User Blog - Spotlight Series

For this latest entry in the BallHype Spotlight Series, we tapped two fantastic writers: TheStarterWife of Black and Gold Tchotchkes and Signal to Noise of, um, Signal to Noise. Both have been involved in the excellent Deadspin Book Club. Here, they'll debate the notion of whether Olympians should feel compelled to speak out on China's human rights record and Darfur while competing in Beijing. Enjoy.

Signal to Noise: I suspect we agree with the concept of athletes being politically active, aware, and making statements regarding the Olympics. I suppose any particular difference would be on whether or not they actually should. There are a bunch of qualifiers regarding this particular Olympiad and the conditions on the ground in China that make this a really tough thing to say "yes, those competing ought to say something about China's abominable human rights record" without hemming and hawing.

Obviously, China's human rights record, past and present is hideous. It has an economic hand in Darfur, there is the little matter of Tibet, government by one-party rule (I hesitate to call it completely Communist because it has mutated the biggest elements of capitalism into it; going beyond what we traditionally think of as Soviet-style Communism), its record with Falun Gong and other religious protesters, and I can still remember watching TV coverage of Tianemen Square in 1989.

But should athletes be compelled to actually speak out on these things?

TheStarterWife: Yes.  These three sections from the "Fundamental Principals of Olympism" in the Olympic Charter state -

2.  The goal of Olympism is to place sport at the service of the harmonious development of man, with a view to promoting a peaceful society concerned with the preservation of the human dignity.
 
Human dignity. Peaceful society.

When the IOC decided to award the 2008 Summer Olympics to China, they looked past the basic tenets of their own mission, and it is up to the athletes speak their conscience and reclaim the spirit of the Games.

5.  Any form of discrimination with regard to a country or a person on grounds of race, religion, politics, gender or otherwise is incompatible with belonging to the Olympic Movement.

When the host country not abide by this declaration, it is up those who will be center stage - the athletes - to speak up for all of the citizens who have been silenced.

S2N: The IOC looked past the basic tenets of its own mission decades ago with the bribery scandals of the 2002 Winter Olympics. This is a body more concerned with its own contracts and monetary intake than abiding by its own rules. But I don't believe it becomes the obligation of the athlete to speak in the absence of the IOC's morality.

I go back to the this basic idea: how knowledgeable is the average athlete of geo-politics? If it's akin to the average American, it may not be a heck of a lot -- and is uninformed political protest really that much better than saying nothing at all?  In no way am I opposed to athletes speaking out on China's faults, if they feel the need to, but the charter also brings this up as Rule 51:

"No kind of demonstration or political, religious or racial propaganda is permitted in any Olympic sites, venues or other areas."

The athletes will be able to say what they please to the press, though. The Olympics has transformed over the years from an appeal to the best of international sport into a cash grab, an amoral enterprise concerned with money, but it's on the participating nations rather than the athletes making up individual federations to object.  The USOC has pulled out of Olympiads it has objected to (1980 in Moscow due to Communism; the Soviets responded in kind in 1984), those responses have a larger influence.

TSW: You should check out this reverse pyramid on the IOC's site.

Don't you think that Olympic athletes have an obligation as citizens, when they are representing the whole U.S. of A., to at least educate themselves on basic world events and controversies?

I don't believe that an Olympic athlete has to speak up if they do not feel comfortable doing so.  It skirts too close to being tools for propaganda for my liking.  But at the same time, any athlete who takes the podium draped in the American flag, who talks about what an honor it is to represent this country, should use the freedom of speech our country guarantees to speak their conscience.

If the though behind holding the Games in China was that it would help open up that country to democratic ideas, what is the point if we are never going to see those freedoms in action?

S2N: The pyramid tells you a lot about the IOC's priorities, only confirming what we all suspect these days.

As for athletes having the obligation to educate themselves on basic world events and controversies: no, I don't believe they have that obligation. I'd like it if every one of them felt they did and followed through on it, and I'd love it if they were secure enough and comfortable enough to speak their conscience while representing the U.S abroad.

The argument behind opening up China to democratic ideas with an Olympic Games hews less towards the outward protest model and more towards the idea of having outside media scrutiny. China is placing restrictions, obviously, on where the media can go while the Olympics are on-going, and you can argue that the scrutiny has only resulted in further crackdowns on press freedoms. But that pyramid tells you so much: broadcasters are higher up on the totem pole to the IOC than the participating athletes or ordinary people.

But the thought was never really about opening up China to democratic ideals: it was about placating a burgeoning superpower with a massive population and making money hand over fist by entering that superpower's media markets and profile.

No athlete is going to risk his or her participation for a medal they've dreamed of all of his or her life to make a political statement. The athlete that does is courageous, but so many of them are focused from a young age on their sport and achievement in it. I remember listening to this particular spot on NPR a couple months back -- this generation's athlete is different.

If they are politically active, they see it as separate from their lives as athletes; there is a fundamental disconnect between their lives inside and outside the stadia/arenas. You and I don't see it this way at all; we'd like to believe those things are inseparable for everyone. There is enough pressure to be an Olympic athlete, expected to win gold, without feeling like you have to speak for those who cannot in the wake of injustice.

I suspect a lot of the desire for athletes to be socially aware and speak out on important issues is borne out of a bit of nostalgia as well. Many of the examples given by columnists revolve around Muhammad Ali's refusal to be drafted into the Vietnam War (which had nothing to do with the Olympics) and John Carlos' and Tommie Smith's black-gloved fists in the air on the medal podium in Mexico City in 1968. We forget that at the time, those three were pilloried for their political statements.

There is too much risk for the modern athlete -- sponsorships, negative coverage, IOC sanctions -- for me to say that Olympic athletes must be compelled to speak out on China's atrocities.

TSW: I've been struggling with a reasonable counterpoint to your statement, "There is too much risk for the modern athlete -- sponsorships, negative coverage, IOC sanctions -- for me to say that Olympic athletes must be compelled to speak out on China's atrocities" for more than a week.

The truth is, I really do not have an argument. An individual athlete does not have to make a stand and risk losing what they have worked towards their whole life.

But in my heart, I feel like protest at the 2008 Summer Olympics - in any form - is the right thing to do.

S2N: We don't disagree on that; we both believe speaking out on these issues would be the right thing to do. Problem is, not everyone is Ira Newble, who went to Darfur and wrote up a petition protesting China's involvement in funding the genocide.

I wish today's athlete would say more, but we're both realistic enough to know what will happen to them if they speak out.  There is also something about holding others to higher standards than you hold yourself, and I cannot imagine doing anything other than trying to be completely myopic and focus on winning in competition, rather than the world of turmoil swirling outside, were I an Olympic-level athlete.

[By Tom Ziller] 

Inspired by Vanity Fair's recent Blogopticon and my long romance with maps, we decide to stick some of the most well-known sports blogs into a graphical graph graphic.

I present: THE BLOGDOME ATLAS. (Click to enlarge.) 

(As I said, click to enlarge. The large version is prettier. And clickable.)

Some preliminary notes.

- I didn't include your blog because it is too awesome for categorization. Don't get mad.

- This is based on science, not opinion. I would post the formulas for 'sexiness' and 'opinionatedness,' but upon seeing them your heart would explode into song, and you'd probably bleed out. I'm only protecting you by keeping the formulas secret.

Some liminary notes.

- Surprised Deadspin rates as not very sexy? Me too. But science is never wrong. So I tested my personal biases and checked. And hey! Will Leitch's Midwestern sensibilities have made Deadspin fairly staid over the past few years. A.J. Daulerio's big-city bawdry could send this thing to the left fast.

- As it were, 'sexiness' has little to do with the bloggers themselves or their hot CSS and JavaScript skills (with two exceptions). Mostly, it's based on the content. Like, The Big Lead posts a lot of bikini/red-carpet photos, so TBL rates as sexy even though I wouldn't date TBL personally. FanHouse, on the other hand, posts fewer sexy photos or Penthouse Forum letters. As such, it rates as 'not so sexy,' despite the presence of numerous sexy writers.

- The formulas laughed when I fed Curt Schilling's 38 Pitches into the database, and spit out a response which said, "You can't figure this one out yourself, you f---ing lazy moron?" The formulas can be cruel.

Finally, some postliminary notes.

- On the exceptions mentioned in Bullet #2 of the liminary notes: Ladies... and Babes Love Baseball were awarded special considerations by the formulas, which allowed writer sexiness to be included in the calculations. This is good, because the formulas aren't into Joe Mauer.

- In no way is 'sexy' better than 'staid' nor 'informative' better than 'opinionated.' It's all good. I just like stereotyping blogs, that's all. Of course, if Joe Posnanski thinks he's getting slighted and wants to start posting FHM scans in order to be legitimized as more sexy than Dan Steinberg, more power to him. Consider the Bald Blogger Sexy Arms Race on. (Neil Best need not apply.)

- We hope to bring more atlases atlii to you, to complete our full documentation of the state of the blogdome. Got an idea? Thrust it in the comments or email it to me (tom AT ballhype DOT com).

Welcome to the BallHype Spotlight Series, Volume 3: Fightin' Words, a series of debates on sporting subjects vital and trivial. In this edition, Patrick Smith and David Chalk of the fantastic baseball blog Bugs & Cranks provide a counterpoint on whether ESPN's obsession with the New York Yankees and Boston Red Sox is good for baseball fans. We begin with Mr. Chalk. Enjoy.


*****

Smitty's view:

I have a friend who believes that, unless you were born and/or live in Manhattan, the Bronx or Westchester County, N.Y., rooting for the Yankees is a character flaw. He believes that, given a choice of teams to root for, people who choose to root for the Yankees are morally deficient.

Hey, I didn't say it. He did.

I don't cast moral judgment on Yankee fans who aren't born into pinstripes. But my friend's point makes sense. What's more, in 2008, that point extends to the Red Sox; if you're not from Massachusetts, Vermont, New Hampshire or Maine (OK, and maybe a little piece of Connecticut), you have no business rooting for the Boston Red Sox.

But anyone who spends 10 minutes a week watching ESPN is bombarded with "news" of those two teams. They're the Duke and Carolina of baseball. Wanna know how Clemson or NC State or Virginia did? Tough rocks, bud. The Worldwide Leader can't get enough of Coach K and Roy Williams. Thus, neither can you.

By its obsessive coverage of the Yankees and the Red Sox, ESPN tells fans in Cleveland and Kansas City and Philadelphia and Houston to fuck off and enjoy this week's theatrical saga of whether Hank is mad at Joe. Or whether Theo wore the gorilla suit again. Like foie gras geese, we've been force-fed the Green Monster and Monument Park for so long that we're too fat and full of toxins to be entertained by the Texas Rangers or the San Diego Padres.

Manny. A-Rod. Youk. Moose. Tek. Joba. Big Papi. Melky. Dice-K. We don't even have to use these guys' proper names anymore; ESPN has made them even more familiar than the players on the teams we actually root for. I'll prove it: you have two seconds to tell me who plays first base for the LA Angels of Anaheim. One thousand one. One thousand two. Could you do it? You probably know it's Casey Kotchman, but it took you longer than two seconds to name him, even though he's hitting over .300 for a first-place team. But Jason Giambi and Kevin Youkilis come to your head in an instant. Why? Because they never left.

