Winning

I had intended to post this story to IN PLAY LOSE on Christmas day, but I didn’t finish it in time. So you’re all getting a belated Christmas gift. Deal with it. My thanks to everyone who has read this blog and encouraged me to continue to write it. I thought that I would offer up some fiction here as my gift to all my readers – and if it’s coming from me, and it’s entitled WINNING, you know that is has to be fiction. Happy Holidays all. 

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WINNING

We all play in the Church League because we don’t otherwise know what we would do with ourselves. It’s an odd league whose history is shrouded in mystery and intrigue. At some point, churches in this town started sponsoring basketball teams, and started challenging one another to games, and it just sort of grew from there. It’s a strange league, and you’re surprised to discover just how many churches there are in this town.
I play for the Unitarians, simply because they asked. Not because I’m Unitarian or anything. Not because I’m anything at all. The Unitarians needed a ringer to keep up with the other teams in the league. Every team’s got a ringer – that one guy who actually knows what he’s doing on the court. Most of the other guys are there to play defense and rebound and get physical, dribble the ball off their feet and drop easy passes and generally bring the game into disrepute. Given that this town is home to a major university with D-I athletics, there are quite a few decent athletes and former athletes about the place, and quite a few people like me and Gordon – has-beens who can’t stop playing, but who still have too much aptitude to be playing with the geezers in the City League.
Gordon picks me up in his old 1980s MG, a car he cannot bear to give up even though the roof is permanently affixed in a down position. This part of the world isn’t exactly the ideal place for a convertible. He keeps a couple of pairs of ski goggles in the glove box, one of which will come in handy here on Saturday, the 23rd of December.
“You’re late,” I say, zipping up my heavy parka and taking a glance at my right wrist – only to realize that I took my wristwatch off.
“Who gives a shit?” he shrugs.
It’s 1:55 p.m., the game is supposed to start at 2:00 and the church is more than five minutes away, but neither team would even think of starting without their ringer. Even so, Gordon drives at an ill-advised rate of speed and the wind almost immediately chaps the skin of my face. I’m reaching for those goggles in the glove box by the time he’s pulled out of my driveway.
“Annie’s making a ham,” he shouts over the sound of the snow crunching beneath the tires.
“Is it going to be edible?” I ask.
Gordon ignores my snide jab, since we both know that his wife is a culinary goddess.
“Come on by for Christmas if you can stand hanging out with me. And if you can stand looking at that photo all afternoon.”
Gordon and Annie have the worst hand-me-down grad student couch I’ve ever seen in their livingroom – this dismal chartreuse coloured thing imprinted with bears – and mounted on the wall above it is a picture from 10 years ago of Gordon doing a two-handed reverse dunk. It’s an elegant, aesthetic marvel of a photo which was shot from courtside and ran large format on the front page of the sunday Sports section. Gordon scored a career-high 32 points in that particular game and led his school to an unlikely win.
And the 32 points was a career high only until the two teams met again a month later and he went off for 33. Gordon was undersized for the center position at 6’8” and usually scored about 14 points a game, but four of the five biggest games in Gordon’s college career came against that one particular opponent, as his teammates figured out Gordon had a great matchup going and made sure to exploit it repeatedly. Which is what you do in basketball, of course – you find what works and ride with it.
And Gordon definitely had it all working in that 32-point game he had, a game now posterized and mounted on the wall in between a couple of standard issue, tux-and-gown wedding photos. And there I am in the photo as well, standing below him and looking skyward towards the rim with a dumbstruck, dumbshit loser of an expression upon my face.
I was Gordon’s good matchup.
Gordon’s video of career highlights, which he sent out to clubs worldwide upon graduation from college, consist entirely of clips of him schooling me. I’ve tried to hit him up for money, since obviously I deserve a percentage, having made him look good enough to land that gig with the club in Australia, but he hasn’t paid up. Yet. I’m still waiting for my cut.
I can laugh about it now. Hindsight will do that. Loses seem less painful that way. At the time, of course, I was livid, because I hated to lose – which we did often – and I hated getting torched like that – which also happened all the time. For some reason, that dumb university from which I have a degree seemed to have a permanent moratorium against recruiting guys taller than 6’7” who could play a lick. We were perpetually undersized and forced to play an open post game that was more centerless than a Winchell’s donut. We could hide some deficiencies, however: all five of the starters were usually about the same height, and we could all do a lot of different things, which meant we could play interchangeably and find a few matchups we liked, and all five of us could shoot. But none of us could guard the floor we were standing on, and we were no match for any team with size and athleticism – which was pretty much every team we played. I would find myself trying to defend guys who were 6” or 8” taller than I was, and the results were predictably awful. And over time, as the losses mount, it definitely changes the way you see the game.
“Your team needs to play some defense,” Coach Gordon advises.
“I’m teaching my kids valuable life skills,” I say. “Defense isn’t sexy.”
“Do you want them to win, or to get laid?”
“They’re 15-year-old boys. Which of those things do you think they want in life?”
We both coach at the local high school. Gordon handles the JV team, while I coach the Freshman. His team is well-drilled, line up evenly-spaced for stretches, pass crisply and are mastering the slide step and other defensive techniques. My team takes the first shot they see, even if it isn’t the best shot, and we usually close practice with a game of HORSE and another game we call ‘garbazz,’ the rules of which aren’t quite clear and seem to evolve from practice to practice. Neither Gordon nor the varsity coach – a sextuagenarian chemistry teacher who still hasn’t embraced the 3-point shot – approve of my coaching methods. The fact is that I have 14 guys on my team and, for about 10 of them, this is the end of the line. They’ll be cut next year when they go out for the JV and likely will never play organized basketball again. So why not let them go out with a bang? They’re the lucky ones, in the end – the ones who will be told to stop playing and be smart enough to obey. They’ll save their bodies and save themselves from years of disappointment.
We hosted a tripleheader last night, the final games before the Christmas break. Gordon’s JVers did a fine job of slide stepping and making crisp passes to open shooters, who threw up enough bricks to build a new fieldhouse. They lost by 20 points, and then the varsity lost by a similar margin in the nightcap, putting on an equally dismal performance. And it was obvious that the entire upper level coaching staff was annoyed with me, because the start of their games had been delayed on account of the opening game of the tripleheader running long. Really long. The Freshman game went 4OT and we wound up losing 100-98.
Their scorn is bullshit, of course – their opponents were just as delayed in starting as they were. But it’s my fault that the whole evening’s proceedings got held up because my team doesn’t play any defense. We repeatedly couldn’t get a stop when we needed it, couldn’t make a play on defense at key times would’ve brought a quicker end to the whole affair.
And my kids were having a blast, which is the most important thing. It’s the sort of game they’ll always remember, even though they lost. They didn’t want the game to end. And if Bryan’s running jumper doesn’t lip out at the horn, we’d have gone 5OT and that would’ve been even better. Not that Bryan was going to make the shot – he’s the 14th guy on a 14-man team for a reason. But when you’ve had seven players foul out and the bench is as good as empty, well … desperate times and all …
“You’ve gotta teach them to defend the pick’n’roll,” Gordon persists.
“Your team needs to learn how to shoot.”
“Defense wins championships.”
“Like you know jack about playing D,” I reply.
Gordon couldn’t guard a potted plant. But winners get to write history, of course. Gordon’s 32-and-16 night during his senior year of college is forever posterized and memorialized on his wall, of course, but only because they won the damn game. Think that would be hanging up there for all to see if they got beat? No fucking way. And never mind that I dropped 27 on him in that game and ran his sorry ass ragged. If you lose, you may as well have gone 0-for-10. And he should’ve been out of the game on fouls anyway. Typical shittyass zebras swallowing their whistles, letting him stay on the floor with four fouls for so long.
So Gordon used to get the better of me. Big picture, of course, big fuckin’ deal? That just meant his team sucked slightly less than mine. They were never very good, either. We were the best players on bad teams. But at the time, of course, I took it extremely personally. I hated Gordon when I was in college. He was my nemesis. I had his picture on the dartboard in my apartment. He just seemed like a dumb ox to me at the time – never saying much apart from the usual trash talk, but we all did that so who gave a shit? What he did say never seemed particularly bright. He’s a dumb jock, basically. I was never the dumb jock type. I tried to make up for my lack of size and lack of quickness by at least being trying to be interesting. The only thing that was ‘dumb’ about me was the fact that I kept playing. And I’m still playing. And still losing to Gordon. And finding myself hating it anew. Clearly, I’m not as bright as I thought.
And whatever I did in a past life which has now forced me to hang out with him, I sincerely apologize. (Not that I believe in reincarnation, and the Buddhist Temple doesn’t have a team in the Church League, anyway.) The ‘connection,’ if you can call it that, is that Annie is my ex-girlfriend’s roommate’s sister. (Got that? There will be a quiz later.) And I found this out at my ex-girlfriend’s roommate’s wedding – there was dumbass, 6’8” Gordon standing there in an ill-fitting suit sipping a Michelob Light and pretending to be interested. It was a Catholic wedding, a big wedding with about 200 people that went on for about 200 minutes. By the time Gordon and I were both about a 12-pack of Michelob Light down, we’d gotten bored with the festivities and snuck out of the reception hall. (As if a collective 13’1” of guys could sneak anywhere.) We broke into the attached gymnasium, found an old leather basketball that weighed about 80 lbs. and played a drunkass game of 1-on-1 in our dress shoes and suits.
And I kicked his ass.
He had/has bad knees, was coming off a surgery at the time, and he had to resort to shooting weak turnaround jumpers and handchecking to compete. I think the score was 11-5 or 11-6. I owned him and I make sure he doesn’t forget it – and he would otherwise forget, since he was completely hammered. It’s all a blur, in the end, no matter if you’re sober or you’re drunk.
But now we’re stuck with each other in this shittowne, where I am a graduate student with nothing much of anything to do and Gordon is the husband of a graduate student with nothing much of anything to do. We both got coaching gigs at the high school – playing D-I ball and then playing professionally overseas looks good on the résumé – and now we resume our fierce personal rivalry twice a year in The Church League. Well, it’s fierce in one direction, as I hate losing to him. Gordon doesn’t much care, nor should he since his teams always seem to win. He’s just happy to have someone around that he knows in this northern clime far removed from his Southern California upbringing. Someone to hang around with, work out with, talk about the game with and shoot the shit with while watching the NBA on TV, during which both of us make far too many brash, bravado-filled references to how we ‘could take’ the guys on the floor.
We’ve both hit our glass ceilings at the game of basketball, but there is plenty of room underneath that ceiling to move from side to side. There’s enough decent players in the Church League to make it worth doing. It’s just enough to rekindle your imagination, you know what I mean? There’s a couple of CBA teams not that far from here, and I’ve still got quite a lot of game left, I’m still in shape and I know how to play. Yeah, I can still play. All I would need is a chance. Just give me a chance somehow and I could make it stick. I could stick with the club and get a paycheque, go from there.
And that thinking is idiocy, of course.
No one playing in the Church League is going anywhere. There ain’t gonna be any CBA scouts beating the bushes and stopping in at the Catholic Church Rec Hall to watch 3-Pt. Jesus play The Unitarians. (Our team doesn’t even have a clever nickname.) The only place any of the players in the Church League might be going is to their in-law’s place on Christmas break. I would go on vacation if I had anyplace to go, and if I still had someone to go on a vacation with. My wife went to Russia to visit her family in the dead of winter, which tells you about all you need to know about how desperately she needed a vacation far, far away from me. Hell, I could go anywhere other than here and probably be happy at the moment, but the problem with vacations is that they end, and then you have to go back to where you didn’t want to be in the first place, which just seems even more miserable than when you first left.
Instead of getting away, I’ll probably spend the next week hanging around my rental house and ignoring my thesis, and maybe I’ll actually get the back window replaced, since it’s covered in plastic and this isn’t the ideal time of year to have a drafty house. And once Christmas is over, there will be a few open gym sessions and shootarounds over at the high school, which is walking distance from both my house and the broken-down gold pickup truck in the driveway. They will be informal, voluntary practices – shootarounds, mostly, nothing structured at all. I’ve been tasked with running these sessions, since ‘unstructured’ basketball seems to be my specialty.
“Hey Einstein? Where the fuck are you going?” I ask, as it suddenly occurs to me that we’re heading the wrong direction.
“Huh?”
“We’re playing at the Rec Hall.”
“Oh. The game ain’t at your gym? My bad.”
Oh, for fucksake.
Gordon promptly pulls a uey and nearly plows head on into a snowbank, headed towards the Catholic church. He knows that location like he knows the back of his hand, since Annie drags him there every Sunday.
Our home court is a gym we share with the Battlin’ Baptists. It’s got bars over the unopenable windows, about 1’ of space between the sidelines and the brick walls, and only about ¾ of the overhead lights work, which means the place has this eerie orange glow to it. The home court advantage is definitely a huge factor in this league, as you learn to play to the peculiarities of your building. In the case of the gym tacked onto the back of the Baptist church, a pipe running underneath ruptured a few years ago. The floor is warped on one side, slants downward, and the boards are dead as doornails. When we play defense, we try to force our opponents to that side of the court, where dribbling the ball is a risky proposition – you’re more likely to have it bounce out of bounds than bounce back to you – and you’re essentially shooting uphill. We always run our offense towards the other side of the floor – the strong side, as we call it. We put our worst offensive players on the weak side as far away and as far down the slope as possible. (So, in other words, I tend to be on the strong side by myself a lot of the time.) And since both us and the Battlin’ Baptists know this about the gym, games between the two teams tend to turn into wrestling matches as both sides vie and clamor for position on the strong side of the floor. It becomes a test of wills to see which team will finally relent and attempt to play the game in the other half of the building, because doing so will almost certainly lead to a negative result.
