ARF

                As an old dog, the old line about tricks has special meaning for me. That’s why I’m glad to report I’ve learned a new one.

                

             It’s a fondness for a team I’d guess few of you will recognize offhand—Tottenham Hotspur. It plays soccer (football to the rest of the world) in the English Premier League. Although I know none of its songs, don’t have a white-and-blue scarf and never have been to its White Hart Lane home in North London, I’m a fan.

 I prove that by knowing that the team’s name is not plural but singular, as in “Miami Heat.”  Collectively, however, they’re the Spurs. Curious, what?

Although I didn’t grow up with the sport, I’ve enjoyed soccer for some years now. My mild affection turned stronger when I covered the 1994 World Cup on these shores, and stronger yet during my attendance at the 1998 edition in France. The color, excellence of the games and passion of the crowds made that event the best I ever covered. The fact that wife Susie and I got to spend five weeks in Paris on the Wall Street Journal’s dime, with side trips to Lyon, Marseilles and Nantes, didn’t hurt, either.

Americans tend to scoff at soccer, finding it low-scoring and dull and and objecting to its numerous tied outcomes. Europeans and others tend to scoff at Americans, believing that our desires for action and finality are evidence of our national immaturity. “Life is a tie,” they’re fond of saying, and I can’t disagree.

But I think we Yanks would like soccer more if we’d glue ourselves down long enough to watch a top-level game from beginning to end. It’s played by average-sized men and thus emphasizes speed and agility, and the players’ skills are nothing short of marvelous. Soccerists can do with their feet almost what basketball players can do with their hands, even though it’s a lot harder. If you don’t believe me, try kicking a ball of any size with your “off” foot. 

Soccer goals may be rare but good passes and goal-threatening situations such as corner kicks are frequent. Action is continuous, with little of the stop-and-go (mostly stop) that bogs down our Big Three team sports.  Once you’re into the flow of a game it’ll start making sense. If you’re a typical, know-it-all American sports fan you’ll be hollering “Work the flanks!” in no time.

 Liking a sport is one thing, though, and rooting for a team is another. I got to the Spurs through my son Michael, an ex-pat who now lives in Copenhagen and works in Amsterdam but lived in England long enough to become a subject of the Queen, and my Scottsdale pal Mike Levy, who has familial ties to fair Albion.  

 Assists go to ESPN and the Fox Soccer Channel, which broadcast most Premier League games into the U.S. “live.”  The eight-hour time difference between London and Phoenix makes for 6 a.m. starts, but through the miracle of TIVO I can tape the games for anytime viewing. I’ve been reserving Sunday mornings for watching Spurs’ replays.

 Son Michael generally phones later on Sunday, and we rehash the action. As he puts it, it’s a “quality bonding experience.” Friend Mike and I also compare Spurs notes. He’s more critic than lover—often down on the team even when it wins—but I enjoy his contrarian viewpoints on many subjects. I mean, how many left-wing gun nuts do you know?

 I have a further bond with the Spurs through religion. That’s because much of the London neighborhood in which they’re based is (or was) Jewish, as am I, and Jews make up such a large part of the team’s fan base that it calls itself the “Yid Army.” Europe isn’t PC the way we are, so that sort of thing goes over there.  Still, like Levy’s rye bread (no relation to Mike), you don’t have to be Jewish to love the Spurs and many goyim do, including actor Kenneth Branagh, rocker Phil Collins, basketballer Steve Nash and WWE wrestler John Cena. My heroes all.

 What really defines Spurs fans, though, is their tolerance for failure. In that way they’re like fans of my Chicago Cubs, so I suppose it was fated that I’d join them eventually. Like the Cubs, the team has been in existence for a long time (since 1882) but has little to show for it. Its last Premier League championship came in 1961, when the circuit was called the First Division. The title before that came in 1951, and its previous history wasn’t more illustrious.

English soccer is like American baseball in that both have a monarchy. In baseball it’s the New York Yankees and in soccer it’s Manchester United. Actually, the Yankees wish they were Man U because that outfit rules as well as reigns, having won 13 crowns in the 21 seasons since the 20-team Premier League was rebranded in 1992-93.  Chelsea and Arsenal each have won thrice in that span, leaving little hardware for the rest.

The Brits keep interest up in the face of such hegemony partly by awarding consolation prizes. The top four Premier League finishers get to play in the Champions League, a lengthy tournament matching the best European clubs, and the top five qualify for the Europa League, a less prestigious go-round. With fourth-place finishes in 2012 and 2010 and a fifth in 2011, Tottenham has been in the mix for such places in recent years, pleasing its fancy.

