The N Stands for Knowledge

MY ONLY true interest in college athletics, at this point in time, stems from my morbid curiosity in athletics done badly. Growing up watching this team in action will do that to you. I’m not at all interested in watching college football, and I only casually watched WSU’s typically low IQ performance last week in a 31:28 loss to Boise State last weekend. I was curious to see if WSU’s refusal to kick a chip shot FG when they were down 17, going for it instead and getting stuffed, would ultimately come back to haunt them (note final score), and I was amused to watch Boise State do everything in their power to lose the game by throwing two interceptions in the final 4:00 of the game instead of trying to milk the clock. With the advent of spread offenses in college football that can seemingly move the ball and score at will has come a propensity for slacking off in some of the other areas of the game where attention to detail is paramount. Why worry about clock and game management? Just score some more!

And that is precisely the reason why college coaches who advocate these sorts of offensive schemes make terrible coaches at the professional level. Such schemes ultimately only work when you have vastly superior talent at your disposal in 90% of your games – which, in the NFL, is pretty much never the case. You never go into an NFL game with such dominating man-for-man advantages that you can simply gloss over the making of mistakes and sweep them under the rug. Recruiting is pretty much the only thing that matters in college athletics, which is why you shouldn’t take any of the bluster and bombast that surrounds high-profile college coaches with any sort of seriousness. That people do take them seriously, of course, is puzzling to anyone who objectively looks at a sport like football or basketball, since the overall quality of play is a giant step down. That college coaches wind up being revered and idolized is … well, we’ll get to that in a minute …

I’m not interested in college football on the whole, and not particularly interested in watching any sort of football at all, but I can’t help myself and I sneak a peak sometimes, since my love of bad football has been well documented, and this is In Play Lose, where everything worth doing is worth doing badly. And while I’m not interested in following the game very closely, I will certainly be on the lookout for some of the worst plays of the year.This was a nice effort on the part of the University of Nevada against Notre Dame, the classic case of forgetting where you are on the field – and doing so in front of a large national television audience to boot:

Umm, you’re doing it wrong ...

But the two dumbest plays of the season so far have both involved Clemson special teams, one where yet another player dropped the ball before crossing the goal line (we’ve been over this already) last week, followed a week later by this doozy where a South Carolina State kick returner in the end zone tossed a live ball back to a referee, resulting in a Clemson touchdown when they fell on the loose ball. As I explained to someone on facebook, the only way this play could’ve been made any more absurd is if he’d actually tossed it forward to an official instead of backward, since the backward toss makes it a live ball, but the forward toss would be an illegal forward pass (this is how I know this rule), and since it occurred in the end zone it would be a safety. And more safeties are a good thing for the football absurdist, since conceding two points (like the Nevada Wolf Pack above) generally involves doing something incompetently. And we need more safety anyway, and it’s good to know that the NCAA and the NFL have been paying lip service to emphasizing player safety recently.

Oh, wait, was that cynical of me? Was I being skeptical? What would make me so?

Oh, that’s right. It’s because Penn State exists.

Oh, yeah, and because Baylor exists as well.

Or more to the point, not only am I’m cynical about two institutions of higher learning, but I’m utterly disdainful of the sorts of people who put forth the kind of crap that I just posted in those two images above. And this Saturday in State College, Pennsylvania, we got to see one of the ugliest scandals in the history of college sport be glossed over and trivialized, as Penn State felt the need to go about trumpeting the achievements of former head football coach Joe Paterno on this, the 50th anniversary of his first game at Happy Valley:



Seriously, just listen to that crap.

And yes, I understand that when Penn St. alums throw out the line that “JoPa built Penn State,” it’s not entirely wrong. I understand that Penn St. was thought of as a lesser college in a shitty backwater town, and that over his nearly 50 years at the helm of the football team, the university piggybacked off of the football team’s success, and the accompanying prestige and notoriety that it brought, to grow, over time, into a major research university. And yeah, all the stuff in that video about his players’ academic achievement are certainly legitimate accomplishments.

But you know what? It’s all blood money.

Joe Paterno employed Jerry Sandusky for 33 years, and every court document filed in the string of lawsuits against Penn State has suggested that Paterno, and other Penn State higher-ups, knew far more about what Sandusky was doing than they led on in public. That people were aghast an appalled when, for once its history, the NCAA did the right thing and slammed the Penn State football program is disturbing. (Of course, the NCAA went all chicken shit and reversed its course, but we’ll deal with those cowards in a moment.)  Quite honestly, the Sandusky incident begs the question as to whether Pennsylvania State University should exist as an institution at all, seeing as how the institution clearly had failed to live up to the absolute, single-most important principle of any academic institution, which is to provide a safe place for young people. This is what is appalling, people. You would think that people with ties to that institution would be aghast by this.

And, apparently, you would be wrong.

Seriously, what the fuck is wrong with people? Are your precious memories of the Saturday’s of your youth spent going to football games on campus really that important? Is your pride so shallow that you can just overlook the sorts of crimes committed on the watch of guys like Joe Paterno? Because let’s get one thing straight here: Joe Paterno employed Jerry Sandusky all that time because Jerry Sandusky could help him win. His job was to win football games. Period. For him, and for his bosses at Penn State, it was win at all costs, even if it meant looking the other way while the most utterly unspeakable of crimes were being committed. All of that other stuff about academic achievement and fundraising and the like that came on the back of football success means absolutely, positively nothing if you sell your soul doing it. But what we’ve seen time and again in America is the willingness of supposedly smart and well-educated people to sell their souls and subjugate themselves to the Cult of the Coach.

People pay lip service to the need to reform college athletics in this country, but it will probably take court rulings in order to truly make that happen. Any sort of genuine reform, given the current set-up, is impossible. You’d like to think that scandals like we saw at Penn State, or with Art Briles at Baylor, or, hell, at Baylor the first time would do the trick, and people would get fed up with this kind of thing and start reassessing their priorities. But instead, we still have stooges and slavish devotees like the ones who took out those advertisements above, and so long as that attitude persists, no reform will ever occur. And that attitude originally emanates from the deified coach of a football or a basketball team.

You want to know what it will take to truly reform college athletics? Fire all the coaches. I’m serious. Fire them all. Fire every one of them. And then fire the athletics directors who hired them, and you may as well fire a few university presidents while you’re at it, since given the directions in which higher education has trended in recent years, it’s not entirely clear they have any real grasp of what their instutions’ educational mission should be, either. But on a day to day basis, coaches of college athletics are the worst. They’re the absolute worst. You won’t find a more selfish, self-serving, self-absorbed profession in the entirety of America, a group who cares about nothing save for their own success and only truly cares about a player so long as (s)he can help them win.

But you can understand the mechanics of how this occurs. After all, students – and student athletes – are transitory in nature. They come and they go, they spend four years or maybe five at a university and then they’re gone. The institution just continues on without them. A highly successful coach at an institution is in the spotlight for years, for decades, and the institution they represent is right there in the spotlight with them.

“Joe Paterno won 409 games at Penn State.” Well, if you want to get technical and semantic about it, Joe Paterno didn’t win any games. He stood on the sideline as a football team won 409 times. And if you just think I’m being a smartass, listen to the tone of any losing college football coach on any given Saturday, most of whom will find ways to blame the kids for the loss:

“The offensive team wanted to run the ball, wanted to run the ball in. I think if the players believe they can execute a play, isn’t that better than believing they can’t execute a play?”
– Connecticut football coach Bob Diaco, after his team’s horrible clock management in a loss to Navy

And I don’t want to hear anyone tell me how such-and-such-a-coach at such-an-such-a-school is different. Fundamentally, they aren’t. They care about the kids only if they help them win, and if they don’t, they jerk their scholarships, and if they want to be a real dick about it, they prevent the kids from being able to transfer to another school. The very fact alone that the NCAA is able to restrict freedom of movement on transfers (which is now also the source of litigation, like most everything else in the NCAA’s business) strikes me as being fundamentally incompatible with a good number of supposed American principles. Coaches are control freaks and want to control everything, and then they suddenly no nothing at all when reports of academic fraud or the presence of strippers on recruiting trips start popping up. Nope, they knew nothing about it! Nothing at all! Bullshit. In the end, it’s really not in their interest to care a whole lot about the kids who pass through their programs, since they’ll leave one way or another and more kids will pass through after that. And quite honestly, a lot of them are just jerks. They are jerks and they act like jerks to their players. What’s also astonishing is that we’ve so systematically brainwashed ourselves into thinking college coaches are somehow reputable that we permit our young people to essentially be abused by them, the attitude being that somehow the kid should “stick it out” despite the abuse. Seriously. What the fuck is wrong with people?

Fire all the coaches, and fire the ADs who employ them while you’re at it. Asking the NCAA to reform itself is sort of like asking the inmates running the asylum to go back into their cells and throw away the keys. That reform will never willingly happen, since everyone involved in the NCAA is, first-and-foremost, worried about protecting their own self-interests. Because in the end, none of those aging, graying administrators on the sidelines or in the suits really give a damn about the welfare of the student athletes beneath them, all of whom are essentially unpaid labor in the industrial complex. The only reform will come when a court eventually rules that athletes have to paid – which I suspect is a matter of when, and not if, at this point. And quite honestly, so long as you have people writing big cheques to the university like those people who put their name on the Baylor ad in a Texas newspaper pictured above, none of this will change, either, since about the only person a college coach feels beholden to is the person who finances their livelihood.

