Lance Armstrong

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You have probably heard or read about Lance Armstrong’s latest troubles.  If you haven’t, here’s the story: he is now accused, on the basis of very credible evidence (including the testimony of his teammates), of using illegal methods to win his various championships. He still denies it. Since the publication of the report a few days ago, however, even more acquaintances and teammates have come forward to corroborate the report’s conclusion.

 

 

 

All right, I’m giggling a little bit. Lance has always seemed a little smug to me, and a little too good to be true. I remember seeing a TV program in which they tested the physical endurance of normal human beings, and then gave Lance the same test; his results were off the scale. He just wasn’t human. And he just smiled secretly and allowed us to admire him.

 

 

 

I’m not crazy about self-promoting athletes: Lance Armstrong, Michael Phelps, Peyton Manning. I like a little modesty. (I make an exception for Tom Brady, because he’s adorable, and we’re all New England Patriots fans up in here.) I remember fondly seeing an boxer named Barry McGuigan on Irish TV back in 2007; he was on the Irish version of “Celebrity Iron Chef,” and he made no bones about not being able to cook, but he could mash the hell out of those potatoes, and he ended up winning the show. (Also he was sort of adorable, in an Irish featherweight boxer kind of way.) He seemed modest.

 

 

 

Most likely Lance was doing something called blood doping. This entails taking a drug called erythropoietin, which makes your body produce more red blood cells than normal; you then drain some of your blood off, have it processed and frozen, and reinject yourself with your own blood cells when you need some extra energy. “I don’t see that as doping,” Partner said. “You’re using your own cells. Why not?”

 

 

 

This is an excellent point. Why not indeed? It’s like saying that a weight lifter can’t lift weights between meets, because he might build extra muscle, and that wouldn’t be fair.

 

 

 

Except that the rules of cycling forbade it. Lance knew this, but broke the rules anyway. And then he lied about it.

 

 

 

He might have come out as a brave proponent of blood doping, pointing out – very fairly – that using one’s own blood cells isn’t the same as using a drug. He might well have won the argument, and the exception might have been made in the rules.

 

 

 

(Of course, then everyone would have been using the stuff, and Lance wouldn’t have been Superman anymore.)

 

 

 

There have been a few supporters jumping up and down to defend Lance. He’s a cancer survivor! they say. He’s done so much for charity!

 

 

 

Oh well, ho hum, and Stalin was very good to his momma. (No, seriously, he was.)

 

 

 

Lance used illicit methods to get to the top of his métier, and then he profited from it.

 

 

 

If he gave a little back to charity, well, that’s terrific.

 

 

 

But he cheated to do it.

 

 

 

So let’s just not talk about him anymore.

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The Olympics, London 2012: a postscript

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I am sorry to see the London Olympics end. It was a jolly old time: lots of surprises, lots of upsets, lots of new friends. Glad about so many things:

 

 

·       Glad to see Michael Phelps win his eighty-two medals and announce his retirement, which means we don’t have to look at his ugly sub-primate face anymore, except maybe in Subway Sandwich advertisements.

·       Glad, in a different way, to see Usain Bolt (from a much smaller country than Michael Phelps) prove once again that he’s the fastest runner in the world, and be smug about it, and we’ll probably see him again in 2016, and he will be at least three times as smug, and probably even faster.

·       Glad to see lots of smaller / less populous countries win medals of all kinds: Grenada, Mexico, Tunisia, Ireland, Slovenia.  (Grenada, with its one gold medal, has the most gold medals per capita of any country in world. In your face, Michael Phelps!)

 

 

(Which reminds me: I truly want to see India win a gold medal one of these days. They’ve never won a gold, in all these years. It will be madness in Chennai and Mumbai when that day comes.)

 

 

The London closing ceremony, like the opening ceremony, was controlled chaos, slathered with lots of music. The opening ceremony was meant to be thought about, and talked about. This closing ceremony was just meant to be fun. (There’s a very heavy message in listening to The Who – the members of which are in their sixties at least – sing “My Generation.”  It makes me feel strange. Isn’t there a line in there that says “Hope I die before I get old”? Doesn’t Roger Daltrey feel funny when he sings that?)

 

 

Also Eric Idle, leading a huge chorus of everything and everyone imaginable (including nuns and Roman soldiers) in “Look On the Bright Side of Life,” from the Python movie “Life of Brian.” This bookended the Rowan Atkinson “Chariots of Fire” number in the opening ceremony, with that kind of deranged I-don’t-care British humor that the world has come to cherish. And it turned into a singalong with the audience!

