IN PLAY LOSE was reminded today, in the aftermath of the Super Bowl, of a conversation I once had on the sidelines during my ill-fated attempt at coaching basketball. I had just pulled a player from the game who had committed her 4th foul, a ticky-tack over-the-back foul on the rebound after she had taken an ill-advised shot:
her: that was a bad call
me: yes, but you took a bad shot and put the referee in a position where they weren't going to give you a break
Now, in truth, the official in that particular basketball game had eyesight slightly worse than Mr. Magoo, but the point was that my own team was making a hash of it out on the floor. You don't get to blame the officials if you don't make the plays necessary to win the game.
My rooting interest in the Super Bowl came mainly from the fact that I live in San Francisco. Civic pride. In theory, a Seahawk fan shouldn't want the 49ers to win, since they're in the same division, but that rivalry has never felt real to me. My developmental years of watching football came when the Seahawks were still in the AFC West, so I grew up hating the Denver Broncos, loving the fact that the 'Hawks would torment the Raiders, and facepalming as they lost in Kansas City 84 consecutive times. I wanted the 49ers to win because I live in San Francisco, and would've enjoyed seeing the collective mood of the city rise into a state of jubilation. That's happened twice with the Giants winning the World Series since I have lived here. You cannot help but get caught up in the groundswell of enthusiasm. I think the bigger reason that I wanted to win is that the Ravens are one of the single most annoying teams in all of professional sports, and have been so for the entirety of their existence in Baltimore. A bunch of loudmouths and blowhards. And I am sick of the Ray Lewis retirement tour. Honestly, I would rather see a class guy like Tony Gonzalez go out with a ring than someone like Lewis. Just shut up already.
But back to the game. 4th & goal, 2:00 left, the 49ers trail 34:29. The QB Kaepernick throws a pass into the end zone, the WR Crabtree is rather clearly grabbed by the Ravens CB ... and there is no flag for defensive holding. Quite honestly, it was a terrible call. And I will admit I wanted the 49ers to win, but I'm not a diehard homer by any stretch of the imagination. In my opinion, it should've been a flag. But none was tossed, the Ravens took over, killed the clock and took a safety to win 34:31.
It was a lousy call, in my opinion. And in all honesty, I thought the officials were generally terrible throughout the game – not because they egregiously screwed up, but more because they just simply couldn't keep up with the speed and the intensity of the game. They seemed overmatched. The game was physical, chippy, and occasionally threatened to boil over, and the zebras just sort of seemed lost out there. Officiating wound up being a huge sideshow in the NFL this season, what with the replacement refs at the start of the year making a mess of everything, and I found the crew entrusted with managing this most important of games to be substandard.
And I'm all for letting the game be decided on the field of play and not by arbiters, but I don't believe in swallowing whistles come crunch time. A foul is a foul, a penalty is a penalty, and should be called as such regardless of time or score or circumstance.
That being said, the 49ers put themselves in an unenviable position to begin with by squandering opportunities in the red zone and turning the ball over and letting a guy run 109 yards with a kickoff virtually untouched right down the middle of Market St. to start the second half and FOR GOD SAKE HOW COULD YOU LINE UP OFFSIDES ON THE FIRST PLAY OF THE FUCKING GAME? It's one thing to be winning the game and get jobbed by a bad call with little or no recourse. (Witness 'Fail Mary' in my previous blog about the Seahawks.) It's another to make a mess of things and reach times of desperation and hope the stripes will bail you out – which is exactly where the 49ers found themselves at the end of the Super Bowl.
And football officials usually have far less damning effect than in basketball – where you essentially award a team free points at the foul line and force players into foul trouble – or in soccer – where a single goal via an awarded penalty can be all you need to determine the outcome. There were 130+ plays from scrimmage in the Super Bowl, and the officials certainly got a few wrong, but so did the players.
So, in short, the 49ers should score more points next time. And maybe tackle someone. The bad call didn't cost the 49ers the game. They did a fine job of costing themselves.
“... everything is complicated by the presence of the opposing team.” – Jean-Paul Sartre
Sunday, February 3, 2013
Edmonton Disease
It would figure that my favourite hockey team is one that has never won anything. I became a Canucks fan for life in 1982. I was living in Seattle at the time and the cable system included BCTV and CBC British Columbia, which meant a steady diet of Canucks games on Wednesday and Saturday nights. The Canucks were a maddening, underachieving team that year who got insanely hot at the end of the season and benefited from some of the most improbable upsets in NHL history to make a run all the way to the Stanley Cup finals, where they got waxed 4-0 by the juggernaut, 4-time champion New York Islanders. But they fought the Isles pretty good and were unlucky to win the first game of the series. They showed themselves well and I was hooked for good.
Which means I’ve now waited 30 years for them to hoist the cup and it still hasn’t happened. Sigh. Why do I do this to myself?
When I moved back to the eastside of the state of Washington, I kept my Canuck allegiance through the 1980s even though the state’s drysiders were much more inclined to follow the two teams in Alberta. And understandably so for several reasons – the Spokane TV stations went up into Alberta; the city had much more of a connection to the Canadian cities on the plains than the stylish, cosmopolitan metropolis on the B.C. coast; and the surprisingly sophisticated Eastern Washington fan base (Spokane has always been a great minor league hockey town) knew a good product when they saw it and unlike the Canucks, the two teams in Alberta were actually good.
Which is a gross understatement – the Edmonton Oilers of the 1980s were probably the greatest assemblage of hockey talent in history, winning 5 Stanley Cups, and about the only team in the league who could keep up with them and play them even was the Calgary Flames. If I had to pick one to begrudgingly support come playoff time, it was the Flames because I hated the Edmonton Oilers, mainly because Gretzky toyed with the Canucks for the entirety of his career, racking up more points vs. Vancouver than against every other team. The Canucks were completely hapless in those days, in the midst of 17 consecutive losing seasons, more known for their zany mustard-coloured jerseys than anything they did on the ice, and Gretzky would skate circles around them and make them all look like buffoons.
I mention all of this because tomorrow night the Canucks are playing the Edmonton Oilers and I will likely tune in. My my, how the tables have turned over time. The Canucks still can’t win the big prize, but they’re consistently one of the top clubs in the sport and they are also a moneymaking machine, routinely listed at or near the top of the financial table among a sport with some persistently-struggling franchises. Their insanely loyal, cheesehead-style fan base not only sells out every home game but often travels en masse, filling up thousands of otherwise empty seats in arenas in the NHL’s Sun Belt climes like Anaheim and Phoenix. The Edmonton Oilers, meanwhile, are showing some improvement this year, having assembled a good collection of talent through one of North America sport’s time-testing strategies for doing so – being terrible for half a decade, and simply having so many high draft picks that you can’t help but amass some good players after a while. Other than 2006, when the Oilers reached the Stanley Cup finals after one of those fluky sort of runs you see in the NHL playoffs, the franchise has withered and dried up over 20+ years. Gretzky took his game to the bright lights of L.A. in 1988, but the team still had enough talent to win a Cup in 1990. Since then, however, it’s been pretty destitute up on the prairie, and the franchise has given birth to a very important concept that we must explore here in IN PLAY LOSE, a concept that an astute Canadian sportswriter whom I cannot recall the name of labeled “Edmonton disease.”
It was much, much easier back in the 1980s to maintain a powerhouse franchise in the NHL, and in a lot of the other sports as well, as player movement was still tightly controlled by the clubs. But with new collective bargaining agreements and the growth of free agency in sports, it’s become far more difficult to do so. In three of the major professional sports in North America, there are salary caps in place which set minimum and maximum amounts franchises can spend on players. The leagues like to spin this as a way to promote competitive balance in the league, holding up Major League Baseball and the big European soccer clubs as an example, wherein the Yankees and Man United and Réal Madrid can supposedly just spend their way to winning championships. This argument is, of course, nonsense. It is a smokescreen. The fact is that salary caps are put in place to make sports franchises more profitable, and to protect owners from themselves. These are a bunch of bazillionaire egomaniacs we’re talking about here who own professional sports franchises, and given the chance to plunk down $100 million on a player, they would do so in a heartbeat if they thought it would give them a chance to win.
Now players can benefit from salary caps as well – if a CBA states the players are entitled to 55% of the gross revenues of the league, for example, and the gross revenues of the sport’s franchises goes up, then their salaries go up as well. Indeed, the average salaries have skyrocketed across professional sports in the past three decades. And free agency allows for greater player movement after a certain number of years, thus eliminating team control and creating some interesting challenges for clubs – after your club has spent 5 years accruing talent to be competitive and win, you some how have to figure out how to pay for it and keep a team together.
And yet with salary caps come limitations on how much clubs can spend on players. Caps are there to hem in ownership. Over time, the net result of this is that the offers for available free agent players are basically the same across the board. Clubs may have finagled some extra $$$ here and there which they can throw at a player, but basically a free agent in the NFL or the NBA or the NHL is going to get similar sized offers. If dollars aren’t the only issue, then other factors can come into play, such as quality of life. Hence Edmonton disease, which is a principle based on a very simple question: if you, an NHL player, has a choice between playing in New York or L.A. or Edmonton, then why would you stay in Edmonton?
Edmonton disease actually runs most rampant in the NBA, an entity in which glitz and promotion has long been forth by the league as being far more important than the actual product on the court. The NBA is a marketing machine, selling their superstars and the most glamorous of franchises. The list of glamour boys shifts a bit here and there from time, but the NBA’s love list includes the Knicks, Celtics, 76ers, Bulls, Lakers, Suns, the Heat and Magic down in Florida, and these days you can toss in a couple more franchises – the Brooklyn Nets and the L.A. Clippers – who’ve done little more to deserve it than be located in Brooklyn and L.A., a pair of franchises which have been so utterly incompetently run over the years that, had they not been located in big markets, they almost certainly would’ve been relocated. (It should be pointed out, in fact, that sheer incompetence can negate inherent quality-of-life advantages. As an example, I give you the Golden State Warriors. But after defying the laws of averages, probability, and quite possibly the laws of physics in being so bad for so long, they now have some terrific young players and grand future plans, so maybe there is hope for the W’s after all.)
So, OK, budding NBA superstar. You’ve plied your trade for 6 years with ... let’s just pick a franchise here for sake of argument ... with the Indiana Pacers, who would love to keep you and can offer you $75,000,000 over the next 5 years. But so can the Brooklyn Nets, and wouldn’t you love to sell your own personal brand in a big media market like New York City. And the Phoenix Suns can offer you $75,000,000 as well, and you’ve been going to every year in the dead of winter and it’s 80° and you can get out on the golf course on your day off in Arizona. You’d love to live there in the sun, wouldn’t you? Jeez, you have it pretty good there in Indianapolis, to be sure, but it’s awfully cold and you’re a young guy and there’s a lot more to do in a place like New York or Phoenix.
And if you’re the Indiana Pacers, of course, you’re realizing that it’s going to be very, very difficult to keep your budding NBA superstar. You may, in fact, be able to offer him more money than anyone else (a caveat in the NBA which can have some drastic long-term consequences, of course, since overspending to keep your free agents will eventually mean having to pay less to the rank-and-file), but there are other factors at play which you cannot hope to compete with. And this is not to slag on Indianapolis or Edmonton, both of which I’m sure are nice cities. But where your franchise is located becomes a prime selling point, and a place like Edmonton can never, ever hope to compete.
And when you look at the NBA, for example, there are a number of franchises which seem completely, utterly hopeless. The NBA used to like the idea of being the only game in town, and enjoyed setting up shop in places like Sacramento and Charlotte where they could control the entertainment market place. But those are the exact franchises which, ultimately, struggle to compete. A pecking order is established and player movement invariably follows that order. If you’re at the bottom of that order, you’d best enjoy whatever success your team may have, because it isn’t likely to last very long.
(Some would go so far as to suggest that in the NBA, the league offices actively root for some franchises to succeed at the expense of others, and go so far as to rig the game in the favour of those franchises and their superstar players. One particular owner, Mark Cuban of the Dallas Mavericks, went so far as to yell something like “YOUR GAME IS FUCKING RIGGED!” at NBA Commissioner David Stern during the first Miami-Dallas NBA final and amass a pretty substantial fine for during so. I wish to believe that isn’t the case, but we will touch on those conspiracy theories at another time, when we delve deeper into the plights of the Seattle SuperSonics and the Sacramento Kings.)
You can vaccinate your franchise against Edmonton disease to a certain extent, but you need some help. Perhaps the greatest example of this in pro sports is the San Antonio Spurs. A large reason for their success is dumb luck, of course – the Spurs happened to be terrible and have the first pick in the draft twice when David Robinson and Tim Duncan were available. Not only did they dumb luck their way into two great big men, but they were two quality individuals with team-first professionalism and a far greater interest in winning than personal spoils. The Utah Jazz, Detroit Pistons and Houston Rockets have done much the same thing, putting together long track records of success and generally being lauded for their professionalism. After all, players want to make money, but players also want to win championships, and they’ll gravitate to places where that latter aim can be realized. The Spurs have also been light years ahead of the rest of the NBA in the use of so-called Moneyball concepts – savvy spending on players deemed suitable for their system through advanced statistical analysis. Their former assistant GM, Sam Presti, has taken his laptop with him to his job as GM in Oklahoma City, where he appears to have also lucked himself into getting to build a franchise around Kevin Durant, who is the exact sort of loyal, committed superstar you need to build around if you’re running a franchise far from the bright lights of New York and Hollywood and your club is going to stay competitive.
In all sports, the single most important thing your franchise can do is hire a competent GM, because the GM’s job, first and foremost, is to procure talent, and do so at times when your franchise may face some inherent disadvantages. The teams which are successful, year after year, are usually the best run and smartest run. This is especially true in the NFL, which for years has used tools like the schedule to actually attempt to foster competitive balance, and yet the Patriots and Steelers and Packers are always vying for the super bowl while the Arizona Cardinals are always 5-11 and the Detroit Lions are doing things like this:
Worst play in NFL history, committed by the worst team in NFL history.
The point here is that some sports franchises will find themselves at severe disadvantages when it comes to the acquisition of talent – and, perhaps more importantly, the act of keeping that talent around. Now, the patterns for how Edmonton disease strikes are not the same in every sport. Vancouver was infamously labeled ‘Siberia’ during the woebegone days of the NBA’s Grizzlies, yet it’s a choice destination for hockey players – loyal fan base, the team is always good, it’s a chance to come home to Canada and yet not need a snow blower to get out of your driveway in the morning. Guys will gladly sign on to play for the Pittsburgh Steelers or the Penguins, two perennial powerhouses, yet no one in their right mind would be crazy enough to sign on to play for the Pirates. Yes, the Pirates are a baseball team, and baseball has no salary cap, which means that teams can spend as much as they want on wage bills. But the same rules apply, and a franchise such as the Pittsburgh Pirates, which hasn’t had a winning season in over 20 years, is always going to be picking from the leftovers.
This was made painfully obvious this offseason in baseball for one particular franchise, the Seattle Mariners. (And after watching that unwatchable club for most of my childhood, you can damn well bet there will be more on them in the future.) The Mariners are, by any definition, one of the worst franchises in the history of professional sports. They play in a northern, cold-weather city, and play in a ballpark that is a hitters’ graveyard. They are desperately in need of an infusion of offense into a franchise whose offense has been historically bad in recent years, and offered up 4 years and $100,000,000 to Josh Hamilton – who then received 5 years and $125,000,000 from theCalifornia Los Angeles Angels of Yorba Linda Anaheim. Now, the Mariners could’ve come back and offered 5/$125m as well, but Hamilton’s agent would’ve likely just dialed up the Angels and said “give us 130 and we have a deal.” The Mariners were simply there to drive up the price tag, but were never a serious threat to sign the best available player on the market.
The Mariners then reached a deal with Arizona to swap for the Snakes’ outfielder Justin Upton, who then promptly vetoed the trade – turns out he has a no-trade clause in his contract that specifically lists he cannot be traded to the Mariners! This is done by his agent, in part, to up his trade value – the Mariners very clearly being a team which would want to trade for him – and after finding out what the M’s were willing to deal to get him (which was A LOT – 4 players including some of the gems from their farm system), Upton had a better sense of his market value.
But this does nothing to help the Mariners, a franchise desperately stricken by a grave case of Edmonton disease. They still need hitters and cannot seem to land one. But when you’re an awful team in an awful ballpark where hitters go to die, you’re going to have this happen. In recent years, there has been clamoring among the Seattle press and the fan base for the owners to “spend more money” as if that’s a foolproof way to success. But in order to buy, you also need someone who is willing to sell. To anyone who wants to argue the Mariners have been unsuccessful because they’ve been cheap, I would ask the question, “why do you think anybody would ever want to play for the Mariners?”
Now these patterns can change over time, of course, but the notion that there is a level playing field is ludicrous. Sports is fundamentally a marketplace, and some buyers and sellers are at inherent disadvantages. This is true in all agorae, in fact, be it cities vying for pro sport glory or convention biz or tourism dollars or what have you. Some cities are at a disadvantage, simply because of their size or location. Others have a stigma attached to them over time – witness poor Cleveland, who couldn’t even keep native son LeBron James from taking his talents to South Beach. And after almost every dimwitted trade in the NFL, NBA or NHL, the GM who got bamboozled will say “this frees up salary cap space,” which is the limpest excuse of them all, because what good is it when there is nothing to spend it on?
