GET LOUD!

                Centuries from now, if our institutions still exist, archeologists wishing to learn what life was like in 2013 would do well to check out our TV commercials. No other medium better encapsulates our values and aspirations. If we don’t like the pictures of ourselves they present, it’s our fault, not its makers’. Those folks are sharp and have money to spend, a tough combination to beat.

                

                The commercials that have caught by eye especially of late are in Pepsi’s “Are You Fan Enough?” series. There’s been a bunch of them, tied to National Football League teams and games. The kickoff ad, presented in the usual zip-zip-zip fashion, showed energetic-looking men and women wearing NFL gear and waiving team flags, others with painted faces, and a young man getting a team logo (the Pittsburgh Steelers’) shaved onto his head, interspersed with images of people quaffing the sponsor’s sweet, brown beverage. It ends with a shot of a bunch of beefy guys in a crowded stadium, leaning forward, pumping their fists and shouting apoplectically. 

                

              What if anything is happening on the field while all that activity is going on—the context, don’t you know?—is unseen and unstated. That’s because there is no context. According to the ad, fan fervor is an end in itself and worth celebrating for its own sake.  The French philosopher Rene Descartes defined the human credo as “cogito ergo sum,” which means “I think therefore I am.”  If he were alive today and writing Pepsi ads he’d put “we cheer therefore we are” into Latin, and be well paid for it.

  

               It’s a whole new ball game out there, one in which I’m not comfortable because I don’t qualify as “fan enough” by Pepsi’s standards. I’ve never painted my face in a team’s colors, own no team flags, don’t have enough hair to have a team emblem cut onto my scalp and never have come close to busting a gut over any sports action, although I’ve seen plenty of it.

                I do own some team gear but received most of it as gifts, from people who think it’s the kind of thing I’d like. I’m politely grateful when I get it but promptly pitch it onto a shelf in my closet, from where it rarely emerges. I have a classic Cubs’ cap I like—blue with a red “C”—and often wear to baseball games. I have a couple Olympic t-shirts from my columnist days that I wear in public from time to time, mostly because they’re good brags. Otherwise the duds get worn only around my house, when I’m in my wood shop or doing my morning exercises.

                   An obvious reason for my unease with the current stadium scene is generational: most people my age (I’m 75) didn’t make a display of their fandom during my formative years. We went to games, all right, and cheered for the home teams, but mostly we kept quiet unless something worth shouting about was taking place on the field. Stated differently, there were the games and there was the audience of which we were a part, and the two were separate.  Ditto for plays, concerts and other forms of public entertainment.

                Now the audience considers itself part of the show. I don’t go to rock concerts but I did go to a play a few weeks ago (“The Importance of Being Earnest,” if you can believe they’re still staging it) and the young fellow seated behind me (about 30 years old, I’d guess) whooped or hollered “Yeah!” at every on-stage verbal putdown, of which there were many. I wondered what Oscar Wilde would have thought.

               

                 There always have been people who think everything is about them, but today they predominate. In sports I think their ascendancy began in the late 1970s or early ‘80s when the stadium “wave” made its appearance on the West Coast and rolled across the nation.  The wave was nice in a way—a communal expression—but it also made the statement that the sports crowd can have an agenda that has nothing to do with the game before it.

                I feel similarly about the costumes some people wear to athletic events. For pure entertainment the best show in the NFL isn’t put on by Peyton Manning or Tom Brady but by the fans in the parking lot and stands at Oakland Raiders’ home games. People there have embraced the Raiders’ biker-gang image and celebrate it with fierce face paint, real or temporary tattoos, spiked hair, studded belts and collars, and muscle shirts. And that’s just the women!

                The above two examples are harmless, as was that “Rockin’ Rolland” guy who’d show up ubiquitously on TV wearing his rainbow wig and hoisting his “John 3:16” sign. (Where is he? I miss him.) Not so the latest manifestation of crowd exhibitionism, the sustained, ear-splitting roar.

                You may be interested to know that there’s a contest going on for whose fans are loudest, and that those of the NFL Kansas City Chiefs are winning. Their top decibel level during a game last month was measured at 137.5 by the Guinness World Record folks, beating the previous mark of 136.6 for an outdoor stadium set a week earlier at a Seattle Seahawks’ home game. Both readings were about the same noise level a jet passenger plane creates on takeoff, as heard by someone standing on the runway bare eared.

