A lot of terrible things are done in the service of ideals, the abstract and the big picture giving people license to rationalize what should not happen. Sometimes people believe that a place is special and being a part of that place makes them special, so they reflexively lash out at those who see dark corners and not just green lawns. It’s my country right or wrong. For too long, Penn State has been its own country. From Bruce Arthur’s excellent National Post essay about life in the place named Happy Valley:
“People who grew up here, and people who live here, both point to the local ties of the people already implicated, how they are steeped in this place. As State College native Michael Weinreb wrote for ESPN’s Grantland.com, ‘We grew older, and we came to understand one of the central truths of human nature, which is that when you brush up against a truly powerful force, it is never quite as benevolent as you imagined it to be.’
‘You’ve got to remember that a lot of guys who were involved in the cover-up grew up here, or close enough,’ says the State College native who knew McQueary, the Curleys, and the Paternos.
‘There are a lot of people here who never left,’ says another longtime resident who works for the university. ‘Look at this. Joe’s been here 60 years. Mike McQueary, local guy, played here, never left. Tim Curley grew up here, high school here, never left. Schultz came here to go to school, never left. Even Spanier had been here for 16 years. That’s a long time for a university president.
‘And again, that in itself isn’t evil. But it makes it a lot easier for secrets to be kept when you’ve been here forever, and you’re part of this thing, and there is this mafia-like sense of the family. It’s identity. And it wasn’t just Joe.’
It wasn’t just Joe. It wasn’t just Spanier. It wasn’t just Curley. It wasn’t just Schultz. And tragically, it was not just Sandusky, either.
Happy Valley is a place wrestling for its soul, wrestling to keep itself alive in its own mind. The high priests let the children suffer for the grander idea, for the place that was good. A professor who teaches journalism ethics here, Russell Frank, wrote a piece that began, ‘It’s time to stop calling this place Happy Valley. The name doesn’t fit. It never did.'”
When I was recently looking for clips of Smokin’ Joe Frazier to pay my respects to the late, great boxer, I came across a 1973 segment of the show Superstars. That program pitted athletes from different sports against one another in a variety of competitions to judge who was the finest overall athlete. It was back in the day before sports stars were routinely millionaires and didn’t mind picking an extra paycheck for a lesser event. Even though it was just weekend network time filler, Superstars was lended gravitas in its inaugural season by Jim McKay, who was just months removed from anchoring the coverage of the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre.
One of Frazier’s fellow competitors who did not need to make some extra money was race car driver Peter Revson. Revson was nephew of Charles Revson, founder of Revlon, and was heir to a billion dollar fortune. Not surprisingly, he was a dapper guy and something of a New York playboy. I had never previously heard of him and wondered why. It turns out, shortly after this program was broadcast, Revson was killed in an accident during a practice run at the 1974 South African Grand Prix. His brother, Douglas, also a racer, had been killed seven years earlier in a crash.
•••••••••••
“Many times mentioned as the most eligible bachleor in New York”:
To the avid baseball fan, it would seem Billy Beane has ceased being an elite GM, the architect of Moneyball who could outsmart his peers, mostly because his interests are too broad. Among other things, he’s involved professionally with major-league soccer, computer software and finance. Beane’s restless mind stems in part from being a working-class kid who grudgingly passed on a Stanford scholarship he dearly wanted to accept in order to pocket a signing bonus from the Mets. Simon Kuper of the Financial Times was on hand recently when Beane caught up with author Michael Lewis, the two forever linked by baseball statistics, market inefficiencies and Brad Pitt. An excerpt:
“And so Moneyball became in large part the drama of Billy Beane: the autodidact who gave himself an education. When Beane was 18 years old, Stanford University had offered him a football and baseball scholarship. He and his parents – bright people without much money who had married young and joined the military middle class – were ecstatic. A good college was everything they wanted. But then the New York Mets offered Beane $125,000 to play baseball instead, and he felt he ought to do it. The movie shows the teenager, around the kitchen table with his parents in the simple family home, making the fateful decision. The filmmakers catch the scene well, but, as Beane says, ‘I’m not sure they could capture the complete horror.’
‘Listen,’ he adds, ‘I’m trying not to talk about myself here. I don’t look at life as a bunch of hindsight reviews of your decisions. But that’s exactly what I wanted to do, to attend Stanford University.’
Billy Beane was 18 when Stanford University offered him a football and baseball scholarship, but he went to play or the New York Mets instead
Beane’s life since – his compulsive reading, his discovery of the Moneyball system, his later discovery of soccer – is a long attempt to give himself the university education he never had. Just as Sergey Brin and Larry Page created Google partly because they went to Stanford, Beane created Moneyball partly because he didn’t.”
