Lose Tunes Track 04

This edition of the Lose Tunes is brought to you by the bottle of Ridge 2006 Grenache that we had at the office on Friday afternoon. Yes, we drink wine in the office on Fridays and you do not. Sucks to be you.

Today we are featuring the best thing from Cincinnati since Ken Griffey Jr. and Skyline Chili. Away from the stage, the members of The National are some of the funniest, most engaging, most congenial musicians out there. But this song pretty much wrecked me the first time I heard it, both because of the innate beauty of the song and the greater, pervasive sense of sadness and loss. It is a crusher. And it would not crush so much if it were not such a beautiful song.

Quick Misses

Many thanks to IN PLAY LOSE British Columbia Bureau Chief Jesse Matthews
for passing along this cartoon to me. All it's missing is a panel reading, “and the refs sucked.”

This is a new feature of IN PLAY LOSE called Quick Misses. There is always time for more lose, of course, but not always enough time for The LOSE to write about losing. As you may have noticed, I tend to write long form on this blog, but if I put off writing about failure-related topics until I have more time to write, I wind up never writing at all. Quick Misses are intended to fill in the gaps between essays. I’m going to try to keep these short(ish) here, and try to cover a decent amount of ground.

So, on with the buzzard points:

• I worked in the squishiest, most PC office in the history of the world, one where they referred to these as ‘dot points’ instead of bullet points because they didn’t like the violent connotation of the word ‘bullet.’ This was one of the damn stupidest things I’d ever heard and I’d steadfastly refused to participate in that nonsense, because the word bullet, like just about every other word in the English language, has multiple meanings and multiple contexts – and in the context of text and design, that little round thingie at the start of this graf is called a bullet. Nicknames, however, are intended to be representative of specific ideas. Abe Pollin renamed the Washington Bullets in 1997, saying he didn’t like the violent connotation of the nickname and doing so in the aftermath of the assassination of his lifelong friend, Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin. And I can understand that – but the Wizards isn’t much better. Indeed, given the context of the term ‘wizard’ in American history, an argument can be made that choosing Wizards for a sports team is even worse. (Although it’s probably cooler now in the post-Harry Potter world.) The best solution to me for D.C. seems to be to merge the two names together – the Washington Buzzards! Given the carrion and the carnage left behind at the end of an NBA season in Washington, buzzards won’t go hungry. In that spirit of absurdist compromise, I present you the buzzard point.

• If I’m the owner of the Miami Dolphins, I’m firing everyone. I’m firing the entire organization. This is a good start, but it isn’t enough. The Ted Wells Report outlining the behaviour patterns within the Dolphins clubhouse are absolutely disgraceful. Locker room culture certainly can be boorish and sophomoric at times, and sometimes the lines between what is and isn’t appropriate can get blurred. That does happen. It’s not OK, per sé, but it is understandable. But what went on in Miami speaks to a total lack of leadership on all levels of the club. That a culture as toxic as what developed in Miami came to be is the fault of the coaching staff who set such a tone, the players who let it persist in the locker room, and the management who assembled this cast of characters in the first place. All of them failed. Get rid of them all. I’d live with a 2-14 season if it means ridding myself of this lot.

• That segues nicely into my opinion about Michael Sam and whether or not it will be a ‘distraction’ that an openly gay player is on an NFL team. Given that they won the SEC Eastern Division this past fall, Sam coming out to his teammates at the University of Missouri before the season obviously wasn’t that much of a distraction. Sam was the SEC Defensive Player of the Year last year, and is thought to be something like a 3rd round NFL pick owing to the fact that he’s something of a tweener size-wise – an undersized defensive lineman – but there have been lots of anonymous whispers from unnamed NFL front office sorts saying that him coming out and admitting he is gay will hurt his draft status, saying that it will create a ‘distraction.’ Bullshit. If you and your team are ‘distracted’ by this, then your team sucks. When you’re a public figure (which athletes are), you live under a microscope whether you like it or not. You have reporters and camera crews and agents and P.R. lacqueys and the like milling about you all the time. YOUR WHOLE LIFE IS ONE BIG DISTRACTION! Again, it’s a question of leadership. The organization that cares about winning, first and foremost, won’t give a damn about one guy’s sexual preferences. If he can help the team, then a team with clue will do whatever is necessary to let him do that. And a decline in his draft status may hurt him upfront (where you get drafted determines your starting salary, after all), but if he can play at the next level, the potential is there to make it all back and more. If you can play, you’ll eventually get paid. In the immediate, it’s also a pretty nice source of motivation to be downgraded in the draft. It gives you something to prove. As you may recall from this past season, a team which started two 5th round picks and a 6th starting in their secondary, a 3rd rounder being grossly underpaid at QB, and two receivers who the club spent all of $26,000 to sign sure had a nice season. They played with a chip on their shoulder almost as large as the final margin of their victory in the Super Bowl. The potential is there for Sam to have a nice NFL career, and if/when that happens – I say “if” not to doubt his abilities, but to speak to the uncertainty of a long career in a game as violent as football – no one will really care much about his orientation anymore.

• New NBA commissioner Adam Silver ripped a page out of his predecessor’s book in addressing the media during the NBA’s All-Star break in New Orleans, using his most lawyerly of skills to skillfully avoid answering a question about the large number of teams which appear to be tanking this season:

“My understanding of tanking would be losing games on purpose. And there’s absolutely no evidence that any team in the NBA has ever lost a single game, or certainly in any time that I’ve been in the league, on purpose. And, to me, what you’re referring to I think is rebuilding. And I’m not sure it’s just a function of the collective bargaining agreement; I think there’s a balance with any team of the need to look out to the future and at the same time put a competitive product on the floor.”

Lies lies lies lies lies! No one accuses the players who take the court of deliberately attempting to throw games. Players aren’t that dumb. They play hard. They play to win. They push that rock up the hill in a most Promethean of fashion, trying to fight fate, because they know damn well that their jobs are potentially on the line. None of us who speak of NBA teams tanking insinuate players aren’t trying. We do, however, insinuate that their bosses – the owners and the GMs of their franchises – are purposefully, deliberately setting their teams up to fail. And when your GM dumps every asset of your team to get under the cap, that is EXACTLY what you’re doing. Hell, the Boston Celtics have traded so many players for so many draft picks that they may run out of players. I can hear the announcer in Gah-den now: “starting at center (center-center-center-echo-echo-echo), the protected 1st round pick in 2018 ...” No actual player, mind you, just the abstract concept of a draft pick. Blowing up the franchise in the interest of creating cap space has been a time-tested strategy of incompetent NBA GMs, as it staves off having to answer for your own idiocy for a little while. They’ve also been given even more rope to ultimately hang themselves with CBA inventions like the Amnesty Clause (you basically pay a guy to go away but don’t have it count on your salary cap), which gives them a chance to come clean and admit they didn’t know what they were doing when they handed $50m to a 33-year old center with bad knees and limited offensive skills. But you get outed as a fraud eventually, as Chris Grant found out in Cleveland recently.

• That was very Stern-like of Adam Silver, sneaking around a double screen to avoid giving a serious answer. It remains to be seen if he has/will learn from the Little Napoleon’s mistakes. A lot will depend on the nature of the league’s next series of television contracts, negotiations for which are starting soon. The league may get a financial boost from this, simply because some network or another will be dumb enough to pay up. That doesn’t mean the product is any good. And that doesn’t mean it’s bad, either – it’s just that it should be even better than it is, in my opinion, and quite a few franchises are doing their best to make the product as bad as they possibly can, no matter if you call it ‘tanking’ or ‘rebuilding.’

• Wow, I really hate the NBA, but seeing the Lakers and the Celtics battling it out in a race to see who can be as bad as possible does my heart proud.

• Speaking of Cleveland, they’ve had a rough go of it this winter, with huge organizational shakeups for both the Cadavers Cavaliers and the Browns, a franchise whose weirdness knows no bounds, but we’ll deal with Cleveland in a later post. The Mistake by the Lake is worthy of far more ink than this.

• I hope that Adam Silver watched the Super Bowl parade in people, saw 750,000 fans in the streets of Seattle, and thought to himself, “wow, that is a lot of people who hate my product and hated my former boss. I have some work to do on that front.”

• I do feel inclined to gloat about the Super Bowl, and how much the Seahawks completely dominated the hapless and pathetic Denver Broncos, but I don’t want to beat a dead horse. Well, maybe I do just a little ...

Lose Tunes, Track 03

Our edition of Lose Tunes today is brought to you by The Kraken, a rum made in that bastion of sun, palms, swashbuckling and rum-running ... Indiana. Good stuff though, a rum as black as your soul with a nice vanilla overtone as well. Drinking this stuff is making it easier for me to get through all of this work I am doing tonight.

This tune is a natural choice for the Lose Tunes, simply because of the name. This is a Danish electronica band named When Saints Go Machine and the song is Fail Forever. It would likely be on this playlist in spite of the name, since the song pretty much hops:

And here is a bonus remix track version of the Saints by Chilean DJ Nicholas Jaar, which is pretty remarkable:

Gold, Silver and Lose

The Olympics are here.

Be still my foolish heart.

