All the News That's Weak, We Print

Sigh

QUICK, to the buzzard points! We have no time for an intro:

• The Women’s World Cup is a wonderful event, showcasing some seriously badass lady footballers, and I recommend that everyone watch. The women’s game is still developing internationally, and while seeing two teams put up 10-spots might suggest FIFA was overly ambitious in expanding the field to 24 teams when there wasn’t really the depth of talent worldwide to merit it, there has been a surprising amount of parity so far, as only two teams have taken a full 6 points from the first two games. It’s good stuff and you should tune in when you get the chance (which, regrettably, I’ve not had nearly enough opportunities to do).
The women have been clamoring for years for their event to be taken seriously, and deservedly so. A good way to start would be for their governing body to take it seriously. That FIFA signed off so willingly on the damned fool idea of having this entire tournament be played on artificial surfaces is an abomination. It’s weird enough that they’re holding this tournament in Canada and none of the games are in Toronto, but I know they have the Pan Am Games there in July so I can understand it. Like I say, it’s just weird. (Would you have a World Cup in England and no games in London?) The idea to play the whole thing on artificial turf, however, is terrible. The Lose loves me some Canada, of course, but they got this one wrong from the beginning and it never should have been allowed to happen. Artificial surfaces have certainly improved since the Astroturf heyday of the 1970s, but it’s hard on the knees and the ankles, the turf burns are still gnarly, and the rubber and the sand flying everywhere is an ungodly mess. And even though Canada has winter 9 months out of the year, June and July ain’t among those months. Playing on a plastic pitch full of rubber and sand on top of concrete in 30°C temperatures or more is sort of like trying to work out in a tandoor. Only bikram yoga disciples are dumb enough to want to do that.
And I can certainly understand that all of the stadia in use for the Women’s World Cup are multi-use venues that operate year round in municipalities where the weather makes keeping a quality grass a challenge. Canada isn’t alone in having that problem. The two MLS clubs in the Pacific Northwest, Seattle Sounders F.C. and the Portland Timbers, play on artificial surfaces as well, since heavy rain + sea level tends to = swamp. Among the unexpected problems Iceland had when they nearly qualified for the 2014 World Cup was that they had to scrounge and scurry to get a pitch together for their playoff with Croatia, since Iceland hadn’t hosted a football match in November in its history, and grass has a peculiar way of not growing there at that time of year. They managed to do so, however.
And that’s precisely the point. Iceland managed to get a nice pitch together because they had to. FIFA generally doesn’t allow international matches on artificial surfaces – for men. Now that Costa Rica has a grass surface in its new home football grounds, none of the listed national stadia around the world have plastic pitches. Were the World Cup to take place in the United States in 2022 2026, they would almost certainly play some matches at Whatever The Hell The Phone Company Is Called Field in Seattle, and they would plunk down a temporary grass surface, just as they did in the Silverdome in Detroit back in 1994. If you can lay grass down in a dome, you can lay it down in Edmonton in June. Even though the Canadians were basically rubber stamped as hosts for this World Cup – they were the only bidders – FIFA has been pretty clear in saying to bidders for other tourneys that matches are to be played on grass. Choosing not to enforce that, in this case, seems incredibly careless and thoughtless.
And, quite possibly, sexist. Some 60 players filed a lawsuit to that effect, saying that it was discriminatory to make the women play on artificial turf pitches when FIFA would never permit that in the men’s World Cup. They have a point. The lawsuit wound up being dropped, since it wouldn’t have been heard in time. Scotts Lawn Care, upon hearing of all of this plastic pitch tomfoolery, offered to lay down temporary grass fields in the six stadia used for the World Cup for free – a cost of $3,000,000 they were willing to eat, having correctly viewed that laying sod for the event and solving an international dispute would constitute a pretty good use of their advertising budget. FIFA’s response to this was basically one of indifference.

“It wasn’t a long, drawn out explanation. We didn’t get a lot of detail back … I read about it in the press like everybody else.” 
– Chris Strunk, Scotts marketing director

The problem with suing FIFA is that it’s run by a bunch of stubborn old dirty bastards who respond to such a showing of dissent by digging in their heels and turning it into a pissing contest. They make bad decisions and, when called on their bad decisions, have a tendency to respond by making worse ones. In this case, they’ve dug their heels into the rubber and the cement. So we’re stuck with this nonsense. FIFA insists this is never happening again, but it never should’ve happened in the first place.

• The soccer ball bounces and skids and whizzes about on the artificial surfaces, so it takes a little getting used to, but other than the fatigue factor seeming heightened in the heat, I don’t think the quality of play has been diminished too much so far. Apparently, some of the players beg to differ:

“I think I score if we’re on grass … The ball as it comes off my head against Sweden hits a dry turf and bounces higher. If it hits grass, it's harder for a goalkeeper to react, so if the ball bounces higher the goalkeeper has more time to react off the turf.” 
– Abby Wambach, after the U.S. women’s 0:0 draw against Sweden.

Now, I gotta be honest here. That just might be the lamest thing I’ve ever heard. She’s one of the best players in the history of the game, and also one of the players who was most boisterous in the fight against FIFA to get the grass pitches installed, so this might be a case where she just doesn't want to let that fight go. But implying that the U.S. team’s inept offensive performance had to do with the pitch is nonsense. The Swedes were dealing with it, too. Everyone is. Who knows, maybe the Germans would’ve scored 13 or 14 against the Côte d’Ivoire on grass instead of just 10. I have a better idea: try playing better.
The USWNT has a loyal and allegiant fan base in this country, and deservedly so, because they’re terrific, but everyone involved seems remarkably prickly and defensive when sub-par performances are called into question. It’s the one thing I don’t care much for. Hey, if you suck, you suck. Take the hits and move on. Frankly, I think they choked in the final four years ago against Japan. Well, guess what? It happens. They are back and they are among the favourites and if they get offense out of neutral, they’ll probably win the thing, even though they’ll have to possibly navigate a mine field to do so once the knockouts begin, which leads me to my next buzzard point …

• What didn’t get nearly enough press, while everyone was griping about the turf, was the pairings for the Women’s World Cup. When it came time for the draw, the organizers locked all of the top sides into specific groups from the get-go and then built the schedule matrix from there. In the men’s competition, other than designating the top seed in Group A, which is always the host, everything is done through the random draw. In the process of locking top teams into specific groups, organizers also managed to arrange it so the Top 3 teams in the world – Germany, the U.S., and France – are all in the same half of the bracket should the games go to form. The reason for this was “financial considerations.” In other words, keep the U.S. and Canada as far away from each other as possible in the field, since they’ll have most of the fans between them and the organizers want to maximize the gate receipts. Some might also suggest the organizers dumped those Top 3 powerhouses together potentially in the other half of the bracket for the purposes of giving the host nation a better chance of reaching the final. It certainly wouldn’t be the first time a host country did that. (For Italia 1990, the young U.S. squad was ‘randomly’ drawn into the same group as the Italians, to the surprise of absolutely no one.)
The Lose thinks it’s lame to resort of that sort of stuff under the guise of getting more asses into seats for the games. Hey, here’s a good reason to go to the games: IT’S THE FUCKING WORLD CUP! They do the same thing for the women’s NCAA tournament, whereby teams are allowed to host games on their home floors whereas that’s strictly forbidden on the men’s side. Unsurprisingly, there tend to be very few upsets in the women’s NCAA tournament – teams don’t make it to be a Top 4 seed in the tourney by being lousy on their home court. The reason they do this is, of course, all about money – the NCAA wants to maximize their attendance, and really good teams also tend to have the largest number of fans. But the event should be big enough, at this point, that you don’t need to do that. It contributes to the same teams winning titles over and over again, which is boring. Connecticut and Tennessee winning every year is boring. We only love dynasties until we don’t.
UCLA won 10 NCAA men’s titles in 11 years, and part of why they were able to do that is because the tourney back then was, in fact, broken down geographically, so UCLA was playing whatever western fodder existed in the first couple of rounds. Not necessarily bad teams, mind you, but they weren’t going to play a Big 10 or ACC side until the Final Four at the earliest. The NCAA did away with the hard-fast regionalization, and while UCLA won 10 titles because they were really damn good, it would’ve been a lot harder, if not impossible, to match that feat using the sort of set-up you see in the NCAAs where they ship teams all over the place. The NCAA also did away with home court advantage in the tourney, and the game, as a whole, is better because of it.
The point is that if you’re seriously worried about financial considerations during a World Cup or an NCAA tourney, then you may need to question about why you’re holding it. Personally, I think the thing should stand on its own. Hey, its great athletes performing at an incredible level. What’s not to like? Were I hanging out in Moncton right now, I’d go and check it out.
And a funny thing tends to happen in football when you go about trying to play the meta game and massage the groups – the players aren’t in on it, and most of the organizers’ hopes wind up going out the window. The Spanish organizers went to great lengths in 1982 to try and set it up with the desired idea in mind of having Brazil v. Argentina and West Germany v. Spain in the semifinals if it all followed form, and that lasted all of one match in practice, because Argentina lost to Belgium in the very first game. Spain then lost to Northern Ireland, the Germans got beat by Algeria, the whole tourney went loopy and all of those organizational pipe dreams went kaput. Already in Canada this summer, the #3 rated French got beat by Colombia – a huge upset which may turn out to be a convenient one, as well, since the French now have a good chance of finishing second in their group, thus getting out of the bracket with the Germans and the Americans and being in a direct collision course with the hosts. Everyone should be careful what they wish for.

The Landsliðið are friends of The Lose. These guys are awesome.