In Nick Tosches great book,The Devil and Sonny Liston, the author identifies his subject’s main problem: “In the Saturday night cigarette smokehouse neon dark of that dive, Charles Liston, who neither knew his age nor felt any ties of blood upon this earth nor saw any future beyond the drink in front of him and the smoky dark spare refuge of this barroom from the bone-cutting, river-heavy dank and freezing chill, knew only that he was nobody and that he had come from nowhere and that he was nowhere. He did not see that one could be nobody with a capital ‘N.’” Smokin’ Joe Frazier, who just passed away, and his two greatest opponents, Muhammad Ali and George Foreman, became not just important nobodies but cultural kings.
Frazier, who could barely get a word in, with Ali and Dick Cavett:
A concise explanation of why labor disputes in sports are so tortuous and odd, via Tyler Cowen and Kevin Grier, on Grantland:
“Why are labor disputes in sports so weird?
The bosses control the whole sector and face little competition when it comes to hiring labor. Since the merger with the ABA in 1976, the NBA is a monopoly and operates in a manner (it monopolizes!) that would be illegal outside the sports world. Unlike in Silicon Valley, there are no NBA “start-ups.” You cannot create a new NBA team without permission of the incumbent owners. The league also has to approve changes in teams’ location and ownership.
What does this mean? The owners can get together and agree to jointly cut expenses, that is, the player salaries. Players have limited opportunities to play professional basketball in other countries, but realistically, if you are a world-class professional basketball player, you probably want to be in the NBA.
The star players are the only counterweight to management’s power. To a large extent, they ARE the NBA’s product. Because of this, the owners aren’t talking about using replacement players, and some stars are getting decent offers to play overseas during the lockout. These factors are a cause for concern for the owners and put limits on how much they can extract from the players.”
"There was a stool in the corner of the roped inclosure and on each stood a pair of badly damaged boxing gloves."
One of my favorite A.J. Liebling articles is “The University of Eighth Avenue,” a 1955 SI profile of old-time New York boxer Billy Ray. In the piece, Ray fondly recalls a Brooklyn barroom featuring all manner of organized violence: cockfighting, dogfighting and boxing. The tavern was across the street from Calvary Cemetery. By chance, I just happened upon an old article in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle from 1889 (a reprint of a New York Sun piece), which I think is about the same establishment. Ray had given the proprietor’s name as “Hughie Bart” and the Eagle refers to him as “Pete Hart,” but there are many similarities. The full article:
“Just across the road from the northeast corner of the old Calvary Cemetery stands a little frame structure that is called a pavilion by Pete Hart, who owns it. Mr. Hart is an old time free and easy singer, and there are few men on Long Island or anywhere else who know how to entertain non church goers better than he. Pete is a slim man, verging on the meridian of life, and has an old gold mustache. To the casual observer the pavilion is a very ordinary saloon, with no pretensions to grandeur. The first story consists of two rooms. The outer room has a little bar across one end of it and the inner room is ornamented with a lot of pictures representing calm and rural scenery; also with a few round tables, some wooden chairs and a number of young men who look as though they were given to scrapping. There is a small door in one end of this room which opens into an inclosure about thirty feet square. In the center is a rough wooden platform, fenced in with ropes. On one side are three rows of planks, the upper one being so near the low ceiling that a tall man can’t sit upon it. Behind this door is an ancient piano.
"After it was over a young fellow danced a clog and was enthusiastically applauded."
Yesterday afternoon a sign in chalk was hung about the door leading into this inclosure, which declared that admission could be had for the trifling outlay of 25 cents. A stalwart young man stood in front of the door collecting this amount from every one who entered. At 4 o’clock about one hundred and sixty men were inside and the air was heavy with tobacco smoke. There were stools in the corners of the roped inclosure and on each stood a pair of badly damaged boxing gloves, and a bottle of water. The gentlemen were all known to each other as Skinny, Freckles, etc., and after a young man had been induced to thump on the piano, various heroic efforts were put forth to induce other young men to sing. There was a stir in the doorway and two young men in tights and canvas shoes climbed through the ropes into the ring, and, after affectionately shaking hands, began to pound each other with the gloves. The utmost order prevailed during the set to. After it was over a young fellow danced a clog and was enthusiastically applauded. James McNamee of the Hornbacher Athletic Club sparred three rounds with Dan O’Hara. McNamee is a handsome young fellow and knows a lot about boxing. He has sparred frequently with Jack Dempsey and has proved himself worthy of meeting good men. He thumped O’Hara whenever and wherever he liked to the great delight of the crowd and to the astonishment of Mr. O’Hara.
