 |
| Remember when Mario Balotelli used to be good at football? |
LET’S cut right to the chase. We don’t have time for an intro. To the buzzard points!
• The Lose doesn’t care much for golf, considering it to be a good walk spoiled in much the manner of Mark Twain, yet it is competition and a difficult one at that, one in which the margins of victory are so small – often just a single-stroke out of 280+ over the course of four days of play – that the differences between being good and being great are minute and nearly microscopic. The game can be pretty unforgiving, particularly on the mental side of things. If it starts going bad for you in the middle of a round, it’s not like you can call timeout or make a substitution. You have to tough it out, figure it out on the go and get through it. And golf has always been a sport where results are all that matter. If you suck for the first two days of a tourney, they cut you and you’re gone with no dollars to show for it. If you suck for a whole season, they relegate you, kicking you off the PGA Tour and sending you back to the dreaded “Q School.” Quite honestly, I think some other sports would be well served to do this sort of thing. The 76ers should’ve been relegated and been playing the Fort Wayne Mad Ants in the D-League several years ago. (Not that I’m making fun of the Mad Ants here. I love me some Mad Ants. If any of my friends go to the North American Scrabble Championships in Fort Wayne, Indiana, this summer, and don’t come back with Fort Wayne Mad Ants apparel in tow, you have clearly failed at life.)
Anyway, while I don’t care all that much about the game itself – personally, I only play golf while carrying a wine bottle with me in the golf bag – I understand it’s incredibly difficult, and The Lose appreciates everything to be done well, in part because it gives me something to write about when it’s done really badly. And golf done badly, at it’s highest level, makes for spectacular viewing. Golf is a game where there is probably a greater sense of disconnect between the élite and everyone else than in any other sport, in that whereas most of us at least had some illusion of being good at a sport at some point when we growing up, no one that I know has any such illusions about golf. We’re all bad golfers. All of us. We’re all terrible. And if you can be bothered to sit through watching an entire golf tourney, you’re generally going to see the game’s élite separated by only subtle moments here and there – Player A will hit the green and sink a long putt, whereas Player B may be on the fringe and take a par, and that will wind up making the difference – but rarely do you see it decided in spectacular fashion. That’s not normal. Tourneys being won on miraculous shots are magnified simply because they hardly ever happen, and the same can be said of tourneys being lost by catastrophic and inglorious collapses that leave the audience dumbstruck.
Which is precisely what Jordan Spieth did on Sunday. Spieth, who is the #1 player in the world, having won two majors already at the age of 21, was cruising his way to winning The Masters on Sunday, having fired four consecutive birdies on Holes 6-9 to open a sizable lead with only 9 holes to play … and over the course of the next 40 minutes or so, that lead completely evaporated, as he bogeyed the 10th and 11th and then hit the ball in the water twice and took a 7 on the Par-3 12th. He basically gave The Masters away in that sequence, winding up finishing tied for 2nd, a collapse scarcely seen in a major tournament before.
How exactly does someone overcome a choke like this? Well, the solution is pretty simple, and it would be the same solution if he hadn’t choked – go on to the next tourney and try it again, which is this coming weekend at the Texas Open. The Masters is one of the so-called “majors” in golf, but what does that actually mean? There is history and prestige to winning the tournament, but fundamentally what you do to win the tournament – complete 72 holes in the fewest number of strokes – is no different than in any other tournament. This is why I talk about that you must fear metaphor. The mechanics of the game are the same no matter what you do, but it’s the meaning that you attach to the game which changes. And like I say, it works both ways, good and bad. I remember an interview from long ago that the young Boris Becker gave after first winning Wimbledon. He was asked if his goal was to win the U.S. Open that fall and he said no, that his goal was to win the tournament in Indianapolis later in July, simply because Indianapolis was the next tournament on his schedule. Win or lose, that’s how you should always approach it.
Spieth handled the disappointment well (then again, what’s he going to do? Throw a tantrum on live TV?) and he’s a bright young player with a terrific future and an already accomplished past, so here’s to hoping he wins a few more and puts this one behind him and that, at some point in the distant future, he’ll be asked to recall the 2016 Masters and be able to laugh about it. I sure hope he’ll be able to laugh about it, since everyone else will be.
