I'm sure you know people like the one I'm about to talk about; people who live these charmed lives where nothing ever goes wrong. I have a friend, a former colleague whose life at least appears to be like that. She has her head together, a great marriage, a good job with a lot of flexibility, and two beautiful children. Her family is always doing something -- they ski together, they do dog agility, her daughter has variously during her life so far been involved in Irish step dancing, gymnastics, skiing, just to name a few -- and she also plays the violin. Her son is a hockey demon. This isn't a couch potato family that likes to watch sports. These aren't people who talk about "Carmelo" and "A-Rod" and "Eli" as if they're talking about their friends, these are people who are always out there DOING.

And yet during the height of Lance Armstrong Mania, this woman was glued to the web stream of the Tour de France, proud as hell of her yellow Livestrong bracelet. There was just something about Lance Armstrong.

Last year you couldn't get away from coverage of Tim Tebow when he was with the Denver Broncos. Plenty of athletes are devout Christians; R.A. Dickey is one. But Tebow was so "out there" with his, and when he played well over his head and was nice to the press, suddenly you had people actually speculating about whether he really WAS the second coming of Jesus.

America is trapped in its own mythology of a rugged individualism that largely only existed in movies and television. The myth of the cowboy painted in decades of John Ford westerns and the spaghetti westerns of Sergio Leone and on TV shows like Gunsmoke and Have Gun Will Travel, evolved into the Lone Cop mythos of Dirty Harry and gave rise to an intransigent gun culture whose adherents seem to take these images and extrapolate them to actual modern life. Having a Bushmaster doesn't make you Paladin or Marshal Matt Dillon or Dirty Harry.

The sports mythos is newer in this country; a phenomenon that had to wait until the advent of mass media. But beginning in the 20th century, America has had a love affair with sports heroes, going all the way back to From Babe Ruth, Jim Thorpe and Jack Dempsey in the 1920s. But it has really only been during my lifetime that the elevation of sports into a quasi-religion has taken place, and with the advent of 24 x 7 sports talk radio, everything athletic becomes a Story.

Every professional athlete that has emerged from the pack as a sports hero has a story, and most of the time it fits very nicely into Joseph Campbell's hero myth, in which:

...a hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.

Every sports story contains some variation on this myth, which is sometimes combined with Greek Tragedy. When that happens, we get a president like Ronald Reagan, whose very nickname evoked the Tragic Athletic Hero he had portrayed in a movie decades before. The Tragic sports heroes in the American consciousness are guys like Lou Gehrig and Brian Piccolo and George Gipp -- cut down in their prime and made immortal in movies.

These mythical archetypes have such power over our consciousness that we do whatever we have to in order to keep them from crashing on the shoals of reality. Whether it's the old colleague of mine who reacted to the news of O.J. Simpson's arrest for the murder of his wife by saying "He couldn't have done it...he's O.J., man!" or the millions of people like my other colleague who despite being otherwise pragmatic, truly believed that a man could beat stage IV cancer and then come back to win seven grueling bicycle races, we are a people of illusions about sports and sports heroes.

Today, towns that won't pass school budgets if the bulk of the money is for science labs and will cut band and orchestra in lean years will think nothing of voting "Yea" on $700,000 for lights for the high school football field. Parents push their kids into soccer and Little League and Pop Warner football whether the kids are any good or not, because in an age of six-figure college costs, they know that the athletic scholarship is going to bring more help than the few thousand available for academic scholarships. They may know intellectually that only a few select kids grow up to be Tom Brady, but then they look at the bigass house that one NFL player who grew up in my town built for his parents and they think, "Why not my kid?"

All of which brings us back to the power of the Great Sports Story and the news from this week. Anyone who hadn't figured out yet that Lance Armstrong had to be doing something to give him an edge was either delusional or an idiot. If Lance Armstrong had merely beaten cancer with lung and brain metastasis, that would have been incredible. To do that and even COMPETE in the Tour de France would have made him heroic in the truest Joseph Campbell sense. To have won once, even if doping, would have made him a Great American Sports Story. But Armstrong had to get greedy, becoming addicted to the glory and the endorsement deals and the women and the money. We've given a lot of lip service to illegal drugs and addiction over the years, but none to the addictive nature of sports heroism. For a while, Armstrong went on the hero's journey but ended up not even as a tragic Greek hero, but just another small-time con man.

Then we get to the more interesting story of Manti Te'o, the Notre Dame quarterback whose story was like crack to sportswriters -- the college football hero who soldiers through the Big Game despite his devastation at the loss of his beloved grandma. I don't think there's been a dead grandma this famous since Jonny Fairplay created a lie that his own grandma had died in an attempt to win Survivor: Pearl Islands. But the story didn't stop there. Te'o also had a supposed girlfriend who had survived a devastating car accident only to find out that she had leukemia, dying within six hours of Beloved Grandma, whereupon the Distraught Hero went out and led the Fighting Irish to a 20-3 upset victory over Michigan State. And the sports press lapped it up, just as they'd lapped up Lance Armstrong's Victory Over Cancer, and the steroidal tag team of Mark McGuire and Sammy Sosa breaking Roger Maris' home run record, and the Tim Tebow is Jesus meme.

