Cobb

Obligatory Seriousness on Lance Armstrong

There is an organization called the USADA that seems to be bending the rules so that they can erase Lance Armstrong. I am curious not so much to find the truth of whether or not Armstrong doped, but to figure out exactly what purpose it serves for the USADA to execute its aim to clawback his rewards after 17 years. 

Actually that's a rhetorical curiosity. I've already made up my mind that referees don't get infinite instant replays. The statute of limitations on sport should be the season. If you cannot determine by the end of the season who is the legitimate champion of the season, then don't give an award. If you cannot determine, by the end of a game, if all the rules of the game were followed, then declare the competition null and void. 

I am convinced that Armstrong is being unfairly persecuted, and furthermore that every sport that has doping rules should ensure that they are immediately enforceable. If Armstrong outsmarted the USADA, then too bad. My bias is that this agency is doing to its sport what boxing governing bodies did to theirs which is to draw into profound relief its inability to hold the respect and admiration of its chartered participants.

I'll keep my ear out for what the cyclists, teams, trainers and coaches have to say. 

Chinese vs British Ceremony

I'm one of the few people I know who found the opening ceremonies to be thoroughly enjoyable. Some of that owes to the fact that I am something of a Neo-Victorian. There's a lot to that but I'll leave it for another day. 

The Chinese on the one hand orchestrated a mass of performers to master a single skill and aggregate them into synchopated rhythm. The British on the other hand put together a series of vignettes chronicling history which involved a wide variety of characters performing different roles to create. To watch the Chinese ceremony is to witness 1000 drummers drumming & dancing in uniform. To watch the British ceremony is to witness 1000 people in 50 different groups with 50 improvisations off 50 drummers in 50 different costumes. I admire the British complexity, and I am put off by the Chinese uniformity.

Consider the possibility of something going wrong. Imagine that one of the parade of Chinese drummers gets violently ill in the middle of the ceremony. Your eye would immediately pick him out of the crowd as his spot on the grid went awry. And you would know deep in your heart that his failure would mar the entire act, and that he would face endless shame, humiliation and even punishment for being the puzzle piece that fell out. 

Now consider that same violent illness attacking one of the Mary Poppins clones, or one of the factory workers in the British illustrations. The entire affair would procede without most people noticing at all. It is that kind of robust and multivariate performance that allowed the British to even choreography sheep into the ceremony. 

In short, the British allowed people to be people and sheep to be sheep. 

 

Olympic Journal - Day 12

Jeter's Tatoo
I bet my son a nickel that the reason that American sprinter Carmelita Jeter was wearing the full red body suit for her event was that she had a tatoo that she didn't want the world to see. I like Jeter and I was trying to figure out whether or not she was as ripped as the other track women. It turns out that, hell yeah she's ripped and that yes she has a tatoo but it's nothing to be ashamed of. That's where I'd put mine, a lightning bolt on the outer thigh.

May Traener
Well I truthfully cannot keep track of all the hypenated women's names that we have out there. In fact it's starting to sound like South America with some of these females. That's all good for what it's worth, but awfully damned confusing. I suppose we have Joyner-Kersee to blame for a lot of this, not to mention Briscoe-Hooks. Richards-Ross is the latest and isn't she just a sweetie? Hmm, maybe, maybe not, but she's got the hair going on and that big Chanel bling earring thing too. Gotta say, I'm liking her personality, but Alysia Montano is the winner in that department. Felix is good looking - well their all good looking, but hmm. Who do I like best? I guess Felix. We've already forgotton Tarmoh from the Oregon trials. Too bad. International media is deadly. So when Al Michaels tells women to smile it sounds really annoying and cruel, but to get dissed in media is even crueller and media don't care. So when you smile for the camera, I know I love you better..

Oh yeah. Go May Traener. Great work. True champions. Blam. USA USA USA!

The Underwater Camera
It doesn't exist in prime time, and that, n's and b's, is the only reason to watch water polo. So I won't.

Erik Kynard
Where can I get some of those socks, yo? He can single handedly bring back high tops and tube socks. It's really too bad he didn't get the gold. And why are we not seeing and hearing Dwight Stones? Didn't they even bother to ask him into the booth? Speaking of which, what happened to Liam McHugh? He ripped it for the Tour de France. 

 

Olympic Journal - Day 10

I'm watching a lot of stuff from a couple days ago and trying to catch up. But there are a few things worth mentioning.

