Category: Sports

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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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My Personal Super Bowl Triumph

Indianapolis 29, Bears 17. Thus ends Chicago’s once-a-generation visit to the NFL championship game. The rain and Prince, as well as the final score, lent a soggy, dispirited feeling to the proceedings.

But on the plus side, I feel like I really must have grown as a human being. I watched without dismay or rancor: I let loose with one first-half “god damn it,” but after that nothing stronger than a “God bless America” escaped my lips (the presence of an impressionable and watchful seven-year-old helped check any over-the-top displays, as did the fact the Bears were outplayed for all but the first few minutes of the game. Bottom line: Stuart Smalley would have been proud of me).

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Words and Music

Beardown

I’ve been working on pulling together the story behind the writing of “Bear Down Chicago Bears”–a mystery of perhaps less significance than, “What happened to the WMDs?” Still, you work with what you got.

Along the way, I called the song’s current publisher, Mark Spier, of Larry Spier Music, in New York City. He says he’s getting lots of requests for the sheet music. Alas, there is no currently published sheet music. So his firm has made a PDF copy of the 1941 sheet music and is selling it online. In the 10 days since the Bears beat the Saints to get into the Super Bowl, Spier has sold 200 to 300 copies (including one copy to me; Dad, it’ll be in the mail soon). The first thing I learned from the sheet music, beside the Bears’ 1941 address (37 S. Wabash), is that the song is to be played at a “bright march tempo.”

You can buy the song from Spier here (it’s three bucks; the company is selling several other Bears-related musical items, too). If you’re not satisfied with a virtual copy, I found at least one copy of the 1941 original for sale on eBay (the seller has timed it so that the auction will end near game time on Sunday.

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One last thing: The graphic on the “Bear Down” cover page: It looks familiar; it’s looks similar, in some way, to Chicago Cubs scorecards, which always seemed to have an abstract quality to the cover art (that’s the 1941 scorecard here, part of a great online collection assembled by a “die-hard Cubs fan” (poor soul). I wonder if the same illustrator worked for both teams?

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Today’s Top Question

BearsTwo questions, actually: What’s the origin of the Chicago Bears’ nickname, “The Monsters of the Midway,” and how did it come to be applied to the Bears?

Part One is easy. When Kate asked me a couple weeks ago, I knew it had something to do with the Midway Plaisance on Chicago’s South Side, but was fuzzy on why that might apply to the Bears, who played in Wrigley Field (on the North Side) through 1970.. That Midway began as a park, was the center for carnival-type attractions during the World’s Columbian Exposition in 1893, and ran adjacent to the University of Chicago. And in fact, the original Monsters of the Midway were the U. of C.’s football teams under coach Amos Alonzo Stagg. But the university, once a gridiron powerhouse, gave up football in 1939. That coincided with a golden age of Bears football. After the U. of C. abolished football to better focus on the serious business of education and splitting the atom, the Bears became known as the Monsters of the Midway (and began using the stylized letter “C” that the university had adopted as its helmet emblem).

OK so far. But all the accounts I’ve come across fail to explain just how the Bears began using what had been a college nickname. Invariably, references say the Bears “acquired” the name or that it “was applied” to them. A scholarly study of the University of Chicago football, “Stagg’s University: The Rise, Decline, and Fall of Big-Time Football at Chicago,” says the Bears “appropriated” the name.

Something’s left out here. Either George Halas or someone else with the team came up with the idea to grab the University of Chicago nickname (which was long out of date, by the way; my dad likes to recall how in the late ’30s, some locals wanted to set up a contest between the Maroons and the Austin High School, a juggernaut on the city’s West Side), or–my theory–it caught on after some sportswriter or headline writer began using it.

More research to come on this pressing question.

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Last Days at the Ballpark

First of October, last day of the baseball season. Not really the last last day — two rounds of playoffs and a non-global World Series are still to come. But in reality and emotionally for most teams and most fans, Sunday was it. It’s a great occasion for musing on the changes of season and of life. Let’s skip that; Roger Angell and by now about fifty-one other diamond prose slingers have been there and done that. Besides, I went to just one game all year (the A’s cuffed the upstart Tigers). But I’ll indulge in a couple of pictures that come to mind:

–Fan Appreciation Day, Oakland Coliseum, 1983 or ’84 or ’85: The last Saturday of the season. I went with Kate. We sat in the second of the three decks on the third-base side. I don’t remember who the A’s played or what the outcome was. But the park had that look it only gets at the tail end of the year, the afternoon light coming in at an odd low angle. It being Oakland, the game was sparsely attended, as it should have been, the A’s having descended into a stretch of mediocre years. What I remember, though: Seagulls, crowds of them, all over the field and the stands long before the game was over.

