My Life in 100 Anecdotes

I write slowly, I know it. But as I look back on the almost five years that I’ve had this blog, I am grateful that, slow as I was, I did write.

Today I close Czardoz Contra World with my 100^th post. With this nice round number, it’s time to conclude this blog and start another (link pending).

I believe that lives are lived in anecdotes, not necessarily in days or years. And though it is tempting to think of “the best day,” a la City Slickers, I don’t remember full days, only moments. And that’s why I made my blog a collection of anecdotes about my life.

Over the years, there were many things I wanted to write about but never got to. Some articles were begun but never made it to the blog, usually because I couldn’t find out what I was trying to say, or because it took me so long to sort through my thoughts that they were no longer timely. Some articles got close but died for lack of some kind of relevance that would make them more than just self-indulgent words. Sometimes, I realized that I just didn’t have anything to say.

For this last post, I’ve included some anecdotes that mattered to me, and though I didn’t know then what to say, and may not know much better now, I found in each of them something about my life that I wanted to remember.

If I die tomorrow, I hope these items and the 99 posts that came before will be sufficient to explain who I was and what I valued.

*          *          *

February 2009: In Defense of Grimlock

I was luridly fascinated by the DVD audio commentary for Transformers: The Movie, perhaps because it matched the shambling mediocrity of the animated film itself. The hilarity began when director Nelson Shin started talking. He seemed to have only the barest command of English, and his comments, ranging from bemused to befuddled, had me doubting the level of control he had over the movie. He seemed only dimly aware of what was going on and why. Here’s Shin explaining a scene near the beginning of the movie where Unicron is shown sucking up a planet:

“Inside of the Unicron, this is organic, he gets the juice out and he’s getting lights [life], so he’s now the uh, he can survive, he can activate.”

Fun fact: Shin is now president of a Korean animation company that supplies animation work for numerous American shows, including The Simpsons. 

*          *          *

August 2012: How many guys does it take to throw away a perfectly good hamburger? (Answer: Five Guys!)

Regular readers of my blog will probably think that I eat fast food way too much. To that, allow me to emulate a charming Southern gentleman and say, “Guilty as charged!” (Yes, I know it’s a stale joke now, but trust me, this was a big deal back in August!)

In August, I went to a local Five Guys that I had been to a few times. Five Guys, to me, was the new kid on the block, an aggressive challenger from the East Coast that had made significant inroads in Southern California over the past few years. I think it had gained a sort of cult following based on complimentary all-you-can-grab peanuts in the store, messy burgers wrapped in foil, and that magazine article of Lebron James endorsing Five Guys that seems to be framed and posted in every store.

They make good burgers, and seem like sort of a more expensive cousin to In ‘N’ Out, bigger and sloppier, but with just as much hipster cred and everyman authenticity.

So on this occasion, I mistakenly grabbed someone else’s order, which I only realized when I had returned to my seat and peeked into the grease-stained bag. I brought the bag back to the counter and explained my folly. The server told me, “Oh, well we can’t take it back.” Fair enough. As a customer, I wouldn’t want to feel like I had to accept a plate of food that had previously been handed to someone else. She and the store manager exchanged some words to the effect of, “Make a new one for that customer, STAT!”

And then the three of us, the manager, the server, and I, we all just walked away, as if the bag contained a time bomb. I sat down and glanced somewhat uncomfortably at the bag of perfectly edible food that had been abandoned for the moment on that counter.

And here the questions began. Did they mean for me to take the bag, as a bonus, since they couldn’t? Were they going to retrieve it and maybe give the food to an employee later? Were they going to follow the most likely possibility and just throw it away? Should they have at least offered it to me? Or should I have said something, even though it seems sort of presumptuous to claim a free burger after my mistake had rendered it unservable to the rightful purchaser? What exactly was the right thing for me to have done?

Even though I told my brother as we sat there, “They’re just going to throw that away,” I somehow wasn’t prepared for the sight of the store manager chucking the entire bag right into a trash can not three feet away from me.

Even though I figured this was just store policy, and probably the policy of almost every restaurant you could name, I was dumbstruck. It was obscene. Children are still dying in Africa, aren’t they? I should hope so. Well, not “hope,” but I should think so.

When I was very young, there were often television commercials in the afternoon and evening for various outreach programs, asking for donations to help poor people in Africa and South America. You know the type, “just 48 cents a day will feed a child like Maria, and provide her with clothing, medicine, and a good education.” One time, according to my mother, I was watching one of these commercials, and I asked my mother, “Can we give them some food?” Apparently, I thought it was possible to just grab some delicacies from our refrigerator and pass them through the television screen to the rapturous enjoyment of these children. Or maybe I didn’t really believe that, but what I wanted was about as much a fantasy as that would have been. I wanted to help those other kids, and I thought that if I wanted it badly enough and spoke up about it, then every child in Africa would get three square meals a day, a pair of Nike sneakers, and a beautiful new schoolhouse.

Everyone had a good laugh over my naïveté and presumably we moved on with our lives. Hopefully those children in the developing world are moving on with theirs as well. The next time this happens, perhaps my choice is simple: I’ll speak up and say, “So can I keep this one, since it seems a shame for you to just throw away all this food?” I’d like to see them throw it in the garbage in front of me then.

And so, a noble burger was sacrificed so that I could learn a lesson, right? Not on your life. As soon as the manager’s head was turned, I reached into that trash can and nabbed that rudely discarded bag. And did I eat the food inside? Of course. And how was it? It tasted great. Like justice. 

*          *          *

August 2012: “a Tony Scott joint”

I wanted to add a few words to the funeral mound of observances of Tony Scott’s death, something different from the consensus in the media, which intoned, somewhat condescendingly, that we had lost an energetic maker of films that were critically unremarkable but commercially viable. I really don’t see why every critic had to chime in if they were all going to say the same thing. I guess keeping all these movie critics on staff saves the country’s unemployment figures from going even higher.

I never saw Tony Scott’s magnum opus, Top Gun, but I was a big fan of Man on Fire (which, along with Hide and Seek, had me convinced that Dakota Fanning was one of the very few child actors who could “bring it”). Undoubtedly, when you watch a lot of Scott’s films, you start to think they were all basically the same film, but the same criticism could be leveled at critical darling, Wes Anderson.

Scott’s movies had panache without the pretension. He managed to navigate a treacherous middle path between the Scylla and Charybdis of earnest self-seriousness and smirking irony. And with mild apologies to Spike Lee, I believe that if any filmmaker should have been using the word “joint” to describe his films, it was Tony Scott.

*          *          *

August 2012: The Bamiyan Buddhas

Around this time, I read a news item about the preservation status of the Bamiyan Buddhas of Afghanistan. Sadly, “preservation” is generous, as there hasn’t been much left to preserve since the giant Buddha statues (the largest two were some 53 meters and 35 meters tall, respectively) were dynamited into the afterlife by the Taliban regime in March 2001.

I first learned about the Bamiyan Buddhas when they made international news in 2001, as talk grew about the Taliban’s intent to destroy the statues, which had been crafted in the 6^th century. I was affected by the notion that a work of art, though admittedly a work of religion in the eyes of those who hated it, could be treated so callously by a government. I thought to myself that any government, any people, who could do something like this would be capable of even more astonishing crimes against the living. 

Indeed, the Bamiyan Buddhas were close to my mind after the crimes of September 11, 2001. I’m not saying that 9/11 would have been averted if the “civilized” nations of the West had just bombed the hell out of Afghanistan and the Taliban, and saved these Buddhas early on. But no one should be surprised that these were the monsters who harbored Osama bin Laden. Destruction of artifacts, art, and cultural objects is perhaps the bellwether of genocide and murder. The Taliban were all too eager to destroy something that a competing culture held dear, if only because it was easier than hunting down every last person who still held those things dear.