It goes without saying that sports’ greatest spectacle is rife with failure. But the Olympics go far beyond just winning and losing. With both their sheer stature and their structure, the Olympics present The LOSE with a veritable gold mine of storylines, as a fair amount of the worst aspects of human nature surface during the course of such single-minded pursuit of winning. Cheating, whining, swindling, politicking, corruption – the Olympics has it all. It simply gets no better (or worse, depending on your point of view).

Now, the over-the-air broadcasts will do their best to gloss over all of the seedy stuff, portraying the Olympics as a bastion of all the best that humanity has to offer – talent, sacrifice, dedication, tenacity, desire, commitment to excellence. All of which is true. The #1 reason that you should watch the Winter Olympics for the next couple of weeks – indeed, it’s pretty much the only reason – is that the athletes are incredible. Just incredible. They will do things which most of us can’t even imagine, much less attempt to do. They will showcase small facets of human potential nearly perfected, elevated to levels seemingly unfathomable only a few years ago. And that’s pretty awesome. Anyone doing something that well is worth my attention, even if I think the particular sport is stupid. I’m likely to think the sport is stupid no matter what, but I can certainly appreciate the toil and the effort required to reach the highest level.

And this is the Winter Olympics we’re talking about, of course, which means that not only are the Olympians incredible, but they’re all completely crazy. Everything in the Winter Olympics hurts. It’s all subject to harsh conditions which seem unnatural – most of us can barely walk on ice and snow – yet here are people strapping skis and blades to their feet, or climbing into various sledding contraptions, and they’re throwing themselves down hillsides or whooshing across a frozen plane. Failure in the Winter Olympics can hurt really badly, and no matter what happens, you wind up feeling cold. And if there is a sport in the Winter Olympics that seems sissy – let’s take the classical form of speed skating, for example, where two people race the clock and just make a series of left turns – the organizers just come up with a new variation specifically for crazy people – which is how you wind up with short track, which is speed skating mixed with demolition derby. (The LOSE appreciates speed skating, by the way, but the deviant in me always wonders what would happen if you surprised all the competitors and made them race in the opposite direction. They’d probably all fall down.)

This year, the Winter Olympics are taking place in a country synonymous with winter: Russia, where the winters are among the harshest of anywhere on the planet. The winter conditions in parts of that enormous nation boggle the mind. However, this isn’t exactly what comes to mind when you think of either a) a Russian winter, or b) a winter sports paradise:

Welcome to Sochi, which is a summer resort on the Black Sea.

In order to host a Winter Games, the Russian government has basically had to manufacture a ski industry in the nearby mountains, along with creating all of the infrastructure to link ski and sea together. The cost of this endeavour, all told, is estimated to be somewhere around $51,000,000,000. That is a lot of zeroes.

It could be argued that choosing such a location is a case of the Winter Olympics being a victim of its own success. (The cynic might say a victim of its own largesse. I’ll leave that for you to decide.) For years, the Winter Olympics was held in quaint little mountain hamlets like St. Moritz and Chamonix and Lake Placid, and was a cute little sideshow, a teaser for the grand summer spectacle that was the Summer Olympics which would happen later in the leap year.

But the International Olympic Committee made a decision to split off the Winter Games beginning in 1994, allowing them to become a show all to themselves. Since then, the games have grown really big, really fast, and all you have to do is look at a map to figure out where the problem lies. There just aren’t enough cities big enough in mountain locales to host this sort of event. The IOC now has to be creative when it comes to awarding the Winter Olympics, as the event is far too big for the mountain ski resorts of the world: Cortina d’Ampezzo and Garmisch have given away to Turin and Vancouver. Vancouver at least made some sense, given that the mountains basically run through the city (there are ski areas within the city limits of the suburbs) and the winter sports mecca of Whistler is an hour up the northerly road, but I’ve been caught in enough downpours in February in Vancouver to know that it ain’t exactly a winter wonderland. The choice of a summer resort on the Black Sea as the site of a winter sports festival requires the suspending of all disbelief, but the IOC has always been good in selling faerie tales, not to mention believing their own myths. (The 2018 games are centered on Pyeongchang, which is a cool looking area in the mountains of South Korea, but all of the ice events will take place down the hill in the coastal city of Gangneung. A cursory glance at the list of hopeful bidders for the 2022 Winter Olympics shows a few more creative acts of geography.)

The ways in which the Winter Games have grown are certainly ways that I approve of: adding more opportunities for women participants, which I am certainly in favour of, and also the further adding of legitimate forms of winter sports expression like snowboarding and freestyle skiing. But there’s a curious by-product of this move, which the IOC was well aware of in both of those cases: the United States now does well. Really well. (Some of the events were lifted right out of an American invention, the X Games, whose effect on the Olympics shouldn’t be discounted.) Consider that in the 1988 Winter Olympics in Calgary, U.S. athletes won a grand total of six medals. And 14 years later, at the new-look, younger, hipper Salt Lake City Games, U.S. athletes won 34. Some of that was due to home-field advantage, of course, as the home side usually excels, and some of it due to an emphasis on the Salt Lake City games by the USOC. But the IOC knew very well that to keep their winter event relevant, they needed the U.S. to be successful at it, because U.S. success translates into U.S. interest, which means good U.S. television ratings, which means continued flow of revenue through U.S. broadcast rights fees.

And there isn’t a greater example of biting the hand that feeds you than the IOC’s relationship with the United States, as it is wholly dependent upon American television revenue to continue their operations, and yet the IOC is one of the most decidedly anti-American bodies on the planet, possessing all the disdain for their primary clientele that the head of a cartel has for the flock of addicts keeping his smuggling operation afloat. We tune in regardless, simply because we love the competition. It’s theatre of the highest order. The drama of the event and the emotions it creates – both in victory and in defeat – is far greater than any drama we can script for a cinema or a stage. It is better than fiction.

And, on occasion, stranger than fiction.

The impact of that particular comedy of errors from 1994 on the Winter Olympics cannot be understated. Consider that 1994 was the first time the Winter Olympics were standing on their own. The U.S. sucks in the Winter Olympics. There isn’t even the same old enemies for Americans to hate, as the Berlin Wall has fallen and the Cold War is over. (And we’ll cover that point in a minute.) What’s interesting for an American in this event taking place in a snowy Norwegian village? Well, not much really … until figure skater Nancy Kerrigan, who is gorgeous and graceful and excels at one of the few winter events Americans actually do well at, gets whacked across the leg with a club and all signs point to the perpetrators being members of the entourage of one of her closest rivals, Tonya Harding. Well, hell, the Winter Olympics just became Must See TV with that single swing of a club! The ratings on CBS for the 1994 Winter Olympics in Lillehammer promptly went through the roof, adding an ever greater sense of legitimacy to the whole event. And without that scandal, I would argue that the Winter Olympics wouldn’t be a fraction of the size that they are today. That scandal was the greatest gift the IOC could have ever hoped for. (There was even a nod to the old school, business-as-usual ways of the Olympics at the end of that Kerrigan-Harding bit, with Kerrigan settling for a silver in Lillehammer and losing out to Ukrainian/former Soviet Union skater Oksana Baiul through what appeared to be an act of bloc judging. It doesn’t really matter who I thought did/didn’t deserve to win. The whole point of bloc judging is that it doesn’t matter who deserves it. That was nicely done by the IOC, keeping it real like that while giving a tip of the cap to the past. But I'm getting political far too early in this blog, and this parenthetical is getting far too long, but I will also point out that I've actually been to the actual restaurant where the evil Nancy Kerrigan whacking plan was hatched, which is my only personal connection to this post.)

The IOC HQ in Lausanne is the most wretched hive of scum and villany this side of Mos Eisley. It's always been a haven for the best-dressed and most well-connected autocrats, scoundrels and scofflaws that the world has to offer up, all supposedly under the auspice of promoting (and zealously protecting) the Utopian Olympic ideals set forth by IOC founder Baron Pierre de Coubertin. Most of those ideas were myths, of course – the notion that Greek city-states all suspended wars for the purposes of sport is not true at all, and the notion of amateur athleticism (since mercifully disbanded) is that of an élite creating a realm and idle plaything all for itself, since the rich would have time for such leisurely activities while the working class were busting their asses in factories during the Industrial Revolution. And being a member of the IOC has always been a curiously good way to line one’s own pockets. The IOC somehow managed to spin its way out of further scrutiny in the wake of the Salt Lake City bribery scandal, when a large part of the argument put forth by those implicated in Utah was, in essence, that they were bribing IOC members because that was business as usual. It was what was necessary to land the games, and everybody else was doing it as well.

The new IOC president, Thomas Bach, recently made himself look stupid in calling out Barack Obama and a few other Western leaders who have shown their disliking of Russia’s anti-gay laws. He didn’t name names, of course, but everyone knows who he’s talking about. Bashing the U.S. has always been a popular pastime at the IOC, none of which should ever be taken with more than a grain of salt. My personal favourite IOC sniping at America for years came from the desk of Dick Pound, whose name I shall not joke of and who was head of the IOC spinoff World Anti-Doping Agency. He always loved taking the U.S. to task for lax policies when it comes to testing athletes for performance enhancing drugs. I will take the IOC seriously on that front after it goes back and retroactively strips EVERY SINGLE MEDAL that was ever won by an East German athlete. They’ve stripped medals before, after all (Marion Jones immediately comes to mind), and it’s not like there isn’t proof. There are entire warehouses full of documentation of a state-supported doping programme in East Germany. But making a principled statement of that sort would require far more courage than anyone at the IOC can ever muster.

