On the Ball City!

Kick off, throw in, have a little scrimmage,
Keep it low, a splendid rush, bravo, win or die;
On the ball, City, never mind the danger,
Steady on, now's your chance,
Hurrah! We've scored a goal.
City!, City!, City!
– Lyrics to 'On the Ball City,' the official song of Norwich City F.C., originally penned in the 1800s and considered to be the oldest football song still in use

This blog was simply meant to be, as I’ve somehow stumbled my way into being a supporter of an endless series of teams that never seem to win anything. The one exception to this is the San Francisco Giants, of course, and I can think of nothing better to do on this 80° San Francisco day than go out to Phone Co. Park and watch the Jints go all St. Patrick on the asses of those dirty, nasty Snakes from Arizona. But since I grew up in the Pacific Northwest, which is about as inarable a landscape as it gets when it comes to winning, I’ve been saddled with failure on all sorts of levels – the Mariners perpetual ineptitude, the Seahawks bad Karma, the Canucks running the gamut from laughingstock to juggernaut heartbreaker during my lifetime but never breaking through, and the Sonics, of course, RIP Sonics, whose move to Oklahoma City constitutes a scar and a stain that never gets scrubbed away. And then there is Washington State, of course. Sigh …

And so I go to Great Britain as a student in the late 1980s to a lovely and pleasant little city called Norwich and they happen to have a terrific soccer club, Norwich City F.C. And I was hooked, of course, and have become a supporter for life, appreciating both the quality of the product on the field at the time and the ethos of the club as a whole. Indeed, at that time the Canaries were coming off one of their most successful years ever – a season in which they’d been top of the table in Div. 1 for most of the season, only to falter in the final month and wind up 4th, and reached the semifinals of the F.A. Cup to boot. They had a roster of top-flight talent, some of whom would be playing in the summer of 1990 in the World Cup in Italy, and they played an attractive passing game which was decidedly different than the traditional English highball style of the time. Much like their yellow-and-green American counterparts, the Oakland A’s, the Canaries have always had to do things a little bit differently to compete, being a small club compared to their Div. 1 counterparts – the urban area of Norwich has a population less than 200,000, and the Canaries’ home grounds, Carrow Road, has a capacity of 27,000. They had stockpiled their roster at the time through beating the bushes looking for players, buying low and selling high.

And they’d never won much of anything, of course, and still never have.

Norwich City has never won a league title, never won an F.A. Cup, and never even as much as been to the final of the F.A. Cup. They’re the good guys of English football, a plucky, tenacious, and proud club that’ll show up and give you a good game with a loyal throng and good-natured lot of supporters behind them. (Well, those clownshoes from Ipswich probably don’t think we’re the good guys. Pox on them.) The Yellow Army always takes an encouraging, pragmatic stance when it comes to rooting on City – enjoying the club’s achievements in the moment, and not allowing the lack of championships in the past nor the unlikelihood of championships in the future to tarnish the beautiful game at Carrow Road on a weekend afternoon.

And this past Saturday, the Canaries had match at Carrow Road with the Royals from Reading F.C., a match which took on enormous significance. After assembling a 10-match unbeaten streak earlier in the season, including wins over Arsenal and Manchester United, the Canaries’ season has completely gone off the rails. They’ve been godfuckingterrible for four months, as the offense can’t score, they can’t win on the road (1 win all season away from Carrow Road), and they’ve conceded countless numbers of late goals in losses which have led to a hideous goal difference. Daydreamy early season talk of competing for a European place had given away to a far more serious concern, as the spectre of potential relegation reared its ugly head.

Relegation is concept that is notably absent from American sports. And given some of the awful products professional clubs churn out in America, it probably shouldn’t be. (I mean, really, why should we have to put up with the 5-11 Arizona Cardinals every year?) Whereas the MLB and the NFL and such are singular entities with franchises distributed to various cities, football in England (and, indeed, most everywhere else in the world where soccer matters) is structured as a loose association of clubs in a multi-tiered system. There are 92 clubs in the four divisions of English professional football, with countless more clubs scattered in regional leagues below that. Finish in the bottom three of the league and you get demoted to a division below.

This structure serves well to keep talent from being diluted, of course, because the best players will naturally move to the highest levels of competition. For the sake of providing an example, I will make myself authoritarian ruler of the NFL and decree that the league is dividing into 2 divisions this coming season, based upon last year’s results:

XP’s NFL Division 1 (with records from last season)
13-3: Atlanta, Denver
12-4: New England, Houston
11-4-1: San Francisco
11-5: Indianapolis, Green Bay, Seattle
10-6: Baltimore, Cincinnati, Washington, Minnesota, Chicago
9-7: N.Y. Giants
8-8: Pittsburgh, Dallas

XP’s NFL Division 2
7-8-1: St. Louis
7-9: Carolina, New Orleans, Tampa Bay, Miami, San Diego
6-10: N.Y. Jets, Buffalo, Tennessee
5-11: Cleveland, Arizona
4-12: Oakland, Philadelphia, Detroit
2-14: Jacksonville, Kansas City

In XP’s NFL, only the teams in Division 1 can compete for the Super Bowl. Oh yeah, and all of that TV revenue for the league goes expressly to the top tier, because let’s be honest here, who wants to watch Jacksonville play Detroit? So if you’re in Division 1, your revenues just doubled, which also means that your budgets for players just doubled as well, and there are some pretty good players to be had down in Div. 2 there, now aren’t there?

So think about what the quality of play would be like in XP’s NFL Division 1, as XP the authoritarian decrees the 16-game NFL schedule features a round-robin format where every team played each other once. with every team basically stacked 53-deep with talent, this would make for an incredible quality of play.

But the genius of such a structure has always been that it eliminates many of those pointless endeavours in getting the season over with that you see in American sports where two teams with no realistic shot at achieving anything go through the motions in the late stages of the season. This is because being relegated is an absolute disaster with dire consequences for your club. So not only would the teams at the top of XP’s NFL Division 1 be jockeying for playoff positions, but teams at the bottom would be doing everything imaginable to avoid being dropped to Division 2, and desperation leads to some remarkable late-season doings. Virtually every significant European football league has some club that is never any good yet seems to always pull a Houdini act at the end of the year to avoid being dropped. It makes the battles at the bottom of the table as compelling for the spectator and the viewer as the battles at the top.

And don’t fret, members of XP’s NFL Division 2 – claim the Div. 2 league title and you’ll move up to the top division, and reap all of the prestige and glory that come with it – not to mention the revenues, of course. Did I mention the revenues? So all of THOSE Div. 2 games, while not being great viewing in and of themselves, also take on huge importance, because the goal for those clubs is ultimately break through and join the top level. And that achievement of breaking through, for a bunch of teams like the Arizona Cardinals or Detroit Lions who have never won anything, would be worthy of a civic celebration onto itself.

Such is the case in England, of course, where winning promotion to the EPL is a HUGE deal. Unlike the winner-take-all spoils of America, multi-tiered soccer creates multiple reasons for happiness. In the big picture, the American in me says that Norwich City F.C. has never won ‘anything,’ but winning the second division three times in their history is nothing to sneeze at. The last of those second-tier titles came in 2004, after which the club put on one of the worst displays of EPL football imaginable the following season, going months before notching their first win and quickly being relegated again. City’s fortunes further faded and they found themselves subjected to the indignity of being relegated to the third tier in 2009, at which point they righted the ship. Two successful campaigns led to two promotions, and the Canaries were back in the English Premier League come the summer of 2011, given keys to the penthouse in the most exclusive sporting association imaginable, one they had helped to found 20 years earlier and one which hadn’t hesitated to throw their ass out when they couldn’t produce any quality on the pitch.

