The Captain (Right, Chick?)
Of all the players acknowledged as the greatest in basketball history, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar is the most underrated. Six times NBA MVP, six NBA championships (with two different teams), three NCAA titles in three years, and yet, he is almost ignored. Basketball fans are still arguing about Wilt and Russell, sad I know, yet where's Kareem?
My old pal Bob Ryan is partially responsible. Bob hated Kareem's game on aesthetic grounds and wrote that opinion early and often (he was not alone among hoop scribes). Because Bob was and is a Hall of Fame writer of enormous and deserved influence, the anti-Abdul-Jabbar attitude became an established strain of basketball establishment opinion (Where are the rebounds!!). It was like getting dissed by Voltaire in 18th century France.
Abdul-Jabbar was the distilled essence of the center position. He appeared to have an unfair physical advantage, he used it to perfection, and, best/worst of all, his advantage wasn't enough to make sure his team won. Human beings being what they are, people didn't say "wow, that proves basketball is a marvelous game;" they said, "my dad says you only try during the playoffs."
Let me echo Roger Murdock. Abdul-Jabbar tried all the time. The 1985 NBA Finals ought to be proof of that. And if the purpose of sports is to give pleasure, then what offers more austere pleasure than his sky hook, which is to basketball what Mondrian is to painting.
As for personality, well, Abdul-Jabbar taught the ultimate white bread genius, John Wooden, that genius came in other flavors. That had to take some force of character. Quite a lot, I'd say.
Kareem told the world he was sick today. The world, at least my world, is pulling for him. Celtics fans should be trying to elbow Lakers fans out of the line of well-wishers.
It's only right.
A Choice Not an Echo, or, The Failure of Media Deregulation
At approximately 3:30 p.m., the Michael Felger and Tony Massarotti program on WBZ-FM featured Bill Simmons discussing his feud with Glenn Ordway.
A quick flick of the radio to WEEI-AM revealed that at that same moment, Glenn Ordway was discussing his feud with Bill Simmons. Sports talk about sports talk about sports talkers. If "metaidiocy" wasn't a word before this afternoon, it is now.
Ordway and Simmons are highly successful media personalities and have the knack for self-promotion that goes with that territory (that's no knock, it's a necessary skill for their business). Fake feuds have a long and almost honorable history in show business hype. Ordinarily, I'd be inclined to shrug off this pointless war of easily bruised egos as just another day's work by two guys who are hardcore marketers.
But I can't shake the feeling they mean it. Ordway and Simmons have hurt each other's feelings. If true, that's too bad. But why drag innocent sports fans who only want to hear about Jason Varitek's option year into it? It's always the children who suffer in these fights.
Or rather, it's always the children who have them.
World Series, Part 2: The Victors
Philadelphia sports fans are taught from a very early age to despise all other teams -- and their own, too. So Yankee-hating has always seemed weird to me.
I can understand why Red Sox fans hate the Yanks. They are rivals for the same prize each year. I can see why Mets hate the Yanks. Being a perennial number two in the same racket in the same town can blot the sunshine out of life. Take it from a former Herald employee.
But everyone else? I don't get why fans in someplace like Seattle or Houston would be a professional Yankee-hater. I know those folks have existed since the 1920s, and some of it has to do with our nation's extremely conflicted feelings about money, power, and our largest city, so as an American Studies major I understand. As a sports follower, I don't. You root for teams you play to fail, but if they're not on the schedule, who cares about them?
When it comes to individual Yankees, the hatred makes even less sense. Who could possibly dislike Hideki Matsui, or Jorge Posada, or Mariano Rivera? (Not even the most zealous Sox fans dislike Mo, although they all fear him). It isn't Derek Jeter's fault Tim McCarver likes him so much. A-Rod is the most neurotic superstar of our time, and people razz him mostly because they know it bothers him. That is legitimate fan gamesmanship. It doesn't change the reality of his greatness as a player.
Successful team/athlete hatred exists in all sports (except golf and tennis. Must be a WASP thing). The simplest and best way to see its stupidity is to look at it from the other side of the telescope. Patriots fans complain, and rightly so, about the cardboard cutout stereotype of Bill Belichick held by fans and media from other markets. They should switch to the Red Sox fan side of their brain and examine their A-Rod opinions. It's possible those are caricatures of reality as well.