The Olympic movement has always been particularly good at propping up dubious state-sponsored sport systems – and, indeed, one of the ways that state systems ultimately thrived (and continue to thrive) involves making enough alliances and getting enough people placed in influential positions so as to influence IOC policy and administration of the Games. It isn’t just enough to train/abuse/dope up athletes so that they will win medals on the field, because there is too much left up to chance once you take to the field of play – a place where everything is, in fact, complicated by the presence of the opponent. The state sports system is inherently an offshoot of the Ministry of Propaganda. Anything short of winning is unacceptable, since winning advances the aims of the state. It’s therefore important to also field a handful of corrupt officials and referees, and attempt to manipulate the games behind the scenes. There has been no better example of this than the 1980 Summer Olympics in Moscow, the awarding of which was tantamount to handing the inmates the keys to the asylum. That event was already a mess, with the U.S.-led boycott on account of the Soviet Union invading Afghanistan earlier that year, but then you had blatant acts of upfront, out-in-the-open cheating such as this going on such as this, which makes a complete mockery of the whole idea that games have a purpose as a competition. (And, of course, one of the athletes most affected by that, Australian triple jumper Ian Campbell, went to Washington State, proving that not only can Cougars find ways to lose, but sometimes ways to lose can be found for them.) The event was clearly intended to be little more than a showpiece for the state sports system, a chance for the Soviet organizers to pat themselves on the back in front of a world audience – albeit one much smaller than originally intended. (Here is a fascinating piece on those 1980 games from George Plimpton.)

Now, The LOSE is not naïve. Athletes cheat in the West as well and always have, albeit on a personal need-to-cheat basis. Part of why anti-doping efforts are much harder in the West is that efforts at breaking the rules are usually undertaken by individuals rather than groups, and are much easier to hide in smaller numbers. But unlike in the West, where athletes make the choice to break the rules, those in places like East Germany didn’t necessarily have that choice to make. Here is a PBS documentary on East German doping. That it’s an episode of the show Secrets of the Dead tells you that it wasn’t all fun and games.

But I never have bought into that whole narrative put forth which surrounded the Olympics while I was growing up, which was our aw-shucks, gosh-and-golly American kids were venturing into hostile arenas armed only with their guile and wits while facing those colourless, soulless drones from behind the Eastern Bloc. That I didn’t buy it is saying something, in fact, since that is what everyone involved in the whole construct of the Olympics was selling for decades. Part of why the IOC has adopted a decidedly anti-American stance in recent years is that the movement, for it to be successful, needs enemies and villains and guys that wear the black hat. This flies in the face of the supposed anti-political stance of the Olympic movement, but the fact is that the entire concept of the Olympics only caught on because of the corresponding political back stories. No one cared that all much about the Olympics before 1936, when the Olympics in Berlin became a centerpiece of Nazi propaganda. (Watch this film sometime if you have the chance, as it is a truly remarkable piece of cinema years ahead of its time, political message be damned.) Once the Soviet Union and assorted Warsaw Pact entries began entering, the Olympics became yet another battleground in the Cold War. Every victory over the other guy was a triumph of ideology and way of life. If the Olympics was really not about politics, the athletes would not march in under flags and listen to national anthems on the awards podia. OF COURSE IT IS POLITICAL, and it always has been. The greatest threat to the Olympic movement, in fact, was a potential loss of interest after the Berlin Wall fell. Trying to figure out who was who in 1992 was ridiculous. (The Unified Team? What the hell is that?) Someone has to be the enemy, so it may as well be the baddest dudes on the block – which is the U.S., who wins all the time.

Athletes train and play to win. It is the only objective, in the end. For most of those who participate in the Olympics, the Games are the biggest competition in the world. They are, in reality, the only event that matters, for no other contests in their discipline – even World Championships – carry the same prestige and exposure. The set-up of the Olympics has always dictated not only winning, but doing so at all costs. And this is more true than ever now that the Cold War has fallen and the Olympics have become a 100%, full-on capitalistic venture. Pretty much everyone in the Winter Olympics makes nothing for their efforts and toil in obscurity for four years between games, save for some of the skiiers, the figure skaters and the NHL hockey players (who seem to embrace the Olympic spirit far more than just about anyone else, interestingly enough). Success at the Olympics can lead to fame and fortune otherwise unattainable – which simply intensifies the need to win, and which makes failure all the more of a bitter pill.

Sounds good to me.

Let the losing begin, and let all of the assorted responses to losing begin as well. Let there be controversy, protests, counter protests and everything else. It will happen. There will be whining and bickering and complaining, there will be allegations of foul play and bribery and graft, there will be people booing and protesting at the injustice of it all. It is all great stuff, wondrous stuff. The greater the stakes, the more personal the defeat, and the greater the indignation when it happens.
  
But again, it is all fun and games until something happens like what took place in Munich in 1972. That was a terrible Olympic games to begin with, what with the travesty of the U.S.-U.S.S.R. basketball final, the first appearances of doped out East German athletes who would come to dominate sports like women’s swimming, and a few other acts of lousy sportsmanship along the way, but the murder of athletes by terrorists showed the larger nature of the Olympics. The event does not take place in a buble. It is not just a sporting event and idle diversion for a couple of weeks. Sport is never free of politics. Nothing in this world is free of politics. A gathering such as the Olympics is the ideal place for those people who wish to call attention to their causes through violent means. We have learned the hard way in this country that nothing is safe and nothing sacred. Going into Sochi, there is legitimate worry that some sort of nutjob or another from the various insurgencies and counterinsurgencies running rampant through the areas of the old Soviet Union will decide to turn the Olympics into their own macabre theatre piece. From a distance, a security situation like that faced by F.C. Anzhi Makhcachkala seems bizarre and almost comic: “Due to armed conflict in Dagestan, the club's players live and train in a village near Moscow, at a training base previously used by Saturn Moscow. The club fly in for home matches which have a heavy security presence.” But it really isn’t a laughing matter at all. That such concerns exist at all should really trouble all of us.

And given all of the conditions at play, the awarding of these Olympics to Sochi seemed like a curious idea from the beginning, if an downright bad one. Then again, given how large and how costly the Winter Olympics have become to operate, it is something of a wonder anyone would bid to host the games at all. Vladimir Putin has viewed the Winter Olympics (and also the World Cup in 2018) as an international stamp of legitimacy for his government and what the ‘new Russia’ has/can/will accomplish. The cost of the games – $51,000,000,000 – is absolutely staggering, a sum larger than all previous Winter Olympics combined. The process has been rife with cost overruns and allegations of corruption, and early reports would seem to indicate that Sochi is still not quite ready on the eve of the event, there are security concerns of every sort, and the result of all of this is a collective sense of “why in the hell are we doing this?”

My hope is that Sochi pull this off, and that the Winter Olympics is memorable for the competition. I wonder, however, if this event actually leads to a gradual drawing down of the Winter Games, an event which seemed at one time like a wonderful little vacation like a ski getaway to the alps, but has become one very long, very strange, and very expensive trip.

So let us hope for everyone’s sake that is ALL I am writing about over the next couple of weeks is failure on the ice and snow. I declare open the Lose of the XXII Winter Olympic Games. Let the games begin!

And it would not be the Winter Olympics, of course, without the Norwegian curling team and their fabulous pants:

I gotta get me a pair of those.

Good Riddance

Seattle Public Enemy #1

“This is going to be short for me. I have a game to get to in Oklahoma City.”

That was David Stern’s opening statement in 2013 after the NBA’s Board of Governors meeting in Dallas. The main topic of conversation at that meeting was the fate of the wobegone Sacramento Kings: were they to be sold to a group led by Chris Hansen and Steve Ballmer, with the intent of relocating the franchise to Seattle, or was the sale to be rejected in favour of an 11th hour offer from a Bay Area group headed by Warriors minor partner Vivek Ranadive that would keep the team in Sacramento. By a vote of 22-8, the relocation to Seattle sale was rejected at that meeting, and David Stern, when facing a sizable collection of Seattle-area media for likely the last time, just couldn’t resist the opportunity to get in one last shot. (Here is the entire press conference, in full.) And it wasn't just a slip of the tongue, either. Nothing David Stern ever said or did was uncalculated.

That David Stern would happen to step down as commissioner of the NBA on the same weekend that the Seattle Seahawks are playing in the Super Bowl is an act of serendipity likely to leave a Seattle sports fan wondering if, for once, the stars are aligning over the Emerald City. (Further adding to this feeling is the retirement of Chuck Armstrong, who has presided over the disintegration of the Seattle Mariners, but we’ve dealt with those clownshoes before.) For after barely lifting a finger to prevent the Sonics from being moved to Oklahoma City, Stern basically held the hands of Sacramento civic leaders and bought time until they could all their ducks in a row. The entire process was rife with unstated animosity, all stemming from the fact that the speaker of the Washington State Legislature, Frank Chopp, had made a point of telling Stern during a hearing that the NBA’s business model – extorting sweetheart arena deals from municipalities and, essentially, taking billions of dollars in public subsidies – was garbage.