Every gym in the league has some quirk to it. The Stormin’ Mormons play on a court that has a low-hanging ceiling which often blocks long jumpshots. It also has the lines for approximately 62 different sports, games, and pastimes painted on it, many of which are similarly coloured, so you’re never quite sure if you’re out of bounds or not. Lane violations and 3-second calls are frequent, since no one knows which thick stripes of black paint on the floor are the lane lines. The boundary between basketball and parchesi is unclear. The Blue Hose Bros over at the Presbyterian church, meanwhile, play on a court which is closer to a square than a rectangle. There’s about 15’ of space in the corners between the 3-point line and the boundary. The games there tend to be high-scoring affairs, as the court is so short and, with all that extra width, there are fewer turnovers since the ball pretty much never goes out of bounds.
The home team generally wins games in the Church League, with the exception being Chapel on the Hill, who win everywhere. They are currently undefeated and seem to be on their way to yet another title. Like I said, there are a lot of athletes in this college town, along with a lot of ex-athletes and former athletes and hangers-on, and Chapel on the Hill goes 12-deep with former Div-I guys – a few basketball players but mostly football guys, all of whom are quick, physical, agile and crazy. None of us like playing the Tar Hills, not only because we always lose but because they’re all so Jesusy. And I don’t mean Christlike. The same guy will tell you after the game how he’s been blessed by the Lord Jesus Christ who told you during the game that he was going to assfuck your sister like the whore that she is. They talk a lot of shit and barely play within the rules, not because they’re trying to cheat but because the officials are too slow, blind, and intimidated to do anything about them. But then they hold a prayer circle at Center Court after the game is over and invite you to join in. Given that they’ve just lorded over you and beaten you by 50-60 points, there is a certain amount of reverence to the proceedings and you feel almost compelled to join them.
Their overt showing of religiosity is a no-no in the Church League, where the only Gospel that gets preached is to box out and hit the open shot – but when you’ve won the league for eight straight years, you can pretty much do whatever you want. On the floor, common goals unite us and trump religious differences. The game is inherently nondenominational. The Red Crescents generally vie with 3-Pt. Jesus for 2nd place in the league, usually fielding a team of Turkish grad students who are all 6’8” and can shoot the three. But the mosque doesn’t have a gym, and so The Red Crescents share a home court with the JCC. They’re thankful for the home court even though they hate the place, not because of the hosts but because the gymnasium floor is concrete and only about 75’ in length. (Jews with Jumpers aren’t very good this season, but they did make the playoffs a year ago.) 3-Pt. Jesus is rare in that all of their members either belong to the church or, in the case of Gordon, are married to someone who does. The Unitarians, along with having an unimaginative nickname, are just a ragtag bunch of guys who like to play, and need yet another reason for doing so. We muddle around in the middle of the standings. We are mediocrity personified. As such, I fit right in.
3-Pt. Jesus gets their nickname from the fact that one of the priests is a Notre Dame alum, and there is a framed picture of Touchdown Jesus over one of the doorways to the gym – the referees signals for touchdown and a 3-pointer being exactly the same. They have one of the few gyms in the league in which the court is regulation size and all of the lights work. The heat, on the other hand, is basically nonexistent. 3-Pt. Jesus generally runs and guns at the outset of the game, as much to get warm (and stay warm) as any strategic decision.
We’re 20 minutes late by the time we arrive and both teams are already loosening up on the court. Well, what there is of my team, anyway. With my arrival, we now have five players. 3-Pt. Jesus has 10, all of whom I know by now and one of whom – their starting point guard – is a notorious local gym rat who makes some pocket money officiating high school games. He T’d me up last night, in fact.
“Hey Jake, it’d be easier to shoot if you weren’t so fucking blind,” I say as I pass and his jumper clangs off the back iron. “Officiating does that to you.”
“Don’t start, David. Your kid didn’t establish position,” he says, the two of us rehashing the disputed play from the night before. “Not like your kids know shit about defense, anyway. 100-98? Tell them to guard the pick’n’roll next time.”
Gordon and I are both absurdly dressed – heavy parkas and ski caps, shorts and sneakers. Gordon sits down in a folding chair set up near the half court line, lacing his sneakers and adjusting the brace on the right knee he’s had repeatedly surgically repaired. I sit down in the chair beside him, crack a joke about nothing particularly relevant and Gordon simply ignores me. He looks straight ahead as he is tightening the knots, a steely and focused glare of a game face coming over him. Even in the Church League, Gordon isn’t going to be fraternizing with the opponent at game time. I am now the enemy.
Pfft. Whatever.
Come tip time, of course, I will want to win the game, simply because I hate losing, and because besting Gordon on the floor is the single most satisfying that I can do in this lifetime with my clothes on. But I’m also a realist. A four-year college career marked by three consecutive last-place finishes will do that to you. Eventually, you can’t bring yourself to care that much anymore.
At the start of each season, my college teammates and I would drink the Kool-Aid and buy into that whole line of coachspeak about ‘working harder.’ We’d run the sprints and do the work in the weight room, run the stadium steps and even put in some yards in the natatorium. Every season was going to be ‘different.’ It was going to be ‘the year’ when we made progress. Progress which never came.
Usually, the coach had some new passing game offense he’d want to try and he’d also attempt to instill into the squad a new toughness on defense. And none of that never worked, for a very simple reason – we were too short. It doesn’t do any good to play a half-court game and allow an opposing defense to get set when their players are all bigger and faster. We were basically playing to our weaknesses. And we usually had some new stiff who was 6’10” who was deigned to be our starting center at the start of the season but he couldn’t shoot, pass, rebound, run the floor, or even tie his shoes. But he was tall, by god, so out on the floor he went.
In my typical collegiate season, we’d start out the year trying to run half-court sets and failing miserably, and we’d lose games played at slow paces with scores in the 60s. The 6’10” guy would commit needless fouls and score about 1.4 points a game and get in the way more than anything. Once league play began, it would become apparent that we were headed to a last-place finish as we’d start out 0-4 or 0-5 or something, at which point most of us started dealing with the losses through the consumption of even more enormous quantities of beer than we were already consuming – which was against team rules, but what were they going to do to us? Throw us off the team? That would be doing us a favour.
Right around that time each season, we would pull the upset in some home game that we weren’t expected to win. The key moment in this game would be the point where our team’s best player – me – finally just decided to ignore the coach completely. I would take matters into my own hands and start freelancing on the floor, at which point the rest of the rest of the team would be emboldened enough to do the same thing. I’d drop 25 or 27 or 30 and we would win a game we shouldn’t have, often involving an unforeseen comeback of some sort.
This zesty, zealous performance would momentarily convince the A.D. that there was progress in the school’s long-suffering basketball programme – which was bullshit, of course, since any sign of success was due to the players were actively revolting against the coaching staff. And since we’d usually win this particular ‘turning point’ game by a score of something like 90-85, you’d read columnists in the papers wondering why we weren’t playing the up-tempo game all the time – and coaches read the papers, no matter how much they tell you otherwise. So we’d play the latter half of the season completely differently than the beginning, and have considerably more success. We’d run more and play open court and open post, shooting 3s and playing in transition. The 6’10” stiff would be banished to the bench, never to be seen on the court again.
But the damage from the bad start to the season was too extensive. We would win some games but usually got killed on the road, and we wound up finishing last. We were always a tough out in the conference tournament – teams knew we could play and ignored our lousy W-L records – but out we went, regardless. We were always one-and-done in the postseason.
Now, you would think that there would be an adjustment on the part of the coaching staff along the way. Given your team’s strengths and weaknesses, you should play to your strength. But to a basketball coach, a team whose strengths are entirely on the offensive end of the floor is a dangerous animal. The basket can be like crack in its ability to tempt and to entice. You get such a high from scoring that you just want it again and again, you’ll forsake good sense to get it. You’ll take bad shots, you’ll ignore defensive responsibilities. All you want to do is score, and score, and try to score some more.
To permit their team to play offense, the coach must yield control. He must trust his players to make their own decisions. And basketball coaches loathe that loss of control. They feel helpless. They would rather have their players run the shot clock down to seconds remaining in a basic, controlled pattern than have a guy bring the ball up and pop a 3 from the top of the key. Without coaches there to ‘teach’ and ‘guide,’ the game of basketball would be reduced to nothing more than some slop you’d see at a weekend rec league – unstructured, undisciplined, with bad shots and bad passes and ill-advised decisions everywhere.
In other words, the game would be fun.
Suffice to say, the coaching staff at my university had a love/hate relationship with the leading scorer in school history, as my audacity and my propensity for bucking authority was occasionally matched by my ability to pull it off. In interviews, the head coach would hem and haw when asked about me, saying that I was a “free spirit.” In practice, away from the cameras, I got more than my share of verbal abuse. Not that it ever bothered me, because being the best player on the team has its perks. There is always a caste system, no matter the cliché about “there is no I in team” and such bullshit. The best coaches – even the biggest dicks among them – come to understand that their ability to win games is predicated, first and foremost, on keeping their best player happy. And I was never happy. So I guess you could say I was a coach killer, then. A week after my last collegiate game – the first round if the league tournament, a game in which I scored 39 and grabbed 15 boards and we blew a 10-point lead in the final 2:00 after I had fouled out – the whole coaching staff was fired. A decade later, none of them send me Christmas cards.
And in a decade, a lot changes. One moment, you’re dropping 25 on UCLA at Pauley Pavilion. Then you’re riding the pine in Italy and riding the pine in Portugal and fearing for your life when a riot breaks out behind your bench in the stands in Greece, and just as there are no atheists in foxholes there are also no atheists on a Yak-42 taking off from the aeroport in Nizhny Novgorod in a driving snowstorm. And it’s usually about then that critical mass takes over in regards to the accumulation of a lifetime’s worth of injuries playing the game, all of which seem to finally hit you at the same time. Seemingly overnight, your knees are shot, your ankles feel like they’ve been encased in lead, you can’t lift your arms over your head. And pretty soon you’re playing in some ridiculous 2nd division somewhere, sitting on the bench and playing the last couple minutes of a blowout. It all ebbs and flows away. The river of opportunity runs dry. There is no more upward mobility.
In the moment, of course, there are small wins here and there worth savouring – splitting a bottle of Georgian cognac at a hotel bar in Moscow with a blonde Russian journalist has certainly paid me some handsome dividends. But ultimately, your career spirals downward, and it does so really fast. And finally you start moving side to side in that ample space beneath the glass ceiling – coaching, refereeing, picking up games from time to time – and you make life decisions which enable such behaviours to continue. You find reasons to keep playing. You make excuses. You take any opportunity to be involved in the game. Which is how a kid from Marina del Rey winds up playing in the Church League and freezing his ass off at Chrismastime in some bland college town.
Ollie has a similar sob story to mine – he played several years of pro ball in Sweden after playing college ball in Ohio. Ollie is 5 years older than me, he’s 37 and he has bad knees, is now an accountant and he has moved back to his hometown. He is also the … uh, minister? What the hell do you call a guy who runs the services at a Unitarian Church? I have no idea. Anyway, Ollie runs the church services and runs the team and is the other guy on our team that can play. Along with having a ringer, a bona fide #1 option on offense, most teams in the Church League also have a second guy who can actually play, like Ollie and like Jake over there on 3-Pt. Jesus. The other three starters will generally be decent athletes who have met their match, unable to compensate for the speed of the game. By the standards of people like Gordon and I, they’re complete stiffs.
And the other three who have turned up today to play for The Unitarians – Earl, Marcus, and a guy we call Fingers – are complete stiffs. They are there to rebound, play defense and commit silly fouls. Under no circumstances are they to shoot from more than a couple feet away from the basket. It’s a disappointing turnout, as we usually have more turn up for the games than this, but the roster is always in flux in The Church League. The ringers will turn up for every game, because they cannot imagine anything other than the game being important. For the supporting cast, however, real life has an annoying way of interceding.
“Short bench today,” I say to Ollie.
“Guys out of town. Must be some sort of holiday going on,” he says as he approaching me with several strips of tape stuck to his fingers. “Turn around for a sec.”
“Give me a good number today,” I urge.
“How is 2?” he asks, sticking the tape to the back of my red jersey where a worn off numeral used to be.
“2 is a stupid number.”
“2 it is, then.”
Ollie has a sweet release. The ball has a perfect rotation and backspin when it leaves his hand. In his last bit of warming up, he sinks 10 in a row from the elbow without drawing iron once. But as I say, Ollie is 37 and has bad knees, which means he has no lift on the shot and, accordingly, no longer has much of a range. I warm up, meanwhile, with my usual assortment of hooks, turnarounds and spins all about the key. The same sorts of shots I became (in)famous for back in college – audacious sorts of moves I could get away with owing to my mad hops and my feel for the game. I still have that feel for the game, but I play a lot closer to the ground these days.
