I Hate Sports

Just kidding. I do however, hate this whole mental hangup the sporting culture has. This kind of perpetual navel gazing it engages in. Are sports heartless? Do steroids mean baseball is no longer relevant? Does T.O. talk to much? What is Tony doing with Jessica Simpson? Aren't the New York Knicks disfunctional, hahaha. It's just pitiful, and it's the exact opposite of what sports journalism should be like. If you remember my posts from July-October last year, you'll be very familiar with this angry old man gripe of mine, and you'll also remember the poster child for this.

No, not Terrell Owens, the other one.

You know I love Manny. He seems to be the lightning rod for the "what do your sports say about you" kind of trashy, self indulgent nonsense. The pompous, dictatorial, culture warrior style sportswriter get their reps on bashing Manny Ramirez. Here is a typical example. Anyway, Jeff MacGregor is the latest in this long, proud, staunchly arrogant tradition.



Dear God. Just look at him there. He knows what you do at night, you Manny lovers, and he's fucking pissed. It's like Charlton Heston and Clint Eastwood had a child, and they sent him to a school where the only teachers were Ty Cobb and Darrell Dawkins. Here are some latest taglines;


Here are just a few of the many lessons the fables of the sports world teach us.


Jeff MacGregor sees the NFL combine as just another example of trying to find order in a world in which it doesn't exist.


Alex Rodriguez and Michael Phelps are the latest heroes to be chewed up by the pop culture fame machine.


In his Page 2 debut, Jeff MacGregor urges us all to step back and appreciate sports as one of life's treasures.


Oh yes, ladies and gents, me and Jeff are gonna get very well acquainted. In a world gone mad, only one man stands between us and moral damnation - Jeff MacGregor

Won't someone think of the children?

God this is gonna be awesome.

A children's crusade this week, in which no child is left behind.

When those of us who write or talk about sports for a living trot out the cliché that some professional athlete plays like a little kid out there, what we're usually trying to say is that he or she plays the game with a lot of joy. That they play with the happy abandon of childhood.

Trouble is, happiness isn't the only attribute of childhood.

it's like he's saying this with a toothpick in his mouth. He needs a sidekick - "trouble is, Muchacho, happiness isn't the only attribute of childhood". Yes, Jeff, we don't typically mean "Jose Reyes is playing with a laughable level of incompetence out there". "Jonathon Papelbon looks positively angelic on the mound tonight, what a little cupcake". Well spotted.

As adults we tend to remember only the untroubled innocence. The fun. But childhood is actually pretty frightening, a struggle up the ladder of fears and upsets and confusions for which we're born unprepared. We learn our way out of most of our worst behaviors as we grow. We learn not to be afraid of the dark, not to throw tantrums, not to lash out in anger, not to grab or bite or lie, not to pester adults for their attention and not to put just anything we find laying around in our mouths.

it is indeed, very much like baseball. Colour me put in my place.

Eventually we even learn to share, to ask politely for the things we want and to be gracious if we don't always get them, to overcome our ignorance and to be secure in ourselves and our thoughts and decisions and at ease in our own skins. Most of us do, anyway.

uh-oh! I feel a maturity burn coming along from the mighty arbiter of ethical behavior, Clint Wayne Bronson Stallone up there. Spare me your pontificating. Go write on politics, where immaturity and selfishness is costing jobs. Or finance, where greed and unscrupulous behaviour has helped spark a worldwide economic collapse. You know, go write about something with consequences. Oh wait, you don't know shit about those things, you know sports, but you still want to have a pulpit. Hmm, what to do? I know, ignore sports and see it as a "metaphor" for life so you can cram your self serving pseudo-philosophy down everyone's throat who accidentally stumbles into your article.

I call it Easterbrooking, and these people are so desperate for attention that it won't be long before when you click those links it locks you into the page until you've read every word, dripping with condescention. Absolutely shameless.

