I feel jobbed by sports playoffs

The Major League Baseball Playoffs began yesterday, and I began to watch them but ended up tuning into NCIS instead, a few minutes ahead of the first pitch. Lest you think this is Marty backing away from his ardent support of America's Pastime, I will let you know that I haven't watched the last two Super Bowls (and little of the NFL Playoffs leading up to them) nor very much of the last three or four Stanley Cups. The older I get the more I can't help but feel that we, the fans, are getting jobbed by sports playoffs in all their forms.

With the exception of American Football, which is by its own tacit admission too brutal for such tests of endurance, we find long seasons which are supposed to be so important leading into a relative handful of games which actually determine champions. They're just something silly about that, if not downright ridiculous. Play all these games, and if you win a lot of them, well, you have to play just a few more to prove you're really that good. It's simply dumb, the more I think about it.

Make teams do it to show how they perform under pressure? All right, there's something to that. Maybe. But maybe also all it does is allow overall weaker teams to shorten their benches and appear stronger by what is little more than slight of hand. But that hardly strikes me as fair to the better overall teams. And if sports are supposed to be about the best man/woman/team winning, I think playoffs may in fact lead to situations less than ideal for such outcomes. Were the New York Giants really the better team than the New England Patriots the year the Pats went into the Super Bowl 17-0? Nope. Yet they were the NFL Champs.

I realize that without the allure of playoffs many teams and their fans might quit on the seasons without the promise of something more. And I get that, so far as it goes. But I also get that if you can't survive the trial you shouldn't earn a mulligan for it either. Further, a good team ought to be put on the field first if it wants support. It's really no different a concept than expecting a business to put out a good product or service before it merits patronage.

As we all know, it actually just comes down to the money. Extended playoffs mean more cash for the games and the industries which surround them. I'll admit up front that there's nothing wrong with that per se. But I also think that an honest assessment of the situation should conclude that it is less than ideal for the integrity of our sports and games as sports and games. It teaches whether it means to or not that excitement is more important than the best team winning. Excitement on its own isn't wrong either of course. Yet I just can't help but feel that excitement when it comes more naturally is deeper and more thrilling than when it is manufactured by groups and persons who don't care about my allegiance so much as they do my money. That more than anything else is when I feel jobbed. I think sports fans in general should feel the same way.

To be sure, I'll watch some of the upcoming baseball games as the next few weeks pass. I admit as well that I would watch more ardently if the Detroit Tigers were involved. But my attention will only be half present as I do. Sparky Anderson said it best: the best team in baseball in a given year is the team with the best regular season record, not the World Series winner. He's spot on with that assessment, and I wish more sports fans would think so too.

The truth is out there

And looking out on high I saw Aristotle, the Master of Those Who Know, ringed by the great souls of philosophy.
-Dante, The Inferno

The exact translation of the line I paraphrase above seems in some dispute; what Dante is saying precisely is beyond my poor academic powers to determine. But the gist is reasonably accurate: the poet was speaking of Aristotle, and Aristotle was being commended for seeking and holding and teaching real knowledge.

Not, of course, that Aristotle's knowledge was perfect; no one's is. The overriding point is that we can know; we can hold a real knowledge of and appreciation for persons, things, and events.

Many thinkers today do not accept this preposition. My professors of education (I will not call them teachers) were very open in that they did not believe that there were any things true for all time and all places. In that light, should we be surprised that so many schools do such a poor job of education?

Questions of religion are tossed off as little more than personally interpretive systems which, at best, only help individuals cope with the traumas of this world. Could this be a reason that reverence for anything beyond the person involved has paled lately?

In politics, issues are little more than vague platitudes which help people get elected. Perhaps that is why men and women of depth and understanding eschew elective offices, for they understand that real things are at stake and are too busy actually dealing with them in real time?

Moral virtue is now all too often seen as a myth; should we wonder why there is so little respect for people and institutions?

All of this and far greater errors are based on the idea that we cannot really know anything. The fact is, if that false axiom should prove right, if there is no universal knowledge which we can all, if we wish, understand, then there is no meaning in the world or to life.

