The Dream Matchup … Or is it a Nightmare?

RARE is there a convergence of forces so comically awful, but Tuesday, December 1 is a day Lose aficionados have circled on their calendars, as it yields a matchup so truly wretched that it qualifies as Must-Lose TV.

On the one hand, we have the Philadelphia 76ers, who’ve managed to outdo even themselves this season with an 0-18 start, tying them for the worst opening to a season in NBA season. Tack on the 10-game losing streak the Sixers endured to close out last season, and Philly has now lost 28 games in a row – the longest losing streak in the history of American major league sports. The 76ers had their opportunity on Sunday in Memphis, leading a poor and generally disinterested Grizzlies side 76-71 with 9:00 or so remaining as the boos rained down from the rafters of the FedEx Forum – at which point the Griz rattled off a 15-1 run on their way to a 92:84 victory over the hapless Sixers, who started 0-17 a year ago on their way to an 18-64 record, and who were 19-63 the season before that. This 0-18 start is hardly a surprise – in fact, when I was posed the question by Kenji, the (Un)Official Reno Oddsmaker of In Play Lose (but remember kids, gambling is a sin), about whether a Warriors loss or a 76ers win was more likely to happen first, I took a quick look at the schedule and thought to myself, “hmm, that’s not a very promising schedule for the Sixers coming up, and that 6-game road trip looks deadly. I don’t see a win for the 76ers in the first 18 games …”

And at some point, you’d have to start wondering if/when the league is going to intercede in the goings on in Philadelphia, since the organization’s commitment to not winning is such that it’s making a mockery of the league. The 76ers don’t have a single player on their current active roster with more than three years of NBA experience. They are presently paying out about $20 million to two players they waved in the offseason solely because that $20 million allows them to reach the salary floor – thus avoiding having to make up that difference between their actual payroll and the NBA minimum by giving out bonuses to the players on their active roster. They have no reason to give two shits about the players on their current roster, since scarcely any of those players are even remotely in the organization’s future plans. The players presently on the 76ers’ payroll have clearly been set up to fail. This 3-year run during which the 76ers are 108 games under .500 and now own three of the longest losing streaks ever in the league is nothing short of the most elaborate tank job in NBA history.

And for what? If you’re going to be that bad, for that long, you’d better better get something useful out of the draft. We saw the Houston Astros rise from the ashes this past season after enduring some truly wretched seasons in baseball, but the ’Stros were stockpiling young talent in the process, all of whom matured and then gelled this past season. The 76ers have done none of these things. They stumbled their way into drafting center Jahlil Okafor this year, who has a promising future, but being that terrible for three straight seasons should, hopefully, net you more than one good player in the draft. Philly GM Sam Hinkie’s other “talent acquisition” moves have included: drafting Michael Carter-Williams; deciding Carter-Williams wasn’t any good and trading him; trading for Nerlens Noel, who was hurt and missed his first season and is now shooting .410 from the field which is OK if you’re chucking it from three but not so good if you’re 6’11” and play 2 feet from the basket and now have nowhere to operate since the 76ers have Okafor; and drafting Joel Embiid, who missed his rookie season with a foot injury, didn’t rehab correctly, is now missing another season after another foot surgery, and is now also superfluous since, again, the 76ers just drafted Okafor.

The Sixers brass would have you believe that they’re about to hit the jackpot this coming off-season, since three years worth of trades with brain-dead franchises like the Sacramento Kings has netted them three and possibly four 1st round picks in the upcoming draft, but given how poorly they’ve been at acquiring talent of late, it doesn’t exactly fill me with confidence that they’ll get it right this time. In the meantime, the franchise has pissed away a normally pretty tolerant fan base, and the 10,000 who turn up for home games should all get medals of valor.

But come Tuesday, the 76ers may finally have an opponent they can beat. This is because the Lakers are in town.

The Lakers are 2-13 and Kobe Bryant capped off the day on which he announced his retirement at the end of the season by showing all of us why he should retire immediately, chucking up a rock from deep with the Lakers down three to cap off his 4-for-20 shooting performance in a loss to Hickory High School the Indiana Pacers. (I’m diggin’ those Hoosiers throwback duds.) Bryant labelled himself the 200th best player in the league in a bout of frustration with the media earlier this year, but he was being generous. His real plus-minus for the season ranks him something like the 375th 402nd best player in the NBA at the moment. (As a note, you will see the aforementioned Okafor at the bottom of that list, a fact which I attribute to the poor guy being basically the entirety of the 76ers’ offensive options on every play.) Bryant was truly at his worst during a 4-point, 1-for-14 performance last week against the Warriors, who won 111:77 to break the all-time record for wins to start the season in a game that was essentially over after four minutes. Bryant’s fall from grace at the end of his career has been particularly painful to watch even for Laker haters such as myself. At his prime, Kobe was the best bad-shot shooter in the NBA history. He’s taken – and made – more ill-advised shots in his career than anyone who’s ever played. (That’s a compliment. Sort of.) Now, they’re just bad shots, but that won’t keep him from taking them.

In fact, the Lakers as much as encourage him to keep doing it. What makes the Lakers both comical and galling is not just that Kobe has been terrible, but that the Lakers keep kissing his ass, particularly head coach Byron Scott, who definitely deserves a Big Tool Award at the moment:

This quote right here from Byron Scott, about how Kobe jacking up junk from the outside affects ball movement on offense, tells you pretty much all you need to know about the state of the Lakers:

“He’s had 20 years of experience in this league. We might not have six players that have 20 years of experience in this league combined. He has that privilege basically. From a coaching standpoint, I want Kobe to be Kobe, other guys haven’t earned that right yet.”

So, OK, so Kobe can just keep freelancing and taking bad shots because he’s been doing it for 20 years, even though he can’t throw it in the ocean off the Santa Monica Pier. OK, got it.

Kobe is still a draw at the box office, which is important in La-La-Land to a franchise still milking their ‘Showtime’ golden eras, but I think most of the people coming to see Kobe these days possess a fondness for ambulance chasing and watching trains wreck. Bryant’s $25,000,000 salary comes off the books at the end of the season, and plenty of delusional Laker fans think they’ll be active in free agency this coming offseason and be able to buy their way back into relevancy, but the core talent level on the team is so poor that no free agent worth their salt would willingly sign there so they can endure another 4-5 years of misery in the prime of their career.

I have no idea whether D’Angelo Russell, the point guard they selected #2 in the draft, is going to be any good, since for some inexplicable reason, the Lakers aren’t playing him in the 4th Quarter. Julius Randle and Jordan Clarkson have shown some promise, but the bulk of what you get when you watch the Lakers is Kobe taking bad shots, Nick Young taking slightly-better ones, Roy Hibbert reminding you that Roy Hibbert used to be in the NBA, a few minutes of Meta World Peace and a few odd moments of unbridled joy in the form of Marcelo Huertas.

As bad as Philadelphia is at the moment, the Lakers just might be worse. If the 76ers can’t beat these guys, they may never win a game. They have the similarly lame Denver Nuggets coming to Philly next Saturday, and a game next week with the hopeless and always humorous Brooklyn Nets, but this game with the Lakers offers them the best chance to get off the schneid.

Then again, the Lakers are now beginning a rather ugly 8-game road trip – up next are the Buzzards, Hawks, Pistons, Raptors, Wolves, Spurs and Rockets in succession – so this may be their best chance to win a game between now and the 15th of December, at the earliest. Either way, this has all the makings of the being the worst single game played in the NBA this season. Stay tuned.

Odds and Ends

FOOTBALL has officially gone mad. Just when you thought you’d seen everything to end a football game – and after whatever the hell this was, I thought I’d seen it all – the sport just gets weirder and weirder. This past Saturday, we had Michigan following up that loss that I just linked to by winning a game with a goal line stand against Minnesota – aided, in part, by the Gophers forgetting that the clock had started and nearly letting it run out. We had New Mexico State ending the nation’s longest losing streak, beating Idaho in 2OT and winning when DB Terrill Hanks intercepted a pass with his feet. (I’m serious. He really did.) But for complete, utter lunacy, nothing can top this mess from Saturday night in Durham, N.C.:

Wait … what? What just happened here?

It’s a truly remarkable play by Miami – but, as it turns out, it’s also not a legal one. The runner is down on the fourth lateral before he releases the ball, there is an illegal block, and a Miami player runs out on the field before the TD is scored, which is an illegal participation foul. Yet somehow, after reviewing this play for nine minutes, the officials still got it wrong. The entire crew has now been suspended by the ACC for completely messing it up in live time, and then messing it up further still when going under the replay hoods. So on top of a colossal play, you have colossal incompetence. “The last play of the game was not handled appropriately,” ACC Commissioner John Swofford said in the understatement of the year.

Now, there is no mechanism in place to overturn the result of a football game, either in college or in the NFL. Question is, should there be? The obvious answer is “no,” of course – the result on the field should stand, and going about changing the results in some commissioner’s office is a bad idea. Yeah, it sucks, you got jobbed but that’s life.

But curiously enough, there is precedent for it in other sports, the most notable being the (in)famous Pine Tar Incident between the Kansas City Royals and the New York Yankees in 1983, which came to my mind every time they showed George Brett during the just-concluded World Series, since anyone who has seen the video, where Brett goes apoplectic, hears Brett’s name and will think of that particular play before they remember he nearly hit .400 or remember any other aspect of his storied career. The Royals protested the game, and the commissioner upheld their protest, meaning that the game had to be reconvened and restarted at a later date, picking up right where they had left off after Brett’s controversial home run. In fact, there have been at least 15 instances in MLB history where a protest was upheld and play was resumed, most recently on Aug. 19, 2014, when the Giants protested a 2-0, rain-shortened loss to the Cubs in Chicago on account of the grounds crew’s incompetence rendering the field unplayable:

The NBA, meanwhile, has also forced some do-overs in its time, most recently in 2008 when the Atlanta Hawks and Miami Heat redid the ending of a game three months after the fact when it was discovered that Shaquille O’Neal had been ruled incorrectly to have fouled out of the game with 52 seconds left. Confusing matters further was the fact that, during the three months in between, Shaq had been traded from Miami to Phoenix, so the guy involved in the original mess wasn’t even there to replay the last 52 seconds. The previous replay in the NBA, involving the Spurs and the Lakers in 1982, was even nuttier, involving a fake free throw.