–Last day of the season, Oakland Coliseum, 1986: Kate and I were going to go to the last game of the year with out friends Robin and Jim, who were and are the most faithful A’s fans we’ve ever known. Something came up that I thought I had to do, so Kate went with them to the game; I was going to drive down whenever my work, whatever it was, was done. I had the game on from time to time, and realized as it progressed that the A’s pitcher, Curt Young, had not given up a hit. Around the sixth inning, I left for the game, now aware that Young was pitching a perfect game. Now I started to worry: I had waited so long to go to the game that now I was going to miss a piece of baseball history. While I was on the freeway, the game went into the 7th. Young got one out, then two; he had retired the first 20 batters in a row. I’d be in time to see the end of it; the 21st batter came up (by looking it up, I know it was Kevin Seitzer and the game was against the Kansas City Royals). He hit an infield grounder and beat the throw to first for a hit. I was simultaneously crushed and relieved; too bad about the perfect game, bu at least now I hadn’t missed one (Seitzer turned out to be the only base runner Young allowed that day). I got to my seat in the top of the 8th.

Enough of the glory of my times. One team I follow, the A’s, is going to the playoffs; they’re playing the Minnesota Twins, a team they’ve had real problems with the last four or five years, so I don’t have big hopes.

My other team is the Cubs. That’s a legacy of having grown up in the Chicago area, having gone to my first game at their park and maturing as a fan, if that’s what fans do, just at the time their good late ’60s team came along. That’s ancient history, though, and by now I don’t have a single atom of sentimentality left for them. They’re just a bad team, no more cute or colorful or loveable or worthy of some special loyalty than, say, the Tampa Bay Devil Rays. They’re so bad, they even fail to excel in failure. They did manage to lose 96 games this year, more than any other team in their league. But the mark of a colossally bad team is to lose 100 games; the Royals and Devil Rays managed to achieve that, but the Cubs fell short.

The horror show the Cubs put on has no apparent effect on fans’ willingness to pay to watch. The team drew a full house Sunday, as they did nearly every game. More than 3 million people attended their games this year. The explanation has got to be that the score doesn’t matter any more; the old park, the red brick, the ivy on the walls, the big centerfield scoreboard, the Old Style and franks and Frosty Malts, have become a draw in themselves.

Maybe It’s a little like visiting the U.S. Capitol or the White House. The scoundrels and miscreants in residence today matter less than having an idea what the places were built for and knowing that once, they were home to a Jefferson or a Lincoln or an FDR. Still, I think I liked baseball better when people just stopped coming out to the park when the team stunk. Tickets were easier. And that autumn light, a sparse crowd and a big flock of seagulls seem like the perfect sendoff for a failed season.

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Le Quiz sur le Dopage

This is where sports is headed: The World Anti-Doping Agency, a Big Brotherish creation of the International Olympic Committee set up in 1999 to ensure that athletes don’t use illegal steroids and the like. The agency’s motto: Play True. The unspoken part: Or Else.

Of course, the aim is noble. “Play true” is a wonderful sentiment, and one that every competitor and fan would embrace. The “or else” part is troublesome, though. You have to wonder whether it’s any more possible to create an absolutely clean, level playing field in sports than it is to keep drugs off the streets. How far do you go, how intrusive do you get, in pursuit of that goal? Do you throw out the notion of due process or the presumption of innocence — quaint notions, those — in the hunt for bad actors?

While you ponder that, test your anti-doping IQ at the WADA site. Sample question and answer:

True or False? If a Doping Control Officer comes to your home to conduct an out of competition test, it is okay for you to leave the room alone to make a cup of tea or run an errand.

False. It is important that you protect the integrity of your sample by staying in full view of the Doping Control Officer at all times until the test is complete. If you need to leave the room, tell the Doping Control Officer who will go with you.

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Denial, Act 2

Floyd Landis has, for the moment, a Tour de France title and two blood samples that tested positive for testosterone samples. He won’t get to keep the title if the test results stand, though; cycling officials are ready to strip him of the championship, and the Tour runner-up Oscar Pereiro is saying he wants a yellow-jersey presentation so that he feels like he’s really the Tour winner. So Landis is doing the only thing he can until his lawyers figure out who to sue: launching a media blitz to tell his story, which boils down to “I’m an honest, hard-working guy and I’m telling you I didn’t do anything wrong.” The truth is that there’s really nothing he can say that will get him off the hook. The best case, for everyone, would be the appearance of some incontrovertible evidence that he shot himself up with something, that someone tampered with his samples, or that the test was simply wrong and invalid. Landis could confess. Some lab technician could come forward and say, “I did it.” Or cycling officials could say the test is untrustworthy. Don’t hold your breath.

Instead, speculate about what might explain the positive test result that came back after Landis’s heroic win on Stage 17:

—Landis needed a pick-me-up after getting thrashed in Stage 16 and knowingly took something he shouldn’t have. As I’ve said before, I doubt this because the consequences of being found out were so predictably devastating.

