Special Moments

We're in October, and for baseball fans that means playoffs and the World Series. My Detroit Tigers play a winner take all game five in Seattle this evening. I don't know if I want to watch or not, these old nerves and all. But I have seen two playoff games live in my life. One was classic in its heartfelt salute.

In the 1987 Ametican League Championship Series at old Tiger Stadium here in Detroit Darrell Evans, a fan favorite, was picked off third at a critical moment in game 4. It was a bad play; he simply lost his concentration. Evans felt terrible. The team was rallying and that miscue killed it.

As it was I attended game 5 the next day. Evans came up to bat in the bottom of the first. As he approached home plate the crowd spontaneously rose, and gave him a standing ovation. It showed Darrell that while things happen, we were still with him.

Moments like that mean more than the game. They show respect and affection. They're what sports should be about.

Get the Robots

I've seen it too much, and it's time to do something about it. I say, bring in robo-umps for calling balls and strikes in baseball.

It appears to be working in the minor leagues. In the one AAA game I saw live in Columbus, Ohio last year, they were used on appeal; the umpire was overruled each time but one. I get it: they're human. But if part of sportsmanship is getting the calls right, we need to take that human element away.

We have appeals now anyway; why not on balls and strikes? The umpires themselves should be in favor it, quite frankly. It would make them more anonymous and take pressure off. It would help the integrity of the game.

As it is, I'm seeing far too many bad calls, balls and strikes both, to not as a fan want the change. When we actually know and rue an umpire's name being announced (looking at you, Angel Hernandez) and Aaron Judge being tossed after nine years without being told to leave a game, something's wrong. And the fix is easy.

The Hatred that is Football

I want to show him the hatred that is football.

-Hank Hill, explaining the reason for taking his son Bobby to his first college football game.

Apparently there was a bit of post game dust up between Michigan and Michigan State players after last Saturday's Big Game in Ann Arbor. As of this writing, it is said that nine State players allegedly attacked two Michigan players after Michigan's 29-7 win. This comes after there were issues between Penn State and U of M in the same general area a week earlier. As both teams playing at the Big House (the nickname for Michigan's football stadium) have to exit the same tunnel to reach their locker rooms, there are calls for the school to change the way teams leave the field.

How about a few calls to train these young men, who by playing football are supposed to be changing into mature older men, to keep themselves in check? I know that's easier said than done, given that football seems hell bent on firing up emotions to the boiling point before and during games. And maybe that's the real problem. We stoke the coals of these guys to think of the other team as some kind of enemy invading their territory yet expect them to immediately chill after the final whistle.

Football isn't alone in this, although it does seem to me the main perpetrator. Overwrought celebrations after nearly ever damn play is bound to teach players egotism, an I'm better than you attitude, rather than sportsmanship.

Those are human beings on the other side of the line, guys. Show some respect. A pat on the helmet or back is enough congratulations as a rule. Running towards the sideline or the end zone looking for cameras to self comment on your awesomeness to the world is simply gauche, even mean spirited. You're being, at best, a jerk when you do that. Displays of your superiority are bound to make the other side seethe; the whole thing feeds on itself. What do we get, then?

Fights on the way to the locker room.

Yes, King of the Hill is comedy, and Hank Hill is a comic character. Yet the best humor often reflects certain truths in life. I believe Hank is onto one of them. His remark does not reflect well on reality.

To be Fair to Football

A good friend of mine, one who's a huge football fan, posted a meme on Saturday which said you can't trust someone who didn't watch at least ten hours of college football that day. Well, I guess I can't be trusted. But for better reasons that than, I assure you.

I am less and less of a football fan every year. Yes, I still watch a few minutes during the course of a season, and I'm happy enough Michigan won Saturday, even against a patsy. I sincerely hope the Detroit Lions turn themselves around in my lifetime. But the game is just too brutal, folks. I've read far too many stories of my own old football heroes from 40 years ago who've ended up dead by suicide or severely incapacitated simply because I wanted to be entertained. Don't give me that tired old 'nobody made them play' nonsense. We did, by promising them fame and fortune. Or at least college scholarships for often silly, useless degrees. That in itself is a whole 'nother screed.

I don't want to go off on football only today, because I really don't want to make too much out of a surely humorous meme. I mean, it was intended to be funny, right? The sharer didn't really mean it, did he? I feel that I have to ask, because I wonder that about strident football fans quite honestly. They seem to take themselves insanely seriously. But in fairness to football, part of my attitude towards it has little (I hope) to do with the actual game. Sports in general are becoming less sportsmanlike and far too, shall we say, in your face.