I’m not a Buddhist, and I’m not sure I even know anyone who is a serious adherent to Buddhist ideas. But I recognize the value of religion and spirituality as an impetus for human creativity. No matter how strong one’s adherence to secularism, it would be hard to deny the glorious artistic achievements that were influenced, financed, or otherwise directly attributable to the existence and vehemence of religion.

No matter how technically impressive or aesthetically beautiful, I am aware that many monumental human artistic achievements, whether religious or secular or somewhere in between, were created by blood money and slave labor, and devoted to oppression in kind. After all, the Colosseum, so revered today, was but a temple to carnage and the institution of murder as entertainment. And as Thoreau said about that last remaining of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World,

As for the Pyramids, there is nothing to wonder at in them so much as the fact that so many men could be found degraded enough to spend their lives constructing a tomb for some ambitious booby, whom it would have been wiser and manlier to have drowned in the Nile, and then given his body to the dogs.

– Thoreau, Walden

Nevertheless, the objects exist, and they represent a past and a people who can no longer represent themselves. As a humanist, I am appalled at any wanton destruction of the irreplaceable works of a past culture.

Today, I hear snippets of a similar rampage against art, culture, and human life in Mali. I know next to nothing about the ancient glories of Timbuktu and the present conditions of life in Mali. But I know that anything that can rile up fanatics so desperately that they go out of their way to destroy it is probably something worth saving. At the very least, the destruction of a statue or a manuscript or an entire library is a sign of worse things to come.

*          *          *

September 2012: To “pull a Goran”

When Andy Murray won the 2012 U.S. Open tennis tournament, I wondered if he had divested himself of the title of “best active player who hasn’t won a Slam” only to take on another dreaded title – was this Slam the first of many for him, or would it be the career highlight of a man destined to become a “one-Slam wonder”? Rather like Homer Simpson shedding the “stone of shame” only to be shackled to the even larger “stone of triumph.”

And much like Andy Roddick, whom I had lauded during his last, anticlimactic run at that same U.S. Open. In the journalistic aftermath of Roddick’s career-ender, I stumbled upon this informative slideshow of all the tennis players in the Open era who have won only a single Grand Slam tournament.

Looking at the names, I realize that it’s sort of a compliment when certain pundits cackle that Roddick underachieved or that he needs to have won more Slams to be considered among the greats. After all, do you think such a debate even comes up in reference to a Thomas Muster? Roddick wasn’t a fluke Slam winner, like Richard Krajicek or Anastasia Myskina. After his U.S. Open victory in 2003, he appeared in four more Slam finals over the next six years, and for some of those years, it was not outlandish to think he might win another big one. I doubt anyone looks at a Thomas Johansson and says, “What a disappointment. We expected a few more Slams from him.”

I think Roddick will be remembered very favorably alongside Michael Chang, a fellow American who won his Slam early, gave hope to every Chinese immigrant mother that her American-born son could become a big man in this country (okay, this part is not so similar to the Roddick career arc), then trailed behind the legends in his wake, all the while winning many lesser tournaments, keeping his nose clean, and contending well enough to make fans think a second major was probable, perhaps inevitable.

Roddick also calls to mind another player on the list: 2001 Wimbledon champion Goran Ivanisevic. I mentioned in a previous post that my favorite Slam final was the Federer-Roddick Wimbledon 2009, but Ivanisevic’s 2001 Wimbledon ride was just as memorable.

I remember it primarily because I was traveling in China at the time, riding down the Yangtze River on a cruise ship, watching Wimbledon on the tiny television in my room, because I was waylaid from some local disease brought on by a bug bite. With my head woozy and my hand swollen to roughly the size of an inflatable raft, I lay in bed watching tennis and listening to the lilting accents of a couple of announcers named Alan and Vijay who squandered no opportunities for hyperbole (“Too good!” “He’s playing like a shattered man!”).

Ivanisevic was a three-time Wimbledon finalist with a game tailor-made for grass, but he had never won, and though an eventual victory once seemed inevitable, by 2001 it seemed like his chances had passed him by. Having dropped in rank to 125^th in the world and no longer considered an effective full-time contender, he only got into the tournament because he was granted a wild card. What he did with that wild card was unprecedented, winning the championship and giving his career a storybook capstone.

Wimbledon 2001 had no shortage of drama. It saw Justine Henin reach her first Grand Slam final, losing in three sets to Venus Williams. A 19-year-old Roger Federer upset defending champion Pete Sampras in the fourth round, a loss that more or less sent Sampras into a downward spiral into irrelevance until he finally emerged with a surprise victory in the U.S. Open 2002, after which he wisely retired.

This tournament was probably top British player and favorite son Tim Henman’s best chance at making a Wimbledon final, as he took a two sets to one lead over Ivanisevic in the seminfinal. However, rain delays turned the match into a three-day ordeal and seemed to wash away Henman’s rhythm and resolve; Poseidon had thrown his godly weight behind Ivanisevic.

Ivanisevic beat four Grand Slam winners on his way to the championship (though, like Goran, victims Carlos Moya and Andy Roddick are also one-Slam wonders, and Marat Safin and Patrick Rafter each won but two).

I remember watching Ivanisevic demolish Roddick, who at the time was a young gun known primarily for his cannon of a serve. Here he was, still quite green, and getting schooled by an over-the-hill wild card who simply fired ace after ace at him. It was a performance not just overpowering but distinctive, and I remember uttering “Roddick got Goran-ed!” for some reason.

Sadly, Roddick did not “pull a Goran” in his last tournament. I haven’t followed any tennis since the 2012 U.S. Open. The Australian Open just happened in January, and I couldn’t find it in me to care; I didn’t even look up highlights. First went team sports, and now perhaps even tennis holds no appeal for me any longer. 

*          *          *

November 2012: Fire the Critics

For a long time, I wanted to write a post about Pixar films, because they’re kind of a big deal, and for a long time, I held out because I didn’t think it was particularly useful, and indeed, it felt obnoxiously self-indulgent, to disparage any particular product or company just because I could. But there is something even more obnoxious about movie critics, as an industry, regarding their reviewing of Pixar films. This at least is worth a cursory dissection (vivisection? evisceration?).

A sampling of online reviews and editorials about Pixar and, primarily, their latest release, Brave:

“When it comes to Pixar, the worst is still so much better than most of the other junk being churned out by Hollywood.” (IGN)

“Still, Monsters, Inc. is fun and better than most of its non-Pixar peers (how many times do we have to make that distinction today?).” (IGN again – and to answer your question, you didn’t have to make that distinction at all)

“Arguably the worst of the best, the film [Brave] is simply decent (which ranks better than half the animated films released in a year).” (Screenpicks.com)

“If the Walt Disney Studios logo were the only one on Brave, this film's impeccable visuals and valiant heroine would be enough to call it a success. But Brave is also a Pixar Animation Studios film, and that means it has to answer to a higher standard.” (LA Times)

“Pixar’s own history of excellence has effectively painted the studio into a corner. If Brave were a straight-up Disney release, people would be hailing it, at the very least, as an end to the princess movie as we know it. Because it’s Pixar, they get to whine, ‘What? Princesses again?’” (Slate)

I’m quite tired of this blandly uncritical view that insists on starting with the premise that Pixar films must be judged by some rarified standard that eludes all other animation. If the role of the movie critics is merely to tell us that the gum that gets stuck to the soles of John Lasseter’s shoes is more beautiful than even the finest film that any other studio could produce, then really, what is the point of having the critics?

