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-Oscar Wilde		 Brilliant at Breakfast title banner "The liberal soul shall be made fat, and he that watereth, shall be watered also himself."
-- Proverbs 11:25
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Thursday, March 22, 2012

Tim Tebow is NOT Jeremy Lin
Posted by Jill | 6:24 AM
It's so breathtakingly stupid, so, well, WILPONIAN, that you almost have to wonder how a long-standing Mets fan like me can still be gut-punched by anything a sports organization does. You'd think that after nearly fifty years of watching that baseball team in Flushing make so many dumb moves, I'd be immune to sports organizational stupidity.

Maybe it's true that we in the New York area just don't understand religious people. But the only explanation for why the Jets organization decided it was a great idea to bring Tim Tebow and his thanking Jesus every time the ball leaves his hands to New York is that they looked at Madison Square Garden and saw the Knicks go on a tear the minute Jeremy Lin took to the court for the first time and either started believing that God really does micromanage sports games, or more likely, decided that wresting the back page of the Daily News every Sunday frm the classy Giants organization was worth any downside to bringing Jesus of the Rockies to the most heathen place in America.

But Linsanity was never about Jeremy Lin's faith. God didn't become a Knicks fan just because a devout Christina joined the team. Linsanity occurred because Jeremy Lin was a better player than anyone expected and because no one knew how to play against him yet. Add to that the mystique of Harvard and how there's still a fair amount of cognitive dissonance around the idea of an Asian basketball player (Yao Ming notwithstanding), and you have enough to satisfy the maw of the New York sports press. Yes, Jeremy Lin is devout, but he hasn't made it part of his public persona. He's a Book of Matthew Christian:

6:5
And when thou prayest, thou shalt not be as the hypocrites are: for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and in the corners of the streets, that they may be seen of men. Verily I say unto you, They have their reward.

6:6
But thou, when thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret; and thy Father which seeth in secret shall reward thee openly.

No one hates Tebow because of his faith. If they did, Jeremy Lin would be just as reviled, and he's not. Lin's faith appears to inform his life, not define it to the near-exclusion of all else. With Tebow, you get the sense that the show -- the dropping to the knee, the praising of Jesus in every post-game interview -- is less about his faith than about creating a public persona. That may not be the case, but it certainly appears that way.

Linsanity has died down now that teams have learned how to play against Jeremy Lin. He's still a fine player, but no one's treating him like a god anymore. Tim Tebow led the Broncos to winning six games, in Denver, against crummy teams, and he became a god. The difference is that in buying into the media hype and allowing himself to become Tebow®!!!, he betrayed his own savior's words -- something Jeremy Lin has never done.

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Sunday, December 12, 2010

Karma's a bitch, bitchez!
Posted by Jill | 10:18 AM
Not to get all John Cole on you with football posts on a Sunday, but this has to be karmic payback for the Giants, who made an agreement this week with the Miami Dolphins to allow the Dolphins to come in a day early and use the Giants' training facility so that they could become acclimated to the colder weather (presumably reducing the Jets' so-called "weather advantage":
The roof of the Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome in Minneapolis deflated early Sunday morning, leaving the scheduled football game between the Minnesota Vikings and Giants – which had already been postponed from Sunday to Monday because of the weekend blizzard – in further limbo.

The National Football League scrambled Sunday morning to determine where the game would be played. Late Saturday night, the game was delayed because of concerns that the snow on the dome roof could not safely be cleared by workers in high winds.

Metrodome officials said they found tears in the roof on Sunday and that it was unlikely they could prepare the dome in time for a game on Monday.

Bill Lester, the executive director of the Metropolitan Sports Facilities Commission, said the dome suffered damage to two of its triangle-shaped Teflon panels and that his crew was still assessing the situation.

The N.F.L. could move the football game to someplace like the University of Minnesota’s outdoor football stadium, although it too would have to be cleared of 17 inches of snow.

That could present further problems for the Giants, whose flight was diverted Saturday to Kansas City when snow closed the Minneapolis airport. Anticipating an indoor game, they likely did not bring cold weather gear to Minneapolis.

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Monday, January 25, 2010

Nothing to be ashamed of
Posted by Jill | 5:11 AM
Or, if you prefer, "Nothing of which to be ashamed."

And so the Jets go home, and the Colts go to the Super Bowl. Here's what it's come to at Casa la Brilliant lately: Both of us arrived home so completely and utterly spent on Friday, between workload and despondency over the Supreme Court and the final nail in the coffin of Air America, that the ONLY thing we could think of to get excited about was the possibility that the upstart little team from the Meadowlands just might be able to pull it off and play in that awful game that's punctuated by sexist ads for beer, soda, junk food, and girls pulling off their tops for GoDaddy.

That's when things are at a truly sorry pass.

But a couple of decent nights of sleep will change your outlook, and so by the time it became clear (really by halftime, when the lead had shrunk to a miserly three points) that the Colts were starting to wake up, we realized it was not to be...and we were OK with that. This was a good thing, because once Shonn Green left the game, it was pretty well over, and I'm just glad that the game didn't go on another quarter or it might have turned into one of those laughable blowouts. But still...only four teams go to the championship games and there's no shame in being a team that was never thought to make a serious run, play a superlative first half and then succumb to Peyton Manning, and then have to go home.

It's not necessarily a bad thing for Mark Sanchez to go home from what turned out to be a surprising rookie season without a tickertape parade. Star athletes can easily turn into seriously self-destructive assholes given too much success too soon. (See also: Dwight Gooden, Tiger Woods, etc.) Because the kid will be OK. The kid can play in New York. He played a surprisingly effective first half against one of the greatest quarterbacks of all time, and that's no small potatoes.

This year the Jets provided New York sports fans with a little of that scrappy-team excitement that we really haven't seen since the 1969 Mets. The Yankees are a finely-honed corporate machine, the Mets are the most loathsome organization in baseball at this point, the Giants are EXPECTED to excel with Peyton's Kid Brother at the helm, who cares about hockey, and the less said about the Knicks and Nets this year, the better.

These days we'll take what we can get. Good job, guys.

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