I was watching the Little League World Series last month and was honestly appalled at the number of twelve year old players doing fancy bat flips after hitting home runs. That used to be a no-no, because it was, correctly, I will argue, interpreted as showing up your opponent. Look at what I did, you losers, it's saying to the other bench. Dare to challenge me, will you? Yet it was simply accepted as part of the game this time around, to the point where the broadcast commentators were praising the acts. ESPN was rerunning them for our, I suppose pleasure. We're apparently expected to be impressed by the disrespect.

I don't like it, and there's too much of it in too many of our sports and games. I see it with my beloved Detroit Tigers, an embarrassingly horrible squad this season, where players hit meek, ground ball singles and then in triumph mime silly messages back to the dugout. They have no right being so impressed with themselves. Yet what have we been told, how are we typically sold on the importance of sports for youth? That it teaches sportsmanship, the idea of learning integrity and respect in how and what we play. It used to be you didn't 'show up' the other team. You played your best and let that speak for you.

Sports are becoming too much about bravado and too little about respect. I do think it's particularly glaring with football, where the degree to which players seem to need to 'fire themselves up' before and during games is downright garish, if not flat out ostentatious. But it's becoming part of our sports in general, and I do not believe it is a good thing.

Talking curling

All we did last night was talk curling. Yep. That's all we did.

We talked about the shots we missed and how that did not help the team. Yep. We did that.

The others of us, when not lamenting our own obvious and blatant fouls, assured the other guys that they didn't hurt our efforts all that much. If at all. Yep. We did that. Because that's what curlers do. We tell each other that they did okay.

Yep. It's what we do. It's the curling mindset.

I think we'd be a better world if more minds were set that way.

The second slash double

I'm gonna tell you what. This was one of the best curling matches I ever played in, and I didn't do nuthin. The guys did it all.

They hit the line, they swept like all hell, they called the weight; they made the game. That they made me look good in the process well, I appreciate.

Every time I needed a shot, they supplied it. Every time I needed a hit and roll, they called it and swept in into place. Every time I needed a sweep, they put my rock exactly where it needed to be. They made this game.

It all turned in the second end. I called a slash double for three on my last shot. Even I, when spying it from the throwing end of the ice, wasn't sure it was there. I threw it anyway.

Brian, my vice, calling the line as he should, from that far end of the ice, made a non call. And it was a perfect non call. I wanted him to yell sweep from early on, fearing I was inside, yet he did not call it. I wanted a sweep when my stone was near the hog, the line which a stone must cross to be legally in play, but he did not call it. I wanted a sweep when my thrown rock was within two or three feet of a guard, a rock which might deflect a stone from its target, and he did not call the sweep.

And we missed that stone by fractions and made that slash double for three.

That is the greatest non call of my life. Brian saw it, and said nothing, as a vice who saw the line perfectly should have.

You, sir, are the man.

Friday Night Curling

First there was Friday Night Lights, which dealt with a dangerous game which leads all to often (by its nature) to permanent disability. Then there was Friday Night Tykes, which dealt with, oh, coaches encouraging brutality among eight year olds. And then, there was Friday Night Curling. It is by far the best use of Friday nights.

To begin with, Friday Night Curling does not encourage injury and abuse. It does instead encourage sportsmanship and fair play. I like that.

I'm playing every other Friday night in the Friday night curling league at the Roseland Curling Club in Windsor, Ontario. The Burr and Thistle. It is a league where we do not despise our opponents nor encourage and expect their destruction. It is a league where we congratulate an opponent who makes a good shot. It is a league where we defend our house, not because we, by some bizarre stretch of hyperbole, own it, but because the scoring area is called the house. It is a league where we all meet after games to raise a glass and appreciate fair play. It is a league where friends, not opponents, gather to appreciate all what's best in a game. Even if that means we lost.

Few other sports, even my beloved baseball, can boast of that.

I really think more folk ought to take up curling. It might actually teach us about sportsmanship being more important than winning. For when the One Great Scorer comes To write against your name, He marks-not that you won or lost-But how you played the game.

Grantland Rice sure had that right.

What if they played a football game and nobody showed?

This afternoon, as I write in fact, there is a big football game in Ann Arbor between in-state rivals Michigan and Michigan State. At one point in my life I would have been drooling over the match up. Today, I have no intention of watching a single down. I won't say I don't care, but I don't care nearly so much as I once would have.