To praise Pixar’s track record is justified, but to go out of their way to defend the studio against any serious criticism is to undermine their own critical judgment. This seems to me a kind of moral cowardice, and moreover, it ignores the reality that other studios have started to make some very good movies that stand up well to what Pixar is dishing out.

To take one example, to my mind, Brave is not nearly as good as the Disney movie it most resembles – Tangled. For more examples, I’d rank Kung Fu Panda, How to Train Your Dragon, and Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs alongside the best of what Pixar has made.

Richard Corliss’s Time magazine review of How to Train Your Dragon offers a historical perspective. While he acknowledges Pixar’s edge in box office, awards, and prestige, he has the audacity to compare the Pixar-DreamWorks rivalry to an animation rivalry of yore: Disney vs. Warner Brothers:

“‘Each year I do one DreamWorks project,’ actor Jack Black told the crowd at the 2009 [Oscars] ceremony, ‘then I take all the money to the Oscars and bet it on Pixar.’

That was also the case 60, 70 years ago, when Disney shorts had a monopoly on the Oscars, while the funnier, livelier cartoons from Warner Bros. – which today are treasured – were ignored. In that sense, Pixar’s features are closer to the old, elevated Disney style, while DreamWorks’s films are flat-out cartoons, proud to carry on the fast, cavorting Warner tradition.”

Not just DreamWorks, but Fox, Sony, and all the other companies that delve into animation have tended to shy away from the “elevated” epics that have become Pixar’s signature. This certainly feeds into the perception that Pixar makes “prestige” movies, while its competitors are making the animated equivalents of Michael Bay’s Transformers.

Moreover, we are meant to believe that animated movies by DreamWorks or Fox are churned out by wage slaves in a Korean factory (perhaps Nelson Shin's), whereas animated films by Pixar are willed into existence by an auteur, whose vision is rendered by a handful of artistic true believers. But whatever happens behind the scenes, the results don’t indicate such a strong ideological divide.

The Kung Fu Panda, Ice Age, and Madagascar franchises can be just as sentimental and (sigh) heartwarming as Pixar films, and Pixar’s movies are just as heavily laden with slapstick and low-brow comedy as their counterparts from the wrong side of the tracks.

My goal is not to heap scorn on Pixar for its well-earned success, but to argue that the divide between it and its competitors is narrow, and getting narrower. And though perceptions of Pixar’s superiority persist, especially in the critical community, these perceptions are not always supported by evidence. Pixar is the Apple of the film industry, and fittingly so, since it inherited its creative ethos from its founder, Steve Jobs. But that doesn’t mean that other companies aren’t making products that are just as intricate and enjoyable. 

*          *          *

January 2011: Grand Theft Auto IV

I basically inaugurated this blog with an anecdote about Grand Theft Auto III.  It seems fitting that I should end it with an anecdote about Grand Theft Auto IV. 

When I jumped back into Liberty City with GTA IV, I thought I’d get a few chuckles from driving over pedestrians, maybe roughing up some unwitting innocents in the street, and in the process find out if the Grand Theft Auto experiment had gotten more playable since my last foray into this urban wilderness.

The good news is that the addition of interior spaces, a speaking role for the player’s character, and “life” scenarios like going on dates with a girlfriend do enrich the feeling of “play.” The bad news is that driving is still an ordeal with no happy medium. Either you’re crawling slowly to grandmother’s house, or you’re zigzagging down straight roads and sideswiping pedestrians and lampposts with every turn. Shooting while aiming still requires a finesse I’ll never master. And committing random crimes will once again have the police hounding your ass very quickly, and you are never a match for their killing prowess.

Despite its flaws, I got a lot of enjoyment just from exploring the game’s possibilities, the many “what if” scenarios. What if I kill the bowling alley attendant? What if I kill the girl working at Burger Shot? What if I join the stripper on stage at the strip club? What if I run over some fools while driving Michelle home from our date? What if I kill someone on the street, wait for the ambulance to come, then kill the paramedic after he gets out of the ambulance – will another ambulance show up?

And on and on until I realized the irony of the GTA games: there is ultimately no liberty in Liberty City. In attempting to create the illusion of freedom and seamless immersion, the game ultimately draws attention to the limitations of its technology and all the restrictions imposed on the player. I can kill a hot dog vendor, but then I can’t take any of the hot dogs he was just selling? That don’t make no sense.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in the artificial boundaries imposed on the game map. As in previous games, you are stuck on one island in this fictional world, and only after meeting a set of achievements do you open up access to the next island. Funny thing is, there is a bridge to the neighboring island, and it exists the whole time you’re playing, but access to the bridge is blocked by concrete barriers and a fierce police presence, all under the guise of, I don’t know, construction or an investigation or martial law or some similarly ludicrous excuse. And yes, these coppers would unleash a lethal torrent of bullets if I stepped foot on that bridge.

Days passed. Days filled with the monotony of blowing off steam at the pool hall with my brother Roman. Going on dates to the bowling alley with Michelle and “trying my luck” when I took her home. Muscling low-level hoods and capping rival gangsters. And every day I’d drive by that bridge and those badge-wearing pigs and think to myself, “You don’t own me.”

What was on the other side? What was so important that they went to such extreme lengths to keep me from it? This was Shell Beach in Dark City. This was the painted sky at ocean’s end in The Truman Show.

There is a freedom out there, true freedom that exists without structures, and beyond artifice. The bubble world they created for me was not the world I wanted to live in, so I would make my own world, or die trying. “If man will strike, strike through the mask! How can the prisoner reach outside except by thrusting through the wall?”

I became convinced that if only I could get on the bridge and drive to the other side without getting shot to pieces, then that island would exist, just like the one where I was standing now. It would be real, with real people, and a real life. I just had to survive.

And so, I decided that, come heaven or hell, I would cross the bridge.

There was no sense in trying to drive through a concrete wall, so I knew my only chance was to run through the gaps in the barricade and steal a squad car that was already on the bridge. Once in, they couldn’t stop me. So I ran, taking heavy fire when the astonished goons realized I was actually going for it. Hot lead pierced any flesh that wasn’t covered in body armor, but I made it to the car, pulled the driver to the ground, and immediately I was flying!

Everywhere around me, I heard voices yelling, “Yes, yes! He made it! He can get through!”

The bridge felt like it went on forever. The first few hundred feet were breezy, with a few lights and sirens giving pathetic chase, but then the fuzz lowered the hammer. One after another, black police vans barreled head-on toward me at top speed on the threadlike bridge, trying to block me or crush me. They would take me dead or alive, so long as they ended my run.

But for the first time, my driving skills attained a sort of blissful elegance. It was as if I were controlling my car with my mind, not my hands and feet. Armored van on my left – I dodged right. Another van trying to squeeze me against the wall – I hit full throttle and drove past him straighter than I ever knew I could. I had attained automotive nirvana and eluded them all!

My supporters renewed the rallying cry, “Yes, yes! You did it! They can’t stop you!”

The bridge’s end drew into focus, with the massive skyscrapers of my destination coming into view. And then I saw the wall. There was never just one barricade. The police had a second one waiting for me this whole time, at this end of the bridge.

Every fiber of my being told me to stop the car and end this madness. But it was too late. This was my Thelma and Louise moment. At full speed, my speedometer about to crack from the strain, I slammed headlong into the concrete, the impact shooting my limp body through the windshield like a rocket, sailing past the front lines of cops and cars and landing like a broken doll tossed by a wailing infant. I had made it this far only to collapse under shattered glass and pitiless mortality.  

