Tag: sports

The new season has started.  And it’s going to be a little harder than I anticipated. The challenge is due to switching to midfield. I don’t have enough power on my shot and the defenders seem to get younger and faster every year.  More importantly, I’m willing to pass the ball to our star striker, something too many of our mids simply would not do last year.

So, for the first game of the year, I’m not only the second-oldest man on the team, but I’m sick, I’m playing a new position, and, I discover, we have no substitutes.  Anything else?  Oh, right, here comes the International.  By International, I mean the former professional player who used to play for the national team. He’s just a little better than I am, in much the same way the Sun is a little larger than the Earth. But he’s a good guy, teases me a bit about the highly improbable goal I scored in our last meeting, and welcomes me to their field, which I’ve never seen before.

It starts off all right. Their left wing isn’t really following me back and I twice beat the left defender. Once I make a good pass back to the striker for a solid chance, the other time I slow down too much trying to decide whether to pass or shoot and the sweeper shows up to render the decision moot.  Then Giorgio decides not to pass me a through ball when he’s just outside the box, but rips it and puts the ball in the lower corner instead.  1-0.  Good decision, I think.

20 minutes in and although I’m playing well, I’m starting to breathe pretty hard.  And cough.  Suddenly, it seems like every time we lose the ball, I turn around and find myself 40 meters behind that bloody left wing.  And the International has observed that I’m having trouble getting back, so they start attacking down the left with regularity.  This is a problem, as behind me is the worst player on the team and he’s being forced to defend two whenever I get caught forward.  I also make the wrong decision at least three times when faced with a choice between covering man or ball. Our sweeper lets me know he is unhappy with my decisions.

Somehow, we fend them off, despite a ten minute period where the ball barely gets out of our half.  We make it to halftime, still leading 1-0.

The coach can see I’m in trouble, as when I’m not running, I’m doubled over, apparently trying to cough up a lung.  I also spend most of halftime on one long coughing jag. He tells me to stop worrying about getting forward and focus on defense.  We line up for the second half and I see they’ve got a fresh left wing, and even worse, he’s frisky, bolting diagonally every time it looks like the ball might come anywhere near.  It’s going to be a long 45 minutes.

He’s much quicker off the block than me, although I can match his top speed once I get going.  So, I pull out an American football trick out of the bag, namely, the cornerback’s 5-yard chuck.  I stay close on him, and every time he starts to bolt, he gets a little bump to accompany his first step.  Nothing the ref will call, but it’s enough to disrupt him.  Pretty soon, he’s furious, complaining about me grabbing his shirt – not at all true – and about how I’m knocking him off the ball, which is, in fact, the case.  They try four straight attacks down the side, trying to wear me out, but after the last one, when I take him down hard with a slide tackle right as he thought he’d gotten past me, he decides he’s had enough and takes himself out for a break.

The next guy is even faster and burns me the first time, but he’s less frisky and easier to anticipate.  We almost get a goal against the run of play, but it just goes wide.  I should have been there on the far post to clean up, but I’m a good 50 meters behind.  The first guy comes back in, then the second guy.  He’s still angry, so I laugh at him and give him a Dikembe Mutombo finger wag the first time I shut him down again.  At this point, I’ve decided I will kill him or die trying before I let him past me and he seems to suspect as much.

We survive until the 75th minute when we finally crack. One defender crashes into the back of another and takes him down, the other two defenders freeze, expecting a call, but the referee rightly shouts “play on”. One striker shoots, our keeper saves, but can’t hold onto the rebound and the other striker puts it in. 1-1.

The last 10 minutes is one corner kick after another.  We fight them all off, but then a big central midfielder puts one in the upper corner from 25 meters out; there was nothing anyone could have done.  They get one more to put us away 3-1; my only consolation is that, against all expectations, none of them were down to me. We shake hands. The International is a good sport and points out that we played them tough, we just ran out of gas. 

I watch Ender play. His team loses too, by the same score, but he has a great game, bails out his keeper twice by clearing balls on the line, and although he gets beaten three or four times, he doesn’t make any mental mistakes. He reminds me a little of Jaap Stam; he is an imperious defender and what he lacks in speed he makes up for with power and patience.  He’s in a good mood after the game; he knows they were beaten but they were not defeated. He’s beginning to understand the difference.