The Te'o story is more interesting than Armstrong's because of the many possibilities, and also because of the dilemma it presents to the very sportswriters who bought the Dying Girlfriend story.

Yesterday I posted a video from the musical "Avenue Q", in which Rod, the closeted banker, responds to questions about his sexual orientation by singing about his "girlfriend who lives in Canada." The song is hilarious, and it's also one of the first things that popped into my mind when I first heard this story. Speculation about whether the "girlfriend from Canada" aspect to Te'o's mythical girlfriend implies something about his sexual orientation can be easily found via Teh Google, so I won't go into them here (although being the first out quarterback in NFL history would be pretty Campbellesque all by itself). But whether Te'o is closeted, or took part in a lie to boost his Heisman Trophy chances (it didn't work), or if he's the dumbest fucking person on the planet, isn't really my concern. What IS interesting, though, are the roles of the institution of Notre Dame itself, and of the sports press, and how the how both continue to want to cling to this story of an innocent, devoutly religious young man (shades of Tebow) duped by Evil People.

The college seems particularly interested in finding out just who did this to their prize property, which seems disproportionate to a story that at BEST is just a particularly good episode of Punk'd, especially when one takes into consideration how the college dragged its feet in investigating the case of a young woman sexually assaulted by a Notre Dame football player in 2010 who later committed suicide. The player involved was deemed by the school to be "not responsible" and never even missed a game.

Sports sports sports sports sports. It's always about sports. If Lennay Kekua had been real, Manti Te'o would have been talked about as a hero for the next five years, while Victoria Soto, the Newtown, Connecticut teacher who made herself into a human shield to protect the students in her charge will be forgotten in six months outside of town. Whoever emerges from the pack to be the hero of the upcoming Super Bowl will be on a Wheaties box while no one will ever know who the Virginia firefighter is who in passing noticed an unusual glow in a house and notified the residents that their house was on fire. No one knows or cares in December, Boston police officer Edward Norton saved a woman from drowning. No one cares that Texas high school student Kensen Shi won a $100,000 science prize for developing a computer algorithm that helps robots navigate around obstacles.

Every day, ordinary people do heroic things that make a difference in people's lives. A doctor saves a sick baby. A teacher spends extra time with a struggling student who comes from a troubled home so that student can get the grades required for college. A kid derided by others as a nerd comes up with an innovation that could change the world. We never hear about those. They get a key to their town, maybe a parade, and then they go about their lives, remembered only by those whose lives they impacted. Perhaps that's how it should be. Perhaps heroism isn't about the Big Game, or about winning the championship, or even about getting the scholarship. It's time we stopped elevating people who we watch on television running fast, or hitting a ball really hard, or throwing it far, or running or cycling really fast, and start looking to our own communities, and sometimes even our own homes, for the real heroes. Then perhaps one of those kids who CAN run fast and throw a ball hard won't have to either create or be duped by a story of a dead girlfriend to gain a competitive edge. And a cancer survivor won't feel he has to take drugs to be a hero. And colleges like Notre Dame and Penn State won't feel they has to protect rapists and child molesters in order to sustain "the brand."

Labels: faux heroism, sports

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.

Labels: Christofascist Zombie Brigade, New York Jets, Real Christians, sports, Tim Tebow

In typical New York fashion, the denizens of this metropolitan area are waking up this morning and mobbing Modell's and other stores, wanting to be among the first to buy ridiculously overpriced Giants gear, crowing as if they themselves had accomplished something last night other than polishing off a few dozen chicken wings and a plate of nachos.

Of course we at Casa la Brilliant are happy that the Giants won, but even if they hadn't, it was still a hugely entertaining game, and when you don't know until the last second who's going to win, you've gotten your money's and your arteries' worth. Besides, I will always be grateful to Tom Brady for knocking future wingnut politician Tim Tebow out of the playoffs. Seriously...why was Tebow even a story here? You mean a couple of stand-up guys, great quarterbacks both, both with beautiful wives and adorable babies, both of them at the top of their game, isn't enough for the press? Why is it that even in a Super Bowl in which Tebow isn't playing, he's still sucking up all the oxygen in the room? Where's the love for Manning and Brady and the lame-but-game Ron Gronkowski and for Paterson, New Jersey's own Victor Cruz, who plays football with a sheer joy in the game that we in New York are going to miss now that José Reyes has jumped off the Flushing Titanic?

For that matter, where's the love for Giants linebacker Mark Herzlich, who didn't play in last night's game, but who regarded just being there as enough; just being on an NFL team as enough, just being ALIVE as enough, having survived Ewing sarcoma when he wasn't even out of college. Herzlich didn't figure in the win, but after the game he demonstrated all kinds of win with this:

Giants linebacker Mark Herzlich, who two years ago beat cancer, finally lifted the trophy an hour after game's end. He was inactive because of an ankle injury, but his smile was as wide as anyone's. When he passed off the trophy and walked down the stairs, a pair of soldiers from the U.S. Army stopped him.

