What a boring boring song ... what a boring boring song ...

Part of what makes the notion of nemesis so compelling is that it so illogical. It simply makes no sense after awhile. Most notions of nemesis start out with the nemesis being a superior opponent, but over time that morphs into a psychological hang-up. Often times in sport, the nemesis IS NOT necessarily the better player/team on paper, but they have developed and thus possess a mental edge. They believe they are inherently superior – and the other side believes they are inferior, if not outwardly then as reflected by their play.

Which brings me to the game this past Saturday at the L.A. Coliseum as The Good Guys, fresh off a rather typically annoying and frustrating loss at Auburn the week before, had to face off against their ultimate nemesis on the gridiron. And to give you the full effect, you shall be required to click the following link after every paragraph of this entry and listen to the song in its entirety before continuing reading:

 
That is the single most annoying song in the history of sports, which is performed by the world's most overrated marching band every single time that the Trojans of U.S.C. make a positive play on the football field. And I do mean every single time. First downs, sacks, you name it.

That song's just insufferable, isn't it? Well, the perpetual firing up of Tribute to Troy is done, in part, to annoy the living hell out of their opponents. And when the U.S.C. band travels with the team to away games, they do the exact same thing. They held an alumni pep rally at Union Square in San Francisco the night prior to a game against either Stanford or Cal, I cannot remember which. At the time, I happened to be eating on the open-air terrace atop the Macy's, which is located on the square. The band played that fucking song 5-6 times and I wanted to throw stuff at them. I was not alone.

Their Pac-10 opponents (all of whom absolutely DETEST the Trojans and refer to the school as the University of Spoiled Children) have come up with ways to try and fend off this scourge – Cal fans have been known to sing "What a boring boring song ... what a boring boring song ..." while I think it may have been one of the Arizona schools' band which played the song either off-key or backwards everytime the Trojans misstepped on the field. But part of the problem is the Trojans have rarely misstepped. They have a pedigree to match few in the game, with Rose Bowls and National Championships and Heisman Trophy winners galore. They are the single-most glamourous team in the country, with Hollywood stars turning up on the sidelines and a lineup usually stacking with future NFL talent. And there is no team they've tormented more than the Cougars over the years.

Prior to Saturday's game, the Cougars sported an 8-57-4 all-time record against the Trojans. They hadn't beaten the Trojans since 2002, and during that time the average U.S.C. margin of victory was 33 points. This included the single-most embarrassing moment in the history of Cougar football – a 69:0 win by U.S.C. in 2008. In Pullman, no less. Believe it or not, that game was actually merciful – U.S.C. ran out the clock at the end of the first half up 41-0 and with the ball on the W.S.U. 10 yard line, and then scored 28 points in the second half while handing off to the 4th string RB and running basically two plays the entire time. The Cougars never even crossed midfield.

Another season, the fired up Cougars decided to try an onside kick to start the game against the #1 ranked Trojans. They kicked off from their own 35, needing the ball to travel 10 yards to try and recover the kick, but the kicker got overexcited and shanked the kick sideways and out of bounds – at their own 34. Yes, the kick traveled -1 yard. USC promptly thanked them for the field position by scoring in three plays. It was a long day.

Aha but there is dissension in the ranks of Troy! Last season, their talent-laden squad bombed out and finished only with a 7-6 record (they missed W.S.U. on the schedule, obviously). They were marred by internal bickering which turned into a general sense of disinterest as the season progressed. The Trojans didn't seem to care, which was a stinging indictment of the regime of U.S.C. head coach Lane Kiffin, who has entered this season on something of a hot seat.

Meanwhile, The Good Guys are still in rebuild mode here, but the loss to Auburn showed some progress. There is more talent and some tenacity, particularly on defense. A large part of overcoming the nemeses, ultimately, comes down to believing that you can actually do so. Even with their improvement, USC's uncertain QB play, and the Trojans' hangover from last season seeming to have carried over, the oddsmakers set the line for this game at USC -15½, and I doubt even the faithful members of the Zzu Crew were willing to take that bet.

 
We're a realistic lot, we Zzu Crewers. We want to see some progress. Losing all of the time means not taking yourselves all that seriously. It also means that, when you do fell the giant, it feels even better. The wins feel almost like they should count as two ...

USC displaying less-than-stellar QB play

What, no Tribute to Troy? What's with the silence? Indeed, there was little for the Trojan faithful to crow about on Saturday night, as U.S.C. mustered only 14 first downs and 193 total yards, never completed a pass for more than 7 yards, and had an interception returned 70 yards by W.S.U. for a TD. It was a rarity in contemporary football, a game where both defenses dictated the game. It was tied 7:7 late, but some nimble footwork by a Cougar receiver and some bad Trojan tackling turned a short pass into a 50-yard gain late, which set up a FG attempt:

The kick is good!

The final score is Washington State 10:7 Southern Cal and, instead of chanting along to Tribute to Troy, the fans were chanting "Fi-re Kif-fin!" as the Cougars were taking a knee to run out the clock. And while the LOSE believes that it's important to be gracious winners, an exception is made when it comes to beating U.S.C. And by shutting up that band for the better part of the evening, the Good Guys have not only won a football game, but done a yeoman's act of community service in reducing the level of noise pollution. And it's important to enjoy the moment. With an all-time record now at 9-57-4, the moment doesn't come that often.

And just in case you were missing the song after a few minutes of silence, honorary Coug for the Day Andy up in Ontario found this link. Consider yourself warned. We are not responsible. Sincerely, the management.

Commitment to Incompetence

Carson Palmer running the Raiders famous no-offense huddle.

I never had much interest in fantasy sports. I root for teams, and not for players unless they happen to play for teams I like. And the whole idea of obsessing over statistics means nothing to me. The objective of the game is to win. When you’re playing a real game, you don’t give a shit who scores what. Trust me, you don’t. So long as your team scores more than the other, it doesn’t matter whether or not you score 2 TD’s or go 3-for-4 or grab 15 rebounds. You don’t care. You care a lot more if you lose, of course – “maybe we would’ve won if I hadn’t gone 0-for-10 from the floor.”

This is particularly true in football and basketball, both of which require you to figure out on the fly what’s working and what isn’t. It’s all about making adjustments. Sometimes the adjustment is “give the ball to the other guy.” Go back and watch the NCAA championship game from last spring, and watch how Louisville wins the game by putting Russ Smith, their best player about 30 feet from the basket for the entire second half – thus spreading the floor out and creating more individual matchups they could win. Russ Smith had, by his lofty standards, a pretty bad game, and while players hate underperforming, winning championships is a pretty good tonic.

My other reason for not playing fantasy sports is that I cannot bring myself to draft players from teams that I dislike. They are the enemy. I finished second the one time I played in a fantasy baseball league, which was a NL-only league, in part because I steadfastly refused to draft anyone who played for the Dodgers. I want the Dodgers to go 0-162 and get no-hit 159 times. The Dodgers had some pitching that year which I could’ve used on my fantasy team – my team wound up being mostly St. Louis Cardinals, if I remember correctly, but it didn’t pitch all that well – but I wouldn’t ever want a Dodger to succeed. I hate everything about the Dodgers. I remember having to hope for some Dodger wins over San Diego back in 2010, when the Padres and Giants were battling for a division title. It made me feel so unclean that I thought about going to confessional afterwards. So I don’t want no stinkin’ Dodgers or Yankees or Dallas Cowboys associated with me in any way, shape, or form.