And in the case of the Edmonton Oilers, you’re left with a once-proud franchise with permanently limited resources, an inability to keep talent intact and attract willing new talent. They’re perpetually rumoured to be picking up stakes and moving elsewhere, which is a travesty for the fans, who love the game but don’t want to put up with forking over a whole lot of money for a terrible product. (Owners can only get away with that particular dynamic in Chicago.) Now, since I grew up hating the Oilers, I would like to say that I enjoy seeing them suffer. But the franchise is a shell of what it used to be, so the days of Gretzky and Messier and Kurri and Fuhr are just old stories at this point, ghosts from the past. They’ll inevitably show, during the course of the game with the Canucks on Monday night, all of those championship banners from the 1980s fluttering in the rafters of the whatever-the-hell-it-is-now-named-but-was-once-called Northlands Coliseum. Banners which, 2+ decades on, are starting to look a bit tattered and frayed.
Which means I’ve now waited 30 years for them to hoist the cup and it still hasn’t happened. Sigh. Why do I do this to myself?
When I moved back to the eastside of the state of Washington, I kept my Canuck allegiance through the 1980s even though the state’s drysiders were much more inclined to follow the two teams in Alberta. And understandably so for several reasons – the Spokane TV stations went up into Alberta; the city had much more of a connection to the Canadian cities on the plains than the stylish, cosmopolitan metropolis on the B.C. coast; and the surprisingly sophisticated Eastern Washington fan base (Spokane has always been a great minor league hockey town) knew a good product when they saw it and unlike the Canucks, the two teams in Alberta were actually good.
Which is a gross understatement – the Edmonton Oilers of the 1980s were probably the greatest assemblage of hockey talent in history, winning 5 Stanley Cups, and about the only team in the league who could keep up with them and play them even was the Calgary Flames. If I had to pick one to begrudgingly support come playoff time, it was the Flames because I hated the Edmonton Oilers, mainly because Gretzky toyed with the Canucks for the entirety of his career, racking up more points vs. Vancouver than against every other team. The Canucks were completely hapless in those days, in the midst of 17 consecutive losing seasons, more known for their zany mustard-coloured jerseys than anything they did on the ice, and Gretzky would skate circles around them and make them all look like buffoons.
I mention all of this because tomorrow night the Canucks are playing the Edmonton Oilers and I will likely tune in. My my, how the tables have turned over time. The Canucks still can’t win the big prize, but they’re consistently one of the top clubs in the sport and they are also a moneymaking machine, routinely listed at or near the top of the financial table among a sport with some persistently-struggling franchises. Their insanely loyal, cheesehead-style fan base not only sells out every home game but often travels en masse, filling up thousands of otherwise empty seats in arenas in the NHL’s Sun Belt climes like Anaheim and Phoenix. The Edmonton Oilers, meanwhile, are showing some improvement this year, having assembled a good collection of talent through one of North America sport’s time-testing strategies for doing so – being terrible for half a decade, and simply having so many high draft picks that you can’t help but amass some good players after a while. Other than 2006, when the Oilers reached the Stanley Cup finals after one of those fluky sort of runs you see in the NHL playoffs, the franchise has withered and dried up over 20+ years. Gretzky took his game to the bright lights of L.A. in 1988, but the team still had enough talent to win a Cup in 1990. Since then, however, it’s been pretty destitute up on the prairie, and the franchise has given birth to a very important concept that we must explore here in IN PLAY LOSE, a concept that an astute Canadian sportswriter whom I cannot recall the name of labeled “Edmonton disease.”
It was much, much easier back in the 1980s to maintain a powerhouse franchise in the NHL, and in a lot of the other sports as well, as player movement was still tightly controlled by the clubs. But with new collective bargaining agreements and the growth of free agency in sports, it’s become far more difficult to do so. In three of the major professional sports in North America, there are salary caps in place which set minimum and maximum amounts franchises can spend on players. The leagues like to spin this as a way to promote competitive balance in the league, holding up Major League Baseball and the big European soccer clubs as an example, wherein the Yankees and Man United and Réal Madrid can supposedly just spend their way to winning championships. This argument is, of course, nonsense. It is a smokescreen. The fact is that salary caps are put in place to make sports franchises more profitable, and to protect owners from themselves. These are a bunch of bazillionaire egomaniacs we’re talking about here who own professional sports franchises, and given the chance to plunk down $100 million on a player, they would do so in a heartbeat if they thought it would give them a chance to win.
Now players can benefit from salary caps as well – if a CBA states the players are entitled to 55% of the gross revenues of the league, for example, and the gross revenues of the sport’s franchises goes up, then their salaries go up as well. Indeed, the average salaries have skyrocketed across professional sports in the past three decades. And free agency allows for greater player movement after a certain number of years, thus eliminating team control and creating some interesting challenges for clubs – after your club has spent 5 years accruing talent to be competitive and win, you some how have to figure out how to pay for it and keep a team together.
And yet with salary caps come limitations on how much clubs can spend on players. Caps are there to hem in ownership. Over time, the net result of this is that the offers for available free agent players are basically the same across the board. Clubs may have finagled some extra $$$ here and there which they can throw at a player, but basically a free agent in the NFL or the NBA or the NHL is going to get similar sized offers. If dollars aren’t the only issue, then other factors can come into play, such as quality of life. Hence Edmonton disease, which is a principle based on a very simple question: if you, an NHL player, has a choice between playing in New York or L.A. or Edmonton, then why would you stay in Edmonton?
Edmonton disease actually runs most rampant in the NBA, an entity in which glitz and promotion has long been forth by the league as being far more important than the actual product on the court. The NBA is a marketing machine, selling their superstars and the most glamorous of franchises. The list of glamour boys shifts a bit here and there from time, but the NBA’s love list includes the Knicks, Celtics, 76ers, Bulls, Lakers, Suns, the Heat and Magic down in Florida, and these days you can toss in a couple more franchises – the Brooklyn Nets and the L.A. Clippers – who’ve done little more to deserve it than be located in Brooklyn and L.A., a pair of franchises which have been so utterly incompetently run over the years that, had they not been located in big markets, they almost certainly would’ve been relocated. (It should be pointed out, in fact, that sheer incompetence can negate inherent quality-of-life advantages. As an example, I give you the Golden State Warriors. But after defying the laws of averages, probability, and quite possibly the laws of physics in being so bad for so long, they now have some terrific young players and grand future plans, so maybe there is hope for the W’s after all.)
So, OK, budding NBA superstar. You’ve plied your trade for 6 years with ... let’s just pick a franchise here for sake of argument ... with the Indiana Pacers, who would love to keep you and can offer you $75,000,000 over the next 5 years. But so can the Brooklyn Nets, and wouldn’t you love to sell your own personal brand in a big media market like New York City. And the Phoenix Suns can offer you $75,000,000 as well, and you’ve been going to every year in the dead of winter and it’s 80° and you can get out on the golf course on your day off in Arizona. You’d love to live there in the sun, wouldn’t you? Jeez, you have it pretty good there in Indianapolis, to be sure, but it’s awfully cold and you’re a young guy and there’s a lot more to do in a place like New York or Phoenix.
And if you’re the Indiana Pacers, of course, you’re realizing that it’s going to be very, very difficult to keep your budding NBA superstar. You may, in fact, be able to offer him more money than anyone else (a caveat in the NBA which can have some drastic long-term consequences, of course, since overspending to keep your free agents will eventually mean having to pay less to the rank-and-file), but there are other factors at play which you cannot hope to compete with. And this is not to slag on Indianapolis or Edmonton, both of which I’m sure are nice cities. But where your franchise is located becomes a prime selling point, and a place like Edmonton can never, ever hope to compete.
And when you look at the NBA, for example, there are a number of franchises which seem completely, utterly hopeless. The NBA used to like the idea of being the only game in town, and enjoyed setting up shop in places like Sacramento and Charlotte where they could control the entertainment market place. But those are the exact franchises which, ultimately, struggle to compete. A pecking order is established and player movement invariably follows that order. If you’re at the bottom of that order, you’d best enjoy whatever success your team may have, because it isn’t likely to last very long.
(Some would go so far as to suggest that in the NBA, the league offices actively root for some franchises to succeed at the expense of others, and go so far as to rig the game in the favour of those franchises and their superstar players. One particular owner, Mark Cuban of the Dallas Mavericks, went so far as to yell something like “YOUR GAME IS FUCKING RIGGED!” at NBA Commissioner David Stern during the first Miami-Dallas NBA final and amass a pretty substantial fine for during so. I wish to believe that isn’t the case, but we will touch on those conspiracy theories at another time, when we delve deeper into the plights of the Seattle SuperSonics and the Sacramento Kings.)
You can vaccinate your franchise against Edmonton disease to a certain extent, but you need some help. Perhaps the greatest example of this in pro sports is the San Antonio Spurs. A large reason for their success is dumb luck, of course – the Spurs happened to be terrible and have the first pick in the draft twice when David Robinson and Tim Duncan were available. Not only did they dumb luck their way into two great big men, but they were two quality individuals with team-first professionalism and a far greater interest in winning than personal spoils. The Utah Jazz, Detroit Pistons and Houston Rockets have done much the same thing, putting together long track records of success and generally being lauded for their professionalism. After all, players want to make money, but players also want to win championships, and they’ll gravitate to places where that latter aim can be realized. The Spurs have also been light years ahead of the rest of the NBA in the use of so-called Moneyball concepts – savvy spending on players deemed suitable for their system through advanced statistical analysis. Their former assistant GM, Sam Presti, has taken his laptop with him to his job as GM in Oklahoma City, where he appears to have also lucked himself into getting to build a franchise around Kevin Durant, who is the exact sort of loyal, committed superstar you need to build around if you’re running a franchise far from the bright lights of New York and Hollywood and your club is going to stay competitive.
In all sports, the single most important thing your franchise can do is hire a competent GM, because the GM’s job, first and foremost, is to procure talent, and do so at times when your franchise may face some inherent disadvantages. The teams which are successful, year after year, are usually the best run and smartest run. This is especially true in the NFL, which for years has used tools like the schedule to actually attempt to foster competitive balance, and yet the Patriots and Steelers and Packers are always vying for the super bowl while the Arizona Cardinals are always 5-11 and the Detroit Lions are doing things like this:
Worst play in NFL history, committed by the worst team in NFL history.
The point here is that some sports franchises will find themselves at severe disadvantages when it comes to the acquisition of talent – and, perhaps more importantly, the act of keeping that talent around. Now, the patterns for how Edmonton disease strikes are not the same in every sport. Vancouver was infamously labeled ‘Siberia’ during the woebegone days of the NBA’s Grizzlies, yet it’s a choice destination for hockey players – loyal fan base, the team is always good, it’s a chance to come home to Canada and yet not need a snow blower to get out of your driveway in the morning. Guys will gladly sign on to play for the Pittsburgh Steelers or the Penguins, two perennial powerhouses, yet no one in their right mind would be crazy enough to sign on to play for the Pirates. Yes, the Pirates are a baseball team, and baseball has no salary cap, which means that teams can spend as much as they want on wage bills. But the same rules apply, and a franchise such as the Pittsburgh Pirates, which hasn’t had a winning season in over 20 years, is always going to be picking from the leftovers.
This was made painfully obvious this offseason in baseball for one particular franchise, the Seattle Mariners. (And after watching that unwatchable club for most of my childhood, you can damn well bet there will be more on them in the future.) The Mariners are, by any definition, one of the worst franchises in the history of professional sports. They play in a northern, cold-weather city, and play in a ballpark that is a hitters’ graveyard. They are desperately in need of an infusion of offense into a franchise whose offense has been historically bad in recent years, and offered up 4 years and $100,000,000 to Josh Hamilton – who then received 5 years and $125,000,000 from the
The Mariners then reached a deal with Arizona to swap for the Snakes’ outfielder Justin Upton, who then promptly vetoed the trade – turns out he has a no-trade clause in his contract that specifically lists he cannot be traded to the Mariners! This is done by his agent, in part, to up his trade value – the Mariners very clearly being a team which would want to trade for him – and after finding out what the M’s were willing to deal to get him (which was A LOT – 4 players including some of the gems from their farm system), Upton had a better sense of his market value.
But this does nothing to help the Mariners, a franchise desperately stricken by a grave case of Edmonton disease. They still need hitters and cannot seem to land one. But when you’re an awful team in an awful ballpark where hitters go to die, you’re going to have this happen. In recent years, there has been clamoring among the Seattle press and the fan base for the owners to “spend more money” as if that’s a foolproof way to success. But in order to buy, you also need someone who is willing to sell. To anyone who wants to argue the Mariners have been unsuccessful because they’ve been cheap, I would ask the question, “why do you think anybody would ever want to play for the Mariners?”
Now these patterns can change over time, of course, but the notion that there is a level playing field is ludicrous. Sports is fundamentally a marketplace, and some buyers and sellers are at inherent disadvantages. This is true in all agorae, in fact, be it cities vying for pro sport glory or convention biz or tourism dollars or what have you. Some cities are at a disadvantage, simply because of their size or location. Others have a stigma attached to them over time – witness poor Cleveland, who couldn’t even keep native son LeBron James from taking his talents to South Beach. And after almost every dimwitted trade in the NFL, NBA or NHL, the GM who got bamboozled will say “this frees up salary cap space,” which is the limpest excuse of them all, because what good is it when there is nothing to spend it on?
And in the case of the Edmonton Oilers, you’re left with a once-proud franchise with permanently limited resources, an inability to keep talent intact and attract willing new talent. They’re perpetually rumoured to be picking up stakes and moving elsewhere, which is a travesty for the fans, who love the game but don’t want to put up with forking over a whole lot of money for a terrible product. (Owners can only get away with that particular dynamic in Chicago.) Now, since I grew up hating the Oilers, I would like to say that I enjoy seeing them suffer. But the franchise is a shell of what it used to be, so the days of Gretzky and Messier and Kurri and Fuhr are just old stories at this point, ghosts from the past. They’ll inevitably show, during the course of the game with the Canucks on Monday night, all of those championship banners from the 1980s fluttering in the rafters of the whatever-the-hell-it-is-now-named-but-was-once-called Northlands Coliseum. Banners which, 2+ decades on, are starting to look a bit tattered and frayed.
Wednesday, January 30, 2013
You May Already Be a Winner
The LOSE is back after a vacation, and after recovering from a vacation, because New Orleans was all that was advertised and then some. After that much food and that much alcohol and that much general abuse, my body seems to have responded by declaring a wildcat strike. I’ve been a little slow going here, and am only now just getting back up to speed.
This blog is an act of non-fiction, as such you should always remember that everything here is true, including the lies. Most especially the lies, in fact. But all stories, be they fictional or not, should have a compelling character at the center of it. Which we don’t in this case, since all we have is me, but we’ll pretend and see what comes. The main character of IN PLAY LOSE ventured to New Orleans not just to party like it’s 1999 but also to compete, and I found myself in a dangerous predicament that I’m decidedly unaccustomed to.
I was winning.
For those of you who don’t know me, let me explain my competitive pastime and passion: I play scrabble. I’m really good at it. I’m currently ranked about 56th in North America (although that number will drop slightly after my incompetent display at the Best of the Bay tournament this past weekend). So relatively speaking, I’m pretty good.
But what does that mean, actually? It means that, to be candid and somewhat boastful for the moment, I’m pretty much better at the game of scrabble than most people are good at anything. In the world, there are a very, very, VERY small number of people who are demonstratively better than I am. So, in that sense, I’m really good at this game.
But how good you are is relative not only to the general population but also to those who dare enter the same arena. The 12th man on the worst team in the NBA would mop the floor with the bushers playing pickup ball at the community center. Put him on the floor at the Staples Center or Madison Square Garden and he’ll most likely seem like he has no idea what he is doing. And for all of my relative aptitude at the game of scrabble, I’m also one of the least successful players of my level. I have won quite a few of the few shorter, 1-day tournaments we hold around the Bay Area, but I’ve never won a larger, multiple-day event in the more than 9 years that I’ve been playing.
Now, to be honest, this fact doesn’t really bother me that much. I’m not someone who wants to let a showing in one particular tournament define me. Regardless of whether you win a multiday (which has never happened for me), or you go 1-17 and finish last (which has ... sigh ...), you still have to play the next event. It’s a continous process, it’s open-ended and fluid by nature. Attaching too much weight or stock or value to one event doesn’t really make much sense. The game is still the same. (Shorter tournaments are much more susceptible to volatility and fluctuation, both in terms of the outcome of the game being affected by distribution of tiles and players getting a hot hand. A longer tournament mitigates some of those circumstances a bit, but not entirely.)
And I went to New Orleans mainly for the purposes of having a vacation and a party with some good friends of mine in a city I’ve always wanted to visit. The tournament seemed like little more than an excuse to do so, and my reward for spending 7½ hours cooped up in a cramped hotel meeting room playing a board game would be to have the opportunity to step outside the front door of the hotel, which was conveniently located on Bourbon St., and step into the veritable feast for the senses that is the French Quarter. Going into the tournament, I was far more intent on getting myself several platters of oystyrs on the half-shell, a Central Grocery muffuletta, and a Sazerac to swig than I was in winning the tourney. I had deëmphasized the tournament in my mind to the point where the actual results seemed somewhat irrelevant and caring about the result was a waste of energy. I was going to keep the tourney in perspective.
