If CheikSamb were not playing basketball he'd be working with his father and brother in "export-import fishing businesses."
Rodney Stuckey is good at "dancing, eating and sleeping"
I'm really trying to get myself excited again about basketball, but I don't know how many times I can take the Pistons' recurring Eastern Conference Finals losses before I decide I need a year off from the team or something. It's pretty hard to believe that this team, as constructed, will be able to win the championship, but there are two things that have me optimistic:
There's a very good chance that Joe D. will finally pull the trigger on a trade before the trade deadline this year. I don't blame him for not doing a "fifty cents on the dollar" trade this offseason, but it seems clear that the team as it doesn't quite have what it takes. There is, however, very good reason to believe that this winter they'll be some disgruntled star on a bad team that will pretty much force them to trade him. It happens almost every year, and the last time Dumarscapitalized on it, it netted the team Rasheed Wallace.
There really is a lot of good, young talent on the team. Jason Maxiell, Rodney Stuckey, and Amir Johnson in particular make the season worth watching even if you don't think the Pistons have what it takes this year. Stuckey in particular (i.e. "the poor man's Dwyane Wade) seems ready for a great second year as the go-to 3rd guard off the bench.
Although the top-half of the roster may be aging, there really does seem to be a good foundation forming that can begin to take their place. The fact that Amir Johnson is now in the starting lineup gives me hope that Michael Curry is actually willing to play these young guys, too.
So, even though I complain all the time about the hushed, pretentious way that the television networks present their "marquee" sports programming like The Masters ("a tradition unlike any other") or Wimbledon ("The Championships...Wimbledon"), I've got to admit that sometimes these programs, almost in spite of themselves, have a certain appealing, irresistible warmth.
Case in point: While Wimbledon (which I've made a habit of watching every morning the last couple weeks before I go in to work) was going through one of it's classic rain delays this morning, the network had to kill some time. Their solution: have Dick Enberg and Bud Collins basically sit at a desk and just tell stories for half an hour or so.
Collins, though well known for his ostentatious attire (see above), is also a much-loved and loquacious storyteller. Enberg, though not in my opinion as strong of an announcer as he once was, remains a relentlessly cheerful personality and a great ambassador for tennis.
Anyway, as Collins was telling a long story about some mixed-doubles tournament that he saw back in 1959, a few things occurred to me:
1. Thank god for rain delays at Wimbledon: a sporting event that prominently features a couple of genial old men telling mildly ribald stories is, I must admit, most certainly my kind of tournament. 2. It's moments like that which make it no wonder only about 9% of Americans still give a hoot about Wimbledon. 3. Part of the fun of being a tennis fan is feeling like you're a part of the very clubby exclusivity that a place like Wimbledon cultivates.
The fact is, Wimbledon does make me pretty sentimental. Not only did I play tennis virtually every day as a kid with my brother and my good friends James and Chris, I have surprisingly distinct memories of watching Wimbledon every summer at my Grandparent's Traverse City home. It seemed like every July for years two things we're guaranteed: 1. My brother and I would go up to Traverse City for the annual Cherry Festival and 2. Pete Sampras would annihilate everyone at Wimbledon. Good times. Is there anything, by the way, more likely to make you shamelessly sentimental than the Julys of your childhood?
With the Detroit Tigers finally playing better, the all-star game coming up, and because there's never a bad reason to share some George Plimpton, I wanted to include a link from the SI Vault (a treasure trove so vast that I've barely touched the season) to an article that Plimpton wrote almost 50 years ago about his experience pitching to a group of major league All-Stars during a pregame batting contest.
The article is typically hilarious Plimpton and serves as a perfect example of his much-celebrated form of "participatory journalism." What sports fan wouldn't love to try and pitch against a team of all-stars? Who wouldn't want to see if they could find a way to get through it? And, finally, who doesn't (even if they wouldn't admit to it) kind of want to see Plimpton fail miserably and have the order of the universe reaffirmed just a little?