Yet another perk of the Rec Hall at the Catholic church is a functioning scoreboard, which counts down the final seconds before game time. I look at our collection of slow, aging guys with faded or minimal skills, compare it to their collection slow, aging guys with faded or minimal skills, and feel like we’ve not got much of a shot. 3-Pt. Jesus has a few semi-decent players besides Gordon – most notably Jake, that blind zebra who stands only 5’11” but seems to have unlimited range – but they’ve also got a larger collection of surgical scars than we do. They will play at a quick pace early on so as to warm up in this icebox of a gym, but then they will try to slow the tempo and run halfcourt sets for Gordon, since he’s got a good matchup beneath the basket.
“Should we have Fingers guard Gordon?” Ollie asks as he and I confer before game time.
“Don’t be stupid,” I say. “Fingers will foul out in about 3½ minutes trying to guard Gordon. We only have five guys today.”
“Fine,” Ollie shakes his head of strawy, severely thinning blonde hair.
“I’ll keep Gordon in check.”
“You never keep Gordon in check.”
“Thanks for reminding me.”
It’s just then that a guy wanders into the gym, a basketball held to his right hip. He’s wearing a black windbreaker which he unzips to reveal a predominantly purple tyedye. He’s got on baggy black shorts which are obviously cutoffs from an old track suit, a pair of purple converse on his feet. He’s about 6’2” or so in height, wiry, bearded, with long hair tied into a pony tail in the back. I’ve never seen the guy before, but we’ve all seen a few people like him around and about town. A hippie, plain and simple. We have quite a few old hippies here in this college town, which I’m perfectly cool with, but guys like this purple tyedyed cat make an Orange County cementhead like Gordon instinctively want to sneer.
The hippie stretches out his Achilles and then dribbles his basketball a couple of times along the sideline. He dribbles thrice towards 3-Pt. Jesus’ basket and spins a right-handed layup up and in off the glass – the problem with this action being, of course, that we’ve taken the court and are ready for the tipoff to start the game.
“Hey, this isn’t an open gym!” the referee yells to the hippie, needlessly blowing his whistle first for emphasis.
“He’s on our team,” I say from my location in the center circle, as I am preparing to jump against Gordon.
“He is?” the referee asks.
“He is?” Gordon asks.
“Substitute,” Ollie plays along. “It’s about damn time he showed up.”
“Well your ringer was 20 minutes late, so why would it surprise me that your scrub is even later?” the referee starts whining. “And where’s his damn jersey?”
“Oh c’mon Marty. He probably just forgot it,” I say to the referee, who is Jake’s partner when they work the high school games.
“If he don’t have a jersey, he don’t play,” Marty the whiny referee blathers. “Hey! You! Get your hippie ass off the court!”
“No problem sir. My apologies,” he says politely, hustling from the court and taking a seat in a lone chair next to the scoreboard operator.
“At least wait until the game starts to be a jerkoff, Marty,” I say.
“Don’t make me T you up, Davy!” Marty suddenly gets on my case. “I’ll T your ass up twice and run you back to Russia!”
“Marty dude, chill,” Jake intercedes. “This ain’t center court at the Fabulous Forum. It’s the Church League, dude. Relax.”
I win the tip and the game commences to follow the usual script. As I say, each team basically consists of a ringer, a secondary scorer, and three question marks. The ringers control the action and try to get all of the teammates involved early on in the game, so as to figure out what’s going to work and what isn’t. Passes into me on the low block are immediately fed back out, as I want to see how my teammates are moving, want to find out if we have some good matchups that we can exploit. That, plus it’s good to get people involved. More democratic. And this way, when Gordon and Ollie and Jake and I take over the game in the second half, and basically play a modified form of 2-on-2, the others will at least be willing to participate, albeit on the periphery.
Well, on this day, nothing is working for The Unitarians. Ollie drifts to my side and feeds me in the post, Marcus drives the line and my bounce pass slips right through his hands. Turnover. Next trip down, Fingers finds himself open at the free throw line, which is about 12’ out of his range. His shot only travels about 12’ but Earl is there to clean up the rebound – and he misses an uncontested layup.
Gordon, meanwhile, has decided to deviate from the script decreed for ringers. He posts me up from the get-go, backing me down and knocking me off the block. The good post player gains a wealth of knowledge from that simple move – he knows where the defender is positioned, he knows if the defender is square or off-balance, knows if he is shading to one side or another. On the first possession, I am cheating to his right, to which he spins left and his soft little jump hook kisses off the glass and falls. Next time down, I try to shade him a bit more left. His drop step pins me on his hip and he spins past me, switching hands as he does so and coaxing another shot up onto the rim with a deft touch, the ball spinning and falling. Here we go again. Both he and I may have played pro ball overseas, but we’re clearly back in America now, where the only constants are death, taxes, and me getting owned by Gordon.
We’re down 10 almost immediately, and pretty soon the margin is nearly 20. Ollie is ice cold to start, his flat shots drawing the back of the rim. We claw back into it a bit, as I abandon the strategy of getting teammates involved and move on to the strategy of me scoring all the points. Gordon was never able to stop me even when he had good knees. I can run him about on the low block with relative ease, establish good positions and get off some easy shots – but soon 3-Pt. Jesus figures out that we have only one good scoring option, and I find myself being double- and even triple-teamed. A decade ago, I would’ve just shot over the double team. These days I’m confined to passing it back out, hoping Ollie can find the range (he can’t) or hoping someone else – anyone else – will make a play (they don’t). This isn’t going well.
We burn a couple of timeouts and huddle up with tyedye guy on the sideline, our ‘substitute’ who we have no intention of letting into the game, since we don’t even know the guy. Even so, I notice on several occasions how intently he follows the game. Studying it, taking mental notes. I appreciate the interest, even if his confined to the sidelines.
“Let’s get good shots guys,” Ollie insists during our second timeout, which sees us down by 24 points with a little more than 5:00 to play in the first half.
“We’ve had good shots,” I say. “Fuckin’ make one already.”
“Fuck you,” Ollie snaps at me. “And play some fuckin’ defense.”
Whatever momentum we generate is quickly negated, simply because Gordon is abusing me like a ragdoll for the umpteenth time in our lives. Soft jump hook over my outstretched hand. Two points. Turnaround jumper. Two points. He’s more physical than he used to be, using his body to square me up effectively. I beat him down the court after we turn the ball over, but he picks his spot on a secondary break, catching a pass in stride and knocking down a 3-ball from the top of the arc.
We’re getting worked.
And all this time, the guy in the tyedye is still sitting there next to the official scorer and the scoreboard operator, his hands folded over the top of the basketball in his lap. I’m surprised that he hasn’t left, given that his ‘team’ has shown no intention of letting him play even though they’re down nearly 30 points in the first half.
Hell, I know that I would leave. The only thing worse than losing is not playing. I’ve never wanted to come out of a game. I’ve lied about injuries to stay in the game – insisting that the sprained ankle wasn’t all that bad – or only coming out long enough for a trainer to pop a dislocated finger back in place and tape it to a finger that was functioning. I never wanted out. One reason why I never left that terrible university with the terrible basketball team was that I was pretty much guaranteed to be out on the court. As dumb as the head coach was – and trust me, he was a moron – he knew the slim chance of a win would quickly become zero if I wasn’t on the floor.
I admit it, I can be a selfish prick when I play basketball. I want to win, and the best chance to win to win is for you to listen to me. No wonder I was considered a ‘coach killer.’ The leading scorer in school history whose teams amassed three last-place finishes and then an underachieving senior year. A really good player, but not a great one. Not a winner. We had some hope my senior year, starting off well, but then Gordon went off for 32-and-16 and posterized me in the process with his thundering, 2-handed reverse jam. All the air went out of the sails in that season after that game, although we did not finish last that season. Gordon’s team finished last. Their only two league wins came against us.
And it’s clear we’re not going to be a winner on this day, as Jake drains a cocky trey for 30’ out to give 3-Pt. Jesus a 29-point lead with little more than a minute remaining in in the half, at which point he whoops it up and woofs all the way back down the court. It’s bad enough that Gordon’s torched me for about 20 in the first half, but Jake’s probably got that much as well. The cocky little twerp gets a little too cocky while yapping at Marcus – an otherwise good-natured guy who sells hardware for a living – and Marcus promptly, and somewhat inexplicably, punches him in the side of the head.
Tempers flare, whistles blow, general mayhem breaks out before Marty and whatever the other official’s name is – Blind Man Buff, I think it is – restore order. But Marcus gets tossed from the game and I wind up escorting him towards the door and underneath the picture of 3-Pt. Jesus.
“Bullshit man,” he says.
“C’mon Marcus, we don’t throw punches in the Church League. Those bushers in the City League do that.”
“Bullshit man,” he says.
“It’s not our day, man,” I console him. “They’re just better than us. Relax … and let me borrow your jersey. Tyedye over there needs a jersey to play.”
“Fine, whatever. Bullshit man.”
Marcus angrily removes his red jersey, which is as worn as mine, and the #1 taped to the back peels off. He tosses it to me and walks straight out into the cold, bare-chested and everything. He has scored 0 points in the game, and I sort of wonder if I will ever see him again.
We call our last timeout of the half, which gives Ollie enough time to tape a new number on the back of the jersey of our emergency substitute. We’ve not been properly introduced, and he shakes my hand and tells me his name is Josh. He says he usually plays the point, which is theoretically what Ollie generally does on this team. Hell, it’s what I do on this team. I play every position and Ollie finds open spaces and hits some jumpshots. It usually works, except when it doesn’t. Like today, for instance.
As play resumes, 3-Pt. Jesus turns our Marcus’ meltdown into a full-on, 7-point scramble. First Jake hits the two free throws that came with the flagrant foul. They get the ball and run a double pick for Gordon, the two goons basically knocking me out of bounds in the process. But no offensive foul is called, and when I scream, “C’mon Marty, blow the motherfucking whistle!” from 10’ out of bounds, I promptly get T’d up, which is something that Marty has been wanting to do all day. And Jake hits two more free throws, upping the margin to 33, and they got the ball yet again. On the ensuing inbounds play, the disaster compounds, as Jake drills another 30’ footer and lets out a bloodcurdling scream of delight.
I’m running down the court and looking at the scoreboard: HOME 63, GUEST 27 – and I’m thinking that has to be wrong. That can’t be correct. I really can’t believe the score is as close as it is.
We have but a few seconds remaining, and tyedye dribbles wildly yet skillfully up the floor, eluding several defenders. Jake gives chase and I move towards the top of the key. I’m as annoyed with Jake’s showboating as Marcus was. But, unlike Marcus, I actually know how to mess with someone within the confines of the rules. Josh clearly has some basketball sense, as he sees me at the top of the arc on his left and sets up Jake with a dribble to his right. He then lets loose a wicked cross-over move that leaves his defender in the dust. Jake is beat badly and forced to give chase – at which point Jake runs right smack into the pick I set and crumples in a heap on the floor.
And Josh, now with the 6’8” Gordon guarding him, takes one more dribble to his left, twists in the air, and hurriedly launches a shot from just behind the arc. It’s a hasty, hard-edged heave that is nonetheless on target and drops through just before the buzzer. Make it HOME 63, GUEST 30.
I give Josh a high five, since that play right there was pretty much the only thing we did right all half. Josh is surprisingly calm and nonchalant about the play, and as he walks away from me I get a glimpse of the number Ollie has taped onto his back.
“23? Nice choice of numbers.” I say to Ollie during halftime, the both of us standing out back of the church as Ollie sneaks a couple of drags off a Marlboro Light.
“Wishful thinking. We need a miracle,” he shrugs as the smoke drifts out from his nose. “I generally don’t believe that higher forces determine the outcome of sporting events, but I figured I would summon a little help from higher powers.”
“Maybe you should get some help from the basketball gods for your jumper.”
“That, and your defense.”
“Touché,” I acknowledge my weakness as I kick at some loose bits of snow. “Tyedye there seems like he’s got some skills. We should switch him on Jake. He’s quick. If Tyedye could neutralize that little shit, it would do us all a favour.”
“Nah, I got Jake,” Ollie insists, his pride severing wounded by having Jake go off for 29 points on him in the 1st half.
“We’re switching up,” the ringer makes the executive decision, to which Ollie responds by flipping me off.
And the familiar white Toyota pulls into the parking lot just after Ollie leaves me. She steps carefully across the icy lot in her sneakers, her hands shoved as far as possible into the pockets of her coat. She apologizes for having missed the 1st half on account of making Christmas cookies, which would explain the dot of flour on the tip of her nose. These games draw the usual assortment of on-lookers – wives, girlfriends, kids and such – who are there to show support but not to show much interest.
“Gordon kicking your ass again?” Annie asks as she stands before me.
“What do you think?” I say and she simply nods.
“You and Maria should come for dinner.”
“Maria went home,” I state rather flatly.
“Home for Christmas?” she asks and I pause long enough for Annie to figure it out.
“Yeah. Home for Christmas,” I shrug and Annie rubs me on the right arm.
“Maria isn’t very happy here,” Annie says.
“Gosh, I wouldn’t know why. I thought it was every Muscovite’s dream to wind up living here,” I shrug once more. “Guess I’m not the hunky California kid she thought I was.”
“No, you still are. You just don’t play any defense,” Annie insists. “You two will work it out. You always do. Anyway, come for Christmas. I’m making a turkey.”
“Gordon said you were making a ham.”
“He just wants it to be a ham. If he wishes hard enough, maybe he’ll get a ham for Christmas.”
“You already have a ham. You’re married to one.”
Jake is still wriggling his jaw about on the sideline, having been subjected to a couple of hard hits in the first half. I resist the urge to comment on his glass jaw as I pass, walking instead down to the other end of the court where, in the closing moments of the halftime interval, Josh is shooting some free throws. He has a nice stroke and a good rhythm at the line. His shots have that sweet, pure sound as they draw nothing but net again and again and again. He looks ridiculous, what with the too-tight red jersey pulled over his purplish tyedye, but the guy can obviously play and right now we need players.
“You’re going to take Jake,” I say, retrieving the ball for him. “Make him go left. He’s allergic to his left hand.”
“I know,” he says confidently, bending his knees and swishing another free throw. “Jake was wrong last night, by the way – your guy had the position on the play. It should’ve been an offensive foul.”