Which, quite honestly, it is.

David Stern did a lot to save the NBA, and I don’t think that can be discounted. When he took over the league in the early 1980s, the place was awash in red ink. And under his stewardship, the NBA has gone from being an afterthought with its championship series broadcast on table delay at 11:30 p.m. to a global entertainment powerhouse worth billions. He also managed to get the cocaine out of the game, rid the league of some of the worst owners imaginable (but not all of them), and establish a precedent for labour relations – gross percentage payouts to players in the form of a salary cap tied to leaguewide revenue growth – which has become a model for the sports business in North America. His successes on those fronts should be acknowledged. I have to give him some props.

And now that I’m given him props, I’m going to trash his ass. And I'm probably going to froth at the mouth an be irrational. I apologize in advance.

David Stern was also a lucky bastard. He was lucky that the L.A. Lakers won the coin flip and got to draft Magic Johnson. He was lucky that Red Auerbach knew the draft rules inside and out when he selected Larry Bird. He was lucky that the Portland Trail Blazers were stupid enough to draft Sam Bowie, permitting Michael Jordan to land in an enormous market – Chicago – that had been so badly mismanaged over the years by the NBA that the original expansion franchise in Chicago left what was then the 2nd largest city in America for the greener pastures of … Baltimore. He was ‘lucky’ when his first installment of the NBA lottery landed the next fabled talent to come along, Patrick Ewing, in New York City. The placement of the greatest talents in some of the most storied franchises of the game (or, in the case of Chicago, the untapped market ready to rise), the media and marketing machine could go about selling the stars of the game – but it only worked because those players were great, and those franchises turned out to be great. (Well, not the Knicks, but you don’t have to be great in New York to get attention, you just have to make enough noise to catch the ear of all the media outlets down the street.)

But the unintended consequence of this was the creation of several caste systems within the league. The superstars get all the calls, the glamour franchises get all the breaks. It wasn’t really news when a referee was found to be betting on games, because a lot of people had just sort of assumed that games were fixed to begin with. (People in Seattle have never forgotten this game, and no one in Sacramento will ever forget this one.) There’s always been a fraudulent, disingenuous overtone to the way the NBA conducts its business during the David Stern era, one espoused in the spin well-becoming of the battle-tested attorney who headed the operation.

The latter part of Stern’s tenure was marked by franchise relocations, conflicts of interest (aka The Curious Case of Chris Paul), labor unrest and lockouts. The NBA at present seems to have about 8 franchises that are actually trying to win and 22 more that are trying to be as bad as possible so as to get into the lottery. (Don’t tell the players that, of course, a lot of whom are busting their asses in spite of their front offices … *cough cough* Phoenix Suns *cough cough*) The entire operation is about contracts and cap space and exemptions. The game itself rarely seems to matter. And fans have tired of this: in an era where some of the greatest talents the game has ever seen are taking to the court, the NBA is selling fewer tickets these days than their winter counterparts, the NHL. Does anyone actually take the NBA seriously right now?

And then there is that whole Oklahoma City thing. Watch this documentary to understand it. I was a season ticket holder in Seattle. This game was one of the most wonderful, most exciting things I have ever been a part of. So if I sound like I have an axe to grind, well, I do. So there.

I am fortunate to have one of the few teams in the NBA that does seem to want to win in my backyard at the moment. They have Stephen Curry, probably the greatest shooter in the history of humanity. They have a terrific first six guys that can do everything – inside scoring, deep threes, shotblocking, midrange, transition game, and the five starters are all good passers, to boot. The Golden State Warriors are doing what seemed unthinkable a few years ago, which is making me like the NBA again.

Sort of.

I love the game of basketball and always have. Basketball is the athletic equivalent of jazz, a unique expression of the American urban experience that’s free-flowing and rife with improvisations, and yet it’s also right at home in the farmlands and the countryside. (What? No jazz roots in rural America? Listen to some old Western Swing records and tell me otherwise.) It’s also a game free of fences and walls, the spectators sitting right up close, the only demarcation being an unstated but understood line that neither side should cross, and does so at its own peril. That sense of danger is palpable when you play an away game. You never quite feel comfortable. It’s pretty exciting, actually.

Yet it’s also a game that’s easily manipulated. The rules grant far too much power to a referee to affect the result. (Referees don’t actually want to do that, of course.) It’s always been a game where hucksters and hustlers slink about in the shadows. (In the modern AAU era, the hucksters don’t even hide anymore.) David Stern is a different sort of huckster, one that’s well-dressed and well-spoken, big into packaging and public image, a Cheshire cat with little to nothing behind the grin. His efforts have turned the NBA into ‘fan-tastic,’ family-friendly, glitzy entertainment, but the game just doesn’t seem to matter much anymore.

Maybe that would change if a wrong could somehow be righted and the Sonics returned to their rightful place, but as much as I think that the Kings franchise would’ve been better off in Seattle, the idea of swooping up some other city’s franchise still feels a bit unclean. I wish Sacramento well and hope it all works out (although I doubt it will, but that is for another time.) And I don’t live in Seattle, anyway, so maybe my connections to the Sonics are just some act of the sort of nostalgia dabbling I generally decry.

But when David Stern decided to do his Little Napoleon routine, throwing his weight behind some carpetbagging sleazebags from Oklahoma and deciding it was worth picking a fight with the entirety of my home state so as to secure the franchise for that group of robber barons, he ceased once and for all to be a good commissioner. He was well on his way to irrelevance with the messes he made in Charlotte and Vancouver, but the Sonics fiasco sealed the deal. It was no longer about good business, at that point. It was all personal. And when you fancy yourself an Emperor, you don’t like being told that you’re wearing no clothes.

Good riddance.

Lose Tunes, Track 02

Today's edition of Lose Tunes is brought to you by Pow-Wow Botanical Rye, not because they are paying for it but because I am drinking some while writing this entry. (The crack Sales & Marketing staff here at IPL World HQ needs to get busy selling some advertisements.) This is the most weirdly interesting bottle of usquebae that I think I've ever had. Once you get over the fact that it doesn't take your ordinary usque, you just sort of settle in for a nice, easy ride. You can get really hammered on it if you're not careful, because it's so mellow.

Track 02 on the Lose Tunes soundtrack comes from a band from that bastion of rock'n'roll mayhem that is Provo, Utah. This band is called The Moth & The Flame and I was pretty much hooked by the drive of the bass riff the first time I heard this song. And the screaming out of the word "Sorry!" at the end of the song pretty much destined it to be added to the soundtrack of IN PLAY LOSE, "Sorry" being the generic, almost automatic first response to a great many acts of failure in this lifetime.

This band's new EP is a great record, with lots of sound sculptures and a good amount of ambient terror. You should check it out. And as for this video, is there any greater example of ambient terror than life in the 1950s?

XLVIII Things On My Mind XLVIII Hours Before Super Bowl XLVIII

I. 90% of the internet is made up of porn, cats, and lists of stuff. This blog post about the Super Bowl will contribute to at least two of those categories.

II. The LOSE got to be that one guy the last time the Seahawks reached the Super Bowl, which was in 2006. At every newspaper I’ve ever worked at, there is always that one guy who is a fan of one of the teams in the Super Bowl. And come Super Bowl Sunday, they’re dressed in their team’s colours, screaming at the TV, stomping about the office, jumping up and down with excitement, and generally making a fool out of themselves. In 2006, that was me. For once. It was fun to be that one guy for a day, even though the game didn’t go so well.

III. The LOSE couldn’t help but giggle a little bit this past fall when, in the last week of the season, the playoff fate of the Pittsburgh Steelers was determined, in part, by a bad call in the Kansas City-San Diego game. The officiating crew working that game at Fuck Qualcomm it’s uncool to overwrite a stadium named for a dead guy like Jack Murphy Stadium in San Diego was headed by Bill Leavy, who was the referee in the 2006 Super Bowl between Pittsburgh and Seattle – a game so poorly officiated that the NFL has used parts of it as a textbook for teaching new referees how not to call a game. Now you know how it feels, Steelers fans, to have Bill Leavy & Co. contribute to the breaking of your heart.

IV. The LOSE doesn’t believe the officials cost the Seahawks the game, however – 90% of the bad calls went against the Seahawks, but there were some doozies that went the other way as well. The Seahawks organization, however, was rather annoyed at the time because the game in Detroit, for all intents and purposes, turned into a Pittsburgh Steelers home game – and if you’ve done your proper IN PLAY LOSE related reading and read the book Scorecasting, you’ll know that one of the chapters deals with the nature of home field advantage, which comes down a lot of the time to the home side getting the breaks from the officials. Players know this in all sports, of course, and play through it, knowing that those little things which don’t go your way during an away game are likely to go your way at home, which is why bitching about it, from a player’s standpoint, is pointless. That Pittsburgh got the breaks from the zebras in a home game wasn’t that surprising. That it had become a Steelers home game was the problem. Huge swaths of the supposedly neutral field in Detroit were awash in black-and-gold, as Pittsburgh was a reasonable driving distance and Steelers fans scooped up every available ticket possible. And the primary narrative in the media was about how vaunted Steelers RB Jerome Bettis was going home to Detroit to play his final game. And don’t think for a minute that such narratives aren’t orchestrated. The NFL is the most media savvy enterprise out there. The Bettis angle made for a catchy hook, of course, and the Steelers are an easy sell, given that they’ve won 6 Super Bowls and are a model franchise, whereas those weird guys dressed in all blue from somewhere near Alaska had/have never won anything. In the moment, the Seahawks and their fans resented Bill Leavy and his officiating crew. In the larger sense, the Seahawks and their fans didn’t like being treated as 2nd-class citizens.

