoid it. It contains
what you need!
Dear soul, if you were not friends
with the vast nothing inside,
why would you always be casting your net
into it, and waiting so patiently?

—Rumi

Another Lap With "Senna"

2011-08-23T22:19:00.000-07:00

This is somewhere between an extension and a counterpoint to Rough Justice's semireview yesterday. We might as well get the counterpoints out of the way first-- it won't take too long because I basically agree with RJ. My points of difference have largely to do with the implicit politics of the film: I'm not quite comfortable imputing the disdain for Prost or the out-and-out beatification of Senna. Don't get me wrong, it was certainly hagiographic, and uninterested in interrogating the man's self-presentation. Senna speaks for himself in the interviews that comprise the fabric of the film. That is certainly a political choice, but such a light editorial touch gives the audience latitude in forming their own judgements. The film's sins of omission are almost entirely explainable through its narrow focus on the life of Senna the driver rather than Senna the man. Prost comes off as an antagonist because that is the role he played in Senna's career, and many of his achievements, including his first two championships, happened when Senna was a young driver without a competitive car. Only almost, mind you.

The reason this is a post instead of a conversation is because of the rivalry between Prost and Senna. It was a rivalry of classical form and bitter intensity and it was the centerpiece of the film. The two became teammates on McLaren in 1988, and from the first season, the two found themselves at odds. They were very possibly the best two drivers alive at the time, and McLaren had the fastest car.¹ They were each other's truest peer, and each had far too much ego and competitiveness to subordinate. They also embodied a stylistic contrast that is very easy to lend moral weight: Prost was nicknamed "The Professor" for his methodical, intellectual style and was happy to finish 5th if it would serve his needs in the season's points tally; Senna was brash and intuitive behind the wheel and drove every race for first; Prost played the political games of F1 as well as anyone and was close with FISA president Jean-Marie Balestre; Senna was willfully ignorant of the games behind the game. They mirrored each other historically as well as personally in a pair of deeply controversial crashes in successive Japanese Grands Prix. Their mutual hatred and respect formed a deep bond between them; I think Prost would have done anything to save Senna's life for the same reasons Batman saved the Joker.²

1: Between Prost and Senna, Team McLaren won 15 of 16 races that season.
2: And vice versa, these being comic books.

With its complex subject, epic rivalry, and stunning racing footage, "Senna" is one of the most beautiful and compelling sports documentaries I've ever seen, a fantastic choice for ESPN films to follow the 30 for 30 series, and for what it's worth a full-throated recommendation from the No Fours crew. Keep an eye out for it, in the theater if possible.

A Semireview of Senna

2011-08-23T00:22:00.000-07:00

“They are good that are away.” – Scottish proverb

It is always frustrating to try and get a handle on athletes who performed their feats before you could have payed attention. Most of the information available has already been filtered, and there is no way to see footage, even full footage rather than highlights, without coloring it with your prior knowledge. Even if you somehow don’t know what happens in the event you’re watching, you know of the trajectory of the career, the broad contours of the settled narrative. There is no way to experience the wonder that makes sports worth watching, the feeling that you can't quite believe that what you're watching is happening. Settled fact, no matter how wondrous, is wholly believable.

Thanks to some savvy internet work by Oil Can Samson, the No Fours team scored tickets to a screening of the new documentary Senna in Portland tonight. The film is wonderful formally; director Asif Kapadia tells the story of Ayrton’s life, or at least his professional life, solely through use of footage from his life, with narration from interviews with him and those who knew him. It’s edited to flow smoothly, with no clunky narration grafted on top needed to move things along. As a treatment of a man, it veers well into the territory of hagiography. On its terms, Ayrton Senna is a shining beacon of religious devotion, clean and righteous competitive drive, and overwhelming skill. His teammate and main rival, Alain Prost, is presented as a calculating man of high but lesser talent, reduced to fighting Senna through sordid political channels. That may be largely true, but there must be more nuance to the story than the film gives. No racers other than Senna and Prost say anything in the film, with two (I'm pretty sure) brief exceptions. His personal life is at best hinted at; his two main girlfriends are briefly introduced, but Wikipedia informs me he also was married once in his youth. The film streamlines his life story and details in the name of narrative convenience and purity.

The reason it doesn’t torpedo the project, however, is that the film lets you lose yourself in the breathtaking skill Senna had. Kapadia had access to all sorts of archival footage, and made stupendous use of it. There are multiple long sections of onboard race footage that give you a front-and-center view of just what brand of great he was. Any given F1 driver will hit every apex of every turn, but Senna seems to have taken nearly every single turn of his career at the very edge of his car’s capabilities.¹ There was a thing he kept doing, at the end of a turn, with his wheels on the warning strip at the edge of the track, where he would shimmy the car just a bit to get it lined up, and then nail it out of the turn. It’s enough that he had that kind of driving ability and control; what beggars belief is that he was willing and determined to use it all of the time. The US poster for the film stacks up names to place Senna for F1-ignorant Americans via shorthand.

1: Those capabilities, of course, took him north of 180 mph and around hairpin turns faster than you or I go on the interstate. What F1 lacks in intricate beauty it makes up in physics.

2: As I tweeted, the cycling fan in me is a little outraged that Eddie Merckx didn't make the cut. He doesn't resonate with Americans, but any list of dominant 20th Century athletes, no matter how short, really should include him.

The comparison I couldn’t shake, however, was Allen Iverson, if he had somehow played in a league where his size wasn’t a liability.³ Senna used only one tactic, which was to drive as hard as he could, all of the time, and pass anyone in front of him. His willingness to explore the raggedy edges of the possible/sane stakes out the halfway point between Chuck Yeager and AI. He drove certain that he was more committed to winning, both the race and the next turn, than anyone else on the track, and he was almost always right. He was amazing on dry tarmac, and if it started raining, he was of a different class than the rest of the F1 drivers, the best racecar drivers in the world. On soaked pavement, his feel for what he could and couldn't get away with in his car was staggering. He navigated racecourses the same way AI did the halfcourt, using space that no one else knew existed until it was filled.

3: Is there any way we can get Iverson to the Philippines to play out the rest of his days? Am I wrong in thinking that would be amazing?

I don’t know enough about the sport to weigh in as to where he ranks all-time as an F1 driver.⁴ I don’t really care.

4: To be fair, the film doesn't play that parlor game either, despite its beatific treatment.

You can get a taste of what the movie shows if you search for “Senna onboard” on YouTube, but grainy footage of decades-old television footage can’t compare to taking it in in the theater. Senna tells a compelling (if biased) story, but its glory lies in what it is able to show you. Hearing Senna talk about his life is fascinating, but to be engulfed by the cockpit view of him racing while his V6/8/10/12 screams is electrifying. It is the kind of window into otherworldly talent you can’t get elsewhere. Until we can recreate what Ali, Pelé, Merckx, or Iverson saw, this is the best you can get.

Variation #3: Andy Schleck

2011-08-22T00:22:00.000-07:00

"What though the field be lost? / All is not lost; th'unconquerable will, / And study of revenge, immortal hate, / And courage never to submit or yield." -John Milton, Paradise Lost

Cadel Evans won the Tour de France; Andy Schleck lost it. He lost it in the Pyrenees, where he and his brother Fränk, teammates and among the best pure climbers of the current generation, sat back and raced defensively. He lost it on stage 16, when he couldn't stay with Contador's attack on a climb and then rode his brakes right into a huge time gap on the downhill. And, finally and decisively, he lost it in the individual time trial, where he lost an enormous 2:31 to Cadel Evans. And for all that, with a single brash, majestic ride he came within two kilometers of winning it all.

To understand Andy's ride, you have to go back two days, to his utter failure on the Col de Manse.¹ Not that he couldn't hold Contador's wheel-- there's only a little shame in that. The Schlecks are best suited to longer climbs, and Contador's sheer acceleration on the steeps is his greatest weapon. Only Sammy Sanchez and Cadel Evans managed to hold on that day. But that gap expanded on the slick descent, where an early scare rattled Andy into outright caution. “Boof – 1:06 to Andy. I thought we’d take 20 seconds at the most,” said Contador afterwards. Most damning of all, though, were Any's own words: "I don’t think people want to see a race decided on the downhill. We don’t want to see riders crashes. A finish like that shouldn’t be allowed." Is there a worse sort of talent than a talented coward?

1: Really, you should go back to last year's Tour where he placed second by under a minute, but we have to have some boundaries here.

On stage 17, Contador attacked again, and again got some separation. He was caught up within the last kilometer, which was spectacularly dramatic. With Paris approaching, a resurgent Contador, and time slipping away in the mountains of all places, Andy was on his heels. Which brings us to stage 18.

It was a monster of a stage. After 40 flat kilometers to warm up, it went straight up the 9,000' Col Agnel, then the 7,740' Col d'Izoard, and from there to the finish atop the 8,678' Col du Galibier.² A breakaway of 14 riders, including two from the Schlecks' Leopard-Trek squad, attacked at the base of the Col Agnel, but with no threats to any jersey among them, they were given free rein by the peloton. 37 miles from the finish, on the Col d'Izoard, Andy attacked. Contador was too tired to reel him back; if Cadel Evans countered with Fränk perched on his wheel, he would drain himself just to see a counter-attack that could break him. "This is a brave move, an iconic move!" Paul Sherwin cried. By the summit, Andy had a full two minutes on the field.

His descent was startlingly adrenal. He leaned hard, took aggressive lines, and left himself little margin for error. He caught up to his first teammate Joost Posthuma³ on the blank khaki crags of La Casse Deserte, tear-assing like a man with something to prove, and then he passed him. Posthuma just didn't have the juice to lead him out fast enough.⁴ Andy caught up Maxime Montfort, who set quick lines for Andy, who despite his stock market impersonation was still not a particularly talented descender, to follow, then put his head down and dragged Andy to the head of the breakaway. As they approached the base of the Galibier, Andy was working at the front of the break himself, ratcheting the pace beyond what the others could. He lead the yellow jersey group by over 4 minutes; on the road, he had the overall lead of the Tour by more than 2 minutes.

2: Every time I try to imagine actually riding over that route, something goes wrong. I just don't have any useful referents. I've ridden myself stupid. I ran until I puked one time. Neither one was even hard enough to extrapolate from, let alone compare.
3: This is a perfect name for a fictional character, like a morbid inversion of Oedipa Maas.
4: By this point, Andy had already fully redeemed himself. Everything further was just extra credit. And I'm not apologizing for that pun.

He attacked the breakaway and rode the winding road up the Galibier alone. As he approached the top, his smooth pedaling had grown ragged and an uncharacteristic grimace flashed over his face. An official UCI⁵ car pulled up behind him, and through the sun roof stood none other than Eddie Merckx, swinging his arms and roaring encouragement. The closest analogue here would be if, while LeBron was dropping 25 straight on the Pistons in the 2007 Eastern Conference Finals, Michael Jordan had pushed his way to courtside and started screaming and pumping his fists because GODDAMN RIGHT THAT IS HOW YOU DO IT. It gave a body goosebumps.⁶

5: Union Cycliste Internationale, the ruling body of professional cycling.
6: Which makes it all the more astounding that it is nowhere to be found on YouTube or Google image search. Really, the internet? I guess the good Dr. Pangloss was wrong.

Below, the other contenders were a disorganized mess. Rather than working together to catch Andy, they played chicken, waiting for someone else to take it on themselves up front, while Fränk bode his time in the pack. Finally, Cadel Evans and Contador started to push the group, cutting into Andy's lead. Contador, though, simply had no legs under him. He cracked, losing nearly four minutes and watching his hopes of winning blown to pieces. Evans put on his grownup pants, leading a sweltering chase all by himself. Two kilometers from the summit, Andy was still in the virtual lead, but he was hemorrhaging time. Four minutes became three. Three winnowed down towards two, towards Andy's gap in the standings. He crossed the finish, while Cadel rolled inexorably up, straining at his pedals and occasionally swearing at his companions, who could barely manage to keep up, let alone move to the front.

Fränk, who had spent the entire day chilling in Evans' slipstream, attacked at the top for an easy second place. Thomas Voeckler, who looked about ready to collapse and/or vomit blood, survived Evans' pace to the finish, keeping the Maillot Jaune by a mere 15 seconds. Cadel's strength put him a full head above the field, but he was now a minute behind Andy and fully on the defensive.

The trouble is, I don't think I've managed to do any sort of justice to that ride so far. The bare facts matter, but for those you can just read around some. What's missing is the thrill of it and the doubt. The slow unfurling of the last three hours of the ride: the distance and the mountain yet to go, the sheer energy Andy was expending, and the number and talent of the men chasing him on one hand; the tactical perfection of the move and the tremendous form Andy was showing on the other.⁷ Not to mention how well it fit into the overall narratives of the race: Voeckler hanging onto the maillot jaune by one final shred before losing it on the Alpe d'Huez; Andy setting himself up to win the yellow only to lose it the next day; Cadel being just a fucking horse. And how an hours-long move could have such tight margins as Andy started to fall apart approaching the finish: 2k fewer and he wins by a big enough margin to win the whole Tour; 2k further and he might not have won the stage. That kind of extended tension is incredibly rare, and almost never happens without some kind of tied-game stasis-- a basketball team coming back from 30 points down to win in double overtime, or a pitcher taking a perfect bid into the 13th, say⁸-- the closest analogy I can come up with is a one-day cricket match where the team batting second chases an immense score into the final over.

So no. Andy Schleck did not win the Tour de France. But he injected more drama, more intrigue, more humiliation and inspiration and redemption and bravery than the whole rest of the contenders combined. And just as no one reads "Paradise Lost" to wallow in the poetry of the Almighty, when I look back on this edition of the Tour, my first thought will not be for Cadel Evans. Satan is so much more compelling.

7: But then, Andy's always been one to smile, no matter the pain.
8: I don't mean to say either one is worse. Each has its own particular flavor of amazing.

In Praise of Self-Deprecation

2011-08-19T00:24:00.000-07:00

The buzzard has nothing to fault himself with.
Scuples are alien to the black panther.
Piranhas do not doubt the righteousness of their actions.
The rattlesnake approves of himself without reservations.

The self-critical jackal does not exist.
The locust, alligator, trichina, horsefly
live as they live and are glad of it.

The killer whale's heart weighs one hundred kilos
but in other respects it is light.

There is nothing more animal-like
than a clear conscience
on the third planet of the Sun.

-Wisława Szymborska

ESPN3 Digest III

2011-08-16T22:32:00.000-07:00

"Aerodynamics are for people who can't build engines."
—Enzo Ferrari

Saturday August 20^th
3:15 PM: American Le Mans Series at Road America

For the most car-obsessed country on the planet, America sure does have a pretty bullshit car racing menu. NASCAR, for all that it has the hands-down coolest genesis story, is fundamentally a bunch of identical sedans jamming around a banked oblong.¹ If you step beyond that, your main remaining options are drag racing and funny cars, which I'm pretty sure are just a cross breed between drag racers and NASCAR cars. Our racing turns, should you even want them, shall be either 90° or 180°.

1: I'm not saying there's no skill in NASCAR; that argument is plain stupid. But I am saying that all the skill there is in NASCAR is in Le Mans and Formula One racing, with more skill besides.

Enzo Ferrari, facts aside, must have been American. American automobiles have been stuck in a cult of horsepower since pretty much always, with no real thought given to other contingencies. Our racing lodestars² are the deuce coupe, the Mustang, and the 70s muscle car, all of which have roughly the same level of steering technology as my bathtub. Get a big enough engine, my son, and the roads are yours. In a country with a mapping ethos formed by the Northwest Ordinance, it makes some sense. If you're racing stoplight to stoplight on the gridded expanse of the Great Plains, why should handling be more important than a bench seat where you can canoodle with your 50's stereotype girlfriend? The same badass democratic bootleggers that birthed NASCAR trapped us: our racing is our driving writ large, boiled down to its essence and supercharged.

2: Sure you can have several lodestars, shut up.

The rest of the world, at least to the extent that it cares about such things, is more entertained with Rally Car racing and Formula One, both of which seem much more interesting. Instead of sending cars down a straight line or elementary school geometric figure, these race them around unique tracks where each turn is a new challenge. Rally cars do it on gravel back roads with four-wheel drive, Formula One has ground-bound jet fighters³ tearing through Monaco. They're less culturally freighted, so they get to have things like brake points, hairpin turns, open wheels, and (gasp!) varied terrain.

3: No, you're right, they don't have jet engines, but come on, look at those things. Carmaker Formula One divisions are basically Skunkworks.

So American Le Mans. The Le Mans 24 hour race⁴ is one of the great proving grounds of automotive racing. The American Series is a set of races for different classes of cars, with season winners getting to take part in the real deal race. The cars aren't restricted by what you can buy in a car dealer's showroom, spoilers are allowed, and the courses twist and turn. It's interesting racing!

4: I am rather conflating Formula One and Le Mans racing, which are different beasts. If that upsets you, I suspect you're the type of person I can distract with a link to a bitchin' picture of a Ford GT40, four-time LeMans winner and the coolest car America ever produced.

Variation #2: Johnny Hoogerland

2011-08-15T01:53:00.001-07:00

"When the real world is transformed into mere images, mere images become real being - dynamic figments that provide the direct motivations for a hypnotic behavior. Since the spectacle's job is to use various specialized mediations in order to show us a world that can no longer be directly grasped, it naturally elevates the sense of sight to the special pre-eminence once occupied by touch: the most abstract and easily deceived sense is the most readily adaptable to the generalized abstraction of present-day society. But the spectacle is not merely a matter of images, nor even of images plus sounds. It is whatever escapes people's activity, whatever eludes their practical reconsideration and correction. It is the opposite of dialogue. Wherever representation becomes independent, the spectacle regenerates itself."

Thesis 18, "Society of the Spectacle", by Guy DeBord

There is one thing I've been avoiding in all my discussion of heroism, and that is other people. To be a hero, you don't just have to go through hell, you also have to go through Sartre's hell.

Johnny Hoogerland had heroism thrust upon him, which is to say he is very unlucky indeed. When he and Juan Antonio Flecha were sideswiped by a mishandled car, he was flung upside down at about 30 mph through a barbed wire fence. Not for the squeamish:

He untangled himself, replaced his tattered bib and jersey, and was given some gauze and a functional bike, which he pedaled another 36.5 km to the finish line on shredded legs. From the finish line he went to the podium: in the course of the breakaway leading up to the crash, he had earned enough points to take the lead in the king of the mountains classification. From the podium he went to the hospital, where he was given 33 stitches and quite a lot of painkillers. He hardly slept. As Red Kite Prayer so nicely put it, "Not that climbing out of barbed wire and riding our bike even five miles is impossible—no, the point is that to most of us such an act is unthinkable.... no bike race I might conceivably win has the power to redefine me so completely as a person that getting back on the bike becomes a reasonable sacrifice. After all, that’s what we’re talking about. Getting back on the bike is a sacrifice; in doing so, you are giving up a level of wound care and pain relief that are the first priority to the rest of us."

This disconnect and the striking image of Hoogerland falling over a startling horizontal distance into the barbed wire are what turned Johnny Hoogerland into an icon, and thus into a hero. Heroism is socially mediated: without press, a hero is only another brave person. Ultimately, it's not about what they do, it's about what we do with what they do. Though two men were struck by that car and both continued the race, no one wrote "it doesn’t matter whether you are you – average, anonymous you – or Juan Antonio Fucking Flecha"; cycling websites didn't publish hospital photos of Flecha. I'm not ignoring the gap in the severity of their injuries, but if that were the only metric, Flecha would be getting at least some coverage too. The dude got hit by a car too, after all, and landed hard on the road. But Hoogerland fucking flew into that fence, and where the practical impact their respective injuries had on their joints and muscles is unknowable, the blood dripping down Johnny's calves was unmistakable. The tearful podium presentation to cap it off was so dramatic and so neat a conclusion that even the slightest whiff of artifice would have spoiled it. But who could be so crass? There's nothing cheesy about a real person getting really hurt.

And this is where Johnny Hoogerland's story eludes DeBord's broader critiques. There is certainly an element of the consumerist spectacle in the crash and its conceptual fallout: the passive, entranced crowd on "Society of the Spectacle's" cover, their goggles united in a flat, single angle of perspective could easily be watching that crash footage. But for all its mesmeric imagistic power, there is some buffer for social reality underlying this particular spectacle. Because this isn't about his cycling style, or anything anyone said or wrote or planned. This is about getting hurt and that is the most universal thing of all. In that sense, the crux of Johnny Hoogerland's story is the simple, irreducible fact that he is a man.

Heat

2011-08-12T00:18:00.000-07:00

O wind, rend open the heat,
Cut apart the heat,
Rend it to tatters.