This season promised to be a good one for the Spurs, but results have been mixed. The year’s highlight has been the blossoming into stardom of Gareth Bale, a tall, 23-year-old Welshman whose specialty is curling long kicks into small corners of the net. His goals have made up a one-man highlight reel and propelled him into election as the Premier League’s Player of the Year, a signal honor. With help from American National Team forward Clint Dempsey and Jermaine Defoe, a flashy but self-regarding scorer (I admire him more than Mike Levy does), the Spurs staged a mid-winter run that gained them a heady third place, behind only Man U and Manchester City, last year’s 2-1 finishers. A third would have been the Spurs’ best standing since the BPL was formed.

Sadly, they’ve staggered since, rallying to beat Man City with an awesome three-goals-in-seven-minutes flourish in April but coming up short against lesser foes.  With one game left to play (Sunday against Sunderland) they’re in fifth place, needing a win and a loss or tie by fourth-place Arsenal to land a Champions League spot. It’s a dim possibility.

Bale’s emergence presages better things ahead for the Spurs, but only if he sticks around. Middle-and lower-level Premier League teams long have made a living by developing young stars and selling their contracts for big bucks to the likes of Man U and rich continental powers such as Barcelona and Real Madrid, but the Spurs say they’ll pay up to keep the young man.  Stay tuned.

 Meantime, I’m adopting a favorite saying of Spurs’ supporters: Wait ‘til next year.

Sounds familiar, huh?

20--COUNT 'EM-- 20

                Playing the horses is out of fashion these days, and for good reason. Doing it seriously requires a degree of study that few wish to expend on a pastime, and the sort of obsessive mind that brings one back to a subject again and again despite good evidence that one should leave it alone.

              

             We horseplayers do it, I guess, because the problems involved—picking winners at the racetrack and coming out ahead financially (they’re not the same)—are just so darned interesting.  Every race presents a puzzle with more layers than an onion, requiring calculations of the speeds and running styles of the contestants, their pole positions, the distance of the race, the characteristics and condition of the racing surface and the abilities of the human actors, to name a few.

 Then one must figure out how to bet, a matter which, like all financial choices, concerns the balancing of risks and rewards. Throw in the fact that track-and-tax “takeouts” remove between 15% and 25% of every betting pool before winnings are distributed and you have an equation that has stumped many rocket scientists and other brainy types.

The plus side is the pleasure one gets when one cashes a nice-sized ticket, a glow that exceeds anything that can be felt when one’s card or number comes up in a game of chance. Racing’s challenge is intellectual, not statistical, and in the moment of victory you’re the smartest guy in the room, with the applause no less real for being internal.  

  The cause of the above is that on Saturday the 139^th Kentucky Derby will be run at old Churchill Downs in Louisville. It’s the one race to have when you’re having only one meaning that many civilians will have money on the outcome, if only because of a post-position number drawn in a pool.  A few even will try their hand at handicapping, an exercise that, usually, will satisfy the urge for at least another year.

We regulars look forward to the Derby, too. That’s partly because public attention to the race expands bragging rights (people listen up when they heard you’ve picked a Derby winner), but mostly because the race presents unique handicapping questions that, when answered, increase the joy of winning.

Many non-fans are aware of the main analytical test that the Derby presents-- that the contestants will be running 1 1/4 miles, 1/8-mile longer than they’ve run before.  A good deal of research has gone into determining which have the capacity to go that extra distance, the main one being Dosage Theory, which attempts to quantify how a horse’s ancestry affects his ability to win at various distances. Such info is part of the Daily Racing Form’s Derby-day coverage and, as such, can be perused by the plungers. Trouble is, most horses in every Derby field broadly qualify to win at 1 ¼ miles, so we’re back to relying on the stats and evidence of our senses.

Equally important, I think, is the impact of the size of the Derby field, which this year as in the past several will number 20 horses, barring late scratches. That’s a real herd, one so big that when it leaves the starting gate (two gates, actually) one expects to see John Wayne leading the charge, with bugles blowing. 

One upshot is that post position in the Derby is more important than it is in just about any other race. The horses in positions 1 and 2 are at particular risk; if they can’t beat the field over the first 200 or so yards they’ll become penned between the rail and the horses outside them, and might not escape. No horse starting from PP1 has won the race since Ferdinand in 1986. No PP2 has scored since Affirmed in 1978.

The plight of the far-outside horses isn’t as bad, but anyone who bets on them does so knowing they’ll have farther to run than the others.  Big Brown prevailed from PP20 in 2008 but he was souped up on steroids that were banned for the race the next year. I’ll Have Another won from 19 last year but also won the Preakness, showing he was a lot better than he looked in the Derby form.

The Derby’s length tempts many bettors into favoring late-running horses that have made up ground toward the ends of their previous races, whether or not they prevailed. This reasoning neglects the factor of “trip.” The banging around that’s part of just about every horse race is accentuated in the big Derby field, and any horse that runs from the middle or rear of the pack figures to encounter more of it than those up front.  To win from off the pace an animal must be lucky as well as good, a tough combination.

