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tag:www.splicetoday.com,2005:/rss/departments/sports SPLICETODAY.com 2018-04-24T13:30:41Z tag:www.splicetoday.com,2005:Post/23375 2018-04-24T05:58:00-04:00 2018-04-24T09:30:41-04:00 A Golden Sombrero for Tebow
The wind was whipping around the U.S. Post Office in Binghamton, New York, when a voice blew at me from a concrete bench. It was a hobo lady. "What time is the game?" she asked. "3:05," I said, marching forward on Henry St. toward NYSEG Stadium. It was 2:14 p.m. She was the type of hobo lady from the old television series The Twilight Zone. Suddenly in your face, overacting ever so slightly. I was almost expecting this hobo lady because Binghamton is the hometown of The Twilight Zone creator and host Rod Serling.

This particular Twilight Zone episode would be titled "A Golden Sombrero for Tebow" and Serling's trademark intro, usually done on camera with a lit cigarette in the foreground of the opening scene, would go something like this:

"Submitted for your approval: a former college football star gives up his fame and pigskin career in an attempt to play professional baseball. Not only was he a rare talent as a quarterback, he was a rare young athlete who valued the spiritual life in an era of idolatry and greed. But his dream of baseball success appeared to be dying in the arms of an icy April in a tough city in the southern tier of New York state. It was there in a ballpark an aging, underground sportswriter desperate to write a website story found Tebow engaged in a Biblical struggle with… The Strike Zone."

I continued my lonesome walk to the ballpark having checked in early at a downtown Binghamton hotel packed to the gills with regional Moose Lodge conventioneers. They rode the elevators with Busch tallboys in hand, their spouses with laminate badges dangling over plasmatic highballs in white-knuckle clutches.

Back on the streets of Binghamton, citizens were unhunching their shoulders as the sun was blasting down for the first time in weeks. The mercury was in the mid-50s as I spotted the Mad Monks bar, the only joint near the ballpark, and headed for its dark door. There's an innate thrill that comes from boldly throwing open the door of a dive bar for the first time as a complete stranger, especially if you're alone. Find one near a ballpark and there will always be an old guy in there who remembers. The bartender, Charlie, had one customer. "I've been to every game so far," the customer said of the Class AA Binghamton Rumble Ponies (formerly the Binghamton Mets). "That's how stupid I am." Charlie the bartender played the role of the old guy who remembers. What does he remember?

Wally Backman managed in Binghamton and hit the Monk almost every night. "Dewars," said Charlie. "And cigarettes." Ex-Met Tim Teufel also managed in Binghamton. "He made me get Presidente beer. It's from the Dominican," Charlie said from beneath his large, new Rumble Ponies ballcap. He's got pocket schedules galore stacked near the Slim Jims, but he's a Yankees fan as seen by his collection of photos on the carpeted walls of his tiny bar. He deals with team ownership because his joint is just up the first base line and foul balls come screaming over the top row of the NYSEG Stadium seats and have taken out a window or two. I was immediately greeted with baseball bonhomie and took advantage of the Mad Monks "Tebow Specil" (sic) which was $2.50 cans of beer from an ice chest. "He forgot the L," said the solo drinker as I ordered one. "It should say TeBLOW."

Tim Tebow, the 2007 Heisman Trophy winner and two-time NCAA football champion as quarterback of the University of Florida Gators, has been a Spring Training and minor league sideshow in the New York Mets system since September of 2016. He tends to homer in his first at-bat, as he did in Columbia and Port St. Lucie, both A-ball stops on his baseball revival tour. Tebow will be 31 this August and, like Michael Jordan before him, can't seem to hit the old-fashioned curveball. Amici Pizza, a block down from Mad Monk, had a message board inexplicably proclaiming "Free Pizza for Tebow.

I also found a craft beer restaurant, now ubiquitous in every city, serving a "Tebow Time" New England Pale Ale. Absolutely undrinkable! I wish someone would take the chemistry sets away from all these hipsters brewing beer all over New York State. Binghamton was abuzz when Tebow was first assigned to AA by the Mets. The Press & Sun-Bulletin, the Gannett daily serving Binghamton (but available in print at only one convenience store), began a "Tebow Watch" well before Opening Day.

Then the crappy weather came and the fans were frozen out, as were most ballparks on the entire upper Midwest and northeastern sectors of the U.S. Attendance was of course minimal for the first homestand. Tebow homered on his first pitch on the road and then it went downhill from there. The lefty born in the Philippines to missionary parents will be 31 this August. Most of his teammates on the Rumble Ponies squad are 24 or 25 and the media buzz and fan focus surrounding Tebow sort of makes them invisible. Reporters disregard the Bowie BaySox pitching tactics against Binghamton in lieu of a chat about the NFL draft with the employee of the SEC Network, a gig Tebow can always fall back on if his Roy Hobbs-Meets-The-Pharisees thing doesn't work out with the Mets.

The Binghamton ballpark holds about 6000. It's a nondescript and undersized AA facility with tomb-like cinderblock concourses underneath the stands. The generic, early-1990s feel doesn't impede the excellent sightlines and close seat proximity to the field. I bought a single ducat online in advance from the club and it was second row off the on-deck circle. Turns out I was in the former seat of a famous season ticketholder's dead husband, according to the story she told the people seated behind me. As she droned on the tale of woe, I shrunk down with my cheap beer and looked for Serling in the Binghamton dugout to bail me out.

Instead, I saw young players focused on beating the visiting Erie SeaWolves who answer the Detroit Tigers organizational phone when it rings. It was nice to be enjoying the first spring sun watching two classic bad-weather Eastern League cities going at it on the diamond. Just when the Deposit Middle School choir finished the National Anthem (sounding like the creepy version near the end of the opening theme of Showtime's Homeland) the Tebow fans filled the front row.

A couple to my left had wearing a Denver Broncos Tebow orange t-shirt. To my right, two pimply collector fellows toted front pages of Sports Illustratedfeaturing Tebow and his New York Jets jersey already signed with a black Sharpie pen by Mr. Tebow himself. He wears number 15 in baseball, just as he did while toiling in the NFL.

Despite the first bright sunshine of the season, the official count was 2192 in attendance to see these two sub-.500 squads play ball. A guy named Scott in row three who works at the state hospital congratulated the collector guys and said he's glad Tebow is in Binghamton because "he brings a lot of money into the community." Others spoke of the meteor showers expected later that night, and then I noticed a few hives on my forearm that I tend to get when I'm surrounded by Mets fans, especially minor league Mets supporters. (Last spring, I was in Las Vegas at the Mets AAA affiliate, how does this happen?)

I'm pretty sure the scoreboard played Tebow reading the stadium alcohol policy as he jogged his way out to his position in left field in front of an enormous Coors Light billboard. The irony runs hot and cold in a yin/yang of the genteel and the violent. The "Rumble Ponies" name was chosen by fans on the team website in 2016 to honor the legacy of abundant carousels throughout the Binghamton area. But the stadium spirit crew uses "Let's rumble!" as a fighting inspirational catchphrase every three minutes. Are you child-like stationary equine entertainment or are you the Sharks and the Jets? Make up your mind, for Christ's sake. Which brings us to Tebow's first at-bat. In the bottom of the second inning, wearing the jersey that just says "Rumble" across the chest, the guy who 11 years ago piled up 424 yards of offense and seven touchdowns to beat the South Carolina Gamecocks 51-31, stepped in as the number 7 hitter in the Binghamton order. He wore shiny Adidas cleats and was facing a righthander named Kyle Funkhouser. The fan commentary ran as such:

"We love you Tebow!"

"Do it for Jesus!"

(Umpire calls questionable strike on Tebow).

"Keep the faith, ump!"

Tebow swung and missed badly, striking out to end the inning, stranding his teammate Jhoan Urena on first. As Tebow walked back to the dugout, I had to add a line. A line which happens to be the shortest verse in the Bible: "Jesus wept!" I got a few laughs, and the Denver Broncos t-shirt couple got up and looked like they were going home. This could be fun.

Other than the kneeling Tebow meme that lasted for a year on the Internet (a year being three weeks in 2011), the man has played it pretty straight with the media. He still Tweets tons of scripture and has several self-help religious books on the market. His personal website is quite slick in a Fathead type of manner. The Rumble Ponies media relations types have vowed to only have Tebow press access "if he has an impact on the game" according to Press & Sun-Bulletinwriter Rob Centorani.

I moved out to the left field line standing area to keep Tebow company. Of course, there were Tebowers out there already. An older gentleman decked out in University of Florida Gators gear with a younger guy in an NYPD hoodie. Both had gloves. The orange t-shirt Denver Broncos couple had also relocated to be close to their savior. From there, the angle on the game changed and the sun beats down and you see the beauty of the cut-off men aligning with the rightfielder and his throw was crisp and actually hit the glove of said cut-off man and the symmetry of baseball remains unchanged and will always be a thing of beauty.

There was a distant Gate 4 to the ballpark out there with an industrial tower and old smokestack looming beyond the Post Office parking lot and a freight train yard. The grit seemed to please the Erie bullpen guys and their post-industrial Detroit organization élan. The side view of Tebow is a man of size and athletic ability. The dude looks like he could play well into his 40s. I looked behind me and there were lurking high schoolers with crew cuts, hanging out solo, and a pacing mental patient guy. It was like the holding pen for the extras from The Green Mile. In the foreground of the Tebow view were far too many signs on the low fence declaring "This is a tobacco-free stadium!" and now the old quarterback is Billy Sunday all of the sudden.

The Rumble Ponies took the lead 3-2 in the bottom of the fourth after a hustling triple by Jeff McNeil who then scored on a wild pitch. Urena singled again. Tebow came to the plate for the second time. I noticed a lot of ketchup-on-hot dog fans in the concourses and emerged just in time to hear a guy yell "Chris Farley died for you!" when Tebow took a strike. Two pitches later, Funkhouser struck Tebow out looking.

As he took his position in left for the fifth inning, I realized Tebow had yet to have a ball hit his way. During a between-innings fan contest on the field, one of the young college guys from the third base seats did a Tebow kneel after the Rumble Ponies employee with the microphone asked "Can I get a 'Let's Rumble!' from ya?"

It didn't look good for our hero as Erie brought in lefthander Matt Hall to limit further Binghamton damage. A kid and his dad, decked out in Hall of Fame baseball gear, had moved to the left field line. "I've got Tebow fever, dad," the kid said all deadpan as Tebow stood motionless, examining a fingernail. The cruel New York Postpointed out back in February that the big club sees Tebow's presence in the organization as somewhat of a gag. His Mets media guide entry from last year lists his "signing scout" as a guy who in reality works as a team merchandising executive.

After an underwhelming seventh inning stretch, Tebow led off the inning against the lefty Hall who dispatched him with a called third strike before fans could settle back into their seats. At this point, Tebow's swing looked like not even the Pool of Bethesda could save it. Three at-bats, three strikeouts. "Go back to double-A!" one of the college kids yelled. As the top of the eighth unfurled, Tebow still didn't have a fielding chance in left. Erie failed to score so the whole crowd received a voucher for a free donut at Dunkin' Donuts.

In the bottom half of the frame, a double and hit-by-pitch meant Tebow got a fourth at bat. Hall made him look silly and struck him out swinging. A kid emerged from a birthday party somewhere under the third base stands. "Tebow got a golden sombrero!" he screamed, news delivered by his father, no doubt, as his party mates looked at him like he was a spawn of the Nephilim. For the three people who have read this far and don't already know, a Golden Sombrero is archaic baseball vernacular for a batter striking out four times in one game. As the ninth rolled around the scoreboard in right played a muffled interview with Tebow about his Tebow Foundation. Audio could've been better, to say the least. Erie went down easily in the top of the ninth, the Rumble Ponies won 4-2 and in astounding fashion, Tebow didn't have one single ball hit to him for the entire game.

Outfielder trio postgame celebrations are currently popular in the majors. The three pasture-dwellers assemble in center for elaborate high-fives or acrobatic fist-bumps. Nothing so simple or mundane in Binghamton. Tebow indeed saved the best for last. The ritual unfolds thusly: centerfielder takes the glove from rightfielder then squats as a football center. Tebow moves in for shotgun formation as the QB. Rightfielder lines up next to centerfielder who then snaps his glove to Tebow who then lobs it to the rightfielder who runs a post pattern toward second base. It was a delightful sight, commendably clever and probably the most seldom seen of all baseball celebrations, to be sure.

This subconscious gesture could also lend credence to the rumor Tebow will accept coach Steve Spurrier's offer to come to Orlando to quarterback the first franchise in the Alliance of American Football spring league set for next year right after the Super Bowl.

At Mad Monks after the game, there were a few more patrons under the stained drop ceiling. The same fan guy from the pregame announced he was missing Sunday's game because he has to go to a baptism.

"It's okay," said Charlie the bartender. "Tebow would approve."
 Spike Vrusho tag:www.splicetoday.com,2005:Post/23342 2018-04-13T12:47:00-04:00 2018-04-13T18:21:16-04:00 Unlikely Spring
A couple of Yankees-Red Sox bench clearings on the same night as a dust-up out west between the Padres and Rockies got the blood going again for the former national pastime. All of the colluded-against unsigned free agents must be itching to get out there when they see a Brock Holt (with his Dutch Boy haircut under his winter gear head cover) glare down a Yankees rookie whom he thought slid too hard with spikes up.

Of course, if MLB hadn't forced the umpires to scrap the "neighborhood play" at second base, none of this would have happened. Photos of the bespectacled Joe Kelly throwing his right fist at angered DH Tyler Austin later in the same game show the skinny pitcher has his wedding date tattooed in Roman numerals on his lower bicep. That's only somewhat creepy. Yes, there's a lot of good in the game right now, and that's not just because my team—the Pirates—is in first place in the National League Central.

The Yankees are making their fans squirm already. Just when Giancarlo Cruz-Michael Stanton suffers his second "platinum sombrero" game in an excruciating Sunday loss to the Orioles, the clueless fans of course boo, perhaps unaware they have baseball's version of an ICBM in their batting order among other inflators of a weapons-grade gonfalon bubble. The Steinbrenner tight-asses have gone the unlikely route of loosening the house rules in the Bronx as Yankee Stadium finally is allowing fans inside early enough to watch batting practice. The "Judge" box in right field is also another humanizing element to the alleged Dark Side that is Yankees Inc.

The lack of depth in the Bombers roster couldn't have been more pronounced when bad-tempered beanpole Chris Sale led his Bogaerts-less Red Sox against the Yankees for a 14-1 humiliation at Fenway. It was a good set-up scenario for the next night's donnybrooks, with the ghosts of Bill Lee, Lou Piniella, Carlton Fisk and Jason Varitek swirling around Yawkey Way.

For the bragging fest that is the current version of the New York Mets, well, never mind that they can beat up on the Phillies and Marlins. The real story it is "praise the Lord and pass the Heisman Trophy" as college football star and religious fanatic Tim Tebow led off his season with the Mets' AA team in Binghamton with a home run. He had twice before turned fastball water into home run wine—once for the Columbia A-ball squad and another with the low-A hopefuls known as the Port St. Lucie Mets. It is the "miracle man's" version of Genesis 1:1.

Tebow, the former NCAA football star at Florida and Denver Bronco playoff game winner, also hit a three-run homer in the Binghamton Rumble Ponies home opener against Portland. Since then, he has been striking out more than Giancarlo Stanton. I feel a calling in a baseball Jim Jones type of way and will seek out Tebow soon in the jungles of the Southern Tier of New York State. Stay tuned to this space for further reportage when the weather improves.

The Pittsburgh Pirates have overachieved against some smelly teams, while lost superstar Andrew McCutchen has sputtered in San Francisco except for his six-hit, walk-off homer performance against the Dodgers and another walk-off single. New Pirates Colin Moran (Gerrit Cole trade) and Corey Dickerson (Daniel Hudson trade) have quietly gone about their business: raking base hits all over the park. And Gregory Polanco has grown into his swing, off to a hot and somewhat healthy start piling up the RBIs and towering home runs.

It was also a delight to see the Bucs go into the permanent renovation/Yuppification project once known as Wrigley Field to take two of three games and then get the hell out to go down to Derek Jeter's personal hellhole in Miami. Pittsburgh manager Clint Hurdle was wise to point out the immaturity of Cubs catcher Willson Contreras and hot dog infielder Javier Baez. They are unwatchable showboats and remind me of the me-first antics of former Mets shortstop Rey Ordonez.

Many might not have noticed the Oakland A's have returned to using a mechanized "Harvey the Rabbit" robot to deliver baseballs to home plate umpires. It is a high tech, mobilized version of the scary rabbit that would emerge from a panel in the turf next to the home plate circle back when Charlie O. Finley was the zany owner of the A's. I'm somewhat surprised a tech-company hasn't stepped in with sponsorship of this "ground-based drone" delivery system.

And if you've watched any televised games, MLB's new Six Mound Visit Limitation rule has given announcers countless minutes of mockery, sniping and caustic irony. The veteran geezers also like to call out the new managers in Philly, Boston and New York that are true rookie skippers with no previous managerial experience on their resumes. It makes me miss Art Howe—the ultimate scapegoat and Moneyball victim.