There's so much I know that I shouldn't know. And I know it because of ESPN. I like sports. I watch ESPN. Thus, I'm bludgeoned with Yankees and Red Sox non-news, day after day throughout the season. I shouldn't know that the Yankees pass around a pair of thong underwear, sharing it to break out of hitting slumps. And I shouldn't know that Daisuke Matsuzaka auctioned himself to fans for a night of sushi. Both those things are fine. But, as a fan of neither Boston or New York, I shouldn't know them. But thanks to ESPN, I do. Whether I want to or not.


*****

Chalk's reply:

When I hear people say they don't care who wins when the Red Sox play the Yankees, I'm reminded of people who won't vote because they think the Democrats are just as bad as Republicans. Certainly, the Sox aren't perfect, but they're nothing if not an acceptable alternative to fascism.

One of the stupidest things I have ever read was a comment left on Bugs & Cranks last October:

"When Boston won [the ALCS over the Yankees] in 2004, it was a big deal to Boston fans… It was not a big sports story for anyone else it was turned into one by ESPN."



My response went something like this:

The curse was not a national story? Babe Ruth, Ted Williams, Bucky Dent, Carlton Fisk, freakin’ Aaron Boone, Bill Buckner — persons of regional interest? No one would’ve thought twice if not for the evil NY/MA/CT media hype machine? Come on. One of the two or three most epically, historically cursed franchises in sports history wins the World Series after coming back from 3-0 down against the evil empire — that's not interesting to anyone outside New England?

It should be interesting to everyone, because everyone should hate the Yankees because everyone should hate evil. (Unlike Smitty's friend, I'm not giving any passes even if you live in or are from the Bronx, Manhattan or Westchester.)

People try to say the Red Sox are now just as bad as the Yankees. Poppycock. If they’re weren’t any Yankees we could hate on the Red Sox, but there are Yankees, so thank god the Sox are doing what they’re doing. You gotta fight fire with fire, absurd payroll with absurd payroll. But the Sox are also doing it with soul — Manny’s hair, Papelbon’s dancing, those things wouldn’t be tolerated in the Bronx. Most of all, the Red Sox don’t pay grown men millions of dollars and then tell them when and how they need to groom themselves. And because of the rivalry, when the Red Sox win titles, it’s like the Yankees lose three times. And that's awesome.

Media coverage of sports is never merely reporting scores, it's recording the drama behind the scores. Drama thrives on "the clash of mighty opposites." (I think that's from Hamlet -- or a TNT commercial.)

The Yankees and Red Sox are the mightiest of opposites. ESPN isn't powerful enough to make them as interesting as they are. But at least in this case, ESPN and the rest are smart enough to focus on something dramatic and interesting.


*****
So who's right? Speak up, Royals fans.


Keep track of the Spotlight Series at the BallHype hub or via the RSS feed. To get involved in future Spotlight Series, contact Tom Ziller.

As a part of BallHype's ongoing Spotlight Series, we asked several bloggers to participate in a roundtable on the issue of "humanizing athletes." Do drunk athlete photos bring fans closer to the players? Or has the blog age pushed them even further away?

Tom Ziller moderated the panel, which included:

• Nik Richie, TheDirty.com
• Will Leitch, Deadspin
• Brooks Melchior, Sports By Brooks
• Michael David Smith, FanHouse and elsewhere
• Miss Gossip, a FanHouse producer/blogger
• Dan Steinberg, the Washington Post's D.C. Sports Bog

BallHype:

Steinberg: Both, I guess. If I had to pick one, I'd say "make the relationship worse." Will argues that photos of Ben R. with booze and hot girls won't make fans like him less, which is true, but it has to make him like the world less. None of us would want our worst (or most private, anyhow) moments on the Internet, and even if it doesn't happen to all athletes, there have to be a bunch who trust the world less. But this is less about "blogs" than it is about the Internet, cell phone cameras, YouTube, etc. I know before I die, something highly embarrassing to me will show up on the Internet, and I won't be happy.

(Ed note: No sense in keeping you looking over your shoulder your whole life, Dan.)


Keep track of the Spotlight Series at the BallHype hub or via the RSS feed. To get involved in future Spotlight Series, contact Tom Ziller.

Welcome to the BallHype Spotlight Series, Volume 3: Fightin' Words, a series of debates on sporting subjects vital and trivial. In this edition, Clevelander Scott Sargent (profile) of Waiting For Next Year and Philadelphian Matt P (profile) of The 700 Level argue over which of their cities is the most cursed sports town in America. Enjoy.

Matt P: In answering the question of which city gets to hoist the "Most Cursed" banner to its rafters, I'd like to first say I'm not at all proud of what I get to defend here. Although I can't argue that Cleveland has gone more recent years without a championship, I do think that going through the painful futility four times a year is a whole lot worse than only doing it three times (or twice, during those seasons when your football team abandoned you). Millions more fans supporting four teams in a major US market, four teams that consistently lose ... every year... while neighboring metropolises hold parades every so often, and cute warm-weather-winter teams in new-age colors celebrate while our guys golf.

Sargent: I'd argue that Cleveland is tortured to the point where a hockey franchise cannot even survive, but the NHL could disappear in to thin air and it wouldn't phase me.  Not at all. 

The first pitch has to be 'number of years.'  Makes sense, I think.  And in that aspect, we have 1983 versus 1948?  We can give you the benefit of the doubt and say 1964 with the Browns - even though that was pre-Super Bowl.  Even then...that's still a little bit of a gap when compared to the Sixers in 1983.  Curse of Billy Penn and all.

Matt P: ESPN's Page 2 once named Cleveland America's Most Tortured Sports City, but that's different than being cursed. To be brutally honest, I think it's only a curse if your team is supposed to win, but never does. When does anyone actually, truly expect a championship in Cleveland? The Red Sox had a curse. The Cubbies have one too. And so does every team in the the Cradle of Liberty. Cleveland may hope for a parade, but expect it... God knows why, but we do. 

There's a difference between being cursed and just plain sucking. Although to be honest, some years it's been easy to forget which category the Phillies and Sixers fall into.

(There. I successfully made it through a point without referencing Bone Thugs N Harmony, which is the only element of cultural significance that I associate with Cleeev-laaaan, other than Major League and the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.) 

Sargent: Cursed versus tortured is undoubtedly a case of straw-grabbing.  Simply because we don't have a mythical ghost of some sort to blame our losses on does not make them any easier to endure.  These so-distant curses that plague the East Coast make for great marketing and between-inning montages for Fox Sports, but they're really nothing more than that.  A losing drought is a losing drought, no matter which way it is sliced.

The Sports Gods are already on Philly's side. The City of Brotherly Love has benefited from the NFC, the NL and the Eastern Conference for years - so I can see why you "expect" to win.  Let's face it: competition hasn't exactly been the best these days.  The shocking part is, Cleveland expects to win as well; much of which is substantiated by coming so, so close over so many years.  Red Right 88, The Drive, The Fumble ... all occurred during winning/playoff seasons.  Just in the most inopportune times within said years.  Unfortunately, for the Cavs of the late 80s, there was that guy named Jordan.  And regarding Indians-Marlins, not only did we expect to win -- we were pretty heavy favorites. Apparently, Jose Mesa had his money on the underdog. 

(And while I would take The Roots over Bone Thugs N Harmony any day of the week, their Grammy is unfortunately the only hardware we've seen in these parts in quite some time.  The sad, sad truth of Crossroads being more effective than crossing routes...)

Matt P: To your point on the sports gods being on our side: that actually supports our "cursedness." Even in weaker conferences, we still haven't seen a parade. I will argue that the NFC East is the toughest division in football though. The bitch is that the other teams in the division keep finding a way to win Super Bowls, which results in the absolute worst part of this curse: hearing it from our rivals. Every year there's more ammo for them, and less for us. We can't even talk trash on Eli Manning anymore. 

That really highlights another edge Philly has in the curse department: there's no way you hear about it like we do. Part of it is our fault, because we talk so much ourselves, but part of it is the big market thing. People just love to hate on Philly. With Cleveland, you'd have to explain why they're "cursed" to most casual fans to properly frame this debate.

And the Marlins thing? We lost on that one too, and we weren't even involved. A recent expansion team from our division has won the World Series more than the Phillies have in more than 100 years of existence. Don't get us started on Joe Table either. He was a Phillie last year. Again. Mitch Williams is also still in town, on our airwaves and berating youth basketball refs. We are constantly haunted by failures of the past, while enduring those of the present. 

(We'll gladly take pride in the Roots, although their 1999 Grammy is Philly's last piece of hardware too. Christ, we both have to reach, huh?)

Sargent: I admit that the NFC East has vastly improved -- but it still doesn't help when teams with worse records in the conference can go further in the season than teams in the AFC with better records. 

Being in a larger market, at least players want to be in that city. Half of Cleveland's hope belongs in players that grew up in the area and actually want to be here.  We're cursed to the point where the Jim Thomes/Curt Schillings of the world feel they have a better chance at winning in Philly so they skip town.  So what's that saying?  Granted, you'll come back with "we had those guys and still lost," but at least you had a chance.

And I'm pretty sure that any fan of any sport is well aware of how bad things have been in Cleveland.  Anyone who watched the MLB or NBA playoffs last season got to see a barrage of "My, look how bad Cleveland is!" montages courtesy of Fox and ABC.  But this goes back to my past vs. present argument -- yes, anyone who's younger than the age of 20 really has no recollection of just how close we were to winning championships in all three sports.  I think we had to make up the whole "stop sign" thing just to give Gen Y something to complain about for the next few years.  I mean, Clay Matthews now sells used cars for a living.  Talk about a twist of fate. 

Matt P: That's precisely the worst part of the curse here in Philly though. We're so often on the cusp, with victory within reach, only to fail dramatically. It puts more venom in the words of our rivals, and more vitriol in our responses.

Curt Schilling? He's badmouthed the Phillies since the day he left (well before that even), wasting no time in doing so yet again after the Red Sox won last year's World Series. He came to the Phillies when he was a nothing, became a decent pitcher, then left and had success and won championships with two different franchises. Thome was just a rental to help us open the new park, and he was injured for a long period of his stay. All he really did when he was healthy was keep Ryan Howard in the minors. 

As far as the NBA, you're lucky to have LeBron. The Sixers can't even seem to succeed at getting a high draft pick, so we remain mired in stagnancy. And sure the Cavs came up short last season, but no one was expecting them to win anything last year. The worst is yet to come for the Cavs, and you may deserve the mantle of "Most Cursed" when LeBron makes his very public exit, then wins a championship elsewhere.

Sargent: So, if I understand this right, being most cursed should be defined by who has had the bigger names yet hasn't won?  Philly's more cursed because they've had bigger free agents yet hasn't came out on top -- in any sport -- since '83.  Yet, Cleveland will be more cursed "when" LeBron leaves? 

Nothing I've heard has dated back beyond the Clinton administration in terms of support.  I still reiterate the fact that Cleveland hasn't seen the word "Championship" on a t-shirt unless it's preceded by the word "State" - typically involving St. Edward's wrestling or Cincinnati football.  This town has seen an inordinate amount of soul-crushing losses, all to good teams, over an entirely too large of time period.  Yes, a team in Philly's division won the Super Bowl.  Yes, the Sixers have been destroyed by the Billy King era.  And yes, the Phillies just can't seem to get a leg up on the rest of the NL East.  None of these issues will ever surpass the last 50-plus years of trophyless drought that this town has endured.  Ever.

Matt P: And no drought will surpass the fact that most sports fans have barely noticed Cleveland's "curse," deserving of derision as it may be. Your primary point is the duration of your loserdom, and I can't argue with time. But we have to hear it so much more, every year, in four sports, from the New Yorkers, the Washingtonians, and the smattering of morons who live in the Philly area but for some reason are Dallas Cowboys fans. 

This may sound pompous, but to the rest of the country, "Cleveland sports" brings to mind only two things: Lebron James and Major League. Not wins, not losses, just "Meh." Conversely, people everywhere love to hate on Philly, and because of the curse, we have no banner to point at and say "STFU."

So I'll see you at the curse crossroads, Bizzy Bone. When all is said and done, I've never once been envious of a Cleveland fan's lot in life. 

Sargent: If market size and geographical location have anything to do with how 'cursed' a team is, we wouldn't be doing this little exercise.

I will agree that present day Cleveland Sports bring to mind LeBron James, but again, we didn't just start this streak of "loserdom."  And neither did Philly.  If a casual  fan can't recall "The Drive/Fumble/Mesa Meltdown," Jordan over Ehlo or "Red Right 88," they may want to hit ESPN Classic a few times in the near future.  Any Nationally televised Cleveland game is bound to remind all of those watching just how bad things are.  To say that this town isn't cursed simply because we're not a bridges trip away from New York City is just silly. 

And your final line about wraps it up.  Why would you be envious of a Cleveland fan?  It's that much worse on this side of the border.

Keep track of the Spotlight Series at the BallHype hub or via the RSS feed. To get involved in future Spotlight Series, contact Tom Ziller.

Welcome to the BallHype Spotlight Series, Volume 3: Fightin' Words, a series of debates on sporting subjects vital and trivial. In this edition, Dan Shanoff of DanShanoff.com and The Sporting Blog argues that the NBA is becoming a niche sport. His opponent: Tom Ziller of NBA FanHouse and Sactown Royalty. Enjoy.

Shanoff: The once-hallowed "Big Four" (NFL, MLB, NBA, NHL) is now a "Big Three" (NFL, College Football, MLB) with the NHL, at most, a very popular niche sport -- and the NBA quickly joining them. 

The only reason people think that the NBA is still one of the "Big" sports is because it USED to be a "Big" sport and thus all of the media coverage -- mainstream and blog -- is filled with people who care, even if most of America doesn't anymore. Just because Bill Simmons and Michael Wilbon care about the NBA more than any other sport doesn't mean that most sports fans do, too.

The NBA is closer to NASCAR than it is to the NFL, with a very dedicated (but very finite) audience. 

Ziller: Saying the NBA is closer to NASCAR than the NFL is disingenuous, because MLB and NCAA Football are both closer to NASCAR than the NFL, too. The NFL is a megalith, and no sport in the United States approaches it in terms of the market, potential and actual.

Not to pull the race card, but doesn't the NBA have the advantage to cross demographic lines where the NHL is rather limited? We know the NBA had a ton of white fans at one point; those would seem to be the ones who went away. The league has not shut those fans off completely, as I think we're seeing with the increased ratings as the epic playoff race heats up. A compelling product will get these fans to come back, while the core demographic (blacks, younger whites) will always be there.

Is the NHL ever expanding outside the white male demo? I'm not thinking so. 

While the NBA might be two tiers below the NFL and MLB in popularity (I'm not conceding position to NCAA Football at this point -- there are vast swaths of this country that are oblivious to the sport), it has the opportunity to once again rise. I think this spring will prove that.

Shanoff: Please consider that the most recent NBA Finals featured the best (and most marketable) individual player in the league (forget the fact that it also featured a multiple-time champion that "purists" seem to think play the game the "right way"), and it managed to be the least-watched NBA Finals ever. I wouldn't confuse the very loud echo chamber of the devoted (the Simmons/Wilbon Effect) to nationwide interest. 

Ziller: No matter what way is the right way, there's an easy answer to this: The Spurs and Cavaliers both play the slow way. They also both play the defense-based way. As soon as the Conference Finals finished, everyone knew this'd be a bad Finals for the viewing audience. LeBron, the Spurs... who cares? It was two of the slowest-paced, defensively-skewed teams in the league. Maybe the presence of such teams (Portland looks to be the next generation) is an inherent flaw of the game, but it can hardly discount the fabulous postseason the NBA experienced on the whole.

Shanoff: Here's the thing: There is one -- ONE -- NBA Finals match up that has a prayer of national interest: Lakers-Celtics. Anything else will rate roughly what last year's Finals did, even if one of the participants is either the Lakers or Celtics. And even if it IS Lakers-Celtics, if it doesn't show substantial improvement over ratings this decade, that would confirm that the NBA is sliding into niche-dom. 

The NFL and college football are the only sports that maintain week-in-week-out national attention -- sustained national attention. Even baseball seems to peak in April, with a lull until September/October. It's apples and oranges: If the NBA had one game a week (on the same day) for 16 weeks, you bet ratings would go up. Football's system is set up for national attention sustained over 4 months. NASCAR's weekly
set-up helps drive is success.

Every other sport is fighting for relevance, ranging from 3 weeks (NCAA Hoops) to 4 weekends per year (golf/tennis) to a single day (Arena Football, let's say). 

The NBA has become a 3-moment-a-year sport: NBA Draft Night, NBA All-Star Weekend and the good fortune of a compelling Game 7 during
the playoffs.

Ziller: I heartily disagree the league's become a three-moment enterprise. Golden State-Dallas? Golden State-Utah? Phoenix-San Antonio? Even Phoenix-Lakers was an event! Detroit-Cleveland? The postseason is a two-month long series of huge moments. Everyone -- NBA fanatic or not -- talked about Game 5 of Cleveland-Detroit. Everyone -- NBA fanatic or not -- talked about GSW-Dallas.
 
If the NBA has slipped into nichedom in the past year, that is a mighty big niche. 

Shanoff: GSW-DAL was a one-time thing: A novelty. And CLE-DET was, again, one moment, as good as it was.  That brings you to 5 moments in a calendar year for the NBA, with 2 being spontaneous and unrepeatable. The NBA playoffs are a grind, and are only talked about by existing NBA fans, with the rare exceptional moment -- please keep in mind ESPN's role (and vested interest) in pushing/creating/manufacturing those moments. That's just the reality of sports, but it doesn't create a larger pie.

Ziller: If those huge NBA moments -- which had everyone in the world talking -- are novelties, why do they keep happening? This NBA stretch run and postseason... is this going to be a product of a series of well-timed flukes, or is it the product of an amazing (and growing) talent base, a stunning visual product on many nights, and smart league marketing via rule changes?

Shanoff: Here's the question: Economics aside, would the NBA be better off with their current "tentpole" strategy (5-6 individual nights of the year as "events" with lots of space in between them) or, like college basketball, a situation where they simply owned 3 straights weeks of the year, with very little national, non-avid fan attention paid beyond that. Again, economics muddles the argument. 

Ziller: Let's not overblow the NCAAs. How many casual fans check out after two weeks, when their bracket's in the toilet? Yes, it completely owns two weeks in March (beginning on Selection Sunday). But the Final Four loses steam among the casual fan (with Nielsen ratings comparable to the worst NBA finals of all-time); if you don't have a rooting interest or there isn't the rare compelling storyline (Carmelo Anthony, for example), the Final Four isn't going to capture you like the championships for most other sports. So basically, if this theory's right, the entire basis of college basketball's popularity is based completely on the novelty of a bracket.

Regarding your question, here's the thing: The NBA went through a bad spell, with few compelling stories beyond the Lakers, the Kings, and Vince Carter. It is clearly on the rise, and has been since last season. The beauty of the so-called "tentpole" strategy: You never know which night these big moments will happen. Kobe can drop 81 on League Pass. Denver could score 168 on some random Sunday. The Rockets -- a 10th place team -- can run off 22 wins in a row. At some point, the fan base created on the backs of these moments will get hooked into watching more often; the compelling product will keep folks watching when little is at stake because, hey!, you never know when something fun will happen. This is why ratings are improving this year for the NBA: The product is getting better, and it's the strategy which has allowed this.

Is the NBA becoming a niche sport? Is it the clear #3 sport now and in the future? Should Shanoff be disbarred? Should Ziller be disrobed? Discuss below, or where ever. It's your life.

Keep track of the Spotlight Series at the BallHype hub or via the RSS feed. To get involved in future Spotlight Series, contact Tom Ziller.

Welcome to the BallHype Spotlight Series, Volume 2: Bibilotech, a series of essays about books. In this edition, M. Haubs of The Painted Area discusses five sports books he's excited to see this year... and five he wishes were written. Enjoy. 

Last summer, we noted in our regular moonlighting space that the past few years seemed to be something of a golden age for basketball books, with intriguing reads about topics from the pros down to the high-school ranks.

In fact, it seems like it's been a pretty rich period for books across American sports.  Football's had pretty much a full century covered, from Sally Jenkins' Real All-Americans to Michael McCambridge's sweeping history of the rise of pro football, America's Game, to Michael Lewis' thoroughly modern look at the left tackle, The Blind Side, among many, many others.

As usual, there has been a motherlode of new baseball volumes spanning the scope of the sport's history, everything from Cait Murphy on the crazy 1908 season to Jonathan Eig on Jackie Robinson's first days as a Dodger to Joshua Prager on the Shot Heard Round The World and the great Joe Posnanski traveling the country with Buck O'Neill.

Meanwhile, it's not a stretch to say that contemporary takes such as Moneyball, Game of Shadows and the immortal Juiced! have affected the course of baseball history.

Even though we could continue naming dozens of intriguing sports books from recent years, there are still plenty of topics out there to be covered.  Here are five '08 releases we're looking forward to... followed by five more sports books we'd like to see:

FIVE FOR '08

The Greatest Game: The Yankees, the Red Sox and the Playoff of '78 by Richard Bradley
(Scheduled release: March 18)

Bradley, who wrote American Son: A Portrait of John F. Kennedy, Jr., takes a highly detailed look at the Yankees-Red Sox one-game playoff while also stepping back to examine the epic 1978 pennant race as a whole.

The topic has been covered from a pinstripe perspective in Roger Kahn's October Men and  famously in Sparky Lyle's The Bronx Zoo, the first sports book we ever read.

Sure, Lyle's juvenile humor and casual curse words were a forbidden delight to our prepubescent selves, and - let's face it - nothing can top Sparky's lesson on how to properly leave an ass imprint on a birthday cake.  Still, it seems like it's well overdue to have a balanced, thorough examination of this classic pennant race.

