Ownership

Time to open up the crack pipe of connecting things that aren't sports to sports, folks. Buckle up.

Today in politics, President Obama proposed a salary cap on the financial industry. Their executives will have to make due on a half million dollars a year, so long as they are on the dole. (I'm not going to get into the merits or demerits of the move, so please save the frothing hatred of Wall Street Fat Cats and the Obama's A Commie comments... though I am highly amused by the idea that by capping their salaries, these firms might lose the oh so valuable talent that led us into this abyss, or that the Toxic Talent will be able to just walk to some other Safe Company, like those still exist, and make their old bank. Anyway, moving on.)

What interests me is the fact that sports teams -- and more than a few of them -- also take government dollars, usually at the local level for their stadium welfare construction projects, but also sometimes through luxury boxes and other goodies.

So, well, a precedent is set.

I've joked about this before, but if the Mets are taking Citi Dollars, and those Citi Dollars are coming from taxpayers, then the taxpayers deserve a say in how the Mets are run. I'm thinking they won't go to the $25 million a year price for Manny Ramirez.

Now that you've gotten your head in the realm of athlete salaries being capped by an outside force, and public sponsorship of what are supposed to be private, for profit enterprises... let's talk about organ donations and harvesting. (Yes, I know, we're a long way from dick jokes and titty here. There's a reason why this blog isn't popular, kids.)

Every year in this country and others, people who could have decades more to their lives die while waiting for a kidney, heart, or other relatively small piece to the human puzzle. Those lives wouldn't be lost in a society where donation is presumed, rather than chosen. Also, many of these people are highly educated, drawing high salaries, and providing a lot of value (read: tax income) to the shared burden that are nation states.

Which, of course, leads you to the rather unfortunate specter of individual people -- which is to say, um, you and me -- being viewed as a resource late in life, rather than the 100% focus of continuing care. (Or not so late in life when we go to The Nazi Place, which is where all long-winded blog posts eventually go.) Which, absent any complete body religious needs, is the great fear of being selfless at the close; the idea that, dammit, I should be able to own *something* in this world. My skin.

(For the record, I'm an organ donor. Moving on.)

Let's pull this back around to sports. What is an athlete who plays hurt when they don't want to, really, but a man or woman who is not in full ownership of their body? And, since you and I have a small stake in who wears the laundry, given that our tickets and gear purchases make up a portion of their salary... is there something, well, less than emancipated about all of that?

I realize this is all disjointed and not nearly Sport Enough, but here's the takeaway: we all like to think that we all have Some Control, and for the most part, we do. But in the greater scope of things, assuming you draw a paycheck for something other than fun (or have dependents, or pay taxes, or have friends rather than minions), that control is far from absolute.

Tomorrow morning, I'm going to be on a train and a subway, no matter how cold it is, or how little sleep I get from staying up late on this little foray into the void. The amount that I make from that is more or less capped by the market and this economy, regardless of performance; even if I have an absolute genius day/week/month/year, my salary is going to look a lot like what it does now. And the same goes, of course, for athletes, with the only difference is that there's a lot more air in that balloon, and a very big grain of salt as to whether the enterprise fails if you bring in someone else at replacement level.

So, in summation... our next stop in the economic spiral is a salary rollback for top paid players from teams (and maybe even leagues) failing. Hard to see people not cutting back on ticket purchases in a bad economy, folks. (Note: Super Bowl tickets went down from $800 to $500 this time around, though some of that probably was just that only one team had fans that would travel.)

And a hard cap on how much any one player can make. Just like in the real world beyond sports.

Your accusations of socialism are welcome in the comments...

The Point

(Feel free to play the video while you read this. And fire up.)



Something I used to do a lot on this here blog (you can, as Yogi says, look it up) is go off on esoteric rants inspired by things that no self-respecting sports fan would read, or at least admit to.

Eventually, I'll tie it all back to sports in some faltering way that would make a pot-smoking undergrad wince, and causes my religious friends to chuckle sadly in the knowledge that they won't have to put up with me in the better next place.

And now that 90% of you have had your eyes glaze over and look for the scroll bar, let's get into it, shall we?

In a recent piece in the London Review of Books, a writer worked over some philosophical constructs in an effort to explain something small and inconsequential; ergo, why the world exists. (He eventually came to the same conclusion that I do in this post, but since you don't read the London Review of Books, you'll just have to suffer with my mangling of it. Ha ha!)

Accepting the belief in a higher power, and hence, the disqualification of the emotionally unsatisfying Random Chance Accident, you get two motivations.

1) Because it had to (determinism, fate, destiny), and

2) Because someone wanted it (free will)

Now, determinism is a relatively simple argument to make, or at least it was when I took intro philosophy in college some 20 (aii!) years ago.

Ergo, that if you simply know enough about the creator and its thought processes, you can predict everything said creator will do.

Let's reduce this from The World and Its Creator to This Blog and Little Ol' Me for a moment, to make things easier to understand. Now, if you punch in all of my vitals into a computer, you would get that I read learned nonsense, run out of things to say about the NFL on Tuesday morning, feel compelled to fill the bloghole, am too far away from the start of the NBA season to go there, and am waiting for the White Sox and Twins to work out the last playoff spot before writing up MLB playoff picks.

You could predict (did?) that I'd write something like this today, and if you knew my reading materials yesterday, might even have guessed the subject matter. I'm a fairly simple piece of meat, and predicting my performance shouldn't be too difficult, provided, of course, that I don't get wind of what you are doing. That would give me the heebie-jeebies, and I'd probably react with a tangent that made no sense to throw the prediction off the path.