The EPL was founded in the early 1990s, a breakaway entity that nonetheless works within the traditional, multi-tiered structure of English football. The top 22 clubs (which has been reduced to 20 since) formed their own private corporation and negotiated their own sponsorship and broadcast rights deals. Each club is an equal shareholder in the organization – with membership dependent on the on-field results, of course. The stated aim at the time of the EPL’s creation was to generate more revenue so that English clubs could both prosper and also compete on the continent, as the game was clearly trending in the direction of heightened importance of international club competitions. To that end, the EPL has been remarkably successful.  The global broadcast deals now are worth somewhere around £3,000,000,000 or so, and the league generates annual revenues into the billions of pounds as well. English clubs have won four titles in the European Champions League since its inception in 1992, and finished runners-up on four more occasions.

Quite simply, the EPL has become among the greatest shows of the sporting world. With the infusion of billions in television revenue, the relaxation of international work restrictions due to the E.U., and its place as the cradle of the game, England has also seen 20 years of the world’s greatest players playing the game domestically. Some English naysayers have noted that such a prevalence of foreign talent has cost the nation dearly when it comes to creating top flight players for the World Cup and Euros, of course, as teams such as Arsenal and Chelsea have been known to field entirely foreign lineups, but there can be no doubt that the national profile, when it comes to football, has never been higher.

But with promotion to the top flight of English football comes an alarming new level of uncertainty, because the drop off between the EPL and the Football League Championship (a gussied up way of saying Division 2) is SO GREAT. Broadcast revenues alone for EPL clubs run in the £45,000,000-£50,000,000 range per club, whereas Div. 2 clubs aren’t likely to generate more than £1,000,000 or so of interest. This steady infusion of monster amounts of capital has helped contribute to the stratification within the EPL itself, as clubs which were already large to begin with, such as Manchester United and Arsenal, have grown even larger and consistently been able to support the lavish wage bills necessary to remain competitive. As the revenues have escalated in the EPL, so has the cost of doing business, as the average player salary has gone up tenfold in twenty years, and the challenge for the clubs like Norwich City is to figure out how to compete. Sure, adding £50,000,000 to your budget is a nice problem to have, but what happens if your season goes sideways and you find yourself in the so-called “drop zone” (the bottom three teams are relegated every year), at which point you’re budget goes up in smoke?

And it can happen, of course. Bad seasons happen for a number of reasons – maybe it’s a spate of injuries, maybe it’s some bad transfer decisions, maybe your club was purchased as a toy by Icelandic bankers and is leveraged to the point of being insolvent. Relegation can have disastrous consequences for your club, which is almost inevitably forced to go into fire sale mode and sell of every good player you have (usually at buyer’s market rates). Often times, relegated clubs have also accrued massive debt in the attempts to compete at the highest level, debts which come due when the EPL revenues have run dry. A good number of the original founding clubs of the EPL back in 1992 now flounder about in the third division, and one – Wimbledon – did the seemingly unthinkable and relocated to Milton Keynes.

The Canaries have focused, in their EPL return, to being fiscally responsible. A lot of the newcomers take the approach of “let’s try to get through this” in their first year in the EPL, hoping to do their best with the players who got them this far and squeak out enough points during the season to avoid being relegated again. (It’s only happened twice that all the newcomers survived.) The Canaries’ Moneyball ethos – buy low, sell high, do things differently – has served them well this time around, as the Canaries were far better prepared for the rigours of the EPL this time around and finished a very respectable 12th in 2012. Two years’ worth of EPL revenues have allowed the club to pay off debt and stand on squarely solid footing, and the club even pulled off something of a coup recently by scooping up a talented young Dutch striker from a financially flailing Portuguese club, and doing so right under the noses of some larger suitors. It was a brash sort of signing not usually seen from Norwich City, a move signifying intent to do more than just survive the EPL, but actually compete for the coveted places in European competition (with accompanying revenues, of course). Norwich City’s one foray into continental competition is decidedly memorable – the club defeated Bayern Munich in Munich, no less – and stands as the high point of the club’s golden age – an era I had stumbled upon when I arrived there as a student 20+ years ago and lasted until 1995, when the team crashed out of the EPL and promptly spent the next eight years wandering the wastelands of the second division.

And that’s what we DO NOT want to happen this year, so enough dabbling in nostalgia and let’s get back to the matters at hand – the Canaries haven’t played worth a damn in 2013 and now survival is no sure thing. And with Norwich sinking towards the bottom of the table, skirting the edges of the drop zone, come rumours of what could happen were the club to fall out of the EPL. Indeed, the agent for the Dutch striker I mentioned before, a player with the wonderfully Dutch name of Ricky van Wolfswinkel, has said the deal is off if Norwich sinks to Div. 2. Norwich disputes this, of course, but I don’t really want to find out. Just WIN SOME DAMN GAMES and settle the issue already! I mean, here at IN PLAY LOSE World HQ, losing is a fairly common (and quite interesting) phenomenon which I try to take in stride, but I understand well that a loss in this game, and the potential loss of a place in the EPL as a consequence, could be disastrous to my favourite football club. The game with Reading on Saturday (a club already virtually doomed to relegation themselves, sitting last in the standings) was therefore of tremendous importance. The three points were vital …

Norwich City 2:1 Reading F.C.

Whew!

The win and the three points moves the Canaries up to 13th place, seven points clear of the drop zone with four games left to play. They aren’t out of the woods yet, but they have three manageable games ahead of them where taking points are realistic, beginning this week against Stoke City (Suck it Frentz! The Potters are going down!) They also have a game at Manchester City which appears to be a beast, but Man City had their designs on defending the EPL title and have come up wofully short. They’re fairly comfortably slotted into a European qualifying place, and they have an FA Cup final to prep for, so its unclear what sort of focus they’re going to have for what is, to them, a pretty meaningless game with Norwich City. And as I said before, the season gets wacky this time of year, with the bottom clubs suddenly channeling their inner Man Uniteds and picking up points which have eluded them all year, often at the expense of middle-of-the-run clubs who aren’t in danger of being relegated but also aren’t in the running for any sort of spoils. (In other words, they no longer care.) So we loyal members of the Yellow Army cannot breathe a sigh of relief quite yet. We must remain en garde and on the ball …

In the days to call, which we have left behind,
Our boyhood’s glorious game,
And our youthful vigour has declined
With its mirth and its lonesome end;
You will think of the time, the happy time,
Its memories fond recall
When in the bloom of your youthful prime
We’ve kept upon the ball

Kick off, throw in, have a little scrimmage,
Keep it low, a splendid rush, bravo, win or die;
On the ball, City, never mind the danger,
Steady on, now’s your chance,
Hurrah! We’ve scored a goal.

Let all tonight then drink with me
To the football game we love,
And wish it may successful be
And in one grand united toast
Join player, game and song
And fondly pledge your pride and toast
Success to the City club.

Kick off, throw in, have a little scrimmage,
Keep it low, a splendid rush, bravo, win or die;
On the ball, City, never mind the danger,
Steady on, now’s your chance,
Hurrah! We’ve scored a goal.

What the hell was that?

I've never understood the appeal of, nor the need for, "reality TV," because we already have it. A sporting event is live, improvised, unscripted, contains some interesting dialogue (usually too colourful for American TV, of course) and wholly unpredictable. No two games are ever quite the same and, even though you may think you know how it will turn out (and there is a whole complicated infrastructure – legal and otherwise – to allow you to wager on how certain you are), you never really do know quite what you're going to get. And there are times you see something on the field or the court or the ice that you've never seen before.

Or that anyone has seen before. Like this mess on the basepaths.

Uh ... what the hell was that?