Maybe it's nostalgia, but in our minds, you can't beat a good old-fashioned pennant race as a dramatic tale. Of course, it has to be "old-fashioned" because a sad aspect of the wild-card era in baseball is that true pennant races are no more.

Contemporary races simply can't compare to races like '78, when the Yanks stormed back from 14 games down in July to edge the Sox in a do-or-die one-game playoff, thanks, of course, to Bucky Fuckin' Dent.

A Few Seconds of Panic: A 5-Foot-8, 170-Pound, 43-Year-Old Sportswriter Plays in the NFL by Stefan Fatsis
(Scheduled release: July 3)

Considering its dominance on the American sports landscape, the NFL is the most under-represented sports entity on bookshelves. Well, we've got three '08 releases for your consideration.  

First up is Fatsis, a Wall Street Journal reporter and NPR commentator known for his acclaimed book Word Freak, about the peculiar, obsessive world of competitive Scrabble players.  In A Few Seconds of Panic, Fatsis gets his George Plimpton on, as he suits up and participates as a placekicker in Denver Broncos training camp - an update of Plimpton's 1963 classic, Paper Lion, when the author played quarterback for the Lions in training camp.

We think it would be unbelievably awesome if the Fatsis book was sold as a package on Amazon, and basically everywhere, with fellow Bronco kicker Jason Elam's thriller, Monday Night Jihad.

Boys Will Be Boys: The Glory Days and Party Nights of the Dallas Cowboys Dynasty by Jeff Pearlman
(Scheduled release: September 16)

Pearlman wrote perhaps the most thankless sports book in a generation, the thoroughly researched, exceptionally reviewed Love Me, Hate Me, which proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that Barry Bonds is the biggest asshole in modern sports.  It's the definitive biography of a guy no one wants to read about.

Now Pearlman's getting back to something more like the fun-loving renegades in his chronicle of the '86 Mets, The Bad Guys Won!, as he delves into the '90s Cowboys in Boys Will Be Boys.  Can I get a White House?!

With characters like Jerry, Jimmy, Barry, Emmitt, Big Nate, The Playmaker and more, this is tailor-made for Pearlman.

The Best Game Ever: Giants vs. Colts, 1958, and the Birth of the Modern NFL by Mark Bowden
(Scheduled release: June 1)

The 1958 NFL Championship, universally credited with launching the popularity of the modern NFL, is apparently a popular subject.  In addition to this book, Frank Gifford, along with GQ's Peter Richmond, has a book on the topic coming out in the fall, and the legendary David Halberstam was working on this subject at the time of his tragic death last year.

That said, Bowden is thoroughly bankable, as his resume includes highly acclaimed books such as Black Hawk Down, Killing Pablo (about the hunt for druglord Pablo Escobar), and Guests of the Ayatollah (about the Iranian hostage crisis).  Bowden also has a well-regarded sports book, Bringing the Heat, to his name; the book followed the 1992 season of the Philadelphia Eagles, who Bowden covered for the Philadelphia Inquirer.

Rome 1960: The Olympics That Changed the World by David Maraniss
(Scheduled release: July 1)

Now, I know that events at the Olympics in 1936 and 1968 and 1972 shook the world a little bit. However, I have no real idea how the 1960 Rome Olympics changed the world, and I don't care.

Maraniss gets the full benefit of the doubt for being the master biographer of Bill Clinton (First In His Class), Vince Lombardi (When Pride Still Mattered), and Roberto Clemente (Clemente).  If he writes it, we wanna read it.

FIVE MORE WE'D LIKE TO SEE

Dave Maraniss on Jim Brown
Since we're talking Maraniss.... While we've been happy to see sweeping, well-regarded bios of Johnny Unitas, Vince Lombardi and Joe Namath released in recent years, the greatest football player who has ever lived, Jim Brown, still needs a treatment worthy of his complex, uncompromising life.

Yes, I know this might be an odd pick given that Mike Freeman's Jim Brown: The Fierce Life of an Anti-Hero just came out in 2006.  But Freeman's work was rather dry.  We'd love to see Maraniss take a stab at providing a fuller, richer portrait of Brown.

1984 Summer Olympics
And speaking of Olympics which changed the world, don't sleep on Los Angeles '84.

On the one hand, the whole thing in L.A. was so goofily American, what with the Hollywood excesses of the opening ceremonies and the self-congratulatory cheerleading by us Yanks, quite amusing given that half the competition wasn't, you know, there. There's a little bit of nostalgia at work, in remembering the Cold-War, pre-Ben-Johnson, three-network era when the Olympic Games were a truly larger-than-life event. Throw in the entertainment provided by mismatched pairs like Decker and Budd, and Retton and Karolyi, and, in the right hands, there's simply a pretty fun read here.

That said, the L.A. Games were also a pivotal moment in American sports history, the turning point when sports truly became big business.  The era of modern sports marketing was really ushered in by the CEO of the L.A. organizing committee, Peter Ueberroth, who turned a massive profit on the '84 games with his systematic approach to corporate sponsorship.  And of course, there was also this guy who led the U.S. men's basketball team to gold who was on the cusp of playing his part in the sports marketing revolution, as well....

Game of the Century: UCLA-USC '67
Someday, the time will be right for a sweeping biography of O.J. Simpson, which will depict how the Juice was one of the truly most fascinating athletes of the 20th century.  Seems like it's still too soon, though, and you'd probably have Fred Goldman on your ass, garnishing your wages one way or another, anyway.

What I'm thinking for now is something like New Yorker editor David Remnick's beautiful book, King of the World: Muhammad Ali and the Rise of an American Hero, which focused on the time when The Greatest loudly came onto the scene in the early 60s, highlighted by Ali's triumphant, shocking championship fights against Sonny Liston in 1964 and 1965.

I'd love to see Remnick look at Simpson through the prism of his USC years - when he rose from his troubled youth in San Francisco to become a polished media sensation in Hollywood - highlighted by the No. 1 vs. No. 2 matchup between UCLA and USC in November, 1967, which none other than Keith Jackson has called the greatest college football game he's ever seen.

Random aside: I hadn't realized until just this minute that UCLA's basketball Game of the Century, vs. Houston at the Astrodome, occurred just two months later, in January, 1968. Two Games of the Century in two sports in two months ain't bad.

Malcolm Gladwell's Sports Book
While we're dishing out the love to our favorite New Yorker writers, let's bring Malcolm Gladwell, celebrated author of The Tipping Point and Blink, into the fray.

We haven't quite forgiven Gladwell for pimping The Wages of Wins wildly in the pages of his magazine, while ignoring that other groundbreaking basketball rational analysts, like Dean Oliver and John Hollinger, exist.  But we'll settle up if Sideshow Mal - who is a sports fan, as illustrated thoroughly by these interviews on ESPN's Page 2 - makes his next hit a sports book.

We're thinking that something NFL-oriented might be up his alley - maybe a thorough look at  theories on how a team or an organization should be built, how game plans are constructed and executed, or how draft prospects are thoroughly scouted, vetted and ultimately selected.  I dunno, he's the crazy Canadian brother with the angles, I'm just the dear reader.

Larry, Magic and David
There aren't really any definitive biographies of Larry Bird or Magic Johnson out there.  Of course, the two are inextricably entwined, so why not combine them into one, and throw in a profile of David Stern to boot, and make it a full-scale look at the NBA's rise from the ashes, focused on the time period between the players' storybook 1979 college seasons and the ultimate triumph for all parties at the 1992 Olympics in Barcelona.  A no-brainer.

(Also be sure to check out The Painted Area's companion piece, on 10 basketball books they'd like to see.)

Keep track of the Spotlight Series at the BallHype hub or via the RSS feed. To get involved in future Spotlight Series, contact Tom Ziller.

Welcome to the BallHype Spotlight Series, Volume 2: Bibilotech, a series of essays about books. In this edition, Geoff Young of Ducksnorts tells you how to quit your job and write a book (or two). Enjoy. 

In August 2006, I got the bright idea of writing a book based on my Padres blog, Ducksnorts. I'd published a couple "Best Of" eBooks in the past that relied almost exclusively on existing material. The next logical step was to create an original work that expanded on ideas considered at the blog.

How did I do this? Glad you asked.

• Given the late start date, I knew I wouldn't have enough time to work with a traditional publisher. I investigated other options and settled on Lulu.
• I put my project management background to use and developed a statement of work with estimated hours, deliverable dates, and other Really Exciting Stuff. Then in November, after I'd completed a couple chapters, I came to the horrifying realization that the book wouldn't get finished unless I made a significant lifestyle adjustment.
• I quit my job.
• After drafting an initial outline and running it past several of my readers (who I can't thank enough), I started researching. I culled much of the information from existing blog posts, which I rearranged by topic, so that, say, everything I'd written about Adrian Gonzalez was in the same place. Then I looked for patterns -- things that had interested me during the season and which I thought might be worth investigating further. From there it was pretty much a matter of fleshing out the outline to create a first draft.
• Once I'd finished a draft, I sent each chapter to two different reviewers and asked them to be brutally honest.
• Next I made revisions based on reviewer recommendations and re-checked my facts. Then my wife and I edited the entire manuscript. We both have backgrounds in copy editing, but I think next time I'll let someone else handle those duties. It's impossible to view one's own work objectively after being so close to it for so long. I physically got tired of looking at my own words. As they say, I've suffered for my art -- now it's your turn.
• All throughout the process, I played with layouts and typesetting. I also got started on cover art earlier this time. For the Ducksnorts 2007 Baseball Annual, I basically did a photo shoot the day before I sent everything off to the printer. I don't recommend that. For the Ducksnorts 2008 Baseball Annual, I developed a concept well in advance and made minor tweaks as I went along.
• Somewhere in there, I approached Padres TV broadcaster Matt Vasgersian about contributing the foreword, and he graciously agreed. I'd been fortunate enough to have Padres CEO Sandy Alderson write the foreword to the 2007 Annual, and his participation in the project encouraged me to continue aiming as high as possible -- the worst anyone could say was "no." I'd already quit a really good job to write these things, so how bad could a two-letter word be? Basically there was no downside, and plenty of upside. And I'm beyond flattered that both gentlemen have been a part of the experience.

Lessons Learned

The big lesson is to start sooner. You really can't get started on a project like this soon enough. Have a plan. Be flexible within that plan, but have a plan. Talk to people about the project. I'm not the most outgoing person, so this is a struggle for me, but getting the word out is huge. Contact your fellow bloggers, contact the local media, tell people you meet on the street. Well, not just anyone -- but if they start talking about baseball, I try to sneak in a quick mention.

The flip side is listening. One of the great things about blogging is that I have a built-in community of folks who share my obsession and who are happy to give me feedback. For instance, several people mentioned that they would have loved a glossary and index in the 2007 Annual. Well, I couldn't do anything about that, but I certainly could include them in the 2008 Annual. So I did, and I like to think that the book is that much stronger for it.

In conclusion, don't quit your day job to write a book unless you can afford to do so. In my experience, writing books is a terrible way to make a living. But it's a whole lot of fun.