College baseball has heated up in the D-3 Liberty League, my favorite cold weekend activity of late. The unlikely Vassar Brewers sit atop the standings while the more unlikely Bard College Raptors are at 4-4 in league action. Bard swept R.I.T. in a Sunday doubleheader with a walk-off hit by pitch in Game One and a walk-off two-run single in Game Two. The defending champion Tigers (22-1 last season) were preseason favorites to win the league, so losing three of four games in Annandale was definitely not part of that blueprint. Vassar tortured Skidmore taking three out of four from the Thoroughbreds and they all sit well above the apparently overrated Rochester Institute of Technology guys in the standings. A study of the Skidmore roster shows not one player from the south or California. They've got a ton of New Englanders and Jersey guys. Vassar, meanwhile, has a Hawaiian catcher, a Pilipino pitcher and dudes from Texas, Miami and of course Southern California.

As I turn 54 this week, I find the simplicity of low-level college ball and the high-stakes MLB stuff to be a good combination to soothe the soul. For some reason I'm compelled to write about it and share the information with even the most befuddled and uncaring readers who may not get the jokes or references until months later, or perhaps never. This is my calling now as Uber attacks my taxi gig, just as Craig's List attacked the newspaper gigs. It is, as Devo wrote, a "strange pursuit." I'm here to stay, however, and I recently heard about a high school kid in Beacon, NY, named Torres who is attracting MLB scouts and has committed to St. Johns. Would love to drive down and see him, but most of the high school action is midweek, which rules me and my day job out of that scenario.
 Spike Vrusho tag:www.splicetoday.com,2005:Post/23327 2018-04-12T05:58:00-04:00 2018-04-11T13:18:30-04:00 We're In An Era of Media Saturation
In a February New York Times essay headlined, "What Happens When Athletes Do the Sportswriting," Amos Barshad writes about The Players' Tribune. The website is a new type of outlet. Derek Jeter teamed up with sports marketing executive Jaymee Messler in 2014, launching the site with the idea of giving athletes an outlet for first-person narrative essays. Due to Jeter's following and the sports-marketing expertise of Messler, one might've guessed the site would survive the initial phase. In the last three and a half years, it has become the go-to site for free-agent athletes to formally announce their free-agent decisions.

While old school fans may cringe at the idea of the free-agency-wooing process, unrestricted free-agency remains the biggest decision of a professional sports career, often involving leaving a city where an athlete matured. Sometimes an athlete leaves for a bigger market and more exposure, other times in order to chase a title, and in some cases, in order to return home. A cynic might say these essays, often heavily edited/co-written, are simply opportunities for athletes to spin the story to soften the blow to the departed city's fans. An idealist might say these essays are an opportunity for athletes to take honest control of their voice. Either way, as professional sports (players, front offices, and the fan experience) have increasingly become financially motivated over the last three decades, the site is a marketer's dream.

We're in an era of media saturation, where attention seems to be the primary currency of our late-capitalistic age. Headlines are more critical than ever. People want to read what celebrities have to say. Star athletes have reached a level of celebrity that gives them a platform and an easy audience. Twitter and Instagram deliver messages directly. The impact on "journalism" has been dubious. Reporting often takes a backseat to immediate breaking news (completely accurate or speculative). Still, people are reading and listening to podcasts more than ever. All of this generally means that for stories to get read, they need to be more sensational, outrageous, or news-breaking. The Players' Tribune offers the news-breaking angle for athletes.

I love certain pieces I've read on the site. One of the highlights was Isaiah Thomas' "This is For Boston." The essay ran in September, weeks after the Boston Celtics and Cleveland Cavs front offices shocked the NBA with a Kyrie Irving-centered deal, in which the Cavs traded him Boston for Isaiah Thomas, Jae Crowder, and a Celtics-via-Brooklyn-Nets 2018 lottery pick.

Thomas' run in Boston was remarkable. The emotional rollercoaster of the playoff run, the tragedy of his sister's death, the tooth and hip injuries... all culminated in a wonderful Game 7 win in over the Washington Wizards in a brutal Eastern Conference Semifinal series. Then the hip injury made it impossible for Thomas to continue. Then the season ends. After it all settled, the shock of the trade felt like a visceral gut-punch. Many of my fellow Celtics fans felt somewhat torn about the deal, though the attraction of gaining Kyrie Irving seemed to quiet the frustration with losing Thomas.

We've entered a sports era where most of us rationalize any deal no matter how cold it leaves us. The emphasis on salary cap gymnastics and contracts, and the quantifiable metrics have replaced any feelings of individual loyalty to players. While we can say, "There's no loyalty in sports," that doesn't mesh with how we actually watch the games and the passion that playoff hoops stirs up in us. The analytical brain versus the passionate heart of the sports fan. How do we balance both?

We rationalize the trades too easily. When players are talked about it terms of calculating financial terminology, it's easier to consider the ramifications of losing a player you've loved to watch. In this framework, people are stocks, to be overvalued, undervalued, or properly valued. NBA talking heads and writers often have no hesitation in describing players as "assets," and "pieces."

The obsession with trades and roster management is dehumanizing. None of this is new to the NBA discussion, but it's widely accepted, which is the problem I have. We can appreciate the philosophy of "The Process," in Philadelphia while acknowledging how frail our bodies are and how difficult it is for a 7-footer like Joel Embiid to stay healthy in such an athletically-demanding 82-game NBA season. Ironically, I originally wrote this mere days before Embiid was inadvertently tackled by teammate Markelle Fultz, fracturing an orbital bone near his eye, possibly torpedoing the Sixers' playoff hopes.

We don't follow the NBA in the same way, but when the actual humans who we cheer for get injured, everyone with a conscience takes a moment to realize that something horrible happened to an actual person. Two weeks later, we read about injury updates and obsess about the player's return.

From November 2016-May 2017, Isaiah Thomas suddenly rose from pure scorer to dominant fourth-quarter scorer, and leader of a 53-win Celtics team. Despite his 5'8" stature (he's not 5'9"), Thomas' star had unexpectedly risen, propelling him from the last pick in the 2011 NBA Draft to scoring guru and cult hero. After that, he dealt with the personal tragedy of his sister's death on the eve of his first playoff game. At that point, hoops fans were forced to reckon with the fact that he was heroic and human. Cameras showed him grieving hours before tip-off against Chicago, supported by then teammate Avery Bradley. Not only did Thomas play, but he provided his usual offensive spark. The top-seeded Celtics struggled at times against the 8th-seeded Bulls as former Celtics point guard Rajon Rondo rekindled his all-around game and it wasn't until an injury kept Rondo out that the Celtics regained their swagger.

As Boston advanced to the second round to face Washington, the drama somehow escalated. Thomas was elbowed in the mouth and lost a tooth early in Game 1. Incredibly, he grabbed the tooth during game-action, and kept on playing. Nothing seemed to stop the player whom Celtics legendary announcer Tommy Heinsohn dubbed, "The Little Guy!" But a hip injury suffered later in the Wizards series slowed the dynamo to normal-human speed. Despite the hip, Thomas put on a memorable display in front of the Garden crowd in a Game 7 win (29 points, 12 assists), pushing the Celtics on to face Cleveland in the East Finals. After attempting to play through the decreased mobility and pain of the hip injury, Thomas was forced to shut it down mid-way through Game 2. The series was not competitive, but the future seemed impossibly bright.

Cue the stark reality of salary cap sheets and roster construction. Cue the dimly-lit front offices of the Garden while the NBA Finals concluded in Oakland. Cue the seemingly strange trade request of Kyrie Irving… the first NBA player to declare he wanted freedom from LeBron James (and James' shadow) in order to create his own legacy. Back to the question of agency. Kyrie bet on himself. And the new Cavs GM Koby Altman decided it made sense for Cleveland to prepare for life after LeBron and grab a high lottery pick from Boston (via Brooklyn). Isaiah and his possibly damaged hip were suddenly headed to Boston's nemesis.

•••

In summary, Thomas' improbable rise was followed by his improbable departure. This was a whirlwind for Celtics fans. Those that obsess about the future or refused to get caught up in the heroics, understood Thomas as a salary cap number waiting to be paid what he obviously hoped was a max contract. Add in the hip injury that caused serious concern, and the size (defensive liability) and it's no longer such a shock. He's a risk. Then he's gone. But the analytical sides of our brain shouldn't always win. In the biggest moments, we cheer with something other than our brains, we cheer with our hearts.

From Barshad's Times story:

Then, in early September, in a first-person essay for a website called The Players' Tribune, Thomas filled in the gaps: How he wanted to hang up on the Celtics general manager, Danny Ainge; how he broke the news to his two young sons; how, after some time, he forced himself to accept that his Boston ascendancy was done. Sports fans had long ago ceased to expect access to the intimate concerns of superstar players: They were too famous, too rich, too big. But here was access not just to the life of a star but also to the star's internal monologue. The Celtics front office had revealed that they saw Thomas as a mere asset — fungible, mobile, dispensable — and he responded by demonstrating his singularity. "When I say this hurts, man, just know that it isn't because of anything anyone else did," Thomas wrote. "It's only because of something I did. I fell in love with Boston." Reading it, I damn near cried.

This is what makes The Players' Tribune necessary. Through the site, he can air his thoughts in an eloquent, thoughtful way, with some editing as needed. Twenty years ago, reporters would've been salivating in front of Thomas' locker when Cleveland arrived in the Garden. They would've urged Thomas to provide a negative sound bite, lashing out at Danny Ainge for making the decision. Or maybe 20 years ago, people wouldn't have cared so much about what Thomas had to say about being traded... except he had become a legitimate cult hero in Boston over last year's season the resurrection of a contending Celtics team.

In a well-known Letterman interview, Jerry Seinfeld described the hypocrisy of fans turning on players after they're traded, concluding with his famous line, "We root for laundry." In the interview, he's describing being a New York Giants (NFL) fan. It's also from the 1994, long before society really began to accept that athletes were more than just athletes and had a right to speak freely, or somewhat freely, on non-sports-related topics. It also describes football fans more than NBA or MLB fans. Football rosters are enormous, injuries are more widespread, careers are shorter, and there are only 16 games in a season. With the exception of quarterbacks, football players are certainly seen as part of a collective by most fans, rather than individuals. The tribal aspect of football, military/warriors only adds to the collective sentiment. The Us vs. Them aspect of our innate tribal human psychology has been ratcheted up by social media in our era of outrage while a decline of empathy is palpable. We can still make the choice to root for the people whose names are on the back of the jersey, as well as the team on the front. Reading athletes through their own words (with some polishing up) helps us root for those people as people.
 Jonah Hall tag:www.splicetoday.com,2005:Post/23303 2018-04-06T06:28:00-04:00 2018-04-05T21:25:17-04:00 Andrew Triggs Stands On the Mound
Andrew Triggs is a tall man from Nashville. According to Baseball-Reference, his nickname is "Triggonometry." A wonderfully dorky moniker befitting his craftiness on the mound. He made his major league debut at age 27, in middle relief. He's now 29.

In most fantasy drafts, Triggs was completely ignored... that could imply he's nobody's fantasy. Because I live near Oakland, and am mildly obsessed with pitchers, I know his name. His uniform number is 60, a high number and a strange one for a starting pitcher. He doesn't throw very hard, topping out at 92, though he gets some heavy sink on his fastball, which limits most of the hits he allows to singles and doubles. In addition to the two types of fastballs, Triggs offers sliders, curves and change-ups from a three-quarters arm slot that helps him deceive hitters.

Fifth starters in a pitching rotation are never secure. Fifth starters who're over 27 are often temporary place-holders, soon replaced by hard-throwing young prospects. They live tenuous baseball lives. They don't usually get the big games. They get "skipped" on occasion, especially early in the season, when baseball still feels fresh, the grass slightly greener, and the sweltering August afternoons are a long way off. Skipped because they aren't exactly trusted. Like temporary employees in an office, fifth starters are relatively anonymous. Triggs makes the major league minimum for players with his experience level. It's for these reasons that I enjoy the successes of fifth starters.

In game number five for the A's and Rangers, Triggs matched up with the ageless Bartolo Colon. For the last three years, Colon has managed to stay in the major leagues simply by throwing the ball near the edges of the plate. Doesn't matter how slow or how straight, desperate teams keep giving him the ball. As my friend Mike said, perhaps he has access to some scientific discovery that none of us know about. Or he has some serious blackmail on certain GMs in Atlanta and Texas. In any event, Colon's 6.48 ERA and .318 batting average allowed didn't keep the Rangers from offering him a minor league deal.

The low-budget A's gave Triggs a chance at the beginning of 2017 and his sinker was indeed heavy. He limited opponents to zero earned runs in four of his first five starts. In mid-May, (eight starts) he was among the AL's ERA leaders with a 2.12. Then he ran into the Red Sox and Yankees and two starts after that, a hip injury ended his season. Such is life as a fifth starter.

On this Monday night in Oakland, Triggs is back in the rotation because two of Oakland's younger, more dynamic starters, are injured, both likely for the season. Jharel Cotton's elbow caught on fire in March. Top prospect A.J. Puk, whom many are eager to see in Oakland, felt his elbow crumble around the same time. Tommy John's name is always a whisper away for modern pitchers. Here comes inning number one of this 29-year-old's season.

From my television, there are more empty seats than full. I look it up: 7416 showed up. That's about one-fifth of the stadium's capacity. The NCAA title game combined with a chilly Monday night and a stadium that doesn't entice many... the end result is a smattering of humans in the stands. For the 19 teams that have even played a home game less than one week into the season, Oakland is now 18th. Only the Marlins, who have cleaned out their roster and are best considered an AAA team this year, have sold fewer tickets.

The Rangers already lost their speedy leadoff man Delino DeShields (Jr.) to a hand injury, so the first pitch Triggs delivers is to Shin-Soo Choo. A whopping 89 miles per hour and right down the middle, with same expected sink. Choo takes lots of walks, but has lost some of his power over the last couple of years. Another two-seamer for a strike, perfectly placed on the inside corner, at the bottom of the zone. Triggs misses twice with the curve, just outside. On a 2-2 count, Choo lines a single up the middle.

Number two hitter Joey Gallo, all home runs and strikeouts, drives a 2-2 fastball deep to left-center but it's caught on the track. Sigh of relief for Mr. Triggs.

Elvis Andrus is up third. Used to be all speed and no power, but with the fly ball-craze and age, the Venezuelan shortstop smacked 44 doubles and 20 homers last year. Andrus chases a curve off the plate for strike one, then takes the next three pitches. Another 2-2 count. Andrus takes the heavy sinker the other way, lining a single to right.

Three batters, three hard hit balls. Then Triggs saves the day. Adrian Beltre's best days are behind him. Triggs mows him down on three pitches, finishing him with a curve down and away. Promising outfielder Nomar Mazara works the count full, but just misses a sharp curve down and in. The location of Triggs' curveball was precise. No runs, two hits, two left on. Another inning in the Triggonometry book.

Colon will manage to limit the A's to a single run over six innings, giving up only a Matt Chapman solo shot in the 3rd.

Triggs will have a chance for a win as he steps to the mound in the top of the 5th with a 1-0 lead, but it won't happen for him tonight. A questionable strike zone (two of the balls appeared to catch the corner) will lead to a Drew Robinson walk. Robinson will steal second and come home on a Gallo single. Triggs will leave after the 5th, a 1-1 tie.

It's one game in a long season. Most experts predict the A's won't win more than 80 games this year, but Andrew Triggs will make at least a dozen starts, maybe even stay in the rotation for the whole season if his hip holds up. And maybe that's enough. They can't all be aces.
 Jonah Hall tag:www.splicetoday.com,2005:Post/23292 2018-04-05T06:27:00-04:00 2018-04-09T14:07:36-04:00 Pictures of You (#135)
It's not often I fall for April Fools' jokes—I'm indifferent to the humdrum tradition—but on Easter Sunday I was flummoxed twice. Early that morning my friend Tom Joyce posted a meme on Twitter that showed the purported pastel uniforms MLB players would wear that day to celebrate the holiday. For a minute, I thought, well, that makes sense: MLB, in its quest for attention and viewers, is never short of gimmicks. Jackie Robinson Day (legit, though I'll note once again that labor leader Marvin Miller was just as important as Robinson in the game's history, helping players become millionaires instead of indentured servants); pink and blue ribbons, bats and such for Mother's and Father's Day in service of cancer charities; throwback uniform days, which have mercifully receded in popularity; and Independence Day stars & stripes.

(The above photo, snapped by Don McLeod in 2002 at Shea Stadium, shows my then nine-year-old son Nicky and me in the stands.)

In that context, Easter made sense in a wacky way. But I quickly realized the joke, and then thought, hmm, it'd be pretty cool if all players had an oversized image of Jesus Christ Rising From the Dead on their jerseys. Now, that would cause a very pleasing stir.