"You're an inspiration," one of the soldiers said. Herzlich told the man he had it backward.

"You're the inspiration," Herzlich said. "Thanks for everything you guys do."

The soldier nodded and asked Herzlich to sign his seat cushion.

There's a man who has his priorities straight, unlike New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who can put together a ticker tape parade with only 36 hours notice to express thanks to a team that plays in Jersey for winning a football game, but when it comes to honoring returning veterans, all we hear is crickets.

At this point we all know that the Iraq War was not just unnecessary and a war into which we entered based on lies that the Bush Administration convinced itself were true because of its own agenda. We all know that a horrific Middle East nuclear crisis is brewing that's likely to involve conflagration between Israel and Iran and who knows who else, and is perhaps even more likely as a result of the U.S. toppling of Saddam Hussein, who had been a pain in the ass to the Iranians for decades. But still -- there are tens of thousands of Americans who fought in Iraq with the noblest of intentions, and when the Mayor of a major city is willing to spend the money to honor a few dozen well-paid guys for winning one well-played game but refuses to do so to honor war veterans (after this nation had made a tacit promise to never again repeat the look-the-other-way reaction that characterized the exit from Vietnam), well, there's something screwy about our priorities.

Rachel Maddow talked about this last week:



You can read IAVA's Paul Rieckhoff's plea here.

Let the Giants and their fans enjoy the parade tomorrow. But while the cars full of Giants make their way up Broadway to City Hall, we'll know that there's at least one Giants player who has his head on straight.

Labels: football, heroism, sports

Looks like Rick Santorum isn't going to be the beneficiary of the Perry Follies:

Then Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum thought enough of Jerry Sandusky nine years ago to sponsor the former Penn State defense coordinator for a “Congressional Angels in Adoption” award, citing his work with a non-profit group he founded to provide care for foster children.

“Its philosophy is simple: it is easier to develop a child than to rehabilitate an adult,” read the citation in the awards dinner program from Sept. 24, 2002.

Sandusky, of course, has been charged with sexual abuse of young boys and Penn State University is under fire for its handling of reports of the coach’s suspicious behavior. The burgeoning scandal reportedly is about to force legendary head coach Joe Paterno to retire.

Santorum, a 1980 PSU graduate, is one of the school’s most distinguished alumni – a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination who represented Pennsylvania in the U.S. Senate from 1995 to 2007. A social conservative and champion of adoption, Santorum is staking his candidacy on an appeal to family values.

Since the scandal broke into the news, Santorum has been circumspect in his comments about it.  He has said he does not know Sandusky personally.

And indeed, the guy has been a top philanthropist for a long time, routinely honored by political figures.

On Tuesday, Santorum told ABC News that Paterno deserved the benefit of the doubt because he has “served in such distinction for all those years.” Santorum also said: “Look, I pray and hope that he (Paterno) didn’t do anything he shouldn’t have done, but it certainly looks horrible for the university, horrible for the football program and obviously people were fired, should be fired,” Santorum told ABC News.

Labels: Dogs fleas etc., Joe Paterno, sports

I've been watching some pro football the last couple of years. I don't know if I'd be watching if both New York teams were terrible, but the Giants are having a pretty good season, the Jets are kind of like the Mets as the area's Goofy Team and might also sneak in. But football for football's sake? Naah. And I have zero interest in college football.

I watch my friends struggle to get scholarship money for their college-bound children, and the only money available is for sports stars. I see the obsession in my town with youth sports and I know that at least some of this is due to parents knowing that while the National Honor Society might throw a few bucks at your kid, a sports scholarship is where the significant money is. Of course they dream of their kid being the next B.J. Raji, a local kid whose parents are soon to move into a ridiculously bigass house with corinthian columns on a through street in my area, but the more realistic parents will take what they can get if it offsets some of the mid-five-figures that college costs every year, even if it's only a couple thousand dollars for excellence in fencing.

Football gives money to a very few kids, but it brings in BIG money to colleges. And for Big Ten schools that have "legendary" coaches like Joe Paterno, the money is huge, which probably explains the cone of silence that was the result of assistant coach Mike McQueary informing Joe Paterno that he had seen Paterno's heir apparent, Jerry Sandusky, raping a boy in the shower.

But while we correctly have universal revulsion in our society for those who molest children, our revulsion seems to be selective. We confuse pedophila with homosexuality. Gay men can't be Boy Scout troop leaders, but no one hesitates to leave their son with a priest, a pastor, or a youth coach.

When a guy rapes and murders his 7-year-old neighbor, we get "Megan's Law", and there is, as there should be, universal condemnation and revulsion. Even if a child is not murdered, but "only" raped, there's universal condemnation and revulsion. It's accepted wisdom that even in prison, child molesters are regarded as the lowest of the low.

But let the abuser come from a religious framework, or from a highly-touted sport (and I'm not sure that there's a difference in some people's heads between actual religion and football, which seems to be a quasi-religion to many), and all of a sudden there's "nuance" and "extenuating circumstance."