The article moves briskly and is full of moments that will (or, at least, they should) make you laugh out loud. My particular favorite moment is near the end when the heat and the stress get to Plimpton on the mound and his inner voice stops trying to keep him calm and starts to crack a little under the pressure:
But during Banks 's tenure the inner voice refused to stay contained within my head. The lips began to move, and my mumbled voice, for some reason with a southern inflection which I have never used before or since, became increasingly audible on that lonely hill, moaning and squeaking like the fluttery breath of a tuckered hound.
"Lookit that thing go out theah!" it gasped when Banks had finally departed, and Frank Thomas ' long home run started for the depths of the upper deck. "Lawd almighty!"
What caused the voice to crack utterly was a string of seven balls I threw to Gil Hodges before he hit three fouls in a row and then his single, none of these first pitches close enough to the plate to get him to so much as twitch the bat off his shoulder. At first the voice offered its usual counsel not to push the ball and to take things easy. Presently, however, it got exasperated—"Hey, come on now, bear down, Ah say"—like a short-tempered farmer training a pup to come to heel. Then finally, as the control continued to flag, the panic surged in not by degrees but quickly, like a prowler's bulk suddenly filling a doorway, and it came in and throttled the voice so that all that came out was a thin high squeak.
And then this curious thing happened. The voice turned traitor. It went defeatist on me. It escaped and ran off, washing its hands of the whole miserable business. But it didn't desert me completely. Much worse, it capered around out there on the periphery, jeering and catcalling. "You po' fat fool, y'think y'all pretty fat and smart standing out theah pitching, hey? Well, lemme tell yo' sumpin. Y'all can't pitch yo' way out of a paper bag, that's what. Jes' try. Jes' le's see yo' try putting the ball ovah the plate."
So I would try—and when the ball missed the strike zone under Hodges ' watchful eye, the voice would cackle gleefully, "Y'all see that? Oh my! Y'all see that ball roll in the dust? Ladies an' gen'men, d'y'all observe that ball drop down theah in the dirt? Haw! Haw! Haw!" it would roar gustily in my head. "Haw! Haw! Haw!"
I know I've mentioned him probably 3 times already, but if you're a sports fan and you aren't reading Joe Posnanski's blog regularly yet, what the heck's going on? Posnanski, ostensibly a sports columnist for the K.C. Star, has a near-daily blog that, in its mix of stats, commentary, and humor, constitutes just about the most entertaining sportswriting you'll ever read.
I particularly loved his post on Tiger Woods on Monday, which considered the unusual hold that Tiger Woods has over so many of us, especially seeing as how nobody really seems to know anything at all about the guy.
In the midst of the post, he talks about how almost every other athlete has has a few stories written or told about them that seem to open them up and get a sense of what makes them who they are. I particularly liked this Michael Jordan story:
It seems that he was practicing before a game, and arena people were going through all the scoreboard games to make sure they worked. “Hey,” Michael yelled out. “Who wins the dot game tonight?” They told him … say it was blue. That night, during a timeout, the dot game began. Jordan turned to Scottie Pippen: “Hey, bet you a thousand dollars blue wins.” Something about that gets me closer to Michael Jordan, his hunger for action, his need for control, his preparation, his desperation to win. Pippen agreed to the bet, which tells you plenty about him too.
Sometimes I seem like half of my posts on this blog are some sort of defense of the world of sports and the unshakable hold they seem to have over me. Maybe that's why I feel the need to champion my favorite sportswriters like Posnanski, Bill Simmons, etc. They remind me that's what's especially fun and addictive about sports are not so much the games themselves, as it is the endlessly entertaining (at least for me) conversations, arguments, and analysis that they inspire.
Okay, I'm really kind of insanely busy right now catching up with work after spending a days hanging out with my mom in the city and then sitting around basically doing nothing at all for a few pseudo-vacationish days this long weekend.
But, that being said, have you seen Jason Maxiell's block of Kevin Garnett in last night's game? It was sick. And kind of unbelievable considering that he's about 8 inches shorter than Garnett. And, thus, this makes it too good not to share...
In order to pay tribute to Rodney Stuckey's fantastic job filling in for an injured Chauncey Billups in game 5, and in order to prove that I know how to import things on to this blog, here is a handy widget (seriously, you've got to love that word, right?) to keep track of Stuckey's progress as the Pistons move on to the Eastern Conference Finals to face either Cleveland (Lebron=Terrifying) or Boston (Garnett=Terrifying, Doc Rivers=Not so much).