Tony Kornheiser eats puppies.

Which, of course, you could also predict, in that Tony Kornheiser really does eat puppies.

But let's escape that rabbit hole of Pot Logic for now, and put determinism on the back burner as, once again, Emotionally Unsatisfying.

Back to option 2, free will. The preferred option for all of us, really, in that it makes us all much more interesting pieces of meat, and for deities alike, since a determinist Creator doesn't seem like any kind of fun at parties. (There are, of course, philosophical arguments against the existence of free will, but they are made by people with scraggly beards who make no money and are no fun in the sack, especially the women. So we're sticking with Free Will.)

So the world -- and this blog, and the eventual crux of this post, which is Your Team Fandom -- exists not from something pre-ordained, or even the long-ago child abuse of a parent who indoctrinated you in the ways of That Laundry.

It exists because you chose it, and continue to choose it, even if you are not aware of the choice. (Just *try* to Geddy Lee out of your head now. I dare you.)

And now, to the thrilling climax... why choose, of all things, to make a world, or root for That Laundry?

It's a mess, complicated, never seems like it will pay off with the goods. Even when it does seem to work out, you know it's just going to break your heart later. The fear of losing is much greater than the joy of winning, after all. And the nonstop praying! It's enough to make you stop watching and go read a philosophy book instead. (OK, maybe not.)

And well, that's it. It's art.

Art is something that lives for its own sake, maddening or not. It can't be explained fully, or even usually very well, but simply experienced. Its motivations are inherently private, and yet shared across consciousness, in a way that makes us all a little more aware that We Are Not Alone. Do it long enough, and it becomes a vice, in that it's mostly a diversion in a life filled with things to divert you.

So, final question time... if sports fandom is, just like life, an art... are you taking joy in your creation? Or are you torturing yourself and others with it?

If the answer is yes, signify your joy or misery by making no sign or comment.

(...)

Thy will be done.

Blogger's Night Out

Tonight, I'm going to a confab of sports bloggers in an NYC watering hole. It'll be my second event in four days (third in five, if you count poker) where I'm face to face with people who also contribute to my online life as a sports blogger. When I'm there, I'll do what I always do in a quasi-work environment: put on my best fake smile and slowly convince myself that Networking Is Enjoyable, that I've got something in common with other people who write for fun, and that, gosh darn it, there's at least ten other things that I should be doing for this here blog to make it more successful, in addition to, well, filling the wordhole.

Realistically, the best of those things would be to find a previously untapped video of a skateboarder lighting themselves on fire, particularly if they have nice breasts.

What's going on out here in Blogfrica, for those of you that care about such things (which is to say, well, the people I've seen three times in the last five days), is that we're slowly taking over for offline print media types. Hey, we might as well... it's not like the press boxes are going to be torn down at all of these stadiums, and with your local newspaper reacting to a declining market share by giving you less and/or charging you more, it's not like those people are going to be coming back with a vengeance. The CPMs (that's advertising talk for the rate that we make from the number of eyeballs that we display to) keep creeping up, and the demographics favor us, in that no one who is settling down at a college dorm right now is finding five new media sources by flipping through the periodicals at the library.

So what's next? Well, it'll consolidate. Anonymity will be replaced by named writers. Coarse opinions and naughty words will fade into the lesser known sites, or be confined to a few notable exceptions. Bloggers will be slowly corrupted by the soft touch of public relations and insider access. How, after all, can you savage the team when it might cost you the private box and one-on-one interview that set your site apart from the great unvetted? And within three to five years (remember, Net time is faster than real time), we'll be reading more and more like what's always been out there, for good and for ill, only with no editors and for less money. It's not like the World Wide Lemur holds the copyright on compromising for a bigger market.

So why go, especially when the siren call of someone else paying for the liquor isn't that big of a deal for me? (I'm remarkably stupid that way.) Well, hell, they asked me. They seem nice and all. Hanging out with sports bloggers is, by definition, hanging out with opinionated sports fans with more than a touch of wit about them. Maybe I'll get some ideas to fill the bloghole (hey, like this!), people for my poker table, or my upcoming NBA auction fantasy league. All in all, possible goals.

You may note the absence of one very real and tangible goal from this that list that many other people have: making a living from blogging. I don't have that one, because I gave up unrealistic dreams of employment when I stopped having a rock band. (Oh, and also because I actually do write for fun.)

Besides, if you do this for a living, you either have to find fiery skateboarders or go to lots of private boxes and hold your tongue. Neither of which I'm very good at, really.

Which means that life at the Tool will continue as it has to know, with the fake name, the access that anyone with cable can duplicate, and the audience that is dwarfed by titty and death. Game on!

Going Out On Bottom

Something is troubling me, folks, in regards to the recent rash of Favre and Strahan and Clemens (i.e., the end of career issue player), and that is this: at what point did Going Out On Top become the be-all and end-all of every well-publicized athletic career?

Being a nerd from way back, the first that I remember reading about this was the legendary Browns of Otto Graham's era, the ones from the first great threat to the NFL in terms of a rival league. Graham was the best quarterback of his era, and he retired at the end of a great run of Browns championships. (You see, there is value in pre-Lombardi NFL history: by knowing it, you can write phrases like "great run of Browns championships" without flinching or giggling.) Ever since, we get this from any number of quasi-important players.