If the guy down the street flashes a group of schoolchildren, pandemonium ensues. But if a priest sexually abuses a child, it's covered up by the Church. If a pastor sexually abuses a child, no one dares say anything. It's as if these people think that the abuse of a child is somehow sanctioned by God, or that there MUST be some kind of "explanation" that exonerates the suspect if he is a "man of the cloth". And when part of the mythos around a star sports coach is that he was "a god" at Penn State, it's not difficult to make the leap from being a figure of speech to an actual reality.

It's been interesting to listen to local progressive talk radio AND to sports talk radio the last few days. I've especially been gratified to see that the sports talk guys AREN'T falling into the "He's The Legendary Joe Paterno So I Know He Meant Well" trap. Even the biggest asshole on the New York airwaves, Craig Carton, minced no words when a Penn State journalism student tried to defend Joe Paterno yesterday by blaming the media:



Carton is a guy who was fired from his last gig for making fun the postpartum depression of the wife of then-Governor Richard Codey, and I have no great love for this guy, for all that he's weirdly entertaining and yes, Boomer and Carton is sometimes my morning drive-time guilty pleasure. But on this one he's 100% spot on.

Carton is the father of young children and as a result is correctly responding from that visceral place of "What if that had been my kid?" But even among people I know, there is clearly a struggle going on between trying to justify Paterno's actions by saying "Well, he thought he was doing the right thing by reporting the incident to the college authorities" and "What if that had been my kid?"

Most of the callers into Boomer and Carton and to Mark Riley yesterday were clearly struggling with what this incident means to Paterno's legacy and what should be done. A caller to Steve Summers last night on WFAN concocted a fairy tale in which Jerry Sandusky went to Joe Paterno and said "I have this problem, I need help", to which Summers responded "Then why didn't he get him help?" A caller less in thrall to the Church of College Football because he himself had been a player told Mark Riley yesterday morning that the entire football program at the school needs to be shut down for two years and rebuilt from the ground up, with NONE of the current staff, including Mike McQueary, allowed to stay on.

But here's what I find disturbing: Why is there even any dispute that Penn State did the right thing by firing Paterno? Aside from the fact that the entire structure deemed it appropriate to protect a pedophile rather than "damage the Penn State brand", why is there any ambiguity? Does fielding a winning football team year after year justify EVERYTHING, let alone anything? When the murder of Nicole Simpson and Ron Goldman hit the news in 1994, it was the talk of the lunch table at the company at which I was working at the time. One of my colleagues refused to believe that O.J. Simpson could have possibly killed his wife, because "He's O.J., man!"

He's Joe Paterno, man!

No, what he is, or was, is a guy who helped bring in over $50 million to Penn State every year, that's what he is. And the bottom line here is that until the last few days when the story could be contained no longer, Penn State and everyone who still defends Joe Paterno, obviously believe that the rape of a ten-year-old, or multiple ten-year-olds, as appears now to be the case, is necessary and a small price to pay if it protects the cash cow that is Penn State football. It's the "Never Disrespect the Bing" school of moral relativism.

And that anyone -- ANYONE -- feels this is justified is a sad commentary on our culture.

Labels: college sports, Joe Paterno, rant, sex crimes, sports

One of the things I had to do as part of the mountainous learning curves of my current job is to become versed in the jargon of oncology. Terms like RECIST, CTCAE grading, various forms of cancer classification, are now part of my daily vocabulary. I don't like having to look at the data from oncology trials, because the minute you look at the data, the 40 or 50 patients in an early trial become actual people -- people with cancer, usually advanced cancer, looking for any hope at all.

And so it was with a particular form of dread that I processed the news that former Mets catcher Gary Carter has been diagnosed with an inoperable, aggressive, stage 4 glioblastoma.

If you weren't a Mets fan in 1985, it's hard to relate to the excitement that fans had at the news that Gary Carter was coming to "our team." Frank Cashen, one of the smartest baseball guys ever to serve as general manager of a ball team, had hit upon the right formula for building a winning franchise -- grow talent from within, and anchor that young talent with solid veterans who still had a few good years ahead of them. Keith Hernandez was the first of those solid veterans, who came to the Mets in 1983 in the Great Neil Allen and Rick Ownbey Swindle. Carter was the second.

Carter was the yin to Hernandez' yang. Hernandez was smart, intense, aggressive. Carter was just as smart, just as intense, just as aggressive, but he covered it all with a smile that made you feel as if the sun had just come out on a rainy day. There isn't a player active today who plays with the same sheer joy that Gary Carter did. There was a reason they called him "Kid." You always had the sense that he'd play even if they didn't pay him.

Mike Lupica, on Carter in a play in game 6 of the 1986 World Series that is now all but forgotten in the drama of the Bill Buckner debacle:

Carter was the first one up with two outs and nobody on and the Mets about to lose the World Series to the Red Sox. This was Gary Carter, who helped make the Mets legit the way Keith Hernandez did before him, who had to keep Game 6 and that Saturday night and the World Series alive. Tough out.