“Oh, you were at the game?”
“Yes. He gave you the T because he knew you were right. Referees really are the devil’s playthings,” he says amid another swish. “You’re an excellent coach, by the way.”
“Ya think? Gordon thinks my kids are soft and that I don’t teach them how to play D.”
“You teach them to love the game,” he swishes another. “That’s far more important than learning how to play the 2-3 zone.”
It’s a good point Josh makes. I teach them to love the game. Gordon teaches them to be successful. But which one of us is correct? What does successful mean, in the end? He and I are both successful, in that we’d played D-I and played overseas. But where did that lead us? We’re both here in this shittowne in the middle of winter playing in the Church League, a couple of guys with about 1½ working knees between them, the both of us having long ago spent every ruble and euro and cruzeiro we ever made from the game, our existences dependent far more on the seemingly inexhaustible patience of our wives than anything else.
Annie actually likes it here. It’s a good place to be if you want to be a veterinarian. After 5 years of following him around through Australia and Brazil and Argentina, it was time for her to live life and dictate terms, follow the dream that she had after permitting him to follow his to its (il)logical conclusion. And Gordon seems to be OK with this somehow. He’s content to be a middle school P.E. teacher and coach basketball and ruck it up once a week in the Church League. He has an enviable level of contentment. If I didn’t envy him so much, I wouldn’t hate him so much. That, plus I hate him because he always beats me.
“We’re going to win,” Josh says, swishing his 13th consecutive free throw.
“We’re down by 33,” I point out.
“We can win,” he insists. 14 in a row.
“If you say so, but only if you live up to that #23 on your back.”
“23?” he looks back over his shoulder. “You expect too much from me. I’m just the son of God. I’m not Michael Jordan.”
Son of God? What the hell is that about?
“Whatever. If you say so, Jesus,” I scoff. “Make like 3-Pt. Jesus there on the wall and sink a few treys for us.”
“It’s not really my game,” he shakes his head. 15 in a row. “I’m more of a midrange guy. We should set Ollie on the wing. Give him some standstill shots from behind the 3-point line. He can make that shot. That, and we should run the offense to both sides of the floor. Your team’s sets are too predictable.”
I hadn’t even really thought of that. We’re used to playing on the court we share with the Battlin’ Baptists, where running a play on the dead side of the floor is a complete waste of time. But this is the Catholic rec hall we’re talking about here. This is an away game. We have to think differently.
I admire his quiet confidence, although that ‘son of God’ reference sort of freaks me out. But still, he’s made 17 free throws in a row here – make that 18 – drawing nothing but net, so he obviously knows what he’s doing.
“We can win,” he assures me as the horn sounds.
“I never win,” I say as we walk towards our sideline.
“You lack belief.”
“No one ever accused me of lacking in confidence,” I chuckle.
“Confidence and belief are not the same,” he insists.
We catch a small break to start the 2nd half, as Marty says “red ball.” This is wrong, since I won the opening tip. Gordon protests and says, “no, yellow ball,” but Marty is your typical referee who is more interested in showing his authority than he is in getting it right, insisting it’s “red ball” to start. Gordon looks to me for help and I play dumb.
And having a primary ball handler pays immediate dividends. Joshua the maestro conducts the orchestra, and commences making music out of chaos. Joshua dribbles to his left and I set on the right block. I go away, set a back pick for Ollie and promptly knock Jake down yet again. Jake’s too busy swearing at me to resume the pursuit on defense, and Ollie snakes through the lane and out to the corner. Joshua’s pass is right in his hands, chest high, perfect placement. Ollie catches in an ideal shooting position, rising and swishing a 3-ball from the corner. A sweet movement that would’ve been made all the more artful if Ollie had risen more than an inch off the ground.
And Josh then overplays Jake on the defensive end, forcing him to his left. He reaches around and pokes the ball away as Jake dribbles past. The turnover leads to an easy layin at the other end. Frustrated by this turn of events, Jake then launches an ill-advised three which clangs off the iron. I clear the rebound and we break. I beat Gordon down the floor and Jake feeds me with a bounce pass as I drive unabated to the hoop. A decade ago, I would’ve slammed it with two hands. But an easy layup will suffice on this occasion. They both count the same.
That’s seven quick points, but the margin is still huge. Nonetheless, we’ve found a nice little groove here with Josh running the offense. He has a nice feel for the game, he has good instincts and vision – traits which you simply cannot teach. Part of why so many ex-players get frustrated as coaches, of course, is that such instincts are not inherent. We can’t teach a kid to see the floor the way we do, to make sense of the position and the angles and do so at speed. A pass that someone such as Gordon or myself can make is a pass a sub-average player wouldn’t even know to look for.
And with the ball in his possession, it’s clear that Josh sees the whole floor. Every pass is purposeful, setting up Ollie or myself in an advantageous position, setting up Earl for a layin and theoretically setting up Fingers for the same if he could actually squeeze the orange.
“I take it you call him Fingers ironically,” Josh says to me as we trot back on defense after Fingers kicks a pass out of bounds.
“You’ve noticed. But he tries hard. He’s a good rebounder and he’s physical.”
“He should defend Gordon,” Josh suggests.
“I’ve got Gordon,” I insist.
Gordon then schools me on two straight possessions with dropsteps and spin moves to the bucket, finding enough spring in his legs the second time to throw down a thunderous dunk that gets Annie clapping on the sidelines.
“Let Fingers cover Gordon,” Josh suggests during a timeout, our momentum having been stymied by Gordon’s two quick buckets.
“I got Gordon,” I say angrily.
“Do you want to one-up your rival, or do you want to win?” he asks me.
You mean they aren’t one and the same? I have too much pride. I admit it. I strongly believe that I wouldn’t have endured losing seasons every year since I was 16 years old if others would simply do as I say! The problem has always been coaches, or referees, or teammates who can’t make plays. It’s never me. Ever.
Or is it me? I don’t know. I’ve grown so accustomed to losing over the years that any faint amount of success is a high unto itself. I’m no better than some transient scrounging the ashtrays and lighting the cigarette butts simply to get that one good puff.
“OK, fine,” I say. “I’ll take Norris. This shouldn’t be hard.”
“And let’s keep running that double pick for Ollie. He’s got a good stroke going from the corner,” Josh says, and Ollie heartily nods in agreement.
“That, and Jake’s getting pissed off from me beating the hell out of him,” I point out.
Hubris has been the downfall of many a gallant soldier, of course. Josh’s smothering defense, and the fact that we keep running him off bone-jarring screens, has Jake rattled and off his game. He’s forcing shots on the offensive end, he’s making poor decisions.
And Gordon is surprised to discover he’s now guarded by Fingers, a man with less height than me but with ample girth to bang on the low block. He mocks me for switching off of him, of course, as I’m now covering Norris, but Norris has no offensive game to speak of, which means I don’t have to pay any attention to him. Freeing me up to roam the key pays immediate dividends – Gordon stubbornly tries to root Fingers from the low block, fails to do so, spins into the lane and I swat away his fadeaway jumper. This triggers a break and Fingers lays it in for two more points. The pass – a soft bounce pass on the run from Josh that simply coaxes Fingers towards the bucket – is so perfect that not even Fingers can fuck it up.
“What was that weakass shit?” I taunt Gordon, neither of us having bothered to run to the other end.
“Man up, pussy,” he barks at me. “Don’t be floating about the lane.”
“Don’t be bringing that crap in the key,” I retort. “You go up strong. I’ll tattoo Wilson on your forehead if you bring that shit my way.”
“Scoreboard, trixie,” he says.
Indeed, we’re still down big, but the margin is only 20 and it feels like progress. Josh insists that we can win the game, but I’d be happy just winning the 2nd half. Small victories. Meek ones. With enough meek wins, maybe we meek shall one day inherit the earth.
And they make a switch on the defensive end, as Jake matches up with our dreadlocked, bearded, tyedye wearing point guard. This is an instant mismatch – Jake is tenacious and bullheaded, but his defensive skills are slightly worse than mine. Josh realizes this immediately, takes Jake off the dribble and sinks a jump shot just off the elbow. He feeds me the ball down low on the left block next possession and my first inclination is to try and take Gordon on the drop. I’ve been known at times to be something of a black hole on the offensive end – the ball goes in and never returns. But on this occasion, Jake collapses down on me and Josh slips into open space. My pass back out is perfect and in one motion he is up and releasing another beautiful jump shot. Swish. Damn, he’s got a nice touch.
“What the fuck was that?” Ollie chides me back downcourt. “You? Passing?”
“I surprise myself sometimes,” I shrug.
The deficit is now down 16 and 3-Pt. Jesus has gone cold. Jake’s long shots clang and clatter about and I keep cleaning the glass. Gordon, meanwhile, is frustrated by our stealth double teams – being bodied up by Fingers while knowing I’m lurking about somewhere nearby, ready to swat his shot to Kingdom Come. He passes out of the double team on one possession and immediately regrets doing so, as Norris throws a brick which leads to another run out. And we have a decided edge in transition, as I can beat Gordon down the court every time, and if the layup isn’t there, we kick it off to Ollie who has found a home on the baseline. His third trey of the half, coming on this secondary break, cuts the margin further. 3-Pt. Jesus calls a timeout with 10:00 to play. HOME 76, GUEST 63.
And during this sustained, spirited 2nd half rally, I have scored all of two – count ’em – two points. But I’m having a blast. I’m blocking shots everywhere. I’m kicking and dishing. We’re on a great roll and 3-Pt. Jesus is starting to tighten up.
“OK, now we need to get the big guy involved,” Ollie insists during the break.
“Nah, keep it going as is,” I insist. “I’ll get mine.”
Indeed, we have the element of surprise on our side – surprise in that the black hole has sprung a light leak. We’re running the offense inside-out, essentially. Josh’s first pass is always to me. I pause, see the floor, notice how the defense shifts. And the shift does occur, of course, since it’s assumed I’m going to shoot. My reputation proceeds me, since I score about 35 points a game in the Church League. Everyone knows what’s going to happen when I get the ball. So the defense keeps collapsing around me and Josh keeps sneaking his way into open spaces for open jumpers – that sweet stroke of his which never even draws iron. I think he’s made five in a row, six including that 3-point bomb at the end of the half. 76-65.
And Ollie lingers along the right baseline, daring his man to drop off and double-team me on the block. Doing so results in disaster – I kick it out to Ollie, 3-ball, corner pocket. 76-68.
Next time down, I pin Gordon on my right hip on the right block. Josh fakes an overhead pass, skips a bounce pass around his defender. The ball has a wicked spin on it and eludes the outstretched leg of a second defender. It runs away from me, the pass, leading me directly beneath the rim – a rim I use to shield myself from Gordon as I snag it with a left hand and, in a single motion, guide it up softly over my head and onto the glass, spinning it into the net. 76-70.
“Wow, they got no fucking idea what we’re doing,” I laugh my way down the floor as 3-Pt. Jesus calls yet another timeout in an effort to stop the bleeding.
Indeed, 3-Pt. Jesus is starting to press out there. They substitute several times but the reserves contribute nothing. They run predictable offense patterns against unpredictable matchups, resulting in turnovers or forced shots which I then clean off the glass. They aren’t thinking on the floor. And we are quicker to the loose balls, we are corralling the rebounds. Josh’s quickness is too much for them to handle, both in the open court and in halfcourt sets. He makes all of us seem quicker by proxy.
“Where’d you find that guy? He can hoop,” Jake asks as we return from the break.
“I think he found us,” I say. “We needed a miracle. He said that he’s the son of God.”
“Fuck off,” Jake scoffs.
Jake promptly tries to take Josh off the dribble and Josh blocks his shot. It comes right back to Jake who drives to the baseline. Josh blocks his shot a second time, and then a third for good measure with the ball finally bouncing of Jake’s foot and rolling out of bounds.
“Fuck you Jesus,” Jake declares in disgust.
Joshua simply smiles, and then makes like Moses on the next possession, the Catholics’ defense parting like the Red Sea as he drives straight down the middle for a layin. 76-72. The rally continues.
Gordon attempts to restore order, stepping out from his domain down low to sink a couple of baseline jumpers. And yet Josh matches him shot for shot. He has a savvy and a 6th sense to his game, an ability to find that open spot on the floor and an exquisite touch. Gordon’s third successive baseline jumper rims out, we break and Earl is hacked across the arms, his squeal and flailing arms giving Marty the hint to blow the damn whistle for a change.
“Nice call stripes,” I say.
“Shut up,” Marty replies.
Now, Earl hits free throws about as often as I hit the lottery, but his first shot is pure and the second does the same. It’s when he swishes the second that I genuinely start wondering if divine intervention is at play. And then Norris throws up a brick which I gather in, firing a baseball pass to Josh on the dead run, a 70’ heave straight out of the 49ers playbook that Josh takes in stride on his way to an uncontested layin. The score is tied.
“Unfuckinbelievable,” Gordon barks and then glares at me.
“Hard to shoot with both hands around your throat,” I say.
“I had both hands around Maria’s throat while she was sucking my dick,” he says, backing me into me on the low block, intent on taking me 1-on-1.
“I love it when you get personal with the trash talk,” I say as I front him, denying him the pass. “But does Annie know what a two-timing slut you are?”
“Stop grabbing me,” he swats my hand away.
“Move your feet then, dumbass,” I say, prompting Gordon to scramble to the other side and yet I beat him to the spot, denying him another pass.
“Since when do you play D?”
“Since when do you quit like a chickenshit? This is the worst choke I’ve ever seen.”
He tries to muscle me out of the way, elbowing in the neck. The whistle blows and Marty makes the call. Offensive foul. And Gordon protests – “Bullfuckingshit Marty! He flopped like a fucking flounder,” – but he doesn’t add the ‘mother’ extension, and thus avoids getting T’d up.
And now that we’ve got Gordon flustered to boot, the play call is obvious. Josh and I know it instinctively. We’re on the same wavelength. The high pick’n’roll, the bane of my Frosh team’s existence last night. Josh runs his defender off the screen, Gordon switches, I cut to the basket. Josh nutmegs Gordon with a bounce pass between the legs, a genius feed which puts an extra spring in my step as I giddily make like my 20-year-old self all over again, finishing the play off with a two-handed dunk and a Rebel yell.
The scoreboard reads HOME 80, GUEST 82. We have the lead. It’s the most amazing comeback I’ve ever seen.
“Triple-double,” the scorekeeper informs me in passing after a timeout. “22-20-10. Quadruple-double with one more block.”
“I don’t give a shit,” I shrug. “I want to win the damn game.”