The good news about a big field is that it usually spreads the wagering around to create a good betting race, meaning that good odds can be had on very good horses. Most Derby favorites in recent years have gone off in the 3-to-1 to 4-to-1 range, and in 2010 Lookin At Lucky was the betting choice at a whopping 6-to-1. Much the same thing promises to be the case in a Saturday field that includes four horses that appear to be outstanding: Orb (7-to-2 in the morning line), Verrazano (4-to-1), Goldencents (5-to-1) and Revolutionary (10-to-1). Each has a top-heavy win record and excellent recent form that includes a major Derby prep-race victory.

 I don’t think there’s 10 cents worth of difference among the four of them, putting other factors into play.  One is value, meaning trying to get more bang for the buck, so I’ll be taking the two longest shots of the top four, Goldencents and Revolutionary.  Goldencents likes to run up front so he’ll have a good trip if he can do that. Revolutionary is a mid-packer, which could be a problem, but he’ll be in good hands because his jockey is Calvin Borel, a three-time Derby winner who is something of a Churchill Downs specialist. Additionally, rain is in the forecast for Saturday and Revolutionary has an off-track win on his record. Post position shouldn’t be a problem for either animal.

The Derby is a good place for longshots and I have two: Overanalyze and It’s My Lucky Day, both at 15-to-1. They look to be about a step slower than the top four on form but that’s more than balanced out by their odds and solid records. It’s My Lucky Day is especially attractive because of an off-track win and the experience he’s gained in 10 previous starts, more than any other entrant.  While I reserve the right to have late inspirations I’ll be taking a $2 exacta box of 3-8-9-12, a $24 bet. It’ll pay off nicely if my horses finish 1-2 in any order.

NOTE: For my take on racing’s Triple Crown series generally check out my Thursday piece on the website chicagosidesports.com. The link is above. There’s other good stuff there, too.  

PROVING 'EM WRONG

                On opening day of the baseball season I retrieved my Arizona Republic from my front walk, took it inside my house and opened it to the sports pages, as usual. The main headline made me want to throw the darned thing away. It read “Kennedy Driven By Detractors.”

             

                I didn’t have to read the piece that followed to know what it would say, but did so anyway. Sure enough, it aped the “critics as motivators” theme that’s impossible to escape in the echo-chamber world of sports. In it, players strive to excel to “show” the people who doubted them, whomever they may be (they’re rarely identified). Teams strive to win on the same ground.

                As you may or may not know, the Kennedy in the headline was Ian Kennedy, who would be the Arizona Diamondbacks’ starting pitcher that day against the St. Louis Cardinals. Kennedy has been the D’Backs’ top starter for three seasons now. He’s a baseball golden boy-- a high-school star in his native California, a PAC-10 pitcher of the year at USC, a first-round draft choice of the New York Yankees (in 2006) and a 21-game winner and Cy Young Award candidate with Arizona in 2011. At age 28 he will have collected some $9 million in salary and bonuses through this season, with his best earnings years ahead.

                Yet what does Kennedy think about when he takes the mound according to Republic baseball writer Nick Piecoro? That somebody once said he was too small to succeed in the Bigs (he stands 6 feet tall and weighs 190 pounds), that he “didn’t throw hard enough” and that he was a “back-end starter at best.”  My goodness, in the face of such obloquy it’s a wonder the young man can muster the courage to appear in public.

                Kennedy no doubt knows the “detractors” stuff is bunk but mouths it because he thinks it adds the touch of adversity that makes his professional odyssey seem more heroic. Writer Piecoro knows it, too, but better knows an easy story when he sees one. Multiple that by a couple thousand and you have the stuff that fills our daily newspaper and TV sports menus, to the betterment of few.

                Indeed, to hear our scribes and commentators tell it top athletes have just two major sources of inspiration: the abovementioned desire to prove “critics” wrong and dedication to a teammate, relative or homey who is ill or deceased. The fact that just about every adult can identify someone in that last list, and the nobility inherent in a memorial quest, makes it that story irresistible to teller, newsman and audience, ensuring its perpetuation.

                The dedicated-victory line probably predates the Trojan Wars but on these shores traces mostly to a tale involving Knute Rockne, the famous Notre Dame football coach. Trailing Army at halftime in a 1928 game, Rockne told his players that he’d been present at the premature-death bed of George Gipp, an ND football hero of several years before, and that Gipp’s dying wish was that, when things looked dark, Rockne should ask his team to “win one for the Gipper.” He did and so did they, pulling off what has come to be regarded as a monumental upset. The legend was burnished by the 1940 movie in which Pat O’Brien, who made his acting bones playing saintly Catholic priests, was Rockne, and darlin’ Ronald Reagan was an angelic Gipp.

                A bit of research casts doubt on the story. While Army was favored in that long-ago clash ND was a not-bad 4-2 in wins and losses going in, and had enough talent to win national titles the next two seasons, so it wasn’t exactly corned beef hash.  Further, contemporary accounts had it that Rockne wasn’t present at Gipp’s death and that his teams well knew his habit of ignoring the truth in his halftime orations. For example, he once told his troops to win one for his hospitalized son even though the lad was hale and home at the time.