                The object of those clamors is very much game-related, designed to disrupt the signals of the visiting team’s offense, and the false-start and delay-of-game penalties they cause attest to their effectiveness. Is this fair? No, but so far the league hasn’t wanted to rile the beast by telling it to pipe down. Fans want to express themselves even at a risk of hearing loss, and Commish Goodell is letting them.

                The Pepsi people no doubt would rate the K.C. and Seattle screamers as “fan enough,” and worthy of drinking their product.  Me, I don’t care what Pepsi thinks. I prefer Coke.     

                NOTE: I have a new piece on Cub and White Sox prospects in the Arizona Fall League on chicagosidesports.com, which you can check out with the link above. While you’re there see my piece on the old ogre Arthur Wirtz by finding “Wirtz Case Scenario.” 

JUST PAY THE DANGED PLAYERS?

                 When everybody says something should happen, it probably will. But this isn’t necessarily a good thing.

              

                 What everybody is saying now is that it’s about time big-time college athletes in the so-called revenue sports—football and men’s basketball-- are paid. Time magazine said so in a September cover story. Joe Nocera, the New York Times op-ed columnist who sometimes writes about the NCAA, has agreed on several occasions. Sports-blab radio hosts have been saying it for years; it’s like you can’t join their union if you don’t share that belief. You might think so, too.

               

                At least, it’s a commonsensical stance. Look around any college stadium on game day and you’ll notice that everyone who didn’t buy a ticket—sportswriters, TV folks, coaches, game officials, ticket takers, concessionaires, vendors and the people who clean up after—are on the clock. In a multi-billion-dollar business that enriches many, what could it hurt to toss a few bucks the kids’ way?   

                But think about it for a minute (I know, it hurts) and complications appear.  How much would be “fair” compensation for the hours the players put in-- $100 a month, $1,000, $5,000?   Should they be paid out of season as well as in? Should a kid who seldom plays be given as much money as a starter, or a starter as much as a star?  Should Johnny Football have a pay class of his own?

                Should players’ injuries be covered by workmen’s compensation, whose benefits can far outlast their college careers? Should the players be permitted to organize?  Should they have a voice in their conditions of employment, such as the duration and content of practices? Should they get to audition cheerleaders?

                I could go on but think the point is made. I also think it’s widely recognized that many if not most of the players already are being paid, only not by check. When I covered the University of Illinois football team for the Daily Illini in 1956 (gasp!), the players joked openly about the “$20 handshakes” they received from alums after games. According to a recent series in Sports Illustrated magazine about a long-term and far-reaching payment system in the Oklahoma State U. football program, it seems those attaboys are worth $200 these days.

                  No-work jobs from boosters were part of the OK St. package, SI averred; nothing new there, either. Ditto for free meals, beers, clothes and whatnot from friendly merchants around any campus. Agents can be counted upon to slip cash to players who might be future clients, as well as to their pals and loved ones; it’s a normal expenditure in that business. A recent piece on Yahoo Sports asserted that five current or recent Southeastern Conference football stars shared some $90,000 in agent payouts over a 15-month period ending last December.

                But even such hauls pale in comparison with the value of what athletes are permitted to receive.  The annual cash value of a “free ride” athletic scholarship to a top-division sports school-- covering tuition, room, board and books-- ranges from $15,000 to $25,000 for students at public universities to more than $50,000 for such high-toned private schools as Duke, Stanford and Northwestern. Multiply that by the four or five years it usually takes a jock to play out his eligibility and you have more-than-ample compensation for semi-skilled labor.

                The final figure is much higher for athletes who manage to emerge with degrees. If you estimate that college grads earn about $20,000 a year more than people without degrees over a 40-plus year work life, you see the basis of the claim that a degree is worth a million dollars, not to mention whatever intellectual lamps it lights.  Even those who wish to quarrel with that estimate must admit that a sheepskin is much more valuable monetarily than any salary young jocks might be paid while in school.

