OLYMPICS PUTINESCA

                The International Olympic Committee, the snooty gang that stages summer and winter world-sports extravaganzas at four-year intervals, is nothing if not predictable. Those guys never have met a dictatorship they didn’t not only like but also trip over themselves to support. To the Olympic motto of citius, altius, fortius (“faster, higher, stronger” for those who don’t speak Latin) should be added a forth word, for whatever the old Romans called despotism. Nero, Caligula, Commodus—the IOC would have jumped into bed with any of them.

           

              The 2014 Winter Os begin Feb. 7 in Sochi, Russia, under the auspices of that put-upon land’s latest political strong man, Vladimir Putin. Yes, the gulags are gone and political dissidents no longer are dispatched with bullets to the brain in the basement of the Lubyanka Building, but anyone disputing pale-browed Vlad had better keep his or her bag packed for a prison trip, sometimes after being beaten on the street by thugs who never are caught. The ex-KGB operative learned his lessons well enough to be able to run things in the old way without the old, collectivist rhetoric.

                Olympia’s dictators’ waltz began with the award of both the 1936 winter and summer Games to Nazi Germany. The other members of the original Axis of Evil were similarly blessed, Imperial Japan with the summer and winter Games of 1940 and Fascist Italy with the 1944 winter fest, although those events were cancelled by the war those nations helped start. Closer to present times, the Soviet Union got to host the 1980 Summer Games in Moscow and the dour committee that runs China welcomed the world to the 2008 Summer Games in Beijing. Idi Amin’s Uganda might have gotten a nod had he stuck around long enough.

                The IOC’s real motto is politics shmolitics, as long as the trains run on time. It’s easier for it to deal with a guy—or small handful of guys—than with the messy cast of characters any democracy presents. Build venues lickety split? Sweep the Olympic area of people who might make tourists uncomfortable?  Clean the air, if only for a couple of weeks? Put a dozen cops on every street for 100 miles around? Poof, it’s done, and let the Games begin.

                Putin has gone all out for the production aimed at showcasing his “new” Russia and himself, spending a reported $50 billion on stadiums and infrastructure. That’s a record for any Olympics and an impressive sum even if many of those dollars did wind up in the pockets of his cronies.  Lately he’s tried to get on the world’s good side by having his ministers say soothing words about easing enforcement of Russia’s anti-gay laws for the duration, and he’s opened his dungeons a crack, releasing the ex-billionaire critic Mikhail Khodorkovsy and the all-girl band Pussy Riot, which in 2012 scandalized Moscovites with an impromptu punk-rock show in a cathedral.  But hey, with a name like Pussy Riot it’s a miracle the police let them off the Metro.

                What Putin’s billions will buy remains to be seen as O-day approaches. Sochi was an odd Winter Games choice because the Black Sea city is best known as a subtropical summer resort with average day-time February high temperature of around 50, so keeping the snow and ice cold might be a bigger problem than keeping spectators warm.   

                The main run-up to the Games, the traditional Olympic torch relay, was more comic than epic, casting doubt on the efficacy of Russian technology (surprise!). Manufactured in Siberia by a company called KrasMash, which ordinarily makes ballistic missiles, the torches went out a dozen times by confirmed count and 50 or so times reportedly, one having to be relit by a guard’s cigarette lighter. Three times torch fuel spilled onto carriers’ clothing and caught fire. One poor torch bearer—a 73-year-old coach—staggered away and died of a heart attack moments after his brief stint.

                As always, the quality of sport in the Winter Games also shouldn’t be taken for granted. These WOs will consist of 98 events in 15 sports—many with small constituencies-- against more than 300 events in 26 sports in the Summer Games. Television dictates that each span 17 days and three weekends, so the dirty little secret of the WOs is that on many days not much is on the card.

                The O bosses have padded the schedule in their usual way, by adding events that really are variations of existing ones, like the three-legged and sack races of company picnics. Letting women do dumb things men do, such as ski jumping, put one more event on the tube, and pirating various daredevil stunts from ESPN’s X-Games added several more. The main suspense in these centers not on who’ll win but on whether contestants will land feet or head first.

                There will be “team” figure skating, which doesn’t involve teams but the usual individual and pairs performances with the scores added together. The question of whether figure skating is a sport goes undebated at O time. If it is, so is ballet.