Later that night, my onetime Tribeca neighbor and Sox partisan Rick texted, at 11:45, that Boston's closer Craig Kimbrel was off to see Mr. Tommy John Surgery James Andrews in Alabama on Monday because he felt a "pop in his elbow." I was tired, but this ominous missive snapped me to attention: I scoured Twitter, beat writers at The Boston Herald and Boston Globe, as well as Major League Trade Rumors and came up empty. I even texted my son Booker in Manhattan with what could be a devastating blow to Boston's chances, slim to begin with, of defeating the outrageously fortified New York Yankees for the A.L. East title. After this scutwork, finding zip, I went to bed reasonably assured that Kimbrel was okay—and since he's in a walk year, I suspect he'll be even more reliable than in 2017—and that ineffectively wild Joe Kelly would not be elevated to ninth-inning duties.

All this after Boston took three of four from the decimated Tampa Bay Rays, behind dominant starting pitching—a sweep of the season's opening series was nixed on Thursday after the Sox bullpen imploded, thanks to Kelly and Carson Smith, wasting a stellar performance by Chris Sale. It's really too early for nail-biting, but I couldn't help it, since Boston's dormant offense won the three games by scores of 1-0, 3-2 and 2-1, before exploding (sarcasm!) against the Miami Marlins on Monday night by a 7-3 score.

That just over 11,000 fans attended that game in Miami was testament to the new skinflint owners of the Marlins (I was familiar with just three or four of their players), even as the broadcast panned repeatedly to the Face of the Franchise, Derek Jeter, as if his mug wasn't already burned in my brain from that horrendous Yankees dynasty at the end of the last century. On Tuesday night, the Sox again prevailed, 4-2 in 13 innings, lifting their record at this writing to 5-1. That the Sox have scored just 21 runs in those six games isn't ideal—and new manager Alex Cora's prescription of resting a regular or two every game, even with a scheduled day off upcoming, will take getting used to; on Tuesday night new acquisition J.D. Martinez butchered a ball in right field, playing in place of premier defender Mookie Betts, and that led to a run—but one supposes the bats will get going.

I live in Baltimore, but don't at all care for the Orioles—manager Buck Showalter's cringes and grunts can make anyone grimace—since they're nasty Red Sox rivals. Still, I had to side with the O's in their understandable chagrin at the Minnesota Twins' carping—who had a 7-0 lead!—about Baltimore rookie Chance Sisco bunting on Sunday against an inexplicable defensive shift in the bottom of ninth inning and reached first for a legit base hit.

The Twins, any number of them, complained that Sisco violated those murky "unwritten rules" in baseball, and that veteran teammates like Adam Jones and Chris Davis would set him straight. I was glad that the O's lost—though not as happy as Yankees relievers Dellin Betances and David Robertson blowing games on successive days to the Blue Jays—but Jesus Christ (whose image, unfortunately, wasn't on uniforms for Easter), the Twins took two of three from the O's, in convincing fashion, so what's their beef?

Not like a no-hitter was on the line, and even in that case, I still don't think opposing clubs should lay down. After all, there's a written rule that players can't ingest or inject PEDs (which I also think is dumb; if a player wants that edge, at the cost of possible future health difficulties, that's his choice to make), but for MLB's bigwigs, as always several steps behind the pharmacists, that doesn't appear as high on the list of infractions as bunting against the shift or sliding hard into second base. Oh wait… that last one was done away with by the "Utley Rule." So clean, but hard, slides trying to break up double plays are verboten. As a replay will, and often does, show.

—Follow Russ Smith on Twitter: @MUGGER1955
 Russ Smith tag:www.splicetoday.com,2005:Post/23245 2018-03-26T06:28:00-04:00 2018-03-25T16:36:03-04:00 Fathers and Sons of the Squared Circle
Eddy Jacks Jr., imitation son of an original star from the glory days of pro wrestling, appeared in his last match in 2008. He was 37. Ever since he'd finished playing college football and washing out of the Canadian Football League, he'd been touted as a Next Big Thing. Not the Next Big Thing, because he had a fair number of flaws, but certainly one of many possible Next Big Things.

It could've happened a bunch of times, such as when he won the Simply Canadian Rasslin' Association (SCRA) Northern Lights Title at 24. The Internet chatroom smarks, obsessed with four-star matches and the Japanese "strong style" of working, made a big deal out of his victory. Here was this kid who could flat-out wrestle, rewarded by a top-heavy, veteran-driven company with a poor reputation for handling young talent. His father Eddy Jacks Sr., the original Eddy Jacks, was overjoyed. The imitation Eddy Jacks' friends, most of whom were trying to enter the business themselves, were insanely jealous. He looked to all the world like a future star. What could go wrong?

Everything, of course. Junior's first couple of title defenses were pretty lifeless, which was tragic given that they served as co-main events for the promotion's weekly television show. His big feud with Craig Valance, a bland English technician who'd served as the federation's default Intercontinental champ for over a decade, generated zero heat. Junior was wrestling then as an All-American blue-chipper, and Valance was doing a typical European heel gimmick, and for some reason those styles didn't mesh. Their work was competent, but their performances lacked sincerity. When their storyline ended at WrestleWar XII, the imitation Eddy Jacks lost cleanly in the center of the ring. He'd held the belt for exactly eight weeks, and now he was finished.

The funny thing was, Junior's promo work actually got better after he left the Northern Lights title picture. The SCRA brought his washed-up father out of retirement and had him serve as his son's abusive trainer, a role that fit the fat man as comfortably as an old shoe. The Jacks Family found itself in a crowded tag team division. The Black Watch, a high-flying tag team from Scotland, was locked in an epic year-long feud with the Baddest Thangs Running, and because the original Jacks had some residual heat with one of the Thangs, they spent the better part of their run putting them over at house shows.

But people liked the Jacks Family, and their Mutt-and-Jeff "Jacks Family Values" vignettes kept them going long after a string of hernias finally forced the original Jacks to the sidelines. Junior would go out to the ring, screw everything up, and then the original would hit his son's opponent with a pair of brass knuckles. There was a Television Title reign mixed in there somewhere for the imitation Jacks, but that strap had been so degraded by innumerable title changes that it was reserved solely for the comic relief guys. Jacks Junior, who hadn't been booked to look strong in years, excelled at playing a loser—and eventually that's what everybody came to think he was.

Five years after he entered the SCRA, Junior's contract expired. It wasn't renewed. No reasons were given, and none were needed. Imitation Jacks had once been, in the words of the original Jacks, "like a hot dog on a bun: on a roll," but now he was about as valuable as last week's supermarket circular. His old man, whom Junior mostly but not completely detested, was no longer able to perform in any capacity and had hung up the boots for good. Senior would occasionally drag himself out of the house for a one-off appearance with his kid in some Rust Belt palookaville, but his cash value as an attraction had dwindled to nothing, too. The difference between the original Jacks and the imitation was that the original had been the undisputed World's Champion back when that still meant something, even if he had only held the strap for a month, and the imitation hadn't been anything at all.

For a while, Junior chased those ever-decreasing bucks. $300 to headline a show in Kalamazoo, Michigan for Great Lakes Championship Wrestling. $1500 plus travel costs to lose to J.W. "Hoss" Maines in a barbed-wire match in Japan that saw Junior's eye knocked clean out of the socket. Other engagements resulted in worse injuries, ranging from a torn rotator cuff (never surgically repaired) to the amputation of two toes. And so it was at 37 that the imitation Jacks, already woozy from the semi-synthetic opioids that were now his mother's milk, botched the landing on a clumsy moonsault and wound up with a fractured hip.

Was it in vain? The best years of the imitation Jacks' life were gone, spent chasing the legacy of an original who in all honesty hadn't been that good in the first place. But the original had been a wrestler, which was the only thing that Junior had ever wanted to be. Junior was a wrestler too, by some accounts an especially gifted one, but now he wasn't anything anymore. He'd wanted to wrestle since he was five, started at 22, and never participated in another match after turning 37. Like most of his colleagues, he didn't have insurance, so his receding years would draw him ever deeper into the void.

"I always kept coming to crossroads," he told me a couple of weeks ago. "I always found myself on the cusp of something. But by the time I got there, the train had already departed. No matter how early I left, it was gone. I kept missing happiness by a few minutes each time. By the end, I wasn't even sure what I had wanted to be in the first place."

What does it mean, you have to ask yourself, to be so close to something that you can taste it, yet still so far from it that nobody would believe you were ever there? It was similar, Junior felt, to his college football experience: you always believed you were lying to people when you told them you had done it, like you were fudging the record merely by reporting it wie es eigentlich gewesen, "how it had really happened."

In his wildest dreams, the imitation Jacks explained to me, he would've wrestled a match so pretty that no critic could ever think past it. It would be the match of which no greater could be conceived; and at the precise moment he lost, his shoulders pinned to the canvas for the "long three," he would vanish into thin air. There would be nothing left of him, no trace of his having existed at all. The match would linger in the minds of the fans who'd witnessed it, but they wouldn't know what it was that they saw, not really. Their memories would amount to nothing more than a digital picture of a xeroxed copy of a stenciled mimeo of a carbon copy of this golden original, an event that, in the words of another famous wrestler, could be "often imitated but never duplicated." He would've been his own man, at last, and gone forever.

But forget that childish fantasy: Junior keeps on keeping on, his dream deferred shriveling up like a raisin in the sun. "I'll be alright," he assured me. "I mean, how the hell else can I be?"
 Oliver Bateman tag:www.splicetoday.com,2005:Post/23226 2018-03-21T06:27:00-04:00 2018-03-20T23:59:48-04:00 2018 American League East Preview
When the Miami Marlins' Jeffrey Loria sold the team at the end of the 2017 season, most fans were happy. When he announced the sale to a group that included Derek Jeter (only four percent, but the face of the group), the "Jeter's next step" stories filled the baseball media. When Jeter announced the Marlins would trade their veterans and hit the reset button, an ugly scenario formulated in the imagination of all-non-Yankee AL East fans. Before we went through the coldest "hot stove" in recent memory, Giancarlo Stanton's name whipped around the rumor mill. Would he land in San Francisco? Would he join the NL Champion Dodgers lineup? St. Louis, filling the slugger's hole left behind by McGwire and then Pujols? In the end, Jeter and his co-owners sent Stanton to the Yankees for two relatively unknown prospects and Starlin Castro. This was a salary dump, and for those believing everything boils down to Red Sox-Yankees, a Jeter-wrapped gift that elevates the Yankees over the Red Sox, assuming Stanton stays healthy.

The team that led baseball with 241 homers in the juiced-ball 2017 season added the most powerful bat in the game. The 168-homer Red Sox (27th last season) would play an interminable waiting game with slugger J.D. Martinez. What a dismal way to follow the MLB winter. The already up-and-coming rival lands Stanton on top of an already loaded lineup. Then Red Sox fans waited with baited breath on a late-blooming outfielder/DH that went berserk after the Tigers traded him to Arizona last summer. From mid-December through late February, the stalemate ensued. It was clear super-villain/super-agent Scott Boras demanded five years for the 30 year-old Martinez. The Red Sox demanded provisions that would cover prolonged injury stints. Martinez missed the opening of the 2017 season with a foot issue that lingered longer than expected. Eventually, the injury insurance was granted. The five years (and $122 million) were granted. The Red Sox have a clean-up hitter again after a year of less-than-inspiring fourth-place-in-the-order slugging. On to the previews, in predicted order of finish.

New York Yankees: The over-under sits at 94.5. The health of Stanton is a legitimate concern. Since his first full season (2011) he's played more than 123 games in a year just twice (2014, 2017). Some of the injuries were pure bad luck (hit by pitch in face and hit on the hand/wrist), and a few came toward the end of summer, when it seems his huge frame (6'6", 240 lbs.) wore down. Playing in the humidity of Miami probably didn't help. Regardless of the previous years, Stanton was ridiculous in July and August, smacking 30 homers in only 54 games. Was the ball juiced? The general consensus among those that write intelligently about MLB: Yes, Indeed. Will it be juiced again? With all the negative attention, probably not so obviously. In addition, one of baseball's best hitters parks (Arizona) will now use a humidor, which is predicted to have an even more dramatic effect than the humidor used to equalize matters in Denver.

Zooming out, Aaron Judge and Stanton will hit homers regardless of what type of baseball MLB tosses onto the field. The AL East's pitchers have to hope that Stanton puts extra pressure on himself and doesn't deal well with chilly April games, and that Judge reverts back to chasing pitches off the plate. Even if they both underperform, the Yankees lineup is more balanced than it has been in years. Aaron Hicks, once a top prospect with the Twins, showed great patience at the plate and plays a solid center field. Gary Sanchez' power is real. First baseman Greg Bird has been hindered by foot injuries, but shown flashes of becoming a true three-outcome (HR, BB, SO) hitter. The lefty takes clear advantage of the short right field porch. Shortstop Didi Gregorious put up his best offensive season (.796 OPS), and Brett Gardner went 20-20 with a nearly identical OPS (.778). As if they needed more depth, the Yankees added young doubles-machine Brandon Drury to play third, and aging Neil Walker (another lefty who pulls the ball) to cover second base.

The Yankees will be relying on Sonny Gray, Masahiro Tanaka, and Luis Severino to anchor the rotation. The back end, C.C. Sabathia and Jordan Montgomery, leave them vulnerable. New York's bullpen (Chapman, Robertson, Betances, Kahnle, Green) will pick them up whenever needed. The AL East has been a hyper-competitive division for a while now. This year, with Baltimore and Tampa Bay likely taking steps backward, the wins will pile up at the top.

Prediction: 96 wins, an epic division race, and at least 225 homers.

Boston Red Sox: Boston Globe sportswriter Alex Speier was recently interviewed on Baseball Prospectus' Effectively Wild podcast. In describing the Red Sox hitting woes of 2017, he listed roughly a dozen nagging injuries. Xander Bogaerts (hand, wrist) and Dustin Pedroia (knee) were the obvious ones, but also mentioned were Mookie Betts (wrist, thumb), Jackie Bradley Jr. (knee, thumb) and a few others.

If you followed the Red Sox closely last year, you may have started expecting runners on second to get stranded there, waiting for help that rarely came. Of course, that's an exaggeration. The team still scored 785 runs, 10th in the majors. On the other hand, they were 22nd in team OPS. That discrepancy was noticeable. Opposing pitchers didn't fear the lineup. A sequence of single, walk, strikeout, single (run scored) is much less demoralizing than single, strikeout, strikeout, home run (two runs scored). The home run revives the crowd. And the 29 other MLB teams seemed aware that fly balls were going farther than they used to in 2017. Numerous players openly described adapting their swings in order to launch lower pitches. Jose Bautista was ahead of his time.

Starting with the absence of David Ortiz, it may have been the case that every young Red Sox player who has yet to land a long-term contract (all of the "B" fellows) pressed too much without the presence of Big Papi. In the Boston pressure cooker, without the release valve that was Big Papi, or the veteran Pedroia (who may not play 120 games in a season again), the young Red Sox bats had some lean stretches. They dealt with minor injuries. Perhaps Betts will never again hit for as much power as he did in 2016. He's said as much in interviews. He knows his strength is doing everything well: he's not Giancarlo Stanton or David Ortiz. It will likely take two-three more years for Andrew Benintendi to become a legitimate power threat. He turns 24 in July.

Back to the idea of the Red Sox and homers. Now they've landed another slugger, Martinez, who will take some of the pressure off of everyone else… assuming he handles the pressure of his own massive contract in a media market often waiting for shiny new free agents to fall short of crazy expectations.

Now let's discuss the potentially dominant starting rotation. Potentially being the operative word. Chris Sale's electric first four months were shadowed by a similar issue he's had throughout his career: an end-of-year slump that involves giving up lots of those homers. During Spring Training, Sale has described a personal goal of working more economically and wasting fewer pitches (subtext: less concerned with the strikeouts…which are also sexy, and which he tallied 308 of last year). Sale's lone postseason outing against Houston surely left a sour taste in his mouth.

David Price's elbow betrayed him early on in the season. With lots of rest, he was excellent out of the bullpen in September and against Houston. Price's return to dominance may be the biggest wild card in Boston's quest for a postseason berth.

Drew Pomeranz was Boston's best starter during the second half of the season (8-2, 3.01 ERA, only eight homers allowed in 83.2 innings). Without that performance, the Red Sox likely would've succumbed to the wild-card spot, rather than hold on to the AL East crown. Pomeranz becomes a free agent next winter. Pomeranz has missed some of the spring with "forearm tightness." Though that can be an indicator of a significant elbow injury, it seems this one is a mere flexor strain, whatever that is. Count me as one of those fans expecting to lean heavily on Pomeranz' success if the Red Sox are to win the division this year. Pomeranz isn't expected to miss more than one or two starts at the beginning of the year.

After the top three, new manager Alex Cora will be crossing his fingers that high-upside lefty Eduardo Rodriguez has seen the last of his knee-problems following off-season surgery. Rodriguez is expected back in the rotation by May. Rick Porcello has had a tumultuous ride over the course of his first three seasons in Boston. In 2015, his peripheral stats showed he wasn't as bad as his 4.92 ERA indicated. In 2016, he won the Cy Young, going 22-4 with a 3.15 ERA that was better than his expected ERA (FIP 3.40). And then there was last year. Leading the league in hits allowed (236), homers allowed (38) and general disappointment (unquantifiable), Porcello was more like Poor Cello. Ironically, it was the first season in which his expected ERA (4.60) matchup up with his actual ERA (4.65). The fly-ball revolution was not kind to Porcello, who relies on a heavy sinker and pinpoint command. After Rodriguez and Porcello, the Red Sox have knuckleballer Steven Wright as an option, though he isn't fully healthy either. Without Pomeranz and Rodriguez, the Red Sox will lean on lefty Brian Johnson and journeyman Hector Velasquez early on.

