The Contador Uncertainty Principle

“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.

Aesthetics And/Or Justice

"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.

Racing Like a Pro Now

"Today this private space has been invaded and whittled down by technological reality. Mass production and mass distribution claim the entire individual, and industrial psychology has long since ceased to be confined to the factory. The manifold processes of introjection seem to be ossified in almost mechanical reactions. The result is, not adjustment but mimesis: an immediate identification of the individual with his society and, through it, with the society as a whole...Thus emerges a pattern of one-dimensional thought and behavior in which ideas, aspirations, and objectives that, by their content, transcend the established universe of discourse and action are either repelled or reduced to terms of this universe. They are redefined by the rationality of the given system and of its quantitative extension.”
– Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man

The Education of an Athlete




I recently plowed through Bill Simmons’s Book of Basketball. I have a lot of opinions about it, but this is not a review, so I won’t get too into it here.¹ One thing that grabbed me, though, was a point he made about a player’s finger roll.² He talked about the homogenization of the route elite players (at least growing up in America) take to get to the NBA. AAU camps and traveling teams create a monolithic culture where everyone works toward the same platonic jumpshot form (Hello, Ray Allen!) and idiosyncrasies are ironed out of everyone’s game. I’m not saying that there isn’t a right way to shoot a jumper (God knows no one should have to shoot like Shawn Marion), but I do think that the paradigmatic nature of sports culture is accelerating, and as a result valuable avenues of athletic possibility are dismissed or not even considered.

1: My take: however you feel about Bill Simmons, this book will likely reinforce that. He’s a pretty good writer with a pretty set schtick. If you hate him, I doubt you’ll like the book. If you love him, you probably already own it. It’s a flawed but still quite worthy addition to the basketball book pantheon. For way more in-depth analysis/review, head over here.

2: No, I can’t remember whom. I thought it was Dr J or Earl the Pearl, but a cursory look didn’t turn it up, and I’m not wading through 700 pages for two sentences. Sorry.

I blame television. Bear with me a bit and I’ll explain. Bill James gets at what I mean in this conversation with Joe Posnanski when he talks about professionalism:

“Bill pulls out his spiral notebook -- he always brings a spiral notebook to games -- and on a page he draws two ladders, one on top of the other. The higher ladder is the ‘professional’ ladder. The lower ladder he calls the ‘amateur’ ladder. He then draws a picture of someone dangling from the bottom rung of the professional ladder. That, he says, is the Kansas City Royals.

‘It's so important for them to be considered professional,’ he says, ‘that they are unwilling to try anything that might make people think they're amateurish.’”

He’s certainly correct,³ but I’d like to extend the point further. I think that a fear of looking amateurish is hampering not only the low men on the totem pole of professional sports, but also high-level amateur sports, and therefore everyone coming into pro sports. It used to be the case that the line demarcating amateur and professional sporting endeavor matched exactly the line of national media coverage.⁴ The only reason you cared about high school sports was if it was your local team or a team they were likely to play. This of course has broken down, leading to things like LeBron James’s senior year playing out partly on ESPN and the like. As I write this, the Wendy’s High School Heisman Awards are on ESPN2. The college Heisman was first awarded in 1935; the High School Heisman was started in 1994. Instead of playing for scholarships or draft position, elite prospects are already playing to establish a brand and jockey for endorsements. There’s nothing inherently wrong with this; it’s the way things have been done in Europe with soccer for decades, for instance. The issue is this fear this arms race creates of not looking “professional”. Half-formed players can, do and should make mistakes. They’re works in progress. Being afraid to make a mistake is how you stagnate, and being afraid to do anything a non-conventional way totally stymies anyone not ideally suited for the current best way of doing it. If you’re trying to impress someone who has Nike’s ear, you don’t want to look silly toying with an unorthodox that doesn’t work yet; you want to have a textbook jumper, forty-inch vertical leap and nothing that’ll make them scratch their head.

3: Though I think his idea about Kansas City stocking its minors with pitchers who throw under 90 is sort of asinine. I do think that velocity is overrated in baseball, but not wildly so. You can be successful without lighting up the radar gun, but your margin for error is thinner the slower you throw. Look at Brian Bannister, for example. The guy has everything you need to succeed except velocity, and consequently has ups and downs. Stocking your system with guys like that might find you the next Greg Maddux, but you would have to deal with the entirety of the haystack to get the occasional needle.

4: For a number of reasons, I’m going to consider NCAA Division I sports to be on the professional side of the divide here, despite the fact that the players receive no (legal) money. At least at the highest levels, the “student-athletes” are students in no more than name.