I've had to explain this play now several times, and basically it goes like this: Segura and Braun wind up on 2nd at the same time. Segura is entitled to 2nd, because he had started there and it wasn't a force play (he didn't have to run in this situation, even though he made the mess by getting picked off), so when the Cubs fielder tags out Braun, Braun is out. It's as if Braun's standing in the middle of the basepath or somewhere in centerfield or something. Doesn't matter that he's standing on the 2nd base bag. So Braun is out, but Segura didn't know what was up, and thought he was out so he started trotting off towards the Brewers dugout, which is on the 1st base side of the field. It's only when the Milwaukee coach points out that he's not out that Segura scampers back to the sanctuary of 1st base, having gone legally backwards. Yes, that's actually legal in this situation. Rule 7.08 (i) allows a runner to run bases in reverse order unless it's "for purpose of confusing the defense or making a travesty" of gam. Segura wasn't doing either of that. He just spazzed and didn't know the rule. (And a case could be made that the Cubs are confused and a travesty regardless.)

This whole situation is pretty ridiculous, but it could've been even weirder: suppose Segura slides back into the 2nd base bag and Braun is standing there and the Cubs tag him but not Braun when they're both on the bag, at which point Segura trots off towards the 1st base dugout again. Then what would've happened? Well, believe it or not, Braun would still be out, because he technically would've passed Segura on the basepaths. Basically, Braun gets hosed in this play no matter what, but he was the MVP two years ago so he can live with the indignity.

Incompetence is often the mother of invention, of course, as bad teams seemingly invent ways to lose. And baseball has more weird stuff than any other sport. You can go back and rewrite the rulebook every year, and still situations come up regularly which no umpire really knows what to do with. I've seen the ball roll under a base. I've seen mammoth home runs become outs, and routine pop-ups becomes doubles, because the ball caromed off one of the assorted speakers hanging from the roof of the Kingdome. I remember the Astros losing a playoff game, in part, because they only got three outs in an inning instead of four.

And now I've seen a guy steal 1st base.

Segura wasn't credited with stealing 1st base in the stats, which is just as well, since the SABR statisticians say there is no way to key into the database the act of a baserunner going backwards on the bases. Ha ha, you smartypants stat nerds! The baseball gods have found a way to flummox you yet! We'll just invent new plays you've never seen and don't know how to code! Ha ha!

And it was oddly appropriate Segura got thrown out stealing 2nd the second time – after all, it sort of looks like he's off the bag when he gets tagged and the umpire misses it. It's maybe the strangest thing I've ever seen in baseball, although someone directed me to this gem from Lloyd Moseby, for which there are no words.

Poetry in Motion

As a treat here before the NBA playoffs begin, I thought that I would post this video for those of you basketball junkies out there to watch and marvel over. This is from 1992: The Golden St. Warriors vs. Seattle SuperSonics in Game 3 of the best-of-5 first round of the Western Conference playoffs. If you have a little time, this is worth viewing. This game is the greatest single sporting event that I’ve ever attended in person:

I went back and watched this video in full, because I’d never actually seen it before. Or if you don’t want to wait it out, skip ahead to the 1:30:30 mark of the video for the greatest lob pass in the history of the NBA – that sounds like hyperbole, but given the situation, you can make that argument. I also went to Game 4 of this series, which was almost as remarkable, and became famous in the annals of the NBA for this display by Shawn Kemp.

This video is a natural springboard for several future IN PLAY LOSE posts, of course, as a lot of us who were at this game thought we were witnessing the dawning of a great new rivalry between two up-and-coming teams that would dominate the league. Alas, the Warriors soon reverted to being The Warriors. (And that Bill Simmons profile of the Warriors is the Big Kahuna of all LOSE posts likely to never be matched. I have to give him some credit for giving me the idea for this blog.)

This game and playoff series with the W's was the dawn of a fascinating multiyear run by the Sonics. It was a long strange trip full of lunacy, despair, anger, disappointment, and also some amazing basketball. It was all wildly entertaining and culminated with a trip to the NBA finals. Alas, the Sonics are no more … or are they? … hmm …

But we'll deal with that stuff later. Instead, I urge you to watch this video and witness just how truly beautiful the game of basketball can be.

Boston

We are having seafood for dinner. My usual impulse when I have an exceptionally lousy day is to combat it with seafood. The day after I was pinkslipped from my job at the University of California, KC and I went to the greatest seafood joint ever, intent on eating 1,000,000,000 oysters. Now, it would take most people decades to snarf 1,000,000,000 oysters, but KC and I can do it in a couple of hours. We wound up only eating about 300,000,000 or so, however, since they had other things on the menu and we decided we would try some of their fresh tombo … which is what I am making for dinner. I call this particular dish Sicilian Tuna Carpaccio since it’s served in a similar fashion to the beef dish. I whip out my light sabre of a fish knife and slice it thin to the point of transparency. Red onions, capers, olive oil, fresh lemon. That right there is the greatest food in the history of foods.

I need these sorts of reminders from time to time of goodness – and few things are better on my palate as an impeccably fresh tuna served raw. And this definitely felt like a bad day, even though nothing happened to me personally. I couldn’t help, however, but be concerned when I saw what was going on in Boston. I have family in the city. I also a number of great friends there, a good number of whom happen to be avid runners, so seeing film of the carnage from multiple bomb blasts near the finish line of the Boston Marathon immediately sent me into disquiet. I worried for all of their safety. Furthermore, a good number more of my friends were in the Boston area over the weekend for a tournament, a good number of whom were likely playing the role of tourist as well as competitor over the long Boston holiday weekend. So I was immediately pretty worried, but I’m pleased to report that, as of this writing, all of the people who I feared for are accounted for.

Days like today were always the worst sorts of days to be working in the media. As dull as a “slow news day” can be, I also subscribe to the adage that “no news is good news.” Outside of elections, the biggest stories you ever cover extensively, frenzily and spontaneously are the bad ones. And contrary to what many of the sock puppets and blowhards on Faux News might tell you, journalists are, in fact, objective in principle. Yes, we do root for people, and will snicker and chortle and personally engage in some schadenfreude, but when it comes time to put out an edition, we’ll refrain from commentary and attempt to be as objective in possible, present the facts as best they can for the public to make sense of what happened.

And that’s where the difficulty comes in. How do you enable others to make sense of what is senseless?

Columbine was possibly the worst. Reading column inch after column inch about bullet-ridden teenagers nearly killed my will to live. I think some of us cried that night in the offices of the New Mexican and afterwards at the bar. 9/11 was an awful day to work in San Francisco, knowing that some of your neighbours weren’t going to be home that day (remember, and never let it be forgotten, that the United 93 which crashed in Pennsyvania was originally headed for San Francisco), but it was also surreal and somewhat jittery – my office was in a complex of Federal buildings and above a BART station (and thus seemed like a potential target for any sort of further terrorist act) and all of us just wanted to get the fuck out of there and go home as soon as possible. Trying to prep an edition for the next day centered on a particularly terrible story like the two I just mentioned becomes a sensory overload, as you plow through story after story on the wires and comb through all of the available information, all of which is bad and a great deal of which saps whatever hope you might have for humanity. Natural disaster stories like hurricanes or massive wildfires at least have an air of awe to the proceedings – “holy shit, mother nature is a fucking badass” – whereas killings just seem needless, seem preventable and unnecessary. Senseless. That’s the word I’m looking for. Senseless.

A lot of these bad days on the desk in previous press offices came flooding back into my mind today. Saying which day and which incident was “worst” is irrelevant, because “worst” implies that somehow something about the others was better. No, they were all terrible. Two particularly terrible days on the job, however – days which I’d not thought about in a decade, if not longer – came into focus again for me. Both were in New Mexico. The first was a fatal shooting erupting on the Santa Fe Plaza during Fiesta de Santa Fe, a harvest festival which has been going on in Nuevo Mexico since before the U.S. was a country. The second was a double homicide, a couple of high school kids shot during the traditional Good Friday pilgrimage to Chimayó, which is one of the most sacred sites in the Western Hemisphere. Both events were precious to the local community of Northern New Mexico, events which were part of what defined the unique community in which I lived. Events which would, from then on, be forever altered. And for what? What was the point of that? What was the fucking point? It was senseless but also selfish – was compromising an entire culture really worth whatever petty squabble resulted in this violence?