And the usual script in the Church League dictates, of course, that now is the time in the game the ringers take the game over. Pro athletes – even has-been former pro athletes like Gordon and myself – want to win more than we want anything else on the planet. We want to win at everything all the time – basketball, cards, golf, ping-pong, you name it. Or at least we should want to win, anyway – but maybe I never wanted to win enough. Maybe I’m the way that I am because I was always so quick to accept defeat. It’s funny, I just called myself a pro, didn’t I? Maybe I was at one point in time. Funnily, I feel more like a pro today than I ever did before.
Norris sets a screen immediately on the restart, I switch off and Gordon posts me up on the left block. It’s winning time, and I can sense his determination. Jake’s pass leads him low and to the basket, but it’s Gordon’s weaker left hand and I have anticipated the play. I promptly block his shot out of bounds. There’s my quadruple-double. Whatever. I’ve never cared that much about stats. So long as I score all the points, it’s all good.
“You play better in dress shoes,” I say. “What was that garbage? You haven’t made that shot since your sister-in-law’s wedding.”
“That was the last time you’ll ever beat me,” he says.
Gordon promptly leans into me and positioning himself to receive the in-bounds pass, pushing off and then running me over, and getting away with it all thanks to Marty and Blind Man Buff as he scores the tying bucket.
“Cheater,” I say at the other end.
“Pansy,” he responds.
He grabs ahold of my jersey, attempting to slow me as I spin past him. But all Gordon ends up accomplishing is ripping the #2 off my back, and Josh the tyedyed saviour of a point guard leads me to the basket with yet another perfect pass. He practically serves up the assists on a silver platter. The layup and one – and how can Marty not call a foul, since Gordon has tape all over his fingers – puts us up by three while Gordon picks up his 4th foul. I box out Gordon on the other end to capture yet another rebound. Gordon’s noticeably hobbling at this point, having played the entirety of the game and never been substituted. Our fast pace is wearing him down. Josh notices this immediately, sensing a chink in the armor of the enemy, and he feeds me in the post once more. Gordon’s got nothing left in the tank and I beat him to the goal for another easy deuce. Gordon then offers up a flat, hurried shot on the other end which I rebound. He reaches for a steal and has his day mercifully ended by Marty’s whistle – even if it’s a shitty call, because Gordon didn’t touch me.
“Foul on yellow, #30, with the reach,” Marty signals to the scorer’s table, and the scorekeeper promptly rings the buzzer to indicate that Gordon has fouled out.
“Get bent Marty,” Gordon says.
“Say hi to Annie over there on the sidelines,” I say.
“I hate your sorry ass,” he comments as he walks away.
“Welcome to my world, Gordon.”
Two more free throws stretch our lead to 89-82, which Earl follows up with a steal of a lazy pass, setting us up for another quick push upcourt. Josh drives the lane but his path is blocked. He kicks it to Ollie on the wing in the corner, but the scurrying defense rotates over. Josh calls for the ball on the low block – a bad idea, since Norris is 6’7” and is in a bad mood – but Ollie feeds him anyway. Ollie’s pass inside is promptly, immediately redirected back out front – a touch pass, a no-look pass to the oncoming trailer … which would be me, who is open at the top of the arc just about the 3-point line. I catch the pass in stride, set, rise and hold the follow through in a pose as I hit the land, my eyes intently watching the beautiful backspin on my high-arcing jumper.
“Game … set …” I say, waiting to hear the swish, “… and match.”
92-82. Dagger in the heart. And I hear the silence, of course. The silence of the 18 people lined up along the 3-Pt. Jesus bench area. The silence of 18 people in the Catholic Rec Hall is actually louder than the silence of 10,000 people in an arena. The more in attendance, the quieter it becomes. That moment when you kill the collective psyche housed within the opponent’s building is the moment that you cherish. It’s what you play for, strive for. It’s amazing it is how, at that moment where defeat becomes inevitable, you can hear a mouse.
No, really, you can hear a mouse. There’s a mouse running along the baseline and it scampers out the open doorway beneath the framed portrait of 3-Pt. Jesus. Or maybe it’s a rat fleeing a sinking ship. I should ask Annie. She’s the veterinarian, after all.
Jake finally gets off the duck in the second half, hitting a couple of treys late to cut the margin. The stat sheet will show that he scored 35 in the game. It’s probably the worst 35-point game of his life. This is why you should always burn the stat sheet when it’s over. The stats are a record of what has happened, not a predictor of what’s to come. And what happened, of course, occurred completely in the ebb and the flow and the moment. Unscripted and unpredictable. Beautiful.
But Jake’s late darts from distance aren’t enough, as Josh masterfully dribbles out the clock, gets fouled and sinks four straight free throws. He’s got all of 3-pt. Jesus chasing him by the end, trying to force a turnover or foul him to stop the clock. He’s finally horse-collared with :03 left on the clock, the scoreboard reading HOME 91, GUEST 96. We clear the lane and I walk over to the scorer’s table.
“Has he missed a shot?” I whisper, hearing the swish of the free throw over my shoulder.
“Nope. 11-for-11 from the floor, 5-for-5 from the line, 28 points …” the scorekeeper says, only to be suddenly interrupted as Josh’s free throw rims out, yet it bounces of Norris’ hand and out of bounds. “… nice job. You jinxed him, you dumbass.”
The sun breaks through late in the afternoon and, while not exactly warm, at least it’s not unbearably, miserably cold for an hour or so. I have a long wait for Gordon, who had grumbled “nice game” in the handshake line and disappeared into the locker room, where he was likely still stewing under the steam of the shower. It isn’t long before the MG is the only car remaining in the lot – not even Annie has stuck around, she being more intent of baking cookies.
Josh and I shot around for 20 minutes or so in the gym together, the scoreboard above the basket still alit and reading HOME 91, GUEST 97. I swear that, in that 20 minutes, he never missed a shot. But then, he swears I didn’t miss one either. Anyway, they finally kicked us out of the gym and locked up, so we’re standing around in parking lot. I’m waiting for Gordon. I don’t know what the hell Josh is doing here.
“You smoke?” Josh asks, stashing the pouch of tobacco inside an inner pocket on his coat.
“No,” I say, but given that I’ve just partaken in the greatest comeback no one will ever know of in the history of the sport, I’m inclined to live a little a take a hit or two. “You didn’t play college ball or anything like that, did you?”
“Me? No. I just play. I love to play – just like you do. I love to be in that moment. I don’t have to win the game. I just need those moments from time to time where it all fits together to make it count.”
“I like winning,” I point out.
“So do I. But if you had to win, you wouldn’t keep playing. Anyway, I was just looking for an open gym today, and I felt thankful to find one. It was my day today,” he says, zipping up his coat while balancing his right foot atop his worn old basketball.
“I would say with that performance that it must be your birthday, but I know that’s two days from now,” I joke and he laughs before passing the joint my way. “Well we’re playing the Tar Hills in three weeks. We can use a point guard if you’re around.”
“Probably won’t be around,” he says.
“Too bad. I hate playing those guys.”
“They’re far too righteous for me,” Josh says with a air of both disdain and authority. “Why would I pray to my dad after the game? That’s just not cool.”
“Playing against 3-Pt. Jesus there didn’t bother you?”
“Nah, they just got the name wrong,” he shakes his head. “I have more of a midrange game.”
It’s fun to play along with the guy’s delusions of divinity. I can’t ever remember seeing a guy play so well who was also so modest about it. We’re all such cheeky and cocky bastards. Gordon isn’t gonna hear the end of me dropping a quadruple-double on his ass today. I may even write it on a post-it and post it on the poster on his wall.
“Well come for Christmas if you like,” I say. “Annie’s making a turkey, or a ham, or a duck or a goose or something.”
“I probably won’t be around,” he shrugs. “I am always on the move.”
“What’s Jesus doing here in the middle of December, anyway?” I scoff.
“Where else should I be?” he says with a shrug of the shoulders.
“I can’t say I believe in you, anyway,” I point out, taking another hit.
“Can’t blame you for that. The most skeptical often possess the strongest beliefs. Deep down. They just don’t know what it is that they believe.”
“Well since you’re a carpenter, can you at least fix the window in my house?” I ask. “I won’t ask you to fix my marriage. Just the window.”
“I can fix the window,” he says, picking up the ball, gesturing for me to keep the short. “You played a brilliant all-around game today.”
“It’s maybe the best I’ve ever played,” I nod after pausing to think about it. “It’s too bad it didn’t matter.”
“Didn’t it though?”
“Church League,” I shrug. “We’re at the end of the road. No one really cares what we do.”
“So, did anyone outside of Moscow care the night you went 0-for-6 from the field, fouled out, and were booed mercilessly by the fans, some of whom threw coins at you since you were clearly an overpriced American?”
Not one of my better memories. I’m surprised to suddenly relive it. He knows me far too well. He know all of us far too well.
“In the greater context, that awful incident means little,” he puffs. “It’s just one game, one small moment, one blip on the radar screen. And yet, compounded with Church Leagues and Greek leagues and high school games – all the way to the NBA – it’s a beautiful game, basketball. It’s a living, breathing entity. And the game always needs more beauty in it – even a couple hours of beauty in a Catholic rec hall. It fuels the game. It may spit a few players out after burning through them in the process, however.”
“Sounds kinda Satanic.”
“Yeah, it kinda is,” he admits. “But you play the game the right way. You don’t care about the sideshows and you never did. Nor did I.”
“So, Jesus, answer me this – if you’re the son of God, then you should be able to do anything.”
“Of course.”
“Then why did you miss the free throw? You shouldn’t ever miss a shot. Like, ever.”
“Because you jinxed me,” he smiles.
“Uh-huh.”
“Even the most powerful forces in the universe are subject to laws of science. The laws are unbreakable. You take a bad shot, you miss. Besides, if I made all of the shots, you would think me a god, instead of someone like you who walks among men. That ambiguity is critical. It also makes it all more fun.”
He shrugs and gives me a wry smile, picking up the ball from beneath his foot.
“It was my day today,” he says. “And it was your day today, too, Bernard. A day that was long overdue.”
No one calls me Bernard. Most people don’t even know it’s my given name. I haven’t used the name in any context since I was a child. The only people who know that name are Maria and my immediate family, and they call me David just like everyone else.
“How’d you know my name?” I ask as he dribbles between his legs and spins on the ice.
“I know everyone’s name,” he says, keeping low to the ground as he dribbles down the blacktop, away from me.
“Thank you for the gift,” I call out to him and he pauses.
“The gift?”
“You won us the game!”
“No Bernard, you won the game! I was just along for the ride! I have never played with a better teammate before! If anything, I should just be thanking you for the gift,” he shouts back before turning away from me and resuming his dribble.
“Happy Birthday!” I shout to him.
“I get that a lot this time of year!”
I would’ve offered him a lift, except that isn’t my car, and Josh didn’t seem like he was going to any one place in particular. It’s another 15 minutes or so, or maybe it’s a half-hour or even an hour, before Gordon drags his sorry ass out to the parking lot, wearing sneakers and sweatpants and his heavy overcoat. He is in a bad mood, and understandably so – he hates to lose as much as I do. And while it may have been ‘my day,’ it came at Gordon’s expense.
But everything is zero-sum in this life: you cannot get ahead unless someone else falls behind. Defeat is always therefore a possibility. Gordon takes the loss personally, of course, not because his teams always win – remember, his teams in college were also terrible – but because his teams could always beat mine. It was as sure as death and taxes – but right now, in my altered state of consciousness, I not even sure I believe in the ‘death’ part.
“I’m not giving you a damn ride,” he scowls.
“Oh, shut up and get over it. C’mon, let’s go get a beer,” I respond. “Poor sport.”
“Damn right I’m a poor sport. We were garbage in the second half.”
“We were garbage in the first half,” I open the passenger side door. “Your garbage just stunk a little more, in the end.”
“Since when are you a fuckin’ philosopher? Oh, that’s right, you always are.”
“A ‘free spirit’ I think you call it.”
“That, or a coach killer.”
“$10 says that, come open gym next week, my frosh team full of budding ‘coach killers’ scrimmages against your goose stepping JV guys and we kick your ass,” I offer him my hand. “Yeah, I know your money’s no good and you’ll have to steal it from Annie’s wallet. Is it a bet? Deal?”
Gordon sneers and refuses to shake. I have the only answer that I really need. For kicks, I hit the button on the dashboard which, in theory, would close the top of his MG. I hear an internal motor whirr, cough, wheeze, and then the mechanism springs to life.
“I’ll be damned,” Gordon says.
“When was the last time that worked?” I ask.
“About 1996,” he says.
“I really do have the magic touch today.”
“You didn’t even shoot that much today,” he start as he puts the car in reverse. “How many’d you have, anyway? 30?”
“Quadruple double, I guess,” I say.
“No fucking way.”
“Fucking way.”
“I’m going to have to listen to this all Christmas, aren’t I?”
“Of course you are. If not from me, then from Annie. She thinks losing gives you humility. Your wife gave me a high five after the game.”
“Unlike Maria, who usually blows me after the game,” Gordon retorts, whizzing down the residential street at an unwise rate of speed.
“C’mon Gordon, we don’t play each other again for six weeks. You have plenty of time to come up with more clever zingers than that. In the meantime, teach your kids how to shoot.”
Gordon opts out of going for a beer, insisting he has to get home to Annie. He drops me off at my rundown rental beside my broken down pickup. I turn on the computer in the study, look at words in my thesis for 10 minutes, turn it back off. Life sucks, life goes on. I call Maria’s number, leave her a message. It’s past midnight in Moscow but she’s usually awake. Even if she was awake, she wouldn’t want to hear about me dropping a quadruple-double in the Church League. Maria doesn’t care about basketball anymore. Sometimes I’m not sure I care about it, either.
Yeah, I do care. And look, there is a basketball game on the TV. Lakers. Shaq dominates down low, of course, but a close game turns the Lakers’ way in the 4th Quarter, as Kobe continues throwing up prayers from deep which somehow find the range, shots dubbed ‘prayers’ and ‘miracles’ by the confounded broadcasters. When you know how to shoot the basketball, miracles can happen in this game.
My otherwise and dark and unremarkable livingroom is unusually illuminated this late in the afternoon – the last vestiges of the sunrise filtering in through the window.
The new window.
I have no idea how or when it got there.
But I seem to be more accepting of the inexplicable these days. Gone is the plastic tarp and the duct tape which held it up. In it’s stead, in the new frame, is a piece of stained glass, a reddish tinted pane which, when touched by the light, sets the livingroom aglow in a bright red hue. A red which seems to match, almost exactly, the colour of the jersey I’m still wearing from the game this afternoon. Hesitant, I am, to remove it.

