...AND OVER HERE

MC GUESTING ON BBC WORLD SERVICE TONIGHT

2009-08-14T18:45:00.000+01:00

I'll be a guest on the World Service's News Hour tonight, discussing Michael Vick's return to the NFL with the Philadelphia Eagles following his serving two years in prison for running a dog-fighting ring....

JOHN TOLOS: MY INDEPENDENT OBITUARY

2009-07-01T07:08:00.001+01:00

At the risk of being thought when Freddie Blassie would have called a 'pencil-neck geek', let me mention that my obituary of John Tolos, 'The Golden Greek' is in today's Independent. It provides a sequel to the one of Blassie I did for the Indy six years ago; you can find that one here. That's Tolos in the photo on the right, working over Classy Freddie in a cage.

As I said in the obit, their Monsel powder angle was one of the most copied in wrestling; wrestlers were soon being blinded in dozens of innovative ways, most famously when Michael 'BS' Hayes of the Fabulous Freebirds threw 'Freebird cream' into the eyes of the Junkyard Dog. This set up a 'dog-collar' match, wrestlers chained together so JYD could wrestle without his sight, before 30,000 fans in New Orleans' Superdome. There was also an infamous angle in Texas' World Class promotion; Gino Hernandez blinded the British-born 'Gentleman' Chris Adams, but died of a cocaine overdose before they could have the revenge match. They opened their next TV show saying 'this week we've have two terrible tragedies, Chris Adams is blind and Gino Hernandez is dead.'

This seems to be quite a week for nostalgia; I recall Blassie, Tolos, Argentina Apollo, Irish Don McClarity, Gorilla Monsoon and the rest wrestling on TV in the golden age when I was, oh, 11 through about 14. It was the WWWF, and I remember for some reason the ring announcer often welcoming us to 'the Capitol Arena in the nation's wrestling capital, Washington DC', which always made me feel Washington was good for something.

MY DOC BLANCHARD OBIT IN THE INDEPENDENT AND AT IRRESISTIBLE TARGETS

2009-05-01T09:43:00.004+01:00

My obit of Doc Blanchard is in today's Independent: you can link to it and read about what wasn't included in the printed version at my Irresistible Targets site, here. Although I'd conceived of two separate yet equal blogs when I'd started, I've now decided to devote most of my energy to IT, so this site is probably going to lie dormant for a while. If you haven't been looking regularly at IT, please do.....

MIKE ON RADIO FIVE: HOLD THE MAYO, EXTRA MURRAY

2009-04-07T18:46:00.004+01:00

I'll be appearing on Radio Five's Simon Mayo programme tomorrow (Wed, 8 April) at about 3:15pm to talk about American sports in this country. Colin Murray will be sitting in for Simon, so expect some of the fun and games of the old Channel Five NFL all-nighters (though not much!). The BBC website should feature the show for a week after broadcast...

NYUK NYUK NYUK

2009-03-26T19:32:00.004Z

I've written briefly, because words fail me, about the impending remake of the Three Stooges, over at Irresistible Targets. The picture to the right, minus the fringe, is actually the same one that's the screen saver on my computer.

WALES VS IRELAND, ALMOST WINNER TAKE ALL

2009-03-21T08:11:00.003Z

Today Ireland play at Wales, and if they win they will be crowded Six Nations champions with an undefeated Grand Slam season. If they lose, they will find themselves in a tie with Wales, and, in a perfect world, the Welsh would win the title on the strength of the head-to-head victory (not quite perfect, of course, since the home field advantage is so huge in rugby, especially in Cardiff, you know Welsh choirs and all that).

But in international rugby, to the winner the spoils do not necessarily go. The Welsh will have to beat Ireland by 13 points or more, because in the case of ties, the winner is determined by 'points difference' in all five matches. So in reality the Six Nations will be decided by who was able to run up the score against Italy by the most points.

Remember 2001? Due to hoof and mouth in Ireland (among the cows, not the rugby players), the Irish finished their campaign in the fall, and in their final match faced English, who had juggernauted through the other four nations in the spring. An Irish win in Dublin would have left the teams level with 4-1 records, but Ireland had beaten Italy 41-22 away, while the English had enjoyed embarrassing Italy 80-23 at Twickers. They'd beaten Scotland by almost as much, and with a 143 point differential were forcing Ireland to beat them by more than they'd beaten Italy in order to be champions. In the end, Irealdn duly won, 20-14, but there was no suspense in the match, as there would have been had anything been as stake.

The Six Nations is often decided on PD: France over Ireland in both 2006 and 2007, although luckily they beat the Irish head to head both years. Or I should say fortunately they'd amassed a better point differential. Wouldn't be better if titles were decided on the field, and not by some guy in a blazer working a pocket calculator?

PARENTHOOD: TRAVIS ON THE BACK NINE, BRISTOL PLAYING SINGLES

2009-03-12T07:31:00.008Z

The sad tale of Travis Henry, who since high school has fathered nine children by nine different women, and despite getting $6.5 million from his last NFL contract is effectively bankrupt, is in today's NYTimes, here. Henry says each relationship was 'cool' until the babies came and then the women 'came after' him. He also says he never had more than three cars at once, and spent only $250,000 on jewellery, which passes for austerity in today's NFL. In fairness, however, unlike certain other running backs, he has never tried to dodge the financial repsonsibility; he just can't meet the bills. He and his fiancee are postponing wedding plans until this can be sorted out, and neither, according to the Times, wants children. Shouldn't that be MORE children?

Meanwhile, there's a different approach to the news that Bristol Palin and Levi Johnston's 'engagement' is off, apparently after Bristol refused to let Levi take their daughter to his family's house, calling them 'white trash'. Levi's mother, remember, was busted, though not until after the election, for selling oxycontin, aka hillbilly heroin. No wonder Rush Limbaugh loved them so much. In reality, young Levi (pictured right with Bristol and their marriage counselor) always looked like he wanted to be there about as much as Travis Henry might have. Now, according to the Palins' press release, Bristol is 'devastated'. But according to Levi's sister, Mercede (where in Alaska do they get these names?) it's a different story. As Tom Paxton sang: How do I know? I read it in the Daily News! Here.

AND HERE'S TO YOU MRS. MYERSON: Julie Battles Light Literary Incontinence

2009-03-10T14:15:00.003Z

My modest observations on the British media 'controversy' over Julie Myerson's using her son's drug problems, and her banishing him from the family home, as a device in her new book, have been posted over at Irresistible Targets, here.

GOING COAST TO COAST AGAIN...