• Baseball season is here and be still my foolish heart. So much lose on a daily basis, all summer long. The American League looks to be a muddled mess, with about 13 teams being able to make a case for being in the race at the start of the year. I have no idea who is any good or bad in the AL. But the hot lose-on-lose action is going to be in the National League, which looks like it’s housing the 5-6 worst teams in baseball. There are the Phillies, of course, who were also wretched a year ago (and who’ve already managed to run into two double plays when the infield fly rule was called during the first week of the season), and the Braves look to be dreadful as well, and it’s not looking so good in Milwaukee or Cincinnati, either (and you can’t attribute much to the Reds’ good start since most of it came at the expense of the Phils), and the Rockies still can’t pitch, so they’ll likely be propping up the standings from the bottom and they even managed to make the Padres look good over the weekend, the Pads having been swept and been outscored 25-0 in three home games with the Dodgers at Pet Food Park to open the season, only to then score 13 and 16 runs on successive nights in Denver.
So that’s six teams who ran the gamut from pretty bad to really bad, two in each division, all of them looking like a 10-game losing streak waiting to happen, and it seems to me that what’s ultimately going to separate the actual good teams from one another on the NL is the extent to which they beat up on the bad ones. You can’t be losing 2 of 3 to the Brewers or 3 of 4 to Atlanta. There are lots of easy wins to be had and the top clubs in the NL need to be ready to feast, since it looks like there are far too many good teams for too few playoff positions.
• If I had to hazard a guess as to who will win the American League, I’d probably put my money on the Toronto Blue Jays. Between the baseballing Jays and the basketballing Toronto Raptors, who are the #2 seed in the Eastern playoffs in the NBA, there is a lot for my sports loving friends north of the border to be excited about in the coming months, which is a good thing, since apparently everyone in Canada forgot to play hockey this year.
The NHL playoffs commence here in a few days, and for the first time since 1970, they will feature no Canadian franchises. But even 1970 deserves something of an asterisk, since there were only two Canadian teams at the time, and the NHL was going through one of it’s weirder periods, being a daffy sort of league known for occasionally doing things that don’t make much sense. The league had rapidly expanded from 6 teams to 12, and in an effort to get the new kids up to speed had split the league into the old guard in the “East” and the the expansion franchises in the “West,” awarding four playoff spots to each division – and thus guaranteeing a recent expansion franchise a spot in the Stanley Cup finals – even though the Original Six teams were far superior. The Montreal Canadians, at 92 points, finished tied for fourth in the East that season, losing out on a tiebreaker for the final playoff spot to the Rangers while finishing with six points more than the West-winning St. Louis Blues and 28 points more than any other Western Division team. The Toronto Maple Leafs, meanwhile, were lousy and finished last in the East, but Toronto’s always lousy so that’s nothing new.
The seven Canadian franchises have no weird twists or shifts in league policy to blame for their malaise in 2016. None of them made the playoffs, nor were any of them particularly close. The best of the bunch, the Ottawa Senators, finished eight points out of a playoff spot. It’s always a shock not to see the Montréal Canadiens in the playoffs, since it happens so infrequently, but the Canadiens endured that sort of lost season due to injuries – most notable to goaltender Carey Price – that can happen sometimes in sports. There’s not much you can do when that happens. It’s just not your year and you just have to heal up, write it off and not read much into it. Edmonton’s hopes for the season, which weren’t all that great to begin with, pretty much evaporated when Connor McDavid, the #1 pick in last summer’s draft and the latest player to be burdened with trying to carry this franchise on his shoulders, promptly hurt his shoulder and missed two months.
The three other Western Canadian franchises – Vancouver, Calgary, and Winnipeg – all crashed in burned after making the playoffs last season, although it should be said that advanced metrics didn’t really like any of those teams a season ago, viewed their success as somewhat fluky and would consider this crashing and burning more to be regressing to the mean. It was particularly depressing for this lifelong Vancouver Canucks fan to watch them start the season blowing leads late and racking up the Bettman points by gagging in OTs and shootouts, since those are the sorts of games that fringe teams need to salvage in order to keep themselves going. If fringe teams are losing close games early in the season, they tend to atone for that by losing by even larger margins late in the season. At one point, the Canucks lost three straight games 5:2, which no team had ever done, and then later lost nine in a row and went about a week without scoring a goal. I thought for a while that they were tanking, but then they went and won all three games against playoff teams on a California swing, so they screwed up that as well. The Canucks couldn’t even bomb out right. Watching this team was a waste of my time.