Never Believe in the No-Lose Situation

I've spoken before about Washington State University's unique ability to wrest defeat from the jaws of victory, but today took the cake. I'm used to them messing up, but I've never seen anything quite like what transpired today in Albuquerque.

Quite simply, they Couged it.

So W.S.U. is playing in the New Mexico Bowl against Colorado State. The game has been about what you would expect from a minor bowl game pitting two .500 teams from the Western U.S. – lots of offense, not a whole lot of defense, and a whole bunch of mistakes. On the strength of QB Connor Halliday's 6 TD passes, the Cougars held a 45-30 late in the 4th Quarter. Colorado State puts together a hurry-up drive down the field late to score a TD, cutting the lead to 45-37 with 2:58 left in the game. The Rams have two timeouts left and kickoff, hoping to stop the Cougars quickly and get the ball back. All W.S.U. needs it to pick up one first down and the game should pretty much be over. The Cougars compete two short passes and the Rams call their two timeouts to save seconds on the clock. On 3rd-and-6, Halladay completes a pass to WR Ricky Galvin for 8 yds. to pick up the 1st down.

The game is, for all intents and purposes, over. The clock stops momentarily at 2:36 so they can set the chains. Once the clock starts running, all the Cougars have to do is run the play clock down to near zero and then take a knee. Do this two more times. This is known as the 'victory' formation and it's one of the sweetest plays in football, since getting to do it means you've prevailed. So all W.S.U. has to do here is run 'victory' three times, run the play clock down on 4th down and punt the damn thing nowhere near anyone and the game is over. Cougars win!

One of the things the announcers have said repeatedly during the game is that, unlike on most teams, the W.S.U. QB actually calls most of the plays on the field himself. W.S.U. head coach/mad scientist Mike Leach has always done it that way in his coaching career, believing that the players on the field have a much better sense of what will work than he does on the sideline. Implicit in such tactics is a believe that your QB will know what to do when he's out there. And this particular situation is a no-brainer. Run 'victory' three times, kill the clock, the game will be over.

But this is W.S.U., where defeat is always possible if you put your mind to it. Or, if you lose your mind out on the field.

The Cougs line up in a shotgun formation, which is weird, and the QB Halladay calls a zone read running play for himself. This play makes no sense at all. Halladay runs smack into a stunned Colorado St. linebacker and fumbles. Colorado St. recovers.

But wait. He was down before he fumbled. The video review overturns the call after a lengthy conference. Now, you would think that, maybe during the long delay, Mike Leach or one of the offensive coaches might say something along the lines of, "what on earth were you thinking?" and "just take a knee and let's get this over with." You would think so, wouldn't you?

So it's 2nd down now and the Cougars have caught a break with the video overturn of the fumble. There is 2:07 left and the referee winds the clock. The Cougars should kill as many seconds as possible here, but no. They run a play with 20 seconds left on the play clock. They promptly hand off to a guy who hasn't played all game, who barrels into the same stunned Colorado St. linebacker as before and fumbles. Colorado St. recovers on W.S.U.'s 33-yd. line with 1:51 remaining in the game.

And at this point I'm incredulous. I mean, it's not like I'm speaking to some higher, more complex form of strategy here in saying that the Cougars should take a knee three times and then punt. This is no-brainer stuff. Everyone who has ever watched football has seen that play out at the end of a game. It's common knowledge. Moreover, everyone on the field has run that play before. Take a knee and kill of the clock. It ain't hard.

So now Colorado State has the ball and it's inevitable they'll score, given that they've got 560 yds. of offense and the W.S.U. defense has been on the field for seemingly the entire game. Sure enough, the Rams fashion a quick drive, score a TD with :33 left to cut it to 45-43. They go for two and run a crazy Statue of Liberty play, at first it appears that the runner is stopped short and forced out of bounds, but a review confirms that the ball had touched the pylon when the runner stretched. So the game is now tied at 45-45. OT here we come. This is already a collapse of colossal proportions, but at least they'll still have the opportunity in OT to redeem themselves.

And then the Cougars promptly fumble the kickoff.

So Colorado State has gone from being 15 pts. down with 3:00 to play to having the ball on the W.S.U. 25-yd. line with :27 left in the game. They hand off, run the remaining seconds down, spike it to stop the clock with :04 left, and then kick the FG. Colorado State wins 48:45.

This is, quite simply, the greatest choke that I have ever seen played out on a football field.

The previous worst most definitely was by the 1978 New York Giants, who simply had to run 'victory' to defeat the Philadelphia Eagles:

What that play by Joe Pisarcik did was change the way teams handle playing out the end of the game forever on. You never leave anything to chance at the end. After that Giants mishap, it's pretty much a given that the QB of a team with a lead is going to take a knee. Hell, his teammates will be there to make sure he stays down. And most teams in the 'victory' formation have a guy standing 15 yds. back from the play just in case something weird happens.

So yeah, W.S.U. should know better. The Cougars then went further and compounded the disaster. They fumbled the last three times they touched the ball. (Remember that the one fumble was overturned on review.) It was the most brainless display I've ever seen on a football field.

And all that I could do was laugh.

Why be angry? It's the New Mexico Bowl, for heaven's sake. It's not like there were national championship implications or anything. And I'm so used to seeing W.S.U. give away games after spending 20+ years around that school that it doesn't surprise me in the least when it happens. I just figured I had seen every possible way of screwing up over the years, only to see the Cougars find a new way to do so. As John Madden says at the end of the video I linked to in my post about Tony Romo, "there is nothing automatic in football."

That's true of other sports as well, mind you:

 
And when the Cougars are involved, it's best to never believe in the no-lose situation.

Turnover Tony

It reads like a film script. An unheralded kid from a small college goes undrafted, signs as an afterthought free agent. Through his talent and tenacity, he earns the starting position. He goes on from there to make millions of dollars, date pop stars and marry beauty pageant queens, playing QB for one of football’s iconic franchises. Sounds like the stuff of dreams, doesn’t it?

Tony Romo probably wants to wake up right about now.

Let's go back to last Sunday. The Dallas Cowboys are holding a 36-31 lead over the Green Bay Packers with 2:58 remaining in the 4th Quarter. The Cowboys have struggled in the second half, having led the game 26-3 at the intermission, but they are still in position to win. Green Bay’s swiss cheese defense hasn’t been able to stop the run – RB DeMarco Murray is averaging almost 7 yds. a carry – and even with the Pack crowding the line of scrimmage, running the football and killing some seconds on the clock is the right play in this situation. Indeed, on 2nd-and-7 from their own 35-yd. line, the play call from the sidelines is for a sweep to the right behind two pulling guards.

But on every play, the QB has options to deviate from the script. Playing QB in the NFL is probably the toughest position in sports. Every situation has a myriad of options, dependent upon the situation and what the defense provides. You have to read the defense, you have to see all the options. You also have to have a feel for what’s working and what isn’t – this WR has a good matchup on the outside, this lineman is struggling on the blocks, etc. If the play call presents bad matchups, you audible and shift to something else, and you have to figure all of this out in a matter of seconds. It’s a position that requires extreme confidence, strong leadership skills, and also the ability to improvise. Oh yeah, and then you have to execute the play while the defense is trying to clobber you.

Dallas QB Tony Romo surveys the field, and this is what he sees:

Aha! Look at that! 40 North Texas acres of space behind that one DB on the outside. The Packers are obviously going all in to stop the run. If the WR gets by the DB, it’s a touchdown, a kill shot. Game over baby. And Tony Romo can make all the throws. Statistics show that he is one of the highest-rated QBs in the history of the game. But as we all know, there are three sorts of untruths: lies, damned lies, and statistics.

Roll tape …

The play is a disaster. The Cowboys are still run blocking and guys are running all over the place. Tony Romo has his life flash before his eyes as he’s nearly planted by an oncoming freight train that is LB Clay Matthews. Indeed, the WR has a step on the DB, but Romo has happy feet and doesn’t set himself. He hurries the throw, chucks up a flailing pigeon of a pass, and it’s intercepted. It’s the WORST possible outcome. In the abstract, the play made sense, of course, but the situation dictates a more conservative approach. And sure, if he gets that throw up a bit, the WR catches it and is running all the way to Fort Worth. Woulda coulda shoulda. It’s the wrong play at the wrong time. A big mistake squarely on the shoulders of the Dallas QB.

Granted new life and thanking the lucky stars painted on the side of their opposition’s helmets, the Packers take advantage, driving in for a TD to take a 37-36 lead with little more than a minute to play, and Dallas’ last gasp drive also results in an interception, giving the Packers an implausible victory. The Cowboys have managed to blow a 23-pt. lead, and the Dallas faithful in the stands and in the press then speak to the fact that they cannot remember a Dallas collapse of such epic proportions.

Evidently, they have short memories. Read that box score from 2011 – a game in which the Cowboys blew a 24-pt. lead in second half – and notice how the Lions got back into it: two pick sixes. Romo’s third interception of the game, with under 4:00 to play in the 4th Quarter, set up the winning score for the Lions.

I’m hard pressed to think of a more confounding athlete than Tony Romo. Few players, in any sport, have logged such a record of making the big mistake at the critical juncture. Mistakes happen all the time, of course. In most games, the competitor who makes the fewest mistakes is the one who succeeds. When errors happen, you simply have to adjust and atone for it in the flow of the game. Make the next play available to you and go from there. But often times, failure is ultimately determined by who makes the last mistake, that error in judgment or performance from which it is impossible to recover. And for all of his skills and strengths – and there are many – no one makes the last mistake more often than Tony Romo.

Who would’ve thought that, in the NFL playoffs back on Jan. 6, 2007, what seemed an aberration would turn out to be just the tip of the iceberg, and the absurd late-game error would become the norm? Tony Romo had ascended to the starting QB position that season and guided the Cowboys to the playoffs. The Cowboys were primed to pull the upset on the road in Seattle, trailing 21-20 but deep in Seahawks territory in the final minutes. Having been a scrub at the beginning of the year, one of Romo’s responsibilities had been to hold for placekicks, a role he still maintained even as he had become the starter. A chip shot FG would give Dallas the lead …

A play like that, in a situation like that, can define your career, fair or unfair. Anyone who watched that game back in 2007 can’t hear the name Tony Romo without giggling a little. I mean, c’mon here. That kick is the length of an extra point. The extra point is so close to an automatic that there has occasionally been talk of eliminating the extra point entirely, because what’s the good in having a play with an inevitable conclusion. Kickers miss maybe one kick from that distance in a season, if not once every two seasons. How could you possibly screw this up?

Words fail.

But it seems that the greater the stage, the more clumsy Tony Romo’s exit stage left will turn out to be. The Cowboys best season under his helm – 13-3 in 2007 – ended with a 21:17 playoff loss to Giants finished off by an interception of Romo in the endzone. The Cowboys had a chance to win the NFC East again last season with a win in D.C. They had withstood the bruising Washington running game, and trailed the Redskin Potatoes by only 21-18 late in the 4th Quarter, with the ball on their own 28 yd. line. Some late game heroics are in order …

WHAT ARE YOU DOING?!?!?!?!

Now, pinning all of the Cowboys failings over the past eight seasons on the starting QB would be decidedly unjust. More often than not, the Cowboys have put a flawed product out on the field during Romo’s tenure. The offensive line, in particular, seems to always be problematic. And since one of the primary jobs of an offensive line is to keep the QB standing upright, it's not surprising that Romo’s been banged around like a piñata for most of his career. He’s a tough guy, and he’s played hurt – really hurt, like broken ribs hurt.

The knock on him is that he’s a gambler and a gunslinger, someone who is risky with the ball. Even when he’s bad, he can be really good. He makes ill-advised decisions, in part, because he believes that he can make all the plays, and his confidence gets the better of his judgment. But that supreme confidence is something you want in a QB, particularly when you are trailing. You need a guy under center who can take charge, make plays and lead a rally. Indeed, Tony Romo has led 4th Quarter comebacks over 20 times during his career, some of which being in games that the Cowboys screwed up anyway. (In 2011, they lost twice when Romo led late drives, only to see the always humourous Dallas kicking game allow FGs to be blocked.) He’s sometimes had to singlehandedly compensate for his team’s lack of a running game or a poor performance by the defense, and do it all while scrambling about the pocket and running for his life. If anything, the argument could be made that he has won more games for them over the years than he has lost for them.

The problem is, ultimately, that he hasn’t won that many. The Cowboys are basically a .500 team in his career. And when a football team loses, the first person who takes the blame is the QB. Cowboys Nation are a particularly self-entitled bunch, and a QB who seems to always find a way to make critical errors at critical times is fertile ground for pillory. Everything he does is ludicrously overscrutinized, both on and off the field. This boneheaded move on the eve of the playoffs didn’t help his public standing, and Jessica Simpson soon found herself reviled by Cowboys fans everywhere after another of Romo’s on-field meltdowns, the broadcast of which included countless camera shots of her standing and cheering him on while wearing a pink #9 Cowboys jersey.

