Categories
Sports Uncategorized

I fixed the Pro Bowl

So I was on the phone with my friend Joe Posnanski today, and we were talking about how the Home Run Derby the night before the All-Star Game is now way more popular than the All-Star Game itself.

Joe and the great Michael Schur take it upon themselves to fix the All-Star Game in an upcoming episode of The Poscast, a podcast you should most definitely listen to if you want to listen to two of America’s smartest and funniest people talk about baseball and peanut butter & jelly sandwiches, sometimes in that order.

Anyway, in the 10 seconds that it took Joe to explain how he and Mike fixed the All-Star Game — you’ll have to listen to the podcast to find out — I figured out how to fix the Pro Bowl.

Look, nobody cares about the Pro Bowl. NFL players care about MAKING the Pro Bowl — it’s a huge honor, and most players have Pro Bowl bonuses written into their contracts. But nobody cares about the game itself. Players come up with random injuries to get out of playing (“Tom Brady announced today that he will miss the Pro Bowl with a Grade 3 paper cut”). Coaches treat it like a charity flag-football game (except for Bill Belichick, of course — read down to the Tony Gonzalez story). TV ratings have declined for six years in a row. The game still gets decent ratings, but anybody who watches the Pro Bowl all the way to the end is by definition way too interested in football. Or has money on the game, which is its own problem.

They have started a skills competition before the Pro Bowl, maybe in hopes of getting some of the shine of the Home Run Derby or the NBA’s dunk contest. But the Skills Showdown features stuff like a dodgeball game and a relay race. Nobody cares about those, either. And the NFL has the perfect skills competition sitting right in front of them.

Here’s how to fix the Pro Bowl:

Turn it into Punt, Pass and Kick.

You’ve seen Punt, Pass and Kick. They’ve been doing it since 1961 as a showcase for young people to show off their football skills. It couldn’t be simpler: You punt, you pass, you kick, they add up the distances, the highest score wins. Sometimes they’ll do it at halftime of an NFL game, and often it’s better than the game. It’s so cool to see some 60-pound third-grader fire a spiral halfway down the field. It’s also a great illustration of how kids get their growth spurts at different times, as you know if you’ve seen Andy Reid doing Punt, Pass and Kick at 13.

So bring all the Pro Bowlers together and let them have at it. Group them by position, and have the positional winners meet in the finals. Tell me you wouldn’t watch J.J. Watt try to throw a spiral down that little tape they string down the middle of the field. Tell me you wouldn’t watch Drew Brees get ticked off after shanking a punt. No injuries. Immense trash-talking potential. TV gold.

The Pro Bowl itself? Cancel it. Have a nice dinner, hand out the bonus checks and send everybody home. Except for the Punt, Pass and Kick winner. He goes to Disney World.

 

–TT

 

 

Categories
Sports

Age, Beauty and the NBA Playoffs

Rajon Rondo (with Ray Allen) brings a new dimension to a veteran team. (US Presswire)

Here’s a question that came to mind as the Heat and Celtics were creating their Sunday late-night drama (and again on Monday as the Spurs and Thunder were creating theirs): Which team, of the four left in the NBA playoffs, is playing the most beautiful basketball?

Beauty, of course, comes in many different forms. Meryl Streep is a beautiful woman; her beauty comes from her eyes, her body language, the way we’ve gotten to know her over the years as someone who’s smart and talented and funny. Brooklyn Decker is a beautiful woman; her beauty (at least what we know of it) comes from… elsewhere.

It strikes me that all four teams left in the playoffs have their moments of beauty, but how it’s expressed has a lot to do with their age.

Categories
Charlotte Sports

Losing the Lottery

Gerald Henderson and the lowly Bobcats lost again — in Wednesday’s draft lottery. (US Presswire)

So you build a backward team — a team born to lose. They go 7-59, the worst record in NBA history. You end up with the best chance to get the first pick in what many people think is a one-player draft. Lottery night comes, and you survive all the way to the final two. The other team used to be in your town. They have the name that people still wish your team had, back when your city cared about pro basketball. Maybe, if you get the first pick, the city will care again.

They open the next-to-last envelope. It has your name on it.

The New Orleans Hornets get Anthony Davis. You are the Charlotte Bobcats. You lose. Again.

Categories
Sports

Brackets, baby, brackets

Well, clearly I’ve been ignoring the blog recently — it turns out that on this fellowship occasionally you have to DO stuff. Among other things, I have utterly failed to publish some breaking personal-grooming news. But it will have to wait at least one more post because in about 12 hours March Madness begins. Thursday and Friday are the best sports days of the year.

My laptop is running out of juice and so I’m just going to throw this out there — a pick for every game. Upsets marked with exclamation points.

EAST

First-round winners: Pitt, Tennessee (!), Wisconsin (!), Xavier, VCU (!), Villanova, Texas, Duke.

Second round: Pitt, Wisconsin (!), VCU (!), Texas (!).

Sweet 16: Pitt, VCU (!) (Clearly I am going off a cliff with this VCU thing.)

Elite 8: Pitt.

SOUTH

First round: UNC, Butler (!), Illinois, Gonzaga, Temple (!), Syracuse, Clemson, Oklahoma.

Second round: UNC, Illinois (!), Syracuse, Oklahoma.

Sweet 16: UNC, Oklahoma.

Elite 8: UNC.

MIDWEST

Round 1: Louisville, Siena (!), Arizona (!), Wake, Dayton (!), Kansas, USC (!), Michigan State.

Round 2: Louisville, Wake, Dayton (!), Michigan St.

Sweet 16: Wake, Michigan St.

Elite 8: Wake.

WEST

Round 1: UConn, Texas A&M (!), Purdue, Washington, Utah State (!), Missouri, Maryland (!), Memphis.

Round 2: UConn, Washington, Missouri, Memphis.

Sweet 16: UConn, Missouri.

Elite 8: UConn.

Final Four: Connecticut over Wake… UNC over Pitt.

National title game: UNC over UConn, 85-74. Tyler Hansbrough is tournament MVP and spends the next 10 years riding various NBA benches.

Categories
Harvard Sports

The forgetting machine

There were maybe a dozen people in the stands when we got to the arena for the Harvard-Brown basketball game Saturday night. Ivy League ball is not exactly UNC-Duke. By tipoff the crowd was maybe 300 people and we were treated to a half of air balls and dumb fouls and guys dribbling balls off their feet. Brown was slightly less mediocre and so they led 32-20 at the half.

But it was still fun, you know? At halftime they had two kids race down the court while putting on an adult-size basketball uniform (including size-18 sneakers). After that two teams of seventh-graders played for a few minutes — that was a reminder that seventh grade is when kids start to have growth spurts. A few of the kids looked like NFL linebackers and most of the others looked like members of the Lollipop Guild. But one of the Lollipop kids drilled a jumper right at the buzzer and everybody cheered.

Somewhere in there I looked down and saw Mike Tirico, the ESPN broadcaster, walking down the sideline. If you had given me 1,000 guesses on where Mike Tirico would be on a Saturday night, I’d never have picked the Harvard-Brown game. It turns out he was doing the Celtics-Spurs game in Boston on Sunday, so he had a reason to be in town… but still. You think he’d go bowling, catch a movie, you know, mix it up a little.

Harvard has a bunch of guys who can run and bang around on the boards, but basically only one guy who can score — a 6-3 guard named Jeremy Lin. The second half started and he started making shots. Harvard pulled to within three points right away, and some of the people who had started to leave went back to their seats, and the whole second half turned into these waves of Harvard getting close and Brown pulling away again.