Two of the higher-end relievers Boston acquired over the last two years have barely pitched. Carson Smith (via Seattle) and Tyler Thornburg (via Milwaukee) would add much-needed insurance to the 7th and 8th innings for Boston. Closer Craig Kimbrel is as close as one could hope to a sure thing. The wacky fireballer Joe Kelly had his best year in Boston, though he struggled in some big August games against the Yankees. If healthy, Smith and Thornburg would give Boston plenty to surround Kimbrel, Kelly, Matt Barnes and Brandon Workman.

Prediction: 95 wins, an epic division race and a wild-card berth.

The last three-team previews will be succinct!

Toronto Blue Jays: Josh Donaldson doesn't have the surrounding cast he did two years ago. Justin Smoak reinvented himself last year. Even if he repeats, the outfield is weak, and the pitching needs too many things to go right. Prediction: 84 wins.

Tampa Bay Rays: Longoria long gone. Tampa has hit the reset button once again, but this team can't overachieve like the Rays have done so often in the last decade.

Prediction: 74 wins and Chris Archer leaves after 2019.

Baltimore Orioles: What a sad situation in Baltimore. Manny Machado is so good. And so close to leaving. The pitching just can't keep up with Boston or New York. The hitting is homer-heavy and not well-balanced. At least Jonathan Schoop is fun to watch. Dylan Bundy will strike you out. Andrew Cashner will not.

Prediction: 70 wins and empty seats in September.
 Jonah Hall tag:www.splicetoday.com,2005:Post/23228 2018-03-21T05:56:00-04:00 2018-03-20T22:15:24-04:00 Baseball Fan: Why I Can't Do This Anymore
In an effort to solve the annual problem of predicting the upcoming MLB season, a ritual I've both detested and relished since 1972, I've turned to a 1977 textbook published by Thomas Books called "Leisure Counseling; An Aspect of Leisure Education."

Here's the lede of the front cover blurb highlighting its mission: "The responsibility of filling large blocks of time—a problem introduced by increased automation, shorter working hours and the waning work ethic—has become a cumbersome burden for many people. This book is designed to aid counselors, therapists, and park and recreation personnel working both institutional and community settings who want to help their clients use their free time more effectively. Personality and needs assessment, values clarification and special problems of alcoholics, parolees, the mentally retarded, psychiatric patients and retirees are examined…"

In other words: the Cincinnati Reds defeat the Cleveland Indians in the 2018 World Series. Joey Votto, perhaps the most dangerous hitter no one's heard of, suffers from depression and has dealt with severe anxiety over the past several campaigns. This upcoming season, Votto hits .400 and leads his team to the promised land. He will become the white, Canadian Muhammad Ali of baseball. Some will see him as the Mayor of Kooksville, others as a messiah wearing a first baseman's glove bearing fame and fortune in the Queen City not seen since the days of Antonacio "Tony" Perez Rigal, a Hall of Famer who hails from Cuba and was an integral cog in The Big Red Machine. All hail Joey Votto.

The Ohio-centric October clash will piss off most of the baseball community, as it should, especially when the vaunted Yankees go down and the Cubs implode and the After School Special script writers in Houston come up blank when the game calls for crucial scenes not involving Charlie Morton or Brian McCann. I'm not touching the playoff scenarios or the Wild Card "win probabilities" that have become sort of a Jonestown Flav-or-Aid for many online writers to consume. Crutches made of numbers and stats no longer interest me. Stand on your own two feet.

Russian hackers will no doubt quickly subvert the unearned arrogance already seeping from the self-vaunted and unfortunately-named "The Athletic" sportswriting website that's hawking actual "subscriptions" in this day and age (what is this, Grit?). In this day of fancy-free Internet non-compensation, the word appalling comes to mind if I'm supposed to enter credit card numbers in order to read suddenly sacrosanct hacks from failing regional dailies all over the land. No thanks. I'll take outdated and inaccurate Bleacher Report feeds any day over yet another predictable Ken Rosenthal sermon about Mike Trout or Bryce Harper and their chalk predictions. The failed ESPN "vertical" Grantland with its spittle-covered grave wasn't lesson enough? The bleary-eyed boredom of "Sports on Earth" doesn't drive you away? The outright douchery of VICE Sports still gets a click or two?

In contrast to the annoying vapor screens with unloadable graphics on mobile devices, this lovely hardback version of Leisure Counseling tome came to me in a moment of winter weakness in front of a free bookshelf at the Dorian Gray-style Rhinecliff, NY Amtrak facility, a crumbling structure along the Hudson River that could've been used for various scenes from The Natural if the film had been shot in Eastern New York instead of Western New York. It sat unclaimed for weeks next to copies of Dennis Lehane thrillers and unread Ian McEwan paperbacks and self-help books.

As a taxi driver I stood all winter clad in Carhartt trousers over long-john thermal underwear in front of an ancient steam radiator waiting for transportation-hungry train passengers disembarking at Rhinecliff. Staring into the high windows and cobwebbed arches, I waited for Andrew McCutchen to be traded and listened to porcine Mets fans talk about Adrian Gonzalez and the hope springing from the preponderance of Juan Legares.

Taxi customers varied with the ebb and flow of winter travel. Perhaps it would be an odd trio of British dandies bound for the winter lodges of Phoenicia ($80 fare) or the more typical cadaverous senior citizen couples bored with the Harvard Club and destined for a weekend of heavy gravy and silty red wine at the Beekman Arms Hotel in Rhinebeck ($8 fare). Don't matter to me, I'm Travis Bickle in a Pirates baseball cap. I've got a metal Roberto Clemente baseball card wedged into the fake wainscoting on the front dashboard of a bone white 2006 Lincoln Zephyr with dodgy sway bars but pretty good acceleration. I know what time the liquor stores close and whether of not you can get bubble tea within a 10-mile radius of your destination. I have Band-Aids, an NYC TAXI Bic lighter for your cigarette and maps of area hiking trails if you must be so bold, but please don't.

After the hype of Jose Altuve and the racially insensitive hairdo shortstop guy in Houston last October, I've found that I relish the regular season now more than the post-season. A charming three-game sweep in June in Kansas City (interleague scourge) or a series win in Arizona is much more interesting to me than which closer will be used for four innings in Game Two of a Divisional Series played late at night God knows where. I vow to spend this regular season upcoming counting mound visits by moribund catchers (I like to call the new rule The Jorge Posada Rule because if David Cone or Andy Pettitte was pitching, he would make up to 50 tediously long mound visits over six innings to make sure he knew what cologne the hurlers were wearing when they wanted to opt for a 2-0 slider.)

And enough with the analytics and the PECOTA and the WAR. Just stop already. Pick me out a winner, Bobby, my homemade bat has cracked during a crucial late season game. I hope McCutchen hits .300 in San Francisco. They are starting early this season because the players told their union they want more off days. March 29 will no doubt be frigid when the Pirates pull into Detroit for yet another Interleague Season Opener. At least the Mets get a traditional foe in the Cardinals at Citi Field on the same day. And when the always low-budget Bucs arrive in Steelers and Penguins country for their home opener, they go up against the Coen Brothers-sponsored Minnesota Twins for another non-rivalry, who-cares home opener that will warrant 30 seconds and several Fargo jokes on ESPN's SportsCenter. Suddenly, every Pirates fan is Joey Votto but without the actual Napoleon Dynamite "skills."

Back to the Leisure Counseling text, if you please. Page 94 has a subhead asking "What are The Four Temperaments?" In 1951, some dude named Karl A. Lund figured out four temperaments that made up individual personality. These four concepts also sum up every baseball franchise among the secret Society of Wealth that is MLB. Here they are, in a nutshell of groupings.

Temperament 1: Melancholic. "Appears to be slow in movement and thought" because of a "sombre mood, without actually being physically heavy" according to the book. This would include the Detroit Tigers, Oakland Athletics, San Diego Padres, Chicago White Sox, Seattle Mariners, Atlanta Braves, Kansas City Royals, Tampa Bay Rays and Texas Rangers.

Temperament 2: Phlegmatic. "Possesses physical bulk but is lacking in vigor, usually displaying a certain amount of clumsiness." Pittsburgh Pirates, Philadelphia Phillies, New York Mets, Baltimore Orioles, St. Louis Cardinals, Toronto Blue Jays and Minnesota Twins all come to mind.

Temperament 3: Sanguine. "Are extroverts, desiring to come into contact with all that is new and living fully in the present." These would be your Washington Nationals, New York Yankees, Houston Astros, Chicago Cubs, Los Angeles Dodgers, Anaheim Angels, San Francisco Giants and Arizona Diamondbacks. It all makes west coast sense.

Temperament 4: Choleric. "Has a firm, concentrated, compact body... capable of standing up to the most incredible endurance tests… courageous, often to the point of being foolhardy." That would be your Milwaukee Brewers, Cincinnati Reds, Colorado Rockies, Cleveland Indians, Boston Red Sox and Miami Marlins (Expect Derek Jeter effigies to burn in Little Cuba by Flag Day.)

As for outdated figures that are managers: Despite upgrades in Philadelphia, Gabe Kapler will be an outright disaster. Buck Showalter might retire this year when Manny Machado is dealt at the deadline. Ron Gardenhire's crucifixion in Detroit will gleefully be overseen by the Centurions of SABRE, Clint Hurdle will no doubt be fired in September once the Steelers training camp has opened as will the C-list guy in Queens who'll somehow keep David Wright on the roster despite his needing Stephen Hawking's now-available wheelchair to prepare for a game.

Enjoy the regular season, fans, and I'll see you at the napkin-free MLB postseason vomitorium as usual.
 Spike Vrusho tag:www.splicetoday.com,2005:Post/23223 2018-03-20T05:56:00-04:00 2018-03-19T21:01:33-04:00 The NFL Draft is a Meat Market
After graduating from college in December 2001, I accepted a position as an assistant manager for Abercrombie & Fitch. The employer was loathsome—all of the claims alleged in Gonzalez v. Abercrombie & Fitch Stores were true to my experience—but the worst part of the job was meeting on Sunday mornings with the rest of the management team to grade the appearances of the minimum wage-earning, merchandise discount-receiving brand representatives. That's right: we sat around and assigned grades, A-F, to the hapless souls we'd recruited off the sales floor to wear and fold what were supposedly that season's hottest articles of clothing.

Some of the other managers were merciless—a result, no doubt, of the sort of arrogance that often accompanies a position of minor authority. Women with figures that weren't even the least bit "full" were derided as obese. One of our better folders, a male of East Indian descent, was described as "stockroom quality" (meaning he should be kept in the back, where he could pass his time applying security sensors to the merchandise). A young African-American male with bright green braces was a source of enduring controversy. Although our most enthusiastic worker, he was despised by upper management, who wanted him removed from the schedule as soon as possible.

"He's not collegiate. He's not quality. What he doing out there?" the regional manager once asked.

"Folding," I replied. "He's the only person we have who is any good at that, including me."

"He's got to go," I was told.

So for weeks I closed the store by my lonesome, as all of the "collegiate" and "quality" employees proved far more unreliable than the brand rep with the green braces. I'd dodge his calls as best I could, but since he lived nearby, he'd often arrive unsolicited, only to find me working far harder than I would've liked. On more than one occasion, he worked off the clock to help me close.

"We just don't have the hours for you," I'd assure him, in the process feeling about as lowdown and despicable as a person could possibly feel.

After giving my two weeks' notice, I learned from a pair of co-workers that I graded out as a solid B, for what it's worth. "But hey, you're totally too smart to be working here anyway," one of them added.

I retell this story for two reasons. First, Abercrombie & Fitch was, and perhaps still is, an awful company. I guess it'll be filing for bankruptcy soon, which is where it and the hermetically-sealed indoor malls where its stores are often located should've gone a long time ago. Second, if you've got anything resembling a conscience, objectifying others in the normal course of business is unpleasant. On the incessant objectification of women, much has already appeared elsewhere, written by individuals not approaching the subject from the position of gender, race, and socioeconomic privilege that I possess. But I do know what it's like to be other-ized (i.e., "man's desire is the desire of the other") after having acquaintances and colleagues affix labels to me such as "buff guy," "totally my type," "a real musclebear," "so wholesome," and so on. The recognition that someone, anyone, happens to be desiring you as a means of gratifying their own base urges is disconcerting.

I recall a tidal wave of articles published in the wake of the Steven Soderbergh film Magic Mike, most asking more or less the same thing: are men now being objectified in the same ways as women? This question, while far from irrelevant, doesn't strike me as the best question to ask... and even then, it's not a question worth asking about Magic Mike or any subsequent example of beefy cheesecake (the so-called "Golden Age" of bodybuilding in the late 1940s and early 1950s would be a far better place to commence such an analysis).

This, thank the fates, is an essay about male objectification that has nothing whatsoever to do with Magic Mike or Magic Mike XXL—which I haven't seen but which I've been assured by friends is a perfectly fine film, perhaps even an improvement on the original. It's instead about one of the principal but largely overlooked means of male objectification in our society: the endless 24/7 sports scouting now adjunct to all major fields of collegiate and professional endeavor. Its fullest flowering is the NFL Draft, an event that occurs but once per year yet is covered non-stop, as if it were always mere moments away. The NFL Draft's official website is a multimedia hootenanny, consisting of thousands of clips of brawny men running 40-yard dashes, bench-pressing 225 pounds for reps, and jumping as high as they possibly can.

When reading through its list of prospects, one encounters descriptions of players similar to this one. "Thick arms eat up ball carriers coming into his path. Quick, small dancer's feet and a bit of short-area speed to spin off blocks inside and follow plays across the field. A bit dense and doughy around the midsection. Potential for weight problems has dogged him throughout his career. Huge hands—can palm a basketball. Gorgeous acceleration off the block. Always-pumping tree trunk thighs allow him to overpower opposing blockers."

What, I wonder, are we to make of that sexualized description? Some would contend that because the recipient of such high praise may soon become a very wealthy man, he, like Kate Upton et al., is "asking for it" (whatever that means). By making himself eligible for a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to develop chronic traumatic encephalopathy, he has given license to analysts ranging from Mel Kiper, Jr. (who has played just as much football as my cat has) to Skip Bayless (ditto) to inveigh against his "doughy body" and "lack of intangibles." And the owner of this huge body will be covered and, uh, uncovered (literally: athletes are made to strip down at the NFL Combine to ensure that accurate measurements of hands, hips, etc. are taken) on a loop as we enter the bleak period in early spring when the only things to report on are the NBA (who cares?), the NHL (is that even real?), and college hoops (irrelevant until the Sweet 16 and irrelevant again after the Final Four).

For someone who's consumed sports programming in a thoughtless, uncritical way for decades—as mere filler to occupy life's thousands of empty hours—the realization of how dehumanizing this process of talent evaluation is, and how close it is to the wretched labor I once undertook for Abercrombie & Fitch, came as a shock. And it's not just pro athletes: Creepy "scouts" follow around teens and pre-teens in the hopes of discovering an individual who will grow, like a prize pig or cow, into yet another over-hyped "next big thing" (George Dohrmann's Play Their Hearts Out offers one particularly compelling example of this twisted reality).

There are, I suppose, certain redeeming aspects of athletic competition, but I'm convinced that those are primarily personal: the thrill of you yourself bench-pressing 400 pounds, running a six-minute mile, or dunking a basketball. These are genuine achievements that, even if exceeded by many others, leave you with a sense of satisfaction. The rest of it, this ceaseless watching and critiquing ("look at the body on that guy," "what a monster down in the low post," and so on), strikes me as born of ressentiment: a frustrated coach and frustrated fans living through one or two fine pieces of beef who gambol and cut-block and swim as they too would have, if only they had grown to 6'8" or run 4.4 40-yard dashes or posted some other arbitrary exercise statistic. And what of these young Apollos, these he-men with the strapping physiques and the can't-miss talent, as they make their way through careers that end inevitably in the pain of early retirement? Well, most wind up as frustrated and broken-down husks of the men they never were but many others thought they could have been. My father was one of these "rotten old jockstraps"—his words, not mine—and I never stopped feeling sorry for him.

Instead of concerning ourselves with superhuman running back Saquon Barkley's "can't miss" pro potential, perhaps we ought to focus on our own rec league performances and 5k runs. By ceasing to objectify the lives of these putative sports demigods, we might draw closer to our own potential, however limited that potential proves to be.
 Oliver Bateman tag:www.splicetoday.com,2005:Post/23195 2018-03-13T05:55:00-04:00 2018-03-13T00:01:32-04:00 The British Style
"Once I transitioned away from hardcore and into the British style, that's when things picked up for me," explained long-time indie wrestling star Chris Hero in an interview for RF Video. "And when I finally got the chance to go to England to wrestle, it was everything I expected."