Pressed to the wall, your Yankee hater will say that his primary objection to the franchise is how it "buys championships." The Yankees commit the cardinal sin of exploiting their inherent economic advantages to win. It's not fair.
No, it's not. It's not fair that New York City has more of the good things of life such as arts, restaurants, centers of learning, etc. than your town just because it's bigger, either. But anyone who complained about that would be regarded as a first-degree crank. Why should sports be different?
(Red Sox fans, who root for a team that is second to none in the ruthless monetizing of that love, should be pelted with rotten fruit if THEY complain about the Yankees spending habits.)
Of all the Yankee-haters, there is no greater poseur than the twit who says he hates the team for socioeconomic reasons; the old "rooting for the Yankees is like rooting for U.S. Steel" idea first posited in the Great Depression. It was bullshit then, and it's bullshit now. Let me tell you a story about that.
In the spring and summer of 1987, I had the most unusual sportswriting gig of my life. I was Yankee beat writer for the "Village Voice." At that time, the giant figures of American leftist political journalism who had helped found the Voice were still at the paper, people like Jack Newfield and Nat Hentoff.
And almost all of them were sick Yankees fans!! These men, whom I grew up admiring to the max, sought me out to discuss the Yanks, which was flattering if bizarre. It was also hilarious. This citadel of rebellion against the American status quo rooted for the ballclub that exemplifies the status quo.
Of course, ideology had nothing to do with. The lefty Yankee fans were fans for the same reason almost everyone is -- it's how they were brought up. Which brings me back to my opening paragraph.
I hated seeing the Yankees win the Series. But that hatred had nothing to do with them. The Yankees don't suck. Losing does.
World Series, Part I: The Vanquished
There's no strength or will here to give the Phillies a hometown boo. They didn't earn one. Sometimes, losing is just a no-fault bummer.
The Phillies had three excellent chances to seize control of the World Series against the Yankees; at the start of Game Two, when they took a 3-0 lead in Game Three, and when they tied up Game Four in the bottom of the eighth. They couldn't take advantage of any of 'em. Playing uphill is no way to beat that opponent.
It is part of the grandeur and misery of postseason baseball that any weakness a team had in the regular season will inevitably reveal itself at the worst possible -- usually fatal -- moment in the playoffs. It even happened to New York, when Joe Girardi's lust for overmanaging cost them a win against the Angels.
The Phillies' weaknesses in 2009 were, in order of appearance, Cole Hamels and Brad Lidge. They each had a shot to be a Series hero, and were goats instead. This is sad, but hardly surprising.
Analyzing my feelings about the Series today, I was surprised at my relative lack of them. Oh, I was disappointed last night, and this morning, but my predominant sentiment was a kind of washed out blur of blah. I think it's baseball overdose. The playoffs are so long, if a fan commits to them, he or she is going to experience far too many highs and lows to keep them all straight. It takes a whole heap of energy to get twisted up over the failure of what one knows damn well is a 10,000 to 1 shot at a comeback. Better to surrender to the void when Hideki Matsui shoves you into it.
Besides, too much sorrow would be an unseemly memorial for the 2009 Phils. Bitching that the defending World Series champion only returned to the Series and couldn't win again is the kind of behavior that ought to get one thrown out of the better class of barrooms. Then there's this: by any rational analysis, the Phillies shouldn't even have made the playoffs in the first place.
Hamels and Lidge were the primary reasons the Phillies won the championship in 2008. They both pretty much sucked all year. Here is a team that could not depend on its number one starter or its closer from Opening Day on. And it made the World Series anyway. SOMEBODY, make that about 23 other somebodies, on the roster must've played his/their asses off.
And so they did, from start to flawed finish (it's hard to hit 11 home runs in six games and lose 4 of them, but the Phillies did). They were an admirable ballclub. I'm glad I spent almost my free time since October 1 admiring them.
S%*#-Stirring: A Primer
It is one of the duties of a professional opinionizer, in whatever medium, to occasionally piss off their audience. A commentator who fails to have at least a few provocative opinions is not doing his or her job properly, just as a commentator who's never glaringly wrong is also playing it too safe to justify their paycheck.
But journalistic ethics apply to opinions as much they do to the presentation of facts. There's a right and wrong way to send the audience's blood pressure up to 220/140. Boiling it down to a song title, you gotta be sincere.