2009-03-06T13:06:00.004Z

The first installment of 2009's Coast To Coast column is up now at nfluk.com, you can find it here. Each Friday I'll be looking at one or two NFL teams, assessing their needs pre-draft, and their prospects after it. I started with Detroit, an easy target coming off their 0-16 bizarro-perfect season, with an even easier target in ex-coach Rod Marinelli. There are a couple of typos in the finished product, and a riff on their signing Drew Henson (ex Berlin Thunder) just to confuse me has disappeared, and you were spared my favourite picture of my favourite space-eater, Grady Jackson, so I'll share it with you here. You may recall the NFL tried to ban Grady last season for using a diruetic, presumably to mask his steroid use. As it happened, the banned drug was included, but not listed in the contents, of an over-the-counter diruetic, which the NFL knew, but didn't tell anyone. Grady's lawyer, very smartly, filed suit against the maker of the supplement, a suit the NFL doesn't want to be in the middle of. When you stop giggling, consider why Grady would be using a diruetic in the first place? It's not like he had to make weight. Maybe he gets a bonus if he's under 365? Anyway, unless the NFL starts testing for BBQ, Grady should be OK for the 2009 season.

UNIVERSITY CHALLENGE REDUX: WHICH TEAM WON?

2009-03-02T07:36:00.005Z

So it turns out there really was a ringer in the Corpus Christi team, but it wasn't 26 year old PhD student Gail Trimble, it was the science wonk Sam Kay, the recipent of Trimble's most dismissive stare when he got one wrong, is actually not enrolled at Oxford at all, but working for Price Waterhouse Coopers, where presumably he is already learning how to cook the books and stretch the rules as an accountant.

Kay was a student when CCO's first two matches were taped, then graduated and took his job. So each time in the remaining shows, when he said he was 'reading' or 'studying' he must have meant he was doing that on his own time at home.

Reports in the Sunday papers indicated that the UC rules were clear, that contestants had to be students for the full-run of the programme, but Kay was quoted as saying that since he had been a student when he started he didn't think he'd done anything wrong. It is a little odd that no one at Oxford noticed he wasn't around town, though, isn't it.

Reminds me of Boris Rankov, who was still rowing for Dan Topolski's Oxford crews even though he was palpably a teacher, not a student.

Although reports on Sunday all screeched that the Manchester University were demanding a rematch, in reality, they conceded gracefully, if not educatedly. Manchester captain Matthew Yeo said he and his teammates were 'firmly of the opinion that the best team won'.

That's BETTER team, Matthew. There were only two of you. Maybe it's time to go back to college, if you're not really there.

UP ALL NIGHT WITH THE GRAN TORINO

2009-02-28T13:30:00.005Z

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.

Update: You can link to the programme last night here. The film segment begins about 1:35 into the show (that's one hour 35 minutes) and runs until the 3 hour mark. That was 0230 ayem until 0400 this morning! Enjoy...

UNIVERSITY CHALLENGE FIXED? YOUR STARTER FOR AN EASY TEN...

2009-02-24T19:13:00.007Z

There is a scene in 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 prgramme has been wrong an amazing number of times, and their pronounciation 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).

SEPARATED AT BIRTH BY THE FICKLE FINGER OF FATE

2009-02-24T16:07:00.006Z

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!

MC--LOCAL HERO?

2009-02-16T14:18:00.004Z

Football Outsiders has posted their annual poll results, and for the third year in a row I've been one of the contenders in the category of 'local NFL writer who deserves a national profile', based on my work for nfluk.com. Without disputing the definitions of 'local' and 'national'--since in football terms, Britain is decidedly local--it's great to appear in the company of writers like Mike Reiss, last year's winner, whose work is always admirable, and to know that some of the stuff I write is being read and appreciated. Thus the internet makes neighbours of us all. Football Outsiders is an excellent website (well, I would say that, wouldn't I?) whether or not you find their statistical analysis compelling. And apparently there was some ballot-stuffing from Seattle; though not from the UK!
Perhaps that had something to do with it being a good day for Carlsons: Seattle's rookie tight end John 'no relation' Carlson was voted the NFL's most underrated offensive player.

THE FRUSTRATIONS OF RUGBY: WALES BEATS ENGLAND

2009-02-15T09:01:00.007Z

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.

IN MEMORIAM: GLENN 'JEEP' DAVIS

2009-02-09T18:34:00.005Z

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.

SAY IT AINT SO, AROID

2009-02-09T07:42:00.008Z

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.

The most interesting part of the story, however, was the allegation that ARod may have been warned about a 'random' test in September 2004 by an official of the players association. Although none of the sources are named, if true, it would put the long-term opposition of the union to testing of its members into a whole new light. Not that they would have been the only ones in baseball turning a blind eye. As I wrote on the same website when the Mitchell report was released, here, even when I worked for baseball, in the early 90s, it was pretty easy to see that there were guys on the juice.

NO NUDES IS GOOD NUDES: FAREWELL, LINGERIE BOWL

2009-02-08T14:19:00.009Z

The funniest, I mean saddest, news of Super Bowl week in Tampa was the shocker that Lingerie Bowl VI had to be cancelled, due to a dispute with the game's site, a Florida, uh, nudist colony.
If I were Peter King I would definitely write 'only in America', except I'm not sure the XL SI pundit ever used the phrase ironically.

The game was supposed to take place at the Caliente nudiest resort in Land O Lakes, Florida...no relation to the sticks of Land O Lakes butter we grew up with, and which Marlon Brando could probably have thought of at least some uses for.

I say 'nudist resort', but being this is America, where stewardesses are flight attendants and the blind are sight impared, Caliente is actually billed as a 'luxury clothing-optional resort'. Even so, what was the problem? 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.'

RESTRICTED TO CLOTHING-REQUIRED? What is this, the NFL? Yes folks, only in America could an event which parades women in little clothing (apart from football pads) playing a violent game for the benefit of ogling viewers of all sexes, be offended by a little nudity.

Here's Lingerie Football League spokesman Stephon McMillen 'The league will not place our fans, players, staff nor partners in a less-than-comfortable environment that would ultimately jeopardize the mainstream perception and reputation of the brand that so many have worked diligently over these past five years to build.'

Let me stop laughing. Does anyone in the mainstream actually perceive of the LFL (pronounced 'laffle') as anything but a soft-core sleazy exploitation device? And its reputation? McMillen sounds suspiciously like a maiden aunt, or a Catholic schoolgirl on a first date. What will the boys at high school think?

Somehow, the Super Bowl managed to survive without LB VI. Hopefully, people are already flocking to Caliente Luxury Clothing-Optional resort. Few of them would be the loyal followers of the LFF. They just switched over to Bud Bowl at half-time, and sent out for another pizza. Angye must be disppointed.