But then that stupid winning thing started happening, and I found myself starting to care. It’s really impossible not to care – you don’t get to be one of the best on the planet at something by not giving a shit. This is a competitive endeavour I’m talking about here, and one thing I’ve found to be true across the entire spectrum of competition is that those who are the best absolutely, positively hate losing. It’s pretty easy to detach and disengage from a tourney where you’re 8-8 after two days and have no hope of winning the thing. Success breeds pressure, it breeds expectations. The more that you win, the more important that it becomes that you win the next one.
So I got the hot hand on the first day of the Crescent City Open, took over first place after the 6th game and then found myself sitting at Table 1 for the 8th and final game of the day. (For non-scrabblers: the lower the table number, the better you’re doing in the event. I’ve been on the other end of that as well. At a tourney in Dallas, I was so bad on the first day that my table had an unlisted number and was located somewhere near Fort Worth.) I was so unaccustomed to being in this position that I couldn’t find my name in the standings or the table assignments posted on the wall. It didn’t even occur to me to look up at the top of the page, where the leaders’ names were printed.
And on the second day of the tournament, I lost a few games but so did everyone else, so I spent the majority of my day at Table 1 and finished the day with a 13-3 record, in first place overall and closing in on winning the biggest tournament of my career. It was a blast and I was having a great time, I was playing great and making good decisions and putting myself in position to win time and again. Playing the game in a style that I feel comfortable with, controlling the board and finding a good tempo to all that I was doing. But I wouldn’t go so far as to label it being in “the zone,” per sé. I’ve been in “the zone” on the basketball court before, where you get so focused and dialed in that pretty much every shot you chuck in the general vicinity of the backboard seems to somehow find the bottom of the net. “The zone” is surreal and somewhat otherworldly by nature, an altered state of higher consciousness. But this tournament didn’t feel like that all, actually. The New Orleans scrabble tournament, in fact, felt surprisingly normal as it was taking place. It felt – gasp! – like I actually knew what I was doing.
But it was a combination of factors – not the least of which being a food hangover from eating a steak the size of my head at Besh Steakhouse on Sunday night – which led to me waking at 4:15 a.m. on Monday morning, being hit with an enormous streak of angst, and struggling with physical discomfort for hours on end. The worst thing that excessive stress does to me is trigger migraine headaches. It also leads to enormous pains in my upper back which can sometimes last for days. I woke up on Monday and I was a complete, utter wreck. And the reason for this is obvious, of course – I wanted to win the tournament. Or, more appropriately, I didn’t want to lose the tournament. And there is a big, big difference between the two.
Like I said before, I’ve never one a multiday tournament before. The closest I’ve ever come before was at a tourney over Memorial Day weekend here in the Bay Area. It game down to the very last game, as myself and another woman were tied with 15-3 records. The game went very badly, as she got more than her share of the good tiles at the right times. This happens, of course, and scrabble is very much a game about managing chaos. You never have an idea of what you’re going to draw out of the bag, and all you can hope to do is prepare how to handle what does. And in this particular game, I was getting crushed and the game was growing short. I finally played a bingo and some other stuff to get within 70 points or so late in the game, to give myself at least a chance of winning, and out of the bag came KOOOSTU.
Blech. That rack is terrible.
And then my opponent put the word COLA on the board with the C on a TWS, in open space, and I had to do everything in my power to keep my eyebrows from arching straight off my forehead and launching into orbit, as I envisioned just how many cookouts I could have with the money I won after playing COOKOUTS for 95 points and I came back to win this game and win the tournament ...
And then she picked the tiles up and plays them somewhere else on the board and hits her clock. Sigh. That one stung a bit, to be close and fall short and very nearly have the miracle I needed to win fall from the sky.
The other time I was in position to win a multiday tournament was in San Luis Obispo and I was 10-1 with 5 games to go ... and promptly lost four out of the last five. There is a word for this sort of inept finishing, and that word would be “choke.” Because sometimes in scrabble you do, in fact, have games that you just can’t win, because you draw bad tiles and your opponent plays all the good ones, but not as many as games are truly unwinnable. Most of the time, it comes down to making mistakes, of which I made a boatload in that particularly disastrous series of games. It was a choke.
We all make mistakes, and the people who make the fewest mistakes are generally the ones who win. As the competition level is raised and the margin for error grows smaller, the mistakes aren’t always as obvious. Either that, or they’re exacerbated because they look so stupid. Think of the dropped pass in football, or the missed layup in basketball, or the routine grounder that goes between the shortstop’s legs. You’re thought when you see that sort of thing is “what the hell is wrong with that guy?” Mistakes do come in all sizes.
But all competitions are about who makes the fewest mistakes, in the end. And I’ve come over the course of playing 9 years to accept the fact that rarely do I lose because of bad luck. Most of the time I lose because of my flurry of incompetence. And the last thing I wanted to have happen in New Orleans was to succumb to my own propensity for self-destruction. I wasn’t afraid of losing. I was afraid of choking.
So I tried some visualization techniques to try and relax, somewhere during my 2nd or 3rd shower on this morning. At first I just repeated to myself, over and over, “I’m going to win today.” I would sometimes even say it aloud, and I mumbled it a few times while wandering alone about the French Quarter in the early hours. “I’m going to win today ... I’m going to win today ... but what if I don’t ... NO! STOP THINKING LIKE THAT! I’m going to win today.” I tried to imagine what it would be like to actually win, what the moment would be like and how I would react. Tried to picture it in my mind. But it all felt like an artificial construct. And “I’m going to win today,” was soon replaced with, “don’t blow it.”
And since my mind has an innate aptitude and ability for conjuring up worst-case scenarios, I’m then thinking about what will happen when I go 0-4 on Monday in New Orleans and blow the tournament and finish completely out of the money entirely. It could happen, you know? I’m playing some of the best players in the world, after all. They know what the fuck they’re doing and me? Me? I’m just a hack. I’m the guy who throws all the parties and jokes and clowns around, who is popular with the other players and isn’t afraid to laugh at himself. But no one takes me that seriously as a competitive player, and why should they? I’m really not that good!
Welcome to the vortex that is my mind.
The games start at 9:30 a.m., and by 9:15 I am a complete mess. I’m so stressed out that I can feel a migraine headache coming on. At any moment, I expect to feel a twinge over my right eye which will then explode into a seering sort of pain which can sometimes render me near blind. My neck and my back are killing me, this dull and constant ache which never abates. So much for being free and easy in The Big Easy.
I’m going to win today ... I’m going to win ... Oh, fuck, but what if I lose? It’s going to be so disappointing, and I’m always coming up short and it will be just another one of those times where I wasn’t quite good enough. At least I’ll have a good story, because all tales of woe and failure ultimately seem funny over time ... just don’t choke, don’t blow it. Lose because Jesse draws the fucking bag on you, which he only does on days that end in the letter Y. But what if I go 0-4 and gag on it? Especially because of all of the people that are rooting for me ... wait ...
I’d been posting status updates on my facebook page, and the response from friends elsewhere to news that I was leading the tournament in New Orleans was somewhat overwhelming. I had over 100 different people liking my statuses, or commenting, or sending me private messages or emails or texts, all of which told me that they were cheering for me, that they were following along with the standings online, and that they were all hoping I would win. And I really took that to heart. So many different people had wished me well, had been excited to see me succeeding. And I realized then that the reason I was so worried about losing was that I didn’t want to let them down.
Which is silly, of course. None of these people were going to see me any differently whether I went 4-0 or 0-4 on the last day of a scrabble tournament. It wasn’t going to change their opinion of me. Regardless of the result, you have to wake up the next morning and go on with your life.
And some people claim that they don’t care what people think, that all that matters to them is fulfillment of their individual goals. They want to win and be on top above all else. Well, OK, but guess what. That isn’t me! I don’t want to be that cold, calculating, win-at-all costs persona. I don’t want to be that narrow. I throw great parties. I make people laugh. I space out and do stupidly maddening things while playing scrabble, the sorts of things Top 50 players in North America shouldn’t do, but then miraculously scramble and still manage to win a lot of games in spite of myself. That’s just me. It’s who I am. I’m a spaz and a flake and a goof.
And people like that about me. In the moment, winning the tournament would feel great and losing would be an enormous downer, but it wouldn’t fundamentally change the way that I am. Nope. I’m one of the Good Guys who wears the white hats, and not one result was going to change that. In the end, being one of the Good Guys is more important to me, and I took the 100+ well-wishes from a wide cross-section of people – from scrabble experts to people who’ve never actually played a game of scrabble in their lives – as a life affirmation.
And so, when I sat down at 9:20 a.m. to prep for my first game of the day, I wrote across the top of my scoresheet, “you’ve already won!”
And I didn’t win, in the end, as if it really mattered. I went 2-2 on the last day to finish 15-5 and I wound up in 3rd place. The games that I lost didn’t go my way. Of course, in the moment, I was pissed when it became clear I wasn’t going to win. Who wouldn’t be pissed? We’re competitors, damn it. The game is fun, but winning is even more fun. The hardest part of it was playing three of my four games vs. three of my better friends on the planet, all of us knowing what knocking each other off would mean. It’s better sometimes to have an unknown enemy to whom you can assign all sorts of negative qualities and attributes, make them into some sort of evil beast who must destroyed for the good of all humanity. We love to beat our friends, just not as much when there is something on the line.
I didn’t win and it bothered me and then my head exploded into a full-on migraine which made it extremely difficult to do anything other than crawl under the blankets in my hotel bed. But after a good 2½ hour nap, two huge platters of oystyrs and a couple Jack Daniels on the rocks, I was fine. It was all good. Win or lose, I was still in New Orleans with my girlfriend and a bunch of great friends of mine, playing a game we’re all really good at and having a great time. What’s not to like about that?
I’ll win one eventually. Or maybe I won’t. I don’t know. It really doesn’t bother me that much. And, of course, having had such a great tournament in New Orleans, I promptly played another tournament this past weekend as was godfuckingterrible, reverting to my wildly inconsistent form which has plagued me in scrabble and pretty much everything else for that matter. The tournament this past weekend was the Best of the Bay championship tournament, which is also an excuse to have a day-long dinner party. I’m all about the parties. We all won, because we all got to eat and eat a lot.
And I would rather see a friend of mine win, which is what happened in New Orleans. The Good Guys win! And as a footnote to that San Luis Obispo debacle I spoke of earlier, I may have choked in the individual event but it wasn’t all bad. It was a California team tournament, North v. South, and we clobbered those clownshoes from the South. And we made a point of celebrating afterwards at a seafood joint in nearby Pismo Beach:
Yeah, that tourney turned out pretty well, didn’t it? In play EAT!
This blog is an act of non-fiction, as such you should always remember that everything here is true, including the lies. Most especially the lies, in fact. But all stories, be they fictional or not, should have a compelling character at the center of it. Which we don’t in this case, since all we have is me, but we’ll pretend and see what comes. The main character of IN PLAY LOSE ventured to New Orleans not just to party like it’s 1999 but also to compete, and I found myself in a dangerous predicament that I’m decidedly unaccustomed to.
I was winning.
For those of you who don’t know me, let me explain my competitive pastime and passion: I play scrabble. I’m really good at it. I’m currently ranked about 56th in North America (although that number will drop slightly after my incompetent display at the Best of the Bay tournament this past weekend). So relatively speaking, I’m pretty good.
But what does that mean, actually? It means that, to be candid and somewhat boastful for the moment, I’m pretty much better at the game of scrabble than most people are good at anything. In the world, there are a very, very, VERY small number of people who are demonstratively better than I am. So, in that sense, I’m really good at this game.
But how good you are is relative not only to the general population but also to those who dare enter the same arena. The 12th man on the worst team in the NBA would mop the floor with the bushers playing pickup ball at the community center. Put him on the floor at the Staples Center or Madison Square Garden and he’ll most likely seem like he has no idea what he is doing. And for all of my relative aptitude at the game of scrabble, I’m also one of the least successful players of my level. I have won quite a few of the few shorter, 1-day tournaments we hold around the Bay Area, but I’ve never won a larger, multiple-day event in the more than 9 years that I’ve been playing.
Now, to be honest, this fact doesn’t really bother me that much. I’m not someone who wants to let a showing in one particular tournament define me. Regardless of whether you win a multiday (which has never happened for me), or you go 1-17 and finish last (which has ... sigh ...), you still have to play the next event. It’s a continous process, it’s open-ended and fluid by nature. Attaching too much weight or stock or value to one event doesn’t really make much sense. The game is still the same. (Shorter tournaments are much more susceptible to volatility and fluctuation, both in terms of the outcome of the game being affected by distribution of tiles and players getting a hot hand. A longer tournament mitigates some of those circumstances a bit, but not entirely.)
And I went to New Orleans mainly for the purposes of having a vacation and a party with some good friends of mine in a city I’ve always wanted to visit. The tournament seemed like little more than an excuse to do so, and my reward for spending 7½ hours cooped up in a cramped hotel meeting room playing a board game would be to have the opportunity to step outside the front door of the hotel, which was conveniently located on Bourbon St., and step into the veritable feast for the senses that is the French Quarter. Going into the tournament, I was far more intent on getting myself several platters of oystyrs on the half-shell, a Central Grocery muffuletta, and a Sazerac to swig than I was in winning the tourney. I had deëmphasized the tournament in my mind to the point where the actual results seemed somewhat irrelevant and caring about the result was a waste of energy. I was going to keep the tourney in perspective.
But then that stupid winning thing started happening, and I found myself starting to care. It’s really impossible not to care – you don’t get to be one of the best on the planet at something by not giving a shit. This is a competitive endeavour I’m talking about here, and one thing I’ve found to be true across the entire spectrum of competition is that those who are the best absolutely, positively hate losing. It’s pretty easy to detach and disengage from a tourney where you’re 8-8 after two days and have no hope of winning the thing. Success breeds pressure, it breeds expectations. The more that you win, the more important that it becomes that you win the next one.
So I got the hot hand on the first day of the Crescent City Open, took over first place after the 6th game and then found myself sitting at Table 1 for the 8th and final game of the day. (For non-scrabblers: the lower the table number, the better you’re doing in the event. I’ve been on the other end of that as well. At a tourney in Dallas, I was so bad on the first day that my table had an unlisted number and was located somewhere near Fort Worth.) I was so unaccustomed to being in this position that I couldn’t find my name in the standings or the table assignments posted on the wall. It didn’t even occur to me to look up at the top of the page, where the leaders’ names were printed.
And on the second day of the tournament, I lost a few games but so did everyone else, so I spent the majority of my day at Table 1 and finished the day with a 13-3 record, in first place overall and closing in on winning the biggest tournament of my career. It was a blast and I was having a great time, I was playing great and making good decisions and putting myself in position to win time and again. Playing the game in a style that I feel comfortable with, controlling the board and finding a good tempo to all that I was doing. But I wouldn’t go so far as to label it being in “the zone,” per sé. I’ve been in “the zone” on the basketball court before, where you get so focused and dialed in that pretty much every shot you chuck in the general vicinity of the backboard seems to somehow find the bottom of the net. “The zone” is surreal and somewhat otherworldly by nature, an altered state of higher consciousness. But this tournament didn’t feel like that all, actually. The New Orleans scrabble tournament, in fact, felt surprisingly normal as it was taking place. It felt – gasp! – like I actually knew what I was doing.
But it was a combination of factors – not the least of which being a food hangover from eating a steak the size of my head at Besh Steakhouse on Sunday night – which led to me waking at 4:15 a.m. on Monday morning, being hit with an enormous streak of angst, and struggling with physical discomfort for hours on end. The worst thing that excessive stress does to me is trigger migraine headaches. It also leads to enormous pains in my upper back which can sometimes last for days. I woke up on Monday and I was a complete, utter wreck. And the reason for this is obvious, of course – I wanted to win the tournament. Or, more appropriately, I didn’t want to lose the tournament. And there is a big, big difference between the two.
Like I said before, I’ve never one a multiday tournament before. The closest I’ve ever come before was at a tourney over Memorial Day weekend here in the Bay Area. It game down to the very last game, as myself and another woman were tied with 15-3 records. The game went very badly, as she got more than her share of the good tiles at the right times. This happens, of course, and scrabble is very much a game about managing chaos. You never have an idea of what you’re going to draw out of the bag, and all you can hope to do is prepare how to handle what does. And in this particular game, I was getting crushed and the game was growing short. I finally played a bingo and some other stuff to get within 70 points or so late in the game, to give myself at least a chance of winning, and out of the bag came KOOOSTU.
Blech. That rack is terrible.
And then my opponent put the word COLA on the board with the C on a TWS, in open space, and I had to do everything in my power to keep my eyebrows from arching straight off my forehead and launching into orbit, as I envisioned just how many cookouts I could have with the money I won after playing COOKOUTS for 95 points and I came back to win this game and win the tournament ...
And then she picked the tiles up and plays them somewhere else on the board and hits her clock. Sigh. That one stung a bit, to be close and fall short and very nearly have the miracle I needed to win fall from the sky.
The other time I was in position to win a multiday tournament was in San Luis Obispo and I was 10-1 with 5 games to go ... and promptly lost four out of the last five. There is a word for this sort of inept finishing, and that word would be “choke.” Because sometimes in scrabble you do, in fact, have games that you just can’t win, because you draw bad tiles and your opponent plays all the good ones, but not as many as games are truly unwinnable. Most of the time, it comes down to making mistakes, of which I made a boatload in that particularly disastrous series of games. It was a choke.
