Victory is Sweet As When You've Known Defeat

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?

No One Man Should Have All That Power

“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!