Category: Sports

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The Show Must Drag On

I’m not much of a fan of the San Francisco 49ers. Sure, I followed them avidly during their long, long run of great and good teams. Hey, two of the best quarterbacks and the best receiver in league history were doing their thing just across the bay, and the organization had solved a mystery most franchises never do by fielding very good squads around the superstars. There was the fun, too, in seeing a team that was one of the worst in the league in the late 1970s turn around and win the Super Bowl at the dawn of the ’80s; I drove a cab in Oakland during that 1981-82 season and the playoff run that followed, and those games made the Sunday afternoons, spent mostly doing grocery store trips and neighborhood trips to and from the local BART station, go a lot faster.

That’s all ancient history. The management that made the team great is either dead or long gone, and the 49ers have been bad for years. In our TV-less house this evening, I turned on the radio to listen to tonight’s game against the Seattle Seahawks. It was a doubly masochistic exercise in that Joe Starkey, the vapid man behind the mike for the University of California games, also does play by play for the Niners. But listening turned out to be fascinating in a dark way because the game was such a debacle. The Seahawks trampled the 49ers so badly, and the 49ers’ offense proved so feeble the few times that the defense was able to set it up with an opportunity — that Starkey and analyst Gary Plummer spent the entire fourth quarter talking about how horrible the team looked. The final score: 24-0; it was San Francisco’s seventh loss in a row.

After the game, Starkey and Plummer talked to Mike Nolan, the head coach. Nolan’s father, Dick, who coached the 49ers in the late ’60s and early ’70s, died yesterday. So that was probably part of the reason the announcers sounded apologetic asking about the game. But you had the feeling there was more to it than that. They were interviewing a guy whose ship is going down, and neither he nor they have a clue about what might be done to right the situation. Nolan sounded hoarse and spent. Plummer at one point said he saw some positives for the 49ers: their rushing game had been OK before they had to give up on the run, and the offensive line had allowed “only” three sacks of the increasingly bewildered young millionaire quarterback, Alex Smith. Nolan actually thanked Plummer for finding something to be positive about, but he didn’t sound convinced.

In the end, Nolan is just part of an entertainment enterprise that’s failing to entertain. The Niners are like a Broadway show that has bombed, finally and definitively. I suppose that the brutal and merciful thing about a Broadway show failing is that it simply dies. Unless it’s in the hands of a particularly insistent investor or producer, it just goes away. The sad thing listening to Nolan is that that’s not how it works in professional sports. It might be better for everyone to just hang up a banner at the ballpark saying future performances have been canceled because the production stinks. But in pro football, there’s always an audience. And for Nolan — you could hear it in his voice as he talked about how badly tonight’s game went — there’s no easy way out for anyone lashed to his wreck of a team. The show must drag on.

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Comets

The San Francisco Chronicle landed on our doorstep this morning for the first time in a couple of months; we actually canceled it, which is a subject worth a site unto itself, and I think the Hearst Corporation is trying to sneak back in (“You didn’t really want us to go away, did you?”); yesterday, we got a subscription offer: six months for fifteen bucks.

Anyway, the Chron materialized out of the predawn mist today. On the front page is a story about Comet Holmes, blogged here several days ago, and I wasn’t nearly at the leading edge of the Holmes enthusiasts. So yes, they’re a little late to the comet-gazing party. On the other hand, we’ve been pretty well socked in the last several evenings in the Bay Area, so no sightings from here. A couple nights ago, though, I took a quick trip up to the Sierra with my neighbor Piero, and the night sky was brilliant and clear: the comet was very bright, though you still had to know what you were looking for to find it (one apparent reason: the comet’s tail is extended directly away from Earth; so what you actually see is an immense cloud of illuminated ice and dust apparently being blown off the comet’s body).