Others are certainly welcome to partake if it brings them an enjoyment of the game, of course. And I did always make it a point to participate in a different sort of office wagering shenanigans – dead pools. Journalists are particularly macabre sorts, of course, and every newsroom has a dead pool. We certainly didn’t want people to die, but we definitely didn’t want it happening while we were working the desk, because a famous politico or celebrity dying just meant MORE WORK. (And you call it a deadline because someone famous is likely to croak 10 minutes before it, just causing you more misery as you scramble to redo the next day’s edition.)

Most sports departments I was involved in, meanwhile, had their own version of the deadpool – figure out who would be the WORST team in the league before the season began. And since I love bad football, the NFL Dead Pool was my personal favourite of these.

It’s actually somewhat tricky picking the worst team in the NFL, because for years the league has tried to emphasize parity. The NFL’s great weapon for doing this, for years, was the schedule matrix used to determine the following season’s opponents. Teams could bomb out one season, have a ludicrously easy schedule the next, and promptly be in playoff contention. (That doesn’t really happen so much anymore, as the 32-team matrix is much less fluid and more locked in from year to year.) And the great unknown in a football season, of course, is injuries. That often tips the scale from a not-very-good team becoming truly awful, as their depth is depleted, but that’s hard to predict.

And it’s also hard to gauge how low the bar will be. Some years 2-14 will win by two games in the standings. Last year there were a pair of 2-14 teams. Yeech. One of those, the Kansas City Chiefs, probably wasn’t that much on the radar of deadpoolers at the start of the season. There was some talent there, but not enough to be that competitive, but they shouldn’t have been that bad. The Chiefs seemed to take on an attitude of “let’s get the coach and everyone in the front office fired” as the year wore on, and they had about the most awful thing imaginable happen off the field that left the whole organization in a state of shock. They get a mulligan. I’ve seen 8-8 predictions for the Chefs, which I think might be a tad optimistic, but they’re not deadpool-worthy this year.

The other 2-14ers of 2012, the Jacksonville Jaguars, really are that awful. They capped off their season with this ignoble performance against the Tennessee Titans (another team which looks pretty bad here at the start of 2013). I’m not sure who they’ve added to improve the squad. To be honest, I’m not even sure why the Jags exist in the first place. But hey, Tim Tebow is available now. I’m sure JAX is contemplating signing the local hero in an effort at trying to convince the Gator Nation to drive up from Gainesville and fill their empty seats at their blacked-out home games.

The temptation is always there to pick the Arizona Cardinals in the deadpool, but the Cardinals are never quite bad enough. My buddy Adell and I used to call them the 5-and-dimes, both because their owners – the Bidwell family – were/are notorious cheapskates, and also because Arizona was usually 5-10 going into the last game of the season. But 5-11 isn’t gonna cut it in a deadpool. The Cardinals may be even worse this year than last, simply because they’ve got two burgeoning juggernauts in their division – the 49ers and the Seahawks – but they also have a good sleeper deadpool pick as well, which would be the St. Louis Rams, who overachieved last season but still don’t seem all that long on talent.

Some good bets from past years aren’t so good anymore. Houston and Cincinnati are, like, actual good teams (which is kind of scary to think about), and the Detroit Lions went 4-12 last year but seemed to invent ways to lose games. Surely, they’re going to grow out of that at some point. That, and maybe they’ll finally learn how to tackle someone. The mistakes on the lakes – Cleveland and Buffalo – are much better deadpool bets, since both franchises seem bereft of both talent and ideas.

But there is one clearcut #1 deadpool selection at the start of the season, and that would be the Raiders. Gads, what a mess. They have home games v. Jacksonville and Tennessee this year, and those are the only two games on the schedule I can see them winning. Carson Palmer threw for 4,000 yds. last year and usually seemed to be the only guy on the field who knew where he was supposed to be lined up. Now he’s in Arizona. There goes the offense. They have an unsettled QB situation, a RB that’s always hurt, they lack playmakers on the outside. For “competitive” reasons, they’ve not yet named a starting QB for this Sunday’s game with the Colts – who do, in fact, have a QB, and Andrew Luck’s gonna throw for a billion yards on that sieve of a Raiders’ defense. This team is terrible, the front office is a mess, the ownership situation is muddled. ‘Commitment to Excellence’ should be replaced by ‘Commitment to Incompetence,’ since I cannot recall a sound football decision made since they last went to the Super Bowl.

So with the 1st pick in the NFL Deadpool, gimme the Raiders. But I’m open to other nominations.

Let bad football begin!

Win With Class

Football season is upon us. (Football of every sort of variety, I should add, as the beloved Canaries of Norwich City F.C. decided to get their shit together and win a damn EPL game today, 1:0 over Southampton.) I don’t pay that much attention to college football anymore, other than to follow the exploits of The Good Guys, who are playing a big $$$ game today in exchange for likely being trounced an annoying 31:24 loss at Auburn in a game they really should've won. It’s the time of year in where one of timeless traditions of American sport resumes, which is the act of scheduling dreadfully inferior opponents in college football and stomping upon them mercilessly, running up the score and making yourself look good in the process.

The LOSE is not impressed by running up the score, even in it’s some team I like who are doing it. (Watching the Rose Bowl-bound Cougars of 1997 win 77-7 over Southwestern Louisiana made me feel a bit unclean.) The objective is to win the game. The margin of victory doesn’t much matter. Most lopsided scores are the result of superior talent – being bigger, stronger, faster, etc. – and I find it usually takes far more skill to win a close game against a good team than it does to win a blowout against a bad one. A blowout on a professional level is more impressive, given that the talent levels are somewhat more evenly distributed.

Running up the score is generally frowned upon in American sports on the professional level. The biggest whomping of last year’s NFL season – Seattle 58:0 Arizona – was hardly a case of the Seahawks running up the score, as Arizona turned the ball over constantly and showed a general disinterest in tackling. The following week, however the Seahawks earned a wag of the finger in a 50:17 win over Buffalo by running a fake punt well into the second half. This sort of thing is not kosher in the states. There are various tricky and clever aspects to sport – the stolen base, the fake punt – and the unwritten rule is that, once you’ve got the game in hand, you stop it with the tricky stuff and just play the game straight ahead.

This is NOT the case abroad, however.

Consider the case of our summertime heroes, those plucky footballers from Tahiti who went 0-3 at the Confed Cup this summer. To their credit, the Tahitians played with class and chose to actually attempt to play some football instead of parking the bus and going into a defensive shell, and they got shelled because of it, being outscored 24-1 in three games. Being matched in such a high-profile tournament against such an inferior opponent left their three opponents – Nigeria, Spain, Uruguay – in sort of a bad spot. All three teams needed to post big margins, since GD is always a tiebreaker in football, but they didn’t want to embarrass their opponents.

But what exactly does that mean? In the case of the Spaniards, they basically abandoned their dominant passing game for an evening and just charged ahead English style. They won 10-0 because of it, but the Spaniards could’ve easily scored a couple early goals and then just held the ball the rest of the game, basically toying with the Tahitians like a cat playing with a wounded rodent. Spain routinely possesses the ball 70-75% of the time, anyway, against the Germanys and the Italys and the Frances of the world. It wasn’t far-fetched to imagine the Spaniards holding the ball for 5-10 minutes at a time had they played that way.

Now, to the Spaniards, it would have been dishonourable to taunt an opponent like that. At the same time, they won 10-0, so it’s not like they let up. Several of the players then said after winning a game that was clearly somewhat uncomfortable that it would’ve been even more dishonourable not to give their best effort for the duration of the game.

See, and therein lies the rub – what counts as ‘best effort’ is a grey area. I learned this when playing/coaching American sports in Europe, and bringing my American attitudes with me.