COCKUP: HOW TO RATE KICKERS

2009-02-08T14:07:00.005Z

A few years ago, I was looking for an efficient way of measuring place-kickers, and came up with a formula. Last year, when I wrote a piece evaluating the 2008 NFL kicking season, I named it: Carlson's Original Calibration for Kickers, Un-scientific Program, or COCKUP. Then I refined it, by measuring Cockup per kicking attempt, which became COCKUPPA. Unscientific as it is, it actually works pretty well, and basically threw up Jason Hanson as the NFL's most valuable kicker last year, with Rob Bironas the best in the AFC. Hanson actually registered by far the highest Cockuppa score of anyone since I started this. Of course you have to tweak it, and consider ability on kickoffs, as well as the dreaded 'clutch' situations, but I'm pretty satisfied with it. You can find the CHFF piece here.

SITTING IN MY MEDIA CENTER: NEW HOPE FOR AMERICA

2009-01-31T22:21:00.002Z

My distinct thanks to Raheem, a security guard at the Tampa Convention Center, which is the Super Bowl media center. When Raheem saw from my credential that I was 'from' the BBC he got all excited, saying 'I get all my news from the BBC!'. We talked for a while and he reminded me, in the mood delineated in my previous post, that there is still some fertile fields in which the seeds of hope can be sown in my native land. Fitzgerald may have said there are no second acts in American lives, but he was wrong about that (Gatsby notwithstanding) and there have been lots of them for America itself.

SITTING IN MY HOTEL: TV TACKLES REGIME CHANGE

2009-01-31T13:07:00.014Z

There are two Americas out there: the one that's out there, and the one that's out there on TV, and what is frightening is the sense that, little by little, the latter is taking over the consciousness of the former, especially the former of the younger persuasion (though I am prepared to admit that there is an element of the old fogey about that perception). If I were still prepared to think of the Ed Murrow speech about TV's power to educate, if I wanted to come home this week and get overcome with a sense of at least symbolic hope, fuelled by the image of regime change in Washington, well, in the nightmare world of TV news, nothing has changed.

Because it's when you're watching the news that it becomes most scary, and of course the news is what you watch first when you're in a hotel room. I use the word scary, because it is fuelled by fear; is it really as simple as wanting to keep everyone indoors watching their channel? Local news is the final resting place of hairspray, reporters and 'anchors' with the depth of cutouts reading stuff written by people who frame every story as if it were eviction night on Big Brother.

Then you go to the 'serious' news outlets, and it gets even worse. The decrepitude of the Bush regime, and the attendant success of Jon Stewart on Comedy Central persuaded MSNBC there was a little mileage in a leftish funnyman of their own, former sportscaster Keith Olberman (who proves once again that it's much easier for sports guys to move into 'serious' broadcasting than 'serious' broadcasters to move the other way), but their designated 'left' show, hosted by Rachel Maddow, reminds me of a school of minnows inviting sharks to come over for a fish fry. A sense of fairness and balance is a bad thing to have when you're competing with Fox News.

Amazingly, it seems every time I flick past that channel, the pale balloon of Karl Rove's face, evil Piglet to Bush's evil Pooh, pops up, answering puffball questions from yet another smugly screaming Irish-American. They're oblivious to the eight years of destruction they've left behind around the world, and listening to a steady stream of calls for more deregulation simply boggles the mind. In the 1930s, the failure of laissez faire left its proponents relatively impotent to stop FDR's implanting the New Deal, though their media, papers and radio, certainly tried. But imagine that magnified to the nth degree: a steady stream of political KY being spread over an electorate bending over willingly to find the remote control and turn up the volume.

I mentioned Murrow above, because the movie Good Night And Good Luck was on BBC last week, and watching Bill O'Reilly groping for his pitchfork and Sean Hannity inflating like a blow-fish (fugu you, liberals!) I remembered the thought I'd had when we saw the film for the first time, in Sydney in 2005, It struck me, watching David Straithairn's Ed Murrow battle both Joe McCarthy and William Paley's CBS,that fifty years later, in the space of my lifetime, McCarthy has not just triumphed over Murrow, he has replaced him. We Tailgunner Joe alive today, he would never be elected to the Senate from Wisconsin; he'd be broadcasting on Fox News, scheduled between O'Reilly and Hannity, interviewing Karl Rove, being taken seriously by the Beltway mob, and being parodied on Comedy Central for us cognoscenti to laugh about. In my childhood, such figures existed: I remember watching Joe Pyne or Alan Burke, but they were relegated to the lunatic fringes of entertainment, like pro wrestling, horror movies, and roller derby, that 13 year olds of all ages loved. Now Rupert Murdoch pays them millions, and makes millions more off their fear-mongering and hate peddling. Money talks, and in this case, bullshit walks, right along side, talking even louder.

WHY I MISSED RICHARD WIDMARK AT THE INAUGURATION

2009-01-22T09:55:00.013Z

Those touching scenes of Dick Cheney being wheeled out for the inauguration, trying to look sympathetic (see left) reminded me a bit of Limas Sweed of the Steelers faking an injury Sunday after he dropped a sure touchdown pass that was right in his hands. I mean, moving boxes out of your office puts you in a wheelchair? All he needed was a neck brace and a personal-injury lawyer, and he could've been Zero Mostel in The Hot Rock. What was in those boxes anyway, waterboards and car batteries? What's left of the federal reserve? Seriously, though, my first sympathetic thought upon seeing the now-disabled soon-to-be former Veep was, where's Tommy Udo when you really need him?

QUOTH THE RAVENS 'NEVERMORE': The Legendary Five NFL Highlights Poem Revived For Poe's Bicentennial

2009-01-20T00:18:00.009Z

Monday January 19th was the 200th anniversary of the birth of Edgar Allan Poe, which was probably a lucky break for the Pittsburgh Steelers, who on Sunday defeated the only football team named after a Poe Poem, the Baltimore Ravens, 23-14 to advance to the Super Bowl against another bird-mascotted club, the Arizona Cardinals.

But with the score 15-14 and the Ravens threatening a comeback, I kept looking at my watch and doing the five-hour math, to see if perhaps we were edging toward midnight, at which point the powerful Poe juju might kick in. Note that only in the NFL would the game played in the northeast in January start at 7:30pm local, while the one played under cover in Arizona started at noon.

Anyway, Troy Polamalu, who could've probably found a part in a Poe story (if not a Melville South Seas novel) had he lived 200 years ago, put an end to the Ravens' dreams. But all through the season, I had been commenting about how Baltimore, and their rookie quarterback Joe Flacco, reminded me of the 2000 Ravens, who won Super Bowl 35 in January 2001 over the New York (sic) Giants, using their 'Angie Harmon' strategy (strip Jason Sehorn naked with Brandon Stokeley's fly patterns).