• When the XI from the Faroe Islands defeated the Greeks 1:0 in Piraeus last November during European qualifying, not only was it the first UEFA win for the Landsliðið in four years, it was arguably one of the biggest upsets in the history of international football, if not the biggest. The Faroes were ranked 187th at the time by FIFA, the Greeks 18th. And we can hate on the Greeks for not passing the eye test and not being as good as their ranking, but they’ve been failing the eye test for 15 years now and it doesn’t keep the Greeks from getting results.
So that was a pretty remarkable win for the Landsliðið, who then decided to have even more fun at Greece’s expense in Tórshavn over this past weekend, beating the Greeks again, this time by a 2:1 scoreline. And neither match was a fluke. The better team won on both occasions.
And yes, I just wrote two paragraphs about the Faroe Islands. Go me.
UEFA 2016 in France will have an expanded field – 24 teams instead of 16 – and while it may water down the competition somewhat, it also generates more interest among the abundant number of European minnow nations, some of whom have taken to biting the big fish. After beating the Belgians over the weekend, Wales are on the verge of qualifying for a major tourney for the first time since 1958. The aforementioned Iceland XI have already beaten the Dutch and the Czechs and may qualify for the first time ever. I think you may see even more surprises in the future on the international level, simply because the club demands on top players, from top nations, are so great now that the international game has to take a back seat for them. Sides from the lesser nations, often built around players who sat on the benches for their clubs for a lot of the year, tend to have a bit more cohesion and freshness to their play which can somewhat neutralize the talent gap. You’re still going to get some Gibraltar 0:7 Germany scorelines though. There are still a lot of bad teams in Europe. And with the expanded field, all of the big dogs will still qualify unless they are completely incompetent. Who knows? Maybe England might actually make it.

Umm, where exactly are you going?

• Watching LeBron James attempt to singlehandedly beat the Golden State Warriors is pretty remarkable. In Game 5 last night, LeBron went for a triple-double and had a direct hand in 70 of the Cavs’ 91 points. 50.3% of Cleveland’s possessions in the NBA Finals result in LeBron doing something – a shot, a turnover, an assist – which is a figure you’re more likely at some small high school which has one good player, let alone in the best basketball league in the world. To their credit, the Cavs have stuck to their game plan of essentially playing defense with their offense – running the shot clock all the way down and then crashing the offensive glass for extra possessions – at least until last night, anyway, when David Blatt inexplicably decided to bench Timofy Mozgov, who is pretty much their 2nd-best player right now, as Blatt was mistakenly lured by the opiate that was J.R. Smith’s hot early shooting into thinking he could go small and match the Dubs’ small lineup for 48 minutes. Trying to play small against the Warriors made ZERO sense to me. Sure they were in the game for a while, but so what? Losing is losing. Mozgov had 28 in Game 4 and has been really effective crashing the basket from the high post and giving LeBron an option when he drives the ball. When he isn’t in the game, the other four guys basically stand around and wait for LeBron to do something for them, which tends not to work very well. Andre Igouadala has shown he can at least slow down LeBron in a one-on-one matchup, which is all the Dubs need because no one else for Cleveland is doing anything.
Thank you for not coaching, David Blatt.
Steve Kerr’s switch to a small lineup for Game 4 was mostly beneficial for the Dubs on the offensive end of the floor, as it created better tempo, better spacing, and some awful defensive matchups for the Cavs. Golden State’s defense has been fine in this series, but they lost two games mainly because their offense was a mess. Going with such a small lineup – 6’7” Draymond Green is playing center – came with the risk of getting hammered on the boards by the much bigger Cavs, but that potentially huge advantage that David Blatt basically neutralized last night by having his 7’1” center sitting next to him, and by the 4th Quarter, the Dubs were constantly first to the ball off the glass. Sure, Mozgov can’t guard anyone out on the floor, but like I say, the Cavs are better off playing defense with their offense. You gotta play to your strengths and take your chances.
Now, in practice, the Warriors have so many options that, in a 7-game series, eventually they are going to find something that works. I’ve felt all along that Golden State would only lose in the playoffs if they actually played badly. (A sentiment Nate Silver echoed. Always good to put some numbers behind my assertions.) Playing adequately is usually good enough, because they can just throw wave after wave after wave at you. LeBron has bordered on non-human in this series, and he still might be able to get them to a Game 7 through sheer force of will, but I can’t imagine he’s got two more games like last night in him. Or does he?

• And from the “something’s gotta give” department, the Official Wife of In Play Lose and I are going to the game tonight at Phone Company Park between the Giants, who are doing their usual odd-year-bullshit June swoon and have lost eight in a row at home, and the Seattle Mariners, who have lost 12 of 17, got beat 10:0 and 13:0 by the Astros over the weekend, and have pretty much shat on every prognosticator’s suggestion of their impending success this year (including mine). The Mariners are such a disaster that they merit further discussion later. As for the game tonight, which promises to be about as gloomy as the foggy skies over head, at least it also promises to be over quickly, since neither team can score right now.

"I am Not a Crook"

Oh look, a paper trail ...

WHEN I saw this letter on Tuesday morning, I knew this was going to be trouble. Unearthed by the South African media and then reported upon by the New York Times, this 2008 letter from the head of the South African FA instructs FIFA to set aside $10 million to contribute to the ‘Diaspora Legacy Programme Fund,’ a nonexistent Caribbean football development program invented by then CONCACAF Jack Warner. This letter corroborates the Justice Department allegation in this indictment which charges that Warner solicited a bribe from the South African FA and that, ultimately, it was paid out through FIFA accounts. The letter is addressed to Jérôme Valcke, who is the #2 guy at FIFA, which suggests that not only did Valcke know about the bribe, he appears to have had a hand in facilitating it. After the Zürich raids were undertaken last week, the FBI hinted that it was just the tip of the iceberg, and that the investigation was going after even bigger fish. It’s hard to get much bigger than the #2 guy. The only one bigger, of course, is the #1 guy in the office next door.

And after winning a 5th term as president of FIFA on Friday, and alternately acting defiant and gloating about it over the weekend in response, FIFA’s #1 guy, Sepp Blatter, hastily announced his resignation on Tuesday, a day that most everyone in the football-loving world – which is, well, almost everybody – will certainly remember. The news conference where this was announced was hasty and haphazard and short, which are three things that FIFA generally doesn’t do because, like all good authoritarian regimes, FIFA’s long on order and maintaining control of the situation. Blatter’s resignation was an awkward fall from grace, but as departing dictators go, there was considerably less kicking and screaming than is the norm.

“While I have a mandate from the membership of FIFA, I do not feel that I have a mandate from the entire world of football – the fans, the players, the clubs, the people who live, breathe and love football as much as we all do at FIFA. Therefore, I have decided to lay down my mandate at an extraordinary elective congress. I will continue to exercise my functions as FIFA president until that election.”
– Sepp Blatter

Now the FIFA spin here is that, after several days of reflection, Sepp Blatter has suddenly developed a conscience. But given that the Justice Department have followed the money and, apparently, the trail leads to the office next door to him at the FIFA HQ, I wouldn’t say it’s wild speculation to suggest that Blatter’s hand has been forced. The resignation seems an act of self-protection. It’s now suggested that Blatter himself is, in fact, the subject of the Justice Department probes, and the Feds are now apparently conducting their own inquiry into the bidding for World Cups 2018 and 2022. He cannot be extradited from Switzerland, but the Feds certainly can make foreign travel uncomfortable. I was somewhat joking the other day about the notion of the RCMP showing up and arresting him in Vancouver at the Women’s World Cup, but maybe that notion isn’t so fanciful after all.

Wow, what a mess. For The Lose, FIFA collapsing is Christmas in June. It’s the gift that will just keep on giving. It’s one part sports, one part politics, one part crime syndicate, and one part Vatican, given that the size of the egos involved reminds you of those clamoring to one day be the pope. There’s a $5 billion-sized pie which should be plenty for everyone to eat, yet everyone seems to want to take that pie and use it for a food fight.

Just ponder this story here to get a good idea of how insane this is. Here are two key grafs from the article, which centers on allegations of vote buying in the bidding for the 2018 World Cup:

England’s World Cup bid team uncovered a host of corruption allegations at the top of world football after using ex-MI6 officers and overseas diplomats in a spying campaign against Russia during the battle to host the 2018 tournament, according to new claims. 
Private ex-intelligence investigators carried out surveillance on the eight other rival bidding nations for the 2018 World Cup, paid for by sponsors and associates of the bid team, according to the document. Britain’s embassies abroad were also used to collect information that was fed onto an encrypted database. Embassies tracked the movements of the Russia 2018 bid team as they travelled the world lobbying voters and provided information on the activities of two former members of the Fifa executive committee English crew were even using British embassies for the purpose.

The story then goes to dredge up some stuff that’s been floating around for a while in the world of football innuendo – stuff like how the Russians broke out a Picasso and some other stuff from the Hermitage Museum and gave it to court votes, and how Russia and Qatar backed each other as part of larger energy extraction deals and such. But wait a minute: why are World Cup organizers spying on each other? This is completely ridiculous. Where do James Bond and Tony Soprano fit into all of this?

But as I’ve said before, this isn’t just about a game. Witness the fact that Qatar’s stock market plummeted at news of Sepp Blatter’s resignation. This is big business and big money we’re talking about here. In the 40-page transcript released Wednesday, American soccer exec-cum-state’s evidence Chuck Blazer testifies that he was taking bribes on World Cup bids for as early as 1998, and as we’ve seen with the processes surrounding events such as the World Cup and the Olympics, the stakes are always ramped up, the ante raised for the next go around. By the time the vote arose in 2010 for the World Cups to be held in 2018 and 2022, the corruption had apparently gotten so bad, and become so deeply-rooted, that nations resorted to spying on each other to see if/when/how they were greasing the skids. This is NUTS!

And this all comes back to Blatter, in the end. He’s the one who built the organization into what it is over 40 years. He’s the one who’s presided over it all. He’s the one playing old school, country time politics, playing the sides and pitting one region of the world against the other. But Jérôme Valcke getting implicated – a day after FIFA officials lied about it, and tried to pin the South African bribery mess on a now-deceased Argentine bureaucrat – was the last straw. Blatter played dumb last week, insisting that he doesn’t know what everyone else is doing within his own organization and can’t control what they do. Not only is that not in keeping with dictatorial behaviour – autocrats have a pressing need to know everything about everybody – but it defies all credibility that the organization would then pass on $10 million to some supposed football development foundation without knowing whether or not it actually existed. That whole transaction implies that bribery, wire fraud and money laundering were just aspects of business as usual. It’s exactly the sort of business that the Justice Department’s New York offices have a penchant for putting a stop to.