Keep track of the Spotlight Series at the BallHype hub or via the RSS feed. To get involved in future Spotlight Series, contact Tom Ziller.

Welcome to the BallHype Spotlight Series, Volume 2: Bibilotech, a series of essays about books. In this edition, Ty Keenan (FanHouse, FreeDarko) discusses his thesis on Gravity's Rainbow and the concurrent Warriors playoff run. Enjoy.

From the beginning of last April to the middle of May, my life was occupied by little more than two activities: following the Warriors’ playoff run and writing my thesis on Thomas Pynchon’s novel Gravity’s Rainbow. On a purely emotional level, both events were of supreme importance. The Warriors’ late-season push and upset of the Mavs in many ways validated a near-lifetime of disappointment and self-delusions on the level of convincing myself that Mookie Blaylock could be the leader of a playoff team. At the same time, my thesis on Pynchon represented the culmination of years of reading books above my grade level and subsequently talking and writing about them like I knew what I was talking about – the only difference being, of course, that this time I actually approached the subject with some degree of authority.

These two events were obviously important to me for different reasons, but it was the act of engaging with them at the same time that made that span of a few weeks to one of the best experiences of my life. (It was also one of the most antisocial, but that’s a story for another time.) Yet while the Warriors and Gravity’s Rainbow are not immediately comparable, there are connections between them. Both the team and the novel flout convention, establishing new forms of basketball philosophy and storytelling, respectively, that do not conform to our standard expectations of what works in those different arenas. Throughout those few weeks, the novel informed my experience of the games (and vice-versa), showing me that basketball and literature do not exist in their own secluded spheres of influence and discussion. Sports were no longer just a pleasant diversion; they now spoke to disciplines ranging from philosophy to politics.

For the uninitiated, Gravity’s Rainbow is an incredibly long (my copy is 760 pages with very small type), extremely difficult novel set during the end of World War II in Europe. There are innumerable plotlines and characters, but, to give you some extent of the overall craziness, the main plot involves Tyrone Slothrop, an American GI whose sexual conquests match up with V-2 rocket blast sites in London. This connection sets off a massive quest through Western Europe for information about Slothrop’s past, although the novel ends without anything being clarified. Every clue is essentially one more red herring, although readers usually finish the novel with the sense that things would have eventually come together if Pynchon had just kept going. Instead, he didn’t, and Slothrop drops out of the narrative entirely with about 100 pages to go. Despite these frustrations, Gravity’s Rainbow is widely regarded as one of the best novels of the last 50 years, if not ever, and it’s difficult to end the novel thinking that the entire enterprise has been a waste of time. As such, my thesis looked at the different ways in which Pynchon compels the reader to keep searching for answers when none are given. I argued that the novel promotes a method of reading – and, by extension, experiencing the world – that shifts focus from results and towards the journey. Or, to put it another way, things that do not immediately conform to established systems become viable.

The Warriors’ run has been talked about at length, and I hope the connections between it and Gravity’s Rainbow are starting to become clearer. Even if you think that Mavs series was an aberration, there’s no denying that, for anyone but Dallas fans, those games represented a moment at which the possibilities of the sport began to expand. Here was a team built around the idea that each player’s talents should define his role and the greater system, a concept that seemed at odds with the common perceptions of What Works in the Playoffs. The most ecstatic of us declared it a revolution and, while it isn’t yet clear if the upheaval will have lasting effects, the idea was extremely potent and exciting at the time. (I wasn’t blogging last spring, but, if I had been, my posts would have looked like that one – just with less lyricism and more explanation points.)

The Warriors were putting my grand claims about Gravity’s Rainbow’s relevance into practice. Sports and books, my two lifelong hobbies, were speaking to each other in a way they hadn’t since I read the entire Matt Christopher oeuvre – it is most certainly an oeuvre – in first grade. Basketball fandom wasn’t just confined to games and websites – it was about deeper ideas that we usually only get to talk about in ivory towers. Yet basketball didn’t occupy the low end of the intellectual relationship – it taught me just as much about the theoretical importance of my academic work. This subject needn’t be confined to the masturbatory intellectualism usually associated with pretentious English majors. It had relevance beyond the confines of campus, and I would be stupid if I decided that this thesis was merely an opportunity for me to impress my professors.

All this talk might sound hyperbolic, and it at least partially is. It is probably just a coincidence that I turned in my thesis on the same day that the Warriors were knocked out of the playoffs by the Jazz, and I would be wrong to think that these two events are perfect fits for one another. After all, Gravity’s Rainbow is not going to be a part of the Warriors Book Club any time soon. But, if this novel has taught me anything, it’s that connections such as the one between it and the Warriors are not illegitimate simply because they’re coincidental. Whatever connection I saw between them expanded my appreciation of both and eventually turned those few weeks into something much more than 75 pages of analysis and a second-round playoff exit.

In recent weeks, John Krolik and Jay Busbee have written in this space about the ways in which importance of sports to the inner city and rural Texas, respectively. These books (and their pieces) have detailed the primacy of sports in these areas extremely well, but I think we do sports a disservice – and let me make it clear that I don’t think John, Jay, Frey, or Bissinger do this – if we assume that sports is only relevant to our greater society when it defines the fortunes of particular people. We can read aspects of psychology, politics, and American culture into the smallest moments in sports. This process doesn’t have to involve borderline-pretentious exercises such as my thesis, either – in a way, it’s the basis for every post with a title like “What if NBA Players Were Household Kitchen Appliances.”

But expanding our analysis of sports isn’t just a way of connecting aspects of our lives to each other. I’ve occasionally heard my fellow grad students decry sports as inconsequential. This, frankly, is a bunch of crap, but the fact that this view remains prevalent means that we cannot assume that it shouldn’t be corrected just because sports are more popular than books. Assuming we want to be taken seriously as analysts, connecting sports to other parts of life is, to put it bluntly, something that can keep us from descending into escapism and intellectual irrelevance.

Keep track of the Spotlight Series at the BallHype hub or via the RSS feed. To get involved in future Spotlight Series, contact Tom Ziller.

Welcome to the BallHype Spotlight Series, Volume 2: Bibilotech, a series of essays about books. In this edition, the illustrious Bill Walton reviews God Save the Fan by Will Leitch of Deadspin. Enjoy.

There are few things on this planet better than the feeling of curling up under the stars with a sleeping bag and a good book. The scent of warmed papyrus takes me back to a day when my comrades on this great journey we call life would sit on the lawn in Berkeley and read poetry concocted from emotions pulled from the deepest reaches of our souls. When ESPN asked me to compose a review of Will Leitch's God Save the Fan , I leapt at the opportunity with zest and vigor.

The heft of Leitch's book reminds me of my 1967 hardback edition of the Tibetan Canon; the volume carries not just the physical weight of paper and ink, but of the mass of a population of believers. Leitch, it is clear, is not speaking for himself or for his friends. He is speaking for an entire generation in the way Jerry Garcia spoke for the children of the 1960s and Descartes spoke for those so lucky to live during the European Enlightenment. Like Descartes, Leitch advises the reader -- the sports fan -- to peer into his own mind in order to validate or rationalize what he sees on the field of battle. In fact, as we sit here, it has been exactly some 396 years since Descartes earned his law license, a heady reminder to the world of sports fans earning their license to cheer today.

Many reviews of the book focus on the specific episodes Leitch discusses in his book -- the vignette about Robert Traylor's pride and joy, in particular, is the pre-eminent genitalia story in the history of written word. There it is, Tractor Traylor's epic, gigantoid member thrashing about like a swordfish on the deck of a vessel in the Sea of Cortez. Leitch spins rich stories you will not find elsewhere, and pulls no punches.

However, Leitch's book also brings to light the most despicable thing I have heard in a decade: The firing of my close friend Harold Reynolds for alleged sexual harassment. I have not seen Harold at the daily chess club in ESPN's Bristol cafeteria in about a year, but I had NO IDEA he'd been fired. This is terrible, easily the most nefarious thing I have ever heard. Harold is a gentle, compassionate man filled with the noble qualities you'd hope to instill in your son or pet chinchilla. Furthermore, Harold Reynolds would never eat in a Boston Market. I can assure you 110% Harold Reynolds is a devout vegan; he promised me this on a van journey we took together from Omaha to the Anza-Borrego Desert once. What a long, strange trip that was. I will never forget, Harold. I will never forget.

John Wooden once said, "It isn't what you do, but how you do it." In this book, Will Leitch does write about things regarding sport and the world of fandom. He beacons a call to arms for fans all over the universe, asks his friends to rise up and take back what is theirs. Like Coach Wooden, Leitch inspires his followers. I talked to Coach Wooden last night, and he agreed Leitch has adapted Coach Wooden's Pyramid of Success well for his own work with Deadspin.

As an industrious and enthusiastic group, Leitch and his army of bloggers have succeeded in defining their own rules and their own success, much as we did at UCLA, when we won 88 consecutive games. With Coach Wooden as our poised and confident leader, we were able to achieve competitive greatness. Likewise, the blogosphere -- filled with buckets of self-control, skill and sincerity -- is well on its way to knocking off the traditional media from its perch high atop the mountain of power. Knock them off, bloggers. Knock them off.

Wait... am I in the traditional media? Umm.

I take it back! This book is terrible. Will Leitch is an abomination of a man; his book is a travesty of monumental proportions. DO. NOT. READ. THIS. BOOK.

Keep track of the Spotlight Series at the BallHype hub or via the RSS feed. To get involved in future Spotlight Series, contact Tom Ziller.

Welcome to the BallHype Spotlight Series, Volume 2: Bibilotech, a series of essays about books. In this edition, John Krolik (SportsHubLA, FreeDarko) takes us through an analysis of Darcy Frey's The Last Shot with today's sensibilities. Enjoy.

Darcy Frey's The Last Shot is not about basketball. It can't be. Basketball is a diversion, a game played for the benefit of those playing or, at the highest levels, those watching. The Last Shot is a book about three kids trying to find a better life for themselves, about a world that demands 18-year old kids to find a level of maturity and drive rarely present in adults to simply escape, about greatness and human fallibility, about greed and ignorance and exploitation. But what makes The Last Shot so compelling is that it is about basketball, because in Coney Island, all of those things are encompassed by the game.

Frey spent a year of his life at Coney Island's Lincoln High monitoring the basketball team's three best players: Corey Johnson, Tchaka Shipp, and Russell Thomas, all of them with the talent necessary for a division I scholarship and a ticket to a way out of Coney Island.

The threat that hangs over all of their heads are the academic requirements for a Division I scholarship -- a 70 average in class and a 700 on the SAT. To most people, those requirements seem fairly minimal, but the educational systems in places ruled by basketball like Coney Island makes the requirements analogous to asking a valedictorian to average at least 10 points for his school's varsity team before being allowed admission; it is revealed that some of the characters were not taught the principles of multiplication until high school, and most of the athletes at Nike's "Academic Betterment and Career Development" camp, better known as ABCD camp, read at less than a middle-school level.