This was Gary Carter, the catcher that year, already on his way to the Hall of Fame but now having gotten the stage in New York after all his years with the Montreal Expos, who was down to his last strike against Calvin Schiraldi, the Red Sox closer.

And in the quiet of the Mets clubhouse later that night, long after Saturday night had become Sunday morning, Carter repeated something he had been saying since one of the most famous baseball games ever played in the city of New York had ended.

One last reporter asked Carter what he was thinking when he stepped to the plate and he said, "I was thinking that I wasn't going to make the last out of the World Series."

It was the same thing he had said to first base coach Bill Robinson after Carter singled to left off Schiraldi and started the greatest half-inning the Mets have ever played. And in the excitement of the moment, Gary Carter might have used the kind of language we never used to hear from him in the clubhouse.

"I wasn't making the last out of the ----ing World Series," is the way Bill Robinson used to tell it.

Gary Carter has always been the nice guy, the affable guy, but that affability masked a will of steel. I hope that will of steel, and the outpouring of love, prayers, and support that have come from all quarters in the wake of this terrible news, serve him well as he deals with a therapy that is still all about burn-and-poison, because there just isn't anything else to do.

We'll be here in the stands rooting for him. Because when you're a Mets fan, you're used to having your heart broken, and our hearts are broken today. But just when you think all is lost, they pull off a miracle.

Gary Carter has already been part of one miracle when his team in 1986 managed to pull out a win no one expected them to, in the bottom of the 10th. Who knows? Maybe, just maybe, The Kid can pull off another one.

Labels: cancer, New York Mets, sports

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.

Labels: football, karma, New York Jets, sports, weather

Because women make men look like boors.

This morning I received from a friend one of those forwarded e-mails that we all hate. You know, the ones in 36-point type that tell some story (which usually turns out to be false or at best apocryphal) that's supposed to warm your heart and guilt you into forwarding it along to your own e-mail list, thereby perpetuating the spam forever. It's a lovely story, but it may or may not even be true. Parables are fine, but parables sold as truth are something else entirely.

But sometimes we don't need to rely on the One Percent Doctrine to get all warm and fuzzy. Sometimes the stories are true:

We live in a world where Peyton Manning walks off the Super Bowl field without shaking anybody's hand. Where Tiger Woods leaves the Masters without a word of thanks to the fans or congratulations to the winner. Where NFL lineman Albert Haynesworth kicks a man's helmetless head without a thought.

So if you think sportsmanship is toast, this next story is an all-you-can-eat buffet to a starving man.

It happened at a junior varsity girls' softball game in Indianapolis this spring. After an inning and a half, Roncalli was womanhandling inner-city Marshall Community. Marshall pitchers had already walked nine Roncalli batters. The game could've been 50-0 with no problem.

It's no wonder. This was the first softball game in Marshall history. A middle school trying to move up to include grades 6 through 12, Marshall showed up to the game with five balls, two bats, no helmets, no sliding pads, no cleats, 16 players who'd never played before, and a coach who'd never even seen a game.

One Marshall player asked, "Which one is first base?" Another: "How do I hold this bat?" They didn't know where to stand in the batter's box. Their coaches had to be shown where the first- and third-base coaching boxes were.

That's when Roncalli did something crazy. It offered to forfeit.

Yes, a team that hadn't lost a game in 2½ years, a team that was going to win in a landslide purposely offered to declare defeat. Why? Because Roncalli wanted to spend the two hours teaching the Marshall girls how to get better, not how to get humiliated.

"The Marshall players did NOT want to quit," wrote Roncalli JV coach Jeff Traylor, in recalling the incident. "They were willing to lose 100 to 0 if it meant they finished their first game." But the Marshall players finally decided if Roncalli was willing to forfeit for them, they should do it for themselves. They decided that maybe -- this one time -- losing was actually winning.

That's about when the weirdest scene broke out all over the field: Roncalli kids teaching Marshall kids the right batting stance, throwing them soft-toss in the outfield, teaching them how to play catch. They showed them how to put on catching gear, how to pitch, and how to run the bases. Even the umps stuck around to watch.

More...

In a world where even the gentlest of sports uses metaphors for war, and one in which the arts and even academics often get short shrift in favor of men's school sports that favor players who believe not just in winning, but in pummeling the opposition into a pulp, here's a bunch of girls who take the idea that sports are about teamwork seriously.

Labels: sheer awesomeness, sports, things that make you glad to be alive

This morning I was trying to find video of figure skater Johnny Weir's hilarious alter-ego, "Vyacheslav Romanov", a Russian gossip (what else?) journalist who bears an amazing resemblance to Orly Taitz (who is now running for Secretary of State in California so she can investigate Barack Obama's citizenship) to accompany the link to the story. And while clicking around, I came across this amazing article by LZ Granderson about Weir, sports, and homophobia written last month after the Olympics over at ESPN.com, of all places.