“These scum have stolen the people’s sport. They’ve stolen it, the cynical thieving bastards. So, yes, it’s nice to see the fear on their faces.” – Andrew Jennings, British journalist

Blatter really had no choice but to resign. The organization, in it’s disgraced state, can no longer function. Those alliances he’s culled over the years through passing out lots of development money aren’t going to keep him out of trouble, and are more likely to cause him more of it, at this point. And it’s killing his on-field product at the moment. We have an incredible Champions League final this weekend in Berlin, as well as the start of the Women’s World Cup – two of the world’s greater sporting events – but no one’s talking football and everyone’s talking the politics of football. So long as Blatter was still around, the distractions would simply mount. I’m not sure in what form the palace coup d’etat would’ve eventually taken, but I suspect it would’ve happened. Dictators who seemed far more invincible than Blatter have fallen before. Unlike those who’ve been found hiding in dirt holes and storm drains, at least Sepp Blatter still had a slight shred of dignity about him.

The king is dead! Long live the king! … so, uh, anyone want to be king? Any takers? Anyone? Sigh.

Sepp’s divide-and-conquer politics have worked so well over the years that he’s left behind a dysfunctional body politic which makes the U.N. look harmonious. You have the European rich bitch neocolonial snobs v. the Afro-Asian kleptocrats – a couple of nonsensical stereotypes Blatter made a point of reinforcing to serve his own needs. All of these different clans have taken to bloc voting to pursue their own regional interests, which is going to make it difficult to try and find a candidate to replace Blatter. Difficult, but not impossible. The heads of the three confederations I just spoke of – Michel Platini, Issa Hayatou, and Sheikh Salman Bin Ebrahim Al Khalifa – have all been mentioned as viable candidates, but the distrust and animosity amid the confederations is so great that getting anyone to cross the lines will pose a challenge. Heaven knows what sort of support anyone could expect from the Western Hemisphere, now that all of CONCACAF seems to be indicted and it looks like it may open season on football execs in South America soon – not only are there rumblings about the Brazilian government going after some of the ‘Top Hats,’ but in Paraguay, the home of CONMEBOL, the president is threatening to strip the organization of the embassy-like status its enjoyed and which has afforded it to act with a twisted sort of diplomatic immunity over the years. It would seem that the best candidate has yet to emerge, and I suspect it’s likely a former player – someone like a Figo or a Clarence Seedorf, if he wants the gig – who may emerge as the best candidate for the job: a player who was highly-regarded on the pitch and yet has the intellect and integrity off it, and who hasn’t been sullied by all of these corrupt administrative practices.

Whomever wins will have to break the bloc voting somehow. The narrative set forth is that Uncle Sepp gave lots of development money to the third world, and that somehow that development if you let those imperialist neo-colonial Europeans, or anyone they support, back into control of FIFA. As such, Prince Ali wound up being viewed as some sort of Western shill in this last election – never mind that, thanks in part to some sound governance and development programs over the years, his home nation of Jordan went from being completely off the radar to being two games away from qualifying for Brazil. And Ali blew that argument to pieces – if you take out all of the graft, after all, it leaves you with even more money to put towards development. That such an argument got voted down shows you where the real priorities lay among the FIFA voters. This is what you’re up against if you want to run this lot. You have to win their trust just long enough while you find a way to throw their asses out the door.

It’s hard to get a grasp on all of this. This is what I get for deciding to write a sports blog. Maybe I should write about something simple instead, like nuclear physics.

Whomever takes over this job is gonna have one hell of an undertaking, as attempting to navigate the sporting, economic, and geopolitical landscape of soccer is dizzying. It’s hard to say who that will be, and hard to say who he will be presiding over. As I’ve said before, don’t confuse last Friday’s vote as being the will of the footballing public. It’s the will of the footballing politicians, and that is a big difference. Whomever doesn’t get snared by the Justice Department probe is, nevertheless, probably going to have to tread cautiously for a little while, and my hope is that a few more nations demand some accountability from the persons who act as the head of their FAs – a glorious position of seemingly endless entitlement, but one which has obviously gone unchecked for far too long. Reform is going to be the order of the day at FIFA, I suspect, as I’m not one who subscribes to the notion that Blatter is somehow going to hand-pick a successor, at this point. The best way to bring about reform is to bring about reformists.

And were that to happen, everything is on the table – including revoking those World Cup awards. I still think 2018 is going to be Russia. That’s too far gone, the event is fast approaching, and even with all of the allegations, the reality is that Russia was likely to win that ballot, anyway. (I would attribute the poor English showing in that vote more to their penchant for being gadflies and making enemies within FIFA, no matter how justified they may have turned out to have been in acting that way.) But 2022? Well, I think Qatar has reason to be nervous.

But the problem is, Sepp Blatter loved power more than football. He likened himself to god and angled to be nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. He wanted to be seen as a world leader. He wanted to be thought of that way, and is someone who seems to me to be very concerned with his legacy. How strange to run what is now referred to by the Justice Department as a RICO enterprise – a term they generally reserve for organized crime – and be so vain as to think you’ll wind up looking favorable at the end of it. Because what Sepp Blatter be thought of most of all, however, is a crook, regardless of whether or not he is ever indicted or charged. And given the human tragedy unfolding in Qatar in the name of FIFA, Blatter may wind up looking even worse than a petty crook, in the end. But however we come to view him – almost certain to be unfavorable – he’s certainly deserved every derogatory moniker we can hang on him and his organization. And simply using the word “crook” as I write about Sepp Blatter makes me draw comparisons to Richard Nixon. Nixon once said that history would look favorably upon him but historians wouldn’t. But simply making that association in my mind proves to me that Nixon was wrong about that. When you destroy yourself so publicly, so colossally, just as Nixon did, and as Blatter is doing now, the words and the images surrounding your defeat resonate for lifetimes.

The Biggest Loser

cartoon by Christopher Weyant, The New Yorker

THE GAMES we play come to mirror the world in which we live, and have always done so. As much as we would like for sports to exist within a vacuum, they cannot do so, nor have they ever done so. Two books which I have mentioned before, and which constitute required reading for all disciples of The Lose, are Franklin Foer’s sociological treatise How Soccer Explains the World and Simon Kuper’s classic 1994 exposé Football Against the Enemy: How the World's Most Popular Sport Starts and Fuels Revolutions and Keeps Dictators in Power, which has been updated for a 2nd edition and given an American-friendly title. Both authors delve into the seedy underworld of the game of soccer: football clubs dealing arms, fan clubs forming paramilitary units, assorted would-be kingpins and tycoons and grandstanding Ministers of Sport heisting the game for their own personal good. These books are extremely useful if you want to get a sense of just how messed up the game of soccer really is. Both these books are acts of gonzo journalism which are quite entertaining to read, although calling them ‘funny’ would do a disservice to some of the subject matter. There isn’t a whole lot that’s funny about Argentine juntas and Bosnian civil wars. I think ‘absurd’ is probably a better term, or maybe ‘crazy.’ The world is mad about soccer, and madness can make you do some stupid things.

Soccer is a beautiful game played by spectacular athletes before millions of adoring fans worldwide, but it is also a shameful sty of sleaze, slime and swine. But apparently it’s always been this way – in another excellent book, Andreas Campomar’s Golazo, a chronicling of the history of soccer in Latin America, Campomar traces the history of the game all the way back to its roots in ancient cultures such as the Mayans and the Aztecs, who played sports where a ball could only be kicked towards the goal and which, as it turned out, were often accompanied by large amounts of gambling. HUGE amounts of gambling, as in, “I’ll bet my entire kingdom that my team is better than yours” kind of gambling. Something about the act of kicking a ball seems to make humankind lose its collective head, and a whole lot of money winds up changing hands.

And it’s a whole lot of money these days, thanks to FIFA. Sky Sport just agreed to pay over £5 billion to broadcast EPL games, which is why Norwich City’s glorious victory (gloat gloat) on Monday took on such value. Broadcast rights to the 2014 World Cup in Brazil netted FIFA somewhere in the range of $4 billion. Fox Sports handed over $425 million for just the American broadcast rights to the 2018 and 2022 World Cups, which is a far cry from when I first started watching the World Cup back in 1982 on a 1-hour highlight show produced by Soccer Made in Germany. The sums we are talking about here are absolutely staggering. FIFA reaped a profit of more than $200 million on the World Cup in Brazil in 2014, and is thought to be sitting on a reserve of over $5 billion, an amount which should be enough for FIFA to fuel the game’s further development for generations.

But, of course, that isn’t going to happen. We know very well where that money is going to go.

Well, actually, we don’t really know, and that’s part of the problem. The Football Federation of Australia, for example, would like to know where their $500,000 ‘contribution’ to the development of a new football stadium in Trinidad and Tobago went, having made this ‘contribution’ at the behest of then CONCACAF president Jack Warner in the hopes of persuading him to support their 2022 World Cup bid on the FIFA Executive Committee – money which mysteriously disappeared, of course, and along with it disappeared whatever support Warner claimed to have had for the Australian bid. The FFA has come under some scrutiny in Australia for this, and their best defense is, well, a lame one, but one which you’ve heard many times in relation to crooked or criminal activities: this was simply the cost of doing business. If you wanted the World Cup to come to your country, you had to pay up. Indeed, the Aussies didn’t even want to report this possible theft, for fear that making a racket about this racket would potentially jeopardize their bid.

But now we have a better idea of where the Aussie’s money may have gone, given that Warner was one of 14 people indicted on Wednesday morning by the U.S. Dept. of Justice – the bulk of them high ranking present or former FIFA officials. Among those nabbed include the past and present presidents of CONCACAF, two former presidents of CONMEBOL, and two sitting members of FIFA’s Executive Committee. The investigation looked into more than 20 years’ worth of activities, and the Justice Dept. alleges that more that more than $150 million in bribes, kickbacks and laundered funds were involved. Racketeering, money laundering, wire fraud – the indictment reads as if the G-Men are going after some mafia crime syndicate or cartel. Four persons have already pleaded guilty, two of them being Warner’s sons, proving that dirty business is also a family business as well. The star witness, Chuck Blazer, was the secretary general of CONCACAF, served on the FIFA Executive Committee, was the highest-ranking official in American soccer, and lived a lifestyle so lavish that he kept a Manhattan apartment just for his cats. Blazer copped to charges related to tax evasion and then flipped, dishing the dirt left and right on FIFA’s illicit activities which took place within the United States, using American companies and American banks.