Hugh Groden, who was recently whipped in a ten round go with Sailor Brown, had a hot set with Smoke Hennessey. Mr. Hennessey amused the crowd later in the day by an unexpected attack on Mr. O’Hara. It was during the last set of the day and near the close of a three round go between O’Hara and John McCormick. Hennessey sprang into the ring and with his bare knuckles tried to strike O’Hara. The latter warded off the blow and struck Hennessey so hard with the boxing gloves he wore that he sent him flying through the ropes. Among the other set tos was one between Billy Dacey and Dan McVeigh and one between Mike Murray and Billy McGibben.”
John T. Brush was an orphan, a Civil War veteran, and a robber baron.
Michael Weinreb outdoes himself at Grantland, witha historical pieceexplaining why three American sports leagues (MLB, NBA, NHL) settle championships with seven-game series. Why seven games? The opening:
“John T. Brush was an orphan, a Civil War veteran, and a robber baron. He was born in 1845, and by the 1880s, he was a prominent baseball owner, a crotchety tycoon who used his department-store fortune to purchase franchises in Indianapolis and Cincinnati before taking control of the National League’s New York Giants. It was Brush who first proposed an unpopular salary cap he referred to as the ‘Brush Classification Plan.’ It was Brush who harbored such a grudge against the American League that he refused to allow his Giants to play the Boston Pilgrims in 1904, thereby resulting in the first of the two World Series-less falls of the 20th century. The players disliked him; the media tore into him with a purplish rage. ‘Chicanery is the ozone which keeps his old frame from snapping,’ wrote the Sporting News, ‘and dark-lantern methods the food which vitalizes his body tissues.’
Brush died 99 years ago, en route to a sanatorium in Southern California to recuperate from a car crash. Unless you harbor a fetish for the dead-ball era or the history of Midwestern textile operations, you have almost certainly never heard of him. And neither had I, until one night, in the midst of yet another protracted postseason series, I thought of a simple question that seems to have no definitive answer. What I wanted to know was how the idea for a seven-game series had begun, and why it became the conventional wisdom among three of the four major professional sports in America, and why this format has come to feel so inherently equitable. And what I realized is that, as much as we would like to think that we have evolved over the course of the century since John T. Brush expired on that cross-country train, and as much as we believe that we’ve found new and better ways to quantify information, the structure of determining a champion in professional sports is still based as much on superstition as it is on rational thought.”
In Spin in 1988. Norman Mailer published ‘Understanding Mike Tyson,’ a piece of reportage about the last heavyweight that mattered, in those days when he was still ascendant in the ring, still the “Baddest Man on the Planet,” before things turned just plain bad. As is the case with a boxing card itself, the article first introduces all of the preliminary figures, making you wait for the person you came to see. The opening:
As an arena for boxing, the Convention Hall at Atlantic City is not one of the happier architectural palaces of the world. It drops the kind of pall on an audience that would come from witnessing a cock-fight in a bank. Lyndon Johnson was nominated there in 1964 with two identical sixty-foot close-up photographs of himself on either side of the podium. The Hall looked on that occasion like the coronation chamber for a dictator. Now, on the night of June 27, 1988, thousands of seats were laid on the great flat floor, and people in the seventeenth row ringside were paying $1,500 a ticket to see the Tyson-Spinks Heavyweight Championship. Since the gala glitz of the Trump Plaza was but a connecting corridor away from Convention Hall, and the Trump Plaza was architecturally close to its purpose, possessing a retina-red decor that inspired you to sport and gamble, the shock in moving from gaming tables to the fight was as palpable as sex after midnight is distinguishable from the gray dawn.
The fight also took forever to start. Celebrities were introduced for fifteen minutes and the successful gamblers who had given back some of their winnings for a last minute pair of tickets could now find a little consolation for the bad ringside seats. (Catching a bout from the seventeenth row is equal to watching a couple make love in a room on the other side of the street.) To be able to boo or cheer, however for Sean Penn and Madonna, Jackie Mason, Warren Beatty, Jack Nicholson, Michael Jordan, Magic Johnson, Marvin Hagler, George Steinbrenner (booed), Dexter Manley, Matthew Broderick, Carl Weathers, Burt Young, Judd Nelson, Chuck Norris, Oprah Winfrey, Don Johnson, Tom Brokaw, Don King, and Jesse Jackson, all in person, would revive the ego when telling about it to the folks back home.
At the press ringside, where you see the fight a lot better, the rumor was that Donald Trump had planned to invite Frank Sinatra to sit next to him but was worried that the ring floor might be pitched too high for Frank and other guests in the front row. So, the ring was lowered. Sinatra, working at rival Bally’s, declined the invitation. It was not appropriate to be seated next to the competition. The principle remained intact, however. Trump understood the psychology of success. It was more important that his front row contingent have a good view than that the suckers in the seventeenth pew complain because the ring had been pitched in a hollow.