No offense to the portly yet astonishingly agile Hero, who currently wrestles in NXT as the under-utilized Kassius Ohno, but that smacks of the way Jack Kerouac conceptualized Mexico: more as symbol than something real, and impossible to grasp even when actually visiting. Hero could no more have conceived of England's illustrious grappling history during his bucolic Ohio boyhood than Canuck Kerouac could've comprehended the fullness of Mexico from his childhood vantage point in Massachusetts. By the time they had gotten where they wanted to go, it was already too late: whatever new things they saw soon became indistinguishable from what they had seen in their mind's eyes.

This is a subject near to my heart, I suppose, because we're now 20 years from 1998—the year Hero and I both graduated from high school. 1998 was the year, after much trying on tape-trading forums, that I secured a copy of a VHS tape featuring some World of Sport wrestling matches from the UK. I'd already purchased, at great personal cost to a kid whose father was at the time "too poor to pay attention," taped compilations of matches from Japan.

These tapes were always overpriced, paid with money orders from cash scrounged or stolen from various wallets, and the stories that unfolded on them were incoherent. There was no context: suddenly there was a match with Gary Albright, then one with Tatsumi Fujinami, then another with Steve Williams. Matches from the early-1980s involving Dynamite Kid were mashed together with those of his early-1990s epigone, "Pegasus Kid" Chris Benoit. It was nigh-impossible to piece any of it together, aside from the obvious fact that the Japanese matches were faster-paced and better-worked than their domestic equivalents.

The British wrestling I received was even worse: a grainy video of obese superman "Big Daddy" Shirley Crabtree belly-bumping with the even fatter Giant Haystacks, some early footage of Dave "Fit" Finlay sporting a moustache and working through a series of brisk wristlocks and double wristlocks, a few sloppy-bodied guys from the 1970s who reminded me of my maternal grandfather trading rest holds, the masked wrestler Kendo Nagasaki engaged in some weird pre-match ritual. This, I marveled, had set me back $20?

Never mind. I was always behind the eight-ball in that regard, the acquisition of trivial knowledge, because I'd really only lived through two eras of wrestling: the post-Wrestlemania II era in the WWE, and the mid-1980s heyday of Jim Crockett Promotions wrestling on TBS. This meant that I knew the great manager Gary Hart from his work with the J-Tex Corporation—Terry Funk, Dick Slater, Buzz Sawyer, and the incomparable Great Muta—but wasn't familiar with his prior involvement with World Class Championship Wrestling in Dallas.

So when I waded into the worlds of wrestling fanfiction and wrestling discussion boards, I realized the nerd-space had already been colonized by people who were older or at least more worldly with regard to their wrestling knowledge. The old people knew the regional promotions like the backs of their hands and the rich kids had their New Japan and Universal Wrestling Federation tapes catalogued in sequence. I was scraping towards a rudimentary awareness of the whole, albeit for no real reason than that I was tremendously lonely and took consolation in watching these musclemen trade holds. It seemed like true understanding was a long way off.

In time, I came to understand the British style. I learned that grapplers like Jackie Pallo and Mick McManus, lumpy bodies and all, worked tight matches in a small ring built around near-constant holds. Closed-fist punches were carefully policed and done only by the bad guys when the referee wasn't looking; legal forearm smashes and "European uppercuts" provided the bulk of the fisticuffs. Unless you were a huge monster such as Big Daddy or Giant Haystacks, you were expected to do kip-ups, bridge out of holds, and execute wrestling rolls. The athletes' bodies were largely devoid of steroidal bloat or even much in the way of weight-room conditioning—Finlay, William Regal, Dynamite Kid, and Davey Boy Smith all beefed up after they came stateside—and the ethnic gimmicks, jungle men and tiny "Orientals," reflected a national tolerance for gross racial caricature that went far beyond what I encountered growing up in the American South.

Simon Garfield's excellent oral history The Wrestling, possibly the best wrestling book ever written, filled in the remaining pieces after I acquired a copy of its second edition in 2007. It had originally dropped in 1996 to widespread acclaim in the UK, given that the British fondness for wrestling remained strong even after World of Sport had left the ITV lineup amid declining ratings and a desire among the Oxbridge set to remove wrestling from television altogether. "They ran opinion polls and there were ten million people who wanted wrestling back on," Giant Haystacks assured Garfield.

Such expertise, at least on my end, was hard-earned. I'd spent the better part of 20 years running down a working knowledge of wrestling in Japan—including worked-MMA variants like Pancrase and Pride—and, to a lesser extent, England. I marked out for the likes of Men's Teioh, Mitsuharu Misawa, William Regal, Finlay, and their ilk, because they were thought to do things the "right way." They were "hard men," they "worked stiff," they made it "look like a shoot." Watching Regal, drug-addled by his own later admission, gobble up Sting at the Great American Bash in '96, Larry Zbyszko on WCW Saturday Night in '94 and Chris Benoit at the Brian Pillman Memorial in '00, brought joy to my heart.

Great for me and my heart, I suppose. I reveled in all this secret knowledge during wrestling's brief renaissance during the Steve Austin heyday and when it declined into bra-and-panty matches and Batista main events. I read every wrestler autobiography released, sought out every DVD shoot interview, all the in hope of goodness knows what. You certainly couldn't write about this for a mainstream audience—David Meltzer and PWTorch and those places had that on lockdown, and they served up delectable fare to the smark diehards. Nor could I write about this subject in grad school while I worked on my Ph.D., which ended up being about education finance litigation and not the pumped-up bodies of 1980s WWE stars. The latter topic would've been novel for its time, the mid-2000s, but as David Shoemaker noted in a Grantland essay headlined "Why Wrestling Matters," nobody was allowed to write about this subject in a serious way, meaning in a way that amounted to something less than an abstruse university press monograph but something more than the matter-of-fact trade literature Meltzer and Wade Keller produced with metronomic regularity.

Now in 2018, everybody's written a "wrestling and politics" article. Anyone who watched a second or two of the Attitude Era has tied themselves into this massive social network for wrestling takes, which is good for people like Michael Elgin, Keith Lee, Cody Rhodes, Kenny Omega, Matt Winchester, Austin Aries, and the many other misfit grapplers who are earning decent livings outside the WWE's purview. But it's also sad, because every Millennial observer becomes an instant expert on any new wrestling thing that hits, and somehow the wrestling collective is instantly an expert on the same new things.

So, yes, of course the English wrestling was worth studying. Who doesn't stream NJPW? Who isn't subscribing to the Highspots video network? The rush to produce content about this subject is ceaseless, but aside from those who were there from the beginning, much of it's oddly sophomoric. Admittedly, it's less bad in terms of wrestling, where any couch potato can watch 10 hours of World Class on the WWE Network and become an adequate pseudo-expert, than it is in fitness, where every relocated Brooklynite who's performed a 45-pound push press at a CrossFit "wod" is entitled to wax philosophical about the subject.

I suppose I shouldn't care as much about this, but I have little else to care for. I never read comics, watched wrestling, or lifted weights in order to accomplish anything but pass the time during a long day's journey into night, so the emergence of these subjects as matters of serious public consideration—often written about by Millennial writers stumbling upon them, as an anthropologist might an aboriginal tribe—has left me ambivalent. It's good to see such things talked about, but to see them talked about so poorly, when I, an old and tired hand, could at least speak whatever truth remains in my body? And what am I to feel when some near-novice goes viral after a red-hot take, Lauren Duca-style, in the process sidelining and silencing many people who have spent years immersing themselves in various obscure activities?

Mind you, I'm no slavish, Tom Nichols-esque admirer of expertise and bemoaner of its demise. The degrees and certifications I've obtained have little if anything to do with the actual body of knowledge I've developed. But let's face facts: for those of us whose histories are scarified on our Xennial bodies, whose truths were hard-earned in a world that changed radically between 1998 and now, there remains a tremendous fear that it was all for nothing, that 500 words of puffery arriving at the right time and in the right publication could wipe it away, that it wasn't worth the html it was printed on.

The British wrestling wasn't what I expected, pace Chris Hero, but neither was anything else.
 Oliver Bateman tag:www.splicetoday.com,2005:Post/23162 2018-03-06T05:56:00-05:00 2018-03-06T07:49:24-05:00 Joe Biden, Performance-Enhanced Alpha Male
When Joe Biden makes his bid for the White House in 2020, he'll be 77. No one will say much about that, though, because Biden has a lustrous tan, shiny white teeth, and wispy, corn-colored hair. Like well-preserved Ronald "Dutch" Reagan before him, Biden has a certain kind of embalmed perma-youthfulness to him, and the pancake makeup he slathers on only furthers the illusion that he's a spry, vigorous Man of the People. He's not, of course, but who cares?

"Diamond Joe" has always seemed like 25 percent of a legendary Democratic politician: he's got a great presence and can work the room. Talking Points Memo posted an amazing video of Biden in action. Watch that sequence carefully: so much of Biden's appeal rests on his performance enhanced teeth, tan, and hair.

There's little else in his record that stands out besides this legacy of enhancements. He enhanced his performance during the '88 Democratic primary by cribbing from old Neil Kinno and Bobby Kennedy speeches. He enhanced his academic record by claiming a higher rank in his law school class than he actually had and to have earned degrees he didn't possess. And then, perhaps most unforgivably, he utterly botched the Judiciary Committee hearings on the Supreme Court nomination of Clarence Thomas, thereby inadvertently enhancing the performance of a man who was himself extremely troubled in a number of respects.

But hey, you know what? Joe Biden hates those nasty steroid cheats. We know this because he has offered one ringing denunciation after another of those wretched men who dared do anything to outperform him on the baseball diamond or the gridiron (he was, it seems, a back on the Delaware Blue Hens football team for two years, though he never won a varsity letter or, even more surprisingly given his own history, claimed to have won one).

He's not alone in his contempt for these terrible villains; lamenting the further cheapening of our always-cheap, always-disreputable athletic spectacles has been something of a cottage industry since Teddy Roosevelt first inveighed against the squalid, bloodthirsty nature of college football. In an unparalleled display of political heroism, Biden went to the barricades in 1989 (and against the recommendation of the American Medical Association) to have anabolic steroids reclassified as Schedule III controlled substances.

He said the following: "The illegal use of anabolic steroids is a major drug abuse problem in this country. Steroids are dangerous drugs that threaten the physical and mental health of hundreds of thousands of young people."

In 2004, when the Controlled Substances Act was further amended to remove the thorny requirement that an anabolic steroid had to actually "increase muscle growth," Biden was that bill's sponsor, too.

Theoretically, anything could now be deemed bad and thereafter banned, and for no reason at all. Because I said so. Lawmaking in many instances is necessarily arbitrary— most of us are okay with ages of consent and speed limits, at least in theory —but it isn't capricious (18-year swings in the age of consent by county, for example, might cause some big problems).

This revised 2004 CSA, however, is both. But don't take my word for it: dehydroepiandrosterone (DHEA), which most studies have concluded is at best a placebo, is on the list! With regard to his frivolous, fruitless hearings on the sullying of America's national pastime by its naughtiest drug cheats, Biden said the following:

 "Many believe we should have more important things to investigate than Major League Baseball. To a certain extent, I agree: This is clearly not the No.1 issue facing Congress. But congressional hearings on baseball's steroids scandal are hardly a trivial pursuit. Our national pastime faces questions more serious than the legitimacy of modern-day home run records. High school athletes watch their sports heroes bend and even break the rules, and they believe their own success may depend on emulating the pros."

Fine.

Little John Boy is going to start gulping down dianabol tabs (the pill of choice for steroid ingénues) in a feverish and ultimately doomed quest to catch up with "Big Mac" McGwire and the other home run heroes he admires. He'll fail, he'll experience "roid rage," he'll have a heart attack. QED.

Say it ain't so, "Tailback Joe!" When Biden made his push to classify anabolic steroids as controlled substances in 1989, the American Medical Association responded with an extremely detailed report of its own, the principal point of which is excerpted here:

"Anabolic steroids have an accepted use in the treatment of several medical conditions, including certain anemias, hereditary angioedema, and breast cancer. Moreover, anabolic steroids can be used safely under medical supervision. [Instead of adding steroids to the CSA]...one appropriate and effective approach to [controlling misuse of steroids] is by increasing the criminal penalty for sale of steroids without a prescription."

All kidding aside, this is a subject in which I'm extremely invested. Readers see "anabolic steroids" in whatever article they're skimming and the knee-jerk reaction is to relate that to "bad guys," to "cheaters," and so forth. We engage in similar denunciations when we see those digitally-enhanced Cosmo covers; it appears that, in our willingness to entertain any moral outrage whatsoever so long as it enables us to feel something (but not too much, and assuredly not anything that shakes us to the core of our being or forces us to remake society or anything else that's so dangerously 1917-y), we can't wait to decry the wretchedness of our coarsened and relativistic society.

The 1992 wrestling steroid show trials, the so-called "Zahorian Affair," warrant mention. In that situation, performers working at the mercy of steroid-using WWF magnate Vince McMahon were supplied with anabolic steroids by George Zahorian, a friendly neighborhood physician who would apparently write anyone a prescription for anything (Zahorian was a "croaker," in 1950s drug slang). Their decision to "juice," in light of the national mania for Schwarznegger-ian muscle mass and a standing order from McMahon to keep the title belts on beefcake types, was perfectly reasonable. They were labor; McMahon was capital.

These bodies of theirs, you have to understand, are working bodies, mere tools of the trade. If Robert De Niro underwent sex reassignment to really "sell" a role, there's a good chance he'd win at least one or two of the lesser acting awards for his courageous choice. Even the great steroid fighter Joe Biden, as I mentioned above, has enhanced those parts of his body—his teeth, hair, and complexion— that contribute to his greatest skill, which is walking around a room and shaking people's hands.

There are genuine issues of goodness or badness to worry about in the world. Most involve very rich people grinding up the bones of very poor people to make their daily bread. They don't involve athletically gifted semi-somebodies injecting themselves with various substances in an effort to tear off a tiny piece of the giant money pie. They do at least tangentially involve Joe Biden, who chose to enhance his profile by scoring cheap political points at the expense of baseball-playing semi-somebodies whose only real "crimes" appear to be that they were much better at sports than Biden ever was. To paraphrase the Kansas newsman William Allen White, that's all right. There is absolutely nothing wrong with such a state of affairs.

"Every prospect pleases and only man is vile."
 Oliver Bateman tag:www.splicetoday.com,2005:Post/23151 2018-03-05T06:58:00-05:00 2018-03-04T22:11:42-05:00 The Making and Faking of Pro Wrestling
I'd known almost since I began watching it that professional wrestling was a load of hooey. My mom, who took entirely too much satisfaction in dispelling childhood illusions, wasted little time in telling me so. Nevertheless, I derived a measure of solace from the fact that these cartoonish characters were at least musclemen nonpareil. Then I saw Dino Bravo thrill WWE fans by attempting to set a phony bench press record at the Royal Rumble.

Bravo, a skilled middle-of-the-card wrestler from the 1970s who'd eventually wind up shot to death by mafia hitmen, had reinvented himself in the late 1980s by beefing up to play the role of "the World's Strongest Man" in feuds against WWE stalwarts such as equally beefed-up Don "The Rock" Muraco and former football player "Hacksaw" Jim Duggan. "The World's Strongest Man" is a recognizable type in the wrestling commedia dell'arte, and has been performed with great skill by actual strongmen Ken Patera, Bert Assirati, Crusher Blackwell, and Mark Henry.

The bloated Bravo appeared out of his element when given a bar loaded with phony York plates and a more-than-generous spot from future Minnesota governor Jesse "The Body" Ventura. I'd just watched my 18-year-old half-brother complete an actual repetition with 405 pounds on the barbell and could still recall my father working with similarly heavy weights during the prior decade. Nothing either did ever amounted to anything close to a 715-pound raw bench—that wouldn't happen until Scott Mendelson pulled it off in 2006—but none of it looked as stupidly easy as Bravo's silly weightlifting exhibition, either.

And it was also curious that Bravo was the man tasked with doing this, given that the WWE had once employed Ted Arcidi, a world bench press champion and a behemoth over whom I'd obsessed years earlier. To be fair, Bravo, even in this heftier state, could still sell wrestling moves and give a half-decent interview, whereas Ted Arcidi could barely wriggle his arms on account of all the mass that he had packed onto his dense frame.

Why, 20 years hence, is a forgettable event like this worthy of recollection, much less commemoration? It was, as already noted, a load of hooey, but it's also extremely revealing hooey. Ever since the so-called "Gold Dust Trio" of wrestling promoters recognized that fans cared much more about exciting outcomes than the glorified clinching contests into which unscripted professional wrestling had devolved by the late 1910s, the sport faced a crisis of legitimacy. Its earliest champions were, in the main, accomplished "hookers" (i.e., men who could actually wrestle), but occasionally burly entertainers like ex-football stars "Big" Wayne Munn and Bronko Nagurski and former boxing champion Primo Carnera were given extended runs at the top of the card. By virtue of their prior success in other activities, these non-wrestlers were capable of selling lots of tickets; however, they were also capable of being pinned by anyone with a modicum of grappling talent. As such, their opponents were under heavy pressure to make them seem like unbeatable monsters.