Easily the most damning allegation, but far from the only one, is that of Warner demanding $10 million from the South African government in exchange for supporting their 2010 World Cup bid, which Warner eventually did. When the South African government reneged, Warner got his $10 million transferred from a FIFA-controlled account in Switzerland, with some $750,000 of which eventually winding up going to Blazer. Australian authorities now think it’s likely Warner simply pocketed their half-mil, a sunk cost from a failed bid for soccer’s greatest showpiece. But what seems clear here is that, when it came to awarding the World Cup, votes were definitely for sale, and the bidding for the 2018 and 2022 World Cups may ultimately turn out to be quite expensive for everyone involved.

The U.S. was able to nab all of these fat cats when they gathered this week for FIFA’s 65th Congress in Zürich, at which point Swiss police raided the 5-star hotel where many of the delegates were staying and arrested seven people. While the U.S. is going after the money laundering set who have run roughshod along FIFA’s western flank, the Swiss are, at the same time, opening criminal probes into the allegations of bribery and corruption which have surrounded FIFA ever since 2010, when the awarding of the World Cup to Russia in 2018 and Qatar in 2022 was announced. The veritable souk surrounding the selection process has already been documented by the Times of London, who sent two reporters posing as representatives of America’s 2022 bid committee to meet with FIFA executives and nabbed several of them, on camera, saying their votes could be had for sizable sums. (The reporters have written extensively about this and also written a book which is definitely high on my reading list.) The England 2018 organizers have testified before parliament of having had FIFA execs demanding bribes in exchange for votes, with one of them – Nicolás Leoz – being audacious enough to also demand to be knighted by the Queen. That’s the same Nicolás Leoz listed in that U.S. indictment, by the way:

“Thereafter, in a private meeting, LEOZ told Co-Conspirator #2, in sum and substance, that Co-Conspirator #2 would make a lot of money from the rights he was acquiring and that LEOZ did not think it was fair that he (LEOZ) did not also make money.”  (U.S. v. Webb et. al, pp. 49-50)

There was an assortment of droll FIFA business on the agenda for the Zürich congress, but the most important item was the presidential election, pitting 4-time incumbent Sepp Blatter against Jordan’s Prince Ali bin Hussein. Amid this backdrop of scandal and corruption, the vote went ahead as planned, with Blatter getting 133 of the 206 votes cast – but lacking a 2/3 vote necessary for election on the first ballot, a second round was required. It was, at this point, that Prince Ali withdrew, handing Blatter a fifth term – one which he had said previously that he wouldn’t seek. In the run-up to the election, Prince Ali’s camp had been thinking they would have about 95 votes, enough to make a 2nd round of balloting quite intriguing given the current state of FIFA affairs. But with only 73, there was no point in continuing. In essence, amid all of Prince Ali’s campaigning and his many meetings with FIFA delegates, about 20 of them had lied to his face. Welcome to the way that FIFA does business.

That Prince Ali had gotten 73 votes at all was notable. Even with a constant barrage of scandals  surrounding FIFA during his 17 years as president, it was widely assumed that Blatter would win the election. I would recommend that all of you watch Jeremy Schaap’s excellent E:60 profile of Blatter, and the organization he heads, to get a better sense of what you’re dealing with here. Blatter is, without question, the most powerful man in sports. He said after his reëlection on Friday, “I am the president of everybody,” and what’s somewhat frightening is that, in some ways, he’s right. While Blatter may fancy himself a head of state, the Justice Dept. would suggest that he’s more like the head of a cartel. Marx had it wrong when he said religion was the opiate of the masses. It’s football. And Sepp Blatter controls the organization responsible for providing the world’s favourite drug.

Blatter’s win in the most recent FIFA election is a triumph of machine politics straight out of Tammany Hall. He has practiced what is essentially ‘honest graft’ for years – and done so under the auspices of what should, in theory, be a good idea, which is the further supposed democratization of the organization. FIFA had been a bastion of European and South American interests for most of its existence before Blatter took over in 1998. He promised at the time to give a voice, and a seat at the table, to all of FIFA’s members, which presently number 209. And intellectually, this makes sense. Why should all of FIFA’s decisions be made simply to benefit the self-interests of a few members? FIFA shares the profits from the World Cups equally with all 209 members, regardless of size or footballing prowess, and every nation has equal say when it comes to elections. One nation, one vote. FIFA has also invested billions, through The Goal Project and the like, in development in the game primarily in the third world. Again, this seems like a good idea. It’s no wonder his bases of power are in Africa, Asia, his “Oceania 11,” and in the many Caribbean islands who have come to dominate the way CONCACAF does business through their sheer numbers of votes. No one in FIFA gave a shit about those places before Blatter. In exchange, they offer him unwavering support.

But what may seem a good idea in theory may, in fact, have entirely different results, and that’s with even the best intentions behind it. The reason I refer to FIFA’s supporting of smaller federations as ‘honest graft’ is that it then turns a blind eye. What happens to that money after it is doled out is another question entirely – and if the behaviors of Jack Warner and Reynald Tamarii are any indication, it likely falls under the guise of ‘dishonest graft.’

We would do well to separate the opinions of the 133 people who voted for Sepp Blatter from the opinions of the rank-and-file members of the football community in the nations those 133 people are supposed to be representing. Ask the football community’s rank-and-file – the players, the fans, the clubs, the football media – in any nation what they think about their federation’s officers, and the answers you’re going to get will likely run somewhere from cynicism to outright disdain. They are assumed to be corrupt, assumed to be swindlers trading favours and engaging in illicit activities. What’s shocking is not that these rumours exist, but that those accused seem to be so brazen about it all, making only the minimal effort to conceal it.

The South Americans, in particular, are loving the fact that the Justice Department has gone after some of the villains they’ve assumed to be corrupt, having put up with this sort of nonsense from manga de viejos hijos de puta for ages. (In his book, Foer uses the wonderful local phrase ‘The Top Hats,’ to describe the assortment of shysters who’ve constantly run amok in the Brazilian game.) I’ve seen the phrase “US 7, FIFA 1” thrown about now in a few places in Brazil (7-1 having apparently come to represent a colossal asskicking in Brazilian lingo in short order). None of what the DOJ has uncovered is a surprise to them. None of it is new. That sort of corruption has always been there, they have known it existed and had to put up with it. (The ESPN FC commentator Shaka Hislop, who played for Trinidad & Tobago in the 2006 World Cup, has an amazing and ludicrous story of having to sue Jack Warner after players’ bonuses seemed skimmed.) The hope worldwide in all of this is that the Dept. of Justice will field an XI which proves to be an opponent that FIFA can’t defeat.

“Not sure this is what Havelange, Blatter and all had in mind when crusading for more US interest in football.” – Rodrigo Orihuela, Bloomberg   

And in the end, they can’t defeat it. This is not going to end well for FIFA. But one of the problems here is that, if you’re looking for a ‘smoking gun’ which links Sepp Blatter directly to all of this, I’m not sure you’re going to find it. Most everyone in football – indeed, in all of sports – outside of the 133 people who voted for Blatter on Friday would like to see him taken down. No one close to Blatter indicates that he, personally, has any real interest in graft. What he cares about, above all, is being in power. He may have been the one who built the organization into what it is, but he hasn’t needed to be bribed in order to do it. He doesn’t have to practice dishonest graft, when simple honest graft and the greasing of his political machine will suffice.

FIFA has many of the hallmark characteristics of authoritarian regimes. The ruler has total control, and demands absolute and unquestioning loyalty – but in exchange, he provides with underlings with cover, which frees them up to run rampant and do whatever they want free of cares or fears of reprisal.  The leader’s only interest, ultimately, is remaining in charge. You’ve seen this very scenario play out constantly in every dictatorship on the planet. But, as it turns, there are, in fact, limits to what you can get away with when you pledge your loyalty to a dictator, because loyalty turns out to be a 1-way street. Cross the line, and you go down – and you don’t get to decide where that line is. The state makes sure that you go down.

And Blatter has never hesitated, when a scandal arises which threatens his regime, to sell out the principal actors – people such as Jack Warner and Mohammed bin Hammam, Blatter’s former lieutenant who is alleged to have helped deliver several of Blatter’s elections, and who has also emerged as the principal actor in the mess that surrounds the 2022 World Cup. Cross Sepp Blatter and threaten his perch and he cuts you off, consolidating his power and casting you aside. He looks the other way while you do your dubious dealings, but only while it’s convenient to do so. But he will sell you out in a heartbeat – a point he made on Friday in a brilliant piece of rhetoric while addressing FIFA’s congress:

“If two other countries had emerged from the envelope, I think we would not have these problems today.” – Sepp Blatter

On the one hand, this plays to the base. The narrative which has emerged among the pro-Blatter set that all of these allegations regarding 2018 and 2022 are simply sour grapes on the part of nations – England and the U.S. – which lost out on the bidding, so you can view this remark as merely some sarcasm intended as a bit of levity. But one of the beauties when you practice the act of spin – and like all good political forces, FIFA are spinmeisters – is that you can, in fact, speak the truth and no one will take you seriously. Take that statement at face value: would FIFA be in this mess today if England and America emerged from the envelope? Probably not. And why not? Because on the merits of the bids themselves, England and America should have come out of those envelopes. That they didn’t speaks to some forces at work which, shall we fall, fell outside the boundaries of fair play. Now, the case for Russia in 2018 was an understandable one – it’s a footballing nation with great resources and a long tradition of the game in its own right. I’ve always thought the Russian bid made some sense. But Qatar?

“Qatar? There’s between one and 50 reasons why that is an awful idea … there are now allegations that some FIFA executives accepted bribes to put the World Cup in Qatar, and I hope that’s true, because otherwise it makes literally no sense.” – John Oliver

And if there is a single defining moment of the Sepp Blatter tenure at FIFA, it has to be the moment that the envelope for the 2022 World Cup opened up in December 2010. All of the graft and sleaze and slime and corruption perpetrated in the name of football was personified in that single moment. In looking the other way for so long, Blatter’s minions had now run amok and taken it to its most absurd conclusion. The inmates were officially running the asylum.

