If anyone watched the Orlando-Cleveland game last night, then I think you knew the Cavs were going to blow the 32-10 lead they had at one point. It was going to happen. At halftime it was 56-55, which means Orlando went on a 45-24 run to end the half against the Cavs...at home. That is the third double digit lead the Cavs have blown at home in this series and they are the #1 seed in the East, supposedly the best team in the East. I don't know what to think about them really...
I want to do some random thoughts because there is a lot to comment on and one article won't do for the day. I may not quote from every article but hopefully it will give us enough to discuss.
-Bill Simmons has written an article about the current state of the NBA, it's officiating, and what he thinks needs to be fixed. Overall, though I tend to disagree with many things that Bill writes, it was a well researched article and did not contain many of the annoying references he usually uses. Though he does open it up with a reference from "Speed," I will forgive him for that, because I wish all of his articles were this well written. Did I mention it was well researched? It gives me hope for his book.
Two nights later, Cleveland and Orlando played an unspeakably awful game that featured a whopping 58 fouls. All the momentum from Game 2 was gone. Here was the new NBA in its new age of unadulterated impurity: Teams hoisting bad 3-pointers, referees trying to "manage" the game and failing, players going one-on-five, stoppages again and again and again, free throws and more free throws, more stoppages, more mismanaging by the refs ... by the time it was over, I wanted to commit a flagrant one on myself.
I was so pumped up after Game 2, I made time to watch Game 3 Sunday night, and then ended up flipping channels because the game was so brutal to watch. One of my problems with the officiating is that players drive to the basket looking for a foul call to bail them out and they get it. A bump on the perimeter that doesn't affect an offensive player's momentum or direction is called a foul, but then another referee won't call an obvious foul in the middle when a player gets hacked. There is no consistency in the calls and the fourth quarter of games seem to stop every 2 minutes. I compare it to watching 2 minutes of a movie and then hitting the pause button and taking a break. Dwight Howard caught the ball in the post on an offensive rebound last night and changed his pivot foot three times. I paused my live television and rewound it twice to watch this. Then he did it again on the next possession down court. Needless to say, this was not called either time.
As much as I like disagreeing with Bill Simmons, he is right. Players can't fight for position in the post and they get called for a technical foul for even reacting to a call they don't agree with. They are expected to be wax dummies no matter what they think of a call and still compete out on the court. That's hard. It's like watching a junior high dance where everyone has to have a certain space between each other and there is no touching allowed.
First, the NBA can't seem to replenish its officiating ranks. 1937, 1939, 1943, 1944, 1947, 1948, 1950, 1951, 1951, 1953, 1954, 1955, 1955 ... those are the actual birth years of 13 current referees. In professional sports, athletes slip from the ages of 34 to 39 unless they extend their stay with PEDs. In the NBA, in which officials are required to run or jog for 150 minutes and make split-second decisions on hundreds of plays, we're expected to believe that the aging process doesn't apply.
Well reasoned and researched.
I have no problem with the the 1950's guys being the senior officials, but if you were born immediately after WWII or BEFORE the Baby Boomer Era, you may need to consider retiring.
Here's another thing I don't get. They have rescinded three of Kenyon Martin's technical fouls in the playoffs. Three of five technical fouls have been rescinded! Do the officials even know what a technical foul is? Even with the foul being rescinded, the NBA doesn't rescind the points the team gets from the foul shots when a technical is called.
I love Jeff Van Gundy's idea of a "penalty box" (basically, banishing guys to their bench for a specific period of time). Say Rafer Alston slaps Eddie House again: instead of a one-game suspension, he'd be benched for the first half. Say Amare Stoudemire drifts off the bench because Steve Nash got whipped against the scorer's table and it's human instinct to protect a teammate: maybe he'd miss the first quarter of the next game. Maybe instead of double technicals for jawing, players would get sent off for five minutes to calm down.
I don't know if this would work or not. I don't even know if I like this idea. It seems like the guy would spend most of his time on the bench steaming and trying to get back in the game to whip someone's ass. Maybe I am wrong and he would cool down. I do like the player having to miss the first quarter of a game for leaving the bench or missing part of the game for a violation. That seems more logical than missing an entire game.
the NBA sent out a memo for its Development League Referee Tryout Camp, which is scheduled for June 19-21 in Los Angeles. Participants officiate two games with prospective D-League players and need a minimum of two years experience at the high school level or higher. Not only do the participants have to pay their own way to get there, but the NBA charges them a $550 fee that covers "lodging for two nights at the camp headquarters, transportation to and from the games, and a camp officiating jersey." YOU HAVE TO PAY TO TRY OUT!
