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.

Image-creation and LeBron James

Beginning with the paparazzi, the question for me is whether there really is some amorphous thing that makes it seem that the celebrities are hiding something or whether today's celebrities have developed this ability to always actually hold something back, to make sure that there is some piece of self that they can feel belongs only to them and not to us. The fact that I bring this up tells you which direction I lean in. There are the little things, like Tom Cruise's sense of humor, Shaquille O'Neal's philandering, or Matt Damon's charity work (maybe you read the Esquire story that talked about his foundation, which he basically refuses to talk about) that you only get hints and pieces about. (In Shaq's case, of course he's not going to talk about it, but the little hints and pieces we get don't come from him, unlike they might from other stars.)

Then there is, as you allude to regarding Tom Cruise, the bigger thing: why are so few stars, especially male stars, publicly out? The theory has always been "people won't watch a gay star," or, at least, "the studios are so afraid that people might not watch a gay star that they just won't take the risk." Neil Patrick Harris is exploding this idea a little bit, but of course even he was closeted for a good long while. But besides Cruise, there are the ever-present rumors about Tobey Maguire, the infamous Kevin Spacey outing, Jodie Foster's years of coyness on the issue, Mike Piazza straddling that metrosexual/gay line, and on and on. That's not even mentioning Diddy. Or David Hyde Pierce, who didn't come out until a few years ago. Or the inside info I have on Jake Gyllenhaal.

Anyway, we've got these constant rumors about this guy or that guy, but are we so sure that people are still holding back on the advice of their agents and managers and publicists? Or has it morphed into something else, something where, with all the rest of your business hanging out for everyone to see, you have to hold something back, there has to be something you won't have to talk about with the magazine profile writer. And if you're picking something, maybe something as big as being gay (not that it should be big, but there's a lot of shoulds in the world that aren't) would be what you'd pick.

The people who go the other direction, who attempt to differentiate themselves by being completely out there, are fascinating cases in themselves. There're the reality TV people, of course, like the Kardashians, but I'm not even really counting them. (Maybe that's just because I don't want the shows so I don't think about them that much.) I'm thinking more of Megan Fox, or the period where Angelina Jolie and Billy Bob Thornton were married. All these outlandish interviews and stories come out about this one's bisexual, that one wears her husband's blood in a pendant, etc. Fox, of course, has been compared to Jolie in a variety of ways, so these interviews she gives have a whiff of cynicism -- she's so obviously emulating Angelina's outrageousness that you just can't believe anything she says. Hell, she's already retracted the bisexual comment. Angelina, at least, took a few years before she started pulling back some of the crazy stuff she and Billy Bob used to say.

It's a fascinating and savvy strategy: you give away "everything," but really, you just lie, or you blow things out of proportion, or you deflect questions about yourself by making outrageous statements about other people, etc. etc. etc. And it works because magazines aren't sending Gay Talese out to follow around Joe DiMaggio and Frank Sinatra anymore. They're sending Scott Raab (don't get me started) to get three hours with Megan Fox. If you've only got a lunchtime interview to work with, you have to build a story around what the person says, and someone can say any damn thing they want.

I shouldn't lay all the blame on the publications themselves. Megan Fox isn't letting this chubby asshole from Ohio follow her around for a whole week. She (or her people, but to us, whatever, it's the same thing) controls her image entirely.

The natural question is how LeBron fits into this. At some point, something's going to happen with him. A few things already have, like refusing to shake the hands of the playoff opponents who bested his team. But something worse is bound to happen. Maybe he'll rape someone, like Kobe. Maybe he'll have three kids out of wedlock, like a down month for Shawn Kemp. Maybe he'll stab someone, like Ray Lewis. Or, hell, maybe instead of something bad, he'll be outed. The point is, he's the guy we feel like we know because of his clowning, his ever-present smile, his attempts at going all growly-face during tense moments in games. Part of it's physical: he has a very open and expressive face, so we think we can read things there. Part of it's that we've been waiting for him since he was 16. But you have to ask whether part of it is genius image creation, because seriously, what do we really know about him? We know he was a bandwagonner in his youth because he grew up in Akron but he's a Bulls, Yankees, and Cowboys fan. And then what else? I think the Simmons story illustrates this, indirectly. Simmons creates this fantasy about LeBron and Shaq taking everyone out to dinner in L.A. and fighting over who gets to pick up the check. Do we have any evidence this could actually happen? Of course we don't. It's all based on what he's done on court and what his puppet does in those ubiquitous and hilarious Nike ads. So what's going to happen when (not if) something punctures that incredible facade? Will he become Mike Tyson? Will we just ignore it the way we ignore the fact that God-fearing, no-cursing, righteous-living Dwight Howard has a child out of wedlock with a cheerleader? Will we poke good-natured fun at him the way we do Travis Henry or Shawn Kemp? Will it more subtly change our perceptions, like how we all now know that Michael Jordan is a complete dick, or that Shaq is an immature bully?