As so that cute little sarcastic jab I just mentioned takes on a much more ominous tone: “yes, we are in this mess now because of that vote, and some of you in this audience are responsible for that.” And don’t think for a minute Sepp won’t hesitate to throw them under the bus. When FIFA’s spokesman responded to Wednesday’s arrests by saying FIFA was “the aggrieved party,” it was met with derision and denounced as mere spin – but again, there is truth in that statement. Indeed, it’s been pointed out that the case now being brought forth by the Justice Department is going to particularly effective because it portrays FIFA as the victim and not the culprit. The Swiss case regarding the votes in 2018 and 2022 stems from FIFA’s own internal investigation (albeit a somewhat bogus one) and the Swiss prosecutors intend to call 10 FIFA Executive Committee members at the time in to explain themselves. Blatter had but only one vote, after all. It’s believed he voted for the U.S., and has admitted that it was probably a mistake awarding the World Cup to Qatar. FIFA would never have been so quick to turn over information to the Swiss government if Blatter himself stood to fall because of it. He may be a narcist and demagogue, but he didn’t get to where he is by being dumb. Those other 10 ExCo guys, however? Well, you all might want to hire yourselves some lawyers that are well-versed in Swiss law right about now.

I believe that Sepp Blatter has come to view all of this stuff related to 2018 and 2022 as a colossal mistake. But the problem is that now that it’s happened, he can’t get out of it. He can throw a bunch of ExCo cronies under the bus, because he can always find more ExCo cronies to take their places. But it’s all too far gone, at this point, to make any drastic changes. The political ramifications of yanking the World Cup away – and all of the dirt which would come out because of it – would far more likely lead to his losing his position of authority than the present Dept. of Justice investigation will. He’s caught himself in his own web, more concerned about keeping his position than anything else, and he’s willing to let what is building up to be the greatest sham in sporting history go forth seven years from now in order to save his own ass.

And in the meantime, people are dying because of this.

graphic by Christopher Ingraham/Washington Post

That’s what’s absolutely sickening about it all. That’s the human cost of the rush to create the necessary infrastructure to host such an event, one which is only going to get worse. That’s an awful lot of blood on FIFA’s collective hands. If Blatter was truly interested in reforming the organization he has created over the past four decades, and not just paying lip service to the idea, he would start by putting a stop to this. And he could do that, of course. He could yank the World Cup out of there tomorrow if he wanted. He has that power and authority. That anyone can just sit by and do nothing, knowing that is going on under their watch, is truly revolting.

And I always caution my non-sports loving friends who attach disdainful dismissives to speaking about this sort of thing. “All that just for a game?” If you haven’t figured it out by now, it’s more than a game. Football is not simply a pastime, and as Campomar points out in Golazo, with his example from the days of the Aztecs, it never really was just a game. Just like rum runners and bookmakers and gaming parlors, those associated in the syndicate of football have always thrived on the ability to control that which people want to have.

The game of football should, in theory, be about what takes place on the pitch. It shouldn’t have anything to do with these hucksters. Unfortunately, the business of football is rarely that simple. Witness the recent battle over reforming laws regarding TV broadcast rights in Spain, a pointless spat between La Liga, the Spanish FA, and some politicians with delusions of grandeur which the Spanish players union finally put a stop to by threatening a strike, reminding everyone involved in the process who the game was really about. For every multimillionaire on the wage bill of Real and Barça, there are far more professional footballers toiling away in the game’s lower ranks, or even among the first divisions of the game in other nations, who aren’t being paid on time, if at all. It is those people for whom the Spanish players took a stand. It is those people, who love and dedicate themselves to football, whom the game should be about, and not these opportunists who hijack the love of the game as an excuse to fill their pockets.

But how to get rid of the bad seeds? Rooting out the graft and sleaze within the game is a mammoth undertaking, one which would require a massive overhaul of the entire organization behind the game  – and would also require far more political will than anyone involved seems to have. And it has to start at the top, because the entire governance of the game, at this point, is based upon what goes on at the top. If you want to root out corruption, root out racism, root out scandal, the best way to start is to root out those who’ve allowed it to persist for so long, beginning with the overlord himself.

I would suggest that rarely has the U.S. ever looked so good to so many people as it does after Wednesday’s indictments. (Questions aside like, “do they even like football in America?) As I said before, it seems hard for me to believe that they’re going to be able to get to Blatter through all of these investigations – but then again, these FIFA guys are all masters of self-preservation, and I certainly expect all of those indicted to start singing much the way Blazer did in an effort to save themselves. The Attorney General stated on Wednesday that this was only the beginning of the investigation, suggesting the indictments were just the tip of the iceberg. If it were ever possible to get to the source, it’s probably through these two investigations currently being undertaken by the Feds and the Swiss. That snippet from the indictment about $10 million moving from Switzerland into the account of Jack Warner certainly raises some eyebrows, and the Feds are certainly good at following the money trail.

Hmm … I’ve already heard some whimsical speculation as to whether Blatter will ultimately attend the Women’s World Cup taking place in Canada. Canadians and Americans are good neighbours, after all. They do get along really well. Reading up on Canadian extradition laws, anyone?

But all of those investigations take time to unfurl, and in the short term, we’re stuck with this mess. UEFA members have been the greatest critics of Sepp Blatter and FIFA, and are now rattling sabres and saying they’ll ponder the idea of possibly breaking away from FIFA entirely. In truth, this might be the only effective way to deal with this, particularly if the Europeans can also bring into the fold a motivated Brazil and Argentina – two countries where calls to clean up the game are getting louder – and also the U.S. and Mexico – two countries frustrated by their dysfunctional confederation and often left to foot CONCACAF’s bills. It’s a pretty powerful alliance, were it to come to pass. It would have all the nations that fans want to see, it would have all the clubs that fans want to see, and most importantly, would have all the players that fans would want to see within its domain. But I don’t see there being any political will to do that. For one thing, UEFA would likely splinter over the question of 2018. Russia being a member of UEFA firmly in Blatter’s camp throws a monkey wrench into all these pipe dreams. And it’s not as if UEFA have always been a bastion of virtue. Everyone’s hands are dirty. Lest anyone forget that Michel Platini, the head of UEFA, voted for Qatar. He’s gotten something of a pass on this fact, having stated that he did so at the behest of the French government. Half the ExCo members expected to be called to testify in Switzerland are from UEFA nations. Just because you can generate a whole lot of revenue on the pitch, it doesn’t mean that matters off the pitch aren’t a mess. In the end, a good number of UEFA members voted from Prince Ali –but not all of them. Amid all of this posturing, UEFA would up looking like sore losers threatening to take their ball and go home. I suspect UEFA couldn’t deliver nearly as many votes to Prince Ali as they were promising. So far, UEFA has been all bark and no bite.

The Top Hats manning FIFA’s assortment of committees and positions do so because it’s in their best personal interests. It’s a collection of some of the most selfish people on the earth. What I found most curious about this recent FIFA congress was seeing just how many of them, in the aftermath of the Justice Department indictments, would still be willing to tether their futures entirely to Blatter. Sure, they’re entirely indebted to Blatter for having enriched them so (and, to be fair, for occasionally doing some good things for football in their respective countries in the process). But do you really want to keep tying your fortunes to a this organization when the biggest and baddest law enforcement agency on the planet has started digging around into its affairs – especially knowing that, were you found to be afoul of American law, FIFA’s likely to do nothing to protect you? All along, these guys have thought they can hide when need be, figuring that Blatter’s patronage would also amount to protection.

The Justice Department got involved because the misdoings of CONCACAF and CONMEBOL fell under its jurisdiction – there were American citizens, American banks and American companies involved in this mess. But the business of FIFA long ago became American business. Many of FIFA’s largest sponsors are American companies. As such, vast amounts of FIFA business runs through this country – which means, in one way or another, everyone involved in FIFA business (Blatter included) is accountable to U.S. law. Seeing seven fellow cronies hauled out of the hotel by the police undoubtedly made a few of them not sleep particularly well. (Apparently, the Brazilian rep hastily fled Zürich as quickly as possible, although the Brazilian government is apparently going to get into the spirit of things and planning on opening some criminal probes of its own.) As those delegates from the Western Hemisphere are finding out, Sepp can no longer protect you. And his history should make it clear that, when push comes to shove, he will not protect you at all.

But then again, a vote for an avowed reformer like Ali was likely going to result in you being tossed out on your ass even sooner. For the 133 who cast their votes for Sepp Blatter on Friday, it was ultimately better to keep dancing with the devil that you know.

So the votes have been cast and the “president of everybody” wins. But no one wins.  Football lost. Honesty lost. Morality lost. Everyone lost. For now. Blatter speaks of the “FIFA family,” and it is hard not to hear the mafioso overtones in his voice when he does so. He wants to avoid transparency and keep everything in-house, and thanks to 133 voters, he’ll continue to be able to do so. For now. Strange, it is, for so many people to want to keep living in a house when the building is on fire.

National League Least

This blog entry is just an excuse for a silly baseball .gif

NO ONE has ever accused Jeffrey Loria of being indecisive. Once he decides changes need to be made with the Miami Marlins, it’s damn the torpedoes and full speed ahead. That his “fire, ready, aim” approach to running a Major League Baseball franchise actually resulted in the Marlins winning a World Series in 2003 should gall every baseball fan to the core. More often than not, of course, MLB’s greatest shyster comes off looking like a buffoon. His club crashes out and Loria’s response is simply to slash and burn, often stripping the payroll of the club down to among the lowest in the majors, with predictable results. Loria is something of a pariah to his fellow owners, as well, having mooched off the MLB’s revenue sharing while crying poor mouth, all the while profiting handsomely from it while he was also going about conning and bilking local politicos into ponying up an estimated $2.4 billion for the atrocity that is Marlins Park – a facility built in keeping with the club’s owner in terms of bombast, tackiness, and artifice.