                Races mostly are singles or pairs against the clock, with the real drama being in the tick tick ticking in (usually) the lower right-hand corner of your TV screen. Hans Brinker would have been dismayed. Then there’s bobsledding, a 90-mph carnival ride in a $50,000 sled with a gold medal (not a brass ring) as the prize, or luge, which is bobsledding with no protective chassis.

                Look out below, but as they say, sometimes you win and sometimes you luge. 

               

               

                 

               

                 

                  

                               

               

               

                

IN THE TANK

                In late October, just before the start of the National Basketball Association season, the Phoenix Suns traded their best big man, Marcin Gortat, and three other players to the Washington Wizards for a conditional No. 1 draft choice and Emeka Okafor, a once-good center whose herniated neck disk meant he probably wouldn’t play this season and might not again. The Suns theretofore had been reckoned as laggards with a potential of maybe 20 victories in their 82-game card. Afterward that estimate seemed optimistic.

               

                Instead of anguished wails the move engendered popular and journalistic approval in the desert metropolis. That’s because the team had accumulated four possible first-round picks in the supposed-to-be-loaded 2014 draft, and its anticipated worst or near-worst regular-season record would give it a good shot at Jabari Parker or Andrew Wiggins, the projected cream of that crop.  Ryan McDonough, the Suns’ young general manager, was hailed as a genius for his act of roster destruction.

                Funny thing, though, some of the young and/or miscellaneous players the Suns collected to mind the store this season turned out to be pretty good, and at year’s end their 19-11 won-lost mark was sixth-best in the league’s western half, well above draft-lottery status. If they continue that way they’ll have to grind out further improvement laboriously rather than through a single-draft splash.

                The situation highlights a paradox that usually goes unremarked in sports. While intentionally losing any single game is deemed disgraceful if not illegal, it’s quite all right—even praiseworthy—for an organization to set itself up to lose a season of games, or more. The practice is called “tanking” and it’s as much a part of big-time pro scene as bloated salaries and ear-splitting game-break entertainments. It makes sense because of the “worst goes first” amateur-player drafts that all our professional leagues employ to give bottom teams a leg up toward redemption.

                Except when an Andrew Luck is available, worst-goes-first works better in small-roster basketball than in big-roster football. It worked so well in basketball that in 1985 the NBA acted to counter blatant tanking by abolishing the top-pick coin flip between its two conference cellar dwellers in favor of a 14-team lottery that’s so complicated actuaries have trouble understanding it.

 The NBA lottery sometimes yields odd results-- in 2008 the Chicago Bulls, with only the ninth-worst record and a 1.7% chance, drew the long straw and Derrick Rose. Further, top picks turn into busts often enough (Kwame Brown, Greg Oden and, apparently, last year’s prize Anthony Bennett) to give pause to the most cocksure general managers.  But the 25% shot that goes to the team with the worst mark is nonetheless worth trying for, and, annually, several always do.

With the Suns out of the running, the NBA’s race to the bottom now is being led by the Milwaukee Bucks and Utah Jazz. Both were decent last year (the Bucks went 38-44, the Jazz 43-39), but each cleared its roster of useful players in off-season preparation for a dive.

 Interestingly, though, they may face competition from a couple of teams that started the campaign with title aspirations. The above-mentioned Bulls, again faced with the season-long injury loss of the above-mentioned Rose, are being urged to dump other veteran stars Luol Deng and Carlos Boozer in order to jockey for a better draft position, and the Brooklyn (nee New Jersey) Nets, who impatiently added old Boston Celtics’ Kevin Garnett and Paul Pierce to vie for supremacy in the East, now find themselves old all around and wondering where their next fix will come from.  A clamorous press in each of those clubs’ home cities does not shy from use of the “t” word.

More interesting, I think, is the fact that big-time sports’ shining recent examples of, uh, creative losing come not from basketball but from baseball, the sport in which futurecasting is the most iffy. That’s because it typically does not get its best young prospects primed by the feedlots of academe but must develop them themselves, with little certainty of reward.