Paying to try out doesn't make sense in this situation at all. This is not a recreation league in your local hometown where the league needs enough money to pay for uniforms and other necessities to put the league together, this is the NBA where you would think they would be dedicated to finding the best officials and that means not making people pay to try out.
If you want a blog that gets traffic, start tracking bad playoff calls. Read the rulebook, familiarize yourself with it, watch each game with a fine-tooth comb and jot down every missed call and incorrect call. Chart how the fouls go up and down depending on the quarter. Chart the inconsistencies. Chart the number of calls, as well as the types of calls, that each referee makes and see if there's some sort of common theme. If you do a good job, I will send you traffic and so will everyone else. It's that easy.
This is a move that is part brilliant and part annoying to me. He gives his SimmonsClones a task to perform and undoubtedly we are going to be seeing blogs that chart all of these referee mistakes and everything else Bill wants appearing on the Internet. How will we have a clue whether the information contained is correct? People are idiots and I am going to assume the 18-25 year old range Bill speaks to is not going to be the absolute best at gathering information and deciphering it together into an accurate picture of the officiating situation in the NBA. We won't have an idea if the information is reliable and that is the annoying part, but it is brilliant because if someone does have good information that is reliable and well collected, then maybe Bill can get his point proven.
A reader e-mailed after the 86-FT Game that he would rather watch a playoffs in which players called their own fouls. At first glance, ridiculous. Within a few seconds, I started talking myself into it. By the three-minute mark, I was genuinely excited. No referees. The players policing themselves. Pickup rules for the playoffs. Hmmmmmm.
That's how bad things have gotten. An idea THAT dumb got my wheels spinning.
I am glad he realizes this idea is dumb...because it is. Overall, a very well written column by Bill. It's this type of column that he writes that almost makes up for some of the useless dreck he has put out (in my opinion) in the past. I am not ashamed to admit I liked this column. Ok, a little ashamed...
-Norman Chad wrote this Boston hating column a few weeks ago. He hates the Celtics. I don't think he actually hates the Celtics, I think he hates that they win all the time. That's the reasoning for a lot of the current Boston hatred, well that and the fans of the Boston teams have been stereotyped like Tommy from Quinzee from KSK, which some may actually be that way. Unfortunately behind every stereotype there is a little bit of truth. I learned this lesson from something a guy who came into my work on Tuesday showed me when he found out I was a Panthers fan. He rolled up his sleeve and showed me a tattoo of the Carolina Panthers logo eating a Cowboy's hat. I cringed a little. I hate the Dallas Cowboys but that's too much redneck for me.
-J.S. did a good post about Jeff MacGregor a few weeks/months ago and I saw a column by MacGregor the other day that made me wonder, as I usually do, what the hell he is talking about. It is called "Do Sports Teach Lessons or Provide Distractions?"
The question I really want answered is "What Purpose Does Jeff MacGregor Serve At Page 2?"
What are sports for?
Entertainment. It's plain and simple, we want to be entertained with athletic events and we have sports to serve that purpose. Other people (pointing at Jeff MacGregor) may want to make them more than they are, but you can't. They may serve as a microcosm of life, but at their very heart they are a billion dollar entertainment industry. The original reality television.
All of which got me thinking about the ideas of sportsmanship and character, and the antique notion that sports have to teach a moral or ethical lesson to be of real value.
This guy is just a real drag. He insists on trying to suck the fun out of everything.
(MacGregor's son) "Dad, I want to play video games at the arcade today."
(Jeff MacGregor) "But son, why do you want to play games? Are you revealing your true childhood ambitions that your alter-self refused to allow you to achieve because you wanted to meet what you thought were our expectations of you as our son?"
(MacGregor's son) "Because they are fun and you are really boring."
(Jeff MacGregor) "Just continue playing coy, insolent child, I will get the true reasoning out of you one day."
And while I understand and empathize with the moral exhaustion that besets us all, somebody somewhere in Major League Baseball thought Manny Ramirez had to be suspended for 50 games for breaking a rule it considered important. Is that rule wrong? Or is Manny Ramirez?
I think he may be overanalyzing this a bit. Major League Baseball set up the rule because they want to make sure there is an even playing field in baseball and the Union and the Commissioner believe restricting the use of PED's is the way to go about helping to even the playing field. You know, so a guy doesn't hit 73 home runs and get walked 200 times. That sucks the fun out of the game a little bit.