Quite a few baseball writers I read, and think highly of, made it a point in the preseason of picking the Miami Marlins to be in the World Series at season’s end. The Lose was quite skeptical of such predictions. Yes, the Marlins had developed a nice nucleus of talent during their latest foray into the badlands, but I could think of 5-6 NL clubs off the top of my head with more talent, so the Marlins even making the playoffs seemed like it would be a challenge. But also, the Marlins’ history of rash, and often irrational behaviour, led me to think that the organization wouldn’t make the sorts of moves necessary in-season if/when it started not going so well. This is an organization that signed every free agent imaginable in one off-season, stunk the following season, and then traded every single player they had signed the previously signed. This is the organization that once gave away a starting outfielder to a pennant contender (who promptly was the NLCS MVP) and demoted another to AAA because of his twitter feed. When push comes to shove in Miami, stupidity takes over and the operation folds up like the house of cards that it is.

And it wasn’t going so well here early in the season for the Marlins, but it was the sort of run-of-the-mill bad start that a lot of teams go through. The offense was struggling, there were some injuries on the pitching front, the Marlins were a few games under .500 but it’s nothing you can’t overcome with a few good weeks strung together. Patience should have been the order of the day in Miami – but Jeffrey Loria doesn’t do patience. After all, he’d invested a fortune in this club in the offseason! He’d signed Giancarlo Stanton to the richest contract in MLB history! (A contract which, like everything else Loria does, withers under scrutiny.) Nope, it was time for some swift, decisive action – firing manager Mike Redmond, whom he had just hired a season ago – and then compounding the disaster by instilling GM Dan Jennings in the position.

Jennings has a long track record of success in the player development area. He is part of the reason why the Marlins aren’t even more of a disaster on a regular basis. On the managerial front, however, he can point to working with a high school club in Alabama 30 years ago. That’s it. The excuse put forth by the Marlins is that Jennings knows the organization, and its players, better than anyone since he’s the one who assembled the cast. What’s more likely the reason is that the notoriously stingy Loria is still paying two former managers – Redmond and the mercurially loquacious Ozzie Guillen – and didn’t want to pay for a third. This bit of cheap chicanery is straight out of the plotline for a Disney movie. There hasn’t been a stunt in Major League managerial hirings quite like this since the day that Ted Turner hired himself to manage the Braves.

And while I don’t necessarily think you have to have a résumé lined with managerial and coaching experiences to qualify for the job, there is a huge difference between the on-field and the off-the-field, day-to-day operations of a professional sports franchise. One of the reasons why so many collegiate coaches fail in the pro ranks, for example, is that lower-level success entirely depends on talent development. But in the pros, everyone has talent, and the contribution of a coaching staff involves much more tactical acumen and more efficient human resources management. It’s a long season, and you have to manage your personnel appropriately to get through it.

The role of an on-field manager was famously discounted in Moneyball, where Billy Beane seems to call all the shots, but you haven’t seen Billy Beane put on a uniform and try to run the clubhouse, now have you? Over the course of a season, the in-game tactical moves of a manager may seemingly not matter much – I think the WAR value it’s been calculated at falls in the 1.0-1.5 range – but no sport on the planet lives within the margins of error quite like baseball, where the difference between a great team and a terrible one is one more win a week over the course of a season. Both the Nats and the Cards were done in, in part, by the Giants in the playoffs because Bruce Bochy managed circles around his inexperienced foes, both of whom made horrible decisions with their pitching staffs at critical junctures. The job does matter, and not just anyone can do it.

It’s also a craft, and a good number of guys have put in the time to learn that craft. Loria’s hiring of Jennings makes a mockery of that craft, and some of its proprietors have been none too amused.

And neither are the Marlins players amused, apparently. Their response to this move was to promptly go into an 8-game losing streak and fall into last place in the NL East. Professional athletes who have no respect for the coaching staff generally respond to it by finding a way to get them fired (that shift in authority, and inability of an individual to adjust to it, being another reason why so many lower-echelon coaches fail at higher levels). Good luck with that, now that the guy who should be doing the hiring and the firing is holding down both jobs. They are professionals being subjected to the Mickey Mouse whims of their front office. And I had the same opinion about Stanton signing that mega-contract to play for the Fish that I did when Redmond took the manager’s position a year ago: if given your druthers, why on earth would you ever agree to work for these guys?

Instead of vying for the playoffs, Florida’s Fish are threatening to do something I didn’t think possible this season – dislodge the Philadelphia Phillies from the National League basement. The Phillies are so devoid of talent that Jeff Francoeur is starting in the outfield. Phillies GM/Captain of the Titanic impersonator Ruben Amaro, Jr., meanwhile, struck this understanding pose when asked about growing disconnect among Phillie Phaithful:

“They don’t understand the game. They don’t understand the process. There’s a process. And then they bitch and complain because we don’t have a plan. There’s a plan in place and we’re sticking with the plan. We can’t do what’s best for the fan. We have to do what’s best for the organization so the fan can reap the benefit of it later on. That’s the truth.”
– Ruben Amaro Jr., Philadelphia Phillies GM

Jeez, Ruben, why stop there? Why not just say that all the fans should get a job? Philly sports fans may be irascible, but they are also loyal, knowledgeable, and surprisingly patient. Look at what they’ve had to put up with. The Phillies have lost more games than any team in the history of sports, the Flyers haven’t won a Stanley Cup in 40 years, the Eagles have never won a Super Bowl, and the 76ers have devolved into an assault on the senses. And apparently, ‘the plan’ in Philadelphia involves taking a 101-win team in 2011 and razing it to rubble over the course of four years. You should always be wary of GMs on bad teams who talk about ‘the plan.’ Usually, that means they have no idea what they’re doing. But bitching about the fact that the fans bitch is usually a good way to get yourself fired – as if there weren’t already plenty of reasons for the Phillies to do that, anyway.

Now that Kevin Towers has been axed in Arizona, Amaro has shot to the top of the list of Guys In Pro Sports Whom I Wonder Why They Still Have a Job. Amaro came along at the tail end of the Phillies’ build-up to winning a World Series, to which he responded by handing out some wonderfully large contracts to players like Ryan Howard in appreciation for their outstanding careers – a sentiment you can understand, of course, but the problem was that the Phillies were already among the oldest teams in the league when they won the World Series, and that core of talent was never supplanted by any youth. (The Phillies’ drafts over the past decade have been atrocious.) Burdened with old, past-their-prime, broken-down players with immovable contracts clogging up the payroll, the Phillies have continued working from a position of weakness, doing dumb things like trading away potential cornerstone Hunter Pence for pennies on the dollar because they didn’t want to pay the luxury tax thanks to all of the dead weight on their bloated payroll.

What both Loria and Amaro share is a delusion that just because their teams won World Series championships on their watch, it means that the two of them know what they are doing. The Florida Marlins more or less lucked their way into winning in 2003, while a whole lot of the organizational building in Philadelphia happened under the auspice of former GM Pat Gillick. Now, winning titles does give you some cred, and also gives you a little leeway when it comes to keeping the fans happy, but only to a point. It’s not 2003 any more, nor is it 2009. You’re always judged in sports by what you do now. Championships matter, of course. The old adage “flags fly forever” is certainly true, and I’m going to like seeing that third championship banner flying out in center field in a few weeks when I go to see the Giants play the Mariners at Phone Company Park. But just because the flag is flying, it doesn’t mean you can wrap yourself in it.

A Nice £130m Problem to Have

On The Ball, City!

TODAY’S playoff at Wembley, between my beloved Canaries from Norwich City and Middlesborough F.C., was dubbed “The Richest Game In The World” – the intrigue in a match between the 3rd- and 4th-place finishers in the English League Championship coming from the veritable pot o’ gold awaiting the winner: promotion to the EPL, and the £130 million in TV broadcast revenues that come along with it. The Good Guys were in control of the match throughout, scoring twice in the first quarter of an hour to take control and ultimately winning the game 2:0 to return to the EPL after a 1-year absence, joining A.F.C. Bournemouth and Watford among the ranks of the newly-promoted.

The Lose has always been a believer in the concept of promotion and relegation, because it keeps clubs on their toes and prevents teams from dogging it. In North America, you have franchises like the Chicago Cubs, who’ve made losing a profitable art form. You’ve also seen the rise of deliberate, systemwide tanking in the NBA and NHL so as to try and secure coveted draft picks. The Philadelphia 76ers have basically written off three seasons in some sort of master plan that I cannot quite figure out. They were horrible the last two years, and will likely be horrible again this coming season, and if you’re a basketball fan in Philly, why would you ever go back to watching that team? It’s easy enough to lose in sports without actively trying to be bad. With franchises in scarce supply, with revenue sharing and salary caps and booming TV rights, money is aplenty in American sports no matter whether you win or lose. In fact, there’s never been a better time to be bad. The Houston Astros played some of the worst baseball in Major League history, and then played even more, all the while drawing 0.0 TV ratings, yet somehow seem not the worse for it.

This is not the case in England, where your budget shrinks by about £128 million the moment you get relegated from the EPL. Promotion to the top flite is, therefore, a massive accomplishment. And with the infusion of £130 million into your budget comes the question of what to do with it – which is a question that’s harder to answer than you might think. Two of last year’s promoted sides were quickly relegated, both of which offer up cautionary tales as to what not to do. Queen’s Park Rangers were so desperate to get into the EPL again that they were carrying a club wage bill in 2014 as large as some of the EPL’s top sides – running up enormous debt and doing some curious accounting in the process. Promotion shielded them from some scrutiny – after all, the EPL plays by a number of its own rules – but now that QPR has collapsed in a heap, finishing last and being taken out with the refuse, they may have to answer for some of their spending habits to officials from the English FA. Burnley, meanwhile, took the money from their promotion and stashed it away, spending far less this season than any club in the EPL and getting the results to prove it. They too are going back down to the English League Championship once more, but a year’s worth of EPL TV money will cushion the blow.