Fruit cannot drop
Through this thick air—
Fruit cannot fall into heat
That presses up and blunts
The points of pears
And rounds the grapes.

Cut the heat—
Plough through it,
Turning it on either side
Of your path.

— H.D.

ESPN3 Digest II

2011-08-11T21:55:00.000-07:00

Editor's note: ESPN3 Digest is a weekly series, in which one or several noteworthy events streaming freely on the Worldwide Leader's oddly comprehensive web channel are highlighted for your edification and (hopefully) delight. Times are Eastern, events are resolutely non-essential.

Sunday, August 14^th
6:05 AM: International Canoe Federation: Canoe World Championships: Czech Republic
This is maybe the least sexy sporting event ever, at least conceptually. I spent my formative years in Northern New England, and much of my summers involved canoeing around the many lakes of Vermont, New Hampshire, Southern Maine, and the Adirondack region of New York, capitalizing on the canoe's main virtue: it is a form of flat-water travel as elegant as it is efficient. Two people can easily ferry lodging, several days' worth of supplies¹ and whatever else they want in the belly of a vessel perfectly designed to knife through calm waters. This is the boat's telos; its narrow-hipped build is as good at tracking straight lines as it is poor in turbulence². White-water canoes exist, but they are rocker-bottomed designs with air bladders fore and aft that always seem to be nothing so much as kayaks born in the wrong bodies³ And yet the ICF is at it, racing canoes (fine, and kayaks) in whitewater, in slalom courses, in every manner of circumstance except remote, peaceful trips in the wilderness. Because they're doing it in the Czech Republic, it is airing stupid early on Sunday morning. I won't be watching, but you should be, so you can tell me about it. I'm hoping at least one of the events looks like this:

1: Food, beer, fire supplies, s'mores makings, more beer...

2: If you have ever tumbled out of a canoe while trying to get in or capsized a friend's by leaning on its gunwale, you know exactly what I mean.

3: It is the policy of this blog, of course, to respect the right of all boats to whatever self-identification they desire.

Variation #1: Thor Hushovd

2011-08-11T00:27:00.000-07:00

No contemporary rider has reinvented himself so effectively as big Thor Hushovd, the Bull of Grimstad.¹ Starting as a time trial and classics specialist, he became a dominant sprinter, twice winning the green jersey and only missing the points classification podium once between 2004 and 2010. But with another, younger sprinter on his team in Tyler Farrar, and Mark Cavendish dominating from behind the best leadout team in the sport,² Thor had ride for his team and pick his days to try to win stages. And goddamn but he did both.

1: If there were a jersey for best nickname, Thor would win it every year; if he crashed out, Fabian "Spartacus" Cancellara would take the honors.
2: In a lot of ways, Mark Cavendish is like Lance Armstrong, sprinting edition: he's a fantastic individual talent with unquestionably the best team and he's sort of a cock. Now, the general classification is far more dramatic and interesting than the points one, and Armstrong had both a stretch of dominance Cav hasn't touched and a ludicrously poignant backstory. I do wonder what it would have looked like had Gilbert committed fully to the points game this year over considerations of his overall time.

The second day of racing was the team time trial. Hushovd anchored the Garmin-Cervélo squad to victory, grabbing the yellow jersey. The next day, in yellow, he was the leadout man that let his American teammate Tyler Farrar take the win on the 4th of July. He managed to hold the maillot jaune for eight days, through the foothills of the Pyrenees. Hard to do more as a team rider.

And for himself, he won another two stages, bringing his career total to an impressive 10. But while all his previous stage wins have come in the sprint finishes to flat stages, this year he won in the mountains. If you have the time, watch this from 5:47 through to the end. If not, the other important bits start at 8:50, and 14:35/16:26 (14:35-16:26 isn't strictly necessary, but at the time those two minutes provided some fantastic dramatic tension), and the finish line appears at 19:00:

After getting himself into a ten-man breakaway away from the elite climbers jockeying for overall position, Thor attacked very early in the hors-catégorie climb up the Col d'Aubisque. He climbed aggressively, but he's still a 180-pounder and at the summit French climbers David Moncoutié and Jeremy Roy were ahead of him by one and two full minutes, respectively. The long descent and flat finish played to Hushovd's strengths, but that's quite a gap to bridge solo.

Since this whole business was framed by a discussion of heroism, I'd be remiss not to discuss descending. While to climb is to embrace pain that increases geometrically the faster you go, to descend well is to court catastrophe. So far as I know, only one man has died on an ascent during the Tour de France; many have died on the way back down. Hairpin descents demand total concentration, flawless balance, and perfect judgement of speed and line. Even a momentary lapse can lead to the end of your career or a very real death. So when Thor was clocked at 112 kph (just shy of 70 mph), nearly 20 kph faster than anyone else took the Aubisque, it wasn't just a nice talking point: it was fucking bananas.

Halfway down, he had caught up Moncoutié. The two slowly reeled in Roy, but as he came into view, Moncoutié stopped helping: it was clear he couldn't take Hushovd at the line, and he wouldn't help finish off another Frenchman. The final 10k were a slow-motion mano-a-mano showdown between Roy and Hushovd, each too exhausted to put the hammer down, with Moncoutié waiting for an opening that never came.

Timing an attack in cycling is essentially brinksmanship. Setting out alone is draining, so you have to justify blowing all that precious energy by building enough of a gap to reach your goal before your legs give out and you get caught up. If that goal is an intermediary sprint or climb to pick up a few points towards the polka dots or green, you might slip away unmolested. But if it's the finish line, you never get that luxury. Every moment you wait, you give yourself a shorter distance to cover with your finite glycogen stores; every moment you wait, you risk an opponent making a move before you and forcing your hand. To time a long attack so well you arrive at the finish fresh enough to seal the win takes an unflinching calculation of your strengths and weaknesses compared to the field; a clear mapping of that calculus over the remaining topography of the day's race; a firm grasp of the politics of the riders around you and their (dis)incentives to team up with you in a break³; and most of all, faith in your legs. With every extra kilometer and every terrain feature on which you are at a disadvantage, your margin for error narrows. La tête et les jambs.

55.8 km after he launched himself from the head of the breakaway and 2.3 km before the finish, Thor dragged himself into Jeremy Roy's slipstream and made a move with everything his legs had left. Roy simply couldn't match the strength of Thor's sprinter's muscles in the final anaerobic kilometers. Crossing the finish line alone in the rainbow stripes of the World Champion was surely gratifying, but the ride that lead up to it? That was beautiful.

3: Any small group of riders ahead of the peloton works out like a version of The Prisoner's Dilemma with hierarchical alliances between any teammates and a set of incentives to cooperate and defect that is constantly in flux based on each rider's position on the road, position in the overall standings, and level of energy. It is the best thing the sport has to offer.

Variations on a Theme

2011-08-10T02:45:00.000-07:00

Fourty-three nineteen. My gear lever feels like a scab on a wound. During our reconnaissance ride I was using forty-three twenty here. Now I’m sticking to the nineteen, a matter of willpower. My twenty was still as clean as a whistle. Shifting is a kind of painkiller, and therefore the same as giving up. After all, if I wanted to kill my pain, why not choose the most effective method? Road racing is all about generating pain.¹

Le Tour idéal serait un Tour où un seul coureur réussirait à terminer l'epreuve.²

Heroism is a word that gets thrown around a lot in reference to athletes. Timely plays, modest philanthropy, hanging out with a terminally ill fan and avoiding getting caught with weed will all get you casually labeled "a hero". But this is facile pulp journalism, a lazy elision of physical and moral feats. I'm not suggesting there's no overlap, and I don't mean to deride the character of top athletes: skill-based sports often demand ascetic, life-consuming amounts of work as a basic prerequisite to a professional career, after all. But for all the hustle and heartbreak games scatter in their wake, how often do we see athletes not merely accept risk, but actually choose to suffer for the sake of an abstract principle? That is: how often do we see heroism?³

1: From The Rider, by Tim Krabbé,a lyrical, digressive telling of the one-day Tour de Mont Aigoual. It is the most beautiful sports book I've yet read, and since in four tries I can't match Donald Antrim, I might as well quote him: "The Rider is a great read—a great ride. Krabbé's half-day race, delivered kilometer by kilometer onto the page, shows the sport for what it is: painful, exhilarating, tactical, relational, fast, slow, dangerous, consuming, prone to mechanical failure, heroic, futile. The race—and the book about the race—becomes a raining and cold history of the rider's life. But to say that the race is the metaphor for the life is to miss the point. The race is everything. It obliterates whatever isn't racing. Life is the metaphor for the race."

2: "The ideal Tour would be a Tour where only a single rider would manage to finish the race." -Henri Desgrange, inventor of the Tour de France

3: There are lots and lots of variously valid definitions of heroism kicking around. Henri-Frederic Amiel, in his Journal of 1849, defined it as "the brilliant triumph of the soul over the flesh—that is to say, over fear.... Heroism is the dazzling and glorious concentration of courage." (When did it go out of fashion to be so rousingly earnest about ideals? World War I?) It seems to me that, in diagnosing heroism, the two important bits are facing the prospect of material or spiritual suffering and choosing to accept it teleologically. Suffering disappointment at a loss is not heroic. Getting hurt is not heroic, though playing hurt might well be, and so on. I should also probably acknowledge that by the terms I'm setting here, heroism is, strictly speaking, very common in sports, but I'm interested in what is extraordinary; nothing reducible to professionalism qualifies.

Let's take a philological detour here. A lot of the vocabulary of sports actually stands in opposition to heroism: "makes the game easy"; "lets the game come to him/her"; "a natural"; or "the genetic lottery", which reduces elite performance to a function of luck.⁴ Nearly all sports are games, and quite explicitly designed to be fun. But there's a reason you don't see too many cyclists nicknamed "Kid". Cycling is all about generating pain. Take, for example, the 1910 account of Victor Breyer, as he stood at the top of the Aubisque with his colleague Alphonse Steinès:

His body heaved at the pedals, like an automaton, on two wheels. He wasn't going fast but he was at least moving. I trotted alongside him and asked 'Who are you? What's going on? Where are the others?' Bent over his handlebars, his eyes riveted on the road, the man never turned his head nor uttered one sole word. He continued and disappeared round a turn. Steinès had read his number and consulted the riders' list. Steinès was dumfounded. 'The man is François Lafourcade, a nobody. He has caught and passed all the cracks' ... Another quarter-hour passed before the second rider appeared, whom we immediately recognized as Octave Lapize. Unlike Lafourcade, Lapize was walking, half leaning on, half pushing his machine. But unlike his predecessor, Lapize spoke, and in abundance. 'You are assassins, yes, assassins!' To discuss matters with a man in this condition would have been cruel and stupid.

Breyer was the assistant organizer of the Tour de France; Steinès, the man who had proposed racing over the Pyrenees. The next year, not only did they return, they decided to include the fucking Alps. The hundredth anniversary of that second decision wrapped up Sunday on the Champs-Elysées. Fittingly, it was a race designed for climbers, featuring seven days in the mountains, with four hors-catégorie summit finishes (including the highest finish in race history atop the 8,678' Col du Galibier), and just a single, hilly individual time trial.⁵ For only the second time since 1967, the Tour began with a mass start instead of a prologue.⁶ Something to bear in mind: when two riders of equal talent race up a mountain, the one who can suffer more without his or her legs giving out will be the first to the summit. Barring a mechanical failure, it is exactly that simple.

4: And there's truth to that. Do you really believe that with a body as large, athletic, coordinated and durable as Shaquille O'Neill's, you couldn't make an NBA roster? A Turkish league one? One in Australia's NBL? Bet I could.

5: Since riders who finish in a group all receive the same time and since, with a constantly revolving set of fresh legs to break the air up front, a group can nearly always catch outliers given enough flat distance, the two main opportunities for riders to set some distance between themselves in the overall standings are in the climbs, where small differences in how fresh your legs are and how deep you're willing to dig can quickly balloon into hard-to-close gaps, and time trials, where everyone races against the clock and drafting isn't allowed. Those shots of riders in teardrop helmets and skinsuits that make them look like aliens? That's time trialing. But where climbing is typically ruled by whippets of men with gaudy power-to-weight ratios, the greater pure power output of a large rider will often translate into very quick time trials. Some, like Lance Armstrong and Alberto Contador, are very good at both; some, like the Schleck brothers or Fabian Cancellara, only one. It is not coincidence that, while all three stand 6'1", Spartacus is listed at a full 30 lbs heavier than the Schlecks.

6: A Prologue is a short individual time trial at the very start of a stage race. It provides a level of pageantry with its dramatic starting gate and individual aero jerseys for every standing national and world champion, as well as, for the Tour anyway, the defending race champion. It also provides a pecking order of sorts, as contenders get a chance to establish a time gap in the standings from the very start.

The Tour is comprised of perhaps the 21 most high-profile bike races in the world; four individual jersey competitions, each contested by a different set of riders over the three weeks; an award for the most aggressive rider; and a team competition. To try to encompass the narrative density and sprawl that follows from all that in a single recap would be such an oversimplification as to be disingenuous: I could no more pull that off than play part of the Brandenburg Concertos on the harmonica. Over the next several days, there will be a series of posts giving the story of the Tour for a single rider. Hopefully, taken together, they will give some approximation of the spirit of the greatest single sporting event there is.

Eternity's Orphans

2011-08-05T01:20:00.000-07:00

One night you and I were walking.
The moon was so bright
We could see the path under the trees.
Then the clouds came and hid it
So we had to grope our way
Till we felt the sand under our bare feet,
And heard the pounding waves.

Do you remember telling me,
‘Everything outside this moment is a lie’?
We were undressing in the dark
Right at the water’s edge
When I slipped the watch off my wrist
And without being seen or saying
Anything in reply, I threw it into the sea.

-Charles Simic

ESPN3 Digest

2011-07-31T21:13:00.001-07:00

Editor's note: This is the first in what will be a regular series here at No Fours. Every Monday you'll get a guide to some events of note that will be streaming (legally) during the upcoming week on the internets.

Guys¹, we live in the future. There are pluses and minuses to this: smartphones are awesome, but cars are not as sexy as the used to be. You can get television channels you would never have dreamed could exist, but we're slowly poisoning the planet and ourselves. Mixed blessings all around! One such blessing is ESPN3, the Worldwide Leader's outpost on the information superhighway. They stream any manner of odd sporting events that might have gotten airtime in the 90s when there was one ESPN channel, but which these days can't break through the wall of noise and triple windsor tie knots airing every hour on the hour. ESPN3 Digest is here to tip you off to the events you might not yet know you need to be watching, either when they air or on replay. All times are Eastern, all events are non-essential².

1: Guys in the gender-neutral sense, of course.

2: When I lived in rural Vermont, my ISP was the local telephone company, which was not part of the ESPN cartel. If you are one of the people locked out of the free video, I'm sorry. I would suggest that these events are indeed non-essential, but also that a dedicated and devious mind may be able to find less legal sources for video feeds if need be.

Monday, August 1^st
12:00 PM: AAU Boy's Basketball: 11th Grade Divison II National Championship
Ideas about amatuerism are, admittedly, to some degree inherently outdated and sepia-toned. The NCAA is a system by which doughy middle-aged white men earn large salaries because of the sweat and labor of unpaid "scholar-"athletes. But there is a line, somewhere, over which sport should be the private realm of children, playing to learn and because it is fun to play. I haven't read Play Their Hearts Out yet, so I don't really have anything incisive to say about AAU basketball as a thing, but I cringe every time high school sports is nationally televised. Maybe this is naïve, but I think the horizon of hype and money shouldn't eclipse players before they're out of high school. Please don't watch this game, I guess?³

3: We're off to a good start!

Tuesday, August 2^nd
2:40 PM: International Friendly: Olympique de Marseille vs. Manchester United
There is, for whatever reason, a spate of interleague soccer occuring right now. The World Football Challenge saw European teams travel to the US for the express purpose of beating MLS teams. (I recently saw West Bromley Albion F.C.⁴ roundly defeat the Portland Timbers. It was underwhelming, both because the end result seemed utterly preordained and because the match seemed to have no teleology.) Here is such a match, but without being part of a tournament. Just a good old-fashioned "who's better?" kind of friendly. If we're lucky, Marseille will be wearing their alternate orange uniforms, which wow.

4: Could there be a more British name!?

Thursday, August 4^th
7:30 PM: Canadian Football League: Montreal Alouettes vs. Toronto Argonauts
CFL games are wide-open and built more for skill players than the jumbo-sized bruisers of the NFL. This has its charms, but mostly I want to list off the CFL team names for you:

Hamilton Tiger-Cats
Montreal Alouettes
Toronto Argonauts
Winnipeg Blue Bombers
BC Lions
Calgary Stampeders
Edmonton Eskimoes
Saskatchewan Roughriders

What more could you want?

Friday, August 5^th
5:40 AM: Aussie Rules Football: St. Kilda vs. Fremantle
Remember back when ESPN hadn't realized that talking heads were a cheap way fill their airtime and any time you flipped to the channel during off-peak hours there was a 50/50 chance you were going to get World's Strongest Man footage or Aussie Rules Football? I don't know where Magnus von Magunsson is these days, but Aussie Rules Football, with its short shorts, manly men, seemingly random punting and fedora-ed finger guns-shooting uprights judges, is still going strong.

Friday and Saturday, August 5^th&6^th
8:30 PM: International Archery Foundation: Archery World Cup Days 1 and 2
This is the #1 pick of the week. What other sport is worried about PEDs that slow down your heart? Where else can you be scouting for the modern-day Robin Hood? I have no real idea what the Archery World Cup entails, but you can bet whatever you like that there will be targets, twangs, and probably some weird sunglasses. What more do you want?

Danse Russe

2011-07-29T00:26:00.000-07:00

If I when my wife is sleeping
and the baby and Kathleen
are sleeping
and the sun is a flame-white disc
in silken mists
above shining trees,--
if I in my north room
dance naked, grotesquely
before my mirror
waving my shirt round my head
and singing softly to myself:
"I am lonely, lonely.
I was born to be lonely,
I am best so!"
If I admire my arms, my face,
my shoulders, flanks, buttocks
again the yellow drawn shades,--

Who shall say I am not
the happy genius of my household?

—William Carlos Williams

Chapeau

2011-07-27T01:08:00.000-07:00

The Atlantic's In Focus blog has two posts up of photos from the Tour de France that I can only describe as lush. Whatever your opinion of the competition, there are few sporting events that can hold a candle to the scenery of the TdF. Do you like bike racing? Do you like beautiful pictures? You won't regret clicking through.

Part I:

Part II:

The Shape of Things to Come

2011-07-24T23:57:00.000-07:00

“When deeds speak, words are nothing.”
— Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

In the corners of the sports world where volume outweighs substance, there was a debate over whether or not the US Women’s Soccer Team “choked” by losing to Japan. I’m not interested in the merits of the case; I have always thought labels like “choker” belong to the sort of glib moralizing that pretends to know what’s in an athlete’s head and heart while projecting the author’s pat opinions onto them.¹ Despite the vapidity of the debate, though, I was happy to see it. It means we’ve come to a place where discussions of women’s soccer are about the nature of the play, not merely the fact that it exists.

1: I have not yet run into a single article of this kind that manages to marry its moralizing to meaningful analysis of the actual play of the match, or really of any kind. I suppose such writing is possible, in the same way that a manned mission to Mars is possible, but I'm not holding my breath.

High-level women’s team sports is a relatively recent phenomenon. Women have competed in tennis for decades and in the Olympics starting in 1900², but professional women’s sports leagues didn’t really become a viable enterprise until the 1990s.³ The calculus here seems pretty simple: Title IX flung open the gates to team sports for young women starting in 1972. By the 90s, the infrastructure had been in place long enough for there to be a generation of women who had grown up playing soccer and basketball under more or less competent coaches, the best of which women were good enough to go pro and the rest of whom were at least potentially interested in following them. Leagues for those sports have existed more or less since, though never as raging financial successes. The WNBA is operated by the NBA, reportedly at a loss, and women’s soccer has seen one league fold and WPS is currently fairly marginal.

2: Women competed in track and field starting in 1928, but some many of the competitors collapsed at the end of the first 800m run that it was not run again until 1960. That probably speaks most to interwar-era female athletic training regimes, but it also says a lot about those runners. Way to go hard, ladies!

3: I am, of course, dealing here with American athletes and markets because that’s what I know at least a little. The story obviously varies depending on where you look, but for Western sports things seem to hew pretty closely to the timeline of a spike in interest concurrent with women’s suffrage movements early in the 20th century which was then stamped out by male-run organizations, and things lying largely dormant until some point after the 1970s and before 2000.