The Chron’s story, while waxing expansively on Comet Holmes’s stunning emergence from nearly invisible object to celestial wonder, treats the phenomenon as something of an imponderable — just one of those things that astronomers scratch their heads about. The truth is, even the better-informed articles on the subject, like one last week in the Boston Globe, make it clear that no one really has a clear answer to why the comet is behaving the way it is. But there’s a range of speculation out there, and as long as you’re having your veteran science reporter write up the comet, and as long as readers are likely to be curious about the why of what they’re seeing, you might as well relay the best-educated guesswork in the field. The Chron’s story gives a couple lines to that near the end, but only after dutifully including notes from a local observer who calls the comet “amazing!” despite having his view obscured by trees and clouds.

Even if the story isn’t particularly well done, it does convey the wonder of seeing this thing that’s been invisibly sailing through space forever and suddenly reveals itself. I suppose that’s the best sort of encounter in journalism or literature: a story that uncovers an absorbing person or place or phenomenon that has been proceeding on his/her/its way for years and suddenly commands attention.

One case in point from today’s New York Times: a front-page story about the high school football team in Smith Center, Kansas — hey, I rode my bike into Smith County last year! In a high school with about 150 kids, in a town of just under 2,000, the team has won 51 in a row. In winning all 10 of its games so far this year, the team has outscored opponents 704-0. In one game, they scored 72 points in the first quarter. It’s a great tale.

Of course, in a sense, the Times can’t leave well enough alone. Landing in a symbol-freighted landscape — it’s small-town America, it’s the Great Plains — the Times investigates just how this juggernaut came to be and what it means. They find a coach who’s been on the scene for generations. And naturally, I suppose, they find that the lessons the coach teaches and that the kids and townsfolk learn isn’t really about football, it’s about life:

“None of this is really about football,” [Smith Center coach Roger Barta] added. “We’re going to get scored on eventually, and lose a game, and that doesn’t mean anything. What I hope we’re doing is sending kids into life who know that every day means something.”

Yes, of course. But presumably, the coach for the team that suffered that 72-point first-quarter stomping is trying to send kids into the world with some constructive ideas about living life, too (“Boys, sometimes you’re the windshield, and sometimes you’re the bug”). Presumably, too, Coach Barta has some athletes on his squad who are especially adept at administering lessons in blocking, tackling and execution to opponents. But the Times doesn’t mention any ot that. Instead, it insists on seeing not a gridiron story — not important enough to its elite audience, I imagine — but a wondrous and somewhat mysterious comet — why, after all, doesn’t the same story unfold everywhere? — glowing out there under the evening lights on the prairie.

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Saturday Notebook

Head-gouge chronicles: Last night, I banged my head into the corner of an open kitchen-cabinet door and took out a little chunk of my bald scalp. It was not a graceful moment, and I did not react gracefully. What’s really frustrating, though, is that I seem to have developed a penchant for gouging my naked head on low doorways, window frames, cabinets, overhanging branches and such like. It happened at my dad’s about 10 days ago when I was hurrying to pack my stuff to leave. It happened to me a month ago, two violent encounters with Berkeley shrubbery, when I was out walking the dog. It happened getting into the shower at a friend’s house in New Jersey about 30 seconds after I looked at the low bar across the stall door and thought to myself, “I’m going to hit my head on that.” I’m not sure why all this is happening now. Maybe I’ve lost my ducking reflex, maybe I’m not paying as close attention to my surroundings as I used to, or maybe I’ve grown two inches without knowing it. All I can say is that I’m kind of tired of walking around with a scab on my head.