I've watched very little of my beloved Detroit Tigers this past season, and I saw very little of the Red Wings last year or so far this year. I've watched hardly any of the Major League Baseball playoffs which are currently going on, and baseball is the greatest game there is by far. I only pay enough attention to the NFL to see how my fantasy league picks are doing, and I'm not sure I should be bothering with that. I've missed the last two Super Bowls, and probably will not watch the next one unless I like one of the teams playing. I'm not sure I'll watch even at that. Even curling, a game I've played for thirty years now and whose season for me begins October 26th, doesn't have the appeal to me that it has in years gone by. I love the curlers, of course, and everyone I've met through the game; they're my greatest friends as a single group. Hell, they're my greatest friends, period. Only family is closer. But the point is that I find increasingly that sports are, well, a waste of time and energy.

Some of it has to do with the games as they now stand. They need improvement, and could make themselves better with a little effort. I've complained about that before, primarily about football, yes, but they all could use a heaping dose of integrity quite frankly. Why can't baseball give Armando Gallaraga his perfect game? It would be so easy to do, no one would argue, yet MLB doesn't do it. How can we expect sports to teach sportsmanship if the powers that be won't serve simple justice? Justice very easily served, I might add.

I've gotten tired of game officials blowing calls where the response is, essentially, oh well. That isn't fair play. And shouldn't sports be about fair play? Unless winning is indeed everything, at which point, damn the whole lot of it.

I've blogged before about my Grandpa Joe's attitude: drop the ball for all it matters. He's right to the point that sports shouldn't be so dominant in our culture although wrong, to be sure, so far as you should play your best if you do choose to play. But I've reached the point where the only games I care about were the ball games with my kids as the grew up, and pitching, catching, and batting with my granddaughter now. Tossing the ball around with Pops back in the day. The rest? It's just kinda become noise.

A lot of the fault is with me. I know that. Sports meant too much to me for too many years and it may well be that I'm overcompensating in this reaction. Still, that doesn't mean that I and the world as a whole haven't reached the point where sports and games have become bread and circuses, especially at the highest levels. That idea works fine in a completely secular world.

And that, perhaps, is what bothers me the most. I fear sometimes that we've become too much of an eat, drink, and be merry world, and that that's becoming institutionalized through sports. I can't help but wonder if we'd be better off if they become mere diversions rather than passions. Because as it is, and as I've said it before and recently, I feel that anymore the games play us more than we play the games. That speaks ill of both us and the games we watch.

American football just isn't all that.

The professional football season starts today. One marquee game on a Thursday night is not a start but only a shadow. The real thing begins today. Football is a great game. It really is. But until the game (and its fans, we must add) starts to lose some of its self importance, it really should take a breath and reconsider why it isn't all that. A reasonable sense of humility is a good thing for anyone and anything.

For starters, there are the repeated and gruesome injuries involved with playing the game. I'm sorry, but there's no game worth playing, and no sport worth being deemed sport, when thousands of players and thousands more in the future have and will suffer debilitating injuries. The libertarian argument that no one made them play simply is shallow in light of the suicides which have come about directly as the result of playing football. Perhaps no one in the strictest sense made them play. But our insistence as a society that players risk injury which all too often has led to death simply so that we can sit with friends on a weekend afternoon and rationalize it away with a blithe 'it's too bad about that awful injury but it was a good hit' rings of nothing but bread and circuses no matter how actually sorrowful we may feel at the time of the injury. We should not cheer what might result in long term injuries which cause people to take their lives as merely part of a game. Football needs to ratchet down the violence or, quite frankly, be banned.

The bravado of American football too really needs to be ratcheted down a few notches too. Oh, you stopped a guy for a two yard gain late in an already decided contest? Big whoop. You don't see players in other sports reveling in their own self glorification over similar plays in their games. Stop thinking your unimportant little play at an unimportant time is so critical to human history. An outfielder catching a deep fly ball in the eighth inning of a blowout has the right attitude. He caught it because he was supposed to give it his best no matter what. Be he knows that it ultimately means nil.

American football is not really the most popular game ever, either. That idea is smoke and mirrors. Let's see what the numbers would be if there were 80 some games per season as in basketball and hockey, or 162 as in baseball. I will guarantee the ratings will drop. What, we won't see that? You mean those big and husky he-men couldn't play that many games? Then the endurance which is supposedly so important in sports doesn't exist in football? That's just another debit so far as I'm concerned.

The fewer number of games played necessarily makes each game abnormally important; yet to be fair that is no reflection on the on the game as the game. It is a reflection of scarcity and nothing more. Add to that the party atmosphere which has attached itself to football, that in itself a reflection on scarcity and not a comment on the actual game either, and we see that it is the sense of event more than the game itself which is the attraction. There's nothing wrong with that of course. But I'll stress again that such is speaking to the event and not the sport. Admit it, football fans: it's the sense of event and not the actual game which attracts many of you. On the whole, the only fans actually interested in the outcome of the Super Bowl or other football championships are the fans of the two teams involved. Just as in the World Series or Stanley Cup.