Competition among wrestling organizations necessitated the creation of ever more outré fictional characters for whom the fans could cheer. Dark-complexioned Italian immigrants became "Wild Men of Borneo," obese college boys acted out the part of illiterate hillbillies, and anybody with a reasonably sophisticated vocabulary and a half-decent physique could find semi-gainful employment as an effete, aristocratic villain. Even real backstories were embellished: college football backups became NFL gridiron greats, Olympic alternates became Olympic champions, and actual Olympic champions became "World's Strongest/Best Conditioned/Most Perfect Men."

When Vince McMahon assumed control of the WWE from his father during the early-80s, he took this practice to new heights. A notorious "juicer" with a body of immense proportions, McMahon was inspired by the work of Joe Weider's International Federation of Bodybuilders to create a roster of pumped-up strongmen with made-up (and trademarked) names and superpowers. Having Bob Backlund, a bland good guy with a solid amateur wrestling background, as world champion simply wouldn't cut it in this brave new world. Instead, McMahon turned to 6'6" bassist manqué and steroid abuser Hulk Hogan, his answer to Weider's similarly larger-than-life Arnold Schwarzenegger. Much as Schwarzenegger never claimed to be anything but a bodybuilder, Hogan was never anything besides an extremely limited professional wrestler. Both men, however, proved adroit at seeming "hard" and "masculine," an ability that brought them great success during a decade characterized by superficiality and excess.

"A culture that idealizes, fetishizes, is addicted to the hard and impenetrable," writes Susan Bordo in The Male Body, "is a cold and unforgiving place to be." I grew up in this culture, and did everything I possibly could to avoid being perceived as soft or weak. My father was hard and impenetrable, and he ruled with an iron fist. Ours was a household dedicated to the ideal of his strength and dominance. "Boys," Bordo continues, "are ashamed to tell others when they are injured; the simple act of telling is an admission that they are not bearing their pain 'like a man.'" My half-brother and I became strong not to cow our peers—we were usually (regrettably) the ones doing the bullying—but to protect ourselves from the pain our father caused.

We needn't have bothered. Much like the Dino Bravo bench press, much like the dozens of Olympic also-rans who were billed as Olympic champs, our father's strength, though certainly still real in some tangible sense, was not what it once had been. His business consumed nearly all of his time and energy, he was aging, he was unhappy... what we perceived in him was what, in caricature, Vince McMahon and Joe Weider sold to their viewers: a façade of strength, and nothing more. He was flappable to a tragicomic degree, his mind a roiling ocean of anxieties and horrifying childhood memories. He, too, had nothing for protection but his remaining illusions of hardness.

The critic Roland Barthes claimed to admire professional wrestling because it provided the spectator with clear and distinct signs: the good guy was unimpeachably good, the bad guy was incorrigibly bad. Although the Attitude Era forced an adjustment of that paradigm, the signs remained clear. The massive bodies, the manufactured backstories, the obvious deceptions (try to imagine middle-aged Hunter Hearst Helmsley or jorts-wearing John Cena actually vanquishing MMA champion Brock Lesnar!)... this endeavor is in many respects the very embodiment of male overcompensation and male insecurity. The participants, no longer necessarily "good" or "bad," still vindicate their phony hardness in pitched, scripted battles.

When I watch pro wrestling nowadays, I find my thoughts drifting inward. Are we men all, I wonder, nothing but poseurs? On that score, wrestling has one final lesson for us. For many years, in order to maintain the original "kayfabe" myth, promoters paid fees to state athletic commissions that regulated professional wrestling as a sport. In the course of revamping his father's federation as a "rock and wrestling" outfit for the MTV generation, McMahon stopped paying his dues to these organizations, explaining that he was in the entertainment business. His matches might feature feats of athletic derring-do, but they assuredly weren't sporting exhibitions.

This admission, though little more than a historical footnote, is nevertheless fascinating. McMahon conceded that he's in the business of peddling obvious falsity to the multitudes. He's an honest liar, thoroughly shady and corruptible in all respects, and it doesn't matter if you're in on the scam: after all, his best and most tasteless WWE-verse jokes are on you. Just buy the t-shirts, the programs, the pay-per-views, the commemorative cups and life will go on as always.

Moreover, serious fans view this truth/falsity stuff as irrelevant. They watch the matches for the quality of the performance: the truth, in their opinion, is arrived at only through a careful evaluation of the act of pretending. The most noteworthy example of this approach to professional wrestling was postmodern grappler C.M. Punk's famous "worked shoot" promo, which catapulted him to the status of the most important man in the WWE who wasn't John Cena. The promo was "worked" in the sense that it was part of a storyline in the fictional WWE-verse; it was a "shoot" in that Punk had aired some actual criticisms with Vince McMahon's jort-loving, Cena-centric approach to booking.

It's here, I believe, that we find an answer to the airy and undoubtedly Gen-X question, "Are we bros just a bunch of poseurs?" Punk lays it on the line: yes, my work is a load of bullshit, but some of us are better at this bullshit than others. For those of us mature enough to recognize the difference, feigned "hardness" is true or real insofar as one can perform well in such a "hard" role. In my teen years, I once criticized a renowned professor for being a person who could simply "recite a good script" during his lectures. But now I realize that, yes, of course that's all he did—the man wrote the script, for crying out loud!

When you're young and stupid and scared in a society that insists that you "be a man"—whatever that actually means—you sometimes find yourself claiming to be way more than you are. You say you've heard of bands that you know nothing about, you purport to lift weights far beyond your Mr. Puniverse skill level, you pretend to have read the great books that any hip scholar worth his salt should have already tackled... and then one of three things eventually happens: you keep lying about having done this stuff but don't ever accomplish any of it, you never do it and focus on doing things you actually care about, or you do it and refuse to look back.

As C.M. Punk's improbable rise to the top of a profession dominated by muscle-bound pretenders demonstrates, it's possible to fake it until you make it. Come to think of it, is there any other way? "Being a man" may at first entail a great deal of self-deception in response to gendered social pressures, but at a certain point along the haphazard highway that leads to mature contentment, it comes to mean nothing more or less than "being yourself."
 Oliver Bateman tag:www.splicetoday.com,2005:Post/23127 2018-02-27T05:56:00-05:00 2018-02-27T13:58:24-05:00 Muscle Men Pushing and Pulling Rope
From 1990 to 1992, wrestling impresario Vince McMahon operated the World Bodybuilding Federation. Like many bodybuilding enthusiasts, McMahon assumed that people outside the hobby could be persuaded to share his interests. He thought that applying cartoonish, ready-made personalities to hypertrophied International Federation of Bodybuilding pros would turn them into morning television heroes for tween boys.

They couldn't, and it didn't. The WBF failed almost as soon as it began, with veteran muckraker Irvin Muchnick dropping a prospective post-mortem, "Pimping Iron," in the June 1991 issue of Spy. McMahon's love for the sport is inspiring—listen to any of his fulsome introductions of Gary Strydom—but the hopelessness of what he was attempting to accomplish should've been obvious in weeks, not years.

The World Bodybuilding Federation had a regular television show, WBF BodyStars, and produced two pay-per-view events. Buyrates for the PPVs were epically low; a fitness journalist friend tells me he's heard they were in the double digits. But the promotional push was heavy, since McMahon had tied the WBF to a glossy muscle magazine (Bodybuilding Lifestyles) and a sports supplement (ICOPRO) that were advertised ceaselessly on both his wrestling and bodybuilding programs.

Although the BodyStars had a host of different gimmicks, from "man of the future" to "soldier," they were invariably presented as good guys in their competitions against villainous WWF wrestlers. On Family Feud, the WBF's top dogs took on WWF heel wrestlers Jacques Rougeau and Brian Knobbs plus managers as Bobby Heenan, Jimmy Hart, and Sensational Sherri. The resulting showdown is painful to watch, with Heenan making weak wisecracks and host Ray Combs oohing and aahing over the bodies of the beefcakes.

One of the strangest intramural showdowns staged by McMahon was a tug of war that happened on BodyStars, again pitting the good guys of the WBF against the bad guys of the WWF. This time, the bodybuilders were coached by veteran wrestler and ex-NFL player Jim Duggan, who towers over all of them, against Curt "Mr. Perfect" Hennig's team of villains.

This event took place in 1992, meaning it occurred roughly a year into the BodyStars run on television and not long before McMahon, losing $200,000 a month and investigated by the federal government in response to allegations that he'd distributed steroids to his athletes, pulled the plug. The first thing you're struck by is how much larger the pro wrestlers are than the BodyStars, with even smaller guys like Steve Keirn and Ric Flair stacking up favorably against their opponents. And when it comes to actually tugging the rope, they're way more athletic, which makes sense since nearly everyone on the wrestlers' side had played a college sport—some at a particularly high level, as was the case with Mike Rotunda, an accomplished amateur wrestler at Syracuse University. The second thing is how awkward the bodybuilders are when they're required to talk on camera. The BodyStars have high-pitched voices, squeaky voices, soft voices... but in no case does anyone on their team appear at ease in his own skin.

It's a strange event, with Jim Duggan at times urging the BodyStars to "get those WWF wrestlers" despite himself working as an active-roster WWF wrestler, and the villainous wrestlers eventually earning the win via cheating. "Those guys have Cadillac bodies and Volkswagen brains," explained "Million-Dollar Man" Ted DiBiase, who'd allegedly bribed the referee to look the other way while he and his friends sat down on the sand to increase their leverage.

This event was undoubtedly part of some major ongoing wrestlers-versus-bodystars feud, some all-encompassing crossover storyline, but I can't make heads nor tails of it. Although I voraciously consumed Weider brothers' bodybuilding magazines (Joe and Ben Weider operated the IFBB, or at least part of it, and so were McMahon's rivals) and pro wrestling in equal measure during the early-1990s, the WBF was such a flop it barely amounted to a blip on my radar screen. YouTube now contains an enormous archive of BodyStars and pay-per-view footage that McMahon appears to believe isn't worth the time and money to remove via copyright infringement claims. If you're high on something and looking for some weird, uncomfortable laughs, watch it; you'll get your money's worth.

As time passes, one can expect a number of in-depth WBF explainers to appear. Bleacher Report has already run such a piece, and YouTube wrestling channels have edited together their own mini-documentaries. All of this pop culture will keep being revisited, often by individuals whose association with wrestling consisted of watching Steve Austin pop tops during the Attitude Era or who became interested in bodybuilding after the viewing of a single Mark Rippetoe lecture on the military press transformed them into gym rats.

And it's strange to see this marginal culture handled this way and by these people. I wasn't the most devoted wrestling fan—I owned a dozen or so VHS tapes of Japanese wrestling, and stuff like the World Bodybuilding Federation escaped my notice because I was living in North Carolina and much more focused on the Southern-style World Championship Wrestling product—much less a world-beating bodybuilder and powerlifter, but I've logged two decades in each of these worlds. One needn't be a subject-matter expert to tell a good story, of course, but it's painfully obvious when the storyteller is out of their depth. For such people, pushing a take or a tale might be their living, but for me... well, with regard to these subjects, it has been my life.

Bodybuilding, in particular, is a niche sport. Based on extant tax filings, roughly 75,000 people around the country hold National Physique Committee memberships, and perhaps half of them compete in amateur bodybuilding events each year. For all the studies about how many people are on steroids—one NBC story from the mid-2000s estimated that five percent of middle school girls had used them!—public knowledge of anabolic-androgenic is shrouded in mystery. Even most users were stupid dabblers, having purchased garbage stuff from drug sources looking to take advantage of high school and college numbskulls.

And here's another thing, what McMahon's has learned all too well during his WBF misadventure: nobody knows or cares about bodybuilding except for bodybuilders, people who want to become bodybuilders, and the people who sell steroids to the people who want to become bodybuilders. Since deceit is endemic to the sport (Underground Steroid Handbook author Dan Duchaine remarked that truth is the first casualty of steroid use), you can't expect straight answers from anyone involved in it. Meanwhile, news outlets only care about muckraking the bodybuilding world when there's some noteworthy crossover into mainstream media that will interest viewers; otherwise, gym owners, supplement company owners, and bodybuilding promoters are left to their own devices, scamming each other and being scammed.

There's a lot of money at stake in the muscle business, but it's not nearly as much as people think. One former high-level competitor joked to me that the fitness empire maintained by Ben Weider and Jim Manion was essentially just a front for embezzling real money, a racket that warranted RICO Act scrutiny. Sociologist Alan Klein had surveyed the Muscle Beach crowd back in the mid-1980s and determined that roughly half of that beefy crowd was paying its way via prostitution—"hustling schmoes," in muscle parlance—or appearances in male-oriented adult cinema.

If you're an idealistic journo hoping to sell tales about these strange people to mainstream publications, it's best to focus on exotics such as doomed social media stars Aziz "Zzyz" Sergeyevich and Rich Piana, those poor Brazilian guys who inject synthol into their arms in order to cause them to swell beyond recognition, or whatever flavor-of-the-week bodybuilder is tying their abs and lats to some progressive, identity-politics cause while remaining kayfabe about steroid use. But beyond that, there's no there out there; you'll wind up like those uncoordinated, goofy WBF BodyStars on the beach, pulling and pushing rope and wondering why no one is getting off.
 Oliver Bateman tag:www.splicetoday.com,2005:Post/23108 2018-02-22T05:56:00-05:00 2018-02-21T22:40:27-05:00 Mask versus Mask
In September of 1982, a masked wrestler purporting to be Mr. Wrestling II appeared in "Cowboy" Bill Watts' Mid-South promotion—an expansive but undercapitalized territory that produced wrestling shows in parts of Louisiana, Mississippi, Texas, and Oklahoma. "Number Two," as commentator Watts and the raucous crowds called him, was approaching 50 by this point, yet the guy under this mask appeared significantly more muscular and athletic. "That's not Johnny Walker," I thought as my mind drifted into the liminal state between dream and wakefulness. "That looks like Len Denton, the Masked Grappler. Heh, they must be working another masked wrestler mix-up angle."

Recently, I've been watching through the catalog of mid-South TV tapings as a means of falling asleep. I'd done this once before, in the late-1990s, in order to familiarize myself with the history of the sport. I was now doing it as a way to self-soothe, half-observing while familiar personalities such as "Hacksaw" Jim Duggan and "Dr. Death" Steve Williams (both in their rookie years as wrestlers) traded make-believe blows and lulled me into a deep slumber.

But something funny happened on the way to bedtime: I became invested in the handful of storylines playing out in mid-South. Watts has been hailed as a genius booker by others in the industry and by himself in his entertainingly self-aggrandizing autobiography, but I always had my doubts. Booking a wrestling card, it seemed to me, amounted to nothing more than taking some good guys and matching them up against some bad guys. This is what prime-period World Championship Wrestling had done and what the WWE had been doing for the past 30 years.

Watts, however, brought an artfulness to his limited palette of matchup options. The "Cowboy" never had more than 20 or 30 wrestlers on his roster, a far cry from the 100 or more on contract with WWE today, and he needed to keep moving these parts around in order to keep the shine on top stars Ted DiBiase, "Captain Redneck" Dick Murdoch, and the Junkyard Dog.

The mid-South model was pretty simple. DiBiase had recently made a major turn from good guy to bad, displacing Bob Roop and "Mr. Wonderful" Paul Orndorff as the company's primary heel. Dick Murdoch, who several wrestlers have accused of having actual ties to the KKK, offered red meat to the region's white trash base by giving them fast-paced matches filled with biting and eye-gouging. And the Junkyard Dog was both the mid-South's superhero and arguably the most popular African-American wrestler ever, a beard-topped mountain of muscle whose two-minute squash matches and aura of invincibility would've convinced most betting men that he, not Hulk Hogan or Ric Flair, would become the sport's first great crossover star.

Those three wrestlers were permanently stationed at the hub of the wheel on which the mid-South turned, and all of the comings and goings that occurred in the company were routed through them. Jim Wehba, a Lebanese-American wrestler from Texas who competed under the name "Skandor Akbar," managed a revolving-door stable of monstrous bad guys who were hired as bounty hunters or permanent henchmen and tasked with defeating Murdoch and the Junkyard Dog. Ted DiBiase, meanwhile, operated as an independent bad guy alongside his self-appointed bodyguard Jim Duggan, who'd been recruited from the "special teams suicide squads" of the Atlanta Falcons to protect DiBiase against all comers.

This proved a formula for success, in that it allowed an endless array of well-regarded journeymen to cycle through the promotion take their shots at the top stars. Watts employed many variations on this, such as having wily veteran Jody Hamilton, who wrestled under a hood as the Masked Assassin, make an appearance as ex-NFL star Ernie Ladd's hired-gun tag team partner, only to double-cross Ladd when Skandor Akbar offered him twice as much money. That particular angle served to turn Ladd, the greatest African-American bad guy of the 1970s, into a reluctant good guy while once again explaining to fans—"educating them," in wrestling parlance—that the Assassin wore a mask to hide his identity because he was an unscrupulous bounty hunter who'd betray anyone at a moment's notice.

The real Mr. Wrestling II hadn't yet arrived in the mid-South territory when the fake one showed up, taking down opponents with a similar set of grapples and holds, and finishing them with Number Two's feared "running kneelift." I'd watched plenty of Number Two's work in Georgia Championship Wrestling, where he'd been a mega-star whose celebrity earned him an invite to Jimmy Carter's presidential inauguration (he politely but publicly declined because it would've required him to unmask) and I knew this pretender wasn't the genuine article. Johnny "Rubberman" Walker, the actual Mr. Wrestling II, was an adept wrestler who could still work a good match in spite of his advanced age, but his white trunks now hung limply on his flat dad-butt like a droopy diaper, and he was never as muscular at any point in his career as Len Denton was in his early 20s.

Denton, who wrestled in mid-South as the Masked Grappler, was a middle-of-the-card bad guy whose job was to beat up on the lesser good guys and lose to the better ones, all in the service of advancing storylines centered around Junkyard Dog and Dick Murdoch. He did this about as well as anyone could, always staging one of the better matches on a given television taping.

Mid-South was unique for the era in that minor and major title changes happened on-air rather than only at live events, an innovation sometimes attributed to Watts but more frequently Buck Robley, one of his veteran wrestlers and an occasional matchmaker/behind-the-scenes figure. This also made sense in such an expansive wrestling territory, where the rotation of shows encompassed many more towns across a much more dispersed geographic area; it gave fans separated by 1000 miles a way to follow the ebb and flow of mid-South action.

Denton had held and lost both of the mid-level mid-South belts, the Mississippi Championship and the North American Championship, so he was usually in the thick of things. And now he was again, this time posing as Mr. Wrestling II so that he could perform as a special and ostensibly unbiased referee in a match featuring one of Skandor Akbar's minions. Denton was also part of Akbar's stable of villains and planned to ensure the match went Akbar's way, but before he could fulfill this role, the real Mr. Wrestling II hit the ring and ousted the ersatz Number Two.

Mr. Wrestling II then cut one of his famous furious promos about the sanctity of his mask, demanding that mid-South owner Bill Watts, who was standing in the ring and holding the microphone, look him in his "fiery blue eyes" and verify that he was the same masked man Watts had wrestled on many prior occasions. Watts conceded he was, and the stage was set for a mask versus mask bout between Number Two and the Grappler.

That match comprised a brisk eight minutes of television time, roughly a quarter of which was devoted to the Grappler trying to remove Mr. Wrestling II's mask and Number Two frantically selling his desperation at the thought of losing this precious totem. In the end, both masked men skillfully teased running kneelifts—this was an era when it was widely established that certain finishing moves, such as the feared "heart punch," could only be pulled off by certain wrestlers, and here that was demonstrated by the Grappler rushing in for the coup de grace only to connect with Mr. Wrestling II's shoulder—until Number Two at last connected square on the Grappler's chin and pinned him.

The mid-South storylines will progress from here, but this moment in time is beautiful to contemplate. Watts was producing low television but he presented it straight, as serious populist sport featuring competitors with legitimate athletic pedigrees; this is why it's much easier to re-watch mid-South footage than those sloppy, kick-and-punch Jim Crockett Promotions studio tapings from the same year (notable primarily for the epic Ric Flair, Roddy Piper, and "Boogie Woogie Man" Jimmy Valiant rants that consumed much of each show). There's a soothing sameness to watching as men like Mr. Wrestling II drifted in and out of mid-South, challenging one regional star or another, while promising lesser lights such as Buddy Landel, Jesse Barr, and Tim Horner honed their craft by losing fast-paced matches early in each show.

We can't return to this distant grappling past any more than we can, say, let talented hack writer Peter David spin out his Incredible Hulk narrative across hundreds of comic books. It happened, it was something that was, we saw it or read it. And for as long as such media remains stored somewhere, it awaits our rediscovery, providing the same thrills at the same pace it once did. It may mostly mean nothing to nobody, but that's the case for almost everything, even those three or four inescapable social media topics about which you're always surprised to discover your older relatives and very young siblings know zippo. The mental landscapes we choose to inhabit are vast but lonely, so very lonely.
 Oliver Bateman tag:www.splicetoday.com,2005:Post/23102 2018-02-21T14:30:49-05:00 2018-02-21T14:30:49-05:00 Concussion Protocol tag:www.splicetoday.com,2005:Post/23096 2018-02-21T09:17:50-05:00 2018-02-21T09:17:50-05:00 Matinee Misery
As Olympic hockey reaches its distant denouement in Gangneung, it's only appropriate the New York Rangers fold up their tent on a lost NHL season. Before doing so, however, the Blueshirts pulled a bait-and-switch on their fans. Sunday's matinee against the Flyers at the Garden featured a first period nostalgia pantomime. Three hockey fights, the first one just 15 seconds into the game, and six goals tallied in the first period. It was a throwback to old school hockey that no doubt titillated the dudes wearing Nick Fotiu jerseys in the stands. But, as expected, the second and third periods were back to the humdrum as netminder Hendrik Lundqvist looked more ordinary with each passing minute.

Philadelphia notched unspectacular goals from unlikely players to dominate 7-4, sending the road support happily toward their southbound trains. Flyers fans are still milking the Super Bowl victory, wearing plenty of green Eagles gear, which certainly clashes with the bad British ketchup orange that has marked Philadelphia professional hockey jerseys since their arrival in the late 1960s.

Perhaps the noon start time didn't help. Always a full house at the Garden, the crowd was more groggy than usual. If you arrive 40 minutes before the puck drop, the Hammond organ player Ray Castoldi does a few songs with the room darkened. He was midway through "Rocket Man" when my daughter and I entered the arena bowl. Given the Rangers' losing streak and fall from playoff grace, his version of "50 Ways to Leave Your Lover" was absolutely funereal. The Rangers still seemed to be suffering from the oddball "we're rebuilding" announcement by the front office a few weeks ago. They won a few games in bold fashion after that proclamation, but then the losing began anew with minimal scoring and more Lundqvist ham and egging. The NHL trade deadline looms and the suitcases are in the mud room for several Rangers stalwarts, including the largely disappointing Rick Nash.

The loss to Philly meant 19 games remained on the slate and the Rangers would probably have to win 15 of them to get back into contention in a crowded scene for the Eastern Conference wild cards. I've admittedly written off the Rangers prematurely in the past and I turned to New York Post columnist Larry Brooks, the last hockey writer left standing in the New York market, to pen the team's obit in Monday's paper. Instead, Brooks hedged and suffered a baffling headline on his column ("Current issues are what doomed Blueshirts' year") as he looked ahead to the Rangers getting a better position in the next NHL draft. The Flyers were responsible for keeping the Rangers out of the playoffs back in 2010 when their shootout win in the final regular season game. Sunday's matinee, however, is not the final nail in the coffin. More of those are on the way perhaps as soon as Thursday night when the 'Gers travel to Montreal. Soon the NCAA conference basketball tourneys will take over the Garden and the Blueshirts will fade into sports oblivion much like their NBA brethren Knickerbockers.

I haven't frequented MSG since the late-1990s when I had a partial ticket plan for Rangers games in order to witness Wayne Gretzky at work. Sunday's visit proved little has changed in terms of the horrible concessions experience and general ineptitude of every single employee in the building. It's the NYC Board of Ed of arena sports. Ushers are aggressive and disinterested at the same time, the upgraded concession stands look great and offer high-end fare, but there's always a catch. They're always out of something important, or they send you to another area to get the bun for your burger. Sunday's disaster was closed beer taps at 90 percent of the 100-level concession areas. They funneled the thirsty hockey crowd into LaGuardia style lines at one singular "pub" with slow credit card machines that required 50 touchscreen keystrokes to land the plane. Two burrito bowls were stumbled through for myself and my daughter, with the inept cashier only ringing us up for one. Score!

Nothing kills the fan vibe worse than this type of botched service at extremely high prices. Granted, Rangers games have become increasingly corporate in terms of spectators through the years, but when the team underperforms the gloom is magnified in the Garden hallways. Word of mouth can still kill your walk-up sales, in other words.

I'd stopped at Paragon Sporting Goods on Union Square the day before, and down in the hockey gear section, a Norwegian family had asked the clerk about the Rangers. Probably an Islanders fan, the nerdy kid unleashed a diatribe about how bad the Rangers are. He made them seem like the 1973 California Golden Seals for crying out loud. "Worthless" and "useless" were used as he talked the Scandinavian clan out of attending Sunday's game. Perhaps blinded by their pile of Olympic gold, the Norwegians quickly vacated the Paragon hockey department somewhat shell-shocked but apparently determined to see some NHL action.

It was fun to see Cody McLeod in his fourth fight in just nine games with the Rangers. There was energy in the room oh so briefly after Pavel Buchnevich duked it out with Shayne Gotisbehere. And why shouldn't Tony DeAngelo go after Ranger-killer Wayne Simmonds? For a brief few minutes, with the first period ending at 3-3, New York had a fighting chance against their playoff-bound rivals. I'd forgotten that the Rangers on-ice fights are replayed in gory slow-motion detail on the gondola scoreboard video screen. Watching on TV the fisticuffs seem silly and staged and have been less frequent, in my opinion. But the live hockey experience is Ancient Rome. It includes the somewhat seedy element of watching a street fight from a padded seat with your favorite beverage in hand.

By the third period the New York Public Library had taken over the World's Most Famous Arena at 34th St. and 7th Ave. Pins dropped and were heard. The mid-day service at nearby St. John The Baptist church was spilling in through the MSG doors. I believe I caught a few strains of "Christ Be Our Light" as Ranger Kevin Hayes was ejected from yet another face-off circle. Booing was minimal, which was surprising given this team was boastful and brimming with confidence leading up to a rousing victory over Buffalo at Citi Field in the outdoor "Winter Classic." Perhaps that win sparked some type of Queens jinx, having played out there in that airport adjunct facility where Mets fans roam, toting their Islanders support proudly on snot-encrusted sleeves?

On the Sunday before the Presidents' Day holiday, general fan rhythm at the Garden was way off, with the self-whistled "Potvin Sucks" chant being botched at least three times I heard it attempted. Dancing Larry is no more. A final look around: seats were filled with families and couples on dates. Every third person had the hunched-forward neck posture of humans studying not the action on the ice, but instead their cell phone screens.
 Spike Vrusho tag:www.splicetoday.com,2005:Post/23090 2018-02-20T13:08:20-05:00 2018-02-20T13:08:20-05:00 The Quiet Beauty of the Winter Olympics
As I write, I've got the Olympics on TV, the sound muted. CBC's showing downhill skiing. It's nighttime here in Montreal, in South Korea it's bright and sunny, light shining hard off packed snow, puffs of white flour marking a skier's sharp turns. The camera tilts to keep the athletes in view, but sometimes we get cutaways to see the course from a higher perspective: bare-branched trees thronging up to fences of red netting, other hills in the distance sloping away, sugar-dusted valleys between them seen in the clarity of winter air.

Those shots are why I have the TV on, more so than the competition. The race makes for a nice subplot: sports have the feel of breaking news with none of the pressure or significance, a live event at which something is happening but nobody dies. It's the view of nature, the sense of scale, that gives me something worth looking at, rather than my computer screen. It's something that I don't have to think about. I don't even have to be bothered with the low-level mental activity of joining cut-to-cut to make sense in my head; the visuals are repetitive enough I know what's coming next. I can stare at the screen and meditate.

There's something about the snow-clad countryside I can relate to, even while where I live the snow melts away in a warmer-than-average February. Korea at least has scenery I understand. In Pyeongchang, the morning light falls at a sharp angle, picking out every fold and ripple in the snow-covered ground. When a skier falls and wipes out, kicking up a blizzard, it's a bright colorless explosion that traps light in a haze of wind-plucked particles, a matrix that in slow-motion seeks distantly for a shape.

The Winter Olympics aren't the only event I'll throw on TV for the sake of a bit of eye-pleasing movement. I'll do the same with the World Cup later this year. But the winter games have a special soothing quality: all that white, all that light bouncing off solid-state water.

Skiing, snowboarding, these sports in particular have a visual power from their backdrops: the scope of their backgrounds. The luge and bobsled and skeleton have a different sense of speed, athletes seen from up close whipping by on a narrow track, a kind of half-inside, half-outside structure that makes for another kind of visual complexity. Conversely, arena-bound sports like speed-skating and figure skating aren't anywhere near as engaging to me, though curling has a hypnotic appeal and hockey is—hockey is hockey, not the same thing, because that sport I watch for itself.

The Summer Olympics don't hit me the same way. Sailing sometimes has an interesting backdrop, yes, and rowing and the marathon and cross-country cycling events. But summer mostly seems a lot of visually dull track-and-field, a lot of things inside stadiums. Winter Olympics rules require any sport to be performed only on ice or snow—though there's some talk of changing that rule to "should be practiced only during the winter months," allowing winter running and cyclocross to be added to the games—and so these Olympics do feel a part of their season, linked to the truest signs of winter. They're involved with the winter world, with leafless trees and slate-blue skies. With a world so cold you can taste it in the images alone, can smell the ice through your TV screen.

It'd be easy to say that this appeals to something northern in the soul. Easy, but dubious; I've only ever had the one soul that I know of, so cannot rightly say if it's more northerly than others. Simply, this appeals to memory, half-buried childhood remembrances of skiing in the woods, of a school outing to a ski hill. To all the white landscapes I have known and internalized.

It's the land that matters. The Winter Olympics are often more about place than the summer games, I feel, because the hosting venues are smaller. Pyeongchang, hosting these games, isn't a city but a county with just over 43,000 inhabitants; Sochi has a bit more than 350,000; even venues like Vancouver, Turin, and Salt Lake City aren't the primary metropoli of their host countries, not like London, Rio, or Beijing. See a view from high above showing the Winter Olympic facilities and the venues stand out, landmarks in their setting: sports are linked to the community. The environment shapes these games in a way that's not true of the Summer Olympics.

Sport creates a world of images. That's not something often written about, and when the images of sport are discussed they're presented strictly as portraits—depictions of athletes, of striving, of the agon. The Winter Olympics remind me that every portrait can also be imagined as a detail from a landscape. That surrounding the noise, conflict and the struggle to be faster, higher, stronger, there's a much greater world that is still, profound, and stronger than can be imagined.
 Matthew Surridge tag:www.splicetoday.com,2005:Post/23087 2018-02-20T05:58:00-05:00 2018-02-19T21:28:49-05:00 Vince McMahon, Man Among Men
Given what we know about the staged or "worked" nature of professional wrestling, bodies would seem to be of little significance. If the wrestler Big Show, who sometimes weighs upwards of 400 pounds, could be ordered by his employer to "put over" (i.e., lose to) Daniel Bryan, 190 pounds soaking wet, why should physical appearances matter at all?

And yet, since the early heyday of promoter-booked wrestling in the 1920s, bodies have been even more important than the actual abilities that those bodies possess. Why else would someone like Wayne "Big" Munn, a towering 6'6" pro footballer who couldn't wrestle a lick, be handed a word title belt in 1925 by promoter Toots Mondt? This is one of the most fascinating of wrestling's many multi-layered ironies: the way things seem (as in the shape and composition of a competitor's body) is not how these things are, since a man the size of "Big" Munn or the Big Show could conceivably have no wrestling skill at all. And yet the way things seem often determines how they are, as in the case of acromegalic behemoth Andre the Giant's extraordinary popularity with the fans: how could a man his size ever lose to anyone, most would think.

Few have understood this perverse logic quite like second-generation wrestling impresario Vincent K. McMahon, who seized upon the exploding popularity of bodybuilding at the tail end of the 1970s to launch a promotion in which style has almost always trumped substance. McMahon, who played a season or two of football at East Carolina University and grew up admiring the fulsome male figure of Steve Reeves, had engaged in bodybuilding-style weight training since the early 1970s. The success of a handful of unskilled bodybuilder types—primarily the slow-moving, well-tanned crowd pleaser "Polish Power" Ivan Putski and sweet-talking villain "Superstar" Billy Graham—in his father's version of the WWF convinced McMahon that future viewers would doubtless share this preference for huge, tight, and extremely vascular bodies that were, like his own, enhanced by the various testosterone cocktails developed in pharmaceutical laboratories around the world. "In our business," he would later tell the Joe Weider publication Muscle and Fitness, "you have to be larger than life, but not just physically—it's the psychology of it, too."

Of course, the deployment of these supersized heroes would itself be veiled by numerous overlapping deceits. Terry "Hulk" Hogan, a bronze-hued giant of partial Puerto Rican descent, would serve as McMahon's standard-bearer throughout the 1980s, generating enormous pay-per-view buy-rates while championing a lifestyle that consisted of such "demandments" (the "Hulkster's" term, not mine) as vitamin-taking, prayer-saying, and regular exercise. Hogan, of course, was at this same time under strict orders to remain "juiced" on whatever performance-enhancing cocktails were prescribed by George Zahorian, a Pennsylvania-based physician and one of the coterie of friendly "croakers" (i.e., prescription-writing doctors) who served at McMahon's pleasure.

McMahon's obsession with cartoonish theatrics and muscular size overshadowed the quality of the in-ring performance, and even legitimate grapplers such as the bulldog-jowled former National Wrestling Alliance champion Harley Race came to be saddled with ludicrous gimmicks and ring outfits. Ken Patera, a 1972 Olympian and putative "World's Strongest Man" who once remarked that the outcome of a weightlifting exhibition would turn on "whoever's steroids were better," found himself put off by McMahon's behaviors and decided to retire in late-1988 after McMahon squeezed his thigh in the locker room and told him he had better start "hitting the roids" again.