Just before the fight began, Trump came into the ring with Muhammad Ali. Ali now moved with the deliberate awesome calm of a blind man, sobering all who stared upon him. He looked like the Shade of the boxing world. “I, who gave you great pleasures for years, now ask you to witness the costs of your pleasures,” he could as well have said. Then Trump standing beside him, was able to hear over the PA system, “New Jersey thanks you, Donald Trump.”
Spinks came into the ring wearing white trunks. He was a much-respected fighter. He has won thirty-two fights and lost none. He had been light-heavyweight champion and had moved up in weight to fight Larry Holmes, taking the heavyweight championship from Holmes by decision and keeping it in the return bout. He had knocked out Gerry Cooney in five rounds. He was an artfully awkward fighter who tried to never do the same thing twice, and he had been the underdog in many of his undefeated fights. He possessed a little of Ali’s magic–he found unorthodox ways to win. People who loved the gallant, the sly, and the innovative, liked Spinks. He invariably did a little better than expected. Tonight, however, he did not look happy. He was smiling too much. In fact, Spinks seemed distracted and relaxed at once. One had not seen that kind of separation from oneself since sitting next to Sonny Liston in a poker game the night before Liston’s second fight with Ali in Lewiston, Maine. Liston had been the relaxed man in the room. He had giggled equally whether he won or lost. The stakes were nickels and dimes, but Liston took great pleasure in peeking at his hole cards before each round of betting. It was easy to mistake such relaxation for confidence, yet the following night Liston was knocked out in one round by a punch that some are still insisting they never saw. It had not been relaxation that was witnessed at the poker game, but resignation.
So the sight of Spinks increased the pall. Spinks was giving a dry-mouthed smile. His nervousness was evident; worse, it was deep. Boxers can come into the ring keen with fear, or rendered sluggish by it, and Spinks did not look keen. It can well be an unendurable load to know for a hundred nights that one is going to face Mike Tyson at the end of them, Tyson with his thirty-four victories and no defeats, his power, his speed, his ongoing implacable offensive force.
Tyson, however, looked drawn. Not afraid, not worried, but used-up in one small part of himself, as if a problem still existed that he had not been able to solve. His expression suggested how hard it was to hold off murderous impulses for a long time. He was waiting for the bell.•
This 1978 NBC News promo is a real time warp. It’s anchored by the late Jessica Savitch, who was, fleetingly, the golden girl of broadcast journalism, and died young and mysteriously five years after this clip. Following the news brief are an American Express commercial featuring the great tennis player Virginia Wade and a promo for Headliners with David Frost, that show’s star being one of the biggest names in America after going mano-a-mano with disgraced former President Richard Nixon.
Swashbuckling Raiders ownerAl Davis just passed away. A person with tremendous capacity for both good and bad, Davis was one of the people most responsible for the NFL-AFL merger which created the modern NFL, even though he didn’t want his upstart AFL to merge with the more established league–he wanted to kick its ass. From a1981 People articleabout the take-no-prisoners football executive, who made the Raiders an outfit for social misfits, on the eve of his team winning Superbowl XV:
“No one kicks the hell out of Davis for long—his competitive instinct is too finely honed. According to an instructive popular myth, former San Diego Coach Harland Svare is said to have approached a light fixture in the visitors’ locker room at Oakland once, yelling, ‘Damn you, Al Davis, I know you’re up there.’ Asked later if he had indeed bugged the Chargers, Davis would say only, ‘The thing wasn’t in the light fixture, I’ll tell you that.’
Davis’ father, Lou, was a successful children’s clothing manufacturer who moved the family to the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn when Al was 5. Strictly second-string as an athlete, Davis had the time and inclination to contemplate strategy. After graduating from Syracuse (in English) in 1950, he became assistant football coach at Adelphi University, then took a series of college jobs before becoming an assistant with the Chargers in 1960.
When Davis joined the Raiders, they had won only one game the season before. The following year he led them to a 10-4 mark. Though he owns only 25 percent of the team’s stock and there are 14 other partners, nothing happens in the franchise without Al Davis’ approval. It was his decision to choose little-known punter Ray Guy in the first round of the 1973 college draft, and to pick a widely belittled defensive back named Lester Hayes in 1977. Both rewarded him by becoming All-Pro performers. Equally decisive in matters of style, Davis also selected the team’s distinctive colors, silver and black. ‘I used to be color-blind,’ he explains.”