But don’t think I’m going to let the kids off the hook here. No, no, no, no, no. I’m not doing that at all. And I’m going to preface this by saying that I do think there is value in athletic scholarships, and that there are quite a few kids – most of them, actually – who make the most of the opportunity to get their higher education. But then you have the kids who behave like this (names of persons and institutions withheld, since these examples are anecdotal in nature, but told to me by people who have no reason to be dishonest about it):

• I know someone who was a psychology professor at an institution with a major college football team. Towards the end of a semester, a student comes to her office to talk about his grade – which is nothing new, of course, and college professors have been subjected to students lobbying about their grades for generations. This particular student is on the football team, and he earned a B in her psychology class. He questions the mark she has awarded him and asks if she can change it. She says no, that he’s done good work, B-level work and that she can’t give him an A. But that’s not what he’s after. He wants her to lower his grade. He wants her to give him a C.
What is this madness?
The reason for this is that, due to a quirk in the way the rules worked pertaining to an athletic scholarship, a student athlete would be eligible for a continuation of certain types of funding if they were on academic probation, and thus needing to go to summer school to make-up for this sort of deficiency – and going to summer school, of course, also made it possible to partake in the football team’s rigorous “voluntary” summer conditioning program. Like a good number of the kids on the football team, this one comes from a poor background and doesn’t have a whole lot of money, so trying to get himself placed on academic probation was the only way he could think to get the funds needed to hang around the campus all summer and work out. Points for creativity, I suppose, but the idea that a kid was actively attempting to make his academic standing look worse in order to find a way to further his football prospects for the fall is absolutely absurd. And if you think that he was the only kid who had figured out this loophole, you’d almost certainly be mistaken. And now for something less humorous …

• I know a woman who worked in the academic counseling center at a large university, and in her division, they were responsible for the tutoring and the academic counseling of members of the school’s football team. One particular player was notorious difficult to deal with – a guy who happened to be a star, an All-American and a potential top NFL draft pack. One of their counseling sessions got particularly contentious, as he refused to provide his classwork, and when she pressed him for it, he informed her that he didn’t have to answer to her, and that she was nothing to him, and that he could bash her head against the wall if he wanted, at which point he stormed out.
Charming.
And he was right, of course, because he was going to be an NFL millionaire in a matter of months. What did he care what some stupid tutor told him? Going to class didn’t matter. He was just going through the motions and killing time until he could turn pro.
Now, of course, guys like that aren’t all that bright. And she also had the ear of the head coach, since it’s her job to keep his prize possessions eligible so he can win football games, and after one phone call, the coach then told this knucklehead to get his ass back to the counseling center. So he did so the following week, albeit begrudgingly, and he walked into her office to find a pair of linebackers from the football team standing in her office, neither of whom he got along with – it seems that if you’re a knucklehead in one area of life, it’s likely you’re a knucklehead in many of them – both of whom informed him that he was going to turn in his paper to her, and continue turning in his papers to her in a timely or regular fashion, or he was going to have to deal with the two of them. She had decided to meet Mr. All-American on a level that he could understand: hired goons. But this was ultimately the lengths to which she had to go. It took both a stated and implied threat of retaliatory violence to get the guy to ultimately comply. And she was doing him a favor, for fucksake. Keeping him eligible means keeping him on the field, which gives him more opportunities to show off his skills for the scouts.

• Another woman I know attended a small, liberal arts university which happened to have a Division I basketball team. We were talking about campus life at this school and she mentioned a particular residence hall on campus.
“Incoming students make the classic mistake of living there,” she said with a roll of her eyes, “because it’s the vacation dorm, and the basketball players move in during the holidays, and then when kids come back from your vacation, they find out that all of their stuff has been stolen.”
And I remember her tone when she told me about this. There was no outrage in her voice. Instead, there was an intonation that this was just business as usual at this school, and that it was just one of those inconveniences that you just had to deal with – the implication being that once your stuff was gone, it was never be to seen again.

Now, what do all of those instances have in common? The kids figured out what they could get away with. Which is what kids do. Kids are smart, clever, and play every angle. Kids can also figure out which people do and don’t give a shit about what they do – and in the end, of course, coaches don’t give a shit about what they do, so long as they keep turning up on the field.

And you can take that attitude to the extreme, and far too many athletic programs have done so. There is no greater example of this – and no more galling an example – than the mess that has taken place in the football program at Baylor, as school administrators turned a blind eye to reports of football players committing sexual assaults against other students. Indeed, Ken Starr lost his presidency and Art Briles lost his job as a football coach because not only did they not take corrective steps when such allegations surfaced, but they were in fact hostile to those making the allegations. Former Florida State football coach Bobby Bowden has joked about the good old days, when all you had to do was call up the county sheriff when one of your football players got in trouble with the law and you could sort it all out, but there is far too much truth in that. You may not get paid to play when you’re a student athlete in America, but far too many of them have discovered a perk: being above reproach and above the law. College kids get in trouble with the law for lots of reasons, of course – mostly because they are young and dumb and do stupid things – and college athletes aren’t different in that regard, but one thing which has been shown far too often to be true is that college athletes get into trouble with the law because they know that they can. So long as they are the BMOCs on campus and treated as such, why let pesky things like the rule of law and civil society get in the way? And I feel pretty comfortable in saying that is not what institutions of higher learning should be teaching its students.

And there is a pretty good way to put a stop to that sort of nonsense. Pay the players. Make them employees of the marketing department, which is essentially what they are now apart from the ‘pay’ aspect. You’re an employee and you’re meant to carry yourself in a certain way. Fuck up and you’re fired. But, of course, that would have to be collectively bargained, and that would mean schools would also have to deal with things like long-term insurance benefits for their student athletes who broke their bodies in the name of the university during the course of their careers, and they would then open themselves up to state labor laws and tax laws and all of that sort of thing – all of which the NCAA desperately wants to avoid. Universities claim they don’t have this sort of money to pay all of their student athletes, which is curious, given that they seem to have millions on hand to pay the coaches:

Can you tell that I hate this damn system?

And for all the supposed good it does, in terms of profile and prestige, which is then theoretically supposed to translate into alumni donations, there are certainly countless examples where that isn’t the case. Hell, Washington State’s athletic department is crap, and has been crap for years, but it hasn’t prevented the university from raising enough money to build a new medical school and the most cutting-edge wine school in the world. (Although admittedly, having one of the school’s highest profile athletes of all time also become a budding vintner certainly helped on that last one.)

This system is screwed up. It’s preposterous and it needs to go. My guess is that won’t happen, at least not so long as middle-aged boosters keep propping the whole thing up with their dollars, university administrators continue masquerading their marginal universities as being major ones, and the self-perpertuating blowhard hype machine that is the NCAA media – ESPN being the worst of the lot – keep deifying grumpy, small-minded control freaks walking up and down the sidelines. It needs to go, but that is not happening any time soon. We appear to be stuck with this mess, so remember, kids, that Joe Paterno built Penn State, and also remember when you’re in Lincoln, Nebraska, that the N on the side of the helmets stands for ‘knowledge.’

Trying to Live

I WAS going to write something on Sunday, something intended to be long and hopefully be profound, but I didn’t. Instead, I went and played scrabble in Berkeley, and played quite badly at that. I played like an ass. I haven’t played that badly in ages. Were it not for some fortuitously good timing and the drawing of some extraordinarily good tiles, I wouldn’t have been able to muster the 3-3 record that I did. Finishing even-steven, much like in football, can be looked at with nuance. There are good 3-3’s and bad 3-3’s and this was one of the latter, because it should have been a whole lot better given what I was drawing. There are also boring 3-3’s, which is most of them, in fact. But I was OK with my 3-3 and I was happy for the distraction, the game itself actually feeling like a distraction and a diversion for the first time in a while.

I like it when that happens, to be honest. I’ll admit, however, that my ethos and approach to the game of scrabble is vastly different than many of the people I know. I’m different from a lot of scrabble players, in the sense that they try to shrug off the games where their opponents draw all the good tiles, and completely fixate upon the games in which their own mistakes cost them. I’m completely the opposite. I absolutely, positively hate it when someone draws the bag on me. I hate it. I can’t stand it. The reason for this is that it doesn’t feel like a game, at that point, because I’m not playing the game. I’m sitting there and watching the other person play – and, quite honestly, I have better things to do than watch someone play solitaire. And I sure as hell don’t want to pay for the privilege of watching this – which is precisely what you’re doing when you pay some entry fee for a tournament and then sit there and watch your opponent play. It’s a pointless activity, a waste of my time, and nothing pisses me off more than someone wasting my time.

But losing because I make mistakes? Sounds OK to me. There is cause and effect there, there is action and reaction and it all makes sense. I lost two games on Sunday as a direct consequence of making utterly stupid plays. Terrible plays. Migraine-inducingly terrible plays. Just awful. And that’s perfectly fine, because I got what I deserved. Mistakes are correctible the next time around. Getting the bag drawn on you is not correctible, because there aren’t any tiles left and the other guy drew all the good ones. It’s just a waste of an hour.

Or waste of a half-hour, anyway, since I tend to play a lot faster than other people and my games end really quickly, which I’m perfectly fine with as well. It has been suggested, with some merit, that I occasionally play too fast, and cost myself because of it. And that’s probably true, but what’s also true is that if it’s taking me a long time to play, it isn’t going very well, and having extra time doesn’t necessarily mean that I’m using it. If it takes me five minutes to make a move, I’m probably spending 4½ of those minutes thinking about what I’m going to make for dinner, or thinking about what I need to do for work, or wondering when and if the Giants will ever win another damn game. It’s not about time, but tempo. I know the pace I like to play, I know the rhythm and the pace of the logical progressions that I make, and I’m far better off keeping a quick tempo than I am laboring over every goddamn possible play. I keep the pace quick to keep my mind sharp, to keep myself focused and in the moment. And in that moment, it’s perfectly OK for me to feel like the world is ending because I have EIIIOOU on my rack. Having EIIIOOU on your rack is, on balance, a good life problem to have. You can’t exchange most life problems. You can’t, at worst, play most of your life problems through an R to make OURIE for 5-10 points. Real life can wait while I figure out what to do with all of these fucking vowels …

I started playing scrabble competitively because I thought it would be a useful outlet, since I’d always been absurdly competitive by nature, and I thought that it would help me concentrate and serve as a fun distraction. It stopped being a fun distraction when I started getting good at it, because with aptitude comes expectations. I’ve always hated losing. And I mean hated losing. I still do, but nowhere near as much as before – if I did hate losing as much as before, I wouldn’t be able to write a blog that’s all about losing, after all. Scrabble is all that matters in the 30-50 minutes that I game lasts, but I hated losing so much that the game wouldn’t end, and I’d often lose the next game – and possibly the one even still after that – because I was still fixating on losing the previous one. But that generally doesn’t happen any more. If you’re angry about losing, you can fail to see the humour in it. Success is actually quite ordinary and mundane. No one ever laughs about everything going according to plan.

Although I never outwardly expressed this sentiment at the time, I started playing scrabble because I thought it might be good for my mental health. At the time, I was about as down as I (thought) I ever was, and it seemed like an activity that would be good for me. And this has generally been the case, in fact, notwithstanding this tournament, where I’ll admit that I came unglued and, come to think of it, this tournament wasn’t very good for me either, but I was quickly able to laugh about it, and anyone who saw me throwing stray beer bottles or smashing my metallic clipboard into a U-shape in the vastly empty parking lot of a casino during one assorted summer/winter Reno vortex or another probably questioned my sanity as well, and probably wouldn’t be wrong in doing that. But in general, it’s been good for me. It grounds me and keeps me in the moment (a moment I’d probably enjoy more if scrabble weren’t full of pointlessly rigid decorum and, more to the point, ninnies obsessed with that pointlessly rigid decorum, all of whom seem to think you need pin drop silence in order to muster up enough concentration to find a bingo and none of whom have probably ever tried to sink a free throw at the end of a basketball game with a gym-full of people screaming at you, coming to discover in that moment that the noise makes no difference and that, in fact, you concentrate even more because you’re motivated to shut those motherfuckers up who are sitting in the stands). (Wow, that was a long parenthetical.)