Commentators have to believe in their comments. The opinion being expressed must be an honest expression of belief. It's EASY to make people mad, especially sports fans. Making up ideas to do so is wrong on a number of levels, not least the most basic moral level. People who get a charge out of irritating others are jackasses nobody wants to be around. There are commentators who do exactly that, not just in sports, and some of them are rich and famous, too. I wouldn't be them for all their riches. It's not my idea of fun, or life.
Upon review, the two columns I wrote at the Herald that angered the most people stand up to that test. When I wrote in 1991 that the Celtics, were they to avoid a long period of failure, needed to break up their team by trading Larry Bird, I acknowledged this would never happen. That's fair. And I believed with all my heart they had to break up the '80s team or face a decade in the wilderness. Older and in some ways more aware, I have a better understanding of how impossible that was for the team's management. History, however, has partially absolved me.
Now where I was flat wrong. In the latter stages of the 2003 NFL season, I posited that the Patriots needed to end their long winning streak in the regular season, because otherwise they would do so in the playoffs, as it was impossible for any team in our time to win 15 straight games. Boy, people hated that one! I was surprised, actually.
The Pats made me eat my belief and more power to 'em (although I looked dangerously close to being right in the fourth quarter of Super Bowl XXXVIII). But while I was wrong, I wasn't dissembling. My opinion, as stated, reflected my true beliefs and interpretation of the facts at the time. That's honest provocation. Dumb maybe, but fair to the angered audience.
Since I kicked the snot out of him last week, it gives me pleasure to come to the defense of my former colleague Tony Massarotti this morning. Tony wrote a column for Boston.com that has pissed off Boston fans more than I ever did. He stated that Red Sox fans should root for the Yankees in the World Series. A New York title would shame Sox management out of complacency and spur on the franchise to new heights of free-spending genius in the offseason.
From my vantage point, Tony is about as wrong as he can be in his underlying charge against the Sox. I saw no evidence of organizational torpor in the 2009 season. The acquisition of Victor Martinez is enough evidence to find a directed verdict of "not guilty." The problems the Sox had this year were not exactly of their own making. In the regular season, the Yankees were better than they were. In the playoffs, the Angels were considerably better than the Sox. As they say at West Point, the enemy has a vote.
But I listened carefully to Tony's defense of his opinion this week during his and Michael Felger's radio show (well, I did for 15 minutes stuck in traffic on 128 one afternoon. Then I put in a Smokey Robinson CD). He meant it. His defense of his misbegotten opinion rang completely true, mainly because it got more coherent and detailed the more he was challenged. People who just throw an opinion out there haven't usually put enough thought into the idea to defend it by any means except repeating it.
Massarotti's audience should feel free to disagree with him as vigorously as they wish. I just did. But as a reforming s@#!-stirrer, I advise the audience that Mazz stirred in accordance with the standards of that odd profession.
Bye Week Self-Scouting
NFL players and coaches love the bye week, for understandable if quite different reasons (time off vs. more time to plan and fret). Writers, at least in my time, were more ambivalent. On the one hand, there's less hanging around football stadiums. On the other, just because nothing's happening with your team doesn't mean you get to stop writing about it.
Astute and compassionate readers should not complain if the Patriots' articles in their daily papers seem like pretty thin gruel today, tomorrow, and Monday. It actually is quite a literary accomplishment to make stone soup taste as good as thin gruel.
Bloggers, especially lazy ones like me, have the option of simply ignoring football during the bye week. But I guess those years of listening to Bill Belichick and other workaholic coaches made more of an impact on me than I'm sure they suspected. As dutifully as any first-year assistant to the assistant quality control coach, yours truly will use the bye to go over game tapes (past posts) and see where I stand.
Since it is me doing this, the review process will not be a lengthy one.
Before the 2009 NFL season began, I forecast its outcome in the following descending order of probability: 1. Patriots win Super Bowl. 2. Steelers win Super Bowl. 3. Some NFC team wins Super Bowl in big upset. How has roughly the first half of the season affected that prediction.
Short answer: Hardly at all -- yet.
Both the Patriots and Steelers are 5-2, and their losses may be attributed to natural phenomena. In Pittsburgh's case, it was the loss of Troy Polamalu to an injury. He's back, and we may regard the Steelers' win over the Vikings as more indicative of their status than their losses to the Bears and Bengals.