I’ve actually been involved with a particular oddity in basketball on a couple of occasions. When I was playing in Britain, we had a game in Cambridge and we won … uh, I don’t know what the final score was but we won by 7 pts., but I think it was something like 91:84, so we’ll use that for the purposes of discussion. Anyway, we started looking over the scorebook after the game was over and it didn’t add up. There was 89 for us and 86 for Cambridge. What we finally figured out had happened was that, since this basketball in Britain in the 1980s and we were playing in some weird building masquerading as a sports hall, it didn’t have an electronic scoreboard and we had some manual flip board by the scorer’s table, and though we were down by two points at halftime, when we changed ends to start the second half, the scoreboard operator got confused and no one involved seemed to notice. The final score was therefore officially changed to 89:86 after the game was over.

Now, it didn’t affect the outcome in that case, but I do remember a case with two high schools in the same league as ours – the three of our schools all vying for the league championship at the time – playing a game where one team won by two points, but when they checked the official scorebook afterwards (which is the official record in basketball and not the scoreboard), they realized that the scoreboard operator had somehow forgotten to put a basket by the losing team on the board. So the game was actually tied, and then the officials had to go into the locker rooms after the fact and tell the players, a good number of whom were showering if not already dressed, that they had to go out on the floor again and play an overtime in an empty gym, the fans all having long since gone home.

But trying to figure something out like this in a logistics-laden game like football would be next to impossible. I mean, you’ve got 100+ people involved on either sideline, you’ve got an extremely rigid schedule, so trying to pick up a game and restart it at a later date would be next to impossible. It’s bad enough trying to reschedule a game when bad weather or some other disaster comes up. And every scenario I have mentioned so far involved players going back out, even months later, and settling the result on the field. In the case of the Pine Tar Incident (unusual in that Brett being called out was the last out of the game), the Yankees still had a chance to bat in the bottom of the 9th and tie the score. In the case of the Duke-Miami game which is the source of this blog, there have been calls to somehow overturn the result, but what good would that do? Sure, the officials got the play wrong, but it most likely wasn’t the only mistake they made all night, it just happened to be the last mistake, one from which it was impossible to recover. And since they called 28 penalties in the game, 23 of them on Miami, you cannot say they weren’t involved in the game in any other way. They just missed this one, as inconceivable at seems. It happens sometimes.

I mean, the officials committing a game-altering mistake late on is certainly infuriating. Don’t get me wrong. We all remember Fail Mary, of course. That’s the single-worst call in the history of the NFL. As a Seahawk fan, I’ll freely admit we stole that one – while also pointing out that the Seahawks have also received several official apologies from the NFL over the years for poor officiating which directly played a hand in their losses, including in consecutive weeks in 2003, one of which involved a referee tackling a Seahawk receiver. (Fast forward to the 1:30 mark of this video.) But the NFL doesn’t alter results after the fact, which annoyed me a few times when it came to ’Hawks games, but they shouldn’t do it, and neither should anyone else. There still has to be a human element to the games, and humans make mistakes.

What’s particularly galling about the Duke-Miami situation is that it involved instant replay technology, and the whole point of the technology is to prevent precisely what happened on that play. Other than the electric eyes in tennis, no one seems to have figured out how to use replay correctly yet. A particularly awkward situation arose two weeks ago in the Rugby World Cup quarterfinal between Scotland and South Africa. Scotland led 32-31 mere moments from the end of the game when the referee awarded the Springboks a penalty, as the Scots were offsides when they handled the ball. The Scots wanted to somehow challenge the play, but even though rugby has instant replay available, it’s only for particular situations and this play didn’t apply. It got even messier when they showed the replay on the Jumbotron in the stadium as the Springboks lined up for a gimme penalty kick which would give them three points and a win, and 80,000 people in the stadium – including the players on the pitch – could see for themselves that the referee had gotten the call wrong. The Scots and the fans, somewhat understandably, were incensed, and South Africa won 34:32 on a bogus penalty on the last kick of the game. Rugby is a sport where dissent is no tolerated in the slightest – the referee’s rule is final is his authority unquestioned – but now it was entirely in the court of public opinion, and the poor guy got absolutely crucified in the press. It all begged the question: what’s the point of having replays at all if you can’t fix what’s so obviously incorrect?

To me, the burden of proof has always been applied wrong in replays. You shouldn’t be doing it based upon what was called on the field. The one empowered with the monitor should be able to use their own judgment. Most replay systems have been set up this way in part because there are particularly prickly umpires and referees unions involved, all of whom don’t like the fact that technology can do their job better than they can, and thus might eventually make them replaceable. But what’s most important, in the end, is that you get the call right, and nobody gives a damn who, or what, makes it. And if a sport decides to say the hell with it and go back to using only humans making decisions, that’s fine as well. Officials are doing the best they can, and we can live with the results.

And the fact of the matter is that controversies of the nature surrounding Duke and Miami are, in the end, good for the game. For one thing, it’s because of nonsense like we saw on Saturday that rules often get enacted, or fixed, to try and prevent it from happening again. And for a game so dependent upon pageantry and being in love with its own nostalgia as college football is, a play like we saw on Saturday, and all of the surrounding controversy, ultimately adds some color and spice to the mix. Football is unique in that there are so few games during the course of the season that every one of them is magnified. Because of this, it’s a game which easily lends itself to legend and narrative. I was speaking the other day online with Tim Williams from the law firm of Williams, Morgan, and Williams, the Unofficial Of Counsel of In Play Lose, and Tim is a Missouri alum. All that I had to do was mention “5th Down” to put him in a cringe. (He then mentioned the Nebraska kicked ball all on his own, which was noble of him.) It’s been almost 18 years, and Zzu Crew members like me are still irked about the 1998 Rose Bowl between The Good Guys and Michigan, when Ryan Leaf spiked the ball to stop the clock and the clock didn’t stop. In the larger picture of things, the greater the controversy at the end of the game, the greater the narrative becomes over time. The stories do get better as they get older.

And if a football team ever wins a game because of a 1-pt. safety, then I will have truly seen it all. But that will probably happen next week.

Please Keep Punting

Two against five. What could possibly go wrong?

KEVIN KELLEY has achieved underground celebrity and cult status in the football world for his unorthodox strategic approach. Kelley is the head coach at Pulaski Academy in Pulaski, Arkansas, where he has won multiple state championships against much bigger schools and done so by turning the game of football into a math problem. He onside kicks after nearly every touchdown, has periodically resorted to 11-man blitzes on defense, is currently trying to work more rugby-style laterals downfield into the game, and, most famously, his teams rarely, if ever, punt. He’s punted something like four times in the last three years. He will almost always go for it for 4th Down, no matter where he is on the field. All of this is done with the numbers on his side. Statistically speaking, you’re actually better off not punting most of the time. (Read the book Scorecasting for a nice explanation of how it works.)

The Lose, however, must take a stand here and say that what we need is more punting in football, and more activity out of punt formations, because it we eliminate punting, what on earth am I ever going to talk about?

Seriously, I’ve seen more dumb stuff involving the punting game in the first two months of football season than ever before. Texas got the ball rolling with this howler which cost them a game, and then W.S.U. decided to join in the fun and turn a potential upset of Cal into a come from ahead loss in the process. Then came one of the most confounding endings to a football game I’ve ever seen this past weekend, when Michigan’s punter dropped the snap on what turned out to be the last play of the game, the ball recovered and returned for the winning score by Michigan State. In terms of lunatic endings to college football games, only The Play and Team of Destiny vs. Team of Dynasty can probably top it. I made a bold statement on facebook later on Saturday evening that, while The Worst Play of The Year Award had already been determined, Michigan had done well to firmly encamp themselves in the second spot.

A spot which Michigan held until Sunday night, when the Indianapolis Colts attempted what has to be the single-worst conceived play in the history of the NFL. Bill Barnwell from Grantland compiled a collection of the worst plays in NFL history earlier this year, but he’s going to have to reshuffle the order and make room for this one near the top.

What the actual fuck was that?

Coach head coach Chuck Pagano took the blame for this after the game, saying that his players didn’t execute the play correctly and that there was some miscommunication. For the life of me, I can’t imagine what would have happened any differently if they’d actually executed this play correctly. And it’s been funny to read some media outlets this morning talking about how the Patriots were brilliantly prepared and brilliantly reacted to this play. (Contrary to popular narrative among New England fans, there are plenty of Patriots apologists in the media.) What, it was somehow brilliant to look at two guys lining up 20 yards from the rest of their teammates and have three guys stand over them? This game already had the added absurdity of the Patriots vowing revenge, since it was the Colts who narced on Tom Brady and triggered the Deflategate melodrama, thus creating a situation where a team was avowing to avenge a 45-7 victory. Go figure.

There is no legitimate justification for this play. None. Down and distance people, down and distance – it’s 4th and 3 and you’re on your own 37, down six points with a minute left in the third quarter. What is the desired outcome here? The Pats jump offsides? How would that happen, when everyone can see the ball so clearly in wide open space? The Pats get stuck with 12 men on the field? Why would that happen, when they didn’t have 12 men on the field before you swung the gate and lined up 9 guys on the right? OK, so the Pats call the Colts’ bluff by brilliantly doing nothing at all, so now what to the Colts do? Take a timeout? You need to save those, because this is a close game. Take a 5-yard penalty for delay of game? That’s dumb, too. You’re giving up field position and wasting time in a game that you are losing! And never mind the fact that the Colts line up incorrectly, and thus have more guys offsides on a play from scrimmage than has probably ever happened before in NFL history. Everything about this play is asinine.

Grateful to the Colts for having lost their minds, the Patriots promptly took this gift – taking possession at the Indy 37 – drove in and scored what proved to be the decisive score in the game, and thus a potentially winnable game for the Colts promptly went by the wayside. That was the single-dumbest thing I ever seen attempted on an NFL field. The Colts brass need to rip that page out of the playbook, stand on the steps of the Indiana state capitol building and publicly set it ablaze.

I’ve sworn off watching football, but I feel as if football is trying to win me back by simply getting stupider than ever, and thus more compelling to The Lose. Along with all of the punting miscues, I’ve seen Texas miss an extra point to lose a game, Kansas fumble a snap when attempting to spike the ball and Rutgers spiking the ball on 4th down. It’s like teams are trying to invent new ways to lose, since the old ones are apparently stale and passé. Whatever it is you guys are doing, just keep punting, or threatening to punt, anyway. Please. Keep punting. It’s job security for me.

Stamford Bridge Over Troubled Waters

Obligatory soccer gif ... or is that water polo?