Playing scrabble has fundamentally been good for my mental health. Losing at scrabble hasn’t, but at least now, it no longer seems to impact me in quite the same way. I guess it’s funnier now, since I’ve reached the point where I’m good enough at the game, and attuned enough to it, to better understand which lost games were actually winnable – which means realizing that I screw up a lot of the time, which maybe wasn’t so apparent in the past. Of course, this doesn’t make the times I get bagged the least bit more tolerable. Nothing will. It’s not the way that I’m wired, nor will I ever be. I consider the possibility of being bagged from time to time as an acceptable risk.

I didn’t lose any games on Sunday because I got bagged. I lost three games on Sunday because I played like a dolt. But I’m glad that I was focusing on playing scrabble, albeit badly, and enjoying going after the tournament was over for pizza and beer as God intended and the best gelato I’ve had outside of Italy with my friends and with The Official Spouse of In Play Lose. Necessary steps, as I’ve become a bit too introverted of late, a bit too immersed in my own world, and getting out did me good. I have a tendency to completely detach and to disengage when it isn’t going very well. This has a lot to do with why I haven’t been writing here at In Play Lose, by the way. It feels less like writers block and more like I had lost my voice. Call it mental laryngitis, if you well.

I felt, at first, a pressing need to write on Sunday, the 11th of September, about the fact that it’s the 10th anniversary of what I call The Day That I Tried to Live, which also happens to be the 15th anniversary of the day in our history that we’d all like to forget and wish never happened. These anniversaries seem to resonate more this year because of the numbers 10 and 15, but why is that? What is this fixation and fascination that we have with multiples of the number five? Me being 10 years on from that day isn’t necessarily any more relevant than the 9th or the 11th. The memory of 9/11 is no less terrible 15 years on than 14, and will still be as equally terrible 16 years on. (Oh yes, insert important note here: if you think I’m trivializing the memory of 9/11, then go and reread the paragraph about 9/11 in that blog post of mine from a year ago about my connection to the deaths and despair. I felt it too, just like many others did, and I think I have the right to remember it in my own way, and if you have a problem with that, well, get stuffed.) It’s not some milestone, this anniversary number that is a multiple of five. It’s not special. We should take back the zeros and the fives, just as we should take back the 11s.

But instead of writing about my mental health, which right now pretty much sucks, I decided instead to go and play scrabble, which also pretty much sucks but which is OK to get lost in every now and again, and whatever world of anxiety I sink into over the board will inevitably dissipate and disappear once the game is over – unless I get bagged, of course, which will still piss me off. But why is that exactly? From what does this thought and sentiment stem? This is where my mind goes when I’m thinking about all of these sorts of things, looking for the broader connections which may, or may not, exist. And I was pondering this today as I was out walking, which is something that I like to do on Mondays, when I will walk for as much as 7½ miles, usually accompanied by the sounds of one of my bass-heavy playlists thumping through the earbuds of my iPhone, and I will walk 7½ miles in spite of the fact that my right foot hurts.

And the fact that my right foot hurts, and pretty much all I hear is the bass in every song, explains a lot about my hatred of being bagged.

Ask me for my most vivid memory of my childhood, and the first thing that comes to mind is a night in either late 1976, or early 1977 – I don’t remember which, I just know that it’s the winter time – that I was so sick that I wound up in the Kaiser hospital in Walnut Creek. I remember I had a very nice and very young doctor who had a Japanese name, and it was probably about 3:30 a.m., and for some fuckknowswhy reason I remember that I had a 100° temperature – and I also distinctly remember the gross, slimy, disgusting feeling of having blood and pus and slime slithering down the right side of my face, because my ear drum had ruptured.

Trust me, that’s not a good feeling. I don’t recommend you experience it. It’s happened to me twice, in fact – the same damn thing erupted a few years ago when I was brutally ill on a day I had to take a 5½-hour flight from Baltimore to the Bay Area. I walked into the E.R. with blood running down the right side of my face:

Doctor: What seems to be the … (pauses and looks up from the chart) … umm, ick …
Lose: Umm, yeah …

And pretty much ever since that moment when I was 7 years old, my hearing has been fucked up and weird. I knew something was wrong then, and have known it ever since. I simply tell people that I’m deaf in my right ear to simplify things, but it’s not exactly that. Even so, I generally try to stand on the right of anyone that’s important so I can actually understand what they are saying. If I stand on your left and you speak, it’s gibberish. If I stand on your left and you speak without facing me, I likely won’t hear you at all. I’m also essentially tone deaf, as anything outside of a really low range just sounds like a muddled mess, which means that I could never really play music, because I could never really figure out how a tone was supposed to sound in the first place, and that always annoyed me when I was younger, because I’ve always loved music, came from a family of musically-talented siblings, and felt as if I could never truly contribute to that particular realm. Pretty much the only part of any song that I pay attention to is the bassline and the drum. Literally, all of that other stuff is just noise to me.

It’s not all bad, of course. Being the rock critic who could never play an instrument made for some interesting interviews with musicians over the years, since we would wind up mostly talking about the creative process required to write good songs. I had one particularly loud boss who sat directly behind me and used to yell at me, and so I would simply angle my chair to the right and their words would then dissolve into a dull yet manageable roar – at least until they figured out what I was doing, and would shout, “don’t you turn your deaf ear at me!” which would always make me smile, because I knew I had just won that small battle in a continual war. But really, it sucks most of the time hearing a bunch of gobbledygook.

And it was a fluke. Of course it was a fluke. It’s a random moment in time where life went off the rails. There was no way to expect something like that would ever happen. Nothing that I personally did, when I was 7 years old, contributed to the ensuing 40 years of hearing loss. I’ve adjusted, of course, almost to the point where I can say “it is what it is” and actually mean it (since most people who say “it is what it is” wish that it wasn’t what it is), but if I think real hard, and try to sift through the fog and the haze and the miasma that is my memory, I can almost – almost – remember what it was like to be able to hear out of both ears.

But one thing I can no longer remember – which pains me to say – is a time when my right foot didn’t hurt, which is really saying something, because back when it didn’t hurt, I could run like a gazelle and jump over buildings. It’s been almost 27 years now since I completely obliterated my right ankle, destroyed it and rendered it basically useless. And I walk almost 7½ miles on it out of spite, because every time I walk on it, my foot hurts. It hurts and it’s more or less hurt for 27 years, and the natural act of changing my gait over those 27 years to account for it has led to bad knees and a bad back and a bad neck … hell, that whole spinal column fucker is fucked up beyond, and again, you adjust to it over time, you come to terms with it.

It was a fluke, it was not the norm, one random moment in one basketball game out of who knows how many I played where it all went catastrophically wrong. That I had no access to the sort of medical care necessary to treat the injury was bad timing. I’ve never held the physicians who treated me in any sort of contempt for that, even though some have suggested that I probably should. I was forced to accept that “it is what it is,” and I can intellectualize that point and accept that point – up until that moment when, for yet another day now for nearly 27 years, my right foot starts to ache, at which point all of my logic and sense and understanding go right out the goddamn window.

And after nearly 27 years of this, I truly cannot remember what it was like to have two functioning feet. Memories of running free and easy all seem like abstractions to me. They no longer seem real. It’s as if it never happened and I just made it all up.

Now, in hindsight, of course, I can be hyperrational about it and say that the simplest way to have prevented this sort of injury was to never play a sport in the first place. Because guess what? Sports are bad for you. They are. If you play any sport competitively, and do it competently at some sort of decent level, you’re going to wind up getting hurt. This is why I find most discussions about the relative violence of football to be somewhat curious: the alternatives, while maybe not scrambling your brain, don’t exactly leave you feeling all spiffy. Watching any Olympic broadcast from Rio this past summer was like making rounds in a surgical unit, as the commentators rattled off every athlete’s endless string of injuries, a good number of them completely gnarly. But of course there is a disconnect. You don’t get hurt every time you pick up a ball. Hell, most of the time, the workout feels great. It’s that one goddamn time that does you in, that one moment out of the ordinary where maybe you plant wrong or step on a guy’s foot or some dumbshit thing like that. It’s the strange irony of sport, really, in that we know that eventually we’ll get beat up doing it, yet we keep doing it anyway until the injuries inevitably settle in.

And bad stuff happens to all of us, of course. We all have our shit. Mine isn’t necessarily any worse than anyone else. That’s not the point. The point is that I don’t like situations which I cannot have at least a minor amount of control – an innate feeling, one that’s ingrained in me, and has probably been innate and ingrained since birth, because one of the other pesky life details of mine, which has been out of my control for most of that time, and which I’ve been trying to cope with and manage and manipulate and run away from and ultimately had to figure out how to accept, is the fact that almost certainly since birth, I have been mentally ill.

Coming to be 47 years old and alive, when by all rights I probably should have been dead long ago, has led me to be fairly straight forward about it, almost to the point of being blasé. “Oh yeah, so, I’m nuts, and certifiably nuts at that. Meh, whatever. Pass me the Tabasco.” But as someone who believes, first and foremost, that knowledge is power, I’ve been attempting quite a bit, over the past year or so, to piece a great deal of my memory back together, as a fair amount of it has seemed to vanish deep in the fog. And that leads to asking myself a lot of strange questions, most of which center on being mentally ill: When was I first aware of it? When did I first resist it? First reject it? Make the first attempts to cope? How was it that I coped? How could I have possibly done so much coping and not croaked in the process? What stupid things did I do this time? What stupid things were done to me? Whom did I trust and what was I thinking when I did that? It goes on and on, it’s a seemingly never-ending process and it wears me out sometimes. I’ve spent the past year slogging through my own personal morass, and I think I’ve spent the past couple months feeling stuck in the mud. And there is really no good time to do that, of course, unless you want to take a month off from your life and spend $14,000 and check yourself into a mental hospital, which I don’t particularly feel the need to do again.

