Being a fan of assholes

This is more properly the area of someone else I know quite well, but Migs's post about the awesome:douche ratio brings up the question of what it means to be a fan. We're all fans of all sorts of people who have Awesome qualities and Douche qualities. Three examples from my own fandom set: Kobe Bryant raped a woman and paid her to keep quiet about it, but is one of the most interesting and talented basketball players ever; Magic Johnson cheated on his wife hundreds, maybe thousands, of times, but broke the mold for the point guard position and provided an example for the world that AIDS can be lived with (if you happen to be extraordinarily wealthy, of course); Eminem uses every misogynist and homophobic slur in the book, but is the most technically talented mainstream rapper of his day.

These three examples aren't exactly of a piece, and the distinctions are important. Kobe and Magic's excellences are entirely unrelated to their off-court shenanigans. (Obviously we can speculate about whether the same personality traits that drive them to be great basketball players also drive them to do the bad things they do, but not only is that pure guesswork, it's also still different from the case of Eminem.) Eminem, by contrast, raps about killing his wife. It's not like he's a singer who uses "faggot" in interviews, thus allowing us to try drawing lines between his music and his personality. We have to take the whole him when we listen to his songs.


For the ladies

The case of Kobe, Magic, or John Mayer is complicated by the fact that there could plausibly be some people who don't know about their outside work, as it were. Imagine a seven-year-old Lakers fan who just loves Kobe Bryant. That child was a tiny baby when the rape happened, and you could understand it if the parents are reluctant to get into the concept of sexual assault with their seven-year-old. (And if that seven-year-old read Mayer's Playboy interview, something's wrong.)

Of course, I'm not seven. What does it say about me that I'm a fan of Kobe Bryant, that I root for him almost without thinking about this dark side? I try to comfort myself with the idea that I'm hardly unique in this. After all, Kobe didn't even lose his Nike endorsement in the fallout from the sexual assault. Obviously Nike didn't feel that people would care enough, and they apparently do not. Kobe's jersey continues to sell at the top of the heap.

The nature of "rooting for laundry" also complicates the question. You can have guys you like more or less on a team, but in general, if you root for a team, you support the players on that team. If John Mayer's antics start to annoy you, you can just drop him. No such luck with Kobe. I would almost certainly hate him if he were on any other team in the league, and I might actually wish him bodily harm if he were a Celtic. But he wears the "right" colors, so all his faults, small and large, get thrown out the window.

There are a million places this topic could go: the role of the media in showing us these bad sides (did people know Mickey Mantle was a drunk?); the chicken-egg question of whether good or bad character leads us to choose things to root for in the first place; the difference between actors, musicians, athletes, and others on the question of how much character matters; etc. This post is getting longish, though, so let's see what happens as a multiple-post matter.

John Mayer and the Awesome:Douche Ratio

[Author's Note: This is the corrected version of this post. The previous version was an accidentally published draft.]

I spent last Thursday and Friday night at Madison Square Garden (the World's Most Famous Arena!) to take in two sold out shows by John Mayer, pop-rock's most quotable guitar God. Why two nights in a row? Mayer is an artist that's worth going back for. Over the course of two nights, not only will he play different setlists, but the songs he does repeat will be played differently. Gravity was a 15 minute epic on night one, with pieces of Otis Redding's "Dreams to Remember" and Jay-Z's "Empire State of Mind" worked in, while night two was more subdued; Half of my Heart featured an extended monologue on both nights. I can honestly recommend few concert experiences as highly as the John Mayer one (and I see a lot of concerts).

If John Mayer did nothing but write thoughtful, introspective songs and play kick-ass guitar solos, it would be pretty easy to tell people that I was a fan of his. But I face a couple of impediments. The first has happened to many artists in the past - his most prominent singles don't represent his best work. "Your Body is a Wonderland" is a saccharine guitar pop song, pleasant to listen to but something he's moved far beyond as a songwriter and guitar player. "Daughters" sounds like a damn Hallmark card, even if it is about having trouble dating girls with Daddy issues (true story). But I'm fine telling people that they need to listen to his last two albums, Continuum in particular, which blend his blues and pop sensibilities.

There's a bigger problem, though. People think I'm a fan of a douchebag.

I can see where they're coming from.

Dating actresses and pop tarts like Jessica Simpson started him on that path. Talking openly about his breakup with Jennifer Aniston to paparazzi really got the ball moving. The trips to Vegas didn't help either. While some found the irreverent Twitter account fun and a mild diversion, some found that he was turning up the douche factor. (Example here.) And I'm pretty sure some people just didn't like his hair cuts.

Then he did a couple of interviews you may have heard about. They've been recapped in plenty of places, so I won't do a full discussion, but if you care Google "John Mayer" and "Rolling Stone" or "Playboy" and then add "n-word", "masturbation", or everyone's favorite, "sexual napalm."

Sexual Napalm.

There's a few questions that result from all this:

1) Is he a douchebag?

Maybe. Even his staunchest defenders have to concede that he made some douchy comments (particularly in talking about the Aniston break up in the press - that was not cool). Being open about his personal life and his opinions makes Mayer an interesting interview, but as someone who's as connected to social media as he is, he had to know that any nuanced comments he made would quickly be broken down to 140 characters. I think that makes him at times thoughtless- I don't know if that alone qualifies him as a douche.

He's also self-centered, for sure, but Mayer's self-centeredness isn't the typical meathead type showcased on Hot Chicks With Douchebags. He's self-centered because he's neurotic; he thinks a lot about how he's living his life, how he deals with other people, and what he's trying to accomplish in life. He's fascinated by himself. Again, I'm not sure that in and of itself qualifies him as a douche, but you could argue that it manifests itself in douchy ways.

But this argument is almost besides the point. None of us actually know John Mayer. We can't really comment on how he treats people, which is generally the mark of a true douche. Let's assume he is one for the sake of argument, which leads to question two.

2) If he's a douche, why am I still a fan?

I'm a bigger believer in something that I'll call the Awesome:Douche ratio. This is an important thing to monitor for any entertainer who you might have to support with your money. I really don't need to care if Bret Michaels is a douche: Rock of Love comes to me as part of my cable subscription, and my decision to watch the show doesn't indicate a particular level of support. But if I'm going to pay for a concert, I'm directly supporting someone's lifestyle. I'm saying that I've enjoyed their music enough that I want them to be monetarily rewarded for it, and I'll use my own wad of cash to do it. So if someone is a douche, their music better be really awesome for me to see a show. I first had to make this decision as my Oasis fandom developed in my teen years. Any rational person probably wants to punch Liam Gallagher in the face. But have you heard Morning Glory? It's one of my top 5 albums of the 90s. Plus, they put on a super show. I decided that I didn't care enough about the band being assholes to deprive myself of their excellent music.

I was on the fence a bit with John Mayer late last year. Initially, I didn't take too well to his most recent album. And defending myself as a John Mayer fan was getting annoying. But then I went to see his show at the Beacon Theater in November, and you know what? He's still got it. Songs I didn't love on his new record blossomed when performed live, and hearing the material from Continuum again reminded me just how much I love that album.

Moreover, the self-centeredness I discussed above is the key to Mayer's songwriting: even if he isn't always the best guy, he thinks a lot about how to go about living as a younger adult male. This makes the songs resonate and become useful as a springboard for the listener to reflect on their own life. At that point, it doesn't really matter if the guy singing is "living it right" (to steal a line), as long as it helps the listener do so.

It is a little weird that non-American Asians seem to have had so little penetration in the American pop music market. Migs asked me the other day, while preparing for his post, if I could name any Asian pop or rock stars. The only person I could come up with was James Iha, who (a) is an American of Japanese descent; (b) was in Smashing Pumpkins, but was not the frontman. I later remembered that there's also Cibo Matto, founded by Japanese expatriates in America (and apparently only popular in the states) and Shonen Knife, off the top of my head.

Of course, as with anything, there is a niche culture -- there are American "J-pop" fans, just like there are American fans of Afrobeat, Norwegian black metal, Mexican rap, and French house. I'm confident saying, though, that I've read far more reviews in mainstream American music magazines discussing albums by and influenced by the above four genres than any mentioning Japanese, Chinese, Vietnamese, or Korean music.

But that's only half the question, and in some ways it's the less interesting half, because there are lots of countries and cultures that haven't exported pop music to America. The other half is "where are all the Asian-Americans?" Black Americans, of course, are a significant part of the American music scene, even in areas that aren't traditionally "Black music". There are plenty of Latino American rappers (Pitbull, Lloyd Banks, Jim Jones), pop singers (Christina Aguilera, David Archuleta, Jennifer Lopez), rock musicians (Los Lobos, Zach de la Rocha, Dave Navarro, Robert Trujillo from Metallica), and other (Joan Baez).


Latina.

That said, Wikipedia tells me that Amerie's mother is Korean, Ne-Yo's mother is of Chinese and African descent, Tony Kanal from No Doubt is Indian-American, and Mike Shinoda from Linkin Park is of Japanese descent. And then how could I have forgetten Jin! Wikipedia also points to a number of musicians with Filipino roots, including Joey Santiago and Nicole Scherzinger.