That Ravens team, like this one, had qualified for the playoffs as a wild card, and had endured a streak of five games earlier in the season without scoring a touchdown on offense (they won two of the five).

The fifth game of the streak came against the Steelers that year, as Trent Dilfer took over from Tony Banks as the quarterback, but Pittsburgh managed a 9-6 win. I was scripting the highlights for our Monday Night show on Five, and watching Matt Stover (who's still kicking for them) hit his second field goal, 'nevermore' sprang to mind, and I decided that instead of narrating the highlights I would adapt Poe's poem and make it fit whatever length the edit was in the ten minutes or so I had to write it.

Courtesy of a reprint which appears in the Facebook Mike Carlson Appreciation Society site, here's the script again. Happy birthday EAP, and it's a shame we couldn't do anything with the Ravens' Edgar Jones (he of the bogus roughing the kicker penalty) this year....

Pittsburgh 9 Baltimore 6

Once upon a midnight dreary
As I pondered, weak and weary,
Over many a quaint and curious highlight from the day before.

As I nodded, nearly napping,
Suddenly there came a tapping.
Jamal Lewis gently rapping, rapping at the endzone door.

Just a field goal, I muttered.
Only that and nothing more.

Oh how vaguely I remember
It was way back in September
When the stadium scoreboard last put up six points in Baltimore.

And for weeks over and over,
Just the toe of Matthew Stover
Was the story of the offense that, it seemed, would never score.

Quoth the Ravens
‘Nevermore’.

So they called upon Trent Dilfer
But his throws were promptly pilfered
By a Pittsburgh Steeler defense, steel curtained as of yore.

And with Dilfer firing blanks
Just as bad as Tony Banks
They put six points on the scoreboard,
but the Steelers scored three more.

You may question. You may carp.
Get hot quotes from Shannon Sharpe.
But a touchdown’s worth of offense is no closer than before.

And if you wish to know the day
When you’ll hear on the P.A.
That magic incantation “Touchdown Baltimore!”Quoth the Ravens
‘Nevermore’.

DAVID VINE AND THE SKI SUNDAY SECRET

2009-01-13T21:41:00.003Z

I was saddened by the death of David Vine, who was the longtime host of snooker, popping up when I desperately was looking for something to watch late at night. But I remember him best as the presenter of BBC's Ski Sunday. I used to watch them put the show together at some of the events I would do for ABC Sports in the 1980s, and I always got a kick out of seeing the finished product when I was back home in London.

That was because of David's knowing commentary, always added after the programme had been edited together. Remember, this was in the days before continuous splits on screen, but David would always be able to 'sense' that someone was having a 'fast' run: and that person would inevitably wind up one hundredth of a second faster than the fastest down the hill thus far.

The top skiers always go down the hill first, usually the first 15. So you knew that, if the BBC were showing someone who started 26th, or 39th, or 55th, there was a reason. Sort of like when I do the football highlights, and we show a kickoff, you know there's either a great return or a turnover. Except those are acknowledged as highlights.

If, when the coverage jumped from skier 15 to skier 26, and David said 'so and so hasn't had a great season thus far, but I have the feeling he's got a fast race in him today' you knew he would fly down the slope and wind up in (or near) the top three. Then when it jumped from number 26 to number 55, and David said, 'he's had a lot of trouble with this hill in practice' you called in the family to watch the inevitable crash.

Those were the glory days of TV sport, when mainstream channels chased the best events in all kinds of sports, all over the world, rather than throwing all their money at the biggest domestic ones, and relegating the rest to niche channels and occasional Olympics. There were great broadcasters with the knack for translating these sports to general audiences, and David was one of them. Even if the delay to Sundays gave him some help! He'll be missed.

LIFE WITHOUT PAROLE: HOLIDAY FUN FROM THE UK IN ENGLAND

2009-01-11T15:04:00.003Z

One thing I forgot to do over Christmas was add another incident to my catalogue of what makes living in Britain so great. In the run-up to the holiday, of course, the queues at the Post Office grow to mosntrous sizes, which makes them even more attractive to the English to join in, just for the fun of it. I can't believe that everyone in the queue ahead me is someone who has never posted a letter before, but sometimes it seems that way. For example, this year I got into a 14 person queue, with two clerks at their windows. About 15 minutes later I was first in the queue, with a woman filling out a form, and needing help line by line, at one window, and a gentleman with a bag of Christmas cards at the other.

He pulled one small stack from his bag, took the top one off, and said 'France, please'. The stamp came, he stuck it on, took the next card: 'South Africa, please'. Then 'Australia', 'Holland', ooh another 'France', 'Ireland'...to which the clerk asked 'northern or southern Ireland...'ooh another France' and so on. At no point did it occur to the clerk, much less to him, to actually sort the cards and ask for the necessary stamps all at once. The idea that France and Holland might require the same postage might have blown either of their minds.

It's like it the old days before all the bar staff was foreign, when you were waiting at the crowded bar in a pub, or even worse, during the interval at the theatre. The person ahead of you asks for 'two pints of lager'. The English barman or maid returns with the two pints, asks, will there be anything else, and the person says,'a pint of bitter'. The process repeats, with the person asking for six more drinks, one by one before ending with a large vodka and orange juice with ice and lemon please'. The English barman would come back with the screwdriver, then say, 'anything else' go fetch the crisps, peanuts or whatever, and then try desperately to reconstitute the order in his/her head to ask for money. Finally, after waiting through all this, and somehow maintaining your status as next-to-be-served in the face of haughty elbows and waving twenty-pound notes, bar person approaches you.

Thinking you are being kinder to them, as well as saving time, you say 'two pints of bitter, a pint of lager, half a shandy, a large whiskey, and a pint of Guiness please'. The bar person draws the two pints of bitter, comes back, puts them down and says, 'what was the rest?' You repeat the order, he/she comes back with the shandy and says 'was that a bitter or a lager?' The lager arrives, then 'was there anything else?' And only after fetching the whiskey, which has to be poured through a British automatic measuring system, twice, to ensure no one gets a drop more than the legal minimum, does he/she start the Guiness, which of course takes three times as long as anything else to pour.

Now at this point there are two paths we can take, depending on how English the server actually is. The purist will simply hover lovingly over the Guiness, not serving any of the other people frantically trying to get attention (not to mention drinks), nor taking your payment, but just gazing admiringly at the slowness with which the dark liquid eases its way into the glass. But the slightly more active, or more xenophobic, Englisher will see this as an opportunity to leave you, and the Guiness, hanging, while serving other people. Eventually,having stopped the tap to let the Guiness settle, coming back to top it off, then going away again before delivering it, and taking your money, then finishing off the next customer before returning with your change.