V. The dominant narrative of this upcoming Super Bowl was likely to be that it’s one last hurrah for Broncos QB Peyton Manning, and this is understandable. Manning is 37, is arguably the greatest QB in NFL history, and who just had the greatest season by a QB in NFL history. His intelligence, affability, and willingness not to take himself serious has also made him a great pitch man and one of the game’s best spokesmen. But just as he jumps routes, Seahawks CB Richard Sherman seems to have hijacked all of the media attention. As someone who tired rather quickly of the whole “Driving the Bus Back to Detroit” narrative in 2006, I’m glad for this deviation from the predictable script. The Seahawks aren’t playing second-fiddle this time around.

VI. As for what Richard Sherman did in the aftermath of the Seahawks 23:17 win over the 49ers in the NFC Championship Game: good for him. I didn’t care what Sherman said, nor would I have cared if Crabtree had made the catch on the critical play and then yakked on and on about how Sherman was actually a chump. (Well, I would’ve been sore about it in the moment, but only because the Seahawks had lost.) The LOSE doesn’t care what people say on the field – and when you’re interviewing players on the sidelines, it’s still on the field. You’re in their house. You play by their rules. Even the game’s greatest spokesperson loses it from time to time in the heat of battle. Sherman trashing 49ers WR Michael Crabtree was somewhat refreshing in its honesty. This idea that we expect athletes to be polite and modest and bow to their fallen opponent after the game is nonsense, of course – it takes enormous ego and arrogance to be great at anything. On the field, games are always full of chirping and woofing and chattering. It’s part of the game. It’s a ploy to try and take the edge off the other side, make them lose their focus. And sometimes it works. (Whatever it was that Materazzi said to Zidane, the LOSE can’t believe that, in the course of his long and storied career, he hadn’t heard it before, if not something worse.)

VII. That Sherman was condemned in the media for this violation of decorum and post-game protocol was silly. The media loves a good interview and a good story, and Sherman is both of those. That some dumb, ignorant, redneck, white trash muttonfuckers came out of the cyber wordwork and threw racial slurs and innuendos Sherman’s way was somewhat disturbing. Noted trashtalker Sir Charles Barkley covered both of these points during a press conference in Seattle I happened to be attending: “there are a lot of idiots in the world, and most of them happen to be reporters.”

VIII. And a few athletes chimed in as well:

All I have to say to that is that maybe Justin Verlander should have thrown some fastballs high and tight to Pablo Sandoval in Game 1 of the 2012 World Series, instead of tossing up these softballs. I’ll make a prediction at the end of this post on the Super Bowl, even though I’m generally terrible when it comes to predictions, but one prediction I am most proud of came up in 2012, in talking about the World Series while walking in the rain with The Official Girlfriend of IN PLAY LOSE after the Giants’ 9:0 clobbering of St. Louis in Game 7 of the NLCS: “sure, the Tigers have Verlander, but what happens to them when Pablo takes him deep in the bottom of the 1st inning of Game 1? The Tigers won’t seem so invincible anymore, will they?” That and basically nailing South Africa 2010 – Spain-Netherlands final, 3/4 of the Semis and 7/8 of the Quarters – are about the only times I’ve ever predicted anything right. So take none of this to Las Vegas. Gambling is wrong! Except if I turn out to be right, of course, at which point I will say, “why didn’t all of you listen to me!”

IX. Getting back to Detroit in 2006: the Seahawks didn’t lose the game because of the officials. It certainly didn’t help. It also didn’t help that an injury to their starting safety created a gaping hole in their defense through which the Steelers scored two of their three TDs in the game. Nor did it help that the Seahawks genius gameplan – the key to which was getting the ball to matchup nightmare TE Jerramy Stevens – was undone by Stevens dropping multiple passes. Yeah, the officiating sucks in an away game, which is why the away team needs to play even better than the norm. The Seahawks didn’t that day. They had the right game plan and didn’t execute, and there will certainly be some wrinkles in the game plan for both teams this coming Sunday, but we’ll get to that here a few more Roman numerals from now.

X. The LOSE and his B-Zero chums threw a Super Bowl party in 1990 while in England. The Brit kids who lived with us wondered what the fuss of the Super Bowl was all about, so we all stayed up until god-knows-what-hour it was to watch the game. The Denver Broncos were playing the San Francisco 49ers, and the Broncos were down 27-3 at the half, which meant everyone else went home early. The Broncos were a walking buzzkill in the 1980s, their regular appearances in the Super Bowl being equivalent to putting on some terrible 1970s soft rock record like Seasons in the Sun or something when you want to get people to leave the party. They would get beat early and beat often, the outcome would be decided by halftime, and then everyone could go home.

XI. The LOSE was living in the Rocky Mountain states when the Broncos won their Super Bowls in 1998 and 1999. On the Sportin’ Life front, my time in Western Colorado in 1998 was pretty cool, not only because the Broncos won the Super Bowl, which generated a whole lot of excitement in the state and the region, but also because of the Winter Olympics, which is a big deal in a winter sports paradise like Steamboat Springs, which has produced more Olympians per capita than any city in the country. I listened to the Super Bowl on the car radio, in fact, as I was driving back from Salt Lake City. I remember the day of the Super Bowl well, not only because the Broncos beat Green Bay 31:24, but because it was also the day that a suicide deer sprung from out of the darkness along the highway and ran right into the front right side of my car, which was slowing mightily at the site of said deer but probably still going a significant rate of speed. This could’ve been disastrous, but the LOSE was driving a Saturn with those springy, dent-resistant panels. The suicide deer bounced off the side panel, stumbled and then ran off into the brush to live another day – albeit likely with some sort of deer concussion. The car didn’t even have a dent.

XII. But yeah, it was kind of neat to see people get excited over their favourite team’s successes. Having grown up in the Northwest, I know very little about this, as only team I grew up following ever won a championship, and that team no longer exists. (Die in a fire, OKC Blunder.) It definitely put a little extra spring in everyone’s step, even in a town 270 miles away from Denver. That sort of effect on the collective psyche of a city, and an extended community, shouldn’t be discounted. We have a tendency to take our games and pastimes far too seriously, but success on the field of play translates into a heightened sense of community and shared purpose which, I believe, is a good thing.

XIII. New Mexico seemed evenly split between Broncos and Cowboys fans, and I gravitated towards the Broncos in 1999, simply because the Cowboys are evil incarnate, and also because a local rooting interests doing well tends to make things easier when you’re primarily working the Sports Desk at a daily newspaper. It’s much easier to come up with an issue on a daily basis that way. Winning is good for business. The LOSE had never been a Broncos fan, of course, owing to the fact that I grew up in the Northwest, and the Seahawks and Broncos were rivals in the AFC West back then. I’d never much cared for Broncos QB John Elway (who, by the way, is actually enshrined on my hometown’s Walk of Fame) but pragmatism ruled the roost during those two years in the Rockies. And I could appreciate the fact that such a great player and great competitor as Elway was ultimately capping off a career with two championships. Elway was fortunate in that he got five chances to play in the Super Bowl in his career (the first three times, his team got blasted). Lots of great players never even get a sniff. To that end, this is an interesting series on ESPN about great players who never reached the Super Bowl.

XIV. The Broncos beat the Atlanta Falcons 34:19 in 1999. The Falcons were enormous underdogs to begin with, and it didn’t help matters that Atlanta FS Eugene Robinson was arrested the night before the game for soliciting a prostitute. This is taking the idea of trying to kick back and relax the night before the game a little too far. (This is also as close to porn as this entry is going to get.)

XV. Speaking of relaxing, the Super Bowl is always a carnival rife with distractions. The tendency, among coaches, is to try and wall their team off somehow from the fêtes going on around them, imploring their players to stay 100% focused. That seems like the right approach, except for the fact that these are human beings we’re talking about here, and human beings are capable of multitasking and being focused when needed. I’m reminded of the 1981 Super Bowl between the Raiders and the Eagles in New Orleans. The Raiders’ entire franchise ethos had been established by recently retired coach John Madden, who only had three rules: be on time, pay attention, and play like hell. Quite a few of the Raider players made sure to get out and enjoy Bourbon St. prior to the 1981 game, which they ultimately won 27:10 in an upset. The Raiders were free spirits and, to a man, the former Raiders have said that they were loose and relaxed for that game, whereas the Eagles seemed tightly wound, and it made a huge difference. It’s never made that much sense to me to try and shudder guys up and pretend that nothing is going on around them. The Super Bowl is a huge spectacle, and one of the things you should do in that situation is ENJOY THE MOMENT, because you do not know if/when it is going to come again. The team that seems most like themselves come game time is the team that’s likely going to be the most successful.