Money quote:

After all, "gay" simply means you're attracted to the same gender. It doesn't mean you're graceful on skates. If it did, the NHL should consider some rebranding.

Being gay can't mean you're overly dramatic, because Brett Favre is the biggest drama queen in all of sports, and besides, after nearly 20 years in the NFL, he's probably slapped more man booty than all the gay men in San Francisco combined. Do we question his sexuality?

Am playing devil's advocate? Of course I am. But it's not just for the sake of being a contrarian. I'm suggesting a slight paradigm shift with regard to our views of what it means to be masculine. Society adopts terms like "metrosexual" so men can clip their nose hairs in peace. Talking heads coin phrases like "bromance" so men can have real friendships. There's so much posturing and projection happening on a daily basis that sometimes I wonder if straight men suffer from the effects of homophobia more than gay men do.

Look, I know a lot of guys who love women in the Eros sense of the word but who don't follow sports and couldn't pick Kobe Bryant out of a lineup of dwarfs.

Conversely, I have a friend who once had to be physically restrained from beating the snot out of a ref during a league basketball game, and he's been with his boyfriend for more than 10 years.

These are not examples of anomalies. These are examples within the kaleidoscope of life, and if some of us would take off our black-and-white blinders long enough -- and perhaps stop acting the way we think we're supposed to act -- we might actually begin to see and appreciate the diversity within the lexicon of manhood. This philosophy isn't just about creating an environment in which it's comfortable for gay men to compete in sports. It's also about creating a space in which it's OK for straight men not to.

Word.

Labels: figure skating, homophobia, sports

Well, after the tragic and unnecessary death of a Georgian luger and the weird opening ceremonies capped by a bizarre malfunctioning Olympic cauldron lighting that looked like giant flaming erections, the quadriennial bacchanalia of athleticism, clean-scrubbed Whitelandia good looks, hype, and marketing known as the Winter Olympics has begun.

Today has been ski jumping and speed skating, though I have yet to see anyone wearing a Colbert Nation logo. But while I enjoy watching the "Those Guys Are Fucking Crazy" spectacle of the Winter Olympics (somewhat less so this year now that the Fucking Craziest sport of all has endured the live and endlessly replayed demise of one of its own), for me the Winter Olympics has always been about figure skating. It has always been so, long before Tonya Harding had Nancy Kerrigan whacked in the knees (and really....admit it...didn't you have a kind of perverse satisfaction when that happened? Don't you remember that awful woman on the news shrieking about how The Beauteous Nancy was Our All American Girl!!! -- confirming the worst nightmares of every girl who was stocky, or had frizzy hair, or a big nose, or for that matter grew up in a trailer park and fought her way to the top tier, becoming the first American woman to land a triple axel -- that there was ONLY ONE standard of beauty and for some strange reason it was Irish?

Sorry about that...but figure skating always brings out one's inner bitch. I know Kerrigan just suffered the tragic loss of her father after a fight with her brother, but she WAS a homewrecker after all, and.....see what I mean? It just HAPPENS.

Skating fans are kind of crazy like that, because figure skating is in many ways like a high school in which EVERYONE is in the theatre club. It's really a shame, too, because if you've ever put on a pair of skates and tried to do anything beyond tootling around a rink, you know that for all the spangles and the drama, this sport is really damn hard. I put on a pair of $195 Riedell boots and $100 Pattern 99 blades at the age of 38 and took lessons from the founder and director of the Ice Theatre of New York in exchange for database and desktop publishing work. I got as far as left-crossovers, and could not for the life of me go the other way, let alone do anything else. I finally put out my old skates for pickup day last year, with the blades rusted from the nor'easter of 2007, unwanted even by anyone on Freecycle. But while my experiment in skating is over, I do know a lutz from a toe loop from an axel; I know what the back leg position of a layback spin is supposed to be, and I know how hard all that fancy footwork is.

But let's face it: Isn't skating about the drama; about the stories, about who's sniping at whom? The bitch factor in skating reached its apex at the 2002 Olympics with the infamous judge-fixing scandal, which resulted in a new scoring system that rates skaters on what they actually do. It took me a while to understand the new system, but now that I know what it is, I actually prefer it. Gone are the days when a Debi Thomas two-foots a triple-triple combination at the opening of a free skate and knows that her gold medal chances are gone.

Figure skating aficionados, judges, and hangers-on are never satisfied with anything less than a jumping machine that also looks like a Balanchine ballerina...unless it's the men's singles event, in which case you have to lock your elbows and throw your arms around, lest you be seen as "effeminate." If you're a jumping machine like returning 2006 gold medalist Evgeni Plushenko, they're bitching because you aren't an artist:

The cold war ended two decades ago, except somebody forgot to tell the people involved in figure skating. The East German judges are long gone, the Soviet bloc has been dismantled, but obsession, paranoia and conspiracy still rule. If skating didn’t exist, Robert Ludlum would have invented it.

“This sport is so political, nobody trusts anybody,” said George Rossano, an American expert on the arcane and controversial points-based scoring system.