You could try saying 'I'm in a hurry, I've got Christmas cards to post' but it wouldn't have done any good.

MIKE CARLSON AS POP IDOL? THE POPMATTERS INTERVIEW

2008-12-16T20:01:00.005Z

I've been interviewed by Robert Collins for his column in the online magazine PopMatters. Makes me a kind of Pop-tart. The full interview is here, though note the Super Bowl in question at the end was in Phoenix, not New Orleans!

LET US NOW PRAISE INFAMOUS MEN?

2008-12-14T16:43:00.012Z

When you look up 'fatuous' in a dictionary, there ought to be a picture of Alexander Chancellor somewhere close. If there isn't you could always cut and paste the one on the right. In the column which the Guardian inexplicably (from a reader's point of view) grants him every week--perhaps they felt obliged to soften the blow after he accomplished the rare feat of being a Brit fired by Tina Brown from the New Yorker--Chancellor chose the moment of Sunny von Bulow's death--after 28 years in a coma--to commiserate over the trauma she caused her husband, Claus von Bulow, when he was convicted of her murder, a conviction later overturned on appeal.

'So let us proclaim his innocence,' bleated Chancellor. His logic was somewhat short of Cartesian. Von Bulow's eventual acquital was won by Alan Dershowitz, due primarily to his getting the main piece of evidence against von Bulow excluded on a legal technicality. Dershowitz was one of the team of lawyers dedicated to doing the same, successfully, for OJ Simpson. But according to Chancellor, Dershowitz said recently 'I have been in touch with Claus repeatedly. I have not been in touch with OJ Simpson since his trial.'

'This tells us something,' burps Chancellor. Maybe it tells HIM something, but it doesn't tell me anything except Harvard law professors may find it more comfortable to hang out with socialites than ex-jocks. Dershowitz has called for 'torture warrents' to become part of American law, and also for Israel to begin retaliatory razing to the ground of Palestinian towns. I don't think I'd judge either policy on whether or not he keeps in touch with Dick Cheyney or Benjamin Netanyahu.

According to a famous (but anonymous) quote in Domenick Dunne's profile of Von Bulow for Vanity Fair, he 'does not dwell in the Palace of Truth'. This is in his very essence, as he is hardly more von Bulow than Chancellor. Born Claus Cecil Borberg, he took his mother's family name, Bulow, because his father was convicted of collaborating with the Nazis, and in Denmark Bulow was a respected name, then he added the von because in England it would seem posher to those to whom such things matter.

I met him once, and came to my own conclusion rather quickly about the likelihood of his innocence. But that's irrelevant to the obscenity of using a long-overdue tragic death as an excuse for bigging up your friend. He may well be innocent, but that's not the time to be 'proclaiming' anything, except Chancellor's fatuous bad taste, and the Guardian ought to be ashamed for running it.

FORREST ACKERMAN IS DEAD: BUT ONLY 4E NOW!

2008-12-08T11:42:00.008Z

My obit of Forrest J Ackerman is in today's Guardian, you can find it here. Oddly enough, I was never a reader of Famous Monsters: as a kid I was too sophisticated for that stuff, and by the time my tastes started their precipitate decline, I was already beyond Forry's demographic. But's it's hard not to appreciate him...That's him, on the right in the picture, in 2001 with the B actress Denise Duff, cashing in on all that hard work promoting horror....or maybe she's trying to convert him to scientology, but as Forry was at one point L Ron Hubbard's agent for his sf writing, he's probably too smart to fall for that!

ACHING WHERE I USED TO PLAY: LEONARD COHEN AT THE ALBERT HALL

2008-11-19T17:22:00.013Z

When Leonard Cohen's band took the stage at the Albert Hall last night, I thought I'd wandered into a production of the Three Penny Opera, like one I saw in Montreal some thirty years ago. Then Leonard himself entered, in his current-trademark hat, which he took off for the crowd with a look of surprise, like a 74 year old grandfather who's walked into his surprise birthday party at a restaurant on Blvd. St. Laurent, 'oh, are all these people here to see me?' Of course, they were, and it was the kind of crowd of long-time fans, the bed-sit warriors grown old and obviously successful enough to afford the tickets, that was going to love whatever Leonard gave them, but as an admirer more of Cohen the writer than the performer, I have to say, he gave them far more than they asked him.

As the evening went on, he would occasionally smile wryly; as if he still marvelled at the way his career path as a struggling Montreal poet and novelist got turned around when he picked up a guitar to impress the girls who weren't impressed by his poetry: one gets the sense that he's never totally left that Canadian poet behind. So when he sings on his knees, which is probably some yoga things that gives him more energy or more wind, you get the sense of a singer who's somehow penitent, and that helps you enjoy his success even more. Even if he hadn't skipped off stage at the end of each set, and each encore, he played with enjoyment, his band was tight behind him, and if every gesture was obviously well-rehearsed, it didn't make them any less sincere, or appreciated. My wife, entranced by his songs since hearing 'That's No Way To Say Goodbye' in New Zealand as an eight year old, raised on Leonard, as it were, hung on every note, and in a way, I should not have been surprised that I found the show so good, because a bootleg cd I have of a 1993 live show is one of my favourite boots of all time.

Some of the band has been with him a while; bassist and leader Roscoe Becke co-produced Jennifer Warnes' 'Famous Blue Raincoat', which you might say launched the Cohen revival. Guitarist Bob Metzger was on that 1993 bootleg. But the real star of the show was Javiar Mas, playing laud (the Spanish oud, or Cuban loud) and 12 string guitar, and adding a dramatic touch to the sounds that echoed Mexican and Greek music, as well as Spanish. He was also wearing a fedora, and it made him look like second runner-up in a Tom Waits lookalike contest. But it was only when Mas was playing that you got the sense you might be hearing something that wasn't note perfect like every other performance on the tour. And one of the keys to Cohen's late-career rebirth has been Sharon Robinson, his backup singer and co-writer; like Lou Reed calling for the 'colored girls' to sing, she adds life to Cohen's vocals, and did a solo of 'Boogie Street' that was powerful. Joining her on backup voals were the British Webb Sisters, whose more folky voices provided a nice mix. Their encore duet of 'If It Be Your Will' , playing harp and guitar, was somewhere in that alt.country/new folk range. The mix worked well, even if the synchronised gymnastics were underwhelming.