But the overarching theme in all of that introspection is a sense of powerlessness, one which ran rampant through the entirety of the first 37 years of my life, and one which I always lacked the right vocabulary to express. You know something is wrong but don’t know what, nor do you why, but you see the way other people act, see how they interact, and feel like it’s not possible for you do that and be that way. You don’t have any idea why that is and it drives you (even more) nuts. And then a few other really awful things happen along the way, just as awful things are wont to happen to some people, but it feels like piling on because you’re already all screwed up to begin with. Sometimes college is a disaster. Sometimes marriage is a disaster. Sometimes you lose a job. This can happen to people for all sorts of reasons but those all sorts of reasons don’t matter when you know, deep down, that there is something that’s just not right about the way you’re wired – in that context, you lose the job and have the bad marriage and the like because you’re shit. Duh. That was hard. This is how it’s meant to be. You’ve been shit since you the day you were born, so why would those situations be any different?

This is where my mind has gone for years, of course. There was always a sense of fated failure to all that I undertook. I felt as if I was star-crossed, luckless, hard done by. Pfft. Whatever. I don’t believe in any of that shit any more. And in making the efforts to understand my own mental illness, get a grasp on it, learn to control and manage it, and then start giving it big noogies, perhaps the best part of it has been to actually feel like I’m gaining some control, because not having any sense of control – indeed, never feeling like control was even possible – is part of what nearly led me to turn up dead. And again, this in no way excuses any of the dumb and stupid things I’ve actively partaken in over the years. Sure, I screwed a lot of stuff up when it comes to relationships, careers and other life choices. But I can learn from those mistakes. I can come to terms with those mistakes. It’s the mistakes seemingly made for me which I’ve never, ever been able to handle.

And having the bag drawn on me in scrabble is a mistake made for me. It’s not what I’m there to do. It’s not the reason why I’m playing the game of scrabble. And now it would be a good time to also point out that I don’t particularly enjoy drawing the bag on my opponents. Winning is certainly better than losing, of course, but I’m someone who has always hated losing more than I’ve enjoyed winning. I’ve always tried to be gracious in victory, since if my opponent is like me, they probably hate losing – and let’s be honest here, at the peak of any competitive endeavor, every competitor hates losing to some extent. They may not all show it in the same way, of course, but if you tolerated losing so easily, you wouldn’t have taken so many steps to try and minimize its occurrence.

The biggest problem with having bad ears and a bad right foot and a bad back and a bad neck and all that jazz is the fact that, after about 10 years of attempting to follow a course of mindfulness and contemplation, I feel as if my mind is, on the whole, in better shape than it’s ever been – but my body is a wreck, and so I cannot really enjoy this sound mind and healthy spirit to its fullest. And this makes me sad, of course, because so much of the first 37 years of my life feels like a life wasted, and now I’ve got a head that actually works relatively well, and the body seems to not want to comply.

And it’s strange to generally be so calm. I’ve still not quite gotten used to that. I used to be all over the place, and it could be fun sometimes, especially when I was feeling extremely creative and the stars would align and give me some acute sense of clarity and vision. I don’t really get that burst of creative energy any more. Instead, I have to go about somehow inventing that energy for myself and managing it, allowing it to burn slowly instead of wildly blazing and going about scalding the hillsides. In the past, I’d sort of be hanging around and waiting for that ZING! of inspiration to arise, and then when it came, I’d just go nuts and roll with it come hell or high water. That doesn’t work for me anymore.

As a result of this general state of calm which has descended upon me, my previously interminably slow creative process – made slow by the fact that I could never finish anything, given that I have the attention span of a gnat – has now gotten even slower. I’ve got probably 2,000 pages worth of drafts of unfinished novels on this laptop, and 100 pages of In Play Lose ideas which never got past the first paragraph. For fucksake, Lose, FINISH SOME STUFF!

So bear with me here. I’ve been feeling something of a mess for the past couple of months, and trying to figure out where to go from here. I feel like I’ve had some mental setbacks, but this is going to happen from time to time. There is no cure for mental illness – nor for most other diseases, for that matter. You have to learn about them, learn to manage them and control them. It’s an ongoing process you must commit to, but one which is also prone to occasional burst of suckage.

And I appreciate, and am humbled by, the fact that a good number of people have sought me out over the past 10 years, across a wide spectrum of life, who are trying to learn to cope with depression or anxiety or other aspects of mental illness and have asked me for advice and guidance. It pleases me, knowing that I am a useful resource for others. I’ve become a passionate and tireless advocate on the mental health front, and I’ll always try to be helpful when I can.

But I definitely need to play more scrabble, given that deciding to make a go of playing it was probably one of the smartest things I’ve ever done. I met my wife and most of my best friends playing scrabble, I’ve taken on roles of leadership and responsibility I would have shied away from in the past, and I managed to follow a process all the way through – starting off knowing nothing at all, making the efforts to learn and improve, and then continuing to make those efforts and actually getting really, really good at it over time. Or at least I thought I was good at it before yesterday but nah, I’m still terrible. But that means I can still get better at it, right? Learning is cool and improving is cool.

But I don’t want to get too good at scrabble, because it would ruin my well-crafted life persona. After all, I’m the guy who can be a pretty good player on his day but who ultimately never wins anything at that stupid game, which sucks in the moment but is probably a good thing on balance, since none of you would want to read a blog called In Play Win. That would just be boring. One thing I learned long ago in the criticism business is that there are three basic reviews: it rocks, it sucks, and it’s boring, and the third one is the worst of them all.

Crickets

THIS is just a note to all of the loyal, faithful readers of this blog around the world: I have not forgotten about you. It was always my intention to take a hiatus this summer, since there really isn’t that much going on during that time, but it’s gone on a little longer than I would have liked, owing to the fact that I’ve had a number of professional obligations which took precedent, some other creative projects that I needed to get moving on, and, quite honestly, because I appear to have developed a bad case of writers block which I’ve been unable to shake.

Fear not, however, we’ll work through all of these “technical difficulties” here at In Play Lose World HQ and return with new Lose here in the autumn months. Thank you for your patience and always remember that if it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing badly.

Some Dude Took a Job in the Bay Area

OWING to work commitments, along with a steady diet of Copa América Centenario football taking place down at The Pants in Santa Clara taking up my time, I didn’t really have the opportunity to write about the NBA Finals. There isn’t really any reason for me to be me rehashing it, at this point – for a good summary and overarching analysis of what went down, I recommend this piece penned by The Official Portland Trail Blazers Correspondent of In Play Lose – and while I was disappointed with the outcome, being a fan of the Golden State Warriors, I was far less disappointed than you might have expected. I had come to accept the possibility of a Cleveland championship this season during the Western Conference Finals, when the Warriors seemed so far gone after Game 4 that a comeback against OKC seemed impossible. The Warriors seemed dead on their feet by the end of the playoffs, injury-riddled and out of ideas. As such, this final outcome of a Cleveland victory in the finals (be it over the Warriors, rather than OKC) doesn’t feel quite as strange to me as I first thought.

The main reason for this is that, as a purveyor of Lose, I love me some Cleveland, and I was genuinely happy for the people of Cleveland to finally get the monkey of their collective backs. You can take The Drive and The Fumble and Red Right 88 and throw it all in Lake Erie. You can push aside the miserable memories of Joe Table blowing the save against the Marlins in Game 7. Forget all of that stuff, Cleveland, and have a great party, because you’ve earned it.

I will say to Cleveland, however, that because of this championship, The Lose is now going to have to scuttle his cockamamie pipe dream and scheme to erect the Hall of Lose in your fair city. Sorry. You’re now too good for this. We’re relocating the Hall of Lose to …

Well, where shall we move it to? What long-suffering and miserable sports city deserves this high honor? This is a source of some debate among the Lose faithful, with Buffalo being the obvious choice, of course, but then you had others pushing for Minneapolis and also Washington, D.C., and it’s hard to argue with the level of losing in both places over the past 25 years, and then I started thinking about Vancouver, which hasn’t won a Stanley Cup in over a century, and some other West Coasters made a strong case for San Diego.

And where to locate the Hall of Lose was going to be the subject of this post, in which I was planning to pose the question of what is the worst sports city in (North) America, and now seemed like a good time to write about that, given that it’s the middle of summer and it’s the dog days and other than some grand failure in international soccer (LOL England and Mexico) and some continually bad baseball, there isn’t a whole lot of stuff going on at this time of year worth talking about. Oh sure, there might be some offseason NBA stuff to talk about, but that stuff is always overhyped and ultimately proves pretty uninteresting, so why would this summer be any diff …

... erent. Wait. What?

That BOOM I heard on Monday morning was not the sound of all of the illegal fireworks exploding in my neighborhood, rising into the skies and turning the fog pink and green and blue. (4th of July sucks in San Francisco.) No, it was the sound of my phone exploding, as twitter went absolutely nutters in response to the short piece by Kevin Durant, written on The Players Tribune, revealing his free agency decision.

Kevin Durant has agreed to a 2-year, $54,000,000 contract with the Golden State Warriors, and I have to admit that this took me by surprise. This idea of Durant to the Dubs had been talked about quite a bit in Bay Area basketball circles, it had been floated and dabbled and pondered, and there would be the occasional tweet or online clickbait suggesting that it might happen, but I don’t think anyone here really took it all that seriously. It was fun to contemplate, fun to imagine, a passing fancy and an idle daydream, nothing more.

Lose: So, Kevin Durant’s a Warrior now.
Spouse: Wait. What?

And I find myself in a curious place as it relates to this particular news, in that it benefits the Golden State Warriors, a team which I happen to greatly like, and also comes at the expense of the Oklahoma City Thunder, a team which I despise like none other. Indeed, the only people I know who are as giddy as Warriors fans about this news are Sonics fans, all of whom have been waiting for this day to come since the moment the Sonics relocated from Seattle to Oklahoma City, as it’s the day when the Oklahoma City Thunder finally commence their decline and descent into complete irrelevance.

But this is In Play Lose, of course, and while I periodically take partisan approaches to what I’m writing on this blog, I usually make it a point to avoid engaging in schadenfreude. We here at In Play Lose do not believe in reveling in the misfortune of others. (And I’m not using the royal “we” in this case, which I occasionally do for dramatic effect, but speaking to the collective “we” of myself and the readership.) I will occasionally post goofy .gif files to this blog of people doing something stupid for the purposes of comedy:

Congrats on the new job, Luke Walton. This is what you have to look forward to in L.A.

But the point is not to laugh at them so much as laugh with them. Failure is funny, it’s ridiculous and not the desired effect. No one is trying to lose. (Well, other than the Sixers, of course.) Laughter is the best medicine, and when you screw things up, the best course of action is to laugh it off, learn from it, and then go on from there.

I try to be analytical and objective on this blog, and I will attempt to do the same thing in this particular situation, because the moving of Kevin Durant from Oklahoma City to Golden State brings up a number of issues which would fundamentally hold true even if you changed the names of the actors and the names on the front of the jerseys. I’m going to do what I can to be objective here, strongly resisting the temptation to point and laugh and poor little Oklahoma City while also resisting the temptation to giddily jump up and down and clap my hands with delight at the Dubs’ good fortune.