Somebody was doing a radio broadcast but I’d be surprised if 10 people were listening. At that moment the two teams were a combined 1-9 in the Ivy League. Nobody knew or much cared about what was going on except the few hundred people in the stands and the teams on the benches and the 10 guys on the floor. But as the game ebbed away to the last couple of minutes, and you could tell it would be close all the way, everybody in that creaky old building cared a lot.

It was tied at 63 when Brown took the ball downcourt with maybe 40 seconds left. Their best player, Matt Mullery, had killed Harvard inside all night — he finished with 27 points. With less than 20 seconds left he got the ball down deep again. Everybody standing now. He gathered himself, went up to shoot — and Harvard forward Evan Harris flew in and blocked the shot.

Harvard raced upcourt. Lin got the ball. Two Brown players smothered him. He tried to get off a shot but it squirted out of his hands as the buzzer sounded. Overtime.

Wait.

One of the refs had called a foul on Brown. They huddled for a minute, then made their decision. The foul came right at the buzzer. Lin would get two free throws with no time on the clock. Make one and he would win the game.

I have to tell you at this point that I have played in hundreds of basketball games and watched thousands more and never seen a foul called with 0:00 on the clock. I’m not sure it’s even possible. If there’s a foul during the game, doesn’t there have to be some time left? But that was the call and here came Lin to the free throw line.

The rest of the players went to the other end of the court — no need to try for a rebound with no time on the clock. The ref handed Lin the ball. Here is the thing about being in a small gym. It was so, so quiet. You could hear him spin the ball in his hands before he shot. The ball had a high arc and everybody watched it.

It bounced on the rim once, twice.

And in.

Harvard 64, Brown 63. The Harvard cheerleaders screamed their lungs out. The two teams lined up to shake hands, both teams in a daze, and then the Brown kids trudged up the steps to their locker room while the Harvard team lingered on the court.

I am pretty sure, at that moment, no one there was thinking about the financial crisis.

Earlier that day we went to a seminar on careers in the humanities, and one of the speakers was the great Washington Post sports columnist Sally Jenkins. She talked about how covering sports is really about covering the athletic heart, and how the athletic heart can tell us a lot about ourselves as human beings.

She’s right. But I think sports is about more than just the athletic heart — it’s about the heart of the fan. Why do we spend so much money on sports, spend so much time watching games, care so much about a battle between the two worst teams in the Ivy League? Well, one reason is that sports is the great forgetting machine — no matter how terrible your life is going, no matter how bad the world, you can get swept up in a game for a couple of hours and pretend that nothing else matters.

We walked out into the cold night, warm. We talked to strangers, suddenly friends. Of course Mike Tirico would come on his day off. Even a small game in front of a tiny crowd can do that to you. It is a rare and valuable thing.

Categories
Movies Sports

Wrestling with wrestling

wrestler

(Photo from “The Wrestler” official site)

A group of us went to see “The Wrestler” on Friday. I wasn’t sure I wanted to see it, but I needed to. I doubt any other subject could cut closer to the bone for me.

I’ve loved professional wrestling, and hated it, my entire life.

When I was little a lot of the bad guys wore masks. When a bad guy with a mask came on the TV, I would run and hide in the other room. Then I would peek around the corner to see what happened. That’s pretty much the way I’ve dealt with wrestling ever since. Not wanting to look, not being able to help it.

My daddy was a believer — wrestlers, in the carny language they use, would call him a mark. He thought wrestling was real. He was a smart man, brilliant with tools, self-educated, but everybody has a hole in their swing and that was his. He took my sister to a match one time, and they sat in the front row, and one of the wrestlers got tossed out of the ring right into their laps. My daddy saw the blood streaming down the wrestler’s face. After that no one could tell him it wasn’t real.

He was right about the blood. Wrestlers call it blading and an early scene in “The Wrestler” shows how it happens. The Mickey Rourke character — Randy “The Ram” Robinson — hides a piece of razor blade in the tape on his wrist. During the match, after his opponent rams him into an exposed metal turnbuckle, Robinson falls facedown on the mat. While his opponent distracts the fans, Robinson slips out the razor and slices open his own forehead.