                Gipp died in 1920, so the players whom Rockne exhorted didn’t know him. That probably was good because history has it Gipp was a card sharp and pool shark better known in South Bend’s after-hours clubs than around campus. The fact that he was an almost-26-year-old undergrad at the time of his death from strep throat, and had been expelled from school for poor attendance (later reinstated), attests to his lack of diligence as a scholar.

 He resurfaced in the news in 2007 when his body was exhumed, and his DNA taken, to check rumors he’d fathered an out-of-wedlock child with a teenaged girl. He beat that rap, meaning that in that case, at least, the Gipper hadn’t been a dipper.

 The latest manifestation of the “win-one-for” syndrome involved the University of Louisville team in last week’s NCAA men’s big-school basketball tournament and Kevin Ware, one of its players. When Ware went down with a horrendous broken leg during a quarterfinal game with Duke the cry immediately went up that L’ville was on a crusade to succeed for him. One radio guy I heard on Semifinal Saturday declared that the fallen teammate gave L’ville a “huge motivational edge” in the games to come, meaning, I suppose, that Ware, a useful reserve guard, was worth more on the bench with his leg in a cast than healthy and on the floor. That doubtful premise was repeated throughout Louisville’s triumphal march.

Let’s try that again, though. Louisville entered the tournament No. 1 in the national polls and as the top overall seed. It was favored in every game it played. It had a deep, athletic roster and an A-List coach. It was leading Duke when Ware was injured late in the first half of a game it won, 85-63, so it must have been otherwise motivated to get that far. But—hey!—never let the facts get in the way of a good story.    

                 So what really motivates top jocks? One thing is that winning feels better than losing, something every weekend athlete knows.  Another is that on the pro level winning pays better, and if money is an abstraction to an athlete (it often is after a certain point) it’s very real to many of the people around him.

                The best description of what makes a champion came to me from my friend Carmen Salvino, the Hall of Fame bowler with whom I wrote a 1988 book (Fast Lanes; Bonus Books).   “It takes a big ego and tunnel vision,” said he, adding “neither of those things go over big around the house.” He might have added that those attributes also don’t look good in print, which is why they’re not often part of the journalistic jockographies we read.

                Given the way athletes are lionized, the big-ego part should be obvious. Just about every player in every big-time sport is a physical genius, having grown up as the best athlete in his school, town or maybe even state, and petted, pampered and protected from age 10 or 11. That’s not the kind of background that breeds humility. It’s a miracle any of them turn out to be fit to live with.

                Tunnel vision is what turns that ability into victories on a field full of others similarly endowed. Lots of people are good at games but few can perform them at a high level amid the myriad distractions presented by any athletic venue, hostile or friendly.  Such concentration is an intensely selfish skill that must be ruthlessly developed. The memory of a departed loved one or a carping naysayer can spur greater effort, but this usually comes when the athlete is alone at the end of a hard workout, debating whether to run that extra lap or complete the extra round of shots or lifts. When the clock is winding down, and the fans are screaming, and the opponent is in his face, any extraneous thought can be ruinous.

                Athletes say they’re at their best when they are “in the zone”—so engrossed in the tasks at hand that they’re unaware the rest of the world exists. Time slows, sound blurs and focus narrows to a laser-like dot.

 It’s world without other people.

             Perfect.     

                                

DEEEFENSE

                It’s good sport in some sports to compare the top performers of various eras and debate which were best, but basketball isn’t among them. With the possible exception of the Michael Jordan-versus-LeBron James argument, there’s no doubt that today’s players are the best ever, with the trend line pointing upward. 

             

               The reasons behind this are several. Coaching has improved throughout the sport, and with coaches at the microphones and stop-action and slo-mo video technology advancing, every televised game is a clinic for young players.  Add better nutrition and physical-training methods and you have a level of athleticism that’s unmatched historically.  High-school kids today can do what top collegians couldn’t 15 or 20 years ago, and ditto for the collegians and pros. Watching games in the current NCAA men’s big-school tournament is like watching “The Matrix” with the players providing their own special effects. The Flying Wallendas had nothing on those guys.

                 Amid all the wonderfulness, though, are a few head-scratching facts.  One is that team scoring averages in NCAA Division I have declined over the last 40 or so years to just a tad over 68 points a game last year, the last for which full-season figures are available, from a peak of almost 78 points in 1971 and ’72, when shorts were short and sideburns were long.  That’s despite such offense-friendly rules changes as the shot clock (introduced at 45 seconds in the 1985-86 season and cut to 35 seconds in 1993-94) and the three-point basket, which debuted in 1987.

National field-goal shooting percentages are down, too, to about 44 in recent seasons from a high of about 48 in 1984. Last year’s mark of 43.6% was the lowest since 1966. That decline has led some to ask the question “Why can’t Johnny shoot?” more earnestly than those concerning the lad’s other failings.