The WWF brand, saddled as it was with a roster of lumbering musclemen, reached its nadir during the early-1990s, at which point McMahon found himself enmeshed in the federal trial of George Zahorian. Zahorian stood accused of distributing the steroids and other performance enhancers that had, owing to the legislative legerdemain of Delaware Sen. Joseph Biden, recently been listed as controlled substances. The trial spiraled out of control, with Zahorian's legal team leaking the names of various WWF competitors who were told to "use [steroids] or they don't participate." Among these names was Hulk Hogan and "Rowdy" Roddy Piper, two of the federation's most noteworthy performers.

McMahon, who was also invested in a professional bodybuilding federation that he'd founded to compete with Joe Weider's International Federation of Body Builders (IFBB), weathered the storm by imposing mandatory steroid testing for his performers (though not for himself, of course—as he told a House investigative committee years later, he wasn't the talent) and beginning to promote smaller, leaner grapplers such as Bret Hart and Shawn Michaels. But although this period in the federation's history, which ran from roughly 1993 to 1996, produced many classic matches, it saw the WWF lose ground to the increasingly edgy World Championship Wrestling (WCW) outfit owned by billionaire Ted Turner and operated by innovative general manager Eric Bischoff.

It was at this juncture that McMahon made another very body-conscious choice: instead of merely steroid-enhanced bodies, he'd give them phantasmagoric bodies. Drawing on lessons learned from the modest success of the small Eastern Pennsylvania/New Jersey-based Extreme Championship Wrestling (ECW), McMahon began building his federation around the premise, championed in years past by proto-hardcore Southern promoters like Eddie Graham and Joe Blanchard, that "matches had to go red before they went green." To this end, McMahon spotlighted oft-injured risk-takers (Mick "Mankind/Cactus Jack/Dude Love" Foley, the Hardy Boys, the Dudley Boys), extraordinary racial and ethnic caricatures (a "Godfather" who arrived at the ring accompanied by his "Hos" and served in the faux-African-American nationalist organization known as "the Nation of Domination"), and a seemingly endless array of anonymous female "Diva" performers, nearly all of whom conformed—if the numerous sexual harassment allegations are to be believed—to McMahon's exacting standards of beauty.

Owing to the terrible press he'd received throughout a career spent profiting from the pretend-yet-real violence inflicted on bodies that were neither insured nor unionized and hoping to capitalize on the tremendous "heat" (i.e., fan dislike) that he'd earned by stripping Bret Hart of his world title, McMahon also decided that there was considerable money to be made by putting his own body on the line. Over the course of a half-decade run as the WWF's top heels, McMahon and his son Shane would take some of the nastiest "bumps" (i.e., feigned falls designed to simulate injury, and which often result in actual injury) in the federation's history. They would do so while giving the WWF/WWE's largely working-class demographic the ultimate "heel": the seemingly untouchable owner, who wielded the power of life and death over the bodies of his employees.

Tabloid columnists like Dave Meltzer and Wade Keller helped shift the attention of serious wrestling fans from the "worked" storylines that realism-obsessed promoters such as Bill Watts and Verne Gagne insisted on providing them with to the backstage maneuverings that precipitated title changes, firings, and other personnel moves. Although it's unclear how much impact a low-circulation, self-published journal such as Meltzer's Wrestling Observer Newsletter had on the broader population of "marks" (i.e., fans who believe that wrestling outcomes aren't predetermined), it certainly influenced many of the sports' decision-makers during the 1980s and 1990s. All of them, that is, except Vince McMahon.

The difference between "kayfabe" and openly "worked" wrestling had never mattered much to McMahon. He never met a midget, obese hillbilly, or ex-luchador in a chicken suit he wouldn't book on his pay-per-view card. In the opinions of former promoters Bill Watts and Larry Matysik, the WWF matches were always the worst in the country. With the exception of amateur star Bob Backlund, who had six-year run as champion in the late-1970s, there was no pretense of "real" wrestling made in most WWF main events: Ivan Putski-versus-Jesse Ventura arm wrestling matches, Bruno Sammartino bearhugs, and "Superstar" Billy Graham bodybuilding pose-downs were the order of the day. And even though McMahon may have ordered "Dr. D" David Schultz to rough up investigative reporter John Stossel in 1984 when Stossel was attempting to expose the business, he had no problem admitting in 1989 that professional wrestling was mere "entertainment" in order to obviate the ongoing need to pay the state athletic commissions that had once constituted an essential part of the "kayfabe" sham.

In a statement to the New Jersey Senate, which was contemplating whether to remove professional wrestling from the purview of its athletic commission, the WWF declared that it was in the business of producing "an activity in which participants struggle hand-in-hand primarily for the purpose of providing entertainment to spectators rather than conducting a bona fide athletic contest."

Mind you, McMahon was likely not happy to see David Meltzer sitting across from him on a 1992 episode of The Phil Donahue Show, listening to Meltzer and one of his colleagues level accusations about McMahon's role in the Zahorian steroid contretemps as well as Pat Patterson's backstage sexual harassment of male midget wrestlers. But he maintained his composure during the show, rebutting Meltzer's charges while sticking to a handful of talking points—a kind of pressure under fire honed, no doubt, over the course of a lifetime spent on the receiving end of lawsuits and criminal investigations. Thus, when WCW head booker Eric Bischoff managed to increase his promotion's ratings in the mid-1990s by playing into the hands of these tabloid writers, hiring old and unproductive WWF wrestlers just to bolster "smark" (i.e., smartened-up fan, as in the case of fans who read Meltzer's newsletter) interest, McMahon stayed the course. While Bischoff was hiring washed-up grapplers to headline his cards, McMahon offered the fans something different: vulgar bloodbaths, plenty of t & a, and relative unknowns who, as with Hulk Hogan and Randy Savage before them, became stars in principal part because McMahon gave them the opportunity to shine.

And eventually McMahon's vision of the product—in his words, a "middle-class" vision, a vision that "was all about Peoria"—would prevail in the so-called "Monday Night Wars" of 1996-2001 exactly as it had during the WWF's national expansion in the 1980s. And make no mistake about it: at base, McMahon was the WWF. During this period, he was the federation's chief "heel." "Stone Cold" Steve Austin and Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson were important actors in this "Attitude Era" drama, but McMahon was its author. So we come again to noted wrestling fan Roland Barthes, who'd famously observed, "We know that to give writing its future, it is necessary to overthrow the myth: the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author." "The reader," in Barthes' opinion, "is the space on which all quotations that make up a writing are inscribed without any of them being lost…[and] this destination cannot be personal."

The WWF, which now has a sizeable creative team and a support staff, doesn't really belong to the "readers" of the "texts" that it produces. Professional wrestling in its postmodern form, once a fragmented and highly diverse activity with dozens of regional variants and hundreds of hometown heroes, is now the exclusive property of a single billionaire author. It remains an idiosyncratic one-family operation, capable of making moves ranging from the brilliant, such as hiring writers to tweet in-character for the wrestlers on Twitter (thus confusing even those Meltzer and Keller-informed "smarks" who look to the Internet for reliable information), to the ridiculous, as when McMahon served as the central character in the 2001-2008 Kiss My Ass Club storyline wherein various employees were made to kiss his bare or thong-clad rear end in order to save their jobs.

Yet this storyline, like the incomplete, puffery-ridden McMahon documentary his company produced, is the key to understanding the central joke at the heart of professional wrestling. At one time, promoters paid men to pretend to fight, audiences paid to watch these putative combatants compete in what most assumed were real matches, and the compensated parties laughed all the way to the bank, with the promoters laughing the loudest. The Kiss My Ass Club allows us to see how McMahon has modified this paradigm. In it, wrestlers (who are acting) are forced to watch as McMahon (also acting) drops his pants in a slow, sexual way, usually shaking his hips and buttocks and performing "tricks" with his ass, such as flexing it to demonstrate the impeccable conditioning of his glutes and hamstrings. The kisses ranged from extremely deep—the talented English wrestler William Regal planted his lips directly between McMahon's buttocks—to furtive and violent, as when the midget Hornswaggle (playing a leprechaun-outfitted character) bit McMahon on the ass after McMahon had joked about his own tan lines and impressive flatulence.

This is, I assume, meant to be both silly, because we're forced to watch as muscular men kiss another muscular man's bare ass, and also infuriating, since the almighty "boss," that Armani suit-clad embodiment of capital, is humiliating his workers in front of his largely working-class audience—the people from "Peoria" whom he's claimed to understand so well. We fans are left to wait for McMahon to receive his cosmic comeuppance, with what Roland Barthes described as the "spectacle of Suffering, Defeat, and Justice" playing out to its obvious and necessary conclusion.

Yet we must also consider the following: the person whose ass is being kissed is actual WWE CEO Vince McMahon, acting as storyline WWE CEO Vince McMahon, and the people kissing his ass are his actual employees, acting as his storyline employees. These men, non-union contract workers who either have to purchase their own health insurance or else have none at all, are kissing their boss' ass to preserve their livelihood (and, with the exception of the Ring of Honor, Impact, and Japanese promotions, this boss is a market monopsonist: he's the only buyer around for whatever services you are selling). And even when whatever latter-day variant of the Kiss My Ass Club that's currently running finally terminates and McMahon and his kids Shane and Stephanie are humiliated by being made to kiss asses of their own (usually the ass of an extremely obese wrestler kept on the roster for such purposes), we reward them in ratings or ticket sales or WWE Network subscription fees for the right to witness said humiliations.

McMahon, though occasionally bloodied and sometimes even seriously injured, has therefore succeeded in having the last word on this matter. Perhaps eating his scripted words amounts to some form of "Justice" and vindication in Barthes' sense, but in a business where everything is a "work," where nothing is as it seems—and where this is known now to be the case, where McMahon has himself gone on the record as declaring that it is a "work"—what could be more satisfying than to profit through one's one own stage-managed public scourging? In the end, the joke is on everyone but Vince McMahon, and I'm sure that, should he deign to consider the matter at all, he would find it riotously funny.
 Oliver Bateman tag:www.splicetoday.com,2005:Post/23076 2018-02-17T07:03:00-05:00 2018-02-16T14:19:49-05:00 Putting Hard Times on Dusty Rhodes
Watch the "hard times" interview that Dusty Rhodes cut in preparation for a Starrcade match with Ric Flair. I make a modest living researching and writing about wrestling, and I love the sport with my whole heart, yet in all honesty so little of it is transcendent and so much of it is beneath your contempt. But this one will have you operating with a blown mind, mark my words.

Queue up Dusty's astonishing performance and then imagine you're watching it from the perspective of a little kid in 1989 watching a VHS tape from 1985. It starts slow. You're focusing on the man's purple scarred-up forehead, his marceled hair, his tea shade glasses, his pink shirt with the neck button that won't close around his capacious double chin… how could you do anything but direct all of your attention to "The American Dream" Dusty Rhodes?

You're transfixed, under Rhodes' spell. For the first seven years of your life, you'd watched a fat Dusty Rhodes-looking father figure scream and shout in your house, so this kind of performance fits around your PTSD-afflicted brainpan like an old shoe, an old jock strap, an old pair of jeggings or some other tortured simile. Then Rhodes' promo starts to build. At the minute mark, he bellows there's "no honor among thieves." Your father was probably saying something similar while his businesses, and by extension his life, crumbled around him. On we go, as Rhodes starts with this "hard times" stuff. Yes indeed, you know from "hard times." Your life is nothing but hard times, so that's très relatable.

"Hard times are when a man has worked in a job for 30 years, and then they kick you in the butt, give you a watch, and say a computer took yo place, daddy," Rhodes laments. Then comes a flirtatious taunt: "I admit I don't look like the athlete of the day is supposed to look… my belly's just a little big, my heinie's just a little big, but brother I'm bad. There were two bad people. One was John Wayne, and the other is right here." Holy cow. There's an appealing toughness to this boasting, something that makes it seem like more than just empty blather directed at the marks who contentedly paid to see the show while Rhodes got well-compensated to be the show. In any case, he was worth every penny.

Two minutes into the interview, Rhodes extends his hand to the screen and tells you your hand is touching his hand for this "gathering of the biggest body of people in the universe." It doesn't make a lick of sense, yet it's undeniably brilliant. Dusty Rhodes is the man of the hour, the man with the power, too sweet to be sour, etc. He could get away with reading the phone book and you'd still adore him. He has to vanquish Ric Flair and get his job back, even though fate and the Jim Crockett Promotions booking team have decreed he never really will... at least not in an honest 1-2-3 manner that prevents Flair from later being re-awarded the belt on a technicality (the famed "Dusty finish" that doesn't finish anything) and Rhodes redoubling his efforts to win it.

Now comes Rhodes' coda: "I'm proud of you and thank God I have you." Are you, Dusty? Are you really? Man, that means the world to me. I hope all your American dreams come true.
 Oliver Bateman tag:www.splicetoday.com,2005:Post/23075 2018-02-17T07:02:00-05:00 2018-02-16T14:15:41-05:00 Vermont's Unlikely Olympic Athlete Machine
There's a hilly, family-oriented New England town of about 3,000, located across the river from Dartmouth College, where young people are encouraged to play multiple sports. The leagues are no-cut, and a sense of sportsmanship's encouraged. You might think this is a progressive approach that offers many developmental opportunities for the town's youth, but that it won't produce any stars. For that you need a ruthless sports culture that has kids competing in one just one sport from an early age, with the ones who can't cut it getting weeded out. That's an understandable response, given the standard model for sports excellence that currently prevails, but you'd be mistaken. The town, Norwich, Vermont, has produced 11 Olympians (nine of them completed in the Winter Olympics) and three Olympic medals, including a gold. For perspective on the freakish nature of this statistic, Spain, with a population of 47 million, has won only two Olympic medals in winter sports since 1936. New Zealand, population 4.47 million, has earned a total of one winter Olympics gold.

New York Times sportswriter Karen Crouse embedded herself in that small town, described by one columnist as "Disney World with maple trees," to write Norwich: One Tiny Vermont Town's Secret to Happiness and Excellence, an examination of how it's become the ideal grooming center for Olympic athletes, having put an athlete on every U.S. Winter Olympic team but one since 1984. What she discovered is sure to lead to a reexamination of the current paradigm that calls for young people to sacrifice their childhoods in the pursuit of athletics, often with great pressure from their parents and detrimental effects on the athletes.

As depicted by Crouse in a book packed with counterintuitive insights and pleasant surprises, Norwich appears to be in some sort of a timewarp where modern phenomena like "tiger parents" and "helicopter parents" don't micromanage every detail of their child's existence. It's a place where young people don't give up their childhoods in pursuit of a potentially big payoff way down the road in a win-at-all-costs environment. As the author explains it, Norwich is "the kind of town where someone dies" and "leaves his estate to the town on the condition that his money be used to ensure that no child endures the winter without a new pair of mittens." It's also the town with the state's highest median family income—$89,000.

Crouse writes about feeling traumatized by the $51 billion Sochi Winter Olympics that she covered, with its bloated budget, human rights violations, and a systemic doping program run by the Russian government. It was, to her, a joyless affair that indicated the Olympics were headed towards a dystopian place of no return where sports are used merely as a tool for the ambitious and powerful rather than the fulfillment of the athletes and the community of nations.

Norwich isn't like Garrison Keillor's fictional town of Lake Wobegon. All the children aren't above average, but the way the community approaches youth athletics, or youth in general, is exceptional. One of every 322 of its residents is an Olympian in an atmosphere that benefits both high and low performers. Those at the top of the athletic ladder have a chance to befriend kids who, while they're less gifted athletically, may have many other qualities to offer in friendship. Life becomes richer for both groups in such a situation.

Crouse tells the story of Hannah Kearney, who won a gold medal in freestyle skiing at the 2010 Winter Olympics and a bronze medal in 2014. She met girls on her youth rec league teams that she wouldn't have ever associated with otherwise. Years later, she's said, when her great success sometimes made each loss feel earth-shattering, those friends were able to help her keep things in perspective. When her parents ran out of cash to finance her skiing, Kearney found a wealthy benefactor who required only that she show him all her report cards and give an accounting of how she was spending each dollar. His generosity with strings attached provided the young skier valuable life lessons.

The author sounds positively besotted by Norwich, which can make the reader wonder about her objectivity. Still, the per-capita level of success the tight-knit community has achieved is so stunning that it must've stumbled onto something unique when it tried to make its kids more well-rounded but ended up producing champions.

Who knew that you could encourage young people to have fun and get such results? Norwich is the embodiment of Hillary Clinton's oft-derided motto, "It takes a village." Conservative anti-collectivists are likely to experience some cognitive dissonance when reading this book. They're going to look for other explanations like Norwich's wealth and proximity to Dartmouth. Vermont's own Bernie Sanders, however, must love it. In fact, he'd be well-advised to tout the town's success as evidence his collectivist approach can succeed. I'd be shocked if other communities don't try to duplicate Norwich's success when word of this book gets around.
 Chris Beck