Is that really surprising, though? The big three sports are multimedia juggernauts because they had a century of build-up, not to mention the luxury of not having to overcome prejudices about what athletes should look like. They make millions upon millions these days because they command large television audiences and the advertising dollars that stalk those demographics. Anyone expecting female pro sports to simply vault into prominence is fooling him- or herself. No sports league has jumped from non-existence to sustained juggernaut. There have been a few flashes in the pan, but even those were direct competitors to existing leagues. But dismissing the WNBA and WPS as irrelevant ignores the mechanics of fandom. We root for the sports we understand, that have become ingrained in how we think about sport in general.

Play is a universal human impulse. Some of us feel it more strongly than others, but everyone is wired to play, and therefore on some level also for sport. Male dominance of the field has nothing to do with it being a uniquely male impulse and everything to do with the historical interplay of physiological dominance and sexism. We think of athletes as male by default because athletes have always been presented to us as male. That’s why it’s the called the Women’s World Cup. Arguments that the WNBA and WPS are doomed to failure, either because they're economically inviable or a pale imitation of “true” (i.e. men’s) versions of the same sport, pretend that the sports universe is static.

Very few of us care passionately about sports that we didn’t play or follow as children. I am a baseball fan because the Cincinnati Reds won the World Series when I was seven, and I wanted to be an infielder because I wore glasses and so did Chris Sabo⁴. Were I female, the first such role model I could have had would have been a member of the 1991 Women’s World Cup-winning national team, with the first regular pro teams appearing for me later that decade. I’m sure plenty of women have grown up with male athlete role models, but there’s a world of difference between wanting to play a game like someone and wanting to grow up to be your own version of them.

4: Were I cooler, I would have wanted to be Eric Davis or Barry Larkin. But this was a year or two before I supported Ross Perot's bid for president because we both had big ears. Cool was not on my radar when I was seven.

Joe Posnanski wrote a piece that was about, among other things, watching the WWC final with his two daughters. He focused on their different reactions to the US team’s loss, but I was struck by the fact that those girls will be growing up in a world where women have always had the option to be professional soccer or basketball players. The most powerful things are those that everyone takes for granted. The viability of the WNBA and WPS is debatable because they’re still new and we can easily imagine them not existing. Those arguing against aren’t interested in what they’re selling, and, whether for reasons of misogyny or other bias, would prefer they go away. Those arguing for are the already converted.⁵ But twenty years from now, I would be shocked if there weren’t two or three relatively profitable women’s professional sports leagues. Women, you may have heard, make up roughly half of the populace, and despite all the messages in sports and culture telling them to go away and not pay attention, have long cared about sports. Right now it is in some ways remarkable that these leagues exist, but when they have been around for a generation, it will be normal, and that’s how they will get big numbers. Unless women disappear or television and the internet vanish, I can’t help but think their growth will be as inevitable as it will be slow. We’ll all be the better for it, because everyone deserves role models who look like them. Besides, how can more and more varied sports be a bad thing?

5: I of course think that those arguing for the leagues are wholly right. But the point is that there is no debate. That's more or less impossible when one side is a casually misogynistic polemic and the other side is marginalized by the size of its platform.

Let Us Now Praise Famous Men

2011-05-09T00:30:00.000-07:00

It is a sad fact that civic art is often also pretty crappy art. This is partially due to who commissions it; an artist making a statue to appease a committee and not offend a populace is unlikely to make bold or striking choices, and said committee, when choosing from a slate of possibilities, is equally unlikely to settle upon a work that could unsettle their constituents. Civic art is nearly always safe art, and safe is one of the more damning adjectives in the art world. But civic art, especially statues honoring individual citizens, has a purpose beyond and before artistic merit. It carries a message; there is a moral to its story. There are times when the story a statue is meant to tell will by necessity limit its artistic statement, and that’s not always a bad thing.

Bill Russell is getting his statue, and it only took a magazine article and a Presidential Medal of Freedom to get Boston around to it. Rob Peterson makes the case over at Hardwood Paroxysm that the statue should be something other than the run-of-the-mill representation of a man in some artistic pose. His suggestion is Russell’s hands, rising from the earth to grasp a basketball, a sort of extension of the idea embodied in the statue of Joe Louis’s arm in Detroit.

But to honor Bill Russell with a statue of hands holding a ball is to miss half of why Bill Russell deserves a statue. Russell’s story, as Peterson makes clear, is a story of athletic glory. Wherever he went, no matter what his personal box score read, Bill Russell and his teams won: 2 NCAA Championships, 11 NBA Championships. He won 5 MVPs even though Wilt Chamberlain put up cartoonish numbers during many of the same seasons. His athletic, ball-hawking defense quite genuinely changed the way high-level basketball was played. It’s hard for those of us who weren’t alive at the time to appreciate exactly how good he was, and the grainy highlights reels of him in action, while giving glimpses of his dominance, also show just how much the game has changed since then without driving home the fact that he was perhaps the most important catalyst for that change. He is the Babe Ruth of the NBA, a living legend whose dominance defies belief. He has more rings than fingers! A hand’s worth more than MJ, current consensus GOAT! On athletic merits alone, Bill Russell deserves to have been given his statue decades ago, and Peterson’s idea of hands snaring a ball would be a fine way to commemorate that career.

But such a statue would do a disservice to Bill Russell the man. The video embedded at the top of the Globe article announcing the statue was split into two parts for a reason, with the second being dedicated to Russell the Activist. Bill Russell used his fame as a pulpit. He was a proud man, unflinching and willing to ruffle whatever feathers he had to to prove the point that he was equal to any other. He marched with King. He refused to play games in cities where the black Celtics weren’t served in restaurants. He won over the city of Boston, but he lives on an island in Seattle because he couldn’t live in a city he knew was racist. Bill Russell lived in an America that was often openly racist, and he made a point to not back down from that racism. They don’t give you the Presidential Medal of Freedom for winning NBA Championships.

Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote an article recently about how the birther media trial of Obama’s citizenship is part of a long tradition of attacks on black citizenship, and how important it is for the America that is so often excluded from portrayal to be manifested publicly. Because the past is a racist (and sexist) place, as well as because erecting statues to honor our civic heroes largely died off during the 20th century, virtually all statues in Boston (and elsewhere) commemorating people commemorate white men. Joe Louis’s fist is pointed South to signify his fight against Jim Crow laws, a symbolic alignment appropriate for a man whose very celebrity was a blow to racism. Joe Louis wasn’t a mouthpiece of civil rights because he couldn’t be. In his time, being an African-American athlete portrayed as a gentleman was transgressive enough. Aligning the fist towards the South is an elegant acknowledgment of that import.

“I hope that one day, in the streets of Boston, children will look up at a statue built not only to Bill Russell the player, but Bill Russell the man.”
-Barry Obama

But Bill Russell used his position on the shoulders of athletes like Joe Louis to further their cause. He spent his adult life advocating for equality, loudly and publicly. He deserves a statue at least as much for that as for his eleven rings. It’s not a surprise that Beverly Morgan-Welch, of the Museum of African-American History, wants the statue to be of Bill Russell in a suit. She would ignore Bill Russell the player, but not for no reason. The best suggestion in the video is actually Tommy Heinsohn’s: the idea is as clumsy as the digital rendering, but his is the only suggestion that tries to encompass both parts of Russell’s greatness. To erect a statue for Bill Russell that didn’t show his proud black face would be a mistake and an insult. While a statue of Joe Louis’s fist is an elegant work of artistic metonymy because Louis broke barriers simply through proud achievement, Bill Russell fought to be acknowledged as a man, not just an athlete, and a statue of him must acknowledge that truth. To show his hands grabbing a ball would be to celebrate his glory on the hardwood, but to simultaneously deny his importance out of sneakers. It may be artistically clumsy, even hokey, for Boston’s statue of Bill Russell to be his whole body rather than just his hands, but the point of the statue is not really to be great art. It is not Bill Russell’s hands that deserve a statue, it is his brain and his heart. Any statue that fails to show that is the wrong statue.

They Are Good That Are Away

2011-04-11T21:07:00.000-07:00

"Every one of these minor characters has a line of development through the story...and that's the way Ford handles characters. Each character, each minor character is believable because the character has a life that could continue after the movie ends and you could figure out what that vector is. What he does so brilliantly is he has a whole bunch of these minor characters realized in this way that form a community, so that you get the sense that if the community were to continue, these relationships would continue to play out. That's the most powerful illusion of the Ford film, that differentiates it from a lot of other action films, where the characters are just vehicles for certain kinds of stunts. He's got a sense of character, and character, to be conceived properly, you have to conceive of it as existing beyond the space of a story you've designed for it."
—Richard Slotkin, Lecture on Stagecoach

There are few feelings as powerful as feeling that someone really gets it. Watching, reading, or hearing someone telling the world to you in a way that is out of step with the standard presentation but truer for it. It's not necessarily the entirety of a work that produces the feeling so much as the flashes of insight that light up corners of your brain you thought only you could fathom.

FreeDarko is turning off the lights. It's not a retirement so much as a disbanding, but I'm going to miss that corner of the internet something fierce. I have my eulogy in with the rest of them in the final post, but I was watching that Slotkin lecture tonight and that line stopped me. Theories and in-crowd theatrics aside, at its core FreeDarko was at its best when it reminded us sport is a world filled with individuals at all levels, where what made one a star was the spotlight, not some magical intrinsic quality that only some players enjoyed. They showed us that when you stop equating scoring the most points with being the most interesting, magical things happened.

And David Put His Hand in His Bag, and Took Thence a Stone, and Slang It

2011-03-04T14:42:00.000-08:00

The sporting victories that galvanize us most, the moments that crystallize in the retelling and live forever in the hearts of fans, the games you know will live forever the moment you see them, are the ones that even the biggest fans don't dare hope for. Joe Posnanski recently wrote about talking to Nick Charles, who recalled sports writers betting on in which 10 second window of the first round Mike Tyson would knock out Buster Douglas. The Miracle on Ice needs no introduction.

On the back of one of the greatest individual one day batting performances ever, Ireland beat England at cricket. Kevin O'Brien recorded a thirty ball half century and a fifty ball century. If that doesn't mean anything to you, it's bananas. (Despite my recent flirtation with cricket, I won't bother trying to do justice to the mechanics of the sport.)

This is a perfect storm of sporting wonder. England is a cricket superpower. They invented the damn sport. For all that relations aren't that bad these days, Ireland and England have a long, deep history of antagonism. England put up a big number, and then Ireland came storming back to win it. The slow build of cricket must have made this mesmerizing. Ireland opened at a good pace, but I doubt anyone felt they could keep it up over the entire course of their innings. The slow, extended narrative arc of the upset must have been perfect. The shift of the idea of an Irish victory from impossible to hypothetical to possible to, in the final over, fact. To win the match in the last seconds against the overwhelming favorite, and, furthermore, for the win to be over your country's former colonialist ruler? I don't know how you'd build a more perfect narrative. You don't have to know the sport to enjoy this, but if you're a cricket fan it's electric, and if you're Irish it will live forever.

You Can't Outrun Yourself

2011-02-22T16:59:00.000-08:00

"Give me a child until he is seven and I will give you the man."
— Jesuit motto

“I love him who desires the impossible.”
— Johann Wolfgang van Goethe, Faust

We are all, in our multifaceted fandoms, captives of our own childhoods. I don't mean that what we liked and disliked at a young age limits limits our appreciation, but rather that the lenses through which we evaluate everything never totally outrun the posters you had on your wall in elementary school and your first favorite player(s). If you grew up idolizing the Bash Brothers, you'll always dig the long ball. Joe Posnanski will always pull for the Duane Kuipers of the world.¹ The NBA is starting to get past finding Michael Jordan 2.0 because its youngest stars grew up with a league owned by AI, Shaq, Tim Duncan and Kobe. MJ was the crafty old guy on the Wizards, not the colossus standing astride the known world. Your sensibilities are molded by who you pretend to be in the backyard or driveway, who you first watch on television, and these days by who you play as on your PlayStation.

1: A large part of Posnanski's charm is that he pays as much attention to the losers as he does to the winners. I'm sure that's how he's wired anyway, but how perfect is it that he grew up in Cleveland?

I grew up in Cincinnati, so pro basketball never weighed heavily on my mind. My family was neutral in the UC/Xavier turf war that consumed the city's hoops consciousness, so I really only followed college hoops during March. I played in rec leagues and spent my fair share of time shooting at the rim behind our house, but there was never any player that burrowed into my consciousness. In baseball I was trying to be Barry Larkin, with a pinch of Chris Sabo because he wore glasses just like I did. I was never a big football fan, both because the violence of it didn't turn my crank and because the Bengals were so dreadful for most of my childhood that it was easier just to look away, and so I never played as a kid. What filled my mental void in basketball, it seems clear in retrospect, was the Harlem Globetrotters video game we had for our IBM 386.

This wasn't a good game. I poked around on the internet, trying to turn up a clip of gameplay or at least a screenshot, but the best I could find was this writeup from Golden Age of Games:

A very disappointing, sub-par basketball game based on the show basketball team Harlem Globetrotters. Well, even for 1990, I would say that this is a very poor simulation of the sport. Ugly graphics, hardly any sound, simple and boring gameplay. Just compare it with other basketball games of that time like TV Sports Basketball from Cinemaware. But what would you expect from Softie? Even EA’s 1986 One on One is more fun to play than this one. Blocky graphics, bad controls, and downright stupid gameplay with no ball physics whatsoever. Stay far from this Real Dog if you can, unless you somehow must play every single basketball game ever made.

Yikes. I haven't played this game since 1990 or so, but that seems about right. Players were pixelated and undifferentiated. Getting them to do what you wanted was at best a crapshoot, especially if you were seven like I was. It was in no way, shape or form well-made. It was terrible. But its trick shots stuck with me. For a seven year-old who didn't really watch the sport on tv, basketball was a sport of jammed fingers and clumped action. But on the computer, you could shoot three pointers, ride on your teammate's shoulders en route to an easy dunk² or shoot that sassiest of shots, the bounce shot.

2: If this were legal, Dwight Howard and Jameer Nelson would be kind of unstoppable, wouldn't they? At least with Yao Ming out indefinitely, I can't think of another big man who would be that good at playing NBA chickenfight. Of course, if this were legal, it would lead to the occasional truly horrific hard foul...

As I got older, longer-distance shooting became a reasonable option. Riding your teammate, sadly, is not and will never be legal. But the bounce shot is a thoroughly possible thing, limited only by its total uselessness. In a game, a bounce shot would be even more blockable than a granny shot. There's no way you could possibly get one off through even a mediocre defense. But that shot burrowed its way into my brain. I'll still try it if I play you in H.O.R.S.E. To me, it's the basketball version of a bird of paradise: it's too fragile and delicate to live in our world, but it makes me happy just to know that it's out there, somewhere.

You can probably guess where this is headed. Just one bounce highlight will send my heart aflutter, but there have been two different moments in the past month! To be a bounce basket enthusiast is to live the life of the camel, with long dry spells sandwiching blinding moments of joy, so this is truly an embarassment of riches.

First:

Al-Farouq Aminu didn't plan to bounce shoot the ball, but when a bruiser like Kyle Lowry knocks you around, you have to roll with it. The basket didn't count in the game, but it did in my heart.

Second:

Obviously, an alley-oop is not a long-distance shot. John Wall only had to get it in the rim's zip code and the dunk monster they call Blake Griffin would take care of the rest. But who cares? He used a long-distance bounce to get his points, go-between be damned. It's as close to reasonable as the shot will ever get, and that's more than enough for me.

The bounce shot is stupid and useless. No player at any level could try it without getting yelled at by his or her coach, and rightfully so. But that's why I love it. It's foolish, it's strategically bankrupt, and I will love it forever for exactly those reasons. Sensible choices lean on logic, unreasonable ones love.

Known Unknowns at GNC and NBA

2011-01-28T11:37:00.000-08:00

Keep your eyes on this space for some noise on Lance Armstrong¹ in the next few days. In the meantime, I have a guest post up at Free Darko today talking about what we can and can't take away from the OJ Mayo suspension and what the broader NBA PED picture looks like.

1: I know, I know, it's the last thing we need. Bear with me, I promise I'll make a point worth consideration.

In the Crease

2011-01-20T17:04:00.000-08:00

I.

We, or at least I, tend to think of sports as culturally hereditary. Most of us follow and care about the sports that our parent(s) do/did, with the occasional extra picked up because we liked playing it as a kid or were on a club team in college. By and large, our sports taste is determined by our upbringing, which lends itself to association with those who were integral to that upbringing.¹

1: It occurs to me that I’m really talking about team sports. Individual sports seem to be natural extensions of human activity, turned into sport only by introducing competition and the concept of winning. People run and jump everywhere, swim everwhere there’s water, and luge everywhere there are ice tracks down mountainsides. Car racing and cycling fit here too, as they’re just a heavily augmented form of individual sport.

That’s all true and good, but in a larger context, the societal menu of sports is a product of history in a way we tend to not think about. Pretty much all major team sports played globally are products of European or American inventors.² Which specific ones are played in a given culture has less to do with the rest of the culture’s shape than with whether the culture, if not European, was influenced more strongly by the British Empire or American cultural imperialism. Given the ubiquity of play in human experience, I would be shocked if any culture hadn’t invented some form of team sport, but victors write history, and likewise the colonizers pick, actively or tacitly, which sports succeed interculturally/internationally.

2: Codifiers, really. Except for volleyball and basketball, I don’t know that any of the major sports can really claim to have an individual inventor.

Soccer was invented by the British, unless it was brought over by the Normans. Rugby was invented at a British public schools. Team handball is apparently an amalgam of various similar European games codified in northern Europe. Cricket has apparently been around Britain forever, or at least since Tudor times. Baseball seems to be grounded in rounders, but in its current form is a product of 19th C. America. Volleyball and basketball are products of America phys ed teachers around the turn of the last century. American football is just rugby’s cavalry warfare transferred to trench warfare. Hockey is what Canadians did to get outside during the winter. Lacrosse, through the magic of passing time and cultural appropriation, somehow made the leap from Native American gatherings to New England and Mid-Atlantic prep schools.

That’s the list. Those are the team sports played globally. Play being the universal impulse it is, I doubt there’s ever been a culture that didn’t invent its share of games and sport, but the way modernity shook out, the non-regional team sports we all share stem from either Great Britain or the United States.³ Soccer and basketball are more or less global, undeniable in their kinetic charm. Volleyball probably belongs in this category too. Rugby is played in a wide scale in England, France, South Africa, and the former British colonies of the South Pacific. Cricket is played outside of Britain primarily by the former colonies in Asia. Australia and South Africa also factor in the sport’s constellation, but the IPL is the heavyweight in the sport outside of national teams. Baseball is played in Latin America and the parts of Asia and the Pacific that the US Army frequented during the 20th C. American football and lacrosse haven’t gone international in a meaningful sense; hockey is played primarily in the parts of the northern hemisphere where bodies of water actually freeze during the winter.

3: I had expected the breakdown to be Europe and the United States, not specifically Great Britain, but that’s what I get for underestimating the British Empire’s cultural might in the 19th C. Those Brits had to have the last say in everything back then, I guess.

II.

All of which is an overly digressive lead-in to saying that I’ve long been curious about cricket. The two sports that spend the most time bouncing around my skull are basketball and baseball. This is a product of parenting—my mother grew up playing baseball, so that was my favorite sport as a kid. I enjoyed basketball the most as a child, and my father put a hoop up behind our house. With different parents I could as easily have ended up a diehard college football or NHL fan. At the same time, I’ve always wondered about cricket because it’s baseball’s overseas cousin.⁴

4: I assume I’d feel the same way about rugby if I were a bigger football fan, but at least rugby has a strong presence on the college club team scene. At least at my university, the few cricket players there were Indian/Pakistani kids who already knew and loved the game. I doubt they would have been hostile to me if I’d approached them, but it was a small corner of that sports world and I’m really more interested in spectatorship anyway, as I can’t hit a baseball for shit and I assume that wouldn’t change in cricket.

Thanks to the magic of ESPN3⁵, I’ve been watching the West Indies Cricket Twenty20 tournament. Twenty20 is the sped-up version of cricket. Test matches involve two teams battling for up to five days; a twenty20 match lasts about as long as a baseball game. Each team bats once, having twenty overs consisting of six bowls in which to score as many runs as they are able. One team bats its entire innings, and then the other side has their innings to try and better that score.