XVI. Which, going back to the Richard Sherman bit, is yet another reason why I couldn’t care less that he said what he said about Michael Crabtree. That’s who he is. Nor do I care that he’s said in the past that Peyton Manning throws some passes that are wounded ducks. The Seahawks are boisterous, confident, brash, obnoxious, and they have fun with the game. They’re not going to try to be anything they aren’t – nor should they. And, like most great trash talkers, they don’t actually take themselves all that seriously, since being willing to dish it out also means being able to take it, and a part of being able to take it is being able to laugh. 

XVII. Like I say, the Super Bowl is something of a carnival, the day having become something of a national holiday. I explained this to all of my friends in Bangladesh that they asked why we were up at 5:30 a.m. watching the Patriots play the Panthers on ESPN India. It was an actual national holiday in Bangladesh – it was Eid that day –  so we got to celebrate two ‘holidays’ at once. (Don't ask me to tell you what became of the cow that was tied out front of the hotel.) And speaking of that trip to Bangladesh, the other person who was on that trip with me – Kate, who is saxophonist extraordinaire for the House Band of IN PLAY LOSE – is breaking out her Brazilian trio for a gig on Sunday night after the game and any Bay Area readers of this blog would do well to check it out.

XVIII. My other foreign Super Bowl witnessing experience came in 1988, when the Redskin Potatoes unleashed one of the greatest single quarters in the history of football on the Denver Broncos. I was in Belgium and I have don’t remember which TV network I was watching or even what language(s) it was in. There were networks on the cable system in Brussels in French, Flemish, Dutch, English, German and Italian, so pick one. The Broncos went all Seasons in the Sun in the 2nd Quarter and went from up 10-0 to down 35-10, but I stayed up until 4:00 a.m. and watched the anticlimactic 2nd half of the Potatoes’ 42:10 victory out of annoyance. If I’m going to stay up that late for the game, damn it, I want to watch ALL THE GAME. Same applied in 1990, when the British Super Bowl party had basically been reduced to me and a handful of 49er fans, who didn’t think trouncing the hapless Broncos 55:10 was enough and wanted the 49ers to score even more, and who also never wanted the game to end.

XIX. Read that score again. The 49ers won the Super Bowl in 1990 by a score of 55:10. Gads, I’ve watched a lot of terrible Super Bowls over the years. It always seemed odd that a league which strove so much to create parity consistently wound up with championship games which were so lopsided. 55:10, 46:10, 42:10, 52:17, 49:26. Yuck. There were some dominant franchises during that time, to be sure – the 49ers, the Cowboys and the Potatoes pretty much took turns, and you can add in the Bears from the mid-1980s as well – and the AFC teams seemed either to be dogs or choking dogs. For someone who doesn’t care a whit about neither the commercials nor the halftime show, this was always something of a downer.

XX. I’m now realizing I’m going to be hard-pressed to write 48 things in this list, as I’m free associating all of this in my head and just sort of vamping on whatever idea came up beforehand.

XXI. I mentioned legendary Bronco QB John Elway’s connection to my hometown before. (His father was an assistant coach at W.S.U. at the time.) Peyton Manning’s connection to my hometown is that his first collegiate start at Tennessee was against The Good Guys in Knoxville in 1994. The Volunteers won 10:9 in an ugly slugfest. That W.S.U. team went 8-4 and led the country in total defense, but couldn’t score. Manning's Vols and W.S.U. simultaneously put a stamp on collegiate football history on New Year's Day 1998 when they lost to eventual national co-champions Nebraska and Michigan, respectively – the former never in doubt, as the Vols got waxed by the sodbusting Cornhuskers; the latter subject to perpetual controversy, as Michigan eked out a 21:16 win over the Cougars in a Rose Bowl with a disputed ending. Manning was the #1 pick in the 1998 draft, taken right ahead of W.S.U. QB Ryan Leaf, whose pro career was somewhat less successful and, ultimately, extremely sad. There were, in fact, pundits at the time who thought the Colts should’ve taken Leaf.

XXII. Manning’s first TD pass as a pro was to Marvin Harrison in an exhibition game against … the Seahawks. When asked about the play afterwards, he said something along the lines of that it was a play called ‘Throw the Ball to Marvin Harrison.’ One of the things which is fascinating about this particular Super Bowl is that, in the complex scheming world of pro football, the juicy matchup of this game, the Broncos best offense v. the Seahawks defense, features two sides whose actual schemes are, by NFL standards, not all that complicated. For all of his running around screaming with his arms flailing and shouting Omaha and such, the offense Manning runs in Denver, much like it was in Indianapolis, is pretty straightforward stuff, while the Seahawks 4-3, cover 3 defense is not far removed from high school sets. That both teams can be this good in the modern NFL speaks to the talent levels. These guys are sick.

XXIII. And here at IN PLAY LOSE, we tend to focus a fair amount on the business aspect of sport, and that so much talent is going to be out on the field on Sunday is a testament to the administrative skill of both squads. The Broncos have done it with some underappreciated free agent moves, and also a bit more bona fide star power – signing the Peyton Mannings and the Wes Welkers and such – whereas the Seahawks have been built through the draft and through shrewd moves by their GM. The Seahawks have done such a good job drafting players, in fact, that a great number of their top flight players are young stars who were low round draft picks. QB Russell Wilson came to them in the 3rd round; badass DBs Richard Sherman and Kam Chancellor in the 5th round. Lower round draft picks are also cheaper in their first contracts. Most franchise QBs command $10 million or so, but Russell Wilson in his 2nd year in the league makes around $500,000 – and that extra $9.5 million you’re not spending on a QB you can then use on a couple of badass pass rushers, like Cliff Avril and Michael Bennett, and a playmaking WR like Percy Harvin (more on him in a minute) and still stay under the salary cap. Many of the Seahawks best players are basically underpaid, which means more money available to sign more good players.

XXIV. The two clubs also have two of the best coaches in football. Pete Carroll just won a poll of NFL players as being the coach they’d want to play for, which is a ringing endorsement (good thing they have some cap flexibility to sign more guys, since Seattle may be high on a lot of FA’s lists here pretty soon). Denver’s John Fox, meanwhile, is someone I have always thought was among the élite minds in the NFL. He managed to maximize the abilities of Tim Tebow and win a playoff game in the process, so clearly he knows what he’s doing. And that’s not a slight against Tebow, to whom I hold no personal animus but an awful lot of other people seem to. Fox built an offense for him emphasizing the run game and controlled passes, and did so believing it gave the Broncos, in 2011, the best chance to win. And he was right. That’s what you’re supposed to do when you coach. But then Peyton Manning came available, and when you have the chance sign Peyton Manning … well, duh, you should do that …

XXV. Quite simply, this is one of the best matchups the Super Bowl has ever seen, two enormously talented teams and two of the smartest, best-run organizations in sports. And MY TEAM IS ONE OF THEM! And The Lose doesn’t really know what to do about this. Not even two World Series titles by my favourite baseball team in recent years has gotten me used to winning. I posess that skepticism and sense of dread and doom that is engrained in Northwest sports fans after years of failure. (And for those of you who don’t understand my allegiance to the San Francisco Giants, I was rooting for the Giants before the Mariners existed. Some would argue they still don’t exist. No argument here.) The Seahawks went from not quite good enough to not quite good at all to not quite good enough again, the Mariners have had about 10 good years out of 42, the Sonics squandered the golden opportunity in the early 1990s and then disintegrated and ultimately left town, the Vancouver Canucks always finish their seasons exactly one playoff level below where their talent dictates they should finish. Seattle ranks down with the likes of Cleveland and Buffalo on the Misery Index when it comes to professional sports. So to have this badass team in the Super Bowl is fucking cool. Not just a really good team, mind you – the Seahawks who lost in 2006 were a really good team – but a badass team that really represents the id of the place from whence I came.

XXVI. And I plan on talking a whole lot of shit and being a pain in the ass to Broncos fan and IN PLAY LOSE East Bay bureau chief Phonerz J. Magratheazaphod at the Super Bowl party on Sunday.

XXVII. But first I need to figure out what to make for the party. Hmmm … I am leaning towards muffuletta for Sunday, because it rules. I made Cajun food when the Saints reached the Super Bowl – poboys and muffuletta. We also had a scrabble tourney that day and I played the word ETOUFFE(E) for some ungodly amount of points. I had the whole Saints thing dialed in that day. I suppose I could go regional with this and do salmon or something. What’s important to remember is that it doesn’t matter if you win or lose so long as you’re drunk and well fed.

XXVIII. I’ve always preferred going to Super Bowl parties to going to bars, although last year I went to about 10 bars. I told a pal of mine working the news desk here in S.F. that I would amble about the Mission and let her know any goings on, particularly if the 49ers won the game, so I would go to a bar, have a drink, watch the game for a series or two and then amble on to the next one. Hey, I’m being asked to go to 10 bars, what’s not to like about that? I supposedly should loathe the rival 49ers but this rivalry is still too new to be on that level. AFC West teams like the Broncos were the sworn enemy during my formative years of fandom. It would’ve been fun for the city if the 49ers had won last year (and it would’ve done all of us a service, since the Baltimore Ravens are about the most thoroughly annoying franchise in sports), and I was somewhat disappointed when they lost. I felt like they were the better team and let the opportunity get away from them. And, as we saw with the 49ers this year, those opportunities can be hard to come by. And I was probably more animated in wanted a 49er win than I should’ve been, me being a Seahawk guy and all. I’ll sight my pragmatism again along with a time-tested excuse: “I was drunk!” Going to 10 bars will do that to you, since you should patronize the establishments accordingly.