While coaching a women’s basketball team in England, we lost a game by 93 points. We were hopelessly outmatched and knew it going in, and I focused on improvement and not the final result. What bothered me was that our opponents, who were bigger and more skilled, decided it was cool to have their best player stand 40 feet from the basket when we had the ball, scoring about 60 points in the game almost entirely on breakaways or fast breaks after our team missed a shot or turned the ball over. We call this “cherry picking” in the U.S., and it is a BIG NO NO. I was less than happy with this, and let the opposing coach know about it afterwards, to which he said “well, you should’ve done something to stop it.” I may or may not have then insinuated that doing something like that in the U.S. would result in his 60-point scoring star forward getting undercut by a benchwarming thug on one of her many easy fast breaks.

Another example came while playing baseball. Yes, I played baseball in England. We weren’t very good and some of the finer points of the game eluded us, like holding runners on. Our opponents would get a base hit and immediately steal second, even when they were up by 10 runs. I got rather annoyed with this. I took a turn late in the game playing catcher and a particularly annoying member of the other side got another base hit. He promptly went to steal second on the first pitch to the following batter – and I had called a pitchout, so I gunned him out at 2nd base much to his stunned amazement. The umpire for this particular game happened to be the manager of our opponents (we were short on umpires), and he didn’t care much for me to begin with, and he promptly told me with a level of disdain, “that was a cheeky move on your part,” to which I said, “in the states, if you were stealing bases up 10 runs, you’d get plunked in the earhole or the middle of the back with a fastball the next time you came to bat.” Come to think of it, I was a bit more colourful when I said it … but he wasn’t amused. (Having just said that, it didn’t surprise me when, coming up to bat the next inning, I promptly got hit by a pitch. I promptly stole second and third and scored on a base hit. I may or may not have flipped off the umpire after scoring a run. I was already a problem child without causing further international incidents.)

The idea outside of the states seems to be that anything in the game is fair game at any point when between the lines. It’s on you to stop them, not expect them to stop of their own accord. We would win basketball games by 70 in England and still have our starters in the game at the end. There seemed to also a corresponding attitude, however, that what happened on the pitch stayed there, and that you didn’t carry it over after the fact. (Now if only fans had that same sort of attitude.)

Like I say, this really doesn’t jibe with the American attitude – the exception being college football, of course, which is an exception to pretty much everything, as it’s one of the strangest sporting spectacles imaginable. Expect to see a few 70-0 scores here in the coming weeks. In many of those games, the team scoring the 70 will have the good sense to empty the bench and play the game straight up from there – but not always. In the end, I find that nothing good ultimately comes out of those sorts of games and far more often some ugly stuff starts to happen – bad players may not play the game well, but they can injure you really, really easily. Respect is a big deal on the playing field, even if the definition of ‘respect’ can be somewhat nebulous at times.

At least in scrabble, when you run up a big margin of victory, there is a certain level of understanding that the reverse is going to happen from time to time. There are some other aspects of the game, much as in any other, which we could deem 'disrespectful,' but it's a grey area which I can get into at some point in the future when I don't completely hate the fucking game.

We try to emphasize to people that they shouldn't be sore losers. Fair enough. But be classy when you win, whatever that means in whatever activity you choose to pursue. Don't be a jerk. You won. You proved your point. Over time, I’ve generally come to take a position where I win rather humbly and try to be gracious, since I positively HATE losing, and assume that my opponents hate it as much as I do. I don’t like to do anything perceived as gloating in the context of legit competition. As for handling how I lose? Well … let’s say that’s a work in progress. But given the subject of this blog, you can safely assume I’ve had lots of experience with it.

My Hero of the Week and Many More Weeks to Come

The LOSE has been on extended summer vacation here, owing to me scribbling away at a novel and also owing to the fact that sport takes the summer off, for the most part, and I already covered the miseries of the misfortunes of the local nine this season, which have refused to improve. Now the EPL has resumed, football is but a few weeks away and there will soon be all sorts of failure to document.

But there is no failure at the moment. There is only winning. The Official Girlfriend of IN PLAY LOSE is no longer the official girlfriend, as a new marketing agreement has been forged and she has accepted a promotion:

She is my hero of the week, and my hero for many more weeks to come.

We win at life.

Leaving Las Vegas

This particular entry of IN PLAY LOSE was particularly difficult to write, even though I've tried to approach it with my usual absurdist intellectual bent. I am not in the mood to argue. So don't argue with me.

Since the LOSE was venturing to the losingest city on earth to play in the National Scrabble Championships, the results seemed almost appropriate. Las Vegas is a place where people lose like no other. They lose their money, their good sense, their inhibitions. It’s a vortex of a place, albeit a beautiful one for someone like me who loves architecture, design, and the art of the man-made world. Las Vegas at night really is gorgeous. I hadn’t been there in about 20 years all told. All places change over 20 years, but Vegas has changed 100 times over, a city that constantly tweaks and reinvents itself, looking to be everything for everybody and sometimes succeeding.

Before I talk about how I did, I should also point out that my opponents played very, very well. As the epigram of IN PLAY LOSE points out, no competitions are acts of solitaire. Whatever objectives you have are countered by the other side’s. There necessarily has to be a loser. Losing is, in fact, the default setting and you do all you can to avoid it. But sometimes you don’t do enough, and sometimes the other persons do more.

My biggest problem as a scrabble player is the same problem I’ve had with every other competitive activity that I’ve undertaken, which is that I’m streaky and maddeningly inconsistent. I’m your classic NBA swingman who averages 14 pts. a game – he scores 26 in one game and can’t miss, then scores 2 the next and looks completely lost and out of his element on the court. I’ve picked up, and given up, a litany of sports in my lifetime in which I had a natural aptitude but became SO DAMN FRUSTRATED with my inability to do them consistently well. Tennis immediately comes to mind. Golf is maybe a better example: I still remember teeing off on the 1st hole at my uncle’s charity golf tournament, having played maybe 10 rounds of golf in my life and having been added to field simply because they were short a player, and, in front of all those gathered, promptly unleashing a 305-yard drive in the dead center of the fairway that drew “oohs” and “aahs” and the odd “damn, I wish he was on my team” from the other players.

My drive off the second tee went 30 yards and killed a few worms.

I run hot and cold. More like Saharan and Antarctic. When things go well for me, they go really well. And when they don’t … you get the 2013 National Scrabble Championships in Las Vegas, which went as bad as tournament I’ve ever been a part of. In some ways, it was even worse than the 2009 tourney in Albuquerque where I went 1-17, simply because so much was at stake in Las Vegas, and to have such a dreadful tourney at a crucial time feels like a cruel twist of fate. People have attempted to comfort me by saying that this is part of the game, that bad tournaments just happen from time to time, but no one I know, at my level of the game, seems to have tournaments as bad I do. I would venture to say, in fact, that a good number of players, if subjected to the sorts of truly wretched outcomes I’ve had to endure, would have the same impulse – which is to quit.

It didn’t help that I was not in a good mindset going into the tournament. For a number of reasons I don’t want to go into, it hasn’t been a very good summer. It’s been a high-cost, high-stress, low-reward sort of summer. I frequently tell people that “if I get mad about scrabble, it’s not scrabble that is making me mad.” I need to have the proper sort of attitude to compete at a high level. I can’t just turn it on and off. I am not someone with deep, intense focus who can just block everything out. Things that affect me away from the board affect me over it. I’m not sure what the solution to this is.