5: When I lived in Vermont and my service provider was the local telephone company, my exclusion from ESPN3 infuriated me. Now that I live in a bigger city and do my business with Comcast, I’ve been enthralled with how easily it lets me watch Bundesliga soccer matches, Liga Dominicana baseball games and whatever else ESPN has the rights to/deems to show. This is the place where the Worldwide Leader seems to actually be trying to live up to that name in non-economic terms.

The bowling and batting are entirely different from baseball, of course; the bowler has to deliver his ball with a straight elbow but can run up to the delivery line, leading to a windmilled over-the-top motion. The batsman has to protect the wickets behind him, and can hit the ball in any direction. Some deliveries he tries to hit over the boundary to score a lot of points, but a ball he can’t hit well he just tries to redirect to where the fielders aren’t somewhere in the oval field surrounding him. This leads to a lot of scoop swings and half-cuts which would never work in baseball. Once you’re used to those differences, though, the logic of the game is pretty similar. Bowlers try to fool batsmen, batsmen try to avoid outs and hit it hard if they are able, fielders try to limit runner advancement and get the ball back in as quickly as they can.

I’ve often heard it said that it’s easy to explain baseball to a cricket fan, but almost impossible to do the reverse. In watching both the play of the sport and the body language of its players, I’m reminded of the Swiss German I learned as an exchange student in high school. Switzerland’s cantons cloistered themselves a millennium ago, and the German-speaking regions developed a flavor of German whose roots are obvious to anyone who speaks the language, but whose spoken words are confusing and opaque to anyone only familiar with standard German. The forms the games take differ in a lot of meaningful ways, but there’s a core resemblance once you get past all the trappings, and getting down to that level has been fun.

Beyond the appreciation of the game’s form, I’ve also been taken with the statistical displays inherent in a game where a team bats only once but for an extended period of time. At the end of every over, a team’s run total is shown if they keep up their current pace, and if they revert to 8, 10 or 12 runs per over, marks ranging from good to huge. When the second team it batting, their progress is graphed against the other team’s score by over. In an age of infographics and statistically-enriched baseball fandom, it’s a joy to watch a sport where meaningful stats are generated in real-time not just to broaden your understanding of the game, but to give you context for the score itself.

For all that I love the depth of understanding and narrative generated by longtime fandom of a sport and team, I’ve been enjoying the opportunity to step outside my normal cultural opportunities and be part of the audience of a sport that never made it into my cultural DNA. I’ll never be a cricket fan per se; I don’t even know how I would go about such a thing, and I’m too invested in baseball to try anyway—I don’t need two sports compelling me to watch languid three hour-long matches. But I’m relishing the opportunity to step outside my biases and take in this twenty20 tournament. Now I just need to find out how to watch some top notch sepak takraw…

The Nest in the Crevasse of the Game

2011-01-15T15:21:00.000-08:00

Dave Ruder is currently a triple-threat musician-teacher-grad student, based in Brooklyn, NYC. Dave has owned two players' jerseys in his life: Rod Woodson and Pedro Martinez (the Pedro fit much better). You can learn more about him at daveruder.com. He also occasionally writes about exactly what you think at Doo Doo Bloggin'.

“For Duchamp, cutting the glass and possessing the goods would remove this ambiguity, moving the window gazer from fantasy to fact to regret – regret, because possession is often smaller and more constrained than fantasy. Fantasy has free play; possession has its single, limited object. Literalized desire is therefore a kind of trap of appetite. You get your meat, but then meat is all you get. Just as Signifying Monkey gets trapped if he takes the game too seriously, the consummation of desire circumscribes one’s freedom to move and change. Better to balance at the boundary itself, to be in and out of the game simultaneously. At the gaming tables in Monte Carlo, Duchamp used to try to play so as neither to win nor to lose.”

Lewis Hyde, Trickster Makes This World, pg. 304

“The far-working lord [Apollo] replied, “Father, you can tease about my love of spoils, but this is not a silly story I have to tell. Here is a child, an accomplished thief, whom I found after a long search through the hills of Kyllene. As far as I’m concerned, for catching folks on earth off-guard, I’ve never seen anyone, god or mortal, as brash as he.”

Homeric Hymn to Hermes, translated by Lewis Hyde

I was never a successful operator in role-playing game circuits during my suburban teenage years. I had the modular books for several series, and even if I found a couple of cohorts, I never had the motivation to mount a campaign. The sweetest part of the enterprise was always the creation of characters. Once the dice have been rolled and we had a read on speed, intelligence, and power, there were several sweet days of letting this persona sit on your tongue – savoring the potential of new narrative paths to pursue. Once these paths had been sussed out, the character was exhausted without ever needing a first exploit. It was time for a new set of narratives.

This role-playing excursion neatly fit into my years of sports latency (post Penguins Stanley Cup 1992, pre 2001 Yanks-D’backs Series). What brought me back for good to the fray of American Big Four sports was a good set of character studies – a roommate who could contextualize the micro-narratives of the 2004 Sox, down to the David McCarty/Curtis Leskanic nitty-gritties. I knew well enough who Manny & Pedro were, but watching the guy who’s supposed to hit home runs hit home runs was not enough to lure me back. I needed something that was less of a direct route to how the game is played to animate the game itself – Alan Embree’s mustache is a good example. It had a compelling shape. It was featured on the field during play. However, in and of itself it had no appreciable affect on play.

At some point, for conversational ease if nothing else, this fascination with David McCarty the Pitcher et al. approaches fandom, i.e. rooting. You become used to the quirky sporting characters in the same way you grow to like your friends’ bands. They become your favorite. Maybe you didn’t grow up with them, but before you know it, these characters you have effectively drawn up through extended observation and exaggeration become those you expect things from and pull for.

Since 2004, I have had a rooting foundation based in personality and narrative rather than one based on geographical roots (I was born in Pittsburgh, child of two NYers). I am a man who eschews building an enduring loyalty for one set of characters over another¹. Still something of a Steelers fan, I have no desire for a Black and Gold win for a couple of years. Two is enough for this decade. Somebody else could use it more. Can’t we channel something to those nice folks in Ohio? As a Mets fan, the same thing would be true had 2006 actually worked out. I can comfortably root only for the long-deserved championship, but comfortable rooting is theoretical and rare. One is often forced to choose between the 2009 Phils & Yanks or endure another round in the Celtics vs. Lakers bout.

1: This is to say nothing of loyalty to one’s fellow fans...

My mercenary team rooting and player-narrative construction are intimately related. Just as I needed more than watching the big man regularly demonstrating how the game works by striking out twenty fools to keep me interested, I need more seasonal narrative arcs than one city/region’s beat writers can provide to keep me in it. I crave a broader view that exposes the hidden, beautiful strangenesses to really make a sport mean something to me². I’ve come upon a framework to discuss this, a kind of mapping of Lewis Hyde’s treatment of Apollo and Hermes from his amazing Trickster Makes This World. Hyde’s project is to paint a picture of an ur-trickster, culled from myths, songs, and tales of the world’s peoples. Hyde analyzes a stable of mischief-makers from around the globe, but he spends the most time in the specifically late-Greek view of Hermes & Apollo as illustrated in the Homeric Hymn to Hermes.

2: There is also this idea of baseball fandom as mathematics. Looking at the box score, the initiate sees the secret meaning and beauty hidden in Joe Mauer’s 4-for-5 day represented in shorthand. It’s like visually scanning music notation and talking about what it sounds like.

Hermes to Hyde is everything liminal, everything gleefully subversive, everything connective, whereas Apollo is everything normative, everything evincing straightforward use of power, everything with the light of day beating down on it. This is to say nothing of the Dionysian³ and differs from many views of the two brothers, but this dichotomy resonates with me.

3: I’ve been thinking there is something Dionysian about Luis Castillo. Sacrifices himself willingly and for nothing, causing fans to drink more, only to reappear (surgically) reconstituted and ready to do it again a couple of frames later.

“Hit the ball.”
Rooting philosophy of one L. R. Levy

Trying to map these characterizations of Hyde’s to something familiar, it at first it seemed to me that Albert Pujols must be Apollonian – steadfast, always visible, fundamentally flawless, powerful. Pujols is the golden boy who sends projectiles forth over great distances with fearsome force and grants prophesies of impending MVP trophies. Watch him go first to third, appreciate his proper fielding position on routine plays that don’t even concern him; this seems to be a player oozing Apollo. Apollo seemed like a five-tool kind of deity. Conversely, there seemed to be a trickster’s lilt to the play of several categories of players. First, the Kings of Thieves: the 80s Henderson/Coleman/Raines- type. Second, the always hungry mischief-maker who although divine at times is his own worst enemy: Three True Outcomes fellas like A. Dunn, M. Reynolds, etc. Third, Raven who steals the sun and slips through the pore of heaven: the control-artist starter (Maddux, most notably).

Upon further reflection, it seems that these attributions are kind of arbitrary. If we declare Rickey to be Hermes, we see the parallel in speed and disruption, but would Hermes would never have had the patience to match Rickey’s OBP. As Hyde points out, no human being can ever live up to a trickster’s standards, there is a fundamental gap between deity narratives and real lives. Character though they may be, people are inevitably compromised by a need for survival and a habit of mundanity. I realized the better metaphor for tricksterism in baseball was in myself. The player’s action is not a tribute to a particular deity; the player’s action is almost uniformly in the service of the rules of the game⁴. If I may be so bold, Mark Reynolds is still trying to win the game the best way his skill set allows him, and if there’s something waggish about his tendency for feasts and famines, that’s an external projection⁵.

4: Barring the spitball, the corked bat, the Clear – i.e. actions which are beyond the rules of the game but are undertaken for the purpose of winning, as opposed to say, stopping in mid-swat-trot and building a sandcastle in the infield

5: Although here we could also feature a guest lecture by Prof. Lastings Milledge of the School of Baseball Showmanship. [Has he continued this on the Bucs & the Nats? I lost track.] Paul O’Neill, Jose Reyes, Kevin Youkilis, Joba Chamberlain and the art of the character-building sideshow, i.e. the difference between creating a consumable personality through your play and creating it through your comportment, is hardly an insignificant topic here.

I find the true Apollonian and Hermetic spirits as defined by Hyde come through less in the comportment of players and more in the way I feel as the proceedings unfold. I feel the trickster spirit most not through watching a sneaky athlete but through observing moments when the action on the field sidesteps the issue of winning the game. Deriving joy from Pujols’s burial of a Brad Lidge delivery somewhere in Galveston is an Apollonian moment to be sure, but not because of the personality of the hitter. This moment is a pure exercise in the rules of baseball. The ball is hit over the fence, and the Cardinals take the lead. This is clear to all – there is no ambiguity as to the meaning of such a monster shot. Regardless of whether your heart is broken or swollen, we’re in Apollo’s realm.

Hermes has many domains; foremost among them is derailing the intentions of the certain. This can best be seen in a moment like Randy Johnson’s pigeon. A Cy Young Winner hurls the ball – nothing could be more straightforward – but a bird gets in the way. The ump makes a non-pitch ruling (incorrectly, but then this game was in March), implying this is beyond the scope of the game, when in fact if rulebooks had been consulted, it would be a clear ball. Johnson may have hit his spot with that one had it continued on, but clearly he had not meted out his sacrifice to the trickster god beforehand, and things moved from everyday baseball into murkier realms. Further interpretation was needed. That pitch (should have) functioned within the game, and despite the shock it caused, it could not easily be interpreted within the framework of the game, despite the fact that violent avian death is generally easier to parse than a Giants’s strike zone.

But trickster moments go beyond the blooper reel⁶. My own collection of trickster moments are clear to only myself and those who share my sporting ethos. Mark Bellhorn brought out a Hermetic streak in me: I was interested far more in watching him exist than I was in watching him succeed. He never slammed any Gatorade jugs, never did back flips, but his quiet, tobacco-ed presence and his thrilling inconsistency at the plate allowed me to project onto him a character who could do anything at any moment. Every strikeout in a big situation he racked up, every walk with two outs and the basses empty, every meaningless eighth inning single created excitement because he was simply thrilling for his empty presence. I stopped caring about who won the game when it was Bellhorn’s time, I just cared about this bizarre character in the batter’s box. My expectation was only that he would act within the rules of the game, but team, situation, playoff implications, etc. all melted at this point and I was left with a pure if abstract swoon over baseball and the players who animate it.

6: How much would the Greeks have loved that “Tommy Lasorda Falls Down” clip though?

To say that the Apollonian fan wants to emotionally take part in a win all the time is partially true. The Apollonian wants the game to continue with clarity and order. The Apollonian treasures an immaculately tabulated score card, telling the story of the game with perfect fidelity. The Hermetic appreciates the flourish devoid of internal meaning – Manny high-fiving a dude in the middle of the play – because it at once functions as baseball and expands the set of actions available to a baseballer. It would be a third category to talk about preferring the dance that the grounds crew does in the 5th inning to the game itself; just as Hermes is the trusted emissary of Zeus, and hence mischief serves ultimate authority, my concept of a Hermetic fan lies on a foundation that the game will eventually proceed in its logical fashion. The Hermetic fan is simply keeping a second score alongside the R-H-E. Yogi’s concept of a score beyond what is officially indicated is getting at it⁷. There is how you played, and there is how you did.

7: The more I think about that quote, the more I think about Anthony
Braxton’s “Concept of the Sweating Brow”.

There is something about this concept that is particularly appropriate to baseball with its constant cycles of short activity followed by a longer period of repose. Evaluating only the topical activity is surely falling short of picking up on what’s really happening. It’s not that the Hermetic fan finds the game in and of itself lacking in any way; there is, as Hyde points out of Duchamp, something of great value to be found in taking stake out of it and allowing in infinite narratives or coincidences to be mixed in with the hard work of playing ball.

Exploit of the Year

2011-01-08T16:08:00.000-08:00

Every year, Bicycling Magazine names a rider (or more accurately, a ride) as earning the "Exploit of the Year". In a sport of diffuse, peripatetic events without any architectonic hierarchy, the very ambiguity of the award is its strength. Like one of those sudden irruptions of beauty and order soccer fans love so writ large¹, a rider's seizure of a race, a chase, or a heroic single-day ride is held up as exemplary and emblematic of the ideals of the sport. We here at No Fours love this model. Its dismissal of objectivity mirrors the diverse, occasionally conflicting standards of an aestheticized fandom. More importantly, it can be expanded to the whole of sports we follow. So, following Picasso's putative quip ("Good artists borrow; great artists steal"), our first inaugural Exploit of the Year. Let's begin with a few honorable mentions.

1: This is not to belittle those moments or soccer in general, because they're the shit.

About nine months ago, I went on a bike tour. Because my everyday bike wasn't suitable for the task at hand and I am awesome at planning ahead, I didn't get all the minor sizing adjustments done before I started riding. Extrapolating from the knee and back pain caused by a saddle a few centimeters too low, not that it's linear, Jens Voigt racing his bloody, bruised ass off on a bike several sizes too small during Le Tour must have felt like post-op Prometheus.

A screaming comes across the sky:

Manny Pacquiao reinforced his status as the best pound-for-pound fighter of any active congressperson in history.

*******

But for all the spectacular² goings on this year, there really was only one viable pick: Armando Galarraga's Imperfect Game. You've got a transcendent individual performance, historicity, thorny questions of ethics and merit and justice and their imperfect actualization within the juridical framework of sport, failure, redemption, personal ethical classiness all around, a shamelessly plugged Norman Einstein's article and a poignant, catchy name.

2: Really, our working definition of "Exploit" here is looks a fair amount like the Situationists' concept of spectacle divorced from its Marxist critique: "We live in a spectacular society, that is, our whole life is surrounded by an immense accumulation of spectacles. Things that were once directly lived are now lived by proxy. Once an experience is taken out of the real world it becomes a commodity. As a commodity the spectacular is developed to the detriment of the real. It becomes a substitute for experience." (Larry Law, Images And Everyday Life). Respectfully ignoring that business about "the detriment of the real", we're collating the year's spectacular sporting commodities, like any other sort of cultural critic. Song of the year, movie of the year, book of the year. Keep on rolling, Guy Debord.

With all of those tangled, poignant issues, the game's emotional impact runs deep. But that's only half the story, because they're all yoked to an exquisite, almost melodramatic narrative structure. Tension inexorably built over 1:44 of playing time, to an exquisite climax-- the one out away from perfection, less than a foot from the base, perhaps a fifth of a second. All of the weight of a century of sport, a lifetime honing pitches, and generations of fandom, all the unresolved angst over reconciling truth, technology, and humanity with the soul and the future of baseball, all forcing the stiletto point of a moment. Aesthetically, it was literally unimprovable.

Love for Sale

2011-01-05T09:46:00.000-08:00

From time to time, it behooves all of us to pay some attention to the man behind the curtain. If The Wire taught us anything, it's that institutions run everything, and that money runs institutions. In this month's Norman Einstein's, I took a look at the commissionership of baseball and why Bud Selig is both inevitable and the worst possible version of commissioner. I'm pretty happy with how it turned out, so you should give it a glance if you're so inclined.

Elevate, Detonate, Exploit

2011-01-03T11:25:00.000-08:00

“The Homeric poems conceal nothing, they contain no teaching and no secret second meaning. Homer can be analyzed, as we have essayed to do here, but he cannot be interpreted. Later allegorizing trends have tried their arts of interpretation upon him, but to no avail. He resists any such treatment; the interpretations are forced and foreign, they do not crystallize into a unified doctrine. The general considerations which occasionally occur…reveal a calm acceptance of the basic facts of human existence, but with no compulsion to brook over them, still less any passionate impulse either to rebel against them or to embrace them in an ecstacy of submission.”
— Erich Auerbach, Mimesis

Derrick Rose has a problem. His hyperathletic game around the rim isn’t drawing enough fouls to make his production as efficient as the true top-flight talent in the league. His fast-twitch forays into the paint, knifing between and around much larger men to tomahawk a dunk or gently lay in an improbable basket are apparently too effective at avoiding contact. His game leverages the fact that he’s faster and more nimble than anyone else on the court; he is a point guard who racks up assists by collapsing defenses en route to the rack and dishing it to newly-open teammates if he can’t quite complete his solo trip. Other top creators in the league create looks for their teammates by engineering situations; Rose engineers a chaos in which his gifts allow him and his compatriots to thrive. The knock on him is that he’s simply too good at making others miss, at sliding next to where the defense expected him to end up. If he tried a little less to avoid contact, the thinking goes, he’d get to the line more often and have to rely less on making the circus layups he forges.

This criticism may be accurate, but it’s odd to tell a player that the hole in his game is that he’s too good at confounding his opponents entirely, rather than just partly. The suggestion isn’t that he do any one thing differently, but that he do a better job at leveraging the rules of the game. Rose plays a game within the rules, trying his best to score and shooting free throws when he earns them. He is engaging with the diktats of the rulebook at face value as they are intended, as negative regulations that punish transgressors. He’s trying to game the guy guarding him and the help defenders who will collapse on him. His approach would be the same in a college game or in a pickup game. Score the ball; deal with the fouls when and if they come up. Rose seems to see his job as playing by the rules governing dribbling, pivot feet, traveling and the grab bag of other offensive regulations. The rules restricting the defense are its responsibility.

It is all very different in the Biblical stories. Their aim is not to bewitch the senses, and if nevertheless they produce lively sensory effects, it is only because the moral, religious, and psychological phenomena which are their sole concen are made concrete in the sensibile matter of life. But their religious intent involves an absolute claim to historical truth. The story of Abraham and Isaac is not better established than the story of Odysseus, Penelope, and Euryclea; both are legendary. But the Biblical narrator, the Elohist, had to believe in the objective truth of the story of Abraham’s sacrifice—the existence of the sacred ordinances of life rested upon the truth of this and similar stories. He had to believe in it passionately; or else (as many rationalistic interpreters believed and perhaps still believe) he had to be a conscious liar—no harmless liar like Homer, who lied to give pleasure, but a political liar with a definite end in view, lying in the interest of a claim to absolute authority.”
— Auerbach

Dwyane Wade often has the opposite criticism leveled at his game, that it is aesthetically shameful for a man with his quicksilver gifts to spend so much of his effort trying to wrong-foot his defender into fouling him. Many of his drives seem engineered to create contact with his defender to get a whistle, and then put up a shot somewhere under the umbrella of continuation. He has averaged between nine and eleven free throw attempts per game every year of his career since his rookie year, when he averaged 5.1. (Rose is attempting 5.3 attempts per game this season, the best mark of his career.) Wade can and does dazzle us when he uses his gifts to do things others cannot, so his occasional dedication to turning a game into a whistle-filled stop-and-start affair with play dictated more by referees than players is a betrayal of the fans and the game, an amorally utilitarian use of the rules to score points at the expense of transcendence.