 

 

And then Boris Johnson, the highly peculiar Mayor of London, handed over the Olympic flag to Jacques Rogge, who handed it over to Eduardo Paes, the mayor of Rio de Janeiro, where the 2016 Olympics will take place.

 

 

(Can you imagine what that opening ceremony will look like?  We had glimpses: there was a samba spectacular, and Pele made an appearance! And one of the performers was dressed as the Santeria goddess Yemanja, goddess of the sea!)

 

 

See you in Rio, kids!

 

 

(If I live that long.)

---

 

 

Again with the Olympics

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Are you bored with the Olympics yet? Not me! It’s been a thrill a minute. Not so much the events, which I find mostly pretty dull. But the stories, egad, the stories!

 

 

Roll the presses:

 

 

Two brothers from Yorkshire won (respectively) the gold and bronze medals in the triathlon. (No, I didn’t know what the triathlon was either. It’s an endurance event, something like the American Iron Man events; contestants have to swim, and run, and cycle, in quick succession.) The UK is over the moon about this. According to Oma, my informant who lives in Luton, not far from London, the brothers wanted to cross the finish line simultaneously, but were told they couldn’t.  (Have you heard about this? Me neither, until Oma tipped me off, and then I read an article in the Financial Times on Wednesday morning. I know: we care mostly about American athletes, and NBC figures we couldn’t care less about a couple of nice young men from Yorkshire. But what a story!)

 

 

A weightlifter from Germany dropped the barbell on himself. It was a pretty horrible scene: a German athlete, Matthias Steiner (who won the gold medal in Beijing in 2008), was hoisting 432 pounds over his head, and his arms buckled, and the weight came down on top of him. It gave me pause. Some of these events are dangerous. You can at least sprain or injure yourself while weightlifting (for example), and at worst you can actually drop a huge weight on yourself, as happened here. Remember the poor young Georgian in Vancouver, Nodar Kumaritashvili, only twenty-one years old, who wiped out on the luge and died of his injuries? Remember poor young Greg Louganis, who hit his head on the diving board back in 1988? He said it didn’t hurt that much, but I cannot imagine hitting your head on a diving board while spinning around in the air feels all that great. (There are certain events that carry little risk of personal injury; table tennis comes to mind. Yes, I know, things can still happen while playing table tennis, but – you know? I could go in the kitchen right now to make a sandwich, and slip, and hit my head on the counter.)

 

 

The beach volleyball matches have turned into the hot ticket at the London games. A FT columnist wrote a very funny column on Wednesday about the matches: it’s like a party, everyone in the stands is drinking and having fun, there are dancers on the floor of the arena between matches, and the announcer is more like a party DJ. Now: don’t you wish you were there, even though you don’t care two bits for volleyball?

 

 

Grenada has a gold medal. Remember Grenada? The USA invaded it in 1983, for some reason I don’t quite remember. Well, they have a gold medalist, Kirani James, in the men’s 400-meter. The whole island has gone properly insane, and was given a half-day holiday to celebrate. (I remember, when I was in Morocco in 1984, we (Moroccans) won two gold medals. The country went berserk. I was in Casablanca on the day the athletes came home from Los Angeles, and it was proper bedlam. It puts Michael Phelps’s smirking about winning seventy-five medals into perspective. Who cares if you’re a medal-winning freak from a country that always wins anyway? We like to see the less-represented countries win. It’s kind of what the Olympics are all about. Right?)

 

 

Iceland keeps trying to win a gold medal in handball. I will not even try to tell you the backstory on this one. Here’s the outline: Iceland has had a hard time over the past couple of years, economic collapse, blah blah blah. They won the silver medal in handball in Beijing in 2008. (There is a museum in Reykjavik which displays a sculpture called “The Icelandic Handball Team”; it’s a set of full-sized silver penises, which denote national pride.) Iceland was hell-bent to win gold this year. As of this writing, they have lost their chance. But they are doughty. And there’s always 2016, providing the Maya are wrong about this whole end-of-the-world thing

 

.

Swans win gold in London. From Wednesday’s FT: “London is now so obsessed with the Olympics the very wildlife turned to imitation: on the Serpentine a five-strong group of swans broke away from a peloton of Canada geese.”

 

 

Even the swans and geese are getting into it.

 

 

As Oma, in Luton, wrote to me the other day: “It's been a great games so far and I'm loving it, loving it, loving it.”

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Olympics update, dateline August 7, 2012

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I am enjoying the Olympics this summer.  They are chock-full of peculiar stories, and give me many a laugh and tear.

 

 

For example:

 

 

There was a badminton scandal. Apparently, eight players from South Korea, Indonesia, and China were throwing their own matches, in order to play against (and presumably beat) lower-ranked teams. The press threw up a couple of images of indignant badminton players, which were pretty funny; also there was a spate of badminton jokes on television. My favorite was: “Isn’t badminton something you play at your family reunion?”

 

 

A man with no lower legs or feet is competing in a track-and-field event. Oscar Pistorius of South Africa, who was born without fibulae and had his legs amputated below the knees in childhood (see photo above), uses “running blades” to compete. He does pretty well. There has been a sniffy little argument about whether the blades give him an unfair advantage; they’re pretty bouncy, apparently, but they also give him a disadvantage at the beginning of the race, so it sort of balances out. And, says I, what’s stopping the other runners from having their legs amputated and using blades themselves? I know that I myself would not be able even to stand upright on running blades. So: good on Oscar Pistorius, as my British friends would say.

 

 

Doping has entered the GATTACA era. A Chinese swimmer won her race by swimming at unbelievable speed. An American official insisted she must either have been doping, or – more insidiously – undergone some kind of genetic modification. (This is all the rage at the moment – have you seen the trailer for the new Bourne movie?) The Financial Times ran a very sober article about this last week, citing the example of “Marathon Mouse,” which (after genetic modification) can run twenty-five times farther than an average mouse. This is creepy, and (to date) undetectable. Who can say what's going on?

 

 

Upsets are fun to watch.  Why do we root for someone who’s already a champion? Isn’t it more fun to watch an underdog win? I hate tennis, normally – it’s just bip-bap-bip-bap to me – but I was lucky enough to tune in on Sunday just as Andy Murray aced his match point past Roger Federer, and I thought that was just fine. I hate to see the same six or seven people winning all the time. (Hear that, Michael Phelps?)

 

 

I’m baffled as to why some sports are in the Olympics and others aren’t. I’ve made fun of badminton today, and trampoline last week. One of my colleagues at work thought “canoe slalom” was a person’s name rather than an event. And yet: no lacrosse in the Olympics. No squash. No cricket. No camogie. (Usually it’s because they’re not universally played. Lacrosse, for example, is pretty much limited to the US and Canada. Cricket is popular in the UK and a handful of Commonwealth / former Commonwealth nations. Camogie – well, give yourself ten points if you even know what camogie is. But what about rugby?)

 

 

Now and then it makes sense to me why something is an Olympic sport. Judo and taekwondo, for example: it’s easy to train for these, and inexpensive – all you need is a bathrobe and a floor mat.  There were dojos everywhere in North Africa when I was there in the 1980s. Archery and shooting are modern transformations of hunting skills. Wrestling is about as primal as you can get. (Also, it’s fun to watch.)

 

 

I’ve been learning stuff every day through these Olympics. I hope it continues right through the closing ceremonies, when (according to the Financial Times) the seven young athletes from the opening ceremony will hand the Olympic flag over to seven elderly CEOs, who will bill back the young athletes for tuition fees.

 

 

More soon.

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Olympics update

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I used to know nothing about athletics, but I know all about them now. Over the past year I have employed a gymnast and two football players in my office, and I just hired a lacrosse player, and they have all taken great pains to educate me in their various sports. Partner, naturally, still tries to instruct me. And now, with the Olympics, my education is proceeding wonderfully.

 

 

Here’s what I now know:

 

 

-        Synchronized divers do not have to be exactly the same height. To be frank, I didn’t know there was such a thing as “synchronized diving” until Tuesday morning, when I saw two adorable young Mexican athletes execute a simultaneous quadruple mid-air flip. But one diver was an inch taller than the other, and it offended my sense of symmetry. Shouldn’t the shorter one have been wearing flip-flops, or something?

-        Trampoline is an Olympic sport. I learned this on “Jeopardy!” the other night, and I told my student assistant Gunnar about it, and we both thought it was pretty funny. I’m sure it takes loads of strength, coordination, etc., etc.; it’s just that I associate trampolines with kiddie parties and circuses. Gunnar found a video of the Canadian trampoline finals online, and we watched a bit of it, giggling quietly. “This guy’s actually pretty good,” Gunnar said. “Until he breaks his arm when he falls off the side,” I said. And then we started giggling again.

-        A North Korean weightlifter just lifted three times his own weight. This has only been done twice before in Olympic history, and it’s pretty amazing, apparently; Gunnar (who’s a football player in training) was blown away by this. The North Korean, Om Yun Chol, is five feet tall, and he weighs only a little less than I do (and I’m almost a foot taller than he is), and he’s adorable. Look how happy he is in the photo above! Apollonia, who doesn’t like short men, called him a “nasty little troll.” I pointed out that he was extraordinarily strong, which is always a selling point (we all like men who can lift and carry), and she grudgingly took her insult back, and we are now calling him “our pocket Hercules.”

-        Swimmers are almost never attractive. Swimming develops all the wrong muscles. A classically well-built man is not, how you say, hydrodynamic. Champion swimmers are built more like otters or harbor seals. My friend Cathleen told me that she can’t help noticing the Olympic swimmers’ hugely developed trapezius muscles, which look eerily unnatural.

-        Road cycling is very dull. Watch the replays if you don’t believe me. Pedal pedal pedal pedal pedal; curve straightaway curve straighaway curve. I mean really. 

-        Women’s beach volleyball is more or less soft-core pornography. Yes, Misty May-Treanor, I’m looking at you. 

-        An athlete from Niger, Hamadou Djibo Issaka, who only learned to row a few months ago, came in last in the single sculls event. Shades of “Cool Runnings”! And good for him! And the crowd cheered him on! (This is what makes the Olympics (at its best) feel like a world event: cheering for someone who’s in last place, or someone from a different country, or someone who isn’t a consummately-trained athlete.  Or all three.) 

 

And we're only a week into this!  And I didn't even mention the badminton scandal!

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Why I should probably stop trying to talk about sports

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I was never much of a sports fan, so I have a hard time picking up the lingo.  Partner is a diehard sports fan (football, hockey, baseball), and I have picked up some odds and ends from him.  It was also helpful to have a college football player working for me last summer; he had obviously explained the sport to his elderly female relatives, so he knew all the right terms to use to help me understand it. (When I asked him what position he played, he told me he was a linebacker.  When I looked blank, he added helpfully, "I just push people around.")  Also, as I grow older and more wizened-looking, people – especially men my own age – assume that I know all about sports.  And who am I to disappoint them?

 

 

A few weeks ago, a couple of weeks before the Super Bowl, one of the university shuttle drivers hailed me at lunchtime and pulled over and asked: “Who do you like this weekend?

 

I laughed in what I hoped was the correctly rueful tone.  “Well,” I said, “they’d better win.” (By “them,” of course, I meant the New England Patriots, the local favorites.)

 

 

He chuckled and waved.  “It’s gonna be a tough one,” he said.  “I don’t know.”

 

 

He drove off.  I was very pleased with my performance on that one; he’d been a semi-pro player and a football coach, so if I could fool him, I figured I could fool anyone.

 

 

But then this happened:

 

 

The Patriots had just won the AFC championship by three points.  (Partner was ecstatic, naturally.)  After the game, I went down to the health club.  I was checked in by a skinny kid who was staring at the after-game show on the TV over the desk.  “Is everyone happy?” I said.

 

 

He looked at me blankly.  “Why?”

 

 

I gestured up at the TV set.  “The game.”

 

 

He looked up again, still blank.  “The – oh, the game.” 

 

 

I tried one more time.  “Everybody was happy at the end? Everybody cheered?”

 

 

He gave me that simpering grin that you give a gibbering child or a person with an impenetrable accent, and looked away from me. 

 

 

I will never try this again.  I’m obviously still not doing it right.

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Super Bowl XLVI

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As you are probably aware, New England lost the Super Bowl last weekend.

 

 

Partner retreated into the other room immediately after the end of the game. He does not like losing.  He is a born New Englander, and he is used to losing, but he prefers to win.  The Red Sox have finally broken their losing streak – twice over the last decade - and the Bruins won the Stanley Cup just last year, and the Patriots have won the Super Bowl three times.

 

 

But not this year.

 

 

Here’s the thing: New England teams are not terribly attractive to the rest of the nation.  When the Patriots last lost the Super Bowl, the Onion headlined: “Patriots' Season Perfect For Rest Of Nation.”

 

 

We are hated, we know.  When our teams lose, we have to put up with a lot of gloating by fans of the other teams, who now feel that their hatred is justified.

 

 

And now we sulk in defeat.

 

 

But you just wait!  We’ll be back.

 

 

And as a recent issue of the Onion so cleverly put it, in a piece written just before the playoffs: “NEW ENGLAND PATRIOTS: Opponents may think they're not what they were when they were younger, but have they considered Tom Brady might get even more handsome with gray hair?”

 

 

(He will, you know.)

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The effect of Tom Brady on middle-aged women and gay men

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The day after the big Patriots-Ravens game, everyone was talking about the Patriots victory, and about Tom Brady. 

 

 

This is an approximation of the conversation between me and my workfriends Cathleen and Apollonia:

 

 

“I didn’t think he was cute before.  I’m sort of coming around to him.”

 

 

“Oh, he’s just fine.”

 

 

“Meh.  Not my type.”

 

 

“Well, but he’s growing into his looks, finally.  He used to look kind of gangling and boyish.  He’s filled out very nicely.”

 

 

“I’ll say.”

 

 

“Do you remember when he hosted Saturday Night Live ten years ago? He was cute.  He did a sketch about sexual harassment, and he just wore his underwear, and none of the women in the office considered it sexual harassment.”

 

 

“What kind of underwear?”  (Okay, that was Apollonia.)

 

 

“Tighty whiteys.”  (This was me. The vision is stamped on my memory.  See the above photo if you’ve never seen the sketch itself; I couldn’t find the clip online.  NBC guards its property jealously.)

 

 

“Oh,” said Cathleen (okay, we’re all out of the closet now).  “I would have pictured something more elegant.  You know.”  She gestured downward.  “Not boxers, but something really nice and form-fitting.”

 

“These were mighty form-fitting,” I said.

 

 

“Oh my God!” Apollonia burst out.  “What are we doing?  What kind of people are we?  Why are we having this conversation?”

 

 

Cathleen and I paused for a moment.  Then we both smiled.  “Because,” I said, “we find the subject fascinating.”

 

 

(And to think I spent all those years not caring about sports!)

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Joe Paterno

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I watched ESPN’s SportsCenter the other night while I was on the treadmill at the health club.  (The mere fact that I am watching sports programming should be taken as a sign that 2012 is definitely going to be the end of the world.)

 

 

I can’t endure listening to sportscasters, for the most part; they do nothing but spout empty clichés.  Before the game, they pretend to know what’s going to happen; after the game, they take all the credit if they were right, and make excuses for the losers if they were wrong.

 

 

But then you have the special features.

 

 

Joe Paterno died this past weekend, and one of his former players came on to reminisce about him.  This went relatively well until we got to the end.  This is a paraphrase: “Of course he was very frail, and naturally he was also very ill.  But I think it’s fair to say that he died, at least partly, of a broken heart.  And I hold the Board of Trustees, and the media, responsible for that.”

 

 

A little later he said: “Joe was very generous.  He always thought of others first: his team, his family, his friends.”

 

 

To her credit, the newscaster interviewing him did not react (actually, she was extraordinarily neutral, which I think spoke for itself).  She thanked him, and gave him her condolences.

 

 

I am nowhere near as calm or as classy as that.

 

 

I would have added something like: “Of course, Joe didn’t think too much about the children who might have been abused by Jerry Sandusky. Maybe they were being abused and maybe they weren’t.  So who cares, right?”

 

 

Or: “Man, I know what you mean.  You’re a saint, and you lead a perfect life, and then you just protect one child abuser from prosecution, and all of a sudden you’re a bad guy.” 

 

 

Mmph.

 

 

Tact will never be my long suit.

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Tim Thomas, Barack Obama, and free speech

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 I was checking my BlackBerry yesterday when I was brought up with an “Urk!” by the following Providence Journal newsbrief:

 

 

 Bruins goalie Tim Thomas, the biggest hero of the team's Stanley Cup championship run of last year, declined to join his teammates during today's visit to the White House. Team officials indicated that the decision had to do with political differences.

 

 

Partner is a big hockey fan.  I have a hard time watching the game with him: too fast, too violent, and I can’t even see the damned puck most of the time.  But I rejoiced with him when the Bruins won the Stanley Cup last year, and enjoyed watching the local victory celebrations.

 

 

Thomas was certainly the team hero: he’s widely considered to be the main reason they won the Cup.

 

 

But he cannot meet the President, or be seen at the White House, because he does not agree with him.

 

 

 

I could not stop thinking about this.  I investigated a bit further, and found that he is not only a far-right true believer, but a follower of Glenn Beck. 

 

 

Yikes!

 

 

I would have gladly forgiven him his beliefs, however, given that he’s such an excellent player.

 

 

But then he had to go thumb his nose at the White House.

 

 

Some questions:

• What if it had been me and a president I detested – like, let’s say, George W. Bush?  It would have been tempting to snub him.  But, then again, it would have depended largely upon the reason for the invitation.  If it were for a personal achievement, like winning the Nobel Prize, I’d have told him to go stuff himself.  If it were this kind of honor – a team being celebrated as a group – I might well have swallowed my pride and gone, for the sake of my teammates.  Because – really – what would I have to lose by standing alongside someone with whom I disagreed?
• Does Tim Thomas agree politically with all of his teammates?  I certainly hope so.  If he should ever learn that they don’t agree with him, he might not agree to appear on the same ice with them.
• Does Tim Thomas think that President Obama is trying to make political points by appearing with a popular sports team?  Really, think about that one. If you stand alongside the President, which one of you will people notice first?  And (last I looked), New England / Boston athletes are generally detested by the rest of the country.  Obama’s doing the Bruins a favor, not vice versa.

 

 

 

 

Greg Wyshynski, a hockey blogger for Yahoo!, wrote a comment about this on Monday.  He makes the point that the team general manager and team president both tried to talk Thomas into going – in fact, they could have compelled his attendance - but in the end they gave up and respected his wishes.  He’s an American; he can do any damn fool thing he likes.

 

 

(Wyshynski makes a false comparison of Thomas’s no-show at the White House to Rangers player Sean Avery’s public support for gay marriage, and says that both are governed by free speech.  This is not an excellent comparison.  Thomas can say what he likes, and hold whatever beliefs he likes; that’s free speech.  Snubbing a White House invitation because you don’t like the current occupant is bad manners.)

 

 

And Wyshynski ends by pointing out that free speech has consequences.  This is his very well-written conclusion: “This is the moment when Tim Thomas, the most valuable player to his team last June, did something that detracted from his teammates' celebration. This is the moment when, for better or worse, he becomes something more than the blue-collar hockey player from Flint with the great backstory and the sterling save percentage. And as long as he's willing to accept that his absence from an event that even Tomas Kaberle attended has overshadowed this day and changed his profile as an athlete, then like Cam Neely I'll respect the decision.”

 

 

Same here.

 

 

Thomas may be a great hockey player, but he ain’t no hero around these parts no more.

 

 

---

 

 

Football for beginners

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I never cared much for football. It was a lot of running and snorting and stamping, and I didn't understand the rules anyway.

 

 

Partner has tried, very patiently, for very many years, to teach me the game. No soap. I used to think I had some kind of mental block that prevented me from learning this stuff; I still think, for example, that a “safety” is when one of the players runs backward.

 

 

Then I hired a member of the university football team to work for me in the office.

 

 

Bingo!

 

 

He was not only huge, but funny and articulate. I asked him what position he played, and he was insightful enough to know that if he'd said “offensive lineman,” I would have been as unenlightened as ever. So he said: “I push people around.”

 

 

Now that I understand.

 

 

He spoke with passion about the phases of his training: strength, speed, agility. I was, naturally, enthralled.

 

 

So now, naturally, I am much more taken by football than I was before.

 

 

Now I see in the New York Times that various teams – mostly college teams, apparently – are redesigning their uniforms to be more colorful, and interesting, and eye-catching.

 

 

So what audience are they aiming this at? The old traditional fans?

 

 

I don't think so!

 

 

They're aiming it at people like me!

 

 

And, just so you know: my former employee's team won their first game of the season, by one point!

 

 

Yay team!

 

 

I hope they win the Stanley Cup!

 

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Shula's 347 Grill, Providence, Rhode Island

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For a long time, Providence had only one steakhouse: the Capital Grille. It was expensive and very deluxe; I've only ever had dinner there once, for a colleague's farewell party, and I felt like an orphan foundling at a Presidential dinner. The service was immaculate, the food excellent, the ambiance old-school: lots of wood paneling and wine bottles and waiters who shimmered up out of nowhere.