APOLOGIES for the long time between blogs. I was doing that silly thing I do where I write novels again. (Shameless plug: click on the gadgets on the right of this page and buy some books! That is all.) Losing has gone on unabated in the past month, of course, and The Lose has his attentions divided between the MLB playoffs, the Rugby World Cup, an occasional peek at the NFL and NCAA football (WSU beat Oregon? Huh?) and now we’ve got the NHL and NBA getting going. But what I’ve been watching more than anything else is a healthy amount of soccer, which has been fun and fascinating and, in the case of Chelsea, downright hilarious.

Soccer is on the international break night now, with UEFA qualifying matches going on, as well as World Cup qualifiers on three continents, and the U.S. had that match at the Rose Bowl last night against El Tri which we don’t want to talk about. *grumble grumble …* The top leagues around the world take the weekend off. (England fills the gap with a nice tradition called Non League Day to honor and support grassroots football). The October international break, coming 6-8 weeks into the European season, is always a good time for clubs to take stock of where they are. Firing managers is common at this time of year, and a pair of jobs promptly popped open in the EPL. Already, underachieving Liverpool has axed Brendan Rogers and hired Jürgen Klopp, the former Borussia Dortmund manager who brought Borussia to the game’s highest levels during his tenure. His appointment has the faithful who fill the Kop at Anfield excited, and with good reason: his teams always play a high-energy, high-paced game that’s actually fun, which has been in short supply lately. (And whether or not Liverpool actually likes fun is another question entirely.) Sunderland, meanwhile, have appointed Sam Allardyce, the typical sort of hired gun manager who always has a place in football, one who goes about uglifying the game for the purposes of getting results. This sorts of guys never have a job for very long, simply because footballers get tired really quickly of such a dreary style of play, but it can work well when you need a quick fix. Sunderland need all the help they can get, as they are the worst team in the league and they have also spent stupidly – they currently have the 8th highest payroll in the EPL, and a drop to the second division could be disastrous, as the club carries an enormous amount of debt. Having watched a heavy amount of Div. 2 football last season, as Norwich was going about their promotion campaign, I could say there were probably 10 teams in that league which are better than Sunderland is now. It’s hard to imagine them winning any games at all in this year’s EPL. Big Sam’s got his work cut out for him.

This is the sort of stuff guys can do even in Div. 2

The whole of European football is something of a caste system, with 1-2 clubs in each country who necessarily dominate their leagues, and with only about 8-10 clubs continent-wide with a realistic chance of reaching the final of the Champions League. As great as the game can be to watch, there is a certain inevitability to what takes place. Regular seasons simply become coronation processions, as the big clubs march to the title, and it can get a little bit stale. But so far this year, the upstarts and the typical mid-table dwellers filling out the ranks of the leagues have refused to read the script. They’re refusing to play along, while some of the dominant clubs have been struggling. The results have been wildly unpredictable. It’s worth getting up early on the weekends to watch, because club football in Europe hasn’t been this fun in years.

Well, it’s a coronation procession in Germany. Bayern Munich have been aided by a friendly schedule (playing their three greatest rivals all at home at the start of the year) and a few fluffy penalties here and there as they searched for their form, but now they’ve found it and become absolutely terrifying. (Two words: Robert Lewandowski.) Bayern have won all seven matches, are seven points clear already in the Bundesliga, and are probably the best team in Europe. It’s good viewing simply to see a team that good play that well. As good as the quality of play is in the Bundesliga – year in and year out, it’s one of the highest scoring leagues in Europe, and also leads in attendance – most of the drama has already evaporated.

The same cannot be said of La Liga, which is completely chaotic. Real Madrid and F.C. Barcelona usually dominate of course, being two of the three biggest clubs in the world. They’ve also had a propensity over the years for playing by their own rules, flaunting the rules, or failing to abide by them entirely – which annoys the hell out of everyone else in La Liga. Any opportunity to take points from one of Spain’s big two clubs thus becomes a settling of longstanding grudges and scores.

And everybody’s taking their shots at Barca right now, who’ve got themselves into a hell of a quandary: Messi is hurt and out for two months, the tax troubles of Messi and Neymar hang over their heads, they were hit with a transfer ban until January and couldn’t add players to their squad in the offseason, and they’re stellar player development system has crumbled to the point that their reserve side finished dead last in its league a season ago. They’ve had to plug holes in their squad with second-rate players as injury concerns mount, and with no Messi out there to dictate the Barca style of playing defense with its offense, and putting the fear of God in their opponents with the threat of a lethal counter, no one is scared of them any more. Forced to play defense with their defense, the results haven’t been pretty – they’ve yielded four goals in a game thrice already. Nicking a game from Barca constitutes the highlight of most Spanish club’s season, and Atletico Bilbao celebrated mightily after thrashing Barca 4:1 in the Super Cup, but that result lost its luster when Barca got crushed by Celta Vigo by the same 4:1 scoreline, and last week Barca bottomed out and got beat by underachieving, bottom-dwelling Sevilla.

But Real can’t take advantage. New head coach Rafa Benitez, the beneficiary of yet another of Real’s infamous off-season power struggles, has a fleet full of sports cars in his garage yet somehow insists on driving the Yugo. He has managed to take a foursome of Ronaldo, Benzema, Bale and James and not figure out how to get them to play together. Real have bumbled along through a series of goalless draws with newcomers and bottom-feeders, and the natives are not amused. It’s not just enough to get results at Real and Barca. You also have to look good doing it. You have to be entertaining. The whole of La Liga is in upheaval at the moment – last week, none of the top six teams in the table won a match – and while logic would dictate that Real and Barca will eventually sort themselves out, it should be remembered that Atletico Madrid won the La Liga title two seasons ago, so the unexpected can actually happen. No matter how it all winds up playing out, it’s all been wildly entertaining to watch so far.

Serie A is also a mess. Juventus have responded to losing some players in the off-season, and suffering through some injury concerns of their own, by putting all of their eggs in the Champions League basket. Given that they made something like €95 million from reaching the Champions League final last season, you can see why they think that way. Juve has taken to resting key players on Serie A weekends to make sure they’re fit for the UCL group stage games midweek. In essentially blowing off Serie A for the first part of the year, they are gambling that no one will assert themselves and they can catch up later in the year – and given how it’s played out so far in Italy, they may be onto something there. Roma can’t get out of their own way, Inter are boring, AC Milan can’t mark the grass they are standing on, Napoli is a roller coaster, and no one’s quite sure whether Lazio is legit or not. Somehow, Fiorentina are top of the table, and not even the Fiorentines can believe that’s happening.

All of this is great for the fans, of course. More volatility means more meaningful games, and quantity translates into quality. I think I’m like most football fans in that my supporting of clubs is nuanced. I have my token big club I root for in the UCL – that would be Barca, even though I was just ripping them – and then I have my modest, good-natured club – Norwich City – for which I willingly temper my expectations. My two hopes for Norwich is that they avoid being relegated from the Premier League (I suspect they will be fine), and that they finish higher in the table than Stoke City, since I have a standing wager of tacos with “Words w/ ” Frentz, the Official Stoke Fan of In Play Lose, over which guy’s club finishes higher. Normally, the best you can hope for, when you root for a club like Norwich, is to nick a point here or there from one of the big guns, or possibly pinch a 1:0 victory from them at home. You simply cannot compete. But what’s becoming clear across Europe so far this season is that the middle class clubs can, in fact, compete. Most trends in football originate in the Premier League these days, of course, and everyone on the continent must be taking their cue from EPL, which so far this season has been absolutely, positively nuts.

Now, the pundits would have you believe the topsy-turvy EPL owes to the fact that no one is all that good. But pundits, of course, are there to sell the drama and the soap opera aspect of the EPL, which is the British paparazzi’s second favorite target after the royal family. A season without a set-up the usual 3-4 glamourous élite sides running away from the rest of the field is bad for the punditry business, since you have to actually have to pay attention to the games, at that point, in order to have something to say. I don’t think it is true at all that the league has somehow gotten worse. Instead, I would say the league is much more balanced and more competitive. Also, offense is up in the EPL about 6% over last year’s clip. More evenly matched sides + more goals = better viewing.

Now, over the course of a long season, what generally happens is wear and tear and injuries catch up to clubs with issues of depth. The bigger clubs have more talent and more depth, and they wear the others out in a 38-week war of attrition. But just because it usually goes that way doesn’t mean it’s going that way now. Each week, those ‘experts’ I mentioned above expect for Arsenal to stop being flaky, for Manchester United to stop playing ugly football, for Liverpool to come up with a coherent plan, and for the traditional powers to start imposing their will … and yet, that doesn’t happen. After 8 weeks of the season, two of the European places are held down by Crystal Palace and Leicester, with West Ham right behind them, and the next two places in the table belonging to the usual glass-ceiling folk, Spurs and Everton, who are threatening to break through. And we’re nearly a quarter of the way through the season now, and verging on losing the “small sample size” excuse. Something’s going on here, and since The Lose is always looking for bigger trends, it’s good to take a closer look.

The EPL has more money than it knows what to do with. EPL clubs spent something absurd like £1 billion on players in the offseason – which they can certainly afford, given their TV contracts. Norwich were basically handed £130 million in revenue when they won “the richest game in football” last May, and when the new TV contracts kick in next year, that number may jump closer to £200 million. But even with the £130 million Norwich got just for showing up this year, it pales in comparison to the sort of budget you’re talking about at Manchester United, who are estimated to have generated £195 million in kit sales alone last season, which allows United to pay a £200+ million wage bill and still do dumb things like shell out £55 million for an untested French teenager … or is that a dumb move? We’ll get to that in a minute. And there has usually been an almost exact correlation in the EPL between the teams which carry the largest payrolls and the teams which have the most success. Just this year, Manchester City crossed a rather dubious threshold, as the team which took the field for their game with West Ham was the most expensive team ever assembled, having cost the Emirati owners of the club over £300 million to assemble.

And, of course, Man City promptly lost to West Ham. So go figure.