The usual answer to the above is that John-boy is a showoff who’d rather spend his playground time slammin’ and jammin’, rehearsing for an ESPN highlights reel, than putting in the hard work needed to improve his marksmanship.  But for those who prefer to think well of the young there’s an alternative explanation that rings truer, and is endorsed by the game’s leading thinkers. It’s that there’s been a whole lot of defense going on of late, and its effectiveness is most responsible for the scoring dearth.

The technical side of that proposition should be apparent to even the casual basketball fan. Back in the day most college teams played either man-to-man defense or zone and pretty much left it at that. Today there’s a whole zoo of exotic schemes (the zone press, box-and-one, triangle-and-two) with variations aplenty, and teams switch among them from one ball possession to the next or even during the same one. You don’t have to be an x’s and o’s person to recognize these—the TV commentators will do it for you. It’s one of the main ways they display their knowledge.

More importantly, the increased athleticism of today’s players is making itself felt more on the defensive side of the ball than on the offense. Any coach will tell you that great athletes aren’t necessarily great shooters but anyone willing to move his feet can play defense, and the better one moves them the better one does it.

  “Coaches always stressed defense but now they have more kids who really can play it,” Eddie Sutton, a three-decade veteran of the major-college coaching ranks, told me some years ago, and what he said then is even more true now.

I think there’s another side to the game’s current D-domination, though, and it isn’t nearly as upbeat as the first. It’s that the refs are permitting more rough stuff than ever before and this is turning the game into a scrum. Indeed, with all the slapping, scratching, grabbing and bumping that’s ignored on the court it’s a wonder a shot ever gets off.

The NBA has set the pattern for this, and probably with reason. Today’s pros are so skillful that they can score under any regime short of house arrest, and without giving the “D” an edge every game’s score would be on the order of 125-123. The collegians aren’t quite that good, so defensive permissiveness often leads to turgidity.

A certain amount of physical contact is inevitable in basketball, especially around the hoop where the behemoths grind for position. Recent-year changes have been on the periphery, where the ball handlers operate.  The refs used to enforce some open space out there, but lately defenders have gone beyond an in-your-face stance to in-your-shirt, often contesting the ground on which ball handlers stand. If I were a collegiate guard I’d load up on garlic before games in the hope my breath might earn me and extra inch or two of daylight.

The refs could reverse this pattern if they chose, but the word from their bosses at conference and national headquarters seems to be “let the boys play.”  One upshot has been to reinforce the sense of unfairness that’s felt when close fouls are called. The other day I was watching a tight Georgetown-Syracuse game in the Big East tournament at Madison Square Garden when a foul was whistled against a G’town  player in the late going, setting off a storm of protest from his team’s bench and fans. The play was reviewed several times on TV, and both commentators agreed that a foul had been committed, but one noted that “they don’t call that foul in this league,” and the other concurred.

 The natural follow-up question—What fouls do they call?—went unasked.  If it had been, the truthful answer would have been “not many.”

The game would be better if they called more.

WORLDLY GOODS

                   Think you’re a good sports fan? Okay, here’s a one-question quiz, and no peeking, please. What’s the WBC?

              

                   It’s an easier question than you might think because there are at least three correct answers. One is the World Boxing Council, one of the agencies that misregulates the ring sport. Another is the World Badminton Championships , which is… well, that should be apparent.

              

                  The answer I’m looking for is the World Baseball Classic, which will conclude over the next several days. The final, in AT&T Park in San Francisco, will match the survivors of a 28-nation go-round that began with qualifying rounds last year. In this month’s deciding skirmishes 16 national teams faced off in pool play, the eight survivors went on to some confusing elimination matches, and the Terminal Two will play for the title on Tuesday, March 19. The winner can declare itself champion of the world, to whomever is listening.

                It’s an odd tournament, one made odder still by that fact that it’s staged in the early spring (late winter, actually) when the sport is just cranking up. It’s there because Major League Baseball, the game’s major engine, can’t (won’t) fit it in at any other time. 

                

                So why bother, you might ask? Because MLB was miffed when the Olympics dropped baseball as an official sport in 2005 after a five-Games run, deciding (1) that it really wasn’t a world sport and (2) that it was too expensive to stage, requiring the big field with stadium around it that most host countries lack.  For a change the Olympic honchos were right, but that counted for little with egos at stake.

                

                The WBC tournaments that have been completed to date—in 2006 and 2009--only have underlined that point.  The Japanese won both of them, mostly, I think, because they cared the most. The U.S., the game’s physical and spiritual home, never has finished higher than fourth (in ’09), partly because some of its better players have been indifferent toward the event, treating it in much the same manner as some National Football League stars treat their league’s post-season All-Star game, as an injury trap to be avoided.   