 

 

Now high-end steakhouses have popped up everywhere. Ruth's Chris Steakhouse. Fred & Steve's Steakhouse, up at Twin River. Fleming's, which Partner and I visit every few months, and which has given us some really tremendous meals.

 

 

And we finally hit Shula's 347 Grill on Independence Day.

 

 

We felt like trying something new, and I happened to have a gift certificate, and we had nothing else to do. We got there around 2:00 p.m., and there was – literally – no one else in the place. We had a server named Milton, who was perfect in that old-fashioned steakhouse way: very attentive without overdoing it and without intruding. We had appetizers and burgers, so we can't speak to the high-end steak menu, but I can tell you that we had an excellent meal.

 

 

Partner's big problem with the place, of course, had to do with the founder. “So,” I said, “Shula was a football player.”

 

 

Partner grimaced. “Coach,” he said. “Miami Dolphins. He won a couple of Super Bowls in the 1970s. Big deal.” (Partner is a New England Patriots fan.)

 

 

I pointed over to the entryway, where two huge metallic football-shaped trophies stood. “I assume those are Super Bowl trophies?”

 

 

He glanced over disdainfully. “Replicas.”

 

 

“Maybe, when you win the Super Bowl, they give you as many trophies as you want,” I said.

 

 

Partner grunted. “Bill Belichick won three Super Bowl trophies.”

 

 

“Well, he should open a nice restaurant too,” I said. “All the waiters could wear hoodies. And when you compliment the waitstaff, they can say: 'I can't take credit. It was a team effort.'”

 

 

Partner grunted again.

 

 

Well, it was an excellent meal, despite the fact that we were surrounded by photos of Don Shula shaking hands with celebrities I didn't recognize.

 

 

As we were leaving, I spotted one last photo on the wall: Shula shaking the hand of Bill Belichick. I called Partner over to see it. Belichick had signed it, and written a long note to Shula on the photo.

 

 

And he signed it: Bill Belichick, SB 36 / 38 / 39 champions.

 

 

One more Super Bowl than Shula won, see?

 

 

Bill Belichick is a shady bitch!

 

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The curse of the Red Sox

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Partner likes sports a lot, but I'm a little lukewarm on the subject.  I like rugby, but for non-sports-related reasons.  But I do like baseball, sort of. It's easy to understand (although I still don't really understand why you're out if they catch your pop fly), and it's very slow and restful.  And sometimes the players look pretty hot in their little baseball outfits. I remember seeing Jim Rice pacing around left field in 1983 at Fenway Park; even at a distance, wearing that stupid uniform, he looked menacing.

 

 

Naturally, living in New England, we are Red Sox fans. This is a peculiar kind of fandom. Red Sox fans are generally hopeless about their team's chances in any given year.  This comes from many years of losing (the Curse of the Bambino, etc.).

 

 

Until 2004, and then again in 2007, when the Red Sox actually won the World Series.

 

 

But it takes more than two championships to change a lifetime's attitudes.

 

 

This year, for example. We were barely a week into the new baseball season, and the Red Sox had lost their first six games in a row. Six! So I say to Partner: “What if this is the way the whole season goes? What if they lose every single game this season?”

 

 

“They probably will,” he said gloomily.

 

 

When you play Keno, sometimes, there's a prize for getting none of the numbers. Why not in baseball? It's amazing to lose six games in a row. (I think Charlie Brown's Little League team lost every single game one season, but that was only in the comics.)

 

 

Then, of course, the Red Sox had to go and win a game against the New York Yankees. (Which really pissed the Yankees off.) So we broke our streak, but in an entertaining way, because we always enjoy seeing Yankees fans miserable.

 

 

(Go look at those rugby players again. They're inspirational.)

 

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The he-man sport of rugby

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I knew nothing of rugby until Partner and I went to Ireland in 2007. We quickly discovered the little betting parlors that crowd every Irish streetcorner. Partner busied himself with dog racing, but I was fascinated by the Rugby World Cup betting sheet, which was the size of a tablecloth and allowed you to bet on everything, including number of teeth knocked out during a game. Without really knowing what I was doing, I put a bet down on the opening game of the series: the Namibian team would beat the Irish team. I also bet that the first goal in the game would be scored by the captain of the Irish team.

 

I lost my first bet and won my second. Net gain: forty euros on a two-euro bet.

