Category Archives: Sports

F-Bomb defiance

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The last two movies my wife and I have watched have been exactly the same movie, except that one of them was terrible and the other was really awfully good.  In the new Red Dawn (which we Netflixed because my wife has a crush on Chris Hemsworth), a rag-tag group of American insurgents fight against terrible odds against the technologically superior forces of the (snicker) North Koreans.  In Oblivion, a rag-tag group of American insurgents fight against terrible odds against the technologically superior forces of Melissa Leo (or, you know, space aliens using Melissa Leo’s voice and presence).

Oblivion‘s better than that.  I thought it was one of the better sci-fi action flicks that I’ve seen in awhile.  It was thoughtful and smart and although afflicted by massive plot holes and leaps in logic, you don’t really notice them much while you’re watching it.  Tom Cruise may be a loon, but he’s a fine actor, and looks great, and it made for a very satisfying night at the movies.

But, here’s the point I want to make, and it requires a pretty massive spoiler alert, so if you haven’t seen Oblivion, stop reading and go see the movie and then get back to me, but there’s a moment in both movies I want to talk about. Both movies are rated PG-13.  Both, therefore, get one F-bomb to play with.  And both drop their F-bomb at an identical moment in the plot.

In Red Dawn (the plot for which I’m also going to ruin for you, but I feel less bad about it, ’cause, get real, it’s not like you’re going to see the durn thing), the bad guy is Captain Cho, who the technologically superior (snicker) North Koreans have put in charge of their invading forces in Portland, where the movie’s set.  (Cho is played by Will Yun Lee, who is from, like, Arlington Virginia.  Hey, it’s a gig).  And of course, he has to have a final big fight scene with Chris Hemsworth.  And at the climactic moment of the fight, Hemsworth gets to drop his F-bomb. “F-you,” he says, or something similar.  So okay, in Oblivion, same thing–final confrontation with Melissa Leo, and what does Tom Cruise say?  Same thing, right before he destroys the Death Star. 

I found it interesting.  The same thing happens in Stephen King’s The Stand, where our rag-tag bunch of patriots have it out with the baddies in Vegas; same last line.  And while I can’t remember which movies it’s in, I know I’ve seen it other places as well.

It’s interesting how the F-word, once essentially a verb suggesting a kind of violent sexuality, has now become a word suggesting plucky defiance, a cheeky response to oppression.  Of course, the F- word has lots of other meanings–it’s plenty versatile, as taboo words tend to become.  But of course meaning depends on context, and in the context of PG-13 action films, it’s a positive thing. Sort of uniquely American, even.  As we patriotically give the figurative finger to our oppressors.

Of course, that’s also sort of a silly stance for us to take, given that we Americans possess the greatest military the world has ever seen, with military expenditures taking up a preposterously huge part of our budget, despite the fact that like the next twenty countries in terms of military expenditures are also allies.  In what sense is America a nation of underdogs?  We’re much more bullies than bullied.

And to give Red Dawn its due, that point does get mentioned.  Chris Hemsworth is an Iraq war veteran, and he says to his high-school-aged-army ‘in Iraq, we were the occupying force, and the insurgents were fighting us–here, we have to fight like the mujaheddin, we’re the bad guys, we have to fight a guerrilla war.’  Red Dawn does plug into what we might describe as a kind of Tea Party/conservative/Christian right paranoia, in which traditional American values are endangered, and we few patriots are left to fight the encroaching forces of, whatever, Kenyan socialism.  That stance, of course, is as ridiculous as the idea that the North Koreans could conquer Portland because of their (snicker) technological superiority. But whatever.  Why begrudge Tea Partiers their own action movie?

But we like underdogs.  Nobody wants to root for the Yankees; we prefer the plucky underdog Red Sox.  We loathe the Lakers–go Jazz!  We liked Rocky over Apollo, the Karate Kid over his tormentors, Hickory High over all those big-time schools in Hoosiers. Right now, the NBA playoffs are going on, and although I like basketball, I can’t get that interested; Miami has the best team and the best player, and they’re going to win.  It’s depressing.  So, in their first game against the Bulls (who had, like, their best four players out with injuries), when Joachim Noah, the Bulls emotional leader said ‘F-you’ to Lebron James (caught on camera; you couldn’t hear him say it, but it was clear enough), I got . . . interested in the series. And the Bulls won .  . . one game. And lost the next four. The race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, saith the Preacher in Ecclesiastes, but generally that’s the way to bet.  And we know that, we know that powerful forces usually do actually win over less powerful ones, no matter how gritty and endearingly courageous the underdogs might be.  None of that really matters.  In reality, the rich beat the poor, big beats little, corporations usually do win.  Which is why we like movies (fantasies) where the opposite happens.  And why movie-makers go to fantastic lengths to make sure the heroes are underdogs, even when it doesn’t actually make sense.

There’s a terrific ‘F-you’ TV commercial on right now.  This skinny little kid, with the world’s awesomest Mom, is bullied by kids who steal his football.  But our skinny hero happens to know a kid weightlifter, a kid welder, a kid bear wrestler (!), a kid fire-fighter.  And the final line of the commercial, “touch or. .  .” “Tackle!” is the F-you moment.  Heck, yes, we’ll play you for the ball.  By the way, our right tackle wrestles bears.

And yes, I know some people find the F-word offensive.  I get that.  And yes, there’s absolutely a morality of language.  The Ten Commandments forbid ‘taking the Lord’s name in vain.’  A sin of language.  Or ‘bearing false witness.’ A sin of language.  But those sins are also sins of context, as must be the case with anything involving language, where we’re always invoking, reflecting, creating culture. I’m a playwright, and if my characters need to drop an F-bomb, I write it. And don’t feel like I’ve thereby sinned.

And sometimes, when facing implacable institutions, all-powerful bureaucracies, entrenched enemies with their castles and their moats, the F word is a battle cry, a shout of courageous defiance.  My grandmother was fond of a poem, which she turned into a needle-point sampler: “it may not be classic, it might be profane, but we mortals have need of it, time and again. And you’ll find you’re recover from life’s greatest slam, if you never say ‘die,’ say ‘damn.’”  As language has shifted and changed from her day, we might rewrite it as follows: ‘when you find that you need all your grit, all your pluck, never say die, say. . . . ‘

 

 

Jason Collins

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Yesterday, Jason Collins of the Washington Wizards came out.  He therefore becomes the first active male professional American major team sports athlete out as openly gay.

All those modifiers are necessary, because there have certainly been other prominent gay athletes.  Martina Navratilova and Billie Jean King in tennis.  Greg Louganis, the Olympic diver.  Sheryl Swoopes in women’s professional basketball.  John Amaechi, in the NBA, and Dave Kopay and Kwame Harris, of the NFL, all came out after they retired, as did Billy Bean in baseball and, most recently, Robbie Rogers, an English premiere league soccer player.

What makes Jason Collins unique, therefore, is that he’s still an active player, a current male team sport athlete who still has to deal with whatever issues a pro locker room brings. All that icky showering and so on.  So, another milestone passed, another bridge crossed. And pretty uneventfully, in this case.  Since his coming-out article came out yesterday in Sports Illustrated, he’s received overwhelming Twitter support, including heartfelt and enthusiastic congratulations from Kobe Bryant and Magic Johnson, from Steve Nash (“Maximum support!), from NBA commissioner David Stern (“proud you assumed the leadership mantle on this very important issue”, from Bill Clinton and Michelle Obama, from fellow player (irony alert) Rudy Gay, and from RuPaul (“I’m still gayer than you!”).

All his former coaches weighed in positively.  Kevin Love and Metta World Peace (the NBA needs a guy named Understanding), tweeted their support.  Current players with Collins’ back; basically a Who’s Who of stars: Dwayne Wade and Al Horford, Paul Pierce and Baron Davis, dozens more.  There have been, so far that I know, zero negative responses from NBA players, past or present.  Collins says that if anyone says anything privately, he’ll deliver an elbow and a hard pick and then let it go.  There are basketball ways to deal with homophobia.

To me, it’s interesting that it’s Jason Collins.  Richard Greenberg wrote a terrific play ten years ago about this scenario. Take Me Out is about a baseball player coming out.  Saw it on Broadway and liked it immensely, while still quibbling over plot points.  In Greenberg’s play, the ballplayer, Darren Lemming, is a superstar; he was thought to have been based on Derek Jeter.  (Uh, after Minka Kelly, Hannah Davis, Jessica Biel et. al., no, I don’t think Derek Jeter’s gay.) Take Me Out opened on Broadway at a time when there were rumors about Mike Piazza, who probably isn’t either.  Point is, Jeter and Piazza are both first ballot Hall-of-Famers. Greenberg’s point is that to do something like come out, a player would need the protection of genuine athletic greatness.  No one’s going to hassle Derek Jeter.