I mean, c'mon, how much longer could you have expected to wait before I threw in some sort of Pistons-related post?
Head on over to the Pistons official website to see a very entertaining list of their various "All-Time" teams (thanks to Detroit Bad Boys for the heads-up). It was a bizarre pleasure to be reintroduced to Ratko Varda (a member of the "Ron Behangen All-Stars" for players that only made it into one game) and Bison Dele (a member of the "All-Teal" team from the ill-fated teams and uniforms of the mid-90's) among others. If you're a Pistons fan, it's a must read.
Quick sidenote: when did "official" websites get so good? Basically everything on the NBA's official website is solid, while the Major League Baseball website is an excellent place to go for radio and game-tracking. Am I crazy or were these terrible places to go for any information at all just a few years back?
Oh me, oh my: Thanks to a tip from the hilarious (if erratically updated) Mickey Tettleton Memorial Overpass, it turns out that you can now read every back issue of Sports Illustrated in their new section called "The Vault."
I'm going to assume that everyone out there is exactly as enthused about this as I am. We all made our dad's save up their back issues of Sports Illustrated (going back years and years) so that we could read them when we came to visit, right? We all can recall with perfect clarity the exact images and texts of certain covers dating back twenty years, right? And, finally, we all know that the following cover is the greatest in the history of the magazine, yes?
Bill Simmons has an interesting column up today which contains letters from a bunch of bitter, betrayed Seattle SuperSonics fans angry about the way in which their franchise has been bought and hijacked, in predictable fashion, by a bunch of Oklahoma businessmen that assured the city they would stay there when they bought the team and almost immediately made plans to move the franchise to Oklahoma City once the sale was finalized. Terrible. Anyway, here is the article, which is worth reading if you want a snapshot of the sort of loving, occasionally over-the-top fandom that I and so many others suffer from.
Also, at the beginning of the article, Simmons quotes from a piece by the wonderful New Yorker writer Roger Angell which I'd never seen before and really does seem to encapsulate the awkward position so many adult-age sports fans find themselves in, and why they still can't give it up:
Nobody has ever summed up being a sports fan better than the New Yorker's Roger Angell in his piece "Agincourt and After," in this passage about Carlton Fisk's famous home run in the 1975 World Series:
It is foolish and childish, on the face of it, to affiliate ourselves with anything so insignificant and patently contrived and commercially exploitive as a professional sports team, and the amused superiority and icy scorn that the non-fan directs at the sports nut (I know this look -- I know it by heart) is understandable and almost unanswerable. Almost. What is left out of this calculation, it seems to me, is the business of caring -- caring deeply and passionately, really caring -- which is a capacity or an emotion that has almost gone out of our lives. And so it seems possible that we have come to a time when it no longer matters so much what the caring is about, how frail or foolish is the object of that concern, as long as the feeling itself can be saved. Naivete -- the infantile and ignoble joy that sends a grown man or woman to dancing and shouting with joy in the middle of the night over the haphazardous flight of a distant ball -- seems a small price to pay for such a gift.
I'm currently too laid out by a wicked sore throat to do much writing, but I wanted to quickly remind everyone that hasn't done so yet to check out Gilbert Arenas' blog on NBA.com. Arenas, a point guard for the Washington Wizards, is not only a fantastic player, prone to dramatic last-second shots and the kind of agressive game that has Kobe Bryant claiming"he has no conscience," he's also an insightful and sometimes shockingly candid blogger. He provides the kind of spontaneity , uniqueness, and up-close feeling that seems emblematic of what sets the NBA apart from the other sports leagues in America. Check him out, y'all.