Others, prominent among us, do not. After last week's tutorial on the matter, delivered by three of America's most gifted athletes, I've come to the conclusion that Terrell Owens, Manny Ramirez and Alex Rodriguez are much more childlike in their play than any of us ever suspected. They're like little kids out there! By which I mean they're alternately petulant, selfish, fearful, spoiled, forgetful, insecure, irresponsible, attention-starved and prone to hysterics. When they're not trying too hard, they're not trying at all. They are an absolute laundry list of the least attractive attributes of every child everywhere.

and they get the absolute privelidge of being judged by you, and the rest of the sporting world. Why? On what basis? A few headlines, the intolerable Ed Werder's little soundbytes, some trashy photographer catching Madonna and A-Rod in the same frame? Oh, it's totally ok, because they make a lot of money and had the audacity to be good at sport. Bastards. Look, none of these three is an angel. There's every liklihood they are all nasty people (though I don't personally support that view), what is true is you don't fucking know. No matter how much ESPN 360 you've watched. You don't know these people, and that's fine, to have snap reactions, whatever, but it doesn't justify a persons insatiable need to grab the moral high ground by criticising people they just don't know from the safety of a web page.

I, for instance, have criticised Jeff MacGregor's article, and litany of articles, as self serving, but I don't know the guy, I don't pretend to know. And besides my whole ranting, you know what about this stuff? It's fucking boring. Consistantly, again and again, polls on sports websites come back saying people are sick of the drama. People just want to see the fucking game and talk about it with their friends. Do you sit there and go "gee that A-Rod sure is a jerk, I think he's a jerk, do you? He sure is a jerk?" Or do you compare how teams match up, what the likely career arc of Homer Bailey is, the chances of the Utah Jazz making unlikely noise in the Western Conference playoffs?

This judges not only whether you actually enjoy sports, but also your level of being able to keep shit in perspective.

Having watched A-Rod's public performance over the past several weeks, can anyone doubt the depth of his personal uncertainty or the breadth of his need to please others? His need to be liked above all else?

There is something so unfinished about his character as to be disturbing.

Disturbing/Not disturbing. Again? Disturbing/Not disturbing. Get real. And I'm not saying sports don't matter, I love sports. And if you wanna say something like "that dunk was the greatest thing in the Universe ever", I'm right there with you, that's about sports, they are fun and that's what they are there for. Hyperbole has it's place - in fun. In judging other people, it's a pretty petty, weak and indulgent thing to do I think.

Every interview seemed to reveal not just his need to say the things he thought others wanted said, but a willingness to let others make every decision for him. To seek the approval of cousins, agents, managers, doctors, reporters on the matters of contrition and steroids and contracts and surgery. The person with the least influence on A-Rod's life is clearly A-Rod himself. In this way, he is never at fault. Deferential to the point of self-destruction, he's an absentee landlord in his own house.

And for the next six to nine weeks, the Yankees and Team Rodriguez and Major League Baseball will bring to bear on A-Rod's fragile hip all the expensive weaponry of Western medicine. For his psychic frailty, however, for his insecurity, for his bottomless self-doubt, for his unformed morality and his spiritual vacuity, they have nothing.

it's such a metaphor for the human condition. It's like, we're A-Rod, you know? And we're like, spiritually nihilistic, that's like the stuff, like the "agents". And it gets us out of control. And over here is the Western medicine - spiritual medicine. And it's not helping man...it's not helping! Woah. Just blew my mind.

Yeah, but actually, they have psychiatrists, which I believe he has spoken to, seen as a joke by many people. They can totally help if he does have some emotional issues, which neither of us have any idea if he does or he's just sick of people doing shit like this.

Manny Ramirez is his near-perfect opposite. He neither knows nor cares what anyone thinks of him or his decisions. Or anything else in the world. This might seem admirable if it arose out of mindfulness, out of some deeply held conviction or hard-won state of spiritual satori. Rather, it seems to arise out of a child's fuguelike cluelessness. Imagine trying to call little Manny back into the house for dinner 25 years ago. You'd still be standing there. Literally carefree, Mr. Ramirez is oblivious to everything in the world but himself. A savant with a bat, he too is never at fault.