Once that culture and community is altered, it never seems to quite return to how it once was. I’m reminded now of another particularly bad day at the office, albeit due entirely to an act of self-inflicted and self-contained violence. I remember hearing on the radio while sitting in my office that Kurt Cobain had been found dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. I spoke with a local wanna-be promoter I knew, a fringe hanger-on to the scene much like me and seemingly 1,000,000 other people, and he told me straight up that, “Kurt just killed the Seattle music scene.” The scene which, somewhat confoundingly (the record execs were pretty perplexed by the sales numbers) had come to define, through sound, the collective since of hangover and malaise and economic detachment of the post-Reagan era. I thought that statement was a bit far-fetched but I have to admit that the promoter was correct. After that death, all of the flaws and the warts and wrinkles in the scene were out in the open, were fully exposed, and the seemingly endless stream of northwest bands dominating the airwaves began to run dry. The inevitability of the great run coming to an end seemed more certain with each passing day.

These past incidents I would up immersed in from the supposedly detached and objective perspective of a news gatherer came to my mind today when I watched bombs going off at a sporting event, at a community event on a holiday. I don’t really care who did it or what particular axe they have to grind. I don’t care about their politics. Sport is not political. It is those surrounding sport who politicize it. The people standing at the finish line of the race had nothing to do with whatever agenda the perpetrators wished to further. They may even sympathize, or they may not. It doesn’t really matter. It was senseless. Seriously, what the fuck is wrong with people?

My hope is, in the end, that Boston does not let this particular incident take away one of the unique traditions that has come to define it over the years. Rebuild, renew, and encourage thousands to run through the streets next Patriots Day. And leave it at that. And then do it again the next year, and the next. I think I got my sense of civil resolve (one tinged with a stoic defiance) from my time in Britain. Having an IRA bomb go off in London four blocks from your hotel is a little bit disconcerting. I asked someone at the pub about it and he shrugged it off.

“We just go on,” he said to me. “It’s an excuse for another pint of bitter.”

Well I don’t have any bitter ale in the house, but I do have seafood. And I am going to eat seafood with my girlfriend, and eat some of the fresh bread she baked today, here in my comfy little house with my two cute little evil black kittens circling around and attempting to steal the fish off my plate, and I’m going to remind myself of some of the things that are genuinely good in and of themselves. And I hope that you do the same. Some days, humanity loses a bit more than others, and the littlest gestures can go a long way to getting it back on a winning path, little actions that others may never see nor hear nor even know. Let's not lose our minds or any more pieces of our souls. Clearly, some other people who acted out today have already lost theirs.

My heart goes out to those who lost loved ones, and to those who were seriously injured, and my heroes of the week were those first respondents who probably saved countless more than have been lost, the people who do the work I know that I never could do.

Words Fail

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the Chicago Cubs.

Do I really need to say anything more?

Nothing Rhymes With Orange

The U.S. national team recently defeated Costa Rica 1:0 in Denver in one of the more bizarrely entertaining soccer games I’ve seen of late, owing to the several inches of snow which fell during the game. I wholeheartedly approved of this, as this was a qualifier for the World Cup, and one of the most important things you can do is maximize your home-field advantage, since points are at a premium. The Americans said afterwards that they’d selected Denver as the site for this game to prepare them for the high-altitude conditions of Mexico City, where they were due to play a few days later, but snow in the Rockies is always a possibility in March and no one in the American camp was particularly bothered at the decidedly un-Central American weather conditions. The Ticos somewhat half-heartedly protested the game after it was over, of course, which was summarily dismissed by FIFA. They had nothing to lose by protesting, wouldn’t have been doing so if they’d salvaged a draw, and they have been subjecting opponents to oppressive heat and torrential rains on the plastic parking lot of a pitch in their former home stadium for years, so they know well how this meta-game is played. (Although the Ticos now have a lovely new national football grounds, with real grass and everything, but it’s too early to tell if their well-accepted home-field advantage from the previous pitch has transferred over.)

The drama and intensity of World Cup Qualifying makes up for the fact that the football can be somewhat ragged at times. These are essentially all-star teams, after all, most of which are hastily arranged in the moment and have little time to prepare. And every region of the world takes on unique characteristics during this process. Pretty much the same 6-8 teams are always battling for the 4 positions in Asia, as the drop off in quality is substantial and leaves you wondering how it is that these countries with massive populations somehow cannot find 11 quality footballers among their ranks. African qualifying is wildly unpredictable, as there are always issues regarding finances, politics, and other sources of internal strife among federations which often undermine the talent on the pitch. Just fielding an XI is sometimes a bigger African challenge than getting them to play well. The South American tourney is, quite simply, the toughest tournament in the world – 16-18 games played in hostile environments and challenging conditions (the most infamous being the 12,000 ft. of altitude in Bolivia). In Europe, the random draw almost always results in a Group of Death (resulting in a very good team being bounced), a Group of Bad (where an overrated team’s true colours are revealed and some obscure, marginal side earns a place), and a Group Where Everyone Shows Up Drunk which makes no sense at all. Europe also features an alarming number of REALLY BAD TEAMS who are there to be pummeled so as to pad the goal difference. Heaven help you if you lose to Luxembourg or the Færœ Islands, that’s all I’ve got to say on that front.

All of this ultimately funnels to the World Cup which, in 2014, is happening in Brazil. Perhaps the most apt description of Brazil comes from Franklin Foer in the book How Soccer Explains the World: “Brazil is the bizarro version of the United States. It’s the fantastically vast, resource-rich, new-world culture that didn’t become a global hegemon.” There has been slow but steady progress in the nation over the past two decades, and this tournament, along with the 2016 Olympics in Rio, is a chance for the nation of Brazil to show off some newfound confidence and swagger, to announce it is ready to take its rightful place among the big players in all international arenas, including those far larger than the massive Maracanã (which is saying something, given that the 1950 final at Maracanã was played before a crowd of 199,854).

There is a general sense in the sport that while the spectacle of a Brazilian World Cup will be magical, the tourney itself is likely to amount to little more than a coronation as the Brazilians capture their 6th championship on their home soil. Some of their strongest challengers don't think they stand much of a chance. The fact that the Brazilians are such overwhelming favourites to win on their home soil is really not that much of a bother, as it’s generally accepted in every nation on earth not named Argentina that the Brazilians play the best football. The idea of the Brazilians lifting the trophy after triumphing in the final at the Maracanã seems almost to be in keeping with the natural order of things, a fitting end to to a showcase of the sport in the nation that cherishes it the most.

But this is IN PLAY LOSE, where we care about teams that do not succeed. And if it has been written in the stars by the Football Gods that Brazil will triumph in Rio de Janeiro in 2014, surely the Football Gods would also write in the stars that they will defeat, in that final, the most worthy of adversaries. An opponent that will bring the act of losing to its highest levels of elegance before succumbing to their inevitable fate.

That would be the Dutch.

And I have already accepted the fate, me being the owner of six iterations of Oranje jerseys which I keep in my closet, and former owner of one of these beauties from 1988:

Having already gone through their once-every-decade meltdown during the 2012 Euros, the Oranje are doing what they generally do in World Cup Qualifying, which is ANNIHILATE THEIR OPPONENTS. Unlike a great many teams with a propensity for playing scared vs. the Brazilians, the Dutch are never intimidated and almost stubbornly so. They won’t have any problem stepping into the ring in Rio and getting in a few good swings of their own in the World Cup Final. And sure, I’m sort of just glossing over the other 30 teams in the tourney here in foretelling this Brazilian-Dutch final, but it really cannot end any other way. If Brazil are the greatest champions in sport, their triumph should necessarily come over sport’s greatest also-ran. Just as nothing rhymes with orange, no one takes losing to the levels of the orange-clad footballers from the Netherlands.