Then there's the time clock and intentionally grounding the ball to stop the clock when you run out of your precious time outs. Two things apply here. One, and this applies beyond football (basketball comes to mind) is that no one in a timed game who has a vested interest in the outcome of the game should have any say whatsoever in the time clock. That should be reserved to the game officials and not the players or coaching staff of a given team. Too many football games are won because a team which has been otherwise outplayed can stop the clock up to three times, then ground the ball with no intent on actually making a play (this an indefinite amount of times) until they're in a position to win. That simply lacks integrity. It is not sportsmanlike. It's no matter that either team could do it. Neither team should be able to do it. If sports are supposed to teach sportsmanship then this needs to be addressed. The obvious answer is that only game officials who work independent of the outcome should have any say on clock usage, and grounding the ball to stop the clock should result in the traditional penalty (which ought to include either a yardage penalty or a runoff the clock) with loss of down. Anything else takes away from true sport.

There you have it: football too often isn't about sportsmanship and is more about an event than a game. Until football accepts that, it does not deserve the mantle it by itself purports to wear.

The NFL and domestic violence

Will Leitch, a senior writer for something called Sports on Earth among other things, has written in this past Sunday's edition of USA Weekend, that American football is wrong for attempting to tone down the actions of its players, especially the on field but also the off field antics. He apparently does not like the new rules against excessive celebration and dunking the ball over the goalpost after a touchdown, for example, lamenting that the NFL is denying players their personality, whatever that means.

Well, we'll tell you what that means: it means showboating or grandstanding, things themselves which were once thought unsportsmanlike. The NFL is quite right in trying to eliminate such aspects of the game.

They are sports, after all. Mere games which, for a long time anyway, we were encouraged to participate in for exercise as well as to learn how to be good sports. This surely means that you do not rub your opponents face into the ground when you're just beaten him for a score. Some high fives and a few a few pats on the helmet should be all the celebration you need, allowing for greater celebrations at more climatic moments to be fair.

Mr. Leitch claims that fans often want individual players to rise above the game. This is a good point, yet not for the reasons he seems to believe. He uses, wrongly, we're wont to think, Michael Jordan as an example of such rising. But did Mr. Jordan 'rise' by belittling his opponents, or by carousing all hours of the day and night? Not that we know. We believe that better exemplars of becoming more than the game come through respecting the game and its fans, transcending their sport to a level which takes the game upwards with them. In local lore this would be such folk heroes as Al Kaline and Alan Trammell, and more broadly the soon to be retired Derek Jeter, whose grace and class both on and off the field has made their sublime legacies better for all three as well as for baseball itself.

We cannot help but think that it is no coincidence that the arrogant, thug mentality which has permeated American football for so many years has made so many players less than stellar citizens. Hardly a day goes by without news of some new domestic violence issue, or gunshot at a nightclub involving an NFL player. The League is trying to address those questions too. As it should. But at the end of the day, sports should be sportsmanlike. That means essentially that you let your actions speak for you. If those actions are profound enough, the player will receive his due. If he must advertise for them, he likely doesn't merit the accolades anyway.

Sports mean Too Much these days

So drop the damn ball. What does it matter? - Joe Cosgriff

The above is an exact quote from one Joe Cosgriff, who was not much of a sports fan. Oh, he'd watch something occasionally, and was even known, every now and then, to ask how the Tigers had done. So we're not saying that he had no interest in sports and games. But we do wonder whether he, perhaps, had the right idea about them.

It is in this light that we note with a certain interest the upcoming reality show Friday Night Tykes. It appears to get into the real world of youth sports, with that distinct in your face attitude which football does so well. Screaming parents and coaches trying to impart manhood unto young men, doing so at the top of their lungs. Yep, it sure looks like it has sports in the right light.

So let's ask Joe's question: what does it matter if an outfielder or wide receiver drops a ball? What really can we take from a successful dunk or pretty goal or even an uphill 35 foot put with a significant left-right slope?

It could make millions of dollars to some people; okay, we get that. But that's only, we will say it, about the money. There's nothing wrong with that per se either. But the athletes who do not bag the extra cash still have friends and family, don't they, as well as more than the capacity to care for themselves and those who depend on them, right? So it hardly really matters, in any rational sense, what the outcome of the game might be.

Yes, yes, sports and games can be good recreation. Yet even that value seems a very minor one these days, especially when so many athletes aren't playing for recreation, are they? They're playing to show that they're better than the other guy. They're competing. It strikes us that such goes beyond recreation, so much so that any point about relaxation is out the window.