Power-shufflers vs. racing elitists: My friend Pete is doing a 50-mile running race today in Portland. Yes. Fifty. Miles. That’s nearly twice as long as a marathon, a distance that neither my brain nor my knees can comprehend. So, Pete’s a confirmed crazy ultra-endurance athlete (the big event he is preparing for: an Ironman-distance triathlon (2.4-mile swim, 112-mile bike course, and a marathon run) in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho. As a serious student of the science of endurance sports, Pete has more than once commented on a phenomenon that has become firmly established in U.S. marathon running: participation is way, way up, and performance, measured in terms of finishing times, is way, way down. That’s because many among the hordes entering the humongous marathon fields in places like New York and Chicago are training merely to finish the course no matter how long it takes. Just in time for this weekend’s marathons in New York City, Salon is running a piece on the subject: “How Oprah Ruined the Marathon.” Now, in a country beset by obesity, you could argue that any popular physical activity is a great thing and ought to be encouraged. But there are those who say that what’s happening in the big marathons is sapping the athletic purpose and spirit of the races; what they see is a bunch of people who, instead of confronting the intense physical and mental demands of racing, are turning marathons into power-shuffling events — little more than long walks performed in fancy gear at a slightly elevated pace. Far from creating a nation of fit, competitive runners. Me? It’s been a long time since I walked 20 miles in a day, and I’ve never run a distance over 7.5 miles, so I’m not criticizing anyone who’s out there doing it at any speed. I think it’s great people want to get out there and get their heart rates up; but at the same time, there is something lost when the competitive ethic, the drive to perform and improve, is squeezed out. (And here’s a tragic postscript from today’s news: “28-Year-Old Marathoner Dies in Olympic Trials.”

Writeroom-Main-Screen

Scribing sans distraction: Now that I have installed the latest Mac operating system on my aging iBook, I’m trying out an extremely stripped down text editor called WriteRoom. When you launch the program, the entire screen is blacked out; you don’t see your computer desktop at all; so no email notifications or browser windows or docks (in Mac speak) to divert you from your writing task. The text you type appears as green on black, an emulation of ancient word-processing screens. Does the distraction-free environment really make a difference? This is only the second day I’ve used it, and I haven’t written anything I was on deadlne for (as opposed to something “optional” like this here post). But so far, I’d say that having nothing to consider but my brain and the words on the screen is a help.

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A Sports Sunday

Today’s best football name: Derek Belch, Stanford kicker.

California 31, Oregon 24: Wow — a matter of divided loyalties in our house. Kate and I went to Cal (she even graduated) and we’ve lived in Berkeley for decades. On the other side of the coin, Thom is a Duck and enough of a fan that a couple years ago he went out to Autzen Stadium in Eugene to watch Cal and Oregon play in a cold, windy, soaking rain. Oregon won in overtime that day, then got thumped in Berkeley last year (Thom and some friends came down here for that one). If you’re a fan, you know yesterday was a big deal; if you’re not, suffice it to say that both teams are very good and the game actually got some national attention. It was far from a perfect game — Oregon gave the ball to Cal four times in the fourth quarter, and still Cal just squeaked by.

For Kate and me, the game was a different kind of challenge. We turned off our TV earlier in the week. So while the Ducks and Bears engaged in a great gridiron struggle far to the north, we were in Berkeley testing whether a household so deprived of video capability could long endure a game with Cal’s radio guy Joe Starkey as the only source of play-by-play. It’s altogether fitting and proper for me to report that despite the usually frustrating and occasionally comic shortcomings of Starkey’s work, we stuck with the game to the end.

Guest observation: Dave Barry, who grew up in Pittsburgh, recalling the denouement of the 1960 Pirates-Yankees World Series:

“That series went seven games, and I vividly remember how it ended. School was out for the day, and I was heading home, pushing my bike up a step hill, listening to my cheapo little radio, my eyes staring vacantly ahead, my mind locked on the game. A delivery truck came by, and the driver stopped and asked if he could listen. Actually, he more or less told me he was going to listen; I said OK.

“The truck driver turned out to be a rabid Yankee fan. The game was very close, and we stood on opposite sides of my bike for the final two innings, rooting for opposite teams, he chain-smoking Lucky Strike cigarettes, both of us hanging on every word coming out of my tinny little speaker.