XXIX. OK, so who wins? Or, better yet, who loses? (This is IN PLAY LOSE after all.) First of all, the Broncos lose if they turn the ball over. Can’t do that. That’s a 100% surefire way for them to lose, and the Seahawks force more turnovers than anyone in the game.

XXX. The Seahawks lose if they try to outsmart Peyton Manning. That will work for all of one series before he figures it out. No gimmick defenses and such. As I said before, the Seahawks keep it simple on defense and you need to do that against the Broncos.

XXXI. The Broncos lose if they don’t come up with some wrinkles on offense. The Seahawks are a strangely constructed team that seems uniquely problematic to Denver’s receivers. They have big CBs who are physical, they have LBs who are tall and rangy, and they have a safety in Kam Chancellor who has systematically destroyed TEs all season. Seattle are also good tacklers, which means fewer yards after contact. Denver will move the ball, because they can do that on anyone, but this will likely have to be in smaller chunks of yardage, which means longer drives. The longer the drives, the more likely a mistake. A lot of the Broncos’ favourite plays aren’t likely to work so well, so they’ll need some different looks. (EDIT: Phonerz J. Magratheazaphod has argued upon first read of this post that Denver is likely to win through primary use of the running game, instead of the pass. I actually agree with this and it was damn lazy of me not to mention that RB Knowshon Moreno is probably the key player in this game for the Denvers.)

XXXII. The Seahawks lose if they can’t block anyone. The offensive line for Seattle has been something of a mess, mostly due to injuries. Russell Wilson winds up running for his life at times on dropbacks.

XXXIII. The Broncos lose if they don’t get any QB sacks. And I don't mean pressure, I mean sacks, because Russell Wilson is so elusive. Denver’s defense has been good against the run, but their secondary is a bit suspect. And when Russell Wilson is running for his life is also when he can be the most dangerous – Seattle is one of the best teams in the league when it comes to improvisational, free form pass plays where Wilson seemingly makes something out of nothing.

XXXIV. The Seahawks lose if they don’t run the ball. Marshon Lynch doesn’t need that many blocks, as he runs behind his pads and simply runs over a lot of people. The Seahawks have avoided Russell Wilson QB read-option running plays most of the year, simply because they don’t want to their 5’10” QB smashed, but it wouldn’t surprise me if they decide to pull out some of those sorts of plays and try to use Denver’s overpursuit against them, particularly since they now have a secret weapon to stretch and spread the field ...

XXXV. The Broncos lose if they can’t figure out what Seahawks WR Percy Harvin is going to do. This is one of the more intriguing twists in the game. Seattle traded for Harvin from the Minnesota Vikings in the offseason, signed him to a $67 million contract, and he promptly got hurt and missed the first 10 games of the season. He played one game and did stuff like this:

He then got hurt again, missed the rest of the regular season, played against the Saints in the playoffs and got knocked out of the game. He’s played all of about 30 plays all year. Harvin is apparently now fully healthy and is the ultimate X factor. Percy Harvin is one of the fastest, most dangerous players in all of football. And for the Broncos, there is basically ZERO film from which to gameplan for him. There is basically a whole swath of the Seahawks playbook they haven’t even run all year involving all phases of the offense. If Harvin is a big factor in the game, the Broncos are in big trouble.

XXXVI. The Seahawks lose if Harvin get hurts again. Which seems to happen a lot. He’s had a fairly checkered career. Although some of his ‘injury’ issues last year in Minnesota may have had more to do with him getting into a row with the Vikings coaching staff. The Lose has always been of the opinion that such sideline squabbles often say more about the coach than the player. And the Vikings just fired everyone this offseason after going 4-12, so clearly whatever they were preaching wasn’t working.

XXXVII. The Broncos lose if the officiating crew follows their usual form. Apparently, the crew tabbed to work the game is known for being more defense friendly in nature, calling fewer pass interference and defensive holding penalties than the league average, and calling more offensive holding penalties than the league average. The Seahawks defense is tight, physical, aggressive, and some would say not entirely legal, so this would likely benefit them and hinder a pass-first offense like Denver.

XXXVIII. The Seahawks lose if the zeebs get whistle happy. Seattle is already one of the more penalized teams in the league. Penalties mean free first downs for Denver, instead of making them earn it. Can’t do that. For the sake of the viewing, let’s hope this doesn’t happen, just because too many penalties makes the game insufferable.

XXXIX. The Broncos lose if this comes down to special teams. Because of the altitude, Denver is a kicker’s paradise, a place where you can hit 64-yard FGs, loft punts that hit the moon and launch kickoffs out the back of the end zone and into the third row of I-Don’t-Care-Who-Sponsors-It-It’s-Always-Going-To-Be Mile High Stadium. At sea level, however, Denver’s kick coverage is terrible – worst in the NFL – and along with his prowess as a WR and running the reverse, Percy Harvin is also one of the league’s best kick returners. Denver’s return man is dynamic but also fumble prone, and the Seahawks have the best kick coverage units in the league: they gave up an average of 1.0 return yards for every time they punted this year.

XL. We all lose if the weather doesn’t suck. Part of the fun of having the Super Bowl in New York should be that the weather for the game is terrible. Football is played in all sorts of weather, from 100% humidity in Miami in September to -20° in Green Bay in January. The weather conditions are part of the game. Part of what makes the game so interesting, in fact, is the enormous number of factors and variables that you have to prepare for, with the weather just being one of them. My thought would’ve been that bad weather, in this particular game, would slightly favour the Seahawks simply because the wind would’ve messed a bit with the passing game of the Broncos. But it wouldn’t make that much difference, as both these teams are used to lousy winter conditions, and it would be cool to see them slopping about in the snow. Apparently, after a dreadful winter back east, the forecast has improved for the weekend.

XLI. The Broncos lose if Peyton Manning throws too many of those ducks Richard Sherman was talking about, and particularly in Richard Sherman’s direction. My suspicion is that Denver won’t throw too much to Sherman’s side of the field, but instead try to pick on the CBs on the other side. (Not that that’s worked very well, either – Seattle has the #1 pass defense for a reason.) Denver needs to find a matchup that works and do it quickly, because Seattle also has eight healthy defensive linemen they will rotate and keep fresh, which means it will be hard to wear them down. The Broncos don’t give up many sacks, but the Seahawks aren’t a team that needs sacks to be effective. They get pressure and disrupt.

XLII. The Seahawks lose if they can’t control the ball. As good as the Seahawk defense is, you don’t want to give Denver all sorts of chances. That offense is lethal. The old adage of the best defense being the good offense comes into play here. Seattle’s offense got mired in the muck at the end of the year, but is actually better statistically than it sometimes appears. I think their ability to sustain drives, and Denver’s ability to get the ball back for Peyton Manning, is where this game will ultimately be determined.

XLIII. The Broncos lose. Which is what I ultimately think is going to happen, because as good as Pot Roast and the rest of the Denver defense looked in their two playoff games, I don’t think they can contain Wilson, I don’t think they can pen in Lynch, and they have no answer for Harvin if he’s heavily involved in the Seahawks game plan. Much has been made in the media of what happens when the league’s best offense goes up against the league’s best defense, but the end result of such games is often, if not always, due to what happens on the other side of the ball.

XLIV. My thoughtful, rational pick for this game is that Seattle wins 27:17.

XLV. My irrational, completely nonsensical, wishful thinking homer pick for this game is Seattle wins 55:10.

XLVI. If I had to pick an MVP, I’d guess either Marshon Lynch or Percy “Mr. X” Harvin.

XLVII. Remember the following for your Super Bowl Squares Pool. In 47 previous Super Bowls:
The number 0 appeared 101 times - 26.86%
The number 7 appeared 78 times - 20.74%
The number 3 appeared 58 times - 15.43%
The number 4 appeared 39 times - 10.37%
The number 6 appeared 31 times - 8.24%
The number 1 appeared 23 times - 6.11%
The number 9 appeared 17 times - 4.52%
The number 5 appeared 10 times - 2.66%
The number 8 appeared 10 times - 2.66%
The number 2 appeared 9 times   - 2.39%
And since I'm too lazy to do the math, here is a chart showing the most likely squares to pay off:

And also that remember that gambling is a sin.

XLVIII. Since I’ve already covered porn (albeit briefly) and lists of things, here is a picture of my cat:

We Are Better Than This

I generally reserve this space for fun and games. The games that we play, and the way that we approach them, generally speak to the sort of society in which we live. We treat games as pastimes, diversions from our day-to-day existences, yet we allow ourselves to get wholly absorbed by them from time to time. And that’s actually a good thing, I think. Right now, I’m far more interested in focusing on the Seahawks being in the upcoming Super Bowl and far less interested in dealing with an assortment of personal life issues and quandaries and challenges. Those problems will still be there on the 3rd of February. They can wait.