We all make mistakes, and the people who make the fewest mistakes are generally the ones who win. As the competition level is raised and the margin for error grows smaller, the mistakes aren’t always as obvious. Either that, or they’re exacerbated because they look so stupid. Think of the dropped pass in football, or the missed layup in basketball, or the routine grounder that goes between the shortstop’s legs. You’re thought when you see that sort of thing is “what the hell is wrong with that guy?” Mistakes do come in all sizes.
But all competitions are about who makes the fewest mistakes, in the end. And I’ve come over the course of playing 9 years to accept the fact that rarely do I lose because of bad luck. Most of the time I lose because of my flurry of incompetence. And the last thing I wanted to have happen in New Orleans was to succumb to my own propensity for self-destruction. I wasn’t afraid of losing. I was afraid of choking.
So I tried some visualization techniques to try and relax, somewhere during my 2nd or 3rd shower on this morning. At first I just repeated to myself, over and over, “I’m going to win today.” I would sometimes even say it aloud, and I mumbled it a few times while wandering alone about the French Quarter in the early hours. “I’m going to win today ... I’m going to win today ... but what if I don’t ... NO! STOP THINKING LIKE THAT! I’m going to win today.” I tried to imagine what it would be like to actually win, what the moment would be like and how I would react. Tried to picture it in my mind. But it all felt like an artificial construct. And “I’m going to win today,” was soon replaced with, “don’t blow it.”
And since my mind has an innate aptitude and ability for conjuring up worst-case scenarios, I’m then thinking about what will happen when I go 0-4 on Monday in New Orleans and blow the tournament and finish completely out of the money entirely. It could happen, you know? I’m playing some of the best players in the world, after all. They know what the fuck they’re doing and me? Me? I’m just a hack. I’m the guy who throws all the parties and jokes and clowns around, who is popular with the other players and isn’t afraid to laugh at himself. But no one takes me that seriously as a competitive player, and why should they? I’m really not that good!
Welcome to the vortex that is my mind.
The games start at 9:30 a.m., and by 9:15 I am a complete mess. I’m so stressed out that I can feel a migraine headache coming on. At any moment, I expect to feel a twinge over my right eye which will then explode into a seering sort of pain which can sometimes render me near blind. My neck and my back are killing me, this dull and constant ache which never abates. So much for being free and easy in The Big Easy.
I’m going to win today ... I’m going to win ... Oh, fuck, but what if I lose? It’s going to be so disappointing, and I’m always coming up short and it will be just another one of those times where I wasn’t quite good enough. At least I’ll have a good story, because all tales of woe and failure ultimately seem funny over time ... just don’t choke, don’t blow it. Lose because Jesse draws the fucking bag on you, which he only does on days that end in the letter Y. But what if I go 0-4 and gag on it? Especially because of all of the people that are rooting for me ... wait ...
I’d been posting status updates on my facebook page, and the response from friends elsewhere to news that I was leading the tournament in New Orleans was somewhat overwhelming. I had over 100 different people liking my statuses, or commenting, or sending me private messages or emails or texts, all of which told me that they were cheering for me, that they were following along with the standings online, and that they were all hoping I would win. And I really took that to heart. So many different people had wished me well, had been excited to see me succeeding. And I realized then that the reason I was so worried about losing was that I didn’t want to let them down.
Which is silly, of course. None of these people were going to see me any differently whether I went 4-0 or 0-4 on the last day of a scrabble tournament. It wasn’t going to change their opinion of me. Regardless of the result, you have to wake up the next morning and go on with your life.
And some people claim that they don’t care what people think, that all that matters to them is fulfillment of their individual goals. They want to win and be on top above all else. Well, OK, but guess what. That isn’t me! I don’t want to be that cold, calculating, win-at-all costs persona. I don’t want to be that narrow. I throw great parties. I make people laugh. I space out and do stupidly maddening things while playing scrabble, the sorts of things Top 50 players in North America shouldn’t do, but then miraculously scramble and still manage to win a lot of games in spite of myself. That’s just me. It’s who I am. I’m a spaz and a flake and a goof.
And people like that about me. In the moment, winning the tournament would feel great and losing would be an enormous downer, but it wouldn’t fundamentally change the way that I am. Nope. I’m one of the Good Guys who wears the white hats, and not one result was going to change that. In the end, being one of the Good Guys is more important to me, and I took the 100+ well-wishes from a wide cross-section of people – from scrabble experts to people who’ve never actually played a game of scrabble in their lives – as a life affirmation.
And so, when I sat down at 9:20 a.m. to prep for my first game of the day, I wrote across the top of my scoresheet, “you’ve already won!”
And I didn’t win, in the end, as if it really mattered. I went 2-2 on the last day to finish 15-5 and I wound up in 3rd place. The games that I lost didn’t go my way. Of course, in the moment, I was pissed when it became clear I wasn’t going to win. Who wouldn’t be pissed? We’re competitors, damn it. The game is fun, but winning is even more fun. The hardest part of it was playing three of my four games vs. three of my better friends on the planet, all of us knowing what knocking each other off would mean. It’s better sometimes to have an unknown enemy to whom you can assign all sorts of negative qualities and attributes, make them into some sort of evil beast who must destroyed for the good of all humanity. We love to beat our friends, just not as much when there is something on the line.
I didn’t win and it bothered me and then my head exploded into a full-on migraine which made it extremely difficult to do anything other than crawl under the blankets in my hotel bed. But after a good 2½ hour nap, two huge platters of oystyrs and a couple Jack Daniels on the rocks, I was fine. It was all good. Win or lose, I was still in New Orleans with my girlfriend and a bunch of great friends of mine, playing a game we’re all really good at and having a great time. What’s not to like about that?
I’ll win one eventually. Or maybe I won’t. I don’t know. It really doesn’t bother me that much. And, of course, having had such a great tournament in New Orleans, I promptly played another tournament this past weekend as was godfuckingterrible, reverting to my wildly inconsistent form which has plagued me in scrabble and pretty much everything else for that matter. The tournament this past weekend was the Best of the Bay championship tournament, which is also an excuse to have a day-long dinner party. I’m all about the parties. We all won, because we all got to eat and eat a lot.
And I would rather see a friend of mine win, which is what happened in New Orleans. The Good Guys win! And as a footnote to that San Luis Obispo debacle I spoke of earlier, I may have choked in the individual event but it wasn’t all bad. It was a California team tournament, North v. South, and we clobbered those clownshoes from the South. And we made a point of celebrating afterwards at a seafood joint in nearby Pismo Beach:
Yeah, that tourney turned out pretty well, didn’t it? In play EAT!
Friday, January 25, 2013
Hero for the Week
The LOSE has needed a few days to recover from the vortex that was New Orleans, where there wasn't a whole lot of losing going on ... well, maybe apart from my dignity ... but there was just enough losing to make it noteworthy in this blog, and I will get to that here at some point this weekend.
But it's time for the Hero for the Week, and this week it is Anouk, who lives in Montréal and whose birthday is today. She is ... uh ... a number of years old. I don't remember.
Anouk is my hero of the week because she is my soul sister and fellow loon, and when I first met her we were both acting as if we were the biggest losers on earth, but we've both been winning ever since in one way or another, and she reminds me from time to time (and hopefully I remind her) that not only does being crazy not have to suck, but it's really the purest way you could ever hope to be. And who cares if other people think you're nutters? The joke will always be on them.
So here's to my Hero for the Week. Happy Birthday, Anouk, and were you here, I would have made you go to the grocery store with me just for old times' sake.
But it's time for the Hero for the Week, and this week it is Anouk, who lives in Montréal and whose birthday is today. She is ... uh ... a number of years old. I don't remember.
Anouk is my hero of the week because she is my soul sister and fellow loon, and when I first met her we were both acting as if we were the biggest losers on earth, but we've both been winning ever since in one way or another, and she reminds me from time to time (and hopefully I remind her) that not only does being crazy not have to suck, but it's really the purest way you could ever hope to be. And who cares if other people think you're nutters? The joke will always be on them.
So here's to my Hero for the Week. Happy Birthday, Anouk, and were you here, I would have made you go to the grocery store with me just for old times' sake.
Friday, January 18, 2013
Laissez les bon temps roulez!
In Play LOSE is headed to New Orleans for a few days, the original reason for this trip being to play some silly board game 20 times over. But this is a vacation, first and foremost, and the results of the actual games don't really matter all that much.
To guard against caring, myself and several others have reinstituted our Kangaroo Court, and we shall fine each other freely for any acts of whining, compaining, or excessive caring about scrabble. Whatever fines are collected with be spent on festive beverages at the end of the tourney.
I have no expectations for the tournament itself, not having played a long event since April of last year. My hope is that I've forgotten how terrible I am at this game. But if do something particularly dumb and loseblogworthy, it may appear on this blog. The subject of losing at this game is something I've become quite an expert about over the past 9 years.
I think I also need a Saints hat, always having had a soft spot in my heart for the Saints, the club having developed a reputation for being lovable losers in the first 30+ years of their existence.
Laissez les bon temps roulez! It's time for some fun. And a whole lot of liquor. I may lose at scrabble but I am going to win at life, although I may need some serious detox when this weekend is over ...
To guard against caring, myself and several others have reinstituted our Kangaroo Court, and we shall fine each other freely for any acts of whining, compaining, or excessive caring about scrabble. Whatever fines are collected with be spent on festive beverages at the end of the tourney.
I have no expectations for the tournament itself, not having played a long event since April of last year. My hope is that I've forgotten how terrible I am at this game. But if do something particularly dumb and loseblogworthy, it may appear on this blog. The subject of losing at this game is something I've become quite an expert about over the past 9 years.
I think I also need a Saints hat, always having had a soft spot in my heart for the Saints, the club having developed a reputation for being lovable losers in the first 30+ years of their existence.
Laissez les bon temps roulez! It's time for some fun. And a whole lot of liquor. I may lose at scrabble but I am going to win at life, although I may need some serious detox when this weekend is over ...
Wednesday, January 16, 2013
Like Falling Off a Bicycle
Having disavowed myself of watching the Seattle Seahawks during the Ken Behring reign of error, and come back around to loving the squad again in the past 15 years or so, I found that watching the Seahawks is sort of like falling off a bicycle. You never forget how much it hurts.
Last Sunday's game was the latest in a long line of frustrating, tormenting defeats. It looked more like a regular old disaster in the first half, when the time zone challenged Hawks looked half-asleep and found themselves down 20-0 to the Falcons in Atlanta. They'd fallen behind 14-0 to the Redskins the week before and then figured out RG3 was hurt and adjusted their game plan. Against Atlanta, the Seahawks again made the adjustment, coming to a stunning realization midway through the second quarter – the Falcons defense is TERRIBLE.
And once the second half began, and the coffee kicked in, the Seahawks commenced a remarkable comeback, with dazzling rookie QB Russell Wilson throwing for nearly 400 yards and taking advantage of Atlanta's seeming disinterest in covering a receiver. Not only were they moving the ball, they were gashing the Falcons 25 yards at a time.
Then it was 27-14 in the fourth quarter and the Falcons – who had used up almost the entire 3rd Quarter on a dominating previous scoring drive – completely came undone. First they abandon any good sense and try a stupid reverse that loses 5 yards, and then Ryan dumbly chucks a pass into double coverage that's intercepted. Four plays later it's 27-21 and the Falcons are in full panic mode.
And then the Seahawks get the ball back late on about their own 40 and what's the first thing that comes to mind?
"Don't score too soon!"
But it's hard to tackle someone with your hands around your own throat, and the Falcons can't stop anybody and the Seahawks are suddenly 55 yards down the field in a matter of seconds!
"Don't score too soon … don't score too soon … 12 men on the field on Atlanta! D'oh, that just moves it to the 1 and they'll score sooner and give the Falcons more time to respond! Damn it!"
I was hoping that I wouldn't have to prepare myself for disappointment. I didn't want to give the Falcons the ball with :31 remaining. I wanted them to have :00 remaining. Because if nothing else, the Seahawks always seem to find a way to bring losing to exceptional heights. Or depths, depending on how you look at it.
This is the team that has lost 3 playoff games in OT, and a 4th on a dropped pass in the end zone. In the most famous of these losses, vs. Green Bay, Hawks QB Matt Hasselback shouted "we want the ball and we're going to win!" into the ref's open mic during the coin toss. He then threw a pick six.
It was during a game with Green Bay this past season, in fact, that the Seahawks were the benificiaries of one of the WORST calls in NFL history, the so-called Fail Mary play that singlehandedly ended the NFL referees strike:
Terrible call. Just terrible. One of the worst in NFL history. Even a homer like me feels a bit unclean about that one.
The problem is that a lot of the WORST have happened to come against the Seahawks. In the Karmic scheme of things, the football gods owed them one. A blown call on an interception late in a game vs. the Houston Oilers cost them a win an a playoff spot way back in the first strike season in the early 1980s – so things have been going wrong for a long, long time. This is the team that has received 3 official apologies from the NFL for incompetent officiating – one for the refs failing to start the clock, allowing the Ravens enough time to drive the field and kick the tying FG; one for a back judge tackling an open receiver vs. the Rams, getting in the way and breaking up a sure TD pass.
And one for this:
Vinny Testaverde.
Notice how the ball is nowhere near the goal line. Sigh. This is the play that brought instant replay to the NFL. Of course it had to happen against the Seahawks.
And all I'm going to say at the moment about the officiating in the Super Bowl was that the league has essentially used the game tape as a textbook on how NOT to officiate at their referees seminars. Not that the Seahawks didn't contribute to their own demise in that game, of course, having come up with a foolproof strategy of repeatedly throwing to TE Jerramy Stevens, who was wide open all game and who repeatedly dropped the ball. And no one should be dumb enough to think the league had it "in" for the Seahawks or anything. Bad calls happen and sometimes they happen in spates. But unlike, say, the Raiders, who are paranoid and treat every call that goes against as an affront and a settling of an old score with Al Davis, Seahawk fans just sort of shrug and go "oh, not again."
Sometimes the franchise just seems cursed. Them and the Mariners both, to be honest – did they build the Kingdome on top of a Coastal burial ground or something? Nothing ultimately seems to go right for this franchise. They thought they hit it big when they won the lottery to sign Brian Bosworth in the 1980s, who turned out to be a bust. Uh, whoops. Then again, about 27 other teams wanted him as well, and would've been happy to land the Boz. And if he'd landed with the 49ers, he inevitably would've played for 10 years and won 4 Super Bowls.
They've had good teams miss the playoffs, even more talented teams underachieve and wind up 8-8. For one reason or another, they are never quite good enough. Sometimes it's due to their own foibles (John Madden once said in an MNF telecast "about the only thing the Seahawks are known for is dropping passes"), sometimes it's some bizarre decision by a Mr. Magoo wearing stripes. They've never won a Super Bowl but rarely bottom out. They're always in that range of teams which probably should be better than they are – and when they are verging on elite, like this season, some sort of disaster will inevitably fell them.
Not only do the Seahawks rarely, if ever seem to win the big game, but they can't even be terrible right.
I went to several games during the 1992 season, which featured a stout and stellar defense led by Hall of Fame DT Cortez Kennedy, who was the AFC Defensive Player of the Year. Tez was a terror and a joy to watch play. My favourite Tez moments would be on 3rd and short, when he would line up in the gap between the guard and center, stand up at the snap, put a hand on each of their shoulders and push both offensive lineman into the backfield, either snuffing the run play out all by himself or blowing a giant hole in the line to be filled by a stream of snarling linebackers. It was amazing to watch a guy who was that good at this game in his prime. They had a great defense that year, to be sure, one of the best in the league.
And the Seahawks went 2-14. The offense was among the worst ever, scoring 8.8 points a game. Their 3rd string QB Stan Gelbaugh started half the games, as the first two QB's had both been injured during a 27-0 debacle vs. the Dallas Cowboys. Football Outsiders has called them the most imbalanced team ever measured, with a championship-calibre defense and an offense that needed to be thrown in Lake Washington.
But in that wretched season, the Seahawks just so happened to beat the other 2-14 team in the league, which meant they had the #2 pick in the draft instead of #1. And the Seahawks drafted QB Rick Mirer, who had a good first year but who regressed quickly, his confidence shot after getting bashed repeatedly behind the sieve of an offensive line the Seahawks put forth.
And the #1 pick in that draft? Drew Bledsoe by the New England Patriots, whom I bet you can't even remember ever being a bad team, because four years later Bledsoe was playing in the Super Bowl and the Pats were at the dawn of their 20-year Golden Age which has seen them reach 6 Super Bowls.
(And don't worry, we'll get to Drew Bledsoe's alma mater here in the new future.)
Those were the dark times in Seahawks history. They were owned by Ken Behring, who had bought the franchise from the Nordstrom family and proceeded to run it into the ground. He up and moved the club to Anaheim at one point, held one practice in Orange County and was told by the league, the city of Seattle, and various court authorities to promptly get his ass back to the Pacific Northwest. The sale of the club to competent ownership (Paul Allen) who then hired competent coaches (Mike Holmgren), led to prosperity and wins and playoff births and a unique, new and gorgeous stadium,Qwest Some Dumb Phone Co. Century Link Field, which is the loudest in the league and packed by some of the zaniest, most loyal, most overcaffeinated fans in the world. Fans who get so excited that they force opponents to jump offside through the volume of their shrieks and whose reaction to this play actually registered on the Richter scale:
I just had to throw that in to make me feel better. Writing this post is making me depressed.
But while the Seahawks have played at a high standard for most of the past 15 years, they've not rid themselves of the tendency to lose in the most frustrating, discouraging, and heartbreaking of manners. Occasionally the Football Gods will give us fans the delight that is Tony Romo, but usually close games and seasons seem to wind up ending in the most agonizing of fashions.