This revelation makes the famous tennis match an apt metaphor for the intellectual and scientific fraud that is called “sexual equality”:

WHEN HAL SHAW heard the voices at the Palma Ceia Golf and Country Club in Tampa, Fla., on a winter night some 40 years ago, he turned off the bench light over his work table and locked the bag room door. He feared burglars. Who else would be approaching the pro shop long after midnight? Then Shaw, who was there late rushing to repair members’ golf clubs for the next day’s tournament, heard the pro shop’s front door unlock and swing open.

Peering through a diamond-shaped window, Shaw, then a 39-year-old assistant golf pro, watched four sharply dressed men stroll into the pro shop. He says he instantly recognized three of them: Frank Ragano, a Palma Ceia member and mob attorney whose wife took golf lessons from Shaw, and two others he knew from newspaper photographs — Santo Trafficante Jr., the Florida mob boss whom Ragano represented, and Carlos Marcello, the head of the New Orleans mob. Trafficante and Marcello, now deceased, were among the most infamous mafia leaders in America; Marcello would later confide to an FBI informant that he had ordered the assassination of John F. Kennedy. A fourth man, whom Shaw says he didn’t recognize, joined them.

The Palma Ceia Golf and Country Club in Tampa, Fla., is where assistant golf pro Hal Shaw says he overheard mobsters planning a match fix nine months before “The Battle of the Sexes.” Courtesy Hal Shaw

Shaw’s workroom was about 20 feet from the men, who sat at a circular table. Through the window to the darkened bag room door, he could see them, but they couldn’t see him. Shaw says he was “petrified” as he tried to remain completely still, worrying that the men would find him lurking there. Then Shaw heard something he’d keep secret for the next 40 years: Bobby Riggs owed the gangsters more than $100,000 from lost sports bets, and he had a plan to pay it back.

Shaw, now 79, told the story of what he saw and heard that Tampa night to a friend late last year for the first time. This spring, he told it to “Outside the Lines.”

The men, Shaw says, used an array of nicknames for Riggs — “Riggsy,” “BB,” “Bobby Bolita.” Ragano told the men that “Riggsy” was prepared to “set up two matches … against the two best women players in the world,” Shaw says. “He mentioned Margaret Court — and it’s easy for me to remember that because one of my aunt’s names was Margaret so that, you know, wasn’t hard to remember — and the second lady was Billie Jean King.”

Ragano explained that Riggs “had the first match already in the works … and the second match he knew would follow because of Billie Jean King’s popularity and everything that it would be kind of a slam dunk to get her to play him bragging about beating Margaret Court,” Shaw says Ragano told the men. Shaw also says he heard Ragano mention an unidentified mob man in Chicago who would help engineer the proposed fix.

“Mr. Ragano was emphatic,” Shaw recalls. “Riggs had assured him that the fix would be in — he would beat Margaret Court and then he would go in the tank” against King, but Riggs pledged he’d “make it appear that it was on the up and up.”

Having played tennis at a very good school that won the state championship my senior year, (NB: I wasn’t part of that team, having switched from tennis to track the year before), I always assumed that Bobby Riggs loss to Billie Jean King was fake. I never imagined, however, that the whole situation was one big fix.  It never made any sense that the guy who crushed the world number one, a player who won twice as many Grand Slams as King, could somehow lose in straight sets to a lesser player no matter how “out of shape” he’d gotten in the intervening four months.

This should help you understand that equality isn’t merely a myth, it is a fraudulent myth that is pushed dishonestly by those with a vested material interest in it.

I was getting my gear together yesterday when I realized that it appears I will live my entire sporting life without ever once wearing my favorite shade of my favorite color, which is the royal blue of Chelsea, Duke and Minnetonka.  That seems a bit strange, if not unfair, given that this is the thirty-eighth autumn that I’ve worn team colors of one sort or another.

Elementary school: red
NSSA: light blue
Junior high: navy and yellow
High school: red and white
Minneapolis KPAC: red and black
College track: orange and blue
College rugby: black
Dragons: black and yellow
St. Paul Sting: yellow and black
New Brighton Nike: green and black
FC prima squadra/veterani elite: green and black
FC veterani: yellow and black

Because European soccer clubs are practically cradle-to-grave, Ender has played for the same two clubs that I have, except for that two-week flirtation with the pro club when he was nine.  Last night reminded me of the time I went to watch my younger brothers play at my old high school and I suddenly realized that they were no longer playing little kid games, but were essentially my athletic peers.