And Burnley’s one-and-done EPL act is nothing out of the ordinary. Fans want their team to do whatever is possible to win, of course, and it’s hard to sometimes look at bigger pictures – especially since the bigger picture is, in essence, that it’s probably impossible to win. There are 92 professional football clubs in the four tiers of the English league, and many of them are perfectly content carrying on in the lower ranks. It’s a business that’s both frighteningly competitive and frighteningly expensive. There are plenty of clubs which will knock it about every Saturday before 5,000 diehards in the lower echelons whose boards of directors have no real drive nor ambition, nor financial incentive for that matter, to do much more than that. Moving up a level can often take you far, far out of your comfort zone.

Perhaps this dilemma has been best chronicled, in recent years, in the late Joe McGinniss’ wonderful book The Miracle of Castel di Sangro: A Tale of Passion and Folly in the Heart of Italy, the story of a small, backwater Italian soccer club which almost inexplicably rises up to Italian Serie B – the 2nd-highest level of Italian football – at which point they are immediately and woefully out of their league. Players need to be paid, stadia financed, and with a rise in level comes an increase in scrutiny of the club’s affairs. It becomes apparent rather quickly that everyone involved in the club off the pitch were perfectly happy trawling about in C1.

Over time, many clubs have found that comfort zone and are perfectly content never to deviate from the norm. While there is a core of élite clubs dominating the EPL year after the year, English football also has its share of solid yet unspectacular performers – the Stoke Citys and the West Broms and what have you – who fill out the ranks and define success by Top 10 finishes and by occasionally nicking a game here and there from the bigger sides. And there are also a few clubs like Norwich City who bounce up and down between Divs 1 and 2 on a regular basis to such an extent that their fans, while not necessarily liking it, do possess a certain sense of realism about their expectations. Success is modest and fleeting when you’re not one of the big guns. Earlier this season, the pairings in the always nutty FA Cup saw mighty Manchester United traveling for a match with a 4th Division Cambridge United side. Cambridge held on mightily for a goalless draw to force a replay at Old Trafford – and the gate receipts for a match at 67,000-capacity Old Trafford were enough to cover the club’s entire budget for a year. The 0:0 draw, therefore, constituted a great triumph on many levels, and being inevitably hammered by Man U in the replay meant little. When you’re not one of the big players, you have to change your definitions of success. You pick your spots and make your own meanings. So having the opportunity to descend en masse at Wembley on a Bank Holiday (as 86,000 City and Boro fans chose to do) took on an enormous importance which, in the grander scheme of things probably shouldn’t exist – after all, this was a 3rd-place playoff we’re talking about here, yet the Canaries and their fans celebrated as if they’d just won the Champions League.

The £130 million that comes with it complicates matters. Norwich’s relegation were actually something of a surprise, as they were expected to be much better in the 2014 season, but three years of EPL money, combined with some sound fiscal policy, had allowed the club to remain essentially debt-free. As a result, they were able to keep the core of their team together and not have to resort to the sort of massive sell-off of players many failed EPL sides face in the face of crippling debts. (The QPR fire sale should be starting at any moment now.) Norwich City are a pretty savvy club with a fan base that is both loyal and patient, so it’s unlikely the Canaries are going to do anything rash. Most likely, they’ll be pretty cautious going forward, trying to keep the nucleus together and add a few good buys here and there, hoping to eke through next season and build from there.

And for the other invitees to the big party, this is somewhat unsure territory. A.F.C. Bournemouth has already said they aren’t going to use their infusion of cash to upgrade their meager, 11,700-seat home football grounds, opting instead to spend it on ‘club infrastructure,’ and there have also been some whisperings that A.F.C., who’ve never been to the EPL before, perhaps have run afoul of Financial Fair Play regulations in a similar fashion to QPR (though maybe not quite so spectacularly). Watford, meanwhile, are well-known throughout England for talent development – beat the bushes in search of players, buy low and sell high – but that sort of approach often doesn’t translate very well in the big-money world. It’s similar to the Moneyball dilemma in baseball, where the A’s analytics-based approach worked really well until other clubs like the Red Sox took the same sorts of approaches and backed it with big budgets. Whatever angle you think you’ve discovered to make your EPL team good, Arsène Wenger has probably already thought of it.

So for a day, the Good Guys from Norwich City F.C. get to celebrate and be kings of the world and roll around in a gigantic pile of English pounds. And then, once the hangover has subsided … well, good luck Canaries. We’re all gonna need it.

WEAK!

The natives are restless in Oakland

TO the buzzard points!

• We start off this week’s buzzard points with the Buzzards themselves, who played some inspired basketball in the NBA postseason this year. Paul Pierce made one confounding late game shot after another while John Wall soldiered on with five displaced fractures in his hand. (Ow! Ow! Ow! Ow! Ow!) The Buzz managed to go out of the playoffs in one of the more excruciating ways imaginable over the past few days. With the series tied 2-2, D.C.’s Wiz gagged away a 4th Quarter lead in Game 5 down in Atlanta, losing to the Hawks by one at the buzzer. Last night, in Game 6, they fell by three points when Paul Pierce’s game-tying trey came about 0.05 seconds too late and was waved off. They went toe-to-toe with the Hawks, who sprinted to the best record in the East this season but who suddenly look very, very beatable. Save for a handful of plays here and there, there was very little difference between the two.
This came on the heels of their ice brethren, the Capitals, completing yet another postseason collapse, blowing a 3-1 series lead to the Rangers and losing Game 7 2:1 in OT at Madison Square Garden. Since 2010, the Caps have a 4-11 record in playoff games where they have a chance to eliminate an opponent. Astute Friend of the Lose, and excellent Canadian, Matt 'Muffin' Tunnicliffe has pointed out that the Caps are singlehandedly responsible for 18% of the blown 3-1 series leads in NHL history. It’s really sort of hard to label this series a choke, however, since the games in this series were all so damn close, but in the end, a rather star-crossed franchise couldn’t come through when it mattered. Both D.C. clubs had the chance to pull the upset, but neither could seal the deal.

• Everyone involved in Deflategate is getting what they deserved. Most of the arguments put forth decrying the punishment set down by the NFL – a 4-game suspension for Tom Brady, a loss of a 1st- and 4th-round draft pick, a $1m fine – are lame and disingenuous. This falls under the guise of cheating, and most every sport on the planet which doesn’t involve going around in a circle in a motorcar is going to be inclined to come down hard when it comes to cheating. The integrity of the on-field product is paramount, first and foremost. Without that, there is no game at all. The NFL has been a bit slack in its enforcement until late, but they’ve made a point this off-season of dinging pretty good both the Cleveland Browns (for sending texts among coaches in-game, which is a big no-no) and the Atlanta Falcons (for pumping artificial crowd noise into the Georgia Dome). Now, you can take issue with the methods and motivations of the league in suddenly deciding to do these sorts of things, and claim that some selective enforcement is going on, but a good way to avoid this entirely is not to cheat in the first place!
Seriously, most of the Patriots’ mustered defenses sound like excuses made by teenagers caught smoking in the bathroom, and have been delivered with similar aplomb. “Deflating the footballs a little bit is not that big of a deal.” Really? OK, then, so why do it? “Every team in the league is cheating.” And I’m sure that everyone else on the freeway was going 80 when the cop happened to pull you over. It doesn’t mean you can get out of paying the ticket. When has that been an acceptable defense in, like, forever? “They only did this because it’s the Patriots.” Well, yes, in fact, that part is true. The NFL dinged New England extra on this one because they view the Patriots as repeat offenders, having already nailed them in 2007 for Spygate and considering the Patriots to generally be disdainful of the rule book. The Pats have done it to themselves when it comes to that last bit. Their reputation precedes them.
So the Pats get what they deserve, but the NFL also gets what it deserves because no matter what decision Roger Goodell makes in this case, he looks stupid and his judgment and integrity are in question. And he’s set himself up for this, having so badly mishandled the Ray Rice situation a year ago. “Tom Brady gets 4 games for a deflated football, and Ray Rice gets two games for beating his wife senseless? Are you kidding me?” Now, juxtaposing those two cases is foolish, because you’re dealing with two separate issues, so people really shouldn’t be making those comparisons – and yet they are, and it’s entirely the fault of the league, and the stooge running it. This is why, were I an NFL owner, I would’ve pushed for Goodell’s ouster amid the fallout from the Ray Rice incident. From now on, everything that Roger Goodell says and does is going to be judged in accordance to his hare-brained decision-making process in that case. Everything. He has tarnished The Shield he so dutifully swore to protect.
As I said at the time, the best thing that could’ve happened to the NFL last February was to have the Seahawks win the Super Bowl, so that you didn’t have to deal with an entire follow-up season where your defending champion is considered to be tarnished and tainted by large swaths of your viewing public. But at this point, the NFL deserves no such favours. It’s a complete mess and a P.R. disaster for all involved, and deservedly so.

• And I’ll follow this up with a point about Tom Brady’s “legacy.” He doesn’t give a shit. Players don’t care about that. They care about it 20 years from now. In the here and the now, players care about winning. I’ve heard and read so much drivel about what this does to his “legacy” and I couldn’t give a shit. Legacies and myths are made up by those who watch the games, not by those who play them.