Television also gets at this more elementally. In addition to driving the media exposure and advertising that pushes the horizon of where your career starts earlier and earlier, an inundation of coverage also pushes the current paradigm on a young player’s consciousness. If you get your sports intake from box scores in the newspapers and the game of the week on network television, you’re going to spend a lot of time imagining how players operate and going with whatever works for you. If you have a league pass, highlights on the internet and the blogosphere, you’re going to be working on whatever works for your heroes. You’re going to be trying to get AI’s crossover, Derek Jeter’s batting stance, not come up with your own whole cloth. I realize that this makes me sound like more than a little bit of a reactionary Luddite, and I’m not suggesting we collectively renounce mass media, but I do think it’s true that this oversaturation ossifies the edifices in charge and narrows development into mimesis.


Case Study: Bill Belichick⁵

"Convictions are more dangerous foes of truth than lies." – Friedrich Nietzsche

I’m not just talking about player development, either. I’ve had a pet theory for a while that, while professionalism has long been an emphasis in sports, the content of the notion has undergone a shift over the past decade or two from centering on social reaction to physical action. Watch a sports game from several decades ago. When players do something spectacular, they act as if it is nothing. When they congratulate each other, it is largely handshakes. At the same time, a lot of kooky things were going on. Knuckleball pitchers. Finger rolls. Eddie Gaedel, for goodness’ sake! I’m certainly oversimplifying, but I think it’s not false to say that the expectation was that you could play how you wanted (legally), so long as you comported yourself. Contrast that to today’s players, who largely seem to be trying to approach some sort of platonic standard, but celebrate plays as if they had won a game. ⁶ I have no real issue with the move away from emphasizing social decorum. It’s the other part that bothers me.

5: Two other stories I thought about using as case stories:
a. Dick Fosbury’s improbable and accidental invention of the Fosbury Flop. He revolutionized the high jump in a way that was totally dismissed by the track and field powers-that-be until they couldn’t ignore its results. (He also only saw high jump as a way to get into college, and seems to have had about as much fun as you can at an Olympics when he was in Mexico City. The article is a great read for several reasons.)
b. Cliff Young was an Australian sheep farmer who torched an endurance race through the simple strategy of not stopping to sleep. He revolutionized a race by using a tactic others hadn’t even considered as possible. (He also sounds like a stone badass and gave away every cent of prize money he won, which is spectacular.)

6: Please don’t think this is a reactionary rant against celebrations in sports. They do annoy me, but I don’t see them as any sort of moral degradation, and in fact often feel such reactionary arguments are wrongheaded and racially tinged. I’ve just always preferred the guy who doesn’t feel the need to shout about himself.

In week ten of the current NFL season, the Patriots had a six point lead but were stuck at a fourth-and-two on roughly their own thirty yard line near the end of the game. Conventional wisdom screams punt in such situations, but Belichick decided to go for it. The Pats fell just short of converting, and the Colts marched in for the game-winning touchdown. Belichick was excoriated by the announcers and commentators, including some former players. The move was decried as a crazy gamble that betrayed a lack of faith in his defense. The thing is, by the percentages Belichick made the right call. You would just never know it from listening to 95% of the media coverage. There is no examination of the percentages⁷, because received wisdom gives you all the assurance you need that you’re right. If you cloak yourself in righteousness, you don’t need to worry about being right. Nobody checks to see if The Right Way is correct.

7: And this isn’t rocket science here. Check out that NY Times article. Combining two percentages isn’t regression analysis; you would hope anyone with a high school education (and these ex-professional football broadcasters are all college graduates!) could do it without breaking a sweat…

Decision-making in sports is almost wholly reactionary. If Belichick had punted and lost, the chattering would all have been about his team’s defensive woes and/or Peyton Manning’s late-game heroics. By having the rare courage to buck pro football’s decision-making paradigm, Belichick got absolutely creamed in the media even though he was right. The problem is that he made a percentage play and got burned. Most coaches will happily give up a 60/40 chance of winning for a 50/50 if the 40% will blow up in their face, because they’ll get backed up by their boss(es). Chuck Klosterman makes the point pretty convincingly that, for all its conservative aura, the NFL is far more radical in its willingness to accept new tactics on the field, but this only holds at a macro level. Coaches will run the wildcat, but they'll still do things like punt to save face even when it reduces their chance of winning. Baseball doesn’t even gladly do this, as the slow acceptance of statistical analysis has shown. Branch Rickey was fully aware of the importance of on-base percentage sixty years ago, but Murray Chass still goes apoplectic over some sabermetric assertions. (And he’s hardly alone.)


