I am usually, after more than three decades in Britain, an ABE supporter. That is, Anyone But England. There are exceptions to the rule: certain football matches, say, against Italy, any matches against Australia, and rugby against New Zealand or Wales. The common denominator in all those situations is that the games mean entirely too much to the other side, who are generally willing to sink to any depths of sportsmanship to win, and whose supporters adopt terminal myopia in pursuit of those wins.
So watching yesterday's rugby match in Cardiff I felt a slight sympathy for the English (and great sympathy for Martin Johnson).
For the Welsh, getting one back against the English is important, and I have great sympathy for that, but rugby is just about all they have left, just about the only way they have to do that. Thus England's rugby players have to bear the brunt of despair over centuries of wanton domination and exploitation.
When I was in college we played in the Little Three, of which Wesleyan was definitely the littlest. So we would play Amherst and Williams, and have our series wrapped up, before encountering nearby Trinity in our final game of the season. We had played our two big games, and then we would meet up with a squad, and their fans, fired up beyond belief for what was their chance to salvage their season, if not, it seemed, their lives. This, on a small scale, is what England face on a massive level when they go to Cardiff.
Having said all that, England make it hard to support them. For the better part of the three decades I've watched them, they've played plodding, brusing, straight ahead rugby--even when they had the ability or potential to be far more expansive, and so it was yesterday. Watching the ball never get beyond Andy Goode, watching it being kicked constantly back to the Welsh, who when they were willing to run with it did some damage, reminded me of Ireland's near-implosion against France the week before, for the same reasons. Possession is crucial to rugby, and although territory is as well, it seems they are still contemplating the lessons American football learned in the 1940s, when they stopped punting the ball away on third down inside their own territory. Of course reaching touch when you kick for it would also help.
But with the prissy Jonathan Kaplan referring, many of the things
I find most frustrating about rugby came to the fore. Having denied Wales a quick-restart try in the first half by turning his back, he then reduced England to 14 men for the second time in the match by penalising Goode for (it has to be said, blatantly) denying the Welsh the ball for a quick-restart after a penalty near the English goal. Two things bother me about this. First is, in a sport that is so dominated by the referee, the idea that he can blow the whistle to award a penalty, but a player can simply pick the ball up and restart, even though the situation causing the penalty (for example, offsides) may not be resolved, is bizarre in the extreme.
Second, forcing a team to play short-handed is a severe punishment, which seems to be reserved for when the referee himself feels his will is being thwarted. Twice in the match Kapland awarded the Welsh an easy three points PLUS ten minutes playing with an extra man for
technical offenses (Mike Tindall seemed to be withholding the ball from play with his face) BECAUSE he knew Johnson had admitted he wanted to slow the game down. In either case, three points was just punishment; if he really thought the Welsh would score from a quick-tap give them a penalty try and listen to the uproar then. The justification is that Kaplan had already lectured the England players: the problem is any sport which demands that referees lecture the players in mid-match needs to rethink its defination of 'free-flowing action'. People are always accusing American football of having too much stop-start, and I agree, but those same people don't seem to mind when a rugby match stops for two minutes while Jonathan Kaplan plays Mr. Chips.
In fact, if Americans prefer their referees to resemble lawyers (if not judges) the English sports demand they be schoolmasters.
But when Lee Byrne cynically took out Delon Armitage's legs while he was in midair fielding a high kick, a blatant attempt to seriously injure him, Kaplan merely blew his whistle for a free kick. The message in rugby is clear: referees are to be protected, not players.
Like most Southern Hemisphere refs, Kaplan dislikes the very idea of scrummaging, and refused to let anyone dominate, usually forcing three or four tries to get each scrum working. His idea of a straight line doesn't transfer to the northern hemisphere; he didn't bother checking on whether put ins were straight: the scrum halves appeared to be playing rugby league. Lineouts weren't much better: Kaplan penalised England for a particularly diagonal throw, but left the Welsh alone, especially in the first half.
Although Kaplan was the dominant figure in the match, he didn't hand the Welsh the victory. The English threw away their opportunities through indiscipline (not just the penalties, but the sloppy kicking) and their reluctance to run the ball. But the spectacle itself, which was involving, was never compelling, and the result left my predomiantly ABE status intact.
I'll be on BBC Radio Five's Up All Night tonight, around 0230 ayem, talking about Clint Eastwood and Gran Torino with host Dotun Adebayo...you can read my review of the film here.
Joyce Carol Oates' novel THEM where a young girl, a mathematical genius, performs her idiot-savant skills while her parents feed her sweets as encouragement. I was reminded of it last night, watching the final of University Challenge, as Gail Trimble of Corpus Christi Oxford swayed back and forth, smashing the buzzer in front of her as she rallied her team to victory. Which led me to a thought I'd had before watching the programme: why were all the questions down the stretch about literary topics, Trimble's specialty? Is University Challenge fixed?
I've watched matches where questions seemed aimed at one team's specialties before, or which capitalised on a lack of knowledge in certain areas by another team. I used to think Bamber Gascoigne would slow down when the university he preferred was in the lead, and speed up when they were behind. Paxman is notoriously fickle in which answers he will accept and which he will not.