One thing I am happy to report is a solution for a problem that came to the forefront on the third day of the tourney, when I realized that I couldn't read the board. This has been a developing issue here in 2013, and I've been dealing with it by sort of very quietly asking KC to read the menu to me whenever we go to a restaurant. Fortunately, my good pal David Whitley had an extra pair of reading glasses which he gave to me, and they make a big difference. I cannot attribute poor performance at scrabble to poor eyesight, but I doubt that it's helped. And for the rest of the tournament, at least I wasn't flying blind.

The game hasn’t been going very well lately – I’ve been in a steady slide ever since New Orleans and have lost some of my interest in playing. Deep down, I really didn’t want to play. There were times in recent weeks where I thought seriously about withdrawing from the tourney, simply because I was residing in such a terrible headspace and feeling like a bad tourney would be almost too much for me to handle upstairs.

Well, the time is here to handle it, I guess.

How does this happen? Well, obviously, I played terrible. My game obviously isn’t well-rounded enough to figure out how to get out some situations. This is easy to see in hindsight – but in the moment, of course, it’s utterly confounding. Everything is dependent upon making what seems like the right play – and when the move promptly blows up in your face, as you’ve just given your opponent a place to play their 80-point bingo and you’ve drawn IOUUV out of the bag, and this happens over and over again, you just wondering why the hell you’re even bothering. You can no longer tell the difference between a good play that didn't work and a bad one which was doomed from the start. The concept of the Threshold of Misery is important here – when it’s going real bad, the frustration multiplies exponentially and you reach the point where you’re no longer feeling as if you’re playing a game, but are simply hoping that some miracle will fall from the sky. That doesn’t end well. Trust me, I know.

There are three basic types of losses in competitive scrabble:

1) you make big mistakes
2) your opponent plays better than you
3) you draw poor tiles and have no real shot.

Most scrabblers I know respond to these in the corresponding ways:

1) “I can’t believe I played like an idiot! I’m so mad!”
2) “Well, (s)he made the plays. *Tip cap* They’re still a lucky bastard.”
3) *shrug* “Not much I could do about that one.”

I respond like this:

1) “OK, I won’t make that mistake again. I can learn from this.”
2) see response to #2 above
3) “I HATE THIS FUCKING GAME!!!! WHAT A FUCKING WASTE OF MY TIME!!!!!”

Most players hate the first type of loss. I hate the third. Perhaps I need to have my therapist explain to me why it is that such a loss of any sense of control affects me so much. There are probably some deep-seeded insecurity issues there. But whatever. This isn’t a self-help blog. The point is that all of the losses mentioned above happen, and they don’t necessarily occur in proportion. We call the third loss being “bagged,” and in Las Vegas I got bagged over and over and over again, to the point where I felt like I was watching my opponents play solitaire and absolutely nothing I was doing was making any difference in the outcome of the game. In theory, not only will you get bagged from time to time, but you’ll also do the bagging. I had one of those in my favour. (I would’ve had a second game with a lopsided scoreline in my favour, except that I just wanted to get the game over with, and didn’t look for any big plays at the end, because my opponent was miserable to the point of unpleasant and I just wanted to get away from him. But we’ll get into the concept of being a miserable opponent here in a minute.)

The third type of loss is primarily due to luck. Some of the tiles are good, and some are bad, and you’ll draw some of each over time. The standard line people like to spout is that “luck evens out.” The standard line is nonsense. Sure, over the course of 25,000 games I’ve played in the past 10 years, the tiles have probably evened out. But I haven’t played 25,000 games in the past 10 years at the National Scrabble Championships in Las Vegas. The bag of tiles has no memory and no sense of place. It could be in Las Vegas or on my livingroom table. Luck is not a mathematical or rational construct. It is a metaphorical one. And this is why we must fear metaphor – the greater symbolic value we attach to something, the greater the disappointment if it doesn’t turn out. And when you slap a label like “national championship” on a tournament, the metaphors run wild, the disappointment at a lack of success compounds, and it’s easy to feel like you’re just getting hosed repeatedly.

And when it comes to metaphor, I embrace too easily that which I should fear. I’m someone who makes metaphors out of everything around me. I have a ridiculously logical and rational mind coupled with the eye and the voice of a poet. Rarely does A=A to me. Often times, A=B and A=C. Should I see the world this way? Almost certainly not. It makes for an aptitude when it comes to literature (where the ability to render A=B is paramount), but also makes for a propensity to attach far too much meaning to events. This is particularly true of negative ones, since failure is complex and multifaceted. Why do you succeed? Well, you did what you were supposed to do! Why do you fail? Hmmm, it’s complicated … I was always naturally good at scrabble, the mechanics and mathematics and spatial awareness seeming to suit one area of my particular skillset. Unfortunately, the part where random chance comes into play drives me fucking mad as hatters. It sort of makes me wonder, in hindsight, why it is that I bother to play at all, given that the game has a rather large component of random chance which seems almost destined to make me crazy.

And I went crazy in Las Vegas. It almost killed me – and I’m dead serious when I say that. I very nearly had a nervous breakdown. I did manage to only break one pen somehow, and I probably would have smashed all of my equipment to smithereens if given the opportunity. The losses mounted and the frustration gathered and finally I reached the point where I just felt completely numb. I was zombified by the last day of the tourney. After the fact, I’m very rational about why I lost, and can look at outcomes with the appropriate amounts of humour and absurdity, but in the moment it eats me up inside.

I hated this tournament. I hated every minute of it. And right now I hate scrabble – but I hate the player and not the game.

I have no doubt that my girlfriend’s performance in the tournament was significantly and negatively impacted by the fact that she had to put up with me. I hate knowing that to be true. It’s absolutely unacceptable to me, as a person, to be causing such difficulties for someone who loves and cares about me. I was sullen, I was moody, I was smoking and was needing to be drunk all the time, I was uncoöperative and unresponsive. I was the sort of opponent people loathe to play against – the sort who stews in their own misery every time something goes wrong. In short, I was an absolutely TERRIBLE human being to be around for 5 days. Now, my friends all know that I’m ultracompetitive and that my frustration when I lose is all in the moment and my usual good humour will soon return, so they know not to take how I act to heart – but that shouldn’t even matter.

The bottom line is that I hate the way the game makes me feel.

And I really shouldn’t be partaking in any activities that do so. And now that one long weekend in Vegas has essentially managed to undo all that I’ve strived to accomplish and achieve in the game over the past five years (yes, it really was that bad a tourney), I need a break.

I threaten to quit scrabble all the time, but never do, and I’m not going to now either, even though saying “I Quit” aloud repeatedly in Las Vegas was about the only source of comfort and relief after awhile. I’ve managed to become so involved in the game on administrative and managerial levels that detangling myself from all of that is nearly impossible. And I still enjoy that aspect of the game, so I’ll run the tourney in San Francisco this fall and be involved on that level. I just need to not play for a while and focus my attention on doing something else – writing novels and telling stories, working on art projects and cookbooks and practicing mixology. But I need a hiatus from the game. It needs to become fun again, and stop being a soul-sucking vacuum.

The worst mistake I have made playing scrabble is defining myself by the results of the activity. That’s a somewhat natural reaction, however – the game offers so little in terms of tangible rewards that all you can really strive to do is achieve your own personal expectations and meet your own standards. I have ridiculously high expectations for myself in terms of wins and losses, but having the goal of not losing my mind should be easy enough to attain. I can do better than this, win or lose.

Caro's Threshold of Misery

The LOSE has been busy here of late, cranking out a magazine at the office and writing up a draft of a new novel. But the LOSE took time out to travel to Las Vegas, where I participated in the National Scrabble Championships. And as resistant as I am to the idea, I will be a dutiful reporter here and go into some sort of detail about this tournament here in the coming days.