—Landis was doping all along and just happened to get caught after Stage 17. Landis and his supporters make much of the fact he was tested eight times during the Tour and that just one of the results came back positive (in fact, the head of the International Cycling Union says only one of 300 tests administered during the Tour — Landis’s, after Stage 17 — came back positive). But what if he was taking something all through the Tour that went undetected, for whatever reason, until his incredible physical effort in the 17th stage? I suppose you could call this the BALCO scenario, after the Bay Area sports-nutrition lab that distributed performance-enhancing substances that anti-doping tests couldn’t detect. ESPN cycling correspondent Andrew Hood notes that Landis was seldom tested in past years, and also discusses known ways of defeating the current testing protocols.

—Landis doped unknowingly. Maybe a well-meaning trainer gave him a little something extra in his daily dose of vitamins and supplements (not a credible possibility; the probability of detection, and the consequences from it, are just too high); or some enemy managed to slip him something (I shy away from most gunman-on-the-grassy-knoll theories, so I can’t swallow this one).

—Alcohol or cortisone or something else threw off the test results. A real possibility, according to some serious sports-nutrition types, though probably very hard to prove.

—Landis’s samples were deliberately contaminated. By whom? Why? It’s the gunman on the grassy knoll again. Tough sale.

—Landis’ normal testosterone levels are naturally high, leading to a false positive result. If this is true, it ought to be a matter of producing the medical records that demonstrate it.

Take your pick, or come up with your own explanation. I’m still sticking with my instinct that a guy who’s been around the highest level of cycling for so long, who had apparently gotten to the elite level without doping, wouldn’t have done something as suicidal from a career perspective as drug himself with the whole world watching.

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Heart

Floyd072006

Today, Floyd Landis had to face the Tour de France cameras again. Yesterday, he ran out of gas on the stage’s last climb, hit the wall hard, and lost the Tour’s yellow jersey. Then he gathered himself, told reporters that even though he didn’t expect to win the Tour anymore he’d still give it a shot, and went to bed.

Today? Well, I may have disappeared so far into cycling-race geekdom (along with immediate family members and close friends, some neighbors, and assorted bicycling compatriots) that I underestimate the difficulty in conveying how amazing today was. Landis came out and attacked the field on the last big mountain-climbing stage of the Tour, and this time, he broke everyone else. Talk about heart.

He did not capture the overall race lead, but because of the nature of the last three stages — a relatively flat one tomorrow with limited apparent tactical opportunity for big moves by the race leaders, a time trial on Saturday in which Landis will be a favorite to win, and the short, flat finish on Sunday in Paris — he’s got a real chance to win the Tour. Of course, the thing about this Tour, unlike nearly every Tour for the past 25 years, is that you never know what tomorrow will bring.

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Ready for Your Closeup?

If you’re watching the Tour de France every day on OLN — a bad habit in our household driven by the fact it’s the only place to see the race here in America — you’re well acquainted with the astounding caravan that moves along with the race. Motorcycles carrying TV, video and still photographers and course marshalls and timekeepers. Cars carrying race officials. Team cars — at least one for every starting squad of nine riders — carrying the team directors (the overall race strategists) and sundry VIPs and journalists. Neutral cars to support riders up and down the course regardless of which team they’re on. Overhead, at least one helicopter shadowing the progress of the daily race leaders. One of the more demanding and stressful factors for Tour riders must be the constant din of honking cars, revving engines and churning helicopter rotors.

For fans, though, the presence of cameras rolling along with the riders means that you’re right in the middle of the action. For riders, it means there’s no place to hide when something goes wrong. That’s what happened today for Floyd Landis, the former Lance Armstrong lieutenant who had managed to take the race leader’s yellow jersey this year. After a strong finish yesterday on one of the Tour’s classic tough mountain stages, lots of people had started to feel Landis would go on to win the race. But today — today was another brutally hard day, and on the stage’s last climb, Landis blew up. When one of his rivals accelerated sharply and the group around him chased, Landis simply couldn’t make his legs go any faster or harder. It was stunning to see — at least for Tour geeks who are used to seeing a single rider impose his will on the race.

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Of course, Landis had one faithful companion as he found himself wallowing up the climb, his closest rivals vanishing up the road ahead of him: as usual, a Tour cameraman was there to capture every moment of suffering. All Landis could do was keep turning over the pedals until he got to the top, no matter how long it took.

[Later: Landis avoided the media at the finish, but later gave what Velonews termed an “impromptu press conference” during which he showed a lot of class. One exchange:

Q: Did you know when you were dropped that the yellow jersey was gone?

FL: I knew I felt very, very bad. I didn’t expect to stay close to the leaders. I did what I could. I kept fighting, but I didn’t have much left. I did everything in my power to stay close, but you saw what happened. ]

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