“And, of course, if you were around back then and did not live in Russia, you know what happened: God, in a sincere effort to make for all those fly balls he directed toward me in Little League, had Bill Mazeroski — Bill Mazeroski! — hit a home run to win it for the Pirates.

“I was insane with joy. The truck driver was devastated. But I will never forget what he said to me. He looked me square in the eye, one baseball fan to another, after a tough but fair fight, and he said a seriously bad word. Several, in fact. Then he got in his truck and drove away.”

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Tour Arborists

[Paul Sherwen and Phil Liggett on Sunday morning as they narrated an aerial view of a French chateau southwest of Paris:]

Paul (informatively): You might not know this but in a very secluded part of the garden there’s a very old tree, a sequoia which was planted around about 1860.

Phil (surprised): The sequoia is not , not a tree of, indigenous to France, it’s Africa, isn’t it, the sequoia tree?

Paul (reassuringly): I believe it is.

Me: Sequoia. Sequoiadendron. Metasequoia.

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Hell of a Race

We got up Wednesday morning with the rest of the cycling fans and Tour de France geeks — we noble, perplexed few — to watch what everyone knew would be the climax of the 2007 race: a fantastically difficult climbing stage in the Pyrenees during which Michael Rasmussen, the Dane wearing the yellow jersey of the overall race leader, would try to fend off a last spate of attacks from the handful of riders who still had a chance to beat him. And putting aside my feelings about Rasmussen, a racer with no charisma who was riding under a cloud of suspicion because he had missed several random doping tests, there’s no other way to describe his day: He rode a hell of a stage.

On the slopes of the day’s final climb, he was left alone to contend with his three closest rivals, Alberto Contador (Spanish) and Levi Leipheimer (a Yank), both of the U.S.-based Discovery Channel team, and Cadel Evans, an Australian riding for Belgium’s Predictor-Lotto squad. The battle came down to Rasmussen, who rides for Rabobank of The Netherlands, and the two Discovery riders as Evans just struggled to hang on. Contador and Leipheimer didn’t spare their foe. They repeatedly tried to break him by charging off the front of the tiny group and challenging him to follow. But time after time, Rasmussen slowly caught them and waited out the next attack. Finally, with 1,000 uphill meters to go, he stood up and accelerated himself and easily outdistanced his opponents. He won the stage and increased his lead. He was a lock to be this year’s Tour champion, and he looked like he’s won it the hard way, by facing down his strongest rivals and outperforming them when it counted.

And then something happened — something not entirely unforeseen in a race and sport that is making a habit of throwing out its top performers over actual or suspected illegal doping: Rasmussen’s team fired him and withdrew him from the race over the issue of the missed tests; he not only failed to tell team and testing officials where he’d be in the month before the Tour, he lied about his actual whereabouts.

There’s no exact parallel I can think of in U.S. sports, though pro basketball and pro football are getting close with their aggressive discipline against lawbreakers and on-court/on-field miscreants. But in the Tour, it’s not just individuals players who are taking the fall. To date,, two full teams have pulled out of the race because individual members have reportedly tested positive for doping. In a few hours, Rasmussen’s team might become the third to quit. Imagine the New York Yankees folding their entire season because it was discovered Jason Giambi and friends had been juicing, and you come close to the enormity of what’s happening.

So what now? This year’s race might remain interesting as a freak show, though maybe the remaining 19 teams and 140-some riders might rise above what’s happened and put on a serious performance for the four remaining stages. But whatever happens between now and Sunday, this Tour is a race without a champion, and a race like that is hardly a contest at all.

Lots more to be said: about how much of what’s happening now is driven by hysteria and overreaction, about whether the notion of due process should be thrown entirely out the window, and about whether the international sports drug cops are really up to the job of keeping games and contests clean in an evenhanded, just, disinterested way.