That was then, this is now.  Jason Collins is hardly a star.  He’s a journeyman career backup center.

Here’s his profile: graduated from Stanford, with his identical twin, Jarron Collins. Both brothers are seven feet tall; neither would have a career if they weren’t.  Basketball is a sport that rewards height, and a seven-footer can play professionally without being particularly athletic.  Jarron Collins played for the Jazz, and both Collins brothers fit the same profile–they’re not very quick or fast or strong, and aren’t great jumpers.  So take a guy who is very tall, but not much of an athlete, a disciplined and intelligent man.  Well, he can learn how to shoot–shooting’s just muscle memory, just takes practice.  Both Collinses can hit a fifteen foot jumper.  Jason Collins can get good rebounding position, and he can set a pick or screen.  He can’t block shots, despite his size (he can’t jump), but he can hold his position and take a charging foul.  He’s not a good one-on-one defender (not quick enough), but will battle the other team’s center, using his size. He plays, in other words, an inelegant style of basketball, not pretty, but in a limited role, effective.  Make Jason Collins your starting center, and you’re not likely a good team, but bring him off the bench and play him 12-15 minutes a night, and he can help you.  My point is, that’s not really the profile I would have suspected for the first out ballplayer.  And yet, it really is exactly the same profile John Amaechi had–and Amaechi came out within a couple of years of retiring from basketball.  Don’t know what to make of that, probably nothing.  Just this: so far, at least, superstars haven’t been the ones to out themselves.  Maybe they feel like they have too much to lose.

I assume Collins likes basketball.  But as an intelligent, articulate, disciplined guy, with a degree from Stanford, he could have pursued a number of careers. Pro basketball pays the best. Ten years in the NBA will allow him the financial independence to do literally anything he wants to do with his life.  And he’s only 34 years old, a young man, with a bright future.

His announcement is interesting in other respects.  He’s an identical twin, and very close to his brother, Jarron, but Jarron’s straight and was apparently completely taken by surprise by Jason’s announcement.  Their Mom, though, wasn’t surprised by it; said she’d always known.

For those arguing that being gay is or isn’t biologically determined, the Collins brothers would seem to complicate the issue or confirm biases, depending.  I don’t think it matters.  Sexuality and sexual orientation are complicated matters, and for me, this happens to be one instance where the best evidence is actually anecdotal.  Jason Collins says he’s known he was gay for years, that it dates from when Jarron was dating a girl seriously and he wondered why he didn’t seem to feel the same way about girls that his brother did.  Why is that story not enough?  The dude’s gay.  Power to him.

And see, that’s where this gets fun. Jason Collins is a black basketball player, a center, and gay.  That’s how he put it in the SI article.  So count the exploded stereotypes; Jason Collins is not, I don’t know, swishy.  He’s a blue collar dude, a tough, hard-nosed player who plays a very physical style of ball.  He’s a pick setter, a screener, a rebounder.  He takes on the meanest, toughest players in the league, and he battles ‘em to a standstill.  None of that impacts, or is impacted by, his sexuality.

Why did he come out?  He says it’s because his roommate at Stanford, a straight guy, also a Kennedy and currrently a Congressman (Joe Kennedy) told him about marching in a gay rights parade, and he thought, ‘dude, he’s straight and he’s marching for my rights?  Why wasn’t I there?”

One wonders what effect this will have on Collins’ career.  I think it’s quite possible that his career may have ended were it not for this announcement.  This last season, he was a back-up center for the Washington Wizards, a terrible team. A bad, older player on a bad team, in other words. His contract is over, and he’s now a free agent, able to sign with anyone.  I wonder who wants him.  He’s not actually all that good–never was.  Maybe New Orleans, backing up Anthony Davis.  He could be a mentor for a talented young center, as much a coach as teammate.  And New Orleans would certainly welcome him, one would think.

But my gosh, the reaction is interesting, isn’t it?  No negative responses, none?  Nothing but support, from teammates, coaches, league officials, politicians?  Everyone happy for him, everyone saying ‘good for you!’  It’s not like homophobia has disappeared, but isn’t driving it underground a victory?  Have we really come this far, that fast?

One last detail: players can choose their uniform numbers. Last year, Collins changed his number to 98.  Yesterday he explained why.  It was in honor of Matthew Shepherd.  Poor Matthew Shepherd, of Wyoming.  Beaten to death by homophobic psychopaths.  In 1998.  So Jason Collins is out.  So, here’s one more voice, added to the chorus: Good for you, big guy.  Hoop it up, dude, and we all got next.

 

 

 

The NFL Draft

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I spent three hours last night watching what has to be the most incomprehensible TV program possible for anyone outside the loop.  The loop, in this case, is hard-core fans of the National Football League, and while our numbers are legion, we’re not ubiquitous; football haters likewise abound.  And not to get too gender-cliche-y, the NFL draft does strike me as a potential battlefield in the war of the sexes.  It’s a guy thing.  Guys like football, action movies, and NASCAR; gals like gymnastics/ice skating, chick flick romcoms, and mini-vans.  Of course there are also lots of exceptions–girls who like football, for example; not to mention Danica Patrick.  But cliches exist because they have some basis in reality.  ESPN has both male and female anchors, and yes, Chris McKendry does draft analysis, just as Linda Cohn is a hockey expert.  Still, I watched the draft last night, and while my wife was exceedingly awesome about it, she conspicuously didn’t watch with me.

Anyway, the NFL draft.  Boy, is it weird.  I’m sort of a football fan, even, and I get how weird it is.  So here’s how it works: college football players are put into a pool of candidates, and NFL teams take turns choosing which ones they want; they then have exclusive rights to sign their selections to a contract.  Yes, it’s exactly the same system used to pick sides in junior high school gym class: “I’ll pick Bobby; okay, I pick Sam.”  Imagine that every person who graduated from college in Accounting were then meticulously ranked and underwent accounting skills tests and interviews, and then every Accountancy firm in America got to pick, in order, which ones they wanted to hire. That’s the basic principle.

I watched last night because of Ziggy.  Ezekial Ansah, who played football at BYU this past fall.  Ziggy is from Ghana, where he played a little basketball, but no football at all, ever.  He joined the Church, came to BYU, and then was persuaded by roommates to try out for the football team.  The roommates thought maybe Coach Mendenhall might find some use for a guy 6’5″, 275 pounds, who was also a fantastic natural athlete–incredibly fast and quick.  And, by all accounts, a heck of a great kid.  Coach worked him out, and couldn’t believe what he saw.  My favorite Ziggy story–apparently at one point, he told his roommates that he thought he’d quit the team.  He liked it and all, enjoyed the camaraderie, liked the coaches and his teammates, but he came from Ghana, after all, needed to put his education first.  I mean, it’s not you could make any money at this football thing, right?  Right?  (Ziggy was drafted fifth, by the Detroit Lions. Last year, the fifth pick in the draft signed a contract for 18.5 million dollars.)

I am a deeply conflicted football fan. I probably would not have allowed a son to play high school ball, for example; not that either of my boys wanted to.  It’s a dangerous, violent game, with serious health consequences for way too many players.  It’s also beautiful, with an occasional athleticism that takes your breath away, and the guys who play it professionally talk about how much they love it, and miss it when they can’t play anymore.  And I look at the NFL draft, and part of me is thrilled for these guys, for the bright (and wealthy) futures their drafting portends.  It’s about opportunity–an opportunity for guys to do well, but also an opportunity for teams to improve themselves.  That’s why we watch–we want to see who our favorite team drafted, and fantasize about how great they’re going to be.

But you also can’t help but notice another resemblance–to a slave auction.  Before the draft, there’s the NFL Combine, where all the players run and lift weights and jump and undergo interviews and take intelligence tests.  Are weighed and prodded and examined.  And the top physical specimens are then selected, without having any choice in the matter.  Ziggy Ansah blew everyone away at the Combine–he’s a sensational athlete.  He also has less football experience than anyone else in the draft.  He’s seen as a ‘project,’ with a ‘high ceiling.’  For that potential, the Detroit Lions will be gambling 18-20 million dollars. And Ziggy will have no choice but to move to Detroit.  He’s from Ghana.  Perhaps he would find a gentler clime more congenial.  Tough noogies–it’s Detroit or nothing.