As an Eagles fan, I dream of a championship. If it should happen this year, should Brian Dawkins retire? Well, of course; he's close to the end anyway, and last year was borderline ugly at times, with him really not performing to his level. Fine, then, B-Dawk gets to go out on top. How about Donovan McNabb? Well, no... in that if there is an Eagles championship, you'd have to think that he was a main cause of it, and you'd like to see the team be as good the next year. Or Brian Westbrook? He'd be 30 then, and wouldn't it be better if he could... You see the point. At some level, going out on top just means a much nastier word, a word that no one wants to embrace. Quitting.

Consider your own career for a second, in relation to the anointed. Are you going to be able to retire on top? My guess is, well, no. You'll retire somewhere in the great uncharted middle that is most cubicle life, assuming that the whole endeavour isn't farmed out to Bangladesh, and it will be. After that, you'll consult and cobble until you can manage something else. That's because for us, our career is very closely tuned to our lives, unlike professional athletes.

Everyone is, on some level, what they do and what they think. Pro athlete is attractive as a career profession and as a role model, because (for the most part) what they think is positive; if you don't think you are going to succeed and win, you aren't going to make it to the top level, even as a loser.

This is also why it smacks of artifice (at best) when an athlete picks their time to go, rather than just, you know, do the work and let someone else make that determination. No one else in our society makes their own determination to quit: the most celebrated entertainers never bail out despite innumerable threats, and it's rare that you see a celebrated CEO leave on anything but his shield. Media moguls like Rupert Murdoch and Sumner Redstone cling to the jobs until they are no more; so do, for the most part, Supreme Court justices.

There's really only two classes of people that try to game the system and be above every other monkey with a tax bill to pay... athletes and lottery winners.

And this is yet another reason why it's OK to hate on both.

(Ed. Note: Strahan, probably in the absence of what he'd consider to be meaningful cash, decides to stay in a Grecian beach and/or the Fox television studios in LA. Hey, maybe the Giants can coax Tiki Barber back to rush the passer instead...)

Your Dystopia Is Now

Here's your off-topic rant of the week. This time, it's nearly free of politics!

When I'm not wallowing in blogger bucks, I make my bread in online advertising, and have for this whole damn century. (Translation: I'm 150 years old.) During that time, I've seen, and occasionally done, dumb things. It's what direct marketers do. Innovate, execute, test, lather, rinse, repeat. I love what I do.

What I can complain about, however, is how it's perceived. And that's as follows: we're all unethical greedheads who want to rule the world (muhahahahee! Standards, as Doctor Horrible would say) with our creepy crawly methods that allow us to cyberstalk you (Yes, YOU) into an Orwellian dystopia.

Now, rolling this back for a brief moment into sports... let's imagine, for a moment, that you do what I do (advertising, that is, and not that other, profoundly disturbing, thing), and you have advertise an at-home beer making product. (Insert a Homer Simpson noise here.)

You think you want to reach me, in that I'm a Guy With A House In A Decent Zip Code Of A Certain Age And Income Who Entertains, because my demographic indexes are off the charts to match the kinds of people who buy your stuff.

You might, if you had the means, cold-call me at home, fill my mailbox with flyers, and buy time on my television set, perhaps during NFL football games. You could easily spend your entire marketing budget to try to reach me and others like me.

Except for one tiny little problem.

I don't like the taste of beer very much, so I drink other stuff. So I'm never going to buy your product.

The problem is that cyberstalking doesn't actually work. It rankles and distracts, rather than creating a positive experience for your mind to associate with the product that's trying to be sold. (You can and should create a different message to audiences that are targeted, but that's a whole 'nother story.)

However, if you can simply show your ads to an audience base where all of the non-buyers have been screened out, um, that works. Like gangbusters.

Now, step back from that hypothetical and think, for just a moment, about the stuff that you see ads for. I'm betting that most of the people reading this can recite several tampon manufacturers, despite not having the plumbing to ever purchase that product. Others that can't really imagine themselves taking penis pills can also rattle off several brands. Still more that wouldn't ever take a cruise vacation. Or drive a Hummer, even if gas wasn't $5 a gallon.

Non-targeted, irrelevant, annoying and pointless advertising makes up so much of what we see, we spend money to avoid it (DVRs), keep ourselves out of phone books, change land lines to cell phones, maintain multiple e-mail addresses, and use Internet browsers that block and filter and focus to try to keep our minds on relevant tracks.

Meanwhile, the advertising that drives a lot of the economy (for good or ill) get increasingly "out of the box" to try to reach us anyway, with stunt PR stuff, content that's much more about how clever the ad is than any reason why you'd actually buy the product, and increasingly obvious and noxious product placement moves during content.

Oh, and they also bring more of all of that, because when something doesn't work as well as it used to, you have to do more of it. (And we're back to the penis pills.)

So when a company -- someone you haven't heard of before, because their business model is a business to business play, rather than a business to consumer one -- tries to put together the pieces that would make advertising more relevant, that's somehow Going Too Far.

The idea that my clickstream or my past keyword searches could be used not to make the current dystopia even worse, but to actually find a way to fix an increasingly inefficient and broken system... well, dear God in heaven, that's something we can't have.

That's a "Minority Report" intrusion on our precious, precious privacy (the sames ones, by the way, that we're more than willing to toss into a dumpster when the fear media tells us to, but that's another story).

And that is, not to put too fine a point on it, bullshit.