And yet my eyes opened!

I stand up, pat myself down, amazed. I had been shot, I had flown, I had crashed, and yet I live! And then I look about me and realize that I have crossed the bridge and am on the new island. It is real. And it is beautiful. I had made it. My dream was not in vain.

All I have to do now is grab the nearest police cruiser, as I had at the beginning of my escape, and drive. Always drive. And then I am free.

At least, that’s what I was thinking when my vision turned murky white, and my knees disappeared beneath me. I felt a warm moistness all over my chest, like I was bathing in salty water. And then the world went dark and I felt . . . nothing at all.

. . .

It was probably ten years ago that I played GTA III, but I still remember the Great Siege of Ammo-Nation. Ten years from now, when the many sordid misadventures of Niko Bellic in GTA IV have faded from memory, all we’ll remember is one glorious moment when I hurtled through a police barricade, jacked a squad car, and hightailed it across a facsimile Manhattan Bridge, crossing the Rubicon, making my own freedom.

*          *          *

Here we are at the Ides of March. As Caesar goes, so goes Czardoz, dying today, only to live forever . . .

Baseball is over

I’ve never enjoyed football, and I long ago abandoned hockey and basketball. Baseball was the first of the major team sports that I embraced, and it’s the last I let go of.

I tried to give it one last shot. I tuned in the other day to the “first wild card game in baseball history,” as the announcer intoned on the TBS broadcast. This is a new format this year, where two potential “wild card” teams have to play each other in a one-game “play-in,” with the winner seizing the wild card spot for their league’s playoffs. The ardent sports fan in me thinks this is actually a promising innovation, because it gives two more teams a shot at the playoffs, and it increases tension as the pennant races wind down, while giving more weight to actually winning a pennant, since having the fourth best record in your league doesn’t automatically guarantee you a wild-card spot.

Or at least, the ardent sports fan in me would think this, if he hadn’t died some time ago.

I think he died a few months ago when I saw a headline in Yahoo or MSN saying that some team, maybe the Oakland A’s, went from hopelessness to being the hottest team in the game. At that moment, I realized that I couldn’t name a single player on that team, nor did I care to find out. Oh, and I hadn’t watched a single baseball game all season. Nor did it electrify me that there were seven no-hitters (including three perfect games) this year.

So when I was flipping through channels and happened upon this one last game, St. Louis Cardinals vs. Atlanta Braves, I was surprised to find some lurid fascination in it. I tuned in with the Braves leading 2-0, and I thought a Braves win would be nice, because I at least knew that their star third baseman, Chipper Jones, would be retiring at the end of the season, and a long playoff run would be a respectable way to go out. Jones is a universally respected player, and one of the few active players who was around when I was a kid who still got excited about baseball cards.

Naturally, Jones soon made a throwing error that led to three runs for the opposing team, putting them up 3-2. Then it was 4-2 after a Cardinals home run. Then 6-3, Cardinals, thanks to two more Braves throwing errors. In the bottom of the 7^th, Jones came to bat with two outs, two men on base, and a chance to pull his team even. He grounded out swinging on the first pitch.

Somebody stop the bleeding! And yet the worst was yet to come. In an act of unspeakable masochism, the Braves insisted on keeping hope alive by again bringing the tying run to the plate in the 8^th inning. With runners on first and second, some player I’ve never heard of hit a long pop into left field. A miscommunication between two fielders allowed the ball the drop untouched. Maybe a hit? Likely an error. Either way, the bases would be loaded with only one out, and the Braves would have their biggest chance of the day, aided by a heap of what is called “momentum.”

But no! The umpire invoked the infield fly rule, the details of which are so arcane that I won’t go into them here, but the result was that the batter was ruled out, and the runners advanced to second and third. Scoring position, but two outs, not to mention a burning raft of controversy surrounding a call that could not have been considered reasonable by anyone other than the employees of Major League Baseball whose sole job is to toe the company line.

Oh, the game was played in Atlanta, and what happened next was what Gorilla Monsoon might have called “pandemonium.” The fans immediately hurled drink cups, food wrappers, and assorted trash and debris onto the field, accompanied by a lusty cascade of boos and hisses. The TV announcers shook their heads and deplored this “very disappointing” and “absolutely embarrassing” behavior on the part of Braves fans. (Yes, an uncharacteristically boorish response by fans who for the last several decades have cheered their team with a “tomahawk chop” and faux-Indian chanting.) Whatever “momentum” existed was extinguished in the 20-minute delay that was required for the grounds crew to pick up the garbage.

Presumably, the Braves players were too ashamed to score after this disgraceful display. But Chipper Jones would have one last chance in the bottom of the 9^th, two outs, no one on base. He hit an infield squib that he barely beat out when the first baseman was pulled off the bag. It was ruled a hit instead of an error by the official scorer. Many commentators considered this a gift. I guess you know it’s time to retire when the scorer is giving you a hit that you probably didn’t deserve. Two batters later, the game was over and the Braves were finished, as was Jones’s career.

*          *          *

At one point in the game, during an unconventional putout (the pitcher threw the ball to first and it bounced off the runner’s back), an announcer said, “In case you’re keeping score, that play was 1-3. Does anyone keep score anymore? I hope so.”

Why do you hope so? What pleasure do you get from seeing solitary old women sitting in the stands and marking down a bunch of numbers to record the mundane details of where the fielders throw the ball?

As a matter of fact, I have started keeping score, and the score is: Sanity 1, Baseball 0

I loved baseball as a child because it was full of baseball cards that I could collect and statistics I could memorize. It’s the only sport where numbers themselves take on mythic status (61, 714, .400). It had old stadiums that people would wax poetic about, and those were just one small piece of the venerable history of a sport that seemed intertwined with the American spirit. Most of all, baseball had “hero moments.”

In the other team sports, there is always some kind of mob ready to spoil your moment – the double-team jumping in front of your last-second shot in basketball, the backfield crowding all available receivers in football, the ridiculous crush of bodies that makes even skating down the ice seem impossible in hockey, let alone shooting with any sort of freedom.

But in baseball, there is patience. The hitter stands in the box, the pitcher stands on the mound, with nothing between them, and they wait, each one knowing that the next pitch can be his “hero moment.”

My fandom had existed as a kind of hero worship, but we long ago entered an era where I no longer know who the players are, and when I can no longer conceive of hunting for heroes in pop culture, but am far more interested in becoming the hero of my own life. And so I find it remarkable that millions of men (and women) can be found who so gladly hitch their dream wagons to these sports teams and their fortunes.

Watching this Braves-Cards game, I saw that professional baseball, as reported and televised, has become a circus act. Once in a while, you get to see some bizarre or humiliating spectacle, and that can be amusing. But the days of baseball being something I identify with are over.

Hats off to Chipper for devoting two decades of his life to The Show. Time to call it a career, for you and me both.

Aces

It is sad news to hear Andy Roddick announce that he will retire at the end of the current U.S. Open tournament, that is, at the end of his U.S. Open, which is not likely to last past the quarterfinals.

For someone who won only a single Grand Slam tournament, Andy Roddick has always seemed to command an unreasonably large slice of attention in the world of tennis. Certainly, part of that is because I live in his home country, an America starved for tennis success after being spoiled by decades of dominance. Consequently, the national fan base cleaves to its one star, grasping helplessly at the hem of his increasingly tattered garment.

I was never really a fan of Roddick’s cocky demeanor, over-reliance on his serve, and relative mediocrity in a time of titans. Playing in the shadow of the near-invincible Roger Federer, and then effectively replaced when the almost equally dominant Rafael Nadal emerged as Federer’s true rival, it’s reasonable to say that his impact on the sport of tennis was minimal.