But before I do that, it's important to bring a concept into play here which was all of my gambler friends know about. This is a snippet from Mike Caro's "Threshold of Misery" theory, which I vaguely knew of in the past and was then reintroduced to by my good pal Jason Hlady up in Saskatchewan after I had a truly dreadful tournament in Albuquerque in 2009:

Few concepts have resonated with students more than Caro's Threshold of Misery. I continually receive letters, e-mails, and face to face thanks from both poker players and people in the "real world", telling me how much this simple truth has meant to them.

Here's how it goes: suppose you're a small to medium limit player, and you can envision yourself comfortably losing a maximum of $1,500 today. I'm not suggesting that you'll be happy about losing that much, just that you can comfortably handle it and that anything more will begin to feel uncomfortable.

Okay, now you find yourself down $500, then $1,100, then--before it registers, you've zoomed past $1,500 and are losing $1,800. You've entered dangerous territory. And it gets worse. And worse. Hours later, you find yourself losing $4,530. Now, your mind is numb. I believe that most people at this point can't mentally comprehend added losses. It all feels the same. You've crossed into Caro's Threshold of Misery, which is the point where mental and emotional pain is maximized and anything further won't register.
 
You must be aware when you cross that threshold, because beyond it decisions don't seem to matter. This is true in real life, too. When romances unravel or businesses fail, you might cross the Threshold of Misery and stop caring about making critical decisions. That's because the pain is already maximized and anything else that goes wrong can't add to the agony ... at these times, in poker and in life, the secret is to keep performing like you care.

How'd I do in Vegas? Well, I wouldn't be explaining the threshold of misery theory if it went well, now would I? This blog is intended to be an act of somewhat creative nonfiction, because truth is stranger than fiction. And I couldn't have invented this tournament in my head if I tried.

A Giant Inferno

"If you're going through hell, keep going."
– Winston Churchill

On May 12, at Pacific Bell SBC AT&T Phone Co. Park, the 2012 World Series Champion San Francisco Giants defeated the Atlanta Barves Braves 5-1. The Giants were 23-15 at the time, atop the NL West Standings and had just finished winning three straight from the NL East leading Barves Braves by an aggregate of 23-4.

And then this happened:

After today’s 7-2 home loss to the New York Mets, which completed a sweep by the Mets, the Giants now stand at 40-50, meaning they are 17-35 since the 12th of May. Some of that has been due to some bad timing with the schedule – the Giants have had a series of long road trips after the schedule was frontloaded with homestands – but they’ve also managed to lose three of four at home to the Miami Marlins and get swept by the aforementioned Mets, a team consisting of about four guys you would actually want and 21 guys I’ve never heard of. I think the season reached an absurd new low on Monday night when the Giants lost to the Mets 4-3 in 16 innings, leaving 18 men on base (11 in extra innings) and batting 1-for-15 with runners in scoring position.

[Side note: thanks to good pal Diane over at Value Over Replacement Grit for answering my query on the absurd number of extra inning games the Mets have been playing this year. The VORG is an official Friend of The Lose, or FTL, because we wouldn’t want any FTW going on around here, and you should read Diane's blog all the time.]

On May 14, the Giants ventured to Toronto for two games at The SkyDome (and I don’t give a shit what it’s called now, it’s still the SkyDome) against the last-place Jays, and the Giants got shellacked 10-6 and 11-3 and it’s been a free fall ever since. So my first instinct here is to blame Canada for the Giants miseries. Surely this is Canada’s fault. WHAT HAVE YOU DONE TO OUR TEAM?!?!?!? Except I really like Canada, have many friends there, speak excellent Canadian, and appreciate the fact that our northern neighbours are both extremely mellow and secretly badass. And that was 50 games ago, so surely the Giants should’ve gotten their shit together by now.

No, it’s not Canada’s fault. As the Official Girlfriend of IN PLAY LOSE just said from across the room, upon hearing what I was writing about, “it is with heavy heart that we regret to inform you that our team sucks.”

It’s really tough to watch this happening. The Giants won the World Series in 2010 and 2012, and the 2011 team, while being offensively inept and dreadfully boring, still managed to win 86 games and be in the race most of the year. And after a great start to this season, they’ve completely gone off a cliff. This can happen sometimes to veteran teams, of course, who can seemingly get collectively old and slow all at once. The 2001 Mariners won the most games in American League history, the 2002 and 2003 teams were among the best teams in baseball history not to make the playoffs … aaand then, in 2004, they were in last. They were old, slow, couldn’t hit nor field, and a good number of their longtime vets had outlived their usefulness.

Thing is though, the Giants aren’t really that old. Many of their best players are in their mid- to late 20s. Having made a whole bunch of terrible free agent decisions in the aftermath of the Barry Bonds era, the Giants have instead been living off a steady diet of serviceable veterans on short-term contracts while developing their own young players. The bulk of this team’s core is home grown talent they’ve now been hurrying to sign to long-term deals so as not to have to deal with free agency issues at all in the future. They made it a point to keep the majority of the 2012 team intact, and with good reason – they just won the World Series, for cripesake! But suddenly, the core seems to have just completely rotted out. Something is rotten in the proverbial Denmark. (Even more rotten than in the real Denmark, which doesn’t seem possible).

OK, so what the hell is going on here?

The Giants have had an absurd number of injuries, for starters, many of them in bunches and a number of them weird. Pitcher Ryan Vogelsong was pitching a shutout when he broke his hand batting; CF and leadoff man Angel Pagan may have done the remarkable in a rare Giants win, but he also apparently injured his leg severely on what was the most exciting play of the season, and he is now basically shelved for the year. NLDS MVP Marco Scutaro was hitting .330 again – remarkable for his age – then he broke a finger so badly that it’s now bent at an angle. He’s trying to play through it, amazingly. Broken fingers, strained feet, appendicitis, cyst removals from swollen knees – you name it, this team has been a M*A*S*H unit. But bad teams always have lots of injuries. Every team has some injury issues during a season, but bad teams suffer because there isn’t enough depth of talent to play through it and be successful.

The offense has gone into a complete tailspin here of late, lacking any sort of continuity and having guys come back from injury too quickly who clearly aren’t effective. But early in the season, the offense was carrying this team – which should be a red flag, because Phone Co. Park is the most pitcher-friendly park in baseball and any good offensive stats will tend to regress. The Giants will only win if they pitch well.

And therein lies the biggest problem: the Giants CAN’T PITCH. They haven’t worth a damn all season, but were bailed out early on by a string of improbable late game heroics, as the Giants pulled off one surprising comeback after another in the late innings. The team that threw four shutouts in their last 7 postseason games of 2012 – all wins – now has one effective starter (Madison Bumgarner) and a really good LHP setup guy and closer who never get in the games because they’re losing all the time. Matt Cain, the ace, followed up giving up 7 runs in 3 innings on Friday by lasting .2 of an inning today. Tim Lincecum, who found his form in the playoffs in the bullpen, and playoff hero Barry Zito are both rarely able to get out of the 5th inning these days, which means the bullpen is constantly taxed, guys are all out of sync, and everything’s a mess. Now the defense, which was so slick in the World Series, has started to come apart. The offense is wheezing. Even manager Bruce Bochy seems to be losing his Midas touch. They're inventing new ways to screw things up.