For me, The Last Shot is, more than anything else, a way to look at how the athletes we pick apart and marvel at are made, and who they really are beneath what they do on the court. Friday Night Lights, the book The Last Shot is most often compared to, is about a town, but Frey makes his book a personal journey by allowing us to see things how the athletes do, and the book's power comes from juxtaposing the three-dimensional view we get of his characters with the way the rest of the world sees them.

Corey Johnson (6-1 guard, good athlete with explosion ability. First step is nearly unstoppable. Good court vision, with a flair for the dramatic pass. Streaky outside shot) is the least ambitious of the three, the most popular guy at his high school, as gifted with women as he is on the court, an aspiring writer and poet, endlessly creative, a trend-setter, brash, smooth, and confident, seemingly never allowing the pressure to faze him. He sleepwalks through most of his classes and seems to have no hope of passing his SATs, as he is not putting in extra time studying for them and has not even capitalized on his opportunities to take it as many times as he can. He may be the smartest of all the characters in the book; he never goes somewhere he's not supposed to on the court, never at a loss for a witty remark, and constantly writing one piece or another. For most 18-year olds as gifted as Corey, coasting through high school means a stint at a lesser-known liberal arts school or a lower-rung state college, but the stakes are much higher in Coney Island -- the book is filled with images of players who "didn't make it" because of academic requirements and now work at gas stations or on a corner somewhere.

Tchaka Schipp (6-7 forward, great athlete with tremendous strength, speed, and leaping ability. Great motor. Nose for the ball on both ends of the floor. Can dunk in traffic inside, and is willing to trade elbows on the low block. Good help-side defender. Raw offensively; very few back-to-basket moves; handle and range on outside shots are nonexistent. Shorter than most 4s at the college level) is the most gifted of the three; blessed with a body full of raw power and strength, a stable home life in a neighborhood in Brooklyn, and a natural intelligence, he seems destined to make it out, and makes a 700 on his SATs relatively early in his senior year. He picked up the game fairly late -- cycling was his original sport -- but seems determined to make up for lost time on the court (where he attacks the basket with a primal fury often punctuated with a victorious scream after a dunk) and off the court, where he constantly watches tape of college games in order to learn new moves. He's the one most fazed by pressure during games, playing horribly in his first few ABCD games due to nerves, and air-balls a free throw during a summer league game against an all-white team. (Quote from an opposing player's father, who thought Frey was also a parent: "Bet he never practiced a free throw in his life. Just runs up and down the court.") He is constantly attempting to balance a more refined image of himself with the reality of his upbringing; during one post-game interview after a tough loss, he breaks his stoic character and blurts out "Damn, did you see that last dunk? That n****r was buggin'! Cocked that s**t to his nuts! (embarrassed pause) Um, don't quote me on that, okay?" Because of his potential and 700, Tchaka is also the one who experiences the full force of NCAA recruiting; Tchaka is constantly visited by coaches from top schools with promises of playing time, future stardom, an education, and a personal concern. Frey highlights one incident when a coach recruiting Tchaka promised him that he was entering a family, and that if he wasn't in contact with Tchaka 20 years after he stopped playing for him, he'd "kick his ass!" The next year, that very coach accepted the head coaching position at UNLV.

Russell Thomas (6-2 guard, Ben Gordon-type scorer. Beautiful outside shot, which he can hit with confidence off the dribble or running off screens. Able to get to the basket. Ferocious defender, gives his man 40 minutes of hell. Concerns about what position he would play at the next level; lack of explosiveness is also an issue.)  Thomas, whose real name is Darryl Flicking but had it changed for the book, is the most intriguing of the three. The book begins with one of his solitary workouts in the Coney Island court semi-jokingly referred to as "The Garden." He shoots over and over, moving to different spots with mechanical precision. Then he gets out a chair, sits in it, and swishes one-handers. Occasionally he will put a brick in each of his hands and practice defensive slides. He is the most relentless of the three, the one whose drive seems to be right out of the tall tales we have made Michael Jordan, Tiger Woods, and Kobe Bryant into; he never showboats, defends his man with religious zeal, spends his lunch period studying for his SATs, and immediately sets to his homework when he comes home. He is obsessive, insecure, and unpredictable; his coach calls the monitoring of his daily moods "the Russell watch." He nearly killed himself the year before Frey arrived after he hit his girlfriend, fearing that the incident would go on his record and scare away Division I schools; he had to be talked down from the top of a high-rise building. He has a kind of singular vision on his goals; he promises to wear a tie and wingtips to school and dunk during a game at the beginning of the year, and follows through with both. He gets a serious girlfriend during his senior year, and goes from telling Frey that he loves her and will someday marry her to regaling Corey with boastful stories about his coldness towards her. The recruiting process feeds on his insecurities; during a summer league game, two scouts reveal that they have labeled him a "choker" as he steps to the line for two crucial free throws, UC Irvine withdraws their scholarship offer just as he was about to sign there based on concerns over his SAT scores, is clearly driven crazy by the attention lavished on Tchaka, and he finally decides to sign with Temple, sight unseen; when pressed about his decision by Corey, he snaps "because I'm sick of all this f*****g recruiting, okay?!"

Seen 17 years after its events occurred, The Last Shot reveals that the three players' only choice was failure. Corey's lackadaisical approach cost him his 700, and he ended up going to junior college and missing the NBA, although he still dreams of becoming a writer. Tchaka accepted a scholarship and the promise of playing time at Seton Hall, only to be buried on the bench and mentally broken by noted douchebag P.J. Carlesimo, leading to him to transfer to UC Irvine in hopes of a starting spot, but he got in a car accident, rendering him unable to play basketball at the same level ever again; he now does plumbing work for $8.50 an hour. Russell didn't make his 700, but kept his determination, became one of the most prolific scorers in junior college, and eventually got his degree, but his intensity proved to be his downfall; he was involved in an incident of domestic abuse with his wife, attempted to find God, and ended up living homeless separated from his wife and child in California; at 26 years old, he was hit by an Amtrak train and instantly killed. Many believe he threw himself in front of it.

The book does contain a fourth player, less involved in the central events of the book than the other three, a tiny freshman phenom of a point guard and basketball savant, with blazing speed, a yo-yo handle, otherworldly court vision, and a deadly shot. He is the most cocky and the most jaded of the four, always flapping his mouth and even deriding Tchaka's abilities to his face. He had not one, not two, but three older brothers show promise in high school but ultimately fail to make their 700 and end up in some sort of juco purgatory, and the experience has clearly impacted his family; his father approaches Frey directly and asks him how much he's going to be paid for Frey's book, having seen too often how young players are chewed up and spit out by those looking to profit off them and left with nothing. Unlike the other three, the freshman is shameless about hitting up Frey for meals at McDonald's and soda money, and is clear about his intentions to get his from college recruiters, admonishing the other three for not asking for any illegal gifts; he dreams of getting hooked up with a white Nissan Sentra, which are, in his own words, "milk." But he also benefits from his loss of innocence -- he vows that he won't turn out like his brothers, and puts in hours with tutors every day so that he can live up to that vow. He turns out to be the book's lone success story, propelled out of Coney Island by immense talent and confidence and a drive forged by the crushing failure that had preceded him. His name? Stephon Marbury.

Like my boss says, THIS IS A LEAGUE OF STARS. And the NBA's stars often walk a blessed path, especially since The Man From Farregut showed us that the young can lead a team to salvation. Nowadays, the great ones have been hand-chosen from before they hit middle school; they get put on AAU teams, play high-level rec-leagues during the year, go to ABCD camp, and go to big-time basketball factories like Oak Hill and play other basketball factories in games that are broadcast on ESPN bear only a passing resemblance to high school basketball. But the game does not reside in those chosen few. It resides in places like Coney Island, in courts like the Garden where kids play 5-on-5 and execute offensive sets until the sun is a memory, where the sidelines are littered with the hollow entities of those whose sacrifice was demanded by the game so that the chosen few may emerge, in behind-the-back passes and crossovers that exist for their own poetry, where the game is not an escape from reality but the only reality permissible, in stories of players only seen by human eyes like Spoon and Chocolate and Ju-Ju and The Goat. Few stars are born in places like Coney Island, but all of them live there, and Coney Island likewise is in every star; the ghosts of Marbury and Isiah and Jordan haunt the courts and fueling the dreams of the game's footsoldiers, putting up shots in hopes that they may be The Next, with the vast majority failing and paving the way for the one who will someday come. For Russell, Tchaka, and Corey, the game was their life; what they did on the court was the sole truth on which a lie about their realities was built. The truth of the game is in Coney Island, but the truth isn't always what you want to hear.

Keep track of the Spotlight Series at the BallHype hub or via the RSS feed. To get involved in future Spotlight Series, contact Tom Ziller.

Welcome to the BallHype Spotlight Series, Volume 2: Bibilotech, a series of essays about books. Jay Busbee is the creator of the Southern sports blog Sports Gone South and the Atlanta sports blog Right Down Peachtree. (He was more Landry than Riggins in high school, but then, weren’t we all?) His essay is on the effects of Hollywood on Friday Night Lights, The Book. Enjoy.

It began, as the best stories do, with something both simple and universal: high school football.

In 1988, sportswriter H.G. Bissinger packed up his family and moved from Philadelphia, where he’d worked for the Inquirer, to the tiny West Texas town of Odessa. There, Bissinger found a town mad with passion for high school football, a town that could pack a twenty-thousand-seat stadium to capacity, a town that hoisted all its hopes and dreams onto the shoulders of seventeen-year-old kids.

The resulting book, Friday Night Lights, is a singular achievement that transcends the narrow genre limitations of a “football book.” It’s got about as much in common with Just Give Me The Damn Ball as “L.A. Confidential” has with “Big Momma’s House 2,” and it’s hands-down one of the best works of journalism of the last quarter-century.

Bissinger understood that there are universal truths in even the most mundane of worlds, and it would be tough to get more mundane than Odessa. There, however, Bissinger witnessed America in miniature; racial strife, misplaced educational priorities, and paper-thin dreams dominated the story.

“Odessa is the setting for this book,” Bissinger wrote, “but it could be anyplace in this vast land where, on a Friday night, a set of spindly stadium lights rises to the heavens to so powerfully, and so briefly, ignite the darkness.”

Bissinger observed Gary Gaines, the coach who’d come home to “For Sale” signs on his lawn following a loss; Boobie Miles, the promising running back cast aside after a crippling injury; and all the rest of the Permian High School Panthers. He followed the Panthers from their first days of summer practice to the state playoffs, where…well, let’s not spoil things, but Permian’s story is the proverbial too-unbelievable-for-Hollywood tale.

Which is ironic, because Hollywood is exactly where the story picked up next. Permian High School begat Friday Night Lights the book, which begat Friday Night Lights the movie, which begat Friday Night Lights the TV series. Each version grew farther from the original, "real" story, but—in what qualifies as a minor miracle—each version maintains an essential integrity, even though TV series characters like Jason Street and Matt Saracen weren't even "born" when the events of the book took place. (ESPN.com followed up with the book’s subjects ten years after the book’s events, and documented the drastic changes that the book wrought on Odessa.)