The problem is that Wade, rather demonstrably, benefits from this. Unless you think his injury-prone body suffers at the hands of all this contact in a way that will shorten his career appreciably¹, no substantive case can be made for why he should stop doing anything he’s doing. He’s a better player for those fouls, scoring more points on fewer shots than he might if he worked harder to make every basket and stopped worrying about fouls. It may make his game uglier, but why should he care? Any solution to the problem, if it is a problem, lies in the hands of the refs making the calls and the rules they enforce. Wade is taking advantage of a situation he didn’t create, maximizing his impact at the expense of the occasional transcendent moment worth no more than the points he’s already getting at the charity stripe.

1: This is entirely possible, and maybe even provable on aggregate, but seems pretty unknowable for the specific case of Dwyane Tyrone Wade.

“The old man, of whom we know how he has become what he is, is more of an individual than the young man; for it is only during the course of an eventful life that men are differentiated into full individuality; and it is this history of a personality which the Old Testament presents to us as the formation undergone by those whom God has chosen to be examples. Fraught with their development, sometimes even aged to the verge of dissolution, they show a distinct stamp of individuality entirely foreign to the Homeric heroes. Time can touch the latter only outwardly, and even that change is brought to our observation as little as possible; whereas the stern hand of God is ever upon the Old Testament figures; he has not only made them once and for all and chosen them, but he continues to work upon them, bends them and kneads them, and, without destroying them in essence, produces from them forms which their youth gave no grounds for anticipating…And how much wider is the pendulum swing of their lives than that of the Homeric heroes! For they are bearers of the divine will, and yet they are fallible, subject to misfortune and humiliation—and in the midst of misfortune and in their humiliation their acts and words reveal the transcendent majesty of God. There is hardly one of them who does not, like Adam, undergo the deepest humiliation—and hardly one who is not deemed worthy of God’s personal intervention and personal inspiration.”
— Auerbach

Rose and Wade are players at two ends of a spectrum. At the end I’m calling Homeric, there are the players who seem to play for baskets, not points. If they get fouled they’ll happily take their free throw(s), but the goal is to put the ball through the hoop. This is the basketball of theory, where fouls exist to reign in behavior out of step with ideal play. Rose seems to play within this frame, as do many others. Young players often do their work here, but some veterans also do. There’s no one reason why a player would play his game without taking strategic advantage of its arbiters; Rose seems to play this way because his quickness and proprioception allow him to take shots anyone else would have trouble replicating, but others do because they don’t yet have the refs’ biases internalized, because they’re not smart enough to do it on the fly, or because they’re not deft enough to effectively execute.²

2: Shaq, for instance, by dint of being the closest thing the league has ever seen to a ball-playing wall of meat, doesn't seem to ever get the benefit of the doubt you need to manufacture a call.

At the far Elohist end of said spectrum, there are the players actively maximizing the parts of their game that subvert the rules to their advantage. Most obvious is the creation of contact to draw calls on offense, long the calling card of Dwyane Wade and Paul Pierce³. Rip the ball through the extended arms of the defender. Drive directly into his torso and flail up a shot. Flopping also falls squarely in this category. Exaggerating real but minimal contact, flailing and/or falling over almost nothing, making the incidental look like a mugging creates turnovers, puts your counterpart in foul trouble. Part of what makes Manu and Chris Paul so good is that they’ll happily commit what amount to physical lies to gain an advantage. It can be ugly basketball, but these players know that, for all the moments of transcendent physical magic, the job of the NBA player is to win, and the rules that were invented to govern play can be used to manipulate it.

3: As a Celtics fan who has seen a lot of the Truth in action, I've noticed a funny thing about his calls: he gets a lot of calls he doesn't strictly deserve, but he also doesn't get a decent number he does. He's the wing player who cried wolf, and refs often seem to think a real foul is him playing up nothing. I suspect he still gets more calls than he maybe should, and this development is entirely his fault, but he does lose a number of them because of how he's played over the years. It's an interesting dynamic to watch in action. I doubt he's the only guy for whom this is true, but it's more dramatic for him than for anyone else I've noticed.

The difference here is one of degree and emphasis, not anything like a pure dichotomy. The debate about Rose’s ability to draw fouls is noteworthy because it falls so far to one side of the spectrum. While explosive athleticism has its high water mark in a player’s youth, it doesn’t desert older players so much as slowly dissipate.⁴ At the same time, the savvy to exploit the duties and weaknesses of the men with whistles grows for all but the most blockheaded players as their service time rolls on, but there is nothing to stop a precocious rookie from using the same bag of tricks. All it takes is to recognize that playing NBA ball is a performative act, and that adjusting one's actions to those that judge the performance is as smart as good shot selection.

4: Catastrophic and chronic injuries are the wild cards here, of course, cutting players down in their tracks or leaving them diminished in a moment. They're something that can't be planned for or anticipated, however, and lie outside of what we're discussing here.

The other factor in this, of course, is the star call. For all that officiating strives to be fair to all in all situations, the NBA is a league where an established star gets the benefit of the doubt, and that is exactly what we’re talking about here. If Kobe Bryant draws a lot of contact in the lane against a rookie, even if the rookie managed to stay within the tenets of verticality, Kobe is going to get the call more often than not. The narrative of a career makes the established star of the NBA firmament “more of an individual” than a scrub who isn’t on a first-name basis with the ref. You don’t have to posit conscious bias to see how this colors calls. Again, so long as this discrepancy exists, players would be foolish not to exploit it as much as they are able.

The ideal player, of course, would walk in both these worlds. Derrick Rose isn’t going to stop being able to jump through the roof even if he succeeds in getting more calls, and Dwyane Wade, for all his ref-leveraging, also spends plenty of time leaving mouths agape. The friction comes on our side of the TV set, where we want to be thrilled with high wire acts of derring-do and where playing to the ref, especially done by our team’s opponent, is an abasement of the game. The players in the league would do best, and I think largely are, to try and be both. Athletic plays raise awareness in a way that can fuel a career. Blake Griffin is on a bad team and plays little defense, but every game he plays is must-see. Leveraging the calls helps a player maximize his efficiency and manufacture wins. When the two conflict at the margins, like with Derrick Rose, we get the only real disconnect. Fans, I think, are and should be rooting for spectacular acts of Homeric heroism, but players would probably be better served to look toward the Elohist side whenever in doubt. Here’s hoping not all of them figure that out. Whenever there’s friction between aesthetics and efficiency, I hope it's a fair fight.

Effing the Ineffable

2010-12-27T11:27:00.000-08:00

From the recent New Yorker article The Science and Imagination Behind Modern Dessert, which is well worth your time in its entirety:

Did he have a dream dessert that he had tried and failed to perfect? He nodded. “Yes, there’s one I’m working on. I haven’t really . . . perfected it yet. You see, I’m a big fan of F.C. Barcelona”—the soccer team—“and I wanted to make a dessert that would re-create the emotions Lionel Messi feels when he scores a goal.” Messi is the great Argentine striker who stars for Barcelona. “I feel I’m close. Could I try it out on you at the end of lunch?”

The desserts came around. And here was the real thing, here were true desserts: not dancing nimbly on the edge between sweet and salty, like Albert Adrià’s, but plain old-fashioned sweets touched by the invention and audacity of a liberated imagination. There was watermelon rind with bitter almonds and tarragon; a hot lemon-mint eucalyptus liquid that, as it was poured, solidified into a small, sweet iceberg. Then lemon custard and granita, with the floral scents in a small cup alongside: you eat and smell by turns. Lemon zest, pure distilled mint flowers. And then an apricot ice-cream bombe with a spun-sugar shell and apricot foam inside and an apricot sabayon inside that.

Finally, the server arrives with the Messi dessert, as Jordi fusses anxiously in the background. He presents half of a soccer ball, covered with artificial grass; the smell of grass perfumes the air. On the “grass” is a kind of delicately balanced, S-shaped, transparent plastic teeter-totter—like a French curve—with three small meringues on it, and a larger white-chocolate soccer ball balancing them on a protruding platform at the very end. A white candy netting lies on the grass near the white-chocolate ball.

Then, with a cat-that-swallowed-the-canary smile, the server puts a small MP3 player with a speaker on the table. He turns it on and nods.

An announcer’s voice, excited and frantic, explodes. Messi is on the move. “Messi turns and spins!” the announcer cries, and the roar of the crowd at the Bernabéu stadium, in Madrid, fills the table. The server nods, eyes intent. At the signal, you eat the first meringue.

“Messi is alone on goal!” the announcer cries. Another nod, you eat the next scented meringue. “Messi shoots!” A third nod, you eat the last meringue, and, as you do, the entire plastic S-curve, now unbalanced, flips up and over, like a spring, and the white-chocolate soccer ball at the end is released and propelled into the air, high above the white-candy netting.

“MESSI! GOOOOOAL!” The announcer’s voice reaches a hysterical peak and, as it does, the white-chocolate soccer ball drops, strikes, and breaks through the candy netting into the goal beneath it, and, as the ball hits the bottom of a little pit below, a fierce jet of passion-fruit cream and powdered mint leaves is released into your mouth, with a trail of small chocolate pop rocks rising in its wake. Then the passion-fruit cream settles, and you eat it all, with the white-chocolate ball, now broken, in bits within it.

You feel . . . something of what Messi must feel: first, the overwhelming presence of the grass beneath his feet (he’s a short player); then the tentative elegance of acquired skill, represented by the stepladder of the perfumed meringues; and, finally, the infantile joy, the childlike release, of scoring, represented by the passion-fruit cream and the candy-store pop rocks. I saw Jordi watching us from the kitchen entrance. He had the anxious-shading-into-delighted look that marks the artist.

No One Man Should Have All That Power

2010-12-24T10:46:00.000-08:00

“It is so much simpler to bury reality than it is to dispose of dreams.”
—Don DeLillo

So LeBron opened his mouth about contraction. I assume this was at least semi-prompted by a reporter, but I don't think that is much of an excuse. I'm on record as not having a problem with his free agency machinations, but this is taking things a bit too far.

"Hopefully the league can figure out one way where it can go back to the '80s where you had three or four All-Stars, three or four superstars, three or four Hall of Famers on the same team," James said. "The league was great. It wasn't as watered down as it is [now]."

Say what? I'm not going to spend the time on Basketball Reference to really break it down, but that's nonsense. Sure, there are seven more teams in the league than there were in the 80s, but how much is that offset by David Stern's global reach? I have to go wrap my presents in a minute so I'm not going to find the exact demographics, but you have to figure that the Manus, Yao Mings and Dirk Nowitzki's make up for a good portion of that "watering down". The talent pool the league skims the top of may not be large enough to field thirty teams as strong as those twenty-three, but if not it can't be off by much.

Beyond that, though, LeBron is just making things up about the 80s. It's hard to fault a guy who was born in 1984 for having his history wrong, but if he isn't going to do the research he should probably avoid making concrete statements that are so blatantly self-serving. The media narrative about 80s ball being teams not stars is predicated on the only three teams that won titles that decade playing a strong team game. Bird and Magic shared like few other superstars ever have¹ and the Bad Boy Pistons' ringleader was the prototypical star point guard. That league had its share of stinkers too. It's hard to argue that a decade where only three teams won the title was had a better competitive mix than today, when five teams have won over the past ten years.

1: I am legally obliged to point out here that LeBron has the least selfish game of any superstar wing since those two dudes, but you knew that.

LeBron has every right to be wrong, I suppose. The real reason this puts my hackles up is that he's telling thirty guys that they should be fired. I get why he wants to hearken back to a mythical time when every team had "three or four superstars"² because then he wouldn't take so much flack. But this sort of talk undercuts the players' union in a really shitty way. If he disagrees with them philosophically I'm all for him airing that tactfully, but he's directly saying that the NBA would be a better place if the six worst players at each position didn't have jobs. Maybe he thinks that's true, but if I were his union rep I'd be screaming at him. Those thirty guys don't affect the money in his pocket, so why is he trying to take theirs? If you're going to buck the union this hard, you damn well better be able to back it up with facts, which he doesn't come close to doing. I can see a legitimate case being made for contraction, but this doesn't come close. Merry Christmas, scrubs, LeBron's made up history obviates the need for your jobs! Enjoy the D League and Europe!

2: Of course, if every team had three or four superstars, we would all mentally recalibrate our superstar threshold, because in a world with sixty basketball superstars superstardom would be meaningless.

Palate Cleansing!

It would be unseemly to throw up an unmitigated negative post in the midst of our staunchly non-denominational (wink wink!) holiday season! To make up for that, here are a few presents from those of use here at the No Fours central office.

To start, the two most wonderful non-dunks of the past week.

Hedo, that's a pretty bad way to start the conversation.

Andray Blatche has the power to let power go!

Finally, everyone's favorite Tom Waits Christmas non-carol. Happy holidays one and all, merry Christmas, happy belated Hanukkah, and a joyous Kwanzaa to every one of you!

Both Sides of the Coin

2010-12-21T15:39:00.000-08:00

On Some Faraway Beach: Ryan Lochte's Quiet Dominance

“I love him who desires the impossible.”
—Goethe, Faust

Nobody but swimmers pays attention to swimming when the Summer Olympics aren’t happening. As with many Olympic sports, it’s compelling enough when it’s on NBC amid the din and pageantry and Costasification, but it slips easily off the radar when the volume gets turned back down. There’s no external history to the sport for us, no obvious route to fandom. Competitive swimmers are dedicated athletes who battle for glory, but they’re also pale people who live their lives swimming endless laps in artificially-lit pools and know more about chlorine's effects on hair and skin than you or I would care to think about.

We’ve more or less reached cultural sports saturation. The big three rule the airwaves and bandwidth, and hockey, NASCAR and MMA all vie to join the club. Soccer is the wild card, combining massive global success with stop-and-start domestic attention. Anything else is a niche interest. Michael Phelps is a star, but in the Lance Armstrong way where he transcends the limitations of his sport’s appeal. He's context-free, famous for being a winner, not a swimmer.

I’m totally fine with that. As a dedicated sidestroke man, competitive swimming was never my game and I therefore wouldn’t know how to follow it if I wanted to. I imagine, however, that the sport’s grappling with technological advances in swimsuits is fascinating if you have all of the facts. Remember that during the Olympics there was a lot of hullabaloo about swimsuit technology, nearly as much as there was about swimmers. New advances in computer design and materials let Speedo et al. make a suit that slipped through the water and forced the swimmer’s body into ideal hydrodynamic position while giving muscles compression. Just like when speed skating saw the clap skate’s introduction, the record books were rewritten over the course of a year or two. The marks of old champions fell not just to superior talent and modern conditioning¹ but also to a technological advantage modern swimmers enjoyed. A lesser swimmer could post a better time than, say, 1990’s best breaststroker² purely because of what he or she was wearing.

1: And, if we're being honest, modern drugs in some instances.

2: I will never be mature enough to not snicker at some things...

Unlike speed skating, the powers that be in swimming decided this was a bad thing. They were smart enough not to tamper with the record books and disallow the new records, but high-tech bodysuits were illegal in races starting this year. Predictably, the onslaught of new swimming world records stopped pretty much overnight.

Except for Ryan Lochte. Lochte, whom you may remember as the Scottie Pippen to Michael Phelps’s Jordan in the 2008 Olympics, or maybe Drysdale to his Koufax, has apparently been on a tear. He has set two world records this year, both in individual medleys. This wouldn’t be noteworthy were it not for the fact that no other swimmer has broken a single one.

The swimsuit era is apparently competitive swimming’s version of baseball’s Steroid Era, when world records fell left and right because of an unnatural competitive advantage over history. Credit the sport’s organizers with deciding to put a stop to it all, rather than sit back and enjoy records falling as engineers built faster suits, an Enlightenment ideal of sporting progress.³ Lochte isn’t getting much press about the accomplishment, probably in part because of media desensitization to broken world records. Still, if he keeps performing at this level he should be able to win enough gold medals to have NBC produce soft-focus human interest clips and get his face plastered on all the Wheaties boxes he could want. In the meantime, we’d do well to take a second and appreciate someone not just beating his competitors but also overcoming a systematic handicap to set world records. He swam those two individual medleys faster than anyone else ever, including previous record-holders who enjoyed a virtual head start. If swimming were on Sportscenter, he would be LeBron James or Michael Vick. That's not going to happen, but he deserves more than nothing.

3: There will of course still be a swimsuit technology arms race, but within set limits, much like UCI regulation of bicycles.

You Don't Miss Your Water 'Til Your Well Runs Dry: Floyd Landis Bottoms Out

“What is left is the other side of the Faustian bargain: To live all one’s days never able to recapture the feeling of those few years of intensified youth. In a way it is the fate of a warrior class to receive rewards, plaudits, and exhilaration simultaneously with the means of self-destruction.”
– Bill Bradley, Life on the Run

I doubt you noticed, because it’s depressing and not that meaningful by itself, but it came out a few days ago that Floyd Landis wore a wire for federal agents last spring to help gather evidence against Michael Ball, who ran a low-level pro team. Landis, whom we last heard making pointed accusations⁴ about Lance Armstrong/US Postal Service Team doping, seems to be doing everything he can to destroy anyone he can in cycling. If you’re virulently anti-doping, maybe that makes him a hero for doing the ugly right thing. If you stake out any other position, he’s a flawed man striking those he can to get even. Maybe he’s trying to prove a larger point, but if so any message he’s trying to convey is lost in the mess of it all.

4: Accusations which, it should be said, are equally plausible and unproven.

His is no righteous cause. If you believe the urine tests, he won the Tour de France by doping and was rightfully stripped of the illegally-gained title. If you believe his statements, he’s innocent of those charges but guilty of systematically doping throughout his career. He’s hardly the lone doper in cycling, but that doesn’t excuse anything. Even if this Michael Ball wire business is part of a Justice Department attempt to entangle former USPS riders into a case they can then roll up the food chain to Lance, it’s also biting the hand of a man who tried hard to get Floyd a job when almost no one else was interested in his comeback. That’s pretty cold, especially for a guy who needs all the friends he can find.

And yet I find myself feeling for the guy. I’m not trying to excuse him, necessarily. I don’t know enough about what he’s doing or why he’s doing it to really construct an informed opinion about where to place him on my personal good guy/bad guy spectrum. Either way, it’s pretty hard to imagine things going worse for a pro athlete who is still healthy (in a non-professional sense) and didn’t murder anyone.

His high-water mark was winning the 2006 Tour de France, a victory born of one of the greatest one-day rides pro cycling has ever seen. After performing so badly in the race’s 16th stage that he was written off as a contender, he responded by destroying the field in the 17th, beating the second-place finisher by nearly six minutes, a margin rarely seen in the pros. It looked like he had picked up the mantle of Great American Cyclist that Armstrong had abdicated, third in a line that started with Greg LeMond. If he could build on that victory, he could grow the sport further in the States while basking in adulation and endorsement dollars. But then it all went wrong.

The specifics are up for debate, but no one now claims he didn’t dope. Cycling is a sport rife with doping, so to be stripped of a Tour victory for it has to feel somewhat unfair to the caught rider. If half the peloton is doing it, getting singled out can’t seem fair, even if the punishment is the law. If he’s right about Armstrong’s doping history, it must be galling to have served as lieutenant for a serial offender who walked off a legend and then to go down in flames for the same crime. Examples must be made if the sport is going to get cleaned up⁵ but you can't fault the examples will feel singled out if doping is as pervasive as some claim. Add to that the possibility that he got caught for a drug he might not have taken and things get even murkier.

5: Whatever that means.

But fine, he doped and got caught for doping. That’s the system working. Others getting off scot-free doesn't excuse the crimes of those caught. Trumpeting his innocence, he raised around one million dollars from fans to fund his court defense, but he lost, was suspended for two year, and his legal bill was at least twice what he raised. He won the Tour, but that blew up in his face before he had the chance to cash in on the victory. Financially, he’s ruined.

His honesty, if that’s what it is, in admitting his own doping while fingering Lance bolsters his credibility as an accuser, but it also lays bare the duplicity of soliciting money from fans to clear his name. Whatever loyalists remained after years of court motions and underwhelming comeback were surely jettisoned then. Any sympathy he earned when he was running those Ride With Floyd events was gone in a flash of hypocrisy. “They all did it too!” is a way shittier justification than “I’m innocent!”

His career is over. Since his suspension ended Landis has been an unremarkable domestic racer. His sole international race was the 2009 New Zealand Tour of Southland, where he finished 17th of 95 racers in a race that has only ever been won by Kiwis, Aussies, and a lone unheralded American—hardly a springboard back into European racing. He last competed in the Cascade Cycling Classic in Oregon without a team, so it’s fair to say he’s done as a professional cyclist. Given how thoroughly he’s burned his bridges in the sport, I don’t see how he could forge a career in management, media or with a company in the industry.