                

            Asserting the U.S’s baseball superiority isn’t mere chauvinism; even at a time when MLB has become truly international, boasting the best players from a dozen lands, more than 70% of them are Yanks, and several of the 16 teams in the WBC besides the U.S. have large American contingents. A couple of the others—Spain and The Netherlands-- wouldn’t be there without help from players from the Caribbean.

Indeed, without stretching the definition of nationality past recognition it would have been hard to hold the tournament at all. Citizenship in a country isn’t required to play for it; just having a great-grandparent born there suffices. In the case of Israel every Jew is eligible.  American Jewish big-leaguers Ian Kinsler and Kevin Youklis had expressed an interest in representing their ancestral homeland, and if the qualifying rounds hadn’t been in September, while their pennant races were in progress, the country might have made the field of 16. Too bad.

The best example of how goofy the who-to-play-for game can get is David Hernandez, a relief pitcher for the Arizona Diamondbacks. He was born and raised in Sacramento, California, and speaks only English, but has a great-grandmother from Mexico, so when that nation invited him to join its team he said yes. At the last moment he couldn’t find abuela’s papers, and when the U.S. then said it wanted him for its squad he said okay again, and was in the bullpen when the U.S. played Mexico last week.

One first-round series of the WBC was staged in and around Phoenix, and since I’m there I dropped by to see what was up. The U.S. team was scheduled to play in the Diamondbacks’ domed home of Chase Field, but ticket prices for their games started at $60 and I’m too cheap for that. Instead, I anted up 30 bucks to watch Canada face Italy at the spring-training park Salt River Fields, which is about 10 minutes from my Scottsdale home. When it dawned rainy that day they changed the venue to Chase, so I and Harvey Volin, my snowbird pal from Denver, had to schlep downtown to see it.

I went with some trepidation, expecting the Italian team to consist of a bunch of guys from the Bronx named Vinnie.  ‘Twasn’t so. While 19 of Italy’s 28 squad members listed U.S. hometowns, several gen-u-ine Italians played, including the 24-year-old third baseman Alex Liddi, of Sanremo, the first man born and raised in the country to play in the U.S. Major Leagues, with the Seattle Mariners. He batted fourth for the Italians and went 2-for-4, batted in a run and handled three fielding chances cleanly.

The game underscored the WBC’s nationality maze. The Canadian star was Joey Votto, the National League’s 2010 Most Valuable Player with the Cincinnati Reds. He was born in Toronto but could have played for Italy because he has Italian forebears. On the Italian side was shortstop Anthony Granato, who also was born in Toronto and so could have played for Canada.

The game featured the flag and player parades that always decorate international sport. Three national anthems were sung, with the U.S.’s joining those of the competing teams. About 8,000 people showed up in the 48,000-seat ballpark—most of them attired in Canadian red because lots of Canadians winter in the Phoenix area. Everyone got along, which was in contrast to the next day, when brawls on the field and in the stands punctuated the Canada-Mexico game. In a way that was a good thing because it showed that some people cared who won. Maybe if baseball is lucky it’ll one day have a Baseball War like the Soccer War of 1969 that matched Honduras and El Salvador.

Harvey and I hadn’t planned on it, but it was a stroke of good luck that we saw the Italian team. It’s been the surprise of the tournament, upsetting Canada and Mexico in Pool D to advance to the second round. Last Friday it cold-cocked the Canadians, gaining the 10-run lead (at 14-4) that caused the game to be stopped in the eighth inning.

The game showed that, however constituted, the Italian team has advanced to the point where it comes under the anybody-can-beat-anybody rule that governs most of baseball at every level. While its lineup contained a few recognizable big-league names, its game batting stars were Christopher Colabello, a Massachusetts native whose last professional stop was in Class AA, and Mario Chiarini, a homegrown from the Italian pro league. Italia probably won’t win the whole thing but it certainly deserves a “Viva!” for a nice try.

 As of this writing the U.S. team still was alive in the tourney, as was Japan, Cuba and the Dominican Republic. The baseball could be good—check it out.

 A better way to find out which nation is best at the game would be to have the winners of several of the national major leagues have it out after their regular seasons, but I could see a problem with that.   I mean, we already have a World Series, don’t we?

ADDITION BY SUBTRACTION

                What are the elements of a successful marriage? I can’t say generally, but I can offer the example of myself and Susie, my dear wife of 32 years.  She likes it warm and I like it cool. She’s a pack rat and I can’t wait to throw things away. I think all food is created equal and she’s happiest nibbling on carrots and lettuce.

               Our twains diverge further when it comes to sports. In baseball she’s been flighty as a gnat, at one time or another being a devoted fan of the Detroit Tigers, L.A. Dodgers, Chicago White Sox and, now, the Arizona Diamondbacks. I’m as constant as the moon, rooting for the same Chicago teams as I did at age seven, despite also having lived in a number of other cities.  

                We’ve been Arizonans for 15 years, and I like the place fine, so my attitude toward the Phoenix pro teams puzzles even me. The only local club I’ve had any enthusiasm for was the basketball Suns during Steve Nash’s heyday, but while I enjoyed watching them play it didn’t bother me much when they lost.