What we live in, in regards to the current amount of ads that we see, is not sustainable. And things that are not sustainable have a way of changing. Maybe with great grumbling and heartache, and maybe with less than you'd imagine. But the change comes anyway.

Oh, and one final thing... everything that an overly paranoid consumer would find objectionable from a behaviorally marketing company is already being done, but not by people who are straightforward enough to admit it's their core business.

(Who? Um, the companies who use register tape information at the supermarkets, data from car toll transponders, GPS and DVR providers, and Google, who also accesses e-mails, blog posts and much, much more. Google, by the way, hosts this site. Here's hoping that I didn't just get on their deny service list again...)

Shame

Where there is no shame, there is no honor. - African proverb

This will, hopefully, be the last time I get political for a while here. The site's traffic can barely stand it. Y'all have been warned.

Last night, I finally got my hands on this week's New Yorker with Barack and Michelle Obama dressed in their right-wing Lie Show regalia. It's not really going to make me cancel my subscription (so long as they keep from hiring the inexplicably employed Gregg Easterbrook), but I'd like to address some of the kerfluffle that has ensued from it.

The cover has entered into a larger media narrative, namely that people are having a hard time making fun of this candidate. I'm not sure you were aware of this, but it seems that the job of the President is now to be the source of inexhaustible comedy fuel. If the Commander-in-Chief doesn't provide us with exceptional laughs (either through relentless character flaws, an intelligence gap that you could drive a Hummer through, possible senility, etc.), this makes he or she Unlikable.

(An aside -- I'm not sure where John McCain Is Old is exactly breaking great comedy ground. But far be it for me to be a hack throwing stones...)

One wonders, really, how much of this has been true of other post-catastrophic leaders in world political history. Were the Germans, Italians and Japanese in the late '40s annoyed with their governments for not being as easy to mock as their predecessors? Do the Cambodians sit back and reminisce about the chuckles they had with that wacky Pol Pot? Can we find some old-school Russians to talk about how funny the Stalin purges were?

I'm guessing... no.

Ah, but there I go again (Reagan voice off), living life outside of a media bubble that refuses to admit the following truths in print and in public.

To wit:

1) The mocked left-wing celebrity opposition to the war in Iraq was not only the correct public policy, but now the overwhelming majority viewpoint in America.

It was never a fringe view, despite the best efforts of the media to portray it as such; even in the most frenzied War Is Fun And Easy days, two out of five Americans didn't support this. It's now closer to 4 out of 5, which makes it right up there with dentists who prefer that their patients chew sugarless gum. And can someone, for the love of God, revoke the license of the fifth dentist? He's a sadist.

2) The only reason that Barack Obama is the Democratic nominee, and the only Democrat who is in line to win a majority of votes in a Presidential election in 32 years, is because Hillary Clinton voted the wrong way on Iraq.

Which makes her, as far as I can tell, the first person in America to lose a job over this terrible decision. Of course, since she didn't have the job in the first place, you can probably argue the semantics.

3) The standard of living among average Americans -- you know, the folks for whom the actions of the President are more than a junior high school level game of Jocks, Nerds and Cool Kids -- has gone down dramatically under the Bush Administration. Mostly for the reason that they are paying two to three times more then they used to on transportation and heat, as a direct result of... the war in Iraq.

So no, it's not the case where people don't care about the war. They care about it because, despite no real amount of media linkage, they have gotten the wacky idea -- substantially less wacky that Iraq had no relation to 9/11 -- that one of the reasons why they're getting killed at the pump is because we destabilized the region that produces oil. They care about it because they can, actually, understand what happens to an economy that spends more than it takes in, because that describes their situation at home, too. Which is what we do every damn day of the year, as a government, and we all make up (or, at the very least, fund) that.

And that's why Obama is competitive in places like Montana, North Dakota, Virginia, Alaska, Idaho, Indiana -- i.e., places where a Democratic presidential contender hasn't won in so long, they haven't even tried. Despite the idea that Scary Screaming Black Men and Secret Muslims are coming to exchange Terrorist Fist Pumps after they take away your gun and set fire to the flag. (To all of my older relatives and their e-mail chains... now, really. How do they find the time to do all of that? You've got to give it up for their fiendish work ethic.)

But let's get back to the Shame.

Some of the people I work with like to tell me about the latest South Park episodes. It's something that appeals to them, and truth be told, it used to work for me, too. Good writing is good writing, and you put up with a lot for it. (Witness your tolerance of posts like this one.)

Me, I can't watch it anymore, because of what it represents -- which is to say, art without a conscience. Humor without shame. An antidote to honor. Not to put too fine a point on it, but Evil.

You see, Mssrs. Stone and Parker led the anti-war backlash with their noxious puppet movie, and the ethos that you are leaving some humor money on the table when you don't attack both sides. Besides, those uncool kids that opposed the war made for such better and easier targets. I mean, Janeane Garofalo is shrill and all, and well past the point (if she ever was there) of fuel for self-play. So have at it, gentlemen! Chant "No Blood For Oil" some more. That's good and funny! It might even be more high-larious at a soldier's funeral. Go nuts.

There's only one problem with this, and with the New Yorker "satire" cover... and that is this. Laughing at the victims of serious crime doesn't feel very good. It nags at the root of a healthy conscience.