The latest controversy centers on Yevgeny Plushenko, the defending Olympic men’s champion from Russia. He retired, then made a comeback for Vancouver, where he is favored to win a second gold medal. There is no better leaper in the world. Plushenko jumps like a teenager at a horror movie.

He is also fast and calm under pressure. And in the words of Dick Button, the 1948 and 1952 Olympic champion, “He has enough chutzpah to fill the Grand Canyon.”

Still, there are drawbacks to Plushenko’s skating: footwork and artistry. This is a guy who could use a few lessons at Arthur Murray. It was the same problem that Tom DeLay had on “Dancing With the Stars.” Both men have terrific charisma, but would be well advised in the future to avoid rhinestones, bolero jackets and the cha-cha.

Plushenko freely admits this flaw in the transitional moves — footwork, choreography and musicality — that link his soaring triple axels and quadruple toe loops. At a news conference last month, referring to himself and Brian Joubert of France, Plushenko said, “We don’t have any transitions, because we focus on our jumps.”

He also suggested that judges could prop up skaters under the new scoring system, just as in the old 6-point system, by inflating their “component” scores, the equivalent of the old artistic marks. This added to the suspicion by some that exaggerated artistic marks were given to Plushenko at the recent Russian and European championships

And if you're an artist, they bitch about that too, especially if your name is Johnny Weir:

Many relish his ornate, unapologetic style, while others believe the glitz has overwhelmed the skating, making his chances for an Olympic medal as slippery as the ice itself. Underlying every move of Weir, a three-time national champion, is this question: What are the obligations of a skater who must play to the crowd and the judges?

That tension is evident in the way Weir, 25, skates and talks. He is enamored of the classic Russian style, yet sometimes he can appear more burlesque than Bolshoi. He wants to be “an athlete my country can be proud of.” At the same time, he said: “You’re putting on a show; you’re putting on a performance. I feel like that every day when I walk out of my house.”

When he walks into the rink each day, Weir wants his coach, Galina Zmievskaya, to say, “Look at you.” She has taught him to walk “like you’re the king,” head up, shoulders back, not seeing anyone, only the objective ahead — “the end of the carpet that’s been rolled out for you.”

Weir said: “My obligation has always been to bring the artistic side of my sport out. Jumps are jumps, and everybody can do those jumps. But not everybody can show something wonderful and special and unique and different.”

He is not particularly interested in making skating more mainstream or masculine, Weir said. No need to grab the average N.F.L. fan. “I wear pink,” he said. “I have no problem where my sport is as far as our fan base.”

Johnny Weir is a blog post all by himself, because you either love him or hate him. My old friend Mark Lund from my days as a skating hanger-on has problems with Weir's style of skating, and indeed his overall style, but Weir is nothing if not fascinating. He's taken a lot of heat from the gay community for not coming out and saying he's gay, but I'm not convinced that he is. In fact, after a few episodes of Be Good Johnny Weir, I'm beginning to think that there's gay, straight, bisexual, and Johnny Weir. I may be wrong, but I think it's entirely possible that Johnny Weir is neither gay nor straight, but something else entirely...maybe we should just call it "fabulous"? It's an ambiguity he seems to relish for the sheer joy of fucking with people's heads:



Historically the women's final has been the marquee event, but with little drama and backstory other than the fact that China, Japan and South Korea are now what the Eastern Bloc countries used to be -- finely-tuned sports machines cranking out one perfect skater after another, it's the men's event that's the most interesting -- and has the strongest lineup. It doesn't matter, though, where the Olympics hype machine is concerned, that Evgeny Plushenko may try a quad-quad, or about Stephane Lambiel's costumes, or whether Tomas Verner can manage to put together a clean freeskate, or if Japan's Nobunari Oda mounts a great comeback from a DUI suspension. Just as the Battle of the Brians and the Dueling Carmens was the big story of 1988, this year's big story is going to be the mutual sniping of the ferociously straight "warrior" Evan Lysacek, who conspicuously dates the drop-dead gorgeous ice dancer Tanith Belbin, and the aforementioned Johnny Weir. It's really a shame, too, because there's another skater on the men's team who for my money strikes the perfect balance between the athleticism of the jumps and the interpretation of music, and that's the nearly-ignored 2-time U.S. Men's Champion, Jeremy Abbott. The seraphic-faced Abbott doesn't get involved in the whole yin/yang of the social policy drama that's been enacted by Lysacek and Weir since they were twelve. All he does is pick interesting music, and then go out and do things like this:

...and this:

Coverage of figure skating starts with the Men's event on Tuesday from eight to midnight Eastern Standard Time.

Labels: figure skating, sports

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.

Labels: football, New York Jets, sports

Those outside the New York area, or who do not watch gossip shows or read Huffington Post, may not know that New York Jets owner "Woody" Johnson lost his 30-year-old daughter last week. That Casey Johnson was associated with noted famewhore Tila Tequila is immaterial. If you've ever known someone who lost a child, even an adult one, you know how this affects a parent -- and a family. I have a friend who recently observed the fourth anniversary of her daughter's death at the age of 24, and she noted, "It almost gets worse the more time passes."