One of the really fun things about sports is the way in which you can watch a particular thread develop over the course of a season:
This football season, I was constantly going on to anyone who would listen (basically no one, though some were polite enough to pretend) that if a quarterback is any good, his top skill will never be considered "arm strength." It's a given that all good quarterbacks have strong arms, but it's the equivalent of saying that Tim Duncan's greatest asset is that he's tall. Sure, he wouldn't be anywhere without it, but that alone has extremely little to do with what sets him apart. Unfortunately, when you begin to think about what separates a good quarterback from a great one, the differences are extremely difficult to explain in ways that don't sound like they're rooted in some relativist, completely unquantifiable category. So, over the course of this season, Bryan and I would watch football and I would ramble on about how Tony Romo has the ability to be a great quarterback if only because he always seems to be at his best when the play has fallen apart and there's nothing to do but make a decision on the fly. Brett Favre obviously has the same gift (and Michael Vick, once upon a time). Peyton Manning and Tom Brady do, too, though their gifts for experimentation and improvisation are subtler because most of their creativity is mental, e.g. deciding in their head when to abandon a certain play and throw to, say, the 5th option on a particular play.
When quaterbacks do this correctly the results are as close to artful as football gets. For example, check out Brett Farve throwing this shovel pass on the run. Even though this footage is kind of grainy, it gives in some ways an even better sense of the chaos in which a great quarterback makes some of their best decisions:
So, as the season progressed my football obsession revolved around looking for these moments where everything broke down in order to see what the quarterback would do. As my sports passions are always rooted in the players themselves, what more telling moment can there be than the times when everything falls apart and the script has to be abandoned? Romo and Farve both had great regular seasons and provided a number of moments that would make me jump out of my chair screaming, and I loved them for it. Others, such as Jon Kitna, the mistake-prone quarterback of my maddeningly bad Detroit Lions, failed to come through time and time again. Eli Manning, the quarterback I see more than any other due to my living in the New York market these days, also showed a lack of improvisational talent. At least until the Super Bowl...Down by four, third and five, fourth quarter, a minute left. Eli drops back and faces a full-out blitz. With members of the New England Patriots literally grabbing his jersey and starting to pull him down, he somehow escaped, freed himself from the crowd, and threw a pass to what had to have been the 3rd or 4th option on the play. Catch! Followed, a few seconds later, by a touchdown that would put the Giants aheaad for good. It was exactly the kind of moment I'd been watching for all year, and it happened to be the one that led directly to a team winning the super bowl! In the end, Eli Manning's ability to physically throw the ball so well in that situation wouldn't have made a relevant if he hadn't miraculously freed himself from the defenders and thrown a the kind of ball that only David Tyree was able to get his hands on (and make a spectacular catch of his own). Watching this season's theme (if in my eyes only) develop and conclude in such a satisfying way is, in the end, one of the reasons I fear I'll never be able to lighten up on my sports obsession...
Novak Djokovic, aka "Nole," aka my current favorite tennis player, just rolled through the field and won the Australian Open, knocking off the immortal Roger Federer in straight sets along the way!
The fact that he's the first Serbian player to win a men's singles title strikes me as kind of cool as well, though why that is I can't really say. Doesn't everybody root for Serbian stars in every sport (assuming their name isn't Darko Milicic) anyway? I kind of see Serbia as the inner-city of the Europe, so when a player comes out of there and achieves success (even if their background wasn't exactly destitute) it seems a little cooler somehow.
Anyway, as he's only starting to break into the mind of the American sports fan, I thought I'd show another clip of Djokovic goofing around before a match that shows the humorous, self-aware qualities that make him my current favorite player on the tour (with no disrespect meant to the brilliant Federer or the nearly as brilliant Raphael Nadal):
Is is too early to get excited about the upcoming baseball season?
Last night, The Detroit Tigers agreed to give up two top-10 prospects (including Cameron Maybin, a personal favorite of mine) to get back the following two players from the Florida Marlins:
All-star 3rd baseman Miguel Cabrera:And former Rookie of the Year and Cy Young runner-up Dontrelle Willis:
I'm so excited about this I couldn't get to sleep last night. I know a lot of my friends aren't the biggest sports fans, but for those of us who are, you live for these kind of trades to go through. It not only makes them much, much better going into the next season, it gives the fans months to speculate about how everything is going to shake out in terms of lineups, rivalries, etc. Damn, why did the Tigers have to get so good as soon as I left Michigan!