And this game with the Falcons was no different. After the Seahawks score a TD to take a 28-27 lead, completing what would appear to be one of the most stunning comebacks in playoff history, there are :31 on the clock and the Falcons are on their own 28. Two quick passes, two timeouts, 49 yard FG with :08 left. Atlanta 30, Seattle 28.
Not again.
It was a crushing loss but the future looks bright. The Seahawks have one of the youngest teams in the NFL, have a star in the making at QB at Russell WIlson, a beast of an RB in Marshawn Lynch, 2 All-Pros on their line, the best secondary in football – they look like a burgeoning juggernaut, a force in the NFL for years to come. The only problem, of course, is that the other burgeoning juggernaut, by the looks of it, is in the same division – the San Francisco 49ers. Wouldn't that figure?
I do hope the 49ers beat the snot out of those poseurs from Atlanta. I've never seen an NFL team look so scared in my life as they were at the end of that game last week. Scared when they didn't need to be, because this was the Seahawks they were playing. Surely, it would somehow work out for the Falcons in the end, because for the opponents of the Seahawks, somehow it always does.
Last Sunday's game was the latest in a long line of frustrating, tormenting defeats. It looked more like a regular old disaster in the first half, when the time zone challenged Hawks looked half-asleep and found themselves down 20-0 to the Falcons in Atlanta. They'd fallen behind 14-0 to the Redskins the week before and then figured out RG3 was hurt and adjusted their game plan. Against Atlanta, the Seahawks again made the adjustment, coming to a stunning realization midway through the second quarter – the Falcons defense is TERRIBLE.
And once the second half began, and the coffee kicked in, the Seahawks commenced a remarkable comeback, with dazzling rookie QB Russell Wilson throwing for nearly 400 yards and taking advantage of Atlanta's seeming disinterest in covering a receiver. Not only were they moving the ball, they were gashing the Falcons 25 yards at a time.
Then it was 27-14 in the fourth quarter and the Falcons – who had used up almost the entire 3rd Quarter on a dominating previous scoring drive – completely came undone. First they abandon any good sense and try a stupid reverse that loses 5 yards, and then Ryan dumbly chucks a pass into double coverage that's intercepted. Four plays later it's 27-21 and the Falcons are in full panic mode.
And then the Seahawks get the ball back late on about their own 40 and what's the first thing that comes to mind?
"Don't score too soon!"
But it's hard to tackle someone with your hands around your own throat, and the Falcons can't stop anybody and the Seahawks are suddenly 55 yards down the field in a matter of seconds!
"Don't score too soon … don't score too soon … 12 men on the field on Atlanta! D'oh, that just moves it to the 1 and they'll score sooner and give the Falcons more time to respond! Damn it!"
I was hoping that I wouldn't have to prepare myself for disappointment. I didn't want to give the Falcons the ball with :31 remaining. I wanted them to have :00 remaining. Because if nothing else, the Seahawks always seem to find a way to bring losing to exceptional heights. Or depths, depending on how you look at it.
This is the team that has lost 3 playoff games in OT, and a 4th on a dropped pass in the end zone. In the most famous of these losses, vs. Green Bay, Hawks QB Matt Hasselback shouted "we want the ball and we're going to win!" into the ref's open mic during the coin toss. He then threw a pick six.
It was during a game with Green Bay this past season, in fact, that the Seahawks were the benificiaries of one of the WORST calls in NFL history, the so-called Fail Mary play that singlehandedly ended the NFL referees strike:
Terrible call. Just terrible. One of the worst in NFL history. Even a homer like me feels a bit unclean about that one.
The problem is that a lot of the WORST have happened to come against the Seahawks. In the Karmic scheme of things, the football gods owed them one. A blown call on an interception late in a game vs. the Houston Oilers cost them a win an a playoff spot way back in the first strike season in the early 1980s – so things have been going wrong for a long, long time. This is the team that has received 3 official apologies from the NFL for incompetent officiating – one for the refs failing to start the clock, allowing the Ravens enough time to drive the field and kick the tying FG; one for a back judge tackling an open receiver vs. the Rams, getting in the way and breaking up a sure TD pass.
And one for this:
Vinny Testaverde.
Notice how the ball is nowhere near the goal line. Sigh. This is the play that brought instant replay to the NFL. Of course it had to happen against the Seahawks.
And all I'm going to say at the moment about the officiating in the Super Bowl was that the league has essentially used the game tape as a textbook on how NOT to officiate at their referees seminars. Not that the Seahawks didn't contribute to their own demise in that game, of course, having come up with a foolproof strategy of repeatedly throwing to TE Jerramy Stevens, who was wide open all game and who repeatedly dropped the ball. And no one should be dumb enough to think the league had it "in" for the Seahawks or anything. Bad calls happen and sometimes they happen in spates. But unlike, say, the Raiders, who are paranoid and treat every call that goes against as an affront and a settling of an old score with Al Davis, Seahawk fans just sort of shrug and go "oh, not again."
Sometimes the franchise just seems cursed. Them and the Mariners both, to be honest – did they build the Kingdome on top of a Coastal burial ground or something? Nothing ultimately seems to go right for this franchise. They thought they hit it big when they won the lottery to sign Brian Bosworth in the 1980s, who turned out to be a bust. Uh, whoops. Then again, about 27 other teams wanted him as well, and would've been happy to land the Boz. And if he'd landed with the 49ers, he inevitably would've played for 10 years and won 4 Super Bowls.
They've had good teams miss the playoffs, even more talented teams underachieve and wind up 8-8. For one reason or another, they are never quite good enough. Sometimes it's due to their own foibles (John Madden once said in an MNF telecast "about the only thing the Seahawks are known for is dropping passes"), sometimes it's some bizarre decision by a Mr. Magoo wearing stripes. They've never won a Super Bowl but rarely bottom out. They're always in that range of teams which probably should be better than they are – and when they are verging on elite, like this season, some sort of disaster will inevitably fell them.
Not only do the Seahawks rarely, if ever seem to win the big game, but they can't even be terrible right.
I went to several games during the 1992 season, which featured a stout and stellar defense led by Hall of Fame DT Cortez Kennedy, who was the AFC Defensive Player of the Year. Tez was a terror and a joy to watch play. My favourite Tez moments would be on 3rd and short, when he would line up in the gap between the guard and center, stand up at the snap, put a hand on each of their shoulders and push both offensive lineman into the backfield, either snuffing the run play out all by himself or blowing a giant hole in the line to be filled by a stream of snarling linebackers. It was amazing to watch a guy who was that good at this game in his prime. They had a great defense that year, to be sure, one of the best in the league.
And the Seahawks went 2-14. The offense was among the worst ever, scoring 8.8 points a game. Their 3rd string QB Stan Gelbaugh started half the games, as the first two QB's had both been injured during a 27-0 debacle vs. the Dallas Cowboys. Football Outsiders has called them the most imbalanced team ever measured, with a championship-calibre defense and an offense that needed to be thrown in Lake Washington.
But in that wretched season, the Seahawks just so happened to beat the other 2-14 team in the league, which meant they had the #2 pick in the draft instead of #1. And the Seahawks drafted QB Rick Mirer, who had a good first year but who regressed quickly, his confidence shot after getting bashed repeatedly behind the sieve of an offensive line the Seahawks put forth.
And the #1 pick in that draft? Drew Bledsoe by the New England Patriots, whom I bet you can't even remember ever being a bad team, because four years later Bledsoe was playing in the Super Bowl and the Pats were at the dawn of their 20-year Golden Age which has seen them reach 6 Super Bowls.
(And don't worry, we'll get to Drew Bledsoe's alma mater here in the new future.)
Those were the dark times in Seahawks history. They were owned by Ken Behring, who had bought the franchise from the Nordstrom family and proceeded to run it into the ground. He up and moved the club to Anaheim at one point, held one practice in Orange County and was told by the league, the city of Seattle, and various court authorities to promptly get his ass back to the Pacific Northwest. The sale of the club to competent ownership (Paul Allen) who then hired competent coaches (Mike Holmgren), led to prosperity and wins and playoff births and a unique, new and gorgeous stadium,
I just had to throw that in to make me feel better. Writing this post is making me depressed.
But while the Seahawks have played at a high standard for most of the past 15 years, they've not rid themselves of the tendency to lose in the most frustrating, discouraging, and heartbreaking of manners. Occasionally the Football Gods will give us fans the delight that is Tony Romo, but usually close games and seasons seem to wind up ending in the most agonizing of fashions.
And this game with the Falcons was no different. After the Seahawks score a TD to take a 28-27 lead, completing what would appear to be one of the most stunning comebacks in playoff history, there are :31 on the clock and the Falcons are on their own 28. Two quick passes, two timeouts, 49 yard FG with :08 left. Atlanta 30, Seattle 28.
Not again.
It was a crushing loss but the future looks bright. The Seahawks have one of the youngest teams in the NFL, have a star in the making at QB at Russell WIlson, a beast of an RB in Marshawn Lynch, 2 All-Pros on their line, the best secondary in football – they look like a burgeoning juggernaut, a force in the NFL for years to come. The only problem, of course, is that the other burgeoning juggernaut, by the looks of it, is in the same division – the San Francisco 49ers. Wouldn't that figure?
I do hope the 49ers beat the snot out of those poseurs from Atlanta. I've never seen an NFL team look so scared in my life as they were at the end of that game last week. Scared when they didn't need to be, because this was the Seahawks they were playing. Surely, it would somehow work out for the Falcons in the end, because for the opponents of the Seahawks, somehow it always does.
Sunday, January 13, 2013
The Best Bad Idea We Have
I've not seen very many films this year, but I have to say that the list of Oscar nominees does not really impress me. Just not a lot of stuff I'm that interested in seeing. The only film up for Best Picture that I have seen – Argo – was a pretty good film and also contained the line of the year. A line which pretty much sums up a large swath of my existence, and pretty much fits in perfectly with this entire conceit of this blog:
My Hero for the Week
"Jesus was not a celebrity. Jesus was a hero."
That phrase was uttered by a priest during a midnight Christmas mass I attended in New Mexico. I am not religious, but had been invited by a friend to the service, and while some might find such statements to be trite, I took this particular one to heart. There are too many celebrities and not enough heroes in this world. Don't aspire to be the former. Strive to be the latter.
And thus I present my Hero for the Week, which probably won't be given out every week because I'll forget, but I like the sound of it. My Hero of the Week is a person who is losing at losing – that is to say, they aren't losing at all.
And my Hero for the Week is Kate, who is a musician here in San Francisco and whom I've known for 15 years. She has been fighting now for 7 of those years, fighting and fighting and sometimes I was afraid that she was going to lose. But Kate is also the toughest, most determined person I know.
This past week, Kate got the best news she's ever received from her doctors. She says she will never truly be in remission – but I know that just means she will have more chances to win. Kate doesn't like to lose and she isn't going to. She is going to keep winning and winning and winning some more.
And for that, Kate is my Hero for the Week. I strive to someday possess a similar strength.
That phrase was uttered by a priest during a midnight Christmas mass I attended in New Mexico. I am not religious, but had been invited by a friend to the service, and while some might find such statements to be trite, I took this particular one to heart. There are too many celebrities and not enough heroes in this world. Don't aspire to be the former. Strive to be the latter.
And thus I present my Hero for the Week, which probably won't be given out every week because I'll forget, but I like the sound of it. My Hero of the Week is a person who is losing at losing – that is to say, they aren't losing at all.
And my Hero for the Week is Kate, who is a musician here in San Francisco and whom I've known for 15 years. She has been fighting now for 7 of those years, fighting and fighting and sometimes I was afraid that she was going to lose. But Kate is also the toughest, most determined person I know.
This past week, Kate got the best news she's ever received from her doctors. She says she will never truly be in remission – but I know that just means she will have more chances to win. Kate doesn't like to lose and she isn't going to. She is going to keep winning and winning and winning some more.
And for that, Kate is my Hero for the Week. I strive to someday possess a similar strength.
Friday, January 11, 2013
That's Football
For the purposes of the international audience (yes, it exists), I should try to standardize some terminology that I use on this blog. I am generally going to use the word soccer to describe the world's favourite sport, so as to differentiate between the sport and the American version of football. I will, however, most likely refer to soccer players as footballers, simply because I like the term, and may occasionally use the term football in a context such as: "they played some of the most dreadful football I've ever seen in that 0:3 loss to Norwich City over the weekend."
I just wanted to clarify this from the beginning, so as to avoid as much confusion as possible. I will, of course, fail miserably at keeping to this style, beginning with the title of this post. Just roll with it. You'll figure out what I mean.
And yes, I mentioned Norwich City in that last sentence because the Canaries and my club of choice, having been indoctrinated into the Yellow Army during my time as a student in Great Britain. It would figure that I'm a fan of a club that's never really won much of anything in their history. On The Ball City! It's time to show those Magpies from Newcastle United who's at the top of the pecking order.
As I mentioned a few days ago in my praising of bad American football, the game of soccer possesses some unique and interesting nuances when it comes to losing. I love the game and always have. It doesn't have the same hold on the sport psyche of Americans that it does in many other countries, but soccer culture has always existed in this country, albeit in less obvious and apparent forms. The game does, however, have some basic premises which seem at odds with Americana.
For one thing, if you're going to understand soccer, you have to understand that the draw is generally considered an acceptable result. We hate draws in the U.S. All American games now have some semblance of an overtime involved. There must be a winner, even if it takes 18 innings and you've got leftfielders coming into pitch and pitchers with .100 lifetime batting averages hitting cleanup and playing 1st base by the end of the game, the two baseball teams having exhausted their benches and all good ideas in the process. (Indeed, the most memorable games of any marathon baseball season are usually the extra-inning games I just described, which turn surreal and comical after awhile as all logic and baseball orthodoxy fails to produce a winner.)
But in soccer, of course, draws are so common that teams often accrue nearly as many draws as they do wins and losses. It's part of the game and you have to accept as much. The solution for breaking ties in knockout situations – the dreaded penalty shootout – is a wretched and revolting construct done out of necessity but not really fitting with the aims of the game. In a knockout competition, there has to be a winner, and yet soccer is fundamentally a game in which there is often no winner at all. Much like life, in fact. I have always believed that our games are symbolic of our societal mentalities. Whereas American sports emphasize the necessity of winning, the game of soccer emphasizes the fact that winning isn't always possible, and that sometimes it's all you can do to get by and settle for a draw.
And the victories on the pitch, ultimately, are cause for jubilation as much out of exhaustion and a sense of relief as anything. This is because the game of soccer is SO DAMN FRUSTRATING! A simpleton complaint about soccer is that there is a lack of action, because no one ever scores. A simpleton counterargument is that you have to watch the buildup of the play, get a feel for how it develops. But neither argument really speaks to the essence of what's going on out on the pitch.
My first British footballing experience took place at the City Grounds in Nottingham, as my hosts thought some of us Americans should take in a unique European experience. The home side Forest were one of the top clubs in England at this time, and their opponents were a woful Charlton Athletic side known for a pulling a Houdini act every year and avoiding being relegated somehow but doing little of anything else.
So we are in the terrace, the standing room area behind the goal where all right-minded supporters should be, and my host Mark, questioning my knowledge of 'real football,' makes a suggestion along the lines of 'watch the development of the play.' Having only watched high level soccer on TV before this, it occurs to me immediately that there are two things the high TV camera angles distort: speed and space. Everyone is moving a lot faster than it appears on TV, and there is a whole lot less room to maneuver.
But I do what Mark suggests, and pay attention to the buildup, which goes something like this: the right back playing a little 1-touch with a midfielder, slipping into open space to get the return pass and playing it into space down the right side to a streaking winger, who engages the Charlton defender in a brief little game of cat-and-mouse, deking and juking before laying the ball off to an arriving midfielder in support. Forest have some of England's best players and their quick movement of the ball causes Charlton's defence to lose its shape. With the continued buildup comes enthusiasm that builds, rises, an excitement gathering among the 30,000 or so in the stands at the City Grounds. The midfielder looks for a target in the box but the defender sloughs off, giving him space and a clear shot on the target and … no goal. And the crowd lets out a collective groan at the missed opportunity, declaring the midfielder to be rubbish and recommending that they send that duffer of a winger back to Mansfield Town or some other Div. 3 club – only to be engaged again as the next buildup commences, soon to be let down by the failure of the attack.
Now take that sequence I just described and run it about 10-11 times and you've got your typical soccer match.
There is always buildup, development, genesis of ideas, and yet the goal never comes. The cross if off target, the keeper makes the save, the offsides flag goes up, the official randomly calls a foul on no one in particular on the attacking side which makes no sense at all. The goal never comes. I always find it curious when the astute and erudite British commentators say "a bit of a surprise, really, that a player of such quality could squander such a chance," because I've been watching the game for 30+ years and that is what always happens. The goal never comes. The fans are collectively, constantly disappointed as one failed opportunity follows another, and are collectively and constantly angsty/nervous/agitated/terrified when the opponents have the ball that this next opposition attack will be that one time that their defence collapses – which never happens either, because the goal never comes.
It's a promethean sort of endeavour, soccer. A constant effort to do the impossible. The game is fundamentally frustrating and somewhat fatalistic, even, a quixotic attempt at the impossible which is rarely rewarded. Very often, one team will dominate possession of the ball and have a huge advantage in shots, and yet the game ends in a 0:0 draw. Or, worse, a 1:0 defeat. A defeat that seems wholly undeserved, given that the team which had such control ends up taking the loss. But "that's football," as players/coaches/fans are quick to say in such a circumstance, usually with a shrug. The game, like life, isn't fair.