                The real scandal of college sports doesn’t concern what the players get— legally or under the table—but what they typically don’t get, which is the ability to pursue the education they sign up for. Playing football or basketball at the top college level is a full-time job, with players so tied up in games, travel and workouts and practices of various kinds that they have little time or, sometimes, energy for schooling.  Add that the youngsters must cope with the sort of news-media attention that would disconcert most of their elders and normal student life becomes an impossibility.

                It’s possible that a strong-minded, persistent and well-advised young man can get through the athletics’ cement mixer with an education worth its name, but most 18-to-22 year-old jocks don’t fit that description. Abetted by their coaches, most are channeled into unchallenging majors whose requirements don’t conflict with their sports schedules, and eased along further by “program-friendly” profs and “academic advisers” who relieve them of the necessity to do much coursework.  Yes, the lads often are complicit in their own exploitation, but their youth is an excuse while the adults who manage them have no such “out.” Putting players on a payroll only would increase the overseers’ leverage.

                 They’re not going to tear down the stadiums, the coaches aren’t going back to being paid like regular teachers and dumb-ass boosters aren’t about to get lives outside of sports,  so remedies are hard to imagine, much less implement. One small thing that could be done, though, is return to the former practice of denying athletic eligibility until a student satisfactorily completes a full academic year. That might discourage college attendance by players who are interested solely in honing their games and give the others a taste of what the rest of the student body is up to. Some might like it and insist on continuing.

               

                 

  

   

GO BUCS!

                The baseball playoffs start today and since my Chicago teams aren’t in them (they rarely are) it’s good to have a Plan B. This year I have one in the Pittsburgh Pirates.

                

                I lived in Pittsburgh from New Year’s Day, 1963, until Labor Day, 1966, almost four years.  I went there to take a job on the copy desk at the Pittsburgh Press, one of two largish newspapers that offered me employment after I’d completed my six months of active duty with the Army Reserve.

 Working in Pittsburgh hadn’t been my objective but getting on a metropolitan paper was; in my previous jobs in Champaign and Elgin, Ill., and Ann Arbor, Mich., I’d seen too many good newspaper people stuck in small towns past the point they could easily leave, and I’d resolved to escape that trap. My other bid was from the St. Paul Pioneer Press, and for meteorological reasons Pittsburgh seemed the better choice.

It turned out that being chained to a copy desk wasn’t for me, and by the summer of ’63 I was looking for alternatives. Providentially, I got a call from the Wall Street Journal, with whose Chicago bureau chief I’d previously interviewed. I’d scarcely remembered the chat but for some reason he had, and when an opening arose in the paper’s Pittsburgh bureau he passed along my name. I didn’t know a stock from a bond (really), and never had read the paper before I went to work there, but when the Journal offered I accepted, figuring I’d at least get out of the office once in a while.

Life is a series of accidents and this one turned out happily. My new colleagues by example taught me more about reporting in a few months than I’d picked up the previous six years, and I thrived under the paper’s nurturing regime.  My late wife Carol and I liked Pittsburgh, too. It wasn’t the city our native Chicago was but it was livable on our modest budget, and a half-hour’s drive in any direction from our home in suburban Crafton got us out into some pretty, rolling countryside. We had children there, and made friends, and were sad to leave when the paper transferred me to New York.

Carol wasn’t a sports fan, and the kids kept us busy, so I didn’t do much ballgame-going in Pittsburgh, but several times I did make it out to Forbes Field, where the Pirates played. It was a big old park, a remnant of the dead-ball era when shots between the outfielders could roll forever and triples were frequent. Sometimes they’d roll under the batting cage, which after batting practice was stashed on the playing surface in deep-center field because there was no other place to put it.  You don’t see that sort of thing anymore.

I mostly followed the Pirates (or ”Bucs”—short for Buccaneers-- as they’re called in Pittsburgh) on radio and TV. This acquainted me with Bob Prince, one of the best baseball mike-men ever. Prince was smart and clever, a “homer” who nonetheless made baseball fun even if you weren’t a local. He hung whimsical nicknames on Pirate players of the era (the light-footed centerfielder Bill Virdon was “The Quail”; the tall, stooped leftfielder Bob Skinner, who ran with a bent-legged gait, was “The Dog”), crowed “we had ‘em all the way” after close wins, and sometimes interrupted his playing-field narratives to verbally admire females in the stands. It wasn’t PC but you had to smile.