Then there are the Maple Leafs. No, let’s not go there.
The Lose is very pro-Canada when it comes to hockey. (Except for the Flames and the Oilers, who can both suck it.) It was outrageous and shortsighted in the mid-1990s when Gary Bettman came into the league with his dumb Southern strategy and all of a sudden Canadian franchises were deemed to be unable to compete financially, on account of a weak Canadian dollar at the time, and pretty soon you had the Nordiques playing in Denver and the original Jets going off to suffer a painful death in the Arizona desert. It was a dimwitted and shortsighted strategy which still hasn’t quite worked. The NHL has more badly performing franchises than any other league and it has little to do with market sizes and weak Canadian dollars and has far more to do with them being located in places where ice doesn’t actually form. Canada is where the game is loved and idolized and mythologized, and Canadians deserve better than the nationwide incompetence they were subjected to this season.
• The biggest reason that The Lose is happy the NBA regular season is finally ending is that Kobe Bryant is finally going to go away. Sure, it’s great he’s play 20 years and won 5 championships. I’ll give him that. But his last two seasons in L.A., where he was making $25 million a year mostly because no other free agent worth their salt would sign to play with Kobe, have been utterly farcical.
It’s bad enough that Kobe’s lost his game. Injuries and age have taken their toll. It happens to everyone and it’s tough to watch, particularly when it’s a player who’s been historically great. But what makes Kobe’s fall from lofty heights all the worse is that Byron Scott and the entire Laker organization have basically let him do whatever the fuck he wants out on the court to the detriment of his team and teammates. Among players who shoot as much as Kobe has this year, none have ever had a worse field goal percentage. Meanwhile, on the other end of the floor, the Lakers’ defensive rating when Kobe is on the floor is among the worst in the history of the NBA. Byron Scott actually had the audacity, after the Lakers lost by 48 to the Utah Jazz recently, to suggest that some of the players on the club needed to be held accountable for such a laughingly bad performance – which is completely inane, since Kobe’s been putting up one bad performance after another for two years straight and had carte blanche to do so, and so why should anyone on the team take Byron Scott’s words to mean anything, since there is clearly a double-standard here?
The Lakers have been a train wreck from the outset, naïvely thinking they could compete for a playoff spot and then having Scott coach them like it, sitting his young players out in the 4th Quarter when they should’ve been out there getting experience, consequences be damned. They gave Kobe all that cash primarily because he was still a box office draw, yet as the Kobe Going Away Tour has been carrying on in NBA arenas, he’s often been sitting out home games to compensate, which doesn’t play so well with your regularly paying customers. The Lakers have the second-worst record in the NBA, but if the ping pong balls work their mysterious ways and they fall out of the Top 3 in the lottery, they’ll have to forfeit their first round pick to the Sixers as a result of some bad trade or another over the years. D’Angelo Russell’s recent foray into undercover investigative journalism is only the latest in a series of headaches. They are a total mess worlds away from being competitive again.
Kobe’s last game is this Wednesday as the Lakers host Utah, and I just read the second-dumbest NBA column I’ve read all year (this being the dumbest) which suggested that Kobe’s finale should be the headline game on ESPN that night instead of the Golden State-Memphis game in which the Warriors are trying to break the 1996 Chicago Bulls’ all-time win mark. OK, sure, I’m a Dubs fan so maybe I’m biased, but let’s think about that for a minute … watch a washed up superstar go 7-20 from the field and guard no one and never pass … watch one of the great teams ever try to make history … well this is In Play Lose, after all, so maybe I should tune in to that game at Staples Center after all …
Anyway, congrats on your retirement, Kobe. Now go away.
• I always like to close out a Quick Misses post with some new music I’m listening to, and right now I’m listening a whole lot to Azel, the new record from Nigerien guitar maestro Bombino, who is probably my favorite single musician in the world right now. Bombino’s music is what happens when you take the transcendant, trance-infusing tones of the Sahara desert and mix it with a rock ’n’ roll attitude. I love everything on this record, but this track called Inar is a particularly good one. He’s playing here in San Francisco at The Independent later this month, and I’ll be there with my dancing shoes on and with an enormous glass of whisky in my hand so that dancing so much won’t hurt as much in the morning. Enjoy:
