Yankees 4, A's 3 (13)

Details here.

So this is how the visting teams win: late-inning, top-of-inning home run.

Giambi.

Sun-Devil Joe reports that Kardiac Kyle is trade bait. (What, for a first baseman who can hit? Maybe/ Please?) Now, Myer, Bruney, Viz, Henn, Proctor, and--hold the presses--Mo keep truckin'.

Shall we party like it's . . . 1996?

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.

A's 5, Yankees 4 (11)

A game that fits into a nice template: one of those West-Coast, late-night, extra-inning road affairs you keep following (me: internet) even though you're pretty sure how it will end.

In extra-innings, when you're the visiting team, it's awful, because if the other guys score first, the game is over. If yours is the home team, it's awful, because you're pretty sure the other guys will score first, then bring out their closer.

And the win either happens 1) with a home run to the upper-deck, or 2) some bloopy little thing. So rarely in between.

Sure enough: 11th inning, bases loaded, one out, grounder to Menk. Ball game.

Twins 5, Yankees 1

Just when you thought it was safe . . . .

Mose hurt. Okay, in the great tradition of Spahn and Sain, we're now Pavano and Pettitte, and then forget it.

Also, Kardiac Kyle makes his first appearance. Sent in to hold the line for one inning, he goes walk, steal, strikeout, single, single, double, double for a quick 4 runs in one-third of an inning. Lovely.

Durham LAX: All charges dropped

Attorney General Roy Cooper: "Innocent."

I doesn't get more definitive.

Yankees 10, Twins 1

Pettitte, now we hope, is better.

Once Wang comes back, do we have a rotation?

Oh, and A-Rod. Another homer.

Continuing: Duke LAX charges to be dismissed

The link here.

Surely there have been greater cases of prosecutorial misconduct in recent years.

But none so brazen in the face of the truth.

Duke LAX Case: All charges dropped

ABC news is reporting that all charges have been dropped in the Duke Lacrosse case.

Ongoing . . . .

GOP blowing it?

It is time to face facts:

If the Democratic New Hampshire primary were held today, Hillary would win.

If Democratic Super-Duper Tuesday were held today, Hillary would win 75% of the states.

If the general election were held today, Hillary would beat anyone on the GOP side.

In part, this is a matter of external events. Neither Rudy nor Romney nor Thompson (nor, really, McCain) should have to answer for Bush's missteps in Iraq. But Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid (for all the ridicule directed at them) are not stupid people, have--for all their overreaching--framed Iraq as the GOP's war, seperate and distinct from Afghanistan, Iran or anything else in the world.

Their characterization of "The War in Iraq" as a stand-alone enterprise happens to be wrong, of course. But politics is the art of persuasion, and right now the Republicans are having a hard time persuading 60% of the electorate.

Just to turn on the news is depressing. John McCain has inserted himself, foolishly and unnecessarily, into the Imus kerfuffle. And what plagues Giuliani has, until this morning, something I couldn't quite fathom.

Now I get it. What plagues Rudy is a kind of intellectual laziness that is, first, uncharacteristic of the man, and second, deadly to a Presidential candidate.

Rudy is travelling down the same road as George Romney (as in "Romney later explained") in 1968 and Ted Kennedy (last seen looking for his verb) in 1980.

John Podoretz has more.

Yankees 8, Twins 2

Significant for two reasons:

1. No Yankee--not Babe Ruth, not Joe DiMaggio, not Mickey Mantle, not Reggie--ever hit five home runs in the first six games of the season . . . until A-Rod did so as of today.

2. Pavano, Pavano. With everything patch, patch, patch, this was a good sign. Now, let's see, if Wang comes back, Moose warms up, Pettitte does whatever, Igawa can throw a breaking ball for a called strike, then we got something.

3. Aside from A-Rod, the bullpen has been the team strength. Assuming the starting pitching gets figured out somehow (which may entail a trade, with teams lined up around the block to grad Hrubey or Viz, and Cashman looking more for a salary dump), and we know the hitting will be there . . . okay. No panic.

4. Don't tell me that they're playing well 'cause they're out of the cold. What good is clustering wins in warm weather if presumptive October baseball might be played in Detroit, in Boston, and certainly--duh--in the Bronx?

Orioles 6, Yankees 4

This first week has been disheatening without being catastrophic (for that, see the Astros).

Tomorrow or the next day, Mike Lupica will write that the Yankees are "one A-Rod blast away from being 1-4." That is true enough, but rather irrelevant, when one considers that the Yanks are one A-Rod pop-up away from being 3-2, plus one Josh Phelps fly-out away from being 4-1. Almost every game has been a close-run thing.

What, heading into week two, must Torre attend to?

1. The starting pitching.
2. The starting pitching.

No--really, that's about it. Teams go through bad hitting patches all the time, situations where they fall behind two runs after the fifth and a kind of ennui takes over. Offensively, the Yankees find themselves in this kind of trough. When it happens at the start of the season, it is all anyone can talk about because there's nothing else to measure it against.

It is hard to remember but well to remember that the 1998 Yankees started the season 0-3. These were the Yankees still stinging from a shocking 1997 Divisional Playoff loss to the Cleveland Indians, and starting the season as they did--no kidding--churned the rumors that Joe Torre would be fired soon, if the Yankees did not turn things around. So . . . the Yankees went 125-47 the rest of the way, won the first of three consecutive World Series, and paved the way for Torre, Jeter and Mo to ascend, one day, to the World Series.

The defense will be helped by Matsui's injury. Melky will be an upgrade.

The bullpen, right, now, is the team's biggest strength.

So? So we'll see.

Yanks 10, Orioles 7

New drinking game: every time A-Rod gets the game-winning hit, take a shot everytime someone says, "The only thing that matters is what he does in October."

Yankees 10, Birds 7

Just another installment of: you don't know nothin.'

'Cause nobody does.

A-Rod's homer?

A start.

Bird 6, Yankees 3

Ahhhhhhh . . . I no sooner dedicate myself to the whole season than the chaos of Thursday night intervenes, and I miss Andy Pettitte's, ah, glorious return.

Now this. I saw the game unfold in the most painful way possible: the manual, inning-by-inning scoreboard at Minute Maid Park--where, by the way, I paid witness to another undoing of the Astros, and this during Jeff Bagwell Appreciation Day (not to be confused with Jeff Bagwell day, the retiring of the uniform number and all of that, set for August 26th).

From seeing one game and reading about two, from hearing what people say, I think we know the following:

1. The Yankees have had two tipping points in their history: 1965 and 1982. These were the times when everyone became old and slow. Are the Yankees there yet? No, but warning signs are everywhere. Their pitchers are fragile. The talent core-minus-A-Rod-and-Jeter (call it Georgie, Mo, Giambi, Matsui, Moose, Andy and even Damon) are all a year further away from their prime. Unless Cashman's wizardry has has re-stocked the minors with players not just ready to contribute and play well (Robbie, Melky) but to be out-and-out dangerous, the third Bronxian Dark Ages may be closer than we think.

2. That said, we can't worry so quickly. When a team stops hitting in the clutch for awhile, when a few errors mount up, the entire season can look hopeless.

3. Matsui's throwing arm has come seriously close to disqualifying him from the outfield.

Yankees 9, D-Rays 5

So here it is, a day late: my attempt to capture every single Yankees game of the 2007 season.

A day has passed. What do we think we know?

*The two most important (by important, think tipping-point important, think Malcolm Gladwell) members of the Yankees are going to be Hrubey and Vizcaino--if they stay healthy and if they don't suck. Unless the Yankees starting pitching is much, much worse than I expect (the Yanks are notoriously safe with injuries, especially pitchers), this edition of the Yanks are good for 93 wins, easy. Since 2000 they've been looking to re-do the bullpen that gave them three consecutive World Series Championships; they've done it all kinds of ways: various Witasicks and Wohlers; a return, in turn, of Stanton, Nelson, and Mendoza; big bucks to Flash Gordon (which worked as far as it went, until the 2004 ALCS, when Flash, undone by a season of exhausting work, could barely play catch with Georgie, and the season went down the tubes); and finally, last year with Sturtze, Proctor, Kardiac Kyle and Mo--more thrills and chills. In the immortal words of Guido the Killer Pimp, this is getting boring. Is finding two or three relievers who can get through the sixth and seventh without resembling carnival sideshows really that impossible? Will we see Proctor make it to September and still be able to open his front door without wincing? Are Hruby and Viz for real? Just asking. The answer is the season, long term.

*The Yankees will have to win games like yesterday's, if only because they may find themselves behind in the sixth and seventh more than they would like to be. Still, we can talk about the great Yankee rotation of Rocket, Wells, Lefty, and Moose in 2003 . . . and then remind ourselves how many times the Yankees found themselves behind first the Red Sox, then the Mariners. The freaking Mariners.

*A-Rod is fine. Still, though: A-Rod at short, Jeter at second, Cano at third. How many extra wins? Three, four?

NYC's top five

Reader Blue writes:

Yo Yank!
Please give me the top five things to do and see and avoid in NY City. Me and the little lady might visit The Big Apple in April.

Glad to oblige. April, you say?

Yankee Stadium: The guiding principle of New York City is, Stick to the things that will actually exceed their hype. (By way of what to avoid, stay away from Soho, avoid Canal Street, Fie on Chinatown.) Yankee Stadium--with its royal blue seats affording a view of the emerald playing field, the monuments to Ruth and Gehrig, DiMag and the Mick in Monument Park, the bleacher creatures in center field chanting the names of the starting players (one after the other, each until the player being whose name is chanted turns and waves), and, above all, a few minutes before that ritual, the pleasure of seeing Jeter, Matsui, Damon, Robbie, Georgie, and A-Rod trot confidently to their stations at the top of the first--is such a place.

Remember the end of For Love of the Game? The best line, the only meaningful line in the whole movie, was Vin Scully's, after Billy Chapel's perfect game: "The cathedral that is Yankee Stadium belongs to a Chapel." The cathedral that is Yankee Stadium. Yes, and yes again. Also, the House that Ruth Built has only two more seasons to go before the new playpen opens across the train tracks.

Broadway: My this-year's discovery. Check out the ticket kiosk that offers half-price tickets in the basement of the hotel--I forget the name--on 48th Street. The only drawback is that the kiosk only takes cash, which can be a problem, in that New York City is one of the three cities in the country where you find yourself returning again and again to the ATM machine. New Orleans has Bourbon Street, Las Vegas has the tables, and New York City has the cabs, the cloakrooms, the street vendors, and the bars that have been standing since 1848, the place you go in for one drink, so keeping a tab is a pain. (This I discovered: Easterners break a twenty for their first drink, and leave the change on the bar in front of them, taking what they need until they leave.) On which subject:

The bars that have been standing since 1848 (or so): Absolutely no guesswork at all. Wait until after five, but go before dark. Walk down a street, look for a wood-front tavern featuring a green awning, or else a corner place with its name spelled out vertically, and just walk in. Maybe it'll be noisy, maybe quiet, maybe sports, maybe Wall Street, maybe theatre. The bartender next to you will lecture you on whether or not the Yanks should trade A-Rod, Mr. Brown Class of '01 on the stool next to you will tell his friend (but loudly enough--on purpose--for you to hear) whether the market is due for a correction. You never know.

This method was how I discovered Rosie O'Grady's--the bar, not the steakhouse--on Broadway and 50th. And, in five minutes, with the help of the owner and a bond salesman, fixed the BCS.

Battery Park: More or less compulsory. The boat to Liberty Island can be a pain: go early, early, early. A few blocks north, Ground Zero. Not a lot of joyousness, but . . . you have to go. (Take the 1 Train to South Ferry, end of the line, get off, work your way north.)

The best walk in the world: From a memory of twenty years ago this spring. Sunset. The walk down Sixth Avenue, from Rockefeller Plaza to the Empire State Building. Has to be seen, etc.

Leave you with one memory. On a whim, Saturday, I walked from my hotel to the Ambassador Theatre, where (as I wrote already) Bebe Neuwirth was finishing her last week in the revival of Chicago. The man at the box office was quintessential New York: bald, muscular, compact, gray blazer, yellow shirt, red tie. New York.

"Uh . . ." I asked. "Anything for tonight?"

I thought he might laugh at me. Instead, he tapped out a few keystrokes on his computer.

"Ahhh," he said, and squinted at the screen. "Got sixth row. Y'want sixth row?"

I want sixth row.

"Ah," I asked, feeling warmed-to, "tell me, please. Is it pronounced Babe Neuwirth or Beebee Neuwirth?"

Now he smiled, in the same way a Soprano smiles, mid-whack. "Beebee," he said.

Oh, and on Monday, I have no idea where we were or how to get there, but as Astro-Girl and I worked our way from Chinatown home to the hotel, we stumbled onto a collection of Federal Buildings and courtrooms, and up one impressive set of gray steps, a filming of an episode of "Law and Order." Tom Berenger and Armand Assante were the featured performers that day.

My first clue was the 18-wheeler with the enormous PARAMOUNT PICTURES logo on the side.

"You know what this means?" I asked Astro-Girl.

A man walking behind us, carrying a violin case and a backpack, answered me.

"Yeah," he said as he passed. "I know. And it f%&*s up the traffic every day. It sucks."

Nearer to the set, a real-life ADA, who seemed all of twelve, and all of ninety pounds, and a real blonde (cut short), was more helpful.

"It was kind of exciting at first," she admitted. "But then it got boring. They're here every day."

Astro-Girl, who lives for all things "Law and Order" (all but the first team on "Criminal Intent"--D'Nofrio bugs her) was disappointed.

"I wanted to see McCoy," she said.

"Saying something profound and laconic as he and this season's McCoy-babe walk from the courthouse?" I guessed.

"Exactly," she said.

NYC Take Two

Astro-girl and I, on Sunday, head out for the next section of our Manhattan Adventure:

*Gyros from a street vendor. If that isn't an adventure, what is?

*Bloomingdale's. Who would Astro-girl be without her shoes?

*A matinee: Mamma Mia at the Winter Garden. Two things are going to take place in the 21st century: Oscars are going to be handed out for actors offering impersonations of famous people of the 20th century (so far we've seen Katherine Hepburn, Ray Charles, Truman Capote, Idi Amin--or rather their alter egos---so honored), and every popular musical group and performer of the 20th century is going to to empty its catalogue in an attempt to strike it big on Broadway. Who have we had yet? Queen, the Four Seasons, Frankie Valli, Billy Joel--and, in Mamma Mia, Abba. The story, of course, is a piffle (a bethrothed young lady's search for her father* among three candidates), yet oddly touching toward the end, and the three performance numbers at the end ("Dancing Queen" chief among them) are socko.

*Macy's. Which no longer advertises as "The World's LArgest Store," oddly enough.

*The Capital Grille. Steak!

And to all a good night.

(*Corrected from "Husband," thanks to SundDevil-Joe)

Give My Regards to Broadway

Remember me to Herald Square--which, come to think, have been the two spots in New York City that Astro-Girl and I have occupied since the cab from La Guardia dropped us off at the 53rd Street and Sixth Avenue Hilton in Midtown. In, as they say, the heart of Broadway.

Let me be clear: I am starting to get a little bit fed up with the notorious waste of money associated with these college conferences. The leading higher education luminaries schedule these blessed things in the most expensive hotels in the country, confident in their ability to hector their institutions into subsidizing travel and accomodations. Last year's conference was at the Palmer House, in Chicago; this year's conference is at the Hilton, located halfway between Times Square and Central Park, ran hotel bills into four figures for each of the participants, a figure they would never pay if forced to pay themselves. There is very little we could accomplish here that we could not accomplish at the best Embassy Suites in Springfield, Illinois or DeMoines, Iowa; it is the confidence that people have in reimbursement--reimbursement from money that comes from tuition fees and state aid--that allows them to hold these events in Chicago last year, New York City this year, and San Francisco two years from now. (Next year was scheduled to be Orlando, but was switched to New Orleans--a bad idea for an entirely different reason.)

But? But here we are.

I have turned this into my all-cliche tour. Thursday afternoon, I treated Astro-girl and I to hotdogs from a street vendor. Thursday night, I treated myself to a slice of pizza, past midnight, at La Famigla 24-hour takeout on 52nd and Broadway. Yesterday was coffee and bagels for breakfast, followed by my presentation, followed by sinner at the Havana Club, hosted by Longman Publishers. Today, down to Macy's with Astro-Grirl (she complained of motion sickness on the subway), and a shopping spree covering seven floors. Then, tonight, a walk to Rockefeller Center and dinner at the Sea Grill, with a table looking onto the skating rink. Then a walk to Ambassador Theatre on 49th, for sixth-row seats to Chicago, featuring Bebe Neuwirth--only this time as Roxy instead of Velma.

(Digression. Most people remember Neuwirth as the frigid psychiatrist Lilith, first on Cheers, then as a recurring guest on Frasier, a show whose re-runs Astro-Girl and I have turned into our end-of-the-night ritual. Neuwirth is one of those performers--Jerry Orbach is another--so entrenched in non-singing and non-dancing roles, usually on TV, that it becomes a shock to people to discover they can sing and dance. Velma was the part Neuwirth brought to life in the Chicago revival in the 1990s, and should have been the role Neuwirth rode to a Best Supporting Actress Oscar when the musical was made into a movie in 2002, but Neuwirth was passed over for Catherine Zeta-Jones, who can neither sing nor dance, a problem for a role that is ninety percent singing and dancing. It is one thing to dub another's singing voice in a movie; it is quite another to hire someone who can't dance, and try to cover up her deficiencies by way of quick cuts and reaction shots, a strategy Chicago attempted, and which fooled a sufficient number of Academy voters.)

Anyway, Neuwirth was sufficiently wonderful as Roxy, as I thought she would be.

And I had the added bonus, when I bought the tickets this afternoon. See, the door to backstage at the Ambassador is hard by the stage door, so as I emerged from the box office onto 49th Street, I passed by a door, and a voice that was unmistakable.

The voice sang the seven-note warm-up known to seven year-olds: "La-la-la-LA-la-la-la." Up and down the scale.

Throught the stage door, the voice was Neuwirth's.

A good moment. A New York moment.

A Spelling Bee for the ages

No kidding.

Wednesday afternoon, as a judge, I had the best seat in the house for one of the most emotionally wrenching experiences one could imagine, not involving death or bloodshed. Wednesday afternoon was the day of the East Texas regional spelling bee.

No, really. Read:

(X) Blue Jays 9, Yanks 1

Karstens chic continues.

Dunno. 4 1/3 innings, 4 runs? I guess I'm missing something.

(X) Phillies 3, Yanks 2

Pettitte, looking sharp.

Pavano, not so much.

Happy St. Patrick's Day

To those who would ask, "What law would you pass if you could?" I always have two responses:

1. Make Opening Day for baseball a national holiday.

2. Eliminate all other holidays (not the time off, just the holidays), save Thanksgiving and St. Patrick's day.

Christmas has become more trouble than it's worth. I find myself going to sleep early on New Year's. Valentine's in tolerable, but expensive. Easter is fattening. The Fourth of July is sweaty and an interminable wait for the fireworks. Halloween is fattening.

President's Day, Memorial Day, and Labor Day are times off from work with nothing else special. Perfect.

Tonight, time to hoist a tall one to Nanny and Pop-pop.

(X) Astros 4, Yanks 3

A ho-hum game for both teams. Wang: sharp. Woody: the same, working around a few errors.

If Mo Ensberg (third home run) is as sharp in the regular season as now, the Berkman-Lee-Mo-Scott middle of the order will be scary.

March Madness, day three . . .

. . . and all of my Great 8 teams are still alive.

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.

(X) Yanks 3, Braves 2

Igawa,three shutout innings.

Wang, Moose, Pettitte . . . Igawa, Karstens?

Could happen. No joke.

(X) Thuh-uh-uh-uh Yankees win!

Details here.

Honest to God, I've forgotten yesterday's opponent already.

Is this kid Karstens (four shutout innings) the real thing? Will Proctor and Kardiac Kyle (scoreless innings both) be able to comb their hair come September 1?

And how will this Yankee team do against left-handed pitching? The Yankees achieved Boston Massacre II by feasting on a Boston bullpen that couldn't deliver up a decent lefty for a lefty-lefty match-up.

And:

Most things that happen in sports are a stunner.

USA 4
USSR 3

Yeah, I saw that HBO special for about the twentieth time. And I thought about the 1996 New York Yankees, who were bounced in the first two games of the World Series and came back, 4-0--improbably, improbably, on the wings of a suffocating bullpen and a whole host of prospects (Bernie, Jeter, Mo, Andy) who decided to blossom at the same moment.

I'll give other people "Do you believe in Miracles?" I'll take Charlie Hayes gathering in the third out of Game 6.

I was thirty years old in 1995. I said, "If the Yankees never win again, I've enjoyed enough."

And then I was treated to four crowns in five years. Gravy. Gravy.

(X) Reds 6, Yanks 3

Box score here.

Mussina: 3 innings, 3 runs. 5 hits.

I feel a case of the March blahs coming on.

Damon and Cano look good, but beyond that . . . blah.

(X) Boston 7, Yanks 5

Pavano, two runs in three innings. But supposedly he looked good.

Got a call from, among other people, Robbie-Boy over the weekend. RB said, "I knew you were busy at work. I always know that when you drop your blog for a few days."

Bingo. I started this because I could never keep a diary for more than a few weeks. Somehow this made it all easier, and I hate myself when I let it go a few days. Blame the run-up to Spring Break.

It has taken me this long to realize that February and March are the best two months to be a college English teacher, especially at a community college, and for three reasons:

1) Spring Break!

2) Conferences, those out-of-town junkets that prove, once again, that nothing beats checking into a hotel someone else has paid for, sitting down to a meal someone else has paid for, and--best of all--boarding a plane someone else has paid for.

3) Mindful that April is usually the month for textbook aquisitions, publishers descend on us starting in February and treat us to, among other things, some really nice meals. It is quite a switch: I go ten months a year, hectored by secretaries, hounded by deans, and then for six weeks or so I find myself at the best restaurant in town, drinking a single-malt scotch older than most of my students as a prelude to the sort of dinner I can afford to treat Astro-girl and myself to maybe once a month.

The past two years, I have been doubly blessed. The past two years, I have been invited to present at the 4 C's (or rather, CCCC, an acronym for something I can never keep straight, though one C stands for "Composition" and the other "Convention"). It follows hard upon Spring Break, essentially (except for two days) keeping me away from my place of employment between March 9 and 28th. Thus the pile of work I did in the run-up to Spring Break, and the equally depressing pile that awaits me when I return.

Our college has a loose rule: get yourself invited to a conference, one conference a year, and they'll pay travel, accomodations. Last year, it was Chicago, and my introduction to the Palmer House, the El, the Chicago Art Institute, and--by sheer accident, as Astro-girl and I walked through the business district back to our hotel one stunning Sunday afternoon--the Billy Goat Tavern, the inspiration for Belushi and Ackroyd's "Cheese-bugga, Cheese-bugga" skit on SNL. Since it was a Sunday, and since the Billy Goat caters mostly to the business district types, the place was empty, and in fact AG and I were the only customers. That day's Goat employees, both men, seemed about twenty, surely the youthful descendants of the Greek proprietor portrayed so well by Belushi, and had well absorbed the insitutional DNA of the place. The conversation between one of them and Astro-girl went about as follows:

AG: "I don't know what I want."

Kid: "You want cheesebugga."

AG: "Well (scanning the menu above the counter), maybe I'll have . . ."

Kid: "You want cheesebugga."

The one salutory fact was that this was one of only two meals we purchased all week. Publishers, thank you.

This year, New York. I think I'll have the fish.

This is getting ridiculous

Or too easy. A polar excursion designed to draw attention the global warming has been called off because of . . . wait for it . . . extreme cold weather.

All explain-away-the-data global warming stories invariably contain this quote, or something like it:

"They were experiencing temperatures that weren't expected with global warming . . . but one of the things we see with global warming is unpredictability."

Because, of course, warm means warming, cold means warming, dry means warming and wet means warming.

And, of course, nothing is as unpredictable as freezing cold weather at the North Pole.

(X) Yanks 6, Tigers 5

Igawa, nothing much.

(X) Yanks 10, Phils 5

Big story: Carl Pavano pitches.

Two innings. One run.

Not exactly Ron Guidry, circa 1978.

But a start.

(X) Yanks 4, Bucs 3

Details here.

Wang, Pettitte, Moose--with that offense, and Rivera in the bullpen--could be formidable.

We're back to where we've been the last three years.

Innings seven and eight.

Coulter: our Moore?

One of the most exasperating periods of my life was the two-week boomlet for Michael Moore's Farenheit 9/11. The week the movie came out, I was staying at Evergreen State in near Olympia, Washington, for a conference on Learning Communities, and to understand this location, you should be familiar with 1) Chuck Klosterman's dictum that people attend Evergreen State to avoid attending life, and 2) Olympia is an hour away from Seattle.

The conference was run by a series of professors--ones that either taught at Evergreen or should have--and on the Thursday of that week, the night Farenheit 9/11 came out, a group of them drove an hour to Seattle to stand in line for two hours in order to see the movie. I should emphasize that, by and large, these people (two-thirds of them women) were wonderful and kind and and brilliant and hospitable to a fault--right up until the second when the subject turned to politics, at which time these people would turn into fanatics ready to lecture all of us on the stolen election, the corrupt Supreme Court, Chimpy McBushhitler, and Ho ho ho, wasn't it just hilarious that Fiji had signed off on the invasion of Iraq (leaving aside that 250 Fijian soldiers, who were placed in charge of currency transports through deadly territory, were roughly equivalent to 117,000 French, had France ever intended to stick an oar in, which it hadn't)?

One woman in particular sticks out: mid-fifties, attractive, and dressed in the de riguer Birkenstocks, she was one of those who had gone to see the movie, and on the Friday morning of that week, she described the movie to me, then realized that I was from Texas, then with utter solemnity said, "You'd better hurry and see it. You're in Texas. You know they're going to try and have it shut down."

When I expressed doubt that government agents would be charging into the River Oaks 3 to confiscate a documentary, she shook her head: No, no, Bush would be coming after the movie.

Once I returned to Houston, I emailed her that Farenheit 9/11 was playing in a movie theatre not four miles from the elder George Bush's house, she emailed me back, wondering, Well, how can he live with the shame?

Now comes the truly exasperating part. I saw Farenheit 9/11, not that I bought a ticket. (I purchased a ticket for something else and snuck in, not wanting Michael Moore to have a single dollar of mine.) Afterwards, in talking to people about it, I was struck by a certain debating tactic. Point out six falsehoods, ten, twenty, and wait for the response: "So? So he's our Rush Limbaugh. Big deal."

No kidding. I must have heard that line of argument a dozen times, everytone from dinner companions to Bill Press on cable news, repeating that line over and over and over until it became established fact. Point out blatant falsehoods in the first scene in the film, and get this: So? Our Rush Limbaugh, bro.

And so it has been with our side and Anne Coulter: living off her hyperbole, taking joy in the rage she conjured in others, excusing her hyperbole by saying, So? She's our Michael Moore. Or Bill Maher. Or Al Franken. Or, speaking of dissemblers, Bill Clinton.

So--I always imply--shut up.

Not any more. I give up.

The Sainted Soxblog makes the case.

Proctor: the real thing?

A nice little story about a kid who could make a difference.

Just pace him, Joe.

Since 2000, it has been the same story: the only thing worse than being a reliever Joe Torre doesn't trust is being a reliever Joe Torre loves. 'Cause you're going to get worked to death, son.

Tired arms cost the Yankees first-round losses in 2002, 2005 and last year; cost them the pennant in 2004 (the saddest sight in the world was Tom Gordon throwing those grapefruits to Ortiz and Manny), and cost them the series (okay, a lack of offense hurt) in 2003.

The current curse of the Yankees has been described as a franchise still looking for those last two outs they left in the desert in 2001. One might as well say that this is a franchise looking for the bullpen it had in the late nineties: Stanton, Nelson, Lloyd, Mendoza . . . and Mo.

(X) Yanks 6, Twins 1

And another exhibition season begins.

Giambi, Damon homer.

More importantly, Wang: two perfect innings.

The kid has got to be great this year.

Al Gore: Eco-Hog

If the eco-nuts gain any more traction--if the notion of what we, as individuals, must give up to keep the Statue of Liberty from standing hip-deep in the Atlantic Ocean--stories like this are going to gain more and more currency as time goes by.

Already, stories circulate of those Priuses (you know, those pet cars millionaire celebrities own, the ones parked out back behind the Humvee and the Escalade) driving to LAX, and to at least eighty private jets fueled and ready for take-off.

This is a piece with John Edwards' ugly-ass McMansion. Do these people know the depths of self-parody they've fallen?

Final Oscar thoughts

This was the all-timer in dreariness. By the end, DeGeneres was trying as desperately for laughs as a pre-Deano Jerry Lewis working the early show at Moe’s I-95 Supper Club. Wait–someone in the band smokes dope? Bob Hope wouldn’t have attempted that 35 years ago.

A movie I actually liked a lot won. One of the best six directors of the past hundred years FINALLY won. And yet the thing staggered toward the finish line and fell over face-first.

I saw Clint Eastwood yawning. He wasn’t alone.

Live-blogging at the Oscars

Opening monologue. Degeneres bombs. "And Al Gore, who the American people did select . . ." Christ. What next, Enron jokes?

First guy to get played off: the technical guy for Pan's Labyrinth . . . just so we could go back for more Degeneres humor. This is turning into a dreary evening. And why didn't they award a best-supporting actor or actress award early, just to liven things up?

Will Smith's kid and Little Miss Sunshine himself . . . award for the shorts! Ha ha ha ha ha. Oh, brother.

Dinner break.

Alan Arkin wins--good for him. LMS's consolation prize?

Oh, now DeGeneres interviews Wahlberg right after Wahlberg lost. Yipes.

Now, the Gore song.

1. Nice, being lectured about cardon emissions by the Gulfstream crowd.

2. That stuff in the back is, flat-out political advocacy. “Elect leaders” who do this and that.

3. Gore and DiCaprio. I’m going to go idle my car in my parking lot for a half-hour.

Writer's montage isn't bad.

Hanks and Mirren for Best Adapted Screenplay. NOW can we get rolling here?

And the winner is: William Monahan . . . for translating Infernal Affairs into English.

Ahhh, I wanted Cohen to win.

DeGeneres with an Oscar caddie. Smiles.

DeGeneres asks Spielberg for a second take. OK. That's three laughs in ninety minutes.

Almost ten now. Posted this haiku on Irish Trojan:

Seinfeld presents doc
Await inevitable
Gore getting restless

And Gore wins. Says, "My fellow Americans . . ." thus cancelling out his funny moment earlier.

Oh, God . . . ten o'clock, and we haven't gotten to the roll call of the dead.

Ten twenty-five, and nothing yet.

An Inconvenient Truth has just won two more Oscars than Manhattan did.

Thanks to Helen Mirren for being the only winner not requiring a) a script, or b) a stammer.

DeGeneres just resorted to a "the band smokes dope" joke. 1971 just called for his puinch line.

Forrest Whitacker reads, but he's all right.

Scrosese wins: "Can you double-check the envelope?" The Departed is not one of his best five films, but this is how things go.

Clint Eastwood, caught yawning.

Diane Keaton, sputtering and stammering and channeling Annie Hall.

And The Departed, your Best Picture.

Good for Scorsese. But a dreary evening.

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.

A-Rod needs his own Don Imus

To say this:

A-Rod. Please stop it. Please stop talking. Take batting practice. Take fielding practice. Run on a treadmill. Anything.

This isn't helping, I don't care what anyone says.

Probably the best . . . .

. . . commentary on the current DC standoff is Todd Linberg's in the Washington Times.

No one has put it better than this:

Opposition to Mr. Bush's Iraq policy is now the organizing principle of the Democratic Party, much as a personal and visceral opposition to Bill Clinton became the organizing principle of the Republican Congress in the 1990s. In both cases, it verges on obsession. In both cases, many of those who are caught up in it know better. But they aren't the masters of the passion emanating from the party's grass roots; they are its servants. It will find an outlet through them.
The question will always be this: What's next? First, a non-binding House resolution. Next, an attempt to derail the surge through conditions on funding. After that, what? I don't know, but, and this is the point, there will be something.
Mr. Bush said at his news conference last week that it doesn't matter so much what he or anyone else says now; it's a question of what kind of results Gen. Petraeus can achieve on the ground. In one sense, I suppose, that's true, in that if Gen. Petraeus is unable to make a dramatic improvement in the security situation in Baghdad, Washington rhetoric will be no substitute.
But suppose, for purpose of argument, that Gen. Petraeus does get results. Suppose the surge works and Baghdad becomes and remains fairly calm. What happens then? Do Democrats rethink their opposition to the war? Do they conclude that they were wrong to oppose the surge? Do they join with the president in a renewed effort to support the political process in Iraq and speed reconstruction efforts there? Do they turn off the grass roots sentiment that swept them back to the congressional majority, telling their most vocal supporters that they need to simmer down so that the party can play a constructive role on a serious question of national security?
In two words, no way. This opposition is fully vested in its position. If Baghdad remains insecure, it's time to bring the troops home, and if Baghdad becomes more secure, it's time to bring the troops home. That's because it's time to bring the troops home. National security policy is no longer the property of the specialists in the subject in the Democratic Party; it belongs to the grassroots. The exquisitely pained position of Hillary Clinton, who made herself into one of those national security specialists, is illustrative of the current moment.

Bingo.

Mariano Rivera (among others): Bernie may not be best fit for Yanks

Funny. Mo Rivera stays quiet for a dozen years. Now all of a sudden he's Charles Barkley?

Dane Cook: an hour-long concert on Burger King's new sandwich

The Onion has the details, bro.

What I Always Say

Via NRO's new feature, Planet Gore:

Weather vs. Climate [Jay Richards]

The Center for American Progress has just released a report explaining the difference between weather and climate. The gist of the report is that you can't detect large-scale global warming merely by observing local weather. You may find yourself stuck in a blizzard, for instance, but you can still be darned sure we're causing catastrophic global warming: "The chaotic nature of weather means that no conclusion about climate can ever be drawn from a single data point, hot or cold." OK, but then why don't the global warming Chicken Littles ever make this point when we're having a heat wave?

Best four words in the English language

"Pitchers and catchers report"

Oh, and Mike Mussina, of all people, smacks around Carl "bruised buttocks" Pavano.

The season will be interesting.

Ha ha ha ha ha!

Headline, Via Drudge:

HEARING ON 'WARMING OF PLANET' CANCELLED DUE TO SNOWSTORM

Like it a lot.

True New York Times Headlines of the past

"MacMillan Reports Signs Of New Ice Age" (Sept. 18, 1924)

"America In Longest Warm Spell Since 1776: Temperature Line Records A 25-Year Rise" (March 27, 1933)

"Major Cooling Widely Considered To Be Inevitable" (May 21, 1975)

Via Steyn, who--using the Kyotophiles' own math--writes:

"Climate change" isn't like predicting Italian coalition politics. There are only two options, so, whichever one predicts, one has a 50 percent chance of being right. The planet will always be either warming or cooling.

By now you're probably scoffing: Oh, come on, Steyn, what kind of sophisticated analysis is that? It doesn't just go up or down, it could sorta more-or-less stay pretty much where it is.

Very true. In the course of the 20th century, the planet's temperature supposedly increased by 0.7 degrees Celsius, which (for those of you who want it to sound scarier) is a smidgeonette over 1 degree Fahrenheit. Is that kinda sorta staying the same or is it a dramatic warming trend?

And is nought-point-seven of an uptick worth wrecking the global economy over? Sure, say John Kerry and Al Gore, suddenly retrospectively hot for Kyoto ratification. But, had America and Australia signed on to Kyoto, and had Canada and Europe complied with it instead of just pretending to, by 2050 the treaty would have reduced global warming by 0.07C: a figure that would be statistically undectectable within annual climate variation. And, in return for this meaningless gesture, American GDP in 2010 would be lower by $97 billion to $397 billion -- and those are the U.S. Energy Information Administration's somewhat optimistic models.

And now Jerry Mahlman of the National Center for Atmospheric Research says "it might take another 30 Kyotos" to halt global warming: 30 x $397 billion is . . . er, too many zeroes for my calculator.

So, faced with a degree rise in temperature, we could destroy the planet's economy, technology, communications and prosperity. And ruin the lives of millions of people.

Or we could do what man does best: adapt.

Letter of intent day

As expected, by closing the deal on a number of verbals, USC zooms past Florida to claim the number-one recruiting class in the country.

Chief stud: Running back . . . Joe . . . Mc . . . Knight.

Like it a lot.

The Astronut

The latest here.

There is not much to add, except that in this corner of Texas--the Interstate 45 corridor, running from Houston through Clearlake, past NASA Road 1 on down to Galveston and the Gulf--the news is being taken almost as a family tragedy, as if watching a favorite uncle being led away in handcuffs.

On either side of this fifty-mile stretch of freeway, where the best and the brightest of the space program walk among us, astronauts are revered more than soldiers, and soldiers are plenty revered.

Bad things that happen to the space program hit plenty of people around on a personal, a gut, level. A speech professor at my college worked for NASA for years, knew all the crew of the Challenger that exploded, including Christa McAuliffe. He was working at a classroom at the Space Station when it happened, leading a group of visiting students through a closed-circuit broadcast of the blast-off, when the shuttle exploded and, a minute later, a group of NASA personnel quietly led the children out of the classroom and on to the buses. It was this professor who told me what many people suspected: that the crew was killed not by the explosion but by the nine-mile fall to the water off the Cape; when the capsule hit the surface, the impact shattered the crews' spinal cords, killing them instantly.

This farce is nowhere near as tragic as that awful day. But, believe me, it has hit home.

Enough already!

Check back with me in twenty years.

But it is my sense that "global warming" is the biggest fraud perpetuated upon Americans in my lifetime. I have lived through "the population bomb"--thirty years on, earthlings have the greatest access to food, shelter, clothing, fuel, and medical care in any time in human history. I have lived through "global freezing"--remember those stories, of armadillos heading south from Nebraska to Texas? I have survived "50 million HIV positive Americans by 1990"--that sage piece of wisdom delivered on "Oprah."

Someone help me out here. Wasn't there a thing called, oh, I don't know, The Ice Age? Can we all agree it's warmer now than then, not entirely the fauly of SUVs?

Been down one time. Been down two times. Won't get fooled again.

The two greatest columnists in the English language, George Will and Mark Steyn, weigh in.

"Can you hear me in the back? Because I can hear you."

The above words were said not by my soon-to-be nine year-old niece's substitute teacher, but by Dennis Kucinich at a DNC meeting at which the Dem presidential candidates were given the chance to "introduce themselves."

As Dana Milbank writes, the candidates were given six minutes to speak and were allowed to have supporters bring no more than 100 signs into the hall. What actually transpired was 1) Every single candidate went at least double the allotted time, and 2) Hillary Clinton's supporters violated the sign limitation most egregiously, bringing in at least 300 HILLARY! posters.

Well, I'm convinced.

More or less representative of this bunch was Chris Dodd, summarized thus by Milbank:

Dodd, in his Phil Donohue hairdo, opened by noting that "sometimes, the introductions go on longer than my remarks." Not this time. He went on about Bill Clinton, Franklin Roosevelt and his 2-year-old daughter. At 10 minutes, he offered what could have been a rousing finale: "We're not going to take fear for an answer any longer in America."

During the applause, Dean stood up and attempted to reclaim the microphone. But Dodd wouldn't budge. As the timekeeper raised the red "TIME" sign repeatedly over the next 10 minutes, Dodd quickened his pace and added phrases such as "Let me also add here quickly."

Leaving aside that Milbank does not know how to spell "Donahue." It is well to remember that Bill Clinton gave the worst speech in the history of the world, non-Fidel Castro division, when he placed Michael Dukakis's name in nomination, in Atlanta in 1988. It was then that a rule of thumb was born: if your biggest applause line includes, "Let me conclude . . ." you're in trouble.

And, if reference to the above quote by Kucinich, if the audience takes advantage of your speaking time to visit the bathroom and return cell phone calls . . .

I always wonder about these events. First, do these candidates believe that length is a product of status? Second, they think they're saying anything new, or anything revelatory? Take gun control. I know as I sit here that, whether Hillary or Obama or whoever, when asked about guns a year hence, will say, We must get guns out of the hands of criminals while repecting the rights of hunters and sportsmen . . . Just as We must maintain the security of our borders without disrupting the rights of our citizens. Just as (if applicable) I voted for the war based on the faulty intelligence. Blah blah blah.

And third, don't they think briefer speeches might garner them some favorable press, even the thanks of a grateful constituency? I remember at the 1980 Republican Convention, the last with anything you might call real drama, George Bush the elder was given twenty minutes of speaking time on the third, the nominating, night. He spoke for ten minutes, waved, and was gone. Walter Cronkite nearly fell out of his chair. Speak for less time then alloted? Did that just happen?

Some hours later, Ronald Reagan tapped Bush as his running mate. And a Bush has been on a national ticket in six of the past seven elections.

Did brevity lead to the Vice Presidency? No, not directly; call it good karma.

Fourth, don't any of the candidates know that the greatest speech ever by a sitting President was ten sentences long?

NFL to priest: Drop dead

A church in the Park Slope section of Brooklyn has invited a group of youngsters (by which I think they mean "boys") to a pre-game Mass tomorrow, after which the priest and congregation will retire to the basement to watch the Super Bowl on a 42-inch LCD television. After the game, the TV will be raffled off, and the proceeds (past the cost of the TV) donated to various church youth functions.

Not so fast, says the NFL, whose lawyers sent the (offending?) priest a letter demanding he cease and desist.

No, I'm not kidding. Apparently the NFL's lawyers are too concerned that too many clusters of too many people assembling to watch the game (as opposed to being at home, watching it in their livings rooms) will adversely affect the Nielsen ratings for the show, which would harm the rates the televising network could charge, which in turn would, down the road, harm the rights fees the league could charge for televising the game. In that spirit, the NFL has taken it upon itself to forbid the showing of the Super Bowl for any money a) to large groups in venues not usually used for the watching of football, and b) on screens larger than 55 inches.

So: no churches. No Kiwanis dining rooms. But sports bars are okay. (Incidentally, I recall their being some trouble about sports bars showing too many games, or not paying rights fees, or something. As I remember, the NFL threatened to get tough, the bars threatened a nationwide boycott of Budweiser, which pays a zillion dollars in ads fees to networks during NFL games. End of story.)

This kind of overreaching reminds me of how vigorous the NFL goes to protect the trademark of the name, "Super Bowl," so much so that the subsitute names merchants use in hawking their wares ("Big Game," "Super Game") have become a running joke. How long before the subsitutions are thought to be actionable?

Already the NFL, sensing a PR nightmare for serving Fr. Flanagans across the country, is starting the backpeddle.

Incidentally, I have found a trick that makes watching NFL football a bit more bearable. It is a trick I had heard of, but never thought to employ until now.

It's this: Unless the day's fare is a match-up of two unfamiliar teams and is a game I have been waiting for all week . . . I never watch any pre-game shows whatsoever.

The single pre-game show I have seen in a month was CBS's, before the New England-San Diego playoff game, just to get some insight on the Chargers' blitzing, which was brought to me by splendidly intelligent Jason Taylor of the Dolphins. Taylor's statement about Tom Brady--"He's one quarterback you can't pressure by getting close to him; he only feels pressure when you knock him down"--was something I had noticed all season, but hadn't put into words quite as well. But beyond that one time, nothing, natta. Don't want to hear the picks, don't want to hear the fake laughs, don't want to hear who's got something to prove. During the week after the Pats-Chargers game, I stayed away from all TVs on the assumption that there was nothing new anyone had to say about the Patriots and Colts. The game itself was marvelous and heartbreaking and I don't think I missed a thing.

(Now post-game shows are another matter; I don't mind watching someone comment on something that actually happened that day.)

Tomorrow? Colts? Bears? Wake me up at twenty past five, Central time.

The Patriots, one week later

The 1998 and 1999 Yankees were, quite simply, the greatest baseball team ever assembled. Even the best baseball teams have a glaring weakness or two. The 1927 Yankees had no team speed--not that they needed it. The 1976 Reds had mediocre starting pitching, and the 1989 A's starters were awful after Dave Stewart and Bob Welch. (It is telling that A's, for all their talent, only won the one World Series interrupted by an earthquake. This happenstance allowed them to sweep: two games were won by Stewart, two by Welch--each, two weeks apart). Both the Reds and A's boasted explosive offenses, above-average defenses and deep, suffocating bullpens--give them a lead after six and you were done.

The Yankees came close to both the A's and Reds in offense and had a significantly better bullpen, anchored by the Hammer of God himself, closer Mo Rivera. Their starting pitching put the A's and Reds to shame; the '98 model had two Cy Young Award candidates (David Cone, David Wells) supported by Andy Pettitte and Orlando Hernandez; the '99 version boasted Roger Clemens as its fourth starter.

The dominance of the 98-99 Yankees can be summed up in three statistics. First, the team went 22-3 in the postseason over those two years. In the three-tiered Wild Card era, there isn't even a second place. Second, the Yankees went 8-0 in two World Series. Two consecutive sweeps in a row is without precedent. Third, the eight wins over two years are part of a 14-0 World Series run that began in the 1996 Series and continued through the 2000 Series. The '96 and '00 editions were lesser versions of the '98-'99 juggernauts for different reasons. The '96 team was an odd mixture of veteran badasses (Tim Raines, Cecil Fielder, Darryl Strawberry, Mariano Duncan, David Cone), top journeymen at their absolute peak (Paul O'Neill, Tino Martinez, John Wetteland, Jimmy Key, Joe Girardi), and Stick Michael prodigies coming into their own (Derek Jeter, Bernie Williams, Andy Pettitte, Mariano Rivera). Add one Hall-of-Famer enjoying his clover (Wade Boggs) and one clutch-hitting back-up catcher (King Leyritz) you have a champion.

The 2000 club was the outlier, the 87-victory fluke, the team that invoked all the cliches, winning "on pure pride" or whatever over three teams that were, each of them, probably more talented--in the case of Seattle, demonstrably so. The A's and Mariners both thought they had the Pinstriped Monster beat; and the Mets, in the Series, played as if winning were a formality, and found themselves on the tail end of at least two games they should have won.

As this run from Heaven was going on, I asked myself a few questions:

How would I react when it was over?

How would I react when I had my heart ripped out, the way this Yankee team ripped out the hearts of so many others?

How would I react when Mariano Rivera, the Hammer of God, failed to get it done?

(Digression here. How great is Mo Rivera? Imagine an all-time starting line-up: nine position players, right-handed pitcher, left-handed pitcher, reliever. Babe Ruth goes in right field. Walter Johnson, your right-handed pitcher. And Mo Rivera is your reliever. These are the three who defy argument. I drive between campuses all day, this is my job, and when a current ballplayer is on a sports radio show, and Mo Rivera comes up in conversation, I swear, there are a few seconds of silence, after which the current ballplayer whispers something like, "The guy's a freaking witch.")

Little did I know that all three of the above would happen at once--literally the instant that Luis Gonzalez blooped that sawed-off, one hundred and twenty-five foot dying quail over Derek Jeter's glove. The Diamondbacks, that Series, outplayed the Yankees in every aspect of the game except closer, and the difference in the respective abilities of Rivera and Byung-Hung Kim was reflected in the fact that the Yankees--who three times had starting pitchers chased in the early innings (Pettitte was tipping his pitches, and Game One starter Mensa Mussina was driven bonkers by a week-long layoff and by having to pitch in an unfamiliar park) and sported the worst batting average in an extended Series since the 1919 White Sox (who, let us not forget, lost the World Series on purpose)--were still able to scrape their way to a 3-2 lead in games heading back to Phoenix for Game Six.

We all know what happened in Game Seven. Rivera's inexplicable meltdown: three hits allowed, one hit batsmen, one crazy wild throw that pulled Jeter off the bag and prevented an easy double play. For years, the domestic shorthair cat who had moved into my apartment had served as a harbinger of Yankee fortunes: if Jeter or Paul O'Neill or Brosius came up to bat in the late innings, Ferris would run to the bedroom, anticipating my joyous screams. When Rivera would appear in the ninth, Ferris would fall asleep in my lap, certain that all was well.

And it was, in the years between Sandy Alomar's home run in the '97 playoffs, Rivera's first year as closer, and Gonzo's bloop. I had been so certain the Yankees had done it, had won their fourth Series in a row, I actually relaxed.

This was when my heart was ripped out. Two friends had come over to watch the game; after they left I turned all the lights out and stared at the ceiling. Eventually I fell asleep, only to wake up again and again, every ninety minutes or so, and to one thought: Someone tell me that didn't happen. It didn't happen. Didn't.

But of course it had.

This was the moment I remembered watching the end of the Patriots' game last Sunday. And that's all I have to say.

Durham DA Nifong hit with Ethics violations

The details here.

Consider:

At this moment, removal as DA and a lengthy suspension of his law lisence is the best case scenario. Nifong's career as DA is over. Disbarment is a genuine possibility.

And jail time? Don't be surprised.

I'm reminded of what one of the mothers (it might have been Mrs. Finnerty) said on 60 Minutes, when asked what she would say to Mike Nifong, were he in the room.

"'Mr. Nifong,'" she replied. "'You picked on the wrong families. And we're going to remind you of this every day for the rest of your life.'"

Pats' Postmortem

Almost ready to talk.

The rich gets richer

The post in April, on the North Carolina NAACP website, shows the mindset of the NAACP at the time. Of particular interest is this sentence, posted in early April, which advised not only vocal participation by the NAACP but quick action by the Duke president even before the DA's investigation was completed:

First, we must clearly denounce any code of silence, which seeks to inhibit ascertaining the facts.

Second, we must have deep compassion and concern for the victim and challenge any attempts to demean or destroy her rather than to seek and ascertain the truth.

Third, we must ensure that the D.A.’s investigation be completed thoroughly and promptly and that serious consequences be meted out if all the allegations are proven to be true. All of the allegations include sexual violence/gang rape, racial slandering/hate crimes, underage alcohol use, and any prior history of racial bigotry and intimidation must be fully investigated. We do not want a rush to judgment. But neither do we want a delay of justice. While the D.A. completes his thorough and prompt investigation, we want Duke to zealously conduct and complete its own internal investigation.

The idea that Duke should wait until the D.A.’s investigation is completed is wrong-headed.

I mean, this is too easy. It took me four minutes on the North Carolina NAACP website to find the above passage, which encapsulates perfectly the mindset of the NC NAACP nine months ago. So different now: "Keep moving, folks. Nothing to see here." This attitude is so in-keeping with Lawrence O'Donnell during his year-end appearance in The McGlaughlin Group, when he pronounced the Duke Hoax (though he didn't call it that) the most overrated story of 2006: "It doesn't need a this kind of daily examination. Let the story play out."

Poor fellows. Gradually at first, and then suddenly, all fun went out of the game. Now, we're (mostly Joseph Cheshire, but the rest of us as well) are supposed to be quiet. Now, we're supposed to sit back, turn away . . . you know, let the process play out.

Not a chance, guys. Nine months of facts, revelations, and story after story after story later, now it's our turn to bang the pots. Outside your window, in case you were wondering.

(I owe an Anonymous for this tip; in my previous comments box I was made aware of the so-called "82 Crimes and Torts," whatever the hell that means, the NAACP claimed the Duke players committed, a claim made just as the case was congealing. I'd thank Anon if I knew Anon's name; as it is, a word of thanks as it is.)

Oh, this is rich

The North Carolina NAACP wants everyone--especially the defense--to shut up about the Duke rape case while the state's Attorney General looks into the matter.

Sure thing, guys.

Finally, part 2

Fell asleep last night with the laptop in my, well, lap. To finish up on the Patriots this past weekend:

2. There is something awe-inspiring about Bill Belichick's ability to consistently win with only one historically superb star. The Packers of the sixties had eight Hall-of-Famers; the Steelers of the seventies had eight or nine; the Niners of the eighties and Cowboys of the nineties, when all is done, will have around a half-dozen apiece. The Patriots, right now, have Tom Brady, and maybe Adam Vinatieri (whose cause, ironically enough, would be helped by a big game this weekend against New England). Richard Seymour, Rodney Harrison? Maybe, maybe not. Teddy Bruschi? Deion Branch? Sorry. Ty Law? Long shot.

The only historical parallel I can think of (I was discussing this with Robbie-Boy on Sunday) is Bobby Knight. Personal shortcomings aside, Knight won three Final Fours and 880 NCAA basketball games with one future NBA Hall of Famer, Isiah Thomas. (By contrast, Dean Smith had James Worthy and Michael Jordan on the same team.)

How Bill Belichick succeeds is, first, bringing in players very good at very, very specific tasks, and, second, running his squad in as heartless and calculated a manner as possible. There was no earthly reason to cut Deion Branch loose; the money they saved was not needed to stay under the cap, and the amount they came in under the cap cannot carry over. Yet here they are, one win away from the Super Bowl.

3. With this season's version of the Patriots showing vulnerability, it is time to look back and truly appreciate the Super Pats of a few years ago, a team whose playoff games were almost relaxing to watch. I've rooted against Peyton Manning for a decade, but his 20-3 loss to the Patriots in the 2005 AFC Championship Game was the only time I felt sorry for him.

It is difficult to explain this to anyone under forty, but until the 2002 play-offs, the Patriots were the team of disappointments and freakish accidents, a team better known for its drunken rioters from Brookline and Framingham than anything it performed on the field. This was a team that once played a home game in Alabama, a team whose coach was fired/quit heading into the playoff bye week. When the Pats were bad they were putrid; when they were good it hardly seemed to matter, as when, in 1985, they appeared as the designated Super Bowl punching bag for the Chicago Bears. After the game, it was reported that half the team was on coke (though in fairness, if I were going up against Richard Dent and Mike Singletary I might need a little something myself). This was a team that ran fourth in Boston behind the Celtics, Red Sox, and Bruins (and when Doug Flutie played at Boston College, fifth).

The fulcrum was the (correctly called!) Tuck Rule game against Oakland in 2002. Since then, in every game but one (Denver last year), every bounce, every close call, every freakish event has broken the Pats' way, no more so than this past Sunday. And so we look to this Sunday, to see if the magic sustains itself.

Finally

Three last points on the Patriots.

1. They do occasionally play like punks, a story unreported by a media caught up in the Belichick/Brady saga. The Patriots behaved like seven year-olds at times then, and at times now.

The other two tomorrow

The Day After

Someone tell me what happened. I was ready to ask for a re-count.

There were two certified Hall-of-Famers on the field yesterday. One rushed for 187 yards and two touchdowns. The other threw three interceptions. Guess who won?

San Diego spent 45 minutes blowing New England off both sides of the ball. Leaving aside the weird Denver game that turned on two atrocious calls (pass interference near the end of the first half, and the no-call on the fumble out of bounds in the end zone) and several weird flukes, Brady has never looked worse in a game so big. Bill Simmons on ESPN.com postulated a month ago that Brady is badly hurt, somewhere, not that we'll know. Bill Belichik keeps such matters a secret worthy of North Korea, and so it will be February 15th or thereabouts when we read in tiny print that "Tom Brady entered Boston Mercy hospital for elbow surgery." Or knee surgery or back surgery or whatever; no way does the Brady of three years ago not drill Ben Watson between the numbers on that down-and-in.

Patriots 24, Chargers 21

Good Lord. What happened? I'm not even clear on the names. To wit:

1. Sometimes luck is the best plan.

An interception that leads to a fumble, then a recovery, hence a first down? I've been watching football 31 years; this is the third time it's happened in my presence. A late, late, late hit on fourth down, a punk-ass move unworthy of Texas 5-A, something that leads to an opponents' field goal? See below.

2. Bad actors.

What was up with these two teams? Why all the bad blood? To paraphrase Jim Rome, Arizona State-Arizona thinks those teams were over the top. San Diego was like a young pit bull looking to make its mark against the lead dog; nice try.

3. "I'm Keith Hernandez!"

I don't know anything about NFL football except what I see on TV. So I've seen the Patriots' struggle this year, not least because of the Hoodie's "I'm Keith Hernandez" moments, encapsulized by his cutting loose of Deion Branch. This, as Bill Simmons wrote, was his "I'm Keith Hernandez!" moment. This was the trade of Branch that led to a bunch of second-guessing, the whole 13 million under-the-cap business.

And yet here he was.

So what do we say about the Hoodie? He does what he does, and--against all odds--it works.

I don't . . . believe . . . what I just saw

Okay, somebody describe to me what just happened.

I mean, somebody tell me how the Patriots just won this game. I don't know myself. I'm in favor of the Patriots, and I'm ready to ask for a re-count.

Look, (to steal from Larry Miller) let's all have a drink. Then let's reconvene.

Okay? Okay.

Zzzzzzzz (Respite from the Smelly Lounge)

Staffing week, maybe my last.

Staffing week, for a department chair in the type of college where I work, comprises 15-hour days in the run-up to each semester, and keeps me from my loves: a good movie, a good steak, and writing that keeps the black dog at bay.

I'm going to New York in March to deliver an essay about my teaching. Why the Composition Convention keeps choosing the most expensive venues in the most expensive cities (the Hilton on Sixth Avenue? Good gracious!; last year was the Palmer House in Chicago) escapes me. Would it kill them to hold their conventions in cheaper venues, like Lubbock, or at least cheaper-but-still-nice venues, like Austin or Memphis or Long Beach?

Anyway, what I've been thinking lately is that there should be more teaching, more writing, and a lot less of Staffing Week. Be that as it may, SunDevil Joe, Robbie-Boy, Astro-Girl, Chumley Felix, Cahill, I suggest we meet back here after the Patriots game on Sunday.

New England 37, New York Jets 16

Nice to know you can count on a few things in life, Tom Brady and Bill Belichek among them.

Next up: San Diego.

Funny thinking of Tom Brady (who is not yet 30) going up against "the kid," Phil Rivers.

Duke invites 2 players back to campus

Another stone drops. Reade Seligman and Collin Finnerty may enroll and re-join the lacrosse team (the third, Dave Evans, graduated last spring).

Apparently the presumption of innocence means something after all.

Details here.

My favorite part of every one of these articles lately is what comes near the end: "Nifong could not be reached for comment."

Texans' Ryans NFL Defensive Rookie of the Year

So we got that, at least.

The latest on Duke

Mike Nifong sworn in as Durham DA today.

In private.

Behind locked doors.

Unreal.

KC has the details.

The Fiesta Bowl, Boise State, and the Future (part three of three)

There is no question that, at present, the Fiesta Bowl is one-fifth of a system that is unwieldy at best, and possibly corrupt as well. The BCS is college football's horse-by-committee, a closed shop that manages to strip away most of the traditional rivalries of the bowls while doing nearly nothing to resolve the problem of an identifiable champion. When it works, it does by accident, when there happens to be two undefeated major programs and zero undefeated mid-majors, a Utah or a Boise State. This has happened exactly twice, in 2002 and last year. Furthermore, anyone who thinks that Boise State victory brings us any closer to a playoff should consider that 1975 Fiesta Bowl, which was played the day after Christmas. In those days, with no BCS, schools played their bowls and turned matters over to the voters. Even when number one played number two--as happened with Penn State and Alabama in the 1979 Sugar Bowl--nothing was guaranteed. (Alabama defeated Penn State, but was number two to USC in the UPI Poll by virtue of having lost to USC earlier in the year. USC, at 11-1, lost the only game it would lose over two seasons, to . . . Arizona State.) In 1975, having won the Fiesta Bowl, having beaten a major power, the Sun Devils and their fans had a week to do equations in their heads, thinking, "Well if UCLA beats Ohio State in the Rose Bowl, and if Alabama loses the Sugar Bowl (or even wins unimpressively), and if Oklahoma loses in the Orange Bowl . . . my God, we'll win the National Championship!"

It takes a lot to go from number seven to number one in one week. In fact, it has never happened. But it very nearly happened that year. Alabama won the Sugar Bowl, but in lackluster fashion, and (in Dick Vermeil's final game as Bruin coach)UCLA pounded Ohio State. In those days, the Orange Bowl was always the last game on New Year's Day; most of Sun Devil Nation tuned in, hoping for a miracle. It didn't happen. Oklahoma won, and all of us were treated to final AP and UPI polls that began as follows:

1. Oklahoma (11-1)
2. Arizona State (12-0)
3. Alabama (11-1)

This was the first serious call for a playoff I remember. Bear Bryant, furious for (in his eyes) being robbed of a championship, screamed bloody murder. And this was thirty-one years ago. However, what has happened in the interim--the Bowl Alliance, then the BCS--has been an effort to prevent a play-off, rather than lead to one. The issue is not money; though the Big Six conferences do enjoy their fat guaranteed paydays, there is no question the money would skyrocket if the bowls were somehow lashed to a playoff system. (Think March Madness times ten.) The issue is always, will always be, power. The NCAA has full power to regulate any intercollegiate playoff system; hold so much as a single game that might be called a "play-off" (the so-called "Four- (or Five-) plus-one" scenario, and the Big Six-plus-Notre-Dame will lose their power to include, exclude, negotiate, schedule and divide up the profits among themselves.

(It is precisely because there is no playoff that, despite common misconception, the winner of next Monday's game won't be the "National Champion" of anything, strictly speaking, or even the "Champion" of anything save the BCS. The rough analogy is the Master's Golf Tournament, which unlike the other majors, which crown the national champion of a professional body--the Professional Golfers' Association, say--the winner of the Master's is not the champion of anything but a particular tournament. The Master's is not even a tour event, strictly speaking; all its glory is conferred upon by the players, the media, and the fans of the sport. Which is why Augusta National can talk of requiring a uniform (read: less areodynamic) golf ball without fear of interference from the PGA or USGA.)

When the BCS has been expanded, it has been for no other reason that to forestall Congressional anti-trust oversight. The notion is that an odd Utah or Boise State will keep the hounds at bay. This does little to help us. If Florida manages to defeat Ohio State in any convincing manner, the final BCS standings will probably read as follows:

1. Florida (13-1)
2. Boise State (13-0)
3. Ohio State (12-1)

What can be said for the Fiesta Bowl is that, when a mid-major school attempts to enter the party, it usually uses the Tempe gate. Arizona State was the first to do so. Penn State and Miami gave us the second National Champion crowned in a bowl outside the Original Four (Brigham Young won its lone National Championship by prevailing in the Holiday Bowl in 1984; its finish ahead of 11-1 Washington was helped in no small part by the respectability Arizona State had helped bring to the Mountain Time Zone.) Only two teams outside the Big-Six-Plus-Notre-Dame have ever played in a BCS Bowl. Both have gone to the Fiesta Bowl. Utah did so by going undefeated in 2004; Boise State went this season. Both times their geographical location was actually a benefit; the Fiesta Bowl reasoned, quite correctly, that not only would the fans of these schools buy up their allotment of tickets and any others they could get their hands on, but that thousands of fans without tickets would flood the Valley with their tourist dollars. This brightens prospects for whatever mid-major may manage to run the table: a TCU, a Brigham Young, even--one day--an Air Force, Wyoming, or Nevada. The future will be the opening of the door--just a crack, though. The playoffs are at least fifteen years away, maybe twenty. At least.

The Fiesta Bowl, Boise State, and the Future (part two of three)

It is an effort to list all of the consequences of that single football game.

The 1975 Fiesta Bowl was the game that turned college football on its head, opened up the Pac-8 to the Arizona schools, put the Fiesta Bowl on the map, introduced a college football-watching country to an entire time zone, and helped inch the football world toward an opening-up of television contracts.

(It is hard to remember but well to remember how byzantine the bylaws and contracts were back then. Until the late seventies, neither the Big-10 nor Pac-Ten could send a team to any bowl but the Rose, and so in 1974, for instance, Michigan started the season 10-0, lost to Ohio State, and stayed home. Also, the NCAA negotiated all television contracts, and allowed only a handful of games on the air. Nowadays the Pac-10 and Big-10 send at least ten teams to bowl games, and on Saturdays one can watch college football, uninterrupted, from late morning until past midnight on multiple stations. A single school (Notre Dame) has its own network television contract, for heaven's sake.)

What happened soon thereafter was a realization by many that both the Fiesta Bowl and Arizona State had outgrown one another, and both had outgrown the WAC. Arizona State was ready to challenge for the Rose Bowl, and the Fiesta Bowl was ready to be more than a mere showcase for ASU. In 1978, Arizona State (along with Arizona) moved to the Pac-8, making it the Pac-10; and the Fiesta Bowl, which was contractually allowed to break its ties with the WAC should any team leave the conference (of course, everyone knew the clause had been written with ASU in mind), became free to offer both of its bids to any team that would accept them. This double-bid status became a piece of enormous good luck over the next dozen years, as independents, along with conference champions with no bowl tie-ins, became the Next Big Thing in college football.

A bowl designed for an upstart became an upstart itself, moving to New Year's Day in 1981 as a clear challenge to the Big Four. Soon thereafter, the game became the first to add a corporate title to its name. The Sunkist Fiesta Bowl was born, the appearance purse bulged, and the game became a locus of perennial national consequence. It helped that over a seven-year span, six independents (Miami three times, Penn State twice, Notre Dame once) won the national championship, two of them by winning the Fiesta Bowl. (Had Penn State beaten Oklahoma in the 1986 Orange Bowl, the string would have been seven-of-seven.) The watershed was during the 1986 season, when it became clear that two undefeated independents--Miami and Penn State--would wind up the regular season No. 1 and No. 2. Completely free of any conference tie-in, the Fiesta Bowl went to work, taking the revolutionary step of moving the 1987 game to January 2nd and then fattening the purse. The traditional bowls (especially the Orange, which considered Miami its possession) howled, but the two teams met in that year's Game of the Century. It hardly mattered that the game itself was a dud, aside from the thrill of watching a Miami team full of loudmouths and criminals beaten 14-10 by Joe Paterno's Eagle Scouts (the offensive player of the game was John Bruno, the Penn State punter.) The 1987 Fiesta Bowl was the highest-rated football game to that point, and there was no turning back.

Occasionally, the double-indy system did not work. Sometimes the game was the runner-up bowl; it seemed for half-a-dozen years that Nebraska (by losing to Oklahoma) kept playing Florida State (which kept losing to Miami). And occasionally the greatest schemes fell flat; in 1993, the game set itself up for a re-match of a Notre Dame-Florida State thriller, but Notre Dame spoiled everything by losing to Boston College, and the Fiesta was left scrambling, finally settling on Arizona and a Miami team imploding from a decade's worth of misbehavior. (Arizona breezed, 29-0, in a stinker; on a hunch, my younger brother Rob and I drove to Sun Devil Stadium New Year's morning and bought a pair of field-level seats from two kids unloading their parents tickets. We paid fifteen bucks--total. Try doing that these days.) Often enough, though, the formula did work, and when the wind blew the other way--when Penn State, Miami, Florida State, Pittsburgh, and every other major college program save Notre Dame became conference aligned--the Fiesta Bowl swung back again, and found its way into the Bowl Alliance, and ultimately the BCS, hosting the championship game every fourth year. When the BCS added a fifth bowl, a stand-alone BCS championsip to rotate between the four BCS sites and run a week after New Years', the Fiesta Bowl location (now moved across the Valley to Glendale for the new stadium) was chosen as the first host.

The real loser, as time went on, was the Cotton Bowl: not as nimble, not as spendthift, too interested in landing the Heisman Trophy winner; plus the game is played in a bad neighborhood in, too often, terrible weather. (Don't know why, but New Year's Day in Dallas is almost always miserable: either wet or freezing, and always windy. Just ask Joe Montana.) The founders of the Fiesta Bowl had wanted, more than anything, to convince the country that the Valley of the Sun was as good a place to spend Christmas week as Southern California, Miami or New Orleans. To that extent--and against a dozen bowls that might have beaten them, had any of them been a little more aggressive--they had succeeded.

The Fiesta Bowl, Boise State, and the Future (part one of three)

So this time--for sure--the BCS will reform, right? In the wake of Boise State's spectacular, incredible, excellent, very good Fiesta Bowl comeback against Oklahoma (a game that included both a hook-and-ladder and a Statue of Liberty play, both for scores), we are faced with the very real possibility of the only undefeated Division I-A team--having won a BCS Bowl and beaten four Bowl teams, including Oregon State (which beat USC, which clobbered Michigan, which lost to Ohio State by three points)--ranked second in the BCS come next Tuesday. Surely, then, this will be crystallizing moment, when college football sees the error of its ways and institutes the long-awaited playoff system--four teams, eight, ten?

No. Of course not. The reasons why, in a minute. First, a few words about the Fiesta Bowl, and how appropriate it was that Boise State's classic victory should take place there.

The Fiesta Bowl has always been for upstarts. In the beginning, it was formed by resentful triplets starving for attention: the Western Athletic Conference, Arizona State University, and the powers of the greater Phoenix/Tempe area.

As is recounted in the history of the game, in the late sixties and early seventies, the Western Athletic Conference was growing dissolute about the fact that no prestigious bowl would accept its champion. Football in those days was even more a closed shop than today, as a long-ago (and non-archived) Sports Illustrated article recounts. To paraphrase, outside of a few tie-ins, the power rested neither in the NCAA nor the conferences but in a few powerful schools, which invariably meant that a few coaches-for-life who would set up bowl match-ups between themselves and present the match-up as a fait accompli. (The 1975 Sugar Bowl, between Alabama and Notre Dame, was apparently settled on a single phone call between Bear Bryant and Ara Parseghian.) Arizona State, churning out one undefeated (or one- or two-loss) season after another, was simply shut out, not only from the big four (Rose, Orange, Sugar, Cotton) but from most bowls, most years, period.

The solution--for the WAC, for Arizona State, for the Phoenix community at large (itself tired of feeling like a suburb of Los Angeles, its citizens receiving boring 10-7 Los Angeles Rams shoveathons week after week)--was the Fiesta Bowl. The very existence of the Fiesta Bowl was, as the sixties became the seventies, a close-run thing; throughout the sixties, the only bowl game approved by the NCAA was the Peach Bowl, a game (incidentally) won by Arizona State to make the school even so much as a blip on the college football radar. The Phoenix businessmen who backed the Fiesta Bowl would follow the Peach Bowl's model, and blend the game with endless charity efforts in the Valley of the Sun. The model was presented, and the NCAA approved.

From the start, there was no question of why the game existed. The Fiesta Bowl was contracted to feature an at-large invitee to play "The WAC champion," but it was clear the game was designed by wealthy Phoenicians as a Valley showcase for Arizona State, period. ASU played in five of the first seven Fiesta Bowls, winning four; had the Fiesta Bowl been incorporated (as it should have been) in 1969, ASU would have played in seven of the first nine, and almost certainly won six. The entire country (by which I mean the football-watching country at large) was in ignorance of the squads ASU coach Frank Kush was turning out year after year--which he did, first, by securing the best (not-insignificant) talent between Texas and the Colorado River; and second, by working and drilling said talent until said talent dropped. The ASU training facility in Northern Arizona is called Camp Tontozona; the hellacious mountain to be climbed at a jogger's pace is called, to this day, Mount Kush.

In the first few years, the Fiesta Bowl was between Arizona State and some offensive-minded independent such as Pittsburgh or Florida State. It was a nice sideshow, a flurry of offense in the dry desert Christmas air, right up until 1975, when ASU went 11-0 in the regular season and intruded in on the AP Top Ten, much like an newly minted oil baron might crash the country club.

The andidote, it seemed, was number three Nebraska, who (in the view of paranoid Sun Devil fans; "They're out to screw us" is embedded in an Arizona sports fans' psyche) seemed sent by the nation's football establishment to squash the Devil uprising. Oklahoma or Ohio State or Notre Dame might have worked, but (Devil fans projected) Nebraska would do. Nebraska was 10-1, having lost only to Oklahoma, and only accepted the Fiesta Bowl invitation the second time it was extended.

Compared to Boise State versus Oklahoma, no one can imagine the sense of David v. Goliath that December 26th, 1975, when the team with the sophomore quarterback (Dennis Sproul), the sophomore receiver (John Jefferson), and the stud cornerback (Mike Haynes) took the field against the Great Red Farm Combine.

I was ten years old, and living in Phoenix. The game itself was a classic, and held my family and I spellbound for every minute of its play. ASU scored two field goals early (courtesy of coach's son Danny Kush). Nebraska responded with two touchdowns; then, when Sproul was injured near the goal line, sophomore back-up Fred Mortensen replaced him. Mortenson's first play: a touchdown pass to Jefferson. His second play: a two-point conversion, another pass, this time to Larry Mucker. 14-14.

Fourth quarter: another Danny Kush field goal. 17-14, ASU. With a few minutes to go, the Huskers began a march toward the end zone. Their lineman blew the Devil defenders off the ball, their running backs were pile drivers. My family, assembled before the black-and-white RCA, sat silent, resolved to our team's fate. Nebraska drove the ball to ASU's 31. Quarterback Terry Luck threw two incompletions. On third-and-ten, he completed a pass to fullback Tony Davis, who was hit by two Devils and fumbled the ball. The Devils recovered and ran out the clock.

Bedlam. Sheer insanity.

To this day, Arizona State 17, Nebraska 14 is a score I keep in my head alongside USA 4, USSR 3. When I heard a commentator say, "Well, 52,000 fans paid for seats they didn't use much today," Yes, I thought, and yes. I was ten. I had never loved a team with such innocence, nor ever would again. (My next sports crush, the late-70s Yankees, would introduce me to winning's ugly side.) I had been given a mini-bike for Christmas a day earlier--the greatest Christmas gift of my life; it was a magical week--and, after the game, as my father drove me and my mini-bike out to a place where I could ride, as we listened to hi-lights of the game on his AM radio--especially Mortensen's heroics--I thought, What a team. What a game!

My father chose a spot of desert that, in a few year's time, would be a golf course. As I puttered up and down the hills, as a typically breathtaking Valley sunset broke pink and orange over the distant mountains, I saw my father through the dust, seated in the Country Squire station wagon, smiling as the game commentary played on the radio.