                More seasons than not I’ve been downright hostile to the D’backs, failing to cheer their successes and gloating over their failures. I confess that that attitude stems in part from envy over their winning a World Series title in only their fourth year of existence in 2001, something my team, the Chicago Cubs, hadn’t done for 93 years to that point, and 104 years now. But I think it’s also been a reaction against the inattentive people who make up a large part of the Arizona fan base, folks who rarely rouse themselves to cheer the team on the field unless prompted to do so by the electronic scoreboard at Chase Field.

                Lots of times Susie and I have settled into our favorite upper-deck (cheap) seats at Chase, with empty seats fore and aft, only to have locals plop down in the row in front of us and hinder our view. We’ve learned not to bother moving because more often than not they’ll leave after a couple of innings, never to return.  Where they go I have no idea. A better question is why they came in the first place.

                Over the last few years, however, the D’backs have done a few things I’ve liked, and have turned my antipathy into neutrality. Lacking a “C” on their jerseys they’ll never supplant the Cubs or White Sox in my affections, but I can foresee a time when I’ll be at least a little pleased when they do well.  As Susie can attest, that’s big.

                The person who’s turned me around is Kevin Towers, the D’backs’ general manager since September, 2010. He’s not only savvy baseballwise but is a standup guy as well, one of the few MLB execs who’d frankly discuss steroids use in the game during the 1990-2005 HITS Era (for Heads In The Sand), when juiced players were jacking juiced balls out of parks at a mockery-making rate and the official word on the subject was mum. The fallout from that span will always stain the sport, stamping a permanent asterisk on the records of the period.

                Towers made his bones generally managing the San Diego Padres, achieving four divisional titles and a World Series appearance (in 1998) in a city that’s as indifferent toward baseball as is Phoenix. In one of his first moves here he captured my attention, trading away Mark Reynolds, then the team’s posterboy.

                What made that deal wasn’t the guy Arizona got (David Hernandez, a useful relief pitcher) but the guy it got rid of. Reynolds best exemplified the D’backs of the new century’s first decade, a dumb slugger who hacked for the fences each time up but connected mostly with air. His 223 strikeouts in 2009 was a Major League record, breaking his own mark (204) of the year before. 

                More offputing yet was the attitude behind all those Ks; when asked about his propensity to whiff Reynolds always answered “that’s my style,” as if baseball were an individual game.  His negligent play at third base rounded out his zero persona.

                Although Towers got little credit for it hereabouts, he accomplished a small miracle in 2011, building a bullpen from scratch and turning a 65-97 team into one that went 94-68 and won a divisional crown.  A lot of luck went into that record, and it wasn’t repeated during last year’s 81-81 finish that more accurately reflected the team’s talent level.  Towers recognized this and completed the housecleaning that he’d begun two years earlier, sweeping out center-fielder Chris Young and right-fielder Justin Upton, two more players cut in the Reynolds mold.    

                The dumping of Upton was especially controversial; the team had made the young man the first choice in the 2005 draft and he’d intermittently flashed superstar gifts, sending drives into the darkest recesses of industrial-looking Chase. Mostly, though, he looked distracted, and Towers reasoned that it no longer was useful betting big money that he’d shape up.

                The players Towers has added—mainly second-baseman Aaron Hill; third-baseman Martin Prado, who came from Atlanta in the Upton trade; and right-fielder Cody Ross-- aren’t light-up-the-sky types. One writer for the Arizona Republic called them “white hot” competitors fanatical about winning, but that was silly because baseball is a game of adjustment and reaction and any player who burned white would quickly turn into a cinder. But they do look like adult pros who’ll show up to play every day, a welcome change in these parts.

                I don’t know how Arizona will do this season. They share a division with the San Francisco Giants, who’ve won two of the last three World Series, and the refinanced Dodgers and their $200 million payroll.  Baseball is mostly about pitching and the D’backs’ is iffy, especially the starters.  They should be out there trying, though, and I could get behind that.

MANTI AND CALEB

                

The common wisdom had it that the Wall Street Journal, my estimable former employer, hired as reporters people steeped in financial knowledge, the better to negotiate the subject’s complexities. The common wisdom was wrong.

               

             I was Exhibit A in that regard. I don’t know what the paper is doing now, but when I was signed on in 1963 as a 25-year-old I was as green as they came businesswise, not knowing a stock from a bond. When I expressed anxiety about my deficiencies I was told not to worry, that if I kept my eyes and ears open I’d pick up what I needed.

 Business and finance were merely “subject matter,” a senior colleague assured me then, and no harder to learn than any of the myriad other things journalists are called upon to cover. If one has the reportorial essentials—mainly curiosity, a low tolerance for B.S. and a willingness to pester people with unwelcome questions—the world would yield up its mysteries, or at least some of them, he said.