(Not quite, as I scored two goals against them when a group of players who were mostly from my year or the year following beat them 3-1 in the annual alumni game, but essentially. And it was a lot of fun to play with one younger brother on the Sting and with the other who was with Nike.  Between the two of them and Spacebunny, they got me back into soccer after nine years off for track, rugby, and martial arts, for which I am quite grateful.)

Last night’s friendly was fun for me to watch, first because it was a local derby, and second because, as the coach said, Ender went from being one of the role-players to one of the leaders of the team. He owned the right defense, shut down both the enemy strikers thrown at him, and combined effectively with the sweeper to cover up the occasional defensive breakdowns.  He prevented two easy goals by getting back and clearing balls that the goalie couldn’t hang onto after making saves, and repeatedly launched the attack by coming up the line and putting nice balls on the ground behind the opposing defense for the strikers and midfielders to run onto.  The first goal and most of their good opportunities were started by long passes he made, usually to his favorite teammate, Jet.

We were all impressed by Ender’s first assist at this level. The other team was in the midst of a counter attack when he broke on a ball being passed to the attackers near midfield, intercepted it, beat an opposing midfielder, and then passed a through ball into the box for a teammate to run onto. The midfielder drilled it first time and the goalie never had a chance.  The whole team went wild as that put them up 3-1 and pretty much iced the game, which finished 4-2 after the other team got a late goal at the very end.

My 29th soccer season hasn’t begun quite so well; in our second practice I banged knees with a teammate who later inadvertently stomped upon my left foot.  But I’ll be fine by our first game and it should be fun to play in the big stadium that belongs to the new team in the league. Not that anyone will be coming to watch the old guys play, but there is something about night games in stadiums that brings back those old state tournament memories. I don’t know how many seasons I have left; I’m hoping to play five more, but regardless, I plan to enjoy the game as long as I can still play it.

A new soccer season has begun and I was talking to Ender after our practices yesterday. He happened to mention, in passing, that he’d gotten into another fight with his teammates towards the end of last season. This wasn’t anything new. Like me, he’s an outsider by nature, and although he gets along fine with his teammates most of the time, the fact that he only joined this team two years ago, was the youngest on the team last year, and is observably different than the others tends to make him an occasional target given the usual group dynamics.  Things are also a little more rough-and-tumble here in Europe because fighting in school is largely ignored by the teachers unless someone gets badly hurt.

His first season with the club, he had to beat up the son of the assistant coach, (who is a teammate of mine), which didn’t faze anyone, including the boy’s father, since the kid is a little fireball who can be set off by anything.  (Ironically, despite the fact that this boy and Ender dislike each other, they play very well on defense together, much better than any other two defenders or midfielders. The father and I both find this very amusing.)

That season Ender also had to deal with two other boys egging a third boy on to attack him, and sent the boy running away crying by smashing his cleats into the boy’s face after blocking his punch.  When I asked him why he hadn’t used any judo techniques, he shrugged and said that he had been holding his cleats in his right hand and it hadn’t occurred to him to drop them.  The two instigators tried lying to the coach and claimed Ender attacked all three of them, but the coach is no idiot, and to the third boy’s credit, when asked about the situation he told the truth and exposed the other two boys.

This year I noticed the star of last year’s team, X, who had always been fairly friendly to Ender, being just a little colder to him than usual at the field.  When I asked what was up, Ender explained that he had beaten up X and his friend towards the end of the second season. I was more than a little surprised to hear this, not so much because he was outnumbered, but because X is an exceptional athlete, is bigger and older than Ender, and is easily the strongest, fastest player on the field.  I mean, the boy could play with my veteran’s team and not only hold his own, but probably be one of the top five players on the field.  He’s also a year older than Ender, and this year has gone up to play on the team that is one level below the adult first team. Judo or no judo, X would have been the one player I would have expected to get the better of Ender in any physical encounter.

Ender explained that X’s best friend, L, was acting up and threw a kick at him, so he caught the foot and walked it forward, thereby putting L on the ground. Seeing his best friend go down, X jumped in, caught Ender from behind and threw him down by his shoulders.  However, while going down, Ender went to hook X’s leg and ended up catching his knee, he then rolled, came up, punched X in the face, then put him in a judo lock and told him to knock it off.  Thus ended the encounter, with no one seriously injured. But X’s pride as the undisputed alpha male of the team had been bruised, hence the uncharacteristic coldness. On the other hand, Ender rather bemusedly observed that all the other players have been strangely respectful this season.