And there aren’t any good solutions. Their minor league system is iffy, so it’s hard to make deals. Conversely, they don’t really have a lot of guys a playoff contender would want (save for RF/fan favourite/weirdo Hunter Pence, who actually referenced that Churchill quote for the media last weekend), so trying to restock through deadline day deals isn’t really going to work. They’ll have some money to spend in the offseason, as the collective $40 million their paying to Zito and Lincecum comes off the books, but the Giants aren’t big players in free agency anymore. Their m.o. in the championship years has been to add on to good rosters throughout the season by fleecing the Marlins and Réal Ciudad Kansas through a series of trades and other acquisitions. There isn’t any point in going that route when you’re 10 games under .500 at the all-star break. The cupboard is far from bare, of course – Buster Posey is a good start, Matt Cain won't suck forever, Brandon Crawford will remember how to field, etc. – but there are some serious decisions to be made about the future of this team. And in the meantime, the slog continues.

The Giants have been a source of joy for us in recent years. On Oct. 1, 2010, I lost my job, but three days later I was caring far less about that and far more about the fact that the Giants had beaten the Padres on the last day of the season to clinch the division. Watching them proceed from there to win a World Series brought a joy and happiness that was a most welcome distraction in an otherwise terrible time. “Who cares if I don’t have a job? It’s 80° out and there’s a World Series victory parade!” Watching them go through this abysmal death march of a 2-month stretch has been extremely discouraging. The city that lives and dies with this team and sells out every game has been mired in an interminable hangover without the benefits one gets from of a few stiff drinks.

But I know that you cannot win every year. Admittedly, we’re a little spoiled here at the moment – two championships in three years is pretty remarkable, especially since they’d not won one since 1954. We Giants fans were becoming perilously close to being those annoying, irritating types who gloat constantly because their team wins all the time.

That would’ve been kinda awesome if that happened, wouldn’t it?

Hero(es) of the Week

Today the airport unit of the San Francisco Fire Department was pressed into service as first responders for one of the most unimaginably awful reasons – a Boeing 777 coming up short on its approach to the runway, smacking its tail first (which then separated from the rest of the body of the plane), spinning round and ultimately skidding to a stop as the fuselage became engulfed in fire. It's a terrible tragedy – 2 persons lost their lives in the crash and 49 were seriously injured – but it's also a damn miracle, as there were 307 people on the plane altogether.

I'm not that far off when I say this happened in my backyard – we live 15 minutes from SFO, and we're basically the emergency aeroport shuttle for all of our friends who miss connecting flights, get stranded in bad weather, oversleep, are too hungover to fly, etc. This was a soul-shaking sort of event today, since air travel in this country has become so safe that you almost take it for granted – there hadn't been a major commercial aeroline accident at SFO since 1968, and there hadn't been one which was fatal since something like 1953. This just doesn't happen. You simply cannot believe a jetliner has crashed. You cannot believe that it is real.

And I just wanted to take this time to thank those first responders, who are the true heroes of every week. I live 2 blocks from S.F.F.D. Engine Co. #7, and the engines have a tendency to go revving thru the neighbourhood with sirens blaring at all times of day, which can be annoying. But the men and women of Engine Co. #7 also nearly collectively killed themselves (and I mean that in all seriousness, as several were injured) working in the middle of the night back in Sep. 2005 while fighting an inferno next door – a slum tenement not up to code which was gutted by a fire that nearly took all of the surrounding homes down with it, including mine. They very likely saved our house that night, and all of us who live in this neighbourhood were left standing helpless in the middle of the street, watching the fire crews work and hoping it would turn out OK. I will always be grateful for that. It was a horrific night I have since had the odd nightmare about – there were multiple fatalities among the residents of that building – and yet it could have been so, so much worse.

So I love the S.F.F.D., and their efforts at keeping people safe in this city never go unnoticed by me. They truly are The Good Guys and they are my Heroes For the Week – and pretty much every week, for that matter. A lot of people didn't lose today at SFO, in part, because of their efforts. But my heart goes out to the families whose loved one were lost or wounded. There are no words.

The LOSE has been on hiatus here, mired in deadline pressures and such at the office. We'll be back talking about silly games and such here in the near future. In the meantime, I need to write these damn articles. Nertz.

Go Tahiti!

Today the Confederations Cup kicks off in Brazil. This is somewhat of a dress rehearsal for next year’s World Cup, and the host country will definitely be under the microscope – not only will their progress in preparations for next year be scrutinized, but the Seleção themselves are a bit of a mystery, having played few meaningful games in recent years, and not looking terribly impressive in those. No doubt some of their top rivals will be watching today’s game with Japan closely and taking copious notes.

The Confed Cup always has a rather ersatz field, as it brings together the current champions of the world’s six regions. It’s a fun and somewhat unpredictable affair – witness the fact that the U.S. reached the final in this event four years ago, having beaten Spain in the semis, and the Screamin' Eagles then had the Brazilians down 2:0 a half hour into the final before the Seleção rattled off three goals to restore order to the universe. And this year the LOSE has a special rooting interest in this event, as it features probably the biggest underdogs you’re ever going to find in a major international soccer tournament, or just about any other tournament for that matter. There probaby hasn't been an underdog this big since Angola tried to play the Dream Team at the Barcelona olympics.

And that would be these guys:

I mean, uh, these guys ...

Behold the national team from Tahiti.

Tahiti won the most recent championship in Oceania, which is far and away the weakest region. It’s so bad, in fact, that the Australians started playing in Asia essentially because they got tired of winning all the time. No legit competition. The Socceroos departure has left the region at the mercy of New Zealand, who’ve shown themselves well – the All-Whites were the only team at the World Cup in South Africa that didn’t lose a game – yet somewhat inexplicably, New Zealand bombed out in the most recent Oceanic championships, and Tahiti wound up winning the tourney and punching a ticket to one of the more prestigious soccer events on the planet.

Tahiti is ranked about 140th in the world right now. They have one professional player, who plied his trade in Greece this past season. One of their goalkeepers used to play in France. Other than that, the Tahitians are all semipros or amateurs who mostly play in and around Papeete.

These guys are awesome. Their coach has stated that their primary goal for this tournament is to go through a half without getting scored on. Scoring a goal would be a triumph. Scoring a goal against Spain would probably get your picture on a postage stamp. They have no chance and they know it, but a few days they get to be treated like football royalty. And when they take on Spain next week at Estádio de Maracaña in Rio – an arena which is, quite simply, one of the games greatest stages, if not the greatest of all – they're damn sure going to enjoy the moment.

Compare and contrast the carefree attitude of the Tahitians with the plight of their first opponent in the tourney, which are the African champions from Nigeria. The Nigerians had a world cup qualifier in Namibia last week, after which the players stuck around Windhoek and refused to board their flight(s) to Brazil, briefly staging a wildcat strike after not being paid. This kind of thing seems to happen all the time in African football, which seems constantly besieged by political infighting and cronyism. FIFA finally had to step in and resolve this issue, working out a settlement between the national federation and the players, and the Nigerians are now headed across the Atlantic but aren't likely in the best of moods.

Not that it will likely matter that much in terms of the final results on Monday – the Nigerians have far more talent and will likely overwhelm the Tahitians. But the Tahitians don't need to win to acquit themselves well. By simply being there, they've already won, and I suspect they will embrace the challenge and compete accordingly. Even if they get thrashed (and they likely will), the actual scores of the games won't matter much. It's always better to play, and to lose, than not have the chance to play at all.

And in any event, they get to go back to Tahiti when it's over:

You could do worse.

How Do You Say "This Team Sucks" in Danish?

As I've said before, sports are the greatest of reality TV. Unscripted and unpredictable. You really do have NO IDEA what is going to happen. Most of the time, it will follow some sort of pattern you can expect, given who is at play and what the situation is. But not always.