But sometimes real life intrudes. Real life can be really ugly. And sometimes it gets personal:

COLUMBIA, Md. (AP) — Someone armed with a gun opened fire at a busy shopping mall in suburban Baltimore on Saturday. Three people died, including the person believed to be the shooter, police said.
The shooting took place at the Mall in Columbia, a suburb of both Baltimore and Washington, according to Howard County police.
Someone called 911 at around 11:15 a.m. to report a shooting at the mall. Police responded to the scene and found three people dead, including one person who was found near a gun and ammunition. No details were released about their identities.
Police said they believed that one of the people found dead was the shooter. Two people with minor injuries were transported to a hospital for treatment.
The mall is at the center of the town and typically opens at 10 a.m. on Saturdays. It was busy with shoppers and employees when shots rang out before noon.
Joan Harding of Elkridge, Md., was shopping with her husband, David, for a tiara for their granddaughter's 18th birthday. She said she heard something heavy falling, followed by gunshots and people running.
"My husband said, 'Get down!' and the girl that worked in the store said, 'Get in the back,' " Harding said. That is where they hid until police gave the all-clear.
At a news conference, Howard County Police Chief William J. McMahon said police are relatively confident that there was only one shooter.
"We don't know a motive yet," McMahon said. "We are very confident that it was a single shooter, and there was not another shooter in the mall."
The mall was closed to the public as police went store to store looking for people who might still hiding, McMahon said. He said the shooting occurred at a store on the upper floor.
He said it wasn't clear whether the shooting was random or whether the shooter and victims knew each other.
Witnesses described moments of panic as they heard a succession of gunshots and screaming as people ran for cover into nearby stores and hid behind locked doors.
Tonya Broughton of Silver Spring, Md., was with a friend getting facials for a 'girls morning out,' she said. "The only thing I heard was all the people running and screaming and saying 'There's a shooter! There's a shooter!' " she said.
Wearing a gel face mask, she and her friend hunkered down in a Victoria Secret store.
People were directed out of the mall and into a parking lot, where some boarded a bus and others walked toward their cars. Some people were seen crying. McMahon said detectives were interviewing witnesses as they emerged from the mall to try to get a better picture of the events that had unfolded.
Laura McKinzles of Columbia works at a kiosk in the mall. She said she heard between eight and 10 gunshots, followed by people running and screaming. She ran into the backroom of a perfume store and locked the door.
Allison Cohen, who works at the apparel store "Lucky Brand Jeans," said she always felt safe at the mall.
"I truly never thought something like this would ever happen here," Cohen said. "It's really, really shocking."

My future in-laws live in Ellicott City, Md., which is near to Columbia. They were shopping in this mall at the time. They were apparently at the opposite end of the mall when the shooting began, near an exit. They were able to run from the mall to safety. But 15 minutes earlier, they were in the area of the building where this occurred. 15 minutes. That small sliver of time being difference between safety and potentially being in harm’s way. They are OK, which is a great relief. I am thankful for that. I am very, very thankful.

But I am also livid that I live in a nation where something like this happens at all. That several people have suffered the ultimate loss in this incident – the loss of one’s life – makes me extraordinarily sad. It also makes me angry. Really angry.

This sort of violence is senseless and needless. This is not how a supposedly civil society conducts its affairs. It’s unacceptable. If we cannot ensure the basic safety of our citizens, then we, as a society, have failed. And this sort of thing happens FAR TOO OFTEN. It seems to happen almost every day in one area or another of this country. That we, as a supposedly civil society, have not taken more steps to prevent these sorts of incidents from happening should be infuriating to every person who lives here.

My outrage is genuine. This isn’t me speaking in the abstract. People who are very dear to me were very nearly in harm’s way today. And in recent times, there have been two instances where people that I know have been killed in acts of gun violence. That’s two times too often. Any number larger than zero is too often. It’s not acceptable. In one case, it was a murder-suicide. In the other, it was someone I know who is an attorney and was attempting to mediate a dispute who was in the line of the fire when one of the parties pulled a gun. I mention the situations because violence takes many forms. The end result was the same in both cases, however – a senseless loss of life. Two incidents which have forever altered the ways that I see this life of mine.

The thing is, it should not take personal connections, a personal feelings of loss, to make us care. This shooting today in Columbid, Maryland, should outrage you even if you know not a single person in the greater Baltimore-Washington area. We, as human beings, should not be doing this sort of thing to each other.

And I have ZERO interest in debating the politics of gun control right now. Whether I do or do not favour gun control isn’t really the point. What is the point is that there are an awful lot of gun control apologists out there who will quickly respond to an incident by using an excuse other than the prevalence and easy accessibility to firearms. “People are crazy,” they will say. “Crime is everywhere,” they will say. To which I say this: OK, well if the problem is crime or people being crazy, then what are you doing to solve that problem? Don’t pay lip service to ‘bigger’ life issues. If those are the real problems, then try to solve them. Go on, do it. Make your community and your society a better place. I urge you to do it.

Same for gun control advocates: don’t just bitch about guns. Strive to make change. But what if you cannot make grand societal changes, at least in the short term? Then make small change. The solution is larger societal issues is found in often found in small ideas. Find commonality with people, find common purpose. Surely, we can all agree that a gunman shooting innocents in a mall is unacceptable.

It would be easy for me to be hardened and inflexible, to be cynical, having not only seen three people I know killed by gun violence in recent years, but also having been a victim of a violent crime in the past in which my life was threatened. Yes, it happened to good old, whitebread, milquetoast, middle class me. I was fine, in the end, the victim of an act perpetrated by a couple of junkies who likely didn’t remember they had even done it. It would be easy to call this a random act, but it was nothing of the sort. Two guys who wanted the means with which to get high chose to commit a crime so as to make it easier for them to do so. We should be careful using the word random to describe incidences of violence. It is not random. It is a choice, though not necessarily a conscious one.

And imagine how I felt when, a couple of months after that, I came across one of the perpetrators while walking along Mission St. And I did know it was him. I could never forget that face. I will remember those two faces forever. And there he was – strung out, yellow-eyed and trembling, leaning up against a lamppost near a bus stop. And I stopped in my tracks, I just froze there in place and glared at him, glared right through him, wondering if he remembered me.

But no, he did not remember me. He had no idea who I was. No idea at all.

And in that moment, of course, I was outraged that this scum junky was out on the streets, having evaded capture by the S.F.P.D. All sorts of cynical ideas go through your head in a moment such as that – what a joke, the criminal justice system is in this country. What a laughingstock. Guys like this motherfucking sleazebag are free to just roam about, pickpocketing and thieving and doing whatever the fuck they want. The cops don’t care. No one cares.

It’s when you give in to cynicism that vigilantism suddenly seems like a good idea. In that moment, I could’ve killed him. And I really do mean I could’ve killed him, as in physically, as he was so meek and pathetic and I was so angry that I could’ve beaten the living shit out of him right there on the street, leaving him begging for mercy, but also leaving him wondering why it was that this seemingly random dude was using his face as a punching bag.

But I did nothing of the sort. Instead I just moved on. I pitied him. I felt sorry for him, because I was certain that this guy – who was willing, with an accomplice, to pull a gun and a knife on a guy for $7 and an iPod – had completely lost who he was. He wasn’t a human being anymore. He was a zombi, as good as dead. Me using violence as a response to violence, and doing so at a time of my choosing when I had the upper hand, would have been the easy way out.

What is far more difficult, however, and also far more important, is committing to finding solutions to problems which lead to people behaving in the way this person had behaved towards me. This shouldn’t happen to others. It shouldn’t happen at all. If I can do something to prevent that from happening to one other person, I have made this society better.

I regularly donate not so insignificant sums to institutions devoted to the study of mental illness, something which I care deeply about. I have done so now for quite some time, believing that knowledge is power. We humans are a dangerously flawed species, but we are also gifted with the ability to learn and understand ourselves, to learn why it is that we do the way we do things, and to ultimately change both individuals and the individuals who come after them. While I do not believe that mental illness is the reason that all crimes of the nature of this shooting in Columbia occur, I believe there is often a strong correlation. It seems inherently irrational to me that we, the human race, so easily hurt one-another. I believe that the seemingly soulless shells of individuals who sought to hold me up could have been prevented from reaching that point somewhere in their lives. That behaviour seems preventable to me. There are reasons why this happens. Lots of reasons, some of which make no sense. Me personally, I am not smart enough not well-learned enough to explain this, but that doesn’t mean I should do nothing. If by contributing financially, I am able to enable those who are smart enough to find some answers, then I have made a difference.

And that is what you should do. Make a difference. Care about your community, your society. There are many angles to a story such as what happened in Columbia. There is some aspect the act of a gunman going on a spree in public space which should make you uneasy, which you should want to change so that it happens less often, if at all. So pick one and go about solving it, whatever that might entail. Do not be cynical. Do not just sit there and do nothing. Even small things are enough – acts as small as standing on my soapbox here in this small corner of the internet and imploring others to be involved. It should not require an enormous act of violence to compel us to action, but sometimes we need to be shaken to get off our duffs and act. (And I admit that I am just as guilty as succumbing to inertia as everyone else.)

The cynic would say that another violent act such as this will inevitably occur. I do not share that view. This sort of loss is not inevitable. Losing is only the default in sports and in games.

We are better than this.