The personal picture seems no better. In 2006, his close friend, ex-roommate, and father-in-law committed suicide, something Landis has admitted is almost certainly related to his doping conviction. His wife left him in 2009. He has never had a close relationship with the Mennonite parents who disapproved of his cycling when it was just a childhood hobby. It’s hard to imagine he has any strong roots after living the nomadic life of a peloton rider. He’s working with/for the Feds these days but there’s no future in that once Lance Armstrong is either caught or slips their snare.⁶ After that, what does he have left? Cycling is done with him, whether or not he’s done with it. He has no background in anything else or education beyond high school. I don’t know anything specific about his finances, but there’s no way he’s rich after his legal battles (and maybe divorce settlement). His family has fallen apart. He is the shell of what he was, defined by the career that was ripped from him. He hasn’t really been a pro cyclist for five years, but he’s a 35-year-old with no other obvious options. He's a man who has outlived his self-definition, and there's nothing sadder in sports. I'm not saying he didn't get what he deserves, but I can't help but feel sorry for him.

6: If the feds couldn't get Barry Bonds for his ties to an organization as flagrant as BALCO, I have my doubts about their ability to nail Armstrong. He's well-connected and powerful in his sport, the American public loves him as a champion and cancer crusader and if he did dope, it surely happened largely in Europe, at least on an organizational level.

Kobe Gettin' Work

2010-12-17T16:12:00.000-08:00

No need to apologize if you missed it or didn’t think much of it, but I was fascinated by the LA Times report the other day that Kobe Bryant is catching a lot of flak from Armenian groups for his deal with Turkish Airlines to be a “global brand ambassador”. Given the global nature of celebrity at the top of the sports pyramid, it’s no longer surprising when a star is criticized as a sponsor, but the normal script involves a flare-up when personal conduct, on or off the field, is seen as being at odds with the brand or product’s image. The media hates any disconnect in narrative, so, for example, Tiger Woods can’t endorse a classy watch if the tabloids have caught him doing less than classy things.

The Turkish Airlines flap is a different, new sort of celebrity/sponsorship uproar. Unless I’m forgetting a similar past episode, Kobe is the first American sports star to be asked to articulate a foreign policy. The facts: Turkish Airlines apparently enjoys a close relationship with the Turkish state. By getting in bed with one and therefore to some degree both, Kobe has accidentally aligned himself, at least in the eyes of LA’s resident Armenian population, with a government that has systematically worked to avoid international acknowledgement of the Turkish genocide of its Armenian citizens during World War I. That genocide occurred is beyond debate. Efforts to avoid UN/international recognition of such are Turkish efforts to protect their national pride and/or reputation. What seems like a moral no-brainer with no modern policy implications is muddled by the convenience of trade with Turkey for America and Western Europe, the two most likely sources of censure. Any claims otherwise are denial in its ugliest form.

The question, then, is how that debate relates to Kobe Bryant, global brand ambassador. What exactly do endorsees owe their parent companies? What do athletes owe the public? Does Kobe’s economic tie to a brand necessitate a public opinion about an atrocity nearly a century ago? I don’t really see how you can make that leap. If Kobe were singing the praises of the Turkish government, sure, he would have an obligation to let everyone know where he stands on the point. But did we demand Allen Iverson denounce anything when he took his talents to Besiktas or an explanation from Hedo Turkoglu or Mehmet Okur when they joined the league?

I’m a guy who has a lot more interest than most in genocide. The politics of the term and its use (and non-use) fascinate me. If you want a discussion of how the Armenian Genocide compares to the Holocaust or the tragic oddity that is the Cambodian genocide, I’m game. But I’m much happier if sports stars err on the side of political silence. If a topic is personally important to someone, they should feel free to use their fame as a platform. Bill Russell is regarded as a civil rights hero for a reason. Tracy McGrady’s trip to Sudan did some small but non-zero amount of good in the world. NBA stars supporting Obama was fun. Luke Scott has a right to open his mouth and remove any doubt that he’s (politically) an idiot. But it’s a big step past that to demand Kobe give up this endorsement or make some sort of statement he doesn’t mean to appease people.

If you find the Turkish government and by extension Turkish Airlines distasteful, if you think Kobe’s tarnished himself by getting in bed with them, that’s fine. Vote with your dollars, write a letter to the editor, do what you feel. But Kobe is a sports star shilling for an airline. He isn’t obligated to become “a champion of human rights” because he’s won a few rings. To suggest otherwise is to place unrealistic expectations on someone whose job and education haven’t required reading the international news page. It would be great if he supports HR 252, as the article suggests, but only if that support stems from personal resolve, not some sort of professional obligation or attempt to save face. Let’s save the venom for people that owe us better than they’re giving us. Kobe owes LA’s Armenian community his basketball skills, not his advocacy. If he wants to give it to them, that’s great, but he’s under no obligation to do so, or to turn down millions at their behest. Requiring athletes to take political stands based on endorsements does no one favors.

Today is All We Have To Dunk On

2010-11-27T23:00:00.000-08:00

"I am no man, I am dynamite." - Friedrich Nietzsche

Rough Justice: God I hate the Dominate Another Day commercial.

Oil Can Samson: It's so dumb!

RJ: It's not just dumb, it's so damn empty!

OCS: It takes a mediocre premise and executes it badly.

They should have made a video of D-Wade doing some sweet crossover and then posterizing a grizzly bear in space if they wanted to make him a superhero.

I'VE GOT IT
I CRACKED THE CODE

RJ: Right, putting him in a helmet and then showing stuntmen drive a motorcycle fancy and dangerous-like is just nothing at all.
HIT ME

OCS: RJ, the next great basketball viral video is going to be Rondo in the vomit comet performing absurd geometric feats of zero-gravity dribbling.

RJ: Here's my rewrite of the DWade superhero commercial:

OCS: And then all of a sudden it's 2 Gs and he's all, "Oof."

RJ: He's driving around Miami, minding his business, when he stumbles upon a bank robbery. The robbers are rubber mask versions of the Celtics. He defeats and apprehends them with a basketball and feats of stunning athleticism.

Then he's having a celebratory burger somewhere when similarly-masked "Kobe" and "Pau" try to stick up the joint.
Cue similar hijinks, but this time inside a crowded restaurant.

End to him dribbling off, with a voice-over clever line.
(I have not yet thought of this line.)

OCS: Naw, I've got it:
Scene opens on a Spanish field.
Don Quixote is vainly tilting at a windmill.
D-Wade dunks on the windmill so hard it explodes. Don Quixote applauds, Wade and Sancho Panza do a tight high-five.
CUT.

RJ: No, no, Wade and Sancho do the jump up shoulder bump.

OCS: Yup. Yes they do.
Well, Sancho just does the shoulder bump: he's already elevated, riding a donkey and all.

RJ: Also, the windmill needs to have either Celtics clovers or Lakers colors all over it.

OCS: Three blades: C's, Lakers and Magic.

RJ: The fourth should probably be the Cavs, just to twist the knife.

OCS: That's just uncalled for.

RJ: Because no one has ever built a tribladed windmill.
Well, no one back then, anyway.

OCS: Man, make it a modern steel one, just to highlight what a badass he is.

RJ: But then we'd have to put Don Quixote on a motorcycle and we're back to being stupid for no reason like the original ad.

OCS: Why?
I'm cool with anachronism.
Well, let's just stick with a 3-bladed old-style one.

RJ: How 'bout instead of that we put D-Wade into some sort of historical El Heat costume, like when Kobe dressed up as DaVinci.

OCS: That was tight.

RJ: Man, that could spawn a whole series of D-Wade dunking on various historical literary unattainable targets.
Moby Dick: Boomshakalaka!

OCS: And then just to highlight how classy he is, he dunks so hard Cyrano de Bergerac gets the girl.

RJ: He could posterize King Lear into understanding his daughters.

OCS: He grabs the apple of knowledge of good and evil from Eve and dunks it in the Serpent's face

RJ: Yes!
He could fool so many dudes with his crossover that the charge of the Light Brigade would succeed.

OCS: "Ours is not to question why, ours is but to dunk and fly"

RJ: That settles it. We're starting a sneaker company.

Duty Calls

2010-11-23T14:39:00.000-08:00

"Broad paths are open to every endeavour, and a sympathetic recognition is assured to every one who consecrates his art to the divine services of a conviction of a consciousness."
– Franz Lizst¹

1: I get why people are upset about the Call of Duty Ad, but a)it's a clever, effective advertisement and b)I have no patience for "more patriotic than thou" arguments about video game ads. That's my definition of missing the forest for the trees. I care more that Kobe has such good, sly taste in non-shoe endorsements. Dude geeks out about what he likes, and I can get behind that. (If Enter the Dragon gets made today, it's Kobe fighting Bruce Lee, isn't?²)

2: Martial arts Kobe is a far more terrifying proposition than kung fu Kareem, right? Also, if Bruce Lee were around today it would be Bruce Li, wouldn't it? But nesting footnotes is ridiculous, so I'll stop there.

The Contador Uncertainty Principle

2010-11-21T23:27:00.000-08:00

“The significance of this mass ceremony…is paradoxical. It is preformed in silent privacy, in the lair of the skull. Yet each communicant is well aware that the ceremony he performs is being replicated simultaneously by thousands (or millions) of others of whose existence he is confident, yet of whose identity he has not the slightest notion.” – Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities

The problem with Alberto Contador isn’t that he’s a doper who got caught red-handed. The problem with Alberto Contador isn’t that he, cycling’s reigning champ, got blown up by a false positive, either. The problem is that he’s a mystery we’ll probably never have the facts to solve, and that he’s more harbinger than aberration. Maybe he did it, maybe he didn’t, but the whole culture has to move forward without any sort of closure. It looks like he’ll face some punishment from the UCI, he may follow through on his threat to retire, but, barring a revelation as shocking as it is unexpected, opinions will have to be formed without proof.

Here are the facts: Contador has been largely unstoppable in the grand tours since Lance Armstrong retired. He won the Tour de France in 2007, 2009 and 2010, and didn’t in 2006 and 2008 because he didn’t take part. He made up for his tour absence in 2008 by winning both the Giro d’Italia and the Vuelta a España. His teams weren’t included in the 2006 and 2008 tours because of doping investigations, but he was never individually implicated. Word came out this fall that he failed a doping control on the final rest day in the 2010 TdF, testing positive for clenbuterol, a drug that builds lean muscle. Then we learned that a urine sample from the day before that rest day tested positive for plasticizers, indicating an illegal blood transfusion or infusion.

Contador’s team claims he ate some contaminated meat gifted to him by Spanish friends during that rest day. This incensed the Spanish meat industry, which swore it was clean, and experts ruled that explanation both plausible and somewhat unlikely. (The store from whence the meat came has now been tested and shown no hint of clenbuterol, for whatever that's worth.) The plasticizer test has not been validated for anti-doping use, a fact that doesn’t impugn its accuracy but does allow anyone so inclined to cast aspersions. Complicating everything, clebuterol is sometimes present in livestock and plasticizers are environmentally present in modern life. (Remember the BPA/water bottle kerfuffle?) I’m no doctor/biochemist, but my impression is that the charges here are pretty damning, but not quite open-and-shut. Making any judgment of guilt or innocence depends at least partially on your reading of Contador’s character, motives and veracity, not simply the facts.

But, of course, the UCI can’t just let this hang over the sport like a chemical sword of Damocles. It has instructed the Spanish Federation to open hearings. What exactly will happen isn’t clear, but it’s instructive to note that a rider by the name of Fuyu Li tested positive for clebuterol last spring, and it looks like he’ll be banned for two years for his transgression. It’s one thing to offer up plausible excuses, but UCI’s doping regulations don’t care about intent. The important thing here isn’t how the clenbuterol got there, but that it was present. Contador has threatened to retire if a ban is handed down, but it’s not clear how that could be avoided if he can’t work up a little more concrete defense.

The point for me isn’t that cycling has another doping black eye. That’s pretty clear-cut. No matter how this plays out, it’s another headline where a top name is tied to drugs. The connection is always going to be louder than the details. The point is that we’ve reached the synthesis of the dialectic of doping. Unless someone does something truly stupid¹, black and white are gone forever from our drugs in sports discourse. Gone are the days when our stars were demigods, protected by their press to fit into neat (and contrived) narrative arcs, but gone also are the days when doping first barged into our collective consciousness and users were exposed simply because the authorities were now looking. In the modern cat-and-mouse arms race of doping, rumors and hints have become damning because hard facts are nearly impossible to come by.

1: People will of course do stupid things, sure as the sun rises, but the bigger the player, the more money will be spent to make the crimes smart.

As I’ve said before, I am spectacularly uninterested in vilifying individual dopers. Don’t misunderstand, I think in many ways we’re underestimating how pervasive PEDs are in sports, but I can’t get my hackles up when an athlete makes a decision that I consider regrettable but totally human. This is a problem that needs to be attacked at a sport-wide level. I’m glad that the UCI is taking doping seriously. I know that randomized doping controls are an intrusive fact of life in the peloton, but I’ll take that over unchecked cheating. But I’m not so naïve as to think that testing eliminates doping, either, or catches all dopers. It shifts it from something that is talked about in some corners of locker rooms to a furtive secret between a private trainer and athlete. If even a system as comprehensive as the UCI’s biological passport, which establishes baselines for all sorts of things I don't understand in each individual athlete and checks their tests not just for abnormal levels relative to human norms but also to all of their prior levels, can be circumvented or flawed, then there is no fail-safe test.

Which leaves those of us who are spectators, fans and media both, watching the sport with a kind of jaundiced ignorance. American fans have already seen this play out with Tyler Hamilton’s vanishing twin argument and Floyd Landis’s fan-funded defense. Anyone could be doping, because getting to the top of the heap is always going to be worth more for some athletes than moral rectitude or respecting the threat of banishment. Various figures make statements about how getting tough on doping has cleaned the sport up, but there’s no real way to evaluate the truth of such claims. How much of the peloton is doping? How much of the peloton used to be doping? If the riders don’t know, and beyond their own bodies and maybe those of their closest confidants, they don’t, how exactly are we supposed to judge at all?²

2: This is why I could never take Jose Canseco's claims about X percent of major leaguers using steroids seriously. He never gave me reason to think that he was smart enough to look beyond his own confirmation biases. (Given that he's bankrupt and tweeting about his lost chandeliers and young, hot girlfriend, he hasn't exactly forced me to reevaluate my position since.)

So what to do about this onlooker limbo? If one is properly disgusted, swearing off the sport is an option, but it’s not like it’s an isolated phenomenon. Baseball has doping, football does too, though no one cares³, I assume it’s something that goes on in hockey, and you’re just playing naïve if you think that soccer and basketball, two sports that prize athleticism and stamina, don’t have at least small portions of their players on drugs too. The edges given by chemistry are too real to ignore, and the financial rewards for success are too big for many to turn down. As long as sports are played by competitive people who are payed to succeed, athletes will dope. Sadly, it’s that simple. And in a modern world of computer-aided chemistry, there will always be a new drug that the tests don’t know about yet, but are trying to find. I’m not trying to be a downer here, but I don’t see any way that isn’t true.

3: Joe Posnanski has said that he thinks the public doesn't care about steroids in football because there's no statistic like home runs to fixate on. I think it's more that baseball is a game of individual numbers that tie the modern game seamlessly to its past, while football is a game of teams filled with masked, numbered men following coaches' orders. Player performance is too context-dependent to compare outside the player's era. The only numbers that matter are wins and losses, and the game has changed too much too quickly to ground it historically. Jimmy Foxx would still be a pretty good first baseman, it seems clear, but what would Bronco Nagurski do in the NFL today? No one could begin to guess.

Several decades (or centuries, depending on how you keep score) into the acceleration of modern communication and hence media, we’ve already endured the slow erosion of the athletes-as-role-model archetype. Penis photos make the rounds on Deadspin for those who care, and the rest of us just try to ignore it. Think of the trouble Joe Namath would have gotten into off of the field these days. Doping is the worst crime an athlete can commit against his or her sport and against our trust, but more and more we’ll have to weigh individual guilt of that crime through the lens of our opinion of the individual.

The aesthetic perfection of some sporting moments and the arbitrary nature of victory in sports often lends itself to our imbuing of sports with a false, or at least overblown, morality. Fair play transcends not breaking the rules to be a mindset and a worldview. I’m not saying that there is no value in that; parents should still tell their kids to play the game the right way. But ever since radio and then television got into pro sports and players started making real money, the love of the game for them is ancillary to the economic benefits of success. The two can compliment each other, but to expect a pro to put aside success and money to play the game “the right way” when they don't is foolish. We’ve come to terms with athletes being people, warts and all, though specific failures still disappoint us. We need to stop thinking about doping as a moral absolute and shift it into that category too, of being just one more piece of information about a person.

It’s one thing when David Millar gets caught with EPO or Ben Johnson tests positive for steroids. But those days are gone. What are we to do with Alberto Contador or the next MLB player to fail a test based what he claims is a “unauthorized ingredient in a supplement”? At least some of the time, isn’t that guy going to be telling the truth? I think it’s correct that punishment depends solely on a banned substance’s presence in a test, but we as fans and media need to come to a place where, when definitive proof can’t be found, we can figure out what to do with a professional’s reputation. If the game is now run in such a way where some significant portion of the dopers won’t get caught⁴, how is it fair to pillory those that do, especially if occasional false positives are inevitable? Hand down stiff punishments, let those who can prove innocence/guilt do so, but in the court of public opinion, let’s stop treating doping like a witchhunt and deal with the facts as they are, not as we wish they were.

4: There's a non-zero chance that Lance Armstrong, America's golden god of cycling and post-cancer heroism, doped throughout his run of dominance. He didn't get caught, so we all have to go with our gut feelings on that one, and on a lot of his rivals.

Like an Upside Down Wrecking Ball

2010-11-13T21:03:00.000-08:00

"[...]Daidalos made wings for himself and his son, and told his son not to fly too high when he was aloft, or else the glue would be melted by the sun and the wings would fall apart, and not to fly near the sea, or else the wings would fall apart from the moisture. But Icaros, lost in delight, paid no attention to his father's instructions and went ever higher." From Library, Pseudo-Apollodorus

Doin' Work

2010-11-10T12:49:00.000-08:00

Tangentially related to the recent KG brouhaha, I stumbled onto this in a Sports Illustrated profile of Kobe from 2008:

It's 1995, and Bryant is the senior leader of the Lower Merion team, obsessed with winning a state championship. He comes to the gym at 5 a.m. to work out before school, stays until 7 p.m. afterward. It's all part of the plan. When the Aces lost in the playoffs the previous spring, Bryant stood in the locker room, interrupting the seniors as they hugged each other, and all but guaranteed a title, adding, "The work starts now." (Bryant remains so amped about his alma mater that when he taped a video message for the team a few years ago, it contained few of the usual platitudes and instead had Bryant reeling off a bunch of expletives and exhorting the boys to "take care of f------ business!")

As odd and alienating as I sometimes find the kind of overrevved intensity that fuels the Kobes, KGs and MJs of the world, I find this totally winning. Kobe too amped up to do anything but curse at high schoolers? Yes please.

Intentional Fallacies

2010-11-06T15:40:00.000-07:00

There has been a lot of brouhaha in the NBA media and online world about KG’s “cancer” trash-talking to Charlie Villanueva, some of it insightful and interesting and some of it not. Jay Kaspian King posted a take at FreeDarko of the event as illustrative of what’s wrong with KG that has gotten under my skin, and I’ve been trying to figure out just what about it I react to so violently.

He starts the piece out musing about the Giants recent World Series victory as affirmation of the social transcendence sports occasionally offers, but then contrasts that to his Red Sox fandom. He moves from watching the 2004 World Series to his disaffection with the 2007 Sox and discovery of liberated fandom, of viewing sports as existing in an “aesthetic realm, where players exist as performers”.¹

1: I love me some FreeDarko, but I’ve never been able to get on board fully with liberated fandom. I take some umbrage at the term, at the implication that my loyalty to my favorite teams is some kind of cage I need to escape to fully appreciate other players. I’ve never felt a conflict between the knot in my stomach as the clock ticks down on a Celtics overtime game and the elation I feel when Chris Paul solves the geometry of the halfcourt set in a way I never would have imagined. They are very different things, but both are essential to what I love in sport. Both are part of what Angell calls the “business of caring” that grounds my love of sport.² I have no problem with the FD idea that you should care about players, not teams, but that decision has always seemed to me like a false dichotomy that would rob me of a lot of the pleasures of my fandom.] But I think his take on this realm is flawed. He’s right that there’s an unspoken line athletes get crucified when they cross, but it’s not when they “remind us that the scope of their lives is larger than ours.” If that were it, things like the DRose Fast Don’t Lie commercial would infuriate the public, not sell shoes. The line is that athletes can’t let us know that their investment in the game is different from ours. Fans, collectively, care about their teams with a nigh-religious sort of fervor. Athletes care about the game and winning, but that’s on a personal level. The team itself is their employer. Maybe one they love, maybe one they hate, but their relationship there can never be the same as the fan’s purely emotional one. LeBron James infuriated the sports media/public not because he called an unseemly amount of attention to a change in employers, but because he did so in a way that callously disregarded the emotions of Cavs fans. We don’t want LeBron to act like switching teams is like us switching employers, we want him to take our feelings into account, to gracefully account for the fans whose lives he is affecting. I don’t really care if a player is the “sort of guy…we can have a beer with”, and I don’t think most other fans really do either, we care if a player acts in a way that disrupts our fandom.