The baseball model was established in 2006 by the Washington Nationals under the veteran executive Stan Kasten. To put it baldly, Kasten’s plan (he even called it “The Plan”) was for his historically ailing franchise to be really lousy for as many years as it was required to build a farm system that could sustain title contention. It took five seasons of between 89 and 103 losses (2006-2010), but the team eventually accumulated enough high-draft-pick standouts such as Ryan Zimmerman, Stephen Strasberg and Bryce Harper to enable it to compete in better company.

Kasten’s present-day disciple is the Chicago Cubs’ Theo Epstein. Hired in 2011 to accomplish the Herculean task of reviving a team whose record of futility impresses even Buddhist monks, Epstein, the one-time Boston boy wonder, has eschewed half measures, remorselessly purging his roster of any veteran who might be worth a prospect in return. The upshot has been two terrible seasons and a third at hand, with who knows how many more looming beyond that.

  True to his Hebraic roots, Epstein is like Moses, determined to have his minions wander through the desert until no one with the old, slavish mentality remains to enter the Promised Land.

 That sounds better than tanking it, don’t you think?

  

               

               

               

               

                

A FULL GLASS

                Electors for the Baseball Hall of Fame can choose up to 10 recently active players for induction out of the 35 or so on our ballots, but in my 17 years of voting I can’t recall choosing more than seven in any one year. Keeping in mind that the Hall is for the greats, not the very goods, helps me focus in that regard.

This year, though, I’ll be picking 10, and my problem hasn’t been who to add but whom not to. It’s the richest candidate list in memory and could yield as many as four inductees, although the requirement that a player be named by 75% of the voters is a steep one.

It’s been a while—since 1991—that as many as three players were elected in the same year by the current or ex sportswriters, and in some years the number has been zero. That happened last year, and we scribes were castigated for spoiling the July induction party in Cooperstown, New York, where the Hall is situated.

 The affair went on as scheduled, and hung three new plaques by vote of one of the veterans’ committees that also decide such things, but the fact that the inductees (umpire Hank O’Day, team owner Jacob Ruppert and 19^th-century catcher James “Deacon” White) had been dead a total of 226 years put a bit of a damper on the proceedings. Why the Hall continues to induct players no living person has seen perform is something I can’t understand.

We’ve all seen this year’s ballot first timers, and a great group it is. Heading it are two-thirds of the best baseball-playing golf threesome ever—Greg Maddux and Tom Glavine. (The third was John Smoltz, who’ll be up for election next year.) Another newcomer is Frank Thomas, the Chicago White Sox’s all-time best hitter save for Shoeless Joe. I’ll be voting enthusiastically for all three.

Maddux and Glavine anchored the pitching staff that made the Atlanta Braves the National League’s best team in the 1990s, albeit one that won only a single World Series, in 1995. Pitching these days is dominated by 6-foot-6 types who can throw a strawberry through a battleship, but Maddux and Glavine are especially praiseworthy in my book because they’re ordinary-sized guys who got by on skill and guile. Maddux is a sure bet to get in—his 355 career wins are eighth-most all-time and his 3,371 strikeouts rank 10^th—but Glavine’s 305 wins weren’t far behind in that most-important category. Between them they won six Cy Young Awards (Maddux had four, Glavine two) and further distinguished themselves with bat (Glavine) and glove (Maddux). Both also are (or were) near-scratch golfers, and I hope they’ll be playing a celebratory round in Cooperstown on induction weekend.

Thomas is a longer shot to win election, partly because some voters are sniffy about designated hitters, which he was for part of his career, but his numbers are of Hall quality. His 521 home runs rank 18^th all-time, his 1,704 RBIs are 22^nd and his 1,667 walks are 10^th, and he won two American League MVP awards, in 1993 and ’94. His star would be brighter if his best year (1994) hadn’t been cut short by the strike that cancelled that year’s last six weeks and World Series and left the White Sox in first place in their division. The big fella was batting .353 with 38 home runs and 101 ribbies in that one, and his figures might have been monumental if the last 50 or so games had been played.

The other seven players I’m naming I’ve named before and see no reason not to again.  I’m rooting hardest for Jack Morris to win election because he’s in his 15^th and last year on the sportswriters’ ballot. Last year he fell just short with a 67.7% vote, and it wouldn’t take much more to put him over the top this time.