Not that UI is infallible. When dealing with general matters I'm familar with, including sports (the Rose Bowl is not the college championship game, the Connecticut River does not empty into Long Island Sound at New Haven, etc) the programme has been wrong an amazing number of times, and their pronunciation of anything non-English is often eccentric at best. But stacking the deck to ensure one college, or indeed, one person who's attracted a huge amount of media attention, wins just would not be, uh, cricket would it. Or at least it would not have been before we found out cricket matches are fixed too.
Trimble appears to have divided the nation. She certainly divided the Observer on Sunday, who devoted a full page to her but couldn't decide if it was unusual that a woman should have brains, or that a woman as attractive as Trimble should have brains, or if a woman as unattractive as Trimble better have brains, or if she were attractive/unattractive because she did have brains/couldn't think at all just answer questions on cue. This was all in the same 'analysis'. Are smart women still that much of a problem? If a male student had dominated his team (and believe me, some did) would he have attracted any attention?
As I said, Trimble struck me as the kind of person who performs, and exudes the sort of smugness on each right answer that has characterised teachers pets and swots since school time began. It was instructive to watch her face early in the match, frozen into disbelief when she was wrong, and even moreso to catch the look she gave the poor schmuck on her far right, recruited for the science questions, when he got one wrong. Meanwhile, immediately on her right, the American girl was having a nervous breakdown with every answer.
It was theatre of the academic absurd at its finest. And, Trimble is a ringer: a PHD student, because UC, like the Boat Race or the Varsity Match, allows anyone studying at the college to participate. This never happened in America, where it was undergrads only.
Brits never believe me when I tell them that UC 
was a direct copy of the GE College Bowl, a show I used to watch when I was young and exactly the kind of know-it-all who stills shouts the answers before these kids today can get the answers wrong. By the time I got to college however, my academic reflexes had been dulled by, uh, college, and I wasnt even aware that Wesleyan fielded a UC team in 1969 until I saw them on TV. They lost by the narrowest of margins, 5 points, to Goucher College, but had been denied points for an answer that was correct, but no one told the host so. When they were brought back, against Davidson, the questions were so obviously slanted in Davidson's favour, Wesleyan was comprehensively humiliated. The college hasn't been the same since.
Gail Trimble, the Fred Housego of her generation, is unlikely to meet the same fate, though she is likely to find that an ability to recall all sorts of hoitsy toitsy facts isn't much use unless she can get into Millionaire or the US version of Jeopardy, where my college friends Steve Berman and Seth Davis have both been champs and argue incessantly over who is superior (I should note that I beat Berms at his Jeopardy board game soon after arriving in LA and being made to watch tapes of each of his appearances--I told you I could identify with Gail Trimble).
Have you ever noticed that the more funny former Sports Illustrated columnist Rick Reilly (pictured right with Joe Namath) tries to get for ESPN ('my kids read Bill Simmons') the more he starts to look like Laugh In host and Vegas comedian Dick Martin (pictured left with a showgirl).
Are they perhaps related? You bet your espy!
For the Welsh, getting one back against the English is important, and I have great sympathy for that, but rugby is just about all they have left, just about the only way they have to do that. Thus England's rugby players have to bear the brunt of despair over centuries of wanton domination and exploitation.
I find most frustrating about rugby came to the fore. Having denied Wales a quick-restart try in the first half by turning his back, he then reduced England to 14 men for the second time in the match by penalising Goode for (it has to be said, blatantly) denying the Welsh the ball for a quick-restart after a penalty near the English goal. Two things bother me about this. First is, in a sport that is so dominated by the referee, the idea that he can blow the whistle to award a penalty, but a player can simply pick the ball up and restart, even though the situation causing the penalty (for example, offsides) may not be resolved, is bizarre in the extreme.
My obituary of Glenn 'Jeep' Davis, the two-time Olympic 400m hurdles champion, winner of a third gold in the 4X400 relay in Rome, and short-time NFL receiver with the Lions, is in today's Independent, and you can find it here. Writing it reminded me of the days when the nation's top amateur athlete was indeed a star, on the cover of Sports Illustrated, and yet still could pursue a career as a high-school mechanical drawing and drivers-ed teacher and coach.
I've done another piece on baseball and steroids for the bbc's website, based on the latest revelations about Alex Rodriguez, though I didn't go into the full story of StrayRod, Cynthia, and Madonna, nor his relationship with his teammates as detailed in Joe Torre's recent memoir, as deeply as I would have liked. You can find it here. This one will run and run. It is interesting how ARod's reputation, even before the steroids, would be as a great accumulator of numbers, but a disappointment, if not liability in the clutch. I wonder if Madonna thought the same thing. For my earlier take on the adventures of the Rod family, see here.
had to be cancelled, due to a dispute with the game's site, a Florida, uh, nudist colony.
According to Caliente spokes-nudist and former nude model Angye (yes, with a 'y') Fox (pictured left, and known to her friends as, of course, 'Foxy') 'we ran into conflicts with the Lingerie Football League wanting more areas of our resort restricted to clothing- required than we could accommodate.'
