One of the more annoying tropes in contemporary sportswriting and--more often--broadcasting is the habit of portraying Cuban athletes as patriotic, altruistic amateurs in positive contrast to (this part is more or less compulsory) "greedy, spoiled, millionaire" American athletes. Every four years--usually right before the Olympics--we are treated to one TV reporter after another standing in front of Castro's sanitized Havana ballyard, every one of them reading from the same script: "No million-dollar contracts. No hold-outs. No strikes. These ballplayers do it for the love of the game, and for love of country."
What crap.
There has been a lot not to like about American sports lately, or pro sports in general: from Michael Vick's hobbies to Barry Bonds's joyless, soulless pursuit of 756. But don't anyone get Cuba wrong. These players may love the game--how could they not? They may love their country. But they don't play for "love of country." They play because Cuba is a penal colony run by a sadistic madman. They play because living conditions are marginally better for productive athletes than the normal run of Cubans--you know, the beneficiaries of Fidel Castro's marvelous health care system, the system in which aspirin and Pepto-Bismol are sold on the black market. These ballplayers don't strike because if they attempted to form a union they would be thrown into dungeons and probably tortured while the world looked the other way.
The only proof one needs is this: how many Cubans leave when they get the chance?
Answer: a lot. And good for them.
The latest from the Pan Am Games.
Showing posts with label Other sports. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Other sports. Show all posts
Monday, July 30, 2007
Saturday, April 14, 2007
USOC awards Chicago the right to bid for 2016 Summer Olympics
The story is here.
The question is: why?
Anyone who has watched Cubs games on WGN over the years knows this thing to be true: Chicago, between the Fourth of July and Labor Day, is the most miserable place on Earth, outside of Mississippi and Alabama.
Heat, humidity. I mean, awful. Visiting players dip towels in ice water and drape them over their heads in the dugout. In the stands, Bobby Backlava look-alikes strip to the waist in Wrigley Field--not a pretty sight.
In July and August, Chicagoans with money and sense escape to Michigan's north peninsula, to Canada, to--don't deny it--Southern California. Those stuck stay stuck--as in, the bus seat, the El seat, the office chair, the bleacher seat.
Conversely, the same slate of time Southern California is Heaven. Seventy degrees, no humidity, no rain, cool breezes off the Pacific.
What were these people thinking?
For people with enough money, geography influences behavior. Washington empties out in August, Paris in July and August. The Hamptons are a graveyard between Halloween and Easter. P-town is a ghost town after Labor Day. Houston's restaurants literally close down on Memorial day weekend. And the Arizona snowbirds go home at Easter, and come back at Thanksgiving, just in time to give us all a picture-perfect view of a powder-blue Cadillac El Dorado going 35 miles per hour on the Squaw Peak Parkway.
Given all that, it mystifies me why great entities with unfathomable money would go out of their way to create such misery. In 1988, the Democrats held their National Convention in Atlanta, the Republicans in New Orleans, and from my vantage point in upstate New York, all I could ask was: Why? Why torment yourself with 90-degree weather and 95-percent humidity, when the weather is so great in Vermont, in Montana, in Southern California?
I thought the same thing four years later, as a nascent journalist covering the Houston convention. There was much to complain about in Houston, but the weather wasn't one; it rained for a week before anyone showed up, and the cool breezes blew. But still.
So. So I can reconcile myself to the notion that Georgia and Louisiana were important state in 1988. What was to prevent the GOP from meeting at the basketball arena in Syracuse, NY, or the Minneapolis Metrodome?
So, Chicago, 2016. Peter Ueberroth is supposed to be in charge of all this. Doesn't he remember that the Los Angeles Olympics, circa 1984, were the greatest in history, that those were the games that signalled the modern Olympics as we know them?
Guess not.
The question is: why?
Anyone who has watched Cubs games on WGN over the years knows this thing to be true: Chicago, between the Fourth of July and Labor Day, is the most miserable place on Earth, outside of Mississippi and Alabama.
Heat, humidity. I mean, awful. Visiting players dip towels in ice water and drape them over their heads in the dugout. In the stands, Bobby Backlava look-alikes strip to the waist in Wrigley Field--not a pretty sight.
In July and August, Chicagoans with money and sense escape to Michigan's north peninsula, to Canada, to--don't deny it--Southern California. Those stuck stay stuck--as in, the bus seat, the El seat, the office chair, the bleacher seat.
Conversely, the same slate of time Southern California is Heaven. Seventy degrees, no humidity, no rain, cool breezes off the Pacific.