 It didn’t hurt that Prince was a legend in his own time who earned his macho bones with a dive into the swimming pool of a St. Louis hotel from a third-floor balcony, and something of a night-life hero as well. It was said that his nickname “The Gunner” stemmed not from any rapid-fire delivery but from his being threatened by a gun-toting man while he was chatting up the guy’s wife in a bar.

            

            There are reasons besides personal nostalgia to root for the Pirates this fall. This season they broke an epic, 20-year run of sub-.500 finishes, a record for futility even my Cubs can’t match. Their last playoff appearance was in 1992 and ended in agonizing fashion when they blew a 2-0 ninth-inning lead to the Atlanta Braves in the seventh and deciding game of the National League Championship Series. Pirate fans still can see Sid Bream, a heavy-legged Brave, chugging home with the winning run in that one, just eluding catcher Mike LaValliere’s tag after a Barry Bonds throw. I covered that series and recall the play vividly.

              

           It’s widely held that Pirate fans are loyal and long-suffering, and thus worthy of occasional success. I agree with the conclusion even though only the last part of that description is true. The steel mills are long gone but the Pittsburgh area remains blue-collar in spirit, an agglomeration of towns around a smallish central city (population about 300,000) where people are careful with their dollars and wary of enthusiasms.

 Sure, they love their football Steelers, but who wouldn’t? The team long has been one of the NFL’s best, and you can fill a big football stadium even in tiny burgs like Clemson, S.C. The Pirates, on the other hand, have topped the 2 million mark in season home attendance just five times in their century-plus history, and this season are averaging only about 28,000 spectators a game, 19^th in the majors. The team draws better on the road than at home.

But the people who do show up like what they see and for the nonce, glad to reclaim my Pittsburgh past, so do I.  Go Bucs! Win one for The Gunner.

CAVEAT FOOTBALLER

                The National Football League has settled the lawsuits against it by the retired players who claim it misled them about the risks of the head injuries they suffered in its employ. The preponderance of journalistic opinion is that the deal is a big win for the league.

             

             The plaintiffs in the suit—some 4,500 of them—are to split $765 million. That seems like a very large sum until you divide it by the number of teams in the league—32—and the 20-year period over which it will be paid.  Although payment will be front-loaded, with half the money to be distributed during the first three years, each team’s average annual payout will come to about $1.2 million, which is about what it spends for Ben Gay and Ace bandages.

 When you note that the NFL’s revenue last season was about $10 billion, and the figure is expected to rise steeply in the years immediately ahead, the conclusion that it made out like a bandit seems inescapable.

And as the TV pitchmen say—Wait! There’s more! The settlement covers all ex-players, not only those who signed up as plaintiffs, so if one of them develops neurological symptoms years down the road—a not-uncommon occurrence with head injuries—he’ll have to share from the existing pot. Current and future players aren’t included, but they are parties to labor-contract provisions that will subject their claims to arbitration, which typically is less generous to plaintiffs than litigation.

The NFL got off without having to apologize or admit fault, things that are dear to the stony hearts of corporate lawyers.  Additionally, the settlement saved it the considerable legal costs trials would have entailed and spared it from having to produce for cross-examination its dubious experts who until recently were telling the players and the rest of the world that there was no proven link between playing football and ailments like Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s and dementia, even though studies to the contrary have existed for more than 30 years.  Again, rack up a “W” for the Big Team in Suits.

So why did the players agree to such a deal? Because many of the afflicted retirees are broke and hurting, unable to wait out the years that litigation would have taken and justifiably leery about their prospects of proving in court that their illnesses stemmed from injuries they sustained as professionals, not as high-schoolers or collegians.

  The “broke” part pertains mostly to ex-NFL bit-parters who never made much money in the game, but it’s notable that the plaintiffs’ list also included such recent-year stars as Bruce Smith, Tony Dorsett, Art Monk, Harry Carson, Leroy Butler, Fred Taylor, Andre Reed and Jim McMahon, whose medical and care requirements eventually could strain even their once-ample bank accounts. Perhaps they and others looked at the head-injury-related suicides of Junior Seau, Dave Duerson and Andre Waters and decided that if help didn’t come soon it might be too late.