••••••••••
Part of the dark side of those macho, lawless 1980s Raiders teams is that drug use was rampant and Lyle Alzado, John Matuszak and numerous others died young. Alzado believed that steroid abuse was behind the brain cancer that killed him at age 43 in 1992. Alzado gets his pump on in 1984 with the aid of a couple of gallons of milk:
ABC News from September 6, 1972, in the wake of the kidnapping and murder of numerous Israeli Olympic athletes by Black September terrorists at the Munich Games. Howard K. Smith at the anchor desk, with reports by young correspondents Peter Jennings and Ted Koppel.
Dan Snyder, the hapless owner of the Washington Redskins, dropped a lawsuit against the Washington City Paper earlier this month. He had originally claimed that a picture of himself with horns and a goatee in the manner of the devil, which ran with the article “The Cranky Redskins Fan’s Guide to Dan Snyder,” was a crude anti-Semitic slur. Snyder was rightly ridiculed for the suit, as the City Paper was clearly lampooning a terrible sports owner and intended nothing racist, and eventually he gave up the fight. One thing I haven’t read in response to his puzzling outrage (though others must have noted it) is that Snyder owns the American company with the single most racist name. If he owned the Washington Blackskins or Yellowskins, there is no way the NFL would allow such an outdated slur. But for some reason it’s permitted with the Redskins.
David Stern had a great run as NBA Commissioner in the ’80s and most of the ’90s, but he should have been replaced long ago. The record TV ratings that the league experienced last season came about only because players defied his wishes. Stern, somehow the last person to not see how free agency turned baseball from a sport of millions into one of billions as player movement sparked fan excitement and made the game a year-round attraction, has long tried to maneuver the rules to make it much more palatable for NBA stars to spend their whole careers with one team. The fans insisted they wanted this, though it’s not the job of the consumers to know what they want. However gracelessly Lebron brought his talents to South Beach, the superteam concept created a ratings renaissance yet unseen in the post-Jordan era. And that was no thanks to the commissioner. Now even that coup is being threatened because of a needless lockout being spearheaded by Stern and his disingenuous owner poverty campaign.
Over at Grantland, Malcolm Gladwell tears through the commissioner’s lies, explaining how the business of basketball is mostly not about he game itself but the real estate and media deals attached to the sport. In stating his case, Gladwell makes an interesting point about the recent history of American wealth disparity. An excerpt:
“One of the great forgotten facts about the United States is that not very long ago the wealthy weren’t all that wealthy. Up until the 1960s, the gap between rich and poor in the United States was relatively narrow. In fact, in that era marginal tax rates in the highest income bracket were in excess of 90 percent. For every dollar you made above $250,000, you gave the government 90 cents. Today — with good reason — we regard tax rates that high as punitive and economically self-defeating. It is worth noting, though, that in the social and political commentary of the 1950s and 1960s there is scant evidence of wealthy people complaining about their situation. They paid their taxes and went about their business. Perhaps they saw the logic of the government’s policy: There was a huge debt from World War II to be paid off, and interstates, public universities, and other public infrastructure projects to be built for the children of the baby boom. Or perhaps they were simply bashful. Wealth, after all, is as often the gift of good fortune as it is of design. For whatever reason, the wealthy of that era could have pushed for a world that more closely conformed to their self-interest and they chose not to. Today the wealthy have no such qualms. We have moved from a country of relative economic equality to a place where the gap between rich and poor is exceeded by only Singapore and Hong Kong. The rich have gone from being grateful for what they have to pushing for everything they can get. They have mastered the arts of whining and predation, without regard to logic or shame. In the end, this is the lesson of the NBA lockout. A man buys a basketball team as insurance on a real estate project, flips the franchise to a Russian billionaire when he wins the deal, and then — as both parties happily count their winnings — what lesson are we asked to draw? The players are greedy.”
As the foundering Boston Red Sox attempt to collapse across the finish line and win the American League Wild Card, Steve Wulf of ESPN profiles their genius owner, John Henry, who applied objective analysis in business before bringing it to big-market baseball. An excerpt:
“Henry loves facts — ‘I don’t read fiction’ — so here are some. He was an asthmatic farm boy who grew up worshipping a miner’s son named Stan Musial; a philosophy major who fell under the thrall of Indian individualist Jiddu Krishnamurti; a rock musician who shaved his eyebrows to play a space alien in a rock opera; a mathematical whiz who was banned from Las Vegas blackjack tables; a commodities trader who watched soybeans grow into a beanstalk that eventually yielded ownership of some of the most storied franchises in Major League Baseball, NASCAR (Roush Fenway Racing) and the Premier League (Liverpool FC). You have to make this stuff up.