Just as the Football Gods have already decreed a Brazil-Oranje final for 2014, so too did they decree the final of South Africa 2010, when the two must frustrated footballing nations on earth both found themselves in the final and pitted against each other, with the ascension to the realm of immortality that comes with being crowned World Cup Champion necessarily coming at the expense of the other. Spain v. Netherlands was about a half a century in the making, as during that time the two nations have often found themselves allies in the struggle for European footballing supremacy against the Germans and Italians, sharing ideas as countless hordes of Dutch players flocked south to be employed in La Liga. The unique Spanish passing game, in fact, has its roots in ideas brought to F.C. Barcelona in the 1970s by Johan Cruijff, Holland’s greatest football ambassador. And the Dutch lost, of course, losing 1:0 in O.T. to a great Spanish side which has also won the Euros in 2008 and 2012, and which can legitimately make the case for being one of the great teams of all time. Prior to 2010, the Spaniards and the Dutch could both lay claim to the least-desirable title in sports, the Best Team Never To Win A World Cup. After 2010, there is no longer any room for dispute as to who carries that moniker.

Despite a half-century of creating some of the games greatest players, sharpest coaches and grandest statements of style, the Dutch have won only one major championship, the 1988 Euros. They are thrice losers in World Cup finals, twice having lost on their opponents’ home turf. And when they don’t lose in the final, the Dutch still make a memorable exit – their losses in epic matches with Brazil in the 1994 Quarters and the 1998 Semis were the best matches of those respective tournaments; their losses in the Round of 16 to the West Germans in 1990 and Portugal in 2006 have become notorious for their nastiness, the latter match producing something like 20 yellow cards and three ejections while the former match produced this unsightly display but also moments like this. And again, that 1990 tussle was probably the best match of the tourney (and it speaks volumes about how bad Italy 1990 was as an event when the best match involves guys spitting on each other).

The Dutch were among the favorites in 1990, possessing two European Players of the Year up front in Gullitt and Van Basten among their stunning collection of talent, but they made an early exit from the tourney through a mix of bad play and also some genuinely bad luck. They were placed in a Group of Death, drew their first three games (one of which owing to a marginal late penalty awarded the Egyptians), were level with Ireland on points, goal difference and goals scored, and wound up playing the Germans in the Round of 16 through the drawing of lots.

But bad luck seems to go along with their penchant for occasionally horrible displays of self-destruction, none worse than the semis of the 2000 Euros in Rotterdam, on home soil, when the Dutch drew 0:0 to 10-man Italy and missed five penalties on their way to being bounced in a shootout. The shootout is the bane of the existence of the Oranje, a crapshoot of a way to end a game in which the Dutch inevitably roll snake eyes.

It’s easy to like the Dutch, because the football they play is so damned good. They are purveyors of some of the most aesthetically pleasing football out there, and are zealously proud of this fact. (It is routinely written into the contract of Dutch managers that their teams must play elegant, attractive football.) Lots of goals, lots of movement, with the constant threat of a goal from seemingly anywhere on the pitch hanging over their opponents. It’s a style that is both entertaining and ruthless. The Dutch were also-rans in the sport until the 1960s, when the counterculture bastion of Amsterdam spawned a revolutionary approach to the game which came to be known as Total Football, a virtual wheel of moving parts and precision in which players can interchange – defenders attack, attackers drop back, etc. – and the flow of play is dictated by figuring out and proceeding to exploit your opponent’s weaknesses. It’s a devastatingly effective system in that it destroys much of your preconceived notion of what players at certain positions on the field can do.

A good way to explain this to an American audience is to use a basketball example: whereas most teams have a 7’0” big man underneath and a 6’2” point guard out front who passes and stays out of the fray, how would you defend a team with five guys who were all in the range of 6’4” to 6’8” or so, all of whom could shoot, pass, and rebound? Such versatility would potentially negate any advantages your team had, since it would create a mismatch somewhere on the floor. (And if you look at the makeup of some of the championship college basketball teams over the years, you notice how quite a few of them are built this way.)

The Oranje game requires multifaceted, versatile players all over the field and breeds creativity, but is also quite cerebral (“Football is played with the head,” as Cruijff has famously said), so the Dutch bring the football fan an intellectual satisfaction to the game as well – not only do they have more talent than the opponents, but they often seem smarter as well.

Too smart for their own good, sometimes. Smartest Guy in the Room sort of smart. The Dutch are often undone by internal bickering and dissent, the management of their XI akin to managing 11 lawyers. And in a system where everyone can be an attacker, it shouldn’t be a surprise that the Dutch seem to have trouble developing defenders. Why play defense, when scoring goals is much more fun? If you could put 11 forwards on the field, the Dutch would’ve won every World Cup since 1974.

Ah, yes, 1974. I don’t need to go into that much detail about 1974, since the final in Munich between the Dutch and West Germany has been written about more than any other football match in history, and quite possibly any other sporting event. All you really need to know is that the (over)confident Dutch strode onto the field in Munich, kicked off, connected a dozen or so passes, earned a penalty, and scored to go up 1:0 before the Germans had even touched the ball. And after that opening salvo – the most dominating, terrifying first three minutes in the history of the sport – they then proceeded to lose the game 2:1, complete with a disputed German penalty thrown in to add some conspiratorial angst to the mix. You have to comb through the annals of history to find a team as great as the Dutch squad of 1974 that came up short. The closest thing to the Oranje were the Hungarians of 1954, the undisputed kings of the sport at the time who inexplicably lost 3:2 in the final in Bern to … West Germany, a team whom the Hungarians had poleaxed 8:3 earlier in the tournament.

“Football is a game played by two teams of 11 players in which the Germans always win.”
– Gary Lineker

The Germans are, of course, the game of football’s greatest villains, the dasher of many a nation’s dreams of glory. They and the Italians both, in fact, the two sides having won seven World Cups between them and done so in ways their detractors would decry as dishonorable. And by “detractors,” I mean the four other great footballing nations of Europe – England, France, Spain and, yes, the Dutch, all of whom have developed decided national identities to their style of play over the decades and generally refused to compromise those principles for the sake of a result – meaning, of course, they often wind up losing, and usually to either the Germans or the Italians. This notion of what is honorable and not is somewhat ridiculous, of course, the implication being that both teams cheat. According to the narrative, the German “steely resolve” is little more than physically bludgeoning their opponents, while the Italians suffocate you with defense, counterattack, take dives, work the refs, and bait the opponents into conceding free kicks and penalties, and both teams will play all the angles to get the desired result. While there is certainly some evidence to that effect (most notably this disgraceful performance from 1982), neither side would be able to succeed at the highest levels without the talent to back it up. They may come off as unlikable in the process, and seem perfectly OK with doing so, but you cannot deny the results in the most results-oriented of businesses. And whomever started the melee in Germany-Netherlands 1990, or France v. Italy in the 2006 final, you sure as hell cannot argue that the Dutch or French didn’t contribute. Such principled sorts should have known better, don’t you think?