What jumps out at me from this list is a perception issue, partly arising from people of mixed race not carrying the Asian parent's name and partly from the fact that "Asian" is a remarkably diverse category in terms of cultures, languages, and physical characteristics. That is, the typical American picture of a Latino, while not always terribly accurate (blond-haired, blue-eyed Argentians might confound people), is probably more accurate than the typical picture of Asians, which I'd guess is based mostly on Chinese, Japanese, and Korean immigrants. Hell, even as to the idea of "Chinese", our picture is not very accurate -- China has a lot of ethnic groups that are not accounted for by our standard picture.

So maybe, in particular relative to population size, Asian-American representation in American pop music is completely normal.

The Great Korean Hope

One week into American Idol watching, Big Mike is still in it, and I'm already annoyed by about half the contestants. And I know which ones will be most annoying - the ones who aren't all that good, but who are cute and popular. This is the nature of the game - it's a popularity contest, and being a talented or interesting performer isn't the only way to be popular. Some of the guys are popular because they're cute. Big Mike's popularity in part stems from his inspirational story. And John Park is trying to do something unprecedented.

Based on Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter followers, John Park is the 2nd most popular performer. He's cute for sure, but he's also attempting to become the first Asian-American pop star (well, male pop star if you count the Singaporean Tila Tequila as a pop star, but she falls more into the famous for being famous genre). It's hard to figure out why this is. The major Asian countries are huge music markets (Uncle Jesse's band on Full House was legendarily "big in Japan," as was Cheap Trick). The Asian-American population is large, particularly in New York and California, and they love music too. Heck, they invented karaoke! Who doesn't love karaoke?

So, why is there this lack? Perhaps because, unlike Latin music, Asian pop isn't a distinct musical style from American pop. But it's surprising that the music industry hasn't attempted to pander to this market. That's the void that John Park appears to be stepping right into.

As I type this, he's doing what is, to my ears, a pretty mediocre version of John Mayer's Gravity. SEGUE~! - tomorrow I'll be talking about the John Mayer live experience, and the douche:awesome ratio.

Generic Pop Stars and American Idol

Sadly, I can't follow up on Migs's American Idol post by saying "I've never seen the show". I saw a lot of whichever season it was that had John Stevens, which I think might've been the Ruben-Clay season, but don't hold me to that.


Look, it's Pink!

Stevens is an interesting data point on this idea that Idol is a great way to create boring pop stars, because he was absolutely the least boring contestant his year, while also having absolutely no chance of winning. Stevens, as some of you will recall (but Migs will not), was a Sinatra/Dino/Bobby Darin kind of singer. This was, of course, fascinating in a pop landscape where memories tend to stretch back only about as far as Madonna and Michael Jackson. You can see, though, how Stevens wasn't going to do so well with, say, "Latin Week" (which was, according to Wikipedia, the week he was voted off).

If American Idol were actually intended to create genuine pop stars (rather than simply being a money machine for Fox, which it is), the producers would recognize that even the broadest of pop music is targeted, niched in a certain way. Name some platinum-selling artist and I'll tell you some other platinum-selling artist's catalog that they'd be completely unable to handle. Getting back to Madonna and Michael -- they couldn't have done each other's songs (even accounting for gender differences). Pink and Britney Spears and Lady Gaga and Christina Aguilera are/were not interchangeable.

The format of Idol, though, requires the winner to finish not-last in each week. If you're middle-of-the-pack at every possible song style there is, you'll do very well on Idol, and you may get lucky enough to win. If you're excellent at some things and terrible at others (as most genuine pop stars probably are), you're probably going home early because you'll have a disastrous performance during, say, Country Week.

This isn't groundbreaking stuff, but it's basically by way of explanation of my lack of interest in the program. It's not the only reason, of course (overly bombastic singing, the judges saying the same things over and over ("a little pitchy, dawg"), too many theme weeks I just don't care about, too much puff in between performances), but if I genuinely thought the next Ke$ha or Pink or Gaga was coming out of this show, I'd watch it, even with Randy Jackson at the end of the table.

Watching American Idol

Not as exciting as Wojo's pictures, I know.

Before I discuss watching American Idol for the first time, have people seen these McDonald's ads with the coach telling the kids they can "eat like Olympians" and then taking them to McDonald's? This is an homage to the Little Chocolate Donuts SNL parody, right?

So after 8 years of avoiding American Idol, I've relented and am watching my first full episode as I write this. I enjoy music a lot. I enjoyed the show Rock Star (sadly, that Tommy Lee band from season 2 did not last). So why not Idol? I tend to avoid things that everyone likes which also seem dumb to me. And Idol always struck me as a way to create mediocre pop stars. Did you ever listen to that album Kelly Clarkson wrote herself? Neither did anyone else. Although she can sing a song written by hook-loving Swedes.

Why am I doing this?

Home bar pride. The lead singer of one of my favorite local bar bands, East Coast (no, not the most original name) tried out for Idol... and made it onto the initial show... and made through all the preliminary rounds... and tomorrow, dude performs live on national TV. He's the one they call Big Mike. I want him to succeed, and I care just enough to actually watch and probably even vote.

This will be a bit of a social experiment. Sort of like that guy who hasn't seen Lost watching the last season of Lost. So far, my thoughts? Many of these people are not very talented, and almost all of them are boring. I generally find myself agreeing with Simon.

Also, does Ellen know she looks like an elf? She could do a production of Peter Pan tomorrow.

Our Gossipy Society and Tiger's Statement

I'm interested in the point Jason made about how many people's interest in gossip is driven by their friends' interest. Following gossip is worthwhile if it means not getting left out of the conversation. Our friend Pam quipped that perhaps we should find friends who talk about more interesting things, and while I agree philosophically, it feels like more of my friends talk about celebrity gossip than before. But why?

Other than our culture getting more vapid (a possibility), I think it has to be the ease of doing it. It used to be that to follow the stories, you needed to buy a magazine weekly. Now, TMZ and Perez Hilton and all the others are free, and offer news faster. Moreover, the increasing number of people doing it has decreased the stigma of doing so. Jason referred to sneaking a purchase of US Weekly at the supermarket, but now friends will regularly send me links to gossip. And I need to read them because... well, how else would I follow important sports stories?

I swear, I only watch Keeping up with the Kardashians to inform Wojo of how Lamar Odom is doing.

I haven't watched the Tiger Woods press conference yet, but after reading reports, I'm still pretty disappointed that he hasn't put on the proverbial black hat (funny, since he wears a literal one all the time) and just admit that he's not really sorry for what he did, and that he's going to go out and kick some puritan golf ass. Reading the clearly manufactured statements about being sorry and wanting to be a better person is just... well, boring. If I wanted boring, I'd watch golf.

Tiger and the media on the media

One of the things that's interesting about the celebrity culture we're in now and the media environment that's created that culture (or fed it, whatever) is when those media organizations responsible for the around-the-clock coverage Migs refers to recognize just how responsible they are for the whole world they've created. I've been letting my TV run Sports Center at night while I play poker, so last night, I saw (two or three times) a piece on Tiger Woods in anticipation of Woods's prepared-statement-reading schedule for today. A significant portion of the piece was about the media's coverage of the car-crash incident, the later revelations that Woods basically had a harem, Woods's refusal to say anything, his entry into rehab, etc. etc. etc. And a significant portion of that significant portion was about ESPN's coverage of same. The audience was shown the absurd parade of New York Post covers, of course, but also clips and audio from Sports Center, including anchors saying things like "nobody really knows what's going on".


Come on, it's my shtick now.

What is interesting about all this is the way that media outlets seem mature and intelligent enough to realize what they're doing when they report breathlessly on Tiger Woods and yet they do it anyway. It's sort of the analogue to the person who buys Us Weekly at the grocery store and hides it from her friends. We know it's an unhealthy obsession, we know that it does far more harm than good, but we don't know how to quit.

Part of the issue gets back to my initial parenthetical above, about whether the media has created the culture or merely fed it. I'm not sure there is an answer, except for the bromide that we all bear some responsibility: if ESPN and TMZ didn't create the stories, we'd have nothing to click; and if we didn't click the stories, they wouldn't make any money from the creation. The media organizations can always fall back on the old collective-action problem, though: ESPN can't stop reporting on this stuff because no one else will stop, and so they'll lose viewers, lose money, and so forth. Consumers do have a version of this excuse, actually: if all your friends care, then you have to care or else you won't have anything to talk to them about.

Given the lack of solution, I guess we just have to hope for one of two things. First, the continued rise of meta, the media covering the media, which is covered by the media, ad infinitum. If we continue on this endless loop of coverage of coverage, the whole thing will have to just implode on itself at some point, and give us the opportunity to start over. (And thus my motivations for participating in this blog are revealed.) Second, we can hope that people just get bored. "Another steroid story. Blah. Another sex scandal. Blah." Sex and drugs are titillating material, though, so I don't really see this happening anytime soon. Sadly.

The Personalization of Celebrity Gossip

The John Mayer Playboy interview has got me thinking about a lot of topics, but the one on the table for this post is the way people now interact with celebrity gossip. There's always been an aspect of judging celebrities based on gossip stories, but it feels like that's increasing. I've talked to plenty of people who don't listen to John Mayer's music that don't just have an opinion about him, but have a strong opinion about whether or not he's a douchebag, whether he was a good boyfriend to Jennifer Aniston, and whether he's a misogynist. I've been trying to work through why that is.

I think there's two main contributing factors. The first I'll refer to as TMZ, but it really encompasses all of the expanding celebrity paparazzi coverage. As the coverage has gotten more constant, people feel like they know the "real story" moreso than in the past. Of course, we don't. We have no idea what went on between John and Jen, even if we saw more pictures of them than an analogous couple from 20 years ago.