I’m not entirely sure he has put two and two together yet. I’ll explain it to him one of these days.

As a father, I was naturally concerned about this, so I asked Ender if the punch he had thrown was a jab or if he had made the common mistake of leading with the rear hand. When he indicated the latter, I began to point out why that had been a risky move, as one always wants to open the opponent without risking the exposure intrinsic to a rear hand.  But when I asked him why he’d led with the rear despite having been repeatedly told not to do so, he explained that at the time, X was doubled over and clutching his knee, therefore he was already open, there was no risk using the rear hand, and Ender could deliver more force with it.

I haven’t really sparred with him yet or trained him anywhere nearly as much as I should have.  But somehow, I think he’s going to be just fine.

The perspicacious Bill Barnwell has worked out the QB Championship Belt dating back to Johnny Unitas in 1959.  It’s a great article, but I have to take serious exception to his choice to award 1976 to Ken Stabler over Fran Tarkenton.

Ken Stabler, Oakland Raiders

Reign: 1974
Stabler had been impressive taking over for Lamonica during the 1973
season, earning a Pro Bowl berth, but he was just a downfield force of
nature during the following season. He threw a league-best 26 touchdowns
while leading the Raiders to a 12-2 record, winning both first-team
All-Pro and MVP honors. He would have a dismal 1975 season, though,
throwing more interceptions (24) than touchdowns (16). That opened up a
spot for …

Fran Tarkenton, Minnesota Vikings

Reign: 1975
This is very reminiscent of the Tittle run from the late ’60s, when a
veteran player who was always very good saw everything coalesce into a
great stretch toward the very end of his career. Tarkenton won his first
MVP award and made his first All-Pro team this year at the age of 35.
He would be pretty good in 1976 before throwing a combined 35 touchdowns
over the final two seasons of his career.

Ken Stabler, Raiders

Reign: 1976-77
The perch once again belonged to Stabler, who completed an incredible
(for the time) 66.7 percent of his passes in 1976 while averaging 9.3
yards per attempt. Adjusting for the era, it’s one of the best seasons
in NFL history for a quarterback. The Raiders would win the Super Bowl
in 1976. Stabler was merely very good in 1977, but there was no superior
candidate to take the title away until 1978.

 Very well, let’s compare the 1976 seasons of Fran Tarkenton and Ken Stabler.

13     10-2-1     255     412     61.9     2961     17     8         Tarkenton
12     11-1-0     194     291     66.7     2737     27     17       Stabler

Now, remember, Tarkenton is already holding the belt at this point and you’ve got to KO the champ to take the belt. Stabler’s performance, while excellent in terms of his completion percentage and number of touchdowns thrown, simply isn’t enough to justify taking it away from the Viking quarterback.  Stabler played in one less game, threw more than 200 fewer yards, threw 30 percent fewer passes, threw more than twice as many interceptions, and had a TD/INT ratio of 1.6 compared to Tarkenton’s 2.1.  Which quarterback would you rather have had behind center?

In 1976, the Vikings scored 305 points.  The Raiders scored 351.  So Tarkenton was still leading the offense into the end zone, he just wasn’t necessarily throwing the ball in there for the final scores.  Both QBs scored one rushing touchdown, but Stabler lost four fumbles while Tarkenton lost two.  That means that Stabler turned the ball over 21 times compared to 10 times for Tarkenton, lowering Stabler’s TD/turnover ratio to 1.3.  This is hardly indicative of the best QB in the game, and it doesn’t merit taking the QB belt away from the Georgia Peach in what was more than a “pretty good” 1976 season.

The big difference I see is that Oakland had a better running game in 1976, averaging 4.1 yards per carry compared to 3.7 for the Vikings.  Stabler didn’t even throw for 6 of Oakland’s 33 touchdown passes, while despite their inferior running game, the Vikings scored more touchdowns on the ground, 18 to 14.  So, that tells us that Oakland preferred to throw in the red zone rather than anything about Stabler being a better passer.