But sports teach us things, don't they? Things like discipline and doing your job and living up to the expectations of people who rely on you. They teach teamwork; they teach sportsmanship and respect for others.

Respect for others. That's are difficult point to take seriously when you're in a naturally adversarial position. Indeed, arguably, such can't teach respect but rather the other side of respect: the idea that I'm better than you. Such competitiveness cannot truly teach anything useful as it can only encourage jealousy and arrogance. Beyond that, so much of the discipline which comes from playing games can be learned without the games, and much more easily and directly. Get to school or work on time; get your job done; be there for people when they need you. If these and a great many other virtues aren't learned day in and day out as you live your life, it seems highly unlikely that the mere practice and play for a game will do it. At best, they are only part of the learning process, and a quite obviously unnecessary one at that seeing as they're a small part of most lives. Even the lives of most athletes.

We're not saying that sports and games are wrong. But we are saying that they're become too much a part of our society considering their relative worth. At the end of the day, no matter how you doll it up, a game is just a game. Nothing more.

We will have good sportsmanship only when someone drops a damn ball everyone simply shrugs and says, oh well. Until then, we will not have learned anything about the real value of any given game.

Football is Too Brutal

It is said that football is now the American national pastime. Be that as it may, what does that say about us as Americans?

There are somewhere in the area of 2,000, two thousand, an outstanding number when you consider how relatively few men have played professional football, former NFL football players suing the National Football League for failure to address the physical and psychological damage the game has done to them. Many former football players have publicly stated that they will not encourage their sons to play football. Why? Because it is too brutal.

Too brutal. Yet we as a nation encourage this activity.

What does this say about us as that nation? It is not something we care to dwell upon. Should we dwell upon it, it might cause us to ask questions which we do not want to answer, let alone ask. Such questions which may cause us to ponder whether we ought to feel as we feel on Sunday afternoons in the fall in the good old U. S. of A.

We don't ask, because it will harsh our buzz. We just want to be entertained. If that means watching grown men possibly scaring themselves for life, even when freely choosing to do so, it's okay. We need that, it seems.

Do we also need former players so messed up that they will not watch the game, a la Mike Webster? Do we care about that? After all, they chose to go down that road. Is that our problem?

Yes, quite frankly, it is. When we as a society encourage young men to behave that way, it is our problem. Their lives are on us. Lives like these: http://www.gq.com/sports/profiles/200909/nfl-players-brain-dementia-study-memory-concussions?currentPage=2

We can regret them, of course. Yet we can do more. We can question whether we ought continue to support a mentality which says this okay. We can question whether our values need to be prioritized better. We can do that.

But we won't. We're Americans, after all. We don't need to question our motives. We're the best.

What is left, then, is the penultimate question: who will explain that to Mike Webster?

Curling

People seem almost shocked at the amount of attention which has been heaped upon curling at the 2010 Winter Olympics from Vancouver. But why should they?

It's a great sport. It's challenging, but not so much that it's too difficult to play. The game is fairly easy to understand (who really understands stunts and pulling guards?). It has a great blend of the individual and the team: everyone throws two rocks, while the others do their best to help insure that each shot works out well for the squad. It has strategy which does not depend on at least potentially hurting people. But the best thing about it by far is the simple sportsmanship of the game.

No trash talking.

No 'not in our house' arrogant garbage. Curlers welcome everyone to the game, and congratulate good shots by the other team without hesitation. During the game.

No whining about the officials. Curlers essentially police themselves.

It's a great game because it is a true sport. We should not be shocked at the interest it generates.

Happy Birthday to a Hometown Hero

Yesterday Mr. Tiger, Al Kaline, turned 75. He is truly one of the greatest players to ever don the Old English D, and perhaps the premier right fielder in the history of that grand American game, baseball.

Kaline turned down a $100,000 contract when it was first offered on the grounds he didn't have a good enough year to merit it. That contrasts well against the players of this age, who just can't make ends meet on $10 million dollars a year and so hold out for $12.5. He was considerate and humble almost to a fault; it would be a challenge of tremendous proportions to find anyone who might speak ill of him. He has been loyal to a club that has been loyal to him. If that isn't a tribute to his character, what else could be?

Number 6 offered to sit out what would become his only World Series back in 1968 because he thought others deserved to play more than him. Yet management would have none of that, and Kaline responded by hitting .379 for the club in its victory over the St. Louis Cardinals that year.

Sportsmanship; that's the premier quality of this living legend. Most any of today's players could learn a lesson from that.

Happy Birthday, Al Kaline, and many happy returns of the day.