But it’s not just Henry’s bio that makes him interesting. He’s a whole host of contradictions. He uses dispassionate analysis in pursuit of his own passions. He’s a serious thinker given to practical jokes, a shy fellow who counts Bill Clinton, Michael Douglas and Steven Tyler among his friends, an owner of a 164-foot yacht who will dash from the owner’s box above home plate at Fenway to the first-aid room to check on a fan who’s been hit by a foul ball. He may be a 62-year-old father of two girls (a 14-year-old and a 1-year-old), but he has never lost his own childlike sense of wonder.
He’s also the kind of person who politely declines personal interview requests, then spends hours thoughtfully responding to e-mail questions — at 12:32 a.m. To a query about the major influences in his life, he writes, quoting mythologist Joseph Campbell, ‘If you follow your bliss, you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you …’ That’s what led me into the financial world. I started John W. Henry & Company because I enjoyed applying mathematics to markets, and it was a profound challenge that resonated within me.”
••••••••••
John Henry enters the womb-like studio of wealthy workaholic, Charlie Rose:
Jack Paar and Liberace welcome Cassius Clay, who was known to sometimes be gassy. The future heavyweight champion (and future Muhammad Ali) was three months from his first bout with Sonny Liston. From a PBS Paar doc.
It’s amusing (in a sad way) that the biggest story from the NFL last week was that a couple of New York Giants faked injuries to disrupt The Rams’ hurry-up offense. It was a minor footnote blown up into a huge sensation and the sport’s biggest story, a parallel one, was all but ignored. And that’s because sports reporters are part of the same machinery as the NFL, more concerned with keeping the cash register humming than offering any rational analysis.
Last Sunday, quarterback Michael Vick received a concussion and bit his tongue so badly that he was spitting up blood on the field. QB Tony Romo was also seriously injured and this (approximate) sentence was uttered on the NFL Network on Tuesday: “It’s been learned that Romo suffered a collapsed lung as well as cracked ribs. It’s not sure if he will play on Monday.”
The question sports reporters are asking: Will Romo play this Monday? The question they should be asking: Whythe hell would Romo be playing this Monday? Why would he be playing a brutal car-crash sport just eight days after his lung–a vital organ–stopped working because it was so severely damaged in an on-the-field injury? I’m assuming a couple of talking heads asked these latter questions, but I guarantee they were in the vast minority. That’s because few people care about the players’ health and everyone cares about the violent diversion and, especially, the money. And, yes, Romo was just cleared to play this Monday.
I know there are other people in our society who risk their lives all the time, most notably members of the military, but the military is important and football is certainly not important. My assumption is this insane attitude will continue until a player dies on the field. Does anyone think that’s impossible?•
••••••••••
FromRollerball,1975: “You know how the game serves us. It has a definite social purpose.”
Muhammad Ali, long before anyone could imagine an African-American President, sagely suggested that a person of color will hold that office only once the job has become completely undesirable.
From “Ego,” the 1971 Norman Mailer Life article mentioned in the video:
Muhammad Ali begins with the most unsettling ego of all. Having commanded the stage, he never pretends to step back and relinquish his place to other actors–like a six-foot parrot, he keeps screaming at you that he is the center of the stage, ‘Come here, and get me, fool,’ he says. ‘You can’t, ’cause you don’t know who I am. You don’t know where I am. I’m human intelligence and you don’t even know if I’m good or evil.’ This has been his essential message to America all these years. It is intolerable to our American mentality that the figure who is probably most prominent to us after the President is simply not comprehensible, for he could be a demon or a saint. Or both!•
"There was no way for Ru to moderate his frenetic relentlessness. He pushed everything to the max." (Image by Tim Hipps.)
From frostbite to a broken neck to a plane crash to morbid obesity, Greco-Roman wrestler Rulon Gardner has famously cheated death so many times it’s difficult to remember that the farmboy scored one of the greatest upsets in Olympic history just a little more than a decade ago. From a 2007 GQ profile by Michael Paterniti:
“After defeating Karelin—in a match that became known as Miracle on the Mat—Ru appeared on Leno, Oprah, Letterman. He showed up at the Espy Awards and was photographed with Tiger Woods and Lara Flynn Boyle. He befriended heroes like Garth Brooks and Jason Giambi. He won the prestigious Sullivan Award, given to the country’s best amateur athlete. There were parades and city keys, more awards and gifts, including a waverunner from Rosie. He showed up in a ‘Got Milk?’ ad, hoisting buckets of milk while wearing a creamy white mustache. He went on tour, giving inspirational speeches to corporate clients willing to pay up to $15,000 a speech. He wrote his autobiography, titledNever Stop Pushing.