The Point

To take an (unfortunately fantastic) example: the mere absence of all advertising and of all indoctrinating media of information and entertainment would plunge the individual into a traumatic void where he would have the chance to wonder and to think, to know himself (or rather the negative of himself) and his society. Deprived of his false fathers, leaders, friends, and representatives, he woud have to learn his ABCs again. But the words and sentences which he would form might come out very differently, and so might his aspirations and fears. – Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man

We have built a magnificent chain of cause and effect, of resources and effort which fuel our major sports. They are channeled into a narrow set of options, which leads to ever greater achievement within that paradigm, but stifles anything foreign to its worldview. The unwritten rules of sport have a tighter and tighter grip on everything within their purview the more money and prestige the sport controls. Victors write history, but it’s more pernicious than that. Victors write the present too, and the media writes both on the victors’ terms.

Think about the treatment of the Seven Seconds or Less Suns. They never won a championship, but that, so far as anyone can prove, is as much a product of Amar’e Stoudemire and Boris Diaw leaving the bench when Robert Horry mugged Steve Nash as it is of any fundamental flaw in their game. But, barring the current Suns pulling off a huge upset or Mike D’Antoni’s Knicks coming up with an Impossible Dreamesque season, the old saws that “defense wins championships” and uptempo ball can’t win consistently will go unchallenged. Conventional wisdom will always do a poor job of separating relevancy and contingency, and we pay our storytellers and interlocutors for packaging narrative, not fact. So Steve Nash’s golden years will go down more Scythian than Hellenic.

I have no solutions to offer. Much like Marcuse in his critique of industrial society in One-Dimensional Man, I see ours as a trap that has been sprung. The finger roll is dead, unless some unheralded wonder rises to enough of a height that little kids will be emulating it. Granny shots are a good idea on free throws, but do you think we’ll see anyone trying that? The perceived rules are now as important as the written rules, and the narrowing of possibility that we’re left with saddens me. The arc of sporting history will be bent to their will. What magnificent possible players will we never see? I have no idea, and you don’t either.

Second Acts in American Lives

An athlete retires. If they were great, there are three ways it plays out. Either they step out not too far past the height of their powers (Michael Jordan the first couple times, Barry Sanders), they play out the string until they are a shell of what they were, but still good enough to get a spot on the court¹ (Michael Jordan the last time, Craig Biggio), or they get injured badly enough that they can’t or won’t carry on (Barbaro, not Darius Miles). But what if they were one, or even several tiers down from the top? I suppose they theoretically have the same three options on how things end, but if you’re a marginal talent, the distance between the first two is greatly compressed, and whichever way you go, Doug Glanville points out² that your choice/the situation thrust upon you is met with deafening indifference.

1: I pretty much always have mixed feelings here. It's always sad to see a man diminished, but there's something raw and human in not being able to quit, in loving the sport and moments of glory more than you love your reputation.

2: It makes sense that Glanville would end up writing in the New York Times. The man couldn't hit, but he always could think.

The sport moves on, the world doesn’t even notice, but the man who was that athlete is there, staring at the rest of a life. You’re roughly 30, in most cases, and have spent the bulk of your life training, preparing to play, playing and recovering from one single pursuit. If you went to college, you probably majored in some combination of your sport, partying and avoiding academic ineligibility. Of all the skills you’ve spent years developing, the only one applicable to a life outside the walls of your old kingdom is that you might be good in front of a camera.

Money is probably also a problem, or at least a nuisance. If you’re not a star, you probably weren’t raking in millions in sponsorship dough, and your salary, though high in almost any real terms, probably didn’t get salted away for this eventuality.³ Even if you do have enough in the bank to be comfortably middle class for the next four/five decades, I think that’s rather anathema to most of the athlete mindset. I’m strongly of the opinion that you have to be borderline pathologically competitive to make it as a pro, barring some sort of obscene physical skillset. A life of idle, average ease probably won’t satisfy the psychology that made you.⁴

3: If you haven't read it, go see this Sports Illustrated article on the finances of retired players. The short (staggering) version is that within two year of retiring, 78% of NFL athletes are functionally broke, while within five years 60% of NBA players are, but the whole article is worth a look.

4: Also worth a look is this article about the unraveling web of lies that is Lenny Dykstra's financial empire. So much for the days Nails was giving stock tips on the internet...

So this is where we end up. You put on that suit, you fake the smile, you press the flesh and try to make deals. You are Doug Mirabelli, former backup catcher, Michigan realtor.