So to answer the question, Manny Ramirez broke the rule so he is wrong.
Or are sports just a performance, a vacation from the real? Is a game merely three hours of happy distraction from the killing grind of the everyday?
It's fucking entertainment. That's it. Like everything else in the world with a set of rules and any type of authority figure, it can also be seen as a microcosm of life. Quit writing such pretentious shit.
Which brings us back to the trillion-dollar question, the one we have to answer before any of the others:
What are sports for?
Entertainment.
A simple, impossible question. But maybe if we all put our heads together we can puzzle it out. Ask your friends, neighbors, parents, children, coaches, players, teachers.
Is this question really worth getting a commission together for? He is so pretentious. I hope he chokes on the organic bagel he is eating in his Smart car, which will undoubtedly be playing classical music.
-Rick Reilly gets paid millions of dollars to write columns that whine about his favorite NBA team. As always, there is more to the story as well. The column is full of shit like this:
Moses wandered the desert for 40 years? Pah. That's Club Med compared to us. For 41 years, we've eaten sand and washed it down with tall glasses of bile. At least Moses had manna. All we ever got was crayon jerseys.
It annoys the hell out of me that every team is fighting and clawing to be a "cursed" team lately. Every team, has a SOB story about how beaten down they are and how long their fans have been waiting for a championship or any type of hope from their sports teams. Shut up. 41 years is not really that long. Denver had the Broncos win 2 Super Bowls in the 90's and the Rockies made the World Series two years ago, and that doesn't include any success the Colorado Avalanche had recently.
Since then, we've run a substitution pattern of famine, plague and pestilence, the last of which was a man named Nikoloz Tskitishvili, on whom we wasted the fifth overall pick in 2002, while passing on stiffs like Amare Stoudemire, Caron Butler and Carlos Boozer. Tskitishvili was really tskitty. One time, he took a wide-open jumper and hit the shot clock.
Maybe you are not really cursed, you just have incredibly shitty decision makers in the organization. It sounds to me like that could be the case.
You sent us Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf. He wouldn't stand for the national anthem.
If I recall correctly, he was a pretty good basketball player. Yes, I remember the ex-Chris Jackson was a pretty good player who helped the Nuggets win basketball games. Standing for the national anthem doesn't win games for the Nuggets and players that did not help the Nuggets win games is what you are whining about. Try to stay on point.
So when you click on Reilly's article, you see a Registered trademark next to "Life of Reilly." He trademarked his article title. He is very impressed with himself.
He officially wants himself to be a brand. Apparently the brand he wants to be is the type of brand that recycles old products and tries to pass them off as new. Deadspin said he was a little shy of being a Hallmark card anyway...but don't you think he is actually going to try and spread the brand name around a little? I have a feeling he is going to try and do this. There will be "Life of Reilly" cards, mugs, and toilet paper. Peter King would even use the toilet paper as he was preparing for his next colonoscopy!
-It's wrong how coaches like John Calipari are able to stay one step ahead of NCAA officials and never actually have to suffer any of the sanctions the school has to suffer. I will never doubt this guy can recruit, but he also bends the rules past the point where it is an NCAA rules violation.
Just like at UMass, his name doesn't appear on anything, but just like at UMass he is in the middle of it, but has found a way to not get himself dirty. He has made 2 Final Fours in his career, the first with UMass in 1996 has been erased because Marcus Camby had improper dealings with an agent. What did Calipari do for his UMass team after this was found out to make them feel better for all their hard work being erased or what did he tell his team to ease the pain? Well, he was actually running the New Jersey Nets into the ground when the sanctions came down, so he wasn't around anymore. He stayed one step ahead of the NCAA.
Now Derrick Rose is accused of cheating on the SAT, which Calipari had to have some knowledge of, unless he is able to keep up with everything about the student-athlete's lives on his basketball teams except for their wrongdoings. If found guilty, Memphis would have to vacate their Final Four appearance and the wins they got for the 2007-2008 year. As usual, Calipari doesn't have to really worry about the lowering of another Final Four banner because he is at Kentucky now with a sparkling recruiting record but zero Final Fours to his record.
I don't hate John Calipari but I do find it odd he stays at schools long enough to get out when sanctions start to come down and leaves the school and the athletic department to take the fall for what violations may or may not have happened. Recruits don't remember his Final Fours had to be vacated, they remember he coached Marcus Camby and Derrick Rose in a Final Four and almost won a National Championship in 2008. That's all they remember.