• As much as The Lose lampoons the NBA for all of the weird decision-making that goes on in the league’s front offices – a strange mix of fuzzy logic, marginal accounting practices and dubious math – the game itself can be pretty remarkable. The NBA playoffs have been terrific so far, in my opinion. Well, some of the Eastern Conference games have been pretty ugly, at times, but that’s simply following the form from the regular season. There’s been lots of good stuff in the West, and the drama and competitiveness has been compelling across the league.
These NBA playoffs feel like something of a strange new world, since the old guard have fallen by the wayside. Of the 8 teams reaching the second round of the playoffs this year, none has won an NBA title in the past 17 years. And with the new blood has come new ideas. The boring era of isos and 2-man games and backing down into the paint has given way to deep threes, movement of and off the ball, and the high post pick and roll. The NBA, at its best, has always offered up athleticism verging on dance, but now you’ve added a heightened cerebral component to the game as well. The NBA has become mathematics in motion. It’s space age stuff and it’s great to watch. Well, I think it’s great, anyway:

Thanks Phil. Did you try to dial that tweet up on your rotary phone? You’re showing your age a little bit, there.
This modern NBA is a little weird to me, I have to admit. It’s taken some getting used to. Perhaps the oddest bit has been attempting to think of the Clippers as anything other than a joke and laughingstock. As long as I’ve been watching this game, the Clippers have been terrible. What have you done to my Clippers? Who are these impostors?
Fortunately, the Clippers decided to chalk one up for the nostalgic set Thursday night in Game 6 of their playoff series against the Houston Rockets. Given a chance to end the series, the Clippers resorted to their losing ways of yore as they took a 19-point lead late in the third quarter, and then proceeded to blow it. They got outscored 40-15 in the 4th quarter to a Rockets team that had James Harden sitting on the bench for the entire period.
All props go to Houston for their inspired play, and also to coach Kevin McHale for realizing he had a hot lineup on the floor and rolling with it while Harden sat beside him. Harden was 5-20 from the field at that point, and with each of his misses – often forced shots amid stagnant offensive sets – the Rockets’ collective life essence seemed to further ebb away. His absence seemed to free up his teammates, who played loose and free in the 4th Quarter, playing as if they had nothing left to lose.
As opposed to the Clippers, who ceased to play entirely.
Seriously, Clippers, what are you doing? The Clips didn’t defend, and they completely froze up on the offensive end. There’s more movement among statues at Forest Lawn then there was to the Clips offense. The Clippers stopped playing. Simple as that. They punched their own tickets and tried to run out the clock. And once Houston got close, the Clippers had nothing left in the tank. They are wholly dependent upon their starters to make things happen (all you need to know about the state of the Clippers’ bench is that 67-year-old Hedo Turkoglu has been getting playoff minutes) and they seemed as worn out as they were stunned by the end.
We’ve seen some remarkable rallies of late – the Seahawks v. Green Bay comes to mind, along with the Royals vs. the A’s in the AL playoff. A trio of World Series crowns have helped lessen the sting of the memory of the Giants’ Game 6 collapse vs. the Angels in 2002, but it’s never fully gone away. Professional athletes are the most competitive people on the planet, and when they throw all caution to the wind and play with abandon, they do, in fact, have the talent to pull off what seems impossible. This is why you never, ever take your foot off the gas pedal.
I still remember, nearly 20 years later, how angry Michael Jordan was when his Bulls got throttled by the Sonics in Game 4 of their NBA championship series. The Bulls had a 3-0 lead in the series, didn’t show up for Game 4, and were down 30 in the 3rd Quarter. His teammates lolligagged and Jordan was mad. Sure enough, the Sonics won Game 5 as well and Jordan got T’d up in the process. Suddenly, they had a series on their hands again. We’ve seen several times now in recent years in baseball and hockey how a 3-0 series lead turned into a 4-3 series loss (most recently by those gagmasters, the San Jose Sharks, against the Kings). It doesn’t happen often, but once is too often. Never give the opponent another chance. Ever.
Now the Clippers have to win a Game 7 on the road, which has happened only 17.6% of the time in NBA history. The Clips-Spurs series was one of the best 7-game series the league has seen in years, and the Clips-Rockets is maybe one of the most confounding. Houston looked deader than doornails after getting blown out in Game 4, but now L.A.’s defense has been awol for two games and their lack of depth is catching up to them. Even if they defy the odds and win Game 7, I’m not sure the Clips have enough in the tank for going seven more run-and-gun, high-octane, first-team-to-120-wins matchups with the Warriors. Having to play a nervy and needless Game 7 certainly doesn’t help matters.

You can actually pinpoint the second when the Grizzlies' hearts rip in half ...

• Seriously, when is the NHL going to stop it with this Arizona nonsense? It’s clear this is unworkable. Why they insist on continuing to stubbornly bang their head against that well is beyond me. You’re only as good a league as your worst franchise. Get it out of Arizona and somewhere it belongs – and no, Las Vegas isn’t the answer. (And for some more amusement along these lines, here is a fun story from The Guardian about the ill-fated Cleveland Barons, the last team in the major American professional sports to fold during the season.)

• This blog is not about politics, although politics is probably the ultimate contact sport of them all, but The Lose will make a point here of saying that in two of the biggest elections of the year – Israel and Great Britain – it was apparent to me that the side with the better political athletes prevailed, even when it wasn’t entirely clear they would do so. The side which could better anticipate the voting trends, and then adapt to the conditions on the ground, won out. This should be a warning to all of my leftward-leaning Canadian friends, whose fall election is shaping up to be one of the better 3-way duels since the final scenes of The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly. Know who the real opponent is and figure out how you need to beat him.

• The thrill is gone.

RIP B.B. King. Few people could match your talent, your work ethic, and your class. You were one of the best. You and Lucille just keep on playing …

Honolulu, Belgium

MYSELF and The Official Wife of IN PLAY LOSE are back from our glorious honeymoon in Tahiti, which is a wonderful place and all of you should go immediately. But this is IN PLAY LOSE, of course, and you don’t want to hear me regale with wonderful stories of a joyous trip to the beaches and the food trucks of the South Pacific (although you can look at the pictures, if you like). No, you come to this corner of cyberspace to hear about madness and absurdity and failure. I know my readership by now. I know what they like. So to that end, I give you this week’s nominees for ruling my own personal Belgium.

And who knew all of the capital of said Belgium was Honolulu? Our first flight arrived at HNL from Fa’a’a at 5:20 a.m. on Sunday morning. It was already somewhat odd to me that the aeroport in Tahiti is basically dormant all day, only to then have all three flights leaving the island – to HNL, LAX, and CDG – leave within 20 minutes of each other starting at 11:30 p.m., resulting in a pile of humanity in the waiting area the likes of which I haven’t seen since a weather delay at O’Hare. And it was certainly strange to arrive at HNL at 5:20 a.m. to find the immigration desk staffed by one person to serve a flight of well over 100 people. But this is HNL we’re talking about, an aeroport which is an absurdist mess. Our flight home was scheduled for 1:30 p.m. in the afternoon, meaning we had 8 hours to kill. Seems like a good idea to go into Honolulu and hang out at Waikiki, right?

The nominees for ruler of my personal Belgium from among the extensive list of candidates during the 8-hour vortex that was Waikiki:

• The cab driver who insisted on driving us to the Moana Surfrider Beach Resort, even though we said we just wanted to go to the beach. He asked if we were staying there and we said no. He said, “you must be hungry so I will take you to a restaurant,” and dropped us off at the Moana, anyway.
• Every single cab driver after that who wouldn’t pick us up later that day at the Moana Surfrider Beach Resort unless we checked first with the concierge. Why do we need to check with the concierge? We want a damn ride! Just take us to the aeroport! Sure, there is some sort of arrangement going on here whereby the cabs and the aeroport and the hotels work together, but one cabbie said to us, “you go check in over there,” pointing to the cab stand and the concierge, and promptly drove away from us with his door open. Just give us a damn ride, already.

• The guy who walked up to KC on the street and said, “so, Miss, can I have my heels back?”
• The guy taking his pig on a leash to Waikiki.
• The cabbie who did eventually pick us up to take us back to HNL and tried to convert me to religion. Which religion is unclear. It may have been more than one. At first he sounded like an evangelical Christian and by the end he was talking like a Muslim. If we’d travelled any further, I may have wound up Hindu by the end of the trip.
• The two Israeli women arguing in front of us while we were eating lunch in the aeroport. A woman and her mother, in fact, the daughter being the mother of three squirming sons of her own. What were they arguing about? Whether or not to feed the 3-year-old an avocado. For 20 minutes. “You should smoosh it up for him.” “Mom, it’s too late for that.” “Give to me, I smoosh it.” “Mom, you should’ve smooshed it an hour ago.” “Is he hungry? I smoosh him an avocado.” I’ve never heard the word smoosh uttered so frequently. It was as least 100 times, maybe more. The whole thing had an air to it of “I have spent the past two weeks you and I’m sick of your shit,” at which point (fill in the blank) is a good reason for an argument, but this just went on and on while KC and I calmly went about contributing to the destruction of all roosters by eating our Lahaina Chicken Company roast bird. The daughter said probably a dozen times that it would take to long to smoosh up an avocado for her son. During the 20 minutes they were arguing, she could’ve smooshed up about a dozen of them. Meanwhile, the kids are squirming about, the dad is in line at the Burger King, they’re supposedly late for their flight but it’s not too late to argue about an avocado. I hope I never reach a point where someone pisses me off to the point where I just want to argue about stupid shit for the sake of arguing. Oh, wait, I play scrabble, where we argue about stupid shit all the time.
• The two clownshoes TSA guys who rerouted the security line at least 10 times while we were in it, one of whom made up for being clueless by simply acting like an asshole. He was the type of guy who responded to confused foreign travelers who didn’t speak English by simply saying it louder. HNL has maybe the most confoundingly bad set-up I’ve ever seen for security, due mainly to the fact that the place has obviously outgrown itself and can’t handle the volume of travelers. The labyrinth changed shape 10 times, and no one had any idea where they were supposed to go, and none of the other TSA agents seemed to know, either.

Worthy nominees all, and I could go on. At first, I thought that maybe it was just sleep deprivation and jetlag, but no, everyone in Honolulu is nuts.

Meanwhile, up at the front of the enormous security line, the agents handling the screening kept giving out contradictory orders – what you do/don’t have to take out of your bags, whether you do/don’t have to take off shoes, whether you do/don’t have to put things in bins. Now, I’ve generally found TSA agents to be good natured and trying to do a good job, and maybe this was just a case where they were overwhelmed by a volume of travelers which snaked in a myriad of directions and ran out the door and down the sidewalk, but it was a hopeless mess, and our King of Belgium for the week handled this situation in a curious way. The Zia Sun tattoo on this guy’s calf shows him to be a native of New Mexico, which means he’s used to stuff that doesn’t make any sense to begin with, and he received about three contradictory sets of instructions as he approached the conveyor belt and metal detector, which clearly annoyed him. At which point he took off his shoes, took off his shirt, took off his shorts, threw all of his clothes on the conveyor belt and walked through the metal detector wearing only his boxers. It was so surreal that no one knew how to respond. The agent on the other side of the metal detector just stared at him in stunned amazement. It was the damnedest thing I have ever seen at an aeroport.

That guy wins at life for doing that. He is King of My Personal Belgium for the week.