But I think the bigger change are personal blogs and Twitter. They allow celebrities to speak directly to their fans. This is of course a lot of fun and occasionally enlightening, but it also gives people a greater sense that they "know" a celebrity. Of course, the picture you get of a celebrity from Twitter is still a mediated one - 140 character thoughts are to understanding a person what a paparazzi photo is to knowing what's going on in a celebrity's life. This works both ways: on the one hand, people have a greater sense that a celebrity is their friend, but they also judge a celebrity negatively if they say something provocative in a tweet.

What it all adds up to is that a person in the limelight now is subject to a scrutiny that is much more personal and heated than it was in the past. This has to be hard for celebrities who are aware of how they are perceived, and have to deal with the inaccuracies and out and out lies that get passed around as news. Of course, if they try and fight back using Twitter, they get an unfiltered communication device - but they also subject themselves to even greater scrutiny.

Championships and Luck

I think Wojo's point about the mano-a-mano nature of baseball is a good one. If a star player goes 1-for-18 in the playoffs, there's no one else to blame but the player, and maybe the quality of pitcher he faces - in basketball and football, its much easier to credit the defense. Now, if that 1-for-18 streak happened in May, we'd simply call it a slump, and people are now even well-versed enough to say things like "regression to the mean" and "small sample size." But only in May. Why?

If we recognize that a player's performance in an important baseball game is as likely to be good as performance in a regular baseball game (and lots of studies have showed this to be basically true), then a 3-for-4 game is just good luck, and an 0-for-4 game is bad luck. What follows from that is problematic for a lot of people - the outcome of a baseball game is determined by the talent of the two teams and the way the two teams match-up, but also by the luck of the draw in terms of players' performance levels. This idea is anathema to the way people want to think about champions as "the best."

Baseball is an interesting sport to discuss for this point, because teams are much more bunched together than in other sports - no team has ever had a regular season approaching the '07 Pats or the '96 Bulls in terms of winning percentage (or, on the flip side, the '08 Lions or the current Nets). Good baseball teams win 60% of their games, and bad ones win 40%. It's not completely uncommon for a bottom team to sweep a series with a very good team. So, when two good teams play, the odds of either team winning have to be close to a coin flip (a better discussion of baseball odds appears in this Phil Birnbaum post). But the winner of that coin flip is exhaulted, and the loser is questioned. We don't give a title to the team that would win the most if we played the season 1000 times - we only play the season once.

To simply explain the results of a 7-game series as luck would make sports seem hollow. Who cares about a dice roll? So instead, we look for reasons why performance was good or poor in that moment. We find character flaws in the losers, and build the winners into supermen. Now, these discussions aren't completely without merit. How a player responds to pressure must have some impact on performance, particularly on the negative side (anyone who's played sports knows the feeling of being "tight" in a big moment and having to overcome that). But it's generally less than one might think.

Recognizing that doesn't necessarily take the fun out of sports, but it does take a lot of the morality out of sports, and baseball writers/fans love morals (see any discussion of steroids ever). Perhaps that explains the resistance.

Bad arguments about baseball and football

Migs's point about the relative mutedness of the discussion of Peyton Manning's testicle size seems dead-on to me. I suffer from even more selection bias, though, since I don't really read about football. I follow the Football Outsiders guys on Twitter and I read Bill Simmons, but that's about it. I'm much more well versed in baseball, so that's where I'm going to take this.

It strikes me that almost 35 years after Bill James hit the scene, seven years after Moneyball, almost fifteen years after the founding of Baseball Prospectus, five years after the founding (and two years after the shuttering) of Fire Joe Morgan, ten years after Voros McCracken published his Defense-Independent Pitching research, we're still having a lot of the same discussions about "clutchness", the value of a home run (every year, without fail, someone argues that homers kill rallies, and thus are sometimes less valuable than doubles), and the "hittability" of pitchers that we've been having since time immemorial.

In football and basketball, I understand why we're still clinging to outmoded ideas. Baseball has a long history advanced stats that doesn't really exist in the other sports. (John Thorn and Pete Palmer wrote "The Hidden Game of Baseball" in 1985. Earnshaw Cook wrote "Percentage Baseball" in 1964.) Second, interactions are vastly more important in football and basketball. Baseball is essentially a one-on-one-on-one sport, where a pitcher faces a batter, who then tries to put the ball where a defender can't get it. Defensive responsibility zones overlap to an extent, but for the most part, if a ball is hit in a particular area, we can assign almost all of the credit or blame for catching or not catching that ball to one defender. Thus, in football and basketball, it is more difficult for stats to have meaning because they have to account for significantly more context.

Perhaps it's that mano-a-mano atmosphere that has retarded the conversation in baseball. We know that fans and writers (through some interaction effect of their own -- I'm not really clear on how much I should blame fans for being who they are and thus forcing writers to write what they need to hear, or the writers for creating the myths fans believe in) love to oversimplify and focus on one particular aspect of a game or a team. Alex Rodriguez is the root of all evil for the Yankees, and Derek Jeter is responsible for all good. Peyton Manning is the greatest regular-season quarterback ever but chokes when it matters. Kobe Bryant has the balls of a horse but Dirk Nowitzki is soft and weak. But when you make these arguments in football or basketball, you don't have to make sophisticated counterarguments to shoot them down -- it doesn't take a stats genius to look at the video of the Manning interception and see that there might've been a slip or a miscommunication between Manning and Reggie Wayne.

In baseball, though, Alex Rodriguez striking out can only be placed on him. He doesn't have any excuses. The arguments have to get more subtle, because you have to point to studies about how clutchness doesn't exist as a skill. You have to impart the concept that 40 at-bats in the post-season just doesn't provide the same evaluative window as 600 in the regular season. What it all comes down to is that you have to convince people of the huge role that randomness and luck play every single day.

I'll conclude by going back to the word "understandable". I get why people have a hard time accepting this. We want to believe that we are in control of things. It's why we have debates about welfare and affirmative action, and why some people were actually on Paul Shirley's side regarding Haiti. The idea that the course of a significant portion of our lives (maybe more than a significant portion, depending on how you feel about free will in general) is determined by factors that are 100% out of our control verges on heresy.

Media Coverage of the Implications of a Very Close Football Game

"Any print columnist who writes that the Saints' victory will forever change New Orleans should be shot. Even the bloggers will do better." - Buzz Bissinger

Yes we will, I think. Totally agree with Wojo about the implications of the game for the city of New Orleans. It's a wonderful story. Certainly everyone at my party was cheering for the Saints, and word from the game is that 75% of the crowd there was cheering for them too. I think we all feel good for the city - a championship is a wonderful pick me up in a very difficult time of rebuilding.

Wojo decided to leave media coverage of the game to another time, and I've decided that time is now. This game has provided an interesting window into where we're at now in how we view major sporting events. On the one hand, there was the instant overreaction - Brees is the best quarterback in football now! Manning is a choker! But there was also a very quick backlash against the standard overreaction. The arguments are one's everybody's heard - Manning played well, made one bad throw (and it may not even have been - Wayne slipped coming out of the break), and shouldn't be punished because his defense couldn't stop the Saints in the second half. This has turned out to be the dominant way to view the game - not the choker/hero theme. Now, part of this is the bias in my selection of reading on football - Football Outsiders is my main source of football analysis, and they are among the most reasoned writers on the sport. They abhor the standard insipid football discussion. But it wasn't just them. Even Bill Simmons, popularizer of the term "Manning Face" wrote a surprisingly reasoned column (even if he did let his readers make the dumb arguments for him at the end of it). In searching for Manning "choker" stories, I found plenty of people saying that we shouldn't jump to conclusions based on one game.

This is a terrific moment. Smart, reasonable writers don't have quite the pull of newspaper columnists, but their power, relative to "bloggers" (and in that group, I'd include writers with mainly an internet presence, like the Football Outsiders guys, Will Leitch, and even Simmons) is decreasing. And thankfully, that may mean a world where excellent players don't get labeled "chokers" because they lose in big games for reasons beyond their control. Heck, people might some day understand the concept of small sample sizes and the non-existence of clutch. But at least for now Manning's legacy is safe.

"Big" win for New Orleans

Well, that was quite a Super Bowl. In the end, I found myself rooting more for the Colts than the Saints, probably 55/45 or 60/40. Somewhere in that range. I am 100% with Migs on the 19-0 issue, but in the end, I think (although it wasn't really a rational process) I wanted Peyton Manning to win more than I wanted Jim Caldwell to lose. That said, I'm completely happy for the Saints and for their fans to get to have this feeling.

Austen made an interesting point to me in a text, though: this doesn't do anything for the city itself. It doesn't help it rebuild, it doesn't help repair the massive racial and economic inequalities that exist there. If anything, in fact, it might give us the opportunity to paper over those issues. When I (and every other person who writes about this win) write something like "good for New Orleans", I worry that this is just one more unconscious tactic in the battle to forget about the plight of the less fortunate.

It's funny, in the other major sports, the championship teams actually provide a tangible benefit to their city by hosting the big games, resulting in additional revenue for local businesses and so forth. New Orleans, though, doesn't get to host tens of thousands of people traveling to see the game, but they do get to pay for hundreds of hours of police overtime for security for the eventual championship parade.

I don't want to come off completely sour about this, but, related to something I tweeted, I think we ought to take care not to blow this up into some life-changing event for the people of New Orleans.