What were these people thinking?
For people with enough money, geography influences behavior. Washington empties out in August, Paris in July and August. The Hamptons are a graveyard between Halloween and Easter. P-town is a ghost town after Labor Day. Houston's restaurants literally close down on Memorial day weekend. And the Arizona snowbirds go home at Easter, and come back at Thanksgiving, just in time to give us all a picture-perfect view of a powder-blue Cadillac El Dorado going 35 miles per hour on the Squaw Peak Parkway.
Given all that, it mystifies me why great entities with unfathomable money would go out of their way to create such misery. In 1988, the Democrats held their National Convention in Atlanta, the Republicans in New Orleans, and from my vantage point in upstate New York, all I could ask was: Why? Why torment yourself with 90-degree weather and 95-percent humidity, when the weather is so great in Vermont, in Montana, in Southern California?
I thought the same thing four years later, as a nascent journalist covering the Houston convention. There was much to complain about in Houston, but the weather wasn't one; it rained for a week before anyone showed up, and the cool breezes blew. But still.
So. So I can reconcile myself to the notion that Georgia and Louisiana were important state in 1988. What was to prevent the GOP from meeting at the basketball arena in Syracuse, NY, or the Minneapolis Metrodome?
So, Chicago, 2016. Peter Ueberroth is supposed to be in charge of all this. Doesn't he remember that the Los Angeles Olympics, circa 1984, were the greatest in history, that those were the games that signalled the modern Olympics as we know them?
Guess not.
Saturday, March 17, 2007
March Madness, day three . . .
. . . and all of my Great 8 teams are still alive.
I'll enjoy it. Never happening again.
I'll enjoy it. Never happening again.
March Madness, day three . . .
. . . and all of my Great 8 teams are still alive.
I'll enjoy it. Never happening again.
I'll enjoy it. Never happening again.
Thursday, February 22, 2007
DJ RIP
There are many teams I have admired and cheered for. Before I turned 35, there were three teams I had loved: Joe Torre's Yankees, Larry Bird's Celtics, and--right at the end--Jake Plummer's 1996 Arizona State Sun Devils. (Since then there have been Tom Brady's Patriots and Pete Carroll's Trojans, who between the Patriots' last defeat in 2002 and the Vince Bowl in 2006, played a total of one hundred and eleven consecutive games without a loss of lasting significance. Another story, though.)
I read today of the death of Dennis Johnson, Celtic guard, point guard for (no quibbling, please) The Greatest Basketball Team Of All Time, the 1986 Boston Celtics; co-author of The Greatest Play of All Time, the lay-up that followed Larry Bird's steal of Isiah Thomas's in-bound in the waning seconds of Game 5 of the 1987 Eastern Conference Finals. Bill Simmons, who was there (of course) has an account that distills better than any other the sheer miraculous nature of the play. About seven things had to go right, and did. I've probably seen that play 50 times--more than Bucky Dent scraping one over the Monster, more than The Band is On the Field, more than Leyritz v. Wohlers ("to the track, to the wall, we are tied!"), more than Leinart's audible on Fourth and Nine (more memorable than the Bush Push a minute later)--and, like few things in sports, it always surprises me when it happens.
For many Celtic fans, 1987 consolation season was more memorable that the 1986 season, for many reasons. 1986 was a coronation, a run-away-and-hide year where the Celtics lost one game all year at home and so demoralized the Rockets in Game 6 to win the championship that my two brothers, mother and father and I were toasting their victory with three minutes to go in the game. (You would have to know my family, and its bone-deep superstitions, to know how unthinkable this usually is.) In contrast, 1987 was a year-long street fight, in which the team tried to overcome the loss, one after the other, of Len Bias to death, Bill Walton to a broken shin, Scott Wedman to a ripped-up ankle, and Jerry Sichting to a shooting slump that lasted, basically, until the end of his career.
Never has a defending champion gone through a season with a weaker bench. And never has a team boasted a better starting five, that marvelous band: Bird, Kevin, Chief, DJ, Ainge. And even then the pain did not stop. McHale was on his way to MVP runner-up (no way Magic wasn't going to win it that year) when he broke his foot, decided to play through it, and was never the same again. Parish hurt his foot and played on a limp, Ainge had knee and elbow injuires. Only DJ and Bird survived essentially intact.