Much as I don't like the guy, based on my feelings that he's a complete fraud, I'm actually not hoping for something bad to come out about him. It just feels inevitable. In fact, maybe that's the best way to convince him to go to New York. If he does something terrible as a Cavalier, he's in Cleveland. First, people there don't have anything to do besides talk about LeBron, so the story's talk-radio half-life would be two to three times as long as it would be if he were in a city, like New York, where people have better things to do. Second, and probably more importantly, community norms are just different. New Yorkers are used to all sorts of weird shit. Marv Albert bit his girlfriend. He's from Brooklyn. Stephon Marbury bought courtside tickets to his own team's game. Coney Island. Ron Artest made up a story about some dude getting stabbed with a table leg. Queens. Lamar Odom is addicted to candy. Queens. David Letterman slept with his assistant (although let's not get too far into that). He's not a New Yorker, but he's practically one at this point. Rudy Giuliani, a "Catholic" "Republican", has been married like six times. Ed Koch is still in the closet. Plaxico Burress shot himself.

My point here is that unless it's something really bad, something worse will happen very soon that will take Knicks' fans minds off of things. In short, LeBron can feel confident that if he keeps his nose relatively clean (and not in a Strawberry/Gooden/Hernandez/Reynolds way, let me add), he'll be better off, publicity-wise, in New York than in Cleveland.

(Quick aside, since I brought up those Mets. Was there any weirder place for a Chinese-Hawaiian-French-Canadian-American trilingual Yale grad with a dual major in French and Southeast Asian history to end up than the mid-'80s Mets? I only wish I'd known how awesome Ron Darling was during the few years he was on the A's.)

Celebrities

I actually did hear that Pam Shriver comment during the ten minutes of tennis I watched last night. That was a truly bizarre match - the 6'10 John Isner against an exceptionally short Irishman, who the announcers must have been gagging themselves to not make leprechaun jokes about. Very David v. Goliath.

Also, Pam Shriver of all people being married to James Bond (even if he is 70 and only was Bond for one mediocre movie) is really bizarre. If you're reading and have no idea who she is, just Google her. I'll wait.

Weird, right?

Tom Cruise... the first thing I thought about him when the topic came up in your post was "wow, he's crazy." And then I wondered how we got to this point with him, because there wasn't really a big CRAZY moment. He didn't bite a guy's ear like Tyson. He didn't shave his head like Britney (or marry her friend in Vegas like Britney. Or marry Kevin Federline. Or date a paparazzo. Britney's done a lot of crazy shit.). He had that interview on Today where he was jumping on the couch, but I think that just re-enforced was people already thought of him. I guess he always seemed sort of secretive and odd, and maybe that morphed into crazy over time. I recall people in the late 90s swearing up and down that Cruise was gay and that Nicole Kidman was a beard.

And I think that's the impact of our culture's increasing speed that you discuss - little things can build up over time. There wasn't a big story about Cruise, but there were lots of little ones. The country might have decided Paul Newman was crazy - but he would have needed to do one big crazy thing in the 60s to get the necessary avalanche of press. Cruise gets an avalanche of press if he just takes a walk.

I also think there's something about the way the paparazzi work that makes us feel that celebrities are hiding something, particularly if they shy away from the paparazzi (which, of course, is the more natural thing to do - the people who embrace it are the weird ones. See any of the Kardashians.). This goes both ways - it seems like, from the stories of Bill Simmons and Neil Strauss, that Tom Cruise is hiding that he's actually really funny and friendly. I would not have assumed he was hiding a hilarious side if not for firsthand testimonials.

I'm also not sure I agree about Cruise really being able to slip into roles. I think he's one of the last movie stars who's basically playing some version of Tom Cruise, Movie Star on screen. He needs a full makeover, like in Tropic Thunder, to disappear. I actually like this about him - who cares if he's "believable" as a specific character? Movie stars are meant to glide between disparate roles and remain who they are. If they lose too much of themselves in a role, its disorienting.