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‘Beauty and Cruelty’

If Thursday’s Tour de France stage is remembered after this year’s race is over, it will be recalled as the day the great Kazakh rider Alexandre Vinokourov crashed hard and lost his chance to win the yellow jersey. All we know for now, though, is that he crashed; whether he’s able to get on his bike and mount the sort of reckless, slashing attacks he’s known for remains to be seen.

It’s always interesting to see how Tour television covers crashes, which are as much a staple of the Tour as they are of the NASCAR experience. With notable exceptions, the on-the-road cameras, carried by photographers on the back of motorcycles, are rarely present when a crash occurs. But they’re always there for the immediate aftermath: a rider sprawled on the road, on a traffic island, or in a ditch, tangled up in his bicycle or thrown across the road from it. How he got that way is almost always a mystery. And so it was today with Vinokourov: When the camera caught up to him, he was already on his feet; a teammate was pulling his bicycle from the center of the road; and Vino, as he’s familiarly known, was in obvious pain. He’d hit hard on his right side; his shorts were shredded, exposing an expanse of raw, abraded buttock.

Still: He had 26 kilometers to go to the finish line. He’s the leader of his team, Astana (Astana is the capital of Kazakhstan and actually sponsors the team) and until the moment he hit the pavement he was considered one of the riders with a better than even chance of winning the 2007 Tour. So there was nothing for him to do but get on his bike and try to catch up to the main field, which had sped into the distance as he stood by the side of the road.

His team manager ordered all the nearby Astana riders — six of the eight members, not including Vinokourov — to stop and form a chase group for their leader. In short, their job was to ride in front of him, as hard and as long as they could, to try to get him close to the stage leaders. Today was a tough stage, and soon the Astana squad started to overtake riders who had already been dropped. One, a sprinter for Robbie McEwen’s Lotto team, appeared not to believe his luck as the Vinokourov rescue team passed him. He sped up and got on Vinokourov’s wheel to get a free ride as far as he could. The pace was so high that soon the Astana domestiques, the riders whose job it is to sacrifice their own chances for the team leader, began to fall away. In just a few kilometers, Vinokourov was riding all by himself. Eventually, he caught and passed a group long discarded by the lead bunch; the exhausted riders, who included sprint leader Tom Boonen of Belgium, fell in behind their bruised and bloody opponent and let him set the pace up the day’s last climb.

It was a stirring charge, and a courageous one. Most people — people who think of bicycles as a form of recreation and who have something like normal thresholds for unbearable pain — would have been in the emergency room. In the end, though, Vinokourov couldn’t catch up; he lost more than a minute to his rivals, and did, in fact, wind up in the hospital. He’s a tough guy — it would be a shock if he isn’t at the starting line tomorrow.

Astana’s team manager summed up the situation after the stage simply and eloquently:

“We gave [Vinokourov] six riders and they did an extraordinary job and went full-gas for kilometers to try to bring him back. Then Vino’ was left on his own. What do you want me to say? It’s the beauty and cruelty of this sport. We must not overdramatize the situation. If we don’t win the Tour – there’s 2008. We haven’t given up hope … if Vino’ is in good health and he wants to win the Tour, we have no choice but to attack.”

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The Sprint Finish

Today’s Liggett/Sherwen call of the final 1,000 meters of today’s fourth stage in the Tour de France:

Liggett: Here comes the run by [team] Lampre now! As they try to bring Napolitano through! This is the first big sprint at the Tour and it is a free-for-all!

Sherwen: Julian Dean is there in the black and white and you can be certain that right on his wheel will be Thor Hushovd, one thousand meters to go, there is the flamme rouge, Quick Step [team] have got control now, they’re on the front but where is Tom Boonen? He’s not on the wheel of his teammates, there’s a line of [team] Milram, they’re looking after Zabel, there’s a lot of pink jerseys in there for T-Mobile, there’s a little bit of a switch, they’re going to start lining up for the finish line, they’re looking now at about 550 meters to go, Gerolsteiner [team] pulls off, still Quick Step in control. …

Liggett: Well, watch out for this little switch at 250 meters, it might disrupt the move here now, and still Robbie McEwen has not got through. I can see Robbie Hunter trying to get through, but they’re still not going to make a big sprint. And Julian Dean’s on the front now! Dean has found his man Thor Hushovd! Dean the champion of New Zealand! Hunter coming on Dean’s wheel! Hushovd opens the sprint in the center now! Förster trying to get through on the right here as now Thor Hushovd hits the line at last.