Do it enough, and it eats away at any human instinct towards thinking that any single person among us -- even, say, brilliant scientific minds who must be concocting global warming tales for their great god Socialism, political leaders who actually see their occupation for more than Grand Theft Government, public health professionals who are genuinely motivated by a desire to ease human suffering, rather than ensure moral-free copulation and abortions for all, etc., etc. -- are not, at their core, base and craven.

It mocks hope, and tells us that anyone who speaks of such a mockable thing is humorless or naive at best, and a secret terrorist and more at worst. It demeans the listener and the teller. It causes real damage to the human spirit.

And if you don't believe me, please go find someone at a house fire, funeral home, or hospital emergency room, and give them a good Nelson Muntz-style "Ha Ha." See how that works out for you.

So in conclusion... no, the cover is not funny, ironic, or in any way worthwhile. Anyone that tells you that it is starts and ends at Wrong. It's also not important that the President should be easily mocked, someone you can imagine having a beer with, or Just Like You at your most petty and limited.

In fact, it's more than OK to want the person with an incredibly more difficult and demanding job than yours to be, well, better and smarter than you. In fact, we should probably demand it.

And if that makes for a world in which people who make us laugh for a living have to, you know, work a little harder to get it done, and maybe push the utterly delusional media into finding these better targets? That's no tragedy. Start with the oil company executives. Move on to the CEOs of the Fortune 500. Spend all day on actors and musicians and writers and performers. I can figure this out, and I'm just a guy with a blogging hobby.

In short, adapt. The same way that, well, the rest of the country has. Preferably without puling over how those pukey Obama kids are ruining your whole fun by realizing that who the President is does matter, and that when political -- and dare I dream it, media -- figures are wrong, they should lose their jobs.

Preferably, with speed. Even more preferably, with lasting historical scorn and whenever appropriate, prison time.

Where, one presumes, some small moment of Shame might happen. There I go, Hoping Again...

Flatus Drop: Hell In A Handbasket

Two really regrettable crowd moments from my week, shared with the Flatus Yahu blog that goes more for the Workin' Blue part of the world. Go take a good long pull. You'll feel better, even if you make other people feel queasy...

Kobe's Airbrushing

There was a story in the New Yorker this week that got some play in the marketing and advertising fields in which I toil, and like too many things, I'm seeing a correlation to sports. It was a profile of a graphics professional who uses digital tools to enhance imagery in celebrity photos, and how the Dove "Real Women" campaign had also benefited from his touch. (That's why it got play outside of the magazine, of course.)

And it struck me how this is exactly what's been happening with your Most Valuable Player of the Association, Kobe Bryant.

Now, my Kobe Hate is longstanding. It started with watching him, as a young player, non-shoot his team to a sweep against the Jazz, when it looked for all the world like he'd rather work on his distance shooting than, you know, win a game. It continued with his fake Good Guy era in the early days of the Shaq time in LA, capped off by the dismantling of the AI Sixers. When the Colorado charges came out, I wasn't shocked; he had seemed like a bad guy all along, so seeing it in public wasn't shocking. (With the Sprite "Obey Your Thirst" campaign out at the time, it was pretty damned funny.) After he ran Shaq, he's spent years putting up numbers and disappearing when it mattered, with the biggest El Foldo being a Game 7 versus Phoenix where he couldn't even be bothered with taking shots in the second half.

So we all knew who and what he was, and what the Lakers were -- a low seed, relatively easy first round out, and a tribute to himself. By the numbers, he could be an MVP, but basketball is more than raw numbers, and he was never really a serious candidate for the award.

Ten months ago, Bryant upped the ante with some of the worst teammate behavior in history, with a trade-me love-me freakout for the ages. When the season actually began, the sense that the Lake Show had to move him for pennies on the dollar was overwhelming... but then a funny thing happened. Andrew Bynum was good. The bench was even better. When Bynum got hurt, they lucked into a lopsided deal for Pau Gasol. So Kobe not only decided to play, he even decided to include his teammates.

And for that, he got the MVP. I can't remember a faster or more artificial PR turnaround.

I was listening to people talking about the MVP debate last week, and one of the yammerheads actually seemed a little surprised by the idea that Bryant might still have a PR problem from the Colorado incident. Maybe it's just because I'm, you know, a father of daughters, and hence, I recognize Bryant for what he is -- the living, breathing definition of the kind of guy that will ruin your kid's life and faith in humanity -- but, um, yes.

Is this an unfair standard for Bryant? Lots of MVPs haven't been very nice people. When Iverson had his issues with the Philadelphia police, it was a first-class media circus, and to this day, I'm sure that most casual fans think Iverson's a worse guy than Bryant. Maybe if the laundry had been changed, and Kobe had three rings with my team, I'd think the same way about him.

But I'd like to think that I'm smarter than that, even if the MVP voters, marketing people, and all of the chuckleheads now wearing Bryant MVP t-shirts aren't. Bryant is a great player; even when his shot isn't falling, he brings a lot of intensity on the defensive end, and his will to win is right up there with Jordan at his prime. He's also a diva, an adulterer, an anal rapist (allegedly), and someone who will throw his teammates not just under a bus, but then push that bus off a cliff... and that's true for when they lose, or if they dare to outshine him.

If that's your definition of value, or a guy whose merch you want to wear, so be it. Me, I'll choose to remember him before the airbrushing.

Top 10 Questions for My Train Station Preacher

10. Why does your concern for our souls going into Hell strongly correlate to dry weather?

9. If someone were to walk over to the other side of the platform and deliver an address on the unlikelihood of finding salvation from a random person delivering a canned speech, would you be able to practice true Christian forgivenes?