Still, the belief that the NFL got off cheap may be premature. Yeah, the league admitted no guilt, but the Latin phrase “res ipsa loquitur,” meaning “the thing speaks for itself,” seems to apply, with 765 million reasons to back it up. In paying the settlement, the league ratified the idea that playing football has serious potential health consequences.  The action takes the sport out of the category of a healthful exercise that might be appropriate at the school as well as the adult level and ranks it with auto racing and downhill skiing as a daredevil pursuit that should be undertaken only with full appreciation of its risks.

A similar recognition is inherent in the recent changes the league has made to prevent head injuries and better treat ones that occur. While laudable, they also underline the fact that something dangerous is going on between the sidelines, which the evidence of our senses confirms every Sunday.  

  What’s the chance of incurring a debilitating neurological injury at age 50 after, say, 10 or 12 years of playing organized football—1%, 5%, 20%?  How about after four or eight years in the sport? We don’t know now but the data is out there and one day it will be tabulated definitively. If the results don’t deter the players themselves—young athletes are strong and cocky, and think that injuries are things that happen to other people—it might make an impression on the parents who have to approve their participation in schools and colleges.

 These parents might note that young, developing brains are more susceptible to trauma than the more-mature ones of the NFL behemoths. They also might heed some recent research that concludes that an individual needn’t have sustained a “big bang” head blow resulting in a verifiable concussion to suffer lasting neurological damage—that the numerous, smaller “dings” he shrugs off in practice or games can have a cumulative affect that can amount to about the same thing.

 You love football, I love football, and the players and their moms and pops love football, but maybe something similar will happen to perceptions about the game. It may take a while but if it does the NFL won’t be celebrating its “victory.”

BASTA!

                I hate to see people suffer, so as a sports columnist I avoided events such as marathons and triathlons, whose main point seemed to be to determine how much punishment humans could endure. Even the winners of those things looked like they’d been through a wringer.  Good manners dictated looking away.

               

                I feel the same way about some of the men’s matches in the U.S. Open tennis tournament, now unfolding at the old World’s Fair grounds in the New York borough of Queens, and on your TV screens. The tourney’s best-of-five set format—like that of the other three tennis “majors” (the Australian and French Opens and Wimbledon)—often results in four-or-five hour contests that can leave their contestants stumbling, gasping, cramping and generally hanging on for dear life. It’s an anachronism whose time has passed.

                Fact is, best-of-five already is history in the big majority of tennis tournaments—men’s as well as women’s—where matches go to the first winners of two sets. It survives in the men’s majors because… well, just because. Tennis, after all, is the sport in which “love” means nothing, and the roots of whose points system—15, 30, 40, game—are lost in antiquity.   I asked around about that “love” thing once, and was told it stemmed from the French “l’oeuf”, which means “the egg.”  But though an egg is roundish, like a zero, it’s too thin a joke to be repeated endlessly.

                Tennis does alter its scoring rules occasionally—about every half-century. The last big one came in 1970 when it changed the win-by-two requirement by adapting the first-to-seven-points tiebreaker to end sets that are tied at six games each. Typically, though, the change has been less than universal, and the U.S. Open is the only major to apply it to a fifth set. That means that while sets no longer can go on indefinitely in Melbourne, Paris and London, matches can.

                  It was only a matter of time before Murphy’s Law, which holds than anything that can go wrong will, would bite tennis with a vengeance. In 2011 at Wimbledon the American John Isner and the Frenchman Nicolas Mahut went at it in a first-round five-setter that lasted 11 hours and five minutes and sprawled over three days, with two continuations for darkness. The game score of the last set was 70-68, if you can believe it.  Because Isner needed a couple of days to recoup for more singles, and both players had doubles commitments that had to be postponed, it screwed up the tourney’s schedule for a week.

                The year 1970 was pivotal for tennis for other reasons. That was about the time when the wooden racquet, the game’s standard forever, began to give way to ones with steel or aluminum frames. Those materials gave players more bang but were only a taste of what would happen when more-exotic substances like graphite, boron and Kevlar came on the scene, sometimes in combination. They allowed racquet frames to become far stronger, lighter and more flexible than previously.  