The Brits may not know much about baseball, but they all seem to know a lot about Moneyball, as that phrase gets bandied about all the time in conversations about the EPL. For 5-6 huge clubs in the league, the solution to everything seems to be to just throw money at the problem. It’s actually something of a lazy approach, and just because you have the money to spend, it doesn’t you’re smart enough to know how to spend it. Liverpool have spent something like £291 million on buying players in Brendan Rogers’ tenure, and that’s worked out so well that Rogers no longer has a job. Man United spent well over £60 million to buy Argentine midfield Angel di Maria, who turned out to be a flop, and they promptly sold him to Paris St.-Germain and took a £15 million loss. Man United has the money, and can afford to be wrong sometimes, of course, but that’s £15 million you didn’t spend on anyone who was any good, and that’s the sort of inefficiency catches up with you. In the meantime, if you’re one of the other clubs in the EPL who doesn’t have that sort of spending power, you have to be smart about what you’re doing. You have to look for good deals when buying players, and have zero sentimentality about selling them. No one does this better in the EPL than Southampton, whose roster gets raided annually, yet Saints finished 7th last year and will likely be a top half of the table club this year. Lesser clubs in the EPL have been doing Moneyball-type analysis long before the term Moneyball even existed, but the financial gaps between clubs are so vast that it hasn’t yielded the same sorts of results you’ve seen in a sport like baseball. At least, not yet, anyway.

Being a smart money, analytical type can be advantageous in that it’s common knowledge in Europe now that the top English clubs will grossly overpay for players, meaning that if Man United and Southampton inquire about the same player from random European club, they’re likely to be quoted two different prices. And while the gap in revenues is still vast in the EPL, there is now so much money in the EPL that, while your club may not have as much money to spend as a Liverpool or Man United, you also have more money to spend than just about every other club on the planet, meaning your baseline for the type of player you can afford has risen greatly.

In this year’s EPL, the best signing of the season so far has been Yohan Cabaye, the midfielder who will be quarterbacking Les Bleus next summer in the Euros, who somehow slipped under the radar and was signed by Crystal Palace. Pair a great playmaker with the Eagles’ plethora of speedy wing players, and all of a sudden Crystal Palace are absolutely flying. Probably the second best signing has been Andre Ayew, the Ghanaian midfielder who was out of contract at Marseille and had a choice of clubs, and wound up at Swansea City. And as Frentz points out to me, the old adage “but will it play in Stoke on a Wednesday night?” is finally being put to the test, as the Potters went out and bagged the budding Swiss star (and all-name team member) Xherdan Shaqiri in the offseason. These are all terrific players, all potential game changers who were had for a relative pittance.

And with game changers in your lineup, the game plan changes as well. No longer are the smaller clubs simply hunkering down against the big clubs and trying to eke out results. Instead, they’re taking their shots and being rewarded for it. A pivotal moment of this season came when Swansea beat Man United. If you’d taken the names off the jerseys and looked at it objectively, you’d say those guys in the white shirts not only were the better team, but they were also better coached and had an comparable amount of talent to the guys in red. Mention that the guys in red have a £200 million wage bill, and you start wondering just how big the drain is that they poured all that money down.

But it’s probably a good idea for the little guys to get in their shots now, because the market for players is subtly shifting yet again. Everyone though Man United was nuts for dropping £55 million on Antony Martial, a 19-year-old French striker. He promptly showed up at Old Trafford and scored four goals in short order and all of a sudden, it looked like a pretty savvy buy. Man City dropped over £50 million each on 21-year-old Raheem Sterling and 24-year-old Kevin De Bruyne, and Chelsea were willing to spend up to £40 million to pry 21-year-old John Stones away from Everton. What’s not important there is the amount spent, but the ages of the players. Something analytics has taught us in all sports is that the peak performance age of players is actually a lot younger than previously thought. Much like free agency is folly in North America, because you’re paying for what’s already happened and unlikely to get a full return on your investment, plunking down large sums in soccer to buy players who are in their late 20s doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. Let’s say Martial blossoms and gives United 10 good years at the club. That’s spending an average of £5.5 million a year, which would be a steal. Even if Martial only gives them 5-6 good years, spending only an average of £10 million or so a year for a striker is way under the market rates. And this ploy also undercuts most of the competition by, again, raising the floor. Most of the mid-range clubs have made their living buying low on young players and then selling high on them down the road, and huge price tags on younger players is going to make it harder to do that across the board. While the rest of the world of football punditry thought United were crazy for paying that much, I happen to think it was brilliant.

They say football is a game that is played with the head

The EPL, and quite possibly all of European football, is subtly changing the way it does business. And you have to look way down the EPL table to find where doing business as usual is turning into colossal folly. Way, way down the table, as in 16th place, which is where defending champion Chelsea finds themselves. Chelsea are on their way to one of the most colossal collapses in English football history. And English fans are loving it. The club’s white knight saga of a narrative – being rescued from the rubbish bin by a deep-pocketed owner riding in from the east, who saves them from near bankruptcy, throws colossal sums of money at the club and magically turns them into a super club – has grown tiresome. At this point, Chelsea just might be the most reviled club in England. (They’re not even popular on U.K. dating sites. It pleases me that Norwich are high on that list, as well as Swansea, since The Official Wife of In Play Lose has pledged her allegiance to the Swans. Clearly, we have good taste.)

So what are they doing wrong at Chelsea? Well, everything. Chelsea was brilliant and dazzling during the first half of last season, essentially wrapping up the title before Christmas, as they’d built a huge lead in the table. But in the second half of the season, owing to some injury problems and some ‘pragmatic’ footballing, Chelsea’s results weren’t nearly that good, as they took up an extremely defensive posture and eked out results, more stymying the opposition than doing anything of their own accord to take points. Now, it’s a results-oriented business, of course, and Chelsea walked off with the silverware at the end, but more than a few people started to wonder if papering over the cracks was starting to take place.

Well, this season, we have our answer. Chelsea have 8 points from 8 games and are lucky to have that. Their two wins were against a 9-man Arsenal team and a win at West Brom where they nearly blew a 3-0 lead. In their two draws, against Swansea and lowly Newcastle, they quite possibly should’ve lost both. The losses have been ugly, and follow a similar script. Crystal Palace basically published the blueprint for how to beat that team – run like hell up and down the flanks and simply dare Chelsea to keep up. Everton did the exact same thing, and Southampton pretty much ran Chelsea into the ground last weekend.

Chelsea are an older side, an experienced side with a veteran core. And while they have a huge payroll, they’ve always tended to keep a very short squad. You need depth in your squad in soccer, because a league campaign + cup matches + European play can add up to 55-60 games in a season. Add in the fact that most of Chelsea’s roster are first-choice players for their national squads, and it means they’ve played even more games. This team looks like a group of guys who’ve all played too much football and not have enough time to recharge the batteries. They looked old and slow in their season opener, a 2:2 draw where Swansea threatened to run right by them, and have looked old and slow ever since.

But where are the replacements? Chelsea have one of the best youth academies in the world – they’re currently European champions – but it hasn’t translated into any top-class players. The youth system for Chelsea is simply a moneymaker, as they then sell young players to other clubs. In keeping the squad short, Chelsea also keep the wage bill tight. They have 35 or some ridiculous number of loanees at the moment – loaning players out usually means not having to pay their salaries – and they’ve been perfectly willing, over the years, to buy up young players and loan them out without any intention of ever playing them at the big club. This is coming back to haunt them. The aforementioned De Bruyne was told he had no place at Chelsea and sold to Wolfsburg in Germany, where he became the Bundesliga player of the year, and has now been sold for a gaga sum to Man City, that team 15 stories higher in the standings than Chelsea are right now. Romelu Lukaku is another example – a young player Chelsea had no use for who is now running rampant at Everton, and who ran all over Chelsea earlier this season.

Those young players had no place at Chelsea because Jose Mourinho doesn’t have any interest in young players. Mourinho is one of a select few of the Phil Jackson types who coach at the highest levels of football and only want jobs where all the pieces are already in place to be successful. They show up at a club and impose a few tactics which might lead their teams to becoming champions – in Mourinho’s case, usually overly-defensive ones – and then they quickly wear out their welcome and hastily flee the scene. You can tout all of your master motivational ploys and tactical acumen that you want, but here’s an idea: how about if you actually try coaching your players and making them better? It’s what they seem to be doing at Swansea and Crystal Palace and Southampton and Everton, all of whom ran circles around Chelsea and left them looking like they were stuck in the mud.

Mourinho’s response to the poor results has been to go into a full-on, very public meltdown. First, he got into a row with the club’s doctor, who happens to be a woman and who had the audacity to do her job when bringing an injured player off the pitch late in the Swansea match, thus leaving them two men down at a pivotal point in the match. (Chelsea having been reduced to 10 thanks to a red card.) A series of rather sexist innuendos then ensued, and ultimately she left the club, all of which is a lawsuit waiting to happen. He’s blamed officials constantly, going so far as to say that they are afraid to give penalties to Chelsea – even though stats show they’ve had more free kicks and penalties awarded them in recent years than almost any other club. He’s benched club captain John Terry, yet let Ivanovic and Fabergas keep playing when they’ve been horrible, in part because he has no real viable options on that short bench. He’s taken to calling out players in the press and them humiliating them on the pitch, going so far as to bench Matic against Southampton, bring him on at halftime and then sub him off 20 minutes later, which is about the single-most embarrassing thing you can do to a player. And all of it’s being played out in the British press, of course, who are eating this stuff up, and now you have leaks coming out that the players are tuning Mourinho out, and Mourinho talking about “rats” in the dressing room. It’s all a colossal mess, and a hilarious one at that.

Many of the seemingly endless number of pundits out there keep insisting that, at some point, this team is going to right the ship and climb back up the table. I’m not sure why they’re thinking that, given the body of work put forth. If you take the names of the front and the back of the shirts and look at it objectively, you see a really bad team, and you see some players who’ve been among the worst in the EPL this season. It seems hard to believe that a team which was so good for the first half of last season can go so bad, so fast. But it does happen in sports. I always use the Seattle Mariners as an example here – in 2001, they won 116 games, and they won over 90 the next two seasons, but come 2004, they were a last place club, mired with a bunch of older players who could no longer perform when they hadn’t replenished the talent pool. Last year’s New Orleans Saints are a good example – everyone thought they’d be good because they seem to always be good, and then they started losing and you thought they’d turn it around, and by the end of the year, you’re looking at it and saying, “you know, that team isn’t any good at all.” Your reputation can precede you in sports, but it’s best if you not buy into your own narratives, and age does eventually catch up to everyone, no matter how good they are. (Which is why I’d be wary of putting money on the Spurs to win the NBA title this year, but we’ll get to that later once the NBA season gets a little closer.)