8. Really, you're here to save us from the eternal pit -- why so angry?

7. How screwed, really, are the people who drive or take the bus to work?

6. Is there a special circle of Hell for people who would rather not start the day with screaming?

5. Are preachers who work in actual buildings, in your opinion, sellouts?

4. Can your love for us only manifest itself from a safe distance, where no one can, say, toss you onto the track?

3. If Cleanliness is next to Godliness, should I be concerned about the veracity of your teachings?

2. Is it a coincidence that your appearances seem to increase with the coming of the Presidential election?

1. Are you sure that Hell isn't just a place where my train never comes, and you and I can never leave?

Public Space

Maybe this is just something that I missed in the 7 years that I spent on the West Coast, where you live in your car and don't really have as much contact with people in the population-dense trains, stations and streets... but, um, since when did the world decide there was no such thing as public space?

Yesterday on the train, as the commuters enjoy the peace and quiet that you find on the newer double-deckers.. and yup, it's a cell phone conversation that we all got to listen to, as the frankly bitchy manager-commuter expressed her disappointment as her subordinate called in sick. I'm pretty sure that I speak for all of the other people on the train when I fervently hoped that the person on the other end of the line was interviewing somewhere else, and reaming her manager. Actually, I'm pretty sure we were all rooting for in that job interview. Or for that person to not Mind The Gap while getting off the train later...

And then again in the evening, listening to a douchebag recount every single detail in his life and his commute and his financial transactions... well, in a few years when you read how a short bitter sports blogger went haywrire and left a string of corpses on the train, you'll know why. But I'm so glad that your house closing went well, Ferret Faced Princeton Junction Guy. And the entire 40 minute conversation was riveting, especially the five to ten lulls where you said, "Uhhh.... anything else..." That was magical.

(The obvious solution, of course, is just to whip out my own cell phone and have a loud and imaginary conversation where I talk about how I'm surrounded by jerks on the train, and that I'll have to call that person back, because I'm in a public space and don't want my fellow passengers to think I'm a complete asswipe... but in this as in many things, I don't have the stones.)

I'm not entirely unsympathetic to the plight of the person taking an urgent call. I've been that person, usually for consulting gigs. But, um, when that happens, you cup your hand over the receiver, you hunker down to block the sound, and you try to end the call, you know, quickly.

Or, even better yet, train your contacts to IM you, and text them back. Either is vastly preferable to treating the rest of us to your sad little life, of which We Don't Care. Since when did casual rudeness become acceptable, just because you've got technology and an inflated sense of your own self-importance?

Can't Everybody Stop...

and wonder how much someone at the World Wide Lemur hates the guy to let this leak? (Caution: NSFW dialogue.)

Epic Drop: To Save The NFL Season, We Need Another Hurricane

Sharp-eyed readers will notice a certain resemblance to an infamous recent editorial by Stu Bykofsky of the Philadelphia Daily News. Having had the, um, pleasure of actually meeting Bykofsky once upon a time, I can tell you that he fulfills all of the pre-conceived notions of what a hacky journo is like... and that while he used to write kvetchy gossip columns for the PDN, he's now clearly moved on to artless agitprop.

Anyway, go read the piece and then come on back. I'm going to try to clear through a bunch of stuff today.

Sports Fans, We're Older Than We've Ever Been

So the other day, The Shooter Eldest, who is now 7, was down in the Man Space trying to fathom football... but the tone to the questions gave her away; her heart really isn't in it. Or the baseball games I've taken her to, or the basketball games that are occasionally on as well. She likes going places, spending time with me, gets what fantasy leagues are, and knows who Dad's favorite teams are. She's also smart enough to give me space when things aren't going well. But actual interest in the game? Not so much.

Independent of my questionable parenting skills, I'm wondering if there isn't something more widespread going on here. When the Ninja comes over to watch games with his kids, none of them are showing a great deal of interest in the game, either -- even the eldest, who has a fantasy team in a Dads and Kids league that the Ninja runs. The grown-ups are reacting to plays, yelling at the television, giving fist pumps and high fives... and the kids are either looking on bemused, or finding something else to do.

And that's the gist -- they're finding other things to do, and they're going to keep doing that. In the next 20 to 30 years, these kids are not going to have the same sense of overwhelming urge to root for their team. Some will, of course, but others will keep it at arms distance with video games, social networks on the Web, music and, um, porn too, since they'll be teens and grown ups with all of the usual stuff going on.

Watching sports is a habit, possibly even a vice. It feels like more than that, because it's a shared and communal experience that acts as social glue; the biggest meathead in Philadelphia and I can get through five minutes of not completely awful conversation if we just keep it to Da Iggles.

But if you had given me the same access to everything the world had to offer, via the Web, as a teenager... well howdy, I was online during the 300 baud dial-up modem days when doing so meant that I was always on the phone, driving up my mom's bills and really annoying the rest of the family, and all for the joy of text messaging on bulletin boards in a slower and less exciting version of CB radio.

So what does this all mean? That the seemingly perpetual explosion of interest in sports has a real and definite end date, at least in the US. That the ads you see will start creeping upward in age, from college-age beer and car ads to middle-aged prescriptions and financial services. And that leagues will, as the demographic numbers start looking less robust, will start to truly embarrassing and regrettable Youth Outreach efforts at the ballpark.