But when the goal does come, well …
After several failed attacks on the Charlton goal in this particular game at the City Grounds, Forest's enterprising right back decides to take matters into his own hands, bringing the ball forward into open space and blasting a worm-killer of a shot that skids along the grass, finds its way between the defenders and eludes the surprised Charlton keeper. A perfect strike into the bottom right corner of the net which sends the fans into a WAVE OF EXULTATION, the joy and delirium flowing as freely as the beer at the pub before the match. It's an ecstatic, electric moment expressing delight, relief – and surprise, really, because someone actually scored a damn goal!
Given that it's so damn hard to score, given that picking up points in the standings is paramount, and given that the draw is a legitimate result in soccer, what then happens quite a bit, of course, is teams make little or no effort at all to win the game. Just hang back, try to ride the wave for 90 minutes, get the draw and pick up a point in the standings. The notion of playing for a draw drives Americans crazy. On arguably the greatest stage American soccer has ever seen – a round of 16 match with Brazil in the 1994 World Cup, played at Stanford on the 4th of July, no less – the Americans played for a 0:0 draw throughout, with hopes of ultimately forcing the lottery that is a penalty shootout, rarely making any real motions to attack even after the Brazilians were reduced to 10 men. It was a befuddling spectacle that seemed somewhat to defy the American spirit: how could you not try to win? Coach Bora would've argued, of course, that standing toe-to-toe and trying to attack the Brazilians would've resulted in a humbling defeat, as the American couldn't match the Brazilians skill. And indeed, the 10-man Brazilians ultimately unlocked the rigid American defense and scored for a 1:0 victory, so even the defensive strategy failed to pay off. But it seemed almost like the WRONG way to lose. Wouldn't if have been better to go down in a blaze of glory?
Of course it wouldn't. Because what difference does it make how you lose? Losing is losing. Losing pretty and losing ugly yield the same result – you go home unhappy. And winning ugly or forcing a 0:0 draw is, ultimately, a better result than losing pretty.
The act of goal scoring in soccer is often spectacular, given how it often takes a spectacular play to produce such results. Savvy soccer sides the world over, of course, long ago figured out their best chance to win involved creating the freest opportunities to score – penalties first and foremost, and also set pieces – and the best way to do that is influence the haggard, overworked referee, who is attempting to single-handedly police 22 guys on a field the size of an acre, and who simply cannot see everything. Hence the culture of diving, of flopping, of constantly politicking and arguing with the officials. Guys get dispossessed of the ball and collapse in a heap as if they've been struck by sniper fire, flop around like fish strewn atop a dock. Always arguing, baiting, courting favour from the official. It is gamesmanship, it is unsporting – and it works. It works often enough that everyone's started doing it. And why not? Some stout defending combined with a timely free kick – or, even better, a penalty earned with a flop in the box – can translate into a 1:0 win. And winning is all that matters, after all.
And like I say, soccer is chalk full of games where what would clearly be construed as the "better" team doesn't ultimately prevail. The flow of play often does not translate into logical results. Life on the pitch is not always as it seems. But it happens to every team, eventually. You just hope it doesn't happen in a particularly important game. "That's football" and that's how it goes. There are very few instances in American games where a similar situation arises. Often times, teams in American football dominate the stat sheet but come up short on the scoreboard, but a lot of the time it's due to self-inflicted wounds – penalties, turnovers, a sloppy play on special teams. There is a much greater sense of cause and effect in America.
Or so it would seem.
We are a society that has always stressed the notion of competition in our economics and commerce, but it's always been abundantly clear to me that businesses HATE competing, because it implies a possibility of failure. People, and businesses and government institutions, ultimately love winning. The idea of "playing fair" is just as much rubbish as that midfielder who couldn't hit the target with his shot. A lot of people conclude that the best way to beat the system is to game it. As long as there have been competitions of any sort – games, sports, contests, you name it – there have been people trying to cheat. The cause and effect, therefore, isn't always so clear cut. There are plenty of ways to go about gaining a competitive advantage that blur the lines between legal and illegal, if not just completely ignoring them altogether.
So, really, is diving on the football pitch any different? If anything, in that light, it seems somewhat resourceful and clever, as much as it may seem to run counter to the 'spirit' of the game. (That, and it's unsightly. C'mon guys, take some acting lessons.)
Losing is still losing, no matter the nation or the arena. In America, you're taught to believe that you can through self-improvement and the cutting down on mistakes. But in soccer, sometimes that doesn't matter. Sometimes you simply cannot win, no matter what you do, so you're best settling for a 0:0 draw, as unpleasant as it may turn out to be. You have to redefine success, and also redefine failure. The 1:1 draw where you gamely hold on with 10-men can feel like triumph, and sometimes the 0:0 draw where your offense couldn't hit the side of a barn feels like the most painful of losses.
No diving or dubious tactics on the part of Notts Forest was necessary at my first English soccer match – they added a second goal while Charlton's meek attacks were easily parried, resulting in a relatively easy 2:0 win for the home side. And while I appreciated seeing that outstanding Forest side (which I think finished 3rd that year in the English Div. 1), my love and appreciation for the game was elevated – and my loyalty forever cemented – with repeated visits to Carrow Road, the home ground of the Canaries of Norwich City F.C. I knew then I would be destined to love the Yellows forever.
And it was at Carrow Road that I not only rid myself of the American loathing of the draw, I actually came to appreciate its occasional benefit to society. I went to a game between the Canaries and Liverpool that year. Liverpool were the biggest, baddest dudes on the block, the best team in England. But our side had talent (3-4 guys wound up on World Cup rosters), tenacity (a trademark of Norwich football over the years), and also didn't take any shit from anyone (witness a 21-player brawl v. Arsenal earlier in the year). It was promising to be a combative and electrifying match. Liverpool brought a healthy number of supporters with them, and their fans had a rather dubious reputation at the time (not entirely deserved, I might add, but that's another story for another time). It was an intense atmosphere, electric and combative. There were extra police in case of any trouble, and a feisty spirit in the air at Carrow Road. The fans of both sides, at first glance, seemed ready for a fight.
And it ended 0:0. Nothing happened. And everyone went home. The only people happy were the local authorities, who didn't need to quell any riots, as any potential combatants had essentially been neutered by boredom. I recall overhearing a pair of red-clad fans talking as I was leaving the grounds, and one of them said, "well, gee, that was a dreadfully dull affair, now wasn't it?"
I just wanted to clarify this from the beginning, so as to avoid as much confusion as possible. I will, of course, fail miserably at keeping to this style, beginning with the title of this post. Just roll with it. You'll figure out what I mean.
And yes, I mentioned Norwich City in that last sentence because the Canaries and my club of choice, having been indoctrinated into the Yellow Army during my time as a student in Great Britain. It would figure that I'm a fan of a club that's never really won much of anything in their history. On The Ball City! It's time to show those Magpies from Newcastle United who's at the top of the pecking order.
As I mentioned a few days ago in my praising of bad American football, the game of soccer possesses some unique and interesting nuances when it comes to losing. I love the game and always have. It doesn't have the same hold on the sport psyche of Americans that it does in many other countries, but soccer culture has always existed in this country, albeit in less obvious and apparent forms. The game does, however, have some basic premises which seem at odds with Americana.
For one thing, if you're going to understand soccer, you have to understand that the draw is generally considered an acceptable result. We hate draws in the U.S. All American games now have some semblance of an overtime involved. There must be a winner, even if it takes 18 innings and you've got leftfielders coming into pitch and pitchers with .100 lifetime batting averages hitting cleanup and playing 1st base by the end of the game, the two baseball teams having exhausted their benches and all good ideas in the process. (Indeed, the most memorable games of any marathon baseball season are usually the extra-inning games I just described, which turn surreal and comical after awhile as all logic and baseball orthodoxy fails to produce a winner.)
But in soccer, of course, draws are so common that teams often accrue nearly as many draws as they do wins and losses. It's part of the game and you have to accept as much. The solution for breaking ties in knockout situations – the dreaded penalty shootout – is a wretched and revolting construct done out of necessity but not really fitting with the aims of the game. In a knockout competition, there has to be a winner, and yet soccer is fundamentally a game in which there is often no winner at all. Much like life, in fact. I have always believed that our games are symbolic of our societal mentalities. Whereas American sports emphasize the necessity of winning, the game of soccer emphasizes the fact that winning isn't always possible, and that sometimes it's all you can do to get by and settle for a draw.
And the victories on the pitch, ultimately, are cause for jubilation as much out of exhaustion and a sense of relief as anything. This is because the game of soccer is SO DAMN FRUSTRATING! A simpleton complaint about soccer is that there is a lack of action, because no one ever scores. A simpleton counterargument is that you have to watch the buildup of the play, get a feel for how it develops. But neither argument really speaks to the essence of what's going on out on the pitch.
My first British footballing experience took place at the City Grounds in Nottingham, as my hosts thought some of us Americans should take in a unique European experience. The home side Forest were one of the top clubs in England at this time, and their opponents were a woful Charlton Athletic side known for a pulling a Houdini act every year and avoiding being relegated somehow but doing little of anything else.
So we are in the terrace, the standing room area behind the goal where all right-minded supporters should be, and my host Mark, questioning my knowledge of 'real football,' makes a suggestion along the lines of 'watch the development of the play.' Having only watched high level soccer on TV before this, it occurs to me immediately that there are two things the high TV camera angles distort: speed and space. Everyone is moving a lot faster than it appears on TV, and there is a whole lot less room to maneuver.
But I do what Mark suggests, and pay attention to the buildup, which goes something like this: the right back playing a little 1-touch with a midfielder, slipping into open space to get the return pass and playing it into space down the right side to a streaking winger, who engages the Charlton defender in a brief little game of cat-and-mouse, deking and juking before laying the ball off to an arriving midfielder in support. Forest have some of England's best players and their quick movement of the ball causes Charlton's defence to lose its shape. With the continued buildup comes enthusiasm that builds, rises, an excitement gathering among the 30,000 or so in the stands at the City Grounds. The midfielder looks for a target in the box but the defender sloughs off, giving him space and a clear shot on the target and … no goal. And the crowd lets out a collective groan at the missed opportunity, declaring the midfielder to be rubbish and recommending that they send that duffer of a winger back to Mansfield Town or some other Div. 3 club – only to be engaged again as the next buildup commences, soon to be let down by the failure of the attack.
Now take that sequence I just described and run it about 10-11 times and you've got your typical soccer match.
There is always buildup, development, genesis of ideas, and yet the goal never comes. The cross if off target, the keeper makes the save, the offsides flag goes up, the official randomly calls a foul on no one in particular on the attacking side which makes no sense at all. The goal never comes. I always find it curious when the astute and erudite British commentators say "a bit of a surprise, really, that a player of such quality could squander such a chance," because I've been watching the game for 30+ years and that is what always happens. The goal never comes. The fans are collectively, constantly disappointed as one failed opportunity follows another, and are collectively and constantly angsty/nervous/agitated/terrified when the opponents have the ball that this next opposition attack will be that one time that their defence collapses – which never happens either, because the goal never comes.
It's a promethean sort of endeavour, soccer. A constant effort to do the impossible. The game is fundamentally frustrating and somewhat fatalistic, even, a quixotic attempt at the impossible which is rarely rewarded. Very often, one team will dominate possession of the ball and have a huge advantage in shots, and yet the game ends in a 0:0 draw. Or, worse, a 1:0 defeat. A defeat that seems wholly undeserved, given that the team which had such control ends up taking the loss. But "that's football," as players/coaches/fans are quick to say in such a circumstance, usually with a shrug. The game, like life, isn't fair.
But when the goal does come, well …
After several failed attacks on the Charlton goal in this particular game at the City Grounds, Forest's enterprising right back decides to take matters into his own hands, bringing the ball forward into open space and blasting a worm-killer of a shot that skids along the grass, finds its way between the defenders and eludes the surprised Charlton keeper. A perfect strike into the bottom right corner of the net which sends the fans into a WAVE OF EXULTATION, the joy and delirium flowing as freely as the beer at the pub before the match. It's an ecstatic, electric moment expressing delight, relief – and surprise, really, because someone actually scored a damn goal!
Given that it's so damn hard to score, given that picking up points in the standings is paramount, and given that the draw is a legitimate result in soccer, what then happens quite a bit, of course, is teams make little or no effort at all to win the game. Just hang back, try to ride the wave for 90 minutes, get the draw and pick up a point in the standings. The notion of playing for a draw drives Americans crazy. On arguably the greatest stage American soccer has ever seen – a round of 16 match with Brazil in the 1994 World Cup, played at Stanford on the 4th of July, no less – the Americans played for a 0:0 draw throughout, with hopes of ultimately forcing the lottery that is a penalty shootout, rarely making any real motions to attack even after the Brazilians were reduced to 10 men. It was a befuddling spectacle that seemed somewhat to defy the American spirit: how could you not try to win? Coach Bora would've argued, of course, that standing toe-to-toe and trying to attack the Brazilians would've resulted in a humbling defeat, as the American couldn't match the Brazilians skill. And indeed, the 10-man Brazilians ultimately unlocked the rigid American defense and scored for a 1:0 victory, so even the defensive strategy failed to pay off. But it seemed almost like the WRONG way to lose. Wouldn't if have been better to go down in a blaze of glory?
Of course it wouldn't. Because what difference does it make how you lose? Losing is losing. Losing pretty and losing ugly yield the same result – you go home unhappy. And winning ugly or forcing a 0:0 draw is, ultimately, a better result than losing pretty.
The act of goal scoring in soccer is often spectacular, given how it often takes a spectacular play to produce such results. Savvy soccer sides the world over, of course, long ago figured out their best chance to win involved creating the freest opportunities to score – penalties first and foremost, and also set pieces – and the best way to do that is influence the haggard, overworked referee, who is attempting to single-handedly police 22 guys on a field the size of an acre, and who simply cannot see everything. Hence the culture of diving, of flopping, of constantly politicking and arguing with the officials. Guys get dispossessed of the ball and collapse in a heap as if they've been struck by sniper fire, flop around like fish strewn atop a dock. Always arguing, baiting, courting favour from the official. It is gamesmanship, it is unsporting – and it works. It works often enough that everyone's started doing it. And why not? Some stout defending combined with a timely free kick – or, even better, a penalty earned with a flop in the box – can translate into a 1:0 win. And winning is all that matters, after all.
And like I say, soccer is chalk full of games where what would clearly be construed as the "better" team doesn't ultimately prevail. The flow of play often does not translate into logical results. Life on the pitch is not always as it seems. But it happens to every team, eventually. You just hope it doesn't happen in a particularly important game. "That's football" and that's how it goes. There are very few instances in American games where a similar situation arises. Often times, teams in American football dominate the stat sheet but come up short on the scoreboard, but a lot of the time it's due to self-inflicted wounds – penalties, turnovers, a sloppy play on special teams. There is a much greater sense of cause and effect in America.
Or so it would seem.
We are a society that has always stressed the notion of competition in our economics and commerce, but it's always been abundantly clear to me that businesses HATE competing, because it implies a possibility of failure. People, and businesses and government institutions, ultimately love winning. The idea of "playing fair" is just as much rubbish as that midfielder who couldn't hit the target with his shot. A lot of people conclude that the best way to beat the system is to game it. As long as there have been competitions of any sort – games, sports, contests, you name it – there have been people trying to cheat. The cause and effect, therefore, isn't always so clear cut. There are plenty of ways to go about gaining a competitive advantage that blur the lines between legal and illegal, if not just completely ignoring them altogether.
So, really, is diving on the football pitch any different? If anything, in that light, it seems somewhat resourceful and clever, as much as it may seem to run counter to the 'spirit' of the game. (That, and it's unsightly. C'mon guys, take some acting lessons.)
Losing is still losing, no matter the nation or the arena. In America, you're taught to believe that you can through self-improvement and the cutting down on mistakes. But in soccer, sometimes that doesn't matter. Sometimes you simply cannot win, no matter what you do, so you're best settling for a 0:0 draw, as unpleasant as it may turn out to be. You have to redefine success, and also redefine failure. The 1:1 draw where you gamely hold on with 10-men can feel like triumph, and sometimes the 0:0 draw where your offense couldn't hit the side of a barn feels like the most painful of losses.
No diving or dubious tactics on the part of Notts Forest was necessary at my first English soccer match – they added a second goal while Charlton's meek attacks were easily parried, resulting in a relatively easy 2:0 win for the home side. And while I appreciated seeing that outstanding Forest side (which I think finished 3rd that year in the English Div. 1), my love and appreciation for the game was elevated – and my loyalty forever cemented – with repeated visits to Carrow Road, the home ground of the Canaries of Norwich City F.C. I knew then I would be destined to love the Yellows forever.
And it was at Carrow Road that I not only rid myself of the American loathing of the draw, I actually came to appreciate its occasional benefit to society. I went to a game between the Canaries and Liverpool that year. Liverpool were the biggest, baddest dudes on the block, the best team in England. But our side had talent (3-4 guys wound up on World Cup rosters), tenacity (a trademark of Norwich football over the years), and also didn't take any shit from anyone (witness a 21-player brawl v. Arsenal earlier in the year). It was promising to be a combative and electrifying match. Liverpool brought a healthy number of supporters with them, and their fans had a rather dubious reputation at the time (not entirely deserved, I might add, but that's another story for another time). It was an intense atmosphere, electric and combative. There were extra police in case of any trouble, and a feisty spirit in the air at Carrow Road. The fans of both sides, at first glance, seemed ready for a fight.