Usain Bolt
A lot has been made about the Jamaican sprinters and that's just playing the meta game. Bolt is the real deal, and a proper champion. I have to say that no matter how many swimming medals Michael Phelps wins, it always feels to me as if swimming just hasn't matured. When there are still 15 year olds breaking world records and three or four athletes dominating the sport years on end, I get the feeling that there's a great deal more evolution for the sport. Bolt is a much more phenomenal star than Phelps. He makes you think about what we've never seen yet in the sport. I must say that I've always liked tall sprinters rather than the short, juiced-up ones. I take Linford Christie over Ben Johnson. And so Bolt is the evolution of Christie, a stronger Christie, and I think he sets the standard for the new class of sprinters future.

Lin Dan
It took long enough to make the Badminton look interesting. I've had to fast forward through more hours of badminton than I ever have in life to witness the men's singles final at long last. All the way to the wire there was drama and the tightest competition between the world's number one and number two. The Chinaman was finally victorious over the Malaysian.

Women's Beach VB
Is this all USA vs China? I have to say that the women's beach volleyball this year has been more exciting than the men's. Not just because Rogers and Dalhauser failed before the Italians, but that the play has just been more riveting with May's team. A lot of crazy digs and bootleg plays have made the games quite stunning, and the Chinese women fought until the end. 

Lolo, Gabby, Dawn & The Image
Two ends of the spectrum in the meta game. On the one hand, Gabby wins her events in style with a bit of grace for one so young, but gets destroyed in the press. Now people are telling her to control her image. The total flip-side is that Lolo Jones can't win for losing and the press and sponsors have and continue to love her. But let's face it, Lolo has the ripped torso a zillion women and men want and she's got an elegance that almost no other female athlete at the games possesses. She's got a compelling story and she's got polish. Gabby on the other hand reminds you of Sandy Cheeks from Spongebob. She's all spunky and clunky - and what a name. Gabby - perfect for the post-balletic twirlers of the modern Olympics, all- wrist braces and chalky and feet that pound clunk after the double pikes. There's no getting around that acrobatics have ruined much of women's gymnastics - the tumbling routines are as routine as breakdancing headspins. What did we ever really see in all that? 

Now that Lolo has her second non-medal event (four is the lonliest Olympic number) I hope she stays popular, because I like her, genuinely. Gabby, if she can grow up normally - as if any American female gymnast could, should be back in Rio. Until then she'll have to defend herself from the sorts of Hollywood & marketing types that create and destroy. Somebody is going to drop a gold brick on her doorstep.

Dawn Harper reminds me of one of my first girlfriends. No matter what kind of gold lay in her heart, she could never transcend her hood-ratly appearance. Not that Dawn is unattractive or improperly ghetto, it's just that she got that Jamie-Lee Curtis hardbody that dudes kinda like and kinda fear at the same time. I also bet that she's just too cocky to shutup about beating Lolo, no matter how gracious she tries to smile for the camera. I like that in a champion, and I think she and Deion Sanders would make a perfect couple. But it took Deion a long time to be accepted as a champion and I don't think Dawn will get enough time in the sun to make any mistakes. But that's what happens to the overwhelming majority of American Olympians, win or lose. 

It seems that the only way to gain any permanent respect is to become a coach, and considering what has been said about Bob Kersee, that's not much of a bright prospect. How can we make Track & Field a better profession? 

Paralympic Buzzkill

The only thing I want to see are Paralympic bloopers. I want to see a Paralympic fail reel. The agony of defeat for people with no feet. 

These days I am making friends with my libertarian sentiments. The reasons are manifold but I won't get into them right now. Understand, however, that the motivations for this idea come from that liberartian network of neurons in my political brain. 

I've been watching the Tour de France this week, and it is a stunning testament to the, dare I say it, triumph of the will. I've always considered it the world's most competitive sport, in which hundreds of men race through a fortnight of greuling trials and many hundreds of miles only to be separated by mere seconds at the finish.

Having been a mediocre cyclist, I have been there. In my 20s I possessed almost precisely the kind of ideal body for cycling. 5 foot 10. 167 pounds. Genetically big calves, great lungs and idiotically steely determination. Socially I thought the idea of cycling 100 miles with a bunch of cyclists to be ridiculous. So I stayed mediocre. But I got close enough to the sport to understand both its appeal and its challenges. The challenge is to push your body to the very limit of its endurance, to get on the bike and stay on it, to pace yourself and then punish yourself, pace and then punish again - to the point at which you can begin to hate yourself for eating a small banana instead of a large one. And.. well, that's the appeal too. Being a cyclist changes how you look at people's bodies.

If you actually believe in the greatness of the human spirit and you have an idea of what people are capable of, you cannot fail to be impressed by what the world's greatest atheletes do. Well, except for swimming. Swimming is catatonically boring. The only good thing about swimming is that it enables surfing, because surfing is awesome. But sports are changing as the human body is changing and progressively getting healthier and our ability with machines are changing. That's why we have the X Games. We are missing what great swordsmen were like. We are missing the athleticism of the ancient warrior, but we are gaining the athleticism of the motocrosser, the BMX stunter, the wakeboard aerialist. In our lifetimes, the improvement of women's gymnastics has been stunning. I expect to see a double back summersault on the balance beam in my life, which in the 70s was the most difficult trick in floor exercises.

We are often told however, that there is some extra measure of courage demonstrated by athletes with missing body parts. I don't buy it. A man who has half a right leg who runs a marathon on a fitted spring cannot possibly be facing greater fear or danger in his event that that which caused his crippling. 

What impresses me when I watch videos like those of Andrew Dickey is the implicit knowledge that there are great failures to match every triumph. You fail more often trying front double pikes from the 1 meter springboard in practice than you score on the dives at a meet. You look at that hill and you shift down into the girly gears more often than you stand up and keep up the bike's momentum. I'm sure Dickey has more scars than a few, just like Travis Pastrana has broken so many bones that he approaches Evel Kneivel. I confess that I'm more impressed by people who wreck perfectly healthy bodies in search of sports perfection than those who start with wrecked bodies in search of sports mediocrity.  It's the old saw about excellence vs achievement.

Getting my grandmother to stop smoking was an achievment. Keeping ex-felons obeying the law is an achievement. Two year olds tying their own shoes is a remarkable achievement. I think the guy who plays Mortal Kombat with his face, because he has no thumbs, is a real champion, not that anybody much cares about Mortal Kombat. I mean what happens if you fail beyond embarrassment? What I want to see is the fat kid stand up after crashing through the fourth hurdle in the 110 meter event. That's remarkable. What I want to see is the anorexic shotputter dislocate her shoulder. What I want to see is the one-legged skateboarder bail on the rail. Wheelchair basketball? No. Goalball? No. Boccia? No. I want to see blood and guts.

I know that we are in evolutionary times when it comes to sport. I also know that a lot of the sports we have evolved to popularity are often not athletic in the least, some border on the merest of cognitive pursuits. So we have time and bandwidth for a lot more events. I think the man who gets up on a bucking bull is courageous and the one-armed man who does the same thing is slightly more. Because we know the bull mostly wins. 

So. Show me the slo-mo fails. That's what I want to see. Real Drama.

Are You Ready For Some Football?

Randy sez:

Jebus Cobbers, what kind of black man allows football season to start without comment? Even those fairies in the Ivy League have football. It's the American passion, where we can violently disagree, yet stop short of blood letting, at least everywhere except a Raiders game.

Oh. The last time I cared about football on a consistent basis was when Bob Griese had a perfect season. I was ruined for football by growing up in Los Angeles and watching Dallas win the division every freaking year. As a kid, I slept under football blankets, but by the time I was in high school.. well it was over because I was no longer big enough to play.

I was fast. Of course I played wide receiver and safety in street games. But all that ended somewhere around 1974. I started skateboarding, body surfing, springboard diving. My real thing was gymnastics and I had just about all the street cred a tumbler could have, I could do fronts and I had a full twisting back. I could not imagine possibly getting better without formal instruction, which I couldn't find, nor having found it, could afford. So I became a diver - as my high school had neither gymnastics nor wrestling, the things in which I could kick ass. And judo. Odd that.

Every Friday I go to my kids' highschool games. This week, in which we lost the most bizzare football game I think I have ever seen, in an overtime tie-breaker, I realized that not once did I ever attend my own highschool's football game. Not even the year we won the 4A CIF title. My daughter is a cheerleader. My son is lead trumpet in the marching band. The football team sucks, but the cheeseburgers are perfect.

I like USC but I don't love them. I hate Ohio State. I hate both Florida and Florida State. Any team that beats any of those three is alright with me. I have a small soft spot in my heart for the Georgia Bulldogs, but not big enough to check out how they're doing during the season. I used to root for Navy in the Army Navy game. I used to root for Yale (of course), and between the Sooners and the Razorbacks, I take the Razorbacks. I don't watch until the playoffs for the most part, and now don't bother to watch the bowl games.