Do not fear. That cannot be the case. Aristotle and all the dead white guys, and a great many others of varying races and creeds (for truth is eternal and thus widely recognized across cultures and peoples) have shown us that we can know. Forget the liberal academics who have no respect for that tenet; it shows only their ignorance. Ignore the science trumps religion tribes; they will not accept that knowledge has different tests in different areas. In science, the test of truth is empirical. In philosophy, the test is Reason. With Theology, the standard of evidence is Faith. In the end, all knowledge compliments itself across these three major branches of her, that goddess we call Wisdom.

We can know. Therefore we can act. We can act for the greater good of ourselves and our world. We can do what we must with the clarity that truth is with us, that it dwells among us and at all levels. In the end, that is why we will win and the secular elements across the spectrum will lose. We have something to stand on. They have a bedrock of air.

Mad Max style justice

"The empathy to understand what it's like to be poor, or African American, or gay, or disabled, or old. And that's the criteria by which I'm going to be selecting my judges."

-President Barack Obama

There are times when I find myself actually warming up to our President. Then there are times, many, many more times, when I have to tell myself that it's not about his charisma, not about how likable he may be. It's about who he really is and what he'll really do.

The so-called Empathy Standard is an example of how he truly intends to govern. Let's set aside for the moment that Mr. Obama is being pretty openly hypocritical on the question of how judges should rule. He said in 2005 that: The test is whether he or she (a judge) can effectively subordinate their views in order to decide each case on the facts and the merits alone. That is what keeps our judiciary independent in America. That is what our Founders intended. That statement appears to be in keeping with the ideal of judicial restraint, although I would have to add that every case should be decided on facts and merit and law alone in order to be more fully and correctly understood. Once beyond that, I must say that any standard which encourages, as this one does, judges and justices to rule with their heart and not according to the law are, at the very least, nonjudicial. At the worst, they are a threat to future of our republic.

We cannot have judges ruling on empathy alone: it is a short step after that to a land where law becomes transient, a mere passing fancy. A quick and easy example of what this would be can found in, of all places, the film Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome. Aunty Entity's idea of justice makes it little more than a game: gladiatorial style combat in the Thunderdome itself, with the macabre chant of 'Two men enter, one man leaves' or Wheel of Fortune like: a wheel, segmented by various punishments and including, for fairness sake one might suppose, a thin sliver of an option for acquittal. We will have shallow law according to the rules and expectations of a game show.

Do we want justice to be a game? I should hope not. Yet when we say that judges should rule on how they feel rather than on what the law says, we will get exactly that. It will be on the quicksand of legal apathy that we shall choke.

Don't read the Label

I do not have what I consider unusual tastes in food. Yet that does not mean that there aren't odd foods which I like.

My wife returned from shopping today with a couple cans of potted meat. I should not like it: meat which spreads like butter doesn't sound appealing on that ground alone. Yet it's good: way too salty, perhaps, but I like salty things. There is one rule to follow, though, with stuff like potted meat. Do not, under any circumstances, read the ingredients. Just eat and enjoy. Nothing that tastes good could actually be bad for you, right?

Now you really, truly do not want to read the ingredients in liver mush. Yes, liver mush. It comes in little grayish one pound cakes and is available all over my other home state, North Carolina. I think it's called scrapple on the east coast. Either way, it's mondo good with onion and mayo on plain old white bread. You simply slice a bit of it off the cake and hey presto, instant culinary delight. Just always remember the rule.

Vienna Sausages are worthwhile too, though I suppose they aren't really all that odd. I think of them as baby food for grown ups, just like the Gerber custard pudding that rocks so well on the palate. But once more, don't read the label on the can. I am eternally curious about what exactly constitutes mechanically separated chicken though.

So anyway, at least every now and then take a chance, set aside health issues, and eat something that's probably not good for you. You'll thank for me it, and I promise to visit you in the ER if there's any unfortunate aftereffects.

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.

Personal History

There's this picture I know which will mean nothing to many folks. Most pictures don't I'd imagine. They're someone else doing something else, and that's that. Most pictures are innocuous that way I suppose.

Some are captures of moments which mean little but for the excitement of that moment for those involved. Some are public and capture the peculiar importance of what it is the photographer was shooting. The VJ Day sailor and nurse, his great embrace and her great acceptance, reflect that sentiment. A birthday party or wedding are more the embalmed history of those being partied to or being married show that as well. They are important to all involved or at least, to those photographed.