The Celtics survived a seven-game scare from Milwaukee, and then a seven-game war with Detroit that ranks better than all but a few finals (New York-LA 1970, Boston-LA 1984, and . . . uh, that's about it). After both teams held serve after two games, providing the way for a best of three, Game 5 was decided by Bird Steals the Ball, an moment so dramatic it overshadowed what happened earlier in the game--namely, Robert Parish decking Bill Laimbeer and getting a no-call in the balance. Game 6 (for which Parish was suspended--coincidentally in a game he probably would have missed anyway with his ankle, and didn't the Pistons scream about that) was a case of the Celtics breaking out to the lead, then giving it up when their starters ran out of gas. (There was a lot of that after 1986.) All of this set the stage for Game 7, which I saw on a black-and-white TV at a friend's house in Long Island City, having come East to visit my presumptive graduate school. I remember the tension before Game 7 as unbearable--the closest any other sport has come close to a really big college football game--and the entire contest seemed to turn on every posession, every shot, every rebound, every (as the Celtics had no bench that year) foul.
I'm exhausted right now thinking about that game. I'm convinced to this day that Larry Bird had decided beforehand to play all 48 minutes, which he did. In any case, he was the author of Boston's walk-it-up play that allowed the Boston starters to grab a few seconds of rest before running the play.
What else? With a tie at the end of the third quarter, starting Detroit forward Adrian Dantley and supersub Vinnie Johnson dove for a loose ball and clattered skulls. Dantley was wheeled off the court on a stretcher and Vinnie Johnson mostly spent the fourth quarter with an ice bag on his head, and went scoreless thereafter. The dagger was near the end, Danny Ainge's fall-away three-pointer that game at the tail end of four consecutive Celtic offensive rebounds. Love those fifth chances. And it was over.
This was the game that gave rise to Zeke's post-game "overrated Bird" comment (Bird's line that game: 48 minutes, 38 points, 20 rebounds--overrated, sure), to the Detroit-Boston hatred that persisted until Boston became so bad (thank you, M.L. Carr) it no longer mattered. And the series overshadowed the the fact that the Celtics--without Bias, without Wedman, without Walton, with McHale on a broken foot and Robert Parish limping on a bad ankle--still pushed the Magic-Kareem-Worthy-Scott-Green Lakers to six games, and lost a series they would have won had it not been for Magic's junior sky hook (which would have been obliterated by Bird's subsequent shot, which missed winning the game by two millionths of an inch. But all credit to the Lakers. They were killers).
Anyway, DJ, who Simmons writes, will someday be in the Hall of Fame, is gone. And--again, as Simmons says--if I was never a part of of his life, I am happy to say that he was a part of mine.
I read today of the death of Dennis Johnson, Celtic guard, point guard for (no quibbling, please) The Greatest Basketball Team Of All Time, the 1986 Boston Celtics; co-author of The Greatest Play of All Time, the lay-up that followed Larry Bird's steal of Isiah Thomas's in-bound in the waning seconds of Game 5 of the 1987 Eastern Conference Finals. Bill Simmons, who was there (of course) has an account that distills better than any other the sheer miraculous nature of the play. About seven things had to go right, and did. I've probably seen that play 50 times--more than Bucky Dent scraping one over the Monster, more than The Band is On the Field, more than Leyritz v. Wohlers ("to the track, to the wall, we are tied!"), more than Leinart's audible on Fourth and Nine (more memorable than the Bush Push a minute later)--and, like few things in sports, it always surprises me when it happens.
For many Celtic fans, 1987 consolation season was more memorable that the 1986 season, for many reasons. 1986 was a coronation, a run-away-and-hide year where the Celtics lost one game all year at home and so demoralized the Rockets in Game 6 to win the championship that my two brothers, mother and father and I were toasting their victory with three minutes to go in the game. (You would have to know my family, and its bone-deep superstitions, to know how unthinkable this usually is.) In contrast, 1987 was a year-long street fight, in which the team tried to overcome the loss, one after the other, of Len Bias to death, Bill Walton to a broken shin, Scott Wedman to a ripped-up ankle, and Jerry Sichting to a shooting slump that lasted, basically, until the end of his career.
Never has a defending champion gone through a season with a weaker bench. And never has a team boasted a better starting five, that marvelous band: Bird, Kevin, Chief, DJ, Ainge. And even then the pain did not stop. McHale was on his way to MVP runner-up (no way Magic wasn't going to win it that year) when he broke his foot, decided to play through it, and was never the same again. Parish hurt his foot and played on a limp, Ainge had knee and elbow injuires. Only DJ and Bird survived essentially intact.