And it’s hard not to do the latter, because with the addition of Kevin Durant, the Warriors have now assembled the most dazzling, most terrifying array of talent on one team that the NBA has ever seen. What happened on Monday was not a seismic shift in the NBA landscape so much as that landscape splitting open and swallowing itself whole. (And judging by recent events, such as Dwyane Wade wearing a Bulls jersey, the league has collectively gone insane.) The Warriors won an NBA title in 2015, and were a minute away from repeating in 2016 after compiling the most successful regular season in NBA history. But they didn’t win the title. Cleveland did, and props to the Cavs for that. So Golden State did what every team, in this or any circumstance, should do, which is look to get better.

They appear to have succeeded.

But before we go any further here, we need a proper nickname. The Warriors had their “Death Lineup” last season – Steph Curry, Klay Thompson, Draymond Green, Andre Iguodala, and Harrison Barnes – but now you’ve replaced Barnes (who you should not feel too bad for, since he is now $94,000,000 richer in Dallas) with Durant, so what do you call this quintet? Because this isn’t a death lineup we’re talking about here. Death is too kind. This is scorched earth. This is extinction.

Here is a list of effective field goal percentage in the NBA last season. You’ll notice a few of the names I just mentioned in the previous paragraph extremely high on that list. There were only four players in the NBA who shot 10% higher than their Expected Field Goal Percentage given how open their shots were – a mark which signifies superior marksmanship. Three of them were Steph, Klay, and KD, all of whom are now on the same team. (The fourth, in case you’re curious, was J.J. Redick.) Steph and Klay are arguably two of the greatest shooters in history, and now they’ve added a third, Durant, who also happens to be 6’11” and runs like a gazelle, who can run the break and finish, who has 3-point range but who is also the best midrange scorer in the game, and who also shoots 61% on post-ups – meaning that if the offense somehow breaks down, you can always just throw it to KD, wherever he is on the floor, and let him jump over people and score.

The possibilities are endless, delicious to contemplate and absolutely terrifying for an opposing coach to ponder. How exactly would you defend a Curry-Durant pick and roll? How on earth do you stop that? Draymond Green is going to think it’s Christmas every time he gets the ball at the top of the circle, what with all of the passing options available to him in the Warriors motion offense. It’s not unreasonable to think he might lead the NBA in assists – except for the fact that the Warriors may blow so many opponents out that he, nor anyone else, will consistently run up huge numbers. Klay Thompson is the best catch-and-shoot guy in the NBA, and given all of the open looks available as teams deal with Durant and Curry, he may never need to dribble again. This lineup is unguardable. About the only way you can stop them is to hope they miss.

And oh yeah, I mentioned that Durant is 6’11” didn't I? He is also an outstanding rebounder, which is something the Dubs desperately need, and he showed in the playoffs that he is capable of playing superior defense, which is something that the Dubs will demand. I had never seen the D from KD quite like I did in that series between OKC the Dubs. He was a human pogo stick out there, blocking shots and getting his long and rangy arms in every passing lane. I never thought of him as an élite defender before, but he has that capability in his repertoire. He is a complete player and not simply a scorer.

This lineup is absolutely preposterous. And I can go on and on, because it’s not a stretch to say that this is the greatest assemblage of talent, in one place, that the NBA has ever seen. The oddsmakers in Las Vegas have already established some of the most ridiculous preseason odds imaginable: last time I looked, the Warriors were -140 to win the title and that line was still plummeting, while the over/under was at 68.5 wins, meaning that if you take the over, you’re anticipating them to have among the four greatest regular seasons in NBA history. People around the game have said they think another 73-win season in unlikely, as this past season has shown to everyone just how meaningless the regular season can be and the Warriors aren’t likely to focus on it, but Golden State can probably win a whole lot of games just by showing up and making some shots and doing little else. Rest and player health will likely be of greatest concern throughout the course of season, but the need for resting players will likely be offset simply by blowing teams out and then sitting guys for the entire 4th Quarter.

Unlike previous conglomerations of supreme talent in the NBA, which took time to figure out how to get players to mesh, this transition will likely be about as seamless as you can get. The Warriors have a defined style of play, a commitment to sharing the basketball and moving the ball to open shooters, and Durant’s skill set is an ideal complement to that game. Durant is an underrated passer, a skill he has rarely had to show off in the iso heavy OKC offense, and I am not all that worried about how he will jibe with Curry. Steph Curry is the two-time MVP of the league, and Rule #1 of good management in the NBA is keep the superstar happy. If Steph says he does not want Kevin Durant on this team, then Kevin Durant would not be on this team. Plain and simple.

“According to a person who saw the text messages, Curry told Durant in a text message that he could care less about who is the face of the franchise, who gets the most recognition or who sells the most shoes (Curry is with Under Armor, Durant with Nike). The two-time NBA MVP also told Durant that if Durant won the MVP award again he would be in the front row of the press conference clapping for him. In closing, Curry’s message to Durant was that all he truly cared about was winning championships and he’d like to do that as his teammate.” – Marc Spears, The Undefeated

I can’t wait to see what this looks like on the floor. It’s going to be spectacular viewing, must-see TV, and people will tune in and turn up, all right. Warriors tickets for away games this past season were already going for 10-15 times the rate of other teams on the secondary markets, and the TV ratings for the finals against the Cavs were among the highest in history. This is good for the NBA, just as the creation of the LeBron-Wade-Bosh axis in Miami was good for the NBA, because it further generated interest. And the Warriors will now be the ultimate NBA villains, which is also good for the game. We love having enemies. We need opponents to hate, if it’s for all of the right reasons – the primary reason being that they’re really damn good!

I grew up in the era of the Showtime Lakers. I hated the Showtime Lakers. I was living in L.A. during their heyday and I despised that team. And do you know why I despised that team? Because they were great. They were absolutely great, and as much as I hated them, I also watched them intently because I wanted to see what they were doing and learn from it. And so was everyone else in the game, in the end, because in order to defeat a team that good, you have to learn from it first. That’s what always happens when a dynast, or potential dynast, comes along. If you don’t like what the Warriors have done, then figure out how to beat them.

And nothing is pre-ordained here. The Warriors haven’t won anything yet. If there’d ever been a season where the results seemed pre-ordained, it would’ve been this past one – and then Steph Curry slips on a wet spot and injures his right knee in the 4th game of the playoffs, at which point the whole equation changed. There are no guarantees and nothing is assured. And there will be a challenger arising, because there always is. This coming season, if I’m LeBron, I’m loving the challenge of trying to beat this team. If I’m Pop down in San Antonio, I’m loving going to work and trying to scheme up a defense to stop them. The Warriors seem as if they’re poised to dominate the league for the next five years – oh, by the way, the Dubs’ Four Horsemen of the NBA Apocalypse are all under 28 years of age – but a challenger will invariably arise. We just don’t know necessarily who it will be, at this point. Maybe Boston gets the #1 pick in next year’s draft, and the #1 pick in the draft after that, thanks to the gift that keeps on giving which are the Brooklyn Nets. Maybe it’s Minnesota when their super young talent comes of age. Maybe another élite talent bails on a bad franchise in free agency in a few years. (Anthony Davis, anyone?) You don’t know where it’s going to come from, but the challenge will come.

Hell, you could never have imagined this Warriors team even existing five years ago. Read this article again. This franchise was a tire fire. They got to being élite through drafting guys who turned out to be a whole let better than people thought, and through making shrewd moves in trades and free agency to add complimentary pieces. Joe Lacob may be irritatingly, annoyingly smug, but he wasn’t totally wrong in what he said about them being “light years ahead.”

That the Warriors were perfectly positioned to poach Durant from the Thunder owes to several flukes and accidents, of course. For starters, the salary cap spiked from $70,000,000 to $94,000,000 this offseason, which gave the Warriors more money to play with than previously imagined, and also meant they could sign Durant without losing any of the core guys they actually wanted to keep, since their three All-Stars are all on what are comparative bargains by NBA wage standards. (If you can call $205,000,000 a bargain.) Most importantly of the three, Steph Curry is probably the most grossly underpaid professional athlete on the planet, having signed a 4-year, $44,000,000 contract extension in the wake of his recurring ankle injuries. Having a superstar talent on sub- to mid-level money frees the Warriors up to do so many things in terms of talent acquisition that other teams simply cannot do. In an online discussion, I likened this Warriors scenario to how the Seattle Seahawks built a Super Bowl champion. The Seahawks were able to stock up on quality players using the money they weren’t paying Russell Wilson – whereas most NFL clubs are laden with lofty salaries for franchise QBs, the Seahawks were paying a franchise QB they stumbled upon the money reserved for a 3rd-round draft pick. Timing is everything in sports, and indeed, in life. 

The Warriors had the money available to offer Durant, but they also had the culture to offer Durant. Oklahoma City has always had a reputation as an organization of being very well-run, but also being thrifty, uptight, a little bit stiff, and a little bit strange. The Warriors, meanwhile, are free and easy. They make the game look effortless at times, they play with a joy and an openness that’s exciting. Who wouldn’t want to play with a team like that – especially one that wins, and wins all the frickin’ time! It would appear that Durant was finding tiresome the way OKC were playing the game, and he wanted something different. He wanted something new.

And after playing for nine years in the league, Kevin Durant had a right to make that choice. Take the money out of it for a sec, because we all know they’re making lots of money. That’s a given. You’re making lots of money even if you’re the 13th man on the Milwaukee Bucks. Everyone’s getting paid. But let us consider the process here, and chart out the course of his career: Durant is 18 and a gifted basketball player, clearly a transcendent talent, but instead of becoming a professional, he has to spend a year at the University of Texas because of some bogus age requirement instituted by the NBA after too many owners stupidly drafted 18-year-olds who couldn’t actually play. After that, he gets drafted by Seattle, regardless of whether he wanted to play in Seattle or not, and then after a season he’s uprooted when the team relocates to Oklahoma City, regardless of whether he has any interest in going there or not, and then he eventually signs a new contract whose terms on precisely how much he can be paid are dictated entirely for him. He never has any choice in this matter whatsoever. And yeah, a lot of us take shitty jobs when we enter the workforce. A lot of us have to pay our dues and take weird gigs in weird places (which is how my New York parents would up living in Pullman, Washington). But at some point, we have a right to choose and make decisions about our future for ourselves.