(That tweet was making a dual reference, by the way; the other point being "let's not start talking about how Peyton Manning has no testicles". But in the interest of keeping a post fairly well confined to just a topic or two, I'll leave the issue of media coverage (creation) of the larger implications of one very close football game for another time.)

It has to be the Saints

Unlike Wojo, I'm fully declared for this game. I've decided which delicious team colored cupcake from Crumbs I will eat after I down 2-3 large pulled pork sandwiches. It's the Saints. It has to be.

• First: New Orleans, Katrina, destruction, Superdome as hell, revitalization, rallying around the team, epic season. No decent human doesn't appreciate this angle, even Colts fans.
• Second, this is a franchise that until this year had won two playoff games total. This fan base has suffered for a long time. It'd be nice to see them win one.
• Most importantly: what the Colts did in the Curtis Painter game was not okay. I'm a Jets fan, and I was cheering for the Colts that day - I wanted to see perfection, just to be able to say I saw it happen. I love Manning for the same reasons Wojo does. I'd have been fine with a Jets win, but the way they got it was repulsive. The goal of football is to win games, particularly if there is something to compete for, like, perhaps, being the greatest of all time. If the Colts win, it will somehow justify their strategy to people - "their goal was to win the Super Bowl, and they did." But they didn't need to do that to win the Super Bowl. Manning has never missed a game and never takes big hits. They could have rested hurt players, but played to win. They didn't. So I don't want to see them win the Super Bowl and somehow think Jim Caldwell has been vindicated in any way.

I'm not exactly sure why the Colts decision makes me so angry. I think its this: our attachment to sports is an emotional one. We have goals and hopes for the teams we follow and enjoy. We want teams to care in the same way we do, or else we feel like chumps - why should we care if the people attempting to make the history don't? The Colts resting their starters made it clear that they and their fans did not have the same goals. The Colts said "This is a business; we have no need to attempt to be the best ever, just to achieve our general goal. We will be risk averse in doing so." It felt cold. (That blank look on Jim Caldwell's face did not help. Neither did the anguished look on the faces of the players.) It made me feel bad for caring that a team was approaching 19-0. The Colts told me, in so many words, that I was a sucker, and that all the fans filling their stadiums were suckers.

So scream (full bellied and drunkenly) with me: "Who dat?! Who dat say dey gonna beat dem Saints?!"

Super Bowl rooting interests

Neither Migs nor I have a rooting stake in this Super Bowl in the conventional way. Indianapolis and New Orleans aren't our teams, they're not rivals of our teams, neither one stole a notable player or coach from our teams ... they just have no connection that I can see. (Although it's possible Migs will point out something I missed in his follow-up.) Sure, New Orleans was in the NFC West for many years. (Remember when the NFC West actually had only one western team, with St. Louis, Atlanta, Carolina, and New Orleans making up the rest of the division. Wasn't that absurd?) But I don't think San Francisco and New Orleans had any real intra-division rivalry then, and certainly none has survived today.

So who do I root for? I guess it's time for bullet-points. (Wizard-points?)

In favor of the Colts:

• I like Peyton Manning. I like his media personality: goofy, but not in a Chad Ochocinco way. More understated, but still endearingly weird. I'm thinking of him berating children and hitting them with footballs, or playing ping-pong with Justin Timberlake, or crashing your football party. (I can't seem to put together the right search to find that last one, but you know what I'm talking about.) I also like Peyton Manning as a football player. First, his throws are sort of unintimidating. They wobble a lot. He doesn't really throw that beautiful spiral ball that most NFL quarterbacks seem to throw. Second, his movement in the pocket is remarkable. I remain confident that, with a little training, I could beat him in a foot race, yet he never gets hit. His knowledge of where pressure is coming from, his little Manning Shoulder Turn (TM), his quick release, and a thousand other little things add up to almost never taking big hits (what percentage of his sacks are him laying down underneath the charging lineman who came free? Has to be huge, right?) and never getting the ball stripped, and it's beautiful to watch.


• I want Tom Brady's possible legacy of being the best QB of his generation dead and buried. If Peyton wins this Super Bowl, and especially if he wins it in either heroic or blowout fashion, his legacy will be significantly burnished, especially considering that Tom Brady's has been overseeing the downfall of Rome over the last two years. (Not that it's his fault, by any means. He didn't even play in one of those two years. But twenty years from now, our memories will be hazier and we'll remember that he was still the quarterback of the Patriots while they fell apart.) It's nothing personal against Tom Brady, really. It's just that I hate the guy.


• Pierre Garcon, Haitian-American. Also, his college football team was the Purple Raiders.


• I think it would be funny to watch how the media deals with the coaching staff of the Colts. Super Bowl-winning coaches are supposed to be revered, but this is a unique situation on the offensive side because of Peyton Manning. Tom Moore gets no credit for being the offensive coordinator on this team, as if calling plays is all a coordinator does. His game-planning, overseeing of the offensive staff, and shaping the scheme in which Manning has had so much success all fall by the wayside because, you know, Peyton makes the play calls. Then, team-wide, Jim Caldwell's Art Shell-like demeanor on the sidelines has made him an easy target for people like Bill Simmons. On top of that, you have his refusal to go for the 19-0 season still lingering in people's minds. The potential cognitive dissonance of "Jim Caldwell, Super Bowl-winning head coach" is too much to pass up.


• I like the resolute way the Colts have refused to buy into "running and defense win in the playoffs" meme. Their defense isn't terrible or anything, but it's not exactly the 2000 Ravens, either. And their run game is decidedly mediocre. They win on the backs of Manning, Wayne, and Clark. I'm for this. (Now, this means that I also was, in a certain way, for the Patriots against the Giants a few years ago, too. That's ok. I can own that contradiction.)

Now, on the Saints side of things:

• I like Drew Brees. (Yes, apparently quarterbacks matter to me a lot.) I totally buy into the awesomeness of his pregame pump-up-the-team huddles. I feel for him over the whole drama with his mom. I like that he's as good as he is despite having something less than the prototypical quarterback's body. (Not that he's JaMarcus Russell or Doug Flutie or anything. But he is pretty short.)


• I like Reggie Bush. I don't mind that he took a lot of money to play at USC. (In fact, I encourage the top players to do this. You're the ones making millions for the schools. Get yours.) Further, he gives me an excuse to continue my run of posting gratuitous photos in my posts.
  
  
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  Most importantly, though, I'd like for him to win a Super Bowl so that maybe people will stop caring, four years in to his career, whether he's a "bust" or merely "overdrafted". He is what he is, and he's still plenty young enough (did you know he's only 24?) to be even a little more than that. If the Saints can win a Super Bowl with him as a significant contributing player, then maybe we can quit talking about how they should have drafted D'Brickashaw Ferguson instead.


• I'm burying the lede here, but: New Orleans. I'm not even going to go into it, because it's all been written. Over and over and over. But suffice it to say that I'd be much happier for the city and fans of New Orleans than for the city and fans of Indianapolis.

I am, predictably, unable to come to a conclusion on this. I'd advise the players, coaches, and fan bases of both teams that I'm in a precarious state here. Any slight move by either one of them could win me over or knock me off their bandwagon. If a Saint gets into a domestic dispute tonight, I'd probably pull for the Colts. If it's revealed that Reggie Bush is secretly a huge Waylon Jennings fan, I'd probably pull for the Saints. I'm in your hands, guys.

Niche media and the Super Bowl

The Super Bowl burnout issue is another one I can talk about in theory without necessarily having any personal history with. My media consumption when I was a teenager was mainly syndicated television and whatever I was reading from the library. In college, I tuned out the mass media, in part because I was in a forest in western Massachusetts, in part because I had always-on internet for the first time, and in part because I could rely on my friends to tell me what was happening in the world at our daily lunch gatherings. Needless to say, I didn't have a lot of football-watching friends, so I missed the Super Bowl Media Explosion then, too. And then after college, my media habits were starting to form into the niche consumption that Migs talks about.


Well hello

Anyway, I started this intending to agree with Migs: it's really difficult to shove things down people's throats these days. I know about "Tik Tok" and Ke$ha, but only because I happened to hear an essay comparing the song to Avatar on NPR a few weeks ago. They played snippets during the broadcast, but I've never heard the song all the way through. And it's not like I'm one of those people who rejects pop music (i.e. I'm not That Asshole).

The big sports stories that I can remember from the past week and a half are Brett Favre's post-NFC Championship Game pictures (which I didn't look at -- I need to see that grossness?) and Joe Mauer's fake ten-year extension with the Twins. As you might guess, my news comes mostly from Twitter at this point.

I don't know how Twitter figures into this, though. Is it just an evolution of blogs and the like, down to how certain things become hits and others fly entirely under your radar depending on who you follow? Or is there more to it than that? Certainly it's more personal -- I'm much more confident that Peter King reads his @replies than I am that he reads comments on his columns or blog posts. (I got an obnoxious direct message from Ric Bucher the other day, for instance, and my list of "awesome celebrity encounters on Twitter" includes Bill Willingham, Michael Cudlitz, Colson Whitehead, and Tom Lenk.) But putting aside the interactivity point, I haven't figured out whether Twitter represents an evolution in what we see and read and hear in the way that the widespread availability of internet access represented an upgrade over television and newspapers, or the way that the invention of blogs represented an upgrade over a web culture that revolved around a couple of major sites.