Thus his limitless self-absorption is the comic counterpoint to A-Rod's tragic absence of any self at all.

Tragedy/Not tragedy. Again? Tragedy/Not tragedy.

Terrell Owens somehow manages to synthesize both these opposing liabilities into one big tangle of neuroses. He can neither live without your attention nor stand for your scrutiny.

Somehow, having now touched all four points of the compass north, south, east and west, Owens remains completely directionless.

it's like a fucking opus. This feels like work. Why does everything have to be such a big deal Jeff?

Set aside for the moment all the hackneyed oratory and manufactured outrage about locker room cancers and news conference prima donnas, and think about Mr. Owens' root problem: At every station along his trail of tears, he drives away the very people he needs most: quarterbacks. This seems in a wide receiver a personality defect worth exploring.

and yet - awesome. Intriguing. Maybe it's to do with his...skill?

Instead, the press will cover with great care and deliberation whether T.O. prefers to eat his wings at Duff's or the Anchor, and Drew Rosenhaus -- who looks more like a carny on the lam from a rural justice of the peace with every television appearance

imagine that. The stupidity. Analysing some sportsman psychological state of mind. What kind of lifeless loser would do that? I mean grow up. Stop treating sportsman like real life G.I.Joe and get some actual role models for a change. This is just intellectual masturbation - I couldn't agree with you more Jeff. Jeff?

For its part, the NFL will restate the manly value of "mental toughness," by which it means "keep your mouth shut." Because in professional sports any deviation from the norm in the mind or the spirit is a terrifying weakness, an embarrassing and incurable infirmity.

Football, like America, does not thrive on emotional complexity. We are a nation in thrall to spectacle and cheap sentiment, and the NFL, like Hollywood, delivers on both counts.

pfft. Hear that America? You just like sport for it's "cool moments", it's "fun", it's "entertainment value", it's "pitting the best in the world against each other", the "spectacle". You don't get sports. Not like Jeff MacGregor does, you plebicite scum. You disgust me. You need to apprieciate all the little emotional motivations, the tragedies, repeat, this is all a really big deal!

And what of me and my colleagues up here in the press box? Well, in much the same way that Rush Limbaugh hopes the new administration fails -- because it keeps him in business to say so -- sports writers have a vested interest in bad outcomes for players like A-Rod and Manny and T.O.

finally after umpteen words, we have the first morsel of intellectual honesty. I'll give you that.

There's no malice in it, really

I take it back.

The dissonance in all this is that in the moral vacuum of professional sports we treat our athletes like children -- then punish them for behaving like children. They're like little kids out there!

If this seems only another indictment of the world of the coddled jock, of the witless superstar insulated from reality, of the vapid action hero finally paying the price for his epic narcissism, think again.

Jeff MacGregor : it's finally here...I've been waiting all article to unleash this beast of an idea. It's going to fucking floor them. Here it comes, are you ready?

Because T.O. and A-Rod and Manny live in the same fantasyland of unearned privilege and unreal expectation every one of us has inhabited for a very long time.

BAM! Oh man. Not even I realised I was going to be that good. Holy shit. I need a cigarette. Jeff MacGregor, you are the cultural oracle of our time, taking the pulse of Western civilisation. I am so good I scare myself sometimes, it just flows through me.

This is the same America of shameless appetite and instant reward, of limitless self-pity and bottomless selfishness, of aggressive impulse and monumental entitlement, of loud opinion and ignorant vanity and ethical bankruptcy that we've all been busy building. This is our no-fault America, the America of perpetual adolescence.

It is a place without consequence or cost, a place without a care for the future or a worry for the past. It is an America of the bright, eternal present, where cause and effect are suspended in favor of a walk through the mall, an empty head and an interest-only balloon mortgage.

This is the America currently collapsing around us.

This is the America we inherit from ourselves, a nation of children.

Kaufman awakes at his typewriter, reciting the words of profundity that have dribbled out his fingertips and onto the page. Looking at him, heavy and sullen with the gloom of an angry winter.

End scene.