With only 8 points from 8 games, the math doesn’t work in their favor in regards to landing a European place, much less winning the title. Man United landed a Champions League spot after finishing 4th last year with 70 points. If that’s your benchmark figure to shoot for, then you need 62 points from 30 games to hit that figure – which, given the nature of the game and the preponderance of draws, means a target of something like like 19 wins and five draws. Now, I happen to think that in this year’s EPL, you’ll see some lower point totals at the end of the season. It may not take 87 points to win the title, like Chelsea amassed a year ago, and it is hard to say how points will get you a coveted top four finish. A more balanced EPL might provide opportunities for Chelsea to rally they might not ordinarily have. But a more balanced EPL also means more quality teams to leapfrog, and more quality teams in contention who have something to play for, which could make a rally even harder to pull off. No team with 8 points in their first 8 games has ever finished higher than 5th in the EPL. More often than not, they finish in the lower half of the table.

Mourinho just signed a new 4-year contract in the offseason, and Chelsea would be on the hook for about £30 million if they fired him, yet the rumours are already swirling. And Mourinho’s never been in this sort of a position before, always been having blessed with clubs that, in the end, have enough talent to run themselves, yet he’s always been quick to take the credit and quicker to assign others the blame. I’m not sure he’s capable of getting them out of this mess. And if the players have quit on him, then what good is he going forward? Quite honestly, that 3:1 loss to Southampton last weekend was a game in which it looked like the players were trying to get the coach fired.

When you have more money than sense, it’s imperative that you spend less time worrying about the former and more time worrying about the latter. In the end, Chelsea this season are an amalgamation of bad habits and lazy thought processes coming back to haunt them. They should serve as a warning to every other big club in Europe, many of whom have slid by on reputation and the size of their chequebooks in recent years in lieu of having any good ideas. Being dumb and rich allows you to trump those who are smart and poor a lot of the time, but being smart and rich allows you to beat almost everyone, and keep doing it over and over again.

There, and I managed to get through this blog without talking about that awful game last night in Pasadena. Go me. I’ll deconstruct the hot mess that is USA FC later on.

The Thrill is Gone

I’M NO longer interested in the NFL, the NCAA, or pretty much any other variant of American football. I have been meaning to write a post about the following subject for a while now, but first, I wanted to see for myself just how disenchanted I had become. This past weekend marked the opening salvo of the NFL season and, other than a snippet here in an evening newscast or crossing an online stream, I watched none of it.

I did flip through a few of the highlights from the implausible game on Saturday between The Good Guys and Rutgers, since bad football is high comic art and there are few purveyors of bad football who have done it better (worse?) over the years than Washington State and Rutgers. Sure enough, the game followed a predictably wobbly script: Rutgers committing a boatload of turnovers and stymying their own potentially game-winning drive by committing 30 yards of penalties on three successive plays; WSU giving up TDs on a kickoff return and punt return to the same guy in the same quarter, the latter coming with 90 seconds left to give Rutgers the lead; the Scarlet Knights then playing no defense whatsoever, allowing WSU to drive 90 yards in a minute, a drive which included Rutgers jumping offside on 4th down, affording the Cougars another opportunity, and a winning TD pass by the Cougars with :13 left on what was essentially a free play, as Rutgers had about 13 men on the field. It was all an utter shambles, and the Cougars’ march through the mess will continue this coming weekend against Wyoming, who is so bad that they’ve lost home games to North Dakota and Eastern Michigan, who hadn’t won a non-conference away game in 27 years. More comedy is likely to ensue, and I may check the boxes out of morbid curiosity from time to time, but I’m not going to watch it.

In the abstract, bad football is hilarious and in the abstract, the game itself is remarkable. It’s a chess match on grass, requiring 11 players to work as one in intricate detail. It’s the most complex game we have ever created. But there is an inherent intellectual dishonesty to it all, as you have to suspend your disbelief, viewing the players as chess pieces rather than actual human beings. There have been numerous portrayals of live action chess in cinema and literature (Harry Potter immediately coming to mind), the act of Knight taking Bishop being a violent battle to the death. It’s something of an alarming image, in fact, since we think of chess as a game that is purely about intellect. Seeing the actions of the pieces physically rendered is something of a shock to the system – and yet, we watch that very thing happen on a football field every week, as players crash into and collide with one another hundreds of times over, yet somehow, we’re immune to the violence.

But I just cannot be immune to the violence any longer, and I’m not alone. What follows is a piece written by the Good Rev. Jeremy Cahnmann, the Official Officiant of In Play Lose, speaking of his disenchantment with the game of football. I am reprinting this here with his permission:

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So I don’t want to get too preachy … but you may have noticed my profile picture has changed. The two men in my profile picture were two men who gave me a lot of enjoyment growing up.
On top is Dave Duerson, who was my favorite player on the 1985 Bears. (The greatest team ever in any sport – just an FYI.) On bottom is Junior Seau, the Hall of Fame linebacker who was just awesome.
Today, neither of those men is alive. Both men took their own lives. I saw a lot of people talking about Suicide Prevention Day, which happens on September 10th every year. I find it ironic that it often coincides with the start of football season.
I grew up loving football, I dreamed of playing it, I watched every Sunday. I thought the day after the Super Bowl should be a national holiday. I was always excited when my birthday (January 25th) fell on Super Bowl Sunday. I was pretty bummed when the Super Bowl started being in February, as I knew that meant no more Super Bowl Birthdays. In college and beyond, various football jerseys made up much of my wardrobe. Drew Bledsoe, Kurt Warner, Warrick Dunn, Brian Urlacher, etc. etc. etc. When I got my first apartment, the first thing I did was buy a big screen TV (it was all of 36” – that was a big screen then and cost $1000), and I made sure I got DirectTV so I could get the Sunday Ticket so every week I could invite the guys over to BBQ and watch football. I always ran my office football pool and Super Bowl squares and was often doing 2-3 fantasy football leagues.
I say all this because I want you to know how much I LOVED FOOTBALL and LOVED THE NFL. Many who know me, know that I no longer watch or even follow the NFL. The game disgusts me.
When Dave Duerson killed himself it made me look long and hard at the game I Loved. Was it worth it? I had heard of players having health issues (Mike Webster and others), I knew some suffered from dementia and other illnesses but I never wanted to admit that playing football was the culprit. When Dave Duerson took his own life, and shot himself so that his brain could be preserved and studied, it made me think what part did football play in his death.
After Duerson’s death, I tried watching football but it wasn’t the same. Then, the next year Junior Seau took his life and that was it, I couldn’t do it anymore. In the last 6 years at least 6 players (former players) have committed suicide and countless others have suffered head trauma, and who knows how many former players suffer with dementia and other brain related injuries due to the abuse their bodies took? The truth is, we will never know.
Football is a violent game. When you ask people to hurl their bodies at one another, it is only logical that injuries will happen. Yes, NFL players get paid handsomely, but is it worth the damages they do to their bodies? Players are bigger and stronger these days, and the game has grown increasingly violent because of that. I love sports, I love teamwork, I love the idea of a group of people working towards one goal, but I no longer love football.
America has an obsession with football. I get that, as I was once obsessed. I know most of you just want to watch the games, play in your football pools and survivor pools and set your fantasy lineups. I don’t expect many people to join me in boycotting football, but when you watch the games, think about the Dave Duersons and Junior Seaus of the world. If you have kids, think long and hard before letting them play football. At a young age, the hits won’t be as vicious, but the risk of serious injury is still there.
I won’t be watching any college games or NFL games this year. I haven't watched a game since Super Bowl XLVI. (That was the 2nd Giants/Pats game.) I promise to not preach every week about this, but I thought I would share it this week, as the NFL season has now officially kicked off.
So enjoy your games. I’ll be watching baseball and waiting for the NBA season to tip-off.

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I find myself thinking in much the same ways, and my discontent from the game has been slowly growing for much of the past seven years or so – interestingly enough, through extrapolating what it really means for a team to be ‘bad’ at the game of football. It was seven years ago that Washington State fielded one of the least competitive football teams that I have ever seen. They were the first team in NCAA history to give up more than 60 points in a game four times, and they also gave up 59 and 58, for good measure. One particularly atrocious game was a 69:0 loss at home to USC – and amazingly, the score was merciful. USC had a 41-0 lead towards the end of the first half and the ball on the WSU 10 yard line – and the Trojans took a knee and ran out the half. They then did nothing more than run the same play over and over in the second half, a routine handoff to the 2nd-string and 3rd-string tailbacks, who each racked up 100+ yards, anyway, as the Trojans scored four more touchdowns in what amounted to a glorified scrimmage. USC’s coach at the time, Pete Carroll, did this because he realized that he was up against a team who was only playing the game because they had to, since the game was on the schedule, and that WSU was doing little more than trying to avoid getting people hurt – because a large reason why WSU was so bad was that so many players had already succumbed to injuries that year. Season-ending injuries and, in the case of their starting QB, a career-ending spinal injury. Nasty injuries, all of them – back injuries, torn up knees, dislocated shoulders. Horrible stuff.

And for what? What was being gained by breaking your body for the worst football team in America? (Actually, that’s not true. The Cougars beat Washington that season, who were 0-12. The Huskies were worse. LOL.) Is that really worth it? I mean, losing gets funnier over time, of course, and anyone who endured that death march of a season in Pullman will have a lifetime of good stories to tell. And being a college athlete, in fact, does afford you the opportunity to get an education (which far more athletes take advantage of than narratives in the media would indicate), but was busting yourself up, in what was ultimately such a failed endeavour, really worth it? But, when you get right down to it, is busting yourself up for the purposes of winning championships worth it, either? I mean, the long-term effects of the injuries sustained playing football seem to be so devastating that you wonder, in this day and age, given what we’ve come to understand, why any parent would willingly let their son play this game. (Indeed, there was a report of a death recently during a high school game in Louisiana.)

And to be clear here, there are no safe sports. I’ve written at length about this before. If you play a sport at any sort of high level, you’re going to get hurt. I have a dead right ankle from playing basketball. My good buddy phonerz has had two knee surgeries from playing ultimate. My friend Laura, who’s my age and who used to be a dancer, has a bad back, bad knees, and has already had a hip replaced. Athletics mess you up, plain and simple. And yet, it’s easy to intellectualize your way out of this realization, of course. You can play basketball a thousand times with nothing happening, but then maybe there’s that one play in that one game where it goes wrong. Once is all it takes and once is all you need. What’s far more damning about football is the extent to which the NFL, and the NCAA to somewhat of a lesser extent, have gone about attempting to conceal all of the evidence suggesting the sort of negative long-term effects from playing football. Indeed, the league is going to be employing a fleet of high-priced attorneys to fight off all of the lawsuits related to the subject for decades to come.