But as I look back on his career, I find something genuinely reassuring and edifying. Though it was easy to make him the poster child of unprecedented American ineptitude, people somehow forgot that he was the one American of his generation who actually won something. Carrying the weight of a nation’s expectations, he persevered and never fell apart. He had a big decline in the middle part of his career, and the lack of self-confidence was visible at times, but you can’t really argue that he sabotaged himself somehow, like a Marat Safin, or that he didn’t want it badly enough. He simply played as well as he could, which unfortunately wasn’t good enough to win Slams in this era.

I find his efforts to be particularly ennobling in light of the insatiable American appetite for winning that has led to the lionizing of athletes like Michael “Bong Hit” Phelps and Lance “Dickweak,” athletes defined by inordinate success based largely on innate gifts that overcame questionable work ethic, in the case of Phelps, and a poisonous “win at all costs” attitude, in the case of Armstrong. If not for the narcissism in our culture born of sitting on the shoulders of the rest of the world, there would be fewer news articles asking why Roddick had “underachieved,” and more articles celebrating how good he actually was.

Maybe Roddick himself got too caught up in the failures and disappointment to realize how proud he should have been of himself that he got as far as he did.

The saving grace was perhaps his outsize personality (at least relatively speaking in the bland world of pro tennis). He was a favorite subject at press conferences, and seemed to delight in comparing the intellect of a referee or a chair umpire to that of an 8-year-old. Most enjoyable for me was his career as a funny and occasionally hapless pitchman for American Express. Remember Roddick vs. Pong, Roddick buying a towel, and Roddick forced to buy a second seat on the plane because massive trophies kept falling from the overhead cabin and onto his gourd? Even better was the spin-off commercial (and I can’t find it online) where the second seat is empty because he ended up losing at the tournament. I respected the good humor it took to make a commercial where he’s on the receiving end of a joke about losing.

Federer called Roddick“a great man.” I'm inclined to think that he gave the sport everything he had, and the sport is in his debt. Though the 2008 Wimbledon final between Nadal and Federer is a universally admired match, my favorite Slam final will always be the Roddick-Federer five-setter at Wimbledon 2009. I said it before (on a comment on my brother’s blog post): "I would love to see a Federer-Roddick final with Roddick bringing his best game ever to bear. Granted, he would still lose, but I'd like to see him press Roger to the limit just once in his life." And that’s exactly what I got.

You could say that Federer was already in decline by this time, or that this was Roddick’s last gasp of greatness, and that this somehow diminishes the meaning or quality of this match. But in the end, the tournament has to be played every year, and a player can only beat the guys who show up. Roddick showed up, and he forced Federer to show what a great player he really was.

It took a truly gutsy effort by Federer to win. As for Roddick, everything that was good about his game was on display, and mistakes were minimal. It was the greatest match I’ve ever seen him play, and I think that to perform at one’s very best level is a worthy goal in itself. Roddick’s landmark achievement is his U.S. Open championship in 2003, but I’ll always remember him for this match.

This was as close as Roddick would ever come to winning another Slam or beating his nemesis when it counted, and most viewers would agree that it could have gone Roddick’s way. Afterward, you could kind of see it in Roddick’s eyes – he knew that it was over, that he would never get this chance again. But in my mind, he solidified his signature role in the tennis world – he stood for persistence and resilience in the face of certain defeat. Americans need to be reminded of this virtue from childhood. It’s certainly more important than the Pledge of Allegiance, and will serve you better throughout your life.

So a great player retires without achieving all he hoped for, but let’s not get misty-eyed. At the end of the day, Roddick still goes home to millions of dollars, a beautiful wife, and the knowledge that at least for a few weeks, he was the world’s best player. But if you must make idols of the millionaires you see on TV, at least pick the Roddicks of the world, people who have visibly agonized over the weight of their fame and the sting of falling short of not just their own expectations but ours as well.

So how long will this dead man keep walking at Flushing Meadows? Since his next match is against someone named Fabio Fognini (and since he’s already up two sets as of this writing), I’m going to say that Roddick will prevail and reach the fourth round, and I’ll even give him the victory in a possible meeting with Juan Martin del Potro, setting up a likely (and by that, I mean, of course, “unlikely”) quarterfinals encounter with Novak Djokovic, who would surely be the end of the line for Andy Roddick, falling against the guy who once jeered him in front of his home crowd after beating him at this very tournament.

But you would request a dream scenario, wouldn’t you? Let’s say Djokovic keeps guessing wrong on Roddick’s serve, or maybe he comes down with a case of bird flu, SARS, or even anthrax. That and a few lucky breaks and favorable calls, and who knows, maybe Roddick pulls out the win and avenges the 2008 U.S. Open loss, the recent London Olympics loss, et al. Once in the semis, I think Roddick could very well handle a David Ferrer or a John Isner (and now we reach deep into the well of fantasy to consider Isner advancing to a semifinal), setting up the most worthy exit Roddick could have from the game, an impossible final “final” against Roger Federer, his true contemporary, and seemingly the only person to consistently go out of his way to label Roddick a real rival, even as Roddick himself denied the validity of such a lofty status.

One last chance to throw everything onto the court.

And who wins? Well, if Roddick is ultimately to have any kind of legacy, it won’t be about winning or losing, will it? 

The Sun Also Rubbish

I’ve crossed Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises off my reading list, not as “read,” but as “abandoned.” This is an unusual move for me, though not because the list is impeccable. On the contrary, the list was made by my college-age self, and beyond the several dozen canonical works that were obligatory, many of the books on there are simply things I had heard of or other/lesser/obscure works by authors whom I had either read or who were moderately well-known. So it’s quite possible that I’ll come across so many dogs on this list that I’ll have to order a rubber stamp that says “abandoned,” maybe with a cartoon Dante next to it.

Up to this point, the only abandoned books on my list were some works by C. S. Lewis, because they were intellectually juvenile and thought themselves far more clever than they actually were. The college-age Czardoz was not nearly wise enough to realize that this is to be expected from the man who gave us Aslan, the Jesus lion. 

The Sun Also Rises, on the other hand, had some genuinely clever and insightful moments during the 90 or so pages I got through. And having read sufficiently from Hemingway, I don’t doubt his intellectual maturity. The problem with this book is that, by and large, it’s boring. This greatest of all literary crimes unavoidably stems not only from the plot, but largely from the Hemingway style, here at its most obnoxiously brutal. The book seems written more as an exercise in his trademark economical style than as a deeply felt exploration of the characters’ relationships and aspirations. The art is formal, not emotional.

The overall effect is that every single character talks like every other character, so that when Hemingway omits the identifiers in long stretches of dialogue, I invariably lose track of who’s saying what. Here is just a mild example:

“I believe it’s a brothel,” Mike said.  “And I should know.”
“Oh, shut it and go get your hair cut.”
Mike went out. Brett and I sat on at the bar.
“Have another?”
“Might.”
“I needed that,” Brett said.
We walked up the Rue Delambre.
“I haven’t seen you since I’ve been back,” Brett said.
“No.”
“How are you, Jake?”
“Fine.”
Brett looked at me. “I say,” she said, “is Robert Cohn going on this trip?”
“Yes. Why?”
“Don’t you think it will be a bit rough on him?”
“Why should it?”
“Who did you think I went down to San Sebastian with?”
“Congratulations,” I said.
We walked along.
“What did you say that for?”
“I don’t know. What would you like me to say?”
We walked along and turned a corner.
“He behaved rather well, too. He gets a little dull.”
“Does he?”
“I rather thought it would be good for him.”
“You might take up social service.”
“Don’t be nasty.”
“I won’t.”