But even as the quality remains stellar, the FNL story has suffered diminishing popular returns. The book was a bestseller, the movie a moderate success. The TV series has clung to life since inception in 2006. Despite almost universal critical acclaim, The New York Times has deemed Friday Night Lights a postmillennial failure as a television program because it hasn’t yet spawned a horde of product tie-ins (apparently missing the entire NBC store dedicated to the show, as well as the choice “What Would Riggins Do?” clothing line). But that assessment misses the point. TV shows franchise themselves out in order to appeal to as many different audiences as possible on the consumer’s terms.

Friday Night Lights doesn’t need to do that; it already exists in a place every single one of us knows (or understands) intimately. It embodies the hopes, fears, dreams and ambitions of anyone older than baby Grace, and not in some hokey wish-fulfillment 24/Sex and the City way. If we lived in Odessa (or, in the TV series, Dillon), we know right where we’d slot in—and maybe that’s the problem. Maybe it’s a little too real for us to take as entertainment.

Friday Night Lights has passed from the realm of story straight into mythology. Like the Western or the Mafia tale, the high school football saga is now an indelible element of Americana.

And like John Wayne and Al Pacino, while Bissinger didn't create the high school football story, he established its parameters. These stories take place in small towns, not suburbs or inner cities. Nobody's a stereotype; the quarterback, cheerleader, head coach, and geek all have shades to their characters. Everyone’s heart’s a little too close to the surface…and no one knows what the hell they’re going to do when football season’s over.

“At times, Odessa had the feel of lingering sadness that many isolated places have, a sense of the world orbiting around it at dizzying speed while it stood stuck in time,” Bissinger wrote. “But Odessa also evoked the kind of America…where anybody could be somebody, a place still clinging to all the tenets of the American Dream, however wobbly they had become.”

As long as there are high schools and football, there’ll be Friday Night Lights. Maybe the Tim Riggins and Boobie Miles of 2058 will be playing on a moonbase, but we’ll recognize them all the same. 

Keep track of the Spotlight Series at the BallHype hub or via the RSS feed. To get involved in future Spotlight Series, contact Tom Ziller.

Welcome to the BallHype Spotlight Series, Volume 2: Bibilotech, a series of essays about books. We start with Bethlehem Shoals of FreeDarko (and soon, The Sporting Blog). Shoals takes us through the tomes which helped form his liberated fandom. Enjoy.

As a pre-teen, I was quite ordinary. I spent a lot of time in synagogue, and read baseball history till it became its own kind of liturgy. In fact, the two often came to pass in tandem. Being groomed for a relatively prim bar mitzvah means lots of Sabbath morning immersion, and being nine means you need some form of distraction. Remember, they don't even teach us what the words mean—just that they matter.

I haven't set foot in a shul since college, and, family gathering aside, really don't think much about baseball. But in that fateful year of 1986, both were tried-and-true features of my week. Every Saturday, I'd spend three hours listening to a bunch of academics solemnly moan and sway, trying their damnedest to stave off the forces of reform just down the street. And, budding compulsive that I'd was, I'd spend the whole time thumbing through the same too-large-too-conceal hardback each time: Donald Honig and Lawrence Ritter's "The 100 Greatest Baseball Players of All Time."

Looking back, I have zero idea how this book fit into the seamhead climate of the time. I had some Bill James at home, but that shit was too bulky to smuggle into a place of worship. And frankly, glancing back and forth between columns of numbers and equations I barely got was only slightly less fun than re-reading Gog and Magog for the hundredth time. I didn't need Honig and Ritter for the "this is our sport" overview they so loudly proclaimed. Yet this book seemed to have one foot in myth and another in cold, slate-eyed judgment. Idiosyncrasy didn't make players great, but "Old Aches and Pains" certainly made you care more about Luke Appling's upper echelon shortstop stats. What united these various players, and the eras they ruled, were the smart-aleck's way with data and the romantic's belief that such tinkering was part of a higher calling. 

But nothing called to me in this book like the entries on Pete Reiser and Herb Score. They were about three pages long each, and I must've memorized every last word of them. Here were two players whose inclusion seemed some in itself a bold statement about the nature of talent, meaning, and faith. Both made Sandy Koufax or Gayle Sayers look like Seaver and Dorsett, respectively; between the two of them, Reiser and Score put together about three seasons of top-flight play. By Honig and Ritter's numbers, this output could be extrapolated out into something mightily impressive. However, even the young Shoals knew that baseball is notoriously prone to the "career year" syndrome, and any number of pitfalls--including less dramatic injuries, which never get given the spine-tingling treatment--could derail this kind of early promise.

If you're looking for the exact moment FreeDarko began, it was on one of these Saturday mornings (maybe a few Fridays, too), as I regarded Msrs. Score and Reiser with a combination of outrage, awe, and profound reverence. These were just baseball players, and fairly obscure ones at that. And yet they'd inspired these kings of letters to put their legitimacy on the line—whether as a lark, an in-joke, or some more solemn statement of purpose—and infest their "100 Greatest" with a form of fantasy. Or at least a kind of subjectivity that threatened their delicate balance between well-rounded humanism and quantitative exploits.

Honestly, I don't think I would've bought it without the religious backdrop. And I think it's no accident that I came to associate this book—and to this day, these players—with the half-dour, half-exultant sounds of Jew worship. Or that, with each passing week, I felt more and more of an urge to read these two entries in the presence of ritual. Which, if you didn't catch it already, made them into my own kind of semi-spiritual ritual. Their stories were sad, sure. But in a way, the "what if" posed by Reiser and Score took on an almost cosmic aspect, a sense of freedom and exhilaration that seems to me the very basis of most Western religions. No matter who you ask, the world beyond our own consists of things avoided, imagined, otherwise unthinkable, and quite possibly blinding in their glory.

Score and Reiser became not only athletes whose careers stood for something far more profound than "damn," but also a way of seeing just why organized religion offered up more than rules and dress pants. Of course, baseball's disappeared from my life, and I rarely feel the need to consult my local rabbi when life seems drab or empty. Maybe, just maybe, though, Herb Score and Pete Reiser allowed me to take these same lessons and unfurl them elsewhere. Maybe FreeDarko's messianic wail isn't just a take-off on doomsday cults, and maybe, even if I can't play the sport they played, I see Score and Reiser in my mind every time I sit down to ponder Today in Travis Outlaw, or Josh Smith.

Keep track of the Spotlight Series at the BallHype hub or via the RSS feed. To get involved in future Spotlight Series, contact Tom Ziller.

Welcome to the first volume of the BallHype Spotlight Series: What If... History Weren't. Tortured franchises and athletes surround us. The blogdome's best imagine alternate histories for their rooting interests. Today, Tom Ziller from Sactown Royalty considers Chris Webber's fortune.

Chris Webber's career has been defined by the word if.

Supposing all basketball players were created equal to this one, with Webber's inordinate physical presence providing necessary anchor for his insatiable skills and childlike swagger... no player out of 1,000 made from this stock would turn out so bitten by snakes and circumstance. Len Bias may rest conveniently as the patron saint of misspent basketball genius, but this is too simplistic -- Len's vice consumed him before he'd proven a damn thing. It's Webber who defines the idea of frittered genius in a true basketball sense; his failing isn't measured by illicit drugs or injured body, it is measured by what happened exclusively on the polished planks. Basketball measured Webber, and basketball cut him down.

As all things, this is relative. Five All-Star teams, five All-NBA teams, five top 10 MVP vote finishes. Top 50 all-time player, according to Hollinger's ticker tape. The best player on the best team for a string of seasons... which is where we pick up our hero's story. Injuries happen in the NBA, all the time. Look at the present. Andrew Bynum just went down, and a well-reasoned Lakers fan friend of mine has the phrase 'Shoot me now' in his GChat signature line. This very morning, I'm eagerly awaiting the return of two of my favorite teams' top 3 players to the line-up. I am fully aware the impact of injuries is common in basketball, and in sport. And despite what we may believe about Dwyane Wade or Grant Hill or J.D. Drew or Fred Taylor, injuries are not predestined categorically; in most cases, torn ACLs just happen with little justification present or necessary. (Ask my Lakers fan friend.)

But there is one flavor of major malady which seems predestined... and this is where we return to Webber. The institution of basketball (or the Basketball Gods, if that's your denomination) hated Chris Webber. His career resembles a fatal game of Paperboy, with boosters and weed and Don Nelson strung into his path. At every moment, something sat before Webber, threatening his incredible game. That absurd timeout saga nearly crushed C-Webb's spirit; it would have qualified our hero only in the Bias category. Nellie told him to 'shut up and rebound' -- Chris Webber! Shut up and rebound! It's like taking a painter's brushes, a writer's quill, a monster truck driver's monster truck. The beating heart of Webber faintly survived, slipping through his second Juwan Howard Hell before rescue was finally achieved by a pair of basketball's underground crusaders: Geoff Petrie and Rick Adelman. Webber had already met one of these crusaders -- Bill Clinton, who reached out to our hero following the Michigan maelstrom. But Big Dog was a bit... err, busy in 1998. (The establishment tied him down to prevent another Webber resurrection, natch.) Luckily, Petrie and Adelman had ready exile and managed to coax C-Webb away. The rest isn't just history; it is legend.

The spring of 2002 has been relived extensively; suffice it to say, the institution can be blamed for 27 free throws as readily as it can take blame for anything else. Disappointment was apparent and very present, of course, but there was a sense of hope you wouldn't believe or understand in that town, in those ears of Chris Webber. This was a mostly young team, a clandestine operation on the ascent... and it was a tipped pass, a free throw, an inch away from slaying the institution's chosen monster, an inch from glory. These men tasted it and they -- not the least of all Webber -- knew they'd be back.

2003, second round, Game 2. The institution wins. They could not kill Webber with dirty money, with drugs, with nationally televised ridicule, with oppression of style, with Rod Strickland and Darvin Ham... but they always held the dreaded microfracture in reserve, awaiting the necessary trigger moment. The institution does not hand out microfractures lightly -- Darius Miles received his due to the institution's encouragement of Portland's blast toward innocence; Kenyon Martin's was justified as a lesson against giving one-dimensional detonators max contracts; Greg Oden did some shady deeds back in junior high, and he's doing time now in some sort of new rehabilitation program for youth they've got going. Webber's microfracture, the evidence shows, came because he was too close to upsetting the fine balance the institution has achieved with regards to success and whom deserves it. (This is why Mark Madsen and Mitch Richmond have rings and Webber does not. This is also why Darko will never win anything.)

That injury was rare in its impact. It altered two championships (derailing Sacramento's chances in 2003 and mucking the proceedings upon his shaky return in 2004). It destroyed a would-be dynasty, and delivered the building blocks of another (San Antonio). The salary impacts solely stemming from that injury -- in the form of Brad Miller and Kenny Thomas -- will last until 2011. It resulted in Allen Iverson getting traded from the only NBA home he knew. Unless a deal gets done in the next year, it may even have resulted in the loss of professional basketball for a dedicated, spirited city.