Now, if he’s a slave, he’s an exceptionally well compensated one.  The draft exists to ensure competitive balance–bad teams get the best players.  And nobody is forced to participate–either in the Combine or the draft. You can choose to do something else with your life.  But if you want to play professional football. . . .

And this is on television? Yep.  The teams select players in ten minute increments. So what happens is that a team picks a player, announced by Roger Goodell, the commissioner of the NFL, and the guy who got picked comes up and poses for a picture with him, and then these ESPN talking heads analyze the choice.  Chris Berman (aka Boomer) starts off, but defers to the real experts, Mel Kiper Jr. and Todd McShay.  For years, Mel Kiper was the draft guru.  He was employed by ESPN at what I have to assume is a preposterous salary just to do this, just to work, basically, one day a year.  And, my gosh, the guy really is an expert, with an encyclopedic knowledge of essentially every player on every team in all of college football, their strengths and weaknesses, and how they fit the needs of the NFL teams considering them.  Then, the last couple of years, ESPN hired McShay, a second guy to do the same job.

And it’s one of the highest rated shows on television. Hour after hour, we watch.  Imagine high school graduation.  Imagine, then, that the principal took ten minutes between announcing each graduating kid.  Imagine that your basic high school graduation ceremony took three days to complete. Now imagine it being televised, and getting a twenty share.

Also, if you’re a fan, you’re a fan of one team, right?  I’m a 49ers fan; I root for the San Francisco 49ers.  Obviously, for a kid in Indiana, I would root for sports teams from the Bay area.  Anyway, I was rooting for Ziggy, but after he was drafted, I kept watching.  I wanted to see who my team picked.  And I had opinions!  On who they ought to pick!  I was hoping for a defensive end, a cornerback, or a safety.  They picked Eric Reid, a safety from LSU.  I knew a lot about the guy; fast, good tackler, could be the next Ronnie Lott.  I liked the pick.  And I am, at best, a casual football fan.  In other words, I watched TV for three hours, tension building, anticipation mounting, for one moment that lasted maybe ten seconds (“The San Francisco 49ers, with the 18th pick in the NFL draft, select Eric Reid. . . “)

It is, a lot, like graduation, where you wait in uncomfortable chairs for that moment when your kid gets her diploma.  Or, like, her 3rd grade play, where you know she’s playing the crucial role of Third Tree, and you sit there waiting for her one line (“Trees also provide shade”).  Which you already know, because you drilled her on it for, like, days.  That’s what you’re there for.  You could give a darn about all the other kids.

It’s complete, utter insanity.  The NFL draft, its massive popularity and the fantastic ratings it gets on TV, it’s completely crazy.  It’s not just the most boring show on television, it’s the most boring show you can imagine anyone ever putting on TV.  And I’m, at best, a casual fan of the sport; mostly, I’m conflicted about whether I should keep  watching football.  Let alone a show about sorting young wizards into their respective Houses (Mel and Todd arguing about who Gryffindor drafted). Neither of them wearing a Sorting Hat.

And I watched it for three hours last night.

And it’s on again tonight.  And I’ll probably watch it tonight too.

Guys, let’s face it.  We’re nuts.  Why on earth do women put up with us?

 

 

 

42: A review

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In an early scene in 42, the new Jackie Robinson biopic, Harrison Ford as Branch Rickey looks through a whole pile of scouting reports, trying to find exactly the right guy to integrate baseball.  He lingers on Jack Roosevelt Robinson’s file; army officer, college graduate, four sport athlete.  Not as famous as Satchel Paige or Josh Gibson, but a good enough player so that no one could question his ability to play big league ball.  What about his temperment? Too hot-headed?  Then Rickey sees a note in the file, and his face brightens.  “A Methodist,” he crows.  “I’m a Methodist, and so is he.  This is the guy.”

If you’re going to make a movie about a seminal character like Jackie Robinson, it seems to me that the first decision to be made is this: is the movie about the person, or his impact?  In other words, should the movie focus on Jackie Robinson, on his personal life and his struggles and weaknesses and how he overcame them, or on the impact his life had on others, his teammates, opponents, the nation generally?  What this film does is combine the two.  It’s a film about absolute morality, a film that says something like this: you were either for Jackie Robinson’s right to play major league baseball, or you were against it, and that decision was a fundamentally moral one.

And that’s how his Dodger teammates line up.  Dixie Walker (Ryan Merriman) and Bobby Bragan (Derek Phillips) and Kirby Higbe (Brad Beyer) never could overcome their prejudices, and opposed him. (Bragan later recanted, which the film depicts, but it’s not given much dramatic emphasis).  And Walker and Higbe are ‘punished’ for it by Rickey–traded to (shudder) Pittsburgh.  Pee Wee Reese (Lucas Black) and Eddie Stanky (Jesse Luken) come around, take Jackie’s side, publicly support him.  Ralph Branca (Hamish Linklater) is pro-Jackie from the beginning.  And this was all a function of their superior moral sense.

Chadwick Boseman is terrific as Robinson, as is Nicole Beharie as Rachel Robinson.  Boseman looks like a ballplayer.  He runs bases, swings the bat, fields a grounder, throws, and never once does it seem actorly. In some baseball movies, the players just don’t look right.  (John Goodman as Babe Ruth and Gary Cooper as Lou Gehrig come to mind.)  Boseman’s terrific in the role.  He captures Jackie’s fire, his competitive passion, his pride.  This is a fierce Jackie Robinson, not in the least meek and long-suffering, which gives his forbearance when pelted with racist epithets some real power.  Beharie’s great too.  Rachel Robinson was a California girl, from an upper middle-class family.  In one early scene she stares, uncomprehending, at a ‘white’s only’ sign on a restroom door.  Rachel Robinson has to be a thankless role–the virtuous, loyal spouse–but Beharie (and Brian Helgeland’s screenplay and direction) create a woman of humor and intelligence, who seems at times rather bemused by this odd racism thing.  (And who makes a point of hiring a white caregiver for Jackie Jr.).

And Harrison Ford is tremendous.  Gruff and uncompromising, Rickey seems perpetually outraged at the vicissitudes of a racist backlash he nonetheless completely anticipated.  It’s a crafty performance–his moral outrage perfectly calibrated for each exigency.  It’s valuable to remember that Jackie Robinson didn’t just decide one day to try out for the Dodgers, any more than Rosa Parks didn’t just decide one day she didn’t feel like riding in the back of the bus.  Both acts were more than just morally subversive–they were carefully calculated.

In the best scene in the movie, Jackie is subjected to absolutely unremitting racist abuse from Ben Chapman (Alan Tudyk–say it ain’t so, Wash!), in a game in Philadelphia.  In a tight pitchers’ duel, Robinson struggles at the plate, and with every pop to short, Chapman lets him have it, n-word after n-word.  Finally, Eddie Stanky leaves the Dodger dugout and confronts Chapman, offers to fight him, even. (I assume this actually happened, and it made me happy: scrappy little Eddie Stanky, all 5’8 and 170 of him, was the one Dodger most likely to punch out the other team’s manager).  Chapman backs down, and in an interview afterwards, says to reporters that he didn’t think his language was out of line.  After all, he calls Hank Greenberg a kike, and Joe DiMaggio a wop and what’s the big deal?  But in Tudyk’s performance, there’s this glimmer of fanaticism; you can see this isn’t just about routine bench jockeying; he hates what Jackie Robinson stands for.

And look, I don’t question for a second the central premise of this movie. Obviously, racism is just flat out evil, and obviously Jackie Robinson had an absolute right to pursue his chosen profession.  Every year, Major league baseball honors the Robinson legacy by having every player, on April 15, on every team, wear 42.  This is right and proper and fitting.  And I do consider Pee Wee Reese, a guy from Kentucky, heroic, when he put his arm around Jackie, a gesture of solidarity, in a game in Cincinatti when the abuse was starting to really rain down.  And I think it’s awesome that Stanky nearly punched out Ben Chapman, and that Ralph Branca (however awkwardly), told Jackie that he should just go ahead and shower with the white players, that it was no big deal.

And it’s a good, inspiring movie.  I liked it.  My wife, who doesn’t like baseball, liked it too.

I just wish. . . .

Okay, Pee Wee Reese and Eddie Stanky were good guys and Dixie Walker and Kirby Higbe and Bobby Bragan were bad guys, and I get that, and don’t disagree.  But wasn’t this, in part generational?  Pee Wee was 28 in 1947, an established young star.  1947 was Ralph Branca’s rookie year, and he was also the best pitcher on the team; his job unthreatened.  In 1947, Dixie Walker was 36, near the end.  Kirby Higbe was 32, a hard-drinking Southerner, from South Carolina.  His autobiography, The High Hard One, is terrific, a rolicking memoir of Depression-era baseball, as well as an alcoholic’s confessional.  It seems a shame to see a complex and interesting man relegated to the role of ‘racist villain’.  Dixie Walker became a highly respected hitting coach, especially known for his work with Jimmy Wynn, a great black player for Houston. As for Bobby Bragan, he was one of those guys hanging on by his toenails to a big-league job, a 29-year old backup catcher, who batted .190 in 1947.  He had to know what Robinson meant to a guy like him–an influx of black talent, competing for one of the 400 major league jobs.  If Robinson succeeded, Bragan had to think his career would be over–and that’s also what happened.  Roy Campanella joined the team in 1948, and the job he took was Bragan’s.

I am glad that the film makes a big deal of Wendell Smith, the reporter for the Pittsburgh Harold-American, a black newspaper, who Rickey hired at 50 dollars a month to be Jackie’s friend, confidant, chauffeur and amanuensis.  Smith was every bit the pioneer Jackie Robinson was, excluded from press boxes, typing game stories with a typewriter on his lap in the stands.  But what the film does not say is that Smith had been agitating for baseball integration for years, nor that he was the man who recommended Robinson to Branch Rickey.

In fact, Branch Rickey broke the color barrier for many reasons, some of them moral and religious to be sure, but also because he wanted first access to the black talent pool that would follow baseball’s integration.  And while he certainly paid Jackie and Pee Wee the same salary, he didn’t pay either of them all that much.  Owners didn’t, back then.

In other words, the baseball fan and historian in me sees the potential for ten much more nuanced and interesting films about Jackie Robinson.  Which is not to say that the film we have isn’t a good one, or an important one, or an inspiring one.  I liked it immensely, loved the performances, love the importance of Jackie Robinson in our history, which the film does get pretty well right.  The fact that other, maybe better films kept peeking out around the corners doesn’t negate what this one accomplished.

 

 

North Korea

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Kim Jung-un is in the news again, threatening missile launches and maybe possibly enriching uranium, and releasing really obviously photoshopped pictures of the great North Korean navy engaged in amphibious exercises. And releasing photos of what looked like a war room (with those Commodore 64 computers Kim was bent over), showing LA and DC and (why?) Austin Texas targeted. Take that, South by Southwest Festival!  And last Sunday, the big network news talk shows were all about North Korea, and what possible actual real threat the North Koreans might pose.

What I know about Kim Jung-un is what I’ve read on Wikipedia, and from the same news sources everyone else gets.  The guy’s either 28 or 29, the son of a psychopath, the grandson of another psychopath.  He either has tremendous power in North Korea, or is a frontman for other, more shadowy figures.  He seems to like basketball a lot, and it would seem his favorite team is the Chicago Bulls, especially the Jordan/Pippin/Rodman Bulls of the 90s.  Dennis Rodman has been basically the one American allowed to visit him, on his own quirky peace mission, one in which he praised Kim’s ‘humility.’  And who knows, maybe Rodman will prove a force for diplomacy, maybe he’ll help defuse the crisis.  Stranger things have happened.

But while I don’t know much about North Korean internal politics (who does?), I do know a bit about movies.  And there have been a bunch of movies lately in which the North Koreans are the bad guys. In the recent remake of Red Dawn, for example, North Koreans have conquered the US, and it falls upon heavily armed American teenagers to defeat them.  (I didn’t say they were good movies).  In Olympus Has Fallen, North Korean terrorists have taken the White House, except for one Secret Service agent who has to take the baddies out–basically, it’s Die Hard except set in the White House.  (Not to be confused with White House Down, coming later, also about a captured White House).  I understand there’s another one later this summer which I couldn’t find. The main villain in Iron Man 3 is a mysterious figure called The Mandarin.  That suggests China, but you watch; there’s no way it’s just, you know, China.  Nothing that specific.  It’ll be something vaguely Asian and menacing.  Who does that suggest in today’s geopolitical scene?  And in the enjoyably inane Battleship last summer, the bad guys are actually space aliens, but the US military initially thinks they’re North Koreans.

As I’ve been watching the news this week, a lot of it about North Korea, I heard a lot of commentary about how the North Korean people view us.  Apparently, they’ve been fed so much anti-American propaganda, they’re terrified of us.  Andrea Mitchell was saying that the North Koreans she met, the kids all ran from her–she looked too threatening.  And everyday North Koreans seemed scared as well.  They’re fed it all the time–how bad America is, how brave North Korea is to stand up to us. Are we doing the same thing?  Beating the drums of war?  Feeding our people propaganda?

Actually, not. We don’t make action movies with North Korean bad guys because we’re threatened by North Korea, or see them as a threat. This isn’t intentional, even. We use North Koreans as bad guys because North Korea doesn’t matter.

Red Dawn proves the point.  The film was in post-production, apparently, when the marketing department saw a rough cut and was horrified. See, the bad guys in the movie were the Chinese.  Xenophobia is one thing: international markets are quite something else again.  You’re talking 1.3 billion Chinese people, a good percentage of whom have developed a taste for Hollywood movies, with money for movie tickets.  The producers pumped in an extra million or so, so they could reshoot and change every reference to China to North Korea.

It’s difficult, in a free trade world market entertainment environment, to create plausible villains for action movies.  Space aliens are the best–aliens aren’t likely to be offended and not go see the film.  Plus, your production designers can really use their imaginations, come up with awesome baddies.  Zombies make terrific villains. The Avengers got good mileage out of Norse gods.  The Taken movies have cornered the market on Albanians.  Nobody cares about Albania.  “Terrorists” are always good, but we don’t want overtly jihadist villains–not with Dubai and Saudi investors paying for the darn things.  Skinheads, neo-Nazis, and evil businessmen can work, as long as their plot is sufficiently menacing.  North Korea’s perfect, though.  North Korea can barely feed its own people–they’re not about to allow folks to see Hollywood movies.  North Korea doesn’t matter to us.  Which makes them perfect movie villains.

I’m paraphrasing someone here–maybe P.J. O’Rourke–but this metaphor works for me.  North Korea is a thirteen-year old boy, and America is a beautiful twenty year old woman.  She doesn’t know he exists, and he can’t think about anything else.  He’s completely obsessed with her, and she can’t be bothered to be cordial, even.  (Like, maybe if he’s the bratty dorky friend of her stupid little brother).  She has way more important things to do, and he would kill for a kind glance.

I think this metaphor explains why Kim Jung-un keeps inviting Dennis Rodman over.  Rodman represents reflected glory.  By having Rodman visit, Kim can pretend he’s pals with a friend of Michael Jordan.  That’s why his plaintive lament, ‘tell Obama to just call me.’  Which the President won’t do; why elevate the little pipsqueak?

He probably isn’t a pipsqueak with nuclear missiles.  He certainly is a pipsqueak with an army. We also don’t know how crazy he is. Not to psychologize, but a youngest son with a nutso Dad, spoiled rotten and given unlimited power–not a recipe for robust mental health.  We need to placate him somehow, or a humanitarian disaster looms–an invasion of South Korea, a war he would lose, but my gosh, the cost. In the meantime, maybe we could consider cooling it with the crappy movies.  We need to give Rodman some room to work.

 

Everything that’s wrong with college sports

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I don’t know if you’ve seen this video. If you watch ESPN’s Sports Center, then you have. It’s Rutgers University head basketball coach Mike Rice abusing his players.  He verbally abuses them, he throws basketballs at them (including hitting one kid in the head), he pushes, shoves and kicks the players on his basketball team.  It’s contemptible, and yesterday, he got fired for it.  Which is weird, frankly, because the school’s known about the behavior captured in this video for months.  They did nothing, except fire the assistant coach, Eric Murdock, who released the tapes.  Rutgers athletic director Mike Pernetti has now said that his initial decision, to put coach Rice on a brief ‘rehabilitative’ leave of absence was mistaken; that they should have fired him back in December, when they first saw the video.  Ya think?

But, okay, one coach with anger management issues, that’s regrettable, and awful for the kids in that program and their families, but it could be seen as an aberration.  Surely to say that Mike Rice abusing his players isn’t Everything That’s Wrong with College Sports.  I mean, it’s just one guy.

So, let me go all nostalgic and geezer-y on you.  When I was a kid, Boy Scouts got to go to Indiana university football games for free.  We wore our uniforms, and we served as ‘ushers.’  I was twelve; I knew nothing about ‘ushering,’ but I did like going to see college football games for free.  And that was back when Indiana had a good time.  They even won the Big Ten championship, in 1967, behind (I remember so well), quarterback Harry Gonso, running back John Isenbarger, and receiver Jade Butcher.  Gonzo ended up going to law school, and becoming head of the IU board of trustees. The team was fun to watch, and winning the Big Ten that year was a Very Big Deal.  It meant a lot, to the community, to the university (where my father taught), to the state.  It was a point of pride. We Boy Scouts were part of it.  We got to run around on the field after the games, and we got to help the cheerleaders put away their megaphones and pom poms.  I was a twelve year old boy.  I got to help (blonde, beautiful) twenty year old cheerleaders.  I have, uh, positive memories of the experience.

In those days, conferences meant something–they were important.  The Big Ten schools were the finest in the Midwest. They were as outstanding academically as they were athletically.  Michigan, Ohio State, Indiana; those are really really good schools.  I have a PhD from Indiana–that means something.  Northwestern is a tremendous school.  Purdue is known for its outstanding engineering and science programs.  A ‘Big Ten’ school was prestigious.  And the universities were crown jewels in American higher education.  And yes, they also played football, but ‘student-athlete’ wasn’t a sick joke–it was something to aspire to.  Harry Gonso wasn’t just the quarterback of the football team, he was an academic All-American, a member of the National Honor Society.  A guy who went straight from the gridiron to Law School.

Conferences had a history, an identity, a tradition.  The Pac-8 included USC and UCLA and Stanford and Cal.  Stanford and Cal Berkeley; two of the finest universities in the world, as excellent academically as athletically.  Filling out the conference were two great rivalries: Oregon/Oregon State, Washington/Washington State.  The Texas schools competed in the Southwest Conference, the South meant the Southeast Conference, and the Great Plains meant the Big 8, which meant perhaps the greatest rivalry of them all, Oklahoma/Nebraska.  The conferences even meant different style of football–the Big Ten meant the Power-I formation, the Big 8, the Wishbone. And the WAC, where BYU competed, was about passing the football. October and November meant conference football season, and January and February, conference basketball season.  You recruited locally, and state pride rose and fall with the local college’s athletic fortunes.

Was it corrupt?  Was there a seedy underside to college athletics, back in the golden age of my youth?  Of course there was.  Boosters openly paid players. Players received all kinds of special benefits. John Wooden built the greatest dynasty in the history of college basketball at UCLA.  John Wooden was a tremendous coach, and a good man.  But John Wooden had to know that the fancy new cars his players were tooling around LA in had to come from somewhere.  In fact, as Wooden surely knew, they came from Sam Gilbert.

But the traditions of college athletics, the rivalries and the regional conference affiliations, they did mean something.  Schools played football and basketball to build school pride and state pride and local pride.  Schools were part of their communities, and if civic minded business people occasionally took their support for the local school team a little, uh, generously, well that happened.  And it shouldn’t have, and it was bad.  The NCAA did police things, a little, arbitrarily and badly.

But now?  I honestly don’t know anymore what schools belong to which conferences; I really don’t.  I don’t know who’s in the Big Twelve, or the SEC.  The Big Ten added Penn State without becoming the Big Eleven or something–now it’s the Big Sixteen, or Big Eighteen, or Big Fourteen–I honestly don’t know how many schools are in the conference, or which ones.  Pretty sure Nebraska’s now in the Big Ten–its ferocious rivalry with Oklahoma now a thing of the past.  So there’s that; the University of Nebraska, a Big Ten school.  Academically?  Seriously?  Michigan and Northwestern and Indiana and Purdue and . . . Nebraska?

And in December, the President of Rutgers, Robert Barchi was told by Rutgers Athletic director, Mike Pernetti, that a video existed showing the men’s basketball coach physically abusing the players on his team.  And recommended a leave of absence.  And Barchi agreed.

Why?  Simple.  Last November, Rutgers applied to join the Big Ten.  In a late November vote, that application was accepted.  Here’s what Barchi said back then:

“The Big Ten includes America’s most highly regarded academic institutions, known for both their athletic success and academic achievement.  This is exactly the right conference for Rutgers. Our university is one of the nation’s leading research universities and our student-athletes excel in the classroom and on the playing field.”

Codswallop.  Here was the Big Ten response, from Iowa President Sally Mason:

“When considering the full spectrum of academic, athletic and research prowess, Rutgers clearly makes for a perfect fit as one of the premier public land-grant institutions on the East Coast. We are excited to welcome them within our ranks, and look forward to collaboration and competition with yet another great Big Ten university.”

Malarkey.

Here’s what Rutgers joining the Big Ten means, aside from the reality that the Women’s Volleyball team from Nebraska is now going to have to take a bus ride from Lincoln to Newark for their away matches.  This isn’t about the students and it isn’t about education and it isn’t about academic standards and it isn’t about athletic competition and it isn’t about anything but money.  The Big Ten has a cable network, the Big Ten network.  It’s lucrative–it’s pouring a lot of money into Big Ten universities.  The Big Ten network would very much like to expand into Eastern markets.  And Rutgers is in New Jersey.  Oh, the Big Ten also added Maryland.  Same reason, same rationale.

So Rutgers will now get Big Ten network money, and the Big Ten network will get lucrative TV contracts in east coast markets, which means more.  None of which any college students will see, of course.  Football teams hemorrhage money for their universities; cable money is a band-aid.  Universities are committed to spending more and more on athletics, and that money has to come from somewhere.  One place to cut costs is insurance–football and basketball scholarships are not guaranteed, and injured kids who can’t play can be released from their scholarships, their families stuck with their medical bills.  Did you see Louisville basketball player Kevin Ware’s horrendous broken leg?  Last weekend, right?  Did you know there’s a chance Kentucky could get away with not paying his medical bills?

But you can also maximize revenues, and the best new source is cable.

So in December, the ink barely dry on Rutgers’ Big Ten contract, President Barchi is told that a video exists. Terrible time for a major scandal, right?  So apparently, Barchi asked not to see it.  Giving himself plausible deniability.  And Pernetti, the AD, the fair-haired boy who had negotiated the whole Big Ten deal (leveraging geography for cash) fires Murdock, the whistle-blower assistant coach, and tries to sweep the whole thing under the rug.  The plan was always to fire Mike Rice, the coach–Pernetti apparently didn’t think he was good enough to compete in the Big Ten.  But then Murdock went public with the video, and forced Rutgers’ hand.

In other words, the allure of cable money meant that a university President and Athletic Director were willing to let a coach get away with abusing his players, to sweep it under the rug for months, rather than jeopardize the dough. A coach kicked his players, punched them, threw basketballs at their heads, and called them the vilest homophobic slurs.  And the university knew about it, and did nothing, because there was too much money at stake.

And these cable deals, they’re happening all over college sports.  Haves and have-nots; the schools without lucrative conference cable deals are the ones left behind.  Rich schools are going to get richer, and the professionalism of college athletics intensifies.

So okay.  Let’s go there.  Ed O’Bannon, the former UCLA basketball star is heading up a class-action suit against the NCAA, in behalf of all former players.  His argument is that colleges are profiting immensely from the kids who play college sports, and that the kids don’t get a dime.  And should.  And the case is winning; working its way through the appellate courts one victory at a time.  What’s at stake?  As Sports Illustrated puts it, nothing less than the entire college sports business model.  Very hard for me to see how that could be a bad thing.

Sports, for people who hate sports

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I like sports.  I grew up playing basketball, baseball, football, tennis.  I played all these sports very badly, but in our backyard, or the backyards of neighbor kids, or in our driveway.  It was how we bonded, and it was also how we excluded.  One neighbor kid didn’t play sports–he was somehow even less coordinated than I was–and didn’t want to.  We didn’t mean to treat him badly, but we did.  I still feel terrible about that.  But we loved sports, and when we weren’t playing sports, we were watching them, either live or on TV.  Or talked about them. My brother was just in town, and while he was mostly here on family stuff–his daughter’s baby’s blessing–we did fit in two basketball games on TV.

I know lots of people who can’t stand sports, who especially can’t stand televised team sports.  I am, in fact, married to one of those people.  I get that. We sports fans can be quite sadly fanatical in our devotion to the teams that have earned our allegiance–that’s where the word ‘fan’ comes from, after all.  I hear from people from time to time who tell me they like this blog, and usually they add “except for the baseball ones.”  I get that too, which also doesn’t mean I’m going to stop writing baseball ones.

But why?  Why do we attach ourselves do devotedly to something as artificial as a professional sports team?  Or college team.  In fact, isn’t inter-collegiate athletics somehow worse?  Doesn’t big-time college sports detract from the educational mission of high ed?  Doesn’t it divert resources that might be better used to hire a new math professor, build a new lab, construct a theatre rehearsal room or dance studio, pay TA’s properly?  Are we seriously seriously, pretending . . .  no.  Wait. Stop! I like sports.  I’m arguing for them.

How?  Why?

It’s good to care about something.

The great New Yorker writer, Roger Angell, used to make this argument; that caring deeply is a basic human good, even if it’s for something silly.  In fact, lots of things we care a lot about are silly.  Once we silly human creatures have got the Food, Sex, Shelter thing down, turns out we have plenty of time and brain-space for silly stuff.  And full-blown life-long infatuation with a sports team is, turns out, mentally healthy.

It’s a shortcut to bonding with other people.

So this past weekend, our family spent some time interacting with my niece’s husband’s family.  I found myself spending some time conversing with my niece’s father-in-law.  Seemed like a nice guy, and we chatted a bit.  Then he mentioned being a baseball fan.  And we went from ‘awkward family party conversation with a stranger’ to ‘my gosh what a cool guy how much fun were we having?’  We got along immediately.  I know the guy now, know how he thinks about something important to both of us.  And it was something safe, not something really volatile–politics, religion.

There’s a theological angle to it, a celebration of human potential, of human beauty.

The human beauty we’re talking about here. . . has nothing to do with sex, or cultural norms.  What it seems to have to do with, really, is human beings’ reconciliation with the fact of having a body.  There’s a great deal that’s bad about having a body.  We can just quickly mention pains, sores, nausea, odors, aging, gravity, sepsis, clumsiness, illness, limits–every last schism between our bodies and our actual capacities.  Can anyone doubt we need help to be reconciled? Crave it?  It’s your bodies that die, after all.

Great athletes seem to catalyze our awareness of how glorious it is to touch, to move through space, to interact with matter.  Granted, what great athletes can do with their bodies are things the rest of us can only dream of.  But those dreams are important.

David Foster Wallace “Federer both Flesh and Not.”

And as a Mormon, I believe that the human body is magnificent, not sin-filled and vile.  I believe that bodies enhance and enable spiritual capacities, not stunt them.  There is not Mormon equivalent to the heresy of ‘the mortification of the flesh.’

BYU is in a basketball tournament right now, the NIT (National Invitation Tournament), and one of the announcers last night was Bill Walton.  Walton was one of the greatest basketball players who ever lived, sort of a hero of mine.  He’s also a dreadful announcer.  Too talky, too interested in long stories about his own career, and not, like, the ballgame right there in front of him.  He was a former teammate of Danny Ainge and we got to hear many stories about what a great guy Ainge was.  And so on.  But then he talked about Kresimir Cosic.  Cosic was a genuinely brilliant player, for BYU and later, for the Yugoslavian and Croatian national teams.  And Walton stopped himself, got a little choked up, trying to describe the beauty of Cosic’s game.

This happens sometimes.  You remember a Willie Mays, a Joe Montana, a Wayne Gretzsky, a Magic Johnson, and your eyes get a little teary.  What they did was so beautiful, it still takes your breath away.

It’s good to care about things, and to care about beauty.  And of course, I get that same feeling when I hear a great tenor sing, or a great dancer dance, or a great actor in a great role.  If there is anything virtuous, lovely, of good report, praiseworthy . . . So watch this kid,twenty years old, from Africa, already a college graduate.  Watch him soar: Victor Oladipo, from Indiana.  Meanwhile, the NCAA tournament is on-going, and baseball season soon to start.  Go Hoosiers, and go Giants.

 

Theology of the read option

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The feature story in this week’s Sports Illustrated asked this provocative question: Does God care who wins the Superbowl?  What followed was a very interesting journalistic take on religion and sports, in the best balanced, well-written SI tradition.  But the question itself seems to me an interesting one, with two (at least two) possible and different answers deeply rooted in Christian tradition.  No, of course God doesn’t care who wins the Superbowl.  Why would God care about something as trivial as that?  And also, of course God may or may not care about who wins the Superbowl, because God already knows who is going to win it.

First approach: God may not care about the outcome of sporting events, but He does have an ancillary interest in the participants in those events.  He cares if players get hurt, he cares if they become despondent after a loss, or so elated after a win that they cheat on their wives, or do drugs, or otherwise celebrate in inappropriate or sinful ways.  God loves all the players equally, as well as their wives and children and coaches and fans, and while He may not love them more or less during a championship event, He does understand that people behave differently most of the time than they behave in extremis.  So it’s even possible that God, knowing and loving us all equally, cares for us differently depending on our circumstances.  Differently when we’re in despair after missing that field goal, differently than when filled with overweening pride after catching that touchdown.

Second approach: God knows everything.  He knows every sinew, every muscle, every brain cell and synapse in all the players on both teams. He knows, precisely and exactly, not only the arm strength of that quarterback, but his arm strength when tired, when being chased, with his legs firmly planted on, perhaps, somewhat degraded turf.  He knows where that pass is going, precisely, exactly.  He knows every variable of the receiver’s foot speed and hand-eye coordination and ability to concentrate.  God’s omniscience is all encompassing.  He knows who is going to win, and by what score, precisely.  What we’re watching is merely an illusion of athletic competition.  The outcome is pre-determined.

The difficulty of this purely deterministic way of looking at it isn’t just that it makes the game a lot less fun.  If the whole outcome is entirely decided, entirely mechanistic, then the question arises: why do we even need a God?  If the winner or loser of the game has been decreed in the heavens, why do we watch?  Why, indeed, do we make any choices, at all, if we only have the illusion of choice?  Why bother praying?  If God knows already if we’re going to pray, and what we’re going to say when we do, then why go through the exercise?  And what good does God do?  Why bother with Him?  If our decisions, to sin or not to sin, are already known to Him, is it fair of Him to punish or reward us?  Can justice be real, can mercy exist?  Can heroism, or courage, or determination, or cleverness, or willpower, do any of those words have any meaning at all?  Doesn’t this make the Superbowl suck?

As a Mormon, do I believe in the omnis?  Omniscience, Omnipresence, Omnipotence: are those words descriptive of the God I believe in and worship? It seems to me that Mormons must necessarily reject those concepts, if our theology is also to embrace agency.  Plus, an omni-fied theology becomes, necessarily, entirely deterministic and mechanistic, in which case, why bother with God at all?  If He can’t affect change, why pray, if we can’t maybe possibly even occasionally surprise Him, then why are we even here?  And if mortality is a testing ground, then the test must be real, must be something we could possibly fail, or, preferably, pass.

Or, to look at it another way.

The Superbowl starts in about four hours. The 49ers bread-and-butter play is the read option.  Let’s look at it theologically.

In the read option, the 49ers quarterback, Colin Kaepernick, stands in the Pistol formation, about four yards behind the center, with Frank Gore, the running back, four yards behind him.  On the other side of the ball is the Ravens’ outside linebacker, Terrell Suggs.  The ball is snapped to Kaepernick, and the line blocks for a running play, the center and guard and tackles opening up a hole for Gore.  Suggs is not blocked; in fact, that’s the key to the play.  By not blocking Suggs, another blocker is freed to block other defenders; the hole more likely to open.  Kaepernick’s main read is Suggs, who has two choices.  One is to step up into the hole that the line has opened up, where he will easily tackle Gore.  If he does that, though, Kaepernick fakes the handoff to Gore, and runs directly to the space that Suggs just vacated. And Kaepernick is very fast–he’s faster than any other player on the 49ers offense, and faster than all but one Ravens’ defender.  Suggs has another choice, however–not fill the hole, stay where he is.  In which case, Kaepernick hands the ball to Gore, who has a nice big hole to run through.

Suggs has to make a choice, and either choice is basically wrong. But the better choice is to stay put, and let his teammates deal with Gore; trust that one of them will be able to shed a blocker and make the play.  Kaepernick also has to make a choice, based on what Suggs chooses. But of course, he has to read it correctly; if he doesn’t, Frank Gore could get clobbered by Suggs.

Choices and consequences and accountability.  The play, the read option, strikes me as a microcosm for mortality.  We read–we assess, we figure out what’s going on–and we then have options.  And they’re real options, real choices, with real-world consequences, with serious amounts of potential pain involved, and we’re held accountable for those choices.

But it all comes down to this: is Terrell Suggs genuinely free to choose?  Is Kaepernick genuinely free to choose in return?

Terrell Suggs has been playing football, playing linebacker, since 1996, his freshman year in high school.  Linebackers fill holes. That’s what they do, that’s what coaches have been shouting in his ear for most of his life.  When you see a hope open up, you run to that hole and you tackle whoever comes through it.  He’s a star, an exceptionally fine player, precisely because he is very very good at filling holes.  The read option relies on him following his instincts, on making the wrong call, on pro-actively trying to tackle Gore instead of staying home and shutting off Kaepernick’s run option. That’s why the read option is such a diabolically effective play; the defender’s instincts betray him. In a purely mechanistic universe, wouldn’t sheer experience and muscle memory cause him to get it wrong, to step up into the hole?  But Terrell Suggs is a very intelligent young man, and also very well coached; I think he’ll play it well.  I’m anticipating what will happen, obviously, in a game coming up later this afternoon, but I expect that he’ll make the right call, and stay at home.  But I think that because I believe in agency.

I believe in agency.  I believe that the choices we make are real ones, that they are not pre-determined, that we can actually decide to do things or not to do them.  I believe that the outcome of the Superbowl has not been decided.  That’s why I’m going to have people over to watch it with me; we think it’s going to be fun.  I’m not sure God cares all that much about who wins. Colin Kaepernick, when he scores a touchdown, kisses his own biceps, on which he has Bible verses tatooed–he’s a devout Christian, and he thinks God is on the side of the 49ers.  Ray Lewis, the Ravens star, has, after each playoff victory, shouted ‘No weapon against thee shall prosper,’ a Bible verse suggesting, to his mind, that the players on the other teams are ‘weapons’ against God, and won’t prosper, because God wants Ray Lewis to win.  I think Ray Lewis and Colin Kaepernick are kidding themselves, and that God’s actual response to their hubris is probably to be amused by it.

But I do think the final score is unknown, to God or to the unfeeling universe.  The key to my theology is agency, not omniscient omnipotence, which I reject.  I think we can act courageously, nobly, inventively, honorably, and that those terms have real-world meaning and consequence.  I think we can surprise God.

49ers stories

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The Super Bowl is this weekend, and I’m pretty excited.  I know a lot of my readers aren’t into sports–I’ve spent my life in the theatre, and a Venn diagram of ‘theatre people’ and ‘football fans’ wouldn’t necessarily show much overlap.  And of the major North American team sports, football is my least favorite.  It’s violent.  It hurts people, sometimes permanently.  But the guys who play it tend to love it, and tend as well to be thoroughly aware of the risks. I played a lot of football growing up, though never in any formal organized way–just playing in our back yard, otherwise known as our dog’s favorite bathroom. Dodging dog poo–ah, the memories.

Plus, it can be beautiful, it really can. A perfectly thrown pass, a beautifully executed play.  Wonderful athletes, leaping and running. So: torn.  But still planning a Super Bowl party.

And this year, my favorite team’s in it.  I became a San Francisco 49ers fan because, heck, growing up in Indiana, why wouldn’t I?  And I thought maybe I’d see if I could humanize the sport a little: tell some stories about the guys who play it.

So: Alex Boone.

The 49ers right guard.  He played college football at Ohio State, where he won the kinds of awards you win as one of the best linemen in football.  He showed up at the NFL combine in 2009, 6’8″, 340 pounds, chiseled, a terrific athlete.  Strong, quick, powerful.  And a drunk.

Boone say he started drinking in junior high, would sit with his Dad and drink beer and watch football together.  He would pound forty beers a night as a fifteen year old. He was arrested for drunk driving as a high school kid.   He finished his college eligibility without a degree, and went to the NFL combine (a big pre-draft workout, basically, attended by scouts from every NFL team), and the buzz was that he would be a first-round draft pick–ten million dollar signing bonus territory.  It didn’t happen.  He wasn’t drafted at all. No one wanted him. No one wanted to gamble 10 million dollars, or even one million dollars, on an alcoholic.

He was out of control.  He head-butted people.  He went to a frat party and beat a guy up.  He went to a party in California, went to a mall parking lot, and got it into his head to jump on the roofs of parked cars until the roofs collapsed.  For fun.  He was arrested for trying to destroy a tow truck. He was drinking every day, completely out of control.  And nobody in the NFL was interested.

Except the 49ers.  They interviewed him, said they would draft him as a free agent (for miniscule money), but with two requirements.  His technique sucked, because he’d never had to listen to coaches.  He had to work with La Charles Bentley, a former NFL lineman who had a camp for budding linemen.  And Mike Singletary, the coach, told him he had to stop drinking.

Boone went to AA.  He’s been clean and sober for three years.  He’s married, and a Dad.  He’s very heavily involved in charity work.  And he’s the starting right guard for the Super Bowl Niners. He’s turned his life around.  And is today one of the most intelligent and thoughtful guys on the team, bright and quotable.

Bruce Miller:

Every year, college football players await the NFL draft, which will determine their futures.  The worst team in football gets to pick first–getting a first shot at the best college player in the country.  The best team picks 32nd, and so on, for seven rounds.  There are always all kinds of speculation about who will be the number one pick, and if you’re a fan, you have strong opinions over who your team should use its precious picks on. And teams can trade picks, and do.  In the 2011 draft, due to trades, the Niners had three seventh round picks.  At that point in the draft, you’re not going to get a superstar, but as a fan you hope your team at least can get a useful player.  And with the last of those three picks, the Niners drafted Bruce Miller.

Miller played his college ball at Central Florida, not a powerhouse school.  But he was a good player there, a defensive end, probably the best defensive player in the school’s history.  Problem is, he was 6’2″, 245.  And at the professional level, that’s just too small.  So he waited, desperate to fulfill his lifetime goal of playing football professionally, hoping someone would take a chance on him, hoping they’d want him for special teams or something. Anything.

So he got the phone call; the Niners welcomed him to the team.  And told him they wanted him as a fullback.

If you don’t know anything about football, that won’t mean much, but you can hardly find two positions with less in common than fullback and defensive end.  For one thing, fullbacks block–that’s their main job.  Defensive players tackle.  All his instincts would be off. It’s like, I don’t know, getting cast as Mercutio and then you show up for your first rehearsal and they say, sorry,  we want you to play Juliet. Here’s your script.  Good luck.

Plus, when they drafted Miller, the Niners already had a fullback, a good one, Moran Norris.

So Bruce Miller shows up to Niners camp, ready to start practice, ready to learn a brand new position.  But the NFL was in the middle of an incredibly nasty labor negotiation, and players weren’t allowed to practice as a team.  Alex Smith, the Niners quarterback, was organizing some informal practices, so Miller went to California from Florida, crashed on Smith’s sofa, and asked the other guys to show him how to be a fullback. And, by all accounts, completely worked his butt off.

It wasn’t going to matter, that first season.  Norris was the starter, and Miller, as he’d hoped, was going to play on special teams.  When the labor problems ended, and the coaches finally showed up, Miller got some more instruction, and was making good progress.  Turns out, his size wasn’t good for a defensive end, but it was pretty well perfect for a fullback.  And Miller had played football all his life.  A season spent sitting on the bench, learning from a respected veteran like Norris would be good for him.

On the third play of the season, Moran Norris blew out his knee.  And his career was over.  And Bruce Miller had to step up and play.

And he’s been great. If you watch the Super Bowl, watch Miller. Miller’s easy to spot–he’s number 49, on the 49ers.  Often you can learn more watching him play than you can from watching the quarterback.  If the Niners make a big play, a long run or a long pass, Bruce Miller’s blocking will have had a lot to do with it–he’s a perfect fullback for the Pistol offense, which the Niners use a lot of the time.  If he’s really lucky, he might even catch a pass. Turns out, he’s great at that too.

Kwame Harris:

It’s hardly news to say that national attitudes towards our LGBT friends have changed tremendously.  Marriage equality now enjoys majority support, and laws forbidding discrimination on housing or employment have been enacted in Salt Lake City, with LDS Church support.  One barrier that has remained unchanged, however, is professional sports.  Olympic athletes, tennis players–wonderful, brave Martina Navratilova– even soccer players have come out in recent years.  But so far, at least, no major team sport athlete has come out as gay.  The old Dodgers’ outfielder, Billy Bean, came out after his retirement from baseball.  But football has remained, at least publicly, entirely straight.

Which is actually hilarious, given the many many homo-erotic overtones of basically everything about the sport.  Still, there has never been an active, out player.

The Forty-Niners play in San Francisco, and are generally reckoned the most gay-friendly team in the NFL.  In August, they became the first NFL team (and remain the only NFL team) to produce an “It gets better” video aimed at LGBT youth.  I love the video, in part because who appears in it–there isn’t a tougher football player alive than Donte Whitner, other than perhaps Ricky Jean Francois.

The Niners now have their first out player.  It’s a sad story, really: Kwame Harris, who played right tackle for the team from 2003-2007 was arrested on domestic violence charges after a fight with a former domestic partner turned ugly. Harris is, by all accounts, a very quiet and reserved guy.  Because they were fighting about what seem like trivial issues–soy sauce on rice, and underwear–the story seems comical.  But a man was badly injured, and another may serve jail time for it–that’s not funny.  No, what’s great about the story isn’t Kwame Harris’ sad legal difficulties, or a relationship turned sour–what’s great has been the response of the Niners’ players.

There are guys on the team at the Super Bowl who played with Kwame Harris.  There are 4000 reporters covering the Super Bowl–Harris has come up. And they couldn’t care less.  Delanie Walker, Brian Jennings–they’ve been asked about Harris, and they say ‘he was a great football player, and a teammate and friend.  His sexual orientation’s irrelevant.’

So remember all that talk about ‘guys in a locker room, they’re not going to put up with a gay teammate?’  Based on the 49ers response, I don’t think it’s going to be an issue.  Obviously, some guys might–the thought that some professional football players may be homophobic is hardly startling.  But for the most part, as Brian Jennings put it: “we’re here to win football games.” And every day that passes, some progress is made. . . .

And then, right after I wrote this, Chris Culliver made some astonishingly homophobic comments, and was promptly blasted for it by Mike Wilbon.  So maybe not that much progress. . . .

Every guy on a football team has a story, and the stories can be fascinating.  Another reason why, despite my very real reservations about it, I remain a football fan.  And go Forty-niners.

 

Catfishing Manti Te’o

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On ESPN, while you’re watching, say, Sportscenter, they’ve got this scroll running along the bottom of the screen, keeping you up with sports news.  Few days ago, I see this news item: “Manti Te’o girlfriend does not exist.”  Say what?  My first reaction was to chuckle–looks like ESPN has a glitch in their scroll.

What a strange story.  For those of you who may have missed it, Manti Te’o, the Notre Dame middle linebacker, and the runner up for college football’s Heisman Trophy, carried on a long relationship, conducted entirely via the internet and phone calls, with a tragically dying young woman named Lennay Kekua. Who, turns out, did not exist.  Te’o was pranked.  Hoaxed.  Bamboozled.  Victimized.

It had been a big story, in Sports Illustrated and in many many other news outlets.  Te’o's girlfriend was in an auto accident, then learned she had leukemia.  She and Manti talked nightly, texted; she was his inspiration. They shared religious beliefs. They prayed together. The same day that his grandmother died, so did Kekua.  He was devastated; he dedicated the season to her.

And it turns out the whole thing was an invention, a false narrative.  The scammer was a guy named Ronaiah Tuiasosopo. He also impersonated Lennay Kekua on the phone.  We all heard his voice; Katie Couric played voice mail conversation excerpts in her interview with Te’o.  Sure sounded like a woman to me.

Deadspin broke the story, not without trepidation.  The single best interview I saw about it was on The Cycle, with Deadspin managing editor Tom Scocca.  The four Cycle reporters (one of them named, I’m not kidding, Krystal Ball) were all snarky about it; clearly saw the story as really hi-larious.  Tom Scocca did not.  He saw the story as tragic, sad on several levels. Said he didn’t particularly want to run it. Sad for Te’o, sad for the state of mainstream journalism.  Because the tragic/inspiring Lennay Kekua story had been such a big story, Scocca and his reporters went over every detail of the main media stories (especially the one in Sports Illustrated), to see what specific facts their story would need to rebut.  He said he was shocked to learn that there weren’t any.  SI had done this entire cover story about Te’o/Kekua without a single piece of supporting fact or evidence.

The story frankly is pretty hard to believe.  Could Te’o really be that naive?  Tuiasosopo/Kekua apparently called him in December–she wasn’t dead after all.  She had faked her death, and was on the run from a drug cartel.  Te’o kept on believing.  He began embellishing the tale, including frankly impossible details, describing seeing her at a Notre Dame/Stanford football game, for example.  Even after he learned of the scam, he kept the Kekua story alive, out of embarrassment and because he didn’t want to disappoint his Dad.

This kind of thing, impersonating a non-existent romantic partner, is called Catfishing, apparently.  Comes from a documentary film: Catfish, which became a reality TV series.  I’ve never watched either.  It’s not a new thing: in the ’80s, a woman named Miranda developed phone relationships with Billy Joel, Warren Beatty and Robert DeNiro, among others.  She told ‘em she was a model, independently wealthy–they believed her, and would talk to her on the phone for hours. They thought they had something going with her–Beatty said it really hurt when she stopped returning his calls. Miranda turned out to be a social worker from Baton Rouge.

But what’s particularly interesting to me is the Mormon angle.  Te’o is famously LDS.  Very prominently LDS.  So when the story broke, and people incredulously asked ‘could he have really been this naive, this gullible,’ my thought was, ‘of course he’s naive.  He’s LDS.’

On the TV show Frazier, they had a recurring bit when we met Frazier Crane’s new agent, this incredibly naive innocent; first time we meet him, he’s wearing a Boy Scout uniform.  It got a nice costume laugh.  He was also described as Mormon. But that public image–Mormons as impossibly guileless.  And it has some foundation.

Which is why Mormons are so susceptible to cons.  We’ve seen it in our family.  Thirty years ago, family members were caught up in a huge scam.  Their bishop introduced them to it as ‘an opportunity for righteous LDS people to pay some extra tithing.’  He wasn’t in on it; he was also a victim, as hornswoggled as they were.  The whole time the Te’o story was breaking, my daughter was job hunting–she got this wonderful job, good paying, easy work, working as a PA for a real estate agent named ‘Mike Jones.’  Seemed too good to be true.  Which, turns out, it was–she figured out it was a scam before she could get burned.  We live in Utah; flimflam capital of the USA.

We like to think of ourselves as goodhearted people, disinclined to think the worst of other people, inclined to kindness.  But the dark side of Mormon culture is this: we tend to believe in a narrative in which righteous people (us) are rewarded for their goodness.  When something seems too good to be true, we tend to think maybe we deserve it.  God’s rewarding us with an opportunity to maybe pay a little extra tithing. That particular notion–a chosen people, blessed with material prosperity as a direct result of righteousness–is deeply ingrained in our culture. But it’s as theologically questionable as it is impractical.  Sometimes a little cynicism isn’t such a bad idea.

In Te’o's case there wasn’t any money involved.  Lennay Kekua didn’t ask for his banking information–she may have hinted at it once, apparently, but Te’o never gave her money.  No, what ‘she’ wanted was Manti Te’o's trusting, loving heart.  And that places the cruelty of Tuiasosopo’s prank quite beyond comprehension.

Ronaiah Tuiasosopo is clearly a bright guy, a talented guy.  He’s apparently a good singer, and obviously he’s a pretty gifted actor.  He impersonated a dying young woman so convincingly that a good man fell in love with ‘her.’  I suspect he’s also a sociopath, indifferent to the suffering he causes.  He’s played Lennay Kekua for years–Manti Te’o is only his first famous victim. I wish there were some way for him to do prison time, but he probably didn’t do anything illegal.  I do hope that Brother Te’o is able to put this behind him. And next time he falls in love, let’s hope it’s for real.  With someone who exists.