                Back in “woody” days,   racquets had faces that measured about 65 square inches, weighed 13 ounces and had “sweet spots”—the hitting areas of maximum power and control—about as big as silver dollars. Now face measurements run to 145 square inches (although most pros use smaller), weigh 10 or 11 ounces and have sweet spots as big as grapefruits.  Add the improvements in strings and stringing and the difference between today’s racquets and old-style ones is about the same as that between an Uzi and a B-B gun.

                The early expectation was that the power surge would most benefit big servers, allowing them to blow their foes off the courts. It didn’t turn out that way. Equally well-armed defenders nullified their thrusts by retreating a few feet from the baseline and slinging serves back almost as hard as they came in. That killed serve-and-volley tennis, once an enlivening stylistic staple, and turned every point into a duel of baseline rockets that continues until one player falters.  It’s made matches longer but not, by me, better. When players don’t wear different-colored clothes it’s hard to them apart.  

                Other factors have made tennis a more grueling game than it once was. The sport these days has a year-round schedule, and its most-used surface is “hard court,” which can mean several things but usually boils down to playing on asphalt. As any recreational runner can tell you, pounding away on hard surfaces is tough on legs and feet, and the better traction they provide means more wear on joints.

 Also, there are more good players than there used to be, meaning that the early rounds of the grand-slam events can be testing even for the top seeds. Back in the day those worthies could count on skating through the first three or even four rounds without much resistance, but today some young Slovenian ranked No. 116 can keep numbers one or two scrambling for hours before succumbing, or not. It’s no wonder that just about every top player must play through pain, and few envision grinding on into their late 30s, the way Ken Rosewall or Jimmy Connors did. Roger Federer, the best player of this era, just turned 32 and can’t get through a press conference without being asked about his retirement plans.  Rafael Nadal, Federer’s closest pursuer, is 27, and given his all-out style and injury history isn’t a good bet to be playing at 30.

Best-of-five might have made sense in Jack Kramer’s time, when players played a dozen events a year, but no more. Two and a half or three hours of tennis—the usual length of a well-contested three-setter—is more than enough to determine who’s best at any level. The way it is now, someone should call OSHA on behalf of the guys, or the SPCA. 

 

               

                

AROD, THE PRO BOWL AND JOHNNY F.

NEWS:  BASEBALL CRACKS DOWN ON PED USERS

               

VIEWS:  That’s the way the news media are playing the penalties meted out to 14 players implicated in the Biogenesis affair. The newsies depict vigilant B-Men banging down the door of the defunct Miami “anti-aging” clinic, rounding up the johns regardless of rank and nailing them with lengthy sentences. Holy J. Edgar!

               

Trouble is, that doesn’t square with the facts. For one thing, only seven of the Flawed Fourteen are current major leaguers, and one of the remaining seven (Jordan Noberto) is an unemployed free-agent pitcher recovering from elbow surgery.  For another, just one of them—Ryan Braun—ever failed an MLB drug test, and his result was reversed on a technicality. That means that testing-- the game’s main line of pharmaceutical defense-- failed to identify 13 players later revealed as users, hardly an encouraging outcome.

               

Further, the case that triggered the actions wasn’t uncovered by Baseball but by a whistleblower. According to stories in the New York Times and ESPN, one Porter Fischer, a Biogenesis employee and investor, staged a late-night raid on the company’s files after concluding he was being scammed by Tony Bosch, the outfit’s fake-doctor owner, and turned the trove over to the Miami weekly newspaper that initially published it.  Without his out-of-left-field help the episode might never have come to light.

               

As for the penalties, c’mon.  After plea bargaining 12 players received the 50-game suspensions they would have gotten as first-time drug-test flunkers even though their PED use seemingly was substantial and prolonged; the major leaguers among them will be eligible to participate in this year’s playoffs if their teams make it that far. Braun’s sentence of 65 games allowed him to end an injury-plagued season with his last-place club and begin work on the new act he’ll unveil at spring training. My guess is that he’ll be a L.A. Dodger by then.