  It’s beyond me why Morris doesn’t have a plaque already. He was a horse of a starting pitcher, with 254 career victories and 175 complete games, and a big-game performer with few peers. He threw two complete-game World Series wins for the 1984 champion Detroit Tigers and went 2-0 for the Minnesota Twins in the 1991 event. His seventh-game, 10-inning shutout in that one, versus the Braves, capped the best Series I covered.

I’ll be voting for Craig Biggio, the former Houston Astros’ hero who topped the “magical” 3,000-hit mark (with 3,060) in 20 seasons, during which he played catcher and second base. I can’t think of another player who manned both those demanding positions ably. He got a 68.2% vote last year and also needs just a small boost to prevail.

I’m not sniffy about DHs and I’ll be voting for Edgar Martinez, the best ever in the slot. Baseball’s annual Outstanding Designated Hitter Award is named for him. I’ll check the box for Mike Piazza, the best-hitting catcher of his era; the relief pitcher Lee Smith, who ranks third in all-time saves; Alan Trammell, a fine shortstop over a 20-year career; and the pitcher Curt Schilling, who topped the career 3,000-strikeouts mark and whose post-season record (11-2 with a 2.23 ERA in 19 starts) is second to none. That’s 10, isn’t it?

The ballot is so full I didn’t have room for a couple of players I otherwise might have favored. First-time nominee Mike Mussina had 270 pitching victories and a .638 winning percentage that’s sixth among starters with at least 250 victories. Tim Raines was a whirling Dervish on the bases and hit very well, too. Another time, maybe.

Once again I didn’t vote for three players whose otherwise-Hall-worthy careers have a chemical odor. Evidence shows that Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens and Sammy Sosa tainted their feats with steroids use, and while nobody is erasing their records, or demanding a refund of their enormous salaries, the Hall properly remains out of their reach, as their poor showings in their first ballot appearances last year showed (Clemens topped the three at 37.6%).

As I noted last year, in baseball there are two kinds of cheating. It’s one thing for a fielder who traps a fly ball to raise it in triumph as though he’d caught it, but quite another to cold-bloodedly ponder risks and rewards and choose to break the rules by juicing up, as Bonds, Clemens and Sosa apparently did. They’ve had their rewards and their bill is now due.

  

       

                  

REVISITING WOODY

             Every so often I read something that stops me cold. One such occasion occurred a week ago last Sunday when I was reading the Arizona Republic’s account of Arizona State U.’s football victory over UCLA the previous day. The paper noted, matter-of-factly, that the win earned ASU head coach Todd Graham $330,000 in bonuses-- $100,000 because it was his team’s ninth of the season and $230,000 more because it clinched a spot in the PAC-12 title game. If ASU wins that game the $230,000 bonus would double to $460,000, or 20% of his $2.3 million annual salary, the paper reported.

               

             I had to read that twice before it sunk in. A guy making $2.3M per gets a $330,000 bonus for doing what he was hired to do?  And in a state that has cut education funding during the term of its present, severely conservative governor?

 I can summarize my first thought thusly: teeeesh.

            

                My second thought was of Woody Hayes. Somewhere in my memory file was the fact that the most he ever earned in a season during his 28 years as head football coach at Ohio State U. was $43,000, and even though that tenure ended 30-plus years ago—in 1978—it isn’t exactly ancient history. Moreover, while Graham’s rep and credentials are modest, Hayes was a giant in his field, with multiple national titles to his credit and mythic status on his home campus.

                Woody was offered raises but turned them down on ground that his pay was OK for a college faculty member. When he got bonuses for signal victories he’d divide them among his staff.  If you’d have told him that in 2013 big-time college football coaches would become lordly CEOs routinely being paid in the $2 million-$5 million annual range, he’d have said you were nuts.

                It’s interesting even to me that I’m citing Hayes favorably here, because I didn’t like him much when he coached.  That was partly because his teams usually beat mine (Illinois), but also because I never cared for the way he compared football to war, a much more serious enterprise.  Further, he was the sort of man who demanded discipline from his troops (oops, players)  but couldn’t exercise it himself,  aiming his frequent sideline tantrums at photographers, game officials and inanimate objects such as first-down markers.  He got the gate at OSU when he finally went too far in that department, punching an opposing player who’d strayed into the Buckeye bench area during a game.