I came to Cohen first via Judy Collins' fabulous 'In My Life', which I heard at 17, played to me by a Smith College date who was trying to seduce me, which shouldn't've been that hard. Maybe I got distracted by the songs. To that point, my tastes were mostly Motown, Stax, Blues Project, Butterfield, Byrds, Beau Brummels, Kinks. While I liked Cohen's songs, I was generally satisfied with other interpreters: I was, however, floored by the novel Beautiful Losers, and by some of his poetry too. In fact, I pretty much ignored his records from the early 70s through my Montreal years, until, like so many other people, 'I'm Your Man' reminded me of what a good song-writer he could be, and what happened when he finally found a style that suited his words as songs. That style isn't really the electric beat, it's more of a torch-song approach, much closer to Serge Gainsbourg than Bob Dylan.

But maybe it's a generational thing that I responded more than Kirsten to 'Chelsea Hotel', which now seems less clever and more touching to me, although I might be indulging in nostalgia for Janis Joplin and that way of life. Certainly I love the way 'That's No Way' moves both me (Judy Collins version or his own) and my wife equally, despite our coming to it from such different places. On the other hand, my all-time favourite is 'Dress Rehearsal Rag', which is even too depressing for Cohen to perform, or at least it has been for the past few decades, so maybe I'm more of a bedsit romantic than I'll admit. Of course, Judy Collins is the only singer who can make a song about a wrist-slicing junkie sound beautiful, but I love Cohen's own version too. Last night, even though I realised I really did admire many of Kirsten's favourite songs, and had a few of my own I hadn't realised I liked so much, for me the highlight of the evening was Cohen's reciting the poem 'For Those Who Greeted Me', from which his song 'A Thousand Kisses Deep' is adapted, especially the verse he used as a refrain:

I loved you when you opened
Like a lily to the heat.
I´m just another snowman
Standing in the rain and sleet,
Who loved you with his frozen love
His second-hand physique -
With all he is, and all he was
A thousand kisses deep.

There were a couple of moments when it could have gone all nostalgic; after all, half the crowd was there figuring they will never get another chance to see Leonard in concert. I've followed that logic with Elliott Carter's 80th and 90th birthday concerts, and I'm figuring on attending his 100th too. This was not a Frank Sinatra 'farewell' tour, with ol blue eyes going through the motions and providing mere hints of the songs his adoring fans remembered. Leonard Cohen went through the catalogue, re-interpreted some, revisited others. He stuck the songs that might have been construed as goodbyes, or looking back, in the beginning of his sets, and he ended on a bang, with a final encore of 'Democracy Is Coming To The USA' which took on a certain resonance given the last election, and which was greeted with a roar. Listening to 'the rich have got their channels in the bedrooms of the poor' earlier in the night, I wondered if we shouldn't see Leonard more politically. On the other hand, you know you're getting old when you find yourself nodding along to 'I ache in the places that I used to play' .

People forget that Cohen there was never a 'young' Leonard Cohen the singer; he'd already has his young career as a precocious writer. He tends to get associated with the Beats, and for good reason: watching last night's concert could provide an illustration of the kind of 'beatific' that Kerouac or Ginsberg had in mind. 'Beautiful Losers' could be the archetypical Beat title; my memory says the novel has a little bit of that feeling, some magic realism (very early on; Canadians were as good as Latin Americans at that) and some classic North American fictional tropes. But before that second, and last, novel, the young Cohen was at first a rather formal poet, working in rhyme and meter, before his poetry merged into his songs. The later freer verse is good, but the early songs benefit from that formalist poetic. And I was reminded of all this last night.

It was one of the best concerts I've been to in ages, and it reminds me of just how good a song-writer Leonard Cohen is. That he became such a good performer too is simply a bonus. But the feeling I left the Albert Hall was one that somehow joined my younger self to my older one, if I can be allowed to show just how soppy Cohen can make me. Or anyone.

INTERNATIONAL RUGBY BOARD TO CANADA: DROP DEAD!

2008-11-15T07:37:00.007Z

In the summer of 2007, I wrote, but couldn't sell, an article on the hypocricy of the International Rugby Board, whose 'world' (sic) cup forced minor countries (like the US or Japan) to play two matches in four days, then wait two and a half weeks to play another two matches in four days, while the bigger countries played a comfortable game each weekend. Then when they did play they were greeted with refereeing that interpreted the laws with far more leeway for the big nations, and much more strictly for the minnows. The inevitable result: lopsided matches that produced the sickening 'well-played' from the winners and our English commentators....

Last night Wales beat Canada by a 'disappointing' 34-13 before 55,000 fans at the Millennium Stadium (Australia was equally disappointed to beat Italy 30-20). But according to yesterday's Guardian, the Canadians had asked the Welsh for a small cut (50p per ticket) of the gate, which would have amounted to some £27,500, to help fund Canadian rugby, which, with a small playing group stretched over a huge country, has immense problems trying to put together elite and national teams. The Welsh, of course, said no, although (or perhaps because) they have to fork up £500,000 to get the All-Blacks to play them. That may seem a lot, but they will gross some £17 million from their four autumn internationals.

What makes it worse, is that Wales is touring Canada next summer, with the Canadians picking up all their expenses within the country. But the Welsh still have to get there, so they applied to the IRB for a grant from a contingency fund supposedly intended for 'developing' rugby nations, and got £70,000 to pay for their airfares. I suppose the argument was that paying for them to go to Canada would somehow help the Canadians more than giving the Canadians money.

Given that the rugby 'world' is rather pathetically limited to about eight first-class 'countries' (England, Scotland, and Wales count as three nations), which includes poorly-funded Argentina, whose game is amateur, and Australia, where it runs a poor third to league and Aussie rules among football for men, the IRB's intense focus on making more money for the big boys is shameful, but given their track record, hardly surprising.

Meanwhile, on a happier note, the NYTimes reports of an inner-city Washington DC school who field an all-black rugby team, (you can find it here) competing with the schools in the affluent suburbs. It woulod be encouraging to know that, were any of them to progress to the international level, their team, the US Eagles, would be treated about the same way they were when they first hit the all-white suburbs....

LEAH MAIVIA DIES; PASTED JACKIE PALLO

2008-11-12T09:33:00.003Z

I had been hoping to write a proper obituary of Leah Maivia for the Guardian, but since they decided not, I'll mention here why I thought she'd interest a British audience. Leah's death attracted the most publicity because she was the grandmother of Duane Johnson, better known as 'The Rock', the star WWE wrestler turned actor.

The Rock came from a wrestling family; grandad was 'High Chief' Peter Maivia, a legendary wrestler and promoter of NWA Polynesia in Hawaii after his wrestling days. When Peter died, Leah took over the promoting, making her the first woman to run a wrestling territory in the days when regional promotions were the business.