The Celtics survived a seven-game scare from Milwaukee, and then a seven-game war with Detroit that ranks better than all but a few finals (New York-LA 1970, Boston-LA 1984, and . . . uh, that's about it). After both teams held serve after two games, providing the way for a best of three, Game 5 was decided by Bird Steals the Ball, an moment so dramatic it overshadowed what happened earlier in the game--namely, Robert Parish decking Bill Laimbeer and getting a no-call in the balance. Game 6 (for which Parish was suspended--coincidentally in a game he probably would have missed anyway with his ankle, and didn't the Pistons scream about that) was a case of the Celtics breaking out to the lead, then giving it up when their starters ran out of gas. (There was a lot of that after 1986.) All of this set the stage for Game 7, which I saw on a black-and-white TV at a friend's house in Long Island City, having come East to visit my presumptive graduate school. I remember the tension before Game 7 as unbearable--the closest any other sport has come close to a really big college football game--and the entire contest seemed to turn on every posession, every shot, every rebound, every (as the Celtics had no bench that year) foul.
I'm exhausted right now thinking about that game. I'm convinced to this day that Larry Bird had decided beforehand to play all 48 minutes, which he did. In any case, he was the author of Boston's walk-it-up play that allowed the Boston starters to grab a few seconds of rest before running the play.
What else? With a tie at the end of the third quarter, starting Detroit forward Adrian Dantley and supersub Vinnie Johnson dove for a loose ball and clattered skulls. Dantley was wheeled off the court on a stretcher and Vinnie Johnson mostly spent the fourth quarter with an ice bag on his head, and went scoreless thereafter. The dagger was near the end, Danny Ainge's fall-away three-pointer that game at the tail end of four consecutive Celtic offensive rebounds. Love those fifth chances. And it was over.
This was the game that gave rise to Zeke's post-game "overrated Bird" comment (Bird's line that game: 48 minutes, 38 points, 20 rebounds--overrated, sure), to the Detroit-Boston hatred that persisted until Boston became so bad (thank you, M.L. Carr) it no longer mattered. And the series overshadowed the the fact that the Celtics--without Bias, without Wedman, without Walton, with McHale on a broken foot and Robert Parish limping on a bad ankle--still pushed the Magic-Kareem-Worthy-Scott-Green Lakers to six games, and lost a series they would have won had it not been for Magic's junior sky hook (which would have been obliterated by Bird's subsequent shot, which missed winning the game by two millionths of an inch. But all credit to the Lakers. They were killers).
Anyway, DJ, who Simmons writes, will someday be in the Hall of Fame, is gone. And--again, as Simmons says--if I was never a part of of his life, I am happy to say that he was a part of mine.
Wednesday, December 27, 2006
Gerald Ford, RIP
My favorite Fun Ford Facts:
1. Ford's reputation as a klutz was, we all know now, completely false. Ford was, in fact, almost certainly the most athletic President of the twentieth century. Perhaps only Teddy Roosevelt, Eisenhower, Reagan, Bush and Clinton come close, and not very. (Taft was morbidly obese; Wilson, Coolidge, Hoover, Truman, Nixon and Carter were all bookworms; Harding was sedentary; FDR was an upper-class dandy; LBJ was a slob; and Kennedy failed to earn his football letter at Harvard and was ghastly, and constantly, ill right up to the invention of cortisone, which in 1960 allowed him to gain weight and fill out that famous face of his, just in time for the first debate with Nixon.) As John J. Miller recounts, Ford was a lineman on two National Champion Michigan teams, this when colleges collected brutes and bullies for the football team, and didn't even require them to put up the appearance of going to class. Five Michigan jerseys have been retired; Ford's #48 is one of them.
2. Ford remains the only sitting President ever to appear before a Congressional Committee. He did so in 1975, to beg Congress to reinstate military aid to the South Vietnamese. However, the Democrats--who in the shadow of Watergate had added 75 seats to an already standing majority--were feeling their oats. Vietnam, which Kennedy had entered, where Johnson had fought and which Nixon had left, had become Nixon's war. No money, no arms--and so we got Boat People and genocide as a consequence. (The parallels to this very moment are clear, I think.)