If he didn’t entirely believe his own legend yet, if he approached everyone as if he were still the old affectless Rulon Gardner, the farm boy from Star Valley seeking a little love and approval, he had seen through to a life beyond the Valley. And that life included proving he was no fluke by winning World Championships the following year and then preparing to defend his gold medal at the 2004 Games.
Where he once clandestinely sold the Cuban cigars he’d collected at an international meet in Havana in order to support himself, his new-won fame now turned on a spigot of income flow. His father had once lived over him, always on the verge of bankruptcy, and here he was, Rulon Gardner, a national treasure having made $250,000 the year after he won his gold—and the number was climbing. (‘He spent nine minutes on the mat with that ugly man from Russia,’ Reed Gardner jokingly told a reporter. ‘I spent fifty to sixty years on the farm, and I don’t have nothin’.’) So, he’d begun to accumulate toys, to live a grown-up version of the childhood he’d missed, with motorcycles and guns and a shiny snowmobile he took into the mountains near Star Valley. Of course there was no way for Ru to moderate his frenetic relentlessness. He pushed everything to the max.
Extreme snowmobiling can be as harrowing as any sport invented, man and machine against the mountain, finding aggressive routes up pitched faces, jumping rivers, riding into deep powder, and searching for perfect isolation. There are breakdowns and strandings, sudden submersions in icy water and the constant challenge of righting a 500-pound machine after having fallen chest-deep in snow—all in quest of some banana-cream vision out there through the trees, up on the ridge, gazing all those silver miles over Wyoming. In other words, it combines all the ingredients that make someone like Rulon Gardner tick: high-octane risk-taking, brute physicality, farm-boy ingenuity, nimble coordination, and conflict reduced to its simplest denominator, survival.
In February 2002, Ru went out snowmobiling with two friends in the Bridger-Teton National Forest, in Wyoming, thirty minutes from his home. They cruised the high peaks and winding valleys for a couple of hours until Ru peeled off, alone, into a gully of virgin snow near the head of the Salt River, ‘to play a little,’ as he put it. Shooshing down into the gully, he had no inkling that he wouldn’t be able to get out for seventeen hours. He was wearing a T-shirt, sweatshirt, and fleece pullover, having left his jacket behind. The sun had begun to dip in the sky; the temperature, which had been twenty-five degrees, began to plummet. Over the course of the next hours, Rulon tried to work his way out of the gully. His machine didn’t have the power necessary to take him back up the route he’d just dropped down. Worse, as he crisscrossed the Salt River in an increasing panic, occasionally submerging his sled, he found himself in a narrow gully where, ultimately, his machine became stuck between two boulders. During the journey, he had to repair a belt and fell four times into the river, soaking his clothes. (‘Once I got wet, I knew I had about an hour before frostbite and hypothermia,’ he said.) Finally, as night fell, he dug out a spot among the trees and waited for his own inevitable death. Sometime around 2 a.m., he heard the roar of snowmobiles, but then the sound faded. ‘I thought I was rescued,’ he said. ‘They came within 200 yards, and I was yelling, but they couldn’t hear me over their engines—and then they just turned away.’ He slipped in and out of consciousness, having visions: first of Jesus and then of his brother Ronald, who died at the age of 14 of a rare blood disease. (When his leg had to be amputated because of gangrene, Ronald said, ‘It’s okay, Dad, I can wrestle with one leg.’) Time crawled. What helped keep him alive was the thought of his family and friends finding him frozen there, a lifeless face with eyes open like Jack Nicholson in The Shining.
The next morning he was spotted by a search plane, and two hours later a helicopter landed, and he was able to crawl across the snow and climb in. His core body temperature had dropped into the 80s, and both his feet were so badly frostbit it would take four surgeries and three months before he could walk.” (Thanks TETW.)
Bill “Spaceman” Lee, a true countculture character who starred in the very button-down sport of baseball from 1969-1982, was an outspoken eccentric who bragged about sprinkling marijuana on his pancakes. In the years before he was blackballed from the sport, Lee was profiled in all his mad glory in a1978 Sports Illustrated articleby Curry Kirkpatrick. An excerpt:
“Much of Lee’s rambling over the years has been about such terrific subjects as pyramid power, zero population growth, the goodness of soyburgers, the badness of sugar, interplanetary creative Zen Buddhism and heavy, heavy, zapped-out karma. But Lee’s philosophy is more out of comic books—to be specific, The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers, which his 8-year-old son Michael shares with his dad—than Nietzsche or Vonnegut or even Paramahansa Yogananda…
The Boston-area public always has been divided along geographical as well as generational lines in its feelings toward Lee. In the blue-collar Irish bars of Southie, Lee was anathema after he defended Judge Arthur Garrity Jr., who ordered the desegregation of Boston schools by busing, as ‘the only guy in this town with any guts.’ On the other hand, the Spaceman was a prince to the city’s hip-liberal college population—largely based in Cambridge—which was thrilled by his outspoken lobbying for decriminalization of marijuana and his open defiance of pot laws.