Wifi? You betcha. Team-mandated MySpace pages for every player? Oh yes. Wince-inducing "rap" sessions where the youths are magically transformed into football fans forever through the simple touch of a messianic quarterback?



To the point where you can parody it, but yes, yes, yes...

Choice

Forgive me, FTT Nation, for the following bit of non-sports. I promise it'll route back to something you might care about in a little while.

Yesterday, the Shooter Family was out for the day to do a couple of different things, the first being to find a replacement dog for the Shooter Eldest. As you'd expect in finding a puppy, we didn't want to just get the first available mutt; there was a lot of consideration of breeds, condition, price, and how the newest member of the family was going to interact with the kids. (We eventually found one, and no, there won't be pictures. It's a nice animal and all, but it's a little girl's puppy, and I get enough grief from my Toolmates as is for being a big damned girl.)

As we were looking, the Shooter Wife pointed out that if we didn't find the right animal today, we could always go out again -- and I interrupted -- next Saturday. "Why not tomorrow?" "Um, sorry, the game's on."

Because I have the kind of spouse that enables rather than denies, she just rolled her eyes and moved on. But it's telling, really.In the last few weeks, I've reconnected with an old friend that lives several hundred miles away. In different circumstances, I could have been in the car this weekend. It was a beautiful day outside; I could have done the yard work and the garage clearing and the basement shuffling that needs to get done at some point. Hell, I've got an outline for the next book to write, a business project that really should get off the ground, and there's always more to do at my job. I could just spend time with my kids; I like doing that, too. There are, simply, a lot of things that I could be doing with my Sunday, rather than watch an 0-2 team try to save their season.

But, of course, I was in front of my set, as I have been for over 30 years, watching my team play, as if my viewing has any actual impact on the games (or, for that matter, my 1-2 fantasy team). And since the Birds put up touchdowns on their first five possessions, with Kevin Curtis setting a career high in the first quarter, with the Shooter Mom here to root it all on, it all seemed worth it. But the end result was the same as when they lose; time out of life, and whether or not you feel good about the payment is up to you.

The point, if there is one, is that the things that you do in life that are habit and routine need to be chosen from time to time, rather than just done. I wonder, on some level, just how often some of my fellow Eagles Fans (you know, the ones that were jumping off buildings before today's game) choose to watch, rather than just do it.

For The Love Of God, Talk About The Freaking Game

So there's a minute or so left in the Eagles Redskins game on Monday night. Despite a third quarter intervention from the great, but not particularly relevant, Charles Barkley, I've been down with the efforts of the MNF crew. Ron Jaworski has shown me some stuff I wouldn't have noticed otherwise, Mike Tirico has been matter of fact and OK, and while I still have no real use for Tony Kornheiser, he's miles ahead of where he was last year with Joe Theismann and Mike Patrick, when the announcers actually made me watch fewer games. They're chatting about stuff other than the game, which annoys me, but the game is kind of dull. It happens.

But then Kornheiser starts making my teeth grind -- and he's doing it in a classic, endemic way that has become so ingrained in sports broadcasts practice, I bet most of you reading this didn't even notice.

"Wow, this would be such a great win for the Redskins."

OK, fine, and true -- I know Skins Fans, and they are legitimately excited by their team. For once against the Eagles, their quarterback situation seemed equal or better; if I rooted for that team, I'd be pumped too. Meanwhile, McNabb is starting to find his rhythm and the Eagles offense is looking a little frisky. Anyone want to point out why for me?

Game continues, and now it's starting to creep in more and more... the disease of Announcer Is No Longer At The Game.

"How long until McNabb leaves?"

Um, probably when the clock hits 0:00, unless there's overtime. Same as everyone else, really, unless the ambulance or the aliens come for him. (The later with the probing, he's probably used to, given the fun of dealing with the Philly media. Ever been in a room with Bill Conlin and Howard Eskin? Not even light can escape the douche baggery. But I digress.)

Now, I can understand -- very begrudingly understand -- the need to add Narrative to a game. I get that we all add stories to fact, that we all live in the world of our choosing, and that the race to What's Next is true for all humans.

But, um, THERE'S A MINUTE LEFT IN A ONE POSSESSION GAME, and the Eagles are driving. What you are saying... could be said in the six DAYS until the next week's slate of games. So, for the love of the moment and actually feeling some honest amount of excitement over the outcome of a game and all of the other reasons why people, you know, eat or have sex or drink or go to movies or read or ENJOY LIFE ON THE PLANET... can you please, pretty please, pay attention to the freaking game?

If you took this same approach to the other things in life that you take sensory pleasure from, you'd be an irredeemable twerp, insufferable in the extreme, and seem like you're suffering from some kind of psychological affliction. In broadcast sports -- you're a sharp. A guy in the know. An expert. A noted pundit.

And an insufferable twerp. TALK ABOUT THE FREAKING GAME THAT'S IN FRONT OF YOU!

Sports Blogosphere Bounty

Over the weekend, there was a blogger fight over at the group place where I hang, Epic Carnival. (You may know them for the quick hitter list work I do there five days a week, which gets a link every morning.) The gist of the slap fight was that a couple of guys who write "edgy" where bent because the publisher made the executive decision to not allow profanity, so he could better monetize the site for advertising. So they wrote a series of posts where they more or less tried to get canned, and then they got canned, and wrote about that, too.

I don't much care to discuss the choices being made. Instead, I wanted to hit the double standard that's present when you work on controversial topics.