I know I’m supposed to know who’s who based on characterization, but again, Hemingway’s characters all share a sort of Lost Generation cluelessness and cynicism. More than a few of the characters are swaggering blunderbusses, and all share an affection for snark, as though sincerity were simply passé. Even the purported protagonists have little to do but bemoan their lives through plastic sneers. 

Lest you think I’m unfairly picking on dialogue, the narrative prose is no better. Witness the following banalities:

There were pigeons out in the square, and the houses were a yellow, sun-baked color, and I did not want to leave the café. But we had to go to the hotel to get our bags packed and pay the bill. We paid for the beers, we matched and I think Cohn paid, and went up to the hotel. It was only sixteen francs apiece for Bill and me, with ten per cent added for the service, and we had the bags sent down and waited for Robert Cohn. While we were waiting I saw a cockroach on the parquet floor that must have been at least three inches long. I pointed him out to Bill and then put my shoe on him. We agreed he must have just come in from the garden. It was really an awfully clean hotel. 

I guess you have to be fairly talented to make a trip to Spain sound dreary. This relentlessly sterile reportage is the least attractive trait of the book. It’s as if Hemingway learned his trade from a court stenographer. I feel like I’m reading all the parts of the story that are supposed to be left out. You know how people sometimes ask, “Why don’t we ever see characters in movies use the bathroom? Are we supposed to believe that they never have to go to the bathroom?” Well, The Sun Also Rises is all bathroom. 

I’m reading The Invisible Man by H. G. Wells right now, and I’m not going to say that it’s a better book than The Sun Also Rises; it’s not.  It’s emotionally shallower and the writing is undistinguished, but at least the story interests me enough to want to know what happens in the end. The Sun Also Rises, as far as I can tell, is about the enormously traumatic impact that a whole lot of nothing can have on a sad bunch of nobodies.

I know that the art of the literary hatchet job, though time-honored and often delightful, can also seem rather petty. It’s not my belief that I understand books better than other people, and that dumping on a bad book in itself makes for worthwhile blogging. That seems more the demesne of movie reviewers. Rather, what is more valuable than any text in itself is that it be read, and it’s the relationship between the reader and the book that is worth writing about. 

If my reading seems lacking, then let’s look at another reading. According to The New York Times (as blurbed on the back of the book), The Sun Also Rises is apparently “lean, hard, athletic,” while somehow simultaneously being “beautifully and tenderly absurd.” In other words, it’s the literary equivalent of Brett Favre. Indeed, I think Favre is just the kind of guy that Hemingway would have liked: a wounded warrior, a lover of unattainable women, freighted with self-worship and unable to recognize that he had become a joke. Perhaps I go too far with that last bit.  But then I read something like this, and I wonder if the joke is on us:

            “No,” said the count.  “You don’t need a title.  You got class all over you.”
            “Thanks.  Awfully decent of you.”
            “I’m not joking you,” the count blew a cloud of smoke.  “You got the most class of anybody I ever seen.  You got it.  That’s all.”
            “Nice of you,” said Brett.  “Mummy would be pleased.  Couldn’t you write it out, and I’ll send it in a letter to her.”
            “I’d tell her, too,” said the count.  “I’m not joking you.  I never joke people.  Joke people and you make enemies.  That’s what I always say.”
            “You’re right,” Brett said.  “You’re terribly right.  I always joke people and I haven’t a friend in the world.  Except Jake here.”
            “You don’t joke him.”
            “That’s it.”
            “Do you, now?” asked the count.  “Do you joke him?”
            Brett looked at me and wrinkled up the corners of her eyes.
            “No,” she said.  “I wouldn’t joke him.”
            “See,” said the count.  “You don’t joke him.”
            “This is a hell of a dull talk,” Brett said.  “How about some of that champagne?”

Amen, sister!

Sometimes a patriot

This is my 51st blog post, and but for an eleventh-hour substitution, it would have been the 50th. If that had come to pass, here is how it would have gone:

This is my 50th blog post. I thought this day would have come quite a bit sooner, but it comes now, and I want to post something special. Something classy and respectable, and that best represents the magnanimous spirit of Czardoz Contra World.

Behold, a goat peeing:

As Paul Harvey would say, now let’s hear “the rest of the story.” I spotted this enchanting tableau at Comic-Con this year, on a congested intersection in the heart of the convention’s splash zone (by which I mean, where the Con’s largesse splashes over onto the streets of downtown San Diego). The goat was one of an unholy trinity of protestors calling for the abolition of Anaheim, specifically in reference to our northern neighbor’s attempts to pilfer Comic-Con from us, but perhaps in general terms as well.

I hope all this talk of Comic-Con leaving San Diego for Anaheim or LA or wherever is all smoke and mirrors. The Con is the cultural touchstone of San Diego, and the city needs this event much more than the alleged wooers. Anaheim has Disneyland. LA has Hollywood, among other splendors. Vegas has . . . Vegas versions of Paris, New York, Ancient Rome, the South Seas, and more magicians than you could fit into a clown car.

Lest anyone think this is purely a local issue, one municipality against another, I must remind you that this is a matter of national gravity, nay, of patriotism. This point is driven home by no less than the greatest patriot, Captain America:

Though Cap is looking about as plush as the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man these days, his point is well made.

This controversy actually reminds me a lot of the Lebron James debacle in Cleveland. I’ve been to Cleveland. I’ve seen President Garfield’s coffin lying in the crypt of the exquisite Garfield Monument. I’ve admired Tiffany’s denim jacket at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. I’ve stood in the footsteps of the concertmaster at Severance Hall and gazed from his perspective at the podium where George Szell once conducted the Cleveland Orchestra.

So yes, I know that Cleveland has its place in the world. But that place is not at the top of a jetsetter’s hitlist. And if I were some young buck (or cavalier, for that matter) with a bright present, I wouldn’t expect a very bright future staying in a town like Cleveland.

Lebron is just a dude, of course. Comic-Con is an institution, and, like the office of President, it’s much bigger than any one man. But even though I can understand the arguments for moving – the bigger convention space, the proximity to Hollywood, the proximity to Disneyland, for Goofy’s sake! – the loss of Comic-Con would leave a cultural void in San Diego far bigger than the bankruptcy of the San Diego Symphony in 1996, bigger than the loss of K-BEST 95 – the only oldies radio station in town and yet to be replaced, bigger even than the death of Dr. Seuss.

Yes, I understand that this is a crum-bum town in which I reside, and when the Namor-reading nerdlinger grows up to be Tobey Maguire or some kind of expensive Hobbit crap, he needs to spread his wings and fly to a bigger toilet. Hell, I did it myself once upon a time.

So no hard feelings on my end. But Comic-Con, if you really do leave, just don’t think for a second that the gasping culture junkies you leave behind in this wasteland will forget that you pulled the plug on their life support.

I belong to myself

He was the grand salami of the Grand Slam, the lothario of Love-40, the debauchee of the double fault. Leave it to others to reflect on Marat Safin’s career. I just liked the man’s farewell.

After his final match, a loss at the Paris Masters tournament on November 11, 2009, he left his adoring crowd with these words:

“Today I will put all my memories, all my wins and losses in a small box. Today a door is closed, hopefully another one will open.”