This article published in Sports Illustrated earlier this summer about Chris Borland, a promising rookie linebacker for the San Francisco 49ers who walked away from the game after a season in the NFL, is shocking simply in his description of the extent to which he and his teammates at the University of Wisconsin went to play, and the sorts of horrid injury troubles they were facing. It’s really disturbing. And in that article, Borland echoes a sentiment predominant in A Few Seconds of Panic, the in-depth look at the NFL by Friend of the Lose Stefan Fatsis. One of the most surprising things about that book, which focuses on Fatsis’ training to become a placekicker with the Denver Broncos, is just how seemingly indifferent the players are to the game that they’re actually playing. So few of them, in fact, seem to even like what they are doing. The best quote of the book comes from WR Charlie Adams about training camp coming to an end. “Actually, the season kinda sucks, too.” To them it’s just a job after a while. I don’t think many of them actually like playing football, but they are professional athletes, who are the most competitive people on the planet. What they do like is winning. There is a big difference.

I was writing a column here the other day for an auto racing magazine, concerning the horrible accident which happened recently at Pocono International Speedway during an IndyCar race which claimed the life of driver Justin Wilson. It was a terrible tragedy, and any time something like this happens in racing there are calls to “take action” to make the sport safer. But the fact of the matter is that the sport is, truthfully, about as safe as it’s ever been, and the accident which claimed Wilson’s life – another car crashed in front of Wilson, and he was struck by the bouncing debris on the track – was something of a fluke. Now, of course, IndyCar and NASCAR and Formula One should always be looking for ways to make their sport safer, if for no other reason than the advancements they make in auto racing safety are often then passed on to a similarly dangerous activity, which is the act of actually driving a car at all. I mean think about it: you’re placing your body inside a metal cage powered by a volatile explosive and hurtling at a high rate of speed. What could possibly be wrong with that? Accidents will happen from time to time in auto racing. You simply cannot account for every variable.

Some commentators have suggested that auto racing, as a sport, threatens to lose its popularity every time a fatal accident occurs – and, worldwide, it’s one of the most popular sports of them all – but if that were really true, we’d have lost interest in it ages ago. Centuries ago, even. As I’ve mentioned before, the most popular sport in ancient Rome was chariot racing, which often drew 250,000 to the Circus Maximus on a weekend afternoon. A large part of the strategy of chariot racing was having your back marker team members attempting to force the opposing chariots to crash into the columns in the center of the track – which generally resulted in gnarly injuries, if not death to both humans and equines alike. The Romans ate that shit up, and we’ve been eating that sort of thing up for centuries. We love it when people push the envelope. We love it when they take risks and put themselves in jeopardy. We, as a species, love to watch and, even more importantly, we love to gamble on it. In this day and age, Americans wager billions of dollars on football every year, just as the wealthy Romans gathering at the Circus Maximus would wager outlandish sums on the chariots, and just as the Aztec chiefs in Central America would wager entire kingdoms on the outcome of matches in their primitive form of soccer. Now, whether we should be doing this is another question entirely. The more sordid and violent the contest, the more compulsion we seem to feel to personalize the outcome, while still depersonalizing the game and detaching from the violence as much as possible.

Humans, as a species, have always loved conflict and combat and competition – so long as it’s someone else who’s doing it and we can watch from the sidelines. The fascination with bloodsports goes also back centuries. (We think of football players as gladiators on the gridiron for a reason.) For some reason, we as a species just love watching people beat each other up. (Sugar Ray Leonard once said he couldn’t believe so many people would pay so much to watch two guys in their underwear beat the hell out of each other in a hotel parking lot.) Interest in boxing began to wane finally after about 2,000 years, but not because of being aghast at the violence. No, it began to wane because spectators got sick of all of the accompanying corruption – which always seems to go hand in hand with anything that is both extremely violent and potentially extremely profitable. But what do we have now? Instead, we have MMA, which is basically human cockfighting. That sport is absolutely frightening. Instead of getting rid of sanctioned violence in the name of sport, we’ve simply come up with one even more violent than before.

And I mention all of that historical stuff because football in America isn’t going away. It’s a deep cultural institution in much of this country. We’ve woven it into our educational institutions to the point where the Homecoming game and the tailgate are inherent aspects of the educational experience. It’s been woven into our psyche to the point where we have to make an active choice to disdain it.

What’s baffling to me about football is that there is, in fact, a lot of things you can do to actually make it a safer game. The obvious parallels can be drawn to rugby, a rough-and-tumble game of full contact and yet one which is considerably ‘safer’ even though players wear no helmets and no pads. Quite obviously, the reasoning for this is that, as a rugby player, you are perpetually behaving in a self-protective fashion. Since your head is exposed, you never make a tackle where you lead with your head, and you’re taught from the moment you start playing to never, ever do that. So much of football coaching is the preaching of sacrificing oneself for the betterment of the team, this militaristic sort of jingo which really doesn’t make much sense, if you think about it – after all, it seems like the best way to help your team on the field is to figure out how to stay on the field. Doing things which would actually prevent injuries seems the smartest course. But the entire game of football needs to be retaught for that to happen. As such, it’s a generation of players away from ever truly being ‘safer,’ if we even want it to be safer in the first place. In the end, I’m not entirely convinced that we do.

About the only reason I’ve even been as interested of late in football as I have been is that the Seattle Seahawks, whom I grew up watching fail in every way possible, have suddenly risen to the level of being a Super Bowl champion. Winning is awesome, and everyone in the Pacific Northwest has endured far too much losing over the course of their sporting lifetimes. But not even that is holding my interest any more. I guess I’ve just reached a point where I can no longer detach myself from the consequences of the actions on the field. As someone who endures the after effects 20+ years on from serious injuries which occurred while I played a sport, seeing the routine sorts of injury reports that come out of the NFL – torn ACLs, broken collar bones, broken hands, broken wrists, etc. – just sort of makes me shudder for the players’ futures. And it’s all of the other unreported injuries that are even more alarming, the various grades of concussions that go unreported, that go undiagnosed over the course of a game. You’d have to be a fool to think that so much blunt trauma wouldn’t ultimately have long term consequences. (And I haven’t even gotten into the culture surrounding football, which I find, at turns, baffling and revolting and perverted, but we can save that for another post.)

I just cannot bring myself to watch it any more. I like baseball too much. I am in love with basketball again. My beloved Canaries from Norwich City are back in the EPL. I am with my buddy Jeremy on this one. I’ve fallen out of love with football, and just cannot bring myself to be that interested any more. Oh, I’ll still pay attention, if only because it’s a source of excellent material for this blog. (The New York Giants loss to Dallas on Sunday night was about as stupid as they come.) But the interest has faded for me. The thrill is gone.

And one of the things I’m going to start doing more of here at In Play Lose is providing a proper musical soundtrack to these posts. To that end, I give you B.B. King, who is still my favorite interview of all time, and who I would love to just sit and listen to as he played for me one more time:

Kind of Blue

Because Miles

I THOUGHT that I would give you an album’s worth of Miles Davis today. Divine music, Miles. It was in the book Lamb by Christopher Moore where he talks of how Miles Davis was actually the angel Gabriel come down from the heavens in disguise. I’ve read almost all of Christopher Moore’s books, simply because I used to do a visualization technique back in my days of foolishly pursuing book contracts and the like where I would go to a bookstore and find the exact spot in the store where my novel(s) would one day be housed – which was always in the fiction section on a shelf next to Christopher Moore, who had titles like Bloodsucking Fiends and The Stupidest Angel and Island of the Sequined Love Nun, and, well, how can you not buy a book with a title like that? (Hint: you should, but read The Stupidest Angel last.) None of those visualization techniques and efforts to write and then sell the Great and Hyperbolical American Novel really amounted to much, in the end, other than me buying a few fun Christopher Moore novels to read. Writing novels – hell, the whole act of writing in general – felt like an exercise in self-torture and strenuous exercise. I think I still have scars in my forehead from banging my head against that wall. I’m happy to report that I’ve retired from the pursuit of such lofty literary goals, and feel none the worse for it. (And everything related to this nonsense makes me all the gladder to be far removed.) I may one day write a memoir about that fruitless endeavour (working title: Tools & Whores), but in the meantime, feel free to click one of those book cover gadgets on the side of this page if you wish to purchase a novel or a book of poems. Or do it some other time, if you wish. I’m not going anywhere. I can wait.

I offer you an album of Miles because it is beautiful music, arguably some of the most beautiful of music ever made. (But don’t you go all jazz snob aficionado on me and start nitpicking with me over which of Miles Davis’ albums are the best. You’re probably wrong, and I’m not in the mood to argue.) And on the 11th of September every year, I make it a point to sit back and savour some of the small and simple things in life which I find innately, inherently beautiful. It doesn’t have to be anything extravagant (although that 2002 Cyrus Creek Cabernet Sauvignon in the wine storage is suddenly looking mighty tempting). It may just be something as simple as taking a long walk on a warm late summer day here in San Francisco and listening to an assortment of other musics – the birds, the passing cars – while enjoying a particularly good cup of coffee.

Aah, coffee. Last night, I went back and watched again the film Wings of Desire, one of the most poetic and soulful movies I have ever known, and in the pivotal scene, when the angel takes the leap and chooses to fall to Earth, what’s the first thing he wants? Coffee, of course.

“I can’t see you but I know you’re here. I feel it. You’ve been hanging around since I got here. I wish I could see your face, just look into your eyes and tell you how good it feels to be here, to touch something. See, that’s cold. That feels good … to smoke, have coffee, and if you do it together, it’s fantastic. Or here … to draw, you know you take a pencil and you make a dark line, then you make a light line and together it’s a good line. But when your hands are cold, you rub them together. See, that feels good. There are so many good things.”
– Peter Falk, Wings of Desire

It’s a truly remarkable scene, the falling of the angel from the heavens to earth, dropped into the grey and the drab slab, walking alongside the graffiti-covered walls of West Berlin, the hemmed-in city an ugly remnant of humanity’s ugliest conflicts, and yet to this newcomer, there is nothing but beauty everywhere. Because it is everywhere, and often it’s hidden in plain sight, but you can see it if only you take a moment to look.