3. Ford is the only man to become President without first appearing on a national ticket.
4. Ford's re-election was probably the most half-hearted modern (read: television era) Presidential campaign waged by someone who had a decent chance of winning. (Dole's odd little 1996 endeavor vs. the Clinton Machine may be tucked away in history.) He ran reluctantly, only as a means of pushing forward the legislation he thought necessary: whipping inflation and all that. (Anyone remember WIN? Whip inflation now?) He had reason to suspect his wife's difficulties, and--as recounted by his former Chief of Staff, Dick Cheney--ran the last week of his campaign, in a razor-thin match, on cruise control, while Jimmy Carter was putting in 18-hour days to stave of Ford's last-minute rise in the polls.
5. Every President has a legacy. Lincoln: saved the union. That sort of thing. Ford will be remembered for (and this was no small task) restoring some degree of confidence in the Executive Branch after Nixon shattered it. This is the popular myth, and it has the benefit of being true.
1. Ford's reputation as a klutz was, we all know now, completely false. Ford was, in fact, almost certainly the most athletic President of the twentieth century. Perhaps only Teddy Roosevelt, Eisenhower, Reagan, Bush and Clinton come close, and not very. (Taft was morbidly obese; Wilson, Coolidge, Hoover, Truman, Nixon and Carter were all bookworms; Harding was sedentary; FDR was an upper-class dandy; LBJ was a slob; and Kennedy failed to earn his football letter at Harvard and was ghastly, and constantly, ill right up to the invention of cortisone, which in 1960 allowed him to gain weight and fill out that famous face of his, just in time for the first debate with Nixon.) As John J. Miller recounts, Ford was a lineman on two National Champion Michigan teams, this when colleges collected brutes and bullies for the football team, and didn't even require them to put up the appearance of going to class. Five Michigan jerseys have been retired; Ford's #48 is one of them.
2. Ford remains the only sitting President ever to appear before a Congressional Committee. He did so in 1975, to beg Congress to reinstate military aid to the South Vietnamese. However, the Democrats--who in the shadow of Watergate had added 75 seats to an already standing majority--were feeling their oats. Vietnam, which Kennedy had entered, where Johnson had fought and which Nixon had left, had become Nixon's war. No money, no arms--and so we got Boat People and genocide as a consequence. (The parallels to this very moment are clear, I think.)
3. Ford is the only man to become President without first appearing on a national ticket.
4. Ford's re-election was probably the most half-hearted modern (read: television era) Presidential campaign waged by someone who had a decent chance of winning. (Dole's odd little 1996 endeavor vs. the Clinton Machine may be tucked away in history.) He ran reluctantly, only as a means of pushing forward the legislation he thought necessary: whipping inflation and all that. (Anyone remember WIN? Whip inflation now?) He had reason to suspect his wife's difficulties, and--as recounted by his former Chief of Staff, Dick Cheney--ran the last week of his campaign, in a razor-thin match, on cruise control, while Jimmy Carter was putting in 18-hour days to stave of Ford's last-minute rise in the polls.
5. Every President has a legacy. Lincoln: saved the union. That sort of thing. Ford will be remembered for (and this was no small task) restoring some degree of confidence in the Executive Branch after Nixon shattered it. This is the popular myth, and it has the benefit of being true.
Tuesday, December 19, 2006
Lupica on Zeke
The last few months have not been sports columnist Mike Lupica's best. He has been exposed as a thin-skinned bully by more than one "Sports Reporters" ex-colleague. And he has embarrassed himself trying to hang the contempt-of-court citations around President Bush's neck.
Still.
Still, he sometimes hits one out of the park. One of the guilty pleasures of Saturday night's Knicks-Nuggets brawl was knowing that Lupica would lay in.
And so he does, for the third day in a row, in what is the best of the three. A sample, in Lupica's pitch-perfect wise-guy prose:
Read the whole thing.
Still.
Still, he sometimes hits one out of the park. One of the guilty pleasures of Saturday night's Knicks-Nuggets brawl was knowing that Lupica would lay in.
And so he does, for the third day in a row, in what is the best of the three. A sample, in Lupica's pitch-perfect wise-guy prose:
I am standing in front of the Garden on Sunday morning, in front of the famous marquee on Seventh Ave., and remembering what it was like back in the '90s, when it would only say "Michael Jordan Tonight" on that marquee and this was the only place in town you wanted to be. You know when that will happen with Isiah Thomas in charge of basketball at the Garden? Never.
Now, in the aftermath of a fight that everybody but the commissioner of the NBA seems to know Thomas instigated, you wonder what type of further embarrassment it will take for Dolan to tell the guy to go back to Chicago or Indiana, go anywhere and get himself good and lost.
Read the whole thing.
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