Super Bowl Oversaturation

Wojo, I don't think you're as much of an outlier on music as you think. Those awesome record stores where the "music community" existed? Not real. No one's best friend was actually the guy behind the counter at a music shop, except maybe rock writers (who were there constantly). Listening to music was a solo endeavor that people mostly did in their rooms. People talk about music as much now as we used to - in fact, we're forced to talk about it more to find out about new bands.

Honest question: am I alone in feeling that the "Super Bowl is overhyped" meme is overhyped? Already, there's been stories, as there are every year, that all the stories have been overdone. And I guess this is true if you watch ESPN all day, because the Super Bowl is, naturally, a top story. But there's where the internet comes in, right? If you work, or are on the move, you get your sports news on the internet; this in turn means you can tailor your consumption on stories. For the Super Bowl, I've read the columns from the football writers I usually read (and they tend to avoid the cliched storylines at all times). I'm not burned out on the Super Bowl - I'm getting excited for the game.

This perhaps an unexpected change in the way we consume media: the things that get "shoved down our throats" are less overwhelming because they're easier to avoid. The #1 song in the country (I had to look it up - its something called Tik Tok by Ke$ha) isn't everywhere, because there's so many entertainment options that don't feature it. So if you hear it and do enjoy it, you're less likely to burn out on it (easy comparison: I completely burned out on Coldplay's "Clocks" in 2003; I didn't burn out on "Viva La Vida" at all). It improves our enjoyment of the big things.

A personal perspective on the splintering of music

I could be the poster child for Migs's comments about how people consume music these days. In middle school, I fell asleep listening to 102.5 KDON, and I could sing all the R&B and hip-hop songs on the radio. ("All the gangbangers forgot about the drive-by ...") I watched Beach MTV every single day during summer vacation, and not just while I ate lunch -- I'd watch it from beginning to end. Yes, I was twelve or thirteen, so Daisy Fuentes in a bikini was a very large part of this, but she wasn't the only thing; I also loved the Blind Melon, Dr. Dre, Bone Thugs, Counting Crows, and Coolio videos, not to mention one-hit wonder classics like Ahmad's "Back in the Day".


(blatant excuse to run a bikini photo of Daisy Fuentes? You hush!)

(By the way, I'm suddenly doubting the very existence of Beach MTV, because I can't seem to find any sign of it online, and it's not on Daisy's IMDB page. Did I make it up? Did I mix up both the name and the host?)

And where am I now? I've seen Taylor Swift's video where she claims she's a nerd who never gets the boy once. (Quick aside -- I hate that video. The song is supposed to be about remaining who you are, about the inner truth, the connection between two people, being more important than the physical appearances, right? So why does the nerdy girl have to take off her glasses and doll herself up to get the boy to notice her at the dance?) I couldn't tell you five albums that were nominated for Grammys, although I know from Keith Law's Twitter that Silversun Pickups were nominated for Best New Artist even though "Lazy Eye" was a huge smash a few years ago. ("A huge smash" in my understanding being that it was played on KEXP four times a day.)

I don't want to oversell things, because when I look at the list of Best Album nominees, I can tell you who all these people are. I was, in fact, aware of the existence of all five artists, and four of the albums. (The one I didn't know, which is either odd or completely appropriate, was the entry from the Dave Matthews Band. I truly had no idea they released an album in 2009.)

Until Migs mentioned it, though, I'm not sure I realized just how out of touch I was. Part of this is that music never has been a communal experience for me. I think I attended my first live show after I graduated college. In high school, I listened to "alternative" more or less as a means of differentiating myself from the R&B and hip-hop masses. (Yes, I was the stereotype, listening to Nine Inch Nails because nobody I knew got me.) I've been to Fun Fun Fun Fest, a fantastically eclectic two-day festival in Austin, twice, alone each time.

In some ways, this has been a blessing: even as my music tastes pushed farther away from what was on the radio, I was never sucked into those awful "have you heard X" bragfests that rock critics and hipsters (who all just want to be rock critics anyway) insist on engaging in.

But more importantly, because even when I had a shared knowledge of the current music with my peers, I didn't really know I had it, I didn't realize that we were losing that community until it had become so obvious that even Entertainment Weekly would acknowledge it. This has left me with an intellectual understanding that music is not what it used to be (the simultaneous deaths of music magazines, record sales, record stores, and music television, including the VMAs) without any strong emotional feelings about it one way or the other. I can't miss conversations about can't-miss musical moments that never happened in the first place.

(By the way, of all the videos I linked to in the above paragraph, there was only one that I actually felt the need to rewatch from beginning to end, and that was Bone Thugs' "Crossroads". Whatever inferences you care to draw ...)

On the Relevance of Musical Awards

Taylor Swift won a bunch of Grammys last night, including "Album of the Year." But if a fairly small percentage of music listeners have heard the album, or its competitors, why should anyone care?

I'll ignore the meta-question about whether music awards make sense at all - judging aesthetic pieces of art as to their objective value is fairly silly. But accepting a world in which its reasonable to give albums star ratings (or number ratings, if you're Pitchfork), award shows still require more than that to be relevant. They need a shared experience.

When I was younger, I enjoyed the MTV Video Music Awards a lot. In fact, my first conversation with my high school best friend was about the 1997 VMAs (remember that one? Busta Rhymes and Martha Stewart, Sting and P. Diddy, Bruce Springsteen and the Wallflowers - lot to discuss the day after). The reason why? Everyone watched the same videos. Everyone had opinions about which one was best because, even if they preferred music that wasn''t represented in the show, they knew enough about the people who were a part of it to have an opinion.

Now? I see a handful of music videos every year, and those generally once or twice. For the Grammys - if I don't like something a good deal, its unlikely that I'll listen to it. Before the internet/iPods/smart phones, even if someone had non-mainstream music interests, they had to interact with mainstream music via the radio, or music video, or just the opinions of their peers. And not just the occasional "oh, I heard that Taylor Swift song a few times, and I liked that one Beyonce song" - exposure was pretty constant. Now? I had only the vaguest notion of who Taylor Swift was until she played SNL, and even then I fast-forwarded through her performances after the first 30 seconds. It wasn't until Kanye interrupted her that I realized how big she was. [By the way, hasn't Kanye suffered enough? He wasn't at the Grammys, I presume because no one lets him go to any awards show anymore. The dude made Taylor Swift's Q rating double. Can't people let it go?]

So I honestly hadn't listened all the way through to any Album of the Year candidates. My main rooting interest was for "I'm on a Boat" in that R&B Collaboration category. Once I realized the interesting performances were over (and really, they were done when Gaga and Elton finished the opening), I turned it off. And I don't think I was alone. Heck, a lot of people probably didn't even turn it on.

Weirdly, the only award show the Grammys might have a longer lifespan than are the VMAs, which are really pointless, now that watching music videos seems so 1997. MTV should just have music performances surrounding a reality TV awards show. Live music + reality TV? Now THAT would be very 2010.

Watching football

Malcolm Gladwell's New Yorker piece on football made an explicit comparison to dog-fighting, and Migs's post talks about boxing. The distinction that I think will save football is that it's not intentionally dangerous the way the other two sports are. The entire concept of dog-fighting and boxing is to physically damage your opponent. (Dog-fighting has the additional lack-of-free-will issue, but that's peripheral to the point here.) While football has violence built in (you have to tackle the other guy to stop them from scoring), it doesn't contain intent to injure. In fact, intent to injure will get you suspended, fined, etc. Thus, even without any changes to the current ruleset, it is more palatable than boxing.

Of course, that doesn't necessarily take it over the threshold of acceptability, because boxing is really far below the line. Furthermore, with the evidence of the danger of traumatic concussions having gone mainstream, I would hope that the sport could not legitimately continue without making some kinds of changes.

The danger of changes, though, is that they'll respond to the wrong problem. Bill Simmons has mentioned a variety of times that he wants new concussion rules in place involving automatic time-off for concussions, including a full year after a second concussion in a season. But this doesn't come anywhere near addressing the findings Gladwell wrote about: offensive linemen don't report concussions all that often. They just slam and slam and slam and then, after they're retired into obscurity, they get stupid and then they die. It's particularly insidious because the glamour players in the league aren't the ones affected by this. Dan Marino and Deion Sanders are television commentators. Jonathan Ogden is not.

In terms of concrete changes, I'm in favor of mandating the principles of the A-11 offense. I think you could combine this with widening the field (why on football and basketball play on the same dimensions they've always played despite radical increases in the size and athleticism of the players mystifies me) to essentially eliminate trench warfare.

Of course, players would still get hit and concussions would still happen. But I think technology and continued crackdowns on "defenseless receiver" hits could help reduce the risk to the level of acceptability.

I think we can all agree that the following video is a great example of acceptable violence in football:

Football and Boxing

In Wojo's last post, he picked up on something that's been troubling me a lot over the last NFL season - concussions, and whether it makes it not okay to watch football.

Although we've known to an extent about the negative impact of concussions for years, two articles released this fall really drove the point home. First, Jeannie Marie Laskas' piece in GQ, which featured extensive discussion of the initial research on the danger of concussions, as well as the NFL's shockingly dismissive reaction; then Malcolm Gladwell's piece in the New Yorker, which emphasized the sub-concussive head traumas that players, especially linemen, face even in practice on a daily basis. And so I found myself watching football games this year and cringing especially hard at hits to the head, and not feeling particularly comfortable with how much I enjoyed seeing a hard hit. Basically, I felt how I do when I watch boxing.