Now, as you may have guessed by now, this isn’t exactly a typical entry to this blog. I mean, I’ve been on a roll here of late at In Play Lose when I’ve had the time to actually write. This pillaging of the Mariners came one day before they fired their GM, and I pretty much nailed The Nats dwindling to oblivion. And it’s bad football season, of course. Time to muse on why W.S.U. is so bad, marvel at how it’s possible that Kansas could be worse, and probably write that long post about how I really don’t care much about American football any more. But all of that can wait. It can wait for another day. Players and coaches and teams play badly on a daily basis – and in the case of the other football, it’s being played badly on a daily basis across the globe – but I necessarily get rather contemplative every year when this particular date on the calendar turns up.

But not for the reasons you might think.

Oh, I can certainly contemplate and pontificate on the events of this date 14 years ago, to be sure. How can I not? It’s the single-defining moment of our generation. I know someone who died that day. People from my city died that day in a field in Western Pennsylvania. We all lost something on that day and in the days that followed – as individuals, as a society, and as a human race. But to be perfectly honest, I have no real interest in rehashing that time and again, simply because doing so renders the perpetrators of what took place that day as being relevant to my life. They are not relevant to my life, nor will I permit them to be relevant to my life. They are not worthy of being spoken about. I will not give them that belated and posthumous joy.

Nor will I permit them to define the meaning of this date upon the calendar. I take back the 11th of September. I take back the symbols and I make my own meaning. I took it back years ago, in fact. There are other things worth celebrating upon this day. (Including the birthday of The Official Scrabble Statistician of In Play Lose.) In fact, the 11th of September is one of the most precious days on the calendar for me, surpassed perhaps only by the 18th of October. (Aah, shit, I need to think up something cool for the anniversary … hmm … well, fortunately she won’t read this blog and know that I’m up to something …) But when I think about the 11th of September, I don’t think about 2001. No, I think about 2006, because the date of September 11, 2006, was the day that The Lose decided he was going to start winning.

Now, for some of you who know me personally, and have known me for a while, this next bit is old news. You can skip over this part. But I’ve met quite a few new people since then, of course, the great majority of whom I’m grateful for knowing, and this blog has now been read in over 80 countries – gasp! – which means that I don’t know a lot of you out there who are reading this post. Thanks for tuning in, I hope you enjoy it, and now seems like the appropriate time to give you a chance to know me a little better.

I’m going to repost something now from a previous blog I used to keep. It’s a post which was written on this date back in 2007. I explained it better then than I have ever done since, and I feel like all of you should know this about me. I ain’t got nothin’ to hide from nor be ashamed of. Apologies in advance for the sloppy grammar that follows. I was writing in a slightly different persona and character back then:

— — —
 
it’s odd that a date which has become synonymous in this country with death, destruction, anger and sadness has now, for me, come to be a date synonymous with life and new beginnings. but it’s best that way – i believe in taking back your symbols.
sep. 11 has become, in essence, my second birthday. you can call it the release date of xp version 2.0.
this is a very personal post, but i feel compelled to write it and finally feel as if i can talk freely about this. i’ve hinted at it before, but never gone into detail. those of you who know all of this about me, and who have kept it to yourselves, i thank you for that, and hereby absolve you of that burden. you don’t have to cover for me anymore.
so, on Sep. 11, 2006, i started over. literally. started everything over. i took a month off from work and entered a monthlong Partial Hospitalization Program at UCSF's Langley Porter Psychiatric Institute. technically, it’s an outpatient program – i could leave every day at 4:00 p.m. – but if you didn’t show up at 9:00 the next morning they’d send the police out to find you and lock you up on the 5th floor of S.F. General. serious shit. but hell, it’s not like i had anywhere else worth going to at that point, anyway.
so, why did this happen? well, during the summer i had what was essentially a nervous breakdown. i wasn't hospitalized, but i should have been. i was like a zombie. i was pretty much dead to the world. this breakdown was, oh, about 37 years in the making. i’ve suffered from severe clinical depression since i was a child. entire years of my life are just gone from my memory, lost in a fog and haze. day after day where it literally hurt to be alive and i wished that i was someone else.
and so, while most of my friends were off scrabbling at the nationals in Phoenix, i was spending several days going through a battery of psychological evaluations. it was eye-opening, to say the least, to hear the doc say to me, “well, Chris, most people who are like you either commit suicide or overdose before they reach 30. you’re 37. congratulations, you beat the odds.”
i’d never really gotten any sort of treatment for mental illness for a couple of reasons. first off, when i manage to put all the pieces together, i can do some incredible things – write 500-page novels in three weeks, design 10 prints in a day. a creative machine that nearly overflows with ideas and energy. i never wanted to mess up that artistic side of me, never wanted to mess with how i see the world.
but the main reason i never did anything about it was that i never wanted to admit that i was mentally ill. there is a terrible stigma to that, and the reality is that the vast majority of the people in the world who don’t suffer from it will NEVER understand the people that do. after all, i’m healthy and have a job and have relationships and all of that jazz. what could be wrong? just suck it up, everything will be OK.
well, it wasn’t OK, and it’s never been OK. it just doesn’t work that way. not for me. trust me, i wouldn’t willingly be this way.
so i agreed to go to the UCSF psych ward for a month, at enormous expense (none of it was covered by my insurance, so i’ll be paying for it until about 2010). Langley Porter is one of the best institutions of its kind in the world, and they have a program designed specifically for people similar to myself: functioning depressives. i got there the first day and surveyed my fellow group members: a nurse, a biologist, a 3rd grade teacher, a Ph.D. student, an executive chef, an event planner, a foreign correspondent. the sorts of people you read about in the papers, the ones who have careers and degrees and families and then turn up dead, having killed themselves, leaving everyone at a loss as to why it could have possibly happened.
Losers. all of us.
probably the hardest thing i’ve ever done was to walk through the door. and, for the first three days, we were all collectively miserable. the social worker asked why the energy level was so low and V., the event planner, said, “because we’re all fucking losers. we suck at life.” and D., the biologist, said, “we’re in a psych ward. life can’t get any worse.”
and then the light came on for me. yes, life COULD get worse. we could all be dead. (i was about the only one in the group who hadn’t attempted suicide.) we could all carry on in this pseudo-catatonic state for years and years and years to come. we could all be jonesing for a fix in an alley. we could go on ruining our lives and ruining other peoples’ lives in the process. yeah, life has been terrible, but we’re here, in this place, because we all need help and we want our lives to be better. THIS is actually the first step in the right direction.
and, really, that was what the program was all about: taking the first steps. teaching people who have suffered so badly, for so long, how to actually live life again, and how to cope with their illnesses. and living with those illnesses meant owning them.
so i owned it. OK, i’m nuts. i’m a lunatic. fine. fuck it.
the group was desperately in need of someone to take the lead, and so i did. i was sick of suffering, and it was time to put an end to it. so, on the fourth day, i decided to lighten the mood. i started telling jokes. i started ribbing people, playing with them, making them laugh and smile. and it continued on for the rest of the month. i would treat people to coffee at the Starbucks across the street. i would take A., the Ph.D. student with the eating disorder, to Safeway to help her conquer her fear of food. i would call people on the weekends and encourage them over the phone. i would clown and goof off, keep the energy level high in the room, stay enthused.
the verve was contagious. i made the commitment to try and get better, and made the others come along for the ride. and it was a hell of a ride: there were days when we would all laugh so hard that we cried, and then feel bad about laughing, and then laugh some more about that.
being crazy doesn’t have to suck.
honestly, going to that program at UCSF was probably the smartest thing i’ve ever done in my life. xp the malcontent, xp the bitter divorcé, xp the jilted lover, xp the walking attitude problem who has been fired on 5 occasions, had over 30 jobs, moved 15 times, and always had a black cloud hovering over his head, was thanked on the last day by his fellow loons for being such a positive influence and making such a big difference in their lives. i don’t think that’s ever been said of me before. i love all of those people like they are my brothers and sisters, and i’m going to call a few of them today and see how they are doing.
as i said, i’ll be paying for the program for years, but i also make anonymous donations from time to time to the general fund. whatever i can give. lack of funds shouldn’t prevent people from getting help and getting better. and, really, there is no reason to suffer. anyone who is suffering should get help, and not be afraid to do so. it’s worth it. trust me. it’s so, so worth it.
one year later and i’ve certainly had some bad times. i always will. there is no cure for depression. you have to learn how to cope. but it’s better. so much better.
 one of the things i began to do while i was at UCSF was the act of setting goals for myself, committing to the process of working to those goals, and then documenting and appreciating the progress. small stuff, nothing huge or overwhelming. breaking things down into simple steps. it necessitates a Zen, somewhat meditative approach to things that suits me quite well: living in the moment. being mindful and present and engaged. and while i still fly off the handle from time to time, in general i’m considerably calmer. at peace. i no longer feeling like i’m fighting all the time.
the best part of it all was connecting and reconnecting with my family and my friends, all of whom i had kept at a deliberate distance. once i accepted the fact that i needed help, i was amazed to discover that i wasn’t alone, after all. the people in the world whom i love and who love me are, in fact, like objects in the rearview mirror – a lot closer to me than they appear. their love and support through all of this has been immense and immeasurable.
i’m reminded of the story of my musical idol, Miles Davis (who happens to share my birthday), who went home to St. Louis and locked himself in his own bedroom and quit the heroin for good. when he was done, the only thing Miles wanted to do was write song after song, and try to catch up after wasting so damn much time. i can’t get back all of the time that was lost and the opportunities in life that were wasted, but that’s OK. i’ve got lots to do and lots of time to make up. i’ll get there. and, in a lot of ways, i’m feeling younger now than i have in years. and that feels better than i could ever describe.

— — —

Now would be a good time to listen to some of that Kind of Blue up there at the top of the entry. I’m certainly going to, because I’m certainly feeling kind of blue after recalling all of that, and I need to figure out where the hell I’m going with all of this.

[Listens to All Blues …]

That’s much better now. OK, so, where were we? So, that UCSF experience took place nine years ago. Nine years have passed. Ho-ly shite. Back in 2006, I hatched a fool-proof, 3-step plan for combating my own mental illness:

1] Own it. OK, I’m nuts. So be it. Next?
2] Knowledge is power. Learn about it. Learn everything that I can about it.
3] Kick its ass.

Well, OK, so #1 was easy. But #3 would be a whole lot easier to accomplish if I could just get past #2. I’ve spent nine years working on #2 and still haven’t come to terms with it. Learning about it means figuring out the ways in which it’s affected me in the past, how it affects me in the present, and how it might affect me in the future. And it’s not just as simple as saying, “oh, well, yeah, I was crazy back then, which is why I acted like such a dumbass.” Uh-uh. Not good enough. That’s too easy. That’s smelling the smoke and seeing the embers and saying, “well, obviously, the house burned down,” but not explaining why and how it caught fire in the first place.