And under the terms of the CBA negotiated between the Players Union and the league, Kevin Durant has the right to finally make his own choice about where he chooses to work, and so what does he do? HE TAKES A BETTER JOB! This is a workplace, in the end, and guess what? Playing for a 73-win team with three other all-stars, in a style of play which fits you perfectly, in a city where you can also maximize your brand which is also an economic engine that offers you a whole host of off-the-court opportunities, is a better job than what he had in Oklahoma City. If dollars are equal, which they were, then why wouldn’t he take that opportunity?

And by the way, I’d feel this way even if he had gone somewhere other than Golden State. You want to go to Boston? Sweet! Team up with Horford and kick some Cleveland ass! You want to join the Spurs and challenge the Dubs? Awesome. Let’s ball! (I never took the Miami or L.A. Clippers stuff seriously. Miami had no chance after deciding to pin its fortunes to Hassan Whiteside. The Clippers had no chance either because they’re hopeless, but hey, at least Doc Rivers agreed to give his son Austin a bigger allowance this off-season.) Or maybe he decided, in the end, he was better off staying put. That’s fine, too. The point is that he has the right to make that choice, regardless of what he ultimately decides, and you can’t say that you support that right only when it’s convenient to do so, and only when your team benefits. 

The criticism of his decision to join the Warriors is dumb. Somehow, if you don’t win a title, you’re a bum, but if you go to a team that can win one, you’re also a bum. This sort of stupidity is put forth either by ex-players who never won anything, or guys who are hypocrites. Charles Barkley said Durant was trying to “cheat” his way to a title – spoken like a guy who toughed it out with the Philadelphia 76ers and never did anything like force a trade to the Phoenix Suns or anything like that … oh wait, except that he did that. Somehow Durant is villified, but not Shaq even though he bailed on the Magic ASAP after the Rockets kicked their ass in the NBA finals. What a bunch of bullshit. Good on Chuck and Shaq for finding better workplaces, and good on anyone who does that. “You shouldn’t go to the team that just beat you.” Oh, OK, so then, signing with the Warriors would have been OK if they’d lost to the Spurs or the Mavericks instead? So he shouldn’t go to a better situation at Golden State, but he should instead choose a worse situation elsewhere? That runs contrary to the whole idea of giving players agency in deciding where they want to play. That line of reasoning makes no sense.

And I’m not interested in the slightest in hearing about how Kevin Durant becoming a Warrior affects the parity and competitive balance of the league. There is no parity, nor has there ever been. Someone please point me to the era of parity in the NBA. The Bulls won six titles in the 1990s. The Lakers and Celtics flip-flopped for most of the 1980s. In the 18 years of the post-Jordan era, 13 of the titles have been won by a total of three teams. Parity is a myth, a word the owners like to trot out every time they want to reopen labor negotiations and attempt to screw over the players. Don’t believe it. The salary cap and the luxury tax and all of that stuff is in place to create cost certainty for the owners, not to create “competitive balance.” Durant goes to the Warriors and now supposedly there is no competitive balance, since only two teams seem like realistic title contenders. This is different from last season where there were how many? Four, maybe? So don’t buy that crap. It’s a myth.

But that doesn’t mean there isn’t going to be a lot of good stuff to watch. I want to see what the Spurs cook up. I want to see what Minnesota is doing. I want to see the Jazz get physical with the Dubs and play some nasty D. I want to see the Dubs and the Clips put about 270 points on the scoreboard. I want to see Portland try to beat the Dubs using the strategy of Dame and C.J. scoring 80 between them, and probably pulling it off at some point. I want to see Cleveland’s title defense, and what Danny Ainge conjures up in Boston to challenge the Cavs. There’s a lot of great basketball out there. And since this is In Play Lose, of course, I also want some horrible basketball. Give me some Sixers and some Nets and some Kings, and this Bulls team is going to be great to follow with this Wade-Rondo-Butler trio, which may be the most miscast, ill-fitting trio ever conceived. The Bulls just seems like a disaster waiting to happen – my specialty.

And it will also be amusing as hell to me to watch what happens to OKC. In one fell swoop, the Warriors made themselves better and also killed their biggest Western Conference rival in the process, which is truly the sign of a successful off-season. OKC still has a decent roster, but it’s a bit ill-suited for a guy like Russell Westbrook. They might be a 45-win team, at best. Westbrook is a free agent this coming summer, and with the extra cash not spent on Durant, OKC can offer him a contract extension, but early indications have been that he intends to leave as well – at which point, if you’re OKC, you simply have to trade him, even if you only get 50¢ on the dollar. But they’re trading from a somewhat weakened position, since no one’s going to trade the sorts of assets OKC will want for a Top 10 NBA player if Westbrook isn’t interested in re-upping with them. (The only one paying that much for a rental is Durant for a new apartment in the Bay Area.) I was posing this question to our Blazers correspondent Evans, putting him in the role of Danny Ainge in Boston, who has the most assets to deal of any club, to which Evans responded, “it’s a tough call on making a trade for Westbrook, because he’s so ball-dominant.” And that’s part of the problem. If you have the sorts of assets OKC might want, is it really going to be worth it to you to make that deal?

So the Thunder are stuck here. They just lost Kevin Durant, their franchise player (“the founding father of the franchise” as was said in the OKC press conference), they’ve already traded away another franchise-level player – James Harden – in the past and got pennies on the dollar for it, and now they’ll possibly have to deal a third in Westbrook. Even they will admit that they can’t draw free agents to Oklahoma City, and this is a classic case of Edmonton Disease if there ever was one: if dollars are equal (which they are more so in the NBA, where they put a cap on maximum salaries you can earn, than in any other league), then why would anyone willingly choose to play in Oklahoma City? Quite honestly, why would anyone coach there, either? It struck me as strange when Billy Donovan took that gig, since it was a very real possibility that the most appealing aspect of the job – having Durant and Westbrook on your roster – wouldn’t be the case in two years’ time. The Thunder struck it rich thrice in the draft, and they’ll have to somehow get twice or thrice lucky again. Otherwise, they’re probably doomed to irrelevancy.

Well gosh, isn’t that is a surprise? This piece makes the very point that I’ve been making from the moment the Sonics moved to Oklahoma City, which is that in choosing to allow a team to move into what’s not in any way a sustainable, long-term market, you’re ultimately devaluing that franchise and very likely dooming it to fail. Every franchise involved in the David Stern Axis of Weasel, the idiotic Charlotte/New Orleans/Oklahoma City/Seattle/Sacramento reshuffling that took place, either already is or likely is destined to be a basket case. I mean, I went to a Pelicans game this past January when I was in New Orleans, and there were about 11,000 people in attendance at Milk Shake Arena for it, and the building was dead. It was just dead. How is that ever going to improve? Why would anyone choose to go there as a free agent, or choose to stay there when their contract is up? The Pelicans are hopeless, the Kings are hopeless, the Bobcats/Hornets/Jordanaires in Charlotte have been a joke, the Grizzlies delayed it for a while but are ultimately headed that way – another genius move by Stern, shifting that franchise out of a what is now very rich and very prosperous Vancouver – and now, there is a very good chance the Oklahoma City Thunder are finally going to start sinking like stones.

You can, of course, be successful as a small market franchise – but in order to do so, you have to be good. You have to be really good. You have to win a lot, and establish a longstanding culture of winning. The San Antonio Spurs have won five titles; the Utah Jazz were great for 20 years. In order to sustain and continue to thrive in the long-term, OKC had to lay that foundation. They had to win championships, they had to establish a legacy – and even though they were blessed with some of the game’s greatest talent, they’ve now failed to do that. And now it’s verging on crashing down, and pretty soon they won’t have anything left to show for it.

And for Sonics fans – who are OKC haters, all of us – the day that Kevin Durant chose to leave Oklahoma City was the day that they’ve been waiting for, since it’s the day that the stolen franchise begins a descent first into mediocrity, and then into complete irrelevancy. Seattle fans have zero sympathy for anyone in OKC who wants to bemoan their small market fate. Boo-fucking-hoo. They were gifted the last two good assets from Seattle, Durant and Westbrook (who plunked a Sonics hat onto his head on the day he was drafted), two players who became two superstars and who almost won a title along the way and were probably unlucky not to do so, almost creating that everlasting legacy for themselves and legitimacy for the franchise. But that didn’t happen, and it turns out it was only staving off the inevitable, because OKC is a small market in the middle of nowhere and is an undesirable destination for an NBA player. It’s no place that any of them want to be. This day was a long, long time in coming. A league is only as good as its weakest franchises – which is why it’s smart of the EPL to throw the weak ones out every year (sigh) – and there’s a lot of dead franchises in the NBA. Frankly, a large part of why there is no parity in the NBA is because there are so many franchises which are utterly hopeless.

And that’s all the schadenfreude you’re going to get out of me in this edition of In Play Lose.

And now I have to wait for the season to start until October? Really? I want the season to start immediately! This is going to be great to witness, either from afar or from up close – but I definitely want to be up close, which means I need to be nice to Smith, the Official Warriors Season Ticket Holder of In Play Lose, so maybe I should beat his ass less often at facebook Scrabble and generally suck up to him more in order to get some tickets. Nah, I’ll keep beating his ass in scrabble. But hey, Smith, are we still on for that Sixers game, right? You know how I love me some Sixers …

The Love of the Irish

On The Ball City!

I’M ALWAYS ripping stuff on this blog, and there are lots of reasons right now to do so. We have the Warriors gagging away an NBA championship and tarnishing a historic season, we have an utterly inept performance by USA FC against Argentina in the Copa América Centenario semifinals, we have a performance by El Tri in the Copa quarterfinals against Chile so heartless and pathetic that it made the Americans look competent, and I should kill Baylor and the whole of the NCAA at some point here soon, and if I ever start writing about the bastion of bombast and largesse and corruption that is the upcoming Rio Olympics, I may never stop. So much lose, so little time. But right now, it’s important that we turn away from hate and skepticism and scorn, instead embracing love after Wednesday’s events at the Euros in France.