               

This leaves Alex Rodriguez as the only player whose case still pends. That’s because, at age 38 and with a thick surgical file, ARod’s 200-plus game suspension lasting through 2014, based on his admitted previous drug use and asserted attempt to hamper the investigation, amounts to a career ender, so he might as well seek arbitration. That’s good because it will force Baseball to subject its evidence to scrutiny in a quasi-judicial forum. If it holds up the game at least will have done something right.

NEWS: THE NFL REVISES ITS PRO-BOWL FORMAT

               

 VIEWS: Lots of sports-page stories invite chuckles but few make me laugh out loud. One did the other day, concerning the National Football League’s annual Pro Bowl all-star game that has concluded recent seasons.

               

It’s no news that fan and player indifference has put the game in jeopardy; I joined those addressing the subject in my blog of July 15, which you can scroll down to read.  The league has taken the criticisms to heart my announcing some changes in the way the contest will be played. The ones that got the most ink were a no-kickoffs rule in the name of player safety, and some tinkering with the game clock to speed play.

               

The change that got me, though, was the way the teams will be picked. Players still will be selected by a clunky process blending fan, player and coaches’ votes, but once a pool of the worthy is established the top two individual vote getters will be dubbed captains and allowed to choose sides without regard to the NFC-AFC conference divide.

               

Let me repeat that. The richest, most-buttoned-down, most-self-important sports league in creation will allow its all-star-game teams to be picked by CHOOSING SIDES, just like kids do in the playgrounds. Don’t you love it?

The stories didn’t say who’d get first pick, but I have a couple of suggestions. One would be to take a page from baseball and have one captain flip a bat to the other and then go hand over hand toward the handle until no more room remains and the top hand prevails. The other would have one captain spin a ball behind the other’s back and ask him to choose between laces up or down. That’s more suitable to football but not as much fun as the bat method.  You can’t do chicken claws on a football.

NEWS:  “JOHNNY FOOTBALL” CAN’T STAY OUT OF TROUBLE

                

Of all of sports’ prizes the dumbest and most overblown is the Heisman Award, given annually to the “best” college-football player.  It forces an apples-and-coconuts choice among players at different positions facing different competition, with no guidelines except those of the individual electors.  It’s really a contest among team SIDs (short for sports information directors) to see which can drum up the most votes for his candidate. The gap between hype and reality was sharp last season, when the No. 1 pick in the NFL draft, offensive tackle Eric Fisher of Central Michigan U., was a player who’d received no Heisman votes.

                

The guy who won was Johnny Manziel, a quarterback. That was thanks mostly to his catchy nickname of “Johnny Football” and a good-enough season of passing and running. His school, Texas A&M, probably thought it had struck gold because Johnny was a red-shirt freshman whose glow would illuminate the school for seasons to come. It also didn’t hurt that he’s a clean-cut looking white kid.

                

The glow has been anything but golden because it turns out that Johnny gets rowdy after a few beers, sleeps through obligations and sends rude messages from small electronic devices he carries. Other 20 year olds also do those things but they don’t have multitudes of followers, virtual and real, eager to broadcast their every expression.

               

Last week Johnny topped himself when it was alleged he pocketed cash for signing photos and gear, in violation of NCAA rules.  If the charge sticks he’d be ineligible for the games ahead. His daddy is a well-off oilman who has hired a lawyer to protect sonny ’s status, shifting the media focus from the gridiron to the conference (or court) room.  That’s just what the college-sports big-timers deserve, huh?

                   

STAY OR GO?

                Your local pro or college team has a home game scheduled for the evening. The game will be televised. Do you want to go to the expense and trouble of attending or are you content to stay home and watch it on the tube?

                

           Increasingly, fans are opting for the latter choice, and no wonder. With traffic tough everywhere and ticket prices high and rising, it takes quite a lot to budge us from our living rooms, especially in this day of high-def TV. My set is five years old but its picture still is so sharp I can recognize faces in the crowds of the games I watch.  Plus, the fridge is near at hand and I can use the toilet without having to stand in line.

                

            Yeah, I know, it’s fun to go to games—to be out with the like-minded crowd that cheers on the home team. We urbanites (that is, just about all of us) live atomized existences these days, penned into a daily round of work or play and home that’s notably short on communal experiences. Instead of going to the movies we use Netflix, instead of shopping at the mall we click on ebay or amazon, instead of voting at a neighborhood polling place we fill in our ballots at our kitchen tables and mail in the results.  Agorophobia used to be an illness but now it’s a national condition.  