And it ended 0:0. Nothing happened. And everyone went home. The only people happy were the local authorities, who didn't need to quell any riots, as any potential combatants had essentially been neutered by boredom. I recall overhearing a pair of red-clad fans talking as I was leaving the grounds, and one of them said, "well, gee, that was a dreadfully dull affair, now wasn't it?"
Tuesday, January 8, 2013
Walking Wounded
I took great pleasure in watching the Seahawks triumph on Sunday afternoon, of course, as they felled the Redskins at FedEx Field in Washington. Although calling that bog painted green a "field" is disingenuous. Seriously, Mr. Snyder, spend some money. You own one of the most valuable franchises in all of professional sports. The least you can do is give your team a quality playing surface.
It's unclear whether the horrid field conditions contributed to the terrible (re)injury of Redskins wünderkind QB Robert Griffin III at the end of the game, but watching that play – where his right knee hyperextended and he crumpled into the mud – left me aghast. It was disastrous for him, for his team, for the sport at which he excels and is expected to carry on his shoulders for the next decade. He possesses a stunning skillset and a dynamic personality to match his dynamic game. Even as a rookie, it is clear that RG3 is one of the league's brightest stars. His descent from the heavens back into the world of mere mortals was shocking and humbling to see. It's hard enough to watch that as a passive spectator, seeing an athlete as superior as him collapse like that. But for someone like myself, who had my love of playing a sport and competing essentially ended in a split second, images like that have a tendency to give me flashbacks. You can call it an athlete's version of PTSD.
RG3 was playing hurt, of course, and there were questions after the game hurled towards Redskins coach Mike Shanahan as to why he left RG3 in the game, when it was clear his mobility was limited and that his already troublesome right knee was only getting worse. The answer to this question, of course, is nuanced and coloured in shades of grey. The only black and white, in the end, is the result on the scoreboard which showed Seattle 24, Washington 14.
It can be debated whether or not Shanahan should've left him out there – personally, I thought he shouldn't – as the game progressed and it became clear that a) RG3 couldn't play to his usual level, and b) The Seahawks knew this and were taking over the game because of it. He made the same mistake that a lot of coaches do in this instance – he asked RG3, and RG3 insisted he could keep playing. And that, of course, is what a competitor is ALWAYS going to say. (Well, OK, maybe not always – Jay Cutler pulled himself out of a playoff game for the Chicago Bears and was labeled things like a coward and a quitter, even though it was later revealed he had a knee injury more serious than first thought.) But that's what a competitor's instincts are going to lead them to say. The objective is to win the game, after all. That's all that matters in the moment. You can go on being hurt after the game is over. You'll have time between this game and the next to heal up.
I know that my first thought, after my ankle gave way, was "I'll just walk it off."
I had started off the game by grabbing the opening tip, driving to the basket and dunking it, and our hapless opponents' ensuing possession resulted in a turnover. Our center sprung me on the fast break with a perfect outlet pass and I was driving to the basket for yet another dunk when I planted my right foot and my ankle twisted to the right. I jumped straight up anyway, and landed on a trailing defender's foot, and my compromised right ankle then twisted to the left. It was a split second in time, the whole motion, after which I collapsed onto the court much as RG3 collapsed into the mud.
I got helped to the bench but I refused to sit down, attempting to put weight on my right foot, figuring that it was just a sprain and that I would be back in the game in a matter of minutes. I would be OK. It hurt, but I could walk it off. There were far more important issues at hand, like winning a basketball game.
This was nonsense thinking, of course. After being persuaded to sit down, one of the guys ran to the locker room and returned with a trashcan filled with ice water. I wanted no part in icing my foot, and it was only when I pried the shoe off that reality started to sink in – with the rapid swelling in my ankle engulfing my whole foot, it looked less like a foot and more like an American football.
This happened in November 1989. I was 20 years old, and on a study abroad program in Great Britain. In that split second of time, I broke my right ankle in a basketball game. And saying I "broke" my ankle is sort of a simple way of putting it – I broke bones, tore ligaments, and also cracked the tendon that operates the joint. It was a complex injury which a variety of factors, an injury that surpassed the ability of the G.P.'s at the local hospital to diagnose and treat it. They were not incompetent, mind you. They did their best with the information that was available to them. But they didn't have the sort of technology available to them, like an MRI, to make such a diagnosis. They could see a bone break on an X-ray so they put a cast on my foot and I limped around Europe with a cane and a below-knee walker during my Christmas vacation. It was only when, a couple months later, I went to an appointment with an astute and savvy physical therapist, who jiggled my newly uncased ankle about for a few moments and listened to various crackles and pops and said "Oh dear. This is not good at all."
I'm paraphrasing a bit here, since I don't really understand medical stuff all that well, but essentially what had happened is that while treating the broken bone through immobilizing the ankle was a good idea, the real problem was the damn tendon, which had cracked and then calcified over. This meant it was extremely weak and susceptible to reinjury. (My right ankle is now also visibly wider than my left if you look at them.) The physio said to me at the time, "you will heal up reasonably well in the short-term. In time, of course – 15-20 years from now – you may start to have some larger problems …"
And 20+ years later, I can't run.
My right ankle is so weak that I've reinjured it stepping off a curb. The last time I tried to stand up when my foot fell asleep, I stepped on the castor of a chair and wound up in the emergency room, very legitimately afraid that i had rebroken it. My balance is completely shot because my ankle cannot function properly – if I attempt to ice skate or rollerblade, I almost immediately fall over. And over time, of course, I changed my gait, so now I have a variety of problems with my right foot and right knee. And my ankle aches anytime I overdo it – today "overdoing" it meant walking 4-5 miles. It's a constant reminder of one moment in time more than 20 years ago which has done more to realter the course of my life than any other particular moment.
And playing basketball again after that was pretty much out of the question. I was a late bloomer, had developed a love of the game and had gotten suddenly, surprisingly, insanely good at it after years of frustration, but I no longer had the sort of power and agility. Before the injury, I had a monstrous vertical leap. Afterwards, I could barely jump over the phone book. I mean, I could've carried on and goofed around on the court every now and then, but once I realized that I couldn't do the sorts of things I had been able to do before, it didn't seem worth it to continue.
Well, I could've had a gigantic, after-the-fact surgical procedure that was nasty and costly and would've meant months of rehab, and it didn't seem worth it to me to go through all of that. In retrospect, maybe I should've done so. But any time a surgeon starts off by saying "first we have to rebreak …" it's never a good sign.
All of this came up for me again in an instant, watching the end of the Seahawks-Redskins game. I hate seeing serious injuries. They elicit a visceral reaction, a cringe after which many of the details from the moment I broke my ankle return to my conscience and become crystal clear to me once again. And while I think Shanahan should've taken RG3 out much earlier in the game, when his knee clearly began to hamper his play, I know that I wouldn't have wanted out. I would've wanted to play, to try to win. Because that's what athletes do. That's what competing is all about. You give all that you can to achieve the goal.
Injuries are a part of sports, of course, and something anyone who participates in athletics ultimately loses at is having a healthy and fully-functioning body. Almost every competitor gives it up, eventually, when being hurt all the time takes away their ability to participate at the level they want to attain or achieve, and it's likely they'll feel the effects of it for the rest of their lives. (And it's not just competitive athletes, mind you – I've known professional dancers who've had more knee surgeries than offensive linemen.) Nasty, nasty injuries. But at the time, you don't actually THINK it will happen to you. If you did, then why would you ever play in the first place?
And I don't regret playing basketball and getting hurt and not being able to run 20+ years later. I regret that I got hurt and was no longer able to play, because I loved to play. And since I'd come late to really enjoying the game of basketball, and had just begun to truly embrace it as my own at the time, it was as if it had been stolen from me. I've really missed it.
Then again, if I hadn't broken my ankle, then, well, who knows? I probably would've just broken a wrist or dislocated an elbow or something. Oh, wait, I did dislocate my elbow. Never mind …
It's unclear whether the horrid field conditions contributed to the terrible (re)injury of Redskins wünderkind QB Robert Griffin III at the end of the game, but watching that play – where his right knee hyperextended and he crumpled into the mud – left me aghast. It was disastrous for him, for his team, for the sport at which he excels and is expected to carry on his shoulders for the next decade. He possesses a stunning skillset and a dynamic personality to match his dynamic game. Even as a rookie, it is clear that RG3 is one of the league's brightest stars. His descent from the heavens back into the world of mere mortals was shocking and humbling to see. It's hard enough to watch that as a passive spectator, seeing an athlete as superior as him collapse like that. But for someone like myself, who had my love of playing a sport and competing essentially ended in a split second, images like that have a tendency to give me flashbacks. You can call it an athlete's version of PTSD.
RG3 was playing hurt, of course, and there were questions after the game hurled towards Redskins coach Mike Shanahan as to why he left RG3 in the game, when it was clear his mobility was limited and that his already troublesome right knee was only getting worse. The answer to this question, of course, is nuanced and coloured in shades of grey. The only black and white, in the end, is the result on the scoreboard which showed Seattle 24, Washington 14.
It can be debated whether or not Shanahan should've left him out there – personally, I thought he shouldn't – as the game progressed and it became clear that a) RG3 couldn't play to his usual level, and b) The Seahawks knew this and were taking over the game because of it. He made the same mistake that a lot of coaches do in this instance – he asked RG3, and RG3 insisted he could keep playing. And that, of course, is what a competitor is ALWAYS going to say. (Well, OK, maybe not always – Jay Cutler pulled himself out of a playoff game for the Chicago Bears and was labeled things like a coward and a quitter, even though it was later revealed he had a knee injury more serious than first thought.) But that's what a competitor's instincts are going to lead them to say. The objective is to win the game, after all. That's all that matters in the moment. You can go on being hurt after the game is over. You'll have time between this game and the next to heal up.
I know that my first thought, after my ankle gave way, was "I'll just walk it off."
I had started off the game by grabbing the opening tip, driving to the basket and dunking it, and our hapless opponents' ensuing possession resulted in a turnover. Our center sprung me on the fast break with a perfect outlet pass and I was driving to the basket for yet another dunk when I planted my right foot and my ankle twisted to the right. I jumped straight up anyway, and landed on a trailing defender's foot, and my compromised right ankle then twisted to the left. It was a split second in time, the whole motion, after which I collapsed onto the court much as RG3 collapsed into the mud.
I got helped to the bench but I refused to sit down, attempting to put weight on my right foot, figuring that it was just a sprain and that I would be back in the game in a matter of minutes. I would be OK. It hurt, but I could walk it off. There were far more important issues at hand, like winning a basketball game.
This was nonsense thinking, of course. After being persuaded to sit down, one of the guys ran to the locker room and returned with a trashcan filled with ice water. I wanted no part in icing my foot, and it was only when I pried the shoe off that reality started to sink in – with the rapid swelling in my ankle engulfing my whole foot, it looked less like a foot and more like an American football.
This happened in November 1989. I was 20 years old, and on a study abroad program in Great Britain. In that split second of time, I broke my right ankle in a basketball game. And saying I "broke" my ankle is sort of a simple way of putting it – I broke bones, tore ligaments, and also cracked the tendon that operates the joint. It was a complex injury which a variety of factors, an injury that surpassed the ability of the G.P.'s at the local hospital to diagnose and treat it. They were not incompetent, mind you. They did their best with the information that was available to them. But they didn't have the sort of technology available to them, like an MRI, to make such a diagnosis. They could see a bone break on an X-ray so they put a cast on my foot and I limped around Europe with a cane and a below-knee walker during my Christmas vacation. It was only when, a couple months later, I went to an appointment with an astute and savvy physical therapist, who jiggled my newly uncased ankle about for a few moments and listened to various crackles and pops and said "Oh dear. This is not good at all."
I'm paraphrasing a bit here, since I don't really understand medical stuff all that well, but essentially what had happened is that while treating the broken bone through immobilizing the ankle was a good idea, the real problem was the damn tendon, which had cracked and then calcified over. This meant it was extremely weak and susceptible to reinjury. (My right ankle is now also visibly wider than my left if you look at them.) The physio said to me at the time, "you will heal up reasonably well in the short-term. In time, of course – 15-20 years from now – you may start to have some larger problems …"
And 20+ years later, I can't run.
My right ankle is so weak that I've reinjured it stepping off a curb. The last time I tried to stand up when my foot fell asleep, I stepped on the castor of a chair and wound up in the emergency room, very legitimately afraid that i had rebroken it. My balance is completely shot because my ankle cannot function properly – if I attempt to ice skate or rollerblade, I almost immediately fall over. And over time, of course, I changed my gait, so now I have a variety of problems with my right foot and right knee. And my ankle aches anytime I overdo it – today "overdoing" it meant walking 4-5 miles. It's a constant reminder of one moment in time more than 20 years ago which has done more to realter the course of my life than any other particular moment.
And playing basketball again after that was pretty much out of the question. I was a late bloomer, had developed a love of the game and had gotten suddenly, surprisingly, insanely good at it after years of frustration, but I no longer had the sort of power and agility. Before the injury, I had a monstrous vertical leap. Afterwards, I could barely jump over the phone book. I mean, I could've carried on and goofed around on the court every now and then, but once I realized that I couldn't do the sorts of things I had been able to do before, it didn't seem worth it to continue.
Well, I could've had a gigantic, after-the-fact surgical procedure that was nasty and costly and would've meant months of rehab, and it didn't seem worth it to me to go through all of that. In retrospect, maybe I should've done so. But any time a surgeon starts off by saying "first we have to rebreak …" it's never a good sign.
All of this came up for me again in an instant, watching the end of the Seahawks-Redskins game. I hate seeing serious injuries. They elicit a visceral reaction, a cringe after which many of the details from the moment I broke my ankle return to my conscience and become crystal clear to me once again. And while I think Shanahan should've taken RG3 out much earlier in the game, when his knee clearly began to hamper his play, I know that I wouldn't have wanted out. I would've wanted to play, to try to win. Because that's what athletes do. That's what competing is all about. You give all that you can to achieve the goal.
Injuries are a part of sports, of course, and something anyone who participates in athletics ultimately loses at is having a healthy and fully-functioning body. Almost every competitor gives it up, eventually, when being hurt all the time takes away their ability to participate at the level they want to attain or achieve, and it's likely they'll feel the effects of it for the rest of their lives. (And it's not just competitive athletes, mind you – I've known professional dancers who've had more knee surgeries than offensive linemen.) Nasty, nasty injuries. But at the time, you don't actually THINK it will happen to you. If you did, then why would you ever play in the first place?
And I don't regret playing basketball and getting hurt and not being able to run 20+ years later. I regret that I got hurt and was no longer able to play, because I loved to play. And since I'd come late to really enjoying the game of basketball, and had just begun to truly embrace it as my own at the time, it was as if it had been stolen from me. I've really missed it.
Then again, if I hadn't broken my ankle, then, well, who knows? I probably would've just broken a wrist or dislocated an elbow or something. Oh, wait, I did dislocate my elbow. Never mind …
Friday, January 4, 2013
In Praise of Bad Football
I have a penchant and fondness for absurdity. It is no wonder I feel so at home in Belgium, given that their two national coping mechanisms – absurdist humour and strong beer – jibe quite with my personal ethos. I find reveling in the ridiculous is necessary in part to blunt the sting of failure. Quite honestly, if it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing badly.
Having grown up in the Pacific Northwest, where losing has become something of an art form over the past 50 years or so, I’ve endured an insufferably large number of completely awful sporting events over the years both in person and on TV, and I’ve come to develop a curious sort of fondness for sports done badly – a fondness which is usually accompanied by strong beer, of course.
Sports done badly wildly vary, however, in terms of entertainment value. Take baseball, for example. Bad baseball teams usually have a propensity for doing one or both of a couple of things: a) their pitchers issue a lot of walks; and b) their batters strike out a lot. The walk and the strikeout are two of the most fundamentally boring aspects of the game. Consequently, bad baseball tends to be boring as sin. The exception to this, of course, is that high comedy can be found on the defensive end. Witness my post from two days ago. But for the most part, it is boring.
Bad basketball is also boring because basketball teams universally share one fundamental deficiency: THEY CAN’T SHOOT! Watching a bunch of bricklayers chuck enough bricks to build a new fieldhouse gets old really fast.
Bad hockey is sort of like Public Skate Night at the Eagles Ice Arena on a Tuesday night. It’s a bunch of guys skating around in circles who don’t seem to know where they are going.
Bad soccer is ... well, soccer is a whole different animal that we’ll get to at some other point in time. That’s an entirely different cultural phenomenon. Still, the occasional own goal or a striker missing an open net from 2 yards away is mighty entertaining.
Bad golf and tennis can be interesting, just because the guys and gals doing it who are otherwise juggernauts and drone suddenly seem shockingly mortal. "Oh look! He hit his tee shot into the trees! I do that!" But those games don't interest me in general, for a variety of reasons I will surely get into at some point. And god help us, we NEVER wants to watch bad auto racing, for the safety of everyone involved.
For my money, only one sport done badly truly stands out, and that's football. This is because football is really an incredible team effort – it takes 11 guys carrying out their assignments and working in unison on every play for the course of 120 plays or more during a game to be successful. For all of the brute strength and physicality involved, what makes the game so challenging is that it's also all about attention to detail – and there are LOTS of details, which means there are also LOTS of ways to screw up.