When it comes to international football, I generally root for the Dutch. They play brilliant football, and their propensity for losing dramatically, and doing so in memorable, critically-acclaimed fashion, is in keeping with my general life ethos. But the Dutch threw up all over themselves and didn’t even qualify for the Euros. I’m also somewhat naturally inclined to lean towards the Belgians, of course, and the Belgians have a stunning collection of talent this year, but they’re coached extremely badly and can be maddeningly frustrating to watch, so right now Belgium isn’t doing it for me. But there is one team in the competition in France who has held my heart for years, and after Wednesday, it’s necessary for me to re-up and reëstablish my longstanding, albeit intermittent, membership in the Irish football supporters union, a membership which dates back to this time 26 years ago …

- - -

It’s June of 1990, I’m 21 years old and I’m in Dún Laoghaire, a seaside town and seaport south of Dublin whose name you can’t pronounce correctly. I’ve spent a week circling the Emerald Isle, going all the way down to Killarney and up the West Coast, stopping off for some lobsters and some glorious Celtic music in the pubs of the small town of Doolin, a gateway to the Aran Islands and one of the most soulful spots on the earth, then cutting through the center of the country on the way back to Dublin, all the while being chased by the rain, because it’s Ireland and it rains approximately 398 days a year there. But this particular day is perfect, or as close to perfect as you can imagine. It’s got to be 75° on the east coast of Ireland, if not more, the sun is shining and it’s absolutely glorious and I’m not looking forward to what promises to be a particularly boring trip: a 4½ hour ferry ride from Dún Laoghaire to Holyhead, Wales, followed by an insufferable, 7½ hour overnight train ride to London, followed by a Tube trek across town to Liverpool St. Station, followed by 2 more hours on a train to Norwich. Bo-ring! The novelty of passing through Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch wore off when I made the westward part of this trip, when I was still excited for the vacation exploits to come and everything was fascinating. The trip back to Norwich is shaping up to be little more than a dreadfully dull, overnight slog.

So I’m boarding the ferry, making my way up the ramp and generally feeling immersed in my usual, 21-year-old ennui, when I hear the roar behind me. The thunderous roar. I turn to look and I witness the coming storm. I see the mob moving my way, I hear and feel the thunder and the sound.

“Olé, olé olé olé! Ireland! Ireland!”

Making its way towards the Dún Laoghaire ferry terminal is a mass of humanity dressed in various shades of green. A few of them are dressed in the green and white hoops of Glasgow’s Celtic F.C.,  but the majority of them are wearing jerseys from the Irish national football team, who will be making their debut World Cup appearance in Italy in a few days’  time. The fans are in full voice, and their chants of “Olé, olé olé olé! Ireland! Ireland!” rattle and resonate and shake.

I come to discover that they number 2,000. I’m going to spend the next 4½ hours on a boat with 2,000 Irish football fans who are embarking on the journey of a lifetime: a ferry to Holyhead, a train to London, another train to Dover, a ferry to Calais, and then a train to Paris, and a train to Marseille, and then yet another ferry headed to Sardinia, yes, Sardinia because Ireland’s first match is against England and is taking place in Cagliari, on the island of Sardinia, because this is still the age of hooliganism, you see, and the Italian World Cup organizers’ plan for coping with the possibility of English hooligans was to pen the mass of English supporters on an island in the middle of the Mediterranean for the duration of the first round of the tourney. It’s something like a 31-hour journey for these 2,000 faithful supporters, who’ve bought this travel package from the Irish F.A. because 31 hours of train and boat travel is still cheaper than 4-5 hours on an aeroplane. These are working people, blue-collar people who don’t have a whole lot of money and they’ve been scrounging, saving up and putting away their Irish pounds from the moment that the Irish officially qualified for the tourney.

I appear to be on a booze cruise for the next 4½ hours. Welcome to the mess.

Now, consider the situation here. It’s a perfect day in Dún Laoghaire. It’s absolutely perfect. I’ve spent the afternoon hiking with my sister to some waterfalls at a lavish country estate, enjoying the bright sunshine. It is truly a perfect day that could get no better. And if you're a young Irishman, and it’s the first day of your dream vacation, and it’s a perfect, 75° day in a pleasant seaside town, what are you going to do? You’re going to go to a restaurant or a bar or a café and DRINK BEER! Duh! All of these guys are smashed.

So not only am I now being approached by a mob of 2,000 strong, but these guys all have clearly been drinking since about noon. And I do mean “guys.” It’s probably 85% males, with a few interminably patient wives and girlfriends interspersed. Young people, mostly: early to late 20s, early 30s, most of them pasty pale and insanely excited for spending several weeks on the beaches of the Italian isles, as their other two matches are taking place in Palermo on the island of Sicily. You can feel the testosterone dripping as they board the ship and begin filtering into the deck where I’ve selected a seat. It verges on overwhelming. This ship of fools desperately needs some girls.

Enter 300 catholic school girls.

This is a natural wonder of the world to my 21-year-old eyes. The scenery just dramatically improved, and this trip is getting better and better.

Not only do we have 2,000 Irish football fans headed to Italy on this booze cruise, but we also have 300 recently graduated catholic high school girls, all of them wearing their cute catholic high school uniforms and short catholic high school girl skirts, who are heading off to Berlin on a graduation trip, and who are loud in their distinctly 18-year-old girl sorts of ways, so between them and the 2,000 fans chanting “Olé, olé olé olé! Ireland! Ireland!” in 5-minute intervals, the decibel level on board is verging on ear piercing.

But you cannot help but feel a bit uplifted amid all of this enthusiasm, as its contagious and whatever nonsense neurosis it is that is getting you down starts ebbing away. And if it grows too loud, there is always sticking in the earphones and slipping a cassette tape into my walkman. (Yeah, I know, I’m dating myself. Deal with it.)

And we’ve not even left Dún Laoghaire, mind you. The boat is rocking and raucous and we’re still moored in the Irish seaport. And since this is an international voyage, as we’re trekking across the Irish Sea tonight, there is a nice duty free store on board, where is where I promptly went upon boarding and picked myself up a bottle of Irish usquebae and a 10-pack of Drum. And you can imagine what any self-respecting Irishman who has been drinking since noon, and who has a 31-hour trip ahead of them, is going to do upon boarding this ship: invade the duty free store. The fans overrun the store and they buy every ounce of liquor in the place – cases and cases of Guinness and Harp, bottle after bottle of Jamesons, and then they even buy up the expensive stuffs, the scotches and the cognacs and the champagnes and the like. The store is completely overwhelmed by the masses, who spend freely and frenzily and they clean the store out. It’s picked so clean that you might need to check it for dental records.  Everyone on board is thus well-prepared for the long journey ahead.

But then we embark, at which point there is an announcement over the loud speaker for those going on the “football train” once we reach Holyhead, the special train that the Irish F.A. has chartered: there will be no alcohol permitted on the train. This is met with considerable consternation from the masses, as well as a not insignificant amount of profanity. But the Irish are a pragmatic and resourceful people at heart, and when life gives you lemons, you’d better make some lemonade. So what do you do in this situation? It’s an ingenious, 2-part solution:

1. Drink as much as you can before you reach the British shore.
2. Give the rest of it away.

And again, let me reiterate: there are 2,000 Irish football fans on this boat, all of whom are drunk, all of whom now have too much alcohol on their person, a good number of whom are hell-bent on drinking themselves to the point that they’ll be passed out for the entirety of their train ride to London, and a good number more who come to the realization very quickly that drinking all of the alcohol they’ve just purchased over the next 4½ hours is likely to result in them being dead. There is more available alcohol on the premises than I have ever seen, and the Irish football fans are giving it away! It’s not more than two minutes after we’ve embarked for Holyhead that a guy wanders up to me where I’m sitting, which is near to the front of this particular deck of the ship, and he pulls out a can of Guinness from the flat he’s carrying.

“Want a beer?”

Is there a more precious, cherished phrase in the English language to a 21-year-old college student?

And this is happening everywhere. Guys are going around the deck and offering alcohol to everyone. They are offering it to the rank-and-file passengers, most of whom accept with a modest shrug and a toast. They offer it to the collection of 300 catholic school girls as well, most of whom are somewhat pensive, at first, and also somewhat giggly, but most of whom are willing to oblige, only to be discouraged the first time around by their stern and stony-faced chaperones. I take him up on this offer, and I toast with the guy, grateful for the free beer.

“You’re not Irish,” he states in a thick brogue after hearing me speak.
“American.”
“Whereabouts?”
“Los Angeles.”
“Come and meet me mates,” he suggests, gesturing with a tip of his head. “We’re in the corridor.”
“Should I bring the whiskey and the Drum?”
“Wouldn’t hurt.”

Well, what the hell?

And this boat is filled to capacity, mind you. Every seat would be taken if people were actually bothering to take a seat – but no one is taking a seat, because everyone who has a case or two of beer they need to get rid of before Holyhead is sitting on the floor. The floorspace on the decks and in the corridors is packed so tight with people that you’re stepping over them if you want to get to the washrooms.

So I take up some floor space with a group from Cork and hold court, because I’m the American kid from Los Angeles and everyone knows of Los Angeles and Hollywood and California, and they want to know more about it, and even though I’ve had generally a miserable time living in Los Angeles, I can’t help but speak fondly of the place, so fondly that I actually start to think that it’s pretty good. And I’m hanging out with a cross-section of the Cork working class – there are farmhands and lorry drivers and dock workers and ‘students,’ the term being a catch-all to describe intellectually driven young people who don’t have a job and don’t have a clue what they’re going to do with their lives. And every 10 minutes or so we have to break into another rendition of “Olé, olé olé olé! Ireland! Ireland!” And I’m learning Irish football songs in English, and learning songs in Gaelic, and mangling songs in Gaelic, as I am popping open another Guinness and passing around my bottle of whiskey while repeatedly dipping into my packs of Drum, because at this point in my British educational experience I can hand roll a cigarette in seconds flat.

And we talk football, of course. One of Ireland’s best players, Andy Townsend, plies his trade for Norwich City, so my sworn allegiance to the Canaries scores me points with the locals. The coach is an Englishman, and virtually all of the Irish players have, in fact, grown up in Britain and simply possess lineage qualifying them for Irish passports. No matter. They have sworn their allegiance and donned the green shirt, and thus they may as well have been born in Donegal. The fans are alternately brash and realistic about their side’s chances, chirping of how they’re going to smash the English at one minute and then, a minute later, hoping they can sneak their way out of the group and into the knockout phase. The Irish national team are tough, tenacious, clever and resourceful, much like the island nation that they represent even though almost all of them have grown up playing the English game. They’re “our lads,” just as I am rapidly becoming one of “our lads” even though I have an American passport.

And it’s not long after I’ve sat down with my new friends that a few of the school girls start filtering in from the corridor, eluding the watchful eyes of the chaperones, and then a few more of them start filtering in, and a few more, and a few more after that. They sit down and join in the fun and they’re immediately the life of the party, of course, because they’re impossibly charming and delightful and gorgeous and you cannot help but fall in love with them immediately. Eventually, some of the chaperones pass through the corridor, stumbling through the area and stepping over all of us, but they don’t bother to scold or admonish the girls, because the girls are in good hands. They’re safe. Nothing is going to happen to them. It’s a mass of humanity they’ve become engulfed in, but it’s respectful and it’s protective. The Berlin-bound girls have been indoctrinated into the footballing faithful now. They’re part of “us.” And since there is no cause for concern, some of the chaperones feel free enough to pull up some floor space here in the corridor and accept the offer of a free can of Guinness or two. Or three. Or four …

And when I rise and move about the ship, I simply venture over to another party, another group of football fans from Tipperary or Sligo or Limerick, and settle in and have a drink and roll a few more smokes and sing a few more football songs. Periodically, you have to get up and dance around the ferry and shout “Olé, olé olé olé! Ireland! Ireland!” because of course you have to do that.