It didn't have to be this way. The institution never saw through the bluster to find Webber's good intentions, to grasp his wholly commendable aura. Maybe the Fab Five's baggy shorts set off the whole false persona stuck on C-Webb to this day, that he's just some sort of hoodlum in a three-piece suit. For whatever reason, with this player, all the good is erased or invisible; all that mattered was someone in higher power thought Chris Webber didn't deserve to win. They were wrong. He deserved it. No, he deserves it. There are still crusaders in our midst, ready to rescue Webber from history. It will not be the same cast; their blood has been spilled enough. But there is one last lunge in Webber to get what rightfully he has earned. And though in color and logo I will have nothing to do with it, my tears are heavily invested in seeing the deed completed. I desperately want to believe Webber will rescue himself, and by extension rescue us all.

Previous on What If...: The New York Knicks, the Chicago Cubs, the Los Angeles Lakers, the St. Louis Cardinals, the San Francisco Giants, the Philadelphia Eagles, and the New York Mets. Keep track of the Spotlight Series at the BallHype hub or via the RSS feed. To get involved in future Spotlight Series, contact Tom Ziller.

Welcome to the first volume of the BallHype Spotlight Series: What If... History Weren't. Tortured franchises and athletes surround us. The blogdome's best imagine alternate histories for their rooting interests. We've already looked at re-tellings of recent times for the New York Knicks, the Chicago Cubs, the Los Angeles Lakers and the St. Louis Cardinals and the San Francisco Giants. It's time to invade the football ranks, so here's the potent Enrico Campitelli Jr from The 700 Level and FanHouse, describing an Eagles altered state. Enjoy.

In 1998, the Philadelphia Eagles finished the season with a 3-13 record.

In the weeks leading up to the 1999 NFL Draft, despite the desperate need for a franchise QB to get the team going in the right direction, the ignorant sports talk radio hosts were clamoring for the Eagles to select Heisman Trophy winner Ricky Williams.

610 WIP radio personality Angelo Cataldi weighed in, "They absolutely must draft Ricky!  He's the kind of back that can completely change a franchise.  Plus, he's got good hair!  If they don't draft Ricky, they're high!  The birds don't need a QB, the three way platoon of Bobby Hoying, Koy Detmer, and Rodney Peete is the kind of triumvirate that can win you championships.  We want Ricky!" 

One 35 year-old fan interviewed at the corner of Third and Moyamensing on his way to work -- who happened to have his face painted green and was inexplicably wearing shoulder pads on a Tuesday morning -- felt awfully strong about who the Birds should draft, "If the Eagles don't pick Ricky, I'm going to have to redesign my entire bedroom.  I've already had my mom sew me new green bed sheets with the number 34 in them and I finger painted a mural on my wall.  It was the old Ray Rhodes wall that borders my sister's room, so Ricky gives it a little more style.  Anyway, we need Ricky!  I'd maybe be alright with Cade McNown or Akili Smith but we really, really need Ricky."

Prior to the draft, new coach Andy Reid stated he was leaning towards Syracuse QB Donovan McNabb but Reid wanted to make sure he didn't let the fans down early in his tenure. 

…

Paul Tagliabue: "With the 2^nd pick in the 1999 NFL Draft, the Philadelphia Eagles select Ricky Williams, running back from Texas."

The loyal Philly fans who were in attendance at the draft erupted in joy.  It was a glorious day for the lonely members of the Dirty 30.  Sean noted the importance of the day, "THIS IS THE BEST DAY OF MY LIFE! Right up there with the time a girl kissed me in the eighth grade in 1984!"

… 

The Ricky Williams era started off slow during the 1999 season.  Williams would often run as if he were in slow motion in the backfield and equipment managers noticed some odd requests, "He's a strange cat.  First he had me stockpile his locker with TastyKakes Krimpets and now he wants one of those visors for his helmet that you can't see through." 

After two disappointing 5-11 seasons in 1999 and 2000, things came to a blow in 2001.  It was during the NBA finals that Williams career took a turn for the worst.  Williams, his good friend Allen Iverson, and visiting Laker Isaiah Rider who was in town for a basketball game, were busted at the TGI Friday's on City Line Avenue in Philadelphia on charges of having large quantities of a leafy green substance. 

At this point with his days in the NFL running short, Ricky Williams thought about turning to his second love, baseball.  "Their drug testing policies are a joke.  I can get away with anything I want over there," Williams noted.  A little known fact to many: Williams was actually drafted by another Philadelphia team, the Phillies, in the 8^th round as an outfielder in 1995.  In the end though, his attempt at baseball fell short and Ricky decided that making millions of dollars in the sports world was just too stressful for him.

Williams couldn't handle all the hoopla and lost his desire to play the games he once loved.  After his early retirement from the Eagles in 2002, Ricky Williams "studied Ayurveda, the ancient Indian system of holistic medicine at the California College of Ayurveda in Grass Valley, California." 

…

Paul Tagliabue: "With the eighth pick in the 2002 NFL Draft, the Philadelphia Eagles select Rex Grossman, QB from Florida."

Keep track of the Spotlight Series at the BallHype hub or via the RSS feed. To get involved in future Spotlight Series, contact Tom Ziller.

Welcome to the first volume of the BallHype Spotlight Series: What If... History Weren't. Tortured franchises and athletes surround us. The blogdome's best imagine alternate histories for their rooting interests. We've already looked at re-tellings of recent times for the New York Knicks, the Chicago Cubs, the Los Angeles Lakers and the St. Louis Cardinals. Here now, the incredible lyrical stylings of Grant Brisbee of McCovey Chronicles. Enjoy.

               INT. HOTEL BAR - NIGHT

               BRIAN SABEAN sits in a New Orleans hotel bar, trying to fish

               a cherry out of the bottom of his drink. TERRY RYAN, G.M. of

               the Minnesota Twins, sits across from him.

                                   TERRY RYAN

                         Sabes, I've been thinking about

                         your interest in A.J. Pierzynski.

                         We've got this kid Mauer coming up,

                         so we'd be interested in moving

                         A.J.

                                   BRIAN SABEAN

                         I've never acquired a hitter in

                         his mid-twenties before. I've heard

                         that hitters in their mid-twenties

                         go all crazy if you pour water on

                         them or feed them after midnight.

                                   TERRY RYAN

                         Uh, right. Listen. I think we could

                         do this for Boof Bonser...

                                   BRIAN SABEAN

                         A struggling pitcher in AA who's

                         lost a couple of ticks off his

                         fastball....

                                   TERRY RYAN

                         ...Joe Nathan...

                                   BRIAN SABEAN

                         A reliever whose shoulder is held

                         together with double-sided tape and

                         Laffy Taffy....

                                   TERRY RYAN

                         ...and, oh, like, some random A-

                         ball pitcher. My scouts like that

                         Franklin Liriano guy, but it can be

                         whomever you choose.

                                   BRIAN SABEAN

                         It's an interesting offer. Allow me

                         time to talk it over with my staff.

                                   TERRY RYAN

                         You don't mean that glowing rock

                         you keep in your pocket, do you?

                                   BRIAN SABEAN

                         I don't expect you to understand my

                         methods. Please, give me some time

                         to talk it over with my staff.

               INT. HOTEL BAR - LATER THAT NIGHT

               Sabean picks up his cell phone and dials a few numbers before

               he's interrupted by MAGICAL COCKTAIL WAITRESS FROM THE

               FUTURE.

                                   MAGICAL COCKTAIL WAITRESS FROM THE

                                   FUTURE

                         Would you like some celery stuffed

                         with peanut butter?

                                   BRIAN SABEAN

                         Well, I'm just about to finish

                         dialing a phone number...but, sure!

                         I don't see the harm.

               Sabean takes seven pieces of celery stuffed with peanut

               butter and shoves them in his mouth. He finishes dialing.

                                   TERRY RYAN (V.O.)

                             (over phone)

                         Hello?

                                   BRIAN SABEAN

                         Mamfff ag gagble yssss.

               SUBTITLE: I'd like to go ahead with the trade.

                                   TERRY RYAN (V.O.)

                             (over phone)

                         Brian, is that you?

                                   BRIAN SABEAN

                         Mfmmm gorrfa gorrfa sffff!

               SUBTITLE: Yes, it's me. I'd like to go ahead with the trade.

                                   TERRY RYAN (V.O.)

                             (over phone)

                         Brian, dammit, I don't have time

                         for this. Are you mocking me?

                                   BRIAN SABEAN

                         Mmaffmf flllalalfp grfff. Grfff!

                         Grfffffla!

               SUBTITLE: I'd really like to do the deal, but my mouth is

               filled with peanut butter!

                                   TERRY RYAN (V.O.)

                             (over phone)

                         I see how it is. A polite "no"

                         would have sufficed. I'll peddle my

                         wares elsewhere.

               Ryan hangs up. Sabean puts his head on the table in

               frustration.

                                   MAGICAL COCKTAIL WAITRESS FROM THE

                                   FUTURE

                         Would you like some more celery

                         stuffed with peanut butter?

               Sabean lifts up his head.

                                   BRIAN SABEAN

                         Yes, please! Those things are good!

                                   GLOWING ROCK (V.O.)

                             (inside Sabean's coat

                              pocket)

                         Trade for Enos Cabell!

                                   BRIAN SABEAN

                         C'mon, Glowing Rock. He's not even

                         in the league anymore. Unless he'd

                         come back from retirement, that is!

 

If the Giants don't trade for A.J. Pierzynski, the Matt Herges-as-closer experiment doesn't last nearly as long in 2004. Joe Nathan would have stepped in to fill the closer's role. Dustin Hermanson isn't tried as a closer, and he doesn't lose three games down the stretch. Nathan saves all three games of a sweep against Dodgers in the final series of the season. The Giants win the 2004 National League West.

Kirk Rueter strikes out 13 in the final game of the NLDS. Barry Bonds gets on base 18 times out of 15 plate appearances in the series, and the Giants sweep the Cardinals. The Astros don't fare much better, as Bonds hits seven home runs off of Roger Clemens in the NLCS. Jason Schmidt picks up two wins, and the Giants roll to the World Series.

Curt Schilling catches a rare virus before his first start in San Francisco. His charisma and dexterity take a -2 hit, and his vocal chords are irreparably damaged. He never speaks again. Also, the Giants win the World Series. Fever Pitch ends with a sad Jimmy Fallon. A Boston-based scientist works extra hours to take his mind off of Boston's loss. He accidentally develops a method to turn salt water into fuel. The world enters a new era of prosperity and peace.

Tim Lincecum lasts until the 30th pick of the 2006 draft because this is my alternate reality, dammit. He forms a 2008 rotation of doom with Matt Cain and a healthy Francisco Liriano. Since the Giants traded Boof Bonser for Ryan Howard in 2004  and signed Vladmir Guerrero with the money saved on Mike Matheny and Armando Benitez, the 2008 team is a contender.

This all happens because we send someone back in time to give peanut butter to Brian Sabean. It's a foolproof plan. You have to listen to me. The first things I'll need are a DeLorean and a flux capacitor. The second is an attractive female glowing rock to serve as a distraction. The third is....

Keep track of the Spotlight Series at the BallHype hub or via the RSS feed. To get involved in future Spotlight Series, contact Tom Ziller.