I’m sitting here writing this, trying to figure out how to justify loving something where guys cut open their own foreheads with razor blades. I’m not sure I can.

As soon as I figured out wrestling was a show, I’d pick fights about it with my daddy. Can’t you see how that guy pulled his punch? If they were really fighting, would they bounce off the ropes like that? He would scowl at me and turn back toward the TV. We would watch in silence. It was years before I could sit down with him and enjoy it my way and let him enjoy it his way. That was one of the ways I knew I was finally a grown man.

The best wrestlers are storytellers. It’s usually a simple story — most wrestling storylines can be summed up as I hate what you are or I want what you have. (You can sum up most of Shakespeare that way too.) Other writers learned from the classics, or from pulp fiction, or movies or comic books; I learned from Dusty Rhodes and Ricky Steamboat and Ric Flair. There’s no wrong way.

Here’s a little bit of Dusty, thanks to the great wrestling site Death Valley Driver:

Dusty was my favorite. But my dad and I knew that Ric Flair was the best. He created such a great character — the rich playboy who dressed in custom suits, the dirty fighter who always had backup but was legit tough on his own. Even when he did the most heelish things, some people cheered him anyway. Maybe out of admiration for someone so good at what he did, even if what he was good at was being bad.

Flair grew up in Minnesota, but he made his home as a wrestler in Charlotte. It was a base for a lot of wrestlers in the ’70s and early ’80s because one of the main wrestling TV shows taped there; even after the show left, a lot of the wrestlers stayed. I moved to Charlotte in 1989. Not long after I got there, I was stopped at a red light late one Friday night when a black Mercedes pulled up in the lane next to me. Ric Flair sat behind the wheel, just as cool as I always imagined.

Years later, I wrote about him. He had come out with a memoir about his years in the wrestling business. It read like a nonstop party — he must have passed out on half the kitchen floors in Charlotte. That’s how I led off my column. The morning the column came out, I was at my desk when the phone rang. Ric Flair was on the line. He wanted me to know that he thought the column was just fine… but his wife was upset. She didn’t like all the stories about the partying.

I can understand that, I said, not believing I was actually talking to Ric Flair. But Ric, I got all those stories from your book.

I know, he said. But, well, I didn’t actually show her the book before it came out.

Not to give anything away, but there’s a point in “The Wrestler” where Randy “The Ram” has a chance to straighten things out with someone he loves… and he blows it. It made me think of Ric Flair, publishing a book without showing it to his wife first.

The truth is that wrestling attracts people on the fringe — people who got kicked off the football team or spent some time in jail or never learned how to hold down a regular job. “The Wrestler” is matter-of-fact about how wrestlers get jacked up on steroids to build muscle and gulp down painkillers when those muscles break down. It’s not any different than the stories I’ve heard from people who worked in and around the business. Like a lot of things, the more you know about it, the harder it is to love.

Over the years, especially after my dad died, I didn’t watch wrestling as much but I followed certain wrestlers. One of them was a Canadian named Chris Benoit — a small but powerful guy who was great at making the wrestling ballet look like a real fight. He was so good that you could forget his absurd body — his neck twice the size it should be, his muscles way too big for his frame. He was taking in bad things and two years ago they came out. He killed his wife, their child, then himself. That just about put me off wrestling for good. Now I check in on a couple of websites but I hardly ever watch the shows. It’s too painful, knowing what’s real.

“The Wrestler” is a sad, great movie because it feels real. I know wrestling about as well as I know anything and the movie got everything right. Especially the broken-down old wrestler who can’t get through the day without hurting but can’t stay out of the ring. He’d rather die than give it up.

That’s the end of the story for “The Wrestler,” and for wrestling, and even for wrestling fans. We know the whole gruesome thing is not worth loving. But at some point, back before we knew better, we cut ourselves open, and it got in our blood.