2: King partially dismisses that Angell quotation in his piece, which I find funny precisely because Angell’s point is that his love is sentimental, but that doesn’t make it ridiculous, exactly the linkage King casually makes. Here’s the whole thing:
“What I do know is that this belonging and caring is what our games are all about; this is what we come for. It is foolish and childish, on the face of it, to affiliate ourselves with anything so insignificant and patently contrived and commercially exploitative as a professional sports team, and the amused superiority and icy scorn that the non-fan directs at the sports nut (I know this look—I know it by heart) is understandable and almost unanswerable. Almost. What is left out of this calculation, it seems to me, is the business of caring—caring deeply and passionately, really caring—which is a capacity or an emotion that has almost gone out of our lives. And so it seems possible that we have come to a time when it no longer matters so much what the caring is about, how frail or foolish is the object of that concern, as long as the feeling itself can be saved. Naïveté—the infantile and ignoble joy that sends a grown man or woman to dancing and shouting with joy in the middle of the night over the haphazardous flight of a distant ball—seems a small price to pay for such a gift.”

But on to KG.

“With Garnett, there’s always a sense of insecure theater, of a man who hasn’t quite convinced himself of the virtues and authenticity of his passions.”

This is the polar opposite of how I read the man’s excesses. To me, it has always seemed like the fire that burns within Kevin Garnett, the intensity that fuels him to be the defensive force he is comes with this. His intensity and buy-in transformed Paul Pierce and Ray Allen into 40% of one of the best defensive NBA teams ever. I’ve never seen him play with anything but full effort, and to maintain that kind of drive all of the time would seem to me to necessitate walking the thin line between zealot and lunatic. If you find that distasteful, fine, but even his oddest moments, the barking like a dog, the clapping in a guard’s face, seem to be born of an inability to escape the outer reaches of a genuine drive, not some sort of performative enactment of a role he thinks he should be playing. I’ll gladly concede that other interpretations here are totally valid, but that specific and damning a reading of the man’s actions to me demands some sort of proof. King seems to think that the lack of “Isiah’s grim determination…Rodman’s ‘fuck it, we’re winning’ mentality” is some sort of fundamental flaw, that his lack of Jordan’s “impenetrability of the mask” or Kobe’s “visible intelligence” (what?) is what’s wrong with him. But those are all projections, rather than character traits. King reads KG as a bully, while Jordan, who is universally acknowledged as a huge bully gets off the hook because he was “impenetrable”? If we’re talking presentation, maybe, but King is trying to make a more sweeping claim than that.

Rewatch that John Thompson interview. That has always seemed to me to the at the core of Garnett's appeal. Sure he's crazy and does weird things sometimes. But look at that interview. Thompson wants to talk about the numbers KG is putting up, but KG won't let him. He's unwilling to talk about individual success in the face of team failure. Commenter Ben calls the interview a man "grappling with the deconstruction of his identity" as a winner. That rings far truer to me than King's dismissal of it as "Jimmy Swaggert style...wild theatrics". If he's putting on a show, wouldn't he want the cameras to stay on? It's a plausible explanation, I suppose, but requires a fundamental mistrust of Garnett above and beyond the grain of salt all such interviews need to be taken with.

“And while I’m not so naïve as to say that Garnett’s comments marked some unbreached depth of trash-talking, I don’t find it instructive or even interesting, really, to argue whether or not this is in or out of character for him, specifically, or for NBA players, at large.”

“The moment Garnett was traded to the Celtics, he ruined yet another one of my childhood teams.”

“Any rational fan, really, anyone who doesn’t salivate at the thought of jumping strangers, should feel their stomach turn whenever they watch one of these encounters.”

Listen, I’m as interested as anyone in plumbing the performative aspects of professional sports. The idea of persona is fascinating to me, the construction of identity in the press and through televised action, but the risk is mistaking your reading of someone’s persona as indicative of who they are as a person. King throws away any notions of contextualizing trash-talking in that first quote, and then gleefully blurs the line between persona and person in what reads as a very personal takedown trying to tell me how to think about Kevin Garnett. I have no idea what gets said on the court at NBA games, but it’s hard to evaluate the “cancer patient” line without context. If Villanueva is tweeting it it clearly got under his skin, but that doesn’t mean it’s head-and-shoulders worse than what other players are doing. Maybe it is, but the fact that other players aren’t jumping on KG seems to imply to me that it’s at least within the ballpark.

Nobody is obligated to like Kevin Garnett. There doesn’t even have to be a reason for the dislike. I certainly have players who I don’t like for no reason I can identify, and there are plenty whose demeanor puts me off. But that doesn’t mean I get to run around saying they’re bad people.

“Why can’t we call an asshole an asshole every time he acts like an asshole?”

Because being an asshole is context-dependent. If KG brought his act to a pick-up game near me, he’d be the biggest dick around. But he’s paid millions of dollars to win, not to make friends, and getting into opponents' heads is part of that. If Michael Jordan played in your rec league, you wouldn’t want anything to do with him. But he brought his pathological competitiveness to the NBA, where it was appropriate. Garnett had the misfortune of being a dick to someone with a twitter account, but don’t mistake that for making him qualitatively different from the other shit-talkers who came before and after him. If you can prove he is, cool, go for it, but that’s the thing, you have to prove it.

"What the fuck do we owe Kevin Garnett?"

You owe the man a fair assessment. You can think he's a dick, you can think his act is a show, but if you're going to call him out on it, you have to show me something to back it up. You have to show me some proof that he's different from those around him and that his earnestness is a put-on. Otherwise, I’m sorry you dislike him enough that he ended your fandom of the Celtics, but please don’t couch yourself in liberated fandom so you can throw stones at a picture of who he is that you painted. Attacking strawmen makes you the asshole.

Here and There

2010-10-01T13:29:00.000-07:00

Welcome to October, everyone. Baseball's gearing up for the postseason (or eulogizing an ending season), the NFL's getting up to speed and training camp reports are whetting our whistles for what's to come. It's an embarassment of riches, friends. To keep you company over the weekend, the new issue of Norman Einstein's is out today. Among the other worthy articles, two have some No Fours fingerprints on them:

An examination of what, exactly, everyone got so upset about when LeBron and Chris Bosh joined Dwayne Wade in South Beach, Freedom and Agency.
A roundtable discussion of Ken Burns's recent Tenth Inning documentary.

Enjoy, and get ready for the MLB postseason. As long as the Yankees don't win the Series, it should be a great time.

Theodicy and Saint Jeter

2010-09-19T19:11:00.000-07:00

“When we explain action in terms of desires and beliefs we are not putting forward any explanatory theory to account for action. It is true that desires and beliefs explain action; but the explanation is not of any causal hypothetical form. It is not as if the actions of human beings constitute a set of raw data – actions identifiable on their faces as the kinds of actions they are – for which we may seek an explanatory hypothesis. On the contrary, many human actions are not identifiable as actions of a particular kind unless they are already seen and interpreted as proceeding from a particular set of desires and beliefs.”
— Anthony Kenny : Free Will and Responsibility

If you pay any attention at all to baseball, you must have heard the squawking the other day when Derek Jeter acted like a pitch that hit his bat hit his hand well enough to fool the home plate umpire. Joe Posnanski had a good take on it over at his blog. I agreed with a lot of what he said. "I save my deep admiration for people who choose fair play over a momentary advantage," in particular is a notion that resonates pretty deeply for me. Posnanski turns Jeter into a bit of a parable, as is sometimes his wont¹, but in doing so conflates Derek Jeter the man and Derek Jeter the media construct in a way that isn't really fair.

1: I think the reason Posnanski is way up on my current mental list of sportswriters is how he doesn't shy away from turning a yarn into a parable but does so in a way that sidesteps the pat pieties of the Rick Reillys of the world.

"I don't think what Jeter did was wrong, not at all, not in baseball terms. So what was my reaction? Well, I think what Jeter did was kind of ... sad. Has he become so impotent as a hitter -- do you realize the guy now has an 86 OPS+? -- that now he's willing to hop around and have trainers look at his forearm when the ball clearly did not hit him? That's what Derek Jeter has become? And then afterward, he's sheepishly defending the move by saying it's his job to get on base, well, is that what's behind the Derek Jeter aura? Is that what he has stood for all these years?"

Look at what he does there. He's making two points here about how Derek Jeter let him/us down. The first is that Jeter, who is having a pretty bad year and looking more mortal than he ever has before, has now crossed over the line between young and great and old and hanging on, and that's why he did what he did. This may be true, but for that to be the case we'd need to know what's going on inside Jeter's head, or at least that he wouldn't have tried this earlier in his career. Neither is knowable, it seems to me. I agree that playacting is a cheap move, but I don't know how we can claim with any certainty that this is something that he wouldn't have tried a decade ago.

But fine, some license here isn't a huge deal. It's undeniable that Jeter is in his decline, and he needs every break in a way he never has before. I think the point Posnanski makes about aging and cheating is valid, just maybe not as applicable here as he thinks. But look at the second thing he does: "That's what Jeter has become...is that what's behind the Derek Jeter aura? Is that what he stood for all these years?" As a Red Sox fan, the media trope of Derek Jeter as all that is good and just in baseball has driven me crazy, at least partially because he's never really offered a chink in his armor². But what Posnanski does there is to subtly hold Jeter the man hostage to Jeter the media narrative.

2: Other than his crappy defense, of course, but now I'm just being petty.

There was a bit of an internet scuffle about how we should view Kevin Durant after the FIBA championships. By all reports, Durant is a kind, mature young man who lives and breathes basketball and is working hard to max out his talent. But that's the thing, "by all reports". Very few of us know the man at all, and the media we rely on to tell us about him only sees him in his professional context. The upshot was an interesting debate about whether it's fair or a good idea to hold Kevin Durant up as an ideal(ized) player³, and if to do so is simply setting him up to be turned on by the same media that would do the building up.

3: The tweets from Nate Jones are also very worth looking at, but hard to link to. You can find the links in the Bethlehem Shoals article I linked first up there.

I don't think Posnanski is trying to be unfair to Jeter here, but that doesn't mean he isn't. Derek Jeter never told us he was perfect. He certainly never gave us a Barkleyesque disavowal, but who is going to argue with media coverage presenting him or herself as representing truth, justice and apple pie? I'm sure he made a lot of money in his career by being the face of the Yankee Way, but it's a position to which he was voted by others, not one for which he volunteered. "Is that what he stood for all these years?" Maybe that's what Derek Jeter^TM stood for, but that's because the media decided he did. Faking his way into a HBP wasn't a betrayal of anything, it just serves as a warning not to trust the media when it holds anyone up as a symbol of capitalized values. Derek Jeter, like Kevin Durant, LeBron James and any other athlete you choose to look at, is a man, not a myth. We do the athletes and ourselves a disservice any time we lose sight of that fact.

Quick Hits

2010-08-30T12:45:00.000-07:00

We're cranking the flywheel back up to speed here at No Fours headquarters. A full-length post will be dropping here in the next couple days and Oil Can Samson has an article in the upcoming Norman Einstein's, but until then, here are some things elsewhere on the web worth your notice:

The Naismith Hall of Fame inductions gave everyone a great excuse to remember just how awesome Scotty Pippen was. I assume you read some/all of the great essays/posts, but if you didn't see it, take the time to pop over to YouTube and watch Scotty Pippen: Ultimate Defender. I can't watch this video without getting giddy.
At the end of the Tour de France, honors are awarded for the overall winner, best climber, best sprinter, best young rider and best team. But there is also an unofficial award that is perhaps more romantic than any of those, the lanterne rouge, awarded to the slowest finisher who was not eliminated. Last year's lanterne rouge "winner", Yauheni Hutarovich, just beat the world's best sprint teams in a solo sprint to win Stage 2 of the Vuelta a Espana. This is not a major thing, but it is a wonderful thing.
Cincinnati Reds prospect Aroldis Chapman was clocked semi-reliably in a game at 105 mph! Damn.
Finally, if you didn't see the BBC report on Luol Deng returning to Sudan after two decades away, go ahead a budget twenty minutes to rectify that.

The Burdens of Respect

2010-05-25T16:41:00.000-07:00

The practice of the world goes farther in teaching us the degrees of our duty, than the subtlest philosophy, which was ever yet invented.
— David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature

How to Shoot Somebody Who Can Outdraw You: Tom Boonen

“In fact one is tempted to ask whether there is a single man left ready, for once, to commit an outrageous folly.” – Søren Kierkegaard, The Present Age

In (team) sports, as in all human interaction, respect is one of the basic forms of currency. Any time cooperation is necessary or impediment is an option, respect gets factored into the strategic calculus. Football schemes, how much of the plate a pitcher is willing to hit, who gets double-teamed when they get the ball, whether a rider gets help on a breakaway or just drafted, all are at least partly functions of respect. The same is true of our appreciation of athletes: A-Rod and Barry Bonds¹, for example, will never have their staggering achievements fully lauded because they have never quite earned the public’s respect. What athletes have the opportunity to accomplish on the field and the ramifications of such accomplishments hinge to a large degree on respect.

1: I’ve always thought it’s a shame that Barry Bonds is held in universally low respect because, before he was forever tarnished by the BALCO revelations, he had the misfortune/bad judgment to be a surly black man in a largely white game. (Sure, he was an asshole too, but still.) Go look at his numbers in his prime in San Francisco. Yes, he absolutely was using steroids, but so was a significant segment of the league, and he had four straight years with an on-base percentage over .500 while slugging .749 or better. That’s not even possible, but he was never quite recognized enough as he should have been.

In the springtime, cycle racing has its Classics season. In contrast to the grand tours, the weeks-long races where the winner is the man who grinds his opponents away through carefully-laid plans, strategic attacks, team strength and attrition, the Classics are one-day races which are won by the man willing to go hardest at the front with the best legs that day. They are full-bore, chaotic affairs in which a single misstep or mishap² can end a rider's chances of victory. You need a strong team to put you in position to win a classic, but you can't just rely on your team like you do in a tour. By the end of the day, the front of the race is a select few riders, all trying to win, and cooperation is often key in putting yourself in a position to contend.

2: If you want misfortune, ask George Hincapie about Paris-Roubaix…

In this year's Paris-Roubaix, in some corners considered the crown jewel of the classics season, Tom Boonen fell victim to the respect in which he was held by his peers. One of the world's finest sprinters, Boonen has the power to ride away from others on a flat course like Paris-Roubaix, and as a three time former winner was one of the heavy prerace favorites. As a Belgian sprinter in a race that is a Belgian monument, he was born and built for this. His race was going as planned with about fifty kilometers left: he was in a small group of elite riders at the front of the race. Barring the truly unexpected, the winner of the race would come from the group, and Boonen was right where he needed to be.

Until he wasn't. Fabian Cancellara, a Swiss rider who is the reigning world time trial champion, attacked when Boonen was at the back of the group. He quickly gapped the group, and powered away on a long solo attack. No one else went with him, and by the time Boonen saw what was happening, Cancellara was too far gone to cross the gap.³

3: It’s worth recognizing what a ballsy move this was by Cancellara. He had faith in his ability to beat that strong group of riders over 50 km even if they took up pursuit the way Boonen wanted them to. It may have been a lapse for Boonen to be in the back of the pack, but that’s a boldly early time to launch your attack.

A quick digression on the mechanics of bicycle racing (if you're more than passingly familiar with the sport, feel free to skip this paragraph): at its physical center, bike racing is governed by two factors, aerobic capacity⁴ and aerodynamic drag. A rider can go as fast as his legs and lungs can propel him, but if he has no one ahead of him, he has to punch through the air ahead of him. With a rider directly before him, he can use the slipstream that rider leaves in his wake to significantly reduce how much work he has to do to travel at that speed. All cycling tactics revolve around the interplay of these two things. This is why, despite its individual prizes, cycling is a team sport.

4: This disregards the anaerobic work of sprinting, of course, but that would really be getting pedantic, wouldn’t it?

By attacking alone with fifty kilometers left in the race, then, Cancellara was taking a risk. He would have to be faster than a group of riders, taking turns pulling at the front of a paceline to spread the hard work between them, for about an hour. If any man can do it, Cancellara is that man, given the course-he is monstrously strong, and as a time trial specialist he excels at the specific agony of the discipline-but success was by no means certain. If the group he had left behind gave its all chasing him, they could well catch him.

But they didn't. They didn't catch him because they didn't try. Not because they were throwing the race, not because they didn't think they could catch him, but because of their respect for Tom Boonen. Boonen immediately began trying to organize pursuit of Cancellara, but no one would work with him. Once Cancellara attacked, Boonen needed help. As much as a group chasing Cancellara would gain from taking turns exposed to full drag, a solo pursuer, no matter how fast or fit, would have little hope of catching him after spotting him a head start. I have no idea what was said on the course, but nothing Boonen said or tried did was to any avail, and because this was a classics race he had no teammates with him to help. Every rider in that group was there because they were in a position to do well in the race; no one was riding altruistically.

So why, then, concede victory to Cancellara? Such a move only makes sense if you're terrified of Tom Boonen. The only reason you would refuse to form a chase group is if you're certain that all you'd be doing was working hard enough to hand the strongest rider in the group a victory over the others. If you don't think you can beat Boonen after a hard chase for Cancellara, whether or not you catch him, then you're only going to get second, or third if you can't catch Cancellara. If you don't chase, you may be able to beat Boonen in a field sprint, especially if he works harder than everyone else in vain hope of reeling in the attack. You won't win, but you could take second.

In other words, your respect for the abilities of Tom Boonen overrides your competitive instincts. Despite the fact that winning Paris-Roubaix would either make or burnish the career of every single rider in the group far more than a fourth would Boonen's, collectively they decided that they would rather drag race for second than turn themselves inside out for a chance to win. I'm sure it's small comfort to the man denied a chance at the win he clearly wanted badly, but it says something that professional racers in their prime quailed at facing Boonen without his making any sort of move. Any strategic decision in such a situation has to consider what all opponents might do, but to give up hope for victory without any fight at all because of what the man next to you could do speaks volumes about the esteem in which he is held. It may well have been the optimal decision for their race results, but it's competitive cowardice. At least in that race, had he been respected less by his peers, he would have had a chance to win. It's not a trap he had any way to avoid, but he was hamstrung by being so respected.

Why Don’t You Love Me Anymore: Alexandre Vinokourov

As I see it, the whole point of pragmatism is to insist that we human beings are answerable only to one another. We are answerable only to those who answer to us – only to conversation partners. We are not responsible either to the atoms or to God, at least not until they start conversing with us.
— Richard Rorty, Comments on Jeffrey Stout’s Democracy and Tradition

During a sporting event, respect matters mostly between competitors. Spectators can and do cheer and boo, but they don't tend to have too large an effect on competitive balance. After the results are in, however, imbuing them with meaning falls to the audience. Athletes decide what happens during the contest (often with an assist from chance or officiating) but the viewing public imbues these results with meaning. Consider some still consider Hank Aaron to be the baseball's home run king, or why Duke basketball (for example) is despised in so many corners. There is no such thing as an objectively meaningful result; narrative importance is constructed after the fact, consciously and not, to fit what has just happened into the framework of our fandom, biases and to connect it to history.

About a month ago, Alexandre Vinokourov won Liége-Bastone-Liége. What is remarkable about this victory is that Vino has recently returned from a two-year suspension for PEDs and seems to have not lost much riding ability at all. Where previously most suspended riders return quietly, if at all, taking their place as a diminished figure, or as part of a narrative of change/redemption a la David Millar. What sets Vino apart is that he seems to have returned to the sport at roughly the performance level he left and has never directly addressed the cause of his suspension. Any question about his reception was answered when he crossed the finish line at L-B-L victorious and was met with a chorus of boos from the fans at the finish.⁵

5: I wasn’t there, and I got the impression that it was a smattering of boos and no real cheering, not an overwhelming salvo of derision, but even that is a staggering reaction for a crowd at such an important race.