And let me tell you something. #2 sucks.

But frankly, all of it sucks. Let me just get that out of the way because I’m reminded of some conversation I got into online surrounding assisted suicides and one person who was clearly an overly devout simpleton and who was a … hmm, what’s the right word … fuckwit? Yeah, that works … and who was a fuckwit kept vamping on how morally wrong it was that, in Belgium, there had been cases where people had gone the assisted suicide route not because of having terminal illness but because ‘all’ they had were mental illnesses – apparently having zero understanding of the sort of physical toll that mental illness takes upon you over time. It wears you out.

In my case, I’ve spent my whole life living with this feeling of impending doom, this inner sense that the walls or the ceiling or the roof are going to collapse in upon me, I feel that pressure constantly building and my response is to tense myself up. Well, when you spend 46 years feeling that way, your body twists up in knots. My spine is like a corkscrew. I have migraines. I cannot really drive a car, nor barely sit in an airline seat, because it hurts my back. I have pinched nerves in my neck, in my shoulders. And guess what? Those sorts of pains are, at this point, probably never going to go away. This is how I get to live from hereon. Isn’t that swell?

I also have several addictions I cannot get rid of – nicotine, caffeine – and probably drink more than I should simply because I’ve spent the entirety of my life trying to cope. This is why, when the psych said, “you should’ve been dead by 30,” she meant it. Clinical depressives kill themselves, they overdose, they have more accidents because they don’t take care of themselves. When you go through the entirety of your life this way, feeling like shit all the time, feeling like all that you can do is cope and get by, eventually you just stop caring. Or, you do what I did and simply resign yourself to it. Well, this is how life is supposed to be. It’s supposed to fucking suck. Oh well. Tough shit.

And see, that sense of resignation settles in. You’ve gone past a threshold of misery. Things don’t work out – you don’t get the job, or the grad school offer, or whatnot – and it’s not because of the fact that, well, sometimes that happens to people, but it’s obviously because you’re shit and you shouldn’t expect anything to work out. Just shut up and get on with it. Move it along. You make bad choices, bad decisions. You cannot ever succeed because success isn’t possible, unless you’re just stupid dumb lucky. Whatever good interpersonal relationships you might have start to flounder, because those people wonder just what in the hell they are supposed to do with you, or you can just settle for some bad ones, usually one-sided affairs where your boss in your bad job or your spouse in your bad marriage simply point out how shitty you are and bad at everything you are. But this is how life goes, see? You have a brain that doesn’t work, you’re not normal and you cannot function like the others around you. This is obviously the way it was meant to be, right?

And if you happen to be me, someone who has lived their whole life in a state of mental illness and come to accept it as it is, you might even do something like marry a woman who is the single-most evil and cruel person who will ever meet and then, some five years after you divorce them, you’re casually walking down a street in San Francisco and you notice her mother approaching you (the second-most evil and cruel person who you have ever met, for that matter), and it occurs to you that you should duck into the Egyptian convenience store in a hurry, because if she sees you, and she happens to tell her daughter about how she ran into you on the streets in San Francisco, then that person will now know where you live, and there is a nonzero chance they will turn up at your doorstep and shoot you dead, but first they’ll make a point of shooting your girlfriend dead, so maybe you should rush home and tell Kate that her life is in danger. Holy … motherfucking … shit …

I’ve had that nightmare now for 17 years, even though we divorced in 1998 and she died in an auto accident in Farmington, New Mexico, in 2003. And you know, Tam, I have made peace with many, many people, I have forgiven and been forgiven, but you are an exception. I hope you rot in the hell you made for yourself. In the end, I did nothing, ever, to deserve that.

And one of the things you do, when you learn about your own mental illness, is start to figure out the difference between what’s your fault and what isn’t, and come to be honest about it. Whatever line you’ve heard about how it’s always easier to blame others for your misfortune is a bunch of bullshit. When it comes right down to it, it’s actually far more easy to blame yourself.

And quite honestly, I don’t know why I just wrote all of that, since I’ve never spoken of it before. Damn, I really do feel like I have nothing to hide. Oh well. Fuck it. It is out there now and I don’t give a goddamn.

And everything that I just mentioned there, that’s all part of learning about it. How did I contribute to my own demise? It’s sort of difficult for me to parse all of that since, in general, I have very sporadic memories of large swaths of my life. I’ve spent most of the past year working with a therapist essentially attempting to rebuild my memory of pretty much everything that occurred prior to 1998. Because honestly, I don’t really know any more. I can no longer tell the difference between what is real, what was imagined. But it doesn’t do me much good going forward if I don’t actually know how I got here.

One of the tenets of DBT (the therapy technique they employed at UCSF) is the concept of ‘radical acceptance,’ in which you come to accept that which has happened in the past without making judgments. (I may be the only person you know who actually says, “it is what it is,” without irony or contempt.) It’s been shown to be effective with people who’ve suffered all sorts of traumas. (Hmm, I think what I was just writing about qualifies.) And it sounds simple, right? Pfft. WRONG! It’s actually about the hardest thing you’ll ever do in your life. And it’s really damn hard if you basically have no idea what you were doing in the first place. The whole point of this has been to figure out how being mentally ill was affecting me all along. I’m basically my own personal case study. Yeech.

And in the past, when I have attempted to work through my own mental illness, attempting to sort it out, the result has been near disastrous. It has left me feeling even worse. I have attempted to do so in the context of writing fiction, in fact – most of the 10 years I spent between novels was spent trying to somehow explicate the nature of mental illness in the context of a novel. I concluded, finally, that no matter how good the finished product would have been – and I am serious when I say that it would have likely been the greatest work I could possibly produce – it was not worth killing myself over. So I set that aside and wrote a comedy instead. I ain’t ever writing any serious fiction ever. I’ve already experienced some of the worst people on the earth, including myself. I don’t need to go about making those sorts of characters up.

But reassembling the past was important to me. I wanted to do it and now, with the help of my interminably patient therapist, I’ve pieced together something of a past, even though it’s taken me all year and a few thousand pages worth of writings on the side. And it’s easy, at this point, to find myself laden with regret. Regret is a killer. Don’t succumb to regret.

When you do something like this, you also lose all of your good and convenient excuses. You cannot blame doing stupid stuff on being mentally ill, since you did plenty of not stupid stuff as well. It’s been a humbling exercise, one which in the past would have left me feeling even worse than when I started. But it’s different this time. I always make it a point to walk home from these intensive sessions, putting in the headphones and finding some beautiful music, ignoring my angry right ankle and just opening my eyes wide, permitting myself to take in the world around me. The sights, the taste of a cup of coffee, the beautiful aroma of the BBQ joint I walk past (a scene which is absolutely unfair), the feeling of the breezes. Small things, really. Simple pleasures, all of them meaningful in their moment.

And learning to live with your mental illness, ultimately, comes down to learning to live without it. Wait? What? What does that mean? Didn’t I say before that there’s no cure? Well, I did. But I also said #3 was kicking its ass. And kicking the ass of something that will never go away is a good thing, because it just means you can keep kicking its ass all the time and gaining satisfaction from doing do.

But what it also means is that everything you have known about being alive has to change, and you must be willing to make that change – which is actually kind of scary. It’s what you know! And yes, learning to live without it when you’re 46 years is inevitably going to make you wish that you had learned to live without it when you were 20 or 25. You can’t get the time back, you can’t change it and you can’t undo what you’ve done. But hey, if you get to 46 and you’ve learned to live with it, and come to see yourself as being both a by-product of your own mistakes and a survivor, then, hey, it’s not so bad being in the present.

And I’ve spent the last nine years doing what I can to kick mental illness’ ass. My fucking weird stupid brain which revs at 20,000 rpms all the time is actually useful for that. Since I don’t take any medications – they don’t work, my tolerance is too high – I’ve basically had to train myself to practice a constant mindfulness routine, one in which I’m constantly aware of how I’m feeling and adjusting to it. It’s sort of meditation on steroids. I’ve gotten to the point where I can do it constantly, all day every day, while going about my work routines at the same time. Being a master multitasker comes in handy. I’ve practiced this routine for nine years now – just sort of checking up on myself, thinking about how I’m feeling, noticing the environment around me and how I respond, etc. It’s become second-nature to me. It comes as easy as breathing.

But in order to that, and commit to it, I’ve also had to mellow out. I’ve had to teach myself how to relax. I’ve had to find appropriate outlets for stress – such as this blog of mine, in fact, because the most effective stress relief I know is laughter. Being blessed with a good sense of humour and a heightened sense of absurdity comes in handy. I laugh easily. I let it all go.

But I also don’t take any bullshit. I have no tolerance for bullshit. I’m too old for that crap and I haven’t got the time for it, so don’t piss me off – although, in truth, that is pretty hard to do these days. Harder than ever before.

You see, I’m winning a lot these days. Maybe not as much at scrabble as I would like, but that’s mostly due to the fact that I’m a terrible scrabble player. I like my profession and I like what I do. Gone are days where I felt the need to kill large swaths of brain cells with beer to cope with working for operations which I felt to be morally, professionally, and ethically bankrupt. (Any job I get is inherently going to be someplace dysfunctional, however, simply because dysfunctional people are far more interesting.) I write books and tell stories and I’m going to write more of them, so keep on buying them. Being a complete and utter failure at most everything I did for most of my life has made me an expert on losing, which goes well with this blog, so that’s not as terrible as it sounds. I have a mathematical brain and the eye and the voice of a poet. In the past, that made me weird. Now, that makes me versatile, multifaceted. I can pretty much do anything that I wish to do. I live in San Francisco, which is terrific. (Although there’s been far too much success here of late. But the A’s are in last and the 49ers start up this weekend, so I’ll have some more material to work with.)

Most importantly, I have a great wife who loves me and brings me peace of mind, I have terrific people surrounding me who mean the world to me, I’m alive when by all rights I probably shouldn’t be and every moment of it, no matter how small, is time well spent. For that, I am and always be grateful.

And I’m going to listen to that record again now, Kind of Blue, even though I’ve been listening to it while writing this blog, and even though it’s now 3:50 a.m. and I ought to sleep, because I’m all about being present and being in the moment, and that record contains several of the greatest moments of them all. What’s most fascinating about that record is just how spacious it is, how sparse. Miles was, at times, making music by not making music at all. It’s those gaps and open spaces which, paradoxically, are often the most beautiful tones.