Like I say, everyone makes mistakes, but it’s the sheer number of late game blunders by Tony Romo which boggles the mind. Scroll back up and examine those gifs again: whereas the fumbled FG snap (giggle giggle) was something of an anomaly, the plays vs. Green Bay and Washington are both fundamentally bad decisions. Playing QB is inherently about managing the game. Smart decision-making is crucial. Failing to do so is often disastrous. Not only is Tony Romo making bad decisions, but he is apparently not learning from his mistakes. And as good as he has been in his career, Tony Romo’s not going to change the perception of him until he stops making those mistakes when the game is on the line.

Will you STOP DOING THAT?

That particular blunder occurred near the end of one of the best games of this season, when the Cowboys went toe-to-toe with Peyton Manning and the Denver Broncos. Tony Romo threw for 506 yards in this game, a franchise record and one of the better games in NFL history. But all of his heroic work was undermined on one single play, an interception which came with the score tied in the final minutes. The Broncos then ran the clock down to near zero and kicked a FG to win 51:48 …

Wait a minute, what? 51:48? Where’s the defense? Oh, that’s right, Dallas doesn’t have one of those. The Cowboys are the worst defense in the NFL this year statistically, and bordering on being one of the worst of all time, but don’t just trust the stats. Trust your eyes as well. Just look at the way the Cowboys defended this quick slant pass, a fairly basic play in contemporary football:

Uh, guys, you might want to cover #81.

Uh, so what part of “you might want to cover #81” did you not understand? I guess by saying ‘might,’ you thought it was somehow optional or something. My bad.

That was Calvin Johnson of the Lions picking up some of the 329 receiving yards he gained against the Cowboys earlier this season. Now, granted, Calvin Johnson is arguably one of the greatest receivers in the history of the game, but still ... 329 yards? By one guy? This was a game in which the Lions amassed over 600 yards, scored 24 pts. in the 4th Quarter, and drove 80 yards in the final minute with no timeouts left to score a TD and win 31:30. Against the Dallas defense, anything is possible. They also allowed the Saints to pick up 40 first downs earlier this year, which is an NFL record. And while Romo gets fitted with the dunce cap for the Green Bay loss, the defense should join him in standing in the corner, as the Cowboys managed to blow a 23-pt. lead to a team led by Matt Flynn, the Packers 4th QB of the season whom they had signed off the streets. Needless to say, the defense doesn’t give Tony Romo any help. He would probably give his team more opportunities to win this year if he knew how to tackle.

It would be easier to feel some sympathy for the guy were it not for the fact that he plays for the Dallas Cowboys, an organization whose achievements on the field – eight trips to the Super Bowl, and winning five of those – is only surpassed by its opinion of itself. Having done things like anointed itself America’s Team and declared that the roof was open on Texas Stadium so God could watch his favourite team on Sundays, the Cowboys are one of the most loathed franchises in all of sports, if not the most loathed. They are a bastion of largesse and excess, and their new stadium is an homage to bombast, right down to the scoreboard that ate the ceiling. (But is it a nice facility? I don’t know, ask the fans whose Super Bowl seats were condemned by the fire marshal in 2011. I’m sure they enjoyed spending at least $900 a pop for the privilege of ultimately watching the Steelers and the Packers at the in-house sports bar.) In the past, however, the Cowboys have certainly walked the walk to back up their ample volume of talk. Five Super Bowl titles does buy you some cred. For a while, anyway.

Cowboys owner Jerry Jones likes to think of himself as something of a football man. He and Head Coach Jimmy Johnson were the braintrust of an operation that amassed so much talent in the early 1990s that Johnson coached two Super Bowl champions. (The Cowboys were aided greatly, of course, by the worst trade in NFL history.) The Cowboys were so good that they won a third Super Bowl basically flying on autopilot, with empty suit Barry Switzer masquerading as head coach after Jimmy Johnson had resigned.

But once Jimmy Johnson was gone, it was clear where the brains were in the braintrust. The Cowboys have dwindled in the direction of mediocrity ever since. No, they are even worse than mediocre, in that they are constantly underachieving. Jerry Jones spends early, spends often, but rarely spends wisely. The Cowboys always have their share of fancy, talented players, but rarely do they have the depth required to get through a season, and every offseason is a tangle of drastic contract renegotiations to get the club under the cap. (Or not under the cap – like the Redskin Potatoes, the Cowboys are still paying fines to the league for violating the cap.) They've changed coaches five times in 15 years. Regardless of who is patrolling the sideline, the Cowboys have shown a penchant for making mental errors, committing turnovers, and all-around stupid play.

So, in that sense, maybe Tony Romo is the ideal QB.

You would think that they'd be tired of this in Jerry World by now. The Cowboys gave Tony Romo a 6-year, $67.5 million contract in 2007. Along with this, they’ve had to factor in enormous sums for Tums, Maalox, Pepto Bismol and Excedrin to deal with all of Romo’s assorted foibles. But after seven seasons of generally untimely incompetence, the Cowboys promptly gave Romo a 6-year contract extension worth $108 million, $80 million of which is guaranteed. I’m serious. It is an astoundingly bad contract added to a team already chock-full of bad contracts. I think it was weasly White Sox owner Jerry Reinsdorf who once complained that free agency in sports demands paying rates set by your dumbest competitors. He has a point. If Turnover Tony gets $108 mil to throw ill-advised passes and blow games with 3:00 left, just imagine what a real franchise QB will be worth in the future.

I mean, I do feel somewhat bad for the guy. He can pretty damn good sometimes. Most of the time, actually. But I must confess that I am among the throngs of un-Americans who think that America’s Team should go suck it. And so long as you keep the game close, and #9 is taking snaps for the opposition, you had best be on your toes, because you never know when a gift is going to come your way, and it will likely be handed to you on a silver platter emblazoned with a blue star.

From First to Worst

In 2012, the Houston Texans won the AFC South. The Atlanta Falcons hosted the NFC Championship Game. And the Washington Redskins rallied from a slow start and won the NFC East. In the case of the first two, it would’ve been reasonable to prognosticate back in July and see them being contenders for the Super Bowl. The Redskins were a little more dicey, as it was dependent QB Robert Griffin III’s return from a terrible injury in the NFC playoffs. But given that they play in the tough-as-pudding NFC (L)East, it was logical to think they would have a decent shot at repeating.

What a difference a season makes.

The Texans are 2-12, having lost 12 straight (including two games against the truly terrible Jacksonville Jaguars), and are currently leading the NFL Dead Pool race for the #1 draft pick. The Redskins are right there nipping at their heals at 3-11, and the Falcons are right there with them at 4-10. Houston has already fired their head coach, Gary Kubiak, and you wonder if Mike Shanahan and Mike Smith may suffer the same fate in D.C. and ATL as well. It's rare to see three playoff teams flop so badly simultaneously, and the failings of these three clubs provides a cautionary tale for those of us who have teams to root for which are actually good to enjoy the moment, since the moment can pass really fast. (You could also throw into this discussion the New York Giants, who won a Super Bowl two seasons ago and are now 4-10, and looked about as lifeless as any team I can remember in being shut out at home this past Sunday, but the Giants weren't really any good last year, either.)

(Administrative note: there are many media outlets which have chosen to no longer print the nickname of the Washington D.C. football team. The LOSE will continue using the name Redskins, but only in the following context:

Go potatoes! And with that, on with the opera and enough will all of these parentheticals ...)

Most professional sports leagues pay lip service to the idea of parody parity, but the NFL actively seeks it. They've built it into their schedule matrix that the best teams from the year before will meet in the following season and knock each other around a little bit, while the weaklings get to do the same. This naturally tends to draw teams W-L records closer together over time and make dominance difficult. (This was an even more pronounced factor in the past, when the divisions were unbalanced and the schedule more fluid on a yearly basis.) All three of these teams were therefore looking at some stiff competition this season, and both the Falcons and Texans had the scheduling misfortune of playing four games this season against the NFC West, a usually poor quartet of teams which suddenly has 3½ good teams this year. (I saw 3½ on account of the schizophrenic St. Louis Rams, who either win by 20 or lose by 20, depending on the week.)

And it goes without saying that the injury bug has hit these teams hard. Injuries are the great unknown in football – you know they're going to happen, but you don't know just how severe they will be. Championship teams in most sports typically suffer fewer than average numbers of injuries over the course of a season, and bad teams will often suffer more, at which point their lack in depth of talent is exposed. And the Falcons' woes this season have quite a bit to do with injuries, as they've missed their top two WRs for most of the year, and their offensive line is completely trashed. Atlanta's explosive offense from last season, with great talent at all the skill positions, has disintegrated about as badly as the offensive line disintegrated on this play vs. the Washington Redskins last weekend. Matt Ryan does well to avoid a jailbreak by the Skins defensive line, but his follow through on the shovel pass leaves a little to be desired:

That may be one of the worst plays I've seen all season. It sort of sums up the Falcons year.

The Falcons rode their dynamic offense all the way to the best record in the NFC last year, and they had to, because their defense wasn't very good. The defense blew a 20-point halftime lead vs. the Seahawks in the playoffs, only to be saved by Matt Ryan's late game heroics, and then the Falcons blew a 17-point lead the following week in losing to the 49ers in the NFC Championship. And to address this in the offseason, the Falcons did ... well, not much of anything, really. Their defense is just as lousy as last season, or maybe it's worse:

Yeah, it's worse. I have no idea what the DBs are doing on that play. The cornerback gets abused and the free safety misses the ball by a good four yards. They made Redskins backup QB Kirk Cousins look like Peyton Manning on Sunday. (That Cousins is playing at all is something we'll get to in a few minutes.)

Now, I've never believed the mantra that 'defense wins championships.' Most coaches preach defense because they were bad at offense when they used to play, but at least they could be the smart guy who played defense and were thus somewhat useful. Defense is, in fact, easier. It's easier to teach and easier to coach, particularly by small control freaks patrolling the sidelines. That said, you have to at least play it somewhat competently to give your team a chance to be successful regularly. And when injuries ravage your offensive weapons and you can't stop anybody, you're 4-10 in December and there are likely to be job openings.

The Houston Texans, actually, have a statistically good defense – 4th in the league in yards allowed. The problem in Houston has been that the offense keeps scoring on itself. I referenced the following play in a post earlier this year about luck, in which the Texans inexplicably snatch defeat from the jaws of victory:

Forget what I said before about the worst play of the season. THIS IS SO MUCH WORSE. The Texans haven't won a game since they handed the Seahawks this game on a silver platter. The Texans have a solid running game with two good backs, the reigning Defensive Player of the Year in J.J. Watt, and one of the game's great receivers in Andre Johnson, but bad QB play just kills your football team, as it destroys your whole team's collective rhythm and confidence. And few have played the position worse this season than Texans QB Matt Schaub did, as he threw a "pick six" in four consecutive games. So after Schaub got hurt in a game vs. the Rams (which was rather unfortunately met with cheers from the Houston fans), the Texans switched to backup T.J. Yates ...

Egads.

Houston then blew a 21-3 halftime lead on Sunday Night Football, losing to the Colts 27:24 at home, and everyone involved seemed to give up after that. Despite being stingy allowing yards, the Texans are 25th in points allowed, in part because the team is -15 in turnovers and gives up short fields all the time when they aren't scoring on themselves. Injuries have shelved some of their top players, and they've gone through 3 QBs and two head coaches. But this may be a similar case to last year's Kansas City Chiefs, in that there is still a good collection of talent which will recover from an awful season pretty quickly if they can get a coach who knows what he's doing and a QB who can throw the ball to a guy in the same coloured jersey.

The Redskins imploded almost immediately this year, as the Philadelphia Eagles ran all over them in the first week of the season, and they've been behind the 8-ball ever since. RG3 rushed back from his knee injury, just as Minnesota Vikings RB/freak of nature Adrian Petersen had done the year before. What Petersen did was unprecedented, coming off a major knee surgery and playing at an MVP level the following year. It was completely unrealistic for anyone in Washington to expect RG3 – or anyone else, for that matter – to do that. Without his speed and running ability, RG3 hasn't been nearly as effective this year – and, since the QBs are always the scapegoats, this has led to him shouldering much of the blame for the Redskins atrocious season.

Which is preposterous.

He has receivers who drop passes, a defense which can't tackle, and he's become a pawn in an absurd power struggle between megalomaniacal owner Dan Snyder and head coach Mike Shanahan, who has parlayed having John Elway there to win two Super Bowls for him in Denver into a rather curious image as an elite coach. The Redskins have been a dysfunctional organization ever since Snyder bought them, and he's run through six coaches in 11 years. But Snyder loves RG3, and understandably so, as he is a potentially transcendent talent and one of the games great young personalities. Shanahan has now decided to 'shut down' RG3 for the season, supposedly because he isn't healthy enough to continue to play, but he probably wasn't healthy enough to play the first 13 games then, either.

The mismanaged organization, meanwhile, has been hamstrung by fines and penalties for flagrantly violating the salary cap, which is good in that it momentarily stymied Dan Snyder's penchant for grossly overpaying past-their-prime free agents. They'll get some relief from that next year, but this team is one hell of a mess. The Redskins haven't won a Super Bowl in over 20 years and have rarely been relevant during that time other than provide some curiosity to ambulance chasers interested in seeing a wreck. Shanahan is owed something like $7 million after this year, even though he's feuded with his QB and his owner. Snyder will likely have to bite the bullet and get rid of him, and hire his 7th coach in 12 years, but who would want this job at this point? When you are hired by the tyrannical head of the Potatoes (and humorless at that, as he's gone so far as to try to squelch radio broadcasts parodying his team), you're libel to be easily mashed.