I give you Exhibit A. These are the highlights of the World Cup Qualifier the other night in Copenhagen between Denmark and Armenia. The Danes won the Euros in 1992 and have been one of the consistently good footballing sides for about 25 years now. The Armenians, meanwhile, are one of the many dreadful European teams that turned up after the breakup of the Soviet Union. They just lost a home game last Friday to Malta, who hadn't won a relevant game since 1994.

Roll tape ...

We needed some enthusiastic Armenian broadcasters for proper effect.

Denmark 0:4 Armenia. And while we should give some props to the Armenians here for playing hard and playing with class, this performance by the Danes has "let's get the coach fired" written all over it. That first goal was 25 seconds into the game, the second was 15 minutes later, and it's hard to tell at what point incompetence gave way to indifference by the guys in the red shirts. Apparently, what remained of the crowd at the end of the game applauded the Armenians 4th goal and applauded as their players were substituted off. Can you blame them? If I sat through 90 minutes of this tripe, I'd ask for a refund.

Those four goals feature some of the worst defending I've seen at an international level. Well, this was worse ...

 
That's an own goal from a game where Uzbekistan, verging on their first trip to the World Cup ever, lost 0:1 to South Korea. Pretty much the most important game in the history of the country and you lose like that. The Uzbeks can still qualify, but they're going to need some help. It would be fun to see them make it to Brazil, because it's a country that could use some good news, and what's the point of any of this if you can't bring a few hours of joy to people here and there?

And now I have spent more time researching football in Armenia and Uzbekistan than I ever would've thought possible. We would sometimes search for obscure stories when I was working at daily newspapers just to get unusual datelines into the paper, all journalists being devious rascals at heart. You've be perusing the wires and come across some story datelined VADUZ or NOUAKCHOTT and then you just had to find a way to get it in the paper. The research I undertake in writing this blog feels a bit that way sometimes. In following the WCQ for Brazil 2014, I've found myself looking up the likes of Namibian goalkeepers and the history of football in the Faroe Islands. (The Landsliðið played hard but lost 2:0 to Sweden the other night, just so you know.)

But this is a good thing, in the end.

I am someone who has always viewed the world as being far, far larger than just the small corner of it I inhabit. A part of how I choose to understand the world is through learning about how we, as humans, play games – how we compete and, yes, how we fail. And no game on earth is a bigger deal than soccer, a simple game with simple rules that takes on every sort of political, ethnic, ideological, and cultural connotation humans can invent. Just as it's been argued that understanding America requires and understanding of baseball, the same can be said of "the beautiful game" and what it says of the world around us.

Although in Denmark right now, they're probably not too excited, and understandably so. I'm not sure how you say "this team sucks" in Danish, but most Danes speak English better than I do, and I'm sure that particularly American English phrase has been uttered repeatedly.

IN PLAY LOSE Important Concept #2: The MODGOD

Another extremely important theoretical concept here when it comes to our continuing explication of failure is something that I refer to as the MODGOD Theory of Good Intentions.

MODGOD stands for Modified Guterman-O’Donnell and is named for Jimmy Guterman and Owen O’Donnell, co-authors of the book Worst Rock-And-Roll Records of All Time: A Fan's Guide to the Stuff You Love to Hate. In this book, the authors, who are a pair of longtime rock critics, layout a theory as to how otherwise extremely talented artists end up making terrible records, and it goes something like this: an artist(s) gets a great, great idea for a song or a record. They love the idea, think it’s the greatest idea they've ever had, and they approach the ensuing recording project with every ounce of earnest, heartfelt sincerity. But what happens along the way is that they also shut off their internal bullshit detector. And celebrities have enough say and sway that they can then afford to ignore those types of people – producers, engineers, bandmates, managers, etc. – who would point out what an awful idea it is. They can force their idea through the pipeline against whatever opposition may be there. And the end result, of course, is a terrifyingly bad recording. A dreadful product which started out with nothing but the best of intentions.

Feel free to steal this theory and apply it to just about everything else in the world around you. Most of us do not intend to fail. Quite often, you will come to discover that the worst outcomes are rooted in what seemed, at the time, to be the greatest of ideas. Saying “he means well,” ain’t a compliment.

IN PLAY LOSE Important Concept #1: Sayre’s Law

I figured that it’s important, as we go forward here on the LOSE with further explorations of losing, to define a couple of theoretical concepts which will come up in future posts. I can then link back to these later on.

The first of these is Sayre’s Law, which is named for U.S. political science professor Wallace Stanley Sayre and refers to his attempts to explain the particularly vicious nature of politics in academia – in any sort of dispute, the intensity of the feelings involved is inversely proportional to the value of what is actually at stake.

In the sports world, this concept shows up most glaringly every four years during the Olympics, a spectacle which consists of a whole lot of sports that people only care about once every four years. The more seemingly irrelevant the sport, the more prevalent the petty politicking and big-fish-in-small-pond behaviours. You’re more apt to find cheating and corruption in these sorts of situations, because the stakes are otherwise small, and since those who have a passion for the particular endeavour cannot hope to ever achieve any other sort of reward, they’ll fight like hell for whatever crumbs they can get.

Apply this to your own life as you see fit.

3 Points is 3 Points

There are no bad wins ... there are no bad wins ... there are no bad wins ...

Back in action in "The Hex," which is the 6-team, 10-match CONCACAF qualifier for the World Cup. US is playing tonight at The Office, which is the Jamaican's home ground in Kingston. Tough place to play. Reggae Boyz compete hard at home. World Cup Qualifying is always great stuff. There are no sure things – witness that Malta won a game tonight for the first time since 1993, and Liechtenstein got a draw with Slovakia.

The U.S. got a 1:0 lead on a goal at 30' by Altidore, who seems to finally be starting to fill his enormous potential. Four years ago, he positively abused the Spain backline in the U.S. 2:0 upset win over the future world champs, but he's mucked around lesser European sides since until he found his scoring touch this year in the Netherlands, and it's thought he will be for sale to some nice German or EPL club this offseason.

Anyway, this is a great and welcome surprise. So the U.S. has a 1:0 lead late in the game. 89' of the game, actually. And this wide position on the free kick is no big deal, right?

No problems here at all, right?

Jamaica ties the score at 1:1

What was that rubbish?

Uh, guys, can you play some defense please?

The U.S. has been prone to some sloppy defending here of late, and this was atrocious. Absolutely inexcusable to give up points in the last minute like this when the game seemed in hand.

And if you're the Jamaicans, now that you've been given an absolute gift, it would be a good idea here to tighten the screws on the back end and take the 1:1 draw.

Four minutes of stoppage time added on ...

Yes this happens

Not exactly stout defending by the Jamaicans here:

 I have no idea what those guys are doing. Clearly none of them could be bothered to, Oh, you know, mark someone 8 yds. from the goal!

I was afraid Brad Evans, of Seattle F.C., would miss this just strictly due to shock setting in upon realizing that he is this wide open!

But he didn't miss:

So the final is Jamaica 1:2 U.S. and the Screamin' Eagles pick up the 3 points for the win, go top of the standings in The Hex with games in hand and a whole lotta home games left. They're pretty well positioned now after looking pretty shaky early in the campaign.

This would go down as a bad win if there were such a thing. But the whole idea of any game is to win, and winning means not making the big mistake at the wrong time – or making it a minute before the other team does, I guess. You can win ugly if the other guys lose uglier, and it's better than going down in a blaze of glory any day. There are no bad wins ... there are no bad wins ...