He was right and I happily spent years as a general-assignment reporter, writing about subjects as varied as business (of course), education, high fashion and theoretical physics. When I turned my hand to fulltime sports columnizing beginning in 1983 I felt no qualms about competing with men who had far more seniority than I on my new beat. Sports, after all, were just another subject, and in many ways not much different from what I’d been doing. Indeed, on some of the stories I dealt with, I thought my broad background gave me a leg up against people whose main concern always had been with who was on, or in, first.

A couple such stories have been in the news in recent weeks, and although they’ve been covered mostly on the sports pages they really weren’t about sports.  I refer to the ones involving Manti Te’o, the Notre Dame football hero with the dead imaginary girlfriend, and Caleb Moore, the snowmobiler whose death in an ESPN “X Games” stunt enthralled and appalled television viewers. Both were more about human nature and the way we live than about wins, losses or anything else that usually takes place on our fields of play. As such, they’ve pretty much been butchered by the people who’ve spoken or written about them.

For sheer strangeness, few recent stories have topped that of Te’o.  It seems that the Hawaiian linebacker carried on a two-year online and telephonic affair with an island woman whom he came to regard as his girlfriend even though they’d never met. When he was told she’d died of leukemia on the same day last September as did his grandmother he duly informed news-media folk, and earned props for soldiering on in the face of adversity.  That narrative gave a push to his strong Heisman Award candidacy, the first for a Domer in many years.

It turned out that the girlfriend never lived—that she was the invention of a warped, male “family friend” of Te’o’s who’d spoken and typed her lines-- but after he learned this Te’o kept it to himself as Heisman announcement day came and went. Thus, when the hoax became public he was vilified. Indeed, for a couple of weeks last month you couldn’t open a newspaper or turn on a TV set without hearing him mocked and denounced, and in a national poll by the website of the business magazine Forbes, which probably should concern itself with more-serious matters, he was voted the second “most disliked” American athlete, behind only the serial cheater and liar Lance Armstrong.

My first reaction to the flap was that it was wildly overblown, that while Te’o was an imposing lump of muscle he also was a young man of 22 subject to all the limitations of his tender years. I certainly wouldn’t like to see all the dumb things I did and said at 22 (or later) broadcast coast-to-coast. Further, his failure to leap to set the record straight about the matter is easily ascribable to his reluctance to look the fool. My guess is that he thought that if he kept his mouth shut the thing would go away, an error he’s shared with many older celebrities including a President or two. Give the kid a break, for chrissakes!

Upon reflection, however, I began to wonder how unusual was the crux of the story, which was that someone could become so enmeshed in a so-called “virtual” relationship that he could come to regard it as real.  This, after all, is the digital age, when people boast they have hundreds of online “friends” even though they’ve never met most of them, and when it’s not uncommon to see a group of people sitting together around a restaurant table totally engrossed in their own, hand-held electronic devices.

One of my pet peeves is being waited on in a store and having the salesperson be diverted by a phone call and transferring his or her entire attention to the caller.  To some, any jangling phone or streaming text line is more compelling than a live human being, no matter how close. Fess up--you may be one of them.

 Caleb Moore’s tale was, of course, more tragic than Te’o’s, but no less misinterpreted. It was treated widely as an anomaly—something that’s unexpected and out of place.  In fact, the kind of mishap that killed him was the logical consequence of his activity and inevitably will occur again.

Further, and more importantly, daredevilry is not the exclusive province of such high-risk sports as auto and motorcycle racing, downhill skiing and the entire “X Games” schedule (the “X” is short for “extreme,” as in “extremely dangerous”) but is evidenced more often in the ordinary work of the likes of police officers, fire fighters and combat soldiers, occupations pursued by millions. When most people hear gunfire they run away from it, but the cop or soldier runs toward it.  Good thing, too; such people are necessary for our protection individually and as a society.

   That risk seekers are different from you and me is obvious, but for reasons rarely investigated. Something I once read explains it nicely: they are anhedonic, which means they’re unable to experience pleasure in ordinary ways.  While most people find ample delight in, say, a ballgame or a corned beef sandwich, for psychological or chemical reasons others need a real kick to get their juices flowing. This, by the way, also explains why people will take up with dangerous recreational drugs with the full knowledge that they could be their downfall.

 A daredevil like the 25-year-old Moore does what he does because of the danger involved, not in spite of it. He said as much in an interview with the New York Times given shortly before his crash. Recalling the first time he did the fatal stunt as a 19-year-old, a full backflip off a ramp on a 500-pound machine, he said “it was the most exciting moment of my life¸ and the most heart-pounding, too.”

Minutes after Caleb Moore’s accident—while he was en route to the hospital—his 23-year-old brother Colton, also an “X Games” snowmobiler, tried the same trick on the same ramp. He wound up in the hospital with a separated pelvis. Released a day later, after Caleb had died, Colton said he’d be back in action as soon as he was able.