I haven't talked about sports in a while (to everyone's disappointment, right? right? no?), but I was curious if anybody out there was following or interested in the baseball playoffs. Although my beloved Detroit Tigers collapsed in shocking, chair-throwing fashion in late summer, I had one pleasure reserved for these playoffs: rooting against the New York Yankees. Needless to say, their loss last night was perhaps the highlight of the baseball season for me.
I was actually in a bit of a quandary about the Yankees this weekend. If they beat Cleveland it would set up another series with the Red Sox which, as a sports fan, is about as good a series as you can get without your own teams involved. I would've been forced to watch every game simply out of my obligation as a sports fan to watch any sporting event of a certain order of magnitude. Plus, New York is a true baseball city (much more than any other sport), and it would have seeped into every conversation (and been on every TV in every bar) for weeks. Exciting, eh?
Still, after doing some cost-benefit analysis, I decided that (assuming I had the power to control these things) I would rather have a less interesting baseball series between the Red Sox and Indians than take the risk that the Yankees could beat the Red Sox and go on to win the world series. In other words, I'd rather sacrifice any pleasure I'd receive from a great, even classic, series than live in a potential world in which the Yankees are World Series champions. Yup, I hate them that much. Feel free to shake your head in wonderment and disgust, non-sports fans.
Why, you ask, do I hate the Yankees so much? Well, there really are about hundred things about them that drive me crazy, but I'll just list a couple and point you to things like this and this if you're actually interested in all the reasons. My biggest problems are these:
They have so much more money than everyone else that they outspend everyone (save the Red Sox) by 100-150 million dollars. Who cares about things like chemistry when you can just keep buying bigger and bigger collections of talent? The fact that this strategy has backfired the last seven years still doesn't make me feel any better about this. This strategy leads teams like the Royals and the Devil Rays to basically give up, unable to compete the with talent the Yankees can pay (and grossly overpay) for and thus content to sit back, collect their revenue sharing checks, and trade away they're best players once they're do for a raise and contract extension.
They dominate the television coverage so much that you could reasonably think that there were only about 5 teams in the league. Did anyone else out there know that there was a National League as well? It's true, apparently. I don't actually know the teams or who plays on them, but I can certainly tell you everything you want to know about Yankee coach Joe Torre's job statue.
When they lose, we all have to lose. Now that the Yankees out of the playoffs, we get to spend a week hearing about how bad this will be for ratings and how Madison Avenue is praying for anything but a Cleveland-Colorado World Series (because their television markets aren't big enough). Somehow, we hear about this every year when New York teams aren't involved, yet I don't know any sports fan that cares, in the slightest, about ratings. I'll admit, though, that when I was a kid I remember it seemed kind of shameful, like I should be embarrassed that the Detroit television market wasn't big enough. Honestly, it doesn't matter. I don't own stock in the Fox Network, what do I care if they get a good return on their investment? You never hear this kind of talk about the NFL, because there is enough financial parity that one or two teams can never dominate the sport (and thus the coverage) the way that the Yankees have done most of the past 12 years.
So, there's my little baseball rant. Sadly, it appears I'm in too deep to ever stop caring about all this stuff...
I've got a new favorite tennis player: Novak Djokovic
Beyond the fact that he's already on the verge of being a fantastic player (he got to at least the semis of the French Open, the US Open, and Wimbledon), he has one characteristic that about seven people in all of sports have: he's funny. Actually funny. Check out this transcript from the press conference after his loss in the finals to Roger Feder.
In addition, he's been known to do some impressions of the other players on the tour, and they're both funny and actually pretty accurate:
It's so much easier to justify being a sports fan when the sports you follow have a Charles Barkley or a Gilbert Arenas or, it now appears, a Novak Djokovic around to add a little personality.
In addition, there are so many interesting players in tennis right now (at least on the men's side), that the lack of a dominant American player just doesn't hold weight as a reason not to follow the sport. At least watch it for the unsurpassed genius of Roger Federer! Or the defensive brilliance of Rafael Nadal! Or even the exquisite one-trick-ponyness of Andy Roddick and his serve!
(Uh oh, do I sound like an American soccer fan right now?)