Sherwen: Thor Hushovd was perfectly set up for the win by Julian Dean, I just saw the black and white jersey, the Kiwi national champion was right in the right place, he sacrificed himself completely. You need a sprinter to lead out a sprinter. Big Thor has not been superb over the last couple of days but at the end of the day when you’re set up like that by Julian Dean you have to say thanks very much, mate, and you have to finish it off.

Comment: My reaction to these guys’ work usually ranges from mild annoyance to outright disgust — yeah, I ought to just chill; this is just a bike race on TV — but I’ll say something nice here. The end of a sprint stage is beyond hectic. The racers accelerate from 35 to 45 mph, there’s a mass of bodies flying around, and everyone’s madly jockeying for position. What impressed me here is that Sherwen picked Julian Dean out of the crowd a kilometer before the finish line; he knows the players well enough that he correctly predicted that Thor Hushovd would be on Dean’s wheel. That turned out to be the crucial moment in the sprint. To exit slack-cutting mode, though: Both Sherwen and Liggett missed the real drama of the last 100 meters, when Hunter, the South African sprinter, jumped from Dean’s wheel to Hushovd’s in a desperate attempt for the stage win. He timed his finishing charge about a half-second too late and lost by half a wheel. Hunter crossed the line shaking his head and fist in frustration.

Anyway: The point is that the Versus Boys do this part of the race pretty well. Things are moving at light speed compared to the normal baseball, football, or soccer game, and somehow they manage to keep up with it.

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Seventy-Buck Seats

Kate’s former boss, who has done very well over the years in the antiquarian book trade, is a long-time San Francisco Giants season-ticket holder. I think Peter first got his seats in the late ’70s, and he’s kept them ever since. When he bought them, the Giants were not a hot ticket. I remember going to games in the mid-80s where attendance was less than 2,000. The team was bad. Its stadium was worse, unless you liked sitting in an extremely well air-conditioned wind tunnel. Then the team got better and eventually managed to figure out how to build a new ballpark on the waterfront just south of downtown. Not just a ballpark: a gem, which I say despite a strong distaste for the home nine. At the same time, everyone who watches baseball knows about baseball salaries. As Ralph Kramden said in an entirely different context, with an entirely different intent, “to the moon.”

One of the perks of working for Peter was that he would occasionally give away game tickets. It’s a privilege that might appear at any time, with no notice. Sunday night, he called and asked whether we wanted his tickets for all three Mets games this week. Kate grew up in New Jersey, and the Mets were the first team of her heart (I think the A’s give them a run for their money now). I went over to the store to pick up the “boards,” as an informant tells me their sometimes called. Peter and I chatted a little about the Monday game, when Barry Zito, the highest-paid pitcher in baseball (I think) would be on the mound for the Giants.

“I think the price tag was a little high,” I ventured — “ventured” because Peter has both sound and strong opinions. “The team’s taking care of that,” Peter said, “Take a look at the price on the tickets. They’re seventy dollars. Last year they were forty.”

These are great seats. The italics are deserved: they’re 10 or 12 rows up, just to the first base side of home plate. You can hear the visiting players break wind in the on-deck circle, you’re so close.

But $70? I mean, really. Who’s the sport for when the cheapest seat in the house is running at twenty bucks a pop? (And the most expensive seats — you can bet they’re much, much more than seventy bucks.) Thank the sports gods for commercial television — though when you see the lengths professional sports will go to to milk the audience of every last penny, you have to wonder how long you’ll really get to watch games for free.

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