The Red Sox were left in a quandary as to just what to do with Lee. Possibly the most straitlaced organization in all of pro sports, Boston was one of the first teams to impose a no-liquor rule on team flights and one of the last to dress out in form-fitting knit uniforms. In the matter of race, the Sox signed their first black player—Pumpsie Green—long after every other team in the majors had blacks. Even today only two U.S.-born blacks are on theRed Sox’ roster, Jim Rice and George Scott.
In Lee, team officials saw a flaming radical, junkballing journeyman lefthander with no fastball, no loyalty and no moral values. Yet they also saw a media hero who visited all the sick children, kept the sports talk shows in clover and drew crowds to Fenway Park.”
Umpiring baseball apparently comes with a degree of ethnic bias, as millions of pitch calls were analyzed and umpires displayed a persistent tendency to call pitches more favorably for members of their own ethnic group. Considering how few African-American baseball players there currently are and the lack of Latin American umpires, I wonder if that sample size had an effect on the study. An excerpt from an article on Ars Technica by John Timmer:
“Several studies have shown that sporting officials have a tendency to exhibit subtle biases in favor of members of their own ethnic group, So, an umpire that’s white might be expected to favor a white pitcher, giving him more favorable calls when pitches are at the edge of the strike zone. This sort of bias might be expected to be subtle, but the research has the sort of statistical power that comes from large numbers: a record of over 3.5 million pitches, and what their outcomes were. (Here, the authors turned to ESPN.com for a pitch-by-pitch record of the game to match up with their computer data.)
After eliminating things like foul balls, swinging strikes, and intentional balls, the authors still had a very impressive collection of data to work with: 1.9 million pitches in which the umpires made a decision. Then came the real drudge work. Using sources such as About.com and web searches, the authors pieced together the ethnic origins of all the major league players and umpires involved. And then they started crunching numbers. And what they found was a subtle bias that went away when the umpires thought someone was watching them.”
Alternet has an article by Tana Ganeva about creepy new uses for facial recognition technology. An excerpt:
“In the fall, police officers from 40 departments will hit the streets armed with the Mobile Offender Recognition and Information System (MORIS) device. The gadget, which attaches to an iPhone, can take an iris scan from 6 inches away, a measure of a person’s face from 5 feet away, or electronic fingerprints, according to Computer vision central. This biometric information can be matched to any database of pictures, including, potentially, one of the largest collections of tagged photos in existence: Facebook. The process is almost instant, so no time for a suspect to opt out of supplying law enforcement with a record of their biometric data.
Lee Tien of the Electronic Frontier Foundation told AlterNet that while it’s unclear how individual departments will use the technology, there are two obvious ways it tempts abuse. Since officers don’t have to haul in an unidentified suspect to get their fingerprints, they have more incentive to pull people over, increasing the likelihood of racial profiling. The second danger lurks in the creation and growth of personal information databases. Biometric information is basically worthless to law enforcement unless, for example, the pattern of someone’s iris can be run against a big database full of many people’s irises.”
Good piece by Jonathan Newton in the Washington Post about the arm operation known as Tommy John Surgery. The procedure, created by Dr. Frank Jobe, was first performed in 1974 on the pitcher for whom it was named. The article gets to the heart of just how experimental the ligament-reconstruction procedure was when John went under the knife, and explains what changes to the operation have reduced risk. An excerpt:
“When Jobe operated, he sliced John’s elbow wide open and moved the ulnar nerve in order to reach the bone. He took a tendon from a cadaver’s leg and attached it with screws. Then he hoped John’s body would react favorably and the tendon would serve the same role as the ligament.
‘We didn’t really know whether we could do it or not,’ Jobe said. ‘We didn’t know whether we could heal it or not. We didn’t know whether a tendon would be accepted by the body and receive blood supply and become part of the body.’
Jobe and John waited. John did not throw a ball again for 16 weeks. Jobe decided he should not pitch in a major league game again until one year of rigorous rehab. Every step of the way, the recovery unfolded as Jobe hoped. John returned in 1974, and in seven of the next eight seasons he threw more than 200 innings.
‘I would never have thought it would happen,’ Jobe said. ‘I didn’t do it again for another two years. After another year or so, I had a couple successes. I thought, This may be something we ought to use a little more routinely.”
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Elton John (no relation) performs at Dodger Stadium in 1975, the year Tommy John couldn’t pitch for L.A. as he recuperated from surgery:
