tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22430171896842417962024-03-25T02:09:53.238-04:00BO JACKSON'S HIPMarky Schultzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11361451166416906967noreply@blogger.comBlogger75125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2243017189684241796.post-28055746767758597772016-06-21T16:00:00.001-04:002016-06-22T14:49:14.346-04:00SUPERMAN'S CAPE<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: justify;">
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I don't like the Golden State Warriors. I haven't for a while, and maybe
a little bit longer than a lot of my inevitable-backlash brethren. The last time I clearly remember having affection for them, they were the chippy upstarts with the feel-good-story point guard
giving the Spurs a run for their money in the second round of the 2013 playoffs. I said to myself, there's a team on the rise, and good for them. Now, only three short years later, that seems like a distant memory. Part of my inability to get on board with what seems like the entirety of the sports media and the whole fuzzy free world in their adoring love for the Dubs is that I'm a Lakers fan. That makes it really hard to root for other western
conference teams in any way shape or form, sure, but the biggest part of my contempt for Golden State as they have risen to the basketball mountaintop lay in the fact that they carry themselves like a bunch of spoiled brats.</div>
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Matter of fact, a game against my Lakers earlier this regular season is a perfect example of
why they really burn my toast on both sides. In pursuit of a record 73 regular season
wins, the Warriors should have had no trouble with the young–––by all
estimates terrible–––team I root for in early March, when they were absolutely rolling through their schedule. But the Dubs
came out flat that afternoon, and my young guys <a href="http://www.cbssports.com/nba/gametracker/recap/NBA_20160306_GS@LAL">flattened them in the Staples Center</a>. It was a good win for us, and a potentially really bad
one for the Warriors, who had not yet completed their magical 73-win
season, and needed every W they could get to surpass Michael Jordan's
72-win Chicago Bulls. But instead of being humbled by a thumping from a
clearly inferior team, I watched as their starters, who were relegated
to the bench in the fourth quarter with the game out of reach, laughed
their collective asses off.<br />
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I don't know what they were laughing at, but it shouldn't have been the
LA Lakers, who were beating them handily, or really anything else for
that matter. Winning percentage-wise, they were being visibly flip about
the worst upset in NBA history. It spoke to an arrogance that I feel
pervades the team and the organization <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/03/magazine/what-happened-when-venture-capitalists-took-over-the-golden-state-warriors.html?_r=1">top to bottom</a>. As an at-times
arrogant prick myself, I can tell you, there are moments when you have
to turn that bravado off, reassess, and get humble for a moment. A
blowout loss to one of the league's worst teams probably should have
been one of those moments, but there they were, yucking it up.<br />
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And that's when my mild to warm dislike for them turned into a ghost
pepper hot fury. I thought, you know what, fuck these guys. As good as
they are, we just dismantled them on national television, and they can't
even suck it up and stoically accept defeat. Not only did it show a
lack of respect for the valiant effort their opponent just put out (and
truly, utterly piss me off), but it also made me think: where do these
guys get off acting this way?<br />
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Yes, at that juncture they were defending champs, but they also won that
ring with a string of match-up good luck in last year's Western
Conference Playoffs. They also dropped two games to a Cavs team in that
same year's Finals that found LeBron James without the next two best
players on his team, Kevin Love and Kyrie Irving, who were also luckily for the Warriors, lost to injury. And yes, they were chasing the greatest
regular season in NBA history, playing at a level so high that even a
Delores Park hippie would call it stratospheric. But that's exactly when
you should take a look in the mirror and say, "why did we just lose
this gimme game to the lowly Lakers when we're trying to win 73 of
them?"<br />
<br />
At that moment, they chose to laugh instead of reflect, and it's not
without a large amount of schadenfreude that I return the favor. After
completing their record-setting regular season and coming back from a
3-1 deficit in the 2016 Western Conference Finals to set up a magical
rematch with a now-healthy Cavaliers squad, they seemed like a team of
destiny. They romped the Cavs in the first two games of the Finals and
looked poised to torch my burnt toast to a blackened carbon nugget with a
waltz to a second consecutive title. And even when they got thumped in
game three, they came back to crush the Cavs in game four and put the
series at an historically insurmountable advantage of 3-1. You see
unlike their unlikely comeback against the Thunder in the previous
round, no team in NBA history had climbed back from that deficit in the
Finals. So towards the end of that pivotal game four, when they could've
stayed laser-focused and accomplished their goal in a coming close-out
game five, they made another arrogant mistake.<br />
<br />
They turned the series around, right there in that victory they had in
hand, and then proceeded to collapse like a failed Silicon Valley
start-up in the next seven days. The hedge fund money began to bleed
right out of the budget when their emotional and playmaking heartbeat,
Draymond Green, took a shot at LeBron James and his groin with a
flailing punch, this in the midst of a Warriors victory (in the game and
the series) being all but an academic certainty. It made for the third
time in the playoffs that Green, an <a href="https://vine.co/v/iVqWwUMTbwa">unmitigated prick</a> whose <a href="https://vine.co/tags/DraymondGreen">dick-head antics</a> have inexplicably been re-branded as "intensity", took a shot at a
dude's undercarriage. It also, upon league review, was a flagrant foul,
giving Green enough of such fouls in the post-season to warrant a
suspension he probably should've been handed in the previous series
against the Thunder. You know, when he <a href="https://vine.co/v/i9znAaeWgwM">KICKED A MAN IN THE GROIN</a>.<br />
<br />
But yeah, Green followed up his hat-trick low blow by calling LeBron
James something close to or exactly a "fucking bitch" on court, which
isn't so much laughing from the bench at a bunch of twenty-something Lakers
beating the stuffing out of you, but is perhaps the most blatant
example of what happens when you tug on Superman's cape. Bron wasn't
happy about any of it, and made that known to the press. So, with their
third best player and emotional engine suspended going into a close-out
game five at home, the Dubs, again, could have got their humble on
and put Green's absence to the side and focused on winning the next game
and a second consecutive NBA title. Instead, they pissed on the cape
they just yanked on.</div>
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Klay Thompson told the press that he guessed Green must have hurt
LeBron's feelings, and another role player on the team tweeted a fucking
baby bottle emoji, a not so subtle jab at the best player on either
team. And then that same best player, he of the four MVP's and two NBA
championships, proceeded to forgo that metaphorical cape and become a
literal basketball superhero. LBJ and the Cavs beat the Dubs the next
three games consecutively, two of which were in Oakland, with
James leading the way via back-to-back games of 41 points and a game seven triple double that shattered any kind of hubris these stupid Golden State jerks
thought they had earned.<br />
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I've taken shots at LeBron in the past on this very same patch of the
Internet blogosphere, and been proven wrong to a staggering degree. I
questioned his fire and his outlook when he left Cleveland to go to the
Miami Heat, but he made me look like an idiot with a pair of
championships and even more notches on an NBA resume that when all the
dust settles, just might be the most impressive in the league's history.
But I licked my rhetorical wounds, both because he returned to my home
state and the Cavaliers in 2014 with a more mature mindset, but moreover
a displayed greatness that I feel lucky to witness, no Nike-branded pun
intended.<br />
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As a fan, I enjoy watching elite athletes at the top of their game more
than anything else, and despite the media's opinion that Stephen Curry
and the Warriors had stolen his mantle as the best in the world, I knew
better. I knew that a grown-up LeBron was not somebody to be trifled
with, and as I've said so many times before, you doubt his particular
brand of greatness at your own peril. It's a shame that the Warriors
didn't see it the same way, because they might not have been quite so
sure of themselves and pissed away the greatest season in NBA history.<br />
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Nobody has ever won an NBA Finals down 3-1. LeBron and the Cavs have now
done exactly that, and on the 73-win Warriors' home floor to truly
drive the history home. The city of Cleveland hasn't had a championship
professional sports team in over 50 years. LeBron and the Cavs just won
one, in a way that no other team in their sport ever has. Stephen Curry
and Klay Thompson scored a combined 31 points in the deciding game of
the 2016 Finals, one less than their shit-heel teammate Draymond Green
scored by himself. If they can't get humble now, I pity those Golden
State fools. But as an Ohio boy, and a basketball fan, and a man who
believes in respecting your opponent, I could not be happier that they
lost. I'm laughing a very loud laugh right now, and the Dubs have done
little all season to prevent me from feeling like I've earned it. They
pushed to the limit what had become an increasingly entitled title-team
attitude, and a righteous motherfucker from the Buckeye state just
shoved it all the way down their chuckling throats. That feels pretty good, and I just had to say it.</div>
Marky Schultzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11361451166416906967noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2243017189684241796.post-76401475120079092412015-08-14T14:01:00.000-04:002015-08-14T14:08:56.738-04:00I LIVE THE LIFE I LEFT BEHIND<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: justify;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgXmFgyhA9pyQX2d4oX1f78BC4hGdg7LY2YilpO6obramPO37bj0B3pgNEqAmqPvwp7vD54uukJouho7hfdqthEloq92OYoVcW1_0dcqJFKbE8gD7LMbaQ-LWRHEW9RoqDsrca7jX7R2mnl/s1600/true-detective-season-2-episode-5-vince-vaughn-colin-farrell.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="392" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgXmFgyhA9pyQX2d4oX1f78BC4hGdg7LY2YilpO6obramPO37bj0B3pgNEqAmqPvwp7vD54uukJouho7hfdqthEloq92OYoVcW1_0dcqJFKbE8gD7LMbaQ-LWRHEW9RoqDsrca7jX7R2mnl/s640/true-detective-season-2-episode-5-vince-vaughn-colin-farrell.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
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To avoid having to do a big chunk of plot summation, or wade through too much recap, and most importantly to indicate there are nothing but spoilers ahead, I'm going to assume you've already watched season two of <i>True Detective</i>. If that is indeed the case, well lemme break it down like this…</div>
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We're all familiar with the sophomore slump. It’s that crucial second effort that suffers in the light of a particularly bright initial offering. It’s when the first thing you do is so good and compelling and well received that the world at large is in eager anticipation of what you've got as far as a follow-up act is concerned. Sometimes, you just can't quite measure up to that first, vibrant burst of creative energy and your second album or second novel or second film doesn't live up to what you accomplished that first go round. It's something that Nic Pizzolatto's second season of <i>True Detective </i>has been accused of over and over and over again throughout its second season on HBO. The first season, featuring the now indelible pairing of Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson as Rust Cohle and Marty Hart, was known from the beginning to be a one-off series. It was one story told over the course of eight episodes of television, and would step aside after that run to allow in a new, totally different story for the show’s second season. </div>
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After the smash success of McConaughey and Harrelson's masterful dual and duel lead performances, and a strange, Lovecraftian tale of the Louisiana bayou that had everyone in the free world wondering what exactly Carcosa was and who they thought the Yellow King may be, it would've been easy for the second season of <i>True Detective </i>to suffer for its predecessor’s success. It would have been easy for S2 to not live up to expectation, for it to fall under the shadow of the series' first iteration, for it to be an afterthought. And while the consensus of criticism and public reaction would lead you to believe that's exactly what happened here, in season two, allow me to tell you why if the second season of the show isn't better than the first, it certainly isn’t <i>worse</i> in any true usage of that word, and is a masterful piece of television in its own right. </div>
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From jump street, and I mean that literally, from the sprawling and breathtaking views of the California landscape and in particular its interwoven highway system, we know we're in for a show that is going to bring together characters seemingly on separate trajectories, but with the same wish to move forward and to travel on down the road as it were. And whether intended or not, just like season one, they are fated to meet up and meander through one long strange trip of a murder investigation. Los Angeles is a place where everyone dreams of becoming someone else, and it is a perfect backdrop for a story that is all about its four major characters exploring the points at which their former lives turned on a particular pivot point, and they began to live the ones that they lead now.</div>
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The glaring and recurring theme of the entire season is that of past lives. They're referred to directly, as when Ani Bezzerides's new-wave father tells Ray Velcoro he has the biggest aura he's ever seen––he must have “lived hundreds of lives”––or when Vince Vaughn's Frank Semyon wonders whether he maybe really did die in the basement he was abandoned in for days as a child, or when the crooning Lera Lynn, the brooding songstress in Frank’s seedy saloon, tells us on more than one occasion over a stripped-down guitar line that this is “her least favorite life”. But more importantly, and more thematically, our four respective lead characters are all struggling to escape from the turning point in their actual, current lives. Something Semyon would tell us is a point we all face. A point at which we stopped being what we were and started being what we are, whether we like it or not. Or maybe you don’t remember that amazing scene between Semyon and his employee Stan’s now orphaned son in the backyard? After Frank has tried to make up for the boy’s father’s death with a financial gift to his widow and a promise of retribution, he tries to comfort the young man with a speech about life’s pivot points, and what we can do when we stand perched atop one. (One of many scenes that make this season worth a re-watch, I might add, but I'll get there…)</div>
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And all four of our leads have these fulcrum points, when life went from being one thing, and turned into another, and it’s what they spend all season grappling with as their individual demons meet just like those spaghetti junctions in the California highway system. The murder investigation of Ben Caspere brings these four people together in compelling and fascinating ways, as the investigation of Dora Lange's death in season one brought Rust and Marty together to confront their own broken lives.</div>
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Just like their investigation into the serial murders in Louisiana eventually forces Rust and Marty to confront their failed attempts at a successful family and a happy, meaningful existence, Caspere's murder entangles the four points in season two's dramatic square as they try to confront and adapt to their lives beyond a certain unwanted past travail. Caspere's death brings Ani back to where her molestation occurred, Frank back to the violent, criminal past he is desperate to escape, Woodrugh back to his days as a mercenary and the regret of a homosexual love affair, and Ray back to the murder of his wife's rapist and the dispute over his son Chad's bloodline. </div>
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For Woodrugh, we see a man trying to beat back not only his inescapable sexual proclivities, but also a dark past in the U.S. army and as a mercenary fighting the same fight against whatever it is we think we're fighting for in the Middle East. For Ani, we find out, it's a sexual assault in the woods near her father's strange, mysterious [sic] sanctuary. One that she isn't entirely sure she didn't want, she tells Velcoro, crazy as that might sound. For Frank, it's the aforementioned experience in his father's basement, but also as an adult, his abandonment of his baser tendencies to pursue a straight life and a legacy for his children and grandchildren (he didn’t wear a suit 'til he was 38 remember…). For Ray Velcoro, it's moving beyond a murder that if it is not justified, is at least understandable, but has still left him a darker, more violent version of the person he wishes he was. </div>
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Not only did the murder change him, but he later realizes he killed the wrong man (it’s one of the many ways the show really really <i>really</i> puts the screws to Velcoro, but I’ll leave that for another time). Ray not only wishes he was more like his son, but that we all were, he tells the boy and the audience in a voicemail doomed to be undelivered in the towering redwoods and lack of cellular signal that draw the plot towards its close. In a brilliant illumination of the season's aesthetic, Ray was foreshadowed to perish among those trees in a masterful dream sequence featuring his father and a Conway Twitty impersonator that even David Lynch would have to tip his cap to. But oh yeah, that plot!</div>
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It's knotted and muddy and some would tell you damn near indecipherable, but in reality, it's not only that the story is really not <i>that</i> hard to follow along with, but more importantly, it’s secondary to what the show is trying to accomplish this season and as a series as a whole. While the far-out ramblings of Rust Cohle and the inescapable demons of his partner Marty hang like a morbid and beautiful tapestry over the intense, mystic mystery at the first season's core, likewise our four leads in season two navigate through and confront their own existential dilemmas against the backdrop of an equally strange and unknowable menace that so characterized season one. It's a yarn that is still dense and moody enough to hang like baryonic matter over the dramatic scaffold of season two's own unique dark matter(s). Plot is secondary to motivation and character study in <i>True Detective</i>'s universe, and we're better off as viewers because of it. </div>
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And not to be too redundant, but a point well made is one made thoroughly, so let's look at our characters one more time, in particular those vivid motivations. Because motivation made manifest is where Pizzolatto's writing really shines. </div>
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<li>What do you do when you're trying to run from the fact that you murdered your wife's alleged rapist? If you're Ray Velcoro you spend your life fucked up on guilt and therefore a grab bag (or glove compartment) full of substances, all the while fighting in every way possible for the right to continue to raise the son that might be yours or could more likely be the offspring of the very man you murdered.</li>
<li>How about if you can't come to grips with your own sexual preference and the despicable things you did in the U.S. armed forces or their shadowy subsidiaries? Well if you're Paul Woodrugh you again, abuse substances, and then try and careen your bike off the road at alarming speeds and cry through terrible hangovers only to seal things up by walking into what you seem to know is certain death. </li>
<li>Or what if your drunk of a father locks you in a basement as a kid and then as an adult you are a vicious criminal with a seeming heart of gold? If one Frank Semyon, you again, maybe abuse some substances and do everything you can to escape your criminal past and make a legacy for your as-of-yet unborn offspring. </li>
<li>And let's say, you're Ani Bezzerides and you get molested by some creep at your father's way-out spiritual retreat in the woods? Well for starters, you (you guessed it) abuse some substances and spend your time railing against your father's perceived wrong-doing and evident apathy and lecture your sister about exploiting her sexuality whenever you can. Also, you stab things and people with your dead mother's knife. </li>
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Mix these four things together and add one big conspiracy that involves sex, corruption, revenge, and the LA riots, and you bet your ass I'm invested. Again, kudos to Mr. Pizzolatto. And don't even listen to these haters, please, on your way to penning season three. </div>
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Taken this way, the character studies offered in season two are in fact richer and more satisfying than season one, where at the end of the day Marty is simply a softened version of the same cruel bastard he always was, and Rust ends up a little more hopeful about the "big gutter in outer space" he so narrowly avoided leaving behind for good. Given their respective fates, the four main characters in season two leave us with a much more meaningful road traveled and more importantly, their fates tell us something deeper about the intermingled highways of life that we are surrounded by, if not the past ones where things are something completely different. Ray's failure to make amends with his family, Frank's inability to fight back his catalytic pride, Woodrugh's obsession with his own self-destruction, and Ani's exposure of the vast California conspiracy she escaped from with Ray's second son in tow not only all feel earned, but pitch perfect. A friend and I were discussing how the real difference between season one and two is that the bulk of S1 was <i>so good</i> that the finale felt forced and flat, while the breadth of S2 is so great because it also nails the landing, even without a flat circle of time and cribbing its themes and dialogue from <a href="http://www.radiolab.org/story/dust-planet/">Eugene Thacker</a> and <a href="http://www.carmichaelsbookstore.com/book/9780575081574">H.P. Lovecraft</a>. </div>
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Season one focuses on two leads. One, the dark, misanthropic "Michael Jordan of being a son-of-a-bitch“ who's obsessed with his and the world's existential ennui finds out that things really aren't so bad because of a near-death experience. The other, a womanizing, adulterous, violent father of two, makes an unearned peace with his family because hey, time heals all wounds. Compare those fairly trite denouements with where the four, equally compelling characters of season two find their respective fates:</div>
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I'll take Ani's pursuit of justice for Ray, Ray's pursuit of a nobility in death, Woodrugh's misplaced pursuit of his own destruction, and Frank's commitment to the way things outta shake out and to a belief in his own integrity––I‘ll take all of that, any day––over Rust's near-death change of heart and Marty's attempt to make peace with the family unit he wittingly destroyed by the end of season one. Everything about the characters in season two, from their make-up to their motivations to their fates, rings much truer than anything season one had to offer. Tell me why, you grousing internet loudmouths, we should sacrifice true character development for snappier dialogue? Because it's not like season two was without its fair share of memorable lines. And it's not like the corruption in Vincy is that far off from that in the bayou. And it's not like the demented sexual shit that everyone's least favorite lawn care professional was into is that different from Caspere and the young and old Chessani's weird secluded sex parties and manipulation of government contracts for their own personal pleasure. </div>
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I could also get into how Farrell's Velcoro, McAdams's Bezzerides, Vaughn's Semyon, and Kitsch's Woodrugh were equally compelling performances in comparison to McConaughey's Cohle and Harrelson's Hart, but you'd never agree with me. Or I could tell you how that famed tracking shot in the projects in season one is easily rivaled by the out-of-nowhere shoot-out near a meth cookhouse in season two, but this post is long enough as is. Or we could investigate the beauty and execution of Frank’s long walk through desert, gut-cut and watching his life flash before him, but again, in the interest of closing things up, I won’t.</div>
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Suffice to say, I watched damn near the entire series over again before Sunday's finale. I suggest you give it a second watch at some point too. As a favor to me, at least watch those opening credits one last time. Pay attention to our silhouetted characters as they move against the backdrop of the California highways and in particular to the almost too on-point lyrics of Leonard Cohen's "Nevermind", a tune that poetically sums up the show's purpose to near poetic perfection. We get the world we deserve, Frank Semyon tells us is his belief, and it's my belief we got the follow up to season one of <i>True Detective</i> we deserved. It's a damn fine piece of drama at the end of the day, and sooner or later I've got a feeling you'll watch it again. If I did my job and you're still reading, you just might watch it with a more open mind, and find there is a fitting reward for doing so. </div>
Marky Schultzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11361451166416906967noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2243017189684241796.post-70110691335523206922015-02-06T14:42:00.002-05:002015-02-06T14:42:59.170-05:00HIP CHECK: ONE PLAY AT A TIME<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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A lot of folks don’t like coachspeak, and you can certainly count me among the number with a distaste for that athletically Orwellian compound word. Beyond morphology though, the concept itself is one of the least attractive parts about watching sports. We've heard most coaching cliches so many times we can rattle them off ourselves: team effort, everyone's focused, I'm proud of these guys, we'll look at the film, we're moving on to the next game, yap yap yap. And while I will concede there’s rarely anything of importance gleaned from a coach’s in or postgame shibboleths and evasions when faced with the media, there has always been one ballgame bromide that feels more authentic than the rest: <b>a game is not decided by one play.</b></div>
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I like that adage because while it doesn’t soften the blow of a loss caused by a boneheaded mistake or enhance a heroic play at the end of the day, it is still true to a large extent. Competition is, from start to finish, flush with moments that chaotically careen into each other through some kind of contentious butterfly effect. It seems unfair and untrue to say that one specific thing, at one specific time, can be the sole and deciding factor in a game’s outcome. But then of course, Super Bowl 49 comes along and becomes the strongest candidate yet for the exception that proves the rule. </div>
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A great number of things happened in Super Bowl 49 that if turned on their heads would no doubt beget a multiverse of different in-game permutations and sportball superposition, but we’re all really here to talk and think about one thing aren’t we? We’re here to talk about one play. The play that sure as hell felt like it independently and unequivocally decided the game’s winner and loser. Cue a fairly-well-executed segue…</div>
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Since my last post was all about the Buckeyes, I thought it only fitting to start my quick hit on the Super Bowl with two “threes” that will always be associated with the greatest coach in Ohio State football history: <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woody_Hayes">Woody Hayes</a>.</div>
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1. Because he felt that a consistent offense should be one in which a run play garnered at least three yards, the media termed his brand of football: “three yards and a cloud of dust.”</div>
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2. In order to illustrate this belief in the running game and his aversion to the forward pass unless necessary, Woodrow is said to have said, in some form or fashion: “Three things can happen when you throw the ball, and two of them are bad.”</div>
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For a guy like Woody Hayes, who had amazing running backs at OSU, including one of the greatest in college football history in <a href="http://www.sports-reference.com/cfb/players/archie-griffin-1.html">Archie Griffin,</a> this run-first, pass-seldom plan of attack was not surprising. Woody wanted to grind you down on offense and smack you in the face with an elite defense, and the best way to do that is to is to run, run, and run some more when you’ve got the ball. And you’d think that Pete Carroll, another great coach in his own right with a string of similarly stout defenses and a comparable running back in the terrific Marshawn Lynch, might have heeded ol’ Woody’s clarion call to the ground game at the very end of Super Bowl 49. But you’d be wrong of course, and I betcha coach Hayes’s words are hitting Pete pretty hard in hindsight.</div>
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And yes, this is a case of hindsight, that’s for certain. Fans absolutely love to second-guess a coach or player’s decision-making, and this is always with that very comfort of retrospect ready in their apoplectic quiver. It’s very easy without any pressure and the outcome already in front of you to say what you would’ve done. You, the guy on the couch, not the guy that’s a coach. You, the guy playing armchair quarterback, and not the guy with men the size of armchairs flying at him. We all can say what we would’ve done to make a game different, but we’re usually delusional, if not totally full of shit. But what if, in this case, we aren’t faced with of a matter of “I <i>would</i> have” but instead a matter of “you <i>should</i> have”?</div>
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I make this somewhat murky distinction because I want to give Pete Carroll and the Seahawks the benefit of the doubt when it comes to the decision to throw the ball with time winding down against the Patriots last Sunday. Yet just like so many armchair quarterbacks before me, I simply can’t. That’s because the moment the ball was snapped and Russell Wilson dropped back to pass, I couldn’t believe what was happening. I’m not alone of course, as the entirety of sports media and the general public alike have followed suit in pillorying Carroll and offensive coordinator Darrell Bevell for the decision not to hand the ball to one of the league’s premiere running backs with only three feet to go on the road to a Super Bowl title. </div>
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I mean gentlemen, this is Marshawn Lynch. Marshawn freaking Lynch. The man whom, ever since he described his attitude on the field to a reporter at an NFL Rookie camp in 2007 as <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t-iel089cEE">“Beast Mode”</a>, has lived up to that maniacal, threatening moniker with vicious aplomb. A runner whom when called determined, determines what that concept even means. This indomitablity has helped him truck dood after dood after dood throughout his career and become a runner whom <a href="http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/175749">renown has yet to outrun</a>. I bet even A.E Housman knows that Beast Mode, the attitude-turned-noun, could’ve dotted the Patriots’ “I” from one yard out and prevented Tom and Bill from getting that elusive number four.</div>
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Yes, he eats a lot of Skittles and grabs his crotch to celebrate a TD and won’t talk to the media unless you absolutely force him to, but he was a storyline in the two weeks leading up to the Super Bowl more so because he is the best player on the Seattle offense, and probably the best player on the entire team (Sherm, I hope you’re not reading this and good luck with that <a href="http://profootballtalk.nbcsports.com/2015/02/03/richard-sherman-might-not-need-tommy-john-surgery-after-all/">Tommy John</a> sitch!) than for any off-the-field antics. The Patriots’ coffin seemed all but sealed in those final 30 seconds of action, and I might, if I were coach Carroll, have been creative on second down if there were some mere mortal in my backfield, but with a hammer like M. Lynch, you go ahead and try and hit that final nail.</div>
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We’re so puzzled by Seattle’s decision not to give the ball to Lynch because it makes so much sense to do the opposite, hindsight or no. You need one yard, you have a devastating running back, and you have a time out to spend. Don’t overthink things. Give the ball to that cannonball of a man and let him earn you a Super Bowl. It’s why you have him, it’s how you’ve used him these past seasons over and over again, and it’s why you are in talks to pay him <a href="http://www.nfl.com/news/story/0ap3000000466712/article/seahawks-offer-marshawn-lynch-huge-contract-extension">a boatload of money</a> this offseason. Feed the damn beast gentlemen.</div>
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Why wouldn’t you take a chance on something that has <a href="https://twitter.com/FiveThirtyEight/status/562234978013290496">a more than 50% chance of working</a> with two downs to go? Why wouldn’t you, in a game that we’re told over and over by coach after coach is about big name players making big time plays, let that scenario play out in the most crucial moment of your season? Why wouldn’t you thank your lucky stars that a football caromed off of nearly every part of Jermaine Kearse’s body and somehow landed in his hands, <a href="http://imgick.nj.com/home/njo-media/width620/img/giants_impact/photo/16913098-mmmain.jpg">back on the ground</a>, and take the sure route to a TD in the aftermath? Why the hell would you throw the ball? It really is puzzling. I felt it immediately, and I can’t fight the feeling now. The pass was a bad idea. It was a terrible idea. It was in all estimates unconscionable. </div>
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Again though, if I may employ an SAT analogy here…</div>
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ME : COUCH</div>
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PETE CARROLL : COACH. </div>
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I get it. I really do get it. But still…</div>
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The only thing I can say that flies in the face of my disbelief, the only real condolence that can be handed Pete Carroll, Russell Wilson, and Darrell Bevell’s way is that Malcolm Butler made an absolutely fantastic play on the football that was thrown on a second down that will forever live in Super Bowl lore. He broke on that thing like a secret service agent on an assassin’s bullet. He knocked Ricardo Lockette out of the way and grabbed Wilson’s pass out of the air with such assurance and speed that the sporting world seemed to freeze for an instant and rotate 180 degrees on its axis. The game moved so quickly from one outcome to the other that I give Russell Wilson props for even walking upright off the field afterward. I would have collapsed, buffaloed and dismayed, paralyzed with the shock usually reserved for catastrophic injury.</div>
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But that’s Seattle’s only real quasi-positive takeaway here. That’s it. The kid made a helluva play on the football. Yet Seattle’s offensive braintrust still called the play, and Russell Wilson still threw a little high and wide, and Marshawn Lynch still did not get the football in a scenario expertly constructed for him by the Super Bowl gods. Brady led the Pats to the go-ahead score, but a Patriot did little else between then and that second down play to prevent Seattle from grabbing the victory. Lady luck seemed to be booty-calling the ‘Hawks once again, just like she did against Green Bay in the NFC championship, and the kids from Seattle were going to have one more incredible win to seal rare back-to-back Super Bowl titles. But it was not meant to be, because Marshawn Lynch wasn’t given the chance to make it manifest. A game is not decided by one play, but this Super Bowl was.</div>
Marky Schultzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11361451166416906967noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2243017189684241796.post-84102011740959758112015-01-29T20:30:00.000-05:002015-01-30T17:32:06.563-05:00JUST SO HAPPY<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Now that the euphoria of the Ohio State University’s victory in the inaugural College Football Championship Game has (essentially) worn off to the proper extent, I thought I’d share my thoughts on one of the greatest games of my life as a sports fan. I don’t say that last part with any whiff of hyperbole, because the only game I can really compare it to from a personal standpoint is the last time Ohio State won college football’s national championship back in 2002. That would be the game with the now infamous delayed pass interference call in overtime against a heavily favored Miami Hurricanes team. You might recall it? Miami was loaded with more <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2002_Miami_Hurricanes_football_team#Depth_chart">NFL talent</a> than the current roster of the Jacksonville Jaguars and were thought to be unstoppable. That is until we stopped them, and I threw a chair across my parents' living room, and then proceeded to join my friends and complete strangers alike in a night of pure and uninhibited celebration throughout the streets of Toledo, OH. It was a night when I remembered why I watch sports and root for teams––especially the Buckeyes––in the first place. </div>
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That’s because while the majority of a fan’s experience is usually pain and disappointment, more seasons where you don’t win it all then you do, on the rare nights at the culmination of the rare season, the feeling of coming out on top simply cannot be topped. After a 2014 season that began with the preseason loss of our Heisman Trophy candidate quarterback Braxton Miller, featured an embarrassing loss to a (maybe not even) mediocre Virginia Tech team, and the loss of our second (!) Heisman Trophy candidate and replacement for Miller, JT Barrett, the fact that we were even in that game two weeks back didn’t even really make sense. It didn’t feel completely and entirely real. Not even after we trucked Wisconsin 59-0 to make it into the four-team playoff, or after we manhandled Alabama in the semifinal game. It still didn’t feel right. We weren’t actually playing Oregon for the National Championship with a third string quarterback who played out of his mind in those two preceding games. It couldn’t be real.</div>
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But it was, and then that third QB, Cardale Jones, lead the bucks to a third consecutive postseason win to beat Oregon, and then my head nearly came off my shoulders from a combination of screaming, yelling, uncontrollable smiling, and enough alcohol to subdue the Oregon nose guard that <a href="http://www.gannett-cdn.com/-mm-/683a9fea10f8312fb5928a67ef74e7f5032c713d/c=0-8-1614-2160&r=537&c=0-0-534-712/local/-/media/USATODAY/usatsports/2015/01/16/e05868156ea955026b0f6a70670046b8.jpg">12 Gauge</a> overtook in the open field in one of the game’s signature moments. I was out of my mind with glee, an insane level of adrenaline coursing through my veins, and I’m sure that both the people that joined me to watch the game and passersby alike thought that I was some sort of raving lunatic and not the buttoned down scribe you know so well here at the Hip. And what I want to impart about all of this, about this amazing feeling, is what that feeling means, and why I think it's important.</div>
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You can’t tell me that sports don’t matter. I spent my whole life living out the proof that that’s not true. And you can’t tell me that that’s wrong, because I’ve spent my whole time writing this blog with points to the contrary. Sports are a part of my life, and they’re a part of all of our lives, whether we choose to be active fans that sometimes <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=paQwscp3QnI">embarrass themselves</a> like no other, casual fans who tune in for the big game, or people that don’t give one iota of a shit what athletes do with balls on fields and courts and rinks and pitches the world over. There isn’t a purer joy that I’ve come across than one of my favorite teams getting to the top of the mountain in their particular sporting metier. Nothing. Not the love of family or a beautiful woman, not in personal accomplishment or a good deed. And certainly not in the birth of a child, because I don’t have that one under my belt. I’m far too careful when my belt comes off for that. But anyways.</div>
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Yeah, there’s just a joy in this type of victory that cannot be duplicated. Not because it's any more important than the feelings associated with those other things I just threw out, but because it is entirely different. As a sports fan, you are at the absolute mercy of things completely out of your control. And while all of our lives certainly take on that feeling from time to time, we are always behind the wheel, through our sorrow and our jubilation. We’ve always got a varying level of control over the outcomes that produce a happy ending or a sad one in our day-to-day lives. With sports, you simply “root for the laundry” as they say, the jersey on an athlete’s back, at the end of it all. You have your favorite players and coaches and teams for a reason, you tell yourself, but that doesn’t mean that carries any weight whatsoever in what those coaches, athletes, and teams accomplish. You are along for the ride, whether it crests for long periods or reaches dizzying heights of success more often than you can believe. Either way, you’re gambling with your emotions, and the high you get when the big payoff comes through is a feeling unlike any other. Except, maybe, gambling itself. Let’s table that for another time though, because while I certainly have my opinions on that endeavor, today I endeavor to talk about that night and that game a couple weeks back.</div>
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After the game wrapped up and my friends left me to my own devices, I did what I always do after a big Buckeye win. I called my dad, the one who feigns an eroded attention to the game, even though I know better, I called my homies who were gathered around a screen back home, where I wish I could have joined them, and then I pumped my fist and exalted and smiled and almost broke into a boyish skip on my way to the neighborhood bar closer to my house. The liquor was beginning to speak to me, and I wanted to be a little nearer to my bed if my Columbus, OH bred victory high wasn’t through in peaking. I got to the bar, where there wasn’t a Buckeye fan in sight, and seemingly, anyone in sight that even knew that a football game had been played that night. I was asked what the hell I was so happy about. Then I opened my jacket to reveal my scarlet and gray beneath and wouldn’t you know it? I yelled and screamed and smiled and demanded champagne. </div>
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Like the sports fans the bar was so lacking in, it was also bereft of a sparkling white, but that did nothing to slow me down. I enjoyed myself a little bit more on bourbon at $3.50 a glass, looked in a mirror just to see my smile and tell myself that this feeling was real, and walked my drunk ass home, completely content. It wasn’t until the following evening though, that I really felt at home with my excitement. I ran into a friend of mine that next evening at the very same bar, and we started talking about the game and more specifically how happy I was. He, the Louisville Cardinal basketball die-hard, knew this very same feeling just two years ago when his squad trumped Michigan for a basketball national championship, so we decided to compare notes. </div>
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I told him that night two years back, when Louisville beat––yes, indeed, Ohio State’s hated rival––Michigan for the championship, I looked around the bar after the win. Everyone in Louisville was over the moon sure, but this guy, my man, he was fucking losing it. He was out of his mind happy. The kind of happy I vaguely recalled from back in 2002. When our crew came to the decision to find another bar where even more friends were hanging out following U of L’s big win, there was only one guy I wanted to ride with. I settled into shotgun in his Subaru, he made me download <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Shining_Moment">“One Shining Moment”</a> onto his iPhone, we blared it with the windows down, and he honked, hollered, and high-fived total strangers on our way to the next watering hole. I was living vicariously, but it was still a small amount of glorious. So we talked about that night in his car and that game against Michigan, then we talked about my game, and then he took me back to a different championship in Louisville basketball history that made it all come together for the both of us.</div>
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My man laid out the following story:</div>
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The Cards were at the very front part of the Pitino era, and there was a new-found aura of urgency and hope surrounding the program. He and a friend were watching a game in the lead up to that year’s NCAA Tournament and the vibes were good at the bar in question. The scene at the bar was entirely positive, because the good folks of Louisville knew their team was on the upswing, if not contenders at the given moment. My man and his buddy fell into conversation with another fan at the bar, some 15 to 20 years their senior, who recalled vividly the last time Louisville won the basketball national championship, back in <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/1986/04/01/sports/louisville-overtakes-duke-for-ncaa-title.html">1986</a>. The guy was an aeronautical engineer or something of the like in my man’s memory, but he’s not exactly sure. He’s an airplane enthusiast at very least. Our Enthusiast told a tale of the night of that game in ’86, when my man and his buddy were only grade-schoolers, when Milt Wagner drained two free throws to seal the victory and a championship for the Cards. The Enthusiast was at this very same kind of bar he says, and he decided to step outside to have a look at the reaction. What he saw was a neighborhood and a city treading through a flood of good feeling…</div>
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It’s a main drag in Louisville, but there’s a fire engine driving up and down the street, horn at full blast, elated firemen whooping their way through the night. Strangers are embracing in the streets, smiles are pasted on faces like plastic surgeries gone awry, the sound of people yelling their heads off is damn near deafening. The Enthusiast looks to my man, then to his buddy and shakes his head for a beat. “Everyone was just <i>so</i> happy.” My man, retelling the retelling, drops the emphasis on the word “so”, because the Enthusiast did too. And yes, sports fans, that’s it exactly. <i>So</i> happy. My man goes on to say that he and his buddy, to this day, awash in the good feeling that comes with a big Cards win, still lock eyes, smile, and say it again. Everyone is just <i>so</i> happy. That’s why I watch kiddos, that’s why I root for my guys in Columbus, that’s why I stress and freak out, and let the Bucks take years off of my life and reequip my scalp with a set of new gray hairs. It’s all for that one night, at the end of the year, when everyone is just <i>so</i> happy.</div>
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It’s a feeling that when it grips you personally, is great-drugs kind of euphoric, but with none of the manufactured good time you know is lurking behind it. It’s the kind of feeling that when you see it in the eyes of the other fans around, becomes a kind of telepathic good vibe that you don’t want to let go of. It’s the kind of mass hysteria that can grip a city in the opposite way of riot and upheaval, but still lead to the burning of cars and couches and maniacal shouting and embracing and attempting to fly through the roof. It’s that amazing kind of happy that only sports can claim to impart. And man, let me tell you, there ain’t nothing like that feeling. </div>
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Marky Schultzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11361451166416906967noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2243017189684241796.post-569810831633371762014-11-11T18:12:00.000-05:002014-11-11T18:12:06.564-05:00HIP CHECK - HARD TO WATCH<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Let me tell you why I don’t like James Harden. It’s certainly nothing personal. I am not the type of fan to dismiss a player on a few interviews or how they carry themselves or their unfortunate choices in facial hair. A player’s demeanor and attitude can go a long way towards enhancing an already high opinion of their athletic ability and transform them from someone I admire into one of my favorite players, but it is rare that the opposite is true. I try and judge and if need be dislike someone on the field of play purely on the merits of their performance. There are exceptions, where by the accretion of ill will and the need to prove time and again that they totally suck I have indeed written a player or two off––ahem, <a href="http://www.bojacksonship.com/2012/08/moving-on.html">Dwight Howard</a>––I try to keep this a rare occasion in both life and sport. You really have to earn a spot on my shit list when it comes to personality, and Mr. Harden is assuredly not in that swath of the sporting population.</div>
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I dislike Harden purely on the content of his game. He is a deadly three point shooter, a fantastic slasher, an above-average passer, and one of the league’s best all-around scorers. Nothing not to like there. But it is the manner in which he can over and over, within the span of even a single game, make you forget about all of that that really puts me out. That’s because his true primary focus on offense, and hell, in his game as a whole, since he has <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wVYJULACcao">never shown much interest in defense whatsoever</a>, is doing whatever it takes to get to the free throw line. The ability to draw fouls is part of becoming a complete offensive superstar, but in Harden’s case it does not merely accentuate his talents, it sublimates them into afterthoughts. His knack for getting to the line does not underscore his game, it is what his game is all about. Quite frankly James, you look soft son.</div>
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He flops, he flails, he sends his arms and legs akimbo, crashing through the lane like an unconscious sky diver, embellishing every single point of contact made on his way towards the hoop, or more usually, the floor. Half the time, it doesn’t even appear he has designs on putting up a shot, but is driving into the teeth of a defense with the single goal of hearing a referee’s whistle sound. He acts as if fouled so often in fact, I don’t believe most refs know whether or not he actually earned a legitimate call. It’s a cheap way to make an NBA living, and to go about your business as a star player. I question a man as the cornerstone of a franchise and as a leader if he earns his buckets acting his way to the stripe and not hitting shots from the field. Not only that, but the way he plays damages the league as a whole, since the NBA has recently solidified to the casual fan its reputation as a game with less and less watch-ability. </div>
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The greats have always found a way to get to the line, from Jordan to Shaq (most times unwillingly) to Kobe to LeBron, but it has always been a part of their game, and not its centerpiece.</div>
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Harden’s position as the poster boy for the NBA’s flop-first shortcomings is often brought into severe focus by active defenses, as was the case on Saturday night, when the Rockets hosted the dazzling Golden State Warriors. Golden State players were in foul trouble early and often, and visibly showed their frustration with near the same frequency as whistles were blown. Phantom contact and questionable calls haunted their defensive efforts, and though they held the Rockets under 40% from the field and Houston seemingly could not buy a bucket, the Warriors still found themselves in an eight point first half hole.</div>
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They were outperforming Houston when the clock was running, but got killed at the line time and again, with baffling foul calls that sent Klay Thompson to the bench with two fouls in the blink of an eye, left Stef Curry laughing in disgust, and let Harden continue to score without any ability in the early going to hit a shot. It made me shudder to think what a playoff series between these teams would look like, and brought up memories of the 2006 NBA Finals, which were competitively dismantled by Dwyane Wade’s knack for failing down on every drive into the lane. The Mavericks watched in awe as their series lead evaporated and Wade’s free throw shooting eventually turned the tide of the championship series in Miami’s favor. </div>
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That’s why Harden really burns my toast. He doesn’t just offer up an aesthetically, if not morally lacking form of basketball, he hurts the flow of the game as a whole, creates impossible decisions for referees, and hampers the defensive abilities of what as a whole is a supremely talented defensive league. Instead of a wonderful, up and down, back and forth blur of beautiful basketball, I get feigned attrition and finesse-as-function histrionics wrapped in an ugly looking beard. The cynics can claim what Harden does is within the rules and in fact a brilliant manipulation of the NBA’s status quo, but I didn’t develop a love of sports to be a cynic. I want it to be more than that. I want it to not just entertain me, but delight me. Not only to fill my time, but make that time worthwhile. I want the ballet of basketball performed with grace and tact, not reduced to an ugly grind where I watch one player thrash through a defense and shoot free throws. I don’t want to watch James Harden, that’s for damn sure.</div>
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Marky Schultzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11361451166416906967noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2243017189684241796.post-26443191395354217542014-11-03T22:46:00.001-05:002014-11-11T18:13:51.722-05:00HIP CHECK - HEADS-TO-HEADS<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Now that the Monday nighter between the Colts and Giants is in the books and your fantasy football scores are final, week nine of the NFL season is officially on record. With it, so is another round of Manning v. Brady, and like most meetings between the two, Touchdown Tom came out on top. Brady is now 11-5 all-time against his only true under-the-center rival, with the Patriots besting the Broncos 43-21 in Foxboro Sunday afternoon. Of course, the most interesting part of this rivalry is that it isn’t really a rivalry at all in the truest sense of the word. Manning has now QB'd two different teams throughout the showdown’s tenure, and as much as we want it to be, it isn’t a classic one-on-one battle between two athletes in the way it is so often billed.</div>
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It certainly isn’t Ali/Frazier or McEnroe/Borg or Palmer/Nicklaus. It’s two football teams playing against each other, not two men squaring off mano a mano. And it’s also why Brady is the clear cut owner of the rivalry. There’s simply too many other variables in the equation when football teams play each other, and the Patriots have been better than the Colts and Broncos near unanimously. The Pats have most always had a better defense, definitely a better coach, and usually more talent spread across both sides of the ball as a whole (this year is probably an exception to that last rule, but I digress). It doesn’t mean that Brady is better than Manning any more than it means that the other Manning brother is better than Brady because he owns two Super Bowl wins against Gisele’s better half. It probably isn’t either of the following, but is definitely more “any given Sunday” than “Tom is better than Peyton.” More “heads-to-heads” than “head-to-head”.</div>
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The debate rages about which is better while both keep hurling touchdown passes and will continue until long after they’re both gone from the gridiron, and that’s fine. I just don’t think it’s fair to base their merits on head-to-head showdowns. In reality, the nearest comparison to a sporting rivalry that Manning/Brady brings to mind is Magic Johnson's Lakers and Larry Bird's Celtics in the heyday of the NBA’s resurgence in the 1980’s. But even here, the analogy falls apart. One player in five in your starting lineup goes a lot further towards a distinct comparative advantage than the one in eleven ratio that manifests on a football team. That said, we are in all ways lucky as fans to have witnessed these two go at it each of the sixteen times their teams have met. I often drift into this we-had-it-so-good-in-my-day sort of reverie because it becomes part of what you get to talk about with younger fans as the years roll on. </div>
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That’s right kiddos––I will someday get to say––I got to watch Jordan <i>and</i> LeBron in their prime, dominate two completely different eras of NBA hoops. I got to watch Tiger Woods rule over the game of golf in a way that no one else ever will. I got to watch both Pete Sampras <i>and</i> Roger Federer play tennis, and I still can’t say who’s better. Oh yeah, and I got to watch Tom Brady <i>and</i> Peyton Manning throw the football in the same, amazing era of NFL offensive firepower. When all’s said and done, they might be the two greatest quarterbacks that ever lived, and I was around to watch them both go. Even as they age, their talents remain prodigious, their statistics are still both gaudy and in near all cases record-setting, their mutual respect is unflappable, and their auras perpetually inescapable.</div>
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So, who else is ready for meeting number seventeen?</div>
Marky Schultzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11361451166416906967noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2243017189684241796.post-14251285786910317802014-02-18T19:51:00.000-05:002014-02-18T20:09:29.291-05:00SAM WE ARE<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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The last post I wrote here at Bo Jackson’s Hip was about Richie Incognito, Jonathan Martin, and what their beef down in Miami told us about the state of pro football. I talked about how they represent two ends of the NFL’s magnet, and that the neutral portion that should be at the center of this gridiron polarity doesn’t really exist in my mind. The NFL is exactly what it has lately tried so hard to tell us it is not: brutal, unforgiving, poignantly meritocratic, and obviously chauvinistic. And while I pilloried NFL brass and meat-headed racists like Richie Incognito for permeating the league’s consciousness, I ended with a glimmer of hope from Brandon Marshall about the humanity that the NFL has never really had, and what it might take to make it manifest.</div>
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You might go back and read all of that if you want (or the vivid, <a href="http://www.sbnation.com/nfl/2014/2/14/5411608/worst-of-the-richie-incognito-jonathan-martin-report-miami-dolphins">ugly report</a> that was just released on the whole matter), or just wonder why I followed a path from one football controversy to the next, without even sniffing the Super Bowl, and you might be justified in your criticism. But if you watched that game, come on. What can I say? The Seahawks thumped the Broncos with stellar defense, Peyton Manning shrunk in a big game, and it doesn’t do anything to take away from his legacy as one of the greatest football players of all time. Well, I guess I could have said that, but with a lot more words and links, and videos and what not. But I’m not going to. I’m going to skip the big game and pick up where I left off: with a controversy that calls into question exactly what football is, what it tells us about ourselves as fans, and how it might mirror the American culture at large. I’m headed straight from knuckle-headed bullies and a big guy who had enough of them in Miami to an even pricklier question that arose last week from the heartland.</div>
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Missouri defensive end and co-SEC Defensive Player of the Year Michael Sam announced publicly to the <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/10/sports/michael-sam-college-football-star-says-he-is-gay-ahead-of-nfl-draft.html">New York Times</a> and ESPN that he is a gay man. He told us all what he told his teammates and coaches earlier last summer, before the college football season even started: that he is out, and proud, and gay. The small miracle is that his teammates had enough discretion, loyalty, and respect for Sam’s decision to come out that they went all the way up until last week without saying a word publicly about it. They let Sam do that for himself. The larger miracle is that the NFL, already pushing away the clouds of doubt about concussions and brain injury and human carnage, already trying to wash away the stains of Bounty Gate and Richie Incognito, and still swiping at the less-important dusting of Richard Sherman’s unsportsmanlike exuberance, finds itself thrown into an all new imbroglio that most of us thought was still several years down the line.</div>
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Michael Sam is too talented not to be taken in this coming April’s 2014 NFL Draft, and will thus become the first openly gay athlete in the four major American sports. While Jason Collins was indeed courageous and paved the way for Sam’s reveal when <a href="http://i2.cdn.turner.com/si/dam/assets/130429144053-jason-collins-cover-single-image-cut.jpg">he told Sports Illustrated that he was gay</a>, it was while he was an unemployed, and as is the case now, former NBA player. For whatever reason, be it age, a lack of productivity, or perhaps, his sexuality, Collins has not landed on an NBA roster this season. And he probably won’t. And he probably won’t next year. So he is a former player coming out for all intents and purposes, joining others in this<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Amaechi"> honorable line</a>, though his landmark decision to tell the world about his sexual preference stands out as the ladder upon which Michael Sam found the courage to climb up and do just the same. </div>
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Like Collins, Sam isn’t a current professional athlete. While Collins essentially was, Sam most certainly will be. And here, for this writer, is where this young man’s story becomes not only historic and important and brave, but utterly fascinating. Sam, whether you think his intentions were to do so or not, has become the ultimate test case for the gay American athlete, and even more intriguingly, the gay American football player. Sam is poised to become the sporting version of that ideal that Dr. King gave us so many years ago: a man judged not by the color of his skin, but the content of his character. In this case, not the orientation of his sexuality, but his prowess on a football field. If it seems too heavy-handed to invoke the civil rights movement and one of the most transcendent activists the world has ever seen, it speaks both to Dr. King’s very transcendence and brings us to a small but important hurdle that must be cleared before moving on to the real dilemma that Sam creates. To put it simply: Michael Sam is not Jackie Robinson.</div>
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While it feels only natural to draw parallels between the Civil Rights Movement in mid-twentieth century America and our most obvious civil rights issue today, gay equality, this is a clear case of apples and oranges. Jackie Robinson was a prime example of an already existent pool of talent that was being kept out of the highest level of competition available. It isn’t that Jackie Robinson came out to the country as a black man, it’s that black men weren’t allowed to play baseball in the Major Leagues until he and Branch Rickey came along. They challenged a gentleman’s [sic] agreement between baseball owners that black players would not find a place on a Major League roster. The stakes were much higher, Jackie faced a level of abuse that Michael Sam will not likely see the edges of, and the cause was of an entirely different variety. Jackie Robinson is the apotheosis of American courage, so we should not so easily throw other men into his company.</div>
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This is not said to take something away from Michael Sam, but more to not take anything away from Jackie Robinson. It’s an important point that was discussed on what is probably the smartest podcast in sports, Slate’s <a href="http://www.slate.com/articles/podcasts/hang_up_and_listen.html">Hang Up and Listen</a>, last Monday, and one that I was already making internally before the sharp trio behind HUAL verbalized it in their weekly address to the sporting world. The truth is, there have already been and currently are gay athletes in the four major American sports, which we can assume from innuendo and know from <a href="http://www.nj.com/phillies/index.ssf/2014/02/michael_young_ex-phillies_player_is_sure_hes_had_a_gay_teammate_before.html">first-hand accounts</a>. Sam’s proclamation and assertion of the value of his lifestyle and character are thrilling and evident, but they are not the same thing as what Jackie Robinson did for baseball, black and white American athletes, and the Civil Rights Movement as a whole. Not to mention that Jackie is one of the <a href="http://vimeo.com/22472408">greatest baseball players of all time</a>, not just a trailblazer. So let’s just stop making what Jackie Robinson did during <a href="http://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2013/04/10/-jackie-robinsons-faith-column/2068977/">and after his career</a> part of this issue. Let’s let Sam’s announcement exist as its own colossal step forward for football, sports, and a loud defiance of backward beliefs in conservative creations like the sanctity of marriage and the maintenance of the accepted view of what an American family should look like. </div>
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With that all behind us, or at least me, let’s move on to the very present and very telling realities that Sam’s story has and will continue to illuminate. It all goes back to what I said before about Sam as the ultimate test case. My intent is not to strip his announcement of any of its import by looking at it through an overly clinical lens, but simply to peer at him the exact same way the NFL and its 30 general managers are as we speak. From what <a href="http://mmqb.si.com/2014/02/09/michael-sam-monday-morning-quarterback/">a couple of GM’s</a> and <a href="http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/college-football/news/20140209/michael-sam-draft-stock/">execs</a> have told reporters (under the safe umbrella of anonymity of course), Sam’s draft stock might take a hit because of his sexuality. Because he’s now a “distraction” for any team he would join, both internally in the locker room and externally to the members of the media that would likely hound Sam and his teammates. Of course, as a couple of members of the media have deftly pointed out, this is a complete load of BS. Please enjoy both clips, and then kindly join me after the jump. And shouts to <a href="http://deadspin.com/texas-sportscaster-destroys-silly-opposition-to-michael-1521755532">Deadspin</a> for the heads up on the first vid.</div>
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As Mr. Hansen and Mr. Stewart expertly point out, the NFL is full of miscreants and convicted or suspected criminals of varying degrees, and their distractions didn’t seem to stop anyone from signing them up to play football on Sundays. In fact, quite the opposite, as these less-than-rare controversies have and will continue to melt away faster than snowballs in springtime. If these are the very controversies that our aforementioned GM’s and executives are pointing towards, they have already been proven wrong. It’s why Sam’s sexuality is a different kind of litmus test. If he falls in the draft, it won’t be because he’s undersized or lacks the physical traits to be a great pro, or that there are questions about his character, rather it will be because of bald bigotry and clear narrow-mindedness. It will be because no matter how many states continue to legalize gay marriage––and despite politicians on both sides of the aisle in congress supporting equal rights for homosexuals, bisexuals, and transgender Americans––football, and the entire country, still can’t get on board. It will be because the NFL and the bulk of the American population are choosing to be on the wrong side of history.</div>
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Like the women's movement and the battle against Jim Crow, which once begun would not be denied, the victory for those advocating for gay rights is already written on the walls of the United States of America. The gay rights train is barreling down the tracks, with the NFL and conservative America powerless to stop it. The fact that they might try will be yet another black eye for football, and a lesson in the fact that while progress is inevitable, there will always be those that try and slow its pace. Michael Sam is an at least capable and perhaps dynamic talent on the football field, and anyone that chooses to overlook that is making a mistake. They are making a mistake intellectually, spiritually, and in the case of an NFL team that passes on him, a mistake about doing what it takes to make their football team better. Maybe, like the experts seem to think, Sam is a mid-round pick. Maybe he won’t be watched by a camera on draft day with a million dollars trailing him to the stage, or even on the next day of the 2014 draft, but that really doesn’t matter. He is destined to be the first openly gay athlete to be drafted into the NFL and play professional football, and no one can take that away from him.</div>
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But if our beloved game of football is too pig-headed and myopic to accept and celebrate Michael Sam, and he inexplicably slips lower and lower in the draft, it will say a lot about the current state of gay, bisexual, and transgender rights in the United States. Sports have an uncanny way of both projecting upon and reflecting the national opinion, and as such, this young man’s professional fate is tied to our own national character. Let’s hope that not just one, but several NFL teams are lined up to swoop Sam off of the draft board, and that the league and the rest of us can continue to take pride in our differences as people, and as a result advocate for the freedoms that are at the heart of the American identity. </div>
Marky Schultzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11361451166416906967noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2243017189684241796.post-45437134286068854532013-11-11T14:40:00.002-05:002014-11-03T23:01:46.864-05:00HIDDEN IN PLAIN SIGHT<div style="text-align: justify;">
If one examines the arc of a headline sports story in the early 21st century, it usually proves to be a roller coaster worthy curve. I'm not talking one of those old corkscrew numbers with twists and turns–though at times those stories do abound–but more like the big ticket thrill rides that find us starting off at ground level and soaring to unimaginable heights in the sky. Layers of meaning and effect are added, more and more information leaks out as we climb, and before long, we're at the peak of the first hill, looking out and over the landscape of sports wondering what the hell made us think it would be fun to hang this high in the air, where our perspective is out of wack and the slow ascent that brought us this far from the ground doesn't even register in memory. </div>
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This analogy is particularly apt when it comes to the ongoing saga of the 2013 Miami Dolphins, who right now must be wondering exactly how terrifying the drop from the top of this story’s hill is going to be. A couple weeks back, I'm sure the players, coaches and fans in South Beach wouldn't have dared imagine a media circus so large and two of their offensive lineman in its center ring, but that as they say, is where we're at right now. When news surfaced that the Dolphins’ Jonathan Martin had left the team indefinitely to deal with a personal issue, the ripple along the sporting pond was minuscule. But we quickly learned that Martin, who has an anecdotal history of mental duress and a (gasp!) Stanford education backed up by intellectual parents, wasn't leaving his teammates behind for no good reason. The man his teammates affectionately call ‘Big Weirdo’ was stepping away because he had flat had enough of the less-than-genial treatment his fellow Dolphins were apt to hand out. Rookie hazing is one thing, but bullying and harassing a second year guy right out of town is another all together, and from what Martin sez (sorry, reading <a href="http://www.nationalbook.org/nba2013.html#.UoEp9pGcPwI">the new Pynchon</a> right now) and his camp continues to leak, this isn’t just some gentle ribbing.</div>
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We found out the straw that broke the lineman's back was when high school cafeteria style, a table full of teammates got up and left when Martin took a seat with them for a team meal. That knucklehead move aside, Martin also spoke to consistent mistreatment by his fellow Dolphins, having to chip in 15K on a jaunt to Vegas he didn’t even go on, continued hazing into his second year in the league, a general disregard for his dislike for such treatment, all culminating in the release of text messages and voice mails from Richie Incognito, the embattled Dolphins vet who <a href="http://deadspin.com/report-richie-incognito-called-jonathan-martin-a-half-1458148723">called Martin a half-nigger, said he'd shit in the young man's mouth, and polished it off by saying he was going to kill him. </a></div>
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Incognito, despite his name's import, is a fairly conspicuous miscreant. How’s this for a brief career summation: being suspended from and then essentially kicked off the Nebraska football team, transferring to Oregon where he was dismissed within a week's time, ending up on what <a href="http://www.cbssports.com/nfl/eye-on-football/24186395/tony-dungy-scott-pioli-say-richie-incognito-was-off-draft-boards">Tony Dungy called</a> several NFL teams' DNDC (Do Not Draft because of Character) lists, eventually drafted by St. Louis, racking up so many fines and personal foul penalties with the Rams in five years that he was summarily cut, followed by a cup of coffee in Buffalo, which led him to finally land in the mess he's made in Miami. He's a serial punk who once trash talked Antonio Smith into ripping Incognito's helmet off, then attack him with it. Just the kind of guy I'd want molding my team's young linemen. Good grief. And check the GIF:</div>
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But being surprised by Incognito's behavior is akin to surprise that members of a ballet troupe have rhythm. It's part of a football player's job description to be tough and to an extent, unruly–Incognito being at the extreme (and additionally racist) end of this bruising spectrum. And hazing, if you want to call it institutionalized or not, is also part of the game, especially at preseason training camp, the place where a team takes shape, bonds, and teammates spend most of their waking moments together. Did Incognito take it too far? Yes he did. But to what extent we'll never really know. Beyond the racial overtones, the Dolphins’ group dynamic is for the most part unknown to all of us who don’t strap on a helmet every Sunday in the fall. I can't speak to what is and isn't acceptable behavior in Miami, any more than you can. Incognito may be an abusive (ahem, racist) outlier, but is also an example of the nature of the NFL beast. The league just doesn't want to admit it. They want to condemn tough guy behavior and hits to the head, and yet promote an image of concern and commitment to player safety, the latter of which is done with a huge wink and a neck breaking nod. The NFL is one thing, says it's another, and has to decide at some point what the actual realities on and off the field really are. </div>
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But again, we should certainly not be surprised. Football is the manliest game among the manly American sports. It’s full of jocks, tough guys, and varying degrees of dickhead, so why does a guy like Richie Incognito and his treatment of someone like Jonathan Martin, strike anyone as odd? The brash bully putting the screws to the aloof nerd is a story as old as time itself, and on a football team? Of course this kind of bullshit goes on. The difference here, and the reason the story has now gained traction with not only the sports media, but also national news outlets, is that it pushes hot button issues in America. Race is the third rail of any news story, but when combined with money, fame, the most popular game in the country, and bullying–a topic du jour on the internet and beyond–the headlines not only grow in size, but reach out to ever more ears and eyeballs. </div>
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While the character types and plot movements in this story are nothing if not unoriginal, and play to the current national conscience surrounding bullying and the manufactured specter of wussification, what the Dolphins are dealing with tells us more about is what it’s like to be a professional football player. Race is the undercard to the main event of football’s ridiculous warrior mentality and the bullies and jerks it manufactures. </div>
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That’s because the racial aspect is easy to identify and condemn: anyone that uses the language that Incognito did is a racist first and fool second. We can all agree on that. But what the story says about football’s culture and overall aesthetic is where the real intrigue lies. It’s a league where by all accounts thoughtful, at times sensitive young athletes like Jonathan Martin are bullied off of teams made up of men who do nothing but defend his primary bully as soon as both are out the door. A league that saw fit to severely punish the perpetrators behind Bounty Gate, but is itself exposed in a <a href="http://www.carmichaelsbookstore.com/search/apachesolr_search/league%20of%20denial">book</a> and <a href="http://video.pbs.org/video/2365067212/">accompanying documentary</a> as categoric deniers of the repercussions of <a href="http://www.bojacksonship.com/2012/05/choice-is-mine-revisited.html">head injuries</a>. A league in which it is now near-criminal to target another player’s head, but top brass continue to push for an 18-game season and Thursday night double-headers, only increasing the level of carnage. Plain and simple, it is a league that wants to have its brutal cake and eat it too, and for every nice guy like Tony Gonzalez or Arian Foster, there are five more that are closer in temperament to Richie Incognito. </div>
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The story of Jonathan Martin is sad and telling at the end of the day. It’s sad that Richie Incognito, who is clearly a dick, and evidently a racist (he also called Warren Sapp that famous n-word, on the playing field no less, <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/early-lead/wp/2013/11/06/warren-sapp-says-richie-incognito-kicked-him-used-a-racial-slur-in-a-game/">according to the former Tampa Bay Buccaneer</a>), can lead his teammates in pushing around a young athlete with his whole career still in front of him. It’s sad that after that, his teammates and other players lined up to support the bully, and not the victim. It’s sad that the NFL is a place where this sort of thing still goes on, and it’s sad that we’re surprised that it does. Football is violent, the men who play it are intense, possibly performance-drug-addled hired guns, and it is a boys’ club to the Nth degree. As fans, we love it because of these very facts–the way we like action movies and violent video games and books of the very same nature. I <a href="http://www.bojacksonship.com/2011/10/are-you-not-entertained.html">previously opined</a> on why my love for football is giving me all kinds of misgivings lately, but more than ever I’m even more tired of the NFL’s <a href="http://www.bojacksonship.com/2011/07/labor-days.html">two-faced rationale</a>. They don’t want to clean their room, they want to shove everything into the closet when the media happens to check in. Deep down, the powers that be in football know that its manly, violent aura is its bread and butter, and they can’t continue to put lipstick on a pig(skin) and tell us it’s a pretty girl.</div>
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And of course, we haven't even mentioned what the coaching staff and front office in Miami knew, but to a lot of folks, it feels like yes, indeed, they did order the <a href="http://www.indystar.com/viewint/article/20131106/SPORTS/311060004">Code Red</a>. And if they didn't know about any of this, that's even worse. An NFL team should know its own stripes, and whether or not they change, and I'm pretty sure the Dolphins do in this case. Because while a guy like Incognito–or another recent headline stirrer Brandon Meriweather–is deplorable, at least Meriweather seems to <a href="http://nfl.si.com/2013/11/03/brandon-meriweather-low-hits-washington-redskins/">be in on the league’s sick joke</a> that he’s exactly the kind of monster the NFL creates. Don’t just take it from me though, the fan and observer, or Meriweather, the perennial headhunter, take it instead from Chicago Bears wide receiver and league veteran Brandon Marshall. When asked about the situation in his former NFL home of Miami, he summed things up thusly:</div>
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<i>"Take a little boy and a little girl. A little boy falls down and the first thing we say as parents is ‘Get up, shake it off. You’ll be OK. Don’t cry.’ When a little girl falls down, what do we say? ‘It’s going to be OK.’ We validate their feelings. So right there from that moment, we’re teaching our men to mask their feelings, don't show their emotions. And it’s that times 100 with football players. You can’t show that you're hurt, you can’t show any pain. So for a guy to come into the locker room and he shows a little vulnerability, that’s a problem. That’s what I mean by the culture of the NFL. And that’s what we have to change.”</i> – via <a href="http://deadspin.com/brandon-marshall-on-the-culture-of-the-nfl-is-brillia-1461052472/1461476532/@BlueJeans">Deadspin</a> via the <a href="http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2013-11-06/sports/chi-marshall-calls-for-change-20131106_1_brandon-marshall-richie-incognito-jonathan-martin">Chicago Tribune</a></div>
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What Brandon Marshall so succinctly points out and what this roller coaster of a story in Miami continues to accentuate is that football cannot walk the line between rigorous physical attrition and tough-guy BS <i>and</i> politically correct, media-friendly exhibitions of contrition. The NFL has to decide if it is more Richie Incognito or Jonathan Martin. More bully, or victim. Because in the eyes of this writer, no real truth lay between.</div>
Marky Schultzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11361451166416906967noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2243017189684241796.post-72082817754657688802013-07-09T18:55:00.000-04:002013-07-12T17:20:58.243-04:00THE BLACK-ER ALBUM<div style="text-align: justify;">
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After a series of false starts (no athletic pun intended) on a variety of sporty topics, I’ve decided to write a post here at <b>Bo Jackson’s Hip </b>that isn’t about sports at all. I started and stopped posts about Jason Collins coming out of the closet, Tim Tebow moving to New England, and most recently, the two epic collapses we saw in Game 6 of the NBA Finals and Stanley Cup Final. But none of those topics materialized into something interesting to read, so I’ve scrapped all of that and decided to flex a different linguistic muscle.</div>
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In lieu of sports, this post’s focus is Jay-Z, and more specifically his new long player, <i>Magna Carta Holy Grail</i>. Rap music, and Mr. Carter himself, pop up all the time during my posts about sports, so trust me when I say that though this post isn’t about sports, it's still <b>Bo Jackson's Hip</b>.</div>
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This isn’t exactly a review of <i>Magna Carta Holy Grail</i>, but more a discussion of it in relation to Jay-Z’s close to two-decade-long career. I’m not a music critic, but still want to examine what the new album says about him and his position in the music industry and the American culture at large. I probably wouldn’t be suited to review a Jay-Z album because of my devotion to his catalogue and belief that he is perhaps the greatest MC of all time, but ironically I do feel suited to talk about what the album and its artist mean in a broader sense. The album is a statement about Jay-Z’s role as a black success story in white America, a hyperbolic but fairly accurate representation of his cultural influence, his navigation of fame’s complex gauntlet, and of course–because he’s still a rapper at the end of the day–the fact that he’s a much better MC than the rest of these lyrical crumbsnatchers.</div>
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The first track, “Holy Grail”, features a soulful Justin Timberlake delivering perhaps the performance of his career, and acts as a potent thesis statement for the remainder of the album. It is a song about the trappings of fame, and about Jay-Z's continued escapability. It references black figures that have squandered their wealth like MC Hammer and Mike Tyson, and a white musician who buckled under the fierce gaze of the public eye in Kurt Cobain. A brief melodic and lyrical sampling from "Smells Like Teen Spirit" finds Jay and Justin Timberlake re-working Nirvana's bombastic entry into the mainstream, shifting "here we are now, entertain us" into "and we all just, entertainers." The song and much of the album assert that Jay-Z is near immune to the serious damage that fame can do to an individual, and contains some of <i>Magna Carta Holy Grail</i>'s other recurring themes: Jay-Z's position as an influential black American, the responsibility that comes with this power, and his still heavy influence on rap music.</div>
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From jump street, I’m buying it. That’s because I believe that Jay-Z means something in America, the same way that Michael Jordan means something, or James Brown means something, or Ernest Hemingway means something, or Orson Welles means something.</div>
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Or Muhammad Ali means something.</div>
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The boxer is mentioned several times on MCHG (I’m already tired of typing that whole damn thing out), and like Jean-Michel Basquiat, is a continued referential and reverential touchstone. While Jay-Z has never stood up for a cause the way Ali did in his refusal to enter the draft, or spent time in jail for this and his religious convictions, I still think the Ali references are merited. I don’t know that any athlete has ever transcended his own sport to fascinate and inspire both America and the global community the way Muhammad Ali has, and I don’t think that another ever will. Jay-Z no doubt sees himself in a similar light, and while some may call that a typical display of egoism for the rapper, I for one can at least see why he has so much admiration for the champ. Like Ali, Jay’s the greatest, and he’s black, and motherfuckers have to deal with that. Just take a look at the references to the Louisville Lip from MCHG:</div>
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Just let me be great, just let me be great</div>
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I feel like mothafuckin' Cassius Clay right now, genius!</div>
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Muhammad Hovi, my back against the ropes<br />
the black Maybach, I'm back inside the boat<br />
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America tried to emasculate the greats</div>
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Murder Malcolm, gave Cassius the shakes</div>
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Wait, tell them rumble young man rumble</div>
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Like the greatest heavyweight of all time became more than just a fighter, Jay-Z has become something beyond an artist. This is evident in his move outward into business as the former CEO of Def Jam and current CEO of Roc Nation, and in his co-ownership of the Nets, where he was the driving force behind the NBA team’s move from New Jersey to Brooklyn. And recently, his foray into athlete representation (he’s off to a <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/03/sports/baseball/robinson-cano-leaves-scott-boras-for-jay-zs-agency.html?_r=0" target="_blank">nice</a> <a href="http://www.cbssports.com/nba/blog/eye-on-basketball/22515082/thunder-star-kevin-durant-first-nba-player-to-sign-with-jayz" target="_blank">start</a>) forced him to move up and move on, ceding his stake in the NBA franchise that now calls his home-borough home. He’s done all of this while joining into a high-profile marriage with perhaps the most well-known female artist in music since Madonna, Beyoncé Knowles, only increasing an already large pop-cultural cache. Like Ali, this has happened with, for want of a better word, his <i>blackness</i> intact. In the same way that Muhammad Ali’s race wasn’t an aspect of his fame, but inseparable from it, Jay-Z has always been not only prideful of his status as a <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yVA-xTBeHyM" target="_blank">black American</a>, but intentionally <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d2mBK9LsKf4" target="_blank">unquiet</a> about what it means in the context of our culture.</div>
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This personal motivation, which goes back to his emergence from retirement with 2006’s <i>Kingdom Come</i>, is now a sharpened weapon the rapper wields regularly in response to his critics, an upstart generation of rappers, and frankly anyone who doubts his capabilities. Like Ali, Jay-Z’s confidence, style, and fearlessness are a charismatic combination that captivate the culture as a whole–not just fans of sports or music. <i>Kingdom Come</i> was a warning shot to younger rappers that the king of New York was back, <i>The Blueprint 3</i> was a continuation of that theme, but also a reminder that even as he aged, Jay-Z was still a forward thinking mainstream artist sonically and topically, and his shared effort with Kanye West, <i>Watch the Throne</i>, was a flag-planting ceremony that decided to forego subtlety in favor of a celebration of the black wealth, power, and influence that both men have cultivated. (In between all of that great music was a spur-of-the-moment classic called <i>American Gangster</i> inspired by the film of the same name. It is a deft exploration of the similarities he found in the story of drug dealer Frank Lucas, but I digress...). And of course, it was Jay-Z who brought Kanye along lo those many years ago, when the kilt-wearing media hound was still rocking brightly colored polo shirts and a backpack on stage (I know, I was there on that first tour, but more on ‘Ye in just a moment...).</div>
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By following his farewell to the game, <i>The Black Album</i> (can’t be much clearer than that album title) with <i>Kingdom Come</i>, <i>The Blueprint 3</i>, <i>Watch the Throne</i>, and now <i>Magna Carta Holy Grail</i>, Jay-Z’s statement to the music industry and America as a whole about his status as an artist and a black success story in the United States has been, in order: “I’m back”, “I’m the future”, “I matter”, and now, “I’m not finished”.</div>
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With, MCHG Jay-Z proves himself smarter, stronger, and bent on expanding his breadth of influence and financial prowess. Unlike Ali, and his rap contemporaries the Notorious B.I.G. and Tupac Shakur, Jay intends to flourish into middle age and work towards injecting a bit of melanin into the lily-white power structure of the United States, which fittingly is now run by a man of mixed white and black blood. After all, as Jay already told us, he himself is a “small part of the reason the president is black.” </div>
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And while many assessments of MCHG and Jay-Z’s other recent output point out that the MC is stuck in a “I’m richer than you are” rut, I would argue that his eloquence on the mic is only increasing, and that while his words have begun to ring a familiar bell, like a great novelist Jay-Z is performing deft variations on a theme. His entire career arc can almost be summed up in just one of his most memorable lines: “from Marcy to Madison Square”. He has risen from a low-level street hustler in a Brooklyn housing project to be one of the richest men in entertainment and now to be a multi-dimensional business man who lunches with <a href="http://rapradar.files.wordpress.com/2010/09/jay_z_cover_5.jpg">Warren Buffett</a> and visits with the president.</div>
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I’d pound that message home too if I were him.</div>
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No wonder that pre-MCHG, Jay-Z’s last appearance on record was a <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hAESe4Dc0HY" target="_blank">contribution</a> to the soundtrack to Baz Luhrmann’s adaptation of the <u>The Great Gatsby</u>. Like Fitzgerald’s protagonist, Shawn Carter is a stranger in a strange (read: rich) land, with a wealth initially built on criminal behavior that has exploded into a legitimate rise into the upper class. A place where not only do the two Jays seemingly not belong, but must struggle with the old guard of American wealth’s dated ideas about what it means to be rich and powerful. And again, like Ali, B.I.G., Tupac, and Jay Gatsby, Jay-Z refuses to let this life batter him into submission. He will not succumb to figurative and literal beatings, or a fictional or actual death at the hands of his fame and wealth.</div>
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The album's intent is reinforced just before halftime with "Somewhere in America", a triumphant tune that serves as prelude to further explorations of the rapper's self-perceived and actual impact. The next three songs embellish "Somewhere"'s vibe and attitude, as "Crown", "Heaven" and the brief but powerful "Versus" take lethal aim at anyone who would dare sell Jay-Z short. This is all done atop the varyingly lush and sparse production of Timbaland, whose near-continuous presence on the album gets assists from J-Roc, Pharrell, Boi-1da, Hit Boy, and The Dream. Conspicuously absent from that list of who's-who producers is Kanye West, whom Jay-Z seems intent on putting in his place. Lyrical shout-outs to Kanye's <i>Yeezus</i> pop up from time to time, and the album seems to be a reminder to Kanye that he is still the Pippen to Jay-Z's Jordan.</div>
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With his latest release, Kanye West decided to be so direct in his assessment of himself as a powerful black man that the album borders on parody, while Jay-Z foregoes Yeezy’s hatchet in favor of the scalpel. Kanye titles a song “I Am a God”, on an album called <i>Yeezus</i> while Jigga starts “Crown” with a boastful line in the spirit of rap tradition: ‘You in the presence of a king/scratch that, you in the presence of a god.’ This couplet is in line with the <a href="http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5614846" target="_blank">Five-percent Nation</a>’s belief in the black man as god on earth, which is also referenced in “Heaven”, with Jay saying: “Arm, leg, leg, arm, head - this is God body/Knowledge, wisdom, freedom, understanding - we just want our equality.” The Five-percenters take ALLAH as an acronym for arm, leg, leg, arm, head and consider the knowledge of self as an ultimate pursuit.</div>
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Jay-Z has a baby with Beyoncé. Kanye has a baby with Kim. Nuff said. Also Magna Carta (Carter) is a much better play on words than Yeezus (Yeezy/Jesus), just sayin’.</div>
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Kanye can’t seem to get out of his own ego’s way. He turned what is an important and at times breathtaking sonic contribution to the mainstream of rap in <i>Yeezus</i> into a trite black (mogul) power manifesto. Contrastingly, Jay-Z expertly walks the line between pop artist and black difference-maker, enabling him to deliver his message with a stealthy vigor, and also more effectively than his protege. The album as a whole, from promotion to execution, are a not-so-subtle reminder to Mr. West of where he got his swagger from. While Kanye stirs up a commotion with an arrogant projection of his new video on the side of a building, Jay-Z debuts his album art next to the <a href="http://social.entertainment.msn.com/music/blogs/post--jay-z-religiously-unveils-magna-carta-holy-grail-album-cover" target="_blank">real Magna Carta</a>. While Kanye strips his record of artistic packaging altogether and doesn’t mind when it leaks to the web early, Jay-Z makes a game-changing move in the age of the download by guaranteeing his record’s platinum status through a million-copy deal with Samsung.</div>
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In both content and context, Kanye comes off as a child screaming for attention, while Jay-Z asserts himself as a grown man that everyone notices when he walks into a room.</div>
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Yet through all of this chest-puffing, name-dropping (one song on MCHG is called “Tom Ford” for chrissakes), and money-counting, the introspective version of Jay-Z is still the star of the album. Frank Ocean, who joins the MC on the aptly titled “Oceans”, brings out the same Jay-Z he lured forward in <i>Watch the Throne</i>’s “Made In America”. Recognizing his fame and the small odds of his success, he says ‘If it wasn't for these pictures they wouldn't see me at all/Aww, whole world's in awe/I crash through glass ceilings, I break through closed doors.’ Likewise, in “Jay-Z Blue”, he addresses a near-maniacal urge to shelter his new daughter from public torment, sampling <i><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0082766/" target="_blank">Mommie Dearest</a></i> dialogue and giving us lines like: ‘Now I got my own daughter/taught her how to take her first steps/cut the cord watch her take her first breath/and I’m trying and I’m lying if I said I wasn’t scared.’</div>
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A rapper telling you about his fatherly fears is one thing, but when he goes on to talk about how stoked he is about his wife, things really get anti-rap-establishment. What might sound like a cheesy premise for a song is actually anything but, and the modern-day New Jack Swing of “Part II (On The Run)” ends up being a sincere duet with Beyoncé and a sure-fire future hit single. The look inward continues at album’s end, with “Nickels and Dimes”, a last exploration of Jay’s career-spanning theme: his rise from poverty to power. In this fitting closer, he is at once both unsure of his status: ‘I cut myself today to see if I still bleed/success is so sublime/gotta do that time to time so I don’t lose my mind/something ‘bout the struggle so divine/this sort of love is hard to define’ and still clearly comfortable with his self-given title as the best rapper alive: ‘Like Magic in his prime when Kareem sky hooked/Y’all not worthy, sometimes I feel like y’all don’t deserve me, my flow unearthly.’</div>
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Just to get all <u><a href="http://www.carmichaelsbookstore.com/book/9780812981155" target="_blank">Decoded</a></u> on your ass real quick, let’s take a look at Jay-Z’s talent on the mic from just those last two songs.</div>
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After he hijacks <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T9CabmOu-Zk" target="_blank">Juvenile’s cadence and flow</a> in “Part II” , bouncing along with: ‘Touch a nigga where his rib at/I click clat/push your motherfuckin’ wig back/I did that’ the next line is about how he’s ‘been wilding since a <i>juvi</i>’. No one makes you listen close like Jay-Z. Not convinced? How about those “Nickels and Dimes” lines, where throwing in the word “worthy” (as in worthiness and <a href="http://cdn.bleacherreport.net/images_root/slides/photos/001/206/961/KareemWorthyMagic_display_image.jpg?1313730490" target="_blank">James Worthy</a>) after referencing Magic Johnson and Kareem Abdul-Jabar is the kind of subtle double entendre other rappers just can’t mimic. It’s next-level wordplay that only Shawn Carter seems capable of delivering without beating you over the head with its cleverness–a trait so many new MC’s lack. Toss in the fact that the internal rhyme from that other line in “Nickels”–sublime/time to time/lose my mind–would make <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rakim" target="_blank">Rakim</a> blush and you have a record that just made a bunch of youngsters trolling <a href="http://rapgenius.com/" target="_blank">Rap Genius</a> lose their collective minds.</div>
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<i>Magna Carta Holy Grail</i> is a statement on fame, a message to the white establishment, and a vivid reminder to MCs everywhere about who’s still on top. Jay-Z wants you take away a sense of his prominence as a wealthy black man in America, but at the end of the day he still can’t resist sonning a few more rappers before it’s all said and done. MCHG is an example of Jay-Z at his lyrical best, and an example of an artist who is distinctly aware of his own influence and ability.</div>
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It’s Magna Carta, the magnum opus...it’s Picasso, baby.</div>
Marky Schultzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11361451166416906967noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2243017189684241796.post-34476775405517713432013-04-05T20:15:00.004-04:002013-04-05T20:30:56.525-04:00THE HUMAN ELEMENT<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgdq7QAWUgdS6dRIfCMJLST0wP6kmrM9o_bb9pHuqsUejHdLn-28KJ7GlMRfSO-0tvZYULfzeYr2lK0Nc8fa4UDlKB4ATahUh_cEgVIXt5fMAYYcScCwz3akxP-9YTqNYy87bC9hIe4I5Eq/s1600/Ware+Hancock.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em; text-align: justify;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgdq7QAWUgdS6dRIfCMJLST0wP6kmrM9o_bb9pHuqsUejHdLn-28KJ7GlMRfSO-0tvZYULfzeYr2lK0Nc8fa4UDlKB4ATahUh_cEgVIXt5fMAYYcScCwz3akxP-9YTqNYy87bC9hIe4I5Eq/s1600/Ware+Hancock.jpg" /></a></div>
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Sometimes the human element of a sports story is drowned in the tide of larger-than-life personalities and the growing wave of big money. In college and the pros, significance can be poorly grafted on to what is really just a game at the end of the day–a highly lucrative, at times riveting game–but a game just the same. This happens via overreaching profiles in magazines or sappy segments tacked on to pre-game analysis and halftime shows. Often, it’s a lame attempt at manufacturing interest, but sometimes, the human element of a game or team story is pushed to the forefront when we least expect it, and the games we watch are exposed as just another way to pass the time. The points scored and wins and losses recede quickly into the background and the audience’s focus is turned to the fact that players and coaches are our fellow men first, and athletes and professionals second.</div>
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Such was the case last Sunday evening, when a game played to determine who would advance to the NCAA Tournament’s Final Four became a reminder of the gruesome potentialities that abound when athletes compete against one and other for sporting glory. Louisville reserve guard Kevin Ware’s injury has been witnessed and documented thoroughly during this past week, and here on the eve of his team’s Final Four match-up with the Wichita State Shockers, it’s surely grabbed your attention at some point, whether you pay attention to the tournament, basketball, or sports in general. That’s because it was a chilling moment for us all, as people, and leveled the differences between rabid fan and casual witness.</div>
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To put it simply, the young Louisville Cardinal’s broken leg is among the worst things I’ve ever seen on television. While anyone who witnessed what happened could clearly sense and attempt to relate to the sophomore’s pain as he lay brutally hobbled on the sideline, Louisville players and fans experienced Ware’s injury in ways that the rest of the country probably isn’t privy too. I was unlucky, or lucky, or whatever–I was there–to watch the game between Duke and Louisville with a bar full of Cardinal fans in a watering hole within the River City’s limits, and nearly all had gathered with the hope of watching their team continue towards the Final Four in Atlanta and beat a perpetually despised foe in the Blue Devils from Durham, NC. My friends and the others in attendance, along with a bevy of Cards fans at the game in Indy, were at a fever pitch from tip off, but that vivd enthusiasm completely disappeared when Ware’s injury occurred. Their vigor waned even further when it was replayed a moment later.</div>
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Like so many around the country, but with a particularly heavy local heart, they had a visceral reaction to seeing a fellow human being in unknowable pain. One that happened to wear the jersey of their favorite team. Ware was certainly suffering, and he wasn’t the only one. The reaction of those around me, and their reaction to the reaction of his teammates on court, was gripping. Suddenly this wasn’t a basketball player injured, but a man in pain. Those weren’t his teammates crying, or vomiting, or writhing in agony at what they saw, they were Ware’s friends. The crowded barroom, like any other in the area, wasn’t filled with fans, but empathetic fellow terrestrial travelers. One and all were staggered by the reality of the situation, and the outcome of the game seemed to vanish from the collective priority list. It had been replaced by a hope that Ware’s pain could be eased and that his friends on the court could pull themselves together after witnessing the horrifying sight of a young man’s leg collapsing on a routine jump into the air, and the unbearable view they had to the bone protruding from the skin stretched across his shin.</div>
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To say the air went out of the room would not do the change in mood justice. Knowing my own squeamish sensibilities, I couldn’t watch the replay at the time. I have since, but wish I hadn’t. I should have trusted the sage voice of Jim Nantz, who called it the worst basketball injury he had ever seen during the broadcast, or one of my radio favorites Jim Rome, who tweeted that it was one of the most terrifying things he had ever seen.</div>
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What followed looked more like theater of the macabre than a basketball game. Ware’s teammates reacted in a way that lent even more of a desolate air to the arena than his exposed shin bone already had. They reeled and grabbed at each other on the bench, which you can see from the heart-wrenching GIF after the jump, and only <a href="http://blogs.courier-journal.com/adamhimmelsbach/2013/04/04/jim-larranaga-nearly-passed-on-luke-hancock-at-george-mason/" target="_blank">Luke Hancock</a> was able to gather himself enough to walk over to Ware as he lay near the sideline, twisting with an agony I don’t even want to begin to imagine. Hancock comforted Ware with a hand on his chest, no doubt trying to calm a man that was headed for the medical definition of shock, while the rest of the country tried to deal with the literal use of the word.</div>
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Louisville and Duke players looked as if they had just witnessed a fallen brother succumb to the injuries of war, unable to control their emotion as they wept and collapsed to the court. Basketball no longer mattered, but everyone in the arena and the millions watching at home knew that no matter how horrific what they just witnessed was, and how difficult it would be for the players–especially the Cardinals–to continue, the game had to go on. Louisville would have to play the rest of the first half and the entirety of the second with the specter of their fallen teammate hanging over them and the vivid images of his injury replaying in their minds.</div>
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It would have been easy for Louisville to fall apart and let what was a close and tightly contested first half turn into a run away for Duke in the second. Instead, Louisville emerged from the locker room on fire offensively and defensively, with their ball pressure, team speed and tenacity on the interior strangling the Blue Devils the rest of the way. They opened up a lead that would continue to grow until the final buzzer sounded, dispatching of their Elite Eight foe by more than twenty points. I’m not sure what Coach Rick Pitino said to his kids at half time, but it must have been a speech for the ages. I <a href="https://twitter.com/markyschultz" target="_blank">tweeted</a> it shortly after the game and still believe it as I look back: it showed an incredible amount of will for Louisville to do what they did and speaks to their collective character and talent to honor their teammate with an astounding effort down the stretch.</div>
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And incredibly, even cut down by an injury that did its best to destroy his leg, Ware had a part in the victory. His injury may easily be regarded as the most visually disturbing and physically catastrophic in the history of sports, but his only message to the team while being attended to on-court was: “just win the game.” Those that heard his words were stunned that he could manage to inspire his teammates, and I sit here at my keyboard equally impressed with that young man’s heart and intestinal strength. There he was, with an injury that might end his career, his future physical wellbeing hanging in the balance, pain both physical and emotional rushing through his body, and he still had the guts to gather the energy to cheer his team towards victory. In other circumstances Ware could be described as unflappable, but as it was and still is, the better description is heroic.</div>
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If I were to stay in line with the way I usually process a situation like this here at BJH, I would talk about how Ware had been such a solid contributor to his team over the last few games, how he was a game away from a homecoming in his native Atlanta, how his teammates proved their mettle in spades, and how like many times before, Bo’s career-ending injury <a href="http://www.bojacksonship.com/2011/09/things-done-changed.html" target="_blank">came to mind</a> and the threat of <a href="http://www.bojacksonship.com/2011/10/are-you-not-entertained.html" target="_blank">unexpected tragedy</a> was again foremost in my thoughts. But that’s per usual–I am a constant champion of how sports tell us much about being human. This however, was the <i>humanity</i> of sports. Ware and that game between Louisville and Duke are beyond the scope of my usual sporting lens. It was all too real to be analogized, or interpreted, or applied in an appropriate context. It’s the memory of what was happening on that Sunday, <i>what happened</i>, and how everyone both near and far felt in that instant and beyond. It was the incredible journey from tragedy to triumph within the span of a college basketball game.</div>
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I’m a Louisville transplant and Ohio State fan first, but if I wasn’t already pulling for the Cardinals to win it all now that the Buckeyes are out and my local pride begins to shine, I don’t see how anyone, myself included, can pull for another squad to win the NCAA championship. With Ware <a href="http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/-college-basketball-mens-tournament/news/20130331/kevin-ware-louisville-broken-leg.ap/" target="_blank">on the mend</a> at a <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=seJ2LTPaFfw" target="_blank">staggering clip</a>, the Cards riding an athletic and emotional high, and my city excited to the nth degree, the “human element” of this story has officially transcended that oft-used bromide. No matter any prior allegiances, I’d say we’re all Louisville fans the rest of the way.</div>
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Marky Schultzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11361451166416906967noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2243017189684241796.post-19950369594744712742013-03-18T16:02:00.000-04:002013-03-18T17:57:56.567-04:00L.A. STORY<br />
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LeBron James is playing like a man possessed and the Miami Heat have now won an incredible 22 games in a row. King James is building what could end up being the most impressive regular season stat line and overall performance in NBA history and the Heat are achieving a level of dominance that has pollsters pitting them against the entire field when it comes to predicting who will win the NBA title. Who do you got, Miami, or any other team in the NBA? </div>
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South Beach is figuratively on fire with all this damn Heat. </div>
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And yet, another team, and another star player, continue to be the real topic of conversation league-wide. The Los Angeles Lakers, the current eight seed in the Western Conference playoff picture, have been the topic du jour ever since Dwight Howard and Steve Nash both joined Kobe Bryant in the City of Angels this past off season. While I spoke on <a href="http://www.bojacksonship.com/2012/08/moving-on.html" target="_blank">Dwight’s move to LA</a> and what it meant for him and the league, I’ve been biding my time when it comes to letting out words on the Lakers as a whole.</div>
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There are a few reasons for this–I’ve been busy, writing about the <a href="http://www.bojacksonship.com/2013/02/the-night-lights-went-out.html" target="_blank">Super Bowl</a> seemed more important, I tend to take my time ranting and raving on the dominant sports story–but the biggest factor in my decision to stay quiet is that first and foremost, I’m a Lakers fan. Now I don’t get paid to do what I do here at <b>Bo Jackson’s Hip</b>, so I’m allowed to stay a fan first and writer second, but that can sure blur the line between objective reasoning and analysis and a rooting interest in my team’s success. I love Kobe, love LA, and behind Ohio State athletics and the Detroit Tigers, the Lakers are the most important team in sports for this writer. They’re one of my “we” teams and just like for the Lakers themselves, the 2012-2013 NBA season has been tough for me to handle and a lesson in managing expectations. </div>
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With all of the pre-season hype surrounding their big acquisitions and the ever-dominant presence of Kobe Bryant, the Lakers seemed poised to make a run at an NBA title this season. With Bryant, Howard, Gasol, and Nash, the team has at least three and perhaps four future hall-of-famers on its roster. Add in the man formerly known as Ron Artest, Metta World Peace, no slouch in his own right, and you’ve got what looked at the onset of the season like a team prepared to compete with the Spurs, Thunder, and Heat for the NBA crown. But then of course, the season actually started, and the Lakers began to crumble almost from the word “go”.</div>
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First things first, Dwight Howard’s back was still healing, so he wasn’t even close to 100%. Then, head coach Mike Brown decided to implement the if not obscure, certainly <i>unexpected</i> Princeton Offense, to the surprise of analysts, fans, and Laker players as well. The offense didn’t work, plain and simple, and the Lakers <a href="http://espn.go.com/los-angeles/nba/story/_/id/8610888/los-angeles-lakers-fire-coach-mike-brown" target="_blank">sent Mike Brown packing</a> before his second season with the team even had a chance to get going. Next, the Lakers flirted with Zen Master Phil Jackson, perhaps the greatest coach in NBA history to replace Brown, only to spurn him at the last moment and sign Mike D’Antoni instead. The change was followed by <a href="http://aol.sportingnews.com/nba/story/2012-12-22/steve-nash-injury-update-lakers-kobe-bryant-mike-dantoni-pau-gasol-golden-state" target="_blank">a broken leg for Steve Nash</a>, an <a href="http://www.lakersnation.com/injury-update-steve-blake-to-return-tuesday-with-limitations/2013/01/28/" target="_blank">abdominal injury for his back-up Steve Blake</a>, and another key bench player, <a href="http://articles.latimes.com/2013/jan/12/sports/la-sp-ln-jordan-hill-shocked-devastated-hip-injury-20130112" target="_blank">Jordan Hill being lost for the season</a>.</div>
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Not to mention that when Dwight Howard’s back eventually started to look healthier, he suffered <a href="http://www.lakersnation.com/dwight-howard-says-shoulder-torn-talks-playing-through-injury/2013/02/15/" target="_blank">a torn labrum</a> that coincided with Pau Gasol <a href="http://www.sbnation.com/nba/2013/2/25/4027484/pau-gasol-injury-update-lakers" target="_blank">tearing his plantar fascia</a> and landing on the injury report for 6 to 8 weeks. Gasol still isn’t back, but just as the Lakers seemed to be pulling things together and playing a bit more as a cohesive unit, Dahntay Jones decided to make a <a href="http://espn.go.com/los-angeles/nba/story/_/id/9052700/dahntay-jones-claims-attempt-injure-kobe-bryant" target="_blank">dirty play</a> on Kobe Bryant, stepping underneath the Laker legend as he lifted up for a game-winning shot against the Atlanta Hawks. Reports were that Bryant would be out “indefinitely” with a “severely sprained” ankle and the one constant in LA would no longer be Bryant, but indeed, change.</div>
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Just look at all of that nonsense for a moment, will you? I know that excuses may be the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Princess_Bride" target="_blank">refuge of cowards</a>, but I do not feel like a callow apologist or craven Laker homer as I lay out the destabilizing run of vicissitudes that the men in purple and gold have had to endure this year. Did I mention that their owner died a couple weeks back as well? The owner who had been the heartbeat of the franchise since he arrived at the job and led the team to an NBA championship in his first year in the owner’s box? Dr. Buss’ departure from this mortal coil isn’t an on-court mishap like the others I’ve mentioned, it’s just another in the long line of bummers that my SoCal kids have had to battle through on their way to a playoff spot. </div>
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And that’s the other thing! Everyone is deriding the Lakers because they are barely in the playoff picture as of the date of this writing, but a lesser team, in other words, a team without Kobe Bean Bryant, would not even be sniffing the playoffs with this many injuries, this much instability on the coaching staff, and with the death of a front-office cornerstone (who I will admit, was ceding more and more control as his health failed him, but still...). I think it’s damn near heroic that the Lakers are in the playoff hunt in an incredibly competitive Western Conference where the top five teams, not to mention teams six through nine, are head and shoulders above their Eastern Conference counterparts (outside of Miami), considering the fact that the Staples Center has resembled a Korean War infirmary for most of the 2012-2013 season.</div>
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Just look at the numbers if you don’t believe me. Here are the games played for some of the key Laker players:</div>
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Pau Gasol: 36</div>
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Steve Nash: 42</div>
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Jordan Hill: 29 (won’t play another in 2012-2013 season)</div>
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Steve Blake: 29</div>
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Dwight Howard: 60</div>
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Kobe Bryant: 66</div>
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Metta World Peace: 65</div>
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That’s out of a possible 66 up until this point. So the only two starters that have been in the line-up all season are World Peace and Bryant, while the remainder of those players have all missed large chunks of games, and more importantly minutes on the court together with the other pieces of the Laker puzzle. Those injuries have overlapped in bad ways for the Lakers as well, and it seems like whenever one player returns, another goes down with injury. The impending return of Gasol coinciding with the injury to Bryant is only the latest example in this trend. And don’t be fooled by the “60” next to D-Howard’s name. Not one of those games has been played in perfect health, with that previously mentioned torn labrum only adding to his ailing back, rendering one of the league’s most impressive athletes and explosive talents a shell of his former self. It is only recently that Howard has begun to look more like the Superman of his days in Orlando, but he still plays through pain on a nightly basis. </div>
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My point is, as Onyx would say, <a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhQWSRb4OH5t13LZnhIZMb31Mvj5CLWxkZo-3RlxT3dMu-YnxWykxrvuJfLWCQGDH7Z-N7k0dhxI62JOrHZLIE3uwDwjpxNRRnRvuR3Kg4cGxm5kUfn_zUFLTtvXp9Bac_icw36EVNuLdA/s1600/Onyx_Bacdafucup-front.jpg" target="_blank">“Bacdafucup”</a>. If you want to say the criticism of the Lakers is warranted, that’s your prerogative and I wouldn’t completely disagree with you. But this notion that the Lakers are a disappointment because of some sort of lack of effort or refusal to play team basketball is downright offensive to me as a Laker fan first, but also as a fan with a fairly high basketball IQ second. I’m not Hubie Brown or Dr. Jack Ramsay over here, but I can certainly see why the Lakers have struggled, and am not only comfortable with where they are in the Western Conference playoff picture considering, but impressed that they haven’t slipped further down the western totem pole. And of course, there really is only one person to thank for all of this, and that’s the man that has been carrying the torch in LA for the last 17 seasons.</div>
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The Black Mamba, Vino, the ageless wonder. Call him whatever you or he likes, Kobe Bryant is putting together one of his most impressive individual performances in his long and illustrious career, 17 years into that amazing tenure in the NBA. He has not only met or surpassed career averages in <a href="http://www.nba.com/playerfile/kobe_bryant/career_stats.html" target="_blank">nearly every statistical category</a>, but has carried a team that wanted to fall of his back at every turn, and when defeat seemed likely, or a playoff spot beyond reach, has performed at a level that can only be called transcendent. I <a href="https://twitter.com/markyschultz" target="_blank">tweeted</a> it a few games back, when Kobe single-handedly beat the Toronto Raptors down the stretch in Los Angeles with a dizzying array of impossible three-point shots, emphatic slam dunks and jaw-dropping offensive moves: LeBron James may well be the best player in the NBA, but Kobe Bryant is the greatest player in the league. </div>
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That might seem like a murky distinction, but it isn’t. The truth is that no one on planet earth, including LBJ, could have done what Bryant did that evening against the Raptors. He willed his team to victory in a way that blasts that cliché back to the stone age and hit pressure-packed shot after pressure-packed shot when a miss would have almost certainly meant a loss. <a href="http://www.nba.com/lakers/gameday/130308_gameday_raptors" target="_blank">Watch the highlight</a> and tell me you aren’t impressed.</div>
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I’ve been watching Kobe for years now, just like any NBA fan, but with a closer if not keener eye as a Laker fan. Does that make me biased? Maybe, but what it really does is help me put into perspective what exactly he has done this season. The man has played better than I have ever seen him play. His shot is as consistent as it’s ever been, he is spreading the ball around at a clip that is among his career-best, and has physically looked better than he has in years. While the basketball gods seemed determined to poison this season for the Lakers, the Black Mamba ironically doesn’t seem to believe in a snake-bitten 2012-2013 campaign. He plays basketball better than anyone I have ever watched outside of a certain man by the name of Jordan–another shooting guard you may have heard of–and is proving this season more than any other in his incredible career that he is among the best to ever dribble a basketball on an NBA court.</div>
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Right now, we have no idea how much time Kobe is going to miss with his ankle sprain (though that <a href="http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/basketball/nba/gameflash/2013/03/15/32535/index.html#recap" target="_blank">“little black box” thing</a> doesn’t bode well...), but given his super-human ability to slough off injuries that would sideline a man with a lesser commitment to excellence, it won’t take anything away from what he has done thus far. He has kept a team together that seems destined to fall apart, and refuses to believe in the idea of a wasted season. The main reason being, he knows he doesn’t have very many seasons left. It would be easy for KB and the Lakers to admit that this is a train wreck of a season, put their effort on cruise control, and take the off-season to heal and regroup for 2013-2014. But we all know he won’t do that. He’ll come back, and in all likelihood lead a team that, despite their myriad talents, wouldn’t make it to the playoffs without his efforts. Beyond that, who really knows what will happen. A low seed in the Western Conference doesn’t seem like any way to make it to the conference finals, let alone the NBA Finals, but as I have said before, a man who doubts greatness does so at his own peril. </div>
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The Lakers may seem like a disappointment, but to this fan, they are anything but. They are an example of what a team, and more impressively so, a single player, can do when faced with an unreasonable level of hype and expectation is compounded by a slew of season-changing injuries, yet still finds a way to win. The near future seems uncertain for the Lakers but I do know one thing for sure: nobody, not the Spurs, the Clippers, Grizzlies, Thunder, et al want LA to pull things together out west before the playoffs start. They’re too talented a team to overlook if they actually can get healthy and finally play defense as a unit, and they have the greatest player in the league leading their unlikely charge into the post-season. </div>
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Nothing about this year has been ideal for the Lakers, but that’s a life lesson we’ve all learned by now. You can’t wait for the perfect set of circumstances to try and get things done, you just have to play the hand dealt you and push your chips into the pot when it’s all on the line. I’m just glad I’ve got the steady hand of Kobe Bryant and the high-card Laker line-up to ride into the playoffs with. The rest of the league might not be worried just yet, but when it comes time to ante up, we’ll see who folds and who makes the big call up against the purple and gold.</div>
Marky Schultzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11361451166416906967noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2243017189684241796.post-52744709244492961572013-02-10T17:25:00.002-05:002013-02-10T17:47:41.117-05:00THE NIGHT THE LIGHTS WENT OUT<br />
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While I would like to jump directly into my assessment of Super Bowl XLVII, I wanted to start this post out on a more personal note. I’m writing with a heavy heart right now, as I learned days ago that a great friend and beautiful person passed away in my home town of Toledo, OH. I just want to honor him for a moment by telling you what I’ve already learned from his death: don’t let your friends fade away. We all grow up and grow apart to a certain extent, but it’s important to make the effort. To reach out and keep close friends close, no matter the distance or years that may now separate us. Our friends and family, especially the ones who need our help the most, should not be pushed to the background of our lives no matter how naturally that seems to happen. I’ll miss you to the fullest extent dear friend, and hope that your energy finds a peaceful place to rest somewhere in our infinite cosmos.</div>
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So with that said, and no easy transition to make, let’s talk Super Bowl.</div>
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I’ve most definitely watched better Super Bowls, but I don’t think I can recall one as strange as this one. With a huge lead cum huge come back thanks to a power outage smack dab in the middle of the game, there assuredly has never been a Super Bowl quite like the one we witnessed a week ago. While everybody and their brother has an opinion on how the game will play out in the week leading up to the Super Bowl, nobody really had a clear grasp on how this one would play out. Most experts and laymen alike, not to mention the money movers in Las Vegas, had this a pretty even match-up, although some big money apparently moved in the direction of the Ravens toward the tail end of the week in Sin City.</div>
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It’s why how the game started was a surprise to me, and to most that I watched the game with as well. A Super Bowl party is a lot like the game itself. Everyone’s nervous, a little edgy, with too much excitement bottled up all week to relax and have a good time right out of the gate. You have to take a deep breath, drink a tall beer, crack those first couple of bags of chips, and then take in the action properly with everyone else in the room. The players, just like a fan settling in to his spot on the couch, certainly looked jittery, and the 49ers were especially uneasy at the beginning of the game. Sometimes this leads to a quick score by the other team, which the Ravens obliged the Niners with, but it usually doesn’t snowball into the kind of lead that Baltimore had built by half time.</div>
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The Ravens didn’t look particularly dominant to this writer at the onset, but the 49ers certainly played as poorly as they possibly could. Their usually stout defense was steadily pushed around by the Ravens offensive line, and their deft and skillful secondary fell asleep on a couple of plays that could have gotten them off the field on third down. The Ravens quarterback, Joe Flacco, looked unfazed by the pressure, and was bailed out on more than one occasion by the aforementioned sleepiness of the 49ers “D” and a couple of big plays by his talented receiving corps. </div>
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And speaking of those receivers, I still remain convinced that Anquan Boldin should have been the game’s MVP, regardless of his quarterback’s equally impressive effort or the big play-making that Jacoby Jones had a hand in (more on that later). Boldin caught the game’s first touchdown, made a series of drive-extending and eye-popping grabs, and without his 100 plus yards receiving and phenomenal play throughout, the Ravens would not have ended their night last Sunday as Super Bowl champions. Ray Lewis, even with <a href="http://thebiglead.fantasysportsven.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/ray-lewis-si-cover-2013.jpg" target="_blank">god on his side</a>, didn’t even play a factor in the game’s outcome, and Joe Flacco, riding the star power of the quarterback position, didn’t do as much as Q in the eyes of this writer. Boldin is among the strongest and most underrated at his position in all the league, and like former MVP wide receiver Hines Ward before him, did more than his team’s signal caller to secure victory on Super Bowl Sunday.</div>
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But back to the action...</div>
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By halftime, it looked like all was lost for the 49ers. They couldn’t cash in on the two drives they made deep into Baltimore territory, leading to a pair of field goals where touchdowns were necessary to keep them in the game. The murmurs around the room at my Super Bowl party were of the “here we go” and “at least we could’ve got a good game” variety. But then one Beyoncé Knowles took the stage for her halftime performance, and distracted us all from the rout that appeared to be on at the Superdome in New Orleans on Super Bowl Sunday.</div>
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Beyoncé took to a stage as luxuriant (and I assume expensive) as the world of entertainment allows, and like many a Super Bowl halftime performer, made us all forget for 15 minutes that we were, in fact, watching a football game. I was a bit confused at first by the <a href="http://blog.zap2it.com/frominsidethebox/super-bowl-2013-beyonce-half-time-show-stage-gi.jpg" target="_blank">colossal</a> <a href="http://mathworld.wolfram.com/images/eps-gif/GobletIllusion_500.gif" target="_blank">goblet</a> lit up at the center of the field, but was more impressed by her talent and obvious, shall we say, assets, than anything else. She put on a high energy show that left many in awe both in the room with me that Sunday night and in the Twitter-verse, where her breathless, high-intensity workout disguised as musical performance was the topic of conversation up and down my feed. She seemed to soak up every bit of energy that the Superdome had to offer, and it turns out, she just may have.</div>
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Shortly after halftime and a 108 yard kick-off return for touchdown by the Ravens’ Jacoby Jones, the game looked to be all but over. With that touchdown the 49ers looked all but dead in the water. They were facing a third and long that looked like it was destined to end in another giving-over of the football to the Ravens when all of the sudden, <a href="http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/nfl/news/20130208/super-bowl-blackout/?sct=hp_t2_a2" target="_blank">the lights went out</a>. After the game, I heard more than one talking head and bodiless radio voice claim that they were more than nervous when everything went black in the Superdome, convinced that in this post-9/11 America of ours, something terrible was about to happen. I didn’t think that, and nobody I was watching the game with thought that either. What everybody I was watching the game with started to talk about was that this little electrical SNAFU was exactly what the 49ers needed.</div>
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The longer the power outage lasted, the more uneasy you could see the once giddy Ravens’ sideline becoming. They knew what we all know, that the big “MO”, momentum, is as important to a football game and any sporting contest as the talent on the field or the game plans devised by the coaching staffs. This was the exact break that the 49ers needed. The long delay stole momentum away from the Ravens, giving the 49ers a chance to reset the game’s parameters. Remember, the 49ers overcame large deficits to beat several opponents this year, including the Atlanta Falcons in the NFC championship game. It was too perfect a storm for the Niners not to mount a comeback.</div>
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And that’s exactly what they did. Though they did punt away the ball directly following a failed third down after the black out ended, that was their last miscue for the next 28 minutes of game time. They battled back, regained their confidence, and had the Ravens on the ropes. Baltimore did not score again until the fourth quarter. Momentum had shifted. The game had changed. The Super Bowl was all of the sudden up for grabs. A blow out had turned into a shoot out and the Niners all of the sudden seemed destined to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat. </div>
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For all the hype leading up to the game the preceding week–Ray Lewis and his <a href="http://espn.go.com/nfl/playoffs/2012/story/_/id/8899019/2013-super-bowl-ray-lewis-ped-report-caused-deer-spray-sales-soar" target="_blank">deer sprayed</a> last chance at a second championship, a showdown between two head coaches who just happened to come from the same vagina, a loud-mouthed Niner cornerback <a href="http://espn.go.com/nfl/playoffs/2012/story/_/id/8898839/2013-super-bowl-chris-culliver-anti-gay-remarks-rejected-san-francisco-49ers" target="_blank">proving his ignorance</a> in regards to sexual preference, a second-year signal caller covered in tattoos who runs as well as he throws getting an early chance at career-defining glory–all of that stuff was pushed aside because of a 30 plus minute power outage that had given us what might be the greatest Super Bowl comeback in history. For once, the hype didn’t live up to the actual product. This game was far better than any of us could have possibly imagined. But the drama simply wasn’t over.</div>
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After the Ravens stalled on a late drive that had it ended in a touchdown would have also ended the game, they instead kicked a field goal and gave the Niners one more chance at a game-winning drive. It all seemed preordained. The young Colin Kaepernick was going to lead his team down the field, punch in the final score, and make this the greatest Super Bowl that had ever been played. You could just feel it. And for a moment, that’s what happened. But then the 49ers actually got to the precipice of their championship, and the wheels fell off their victory train in the truest sense of the analogy. </div>
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On the brink of capping their amazing comeback, the Niners fell apart. In the shadow of their opponent's goal post, their play calling took a turn towards the mystifying (like forgetting how well their freaking quarterback can run), time management became a factor, the team looked rushed, and then of course, there was what looked like a holding penalty on Michael Crabtree on their last chance at victory in the right corner of the end zone. The way the game had been officiated all night (bumping and holding receivers was fair game throughout, hell, you could even <a href="http://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/nfl/2013/02/03/cary-williams-shoves-official-super-bowl/1888769/" target="_blank">shove a referee</a> and get away with it) this wasn’t that big of a surprise, but upon further review, it sure did look like a blatant holding call. Maybe Crabtree wouldn’t have got to that ball anyway, but there is no “uncatchable” caveat for defensive holding the way there is for defensive pass interference. </div>
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The debate about whether the flag should have been thrown could go back and forth forever, but just think about this for a moment: how would this game be perceived if the flag is thrown, the Niners get four fresh chances at a TD, succeed, and win the game? I don’t have a vested interest in the winner either way, but I bet the NFL is glad things played out the way they did. If the call had been made, you would have the Ravens and every sporting cynic from New Orleans to North Baltimore out there griping about how something was amiss. The Ravens, a team clearly in control of the biggest game of the season, would have been derailed by a freak power outage, then a penalty on the final play. I’ve never, ever believed that a league has actually tried to manifest one outcome over the other in its championship game/series, but there would have been a lot of hot and bothered people yelping about just that had the Niners got that call and won the game.</div>
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But holding call or no, the Niners had their chances to seal the deal. And at the end of the day, I think that’s what is so incredible about this Super Bowl, and why power outage induced as it was, San Fran’s comeback will still loom large in the annals of Super Bowl history. Despite how bad they played in the first half, despite giving up a Jacoby Jones touchdown on the opening kick off of the second half, despite the heroic play of Baltimore’s receivers and the steady hand of Joe Flacco, the 49ers almost won the damn game. They should never have had that four-down chance from the Ravens’ seven yard line at the end, but they did, and they missed that chance.</div>
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For all the Super Bowl detractors that squirm out of the woodwork each year, denouncing the game as an ostentatious spectacle celebrating a knuckle-headed sport that is proving to be violent beyond already established assessments, the NFL’s championship game is still the best in sports. It is the iridescent peacock feather in the league’s shimmering, officially licensed, sideline cap. I’ve said it several times before in many previous posts, and it becomes more and more obvious each year: football is still king in American sports, with no indication that it will abdicate the throne any time soon. Last Sunday’s game proved why no matter the story lines, teams involved, or players on the field, the NFL’s crowning ceremony is always entertaining. </div>
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On occasion, it’s unforgettable. </div>
Marky Schultzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11361451166416906967noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2243017189684241796.post-80012695637391360212013-01-11T14:54:00.000-05:002013-01-11T14:54:28.280-05:00THAT'S WHY THEY PLAY THE GAMES<br />
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Sometimes life gets in the way. That’s certainly the case here at Bo Jackson’s Hip, where I haven’t put up new words since the tail end of August. I never like to take this long between posts, no matter the reason, but in a strange way it’s been good to take a break from writing about sports. Sometimes it’s nice to just sit back and watch. To take in the action, enjoy the games, and not feel like the thoughts and opinions scurrying through my brain have to be typed out on a keyboard. I like to take a little time away, but not even at the end of typing out this initial paragraph, it feels even better to be doing the damn thing once again. It’s a hobby, Bo Jackson’s Hip, but it’s also something that I’m rather proud of when it comes right down to it. I love sports, I love to write, and this is the place where there is no editor or deadline to get in between those two things. </div>
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I guess it’s just good to be back.</div>
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When I was trying to decide what to write about after my long hiatus, I realized that a lot has happened in sports in the interval between September of 2012 and now the beginning of 2013. The World Series was played, where my Detroit Tigers were swept by the San Francisco Giants, the NBA season has started, the hockey season hasn’t, the college football season reached its culmination Monday night, and the entirety of the NFL season is finished, with the first round of the playoffs also in the books.</div>
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And it is that last bit of the sporting world that I wish to focus on in this post. I don’t think I’ve gone through an entire NFL season without writing a post since I started to write things that appear on the internet lo those many years ago. I picked a hell of a season to take off, one of the strangest and most intriguing I can remember, so I think it’s fitting to go ahead and break down the NFL regular season as we jump into the playoffs. If we’re lucky, they’ll be filled with just as many of the unique circumstances and off-kilter happenings that characterized the 2012 season from start to finish. </div>
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The dominant 2012 NFL headline for me, and the place I will start, is with the starting running back for the Minnesota Vikings. Adrian Peterson’s <a href="http://espn.go.com/nfl/story/_/id/7386414/adrian-peterson-minnesota-vikings-tore-acl-vs-washington-redskins" target="_blank">knee exploded</a> in the second to last game of the 2011 season, and while Vikings’ fans were thunderstruck and the entire league gasped at what might have been a career ending injury, I don’t think anyone on planet earth would have believed you if you had told them how things were going to play out for mister “All Day.”</div>
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Just picture it. You hop in a time machine that leaves today and head back to the locker room after that fateful day last December. You track down Peterson, who is clearly crestfallen and heartbroken, questioning what’s next not only for his knee, but possibly his career. Here’s what you tell him:</div>
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“Adrian, I know it looks bad now. I know you’re in physical and emotional pain right now and I don’t know how to console you. Actually, wait a minute, I’m from the not-so-distant future and I know exactly how to console you. Less than a year from now, you will defy all odds and expectations and start the first game of the 2012 season. Not only will you be ready day one, but you will end up rushing for more than 2,000 yards on that surgically repaired knee. Your torn ligaments will become a distant memory in short order as you come up 9 measly yards short of Eric Dickerson’s seemingly unbreakable single season rushing record, lead the Vikings to the playoffs, and are the odds-on favorite to be the league’s Comeback Player of the Year, and also its Most Valuable Player. In short, you will act like a super-human and achieve physical feats that will have some questioning your humanity. I mean seriously, you can tell me, are you an android?”</div>
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I have a feeling AP may have punched said time-traveler into next week with such a cockamamy story, but that’s exactly what happened. I’ve never seen anything like it. I hate to bring the world of Fantasy Football into reality football, but on draft day I avoided Peterson like the plague. I refused to believe that a man could come back for the better part of the following season after what Peterson did to his knee, and I sure as hell wouldn’t have given that man a chance in hell at setting the single season NFL rushing record. Not only does Peterson deserve the aforementioned awards that our time-traveler mentioned, but this season will go down as one of the most legendary in any sport, in any generation. It will turn this man, who was already among the most talented in the NFL, into the kind of legend that any young athlete dreams of becoming. I don’t even want to hear about Peyton Manning competing for the MVP award, although his nearly-as-miraculous comeback is my next topic of conversation.</div>
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Manning’s return from the neck injury that threatened to derail his career and an entire season spent away from the game is nothing short of extraordinary, but Manning is nothing short of an extraordinary athlete. Many questioned whether PM would be the QB he used to be, yours truly included. Some even questioned whether he would return to an NFL sideline at all, ever, <a href="http://www.bojacksonship.com/2011/09/things-done-changed.html" target="_blank">yours truly included</a>. Coming back from neck surgery, a year off, and joining a new team did not seem to be any way to revitalize what may be the greatest career that any NFL quarterback has ever had, but that’s what we get for questioning Manning’s ability, heart, and competitive edge. </div>
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He lifted the Broncos to the No. 1 seed in the AFC playoffs, changed a decent team into a legitimate Super Bowl contender, and erased any of the doubts that swirled around him for the better part of the last year and a half. If he is not the greatest quarterback who has ever lived, he certainly has a solid footing in the debate. No matter what happens in the playoffs, no matter where the Broncos finish, Manning’s 2012 season, like Peterson’s, will be among the most talked about in the history of sport. If not for Peterson, Manning would be the clear-cut MVP and Comeback Player of the Year. That’s how incredible this season has been for these two athletes. They have done so much and proved so many wrong, and yet must share the spotlight when it comes to the individual awards that the NFL has to offer. </div>
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It is simply stunning. But again, this has been a flabbergasting year in the NFL. Beyond what Manning and Peterson have accomplished, there has been even more fodder for discussion and opinion than the usually compelling NFL season typically offers. The Steelers missed the playoffs, the Bengals made it again, the Lions self-destructed, the Jets were a drama on par with any of the Bard’s best work, and three rookie quarterbacks turned teams that missed the playoffs into teams that made the playoffs. And those three rookie QB’s succeeded in terms that are nearly as impressive as Manning and Peterson. Andrew Luck, the number one overall selection of the Indianapolis Colts and Manning’s heir apparent, turned the Colts from a two win team into an eleven win team in the span of one season. </div>
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Though his voice sounds like he swallowed a frog who swallowed a <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YUv1uDhV_Nc" target="_blank">bag full of cotton balls</a> on most occasions, Luck’s feat should not be underestimated. Even with Manning, many wouldn’t have pegged the Colts as a playoff team considering how many other moving parts left Indy, both on the sideline and on the field. Yet Luck turned in one of the <a href="http://msn.foxsports.com/nfl/story/week-10-cheat-sheet-andrew-luck-greatest-rookie-quarterback-ever-110812" target="_blank">most impressive rookie seasons</a> by any quarterback in history, and though the Colts were bounced from the playoffs in the first round by the Baltimore Ravens, Luck’s potential manifested itself in immediate results, turning a rebuilding process into a slight remodel that might add some pressure, but more so brings confidence to a team sorely lacking in that department only a year ago.</div>
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In Washington D.C., the second overall pick found similar success. Robert Griffin III combined his athletic ability, strong arm, and a level of leadership that belies his age to power the Redskins into the playoffs with the help of another fantastic rookie, running back Alfred Morris. Sure, the Skins were in much better shape entering the season than the Colts, but RG3’s accomplishments are nearly on par with Luck’s. Both faced an ungodly amount of pressure to succeed immediately and met it with a steely resolve, taking teams that looked a couple years away from the postseason and propelling them past playoff incumbents that seemed sure to leave them in the dust. The Skins won a division shared with the defending Super Bowl champions in the Giants, and the Colts beat out former champs the Pittsburgh Steelers for one of the last remaining playoff births in a similar fashion.</div>
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The third rookie QB to lead his team to the playoffs, Russell Wilson, may not be the most impressive of the three considering the talent on defense that the Seattle Seahawks already possessed and established big-time running back Marshawn “Beast Mode” Lynch, but he is surely the most unexpected success of the trio. Wilson is undersized, was picked a full two rounds behind Luck and Griffin III, and wasn’t even the assumed starter in Seattle at the onset of training camp. Wilson should have backed up free agent acquisition Matt Flynn, who signed a <a href="http://www.spotrac.com/nfl/seattle-seahawks/matt-flynn/" target="_blank">sizable contract</a> after apprenticing under one of the premiere QB’s in the NFL, Green Bay’s Aaron Rodgers. Wilson not only leap-frogged Flynn on the Seahawks’ depth chart, but led Seattle to the playoffs, on his way scoring 50+ points in three consecutive regular season games. He also<a href="http://sports.yahoo.com/blogs/nfl-shutdown-corner/seattle-russell-wilson-ties-peyton-manning-rookie-record-013137052--nfl.html" target="_blank"> tied Peyton Manning’s rookie passing touchdown record</a>, no easy feat on a team that doesn’t have a true No. 1 wide receiver on its roster.</div>
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And that’s not to mention what another neophyte QB, second-year chucker Colin Kaepernick, has done in San Francisco, stepping in to replace Alex Smith under center for one of the best teams in the league. His arrival in the Bay has given the 49ers added firepower on offense and served as a dynamic complement to Frank Gore at running back, only adding to a clearly dominant defense. </div>
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As in the case of MVP and Comeback Player of the Year, Rookie of the Year honors are just as debatable considering the performances of each of these three signal callers. Debate has raged about who deserves the award, and if you look at the three situations I just laid out, it’s easy to see why. At the end of the football day, I give the award to Luck. As I said, he turned a two win team into a playoff team, was statistically better than most of the QB’s who have been in the league for years, and did so with the specter of the departed Peyton Manning, perhaps the greatest player to ever play the position and an institution in the city of Indianapolis, hanging above him all the way. Luck gets the nod, but not by much, and all three young men make what Cam Newton did as a rookie last year in Carolina look like child’s play in comparison. </div>
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Despite all of these unexpected performances and unlikely heroes, both the AFC and NFC have seen that while so much changes, so much also stays the same. Tom Brady and the Patriots still sit near the top in the AFC going into the divisional round of the playoffs, a Peyton Manning led team is locked into home field advantage throughout, the Texans still seem just below that upper echelon of NFL teams, the Atlanta Falcons once again had a dominant regular season but remain playoff unknowns, and the 49ers and Packers still seemed poised to make a Super Bowl run. The consistent teams have remained so, while the up and coming franchises look like Jim breaking down his mitts in Blazing Saddles: steady as a rock, but still shaky in the face of playoff pressure and unknown territory. This weekend will decide whether or not the upstarts can finally break the hold that the elite teams and the men who lead them (<a href="http://www.moviediva.com/MD_root/MDimages/Copy_of_3StoogeMen.jpg" target="_blank">calling doctor Rodgers, doctor Manning, doctor Brady</a>) have on a chance at the Lombardi trophy.</div>
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The unexpected events that have ruled the NFL season remind me of an age old sports adage: <b>That’s why they play the games.</b> If everything turned out how preseason prognosticators predicted, Las Vegas lines would lead us to believe, or how things looked statistically on paper, all of the charm and entertainment value of the sporting life would fade away faster than a lineman who gets beat on every snap or a QB who can’t hit the fade route. Despite its PR battle with the <a href="http://www.bojacksonship.com/2011/10/are-you-not-entertained.html" target="_blank">increasing brutality</a> of the game itself, the now undeniable affect that <a href="http://www.bojacksonship.com/2012/05/choice-is-mine-revisited.html" target="_blank">concussions</a> have on its <a href="http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/nfl/news/20130110/junior-seau-brain-disease-cte.ap/?sct=hp_t2_a6&eref=sihp" target="_blank">players</a>, and recent missteps by commissioner Roger Goodell, the NFL refuses to relinquish it’s crown as the most popular American sport.</div>
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Indeed, that’s why they play the games, and more importantly, that’s why we watch.</div>
Marky Schultzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11361451166416906967noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2243017189684241796.post-75105165524401637092012-08-20T22:01:00.003-04:002012-08-29T00:31:35.942-04:00MOVING ON<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div style="text-align: justify;">As the Bo Jackson’s Hip <a href="http://www.bojacksonship.com/2010/07/hello-and-welcome-back.html" target="_blank">“mission statement”</a> and each subsequent post here at the site hopefully impart, I like to write about the way sports and life intertwine. Sometimes this connection is direct and undeniable. As we watch athletes live their lives and interpret their motivations, see real-world events collide with the sporting life, or witness the humanity of competition, it’s easy for sports to strike a chord. Sometimes the connection is a bit more indirect. Sometimes it is about the self-applicability of a sports story and the life lessons it can teach, as in the case of Bo, who eventually inspired the name of this blog when his hip injury removed the veil of innocence from my young, bright eyes. I saw how quickly things can change for the worse, and how fragile life can be. The lesson was easily applied and I have never forgotten it. Right now, that lesson is also running hand in hand with my personal life, and another, more recent sports story, so let’s explore, shall we?</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
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</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><a href="http://www.cbssports.com/nba/blog/eye-on-basketball/19765394/four-teams-ok-agreement-in-principle-on-dwight-howard-to-lakers-trade" target="_blank">The trade that sent Dwight Howard to the Los Angeles Lakers</a> happens to coincide with the collapse of a romantic relationship for me, and both bring up ideas about loyalty, honor, faith in something, and the sometimes icy coolness of reality. I won’t get into too many details concerning my now former old lady, but in the <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pX69xvEvapI" target="_blank">words of Big Daddy Kane</a>, “I look at the toilet bowl and wonder what's up/cause I know damn well that she don't piss with the seat up.” </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">What happens during a break up (especially the ones foisted upon you) is that you are placed in a situation that leaves you open to analogy and kinship in other spheres. As I hope Bo’s story illustrates, sports, like any form of art, is rife with just such opportunities. We seek out meaning and understanding in a variety of outlets, from books and film to music and other mediums. In my case, it’s usually athletic competition. It never surprises me either, because sports are what I know best and I've watched them evolve for so long that their advice on the human condition has flowed naturally out of games, seasons, athletes and careers.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">Dwight’s saga reminds us of how the tenuous relationship between player and owner seems to consistently ignore the fan, but that doesn’t mean that we aren’t fascinated by it. At this point, it has played out in seemingly every way, good or bad, and it is never uninteresting. From Wayne Gretzky’s departure from Edmonton, Joe Montana’s exile from San Francisco, Babe Ruth’s curse-causing move from Boston to New York, or LeBron James' figurative bitch-slap to the face of the city of Cleveland, a player changing uniforms is the basis of many enthralling sports stories. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">In the case of Howard and his departure from Orlando, Dwight left the Magic when they needed him most, and did so in the most surreal, self-serving, and ultimately destructive way possible. I wrote about this very fact <a href="http://www.bojacksonship.com/2012/06/shaq-of-control.html" target="_blank">a couple of posts back</a>, when it looked like the Magic might turn to of all people, Shaquille O’Neal, to right the ship. The Magic tried time and again over the years to surround Howard with the level of talent that could bring him a championship and what did he do? He wiggled out of Orlando the easy way and acted as childishly as possible, making a fool of himself and his franchise. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">For some perspective, let’s get back to LeBron James for a moment, whom Mr. Howard, more than LBJ’s recent NBA Championship with the Miami Heat or gold medal with the United States Olympic Team, has made look like a favorite son again. The fans and media lambasted James for the way he left Cleveland, but in light of Howard’s behavior, many now regard James’ decision to leave with a quiet admiration. “The Dwight-mare” has officially replaced “The Decision” as the NBA’s worst free agency/trade rumor debacle. And remember, James left via free agency, at the end of his contract, his right to do so inarguable, and made a calculated decision to end his relationship with Cleveland. The fans there are still bitter, but the media has softened on James. The way he left is still derided, television special and firework presentation and all of that, but his reason no longer is: he wanted a change.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">One cannot condemn James for falling out of love with his hometown and deciding to move on, but Dwight Howard does not deserve that kind of consideration. What he did was whine, cry, demand a trade, take it back, demand a trade again, and then force his way out of town, leaving Orlando with nothing but a lineup of NBA roster-fillers and a hand full of future draft picks in return. He told Orlando, in essence, “I want out”, but he did it in a way that was personally easy and professionally cowardly. He did not honor his contract, he did not honor the fans of Orlando, and he comes out of all of this as petulant, selfish, and indiscriminate. Did I mention that he’s headed to my favorite team, the LA Lakers?</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">I’ve never felt so torn about such good news. I know that while we secured the best center in the league and perhaps, if he should find it in his clearly large heart to grace us with a new contract, the centerpiece of our franchise for the next half-decade, we also got a player that has never shown any fondness for fairness, proclivity for passion, or lust for loyalty. We get a physical specimen with the personality of a rich girl demanding more out of her Sweet Sixteen party. He, like so many athletes in the modern NBA and the sports world at large, has no interest in deferring gratification and building something special. He would rather moan, complain, get his coach and general manager fired, and leave his current employers and fan base holding a bag of air. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
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</div><div style="text-align: justify;">I mentioned earlier that I turn to sports for life lessons and perspective often, but that such insight can also be found in other forms of art, like music. I’m no exception on that front either, and who better to turn to than the best rapper alive? I mention to friends and colleagues often that Jay-Z means so much to me personally because thanks to a career that spans 11 (12, if you’ve been watching <a href="http://hiphop-n-more.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/watch-the-throne.jpg" target="_blank">The Throne</a>) albums, he has lyrically explored nearly every aspect of life on earth, and thanks to his genius as a rapper, provided fantastic insight into many of the highs and lows of existence. I always say that I can fit one of his lines around anything that life throws at me, and two in particular keep coming back to me in my current situation, one in which I’m dealing with an emotional loss and watching Dwight Howard shift to his new digs in LA:</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
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</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><a href="http://www.last.fm/music/Jay-Z/The+Black+Album" target="_blank">“I never asked for nothin' I don't demand of myself/honesty, loyalty, friends and then wealth”</a></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">and...</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><a href="http://rapgenius.com/Jay-z-public-service-announcement-lyrics#note-25684" target="_blank">“You can try and change but that’s just the top layer/man you was who you was ‘fore you got here”</a></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
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</div><div style="text-align: justify;">Are you listening Dwight? Because I sure as hell am. That wealth that Jay’s referring to isn’t just money or fame, it’s success, achievement, satisfaction, self-fulfillment et al. I want you to take a good long look at the three things he puts before “wealth”. As far as the second line, it makes me wary of anything that <a href="http://sportsradiointerviews.com/2012/08/13/dwight-howard-los-angeles-lakers-nba/" target="_blank">comes out of Dwight Howard’s mouth</a> right now. He got what he wanted, out of Orlando, and while he tells us that this will imbue him with an unselfish desire to win a championship based not on personal, but mutual goals that the Lakers will set, all I can think of is the guy who bolted out of Orlando with a trail of lost jobs, disenfranchised fans, and a depleted organization twisting in his wake. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">James and Howard, while now on opposite ends of the “how-to-fuck-your-team-over” spectrum, do still share an unfortunate motivation: winning now. This phrase, “win now”, is something that is relatively new to sports, but in our present day, is near-ubiquitous when discussion arises regarding athletes, fan-bases, franchises, and even the four major sports themselves. As <a href="http://frjamescoles.files.wordpress.com/2009/09/the_shawshank_redemption.jpg?w=500" target="_blank">Brooks Hatlen</a> might say, “the world went and got itself in a big goddamn hurry.” No one–owners, players, or fans–seems capable of building something real, holding on to a shared camaraderie, and pushing towards a goal, regardless of whether or not it is achieved. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">Michael Jordan’s six championships taught a lot of young athletes some terrible lessons about success and what it means. It doesn’t mean you have to be like Mike and fill your fingers with rings in order to be successful, and even Mike stuck with Chicago, let them build, and then flourished. Today’s athletes only see his success, and not the process that got him there, and think that they are entitled to instant gratification. How’s making millions of dollars coming out of high school or your freshman year in college for instant gratification? Don’t you think that you can learn something about yourself and the value of hard work by taking the time to earn the achievement of your goals, and not circumvent that necessary hard work in any way that seems fit?</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">If I sound bitter, I’m at a bitter spot right now. Hell, the country is at a bitter spot right now. The last thing we want to hear living check to check and slowly salting away the money for a better tomorrow is how yet another entitled player or greedy owner took a shortcut to success at the price of what the Jigga Man already laid out: honesty, loyalty, and friendship. Again, sports has much to teach us as fans about life, but Dwight Howard’s story reminds me how much athletes themselves have to learn about life from their fans. It’s a two-way street, and fans understand struggle, adversity, and dedication to one’s own self-worth just as much as athletes do, if not more. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">Dwight Howard shows us the definition of the easy way out, and he shows us how to cheat better than any baseball slugger on performance enhancing drugs or lover stepping out. He did not just cheat his contract, or the NBA collective bargaining agreement, or the organization that nurtured him, or the fans and citizens of Orlando. Most importantly, he cheated himself. Trouble is, like so many of our modern athletes, he has been rewarded for his bad behavior, stepping into a team with Kobe Bryant, Pau Gasol, and the also new-to-LA Steve Nash. If life was fair, the Magic would have dealt Howard to the Toronto Raptors or the Sacramento Kings and let him see just how good he had it in Orlando. But that is the definition of wishful thinking, and the ultimate lesson of the interplay between sports and life is that as fair as we want both to be, they simply never are. </div>Marky Schultzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11361451166416906967noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2243017189684241796.post-35152021565844324322012-07-02T00:14:00.002-04:002012-07-02T04:19:04.962-04:00SO THEM RINGS AND THINGS YOU SING ABOUT...<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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With the completion of its draft of the best college athletes in the country, the NBA's time to shine is officially finished until the beginning of the 2012-2013 season. It's time to wrap up the 2011-2012 season in a neat little bow, and this can only be done with a good long look at the NBA Finals, in which LeBron James and the Miami Heat dispatched of Kevin Durant and the Oklahoma City Thunder in convincing fashion. James won his first NBA championship, which is likely not his last, and the Heat completed the first stage of a mission of dominance they began when James and Chris Bosh joined Dwyane Wade in Miami.</div>
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If you read this blog, or the sports news in general, you know that many opinions on young Mr. James have a way of vacillating to a staggering degree. While I like to think <a href="http://www.bojacksonship.com/2010/07/love-me-some-me.html" target="_blank">that</a> <a href="http://www.bojacksonship.com/2010/10/heat-is-on.html" target="_blank">my</a> <a href="http://www.bojacksonship.com/2011/06/reasonable-doubt.html" target="_blank">own</a> <a href="http://www.bojacksonship.com/2012/05/choice-is-mine-revisited.html" target="_blank">opinion</a> of James has not been susceptible to the level of up and down, life and death, failure or flourish rhetoric that has swirled around him since he entered the league 9 years ago, his team's victory in this year's NBA Finals is a truly important step for James himself, and the NBA as a whole.</div>
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As I've said before, James is the best player in the league, and therefore expected to succeed. The plain truth is that he just hadn't done so up until this season. Sure, he has won individual awards (that's three MVP's and counting) and this was his third trip to the NBA Finals, but without a championship ring on his finger, his incredible talents and phenomenal statistical output would have been footnotes on the story of his continual disappointment. Well, that is over now in some ways, but in others it is not. James is a fascinating figure and has made the Heat a fascinating team, which won't end with this year's success in the Finals. Sorry <a href="http://www.slate.com/articles/sports/sports_nut/2012/06/lebron_james_2012_nba_title_will_the_heat_s_championship_win_make_sports_commentary_less_dumb_.html" target="_blank">Josh Levin</a>.</div>
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Still, it <i>was</i> one small step for James kind, removing a monkey of King Kong-like proportions off his tattooed back. If you had any doubt about the kind of relief that James felt at the end of game 5, you could just watch him bouncing along the sidelines with that mile-wide grin on his face, or soak in the look of sheer elation that washed over his countenance when handed the glistening Larry O'Brien trophy. James needed this ring and he knew it. Hell, we <i>all</i> knew it, but it was amazing to see just how excited and giddy he was at the end of the day. </div>
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One thing I got wrong about James was that I didn't think he could play happy and win. I thought a killer instinct could not be developed while hindered by a joie de vivre, which James has professed all year, but it is a point confirmed with the Heat's Finals victory. He said that he returned to the basics, returned to his love of the game, and returned to being the player he was for his whole life, something that was not part of his make-up in last year's Finals loss to the Mavericks. But what really wasn't there was the level of play that he brought in this year's playoffs and the Finals in particular. With what (to put it lightly) was a slightly hobbled supporting cast (Wade nursing a knee, Bosh an abdominal strain, and Mike Miller needing a <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hUD1LzHqNUc" target="_blank">back-e-outta-me</a>), James averaged 30/9/5 for the post-season. <i>Damn</i> son.</div>
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And those teammates, while a bit gimpy, are a big reason James and the Heat carried the day in the Finals. James' <a href="http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Take%20my%20talents%20to%20South%20Beach" target="_blank">"talents"</a> are one thing, but they fell short on their own in Cleveland. When they are accompanied by excellent shooting and dominant defense, you get exactly what the Heat were this year, and you boat-race a very talented Thunder team out of the the Finals in fine style. Mike Miller, Shane Battier, Norris Cole, Udonis Haslem--not to mention Wade and Bosh--outshone last year's Heat the way that this year's version of James obliterated the reluctant closer we saw a year ago against the Mavericks.</div>
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While he looked apprehensive and willing to acquiesce to Wade last year, he looked determined and completely comfortable with the fact that he is the best player on the court, whenever he is on a court, this year. He dove at the rim and bullied his way to the free throw line, he hit timely jumpers (but didn't live outside the way he did last year), he reminded everyone that he has freakish defensive skills (guarding seemingly anyone he was asked to), and he threw laser passes to teammates on the perimeter when the Thunder and other teams tried to double down and cut him off.</div>
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Now that the requisite James discussion is (almost) complete, the most exciting thing to come out of this year's Finals could be something that had not been anticipated before this post-season run. While it is entirely possible that the Heat will only grow stronger and continue to demolish opponents for the coming decade, it is more likely that the NBA is on the precipice of the kind of rivalry that saw it reborn in the 1980s. That decade had Larry Bird's Celtics and Magic Johnson's Lakers, and this decade might see LeBron James' Heat and Kevin Durant's Thunder become the preeminent rivalry in all of sports. Although they may have to wait a little while for their own <a href="http://www.magicbirdbroadway.com/" target="_blank">Broadway show...</a></div>
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I don't doubt the Heat, but the likelihood that this is the last we saw of Durant and the Thunder, or that they will not continue to get better as they congeal as a team, grow up as young men, and add new pieces, is slim and none. I'm absolutely over the moon at the thought of these two teams being the centerpiece of the league because I love professional basketball, and it would reach new heights if this is the case in the near and somewhat more distant future. I love the Lakers, and I don't count them out, but they, the San Antonio Spurs, Chicago Bulls, Boston Celtics, et al have a juggernaut in each conference to deal with in the coming years.</div>
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Instead of LeBron's prediction of <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pT-I8jQDQ7c" target="_blank">"not 2, not 3, not 4, not 5..."</a> rings for Miami, the league might see a punching match between its two best players that becomes the Association's version of Ali/Frazier. This <i>could</i> be the beginning of LeBron's Jordan-like run towards a fistfull of rings, I just hope it's not. I want to see great players be great, and while that includes James, it also includes Durant. The two may be separated in age a little more than Bird and Johnson, who were already college rivals when they entered the league together in the '79-'80 season, but they share a similar level of ability, and a mirrored competitive drive that will have them going at each other in the Finals over and over if we should all be so lucky.</div>
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So either way the next 5 to 10 years play out, I think the NBA and its fans are in for another golden era of competition and intrigue. If the Heat turn into the Bulls of the 1990's and rip off 6 rings in 8 years, that would sure be fun to watch, but if they find themselves in a grudge match with the Thunder, that would be all the better. James shut enough people up with his first ring that his path to glory no longer rests on the aforementioned number of rings he predicted in the Heat's preseason extravaganza a year ago. I think most will forget that debacle, along with "The Decision", as the Heat continue to raise their temperature and the young guns in OKC continue their already impressive rise to meet the championship challenge that now resides in South Beach.</div>Marky Schultzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11361451166416906967noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2243017189684241796.post-50639937008048888172012-06-04T17:00:00.001-04:002012-06-04T17:03:18.498-04:00SHAQ OF CONTROL<div style="text-align: justify;">
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Recently, it was reported that the Orlando Magic were interested in <a href="http://msn.foxsports.com/nba/story/Shaquille-ONeal-and-Orlando-Magic-reportedly-to-talk-GM-job-052312" target="_blank">interviewing retired center and former franchise centerpiece Shaquille O’Neal</a> for their newly vacant general manager position. When I first read a headline indicating as much on several of the sports news websites that I frequent, I couldn’t believe what I was reading. For starters, thanks to Dwight Howard, the Magic are an incredible mess. D just couldn’t seem to make up his mind whether or not he wanted to re-sign with the team or pursue free agency during the course of this season, and when I say that he couldn’t quite make up his mind what I really mean is that he was a negotiating schizophrenic. He changed his mind like a teenage girl picking out a prom dress and even twice in the same day towards the end of the regular season. Finally, at long last, he signed a one year option to put off free agency until after the 2012-2013 season.</div>
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What this did was put a drop kick into the beehive that the Magic have become. A one year deal did nothing to quell suspicions that he still wants out of Orlando, gave the Magic front office no indication that they could re-sign their big man, and put his coach and teammates into the kind of awkward situation that makes French kissing your sister seem natural. That situation culminated when the Magic fired that aforementioned head coach, Stan Van Gundy and GM Otis Smith, but that wasn’t before a reporter’s question about whether Howard had asked for Van Gundy’s firing led to one of the most uncomfortable interviews in the history of sports near the end of the shortened 2011-2012 season. Check it <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uY8S9K6t170&feature=related" target="_blank">here</a>, and try not to squirm. </div>
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You have to feel for Van Gundy, shake your head at Howard, and blame the Magic front office for what went down this year. So in order to clean up after they cleaned house, the Magic brass decide to pursue Shaquille O’Neal for their GM position. Okay, so, you’re talking about Shaq right? The same Shaquille O’Neal that left your team in the lurch more than a decade ago and signed with the LA Lakers in free agency, the same man that while one of the most dominant big men in the history of the game, is also one of its most ridiculous characters. The same Shaq who, trying to chase a fifth championship in the latter part of his career picked Phoenix, Cleveland, and Boston to do so. That’s Phoenix, Cleveland, and Boston, none of which even reached the NBA Finals, let alone won a championship with Shaq on their roster. This is the guy you want constructing a team for you?</div>
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We’re talking about a dood that starred in <a href="http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/kazaam/" target="_blank">‘Kazaam’</a>, traded rhymes with <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RIAVegnlNjc" target="_blank">Fu-Schnickens</a>, called himself “Diesel”, “The Big Aristotle”, and “The Big Shaqtus” in that order, all after, once again for the purpose of clarity, he left Orlando by choice for the bright lights of Los Angeles. In order to bring some clarity and resolve to an organization that is in dire need of direction, the Magic chose to reach out to a guy that once asked former teammate Kobe Bryant how <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z49whgBNCyE" target="_blank">“his ass tastes”</a> in a freestyle rap at a crowded night club. This is the guy that’s going to keep Dwight Howard around and be the face of your franchise off the court? </div>
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I can’t tell you how little sense this makes. If invading Iraq after we were attacked by a terrorist cell based out of Afghanistan post-911 made sense, then yeah, I guess it makes sense. If the richest country in the world refusing to give health care to everyone that lives here makes sense, then yeah, this makes sense. If Jim Belushi and George Lopez continuing to find work in Hollywood makes sense, then yes, this makes sense. If the fact that you drive in a parkway and park in a driveway makes sense, then yes, this makes sense. If--ah, <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RqMt1fp9yFU" target="_blank">y’all know</a>.</div>
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And thank god for logic winning out, because it was announced a week ago Thursday that O’Neal will in fact <a href="http://www.usatoday.com/sports/basketball/nba/story/2012-05-24/Shaq-Shaquille-ONeal-Orlando-Magic/55190846/1" target="_blank">not pursue the Magic GM job </a>and will not grant the team an interview. The fact that O’Neal was the one who had to make the right decision in this demented courtship is truly astounding, and the Magic might as well keep their crazy caps on and buy Dwight Howard a plane ticket, because even his contractually bipolar ass ain’t sticking around for these kinds of shenanigans. The Magic are a grease fire and even Shaq knows that. </div>
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The Orlando faithful need to get a grip, move on, and hope that yet again they will get the number one pick in the NBA draft and have a shot at rebuilding the franchise. Two of those number one picks, O’Neal and Howard, are making their life even more chaotic right now, but like so many who have spurned luck’s fortunate shimmer, they will probably have their ass polished one more time down the road. I just thank god Shaquille freaking O’Neal won’t be the one deciding who that number one pick is.</div>Marky Schultzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11361451166416906967noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2243017189684241796.post-33463550811599934822012-05-20T22:16:00.000-04:002012-05-22T22:57:53.015-04:00THE CHOICE IS MINE (REVISITED)Having an opinion on anything, especially sports, means that sometimes you have to allow that opinion to shift. It also means that sometimes, you were perhaps more right than you thought you were. I find myself smack dab in the middle of these two seemingly opposing circumstances when it comes to two stories that are floating around the world of sports right now. I have previously expounded upon the career of LeBron James and the violent nature of the game of football in previous posts, and since those two topics are back in the spotlight right now, I thought I would take a two-headed approach to a bit of Bo Jackson’s Hip revisionist history.<br />
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Not long ago, I wrote a post about <a href="http://www.bojacksonship.com/2011/10/are-you-not-entertained.html" target="_blank">how uncomfortable I am with being a football fan</a>. I wrote about how my love of the game is clouded by the sheer destruction it can bring to those who play it, both in the short and long term. In that initial post, I talked about how the media firestorm surrounding head injuries was the impetus behind why I decided to vent on the violence of football, but that what truly unnerved me was the purely visceral feeling I continue to experience simply watching the game. That just taking in the action week after week during the football season had started to make me queasy. About how much of a mental strain it can be to take so much joy away from the game while at the same time knowing deep down that all of the collisions, limb twisting, and brutality of football are not good for those who play the game, and at the end of the day, for the viewer too.</div>
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Well, I was right. And I was wrong. I still have all of the feelings that I expressed in that post, but have now integrated all of the head injury hoopla into my general feeling of unease. That’s because earlier this month, one of the most competitive and perhaps greatest linebackers the game has ever seen took his own life. Junior Seau’s suicide should not be called shocking in any way shape or form. Seau was previously involved in a <a href="http://voices.washingtonpost.com/early-lead/2010/10/junior_seau_injured_in_car_cra.html" target="_blank">car accident</a> that sent his auto sailing off a cliff in Southern California, and while he insisted that it was just that, an accident, many speculated that it was an attempt on his own life. And with all of the information that continues to leak out of the story concerning Seau’s depressive mind state over the recent past and some erratic behavior over that same time frame, it is clear to this writer and many others that the number of blows Junior took to the head had to have had an affect on his mental stability and mood. </div>
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This is accentuated by the manner in which Seau committed suicide. He shot himself in the chest, which already seems like an unusual path to the eternal on first glance, but upon further examination is another chilling reminder of the kind of continued controversy the NFL must deal with in regards to head injuries and their long term psychological and physical effects. Seau shot himself in the chest, preserving his head and the brain inside of it. The similarity to the way that Seau chose to take his own life and the way another former NFL player, Dave Duerson did so just last year is eerie and telling. Duerson’s suicide note, which is featured in the picture above, makes it clear that he knew where the demons haunting him originated. He pleads with friends, family, and the medical profession in that suicide note to study his brain postmortem, the only way to determine if he was suffering from chronic traumatic encephalopathy, a condition that more and more is the telltale sign of a life and personality permanently affected by a career in professional football. <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/03/sports/football/03duerson.html?_r=1" target="_blank">He was.</a></div>
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Duerson’s blatant message from the great beyond was that despite what he may have thought <a href="http://www.slate.com/articles/sports/sports_nut/2012/05/junior_seau_dead_will_the_latest_football_suicide_finally_change_how_we_think_about_the_nfl_.html" target="_blank">earlier in his life</a>, he knew at the time of his passing that football and the impacts his brain was exposed to week after week, year after year, were the reason he had reached suicidal levels of despair. It becomes that much easier for us to make the connection between his death and Seau’s because of the manner of their suicides and the increasing level of scrutiny and research the NFL is devoting to head injuries (at the behest of an increasingly concerned public and sports media). I was right, football is brutal, but I was wrong, head injuries should now become the focus of not only the press, the league, and physicians, but more importantly, players and fans like me. </div>
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As I said, this post is meant to be a reexamination of opinion on two fronts, and the second, while not a matter of life and death, could be a matter of career life and death for LeBron James, the best basketball player on the planet earth. <a href="http://www.bojacksonship.com/2011/06/reasonable-doubt.html" target="_blank">I wrote a post last June</a> after James’ Miami Heat fell to the Dallas Mavericks in the 2011 NBA Finals examining what the hell was wrong, and what the hell was right with James and the Heat, and as with my musings on violence in football I feel that I got a lot of things right. But in the year since, I was also wrong about many aspects of James’ career arc at the same time. I said last June that LeBron needed to ditch the likable, nice-guy persona he built as an insouciant youngster in Cleveland, where he was a teammate’s dream and a bundle of energy and excitement on the court. I thought that the way he and the Heat played in the 2011 Finals--reluctant, ill at ease, unnecessarily unnerved--was a manifestation of James’ unwillingness to embrace his new role as sporting villain and his inability to develop a killer edge.</div>
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I thought that if James could pair his inarguable talent and athletic acumen with the killer instinct that resides in so many of the greatest players in any sport, he would be unstoppable. I thought that if he didn’t do this, he was destined to be known as the ultimate front-runner in the world of sports, which does not usually a legend make. But then he put on an MVP performance this regular season that showed just how amazing a basketball talent he is. There isn’t a player in the league that filled out the stat sheet <a href="http://www.rotoworld.com/player/nba/927/lebron-james" target="_blank">like James did this year</a>, and I thought that maybe I was wrong. Maybe he could remain true to his playful self and succeed at the same time, and I found this especially true considering the Heat were 15-1 while James’ near equal in talent, Dwyane Wade, was sidelined with injury.<br />
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To further my appetite for crow, <a href="http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/vault/article/magazine/MAG1197595/index.htm" target="_blank">Sports Illustrated did a cover story on James</a> in the final week of April that had me completely convinced of the error of my ways. James professed a basketball rebirth, where he stopped thinking so much about his play and returned to an unabashed excitement for the court and enjoyment level that he hadn’t felt since coming to the Heat. His attitude was back to where he wanted it to be, and his play was simultaneously flourishing in South Beach. I thought that I was dead wrong and that James could be a sports world exception, a Brett Favre of the hardwood who never hid his childlike enthusiasm and still succeeded. But what I forgot was that the SI cover story, and the story of James’ alleged personal reclamation of his attitude, were based on a regular season performance. I forgot that we were not, unfortunately, talking about the playoffs. Shout out to the homie Jim Mora. </div>
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Thus far in the playoffs, James seems up to his old tricks. And while I was ready to take back all the doubts I had about his ability to play nice and play well, he is already reminding me of why I thought what I thought. For all of the enjoyment that LBJ claims he has regained, it is not evident on the court, where he still looks listless. Nor is the solution offered up by yours truly, a killer instinct. If James would truly like to win more like Brett Favre than Tiger Woods, or to stay on the court, more like Michael Jordan, he needs to do just that. The most important part of that sentiment being the word “WIN”. Against the Indiana Pacers in game two, James again missed key free throws in the closing moments, and was joined by Wade in having a severe case of the charity stripe yips. With the game on the line and a last shot that could have tied the game, the action didn’t even run through James and the Heat settled on a shot by Mario Chalmers. Chalmers is a fine basketball player, but in order to be what he wants to be, it must be James taking that final shot, or at the very least James passing out of a double team to an open Chalmers or Wade. </div>
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So again, I was right, then wrong, and now I feel right again about LeBron and his ability to win. I know, we’re only in the second round of the playoffs and the Miami Heat are without the third part of their multi-million dollar trifecta Chris Bosh due to injury, but that will be no excuse if once again the Heat come up short. I <a href="http://twitter.com/#!/markyschultz" target="_blank">tweeted</a> earlier this regular season that it amazes me that with the amount of talent, scoring ability, and defensive tenacity that the Heat possess, they consistently look beatable, night after night. That has to change and change quickly if they hope to escape the Eastern Conference Playoffs, where despite a manly 40 point 18 rebound performance from James in game 4, they are struggling with the Indiana Pacers in round two. James needs a lot more of those nights, especially when the pressure is on, and more help from Wade if the Heat want to make a run to the Finals and an NBA Championship. </div>
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It may take a decade, maybe even two before I finally know how right or wrong I am about the devastation that emanates from football and the legacy of LeBron James, but until then I am floating somewhere in the ether on both counts. Right or wrong, I will be as interested as you as to how things eventually play out.</div>Marky Schultzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11361451166416906967noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2243017189684241796.post-9903357089887415022012-03-29T19:05:00.000-04:002012-03-30T15:47:35.416-04:00THE ONE LESS TRAVELED BY<div style="text-align: justify;">Though its culmination is still a few days away, I can already say that the 2012 iteration of the NCAA Division I Mens Basketball Tournament is the most memorable in my years of watching the <a href="http://www.thelouisvillepaper.com/2012/03/02/its-a-mad-mad-mad-mad-march/" target="_blank">Madness that comes with March</a>. This year's tournament hasn't had quite the same level of exciting moments and cinderella stories as many of those in the distant or recent past, but I personally have never had such an immediate connection to college basketball's championship tournament or the kind of of vivid experiences and encounters with the action that will no doubt make this year's Big Dance stick in my memory like no other before it. For me, this year's road to the Final Four was indeed <a href="http://www.bartleby.com/119/1.html" target="_blank">the one less traveled by</a>.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">Before the tournament field was even decided upon, I had already been given a glimpse into what was to come, starting with a trip to New Orleans and the hoopla surrounding this year's SEC conference tournament. I hitched a free ride with two friends to the Crescent City, where we met up with another pal and set down temporary residence in a quaint apartment in the city's <a href="http://wikitravel.org/en/New_Orleans/Faubourg_Marigny#b" target="_blank">Marigny district</a>. It provided a home base from which we experienced the tournament's exciting and surprisingly Blue atmosphere. Two of the three friends I spent my weekend in New Orleans with are dyed-in-the-wool Kentucky fans, and they made the pilgrimage to Nola without tickets for any of the games, but just to be present in the city where their team was making its run through the conference tournament. They were not alone.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
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</div><div style="text-align: justify;">If this picture doesn't do justice to the number of Kentucky fans that infiltrated the city for the weekend, let me try to add to the 1,000 words that the photo hopefully imparts. As depicted, Bourbon Street was filled to the gills with the Kentucky faithful for the entire weekend. I was absolutely floored by the sheer number of fans that came down to watch and support their team. One reason being is that the trip from Kentucky to New Orleans is not exactly a short one (I believe we made our trip in just over ten hours by car, and that was with an extra hour shaved off of our time thanks to a shift in time zones). The other is that the UK fans were there for a <i>conference</i> tournament. With Kentucky already in control of a number one seed in the national tournament, it amazed me that so many fans turned out just to cheer their team on during their conference's tourney. Also, as a die-hard Ohio State fan, I thought <i>my</i> team traveled well. No affront to any of my fellow Buckeye faithful, but Wildcat fans can do more than give us a run for our money when it comes to traveling in support of their school. They flooded that city (ouch, still too soon?) and made me think that some sort of famine had induced a Lexington diaspora to New Orleans, which is still reeling from a storm-induced exodus of its own.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">To add to the excitement that was clearly evident among my comrades and the rest of the Kentucky fans that were crawling all over the city, the French Quarter bar we selected to view the Wildcats' first game at was filled with Kentucky fans of a truly select breed: the extended family of the team's star center Anthony Davis. Grandma, grandpa, uncle, aunt, twin sister--just about everyone except the dynamic freshman's mother and father, who were attending the game at the New Orleans Arena--were right there alongside of us, cheering on their relative with the ungodly wingspan and the rest of his talented teammates towards a conference championship. My Kentucky-fan friends were over the moon, and I was similarly excited to be around the Davis clan, who were warm and energetic throughout the game (and the following day's game as well). They came from Davis' hometown of Chicago and also Mobile, Alabama, where some of them have put down stakes, and called their shot-swatting kinsman "Fat Man", a nickname he apparently earned as a particularly hefty infant.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
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</div><div style="text-align: justify;">It was amazing to see the games through their eyes (which were not, before you ask, framed by <a href="http://bigbluecorner.blogspot.com/2011/11/anthony-davis-t-shirt.html" target="_blank">unibrows</a>) and be surrounded by Kentucky fans that were both long-time supporters and genealogically invested in the outcome of the games. In the end, Kentucky came up short in <a href="http://www.usatoday.com/sports/college/mensbasketball/sec/story/2012-03-10/semfinals-kentucky-florida-vanderbilt-mississippi/53465906/1" target="_blank">the conference championship game</a> to Vanderbilt, but that did little to detract from what for me was a memorable (though somewhat hazy) weekend in New Orleans. I was allowed a second trip to a city that I am truly falling more and more in love with the more I get to experience it, and a unique window into a side of basketball fandom that I hadn't really appreciated up until this point. But my four days in New Orleans were only a warm-up to my tournament experience, which truly got going a few days later back home in Louisville.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">That's because unlike the New Orleans trip, a friend and I had already secured tickets to the games being played at the KFC Yum! Center on both Thursday and Saturday. That gave us four games from the round of 64 on Thursday and two more in the second round for Saturday. I was in high spirits on my bus ride downtown to see the games, and was happier still when I got to my seat, which though high up in the unusually cool air of the Yum! Center, was still a fantastic viewpoint to see the games. And to be perfectly honest, like some of the bigger stars I've seen at large arenas in the world of music, I was thrilled just to be there, no matter how good the action on the court ended up being. Well, it ended up being great and the whole day, while exhausting to a certain degree (especially considering the lack of alcoholic libations available for sale), was sublime. I spent the day surrounded by the tournament atmosphere, which was again dominated by fans of the Kentucky Wildcats.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgISVZcqjhNjR6C4qIlf4v8ufB6f5HK3p50fEkDFSofVf2N6QAAr5MS_O3wJKzQqf9fWuVKZC7d91k25l92vNAZRYz9pWKL4ZZPJzzZB0Q6P1odTezgcoql7AzBizoy2VsS4g6ZxXXsu1d0/s1600/IMG_0635.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgISVZcqjhNjR6C4qIlf4v8ufB6f5HK3p50fEkDFSofVf2N6QAAr5MS_O3wJKzQqf9fWuVKZC7d91k25l92vNAZRYz9pWKL4ZZPJzzZB0Q6P1odTezgcoql7AzBizoy2VsS4g6ZxXXsu1d0/s400/IMG_0635.JPG" width="400" /></a></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">All of the teams represented showed up, but as in the case of New Orleans, none of them showed up like the UK faithful. They poured into the arena's lobby chanting and shouting and didn't stop when they reached their seats, as their boys in blue promptly mowed over instate competition Western Kentucky. The Hilltoppers seemed for a brief window of time in the first half to have a chance at staying even with the best college basketball team in the country, but that soon gave way to a dominating performance from Terrence Jones and more Wildcat alley-oops than a week's worth of LA Clippers games. I was again astonished at the vivacity of the Kentucky crowd, which cheered their team's dismantling of a No. 16 seed like it was a game against their real instate rival and the host for the action, the Louisville Cardinals. Which brings us to why this year's version of March Madness just got borderline psychotic...</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">I told my friend Catherine, who I attended the games with, that as a UK fan she had to have seen the lower portion of the Wildcats' bracket, which if everything shook out right could mean a meeting with Louisville in the Final Four. Our discussion was more along the lines of "how about that", "wouldn't that be something", and "this city would go apeshit". Well how about the fact that it actually <i>is</i> something, and this city <i>is</i> <a href="http://espn.go.com/mens-college-basketball/tournament/2012/story/_/id/7750712/battle-stations-being-readied-state-kentucky-wildcats-versus-louisville-cardinals" target="_blank">going apeshit</a>. It is not only the unlikely run that Louisville has made through the tournament so far that makes the Final Four match-up between the two teams fascinating, but clearly their storied rivalry, their coaches' not-so-under-the-radar feelings of animus toward one another, and the rabidity of each school's respective fan-bases. Jim Rome, a national sports radio host, television personality, and in this writer's mind the best interviewer in his field <a href="http://twitter.com/#!/jimrome" target="_blank">tweeted</a> shortly after the match-up became a reality on Sunday:</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">"Kentucky fan and Louisville fan together on Bourbon St.?! Think that's very combustible? Head on a swivel."</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">JR was referring to the fact that like the SEC tourney, the Final Four will take place this weekend in New Orleans, but I have to say that I don't think even Bourbon Street will compare to what this city is going to be like come Saturday evening. Here in Louisville we definitely have our fair share of parties, with the Kentucky Derby being the shining example of the kind of debauchery the River City is capable of, but I don't think that any Derby weekend is going to be able to compare with what's coming when the Cards and Cats meet up with a chance to play in the championship game. I'm not alone in this opinion, and if you've been around any sort of public sphere here in Louisville since the match-up solidified last weekend, you know that I'm right. "The Game" is a topic of conversation everywhere from sports bars to coffee shops to supermarkets, and I'm as giddy as a school kid that I get to be here for what has to be one of the most contentious Final Four match-ups in the history of the NCAA tournament.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">I always come back to a Rick Pitino quote that I'm not sure I read or heard during a radio interview when I think of the UK/U of L rivalry. I'm paraphrasing, but the basic idea coach imparted was that while he was with Kentucky, there wasn't a Louisville fan to be found in Lexington, but when he took the job at U of L, he realized that Louisville is split nearly 50/50 when it comes to fans of the Cards and Cats. That makes for an electric environment here in Louisville every time the two teams meet, but it has nothing on the atomic level of energy that is going to be pouring out of every nook and cranny of this town come Saturday afternoon.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">Jesus, I'm getting so wrapped up in Blue and Red that I almost forgot that <i>my</i> team is playing in the Final Four's other game against the Kansas Jayhawks. How about I say good luck to both of the Kentucky teams involved in this Saturday's action, and hope that they get to play my Buckeyes on Monday night in Nola. I'm not really invested in the outcome of the instate battle that's about to go down in the Big Easy, but certainly can't wait to watch it all unfold and see how many of the buildings near the U of L campus remain standing if the Cards are able to gut out a victory. As Romey tweeted, keep your head on a swivel if you're on Bourbon St., and do the same if you happen to be shakily making your way down 3rd Street here in the Ville on Saturday.</div>Marky Schultzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11361451166416906967noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2243017189684241796.post-45690895615187286562012-03-01T18:37:00.003-05:002012-03-01T22:14:19.885-05:00PISSED OFF<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgrwjJHSS-p_fs9UtH9RXXMAuMYyw3EHmFs0W7oQcF2EWivnm7oKc4wtjzI2ZCXricKzZE50Fs_HA_guul8lJemUqUpQ4tQglOcwfdYbVlRtDgYz6A2oRJa8JO24rP1ufVlaq_Wmw0od5lf/s1600/Brewers_Braun_Baseball_0668f.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgrwjJHSS-p_fs9UtH9RXXMAuMYyw3EHmFs0W7oQcF2EWivnm7oKc4wtjzI2ZCXricKzZE50Fs_HA_guul8lJemUqUpQ4tQglOcwfdYbVlRtDgYz6A2oRJa8JO24rP1ufVlaq_Wmw0od5lf/s1600/Brewers_Braun_Baseball_0668f.jpg" /></a></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">Since its earliest days, baseball has been a sport where the credo is “if you ain’t cheatin’, you ain’t tryin’.” Now while this used to be a good-natured game of let’s see what I can get away with on the field, where pitchers tried to do <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8KKKhpAmU34" target="_blank">whatever they could</a> to the ball to make it dive away from a bat and hitters themselves had their own <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/09/16/derek-jeter-hit-by-pitch_n_719269.html" target="_blank">unique ploys</a> for reaching base that may have escaped the watchful eye of the umpire, all of that changed with the steroid era. As pitchers and hitters alike tried to gain a competitive edge through the use of performance enhancing drugs, the record books were forever tainted by numbers that were not only ill-gotten, but downright impossible without the help of everything from anabolic steroids to human growth hormone to synthetic testosterone. Baseball has finally tried to clean up its act over the last few years, and some of its most prominent stars will forever be linked to the use of PEDs. This includes its all-time home run king, Barry Bonds, one of its greatest pitchers, Roger Clemens, and a host of other stars including Mark McGwire, Sammy Sosa, Raphael Palmeiro, Manny Ramirez, and Alex Rodriguez, just to name a few.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">With the findings of the <a href="http://mlb.mlb.com/mlb/news/mitchell/index.jsp" target="_blank">Mitchell Report</a> and baseball’s new steroid testing apparatus, the game has finally made an earnest, though not nearly earnest enough, attempt to track down PED abusers. Long suspensions await anyone who is caught using PEDs and random drug screenings have become a part of every player’s life, whether it is during the season or in their months each year away from the game. For me, baseball’s steroid era has been tough. That’s because it incriminated so many of the stars that I watched as a young man and because it means that no matter what, the guys that I grew up watching in amazement will never be given the same level of adulation and praise that players from the past receive. Babe Ruth, Jackie Robinson, Mickey Mantle, Joe DiMaggio, Willie Mays, Stan Musial, Sandy Koufax, Bob Gibson et al. will always be lionized in ways that modern players will never see and it pains me that many of the players of what I consider <i>my</i> generation that actually were clean (Ken Griffey Jr. being the prime example) will always be lumped in with the guys who cheated. For every <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bwzLP5TbwtM&feature=related" target="_blank">Junior Griffey</a>, there are tens if not twenties if not hundreds of <a href="http://www.overstock.com/Books-Movies-Music-Games/Vindicated-Paperback/3268332/product.html?cid=202290&kid=9553000357392&track=pspla&adtype=pla&kw=%7Bkeyword%7D" target="_blank">Jose Cansecoes</a>, and because of that fact, I am unabashedly disappointed. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">It is why I think that long suspensions and random testing are necessary for baseball’s future, and why no matter who they might catch in the act of cheating, the public must know about it, plain and simple. It is with this notion in mind that I have been poring over the details swirling around the positive drug test of reigning National League Most Valuable Player Ryan Braun. Braun is a lean, athletic slugger for the Milwaukee Brewers, who doesn’t seem to have the physique or the personality to be involved with performance enhancers. However, a few months back, after he narrowly beat out the Dodgers’ Matt Kemp for the MVP award, ESPN reported that Braun’s urine was found to contain absurdly high levels of synthetic testosterone after a sample was collected from him following a playoff game on October 1. Under baseball’s <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Major_League_Baseball_drug_policy" target="_blank">drug-testing policy</a>, that means a 50-game suspension. When the results of Braun’s urine analysis were leaked to ESPN (see what I did there?), he had just been given his league’s MVP award and as a result gave the sport as a whole a black eye that it doesn’t need now or ever again. It’s the kind of revelation that makes me sick to my stomach, but it’s got nothing on what happened next...</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">Immediately after Braun tested positive and the suspension was levied, rumors started to swirl about what was really going on. There was talk that there was a logical, albeit <a href="http://deadspin.com/5888054/ryan-braun-says-he-never-had-herpes" target="_blank">embarrassing reason</a> that Braun's urine contained such high levels of testosterone and he appealed the suspension with the help of baseball’s players’ association. For many fans, especially those that call Milwaukee home, Braun was given the benefit of the doubt. This is America after all, right? You’re innocent until proven guilty in the good ol’ U.S. of A, right?</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">Wrong. Braun wasn’t found guilty in a <a href="http://www.slate.com/articles/sports/sports_nut/2012/02/ryan_braun_suspension_overturned_is_it_right_for_the_baseball_star_to_get_off_on_a_technicality_.html" target="_blank">court of law</a>, he was drug-tested by his employer and he failed that test. He was suspended from work under their drug policy and while he is <a href="http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2011/baseball/mlb/12/10/braun-positive-drug-test.ap/index.html" target="_blank">allowed an appeal</a>, for other fans, myself included, whether or not he won that appeal was not going to change a goddamn thing. No player in any major sport has ever won an appeal when it comes to a positive drug test and for me, even if Braun were able to somehow prove mitigating circumstances were behind it all, it wouldn’t matter. He tested positive, plain and simple. Any subsequent tests or the profession of his innocence or support from former or current players <a href="http://www.foxsportswisconsin.com/02/23/12/MVPeeved-Rodgers-defends-Braun-on-Twitte/landing_packers.html?blockID=672718" target="_blank">in any sport</a> wasn’t going to change my mind. Braun is a PED user as far as I’m concerned. He’s on my list of cheaters, and there is no getting off of that list, no matter what some arbitration panel decides months after the fact.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">Well as it turns out, Braun did win his appeal last week. Because the urine sample that he gave wasn’t shipped directly to the testing laboratory but instead sat in a collector’s home for two days, he was exonerated via arbitration by a 2-1 vote. His suspension was lifted, and he claimed that the truth won out. Well I ain’t buying it, not for one second. The lifting of his suspension was carried out due to a technicality that means nothing to me, and should have meant nothing to the panel that decided to uphold his appeal. Just because that little cup of urine sat in some guy’s house instead of a FedEx facility for two days doesn’t mean that the test wasn’t accurate, positive, and proved that Braun is a cheater. I’m not sure how exactly he thinks that he really won here, because I will never look at his ability on the field or his numbers the same way, and I know I’m not alone. Yeah, you get to play those 50 games that the league tried to take away from you Ryan, but you’ll play them and the rest of the games in your career under a cloud of suspicion and with a trepidation attached to your achievements that you will never, ever escape.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">The craziest part of Braun’s reversal of fortune for me is that he never said that the test was inaccurate or tampered with. All he and his lawyers argued is that the collector who took his sample passed two FedEx facilities, both of which were closed for business on the Saturday night in question, and took Braun’s sample home with him. The only difference in outcome that occurred because Braun’s sample didn’t get dropped off at a FedEx office was that instead of sitting in a box on a loading dock until Monday morning, it sat in some guy’s basement. This did nothing concerning the sample’s viability and amounts to the sort of technicality that makes prosecuting attorneys toss and turn for months on end in criminal court. But again, this isn’t a court of law we’re talking about. We’re talking about a company’s drug-testing policy, and when it comes to that, the collector acted in accordance with the letter of the rules. So not only did the collector act properly and his actions have nothing to do with the high level of testosterone found in Braun’s urine, but Braun never questioned the validity of the test in the first place. He was granted his athletic freedom on a technicality that I’m still not convinced was valid, but it was a technicality nonetheless. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">What that means for me, as I said before, is that Ryan Braun is a cheater. Not only that, but he is a cheater who gamed the system and will face no punishment after he obviously broke the rules and had something pumping through his veins other than tobacco juice and Wheaties when he put up the numbers that led the Brewers to a playoff birth and himself to an MVP award. There are players who have tested positive and admitted to their crimes, like Mark McGwire and Alex Rodriguez, those who are clearly guilty and maintain their innocence like Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens (don’t <a href="http://www.bojacksonship.com/2010/08/what-had-happened-was.html" target="_blank">get me started</a> on <a href="http://www.bojacksonship.com/2008/02/rocket-winter.html" target="_blank">the Rocket)</a>, and now a new category of cheaters like Ryan Braun, who are guilty but get off on a technicality that maintains their eligibility to play. In that three-tier cheaters’ gallery, I’m not sure who I like least. Clemens has been so adamant in his innocence in the face of guilt that he was called before a grand jury for lying to congress, but I might actually have to give his hard-headed and asinine insistence more respect than that of Braun, who basically said, “yep, I tested positive, but I’m going to play anyways.” The fact that he has the gall to say that the truth set him free is a whole ‘nother level of “you gotta be kidding me” and I am simply appalled that folks in the media and fellow athletes have stood by this guy considering the facts and innuendo that continue to slowly leak out of this story.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">The Braun saga reached nauseating levels last Friday, when after his suspension was lifted, he held a <a href="http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2012/baseball/mlb/02/24/brewers.braun.ap/index.html" target="_blank">press conference</a> at the Brewers' spring training facility. Framed in sunlight and showing off his all-American good looks, Braun shakily started to explain himself at first, then with growing confidence, proceeded to blame others for his plight and maintain a blustery confidence in his innocence. I have had metaphorical and literal fingers wagged in my face (ahem, <a href="http://www.blinkx.com/watch-video/rafael-palmeiro-testifies-before-congress/sg4pbBtOqAyEareeZjwU0Q" target="_blank">Raphael Palmeiro</a>) as a television viewer by players in similar situations, who I not only didn’t believe, but were later found to be guilty of using PEDs. Braun levied attacks at the collector of his sample, Dino Lauenzi Jr., and said "I honestly don't know what happened to it [his sample] for that 44-hour period. There are a lot of different things that could have possibly happened. There are a lot of things that we heard about the collection process, the collector and some other people involved in the process that have been concerning to us. But as I've dealt with the situation, I know what it's like to be wrongly accused of something, so for me to wrongly accuse somebody wouldn't help."</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">Well how about you wrongly accusing the collector of mishandling your sample, and accusing Major League Baseball of not doing their due diligence during the process of its testing? Sounds to me like the pot is calling the kettle a dark, ebon shade of black here, but Mr. Braun was not finished. He continued, "This is my livelihood. This is my integrity. This is my character. This is everything I have ever worked for in my life being called into question. We need to make sure we get it right. If you're going to be in a position where you're 100 percent guilty until innocent, you can't mess up." Well guess what Ryan? The collector didn’t make you have three times the normal level of testosterone in your urine, and he certainly didn’t make it the synthetic variety. While Braun was well spoken and seemed to aver his innocence with aplomb, I don’t buy it for one second. As the Associated Press reported during the follow-up to Braun’s statements, Major League Baseball isn’t buying it either. MLB executive vice president Rob Manfred told the AP, "Our program is not 'fatally flawed’. Changes will be made promptly to clarify the instructions provided to collectors regarding when samples should be delivered to FedEx based on the arbitrator's decision. Neither Mr. Braun nor the MLBPA contended in the grievance that his sample had been tampered with or produced any evidence of tampering."</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">And that last sentence of Mr. Manfred’s quote is really what all of this is about at the end of the day. Braun is not contending that the sample was tampered with, and if you read collector Dino Laurenzi Jr.’s <a href="http://espn.go.com/mlb/story/_/id/7625756/statement-dino-laurenzi-jr-collected-samples-ryan-braun-case" target="_blank">statement</a> in response to the attacks that Braun threw at him, there is no reason to believe that is the case anyway. Laurenzi did exactly what he was supposed to do, and along with Major League Baseball, is now being vilified by Braun and his attorneys for doing everything that they were supposed to do. For all of the theatricality of Braun’s statement to the press and his maintenance of his innocence, the question that still remains (and the one that should be put to Braun post haste) is this: <b>“Why was synthetic testosterone found in your urine?”</b> That’s all that this huge media blowout and constant game of back and forth between Braun, the League, and Laurenzi Jr. boils down to. If you’re so sure that the truth has set you free Ryan, why was this substance in your body? Until that question is answered by Braun, I will never look on him as anything but yet another in the long line of cheaters that professional sports continues to add to. The problem is, Braun knows the answer to that question, we know the answer to that question, and baseball knows the answer to that question. I just want to hear it from Braun, plain and simple.</div>Marky Schultzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11361451166416906967noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2243017189684241796.post-86680294493866039642012-02-08T21:29:00.007-05:002012-02-15T16:56:58.710-05:00SUPER BOWL SHUFFLE<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgf8DclXMGbuoriX-poCW9fYeNiWLknBS3Q-21jl-1j43e36MXmsDM84hd9a1Np9L3J1SsSjQs6pLdrNx1fLCE0sSlprmJvFL5WrfdPTDN_4CgsCWRu0whGlWWK_vI2JKrkWTIQ5witJGHA/s1600/manningbrady.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgf8DclXMGbuoriX-poCW9fYeNiWLknBS3Q-21jl-1j43e36MXmsDM84hd9a1Np9L3J1SsSjQs6pLdrNx1fLCE0sSlprmJvFL5WrfdPTDN_4CgsCWRu0whGlWWK_vI2JKrkWTIQ5witJGHA/s1600/manningbrady.jpg" /></a></div><div style="text-align: justify;">The Super Bowl, by nature, is never just another football game. From it's hyperbolic moniker to its grandiose affectations to the nonstop media attention, the game is without doubt the premiere event in American sports. While its position as the most talked about and attention-grabbing game of every sporting year is inarguable, there have certainly been better games than others, more intriguing match-ups than others, and juicier story lines than others. The last time that the Giants and the Patriots played in the Super Bowl in 2007 was one of those years when the hype machine was put into overdrive and the stories surrounding the game were clear-cut. The Patriots were trying to complete a perfect season, something that no one besides the 1972 Miami Dolphins have ever done and the first of the era of the 16-game schedule. They were big-time favorites (12 points) over the Giants, who had snuck into the game as an NFC Wildcard. But the Giants slew the Goliath from Foxboro and took home the title in dramatic fashion. This year's rematch of that legendary Super Bowl game was similar in many ways, and brought its own batch of dramatic and melodramatic subplots, beyond the unavoidable allure of a remake of that classic 2007 game.<br />
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Going into this year's Super Bowl, the most fascinating aspect of the game was the “what-if” scenario attached to each of the respective quarterbacks involved. For Tom Brady, if the Patriots were able to find a way to win, he could legitimately claim that he is the greatest quarterback who ever strapped on a helmet. While he has consistently nudged his nose into the room where this conversation was happening, a win in Super Bowl XLVI would cement his résumé and put him next to Joe Montana and John Elway in the three way race that I believe exists for the title of greatest QB of all time (sorry, but I’m just not old enough and don’t have the kind of perspective to go pre-Super Bowl era or really have a grasp of the talent level in the early years of the game). Montana is one of only two quarterbacks with four championship rings and Elway has two rings, but an amazing 5 Super Bowl appearances (which Brady matched this year) to go along with both quarterbacks' sterling reputations as go-to-guys in the closing moments of the game.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">For Eli Manning, a Giants win in Super Bowl XLVI would add considerable fuel to a fire that up until this season has only been the size of a match head: who is the better Manning brother at the quarterback position? This didn’t used to be the kind of thing that was debated with any seriousness, because the older Manning was for so long clearly either the best or second best quarterback in all of football. He and Eli both had a ring, but Peyton had an unmatched statistical pedigree. But with <a href="http://www.bojacksonship.com/2011/09/things-done-changed.html" target="_blank">Peyton in jeopardy of never playing another down</a> in the NFL after off-season neck surgery, a Giants victory would give Eli his second ring by age 31 and it would become a legitimate argument that Eli’s rings trump Peyton’s numbers. Not to mention the fact that Eli would have knocked off Tom Brady to get both of his rings, who is supposed to be older brother’s arch rival. Not only that, but he already ruined Brady’s perfect season, which would have given him a point on his résumé that no other quarterback outside of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1972_Miami_Dolphins_season" target="_blank">Bob Griese</a> can lay claim to. That's almost like winning one-and-a-half Super Bowls if you ask me.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">Well, as it turned out, the Giants beat the Patriots 21-17 on Sunday night in a classic football game that had just as much drama, competitiveness and legendary plays that their first meeting in the 2007 Super Bowl had. Once again, Manning and the Giants made a fourth-quarter touchdown drive to go ahead late, and once again Brady was unable to respond in kind, suffering his second Super Bowl loss to the Giants in five years and raising heretofore unthinkable questions about his remaining skill as a quarterback and ability to rise to the occasion in the game’s most important moments. The fact that these two quarterbacks and these two teams have played such spectacular football in the Super Bowl is a delight for fans and a boon for the NFL’s caché in the world of American sports, but the way that Brady and Eli Manning have started to reach into the story of each other’s careers is some truly fascinating stuff.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgYpqFSYXjtAKjr37mzEh1_4_4jijGl6b5eAVCoYoO7yr49uP897skxgwK1Q2rhPfwp-YkarrQ7IOiPwZCstM4ExXXnO-_nvCLoZNPQ9LKlYbs2RE22nemwIfWyZjzWYeaXQ4q9LkpF4dlU/s1600/Tom+Brady.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgYpqFSYXjtAKjr37mzEh1_4_4jijGl6b5eAVCoYoO7yr49uP897skxgwK1Q2rhPfwp-YkarrQ7IOiPwZCstM4ExXXnO-_nvCLoZNPQ9LKlYbs2RE22nemwIfWyZjzWYeaXQ4q9LkpF4dlU/s400/Tom+Brady.jpg" width="366" /></a></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Lately, the two quarterbacks’ respective fates have been dramatically intertwined and are reaching almost dialectically opposing circumstances. Whereas Manning’s hail mary throw from midfield somehow finds a receiver’s hands in the <a href="http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/football/nfl/gameflash/2012/01/15/4835/index.html#playbyplay" target="_blank">divisional round against the Green Bay Packers</a>, Brady’s is left falling to the turf before <a href="http://profootballtalk.nbcsports.com/2012/02/06/rob-gronkowski-we-almost-had-the-hail-mary-but-almost-isnt-enough/" target="_blank">the outstretched arms of the banged-up Rob Gronkowski</a> in this year’s Super Bowl. Where Brady’s perfectly thrown deep ball to Randy Moss near the end of the 2007 Super Bowl is <a href="http://www.slate.com/articles/sports/sports_nut/features/2011/nfl_2011/hype_week/patriots_giants_super_bowl_the_patriots_almost_perfect_season_nearly_ruined_me_.html" target="_blank">tipped away at the last second</a>, Manning’s is cradled perfectly by Mario Manningham, allowing him to <a href="http://siphotos.tumblr.com/post/17135105174/mario-manningham-makes-a-remarkable-38-yard" target="_blank">stamp both feet to the ground</a> like a library attendant marking a due date, right in the face of hoody-clad head coach Bill Belichick no less. Where Brady’s desperation chuck with D-Line pressure bearing down upon him is <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/02/06/super-bowl-safety-tom-brady-intentional-grounding_n_1257032.html" target="_blank">called for intentional grounding and results in a safety</a> on his team’s first play from scrimmage in this year’s Super Bowl, Manning’s twirling, near-sack chuck into the middle of the field in the game winning drive of the 2007 Super Bowl somehow finds the arms of David Tyree, where he is forever left <a href="http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/vault/cover/featured/10994/index.htm" target="_blank">holding it against his helmet</a> in the football field of memory.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">So while Manning will continue to live out the winning scenario of that previous paragraph, what is next for Touchdown Tom? Well, the future is probably more murky than he would like to admit. Despite all of the attention being paid to Wes Welker’s drop near the four minute mark that had it resulted in a catch, would likely have also resulted in a win, Tom Brady is going to bear the brunt of the criticism for his team’s loss in this year’s Super Bowl. Just ask his wife, who <a href="http://deadspin.com/5882588/my-husband-can-not-fucking-throw-the-ball-and-catch-the-ball-at-the-same-time-gisele-is-pissed-at-the-patriots-dropped-passes" target="_blank">snapped back at some drunken Giants fans</a> with a retort that Tom isn’t probably very keen on and one that he knows doesn’t justify his late-career playoff and Super Bowl stumbles. I think Brady is starting to realize that while he may always have the historic upper hand on Eli’s brother Peyton, the younger Manning has now cost him two chances at football immortality. That fourth Super Bowl ring is on Brady’s mind like it was forged in the heart of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Ring" target="_blank">Mount Doom</a>, and Eli prevented him from achieving it in the most dramatic of fashion in 2007, as the culmination of a perfect season, and now again in 2012, where his superior play kept Tom Brady from that precious number four once again. Sure Brady is one of the greatest quarterbacks of all time, but right now, he is not <i>the</i> greatest, and there is no doubt in this writer’s mind that the man with millions of dollars, a super model wife and an already hall-of-fame-worthy career wants that GOAT title more than anything he has achieved up until this point.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi4AY9Etc-yKruJDJJPu2W2jCmbAa3Yw85-XBCeQMmOPLVt_JZLIgAqDByQk-nCDTfEMg6hlNk8EyEI0-H_rlq6-wJlOKFlJ3OJtYJHgCqJNyZWPs_ePxhuvcRfn9JT9e08ZE3L3YJeNmKF/s1600/manning2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="311" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi4AY9Etc-yKruJDJJPu2W2jCmbAa3Yw85-XBCeQMmOPLVt_JZLIgAqDByQk-nCDTfEMg6hlNk8EyEI0-H_rlq6-wJlOKFlJ3OJtYJHgCqJNyZWPs_ePxhuvcRfn9JT9e08ZE3L3YJeNmKF/s400/manning2.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><div style="text-align: justify;">And perhaps all of this leads us to what might be a turn of the tide in the NFL. It is possible that Manning and the Giants’ victory in Super Bowl XLVI is the beginning of the end of an era for two quarterbacks and the clearly manifest start of one for another two. It used to be that the conversation about the best quarterback in the NFL started with P. Manning and ended with Brady, but it now seems that it starts with E. Manning and ends with Aaron Rodgers (you can decide where the NFL’s other clearly elite quarterback, Drew Brees shakes out, though he seems to be straddling both eras as of right now). Peyton is dealing with a neck injury that <a href="http://blogs.nfl.com/2012/02/08/a-look-at-the-new-reality-for-peyton-manning/" target="_blank">could all but ruin the rest of his career</a>, and Brady has now lost the last two Super Bowls he’s played in. Meanwhile, Eli Manning is now two for two in Super Bowl appearances, leading two Giants teams that were not only unlikely to go deep into the playoffs, but a laughable Super Bowl pick at the start of the regular season and the playoffs in both of the 21st century seasons that they ended up winning it all. And for all of Peyton's numbers and adulation how many signature moments does he have as a a quarterback? Eli now has two, with his throws to Tyree over the middle and Manningham down the sideline, and not only are they memorable for him personally, but they are sure to become two of the most replayed in the history of the sport's biggest game, the Super Bowl. In addition, Aaron Rodgers set a new standard for what is possible at the quarterback position in this year’s regular season, and already grabbed his first ring in last year’s Super Bowl victory over the Pittsburgh Steelers, which ties him with Peyton Manning's lone championship and leaves him still one behind yet another current NFL starter, the Steelers' Ben Roethlisberger.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">So while the younger Manning may not look the part quite as much as Brady or even older brother Peyton <a href="https://twitter.com/#!/nickkroll/status/166359141391147009" target="_blank">as Twitter so snarkily illustrates</a>, and Rodgers got bounced by Eli's Giants in this year’s divisional round, the two quarterbacks have officially stepped forward to join Drew Brees and Big Ben in the debate about who's the best at the QB position in the NFL. None of these relatively younger quarterbacks seems in danger of slowing down at any point in the near future, and they have begun to kick up dust in the face of Brady and Peyton Manning, who were not only considered the two best quarterbacks in the NFL for a solid decade, but dominated the conversation on the position so fully that their recent lapse in productivity doesn’t just seem anomalous, it seems sacrilege. Personally, I’m not willing to write Brady off just yet, especially because the ragtag bunch of Patriots he just led to the Super Bowl only affirms his and head coach Bill Belichick's talent once again, but Manning’s neck injury is continually worrisome and it looks like amazingly, his days with the Indianapolis Colts are all but over.<br />
<br />
Sometimes it can take weeks, months, even years to understand the impact of a single game, especially a Super Bowl, but this year's game has certainly started some debates about the elite players at the quarterback position in the NFL. A reporter asked Eli at the beginning of this season if he thought he was in Brady's class as far as quarterbacking went, and he got criticized and laughed at for saying he thought that yes, he definitely is. Well no one is laughing now and it seems that discussion will now begin as to who is the better Manning, and it will have to continue as to who is the best quarterback of all time. Sometimes the outcome of a game begs more questions than it ends up answering. This year's Super Bowl definitely feels like one of those classic debate-launchers. It might be that the only certain thing to come out of the Giants' victory and the Patriots defeat is a new level of uncertainty. The power struggle at the game's most important position is officially the most competitive it has been in more than 10 years and if it leads to more Super Bowls like the one we just witnessed on Sunday, please let the battle begin.</div>Marky Schultzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11361451166416906967noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2243017189684241796.post-27760152672272439872012-01-26T13:22:00.002-05:002012-01-27T13:49:22.631-05:00WHAT WOULD YOU KNOW ABOUT PRESSURE?<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiHCVEDdcPXujNTF5Vkz8SMUnkZbySdSLt5PsXY02FrRltzFawlgrSxQSNAwckmqA2TspF0-820zhMcYb0K2LpGT99bRCw0ZjsMEcuKJSqU0rzqiKCRGaDEUGldH2V0zp4uPTFzqoFwMCPK/s1600/billy-cundiff.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiHCVEDdcPXujNTF5Vkz8SMUnkZbySdSLt5PsXY02FrRltzFawlgrSxQSNAwckmqA2TspF0-820zhMcYb0K2LpGT99bRCw0ZjsMEcuKJSqU0rzqiKCRGaDEUGldH2V0zp4uPTFzqoFwMCPK/s400/billy-cundiff.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><div style="text-align: justify;">This weekend's conference championship games in the NFL were a wonderful thing to watch. Both games saw back and forth, competitive football that came down to crucial plays at the end of the game. With a trip to the Super Bowl on the line, there isn't much more a football fan can hope for than overtime in one game and a last-second, game-deciding field goal kick in the other. The down-to-the-wire nature of the games in the AFC and NFC set up two dramatic plays that ended up deciding the outcome of both contests, and while that shows you just how fun and enthralling sports can be as a form of entertainment, the end of both games also accentuated what is another perennial part of athletic competition: heartbreaking moments created by huge mistakes on big plays.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">For the Ravens, who lost to the New England Patriots on a <a href="http://www.bostonherald.com/sports/football/patriots/view/20220123cundiff_kicking_himself_after_miss/srvc=sports&position=also" target="_blank">last-second field goal miss</a> by their kicker Billy Cundiff that would have tied the game and sent it into overtime, the sting is particularly sharp. What you will hear from coaches and players on both sides after a game like this is that one play doesn't decide a game, but what fans and the general sporting public know is that a bromide like that is not an adequate salve to heal the kind of gaping wound that Ravens' players, coaches, and fans now have bleeding across their hearts. Cundiff missed the kind of big field goal he has been making all year on the Ravens run to the AFC Championship Game, a 32 yarder that most of his positional peers would agree is the kind of short-distance kick you want to be faced with (if you must be faced with one that ties/decides the game in its final moments).</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">But Cundiff pulled the kick left (or right if you're watching from home), and the Ravens didn't get a chance to play an extra period that could have earned them a trip to Indianapolis to play in the Super Bowl. Now there is a long list of kickers who have made similar mistakes, from <a href="http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/vault/article/magazine/MAG1032492/index.htm" target="_blank">Scott Norwood's miss</a> in the Super Bowl XXV to Boise State's <a href="http://www.deseretnews.com/article/700149562/Former-Boise-State-kicker-Kyle-Brotzman-moves-on-with-his-life.html" target="_blank">Kyle Brotzman's multiple big-game misses</a>, to <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NCOGH--E_80" target="_blank">Ray Finkle's</a> fictitious though equally memorable "laces out" moment, there are more kickers ruing the day they decided to quit the soccer team and play football than there are <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam_Vinatieri" target="_blank">Adam Vinatieries</a>. Now Cundiff joins that club of unfortunate place kickers and has to deal with the fact that his stellar season and consistent poise at the end of many a game will now be footnotes on a resumé with only one real headline: <b>Missed game-tying field goal against Patriots, cost team chance to play in Super Bowl.</b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">Across the country in San Francisco, where the 49ers played the New York Giants in the NFC Championship, a similar late-game miscue cost a team a trip to the Super Bowl. The 49ers fill-in punt returner Kyle Williams (who stepped in for an ailing Ted Ginn Jr.) fumbled the football on a run back in overtime, giving the Giants the ball in field goal range. The Giants pushed the ball a bit farther down the field before Lawrence Tynes split the uprights and gave New York the win and made Kyle Williams a Bay-Area-sized goat. Again, you'll hear from coaches and players that one play doesn't decide a game, but the fumble was Williams' <a href="http://sports.yahoo.com/blogs/nfl-shutdown-corner/kyle-williams-two-punt-return-fumbles-sink-49ers-041648587.html" target="_blank">second misstep on a punt return that day</a>, and like Cundiff, he did the one thing he couldn't afford to do in his situation: he cost his team a chance to win the football game.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">The two players' similar plights are a fascinating storyline folllowing the conference championships, and they are an example of something I think that everyone above ground can relate to: <b>making a mistake when a mistake could not be afforded</b>. I always like to say that this blog is a place where sports and life intertwine, and with that in mind I can't help but look at the human aspect of the story of Cundiff and Williams. Say what you want about the fact that they're just playing a game and that it isn't the end of the world and blah blah blah, but the simple truth is that this was the biggest moment of both of their professional careers, with millions of people staring at them on televisions across the country, and they <a href="http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=shit+the+bed" target="_blank">shit the bed</a>, plain and simple. If you're a 49ers or Ravens fan I'm sorry for your losses, but if you're a human being, you have to feel for these guys.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">Think about it. I think there is a moment in everyone's life where you're sitting there, pressure on, telling yourself that no matter what, under no circumstance can you "insert appropriate action". And then you do it. And you can't believe you just did it. And it feels like the world just spun off its axis and you're in the middle of a Dali masterpiece because life just got so surreal. The sounds and faces around you are muffled and blurred, you are completely inside your own head where the phrase that keeps careening from one side of your skull to the next is: "this is not happening, this is not happening." For both of these players, it was happening, it did happen. Now all they can do is wallow in that failure, face it, accept it, and attempt to move on.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi4Ao0Kh6Oo5EVcnMvYJWVJfY3bMB-39boxSExeJ46qj9MKjCmYNfFgjsVxV43IuKgtbiJX459AWNADz8InWao7OQWRehm3gGQI2gil5Dh-4SDmUcI9J-dPU-Aicnrp2GYWTrPrQQAxt461/s1600/Kyle-Williams-San-Francisco-49ers.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="233" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi4Ao0Kh6Oo5EVcnMvYJWVJfY3bMB-39boxSExeJ46qj9MKjCmYNfFgjsVxV43IuKgtbiJX459AWNADz8InWao7OQWRehm3gGQI2gil5Dh-4SDmUcI9J-dPU-Aicnrp2GYWTrPrQQAxt461/s400/Kyle-Williams-San-Francisco-49ers.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><div style="text-align: justify;">We can search for analogous circumstances for this kind of a mistake, and to stay with the world of sports for a moment, maybe you're a <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m9QDqAsAKUI" target="_blank">young girl</a> or an <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hj5NPNe3jNU" target="_blank">international superstar </a>who forgets the words to the National Anthem, or an <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zz8NLhhfAL4" target="_blank">over-excited soccer star </a>who drops the championship trophy under the wheels of a bus. Or for more real-world examples, maybe you're a bride who falls on her face on the way to the altar or a waitress who drops a bottle of $200 wine on the way to a table full of particularly well-to-do customers or a classically trained cellist who misses a note in their Juilliard audition. There are a million high pressure situations where the one thing you cannot do is the one thing you end up doing. It might ruin the moment, crush your pride, or leave you with an unbearable level of embarrassment, but at the end of the day there's that old adage that you can always lean upon: <b>everyone makes mistakes</b>. Sure, they don't always come in an important, life-changing moment, but they are always there to be made and as human beings, it is simply despicable to attack your fellow man for your own homo sapien borne lack of perfection.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">It's why I commend both Cundiff and Williams for the amount of composure they have maintained in the face of their errors and for the amount of ownership they have taken for said mistakes. It is also why the reaction on social media outlets like Twitter and Facebook and the overreaction of the sports media to their gaffes is absolutely galling to me. Yes, these men failed miserably at the task they are paid a very large some of money to perform, but when fans and the media react the way that they have over the days since Sunday's games it makes me embarrassed to be a human being. Just check out a few of the tweets sent out following the two games:</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>@NotBillWalton:</b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">I'm pretty sure some despicable Ravens fans would like to see Billy Cundiff kick the bucket. Unfortunately for them, he'd probably miss.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>@BradBirdA113:</b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">The Harbaugh bros will do a live reading of their new book "Billy Cundiff, Kyle Williams and the terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day"</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>@Shady_McCoy</b> (that's Philadelphia Eagles running back LeSean McCoy, a fellow NFL player mind you...):</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">I think it's safe to say that Kyle Williams & Billy Cundiff will be taking their talents to the unemployment line. #NOTSC @NOTSportscenter</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">And those are among the more benign of the tweets sent out. Among the more egregious are death threats to both players and their families from Ravens and 49ers fans and similarly horrible jokes and barbs thrown in their direction. There is an element to gallows humor that as a bit of a prick myself I am willing to allow and the environment on Twitter of snap judgment and the levying of instant admonishment that is expected if not excusable, but <a href="http://globalgrind.com/news/kyle-williams-joins-bill-buckner-club-list" target="_blank">threatening a person's life</a> because your team lost a football game is among the most petty and downright deplorable things any sports fan can do. At that point, I believe that your fandom has officially transformed into psychosis and a look in the mirror, not the glossy panel of your smart phone as you thumb out a tweet or Facebook post, is what is truly called for.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">While fans or other players may in the end be exonerated by their ignorance, the sporting cognoscenti that type out stories and columns for respected newspapers and websites cannot be given the same amount of leeway. Yes, they are paid to give their opinion and to inspire debate, but there is no reason for <a href="http://articles.boston.com/2012-01-23/sports/30652854_1_patriots-tom-brady-vince-wilfork" target="_blank">Cundiff</a> or <a href="http://www.nydailynews.com/sports/columnists?columnist=Mike+Lupica" target="_blank">Williams</a> to draw comparisons to <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Buckner" target="_blank">Bill Buckner</a> or to face the immense barrage of attacks against their skill as players, let alone their worth as human beings (shout out to <a href="https://twitter.com/#!/stefanfatsis" target="_blank">Stefan Fatsis</a> for the links to those articles). Cundiff and Williams will probably never play the game they love or live their lives in quite the same way following this weekend's games, and instead of vilifying them or piling on, I think that a certain level of compassion and commiseration is in order. These were their <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U8E2QhBqpr0" target="_blank">"Mr. Destiny"</a> moments, and they both came up short, left to live on wondering what might have been if they had come through in the clutch instead of coming up short.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">I guess what I'm trying to say at the end of the day is that while we can all relate to mistakes and failure of one kind or another, no matter how apt a real-world analogy for what happened to these two men may be, it will never quite capture the feeling that must still be permeating their flesh. While we all know our human foibles all too well, there is no comparison for a fan or member of the media or general public to draw on that can possibly allow us to empathize properly. It is why I believe that all we can do in this situation is <i>try</i>. <i>Try</i> to understand what it is like to miss out on a trip to the Super Bowl in front of millions of people and let everyone on your team down when they were counting on you the most. We have to <i>try</i> to give these two men the kind of support we would desire if we were in their shoes, not tear them down and send them death threats and throw any more gasoline on the fire of disappointment they are both now warming their hands by. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">I say we move on fast and look on toward the Giants and Pats Super Bowl rematch, because it should be a doozy. Check back to <b>the Hip</b> for a Super Bowl recap soon after the game goes into the books.</div>Marky Schultzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11361451166416906967noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2243017189684241796.post-79825577701785371262012-01-10T16:32:00.007-05:002012-01-10T18:00:42.161-05:00(ALMOST) BEYOND REPAIR<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: justify;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEju662X6lGEZzygI6LjceYYFLQfDRUMsmfGvoS_lpMAdKoHg6bQ475IwRMO2694HmhTqVLSlkawSHHteCPQnkNtwGTILlWG8imcukGGihfNDDiFgt3pDs94B6E63t1cO2vR3V-GM1fkMPFm/s1600/bama.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEju662X6lGEZzygI6LjceYYFLQfDRUMsmfGvoS_lpMAdKoHg6bQ475IwRMO2694HmhTqVLSlkawSHHteCPQnkNtwGTILlWG8imcukGGihfNDDiFgt3pDs94B6E63t1cO2vR3V-GM1fkMPFm/s400/bama.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: justify;">Andy Lyons, Getty Images</td></tr>
</tbody></table><div style="text-align: justify;">So last night, No. 2 Alabama trounced No. 1 LSU and won the BCS National Championship game. But are they really the best team in college football? This seems like a ridiculous question and a complete contradiction in terms, but it is a question that you will hear asked for the remainder of the day and the remainder of the week, if not the remainder of the college football off-season. That's because the system for determining the best team in college football is so completely flawed and blatantly inadequate, that it has become the laughing stock of American sports. In no other major sport do conjecture and opinion weigh so heavily on the crowning of a champion, because every other major sport has made the logical and obvious decision that a playoff system is the only fair and just way to give fans, players, coaches, and universities a satisfying outcome to a long and grueling college football season.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">The issue of what to do about college football's national championship has many subtle and complex features and no one solution will ever solve the many ills that exist in the sport's current post-season incarnation, but it is abundantly clear that what the NCAA and BCS are doing right now does not work, will not work, and needs to be changed as soon as humanly possible. Why? Because the National Championship Game is over and done with and could not have been decided by a more clear and obvious margin of victory (Alabama - 21, LSU - <a href="http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/football/ncaa/gameflash/2012/01/09/49563/index.html?conf=Top%2025#recap" target="_blank">could have just stayed at the team hotel</a>) but there are still murmurs throughout the sports media that the national title should be "split". And not just between the two teams that played last night, but possibly with No. 3 Oklahoma State, who had the same record as Alabama entering last night's game and actually <i>won</i> its conference title in <a href="http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/football/ncaa/gameflash/2011/12/03/48646/index.html#recap" target="_blank">more than convincing fashion</a> in the Big 12.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">Of course, all of this opinion and second-guessing of the outcome of the game comes from the fact that Alabama and LSU already played earlier in the season in a game that LSU <a href="http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/football/ncaa/gameflash/2011/11/05/46846/index.html#recap" target="_blank">won 9-6 in overtime</a>. But because college football relies on polls of sports writers and coaches, blended with the statistical analysis of a computer ranking system, Alabama finished No. 2 in the <a href="http://espn.go.com/college-football/bcs" target="_blank">final BCS Rankings</a> (notice how BCS.org links you to ESPN for that info? Who says the mothership isn't controlling sports...) and got a second chance to play the undefeated and clear No. 1 team in the nation, LSU. Now I'm not going to sit here and tell you that rankings aren't necessary in college athletics, because they are. With so many teams involved you have to sort out the chaos some way. This isn't professional sports where teams can play the majority (or all) of the other teams in their sport during the regular season and enter a manageable playoff bracket.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">But while rankings are necessary to help determine the quality of a team's stock, they should not and cannot be the sole factor in determining who gets to play for college football's national championship. If this is going to continue to be the case, then college football will lose its designation as an <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZnhRssAdJxw" target="_blank">according-to-Hoyle</a> sport. I spent a <a href="http://www.bojacksonship.com/2008/11/tension-and-release.html" target="_blank">previous post</a> on just this very subject and deemed anything that relies on judges and opinion and cannot determine a clear-cut victor by means of wins and losses athletic <i>competition</i> and not a true <i>sport</i>. Sports are defined by a winner and a loser, a champion and everybody else. This is not something that college football can claim to have under its current system.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">It is in danger of becoming no better than gymnastics or figure skating or diving--and that is not an assault on the merit of the athletes that take part in those forms of competition--where judges and their opinions determine a champion. How is that any different than how college football currently operates? Sure, the individual games during the regular season have a winner and a loser, but what does that matter if at the end of the year their wins and losses might not mean anything? What does it matter if a team like Oklahoma State can lose as many games as Alabama, but not even have a chance of playing for the national championship? Heck, why do we even have a final score in the National Championship Game? Why not just play four quarters, then have a group of judges and pollsters look at the game and decide who they think actually won. That way if a team loses on a last-second hail mary touchdown pass, but actually played a better game of football than its opponent, they get the win because they are better and deserved it more.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">That sounds foolish right? Well I don't see how the BCS and its ranking system and this anachronistic reliance on the bowl system is any less foolish. The bottom line in college football is money and revenue, but that is true in every other sport as well. And the plain fact is that a playoff system is more lucrative in every other sport, but fans have continually been told that this is not the case in college football. So because of the bottom line and the long tradition of the bowl system, teams, fans and coaches are forced to be continually unsatisfied with how their sport determines its champion. And don't even start with the whole "most coaches want to keep the current system as-is". Yeah, most coaches that coach for a team that has a chance at getting into the National Championship Game under the current system feel that way. They are like anybody else: when a system is set up to benefit you, the last thing you do is question whether or not it's the way things oughtta be.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">So what's the solution? Well, for me it has to be a playoff that also kowtows to the BCS and <a href="http://www.bcsfootball.org/news/story?id=4819399" target="_blank">their continued proclamation</a> that the bowl system must be left intact. Fine, let's do that. All of the lesser bowls and their meaningless outcomes can stick around. The only thing I'll touch in my playoff system are the top 6 teams in the end-of-the-regular-season BCS rankings. Here's how I think it should work:</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><div style="text-align: justify;">What we need is a short, but effective playoff bracket that will still reward teams for ending up in the top two slots of the BCS rankings, and not shatter the bowl system completely, something that BCS will try to convince you would happen if a playoff system were implemented. The most agreed upon and logical next step in the eyes of many is the so-called "Plus-one" format. This would be analogous to the "Final Four" in college basketball, where the top four teams would advance to have a shot at playing in the championship game. The No. 1 team would play the No. 4 team, the No. 2 team would play the No. 3 team, and the winners of those two games would play for a shot at the <a href="http://beyondthebets.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/ncf_a_bcs-trophy01_576.jpg" target="_blank">"Crystal Egg"</a> in the National Championship game.</div></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><div style="text-align: justify;">This simple addition of one game solves many of the problems with the current system, but in my eyes falls just a bit short. I would instead put forth a six-team playoff system that would work exactly like the playoff system in the NFL, if instead of two conferences, there were only one. In the NFL, six teams make it into the playoffs in both the AFC and NFC, with the top two teams receiving first round "byes". They sit at home while No. 3 plays No. 6 and No. 4 plays No. 5. After those games are played, No. 1 gets the lowest ranked team remaining, while No. 2 would play the next highest team remaining. Then you would basically have the "Plus-one" or "Final Four" and things would play out according to the manner I just mentioned in the previous paragraph.</div></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiP1G-LdbRXva7Km_9evEXVib6O_PhGvPiVmourDX40iziwPB73A_mqAsIUiSfd-fyxxjSbDw8UE-U9uo4HASY77x6w9q0ceWkrcE1YRl_5Rv00xkMwQtqPHDEL9bAjtp34_pSpV0dftOcL/s1600/BRACKET.001.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="275" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiP1G-LdbRXva7Km_9evEXVib6O_PhGvPiVmourDX40iziwPB73A_mqAsIUiSfd-fyxxjSbDw8UE-U9uo4HASY77x6w9q0ceWkrcE1YRl_5Rv00xkMwQtqPHDEL9bAjtp34_pSpV0dftOcL/s400/BRACKET.001.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><div style="text-align: justify;">I consider this to be the best way to do things for a few reasons. It would still give the BCS what it currently has: marquee match-ups for the teams that sit atop the BCS rankings, and an opportunity to keep all of the other bowls as exhibition games for teams that played well enough to be bowl eligible. At the same time this six-team format is at once far more lucrative and attention-grabbing, making for 3 (or at most 4, if an off-week is included before the championship game) weeks at the end of the year that would be among the most exciting in the world of sports. Not only that, but the new system is short enough that players would not miss an egregious amount of school time because of holiday schedules and it would not interfere with any other major sport's playoffs or regular season in a significant way. The way things are now, the regular season is over by the first week of December, but the National Championship is not played until the second week in January. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">This playoff structure would actually shave some time off of that timeline and give fans what they want: <b>a legitimate process for determining a champion</b>.</div></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><div style="text-align: justify;">It would also prevent a lot of bellyaching by teams like this year's Oklahoma State squad, who have just as good a claim on being in the championship game as Alabama, but are left out in the cold. Sure, the pollsters might have cost the Cowboys a first-round bye, but they would be "in the tournament" that decides who is champ and could play their way into the National Championship Game the same way the other 5 teams involved with the playoff could. It's certainly a lot better than telling the Cowboys, "Great job guys, you lost only one game all year, an overtime road game that came on the heels of learning that two of your women's basketball coaches died in <a href="http://www.usatoday.com/sports/college/story/2011-11-18/oklahoma-state-carries-on-football/51302384/1" target="_blank">a tragic accident</a>. You fought hard and have as many losses as Alabama, and unlike them, actually won your conference title, but by the weight of opinion only, you will not get a chance to prove you are the best team in the country. Instead, you get to play a meaningless game against fellow heavyweight Stanford (which you will win) and go home thinking about what might have been had you been given the shot to play LSU in the National Championship Game." </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">Mike Gundy <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoMmbUmKN0E" target="_blank">is a man</a>, but I don't think he's taking his team's ranking in the final BCS standings and narrow (we're talking percentage points of percentage points here) third place finish behind the Crimson Tide like one, certainly not after Alabama's manhandling of LSU last night. The six-team system makes so much sense because with that many teams, the chance of leaving out a truly deserving squad is mitigated greatly, the prestige and position of the current <a href="http://www.bcsfootball.org/news/story?id=7316897" target="_blank">BCS Bowls</a> is maintained, and the remaining bowl games don't lose any of their current, rather dull, luster. It seems to me that under this system, everybody wins and finally and at long last, college football could identify a true and clear-cut national champion without any of the speculation and controversy it is currently forced to endure each and every year around this time. Hopefully this time next year, the BCS and the NCAA will have both gotten their respective acts together, and I will be able to whole-heartedly congratulate the national champion. That's something that as of right now, I simply cannot do. </div></div>Marky Schultzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11361451166416906967noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2243017189684241796.post-76145308852927439282011-11-21T17:13:00.002-05:002011-11-21T19:33:42.455-05:00KEEPING THE TITLE<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://cdn.newsday.com/polopoly_fs/1.3321300.1321312324!/httpImage/image.jpg_gen/derivatives/display_576/image.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em; text-align: justify;"><img border="0" height="266" src="http://cdn.newsday.com/polopoly_fs/1.3321300.1321312324!/httpImage/image.jpg_gen/derivatives/display_576/image.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><div style="text-align: justify;">As someone with an opinion on just about everything that has to do with the world of sports, I've learned to think before I speak. When a big story breaks, it is often unwise to go spouting off about something before all of the facts come out. Now, there are a lot of people that make a lot of money doing just that in print, television, and on the radio, but because I don't get paid to write about sports and because I don't have a deadline, I'm allowed to take a deep breath, digest all of the information and opinions that I've heard, and then levy my judgement at my leisure. When it comes to the scandal at Penn State though, the first reaction I had, the only human reaction anyone should have had, of pure disgust and unmitigated admonishment of everyone involved, has not changed one iota in the time that the story broke and now, when I finally set my fingers to the keys.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">We have learned much and heard more from everyone in the world of sports journalism and the larger mainstream media outlets about this story, but it hasn't changed anything about the way I feel and what I think about what happened at Penn State. As a human being, it is easy to feel a knot in the stomach and a vivid anger in the heart when you hear that grown men either took part in the act of child rape and molestation or the ensuing cover up of the crime, so my opinion on the matter in that regard is shared and easily formed. What has seriously angered me in the aftermath of all of this sad, lurid business is that there remain pockets of the population that continue to support Penn State head coach Joe Paterno in any way, shape, or form. There is absolutely no reason for anyone to lend a friendly word or a piteous glance in Paterno's direction, no matter how much he has done for the university, its football program, or the community in State College, PA.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">Paterno recently became the winningest coach in college football history and is perhaps its greatest example of elder statesmanship in an era where scandals of all shapes and forms continually flash across the headlines. This year alone has seen two of college football's biggest programs in Ohio State and Miami both have their reputations tarnished through the impropriety of players, coaches, boosters, and university officials, but as <a href="http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2011/magazine/11/16/penn.st/index.html?sct=cf_bf3_a3">Sports Illustrated points out in their cover story</a> on the Penn State scandal, the violations by those schools and similar situations at schools like North Carolina look effectively quaint in the shadow of what has happened at <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penn_State_Nittany_Lions">Linebacker U</a>. Penn State coaches and officials are not guilty of covering up a player receiving cash for a job he didn't really work, trading his equipment and memorabilia for tattoos, or partying in strip clubs and yachts on a booster's dime. They are guilty of covering up what is perhaps the most heinous crime to ever be associated with a college football program, and need to be treated as such.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">The details of the Penn State story get darker and darker the deeper you dig, as the aforementioned SI piece illustrated, but the central crime and the men related to its cover up are plainly guilty and their lives and legacies will never be the same. There is of course, former assistant coach Jerry Sandusky, who perpetrated the crimes of child molestation and rape in the Penn State showers, <a href="http://deadspin.com/5857440/alleged-victims-mother-jerry-sandusky-admitted-it-to-my-face-13-years-ago">among other places</a>, but his serial child molestation is not the only gut-wrenching crime that is evident here. Two more Penn State officials are already guilty of perjury for covering up Sandusky's actions, and head coach Joe Paterno did as little as humanly possible to make sure that Sandusky was punished and prosecuted for his crimes, though he did avoid a perjury charge of his own in his just-truthful-enough statement to the grand jury regarding the case.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">So what we have at the end of the day is one sick, twisted individual carrying out crimes against young men he (gallingly) met through <a href="http://www.thesecondmile.org/welcome.php">his charity for at-risk youth</a> and several other grown men with sterling reputations risking their own morality and freedom to make sure that no one found out about it. Sandusky is a bone-chilling figure (not to mention an imposing one at over 6 feet tall and 200 lbs. plus), to be certain. Not only did he carry out these crimes, but if you <a href="http://rockcenter.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2011/11/14/8804779-jerry-sandusky-to-bob-costas-in-exclusive-rock-center-interview-i-shouldnt-have-showered-with-those-kids">listen to him being interviewed by Bob Costas</a> (seriously, click that link if you haven't seen the interview <i>and</i> haven't recently eaten) on national television and responding to blunt, terse questions like "Are you sexually attracted to young boys?" by first having to repeat the question to give himself time to think, then answering with a kind of "aw shucks, I was just horsing around" duplicity, every ounce of your humanity urges you to hop a plane to Pennsylvania to give this guy exactly what he deserves. And this terrible, awful individual was protected from upon high at Penn State by Paterno, the Pope of college football (insert Catholic priest joke here), which sullies the legacy of perhaps the sport's all-time greatest and most venerated leader. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">As Dan Patrick recently pointed out on his <a href="http://www.danpatrick.com/">well-listened-to radio program</a>, if this does not constitute <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_penalty_(NCAA)">lack of institutional control</a>, a charge that gets mentioned whenever the NCAA is investigating a large scandal at any university, then what exactly does? Sure there isn't any rampant disregard for rules regarding paying players or special favors for athletes, but what we're dealing with at Penn State is far more widespread and insidious. Sandusky has had the cloud of child molestation charges hanging over him for ten years and no one thought to do anything about it or keep him away from young boys or the university's facilities. This is not only the worst scandal that has ever been associated with any college or university, but a crime and cover-up that should enter the annals of American wrong-doing in any form.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://cache.blippitt.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/Jerry-Sandusky-Joe-Paterno.gif" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: justify;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://cache.blippitt.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/Jerry-Sandusky-Joe-Paterno.gif" width="400" /></a></div><div style="text-align: justify;">The whole business in unforgivable, but again what makes me the angriest is that people still don't seem to understand that in certain circles. If you happened to catch this week's episode of <a href="http://www.thisamericanlife.org/">"This American Life"</a> on NPR, which details life in and around Penn State both in the wake of the scandal and in prior years, when the school was voted the top party school in the country by the <a href="http://www.princetonreview.com/college-rankings.aspx">Princeton Review</a>, I applaud you if you still have a radio. I was certainly tempted to rip mine out of the socket and toss it out the window as I listened to person after person at Penn State, whether they were faculty, students, or employees of the university, continually tell the audience that they just don't understand what it's like at Penn State. The blue and white Kool-Aid these folks are drinking is so potent that apparently it's <i>our</i> fault. We just can't comprehend how powerful and respected a figure Joe Paterno is, and we have to look at this whole situation in the entirety of its context. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">Trouble is, Nittany Lions fans, there is no context. This is the rape of young boys within the walls of a major university and men and women in places of power doing nothing about it.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">Rape, they say, is the ultimate crime of power, where the perpetrator and victim are at opposite ends of the spectrum when it comes to control. If that is true, and I agree it is, then what we have is the longest and most painful case of rape I can ever recall reading or hearing about. Not only were the victims molested and raped initially, but they were endlessly violated by people in places of power that used their influence and positions to cover-up and conceal the crimes committed. What happened at Penn State is rape in its literal form <i>and</i> rape in the figurative sense, as the victims were held down and silenced by those who knew about what happened and did nothing. Joe Paterno et al failed to bring justice to the young men whose lives were irrevocably damaged by what happened, plain and simple.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">If you're tired of reading that word, "rape", I am in no way tired of typing it. It needs to be shouted from the mountaintops that surround Happy Valley whenever anyone tries to explain away or defend what happened there. The word needs to be spray painted on Joe Paterno's front door and tattooed on Jerry Sandusky's forehead. It needs to follow the men and women involved with this scandal wherever they go for the rest of their lives. As Christy Leigh Stewart says, "You keep the title of 'president' even if you served only one term. The same goes for rapists." There is no rehabilitation or redemption that can be earned for anyone with even the slightest bit to do with this ugly, gruesome story and you should do yourself a favor and let anyone who feels otherwise hear why it must be so. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>Children were molested and raped and people did nothing about it.</b> That is all that will come to mind for this writer whenever Penn State plays a football game, makes the headline of a newspaper, or is mentioned in any context. I'm certainly not in the position that so many at Penn State were, the position of being able to do something about what happened, but I do have the relatively meaningless but personally important purview of never keeping my mouth shut on this matter, whenever it is brought up. There are times in life when you can't do much, but still must do everything you can, and for me that is shouting down anyone that supports Penn State in regards to this matter for the rest of my natural life. This post is the beginning, but not the end of my effort to let no one forget what happened to these young men. Please join me in doing the same, gentle readers.</div>Marky Schultzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11361451166416906967noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2243017189684241796.post-82624563280837791242011-11-04T16:46:00.013-04:002011-11-08T13:07:27.809-05:00WE'LL SEE YOU TOMORROW NIGHT<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: justify;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://media.thestar.topscms.com/images/06/fe/22f2f7a94d9db6247cae98b5fda1.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="451" src="http://media.thestar.topscms.com/images/06/fe/22f2f7a94d9db6247cae98b5fda1.jpeg" width="640" /></a></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">I know the tardiness of this post may make it look like I'm a bit late to the party, but I think it's finally time for me to talk 2011 World Series Game 6. While I knew I had to write about Game 6 of this year's World Series between the Cardinals and Rangers, the historical implications of the game made me take a deep breath and process it fully before I started spouting off about how it was one of the best games I have ever seen played. Well, now a week has passed and I can confidently say that it was one of the best games I have ever seen played. I'm not only talking about baseball here either, Game 6 was one of the most enthralling and entertaining games I have ever watched in any sport.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">Because it has been a week since the game was played I'd like to shift the focus for the most part away from a recap of the action (which was <a href="http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/baseball/mlb/gameflash/2011/10/27/39990_scoring.html">sublimely abundant</a>) and more towards what the experience of a great game is all about for a fan. In any sport, during any season, there are always great games. There are back and forth contests with shifts in momentum and amazing moments throughout that constitute a truly great game, but rarely do they come in the playoffs, let alone a championship series or game, and seemingly never in an elimination game where the sport's crown is up for grabs. Game 6 between the Rangers and Cardinals had all of this, and added to its implications was a litany of oh-my-god moments that left me on the edge of my seat and gasping for breath when the game was over.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">If the surging Cardinals seemed like a team of destiny during the stretch run of baseball's regular season, where they had to go on an unbelievable tear to even make the post-season, and during their subsequent run through the National League playoffs, where they rode their heroic superstar Albert Pujols into the World Series, their magic seemed to be fading in Game 6, especially in the seventh inning, when the Rangers took what looked like a Series' clinching 7-4 lead on back to back home runs by Nelson Cruz and Adrian Beltre. A 7-4 lead going into the bottom of the seventh is just about where you want to be when you're up 3-2 in the series and only need 9 more outs to be a World Series champion, but the Rangers were destined to come up short and what happened over the next four innings was as breathtaking a turn of events that has ever occurred in sports.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">What happened after the Cardinals' went down three runs was simply stunning. From there the game went to 7-5, 7-7, 9-7, 9-9, and finally, with a walk-off home run from St. Louis' David Freese, <a href="http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/baseball/mlb/gameflash/2011/10/27/39990_boxscore.html">a final score of 10-9 in eleven innings</a>. That's 11 runs in the last 4 innings combined from both teams, which included what looked like a series clinching home run by the Rangers' Josh Hamilton, misplayed balls, errors, and so many pitching substitutions that the Cardinals' Tony La Russa was using his pitching staff as pinch hitters. In case you aren't too familiar with baseball, the pitcher hits 9th in every line-up because they aren't paid to swing the bat, they're paid to throw the ball. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">As a fan, when you're watching a game like this, you're simply trying to enjoy the action, but what inevitably happens is that your brain starts to add weight to the outcome because of the circumstances and consequences of the gameplay. Sure, this would have been an amazing regular season affair considering the amount of runs scored and frenetic play in the last 4 innings and because the game went into extras, but when the magnitude and timing of the game are also considered, you begin to see what sets it apart and makes it one of the most memorable contests ever witnessed. Let's just go down the list of reasons this game was so incredible. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">We'll start with the where the Series itself was at when Game 6 started:</div><br />
<ul><li style="text-align: justify;">The Rangers were playing in their second consecutive World Series and have never won a championship in franchise history, having lost to the San Francisco Giants in last year's fall classic.</li>
<li style="text-align: justify;">Texas held a 3-2 series advantage after a mystifying end to Game 5, in which a miscommunication between the Cardinals' dugout and bullpen resulted in the wrong pitcher being called into the game.</li>
<li style="text-align: justify;">The Series featured two of major league baseball's premiere players--Albert Pujols and Josh Hamilton--one on each side, and one of its most decorated and venerated managers in the Cardinals' Tony La Russa.</li>
<li style="text-align: justify;">A rain cancellation postponed the game one day to allow the Cardinals' ace pitcher Chris Carpenter enough time to rest and take the mound instead of watching it from the bench. A clear advantage for the Red Birds.</li>
</ul><br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">And as for the game itself:</div><br />
<ul><li style="text-align: justify;">It featured 5 errors, a staggering number considering these were supposedly the best teams that their respective leagues had to offer, any one of which could have ended up contributing to a win or loss for either team.</li>
<li style="text-align: justify;">The Rangers were twice not only one out away, but one strike away from ending the game, but failed to do so both times. Additionally, their clubhouse was twice covered in plastic in preparation for their <a href="http://alt.coxnewsweb.com/cnishared/tools/shared/mediahub/08/19/00/slideshow_1001982286_bravesclinchCC1.JPG">championship celebration</a>, before being restored to its normal, stain-susceptible condition by Busch Stadium employees.</li>
<li style="text-align: justify;">Josh Hamilton, a recovering drug and alcohol addict who was a hand-full of pills and a couple of shots away from being a tale of what could have been, hit a home run that put the Rangers up two runs that he alleges <a href="http://network.yardbarker.com/mlb/article_external/josh_hamilton_god_told_me_id_hit_a_home_run_in_the_10th_inning/7702105">God Almighty told him he was going to hit</a> before the at-bat.</li>
<li style="text-align: justify;">The Cardinals overcame not only Hamilton's seemingly game-ending two run blast, but also back-to-back home runs by Beltre and Cruz in the seventh. </li>
<li style="text-align: justify;">Veteran Lance Berkman of the Cardinals, "The Big Puma" (née "Fat Elvis") was seemingly left for dead after a terrible season in New York last year, but after signing with St. Louis in the off season both scored and drove in runs to keep his team in the game.</li>
<li style="text-align: justify;">The Cardinals' David Freese, a native of the city where he now plays major league baseball, ended the game with a walk-off home run, baseball's most exciting play, after botching an easy pop-up to third base earlier that could have cost his team the game and the Series.</li>
</ul><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://realestatefan.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/josh-hamilton.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: justify;"><img border="0" height="302" src="http://realestatefan.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/josh-hamilton.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Just look at all of that drama! That's the sort of thing that is running through your head as you're watching this game. There's so much on the line, so many twists and turns in the action, and so much back story and emotional investment for both the fans and players, that it all adds up to a truly monumental game. Not only that, but this was a baseball game after all, the sport with so much soul, history, memorable moments and apocryphal legends that it could fill a set of encyclopedias. This game is so great because it is set against baseball's fabled backdrop, where not only are there myriad moments of glory and agony, but enough great World Series Game 6 memories that this contest had one of the highest historical bars to leap over and seemed to clear it with room to spare.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">As NPR sports correspondent and Slate contributor <a href="http://www.stefanfatsis.com/">Stefan Fatsis</a> pointed out in Slate's <a href="http://www.slate.com/articles/podcasts/hang_up_and_listen.html">Hang Up and Listen</a> sports roundtable following the Series (a podcast any intelligent sports fan should have a subscription to), this year's Game 6 was played in the shadow of <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QmRC3RwZNmU">Carlton Fisk's arm-waving walk-off home run in 1975</a>, <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w5JWkJhnPXA">Reggie Jackson's three home run game in 1977</a>, Bill Buckner's infamous gaffe on <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HmEe7vHpKCg&feature=related">Mookie Wilson's ground ball in 1986</a> (a moment that provided the title and plot device for<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0425055/"> the one and only movie</a> my favorite author Don DeLillo has written), Kirby Puckett's <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fYBmWqnBU-s">game-seven-forcing walk-off dinger</a> in 1991, and <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fzpenEOIjhM">Joe Carter's walk-off home run</a> two years later off of Mitch "Wild Thing" Williams in Toronto in 1993. As Fatsis points out by referencing these amazing moments, the World Series has seen its share of Game 6 drama, and this year's has set itself within that pantheon, if not holding the position of its quintessential example. For me, it has to rest at the top of the Game 6 list, simply because I'm not old enough to remember any of those moments save the Joe Carter walk-off, which I vaguely recall gaping at as a wide-eyed eleven year old boy. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">A game like the one played out in St. Louis last Thursday night is the kind of game that makes you remember why you love sports so much if you're a fan. It lets you forget about inflated salaries, performance enhancing drugs, labor disputes and contract negotiations and just revel in the beauty of a game-winning home run sailing through the dry air of autumn, clearing the fence to send one team into a champagne-soaked ecstasy and the other into the nadir of emotional experience as professional athletes. The Cardinals victory in Game 6 of course did not win them the World Series, but only tied it 3-3 and forced a game 7 the following evening, but I think if you asked anybody with an iota of knowledge about sports who would win that Game 7, they would have all said St. Louis. The emotional baggage a loss like that creates for the loser, in this case Texas, versus the blue-whale-sized wave of momentum it gave the winner, St. Louis, was simply too much to disregard.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">And of course, last Friday night, that's exactly what happened. The Cardinals won easily 6-2 and took home the World Series crown, but if there were ever an anticlimactic Game 7, this year's was it. There was just no competing with Game 6 and its positively breathtaking moments and historical repercussions. Sure we didn't have the Yankees or the Red Sox in this year's Series, but if the 2011 showdown between the Cardinals and Rangers is any indication, we don't need any east coast heavyweights to give us something to watch. Instead, all we need is the beautiful game of baseball, where anything can and does happen, over and over. I'm just glad I get to sit back and watch it all happen. Hope you are too.</div>Marky Schultzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11361451166416906967noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2243017189684241796.post-89045080627950497922011-10-19T19:20:00.000-04:002011-10-19T19:20:38.164-04:00THE FALL CLASSIC<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d2/October_22,_2008_World_Series_Game_1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="300" src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d2/October_22,_2008_World_Series_Game_1.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><div style="text-align: justify;">If you happen to read this blog on a regular basis (thanks to both of you!) you might be a little surprised that with all of this great baseball happening I haven't said word one about what's going on in this year's MLB playoffs. Well the plain truth is that like a lot of fans and guys that actually play the game, your boy is very, very superstitious. Especially when it comes to my favorite team, the Detroit Tigers. If I were a proper journalist, I suppose I would have to eventually learn to wean myself off of the love I have for my favorite teams, but as is I can't help but be a fan first, writer second, and as a result I've had to keep quiet on the baseball playoffs while the Tigers were still fighting with the Yankees and Rangers, trying to reach their first World Series since a loss in 2006 to the St. Louis Cardinals.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">It basically comes down to what ol' Crash Davis told Nuke LaLoosh in 'Bull Durham': <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KeVca9MwDX8">never fuck with a winning streak</a>. The Tigers were on one and in the myopic mind state of a dedicated Tigers fan, I had the feeling that if I started to gloat, comment, or complain about anything that had to do with the AL playoffs, I would somehow initiate some kind of new, alternate universe where my comments would eventually screw the Tigers over. Turns out, they went ahead and did that to themselves, so I am now free to say anything I care to about the MLB playoffs and give the world my two cents on how I think things will shake out in the 2011 World Series, which is set to begin less than an hour from now.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">I could start with all of the usually effusive stuff that comes to my mind every year around playoff and World Series time, but if you want to <a href="http://bojacksonship.blogspot.com/2010/10/sweet-spot.html">go back and read about why I think that baseball is so pure</a> and romantic and makes me go all school-girl silly, you can do that at another date. Instead, lets just get right to what led us to this year's World Series match-up and how I think it will affect how the Series plays out. The first thing I noticed watching the AL side of the things? The Texas Rangers line-up is <a href="http://espn.go.com/mlb/team/lineup/_/name/tex/texas-rangers">really, really good</a>. Top to bottom, there are threats for big hits or the long ball, and there aren't many teams in the league outside of New York City that can make that claim. It's why the Rangers just did the boys from Motown dirty and why they ended up in the World Series, because although their starting pitching has been solid, it has not been incredible, which is usually the case for a team that makes a deep playoff run. Oh yeah, and one <a href="http://www.usatoday.com/sports/baseball/al/rangers/story/2011-10-17/nelson-cruz-alcs-mvp-rangers/50808760/1">Nelson Cruz is absolutely on fire</a>. Not bad for a guy in the bottom third of your line-up.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">The Rangers' starting pitching staff has been just good enough, performing at a level just high enough to let their big bats and their bullpen do all of the talking. Like I said before, I'm a huge Detroit Tigers fan and that has screwed with my bias to some extent, but as I watched, I definitely noticed that the Rangers are flat out better this year. I don't think that there pitching is better than Detroit's, but the Tigers found out that even though superior starting pitching always seems to win championships, a team that has a line-up that is as good as the Rangers, adequate starters and a deadly bullpen can still win the day. Sometimes, being able to swing a bat really well can overcome weaknesses in starting pitching, and allow your bullpen to do the lion's share of the work while you crush the ball over the fence and leave your opponent in the dust.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.baseball-betting.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/Albert-Pujols.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="http://www.baseball-betting.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/Albert-Pujols.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><div style="text-align: justify;">As for the St. Louis Cardinals, I don't think even the most keen-eyed of baseball observers saw them ending up in the World Series. They were left in the middle of the NL Central for much of the season, but got hot at the right time, with a blistering performance down the stretch run of the regular season that carried them to a Wild Card birth on straight through the NL playoffs. The <a href="http://bleacherreport.com/articles/856263-albert-pujols-free-agent-rumors-5-craziest-contract-stories-weve-heard">soon to be free agent Albert Pujols</a>, easily the game's best pure hitter, was particularly brilliant, shutting up Nyjer Morgan and his <a href="http://www.foxsportsmidwest.com/10/17/11/Cardinals-get-revenge-on-Morgan-/landing_stlcardinals.html?blockID=583616&feedID=6302">loud-mouthed Twitter account</a> to knock out the Brew Crew and advance to the Series. Unlike the Rangers, the Cardinals do have stellar starting pitching, anchored by their ace Chris Carpenter. The Series will be an interesting contrast in styles, as the Cardinals hope to ride their starters and rely on manager Tony La Russa's manic manipulation of the bullpen to carry them through most games. They also have bats to help with their cause, led by the aforementioned Pujols and augmented by guys like Matt Holliday, who can certainly give the Rangers pitching staff fits on a given night.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">For those of you who don't watch baseball on the regular, I think that the most intriguing part of the Series for the casual fan will be the philosophies of the teams' managers, La Russa and the Rangers' Ron Washington. La Russa is the epitome of the cerebral clubhouse guru, willing to do whatever it takes whenever he sees fit to give his team (particularly his pitching staff) the best chance to win. Washington is a shoot-from-the-hip wild west gunslinger in comparison, with the kind of <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1CgJM2W5IcQ">enthusiasm in the dugout </a>and go-for-broke base path strategy that sees the Rangers running whenever a guy gets on base and an improvisational style that can be hard to counteract at times. La Russa may have the rings, laurels, and <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Three-Nights-August-Strategy-Heartbreak/dp/B002CMLRAQ/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1318909532&sr=8-2">published accounts</a> of unprecedented shrewdness to accentuate his managerial prowess, but Washington brings an insouciance and will to take risks that was only emboldened by the Rangers' experience in their World Series loss to the San Francisco Giants last year.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">As a guy who puts out opinions on the world of sports, I of course have to make my prediction for the Series. As such, I'm taking the Rangers in 5. I won't lie, with the Tigers in the ALCS I definitely watched more of their series with the Rangers than I did the Cardinals/Brewers showdown, so that might have led to a bias towards Texas, but I just think they are the best team on the field right now. That line-up is just absolutely too much to handle for any starting pitching staff, the Cardinals' included. I know La Russa is the mad genius and St. Louis has perhaps the best player of his generation in Albert Pujols, but I like Texas to continue their winning ways and make quick work of the Cardinals. If my Tigers can't be there to avenge their 2006 World Series loss, I'd like to hope that their AL brethren that just sent them back to the Motor City will take care of business. Here's to the World Series, have fun watching and if you never have, go ahead and pop your cherry on what should be an exciting bit of action as fall once again settles in and baseball takes center stage.</div>Marky Schultzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11361451166416906967noreply@blogger.com1