The Pats played VERY poorly on offense in the second half of their road losses to the Jets and Broncos. This almost certainly was due to the natural and expected adjustment process Tom Brady faced returning after missing an entire season with an injury. Coming back from much less injury down time threw Peyton Manning off for about half a season in 2008. He seems to have bounced back nicely. Anyone who doesn't think Brady has is on the same path is the kind of person I like to find when gambling.
No, the only possible reasons I find to doubt my forecast have nothing to do with the teams I named in it. So far, the Colts have been a much better team than I expected. The Saints have been much, much, much better.
By a happy coincidence, the Patriots will play both teams in the near future, on the road yet. Unless New England loses both games by 17 points or so, I abide by my predictions with serene confidence.
OK, almost serene.
I Contain Multitudes -- Very Silly Multitudes
Gosh, I love America. Just this afternoon, going to a well-known retail chain to buy a leaf-blower, I saw the following Christmas ornament for sale -- an inflatable Santa doll the size of a pony. No biggie, huh? Check this. Santa had somehow bumped Jimmie Johnson and was waving maniacally from behind the wheel of the number 48 Hendricks Brothers Lowe's Chevrolet.
I'd get one, but I don't want the sudden deaths of the entire membership of the Lexington Historical Society on my conscience.
But wait, it gets better! I turn on ESPN and there's a segment on one of their features shows on Ron Artest's new life as a member of the Lakers. You'll be happy to know that since he's arrived in LA, Ron has decided to become involved in mentoring -- as a mentor.
Hanging out here and there, Ron has struck up an acquaintance with a younger celebrity in need of guidance. He's taken Lindsay Lohan under his wing, giving her the benefit of his experience in how to bounce back from the occasional life mistake.
What happens when SportsCenter meets TMZ. Probably America's Most Wanted.
We'll Fill Those $5000 seats next season on Bat Day!
The perfect gift for the Yankee fan who lives in the imagination of Yankee-haters everywhere is now available.
For the 2009 World Series, Steuben Crystal has created replica baseball bats of the finest crystal, artistically engraved with the Yankee logo. Price: A mere $9500.
Steuben has bats engraved with the Phillies logo, too, but I don't imagine they'll sell too well once Philly fans discover it is VERY hard to turn Steuben crystal into a jagged-edge weapon with which to settle sports arguments.
The Human Rain Delay in a Nice Suit
If the commissioner of baseball did not exist, the Onion would have had to invent him.
After yet another blown call by an ump in Game Five of the ALCS last Thursday night, Ken Rosenthal of Fox Sports reported that Bud Selig remains adamantly and unalterably opposed to the use instant replay because, and I assume this is a direct quote, "baseball is a game that can't stand interminable delays."
Bud, as nice a guy as you'd ever want to watch a game with, is not high on self-awareness. The fifth game of the ALCS took place after a day off following game four inserted in the schedule by major league baseball, that is, by commissioner Bud Selig. The World Series will start on Wednesday, October 28 and end sometime in November due to decisions made by himself as well. And lest we forget, Selig's main contribution to the 2008 playoffs was to invent the 50 hour rain delay during Game Five of the World Series.
What Selig MEANT to say, of course, was "baseball can't stand delays that television doesn't order us to make." The fact that even distinguished veteran umpires like Tim McClelland are simply melting down in a bizarre mass slump is not a problem, so it doesn't a solution, even if that solution is simple, readily available, and would create far fewer delays than the postseason custom of sending pitching coaches to the mound every time a runner reaches base.
Baseball is perfect. That is baseball's official position on itself and has been so since before Bud Selig was born. All major sports are arrogant, but give the NFL and NASCAR credit. They're willing to tinker with their rules, rightly or wrongly, in the belief that even their splendid selves are capable of self-improvement. Hell, the membership of Augusta National is more capable of looking itself in the mirror than is major league baseball -- at least so far as putting on the Masters is concerned.
All baseball commissioners get paid the big bucks to be front men for the sport's sublimely stupid faith that when it comes to sweating in funny costumes, it is the Chosen One. Bud's JOB is to make an ass of himself in public. Knowing that, I always feel somewhat ambivalent when I ridicule Selig.
Not enough to stop doing it, though.