Shameless Plug

A Beautiful Cup, a novel written by some stiff

I just thought this would be a good time to mention that my novel, A Beautiful Cup, which I wrote in 2003, is available in all appropriate ebook formats. It's available for $7.99 from the publisher, Smashwords, and is also available for $9.99 at Barnes & Noble and I think it's available on amazon and a few other places. It's a fun read and I hope you buy it and enjoy it.

Obligatory IN PLAY LOSE related content: one of the characters in the book is a former world-class 400 hurdler at the University of Minnesota.

I have about 3-4 other novel projects in the works here, some further along than others but all sharing one trait: at the moment, they're all pretty bad. They need some work. I'll be busy this summer.

The Worst Team Money Can Buy, June Edition

We’re going to stay away from the obvious here in choosing this month’s award for The Worst Team Money Can Buy, which would mean selecting the Los Angeles Dodgers, because ripping this sorry lot is shooting fish in a barrel. But after Don Mattingly decided to call out two of his overpriced players – benching Andre Ethier and then Matt Kemp – the Dodgers did seem to get some semblance of a clue this past week, at least for the short term, as they won three of four against the equally moribund California Los Angeles Angels of Yucaipa Anaheim. Now, the Angels fooled everyone briefly with an 8-game winning streak, although it should have been taken with a grain of salt because they beat on the Mariners and the Kansas City Royals (or Réal Ciudad Kansas, as we call them around here, the football-style club name making them seem somehow less incompetent), but the Angels then promptly gagged vs. the Dodgers and are now struggling with the Astros. The Freeway Series in L.A. should have been dubbed The Battle of Who Could Care Less.

Mattingly will ultimately be a fall guy in L.A., I would bet, even though he has a lineup full of round holes and nothing but square pegs to work with. Last year’s astonishing deal with the Red Sox continues to pay little to no dividend, which is a shock to absolutely no one, as the Dodgers took on every bad, bloated contract the Bostons had in exchange for James Loney, a good-field-no-power 1B now plying his trade in Tampa Bay. The Red Sox just gave away all of their problems in one fell swoop and have laughed their way towards the top of the AL East this season. The deal was intended to be a bold foray by the new Dodgers ownership, a salvo across the bow to announce their arrival as big time players after coughing up $2.3 billion – yes, billion – for the franchise at auction. And when people spend money this badly, you wonder sometimes how it is that they ever accrued so much in the first place, given that their decision-making seems problematic.

How much does a bad team cost these days? Well, if you’re in the NBA, it’s $535 million, which is the final price for the June WTMCB nominee Sacramento Kings to be sold to a group of Bay Area investors. Now, I will make no bones about the fact that I’m a Seattle basketball fan, and have gone on and on about the Seattle v. Sacramento saga previously, and I think Seattle got jobbed a bit here owing to the continuing interference of that little troll named David Stern, but I am opposed in principle to franchise relocation, and I wish the folks in Sacramento good luck. Because they’re gonna need it, as the deal in place for the Kings is so bad on the Sacramento end that it seems almost doomed to be a failure.

Between the Seattle group’s deep pockets and the NBA’s need to practice some public extortion, they’ve driven up the cost of doing business so high that, in order to “save” the Kings, the group of investors on the Sacramento side a) spent $535m for a franchise valued at around $295m by Forbes; b) agreed not to take $18m in supplemental revenue sharing will still playing in Arco Sleep Train Arena for the foreseeable future; and c) agreed not to take any revenue sharing money at all once a new arena is built. Now, the Seattle group could do that, because they’re bazillionaires and the revenue streams would be there in the future in Seattle, which means they would be payees into the NBA's coffers. The Kings, meanwhile, take a minimum of $20m a year from the league in just to break already (and more likely more than that), and the realities of demographics suggest the Kings will NEVER be able to be a payee into that system. So this group who bought the Kings are losing money from the moment the ink dries on the Purchase Agreement, and will continue doing so until a new arena opens and probably long thereafter, since the economics of the game aren't likely to remain stagnant.

And the iffy arena deal in Sac claims it will only include $258m in public subsidy from parking revenues – which could turn out to be more like $340m or more – and that the building will be done in 2-3 years – which almost certainly be longer. And all that time the Kings will STILL be losing money. If the building takes 5-6 years, which is far more likely than not here in the Republic o’ California, you're talking about being down $100m off the top. Then again, they just $535m for the Kings, so maybe they have $100m to needlessly chuck down a rathole. But I just don't see how this team can hope to compete, other than to luck their way into a superstar in the draft lottery. And in chatting with frustrated Seattle basketball fans and theorizing with them about the subject of future NBA landscape shifts happening, I have argued that the most likely franchise to relocate in the future is still the Sacramento Kings, albeit 5-6 years from now. Not that it's much consolation to present-day Seattleites, of course, a lot of whom want to extend the middle finger in the direction of the NBA offices, and are right for feeling that way.

But that $535m in Sac is chump change compared to the $2.4 billion – yes, BILLION – that the taxpayers in Dade County will be ponying up over the next 40 years to pay off the bonds used to finance the modernist monstrosity that is Marlins Ballpark. Having bitten hook, line, and sinker for the claims from Marlins owner Jeffrey Loria that the franchise was going broke, the county along with the city of Miami cleared out a swath of Little Havana for this ballpark. The Marlins constant low payrolls and cheap ways masked the fact that they were, in fact, profiting wildly and basically pilfering baseball’s revenue sharing plans to do so, but Loria et. al strong armed and sweet talked their way into getting this deal shoved through the various wings of South Florida government, teaming up with politicos who were long on ambition and short on smarts.

It galls me somewhat that a snake oil salesman like Loria – who bought the Expos in Montréal, ran them into the ground, sold the club to MLB and bought the Marlins – managed to luck his way into winning a World Series a few years ago, thus adding some sort of credibility to his regime (an achievement which had EVERYTHING to do with the fact he brought Montréal’s outstanding baseball development staff with him to South Florida, and NOTHING to do with his acumen as an owner) while some truly decent and long-suffering franchises continue to go without.

This ballpark deal has already led to a mayoral recall, the Securities and Exchange Commission has an open investigation going, and the Marlins have returned to their cheap ways this season after an offseason fire sale that followed last year’s ill-advised free agent spending spree, fielding a team this season that is currently 15-41 and may go down as one of the worst the game has ever seen. The Fish most definitely rot from the head. The fans in Miami are in open revolt – the Marlins are singlehandedly responsible for 40% of the decline in MLB attendance so far this year. Loria has managed to blunt all the wonderful lifestyle advantages South Florida possesses in the process, as no free agent in their right mind will want anything to do with this toxic waste dump of a franchise. Meanwhile, Giancarlo Stanton, who is potentially one of the great players of his generation, can only count the days before he can leave.

The Marlins have pretty much poisoned the well for every other sports entity in the state when it comes to doing business. Already this year, the Florida state legislature has ignored a request from the Miami Dolphins for public assistance in remodeling their aging stadium, and then turned around and nixt a plan for property tax relief so as to finance remodeling of Daytona International Speedway – both of which are far more economically significant than the Marlins, mind you, since DIS generates something like $1.5 billion annually in economic benefit for Central Florida, while the Dolphins stadium frequently hosts Super Bowls and NCAA championships and such. (Good luck to the Tampa Bay Rays ever getting out that terrible dome in St. Petersburg, that's all I gotta say.) Now, perhaps something good will come out of this in the end, in that municipalities will stop shelling out enormous public subsidies for sports franchises so willingly. But in the meantime, there are plenty of good seats available in Miami to watch the Marlins, the Worst Team (Your Tax) Money Can Buy in June and pretty much every month for the next 39 years.