Pretty much all principles of decency went out the window in 1978 for the World Cup in Argentina, one of the uglier sporting events of all time as it was played out in a nation ruled by a military junta, a lot who are easily on the short list for Worst People in the History of the World that desperately viewed an Argentine victory in the tournament as a stamp of their legitimacy as a ruling body, and went to extremes to try to do that. The higher echelons of sport have always been filled with scofflaws and scoundrels, but 1978 took that to entirely different levels. (There is an excellent chapter on this event in the fabulous book Soccer Against the Enemy by Simon Kuper, a book which also does well to explain various aspects of Dutch football neurosis, including the national catharsis that was the 1988 Euros victory over their German rivals.) Even with Cruijff’s absence, the Dutch were a terrific side and worked their way into the final where they faced the hosts, who had scrambled their way to the final with a bit of alleged Peruvian assistance:

The most significant example of alleged match-fixing occurred in the 1978 World Cup in Argentina. This was more than just a football competition, it was all that kept the ruling military junta from losing power, and thus Argentina had to win.
Come the last match of the semi-final stage, they needed to defeat Peru by four goals to reach the final rather than arch-rivals Brazil. Peru were a useful side but, after an Argentine team-talk from which the goalkeeper and substitutes were barred, Argentina won 6-0 after Peru hit a post in the opening minutes. Shortly afterwards it is alleged that Argentina shipped 35,000 tons of free grain - and probably some free arms - to Peru, and the Argentine central bank unfroze $50m in credits for Peru.
– The Independent 

And the Dutch lost, of course, 3:1 in O.T. after very nearly winning in regulation, a Dutch shot hitting the woodwork in the game’s dying moments. One can only wonder what might have happened in Argentina if the home side hadn’t prevailed. (More than a few theorists have noted that the junta survived the loss to the Brits in the Falklands War but couldn’t survive La Albiceleste losing to Belgium in the opening of the 1982 World Cup, a defeat which triggered the side’s hasty early exit from the tourney.) The result of the 1978 final also gave the Argentines a rather dubious reputation, one which stayed with them for more than a decade. For all the brilliance of Maradona, his greatness can never be separated from the "Hand of God," and their unsightly march to the 1990 final through a series of goalless draws and wins in shootouts certainly didn’t help.

The argument put forth by the purists, of course, is that teams such as the Germans, Italians and Argentines cheat because they cannot compete on a fair playing field. If they really have so much talent, they shouldn’t have to resort to dirty tactics to win. I would like to agree with that sentiment, being a loyal supporter of the Oranje and loving the way the Dutch play the game, but I think it’s somewhat misguided. And I’m also getting to the point where I’m tired of glorious losses.

I think I reached that point in 1998, actually, in the epic loss to Brazil. The Brazilians had a stunning array of offensive talent but a weak central defense, a susceptibility to strong center forward play easily masked since teams were so afraid to attack the Brazilians, fearful of being exposed to the Brazilian counter. The two sides that had thrown caution to the wind – Norway and Denmark – had big forwards who dominated the games up front, the results being a shock Brazilian loss to Norway and a near-death experience in the Quarterfinals vs. the Danes. Well, the Dutch figured this out, of course, and lobbed cross after cross after cross into the Brazilian goalmouth, only to have opportunities go awry for one reason or another. It was a fast and furious game which ended 1:1, and the Dutch inevitably lost in a penalty shootout, and got to watch on TV as the French employed much same strategy (albeit with their fleet of midfielders in the key roles) and waxed the Brazilians 3:0 in the final. That was a beautiful game, that semifinal, one of the more stunning matches I can recall, and the Dutch were heartbroken in the end. I’m all for beautiful football, of course, but at some point you have to stop trying to play beautifully and start trying to win the game. Style be damned.

And the international football media skewered the Dutch side of 2010 for it’s occasionally un-Oranje performances on their way to the 2010 final, as they showed a penchant for physical play and played at a much slower pace than is their norm. Yet there they were on the game’s grandest stage, and they had a plan for the ball-hogging, pass-happy Spaniards, a plan taken from the Swiss and the Americans, of all things – the two sides which had most recently defeated the reigning European champion Spaniards. The Dutch came out and knocked the Spaniards around. They were physical, overaggressive, playing the body and skirting the edges. (And in truth, they got away with some pretty nasty fouls which warranted red cards.) They wanted to frustrate Spain, knock them off their game, and then try to spring a counter with Robben, their swiftest player, on the square and hopefully unfocused Spanish defense. And it worked perfectly, of course … until Robben missed. Well, he was saved by Casillas, the Spanish goalkeeper, but he should have done better with the chance. From that point on in the game, there seemed this sense of inevitability to the proceedings, a sense that they’d let the Spaniards wriggle off the hook and that defeat would eventually follow.

So not only can the Dutch not win when they play their game, they apparently cannot win when playing someone else’s game. They come up short in some of the sport’s most hostile environments, on neutral ground, and, in the case of the 2000 Euros, on home soil as well. And it’s always memorable, it’s always noteworthy. Never a dull moment. After years of watching this, I have come to conclude this is how it is meant to be.

And given their place in footballing history, it would only stand to reason that the Oranje would step into the ring vs. the Brazilians next summer, be the most worthy of adversaries and ultimately lose. I can see no other possible outcome. (Unless, of course, the Oranje somehow get paired with the Belgians along the way, who annoy them and irritate them and always find a way to thieve points from them.) So it has been written, and so it shall be. The great unknown will come in 2018, when the event is hosted by Russia, who possess one of the game’s most dominating home-field advantages but who also are one of the game’s great underachievers. All bets are off on that one. In the meantime, I will gladly dress in orange and hope they can buck fate just this once. Hup Holland! Now win the damn game already, would you?

Opportunity Lost

So for those of you that do not know, I work for an auto racing magazine, one specifically dealing with classic, historic, and vintage cars. We have a good guy who comes in and does some part-time work for us named Don, who takes a proof off the wall with an advertisement of cars for sale on it.

"I used to have one of these," he tells me, pointing to the page. "In fact, for all I know, this might actually be my old car."

The car he's referring to is this:

This is a 1938 BMW 328. A beautiful and very rare automobile. Don had bought one in Germany after WWII and had it shipped stateside.

"What ever happened to that car?" I asked Don.

"I sold it in the mid-1950s. I got $1200 for it. But obviously, I should've held onto it," he says with a shrug. "Opportunity lost, I guess."

This 1938 BMW can now be yours for $550,000.

Sonicsgate

The LOSE is keeping a close eye on the goings on surrounding the future of the wobegone Sacramento Kings. I have been restraining myself from commenting on this until it all plays out, as there are a variety of issues which pertain to this blog, and are definitely relevant to this blogger as well.

Full disclosure here: I used to be a Seattle SuperSonics season ticket holder.

That being said, I no longer live in the Pacific Northwest, have lived in Northern California for more than a decade, found the Chris Webber-era Kings teams to be a joy to watch and wish well for, thought they got royally jobbed by the officials in the playoffs vs. the Lakers, and felt as if the Kings missed a golden opportunity to dominate the psyche of Northern California basketball fans, given how pathetic the Golden St. Warriors have been.

So my position on the Seattle v. Sacramento tug-of-war over the Kings is nuanced and we'll get to that in another post.

In the meantime, the following video is required viewing for all loyal followers of IN PLAY LOSE. This is an award-winning documentary about the clusterfuck that led to the Sonics being relocated to Oklahoma City, and all of the clusterfuckers who participated in it. Not only does it prevent me from having to go through the whole sordid history myself (because I'm inherently lazy), but it's best of familiarize oneself with the how-to's of franchise relocation – a primarily North American phenomenon which is madder than hatters. So pay attention folks. Class is in session:

To Coug

“When you go to Washington State, you learn to live with disappointment.”
– Don James, former Washington football coach

In the Quarterfinal of the Pac-10 Pac-12 tournament in Seattle, the women’s basketball team from Washington State University lost to Stanford. This is not news. Were the Lady Cougs to defeat Stanford, not only would it be newsworthy, but it would explain that swarm of locusts descending from the skies. This is because the Lady Cougs have never beaten Stanford. Never as in never, ever. Their all-time record vs. the Stanford women is 0-55, the most inglorious of losing streaks at a school where losing streaks are commonplace.

And while the Good Gals season was coming to an end with yet another loss to Stanford, over on the men’s side of things, the Cougars managed an upset victory over UCLA at home that same week. The Cougars had lost 19 straight to UCLA at home prior to that, a skid which was absolutely confounding – while there have been up-and-down times on the hardwood in Pullman, during that period the Cougars have generally been pretty good, making 3 NCAA tournament appearances and even reaching the Sweet 16 in 2008. They just couldn’t win.

As bad as that skid was, it pales in comparison to one of the more remarkable skids in school history – having lost the first 47 times they played UCLA in Los Angeles. 47 times! Now, granted, UCLA won 11 national titles during that stretch, but the Cougars have generally been competitive on the hardwood over the years. The streak took on a life of its own after a while, as the Cougars would often times put up great showings at Pauley Pavilion, only to lose by 1, or by 2, or in OT, or do something absurd like blow a 23-pt. lead in the final 7:30 of the game. When they finally broke through and won at Pauley, head coach Dick Bennett probably could have run for mayor. The record against the Bruins in L.A. is now 2-54, if you’re keeping track. (And when you’re 2-54, you almost cannot help but keep track.) Dick Bennett also managed to rid the school of another box of Kryptonite as well in his 3-year tenure as head coach, a 38-game drought against Arizona that had dated back to mid-1980s.

But this is how it seems to go at Washington State, where losing is an art form taken to the extreme.

Buoyed by their win over the Bruins, the Cougars then played the dreaded Husky scum from the University of Washington in the first round of the Pac-12 tournament, and it was a game in which the Cougars got way behind, put on a furious rally, and wound up losing by 2 points, thus bringing an end to the season. This would go down as a good effort, were it not eerily similar to their 2-point loss at home to eventual #1 Gonzaga earlier in the year. Or eerily similar to 4-5 other games this year. In fact, come to think of it, I’ve been watching that exact same game for 30 YEARS NOW.

To give you some idea of my connection to that school, my father was a professor there for 25 years, and I basically grew up around that campus. I was taking classes there while I was in high school, and the campus was always a fabulous resource, be it the library or the gyms or as a source of summer employment. It’s actually a really outstanding institution with some top-class programs, most notably the journalism and communications departments – you take classes in the Edward R. Murrow Building for a reason. Famed sportscaster Keith “Whoa Nellie” Jackson is also an alum, and you pretty much cannot watch a local news telecast in the Western U.S. without seeing a W.S.U. grad somewhere on the screen. So even though I’m not technically an alumni, I feel more of a kinship to that university than some of the graduates. I’ve made it a point in the past to go to some of the Bay Area alumni gatherings for football games against either Stanford or Cal. An action which, of late, has been rather dismal and downright embarrassing and has grown decidedly unappealing.

The last time I did so was in 2008, in a downpour “down on the farm” and W.S.U. lost to Stanford 58-0. Considering that 2008 football team was the first team in NCAA history to give up 60+ points in a game four times in one season, 58-0 constituted improvement. With everything that I was saying before about the basketball program, it should be pointed out again that the basketball team has actually been pretty good most of the time. The footballers, meanwhile, are in the midst of a 5-year-run which has seen them go 12-49. A particular wretched stretch of bad football never seen at a school where bad football has been far too common over the history of the program.

“It was an autumn day made for football, if only WSU had played some. Cloudy and highs in the 60s. That's the outlook, respectively, for the Cougars and their opponents.”
– Bud Withers, Seattle Times

When things go bad at W.S.U., they really go bad. Before Dick Bennett arrived as the basketball coach, the program endured a four-year stretch where they went 9-63 in Pac-10 play. The women’s team hasn’t been worth a damn in about 20 years, and have put up a couple seasons where they accrued records like 2-25. It’s said at schools like UCLA that they never rebuild but simply reload. At W.S.U., rebuilding is a step-up from cratering, and the landscape of the athletic program has more craters than the moon.

W.S.U. faces some inherent disadvantages when it comes to competing on the playing field. Success in athletics requires procuring talent, first and foremost, and recruiting to the school is pretty damn difficult. Washington State University is barely within the state boundaries, located in the small town of Pullman some 270 miles east of Seattle and 8 miles from the Idaho border. Now, it’s not a bad place at all. It’s a nice college town, and with 30,000 college kids in the area it is always pretty lively. (The University of Idaho is located 8 miles away in the border town of Moscow. Maybe it was due to living in a town named for the Russian capital that U. of I. grad Sarah Palin got the idea she could see Russia from her house. But I digress.) But it is remote. It’s not for everyone. You have to enjoy the outdoors and enjoy a certainly easygoing pace of life.

And indeed, W.S.U. could go on beating on the Idaho Vandals and such seemingly at will if they chose. But instead, W.S.U. competes in the Pac-12, which is the single most successful athletic conference in history. (And I should point out that the school isn’t just competing for athletes, but also professors and students and money and everything else. College sports are the greatest fundraising and marketing tools a university has, which is a part of why they’ve perpetuated for all these years.) UCLA has won 100+ national titles alone. Stanford, Cal, and U.S.C. are consistently ranked among the top all-around athletic programs in the country. W.S.U. is basically competing against big city schools from California, Seattle, and Phoenix and, particularly in the case of the University of Nike down in Eugene, big MONEY schools as well. It’s just always going to be a struggle. It takes pretty determined coaches to make programs work at the university.

And, of course, there are better jobs available elsewhere for coaches which pay better and offer more prestige, so W.S.U. is almost always used as a stepping stone by coaches. This shouldn’t be a surprise, of course – I personally view coaches as the most selfish bunch of egomaniacs on the earth, almost all of whom spend more time caring about their bank balances more than anything else – but about the time a coach gets a program succeeding at a high level at W.S.U., bigger schools come with their chequebooks open. Because after all, if you can be successful at Washington State, you can probably be successful anywhere. So when things start going well with any particular club – for example, the men’s basketball team rising to prominence and reaching the Sweet 16 a few years ago – there is a certain inevitability that there will be a coaching change (in that case, Dick’s son Tony Bennett, who had taken over from his father, promptly bolted for Virginia) and that lack of continuity just adds to the problems.

[For some reason, W.S.U. seems to be a fertile ground for recruiting coaches to the state of Iowa. They lost a football coach to Iowa State, a basketball coach to Iowa, and also their most successful coach of their volleyball program moved on to Iowa as well, although she gave up coaching so as to watch her son play college basketball. And since it’s March Madness season, you might remember the kid because he likely busted your bracket in the office pool:



Yeah, that kid.]

With losing, however, comes humour, albeit gallows humour a lot of the time, and the Zzu Crew are a patient bunch who tend to take defeat in stride. Quirky places like Pullman also tend to attract some quirky people – thus the school has a long history of colourful characters who are quick with a quip and able to find comedy in almost any situation. (Don James of the Huskies used to complain that he was a “2,000 word underdog” when it came time for the Apple Cup press conferences.) One of whom, Jim Sweeney, died recently and suffered through an inglorious 26-59-1 stint over eight seasons as head football coach but always left them laughing, although his last game with the school was no laughing matter at the time.