                My negative impression of Woody had its origin with my first encounter with him. I was in the press box during the OSU-Illinois game in 1958, making myself useful in various ways, when Bert Bertine, my boss at the Champaign-Urbana Courier, dispatched me to shag a few post-game Buckeye quotes for his story.  With a few minutes remaining I went down to the field, and when the Ohio State players streamed into their locker room at the gun, I streamed with them, as I’d done before with other teams after other games. Notebook and pencil in hand, I was talking to a player when I was confronted by Woody, red-faced angry even in victory.

                “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” he demanded.

                “Er, I’m press,” gulped the 20-year-old me.

                “Well get the hell out of here until I let you guys in,”   the great man barked.

                Woody was reputed to be a man of parts, however, and years later, as a grown-up columnist (sort of), I thought it might be worthwhile to check in on the old lion in his winter of retirement. I visited him the Friday before the 1984 Ohio State-Michigan game. We spent more than an hour talking in his office in the ROTC Building on the Columbus campus; a longtime student of military history, he was given a faculty appointment in the department after he was bounced as a coach. Then we had lunch in the university’s faculty club, where he seemed to know most of the other diners.

 After that we walked over to the football stadium, where he gave a talk at the Senior Tackle, an OSU ritual in which graduating-senior players take a last, ceremonial whack at a tackling dummy. About 2,000 people showed up to watch in very cold weather, and they gave him ovations coming and going.

At age 71 Woody’s fire still burned, albeit a bit lower than when he was coaching. In his office he told me he was up for the Michigan game as much as in days of yore. “Us versus Michigan! Best doggone rivalry there is!” he said. “Competition is what makes you go, you know? You beat nobody, what have you got? You beat somebody and you’ve done something. Yessir!”

He mused that teaching history to ROTC cadets meant that his life had come full circle from his younger days. The son of a school superintendent in small-town Ohio, he’d grown up thinking of becoming a classroom teacher before football sidetracked him. As far as he was concerned, coaching was more teaching than anything else. “I spent more time with my players in a week than most professors do with their students in a year,” he noted.

He went on: “Football teaches things you don’t learn elsewhere. A player learns to get up after he’s been knocked down. He learns to run the play that’s called, whether he’s carrying the ball or not. And he learns that nothing in life comes easy.”

He left his desk to get a book from a case on a wall. It was a volume that contained the Irwin Shaw short story, “The 80-Yard Run.”  Said he: “Some people think it’s a sad story because that run he made in school was the best thing that fella ever did, but I look at it differently. If he hadn’t made the run he’d have had damned little to look back on with pride.”

That afternoon he expanded on that theme in his talk at the Senior Tackle. “This morning I got a call from Fred Bruney,” he told the players. “He said ‘Coach, remember what I did 32 years ago today?’ I said I sure did. He intercepted three passes that helped us beat Michigan. He’ll smile about that on his deathbed. You do the same thing and you’ll have something to smile about, too”

 

                   

  

               

                 

                  

NEWS, VIEWS

                William Safire, one of my journalistic idols, said it took three examples to make a column, so I use his dictum to lead into what follows.  To wit:

                THE MIAMI DOLPHINS’ BROUHAHA--  The first thing that was surprising about Jonathan Martin’s flight from the National Football League team is that a 6-foot-5, 320-pound man could be bullied, harassed or otherwise intimidated by a colleague as Martin says he was, by fellow behemoth and offensive-line mate Richie (no longer) Incognito. Exhibit A in his departure was a threatening, profane, racist screed that Incognito chose to text-message to Martin. The second surprising thing was that, apparently, Incognito didn’t know that anything sent electronically these days can be shared with the world instantly.

               The initial response of many, including the Dolphins’ GM to whom Martin complained about his treatment, was that Martin should have settled his dispute with Incognito by punching him in the mouth. Martin, however, is a well-brought-up young man— the son of two Harvard graduates—who doesn’t buy that approach to conflict resolution. That led some to put him down as a wuss, neglecting the facts that he was an All-American at Stanford U., a second-round draft choice by the Dolphins in 2012 and a starter at right or left tackle from his debut in the rock-‘em, sock -‘em pro game, things that should qualify him as manly on any scale.

              What wasn’t surprising about the episode to even passing followers of football was the involvement of Incogito. He’s been such bad news since his college days that it’s a wonder any team would take him on.