Watching sports is, for me, a completely exhausting and draining activity. I scream and yell, I throw my hat across the room, pick it up, and then throw it again; I hide my face in a couch pillow and jump up and stomp around my apartment in anger when things don't go as they should. The whole thing is very operatic (in a way) and probably explains why my neighbors frown at me when I see them in the hall. This is, of course, the only way to watch sports. If I weren't passionate, how could I justify the time I spend on it or the pleasure it brings?
Although I think that most sports fans intuitively believe that they should keep themselves a little more in check around non-fans, I actually find the opposite to be true. If anything, they should crank up their energy a little.
Case in point: Possibly my greatest moment as a Detroit Tigers fan was when the team won the American League pennant last year on a walk-off home run by MagglioOrdonez and his ridiculous, Sampson-like locks.
It was a dramatic moment by any measure, and I watched it with two women that, while not anti-sports, certainly weren't sitting around talking baseball. Still, it was a fun exciting moment for all of us, and I think it only helped that I was in near-hysterics for the entirety of the 3-hour game. When the big home run was hit, all three of us jumped up and yelled and high-fived as if we had been watching baseball games together for years.
Here are some rules for watching sports with non-fans that I have learned from many years of practice. Follow these and you can save yourself and others a lot of grief:
Keep the negativity to a minimum. Non-fans haven't spent years building up resentments about back-up point guards (I'm looking at you, Lindsay Hunter) or quarterbacks (any Lions quarterback, ever) and thus generally get a little annoyed when you scream obscenities at someone that they've never heard of and that they know you've most likely haven't met. If you're got to be negative, at least try to keep it funny.
Make sure that beer/liquor is involved. Most of my friends will do just about anything if beer or liquor is involved, including watching sports. As long as the drinks are flowing, people are going to be telling stories and talking and laughing and making fun of one another-a good environment regardless of what's on TV.
Avoid trying to explain what's going on in anything but the most basic terms. Nothing makes a non-sports fan cringe more than someone trying to explain (in an unintentionally condescending tone) the importance of a player having a high on-base percentage or why the left tackle is such a crucial position in football. They don't care and are certainly not willing to commit valuable brain cells to keeping it in their head. If they ask you a question, answer it quickly and efficiently-don't get too carried away.
Don't talk about statistics, numbers, or percentages. They don't care. At all. If they cared about it, they would already be a sports fan.
Don't try to make someone into a fan. It's a nearly impossibly task to accomplish, and just not worth the trouble. Any city in America is already full of too many sports fans to begin with-if you just can't bear to watch sports without some serious fans, wait a little longer and you'll inevitable meet them.
IS: Not so bad. I'm still in Dubai. We opened the Burj Al Arab a while back. It's beautiful, but this city has no people yet.
NV: Da. Russian mob has invested millions into land for big, big casinos.
IS: They have money. I have land. It's a good fit. How about you Nik? What has the Russian Bear been up to?
NV: Plowing beet fields outside Kursk. Is about all one can do around here.
IS: Making any money?
NV: Sure, but not Cold War money. I still put on costume and go to malls for a few rubles.
IS: Tell me about it. I tell people I'm a sheik, an actual sheik, and they just want me to put someone in a camel clutch.
NV: Da. I can give no more bear hugs. They lose meaning when you give hundred of them. If I put Rowdy Roddy Piper in bear hug, that mean something.
IS: There is just no place left for us. People like stereotypes, but they don't take us seriously.
NV: We used to strike fear in heart of public. In 80s I speak funny, wear hammer and sickle, give angry look and people get scared. Now they laugh. Is like stereotype is meaningless.
IS: Don't say that Nik. It's just that we are no longer the "it" enemies. I could become the Iron Terrorist, but I'm not going to pander. I was born a sheik and I will die a sheik.
NV: Russia is not what used to be. We are threat to no one.
IS: You are too hard on yourself. Russians still scare everyone. You will always be a stereotype.
Although the top-half of the roster may be aging, there really does seem to be a good foundation forming that can begin to take their place. The fact that Amir Johnson is now in the starting lineup gives me hope that Michael Curry is actually willing to play these young guys, too.