Boxing was once a dominant American sport. Boxers were among the famous sports stars, and kids dreamed of being champions. It was their path to glory. But now? Everyone knows the damage boxing can do. We see Muhammad Ali, one of the most eloquent men of the 20th century, barely able to speak. This hurts boxing on two levels. First, it makes it harder for people to watch and feel comfortable with it. Those Mike Tyson knockouts? Awesome to watch. But you can't help but cringe when you see the hapless opponent glassy eyed. [I won't even get into how creepy it can be to watch old wrestling tapes knowing what these guys are doing to their bodies via steroids, painkillers, and blows to the head.]

Second, as an effect, kids don't want to be boxers. No decent parent would let their kid box, and the kids trying to make it big? They play basketball. Far less chance of ending up a vegetable. This impacts the talent level of boxing and makes it way less fun. Bill Simmons contends that if he'd been born in the 1940s, Allen Iverson would have been one of the greatest middleweights ever, but there's no way a guy that smart was going to box nowadays.

So where does that leave football? Even if the NFL cracked down on steroids to mitigate that bigger stronger faster race that makes the game increasingly dangerous, that doesn't solve the problem - the game was always dangerous. In fact, players from the 1970s were the test cases for the first researchers. Even greater safety equipment probably can't solve the problem, experts have said. So now what? The concussion problem has become increasingly mainstream, but it probably won't really take off until we see the effects on a highly visible player or ex-players (although some would argue Terry Bradshaw counts). But when that happens - how many parents will let their kids play football? What will the decrease do to the talent level in the sport? How will that effect the enjoyability of the sport? Its a bit premature to predict a boxing-esque downward spiral, but its not far-fetched.

Sorry for being such a downer - its Super Bowl week! There's going to be parties! Two best teams in football! It's going to be fun.

By the way, this proves a point I've made for a long-time about March Madness and major tennis tournaments - while early upsets are fun, you don't want too many of them. When you get too many, you end up with weird, uncompelling matchups in the later rounds. Its much better for the best teams to advance and give us potentially classic games in the semifinals and finals. Minnesota and New Orleans were the two best teams in the NFC all year - it was great to see them have a showdown we'd been expecting since October. And Colts! Saints! Two of the best offenses in football, led by iconic QBs? How great is that for a Super Bowl? This is a way better outcome than a string of upsets leading to Ravens-Eagles.

McGwire! Merriman! Morals!

I think it's interesting that you bring up the spitball and the bigger-faster-stronger issues in baseball and football in relation to moralistic arguments.

First, a big part of the reason doctoring the ball became illegal was because Ray Chapman got hit in the head by a Carl Mays pitch after Mays covered the ball in dirt, spit, and tobacco juice, turning the ball a color that was very difficult to distinguish to see when it was coming at his head at 85+ miles per hour. (This wasn't unique to Mays, of course. He was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. Although Chapman was definitely in the wronger place.) There's surely some truth in Ty Cobb's statement that the owners wanted more home runs, too, of course, but there was, at the time, a legit morals-based reason for the banning of the spitball.

I will also add that spitballers, scuffers, etc. get a pass from people compared to juicers. Whitey Ford was apparently a huge doctorer of baseballs, but nobody wants to kick him out of the Hall of Fame. Brian Moehler earned the loving nickname "Scuffy" from the Baseball Prospectus crew after he was caught with sandpaper in his glove. Now, Moehler's not a guy anyone's going to be having Hall of Fame arguments about, but after his suspension was over, he just went right back to mediocre pitching. He moved on with his life in a way that Barry Bonds or Mark McGwire will never be able to do.

Second, steroids in football can have the same moral component now that everyone has read Malcolm Gladwell's piece about head injuries in football. The bigger, faster, and stronger players are, the more force they're putting into hits, and the worse the players are all going to end up. And yet it's not clear anyone cares.

I think that's probably the part about morals arguments that bother me the most. It's not so much that we make them at all in a realm where they just don't apply, it's that we make them in such blatantly inconsistent ways. Mark McGwire played 250 more games than he would have without steroids. Shawne Merriman used steroids to get stronger and faster so he could earn the nickname "Lights Out" for causing serious head trauma to opposing players. Exactly one of these players has earned the public's everlasting enmity.

The NFL and "Morality"

Your point about most bad sports arguments being about morality really struck a chord, because it may be the most frustrating thing about following sports. This is particularly true if you read old sportswriters, the ones that write for newspapers and want to expound on how its grit and toughness that lead to success - as if both the winners and losers about the professional level aren't tough and aren't trying. The fact is, the outcome of most games is about who's better, and the ones that aren't are based on how well players execute in the end-game - but pretty much every study has concluded that there's no such thing as "clutch" players who actually raise their games in these situations. Players play at their level, and if they don't succeed in one game, it doesn't mean they're "chokers."

But if people thought of sports as being just about skill and luck, would as many people care? This gets to your third point. The NFL knows how to appeal to fans. Those classic NFL Films presentations, with that deep, strong voice of John Facenda narrating epic slow-mos? That voice sounded like the voice of God.



That sense of strength, grandeur, of a moral battle being waged on a GRIDIRON (or better yet, a FROZEN TUNDRA) is what puts the NFL above the NBA and definitely above baseball. You know why the NFL fans don't care about steroids? Because the NFL is about being bigger, stronger, gaining any edge you can. Baseball was always less comfortable with players seeking a competitive edge (putting *spit* on a ball is evil).

Overtime in three parts

Three thoughts on NFL overtime. First, a couple of rule suggestions of my own. Second, on the topic of bad arguing in sports. Third, on the NFL and public relations.

Rule Suggestions

Nobody has any unique ideas on overtime anymore, but I'll throw out two that I like.

1. College-rules, but no field goals allowed. What's the play everyone loves way more than a 40-yard field goal? Fourth and four with the game on the line. This format would practically guarantee a couple of those. Of course, the right of response is still infinite, but I'm ok with that, because the touchdown (and like in college, you'd require two-point conversions after the first couple of OT periods) requirement should keep things reasonable.


2. Take the NBA's rule and just play one ten-minute period, regular rules. The danger is that that's just long enough for each team to have one possession and score, so maybe instead of regular rules, you again say "no field goals allowed".

The meta-argument

Ok, now given those eminently reasonable ideas, let's move on to something significantly less reasonable: people arguing about things like this. The classic argument in favor of the current overtime system is "the defense should be able to make a stop". I've never understood why, though, someone finds himself able to make this argument without making the simple maneuver of flipping it around: the team that started with the ball never had to make a stop. If you want to make it such a big deal that you should be able to play defense to win a game, why not make the winning team ... play defense to win the game?

It's not even so much the fact that it's a bad argument that frustrates me. It's that it's a bad argument that itself contains the seeds of its own refutation, if only the person making the argument would take two seconds out of his own head to look at things a different way.

Most bad sports argumentation is, thankfully, not of this form. The more typical problematic debating comes from post hoc attempts to justify opinions formed based on vague moral senses -- think about the kinds of things people say about steroids, or Shoeless Joe Jackson, or Gilbert "Finger Gunz" Arenas.

What's fascinating about the overtime debate is that there's almost no way to impose a moral dimension because, as one Tweeter correctly pointed out, all we're trying to do is find a tiebreaker rule that balances the twin aims of allowing the better team to win while also not just playing the game all over again. I bring this up, because that person's actual tweet didn't go far enough to fully make this point. Instead, he basically pulled an Allen Iverson. "We talkin' 'bout a tiebreaker! Think about it! A tiebreaker! Not a game, a tiebreaker!" The problem is that this is apparently supposed to be an argument for the status quo, and that's just silly. Just because it's a tiebreaker doesn't mean that it's permissible to let it be a patently unfair rule.

Throw overtime to the lions

To point my rhetorical guns at the NFL now: what possible reason could there be for not changing the rule? The NFL is an entertainment product. For all that television shows get turned into watered-down pieces of shit, not truly worth of being called art, by the time they're on TV (hi, FOX! How'd Dollhouse turn out after you fucked with the first half of Season 1? Oh, it blew and didn't get ratings? Gee!), the networks focus-group things to death and do end up putting out product that a lot of people want to see. (Those people just happen to be philistines is all.) But the NFL doesn't have any obligation or desire to be art. It merely needs to please the audience. And guess what? The audience is not pleased! Isn't that all that matters?

NFL overtime

Wojo, if we're going to discuss sports, this was almost bound to come up. NFL overtime sucks. The fact that a team losing the coin flip can lose the game without touching the ball is unfair, even if studies have found that the coin flip winner wins "only" 60% of the time. Plenty of people have hashed out the pluses and minuses of the current system (Brian Burke does a fine job in the post linked above), but I think most people agree the NFL needs to do something different. The question is what.

College overtime, where teams trade drives beginning at the opponents' 25 yard line until one team wins, is fair, but absurd. The games can take forever, as the drives are unclocked and the right of response is endless. 5 hour football games are not fun. Plus, since the drives begin in field goal range, OT + bad offenses = college kickers repeatedly attempting to make 40 yard field goals, which is painful and agonizing viewing. Remember that Penn State-Florida State "classic" in the Orange Bowl? Yikes.

I'm going to swipe an idea that's already being used by af2, the Arena Football League's minor league (although, since the AFL folded, I guess its the major arena football league now). Teams each get one possession, and then its sudden death.

First, you add in basic fairness. Both teams touch the ball, guaranteed.