But in the 1960s, apparently no one had told her about the business, or at least that the wrestling wasn't real. Peter Maivia was touring Britain, where the biggest British heel, Jackie 'Mr TV' Pallo was his cheating opponent. Famously, one night as Pallo was giving him a beating, Leah, at ringside, got so incensed she climbed into the ring and gave Pallo a REAL beating, rather embarrassing for the British star. What's interesting is that Pallo also had a side career as an actor, and, in an episode of the Avengers, was accidentally kayoed by Honor Blackman and said 'I've never been knocked out by a lady before' or words to that effect.

IT SIMPLY ISN'T CRICKET...

2008-11-07T12:40:00.008Z

In the Guardian last week, there was a piece by cricket writer Moss,S rather predictably excoriating 20/20 cricket, particularly when turned into fun by Indians or fiananced in the West Indies (where, were Joel Garner growing up today, he would be playing basketball) by American millionaires. You can read it here.This prompted a couple of interesting letters last Saturday, which you can read here.

Here's my reply to the first of those letters (equally unsurprisingly, unpublished):

John Dallman (letters 1/11) makes two errors of fact and as a result one of supposition in his theory of Allen Stanton's motives in spending $100 million on cricket. He claims baseball is not a major sport outside the United States. In fact, it is the most popular sport in Japan, Cuba, Taiwan, Venezuela, and several other countries, and its list of first-class nations compares very favourably with either cricket's or rugby's. He also apparently has never heard of the next most important American team sports, basketball, whose reach, if not impact, surpasses football, and ice hockey, whose reach is worldwide among winter sports nations.

This ignorance leads Dallman to conclude Stanton sees a market for cricket as an international sport in the US. If soccer, hugely successful in the US as a participant sport, and for the US in international play, cannot attract a public either at the stadium or on television, why would any sane businessman conclude that the US public is desperate for America v India cricket matches?

Perhaps a better motive might be that Stanton, like me, simply enjoys the game, which is basically baseball played in two dimensions, or three if time counts as a dimension. But if I am wrong and Dallman is right, I would happily accept a small portion of Stanton's $100 million to lead cricket's assault on my native land.

In reality, I'm afraid David Fine's letter the same day is more apposite. In a few years English cricket's paleolithic rulers will no doubt be staging their own 20/20 tourney at Lords. It will be sponsored by the UK taxpayer, whose money will have been channelled to Lords via the bailouts of merchant banks, all of whose traders will sip free champagne in their luxury boxes while cursing arrivistes like Stanton for spoiling their game.

WHY OBAMA WON

2008-11-07T07:58:00.007Z

In a line exorcised from my weekly Friday Morning Tight End column at nfluk.com (find it here) I mentioned that, since the Washington Redskins lost their last home game before the election, the incumbent party lost as well, meaning (and this is the bit that was edited out) this election was decided by the Steelers, rather than the stealers. You know what I mean.

WEMBLEY REDUX:

2008-10-29T09:28:00.003Z

My wrap-up of the Wembley game is up at NFL.com, here. It was immense fun for me, especially working with Jerry Rice: in fact in my rush to get Jerry to his ride back into town I left my overcoat, and one of my Obama buttons, behind!

THE UNCUT KILLER KOWALSKI OBITUARY

2008-10-28T13:13:00.008Z

My obituary of Killer Kowalski is in today's Guardian, in a slightly shortened format. You might be interested in the uncut version, which basically restores my own personal reminiscence, and that of the wrestler Violet Flame.

The received wisdom of professional wrestling is that to draw punters, wrestlers need to generate 'heat'. Every 'babyface' hero, whether Georgeous George, Big Daddy, or Hulk Hogan, needs a 'heel' the audience can hate, and will buy tickets to see vanquished. For thirty years, and more than 6,000 matches, wrestling audiences hated no one more than the Canadian-born Killer Kowalski, who has died aged 81. Kowalski was arguably the top heel in the era when regional wrestling promotions filled arenas all over North America, and provided hours of programming for the fledgling television industry. He continued to be the man crowds loved to hate well into the start of the modern era of national promotions and cable television.

Everything about Kowalski screamed villain, including his name. Born Robert Wladek Spulnik to Polish immigrant parents in Windsor, Ontario, he followed his father into the Ford factories across the bridge in Detroit, and began wrestling in there in 1947. His physique and good looks saw him billed variously as Tarzan Kowalski, Hercules Kowalski, and even The Polish Apollo, but he had also appeared as 'Killer', and that name stuck after he tore off part of Yukon Eric's ear while knee-dropping him during a match at the Montreal Forum in 1952. At the hospital, the two wrestlers laughed about the mummy-like bandages covering Eric's face; reporters in the corridor heard Kowalski's laughter and his reputation as a heartless 'Killer' was cemented.

It was a reputation he encouraged. Huge for his day, at 6-6 and 20 stone, Kowalski's features could be twisted into a horror-movie type rage. In the ring he was a committed cheat, bully, and thug, his interviews laced with eloquent contempt for both the crowd and its heroes. When he accidentally kicked Jack Dempsey, serving as a celebrity referee for a 1958 match against Pat O'Connor, he was quick to claim he'd been out to cripple the former heavyweight boxing champ. His signature move was 'The Claw,' 'working on to the muscles of the abdominal area,' as the announcers used to scream. In 1967 he used the Claw on an Australian TV interviewer, a gimmick repeated famously by Jerry Lawler on the comedian Andy Kaufman years later, and reprised in the 1999 film Man On The Moon.

Kowalski won his first title, the Texas belt, over Nature Boy Buddy Rogers in 1950. He and Rogers had a long and successful feud, and he did huge business in Canada against Whipper Billy Watson, who called him his favorite opponent. He and Hans Herman, who played a psuedo-Nazi, had huge success as a heel tag team on the West Coast. But Kowalski was biggest in the US Northeast, starting when he and Gorilla Monsoon captured the World Wide Wrestling Federation tag title in 1963. I recall vividly the abuse he dealt out to fan favourites like Edouard Carpentier, Argentina Apollo, or Pedro Morales, but his greatest matches came against New York's champion, Bruno Sammartino, in Madison Square Garden. Sammartino was the master of absorbing punishment before making the 'Superman' comebacks which drove the crowds into a frenzy, and no one was better than Kowalski at dishing it out mercilessly, then cowering abjectly when it was dished back to him.

Out of the ring, however, Kowalski, known as Walter, was considered one of the few truly good guys in an industry not renowned for its integrity. 'Walter is a pussycat,' wrestler Violet Flame told me when she came to Southampton in 2000 for Meridian Television's Transatlantic Wrestling Challenge, for which I did commentary. She had left Minnesota at her first opportunity, to make a pilgrimage to Kowalski's wrestling school outside Boston. He has taken her in, and created her ring name, to symbolise her 'pure flame of dedication'. In 1976 Kowalski and his first star pupil, Big John Studd, donned masks and captured the WWWF tag titles as The Executioners. It was his last big title before he retired in 1977, to concentrate on training wrestlers. Among his graduates was Paul Levesque, now known as WWE champ Triple H.