A bit more poetry than you’ll ever get out of Federer or Nadal. Sure, they have the Slams and the insatiable drive to be the best that eluded Safin, but it seems like that kind of life and career just wasn’t meant for him. In his words:

“It’s a tough sport. It’s very cruel. What I’ll miss least is the injuries and the pressure. The pressure is what you are going through all these years. Because you are defending your points. You need to achieve, you need to improve, you need to count the points to see if you are going to make the Masters, if you’re going to be seeded at a Grand Slam or not. So you’re completely stressed 24/7. That is what I hate about it. It’s just too much. No rest for the brain at all.”

And now?

“Now I have no schedule, no practices, no nothing. I belong to myself.”

* * *

On a much smaller and less visible scale, I can relate to Safin’s sentiments. I spent almost two years competing as an amateur ballroom dancer, just a pond compared to the ocean of a professional sport, but to me, it was worth any ten sports combined and blended into an unholy smoothie of athleticism.

“Competing,” as any athlete knows, is just a tiny part of the commitment. There are the hours and weeks of practice and coaching and lessons, the body aches and alarm clocks clanging far too early, the hustling through rush hour to get to practice on time, and the hustling out to salvage what remained of a normal life – all meant to make you look brilliant for the five to ten minutes you actually spend competing at the competition. And after that comes the self-examination, the questions about how to get better, the questions about what questions to ask, and too often the halfcocked experiments and harebrained schemes to improve one figure or another. No rest.

I was lucky. I had a dance partner who made practice seem like play, who trusted me to make the right decisions on and off the dance floor, and who believed that everything we were doing was worth it. I can’t imagine Safin had anywhere near the same kind of support.

It’s been six months since I’ve danced seriously, and every day that goes by, I can feel it slipping away, the skill, the fluidity, the determination to become better. I know I could slip back into it just as easily as slip away. Unlike Safin, I haven’t run out of gas yet. But at the same time, I haven’t found the peace he’s found. I hope one day to be able to say the words he says so well: “I belong to myself.”

* * *

This is my 50th blog post, and for a while, as I considered how to commemorate the occasion, I was straddling the line between reverence and irreverence, and realizing that it can be difficult to have it both ways. I chose to lean on the former. Tune in soon for the other contender for the Big 50.

Nine Years Later

I don’t know if it’s a long time or a short time, but nine years later, someone has finally done to Roger Federer what he once did to Pete Sampras, and the parallels are notable, if not shocking (though I have yet to see any mainstream press comment on the similarities, so I may be the first!).

It’s the end of an era. The tennis world turns upside-down. The King is dethroned. The King is dead. Those are the kinds of headlines that try to capture the magnitude of Federer losing to Tomas Berdych in the quarterfinals of Wimbledon. I’d prefer to capture history as it repeats itself, so I’ll give it a shot: The dragonslayer is now the slain dragon. Not much of a ring to it, but it’ll do.

In 2001, I was on vacation in China, of all places, when the news came in, probably from some British announcer chaps named Alan and Vijay on television coverage of Wimbledon: Pete Sampras, grass-court king, 7-time and defending Wimbledon champ, had been beaten by a Swiss upstart – and a teenager at that – named Roger Federer.

I was stunned. It was one of the few constants in the universe, unbreakable like the laws of physics – Sampras always prevails at Wimbledon. How could he lose, and to a relative unknown (by which I mean someone who had never won a Slam, and was not projected to win one soon)? I guess I thought he would never grow old. I thought his body would never tire, his will would never break. And then it did.

What I took for granted at the time was that Sampras lost because he hadn’t played well, not because he was beaten by a great (or soon-to-be-great) player. But how could I have known?

No, I don’t think Tomas Berdych has the potential that Federer had nine years ago, nor do I expect him to accede to the throne as the next King of Wimbledon, but still, there are strong echoes between this match and the one from nine years ago:

• Both Pete and Roger lost to a relative unknown who had never won a Slam.
• Roger was seeded 15th when he beat Sampras. Berdych is seeded 12th.
• Roger lost in the quarterfinals. Pete went home in the fourth round.
• Pete was 29 when he lost to Federer. Roger is 28.
• Both matches were played on Centre Court.
• Both Sampras and Federer, at the time of their defeats, were considered by most to be the best player who had ever lived.

Even the comparison of the losers’ post-match walkoffs is strikingly similar. I quote from CNN Sports Illustrated in 2001:

With no trophy to collect, Sampras picked up three sweaty towels, stuffed them into his tennis bag and slung it over his shoulder. Then, head down [my italics], he slowly followed Roger Federer toward the exit, reluctantly departing Wimbledon.

And here, Yahoo’s take on Federer’s exit yesterday:

When it was over at Wimbledon on Wednesday afternoon, Federer slowly walked toward the net, shook Berdych’s hand, packed his bag and began the slow walk off Centre Court. The English crowd gave him a standing ovation. Federer kept his head down [my italics] for most of the walk to the locker room, blindly waving his hand in acknowledgment. When he was a few feet from the door he stopped and looked up at the crowd, a king surveying his subjects for the final time.

“Head down” – a king hardly knows how to leave his kingdom. History repeats itself.

Asked if there would be any more Wimbledon crowns in their future, what did you expect them to say?

Pete: “Let’s not get carried away. I plan on being back for many years. There’s no reason to panic and think that I can’t come back here and win here again. I feel like I can always win here.”

Roger: [Asked if he thinks he can return to dominance at Wimbledon] “Yeah, I do think that. That’s why I’m here.”

Pete never won another Wimbledon. I can’t say for sure that I think Roger will, but I think he stands higher up among his peers than Pete did in 2001.

If anything, this series of events has made me appreciate all the more Pete Sampras’s accomplishments, and by accomplishments, I mean, of course, the only ones that matter – the 14 Grand Slam titles. Consider how great Federer was from 2004 until 2007 – in every year except 2005, he won three out of four Slams, and in 2005, he won two. That’s 11 Slams in four years. Tack on his first Wimbledon crown in 2003 and his single Grand Slam victory from 2008, the US Open, and that’s 13 Slams. And yet after his loss to Rafael Nadal in the 2009 Australian Open finals, there was widespread doubt about Federer’s chances of overtaking Sampras’s record. It boggles the mind to think that as dominant as Federer was, and for so seemingly long a stretch, he was still behind Sampras, and what had seemed a foregone conclusion back in the glory years of 2004 to 2007 was now a real debate once more.

Well, Federer did come back, and he did surpass Sampras, and if he never wins another tournament, not to mention a Grand Slam, he’s still the king, the greatest tennis player of all time. At least until Tomas Berdych stakes his claim.

Men of Destiny

One of the well-burnished moments of my college life in Chicago was going to my first baseball game, a Cubs-Cards clash at Wrigley Field in that magical year of whatever it was when baseball was de-Marised (and Maris was de-pantsed). My companions and I had paid a pittance for upper level seats, but being young and cagey, we managed to sneak down to field level.

The grown-in ivy shook like verdant waves along the outfield wall in this temple of sport. From where I sat, these two men, McGwire and Sosa, stood like titans. They made the rest of the field look like children playing in a sandbox. Every person with a seat rose in unison each time these Lords of the Diamond stepped up to the plate. Every sloucher in standing-room-only stood on tiptoe. Mind you, this was early in the season, before the chase of Maris became “The Chase.” And yet it was like people knew they were watching history. Every at-bat took on cosmic significance. Every hack was potentially a homer. They were men of destiny. . . .

Except it didn’t happen that way. Oh, it was a Cubs-Cards game, May 3, 1998. Sosa would hit a dinger that day, while McGwire’s juice would let him down. But I didn’t really notice them. The crowd didn’t rise for their at-bats. The cosmos remained unmoved. And the brick walls of Wrigley are always still brown and exposed in May.