Second, it wouldn't take all that much longer than current OT. You'd tack on maybe 20 minutes, tops, unless the sudden death aspect took a long time, and that's already an issue in the current format.

Most importantly, that second possession becomes immensely fun. What happens if the first team scores a TD, and the second team responds: do you go for 2 to end the game, or kick the PAT and give the first team the ball back? If the first team scores a FG, do you play for a FG or a TD on 4th and short? Anything that would allow us all to mock Andy Reid and Brad Childress decision-making more often is an excellent addition to the NFL.

On yesterday's OT game: did anyone besides Brad Childress think it was a good idea to put the ball in Favre's hands when they needed a few yards to improve the field goal distance? When the announcers suggested throwing, everyone immediately said "Of course not. Its Brett Favre. He's going to throw an interception." Then, he did. Congrats to Favre on picking the most epic way to throw the sucker punch to Vikes fans' guts that we knew was coming all year. Truly stunning.

Why people hate the Lakers

I don't think the Laker hate is too complicated.

First, there's a general backlash against teams with national followings. This is true of the Yankees, the Cowboys, and any of the Boston teams. Everyone's had to deal with front running or transplant Laker fans. So that's a part of it.

Then, you have to add on that the Lakers are from LA, home of Hollywood and thus of celebrities. In addition to the general dislike of the major cities that I discussed in the LeBron post, the Lakers are particularly egregious because of Hollywood. Not only do celebrities live there - they show up to Laker games all the time. The Lakers come off as the team of the rich and famous, and nobody wants to cheer for the team all the rich people cheer for.

Most of this leads to people projecting hatred onto the players. Players traits can generally be viewed positively or negatively - Jordan either "knew how to take over a game" or "was a massive ballhog" depending on how people felt about him and the team.

Kobe also suffers from the A-Rod problem - neither is a really naturally social person, but they both want to be liked. A-Rod, ironically, improved this by stop trying to get people to like him after the steroid stuff happened. He started dating Kate Hudson, did nothing but hit baseballs, and suddenly people liked him more. Kobe's image is improving too - because a puppet does his ads now.

As far as the game last night goes, there's not much to say. The Lakers looked off, particularly Kobe, for most of the game. The Knicks miraculously didn't turn it over, and kept it close. Larry Hughes was terrible, and the Lakers built a lead. And no Knick could guard Pau, which makes you wonder why it took them so long to pound it inside to him. As a Knicks fan, its at least been heartening this year to not see every visiting superstar light it up, unlike last year when Kobe, LeBron, and D-Wade took turns trying to put up the most riduclous game at the Garden.

Unrelatedly, Rufus Wainwright has the best voice in pop music. That's all.

Laker-hate

Hate

I'm not going to ask your pity for my status as a basketball fan. The Lakers went to the NBA Finals six times in the last decade and hoisted the trophy four times. I've gotten to root for a top-five point guard (Magic), shooting guard (Kobe), center (Shaq), coach (Phil), and GM (West). I currently get to cheer for one of the classiest players in the entire league (Fisher), and two of the strangest (Odom and chilled-out late-career Artest). I got to see the team almost win it all while getting major contributions from a Slovenian who nicknamed himself "The Machine". Really, don't pity me.

But still -- why the hate? Yeah, Kobe probably raped a girl, but people hated him long before that. On any other team, he's just the ultra-competitive guy who probably takes too many shots but really does honestly think it's the best thing for the team. On the Lakers, he's the antichrist. Or Kareem -- think about how Bill Simmons talks about him. I'm not even sure what the guy did besides score more points than anybody else in the history of the NBA. (Oh, and win six NBA championships and three college championships too.) On any other team, Simmons doesn't even know who he is, but on the Lakers, he's a "ninny". Pau Gasol is the newest target. He's exactly the same player as he was for years in Memphis, but now, Shannon Penn feels the need to tweet offensive things regarding which part of the female anatomy he resembles.

So: why? The obvious comparison is to the Yankees, but the NBA is not baseball. In baseball, people hate the Yankees as a symbol of the competitive imbalances that come with the MLBPA successfully resisting the imposition of a salary cap. The Lakers have spent and do spend more money than most teams, but not by an order of magnitude.

Is it just because they win a lot? The 49ers won a ton of football games in the '80s, but I don't know anyone who hates them. Nor has L.A. has ever won in a particularly hateable fashion -- everyone loves Showtime, and team has never been a group of thugs like the '80s Pistons. Hell, one of the dirtiest plays in NBA history was perpetrated on the Lakers, not by them:



L.A. did seem to get help from on high in that famous 2002 series against the Kings, but people also think the NBA conspired to put Patrick Ewing in New York, but does anyone hate the Knicks? And, hey, Cleveland happened to win the lottery the year the greatest NBA draftee who happened to be from Akron was in the draft.

I even googled the words "hate" and "Lakers" to see what happened. And I got things like (seriously) "Pau doesn't shave", "Phil Jackson complains about the officials", "the Lakers are just lucky because they won even though Shaq couldn't hit free throws", "Rick Fox wants to be an actor", "Derek Fisher cried after losing in the playoffs", and "the fans put flags on their cars". I don't even know what to say to these. (Of course, by googling this, you also get to read things like, from 2005: "Phil and Kobe will never win a championship together again unless they can get LeBron in a Laker uniform!" Eat it, bitch.)

So basically, I got nothin'. I don't have a clue what it is that sets the Lakers apart as the NBA equivalent of the Yankees, the team that other fans love to hate.

Tonight's game

I'd talk more about tonight's game, but I don't know if this blog is really the place to get into the type of analysis I'm prone to right after I watch a game. There aren't any larger cultural implications of the fact that L.A. worked the inside-out game very effectively, for instance. I will say that I'm getting a little tired of guys fouling Shannon Brown all the time. Sometimes he gets out in the open court and he looks like a wee LeBron, eyes only for the basket, long strides, starts to take the ball up high ... and then boom comes some 6'7" oaf grabbing him by the arms and not letting him electrify the crowd. I think it's happened once in each of the last three Lakers games I've watched. As they say on ESPN, c'mon man!

In re: Henin

Being completely honest, I root for Henin because of her name. Years ago, especially when she still had the "-Hardenne" part of her name, I think everyone just Anglicized it and called her "HEN-in". Then people started realizing that that's not really her name, and it sort of morphed into "EN-in". Then, about a year before her retirement (in my entirely subjective memory), it morphed into its present form: "eh-NEH". I really just enjoy hearing Pam Shriver and Mary Jo Fernandez contort themselves over her name.

I do actually like watching her, though. I like how powerful she is despite being 5'6", 130 lbs. She's not built like Serena or Venus or Lindsay Davenport, but she hits that one-handed backhand, the deadly forehand, big serves ... She plays Big Babe Tennis with the physical stature of any random young lady on the street. She's the same size as Marion Bartoli!

Also, I have this weird weakness for one-handed backhands. Even on the men's side, you don't see it that often, but for whatever reason, I just find it much more aesthetically pleasing than the two-handed version.

And finally, I like rooting for late-career players and comeback players. Current examples include James Blake, Lleyton Hewitt, Henin, Kim Clijsters, even Roger Federer and Venus Williams to an extent -- it's really only true in tennis, but I enjoy watching the grizzled vets try to stave off the up-and-comers in what is, more than many sports, a very young persons' game.

Justine Henin

You tweeted last night about going to cheer for Justine Henin. Really? I've always found her inherently annoying. Just something about her manner, her game, her face - she's aesthetically unpleasing to me in every way. There's no beauty in her game - or at least much less than someone like Kim Clijsters, who's fun to watch even when she's not playing well. Her movement is exciting - those splits on the run! Incredible. Defend yourself, Wojo.

A short, slightly inebriated response

I caught the end of Lakers-Cavs in a bar after a dinner I attended tonight in Little Italy. (Did you know the Italian-American Museum in New York has a Danilo Gallinari signed jersey? I was way too excited by this. I think the director, who I've known a long time, was mildly put off by how excited I was about the jersey in relation to the other exhibits.) Not a great last two minutes for the Lakers, but doesn't it seem that the Odom/Artest combo would, over 7 games, wear down LeBron? Particularly notable - in the end game, LeBron had no one to pass to. It just doesn't seem like the Cavs could beat the Lakers in a series, even if they won both in the regular season.

Tomorrow night, I hope to catch as much of the game as possible, although I have promised a nice dinner to Meghan. At worst, I will see the Knicks in 60 broadcast the morning after. My only prediction: Kobe goes for less than 61 this time. But 40 is definitely on the table.



Keith Hernandez's lack of a filter is what makes him so much fun. No, he's not the most advanced guy in terms of baseball thinking, but he's a legitimately smart guy. More importantly, he will meander onto almost anything, like when he and Gary Cohen went on a long discussion last season about the Furry convention they encountered at their hotel in Pittsburgh.

Finally, watching the Australian Open - how beautiful is the 5th set? And I don't mean a specific match (although Gonzalez-Korolev prompted this). Tell me anytime that two players have played even through 4 sets, and I'll watch the end. Its the greatest test of, not heart (that's the old sportswriter cliche), but nerve - you can always feel the tension, and the man who plays through it best is often the victor. When I worked at the US Open, I'd often sprint around when my shift ended to find 5th sets happening around the grounds. Good times.