 

I began to pay attention to rugby at that point, and I liked what I saw. First of all, rugby players are enormous. Second of all, they do not wear padded Halloween outfits like American football players; they wear thin cotton shorts and tight shirts, and they look terrific. Third, the rules of rugby are entertainingly incomprehensible. It’s like American football played as a mixed martial art; they just keep beating each other up until one team has lost too much blood to continue. In one game in the late 1990s, the Irish team won the game by picking up the guy with the ball and throwing him headfirst like a javelin into the scoring area. The Sunday Irish Times had a whole special section explaining how the game worked; I read it twice and was still baffled.

 

And rugby players are characters. There's Gareth Thomas, the only openly gay man in professional team sports in the entire world. There's Lawrence Dallaglio, the huge beautiful deadly English player who makes my heart quiver whenever I look at him. There's Sebastien Chabal, l'Homme des Cavernes, the Caveman. There's Zinedine Zidane, the French player who headbutted another player so hard that I could feel it three hundred miles away.

 

But, in the end, it's all about watching thirty buffalo-sized men huffing and snorting at each other, with murder in their big angry beautiful bloodshot eyes.

 

And that's entertainment.

 

---

 

 

My team big and good, your team weak and stupid

 

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I've learned pretty much everything I know about sports from Partner.  Much of this information is garbled in my mind; I will not ever understand what a "safety" is, for example, because I made up my mind early on that it involves a football player running backwards.

 

 

But now and then something in the sports world catches my attention, and I strain to figure out what it's all about.

 

For example: back in November, there was an incident involving a football player named Derek Anderson.  His team was losing, and he had the nerve (!) to sit on the sidelines with a teammate and smile and laugh for a moment.  The crowds, and the sportscasters, were enraged. 

 

This is unforgivable, apparently. 

 

Unlike (let's say) dogfighting, or texting pictures of your genitalia to the world at large.

 

Yesterday morning I read a commentary in "Sports Illustrated" (don't blame me, Partner subscribes) about this event.  The columnist made it clear that the losing team is required to be stoic and grim.  Anything else lets down the team and the fans.  I quote: "It may seem irrational, but fans want their own passions validated by seeing the athletes they're rooting for show that they feel just as strongly."

 

Yes, babe, it does seem irrational.

 

I always knew there was a theatrical element in sports; I've just never heard it enunciated so clearly.  According to this guy, athletes aren't just supposed to play well; they're also supposed to represent the passions of their home fans.

 

Whoosh!

 

Now, players for any given team come from all over the country and the world.  But once you're on the team, you're a native son.  Once you're on the (let's say) Boston team, you become a Boston soldier, hup hup hup.  

 

Until such time as you're sold or traded, of course.

 

This goes way beyond the whole role-model thing.  This is all about rivalry, and tribalism, and ritual combat.  Cleveland is better than Detroit, Boston is better than Atlanta, the Bep Tribe is better than the Bap Tribe, Cave #73 is better than Cave #74.

 

 

Eesh!  Too serious!  I'm glad I'm not an athlete.  I'm not serious about anything.  I'd never be able to keep a straight face.

 

Sometime let's talk about the erotic element in sports instead.  All that running and chasing and grabbing. 

 

Now that's an interesting topic.

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Sports for dummies

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I grew up as a scrawny nerd and never paid any attention to sports or athletics. Partner, on the other hand, is a tough old screwball, and used to hang out with the Boston Bruins, and he claims he actually took a bath in the Stanley Cup, or something, I forget.

 

 

Well, you know how they say that spouses grow more and more like one another?

 

 

Apparently all those TV football games and baseball games over the past two decades have had some small effect on me.

 

 

I was in the bank last week, wearing my Gonzaga alumni jacket (yes, I earned it, I'm a Zag). The teller, a young man, mumbled something I couldn't make out while he was processing my deposit. “What?” I said.

 

 

He motioned with his head towards the Bulldogs insignia on my jacket. “Gonzaga.”

 

 

“Oh, yeah.” I said. See, I know now that when people hear “Gonzaga,” they don't think, “Oh, of course, one of the leading seminaries of the Pacific Northwest Jesuit Province”; they think, “Basketball!”

 

 

So I smile ingratiatingly at the teller and say, “Who do you like?”

 

 

He smiled shyly and said, “Carolina.”

 

 

I have no idea if that's good or bad. But I know what to say next. “What do you think their chances are this season?”

 

 

He dropped his eyes and shrugged and giggled.

 

 

I repeated the whole conversation to Partner that evening, and he told me I got it exactly right.

 

 

See? I'm not unteachable after all.

 

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