Eventually, I’m completely hammered and doing a conga line throughout the deck of the ferry singing “Olé, olé olé olé! Ireland! Ireland!” with my hands on the hips of one of those catholic school girls – all of whom were forgoing alcohol at first but who are now fully engaging in the practice – and this act of corrupting a young person doesn’t bother me at all, because behind me in the conga line is one of the chaperones of the Berlin trip, some charming 40-something year old mum from Dublin who is shouting and screaming and getting on her gigue and declaring that her boring 40-something husband back in Dublin can get stuffed. We’re all drunk, we’re all nuts, we’re losing our minds and we’re all Irish. We’re Irish, everyone of us, and the lads in green are going off to Italy and they’re going to conquer the world!

But are they really going to conquer the world? The Irish have a tough group after all. England have their best team in years, the Dutch are the current European champions, the Egyptians are the best team in Africa. And the competition isn’t simply contained to La Favorita in Palermo and Stadio Sant’Elia in Cagliari, but might very well extend into the streets. English hooliganism is notorious; the Dutch fans are in a strange phase where they seem to want to throw explosives on the field periodically and generally be a pain in the ass; the Egyptian fans have a reputation for being volatile. And all of these people are trapping on fucking islands, for christsake! Whoever came up with that stupid idea? How do the Irish plan to deal with being in close quarters with these cranky collections of opposition supporters? How will they coexist?

“We’ll be fine. We’ll just charm them,” a lorry driver from Waterford assures me. “We’re charming, we’re clever, and we’re also good looking.”

And all of this time is precious, of course. It’s precious but you might not realize it at the time. I’m on a booze cruise with 2,000 new friends, all of whom share a common love of football and a joy and delight that’s contagious and infectious and you cannot help catching the bug. The football fans on board are joining in, and the non football fans are joining in. It’s a party spanning the length of the ship. The crew members are letting people have their fun, because this motley crew are, all things considered, decidedly well-behaved. There is no ill will nor malice, there are no petty disputes. This is the trip of the lifetime, for the Irish have never qualified for a World Cup before. For all concerned, it’s a long Italian summer vacation they’d never thought they would ever have, and they are damn sure going to enjoy every minute and bring unsuspecting sops like me along for the ride.

Eventually, I somehow stumble upon the guy who first offered me a Guinness, and we’re both piss drunk and out of our minds, and I pause long enough from playfully flirting with catholic school girls to give him a handshake.

“You’re Irish. You’re one of us now,” he insists, and I don’t dare disagree. “Which is a good thing, because your American footballers are shite and the Italians will kick their arses.”

- - -

Actually, the U.S. only lost 0:1 to the Italians in Rome, but yeah, our football team was more or less shite, finishing last in Group A.

The 1990 World Cup goes down in history as one of the lousiest World Cups that’s ever been played. On the pitch, the quality of play was so dire and uncreative that FIFA almost immediately instituted new rules which banned the back pass into the hands of the goalkeeper and awarded 3 points for the win in order to encourage teams to stop being so defensive. There were constant concerns about possible trouble off the pitch from supporters, there were teams from Eastern Bloc nations becoming factionalized after the fall of the Berlin Wall and beginning to split apart. The football was terrible, the hair was terrible, the jerseys were terrible. It was a big, ugly mess.

But everyone involved agreed that the bright spot were the Irish, who made it all the way to the quarterfinals in their debut World Cup appearance and who brought along their throng of vocal, joyful, fun-loving supporters wherever they went. And for more than 20 years now, the Irish have carried that reputation wherever they go. They come to your town, they charm and embrace and enjoy, they lure you in and bring you over to their side, they diffuse tensions and conflicts with their good humor and love of the moment. Football isn’t worth fighting over. It’s worth celebrating.

You can’t outsmart the Irish, as they are much to clever for you: this summer, during the Euros in France, some Swedish fans began to chant at the Irish, “go home to your ugly wives,” to which the Irish responded, “go home to your sexy blonde wives,” at which point the Swedes knew they had been trumped, so everyone started laughing and throwing beer on each other and mucking it up. The Irish party hard but they also respect their hosts: there are videos of the Irish football fans from this summer’s Euros singing as they go about cleaning up the town square after a night of celebrating, picking up trash and beautifying the place. They bring the party, they bring the fun, they bring the love, they bring modest expectations and celebrate any and all success.

And let’s be honest here, there isn’t a whole lot of success. Part of why I rarely trumpet my Irish allegiance is that fact that, well, they’re generally not very good. The Irish play hard and play like hell, but they don’t win too often. The tournament expanding to 24 teams this year afforded the Irish a chance to qualify, which they claimed by winning a home-and-home playoff with Bosnians. Even so, advancing to the knockouts of the tournament seemed unlikely, as they found themselves drawn into a tough group with Italy, Belgium, and Sweden. They were expected to finish last, and hadn’t won a game in the Euros since 1988, but for their forever patient and forgiving supporters, who were certain to turn up in droves, finishing last was nonetheless certain to be a trip of a lifetime.

- - -

And that boat ride of a lifetime ended rather nonchalantly, as the Irish football supporters were segregated out at customs and bordered their own chartered train, while the rest of us passengers all stumbled our way to a separate train and promptly passed out. I woke up somewhere in Central England and didn’t know where the hell I was. It was a strange train in that there were no station announcements and no conductors seeming to ever pass through the aisleways. It was all eerily, uncomfortably quiet. The whole experience seemed surreal. It seemed as if it didn’t actually happen.

And to this day, I have no idea what those people’s names where. I think the redheaded girl I was conga dancing with was named Claire, but I cannot say for sure. They were all people who simply passed through life, people you shared a moment and a connection with who then simply disappeared and you don’t have any idea what happened to them.

Except I did know what happened to them, because I turned on the television for the World Cup games in Italy, and each Ireland game was inevitably prefaced with a live spot where an overdressed reporter found themselves embedded in a wave of Irish supporters, trying to deliver their report as the green-clad fans jumped around and went crazy in front of the camera. And immediately, I knew their faces. I knew all of their faces. I’d been sitting with them in the dark, cramped crannies of an Irish ferry headed for Holyhead, passing them hand rolled cigarettes as they passed me a bottle of Jamesons or a beer. I’d like to think that, 26 years onward, they might remember the American kid from Los Angeles that they met on the ferry. You’d like to think you made that sort of impression, since the collective of them made that impression upon me. And while I cannot be certain, I could have sworn that, among those swarms of Irish football fans on the TV during those Italia 1990 telecasts, interspersed among the football diehards were one or two of those school girls who had somehow slipped onto the wrong train.

- - -

The Celtic folk of the British Isles – the Irish, Welsh, and the Scots – have always done well playing for Norwich City over the years, and this year, two of Ireland’s better players – Wes Hoolahan and Robbie Brady – wore the yellow and green of the Canaries. Hoolahan is the Irish playmaker and he was brilliant in one of their pivotal qualifiers, a stunning 1:0 upset of Germany in Dublin which put them in position to reach the playoff with the Bosnians. Brady, meanwhile, takes many of the free kicks and corners and mans the left back position most of the time, but will occasionally play in the midfield. Brady scored the goal in Ireland’s 1:0 playoff win over the Bosnians in Zenica, a game played in a fog so thick that you couldn’t actually see, on the telecast, that Brady had scored. You just had to take the announcer’s word for it.

And it was Hoolahan who brought joy to the Irish throngs in their first game of Euro 2016 with a gorgeous volley early in the second half to give them a 1-0 lead over Sweden – a team whose second best player, defender Marin Olsson, happens to also be a Norwich City player and whose best player, striker Zlatan Ibrahimovic, happens to be TERRIFYING. Even though Ireland had the lead, Olsson ran rampant up and down the left flank, pouring crosses into Zlatan in the box which the Irish turned away somehow, but eventually Zlatan maneuvered his way around the Irish defense and looped one off the head of an Irish defender and in for an own goal, an equalizer which likely doomed Ireland’s chances of advancing. Following the 1:1 draw with Sweden, the Irish got pasted 3:0 by Belgium to find themselves in last place, needing a win in their final group match against Italy to advance. But the Irish caught a break – Italy had already clinched first place in the group, and chose to rest their starters in the final game – and so the Irish took the game to the Italians, chasing the win they desperately needed.

It was a tight and tense game, scoreless well into the second half. Hoolahan flubbed a fairly easy scoring opportunity late on, and it appeared the Irish would not get the result they needed. But then Hoolahan got the ball at his feet a moment later, and he picked out his on-rushing Norwich City teammate Brady in the center of the box with a peach of a pass, an absolutely perfect ball right onto his head and Brady hammered it past the Italian keeper. Ireland had their breakthrough. Ireland had their 1:0 win and a place in the knockouts, which brought tears of joy to the players, coaches, and their loving fans.

There has been quite a bit of criticism in Europe for expanding the field to 24 teams, theoretically diluting the quality of play, but what it’s also done is made it possible for some of Europe’s minnows to take their place and swim the big fish and get in some bites here and there. Funnily enough, when you give Wales and Albania and Northern Ireland and Iceland a chance to compete, they tend to do okay, and the energy of their supporters is refreshing. You remember why it is that you love the game in the first place when you see, and hear, the sort of elation that it can bring.

And that’s what it should be about. Joy and love, camaraderie, togetherness. It shouldn’t be about hoodlums throwing chairs at each other in the streets of Marseille or setting off bombs on the pitch. It’s easy to be cynical and forget that sometimes.

So it is on to the 16s for the first time ever, and a date with the French, the hosts and the tournament favorites. Ireland’s last trip to France didn’t end particularly well, so the Irish have a point to prove and a score to settle  … aaaand we’ll probably get our asses kicked, but fuck it! Go for it! We’re playing with found money here, a lucky penny we found at the end of the rainbow. The Irish will turn out in force, will be in good spirits, in full voice, and win or lose, they’ll have a hell of a good time. And I’ll be sure to go rummaging through the closet and pull out my finest green clothing for the occasion, because I am one of them once more.

“Olé, olé olé olé! Ireland! Ireland!”