Here at FTT, we did something similar when we added ads on the site, and considering that the site had maybe a dozen uses of profanity in the first 350+ posts, it really wasn't a terribly hard sacrifice to make. Frankly, you get more people bent at you when you make a joke in borderline or questionable taste, or you wave a stick at a particularly rabid hornet's nest of partisan fans, then when you work blue.

Something struck me as I waded into the timewaste (because, no matter how you slice it, nothing about one blogger arguing with another blogger has a thing to do with sports) -- if you want to go for edgy / extreme / "real" and antisocial stuff in your blog, there isn't anybody stopping you. You might lose your advertisers (really, at this level, not such a big deal in the short run), and also get blowhards getting on a soap box about you and your awful, awful mind. But really, it's all about whether or not you've got the chops to work without a net.

This blog is unabashed in its manlove for Big Daddy Drew, the first among equals at Kissing Suzy Kolber. BDD's small email of encouragement, along with the kind words of a few others, kept us going in the "Is Anyone Out There" stage. Today, he wrote a remarkable piece where he was offering up a bounty on Tom Brady's knees. Tasteless? Of course. Morally objectionable? Definitely. Something he may regret if, next week, Brady goes down with a gruesome injury? Well, probably not -- BDD has thick skin, and his hatred of Bill Simmons is so great right now, I'm amazed he didn't offer up the $20 to anyone who'd take out Billy's typing fingers.

Was what BDD wrote more tasteless than what the guys who are no longer with Epic Carnival wrote? Probably not, but only by a matter of degree. But since BDD is, simply, a better writer, he's one of the best-read writers in the sports blogosphere, and if KSK took ads, he'd probably be making reasonable coin from his stuff.

Because, independent of what was written, the plain and simple fact is that BDD's piece is freaking funny. It reads well, rips through the paragraphs and ends when it should, rather than overstaying the welcome. In the hands of a lesser writer, the idea would've been a big Eh, So What. With BDD, it's something I'm forwarding to friends and hype in this here blog. The other guys? Not so much. (And if they take this as a reason to have another blog to war with, well, whatever. I haven't taken their bait before.)

And that's it a nutshell. Life isn't fair, because talent is not evenly distributed. Good writers can take more chances, and will. Charismatic people can get away with more questionable taste. And if you're in the position of looking up at someone else, getting bent, and thinking it's not fair.. you really need to work on your craft some more. Or just learn to live with it.

Epic Drop: Top 10 Masshole Excuses for PatriotGate

The list is here, but I'd also like to take a moment to throw something out there for everyone who, like me, keeps reading Bill Simmons under the Can't Stop Touching The Bad Tooth school of thought.

In the latest incident of You Can Predict Every Word Before You Read It, our favorite punching bag puts out the idea that Media Saturation is what causes everyone to hate on various teams (especially his favorites). I always love being told why I think things, don't you?

For the record... I don't hate the Patriots. I don't hate the Red Sox. Or the Yankees, the Colts, the Mets, the Giants, the Cowboys, the Redskins... and I haven't for a very long time.

A big part of this is fantasy sports. Once you've crossed the Rubicon of hard numbers for dollars and acquired the gambler's callousness (and let's face facts, fantasy sports *is* gambling -- just a less serious version of it, with plenty of levels between you and the pathetic no lifers at the dog track), you really do lose the ability to hate guys.

If my football leagues had all adopted a strict No Terrell Owens policy, I'd draft him more or less where he was slotted in my rankings, and take the dirty money. I've owned Barry Bonds, Manny Ramirez and a great many disagreeable others from teams that have ruined my team's dreams; it's not that big of a deal. If his team wins and beats mine, that really sucks, but it's not like I've got a dartboard in my basement with every team that ever took out mine in the playoffs.

No, what I've come to hate now are the actual fans.

The Masshole, with his bipolar insufferable arrogance / melodrama. The Yankee Fan, who seems to punctuate every disagreement with a call to violence or Ring Taunt. Cub Fan, who is just a championship away from being as bad as the Massholes. Giants Fan, with his painful to watch justifications for the Bonds Problem. And, yes, even my own fellow Philly Fans, who can't appreciate anything, even as they watch generally competitive teams, in brand new stadiums, with significant money to spend on their own athletes and free agents, and a not inconsiderable amount of success / watchable teams.

To all of you -- every single last one -- I have this time-honored advice.

Get On A Plane. Then, get off it, and don't get back on for a while.

Discover what it's like to not be in the warm cocoon of your hometown bubble. See a game from another venue without being part of an obnoxious army of invaders. Develop, for even just small moments, the perspective of having different problems than the ones you currently have. (And if the plane isn't feasible, just turn off your radio and your local Web sites and go spend some time in someone else's cyberhood.)

You'll find that life out here, beyond Red Sox Nation and the Yankee Empire and whatever other marketing slogan you've come up with to embrace groupthink douchebaggery, is actually kinda nice.

And it might also let you call a cheater a cheater -- regardless of the laundry on his back.

FTT Makes You Humble

Let us all now bask in the wit and wisdom of old-time wrestling heel the Iron Sheik. Not Safe For Work, Children, Or Your Ass.



When I am old and playing fantasy leagues, I'm so copying his act. (I may also have to wait until he's dead, to be safe.)

Worst Snapple Fact Ever

From my cap this morning:

"Panama is the only place in the world where you can see the sun rise in the Atlantic, and set in the Pacific."

Tierra del Fuego, bitches.

Who's up for a class action lawsuit?