Here at Casa la Brilliant, we did the football thing yesterday by ordering bar food from our local dive bar and barbecue joint and watching the game. Now, I've never been one for football, but I've found it to be a lot more interesting since we got the flatscreen hi-def TV, because now I can actually see what's happening on the field and understand the game a bit more. I've been partial to the Jets this year, I have to confess, because as I noted earlier in the season, the Jets have a quarterback who if he could only learn how to stop throwing the ball to guys on the other team, has the potential for Derek Jeter-level stardom in New York; a town that's been longing for a new Namath for thirty years. I mean, he's cute as a button and he listens to James Taylor before games so he delivers female eyeballs to television advertisers, and he's Latino in an increasingly Latino city. What's not to like?

So yesterday, Mark Sanchez played like the bonus baby he's supposed to be, and the Jets sent the Bengals packing. Already, WFAN morning drive guy, misogynist, and overall asshole Craig Carton, he of the disgusting remarks about New Jersey state Senator Richard Codey's wife's postpartum depression that got him kicked out of his last job, had to live up to a promise to cross the George Washington Bridge in a Speedo if the Jets made the playoffs. So right now, following the Jets is sort of like being a Mets fan in a year that isn't fraught with futility. I'm sure it would be even sweeter for the owner of this misbegotten franchise, were it not for the raw and gaping wound in his family left by the loss of his daughter.

So you'd think that sportswriters would have the decency to leave the team owner alone, or at the very least offer condolence, no matter how many visions they may have had in the past about hot Tila-on-Casey action. But no....in the sports business, The Question just had to be asked:

Eventually, attention turned to Woody Johnson, the Jets’ owner, whose daughter Casey died earlier this week. Johnson accepted the game ball with red eyes, overcome with emotion. When a reporter asked if victory had eased the pain, he answered quickly, “No, nothing helps,” and he walked into the night.

What kind of fuckwit do you have to be to ask a man if a FUCKING FOOTBALL GAME helped ease the pain of LOSING A CHILD? What kind of fuckwit do you have to be to even THINK that a football game would make a difference?

Labels: American Idiots, football, sports

Even if you, like me, don't give one whit about the Olympics, you have to be thrilled at the achievement of Michael Phelps.

What I dislike so intensely about the Olympics is the jingoism -- the nationalism, the feverish tallying of medals, as if beating the [fill in enemy du jour here] on an athletic field is somehow a surrogate for the battlefield. The Olympics, like so much of professional sport -- and let's face it, most Olympic athletes are professionals -- are so tainted by money and drugs and cheating, that it's hard to take them seriously.

In 1972, Mark Spitz won seven gold medals. It was easy to root for Spitz because not only was he a great swimmer, but he was also drop-dead gorgeous. A poster of him in a Speedo sporting his medals was the male version of the Farrah Fawcett poster of the same vintage. But a funny thing happened on Mark Spitz' journey to fame. Turns out that as soon as he opened his mouth, he was as dull as dishwater. So the dreams of marketers, who had the idea of turning Spitz into a goldmine, dissipated over two lackluster years of trying to turn Spitz into a marketable commodity, and he went on to live a perfectly contented and normal life as a motivational speaker, which he still does.

Michael Phelps is no Mark Spitz. And corporate America is happy. Because Phelps is that rare commodity -- a funny looking kid with a self-deprecating sense of humor, poise, and a complete and utter inability to take himself seriously. He's tall, gangly and awkward. He was an ADHD kid who found that swimming was the one area where he could focus. His nose is too big and his ears stick out -- and the camera loves him anyway. And so do we -- not only because he has just accomplished something astonishing, but also because his head and his heart are in the right place:

Responding to a reporter quoting Spitz's comment that while what he had done in 1972 was the equivalent of being the first man on the Moon then what his successor had achieved made him "the first man on Mars", Phelps simply said: "Records are always made to be broken, no matter what they are."

"Anyone can do anything they want if they really want to," he added.

"I've said all along I want to be the 'first' Michael Phelps not the 'second' Mark Spitz.

"Never once will I downplay his accomplishments by any means. What he did is still an amazing feat and will always be an amazing feat in the swimming world and the Olympics."

Phelps added: "To have something like that to shoot for, it made those days when you were tired and wanted to go home and sleep and not train, it made those days easier and say 'I want to do this'.

"It's something I wanted to do and I'm thankful to him (Spitz) for doing what he did."

And so Michael Phelps will go home with his eight gold medals. The insatiable maw of the media will try to chew off as many pieces of him as it can. He will be invited to the White House, where a small man of low accomplishment will say something stupid and Phelps will smile and say something respectful, yet clever. He will sell computers and PDAs and iPods and athletic shoes and anything else aimed at his demographic. He will make more money than most of us will see in a lifetime. And he will have earned it. Because for a few short hours, he made us cheer for an American Everykid who made good. And because for a few short hours, he let us forget the problems we go back to facing tomorrow.

Labels: Michael Phelps, sports