And though Kentucky fans will dismiss it, it should be pointed out that that's exactly what Memphis fans spent nine years doing. They explained to opposing fans that Calipari had nothing to do with the Camby mess, that it wasn't indicative of anything. But now here they are dealing with similarly damaging allegations of rules violations that happened on Calipari's watch, and it would be naive for UK athletic director Mitch Barnhart to not be concerned, at least a little, because 2-for-2 is 100 percent.
In other words, if Calipari someday leaves Kentucky without In other words, if Calipari someday leaves Kentucky without the NCAA subsequently accusing the school of operating outside the framework of the rulebook, understand, it'll be the first time he's ever exited a program that way.
Fortunately, Kentucky won't really care at that point because he will have brought them a couple of Final Fours, maybe a National Championship, and some respect back, and Calipari won't care because by the time the new NCAA sanctions come down, he will be at a different school.
This is one reason I hate college basketball recruiting and don't ever want to know what goes on behind the scenes.
-Here is an interesting article about the real trade value of Cliff Lee and Victor Martinez. I had to read it twice to get the gist of the article, but I don't know if I completely agree with it.
By the same math, though, a random minor leaguer of the sort who might be part of a deal for two such players is far more valuable than you might think. An average player is worth two wins in a year. A prospect who struggles in his first two years, giving the team just one win in each, and then settles in at dead average for the next four before leaving the team as a free agent, will have been worth about $45 million -- and he'll likely have been paid somewhere between $15 and $20 million, given baseball's idiosyncratic pay scale.
I just find it hard to believe this is accurate, though it is based on Fangraphs information, so it very well may be. There are so many assumptions that go into this, for one that the prospect(s) traded make it to the major leagues and that the great player traded continues to perform at the same level he performed prior and not perform at a higher level.
I think this may all be over my head a little bit but this was an intriguing article.
He talks a little bit about the Jake Peavy trade that almost happened with the White Sox and what surprises me is that the Padres seemed to lower their demands. Nothing against he package the White Sox offered, but the Padres originally wanted five players in a trade for Peavy, including two major league ready players and two top prospects. I think they should have taken the Cubs trade earlier in the winter, but they did not. Peavy is too chicken shit to play for the White Sox in that ballpark. I guess the American League is too scary for him.
-I think the Padres early season success has a lot to do with Adrian Gonzalez, but guess who is getting some credit?
The two things that Towers pointed to on behalf of the Padres, whose payroll is a puny $46 million (and may still go lower if Towers can find a place Peavy would like to play, beyond the Padres, that is): 1) There is no quit in them; and 2) David Eckstein is on their roster.
"A lot of it has to do with David Eckstein," Towers said.
"When you have a player like that, it becomes contagious," Towers said. "He sets the standard. He's so fricking intense. And he has the best in-game instincts I've ever seen."
What is it about David Eckstein that makes general managers and announcers talk about him like they are teenage girls and he is one of the Jonas Brothers?
-Jay Mariotti seems to think if the Cavs lose the series he is going to be gone from Cleveland in 2010.
Everyone has him going to New York to play for the Knicks or to play for the Nets in New Jersey, but does he really have a better chance at winning a championship and succeeding there? I think the higher profile he has playing for one of those teams will also cause increased scrutiny on him, which is not always good. Just ask Randy Johnson, Isiah Thomas, Alex Rodriguez, and Plaxico Burress. I am just saying it is not always a good thing to be in the spotlight all the time, and LeBron James may be smart enough to realize this.
-Gene Wojciechowski thinks the Cubs still have time to play well and blames many of the problems on injuries. Even though the Cardinals have had a ton of injuries this well to key players and have a lower payroll. Whatever, I don't want to disturb Gene with logic.
How long before we have an ESPN Boston web site? Another month? It's going to happen and it may not be a bad thing. Gene usually writes about Chicago anyway, so it is nice we can stick his articles on a site where I don't have to read them...in theory. Unfortunately ESPN still insists on putting the columns on the front page, so when they get other "ESPN cities" it is going to seem like they only care about those cities from a standpoint of coverage and may make their coverage seem more biased. Not that ESPN really cares, because as long as the ratings come in positive, nothing will change.
Showing posts with label Jeff MacGregor. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Jeff MacGregor. Show all posts
Friday, May 29, 2009
Tuesday, March 10, 2009
5 comments 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.
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.
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