And then some pictures tell a story which we would all embrace should the tale behind the picture be known by all. I know one of those.

My father loved country music, especially the twangy bluegrass genre which found its way into northern cities such as Detroit as the great northern flight fed them during the hungry days of industry after the Second World War. He met his wife that way, as he had become friends with her brother, my uncle, who himself had fled an impoverished North Carolina in the days after the war seeking a better life for his family. His extended family had, being among them my mother, came north as well. So my parents met. So is my personal history at its' start written.

Years pass, and time yields towards itself. Dad never lost his love of country music, and never lost his love of its history both personal and in its music. He became a salesman for a company, a national company of which he was merely its local rep. And that took him beyond his proscribed territory. It took him to cities which were beforehand out of his range.

He once found himself in Nashville, Tennessee, for a trade show, where he had a few moments to himself. So he took some of those moments and he went to downtown Nashville, to see the Ryman Auditorium where many of his country music heroes had performed. He took a tour and stumbled into an opportunity to envisage himself among country music's elite. He could have his own picture made at center stage as though he were performing among the country music elite.

They gave him a cowboy hat and a guitar. They told him to take a certain spot on the stage, strum the guitar, look one way, and smile, and they would take a picture. He did it all. And he came out looking, as if in an analogy he had used often himself about others, as a kid in a candy store. He looked like a country music singer in his own right.

He was smiling as though it was meant for him to be there. As though he should be there. And as though he was comfortable, right where he should be.

He was a kid smiling like a kid living his wildest dreams. No doubt he was. I see it in that picture I know.

Lucky Jim and English Humour

I see that I haven't posted a blog since the Twenty-Third of August, so I decided that I had better get back to it. A thousand inquiring readers want to hear what Marty has to say, he says knowingly (foolishly) to himself. And not out loud he hopes, even though he is alone, for that would still somehow be embarrassing.

I stumbled this morning upon the type of thing one often stumbles upon on the Internet, a list (this one by Esquire magazine) of 80 books in no particular order which Esquire insists everyone ought to read. To my delight (I can be delighted rather easily it seems) I found several books on the list which I actually have read: The Things They Carried by one Tim O'Brien, a rather grotesque Vietnam War tale which I thought far too full of itself; Jack London's The Call of The Wild, which I remember little of except that they made us read it in Grade 7; The Killer Angels, a simply marvelous historical fiction from Michael Shaara wrapped around the Battle of Gettysburg in the American Civil War (I gained a great respect and admiration for the Confederate General Longstreet after reading it); and Tom Wolfe's The Right Stuff about the Mercury astronauts, where I similarly learned to like Deke Slayton. On the list too though I have not read it was David McCullough's The Great Bridge, about the building of the Brooklyn Bridge. As he did such fine jobs with biographies of John Adams and Harry Truman I find myself interested in how he might make bridge construction an exciting read. But what most delighted me to find on list was of all things a little comedy which I first read after my wife, who had had it assigned to her in an English course at the University of Detroit, complained to me that neither she nor the rest of the class understood. So I borrowed it immediately. Five pages in I was laughing so hard I was, as the cliche insists, crying. Or hurting, as both adjectives are suggested by like cliches. The book, which by one of those strange intersections of time and circumstance I just happen to be rereading just now, is Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis.

It really is very funny in its very English way. There are passages which until yet I laugh so long and hard at that I have to stop reading for minutes at a time. Then I have trouble getting back to the text because the funniest moments just keep coming back to me. Yes, it is that good. If you like dry, droll, over the top English humor.

And you should, you know. The English have a delightful way of melding sublime understatement, surreal juxtaposition, and outlandish slapstick in hilariously satisfying ways. A wonderful example from Lucky Jim is a passage where an absent minded driver comes near to a head on collision with a bus. His passenger, the actual lucky Jim, describes the incident in harrowing comedic detail, finishing with a description of the obviously excited and screeching bus driver, "...his mouth opening and shutting vigorously.' I'm chuckling at it still.

The closest American approximations are the Marx Brothers and, believe it or not, Bob Newhart. The English, they know humor. Americans should get to know English humor better too.

And I'm not talking Benny Hill either, you walking primates out there.