The Odd Couples -- Kobe/LeBron and Ron/Keith

I'd like to get this one last post in tonight before tomorrow night's big (ok, "big") Lakers-Knicks tilt at the Garden, in re: which I think we were planning on each watching and talking about on the blog. It looked like a game the Knicks might be able to steal, coming as a back-to-back after the actually big Lakers-Cavs matchup, but then L.A. lost tonight mainly by refusing to expend any energy at all, so the back-to-back aspect of things may not be a huge issue after all. That said, Phil Jackson is not going to be happy with the team tonight, and Pau Gasol is going to be especially angry at himself for missing the tying free throws with twenty-four seconds to play. The question is what this does to their mental state, though, because, let's be frank, this is a fragile team. Lamar Odom goes into funks, Ron Artest gets distracted, Pau and Andrew Bynum allow their frustration to take hold of them, and Kobe is prone to doing too much when his teammates go into their various fugues. Derek Fisher used to be a stabilizing force, but he's just not good enough to be that anymore. If I had to make a prediction, I'd predict a blowout. I honestly can't tell you who's going to blow out who, but I think one team or the other loses by 20 tomorrow night.

I think your comment about the Jordan Path, and how LeBron seems to be attempting to follow it squarely, is dead-on, and I unfortunately don't think I have much to add there. I do think it's funny how the puppet versions of Kobe and LeBron are basically the opposite of how they seem to be in real life. Kobe's puppet is outlandish, a braggart, loud, a little nutty. LeBron's puppet kind of plays the put-upon older brother. The best recent illustration of this is during the shoe-fire video: when the fireman tells Kobe that his shoe is "too hot", we cut to LeBron, who just goes "here we go". And indeed, there goes Kobe. I'm not sure who made this choice and why, but for whatever reason, I can't imagine the puppets being quite as funny if the characters were reversed. Here's the video, if you (not you, Migs; you, Dear Reader) somehow haven't seen it:



So as long as I'm talking about the relationship between two media figures, let me jump back to Ron Darling and Keith Hernandez. If I had to guess (and I do -- I'm a blogger!), I would think they hate each other professionally and are completely indifferent to each other personally, because three hours of a broadcast is about all the time they want to spend together. Ron, and I'm not just saying this because he went to Yale (believe me, I'm the last person to be awed by an Ivy League pedigree), has a much more intellectual approach to the game than Keith does. (I'm not in the habit of addressing guys by their first names, but for Ron and Keith, it just seems to fit. Something about broadcasters, I guess.) Keith feels the game. It's an emotional experience from start to end, and his analysis (or lack thereof, if you want to be harsh about it) reflects that. He's not quite Joe Morgan, but this isn't a guy known for Hershiseran analysis of pitch sequences, bullpen machinations, big-picture roster moves, and so forth.


This, I think, is why he puts his foot in his mouth from time to time, like his famous "women don't belong in the dugout" incident. He's just not going to think before he talks. It's not in his skillset. Even his apology for the women comment included the line "You know I love you ladies out there." He clearly doesn't get what it was that was offensive about what he said in the first place, and why "I love you ladies" doesn't make anyone feel better about it. Ron Darling, I am confident, would understand, and in fact does already understand, to the point where he'd never say something insane like that in the first place.

That's is why I imagine that the Darling-Hernandez relationship must resemble how I'd feel if I were forced to sit in a tiny room and talk about sports for three hours with Bill Simmons. His belief that luck is actually a thing in the universe, his dismissal of new ways of thinking about sports (unless it fits his conclusions), his ... well, I don't really need to catalogue all of it. It's been done better than I ever could by the likes of Jonathan Lethem, Bethlehem Shoals, and Sherman Alexie for New York Magazine. And it'll just get me riled up.

The point is that I think I'd end up stabbing Simmons in the press room. Since I see myself as Ron Darling and Simmons as Keith, I hope my point has been made clear.

Of course, my entire worldview necessitates that I dismiss all the above as rank speculation, for entertainment purposes only, because I have no idea how Ron and Keith feel about each other beyond that they apparently can cohabitate during Mets games just fine.

LeBron and "The Jordan Path"

Matt Damon's charity does something for kids, right? I recall that from his Entourage cameo and 8 million ads for it before and after the show. He kept screaming "Do it for the kids!" at Vince.

As for Ron Darling, its worth recalling that the Mets had a Hawaiian player (Sid Fernandez), a guy who'd played in French Canada (Gary Carter), and one of the smartest baseball managers at the time (Davey Johnson). That was an exceptionally weird group on the whole. I'm really fascinated by the relationship that he and Hernandez, who do color commentary for Mets games now, might have. Were they friends in the 80s? Did Ron ever try blow with him? Did they go drinking as a group, but Keith and Doc and Darryl disappeared into the bathroom for awhile while Ron and Tim Teufel ordered more beers? Did they not like each other then but have become friends now? All possibilities.

I take your point about celebrities. It seems like they're hiding something because, well, they are. No matter how exposed they choose to be, via Twitter or blogs or the like, or how exposed the paparazzi make them, there has to be a natural inclination to not have everything judged. It screws you up. John Mayer (not to keep coming back to him, but he's been in the news lately and on tour, so I'm both listening to tapes of his shows and reading interviews with him - its sort of a weird combination) recently said something to Rolling Stone about how when he fantasizes about a girl now, the paparazzi are there, too. (You know what? The full quote is worth it: I have not had a woman appear in my dreams sexually without a paparazzi in the dream too [in the past 3 years]. I can't even have a wet dream without having to explain to someone who's grinding on me, "We can't do this right now, because there's a guy over there taking pictures.") He's in the give away "everything" camp most of the time, but I'm not sure its as effective for a guy as for a girl. Megan Fox says the crazy shit, but mostly what people remember from the articles about her are the pictures. Meanwhile, John Mayer tries to be funny with paparazzi and be open about stuff, and he mostly ends up seeming like a douchebag (I still can't tell whether he is or not - but that's a post for another day, I think).

Which brings us to LeBron (who's been one of my favorite subjects for almost two years now - I've been anticipating his free agency so long I can't quite comprehend that its almost here). He's basically attempted the Jordan Path to global domination. The Jordan Path is about being charming and likable, but also being a blank slate so that you become relatable to everyone. We didn't know about his friends, his romantic relationships, or anything. In terms of political leanings, Jordan, when asked to get involved in a Senate race against conservative, racist North carolina Senator Jesse Helms, famously said "Republicans buy sneakers too." Its a combination of likability with an absence of unlikability. [The Tiger Path, for those keeping score, is the Jordan Path minus personality. I'm pretty sure the Tiger path can only work for golfers - athletes in other sports couldn't be completely quiet and still seem like the most charismatic person in the profession and pile up endorsements.] The Jordan path relies on that show of a personality to be contained though - no one really knew anything about Jordan other than what he showed on the court and in commercials. There was the gambling thing, but that got swept under the rug by his baseball sojourn.

The same is basically true of LeBron. What do we know about him, other than the bandwagon fan thing and that he's surrounded himself with childhood friends? We know how he acts on the court, and we infer things about his personality from that, as you discussed. He doesn't even appear in his own advertisements anymore! They have a puppet do it! (The same is true of Kobe too, but Kobe's not naturally as gregarious as LeBron seems to be - Kobe benefits much more from being played by a puppet than LeBron does). [And btw, I LOVE MVPuppets. Puppet Kobe especially cracks me up.]

LeBron wants to seem engaging, but he also wants to be, essentially, pretty boring. I don't know what skeletons are lurking in his closet. And I agree with you that it would be easier to have something come out when he was playing in a major city, at least in terms of quality of life (even without stuff coming out, quality of life would improve tremendously. Wayne Gretzky said in his 30 for 30 doc that was a main reason for him going from Edmonton to LA - Edmonton was a fish bowl, and LA let him be normal). But what I'm really interested in what following the Jordan Path means for his team choice.

There's the sense that LeBron's brand becomes bigger if he goes to a big city. But that move would make him somewhat less likable. Rural and suburban types to resent the city folks' attitude of superiority. The perception that LeBron needs to leave bumfuck, Ohio to be a real star would make a lot of people mad (heck, maybe it already does). Plus, people perceive him as loyal to his hometown, and whether he is or not, he knows that people perceive this. And finally, just the process of changing uniform, seeming new and different... its not part of being everything to everyone. The Global Icon needs to be a constant.

Of course, Jordan went off and played baseball. That wasn't part of the plan either. Maybe LeBron really wants to go somewhere else, start fresh, be a big fish in a big pond. He might come to New York. I pray he does. But I think we might be mixing up which would be the brand-motivated decision and which would be the self-actualizing one.

A final aside - if you haven't seen, Vince Young got named to the Pro Bowl. No, no one decided he was one of the top 3 quarterbacks in the AFC - but Brady, Rivers, Roethlisberger, and Palmer have all backed out. Matt Schaub was excellent this year and a good replacement for Brady, but Young started 10 games and basically did best by handing off to Chris Johnson. Now, I don't blame Young for accepting the honor, nor do I blame the other guys for backing out of the opportunity to get hit again after a season of wear and tear. Here's the thing: if it makes sense that nobody wants to play in it, why have the Pro Bowl at all? Its not like people watch it. Its not like there's fun events like the Home Run Derby and Dunk Contest that surround it. Why bother? Football where the goal is not to get hurt isn't really very interesting to watch. Just name an All Pro team and be done with it. That, or turn the Pro Bowl into a flag football game played the afternoon of the Super Bowl.