This particular game in 1975 is (in)famous because the Cougars led 27-14 late in the fourth quarter over their hated rivals, the Husky scum from Washington, and they decided to run the score up a bit. Then this happened:

No Apple Cup ever had a wackier windup than the 1975 renewal at Husky Stadium. With 3:01 remaining, Washington State held a 27-14 lead and seemed on the verge of a significant upset. The 3-7 Cougars also had the ball on the UW 14-yard line, staring at fourth and one, and needed only a field goal to clinch the contest. WSU coach Jim Sweeney initially ordered a run, but his players wanted to pass. Sweeney, in what would become a classic blunder, reluctantly acquiesced. After the snap, WSU quarterback John Hopkins threw toward his tight end, but Washington’s Al Burleson stepped in front of him and intercepted the ball.
After two steps, Burleson was on his way to a 93-yard touchdown. After the Husky defense held, Washington got the ball back with 1:58 left and WSU clinging to a 27-21 lead. With the Huskies positioned deep in their own territory, UW quarterback Warren Moon, playing only because of an injury to starter Chris Rowland, launched a “here’s-hoping” bomb in the direction of wide receiver Spider Gaines, running free behind the Cougars’ secondary.
Moon badly underthrew the ball, and a trio of Cougar defenders converged at midfield to intercept it. But WSU’s midfield committee botched the job. The ball bounced off WSU’s Tony Heath and ricocheted into the arms of Gaines, who ran into the end zone for a 78-yard touchdown. Steve Robbins’ extra point gave the Huskies an improbable 28-27 victory, which led to Sweeney’s resignation.
– Sports Press Northwest

"When we scored 52 and beat Washington (in 1973), they gave me a lifetime contract. After that (1975) game, they had me declared dead."
– Jim Sweeney

This game did more to cement a notion which has become common vernacular in the Pacific Northwest – the verb “To Coug,” which means to blow a game when victory is almost certain, and usually in the most incomprehensible fashion imaginable. The phrase itself became infamous after this game, when aghast Spokesman-Review columnist John Blanchette penned a column in response to yet another absurd loss in a lost season. (The key play in that game is at the 25:53 mark of the video, where WSU recovers an Arizona St. fumble on the 4-yd. line, only to have to wiped out due to having 12 men on the field.) He said in that column that he was looking for: "a word, a phrase, even, to sum up this misbegotten football season at Washington State University. To Coug. Verb intransitive."

It’s this aspect which drives fans crazy. Because while it’s one thing to just be lousy, and lose repeatedly in contests where success seems scantly possible, what’s even more crazymaking is constant underachievement. Losing is still losing, of course – the desired final result having not been achieved – but it is the ways in which losing occurs that come to define you over time.

And regardless of the talent level on the field or on the court, Washington State somehow seems to screw it up in the end. For years, W.S.U. had one of the most dominant track & field programs in the country, a program that churned out future world record holders and Olympic medalists. Yet every year, come time for the NCAA championships – the one meet that mattered the most – the Cougars would finish 2nd or 3rd, unable to live up to billing as meet favorites. I watched an astonishing number of football games in the 1980s in which talent-laden squads would lose do stuff like gain 675 yards in a game and lose because they turned the ball over 7 times. The level of talent and aptitude on the team seems simply to raise the magnitude of the implosion, in the end. Every year bracketeers look at the NCAA tourney and say “look for an upset on the 5-12 line.” Well, W.S.U. was the original 5-12 upset in 1980, when one of the best teams in school history lost to 12th-seeded Penn in the first round of the newly-expanded tourney. (And this was a 48-team field, mind you, so losing to a 12 back then was particularly embarrassing.) One of the school’s biggest sporting achievements of all-time – reaching the Final Four in 1941 – also led to a rather ignoble record – Worst Shooting Pct. in the NCAA Championship Game – that lasted for nearly 70 years (until that masonry display by Butler vs. Connecticut a few years ago).

The school's athletes also seems cursed on the injury front. The basketball team of 1982-83 was a contender for the league title and was led by Guy Williams, who was 6'9" and could play all five positions on the floor. He was leading the Pac-10 in scoring and rebounding when he tore up his knee in a game at Eugene, never to play for WSU again. Pitcher/1B John Olerud had arguably the greatest single season in college baseball history in 1988, batting .464 as a hitter and going 15-0 as a pitcher. He then suffered a scary brain aneurysm in the offseason. He recovered, of course, and had a pretty successful major league career, but his Coug days were more or less over at the point.

I could go on and on, give one example after another. The members of the Zzu Crew have been putting up with this stuff for decades. But it’s not all bad, of course. Like I say, Pullman is a quirky sort of place, and everyone associated with the university makes it a point of not taking themselves that seriously. (The Far Side creator Gary Larson is a W.S.U. alum, after all.) There is good humour to be had, and no one stays too mad about defeat for all that long. And the school’s particular peculiar challenges make it a ripe place for innovators and unorthodox thinkers in the coaching ranks. Football’s spread offense, all the rage at every level of the game, has roots in the Palouse – long before it was trendy, W.S.U. coaches Dennis Erickson and then Mike Price had the field spread wide and the school’s long lineage of top calibre quarterbacks throwing the ball all over the place. On the hardwood, W.S.U. was a perfect place for Dick Bennett, whose teams played suffocating, claustrophobic defense like none other and gave the school instant credibility – teams would circle that game with the Cougars on the schedule and absolutely, positively dread it. You have to do things a little bit differently at W.S.U., take some risks and be creative. When it works out, the rewards – however fleeting – can be joyous. The huge numbers of W.S.U. alums assembling in the Bay Area for football games during the Golden Age (3 straight 10-win seasons from 2000-2002) made the games in Berkeley and Palo Alto seem like home games. And the 1998 Rose Bowl, which was W.S.U. first trip to Pasadena since 1931, was one of the most sought-after tickets in the game’s history, as something like 400,000 requests for W.S.U.’s allotment of 40,000 seats.

And I had vowed that if the Cougars ever made the Rose Bowl, I would fire up the BBQ. And so there I was on Jan. 1, 1998, grilling up a lobster and a couple of Porterhouses in -8° temperatures in western Colorado while watching the game through the screen door.

And it was a great game, of course, and one with a fitting end: W.S.U. losing. And not just any sort of loss, mind you, but a controversial loss – the Cougars hurrying to the line of scrimmage at the Michigan 25 yd-line, trailing 21-16 to the #1 ranked Wolverines; QB Ryan Leaf spiking the ball to stop the clock with :02 left …

Except the clock didn’t stop and ran to :00. Game over.

W.S.U. has been waiting to run that last play of the game for 15 years now.

“I got a commemorative Rose Bowl watch. It runs two seconds fast.”
– Mike Price

My Hero of the Week and Probably Every Week

RIP Roger Ebert. I think The Onion says it best of all.

When I first started dabbling in journalism two decades ago, I started by reading about 200 of his reviews and said to myself that I wanted to write as well as he did some day. And I still do.

See you at the movies, Roger ...

The Scarlet Letter

The game of basketball was a big winner today, because this guy lost his job and will likely never coach at a significant level again. Nor should he. He’ll be branded for life for this, and deservedly so. And I’m all for second chances, mind you, but anyone who does something like this needs another line of work. The fundamental covenant of education – that a school environment provides a safe place for young people to learn – seems to have been forgotten here by all the supposedly responsible adults. And some vulgar, bullying boor throwing around racially tainted and homophobic slurs has no place being on the payroll of the State University of New Jersey, nor anywhere else for that matter.

And frankly, the cowardly Rutgers A.D. who didn’t fire him on the spot needs to go too. Hiring Mike Rice to coach the basketball team was his first big hire at the school, you see, and he didn’t want to eat the slice of humble pie with a side of crow that comes with admitting you fucked up. Suspending him for three games? Really? What a joke. His judgment has clearly been compromised, and he has no business continuing in his position, either.

You can understand why the kids never said anything, as the deck is stacked against them. A school can revoke your scholarship, make it difficult for you to transfer. It’s a shitty system in need of reform. Frankly, I think the kids in this video show amazing restraint. If one of them had popped this jerkstore in the mouth, it would’ve been understandable.

Rutgers’ basketball program has been a mess for years, the coaching position occupied by a revolving door of lunatics fired for all sorts of bizarre and unprofessional behaviours. But whomever the Scarlet Knights hire next, it can’t be any worse than this … can it?