Now there is some hope for all of this clubs for next season, of course. All three possess players who, when healthy, are elite-level talents. That's a good place to start. And while the NFL Draft is no guarantee of success when it comes to talent acquisition, they'll all get the pick of the litter. The Texans in particular have built their franchise slowly and steadily through the draft over time, preaching patience to their fan bases as the club blossomed into a budding powerhouse – which is why their sudden fall from grace has been somewhat shocking. But losing is the default option in competition. You have to do everything you possibly can to avoid it. And success is never guaranteed, which is what makes long streaks of success, such as that of the Patriots, somewhat remarkable. Enjoy it while it lasts. It's while I'm enjoying this Seahawks season greatly, and hoping they don't revert to their usual form any time soon.

The Weird Cup

The World Cup draw occurred on Friday in Brazil, an event which used to be somewhat overshadowed but has become a spectacle all to itself. It is of vital import to the 32 teams who have qualified for next year's event. The draw is usually a source of a fair amount of consternation, along with accusations of the host nation rigging the draw, and is fertile ground for punditry of all sorts. And since I am prone to punditry, and had some time to kill at McCarron and SFO aeroports over the weekend, I figured that I may as well join in the fun.

These are my quick thoughts I jotted down off the top of my head about each Group, divided into four categories: those who are looking strong (beast), those who are on the rise (yeast), those who appear to be regressing or don't impress me (least), and the turkeys waiting to be carved (feast). Some of these groups are brutal, some suck, and some are just weird.

This is probably the deepest field in the history of the World Cup. There weren't many surprises at all in qualifying, in the end, as a few stragglers righted the ship just in time to qualify, and there is only one dilettante – the Bosnians – making their debut at this particular beaux arts ball. Lots of seasoned vets in the field. If the tourney weren't being held in Brazil, it would be a wide open race.

Even so, assuming that Seleção are going to run away with it is risky. Sure, they looked pretty dominant at the Confed Cup in June – but this ain't the Confed Cup. And Brazil has long memories when it comes to football – recollections of 1950 will rear their ugly heads between now and June. Seleção may be the overwhelming favourite, and deservedly so, but they also face overwhelming pressure.

Group A
Beast: Having drawn the weakest of the African sides, and two talented sides who didn't play worth a damn this year, Brazil has a nice warm up here for the games that matter later in the tournament.
Yeast: It's not clear to me whether Mexico's 9:3 aggregate over New Zealand means that El Tri have righted the ship, or if the All-Whites really are that bad. Maybe some of both. Mexico's flavor of the month is coach Miguel Herrera, who did the audacious and left his European stars off the playoff roster, loading it up with guys who'd played for his Club América team which was sitting top of the MX table. Not making it to Brazil would've been a disaster, and maybe the Mexicans are moving in the right direction, or maybe they're the Yeast in this group only because ...
Least: ... the Croatians are a mess. They started the year ranked #9 in FIFA (pfft, whatever, but we'll get to that in a minute), lost twice to the Scots, got manhandled by the Belgians in Zagreb, barely qualified for the playoff, got their coach fired, and did a lot of fancy passing in their playoff with Iceland but rarely looked all that menacing. They have a lot of talent and some time to turn it around, but I don't think Seleção are going to be all that worried on opening day in São Paulo.
Feast: Samuel Eto-ó claimed there was a plot not to pass him the ball during the World Cup playoff between Cameroon and Tunisia. The Indomitable Lions always put the fun in dysfunctional. Given Eto-ó's claim, It's ironic they're drawn with Croatia in this group, since it's been surmised many times that the Croats and Serbs wouldn't pass the ball to each other on Yugoslavia's 1990 World Cup team which lost in the quarterfinals, a super-talented team that wasted a golden opportunity.

Group B
Beast: Whomever wins the game on June 13 in Salvador between Spain and The Netherlands. That the two finalists from 2010 are meeting in their first match of the tournament and are grouped together can be attributed to FIFA's dumb decision to seed the pots for this tourney using the FIFA rankings, a fatally flawed system which does a fine job of comparing apples to oranges. The Dutch and the Italians, both international football royalty, both wound up being #2 seeds, whereas Belgium, Colombia and Switzerland were #1s even though none of them have ever done much of anything on the world stage. Both sides have reason to feel like they got jobbed with this draw.
Yeast: Chile also reason to think they've gotten screwed over here by the ping pong balls. A good team, and a dangerous one, but maybe the odd one out here.
Least: Brazil. Clearly, whomever was in charge of rigging the draw did a shitty job, since Seleção will have to play whomever finishes 2nd in Group B. There are maybe only 4-5 teams capable of beating Seleção, and Spain and the Dutch are two of them.
Feast: Goal difference may be crucial in this group, particularly if the Spain-Netherlands game turns cautious and winds up a draw. As such, Australia is likely to get scored upon a lot. But given that they lost back-to-back 6:0 friendlies this year to Brazil and France, the Socceroos are obviously well-practiced in that.

Group C
Beast: If Côte d'Ivoire can't advance out of this group, they may never advance. In terms of talent, they've probably got more than anyone else in what is a pretty lousy group.
Yeast: Another beneficiary of the strange FIFA ranking system is Colombia, who have snuck all the way up to #5 without anyone figuring out quite how they've done it. This is a good team but one which may be lacking in experience. I'm fundamentally a fan of any team called Los Cafeteros, as I am a coffee junkie, and the Colombians should be fun to watch.
Least: I believe the success of Japan in reaching the 16s in 2010 had as much to do with their mediocre group as anything. Great technicians, the Japanese, and you certainly don't want to give them too many opportunities from set pieces, but they lack pace and athleticism.
Feast: If there is one team which always seems to benefit from fortuitous draws, it's Greece, who always seem to land in cushy groups full of dead weight and overrated sides, and then promptly bore all their opponents into submission. Even though they showed a bit more attacking flair in their playoff win over Romania, this is still a plodding team that tries to win every game 1:0. But the World Cup embodies the Peter Principle – you rise to the level of your own incompetence. The Greeks have never won a World Cup match, and I don't imagine that's going to happen here, either.

Group D
Beast: I think that if you're the Italians, you're feeling not that bad about this group. Two tough games, to be sure, but the Italians usually thrive in such tough games, and Mario Balotelli gives them a game-changer up front like they've never had before.
Yeast: Uruguay did what they usually do in qualifying – coast and do just enough to make it into the field. La Celeste flirted without disaster for a bit in CONMEBOL before going on a win streak, snagging a playoff spot and whacking the Jordanians around. Uruguay's 4th place finish in 2010 was a Jekyll and Hyde routine, with the yin of the stylish and popular Diego Forlán counterbalanced by enfant terrible Luis Suárez, who has since managed to provide even more reason to dislike him, and then even more reason still, since when he played goalkeeper in 2010. (And in his defense, anyone who says they wouldn't have done what he did in that situation in 2010, with all that was on the line, is a damn liar.) He's also fucking brilliant on the pitch, which is why anyone puts up with his shit. Now that Forlán is a supporting character, this is Suárez' team and they'll go as far as he can get them.
Least: It is always impossible for England to meet their fanbase's expectation. They got a tough draw here, being grouped with Italy and Uruguay, and it's especially going to be a challenge playing the Italians in Manaus. Nothing in Europe could prepare you to play a game in 85% humidity in the middle of a tropical rain forest. England's a middling side at the moment, but the draw is something else for Fleet St. to bitch about. Yeah, it's a tough draw, but having an E.A.S.Y. draw didn't help them much in 2010, now did it?
Feast: I have no doubt that Costa Rica will play hard, but the Ticos are outmanned in this group and definitely caught a bad break.

Group E
Beast: The French were a disgrace in South Africa in 2010, as they quarreled amongst themselves, mutinied against their coach, staged a 1-day strike, had a player sent home, and brought the entirety of their federation into disrepute on their way to a last-place finish. Some of the same bad actors from four years ago are back, and this team still seems to have some bad Karma about it. That being said, they rose from the dead to beat Ukraine in the playoff, and getting drawn in this group was an absolute gift. They can't possibly mess this up, can they?
Yeast: I like Ecuador, but I would like them more if they could prove that they could win more consistently when away from the 9,000 ft. altitude of Quito. And for god's sake, don't do this again!
Least: The Swiss have become the poster child for hating on FIFA, as the goofy FIFA rankings somehow placed this team in the Top 8 at the expense of clubs like the Dutch and the Italians. In truth, there has never been a good way to seed teams for the World Cup, and it's always been as much about reputation as anything else. But the ranking system still needs some refinement. It's a flawed system, much like the BCS. I'm not sure how the Swiss got to be in the Top 8 other than to beat up on what was a pretty bad qualifying group. That said, sleep on the Swiss at your peril – their young talent which won a Juniors World Championship seems to be maturing nicely.
Feast: I read a quote recently that read, "if you don't see Honduras in your group, then you're probably your group's Honduras." C'mon, be nice to the big H! They've got some nice skill players, and the H showed they could win a tough game by beating El Tri at Azteca in The Hex. I'm down with the H and I hope they steal some points here and there.

Group F
Beast: Most of this year's talk about the draw being rigged seems to be coming out of Argentina. Why Brazil would ever do a favour for their fiercest rival is beyond me, but this draw is just stupid easy for them, as they have pretty much a cake walk all the way to 8s. The great concern for La Albiceleste, of course, is the health of Lionel Messi. They can win this group without the greatest player in the world, but I don't think they can win the World Cup without him.
Yeast: The most fun team in Brazil to watch will almost certainly be the newcomers. Bosnia have been knocking on the door for a few years but kept just missing out. They believe that the best defense is to score a lot of goals, and they just keep throwing guys forward all the time. They have some depth issues, however, and playing no defense tends to lead to quick exits.
Least: For his tireless and outstanding efforts in guiding his team to an African Cup of Nations victory this year, Nigeria coach Stephen Keshi was rewarded by not being paid for several months. Such is the nature of the Super Eagles, who are constantly beset by financial problems and political in-fighting. They continue to be their own worst enemies. After crashing out in comically awful fashion in 2010, and enduring all sorts of internal turmoil and strife, the Super Eagles may finally be getting it together here – which is why you should, oh, PAY THE DAMN COACH!
Feast: Speaking of politics and strife, you can usually count on both to hold back the progress of the team from the football-mad nation of Iran, which really should dominate the Asian game but fails to do so.

Group G
Beast: Germany, Portugal, Ghana, the U.S. Any of these four teams can win the group.
Yeast: Germany, Portugal, Ghana, the U.S. Any of these four teams can finish second.
Least: Germany, Portugal, Ghana, the U.S. Any of these four teams can finish third.
Feast: Germany, Portugal, Ghana, the U.S. Any of these four teams can finish last.
Obligatory home(r) country notes: this is probably the toughest group in the history of the World Cup, not only because of the quality of the four teams, but also because of the travel. The U.S. got the dreaded G4 draw slot, which means they have games in Natal, Manaus and Recife – basically spanning the sprawling width of the South American continent. The U.S. got screwed in the draw ... but they were the most likely to get screwed, since they were the best team in a pot full of CONCACAF and Asian sides. It's precisely because teams like the U.S. exist that a 'Group of Death' can happen. And I was serious before when I said the U.S. can, in fact, win this group. For all the flair and snazz and talent and likability of the 'new' Germans, they still haven't won anything. I think the U.S. can get points from Portugal, who have Ronaldo, of course, but who also have some pretty ordinary players and who looked a bit uneven in qualifying. The Ghana game is a problem, because Ghana has attacking talent but also plays great defense. The U.S. should approach all of this from the standpoint of figuring out how to win the group. Forget 'survive and advance.' Go out and win the damn thing. If you do that, the path – 2nd place in group H in the 16s, then someone from the E/F quadrant in the 8s – really isn't all that bad. The venues aren't ideal, but the U.S. is probably better equipped to handle the humidity than their European foes. I do think they have a shot here. Obviously, I'd prefer they were paired with the Swiss, but this isn't as impossible as it first seems. It's hard, but unless you're Argentina, this tourney is gonna be hard.

Group H
Beast: They seem to be growing great young players on trees in Belgium all of a sudden. When this team's starting XI is healthy, they are an absolute terror. These ain't your slow, stiff, tight, defensive-minded Belgians of yesteryear. And they got a nice draw here, although they're probably not crazy about playing whomever stumbles out alive from Group G in the 16s.
Yeast: The Russians host the 2018 World Cup, of course, which will be fascinating in that they are traditionally a dominant home side and will thus immediately be considered a threat to win it, but their performance leading up to, and during, major tournaments has always been generally uneven and rather perplexing. Russia showed some consistency this time around in winning their European group, and they always have guys that can score.
Least: Algeria seems to have an Italian sort of knack for getting results. They aren't the most flashy team, but they found their way through African qualifying, and then capitalized on some moments of sloppy Burkinabe defending to win their playoff on away goals when Burkina Faso seemed to have more talent on the pitch. I don't expect the Fennec Foxes to advance, but they won't be embarrassed, either.
Feast: South Korea made the 16s four years ago, and are usually good for some fast-paced, high energy football. But they didn't play very well in Asian qualifying at all, and they need to turn it around here soon.

So who lost? Well, the U.S., of course. Group G is insane. Mexico can't be too happy. The trios of good teams in B and D aren't thrilled – and neither are the bottom feeders in B and D, who risk getting run over.

I managed to pick a Spain-Netherlands final, 3/4 of the semifinalists and 7/8 of the quarterfinalists right four years ago – but doing so meant picking stuff that was completely nuts, like Paraguay winning their group and the Brazilians crashing out in the quarters. My immediate thought here in 2014 is semis of Brazil v. Germany and Italy v. Argentina. But that's too obvious. Usually something weird happens along the way. If it didn't, it wouldn't be any fun.