If the Raiders don’t crush the Vikings in the Super Bowl that year, I don’t see any way that Barnwell credibly anoints Stabler the superior quarterback in 1976.  And even with the benefit of the Super Bowl victory, I think it is clear that Stabler’s performance that season was less significant and less remarkable than Tarkenton’s, especially when one takes Tarkenton’s advanced age and reduced mobility into account. So, I hope you will join me in emailing Mr. Barnwell to request that he rectify this historical injustice.

I have to confess, there is one group of people for whom I do harbor a pure and unmitigated hate. I mean, I wouldn’t necessarily want to live next to the mentally unstable or have dinner at a cannibal’s house, and while the only pagan religious ceremony I’ve attended was disappointingly tame, I am a little too well-read in history to be entirely at my ease among pagans.  One always finds oneself on edge against the possibility that they will castrate themselves without warning and cast their liberated testicles at your feet.

But I don’t mind any of them per se.  What I hate is golf spectators.  Peter King, though shaky on many subjects sporting and political, is surprisingly sound on the monsters:

Not a big golf watcher, truth be told. But I watched some over the
break, and I really need to figure one thing out: What is it with
screaming “GET IN THE HOOOOOLLLLE!!!!!” after every tee shot? It was
cute when Bill Murray did it, dweebs. It’s dweebish when you do it on
every tee shot. 

Dweebish?  The term hardly does them justice. When we lived in Ponte Vedra, we were about a decent tee drive from Sawgrass.  Although we were of the Church of Tennis – you have to pick one there when you arrive, Golf or Tennis, it’s the law – we did attend The Players Championship with a friend who worked for the PGA Tour.  It wasn’t a bad way to spend an afternoon, strolling around the course with a drink in your hand, even if you have zero interest in golf. 

But I have never seen a more perfectly annoying group of dorks in my life.  Over the course of the tournament, I gradually went from mild bemusement to moderate annoyance to full blown hatred for them.  As near as I could tell, they count coup by being the first to announce that the ball is going to go into the hole.  But, (and this is the challenge), it is deemed shameful to yell that the ball is going to go in if it does not, in fact, go into the hole.  I don’t know what the penalty is, but apparently it is severe.

You understand the dilemma.  If one waits until the ball is obviously going to go in the hole, someone else will beat one to it.  If one jumps the gun, one will look like an ass. Or, rather, even more of an ass than one already does, being the sort of gentleman who follows a grown man around as if he was the mama duck and one was one of her ducklings.

I suspect I may have witnessed the birth of the phenomenon Peter King describes with such fitting distaste.  One well-lubricated gentleman was loudly pondering the conundrum of when to announce the imminent falling of the ball into the hole as John Daley was preparing to make an approach shot  towards the green where we were standing when a brilliant thought struck him.

“I know, I know, I know,” he told his friend excitedly. “Once the ball gets onto the green, I’m going to yell, ‘get in the hole, Big John’!”

He was roundly congratulated for the perspicacity of his brainstorm, leading me to do some pondering of my own concerning the likelihood that the local home for differently abled adults had been given free tickets to the tournament.  I rejected that on the grounds that the Daley enthusiasts were sporting both Florida Casual and expensive watches, and contented myself with watching to see how the grand experiment would proceed.

The ball had no sooner bounced on the green when the innovator shouted, as promised, “Get in the hole, Big John!” He was clearly the first to raise his voice, as it was at least two seconds before a second shout was heard, declaring, with some degree of certainty, that the ball was indeed on a trajectory that would cause it to fall into the hole.  The ball did go into the hole, to general approval, and the gentleman who had been the first to raise his voice was enthusiastically congratulated by his friends, with considerable high-fiving and back-pounding.

I did not see the man who was robbed of his boldly declarative statement by this cunning maneuver, but I have no doubt that he and his friends stood in slack-jawed awe, wondering how they had been so cleverly bested.  Later that day, I heard the call resound from hole after hole.  “Get in the hole, Tiger!” “Get in the hole, Lefty!” “Get in the hole, Big John!”

Apparently, over time, they have dropped the name, seeing as how everyone understands to whom the ball belongs. Now, you can say that their pastime is harmless.  I won’t disagree. You can assert that they aren’t hurting anyone. I can’t argue with that. You can quite reasonably claim that it isn’t anyone’s business but theirs how and when they cheer. I will not dispute that.

And yet, my loathing for them still burns every bit as pure and as hot as it did on that first sunny Florida afternoon.