My biggest problem with Cruise is what's become of poor Katie Holmes. Remember when she was the hottest chick ever to smart guys? Remember when she was attractive? She lost a certain luster when she started dating Cruise for some reason, and then she started wearing weird clothes and doing weird things to her hair. Its sad. Even if we've all moved on to Mandy Moore and Christina Hendricks.

Segueing to a sports celebrity - Bill Simmons has a really interesting column on LeBron James. Every time I convince myself LeBron's not coming to the Knicks next summer, that its a pipe dream, something reminds me of how awesome it would be, and the idea sucks me right back in. Would I enjoy Wade? Yeah. Would Chris Bosh or Amare Stoudemire make it more fun to be a Knicks fan? Yeah. But no one's LeBron. He would change everything. I would get season tickets for sure. I couldn't NOT get season tickets.

I still can't figure out whether he's more or less likely to stay in Cleveland if he wins the title this year - does the title allow him to go off having given his city the title it wants? Or does it prove he can win and be the Global Icon there, so it lets him stay? - so I can't figure out if I'm cheering for them this year. But I'll be watching. Hard to turn away when LeBron's on TV.

Introductions, and the Curious Case of Tom Cruise

I like that Migs (we do love our abbreviations -- before we had even settled on the title of the blog, Migs had already brought the solid abbreviation TSP) just kicked us right off. I was moving in the direction of "here's our goal for this blog", but I'm glad Migs caught the coin flip and went somewhere else, because my way was going to bore the hell out of you.

So, right, I'm the A's / Lakers / 49ers (in that order) fan. I like tennis, too, but more peripherally -- I didn't grow up as a U.S. Open ballboy, sadly. I briefly played ultimate frisbee in college and would absolutely watch it on TV, but we're not there yet. As Migs mentioned, we kind of have a first-team / second-team thing going on. On my end, I adopted the Mets in New York, partly because they were there (and they weren't the Yankees) and partly out of loyalty to my fiancee. (I'm still getting used to that word. I've been engaged for less than a month.) (You'll note already that I do love parentheses. Sometimes nested, sometimes sequential, always awesome.) The Giants earned lifelong second-team status at the moment of the David Tyree helmet catch. I was at a friend's apartment in Riverdale (he's an older friend -- we taught together; I only mention this because if someone my age told me they were in Riverdale, I'd wonder why) watching that game, and when Tyree made that catch, we jumped and yelled and shouted as if we were actually fans of the Giants (he's a Broncos fan). It was borderline magical. There's also an "enemy of my enemy" thing going on because I grew up hating the Dallas Cowboys. The Michael Irvin - Deion Sanders slap-boxing match was one of the most thrilling moments of my childhood.

On to the movies. I saw Tropic Thunder later than a lot of people -- it was at my uncle's house over a Christmas, as I recall. He has an enormous television, and I think we watched it on Blu-Ray, not that high-def does a lot for a movie like that. I'm no Jack Black fan, and I usually find Ben Stiller's particular brand of humor insufferable (though he did have a solid episode of Extras), but Robert Downey, Jr. won me over. "That's the theme song to The Jeffersons!" is still a great line.

Tom Cruise, though -- what a fascinating topic. I'm not going into any sort of in-depth discussion of his "marriage", his "religion", or anything else except to say that it's not clear whether he's human, alien, evolved, insane, or something utterly beyond comprehension. He's a tabloid joke. He's a tiny, short little man. He's been around for years and has to have had work done at this point.

And yet! I don't remember which movie it was in front of, but I saw a trailer for Knight & Day, his sort of Mr. and Mrs. Smith-esque action comedy with Cameron Diaz. I really want to see it. And believe me, it's not for Cameron Diaz, who, after perusing IMDB for a minute, I don't think I've ever liked in a movie. No, it's for Tom Cruise. He's charismatic, he can pull off the action star moves, he's funny. He can completely get inside a character (like in Tropic Thunder, although the fat suit and bald head make saying something like "he got inside the character" sound sort of trite) or he can be all "I'm Tom Cruise and this is my movie" and he's utterly watchable either way. Think about Tropic Thunder versus War of the Worlds (for all that Tom Cruise was the star as a blue-collar dad, was it a Tom Cruise movie or a Steven Spielberg movie? To me, it was very much the latter) versus the Mission: Impossible franchise versus Michael Mann's Collateral. For someone who projects so little sexuality (compare him to George Clooney, for instance), he has an undeniable presence despite his off-screen "issues" in a way that I think is unprecedented.