Football done badly is an endless series of mistakes. Jumping offside, lining up incorrectly, missed blocks and missed tackles and missed assignments and missed field goals. Fumbles, interceptions, dropped passes and blocked punts. Penalties of all sorts, the best being 12 men on the field. 12 men on the field! For heaven’s sake, people, learn how to count!
For someone who appreciates all that is done badly, it can get no better than bad football – a showing of brute force and strength often undone by a complete lack of IQ or competence. And this is after a week's worth of preparation, mind you. Guys spend all week drilling and then promptly jump offsides on the first play of the game. What are you doing? What the hell is wrong with you?
Here is a summation of what was the most amazing game I’ve watched in the NFL in quite some time, a game that occurred on Nov. 18 in Dallas between the Cleveland Browns and the Dallas Cowboys. The first 3½ quarters were rather unremarkable, a run-of-the-mill failure of a game full of miscues and mistakes. The Browns can’t stop committing defensive penalties which sustain Dallas drives, and the Cowboys then return the favor by allowing Tony Romo to be sacked repeatedly. Dallas is leading 17-13 with, I think, around 5:30 to play when this amazing series of events commences:
• Browns QB Brandon Weeden fumbles the ball away deep in Cleveland territory, thus giving Dallas the chance to close the game out once and for all.
• Tony Romo then fumbles the ball back to the Browns. He is not blameless in this, of course, because you just can’t fumble in this situation. And were the Cowboys to lose, he would most likely be skewered among the frenzied Dallas media, who like to blame Tony Romo for everything from global warming to the national debt. But to be fair, the poor guy has spent the whole game running for his life, as the Cowboy offensive line more resembles a group of toreadors twirling their capes and sidestepping bull-rushing defensive lineman. He’s been sacked something like 8 times, and it’s amazing he’s still standing upright at this point in the game. Nevertheless, not a good time for Turnover Tony to cough one up.
• Given new life, the Browns promptly march down the field, aided by the fact that the Dallas pass defense scheme apparently involves leaving vast acreage of space open for the Cleveland receivers to run through freely.
• The Browns get to 1st and goal and run three unimaginative plays. It’s 4th down at the Dallas 1 yard line and they decide to run the fade pattern in the end zone. Dallas, of course, is looking for the fade pattern, which is pretty much what every NFL defense is looking for down at the goal line, and the Browns’ passing formation more of less telegraphs that this play is coming. The fade pattern only works when you have some superstar receiver on your team like Larry Fitzgerald or Calvin Johnson who is big and who can just go up high and catch the ball in spite of whatever coverage is being offered. The Browns possess no such no such receivers, nor do they possess a QB with the sort of precision and accuracy necessary to throw such a pass. So this is truly a terrible play call all-around by the Browns offensive coordinator.
• Weeden throws the ball about 4 yards out of bounds, anyway, giving his receiver no chance whatsoever to make a play. Turnover on downs. Egads.
• There are little more than 2:00 left at this point but the Browns have all their timeouts left and can stop the clock, while Dallas is pinned at their own 1 yard line. The Cowboys run the ball thrice and net about 1½ yards and then have to punt. They need a good punt to get out of this mess. A good high kick that’s unreturnable, or something angled close to the sideline.
• And you can hear a stream of profanity on the TV coming from the Cowboys punter, who more of less flubs the kick in almost every way imaginable. It’s a low wobbler that’s right to Josh Cribbs, one of the game’s best return specialists and pretty much the only guy on the Browns who ever seems to know what he’s doing. Cribbs jukes and cuts across the field and returns the punt well into Cowboys territory, finally being tackled around the Dallas 30.
• The Cowboys are then assessed a 15-yard penalty, a personal foul for a horse collar tackle. It turns out this is a bad call, since the Cowboys tackler didn’t grab the back of Cribbs’ jersey but instead grabbed Cribbs’ hair, which flows freely out the back of his helmet. You cannot tackle by the back collar of the jersey (and understandably so, because it is a dangerous play) and yet hair pulling is somehow legal in the NFL. So on top of the general incompetence being exhibited by both clubs and their respective coaching staffs, you now have the officials screwing up as well.
• With 15 yards tacked onto the end of the play, Cleveland now starts really deep inside Dallas territory. They start from about the Dallas 15 and there is about 1:30 left on the clock and, in an ideal world, the Browns would somehow eat up that time and score with scant seconds remaining, giving the Cowboys no chance to respond. But it takes Cleveland all of one play to score, as Weeden finds a wide open receiver running free again in vast acreage of open space.
• Like I say, in an ideal world you wouldn’t want to score so quickly if you’re the Browns, but given the fact that Dallas defense has ONLY 9 MEN ON THE FIELD, how could they not score? Somehow, amid the heated debate between the Cowboys coaches and referees over hair pulling which ensued after the punt, they had forgotten to count to 11. So at the very moment they are being called upon to save the game and possibly the season – Dallas has underachieved all year and desperately needs this win over the hapless Browns to stay in the playoff race – the Cowboys defense is, instead, completely disorganized.
• So now it’s not looking so good for the home team, who start deep in their own territory down 3 points to the Browns without much time left. But during the ensuing hurry-up drive, the Browns defense commites 50 YARDS IN PENALTIES, thus greatly aiding the Cowboys’ driving the length of the field in short order and kicking the game-tying field goal to send the game to overtime, where they would eventually prevail.
Now, occasionally there are swaths of time in a game where one team totally goes on the fritz and forgets how to play – witness the Jacksonville Jaguars recently giving up 28 points in 6 minutes vs. Tennessee without the Titans ever running an offensive play. But this particular comedy of errors involving Cleveland and Dallas was notable because both teams were doing seemingly everything possible to try and give the game to the other team while simultaneously refusing the gifts. It was the most incompetent 5½ minutes of professional football I have ever seen. It was absolutely spectacular to watch, simply because I had NO IDEA after a while how they would fuck up on the following play.
And it was no sure thing the game would go to OT, of course. My buddy Chris Cree down in Dallas was watching this game and theorizing how the Cowboys would mess it up – his favourite theory being that, with :06 left on the clock as they lined up for the tying field goal, the Cowboys would jump offsides. (A penalty by the trailing team in the last 2:00 is considered to be a deliberate attempt to stop the clock, and a :10 runoff is required.) Or, the Cowboys could lose their minds and let Tony Romo hold for the field goal again:
"There is nothing automatic in football."
I'm sorry, I couldn't resist. I'm a Seahawks fan. That was one of the best moments in franchise history.
The point is this: bad football can be spectacular entertainment if you allow it to be. It's a wonderful release, a celebration of idiocy and mayhem. Bad football is beautiful in the most absurd sort of way. It's far better to laugh off the foibles of your favourite team than it is to get all bent out of shape because you lost. Guess what! Lots of people lose! In play lose, remember? The difference being that they fail on national TV, of course, whereas most of us just fail on a small, local level.
But we can feel a kinship to those who flounder. It's hard to truly feel connected to the winners – hell, those people do things with their bodies we cannot even imagine. But when the gladiators fumble or drop passes or the kicker misses WIDE RIGHT (ack! Scott Norwood! I lost money on that game!), it is only then that they seem somewhat human.
And in no way do I want to see players fail, of course. I like winning. There was no greater joy in my pro football viewing life than getting to be that guy in the office on Super Bowl Sunday. In every newspaper gig I ever worked at, there was always that guy who was a huge fan of one of the teams involved, and he'd be wearing the jersey and screaming at the TV instead of doing work. Well, when the Seahawks made it to the Super Bowl, there I was dressed in my Shawn Alexander #37 jersey screaming at the TV in the offices of the Examiner. I got to be that guy for a day and it was the best. (Even though the Seahawks got screwed. But I'm not bitter.)
Having grown up in the Pacific Northwest, where losing has become something of an art form over the past 50 years or so, I’ve endured an insufferably large number of completely awful sporting events over the years both in person and on TV, and I’ve come to develop a curious sort of fondness for sports done badly – a fondness which is usually accompanied by strong beer, of course.
Sports done badly wildly vary, however, in terms of entertainment value. Take baseball, for example. Bad baseball teams usually have a propensity for doing one or both of a couple of things: a) their pitchers issue a lot of walks; and b) their batters strike out a lot. The walk and the strikeout are two of the most fundamentally boring aspects of the game. Consequently, bad baseball tends to be boring as sin. The exception to this, of course, is that high comedy can be found on the defensive end. Witness my post from two days ago. But for the most part, it is boring.
Bad basketball is also boring because basketball teams universally share one fundamental deficiency: THEY CAN’T SHOOT! Watching a bunch of bricklayers chuck enough bricks to build a new fieldhouse gets old really fast.
Bad hockey is sort of like Public Skate Night at the Eagles Ice Arena on a Tuesday night. It’s a bunch of guys skating around in circles who don’t seem to know where they are going.
Bad soccer is ... well, soccer is a whole different animal that we’ll get to at some other point in time. That’s an entirely different cultural phenomenon. Still, the occasional own goal or a striker missing an open net from 2 yards away is mighty entertaining.
Bad golf and tennis can be interesting, just because the guys and gals doing it who are otherwise juggernauts and drone suddenly seem shockingly mortal. "Oh look! He hit his tee shot into the trees! I do that!" But those games don't interest me in general, for a variety of reasons I will surely get into at some point. And god help us, we NEVER wants to watch bad auto racing, for the safety of everyone involved.
For my money, only one sport done badly truly stands out, and that's football. This is because football is really an incredible team effort – it takes 11 guys carrying out their assignments and working in unison on every play for the course of 120 plays or more during a game to be successful. For all of the brute strength and physicality involved, what makes the game so challenging is that it's also all about attention to detail – and there are LOTS of details, which means there are also LOTS of ways to screw up.
Football done badly is an endless series of mistakes. Jumping offside, lining up incorrectly, missed blocks and missed tackles and missed assignments and missed field goals. Fumbles, interceptions, dropped passes and blocked punts. Penalties of all sorts, the best being 12 men on the field. 12 men on the field! For heaven’s sake, people, learn how to count!
For someone who appreciates all that is done badly, it can get no better than bad football – a showing of brute force and strength often undone by a complete lack of IQ or competence. And this is after a week's worth of preparation, mind you. Guys spend all week drilling and then promptly jump offsides on the first play of the game. What are you doing? What the hell is wrong with you?
Here is a summation of what was the most amazing game I’ve watched in the NFL in quite some time, a game that occurred on Nov. 18 in Dallas between the Cleveland Browns and the Dallas Cowboys. The first 3½ quarters were rather unremarkable, a run-of-the-mill failure of a game full of miscues and mistakes. The Browns can’t stop committing defensive penalties which sustain Dallas drives, and the Cowboys then return the favor by allowing Tony Romo to be sacked repeatedly. Dallas is leading 17-13 with, I think, around 5:30 to play when this amazing series of events commences:
• Browns QB Brandon Weeden fumbles the ball away deep in Cleveland territory, thus giving Dallas the chance to close the game out once and for all.
• Tony Romo then fumbles the ball back to the Browns. He is not blameless in this, of course, because you just can’t fumble in this situation. And were the Cowboys to lose, he would most likely be skewered among the frenzied Dallas media, who like to blame Tony Romo for everything from global warming to the national debt. But to be fair, the poor guy has spent the whole game running for his life, as the Cowboy offensive line more resembles a group of toreadors twirling their capes and sidestepping bull-rushing defensive lineman. He’s been sacked something like 8 times, and it’s amazing he’s still standing upright at this point in the game. Nevertheless, not a good time for Turnover Tony to cough one up.
• Given new life, the Browns promptly march down the field, aided by the fact that the Dallas pass defense scheme apparently involves leaving vast acreage of space open for the Cleveland receivers to run through freely.
• The Browns get to 1st and goal and run three unimaginative plays. It’s 4th down at the Dallas 1 yard line and they decide to run the fade pattern in the end zone. Dallas, of course, is looking for the fade pattern, which is pretty much what every NFL defense is looking for down at the goal line, and the Browns’ passing formation more of less telegraphs that this play is coming. The fade pattern only works when you have some superstar receiver on your team like Larry Fitzgerald or Calvin Johnson who is big and who can just go up high and catch the ball in spite of whatever coverage is being offered. The Browns possess no such no such receivers, nor do they possess a QB with the sort of precision and accuracy necessary to throw such a pass. So this is truly a terrible play call all-around by the Browns offensive coordinator.
• Weeden throws the ball about 4 yards out of bounds, anyway, giving his receiver no chance whatsoever to make a play. Turnover on downs. Egads.
• There are little more than 2:00 left at this point but the Browns have all their timeouts left and can stop the clock, while Dallas is pinned at their own 1 yard line. The Cowboys run the ball thrice and net about 1½ yards and then have to punt. They need a good punt to get out of this mess. A good high kick that’s unreturnable, or something angled close to the sideline.
• And you can hear a stream of profanity on the TV coming from the Cowboys punter, who more of less flubs the kick in almost every way imaginable. It’s a low wobbler that’s right to Josh Cribbs, one of the game’s best return specialists and pretty much the only guy on the Browns who ever seems to know what he’s doing. Cribbs jukes and cuts across the field and returns the punt well into Cowboys territory, finally being tackled around the Dallas 30.
• The Cowboys are then assessed a 15-yard penalty, a personal foul for a horse collar tackle. It turns out this is a bad call, since the Cowboys tackler didn’t grab the back of Cribbs’ jersey but instead grabbed Cribbs’ hair, which flows freely out the back of his helmet. You cannot tackle by the back collar of the jersey (and understandably so, because it is a dangerous play) and yet hair pulling is somehow legal in the NFL. So on top of the general incompetence being exhibited by both clubs and their respective coaching staffs, you now have the officials screwing up as well.
• With 15 yards tacked onto the end of the play, Cleveland now starts really deep inside Dallas territory. They start from about the Dallas 15 and there is about 1:30 left on the clock and, in an ideal world, the Browns would somehow eat up that time and score with scant seconds remaining, giving the Cowboys no chance to respond. But it takes Cleveland all of one play to score, as Weeden finds a wide open receiver running free again in vast acreage of open space.
• Like I say, in an ideal world you wouldn’t want to score so quickly if you’re the Browns, but given the fact that Dallas defense has ONLY 9 MEN ON THE FIELD, how could they not score? Somehow, amid the heated debate between the Cowboys coaches and referees over hair pulling which ensued after the punt, they had forgotten to count to 11. So at the very moment they are being called upon to save the game and possibly the season – Dallas has underachieved all year and desperately needs this win over the hapless Browns to stay in the playoff race – the Cowboys defense is, instead, completely disorganized.
• So now it’s not looking so good for the home team, who start deep in their own territory down 3 points to the Browns without much time left. But during the ensuing hurry-up drive, the Browns defense commites 50 YARDS IN PENALTIES, thus greatly aiding the Cowboys’ driving the length of the field in short order and kicking the game-tying field goal to send the game to overtime, where they would eventually prevail.
Now, occasionally there are swaths of time in a game where one team totally goes on the fritz and forgets how to play – witness the Jacksonville Jaguars recently giving up 28 points in 6 minutes vs. Tennessee without the Titans ever running an offensive play. But this particular comedy of errors involving Cleveland and Dallas was notable because both teams were doing seemingly everything possible to try and give the game to the other team while simultaneously refusing the gifts. It was the most incompetent 5½ minutes of professional football I have ever seen. It was absolutely spectacular to watch, simply because I had NO IDEA after a while how they would fuck up on the following play.
And it was no sure thing the game would go to OT, of course. My buddy Chris Cree down in Dallas was watching this game and theorizing how the Cowboys would mess it up – his favourite theory being that, with :06 left on the clock as they lined up for the tying field goal, the Cowboys would jump offsides. (A penalty by the trailing team in the last 2:00 is considered to be a deliberate attempt to stop the clock, and a :10 runoff is required.) Or, the Cowboys could lose their minds and let Tony Romo hold for the field goal again:
"There is nothing automatic in football."
I'm sorry, I couldn't resist. I'm a Seahawks fan. That was one of the best moments in franchise history.
The point is this: bad football can be spectacular entertainment if you allow it to be. It's a wonderful release, a celebration of idiocy and mayhem. Bad football is beautiful in the most absurd sort of way. It's far better to laugh off the foibles of your favourite team than it is to get all bent out of shape because you lost. Guess what! Lots of people lose! In play lose, remember? The difference being that they fail on national TV, of course, whereas most of us just fail on a small, local level.
But we can feel a kinship to those who flounder. It's hard to truly feel connected to the winners – hell, those people do things with their bodies we cannot even imagine. But when the gladiators fumble or drop passes or the kicker misses WIDE RIGHT (ack! Scott Norwood! I lost money on that game!), it is only then that they seem somewhat human.
And in no way do I want to see players fail, of course. I like winning. There was no greater joy in my pro football viewing life than getting to be that guy in the office on Super Bowl Sunday. In every newspaper gig I ever worked at, there was always that guy who was a huge fan of one of the teams involved, and he'd be wearing the jersey and screaming at the TV instead of doing work. Well, when the Seahawks made it to the Super Bowl, there I was dressed in my Shawn Alexander #37 jersey screaming at the TV in the offices of the Examiner. I got to be that guy for a day and it was the best. (Even though the Seahawks got screwed. But I'm not bitter.)
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