Vinokourov has single-handedly, in the explosive manner of all in his career, blown open the debate about the role a no-longer suspended racer can and should play in the pro peloton. He has sat out the past two years, as the rules mandate. Legally, he is once again fully qualified as a racer, but how should we, the public, feel about him? The ex-dopers who tend to get a pass are those, the David Millars of the world, who show genuine repentence for their transgression(s) and express a desire to use the rest of their career to prove what they can do clean. That seems like the natural path for someone caught in such an act: confess to the crime for which you've already been caught, and salvage what you can. I don't mean to seem overly calculating, but the zeal of the convert seems to be the sensible path for a pro who thinks they have something left and don't want to be left out as a pariah. Vino has the advantage of not having to worry about sponsorship-Astana was built for him by hometown Kazakhs, so they'll (presumably) stick with him through thick and thin. Given his secure position, he spent his time off concerned primarily with not losing his form.

By the letter of the law, he has done his time off, fulfilling his punishment and clearing his name to race. As he said in his post-race press conference, "We are here to talk about my victory. I paid two years and now I want to show I can win without doping." Absent a seemingly perfunctory "I condemn doping" at the beginning of his remarks, Vino seems to feel that, those two years being over⁶, he is here to talk about the present.

6: Given the career length of the world-class athlete, a two year suspension must be an unbearable eternity for the athlete to live, bereft of professional meaning.

So the question is how those external to Vinokourov react. No man believes himself to be the villain; it is the masses who condemn or exonerate. So far as I could tell, the responses to the whole brouhaha were split between outrage that such a man would be allowed to win, or at least that such a man would have the gall to be outraged at boos and mixed emotions. No one seemed interested in a full-throated defense of a man who presumably has followed all of the rules save the one he was punished for breaking. He is a man who has lost the respect he used to hold in the eyes of the amorphous audience that his peers, fans and media followers constitute.

The wrench in the works here is the impossibility of certainty regarding both the guilt for doping and repentence of the caught doper. When I say that the natural path for the caught doper is an energetic contrition, this is partially because it doesn't necessarily matter how earnest about it the player is. So long as he plays to the cameras when he returns to the public eye, avoids obviously suspicious behavior and generally keeps a low profile as a good citizen, past transgressions will be some combination of forgiven and forgotten. Vino has chosen the harder road of acting as if he has nothing left to prove after his suspension. As a result, he is stuck. As he is performing at roughly the same level he was before his suspension, the reasonable conclusion appears to be that either a) his doping didn’t help him overmuch or b) he is still doping. To view his current results as anything but suspicious requires a pretty generous interpretation of the facts we have and few onlookers seem to be so inclined. We don’t (and can’t) know what exactly he did or didn’t do and what he is or isn’t doing, so his reputation is at the mercy of collective opinion based partially on speculation.

The collective disdain of the public has no mechanism to affect competitive results, but the wisdom of the crowd does have the power to undercut a title by not considering it cleanly won. If it is decided that Vino's victory is fatally flawed because of who he is and what he represents, then there is little he can do to salvage it. He may be able to affect some degree of character rehabilitation moving forward, but it may be that,

Minerva’s Owl Flies at Dusk: Floyd Landis

“The only facts which seem genuinely independent of any scientific theory are those of the present experiences of touch, taste, smell, hearing and sight that each individual scientist is currently experiencing. But such facts are not, of course, public facts, they are private to each individual. So we have the dilemma that, if facts are truly independent of theory they are private and do not form part of the public domain of knowledge; if they are public facts they are affected by all sorts of influences particularly from previous knowledge and upon which their exact form and our confidence in them depend. At least for science, there are no brute facts.”
— Rom Harré, Philosophies of Science

When I started it, this post centered on Boonen and Vinokourov and the role respect plays in their current situations. Earlier this week, however, American pro cycling’s current prodigal sun Floyd Landis set off another earthquake when he (sort of) reversed the defiant position he’s fought for the past four years. Briefly, Landis, who has spent his time since 2006 trying to clear his name after having his Tour de France title stripped for a positive synthetic testosterone test, owned up to using EPO throughout his career and fingered pretty much every current major American cyclist for the same. Lance Armstrong’s Team Radioshack camp has responded by making public emails from Landis they say undermine his credibility, while the cycling press generally has had to come to terms with how much they believe all the parts of Landis’s confession/accusations.

Landis hasn’t truly been relevant to pro cycling since his suspension, but being an American cycling fan has required forming an opinion on his innocence/guilt. At least initially, there were enough discrepancies about his positive test that his protestations of innocence were plausible, and his dogged pursuit of a cleared name helped his case if you were inclined to believe him. He was a sympathetic enough figure that much of the money he spent chasing what he called justice in court was donated by fans.⁷ He was a good man wronged if you believed him or a cheater trying to game the system if you didn’t. After that, the LeMond debacle and his inability to return to professional relevancy undermined a lot of his appeal.

7: He truly was a sympathetic figure for a while: Mennonite boy grows up to become mountain bike racer through practicing against his father’s wishes, then switches to road racing and is the third American to win the Tour de France. It wasn’t too hard to want to believe him when he claimed he was the victim of a false positive.

So Landis’s new remarks are something of a neon example of the trouble that comes with any such revelations about drugs in sports. The source is a man who is about as discredited as you can be. He is not only a convicted doper and at least tacitly complicit in a blackmail attempt, but if you believe him now, he has spent years of his life in the legal pursuit of a lie. Charitably viewed, he could be a man who, after spending years under the shadow of a lie born of self-preservation, has embraced searing honesty to move forward with his life. If you don’t want to give him the benefit of the doubt, here is someone who, after years of ebbing credibility and relevance, lashes out the only way he still can, soiling names of his enemies and maybe trying to blackmail the Armstrong camp.

Landis is lying about all, some or none of this. The VeloNews summary of events, while totally accurate in its treatment of the facts, misses entirely with its conclusion. The whole point, to me, is that these accusations involve what happened seven or so years ago. I don’t see how an investigation would turn up anything new from that period now, especially not something like a positive EPO test. The scrutiny that Armstrong especially has lived under for the past decade makes it vanishingly unlikely that there is damning evidence under some unturned rock. Like any doping accusation that doesn’t revolve around a solid scientific test, there is no way to elevate the charge above hearsay. The only court that will be able to judge here is the court of public opinion.

Whatever his goals and motivations are and were, Floyd Landis is in a position where even his apologists, however many remain, will be hard-pressed to imbue his statements with much sense of credibility. If he’s telling the truth now, he’s been living a lie since 2006. It’s not knowable for those of us who weren’t on the Postal Service squad at the time just how much veracity there is in his accusations, but it’s quite certain that he has lost the respect of just about everyone in the cycling world. For the sake of Landis the man, I hope that he is now committed to being honest, no matter what, but I’m not sure there’s a road here for him to salvage any sort of good name in cycling for himself. He’s too compromised at this point, his actions are too rife with possible ulterior motives, to be trusted. He has lost the respect of his peers, the media and the fans, so unless he can produce some sort of overwhelming evidence of these salacious claims his word will never be trusted.

So What

Respect is one of the main currencies of sports.⁹ Wins and money are the scoreboard statistics, the concrete facts that can be gathered to settle arguments: Bill Russell is a winner because of his eleven championships; Nolan Ryan is the best strikeout pitcher ever to walk the earth. But beyond the accretion of those two things, respect is the most important thing athletes can win or lose. In competition, the respect (or lack thereof) of teammates and opponents dictates strategy, and therefore wins and losses, in games. Its impact is greater, however, outside the lines of competition. The meaning of a victory or championship is not intrinsic, but contingent on society valuing it. Lance Armstrong is a marketing force not because he won seven bike races in France, but because American sports culture, having been told that that was a (italics)big thing(/italics), respected that fact. Sports being, like any part of society, at its base a social construct, the respect of others is what drives recognition. Alexandre Vinokourov may yet earn back his good name, but only if he can succeed and keep his nose clean long enough to shift the narrative of his career arc away from its current focus on his drug suspension. Floyd Landis seems unlikely to ever find the redemption that clearly still means so much to him. Respect plays a role in who wins and who loses, but it has everything to do with whom we think of as winners and losers.

9: All right, of human society in general, but of sports no less for being a part of that.

Bite-Size Morsels

2010-05-11T18:16:00.000-07:00

I'm back from my wanderings, and should have a full-size post up shortly. In the meantime, enjoy the most succinct exegesis of hitting progression in modern baseball, thanks to Baseball Think Factory poster Morty Causa:

Everything in the current game wrt to hitting goes back to Babe Ruth and Ted Willaims. Williams is the philosophy-king of baseball hitting, and Ruth its "natural" genius. Ruth the precursor started it with hitting tons of home runs. Pitchers then had to be more careful. They couldn't let up. They had to be careful what they threw, how they threw it., and where they threw it. Ruth instinctively knew the way to counteract that was to make them even more careful by being patient. Williams took it from there and formed and articulated the philosphy. To be successful, the hitter has to get his pitch. To get his pitch he has to be patient. That means the hitter doesn't just swing at any damn thing the pitcher throws. He has to be selective. The hitter has to know the pitcher's repertoire. He waits on a certain pitch until the count forbids it. This tends to force the pitcher to throw a hitter a hittable pitch more than he otherwise would, although, of course, he, the pitcher, is still more successful than the hitter is. The ineluctable result of all this is that there will be more sort of an evolutionary arms race between the pitcher and the hitter.

Boom. The last century of baseball's core evolution in a paragraph.

Aesthetics And/Or Justice

2010-05-05T13:20:00.000-07:00

"I fear indeed that we shall never rid ourselves of God, since we still believe in grammar." -Nietzsche, The Twilight of the Idols

"The first umpire said, 'There's balls and there's strikes, and I calls 'em like they is.'
The second umpire said, 'Well, I think it's a bit more complicated than that. There's balls and there's strikes, and I calls 'em as I sees 'em.'
The third umpire smiled. 'Well, there's balls. And there's strikes. But they ain't nothing until I calls 'em.'" -Allegorical

In a recent post, The Run of Play's Brian Phillips discusses the structural role of blown calls. His defense of bad calls is beautiful: whereas if a sport's¹ meaning exists in terms of its skeleton of rules, any flaw in enforcement necessarily undermines the sport, "[i]f soccer is a story... the narrative can take in anything and... its aesthetic greatness doesn’t depend on the sympathy between actions and the rules. You wouldn’t stop Macbeth from killing the king, because then you wouldn’t have Macbeth."

1: Run of Play is going steady with soccer, but the issues at hand are obviously more universal. I'm not gonna bother mangling quotes in the name of semantic consistency or avoid relevant non-soccer examples.

The post's paradigmatic example is Maradona's Hand of God goal. In Phillips' exegesis, "the Hand of God was too great and all-comprehending a moment for the rules to have created it: it was a total summation—of Maradona’s character, of the nature of that rivalry, of everything on up to the international climate in the years after Falklands War and arguably the entire 1980s—that couldn’t possibly have existed if it weren’t at a slant to the rules. Lose that and you’re left with a fair, pure, antiseptic match that fulfills the ideal of the sport but sacrifices almost all its truest and deepest significance."

But that presupposes that narrative power is somehow endemic to the moment; or that it occurs in a vacuum; or that, depending on circumstances, it happens or it doesn't. Narrative is constructed retrospectively, though, making that counter-factual sort of glib. Had the Hand of God been called in strict, omniscient compliance with the rules, you're left with an intensely competitive World Cup quarter final featuring "The Goal of the Century", charged with all the baggage of the Faulklands War and ending regulation in a 1-1 tie. Fair, sure. But pure and antiseptic? The hypothetical match might not match the historical match's depth of significance, but there would be no sacrifice, no lack of truth: it would be a different game, signifying differently. But the point remains that la mano de Dios did happen, and it was a pure, searing Moment that transcended its match and struck hard at some supposed locus of truth and justice.

So we're left with the moment as it really happened, to interpret how we will. Analyzing this choice, Phillips offers up a dichotomy that I can't quite get behind. On one hand, there is "the game", a stern, legalistic endeavor seeking only to operate within its parameters. On the other is "the story", casting wide its net without judgement so much as interpretation. For one, there is no good and bad; for the other, no right and wrong². But that formulation both limits the aesthetic possibilities of sports and ignores the very real link between game and story. To my mind, the proper analogy is the relationship between grammar and literature. Language, like sport, is a consummately human realm, with its formal rules and suggestions and exceptions, susceptible of a whole slew of teleological and aesthetic significances. There is value in both Wittgenstein and Gertrude Stein. And just like in sports, the rules and the beauty of language overlap imperfectly.

2: This is, of course, a huge oversimplification, and just like in real life, something is lost when you boil things down this much. Demi-glace this ain't.

A bigger problem is how Phillips tries to reconcile his ideal of soccer's philosophical acceptance of bad calls with the governance of the sport, what he calls the "'game as a story/save the Hand of God' line... as an argument for design". He fully recognizes that premeditated bad calls are a hopeless cause, but totally misses why: "There’s no doubt that a certain amount of bad refereeing enhances the narrative of the game, but that isn’t FIFA’s angle, and in any case giving match officials a certain quota of blown calls to reach would just trade epic accidents for bureaucratic stupidities. The Hand of God wouldn’t mean anything if it had resulted from discretionary refereeing choice built into the rules of the game, because you can’t program spontaneous mysticism."

What's really missing here is the recognition that a blown call is not merely an error or an aberration, it is a failure. To ignore that is to reduce the referees to automatons, to deny them their dignity, agency, and yes, their narrative and tragic power. The NBA has reached the point where referees have name recognition and individual reputations³ for fairness, bias, or incompetence. This is fine grist for the narratively-inclined, but the uncertain ground from which it springs doesn't simply reduce out. It's a necessary part of the game as it is played, by athletes and referees alike, because the parameters are fluid. There is a long history of diegetic whistle-swallowing⁴ in basketball, especially come playoff time. Fundamentally, refereeing is a human endeavor, fluid and rife with contingency.

3: In more concrete analysis, there's some fascinating work going on collecting referee stats.
4: To say nothing of "star calls". Really, let's say nothing about them.

So to say "human error is part of the game" is a lame excuse only holds water if you reduce the game to its rules or reduce the referees to an abstraction. Phillips claims, "The wider the circle within which you’re willing to see the game as aesthetic, in other words, the more you wind up relying on chance and accident," but I don't think that's it at all; the wider the circle within which you're willing to see the game as aesthetic, the more you wind up relying on people.

From Marble of a Broken Sepulchre

2010-04-25T20:08:00.000-07:00

"Irrational streams of blood are staining earth;
Empedocles has thrown all things about;
Hector is dead and there's a light in Troy;
We that look on but laugh in tragic joy."
- from "The Gyres" by William Butler Yeats

Ladies and Gentlemen, Jens Voigt

2010-03-22T20:14:00.001-07:00

From VeloNews:

Changes in the 2010 racing calendar mean that Jens Voigt will not have a chance to make history at Critérium International title later this month. The German veteran has won the two-day race five times, tying a record held by Emile Idée and Raymond Poulidor, but the 38-year-old won’t be going back this year — with Ghent-Wevelgem and Volta a Catalunya coinciding with the two-day race window of Critérium International on March 26-27, Voigt’s Saxo Bank squad is stretched too thin to send a minimum of six riders to the French race.

“Can’t I just start alone? I don’t need a team. All I need is a mechanic and a car!” Voigt told VeloNews. “I can take the jersey on the first day, then I can just hide in the bunch, then you do a time trial. You don’t need anybody else.”

As DeWitt might say, unimprovable.

For We Must Not Tarry Here

2010-02-20T01:32:00.000-08:00

My blogging/sports interests and my overall interests map imperfectly. I am totally dedicated to the first, but it is but a chunk of who I am. From time to time, other parts will by necessity gain primacy. Which is a roundabout way of saying: I'm leaving for the next few months to bike around New Zealand. I understand that this will have a catastrophic effect on my ability follow sports regularly or to contribute to this blog, but, you know, sometimes a man has to step out.

So I leave you in the capable hands of Mr. Samson. I'll be back, and I'll hit it hard when I do, but that won't be until May. Until then, be easy.

Dunk Contest, Lift Up Your Weary Head! (Rebuild! Restore! Reconsider!)

2010-02-18T16:20:00.000-08:00

The All-Star Dunk Contest is a marquee event, one of the ways that each All-Star Break defines itself. It has expanded legends; it has made careers. It has stamped itself on the history of professional basketball. If you've got your ear to the ground, by this point you've probably heard the news that the latest one sucked. That the whole event is broken, even. Now, I don't countenance the notion, no matter how many qualifiers you put on it, that we have exhausted all possible, or even likely, dunks. But the old grey mare, she ain't what she used to be.

The legend of the dunk contest has been built upon a series of performances whose combinations of leaping ability and skill have so exceeded our expectations as to open up, or at least render viable, new conceptual territory for the dunk and, by extension, for the play of basketball. But the development of two trends has fundamentally changed our collective relationship with the dunk and with it, the expectations we bring to the dunk contest.

First, and most simply, the NBA game has been played above the rim for a long time now, and what was once revolutionary is now commonplace. "When Isaiah Rider pulled off the through-the-legs 'East Bay Funk Dunk' in 1994, the entire arena exploded, and Charles Barkley called it the best dunk he'd ever seen. On Saturday, DeMar DeRozan executed a more difficult version of the same dunk and received a score of 42. The problem isn't that dunkers are worse -- it's that we've already seen most every kind of dunk that can be done." ^1,2

1: I'm quoting this post by Eric Freeman in The Baseline. I happened across it when this post was in its fetal development, and its formulation of the relationship between in-game and contest dunking obviated everything I had already written on the subject, then took that as a springboard and made a beautiful conceptual jump that hadn't even occurred to me. If you haven't read it in its entirety, please do. Hats off, Mr. Freeman.
2: Dunking is sort of asymptotic-- cf. (with some disclaimers) this post. (To wit: In the name of clarity, I was objecting less to the concept of the asymptote than to its treatment as an absolute, rather than a statistical fit line with accompanying potential for outliers. And, of course, there is an aesthetic component to dunking which is totally irreducible to those terms, though if someone wants to graph it, I want to see.) In any case, the best of all possible jumpers only has so much hangtime before (s)he starts coming back down and has to get the ball into the rim, and that limits what it is physically possible to do.

More problematic is how the internet has made the literally pure dunker a viable phenomenon. Once, a venue for culturally relevant dissemination of dunking had to be earned through actual on-court performance. Now, anywhere there's a camera and a basket, a whole spectrum of guys from the D-League to the And1 tour to the local Y can, untethered by even time, soar. The dunk as spectacle has been developed no less than the dunk as tactic, and much faster. The last time a dunk contest dropped like a bomb was 2000, a full five years before the advent of YouTube; the whole modality of the internet was vastly different.

And as our expectations catch up with the abilities of contestants, we are commensurately less amazed by what we see. They are reduced to plumbing the depths of technical difficulty or to gimmickry. The first leads to lots of missed attempts; the second, while it can be entertaining and occasionally great, is a sort of lateral transposition away from basketball itself. Each in its own way sort of shits on the potential to redefine what can happen on a basketball court.

Look: the problem is not that there is an event which highlights the dunking abilities of NBA players. However jaded we may be, the dunk is still one of the most spectacular and exciting parts of the game, and All-Stars are some of the best dunkers in the world. The problem is the historicity of the event made explicit through the primacy of the dunk qua dunk-- if that's what you want, go YouTube "James White" or "Frederick Weis". The dunk contest needs to be fundamentally realigned, turned away from the past and towards the players themselves.

So, we make the dunk contest into a game of H.O.R.S.E. This would provide bottomless wells of entertainment and drama in trash talking and the attempt to match the best the competition can throw at you. It gets rid of the built-in advantage enjoyed by anyone under 6 feet, which I'm cool with³. It provides strong incentive to hit dunks the first try without losing incentive to make them difficult and creative. It destroys the viability of practicing a few tricky dunks to compensate for a lack in general ability. It will correlate better, if not perfectly, with the sort of body control and adaptability that make one successful at actually scoring on people. And, from the other end, it will never end in a 3-point contest between Durant and Rondo, which come on.

3: If you can get onto a modern NBA roster, you don't get morphological pity votes. Sorry.

Seriously, even handicapping for multiple takes and CGI gadzookery (which do undermine it quite a lot on the level of its actual "dunks"), that McDonald's commercial with LeBron and Dwight beat the entire All-Star weekend at its own game.