Partially, it's not fair to make that comparison with Gregory Peck and Jimmy Stewart and Paul Newman because we just didn't know about those guys off the screen. The explosion of the tabloid industry, whatever it means for the culture at large, means that we've never been faced with watching people we "know" so much about before. So is Tom Cruise special, or is Tom Cruise just the ur-star, the model for the greats to come?

(Quick aside: Knight & Day is directed by James Mangold, who, prior to this movie, had a little bit of that indie/auteur pixie dust on him: he wrote and directed Cop Land, Girl, Interrupted, and Walk the Line, and directed 3:10 to Yuma. Of course, Walk the Line and 3:10 were pretty big Hollywood pictures, but you can feel a distinction between those and Knight & Day, can't you? Anyway, none of this is the most important part of his background. The important part is that he's a Columbia Film alumnus. More of that residual pride.)

(Meanwhile, what you're missing on the Aussie is your favorite person in the world, Pam Shriver. (Who, wait a minute, was married to 70-year-old former Bond George Lazenby until like six months ago? Really? Why didn't anyone tell me this?) Just now she was bitching about how she couldn't see the court through all the umbrellas and chairs and cameras between her and the court. To be fair, in the wide shot, it looks legitimately cluttered down there. Chris Fowler hilariously had to cut her off with "I'm sorry I asked," because she was about to go into a full-on rant about how she couldn't see.)

An Introduction

I've drawn (via coin flip conducted earlier this afternoon) the honor of writing the first post to this joint responsive blog. My writing partner is Jason Wojciechowski, who I will refer to as Wojo from here on out. We'll be trading posts, discussing pop culture, sports (I'm a Mets, Knicks, Giants, and tennis fan; I'll let Wojo tell you who he likes, but, weirdly, they're all the teams I liked besides the New York teams when I was a kid), and their intersection, along with whatever other tangents we end up on. I'll be the resident live music dork and the one who watches the shitty reality TV shows.

We were discussing the Golden Globes earlier (particularly Christina Hendricks' Golden Globes )
but I wanted to mention my favorite part of the drinking game at the party I was at: not only were we drinking at every mention of Haiti, as well as all praise of George Clooney, but we were going to chug if George Clooney won an award and discussed Haiti. This made us all very sad when he didn't win for Up in the Air. I'm not sure he should have won, but how could the Golden Globes rob us of what was sure to be the most smug self-aggrandizing humanitarian speech of all time? There was going to be a whole South Park episode in there. (Speaking of which - I still cannot get over the "Gingers Have Souls" video)

I'm writing this while watching Tropic Thunder. Any thoughts on this one, Wojo? I'm assuming you've seen it, since you see everything (as opposed to me - I only see everything involving Will Ferrell and Seth Rogen). Tom Cruise is surprisingly funny as the studio head. Unsurprisingly funny is the guy from Hamlet 2 as the director. Hamlet 2 is phenomenal, by the way - the story of a down on his luck drama teacher who writes a bizarre, hilarious sequel to Hamlet and convinces an absurd bunch of high schoolers to put it on. Tremendous choral soundtrack too, with an amazing version of the Elton John song Someone Saved My Life Tonight. If you haven't seen it, your complete obsession with Glee demands that you do. As a sidenote, I promise to catch up on Glee, now that they've released the first episodes on Netflix.

I would be watching the Australian Open, but it appears nothing of note is happening. This is, of course, a good thing, as much as we all love underdogs and upsets - boring beginnings to tennis tournaments (and league playoffs) make for better conclusions. A Nadal upset would be interesting now, but its overrated in comparison to the awesome Nadal-Federer final I hope is coming. Have you gotten to see any of Nadal so far? He looked absolutely terrible at the end of last year, but maybe the six weeks off has given him his legs back and let him play his style, which requires endless running.

I'm going to finish this up to watch a rerun of the Knicks game from yesterday. Prior to the game, the DVR picked up the Mike D'Antoni Show, which I'd never seen before... they're filming it literally in a hotel room (although since its the Four Seasons in Philly, there's a lovely view of Logan Square). I feel like this show would be much better if they had a "Dressing Like Mike" segment, about where he gets his suits, ties (the non-ugly ones) and how to grow such an awesome moustache.

Last thought - though I haven't read the article yet, don't think the John Mayer Rolling Stone cover is going to help his credibility. Yikes.