As for the Pros. Well, I did care for the Bears when McMahon was QB. Only because he had a hiphop attitude. I cared for San Diego when Fouts was almost the man he was supposed to be. But that's the most modern times. I lived on the east coast for most of the time the Raiders were in LA, but I was completely fed up with LA when I left, so the hell with them and Ice Cube.

In the game it came down to the men I thought were all that. That would include Roman Gabriel - Jack Snow, Daryl Lamonica, Gene Washington, Billy Whiteshoes Johnson, Mercury Morris, Walter Payton, Lawrence McCutcheon, Jerry Rice, Bo Jackson, Emmit Smith, and because I had to play center in peewee league, Jim Otto. Like most young men of my generation, I thought that Vince Lombardi was, next to my favorite astronaut Michael Collins and my all time hero Matt Henson, the epitome of American manhood. But these are things from the days before shaving.

These days I watch football like an Alzheimer's patient. It's all in the present tense. I have no anticipation of the games before they air, and no memory of them after. There are times when I watch that I wonder if others are experiencing the same emotions as I am. I love the beauty of the game - the speed and the impact. I hate quarterbacks with too much time in the pocket. I love a good bootleg play every once in a while. I admire running backs who bull down the field 4 yards at a time, play after play after play. I love a good pass rush and a cornerback who can read the offense. There's nothing like a fast tight end who step back, catch a screen then switch direction and run back to the inside. But the greatest play in football will always be the simple down and in. The receiver who has the balls to cut to the middle, the QB who can land the bullet through zone coverage. That's fucking football.

I don't care who lands the plays. The announcers talk too much anyway. Just give me the high definition and the instant replay. I don't care who wins the Super Bowl or who goes to Disneyland. I watch with my daughter the cheerleader. My son played second string freshmen ball. I could not possibly obsess over the sport enough to support him - besides, he's a band geek. The Spousal Unit is still a Michigan fan.

Let me see, what have I not covered? I hate corporate bowls. That there is something called the Tostitos Fiesta Bowl is evidence of the most bold faced whoring in the world of sport, well next to Nascar and Premier League Footy. And yes, the NCAA should find a way to pay college athletes real salaries.

But to answer the question directly, I am the kind of black man who writes an 800 word essay so I never have to answer the question again.

Obligatory Seriousness on LeBron & The World Cup

I have five things to say on LeBron.

1. If I was LeBron, I would have left Cleveland too. It makes little sense to be the world's best and live in a second rate city.

2. Shaq made no difference. It obviously takes more than two to make a winning NBA team.

3. The new Heat will encounter new defense, a la 'hack a shaq' that will shut down whatever the new trio is called in the first season. I like 'The Amazing Three' from the cartoon. I'm surprised that I haven't heard more.

4. Dan Gilbert doesn't need to be any classier than any other loudmouth NBA owner (Mark Cuban).

5. Jesse Jackson should mind his own business, and if I were LeBron James, I would find a way to quietly tell him so. 

--

I have five things to say on the World Cup

1. Suarez of Uruguay got the booing he deserved, but he was not as bad as Zidane.

2. Forlan of Uruguay got the Golden Ball he deserved. He made the most beautiful goal of the entire series.

3. I'm disappointed in NED. They depended too much on Robben against Spain.

4. If Muller hadn't got put out of the semis, I still think Germany would have won.

5. Yay USA. Expect a lot more attention from American sports fans. Still, Altidore pooped out and should have done more.

Landon Donovan & The 91st Minute

That name actually rolls off the tongue nicely if you do it with a British stentorian accent. I didn't see the goal, I heard it old school off ESPN digital radio from my iPhone in my shirt pocket, like an old transistor radio. I was in the courtyard of a massive building that is basically a no-bar zone, and was striving to get the last bit of play by play. I had been listening on the drive to the office, as the minutes ticked away in the US vs Algeria qualifier. I parked on the roof of the parking structure so I could sit and listen to the last moment, frustrated as hell while the announcers kept describing the awesome saves by the Algerian keeper. I had a 9 o'clock meeting with my boss and could not be late, so I trudged into the dead zone hoping to get some signal and some good news from that signal.

So I'm wandering around staring at my phone like an old Dodgers fan cursing his Zenith in Prospect Park the day he can't get tickets to the game. The static comes in and out and he shakes the thing and the single earpiece falls out of his hairy lobe. And then in one moment of double miracles, I get a signal and the announcer yells, Donovan scores!

It doesn't get any more dramatic than that.

Landon Donovan's Goal vs. Algeria - 2010 World Cup from estoban cruz on Vimeo.

Chances are that the video I embedded here will be suppressed by various weasels. But you can't take away the moment.