               

             Sports provide an antidote, but one that gets progressively harder to exercise for most people. My own example is a case in point. In 1972 I and three pals went in on a pair of season tickets for the basketball Chicago Bulls, who were just getting established in our home city. The tix were good, in the second row of the first balcony in Chicago Stadium, on a line with the Bulls’ bench. If memory serves they cost $5 or $6 per, or about $100 for my 10 or 11 games, well within my reporter’s budget.

                

               Our group renewed annually for 22 years, and while ticket prices regularly rose they were in the $25-$28 range through 1993, still affordable. Then the Bulls moved into the vastly larger United Center, whose configuration is quite different from that of the Stadium. The seats in the new place the team considered comparable to ours were in the second balcony, far removed from the action, and almost twice as expensive. Seeing the games from there would have been like watching them on a 12-inch TV screen.  We said no thanks and ended the relationship, and with it my career as a season-ticket holder.

                Twenty-years-ago prices seem quaint now, of course. The average single-game ticket in the NBA now costs about $50 and that’s for a not-good seat; according to the Bull’s current seating chart the ones we gave up now go for $125, and there’s a waiting list to get them. Team Marketing Report says the NFL led the average-price standings last season at $78, followed by the NHL at $61. Major League Baseball was last at $27.  Throw in the usual 20 bucks or so for stadium parking and $30 or $40 more for ballpark food and the game bill for a couple today runs from $100 to more than $200, too rich for my blood.   

                You can beat those numbers, but only if you live in or near a city where sports aren’t a religion. I do, in Scottsdale, AZ, near Phoenix. There, the baseball Diamondbacks usually play to half-filled houses no matter how they’re faring afield, and ticket prices are low. The seats wife Susie and I like best are 10 to 12 rows up in the upper deck behind home plate, from where the field stretches out before us. They go for $16 each, and I know a lot where I can park about two blocks from the back gates for six bucks. Add $11 for a brat with kraut and a Pepsi for me (Susie can’t stomach ballpark food and brings her own) and we get off for about $50, not bad as those things go. We’re usually good for 5-6 games a year.

                That doesn’t work here for the other major sports, though, nor does it ever in places like Chicago, Boston, Dallas and New York, where triple-digit prices for single games are common (especially in the so-called secondary market) and lawyers and commodity traders fill the stands. Add the constant fact that everyone at home sees the games better than anyone in the stadiums and you have the attendance declines of the past few years. The gates in the Big 2 sports of baseball and football both peaked in 2007, and while the declines have been small—averaging about 1% a year in each—they’ve been large enough to attract front-office attention.

                The main way teams are attempting to lure the couch-bound is by making their stadiums more like living rooms.  Jumbotrons—huge video display units—decorate stadiums coast to coast. The biggest so far is the one that hangs in Cowboy Stadium in Dallas, that capital of crass. It measures 72 feet by 160 feet. It’s due, however, to be dwarfed by a 55-by-301 unit ordered by the NFL Jacksonville Jaguars. You’ll note that width is one foot longer than the football playing field.

           Jumbotrons carry some of the video replays fans get at home, along with game stats and various between-innings or timeout entertainments. Mostly, though, they’re billboards that turn paying customers into captive audiences for whatever ads home teams can book. A Jumbotron is being planned for Wrigley Field, that erstwhile temple of baseball purity, and Cubs’ owner Tom Ricketts makes no bones about declaring that he wants it for the ad revenue it will generate. That’s honest but it doesn’t make me like him better.

Worse by me is the way the huge TV screens dominate any premises they occupy, turning the action on the field into an afterthought. Their 1984 aspect is magnified when they take to exhorting crowd reactions. At Chase Field in Phoenix, my home park of late, the ovine fans rarely budge unless Jumbo tells them to stand, clap or dance, or sounds that silly “charge” bugle.

 I’m embarrassed for them. I’ve known how to behave at ball games since I was 10 and need no prompting. At least when I’m watching at home no one tells me what to do, unless it’s to take out the garbage or something similar.