What I remember instead is the crisp spring air, the neighbors barbecuing and watching the game from their rooftop decks across Sheffield Avenue, booze-laden vendors crying “Old Style!” up and down the aisles.

I remember seeing the rooftop across Waveland Avenue behind left-center field painted as an enormous Budweiser ad (RIP), and thinking, at last, now I know what it is to be at a ballpark and take in the Americana!

What I remember most is the girl I went with, and thinking that if only her roommate hadn’t come as well, this would have been the perfect day.

In hindsight, it’s easy to say that we would have been better off watching real children playing in a sandbox for free, rather than pay for this shameful and cynical deception. But for me, it wasn’t about records and glory and the purity of sport. It was about missing the perfect day by the width of a roommate, and realizing that this wasn’t such a bad thing after all.

* * *

This was Beanie Baby giveaway day at Wrigley, and after the game, I saw people outside the stadium hoisting signs offering a cool hundred bells for your Daisy the Cow commemorative Beanie. The promotion wasn’t commemorating Sosa or any other slugger; it was a tribute to Harry Caray, the charismatic and iconic Cubs announcer who had died earlier that year.

Should we be thankful that Caray never lived to see his beloved pastime dragged through the mire? I don’t think he would have liked it, but I think he would believe that the game must go on, even if it continues to wear the stains of a deception it and the fans refuse to take seriously.

Like Beanie Babies, baseball, too, has fallen somewhat in esteem over the past decade. But I believe that this country will rediscover reality one day, and baseball will be restored to what it was when it began, neither a religion nor a scourge, but just a game.

Why do we play games? For the same reason that kids play with Beanie Babies. Because they’re fun.

* * *

O baseball! Tell me stories of the men of days gone by,

Like laurel on your hoary head, once green, now frail and dry.

I weep for Wally Wabash, the Wizard of Walla Walla,

His bat stood five feet tall, his body two heads talla.

Remember Rum Run Rogers, stealing bases in his sleep,

No choice had he since his hango’ers went seven innings deep.

I sing thee, Little Hands McGee, whose glove was small as a flea,

And yet he played that second base like Moses played the sea.

Here’s to you, Ha’Penny Greerson, the southpaw with aim so good,

They said he could hit the testis of choice - and he would.

O baseball! Half-naked we were cradled in your breast,

Half-naked now you stumble to your long deservèd rest.

Notes from Vancouver: Vicarious Edition

Men's Figure Skating

It’s sad that figure skating is a sport where the controversy is more interesting than the sport.

I shed no tears for Evgeni Plushenko or his countrymen, who think he was robbed of a gold by Evan Lysacek. Plushenko’s whole appearance here was predicated on the idea that he could just waltz into the Olympic Games and de-pants the field with his quad jump, and if anyone didn’t want to put his Russian cream and sugar in their coffee, then they were idiots. That self-important attitude doesn’t fly with me. The fact is, Plushenko knew what the rules were before he came, and he lost because the rules didn’t favor (flavor!) what he was cooking.

I understand that without this particular scenario of him losing this way in this place before this world audience (to an American, no less), there would have been no reasonable platform for Plushenko to criticize the advancement, or lack thereof, of his sport. If he had held a press conference before the Olympic Games to say, “Without the quad, you can’t be considered the true Olympic champion,” it probably would have elicited a collective (?) over the heads of viewers. Nevertheless, if he had won, do you think we would have heard such a well-articulated philosophy of the future of men’s figure skating? I don’t think so, and to rip his sport and his rival after losing the competition is a pretty shabby thing to do.

I wasn’t fond of Lysacek’s “rebuttal” interview with Bob Costas on NBC, either, but that has more to do with that network and its stable of preening commentators than it does with Lysacek. When I first saw the interview on TV, I thought it was a passive-aggressive slap in Plushenko’s face, all of Lysacek’s talk about how Plushenko had come back after a three-year absence to miraculously win a silver, as if to say the old dog still remembers a few tricks, so maybe we don’t have to put him down just yet. Watching the interview again online, it didn’t seem so bad. Costas tries his best to bait Lysacek into saying something clearly derogatory, but the youngster is apparently well-coached in the peculiarly bland vocabulary of big-time athletes.

But then came the second televised interview. Why on earth did we need to see Dick Bottoms and Scott “Bald Eagle” Hamilton plop themselves into a couple of easy chairs to tell us how wonderful Lysacek’s “package” was, and how ridiculous it was to even question his victory? Really? I can’t even suggest that a judged sport can produce questionable results without it sounding like sour grapes? Even after years of criticism of its jingoistic coverage, NBC still panders to the most xenophobic tendencies of its viewers.

Plushenko’s right about one thing: the skating federation needs to decide if this is a sport or a show. The sport is based on looking good while performing difficult figures. Fair enough. But it’s already subjective enough by that definition, and when the judges and the federation can’t even convincingly decide whether it’s more important to look good or to perform ever more difficult figures, then the subjectivity overcomes legitimacy, especially when the scoring system is notoriously inscrutable for the typical Olympics viewer.

Forgive the delicious pun, but I don’t understand why these skaters, men and women, insist on sticking to jumps that they just can’t stick. Maybe some day, someone will come along and do six quad jumps and throw in a quint, landing all of them perfectly, and it’ll be the most thrilling and exquisite figure skating performance of all time. Until then, though, I feel like the performances would be much more enjoyable to watch if the skaters didn’t overreach their abilities. Hence, why the Stars on Ice don’t tour the country charging you $50 a seat to watch them fall on their hindquarters on failed quad jump combinations. They want to look good in a show. Maybe the sport could stand to look a little more like a sport.

Coming from a ballroom dance background, I can appreciate the distinction between a sport and a show. I would love to see ballroom added to the Olympic roster, but the line between sport and show is so blurry, even by the standard of judged sports, that I don’t think ballroom would have sufficient legitimacy when placed alongside other sports.

Given figure skating’s illustrious history, I’d hate to see it lose its marquee status because of the growing discernment of its rapacious viewers. Plushenko thinks that the quad is the future of men’s skating, but the sport’s future relies on more than just bigger, tougher figures. It relies on a viewership that understands the sport and will continue to take it seriously, if only once every four years.

UPDATED: QUAD IS QUAD
February 22, 2010

Looking at some more barbs slung between these two men, I feel like I should clarify exactly what I think men's figure skating should be (because my opinion, after all, is the one that counts).

Plushenko: "I think we need to change the judging system because quad is quad. If the Olympic champion doesn't know how to jump a quad, it isn't men's figure skating, it's men's ice dancing."

Lysacek: "If it were a jumping competition, they would give you 10 seconds to run and do your best jump. But it's a four-minute, 40-second program, and it's about sustaining that level of skating and excitement from start to finish. And that's what I've been working on every day."

Lysacek is more or less right, but he's dodging the issue, isn't he? Can he or can he not do the quad? Obviously not. The Olympics challenged him to work within some arbitrary rules, and he succeeded, so congratulations. But why hide behind the rules when a rival makes a direct accusation?

Maybe it's more fun and entertaining to watch beautiful skating in competition, even if it dumbs down the competition a bit. Or maybe it's more of a gas to watch exceptional athletes wilt like daisies before figures that they just can't hack. I don't know.

But in the future, even if the rules discourage it, I think there will be skaters who can do quads, and lots of them, and with consistency and grace, and when these skaters come along and start hitting them at the Olympics, then the rest of the world will have no choice but to follow suit, rules be damned. Will things be more fun to watch? Again, I don't know. But that's sport, and sport isn't always pretty.