                Richie first matriculated at the U. of Nebraska football factory, and played well there, but was kicked off the school’s team after his junior year for “team-rules violations,” the label colleges use to cover up a wide variety of sins. While at Nebraska he pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor assault charge stemming from a fight at a party, a rap that was bargained down from three felony counts. He also wound up on the list of witnesses against a Lincoln, Nebraska, man charged in 2005 with selling steroids to Cornhusker gridders and others.  He didn’t have to testify but the guy was convicted anyway.

               Richie next turned up at the U. of Oregon to complete his college eligibility, but was bounced before he put on his pads, also for undisclosed rules violations. As a pro he’s changed uniforms three times and has stood out more for his late-hit penalties than for his Pro Bowl-level talents. In 2009, as a Buffalo Bill, he was named the NFL’s dirtiest player in a poll of his peers taken by The Sporting News, no small distinction in that well-stocked zoo.

 It’s recently been revealed that police files in Aventura, Florida, showed that last year a woman complained that Incognito had groped her sexually and otherwise molested her while she was volunteering at a Dolphins’ golf outing. No charges were filed and the woman told reporters she couldn’t comment on the matter because of a confidentiality agreement she’d signed, indicating that she’d been bought off.

                Plenty of sociologizing has been used to explain the Incognito-Martin episode, but the clear facts are that football requires of its players the kind of of aggression that’s unacceptable in society at large, and that for whatever reasons a few of them can’t turn it off when the whistle blows or the game ends. Teams hire these guys (and others cozy up to them) at their risk, as the Dolphins have discovered.

               It’s worth noting that Martin’s mother is a noted lawyer specializing in employment matters in general and workplace harassment in particular.   He thus has at his disposable able, zealous and, no doubt, free representation, something that will make him formidable in any forum.

               BIG YANKEE SPITS BACK AT BIG BASEBALL—The 13 other targets of the Biogenesis doping investigations quietly accepted and served their penalties, but not Alex Rodriguez. The game’s highest-paid performer is fighting his 211-game suspension both in arbitration and in federal court. He’s accused Commish Selig and other MLB officials of conducting a personal vendetta against him, and has played the ethnic card by siccing at least one Hispanic group on baseball’s tail.   That’s a lot nastier than these things usually get.

               ARod can do this because 1) he’s very rich, having been paid about $250 million to play baseball to date, 2) doesn’t have much else to do, and 3) at age 38, a 1 1/3-season suspension, stretching into 2015, probably would end his baseball career, which could endanger the four years (and $86 million) remaining on his Yankees’ contract. With that at stake his decision to take his best shot is understandable.

  

              Arod is a repeat steroids offender, but isn’t going into battle unarmed. The likely main witness against him, the defunct Miami “anti-aging” clinic’s owner Tony Bosch, is a con man, and much of the game’s documentary evidence either was stolen from Bosch by a disgruntled former employee or purchased from third parties whose backgrounds and motives are murky. Arod’s legal team, headed by the big-heat Washington lawyer and lobbyist Lanny Davis, no doubt will exploit those issues, both in and out of the hearing rooms. Baseball needs off-season attractions and this will be a good one.

               GIVE PEACE A CHANCE—Can you imagine an NFL game without penalties? It’s hard, but conceivable. Fact is, there was half such a game on November 4, when the Green Bay Packers played the Chicago Bears at Green Bay. The Packers were charged with no (as in zero) penalties that Monday night, while the Bears were flagged just four times.  I didn’t realize this until I saw the box score the next day, but I remember enjoying the game, and not only because my Bears won.

               I looked it up and learned that there have been four penaltyless games in NFL history. The last was in 1940, when the league possessed none of its enormous present self-importance. Penalty-free games for single teams are less rare, but happen about once a season. 

                 Can an NFL team really go 60 minutes without breaking any of the league’s fat book of rules?  No, which means that game officials didn’t see any infractions worth calling on the Pack that evening. What a precedent! If it spreads, NFL games might be watchable again.

               Football has been described as violence punctuated by committee meetings. Now it’s violence punctuated by committee meetings and law-enforcement actions, the latter including the Talmudic-style rules discussions that go on while video reviews of officials’ calls spin out endlessly. No good play can be enjoyed until the field is scanned for penalty markers; “there’s a flag on the play” have become the six saddest words in sports. More zebra self-restraint would spare us some of that.    

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.