Unusually for a wrestler, Kowalski was a vegetarian, explaining 'the more you back away from meat, the more you elevate yourself, the vibratory level of your whole body changes and you become more conscious of higher levels of existence. A lifelong bachelor, at 79 he married 78 year old Theresa Ferrioli, telling Esquire magazine 'What could I do? She told me she was pregnant!'

Kowalski died following a heart attack, but his strength saw him live 12 days after being taken off life support. He is survived by his wife and a brother.
Edward Wladek (Walter) Kowalski
born 13 October 1926, Windsor Ontario
died 30 August 2008 Malden, Massachusetts

WHEN YOUK HANGS UP THOSE SPIKES

2008-10-27T17:53:00.003Z

Based on his current look, do you think that when Kevin Youkilis eventually stops playing baseball for the Red Sox, he will:
a. play for the House of David
b. wrestle in the WWE
c. run for governor of Minnesota
d. audition for Lord of the Rings, the sequel...

SAINTS COACH WAS ONCE A BRITISH STAR

2008-10-23T18:45:00.003+01:00

My piece on Sean Payton's brief career with the Leicester Panthers was posted today at NFL.com: as usual you can find it here

Two corrections: apparently my stalwart memory failed me, and in 1999 the WLAF had already been rebranded as NFL Europe (tks Mike Preston) and Martin Johnson actually played for the Panthers' senior team in 1988, not their youth team (tks to Martin, whom I interviewed at the Chargers' practice today, for Five).

WHY DO THOSE SCUM 'HATE' US SO MUCH?

2008-10-22T20:11:00.009+01:00

There is something almost laughable about the way the interchange among right-wing groups moves eastward across the Atlantic. I noticed it today when Tim Montgomerie (not the one who was once married to Marion Jones), who has previously graced this blog when he's been featured in the Guardian (see here) returned to the G's pages to complain that the reasons for the press' coming down on shadow chancellor George Osborne (pictured above researching foreign affairs) for his discussions about how to sell his party to Russian oligarchs and get around the fact that such actions would be against the law, not to mention his blabbing Peter Mandelson's private excoriations of Gordon Brown, when both Osborne and Mandy were soaking up Nat Rothschild's totally disinterested hospitality, were solely down to their 'hating' Osborne.

This is a tactic the Montgomeries of our world have inherited from Karl Rove and Roger Ailes, who have dealt with criticism of Bush has for eight years by dismissing it as drivel from 'haters'. That this approach can even be broached by the all-encompassing love-in of the Republican Party, the Christian right, and Fox News is funny enough. But it's even better to the people who scream 'hang Obama' complain about the 'haters' who subjected Sarah Palin to the most vicious attacks in American history.

Molly Ivins (if you dont recognise the name, click here for my obit of her) wrote about this in the Bush context, arguing that (a) there were plenty of valid reasons to actually 'hate' Bush, but far more for legitimate criticism and, more importantly, (b) where were all these complainers when Bill Clinton was being accused to murdering Vince Foster,when Hilary was accused of being a lesbian, when Clinton was being persecuted over a blowjob by an investigator supposedly looking into a land investment, well, unless you're a committed right-winger you probably remember.

Now the haters have directed their bile at George Osborne. The press coverage is funny mostly because it's tit for tat: toffee-nosed GO freeloading off a Rothschild, and cozying up with so-called 'Socialist' and legacy Mandy 'Lord' Mandelson, then spilling the beans on their private conversation. It's almost admirable the way Gnat Rothschild feels Ozzie has let the side down, not been a gentleman, and that is more important than mere party politics. Clearly Ozzie forgot the old adage that he who pays the piper calls the tune.

The press relish this opportunity to reveal Ozzie for the empty tux that he is. He's in a real bind: polls show the public has more confidence in Gordon Brown (who BTW looks and sounds more and more like Nixon every day) and his ability to handle the financial crisis, but also holds him responsible for it. Problem is, how do you make political capital out of Brown's failure to regulate the free market when you are a party who ostensibly worship, if not live for, the free market? Mostly with secret plans that cannot be revealed, it seems.

Maybe Mandy could give him some advice about what to do when the press turn on you, though in his case, he always seems to be keeping on the right side for some of the press. What I do find worrying is that about a week ago, the Guardian also ran a piece about how Mandelson was treated roughly by the press (albeit not 'hated' by them) because he is gay. Not because a spin doctor whose greatest achievement in office was calling mushy peas guacamole and building the Millennium Dome, and whose greed has seen him twice resign in disgrace, only to be rewarded as the first television researcher ever to be put in charge, with no public consultation, of economic policy for the whole of Europe, and then 'ennobled' with a double-barrelled peerage, an exercise in upper-class titular bling that should have seen him docked right then.

Ozzie clearly has a long way to go before he reaches Mandelsonian depths. Tim Montgomerie, on the other hand, is likely to find more and more 'haters' out there, who simply refuse to think Tory as they find the country crumbling around them. And that, to him, must be scary.

SAINTS V CHARGERS AT WEMBLEY: PREVIEW

2008-10-22T16:26:00.003+01:00

You can find my look ahead to Sunday's Saints-Chargers game at Wembley at Pro Football Weekly,
or just follow the link here...

THE USES AND ABUSES OF ANTI-TERRORISM, continued

2008-10-09T23:07:00.008+01:00

In order to attempt to protect British investors with money in IceSave, the British government
today seized control of the UK assets of the Icelandic Landsbanki, parent company of Icesave.
So far so good: the Brits protect their own and get some small revenge for losing the cod war.
But what makes it interesting is that the bank's assets were seized used provisions of the Anti-Terrorism Crime and Security Act 2001.

Here is the home office summary of what that bill is intended to do, according to their website today:

Anti-Terrorism, Crime and Security Act 2001

The Anti-Terrorism, Crime and Security Act 2001 (ATCSA) was introduced in order to provide stronger powers to allow the Police to investigate and prevent terrorist activity and other serious crime.

The measures are intended to:

cut off terrorist funding
ensure that government departments and agencies can collect and share information required for countering the terrorist threat
streamline relevant immigration procedures
ensure the security of the nuclear and aviation industries
improve security of dangerous substances that may be targeted/used by terrorists
extend police powers available to relevant forces
ensure that we can meet our European obligations in the area of police and judicial co-operation and our international obligations to counter bribery and corruption

Now call me myopic, but I don't see anything there about seizing the assets of banks suffering failure due to mismanagement or global crisis. I seem to recall a lot of hot air and weasel words about the act never being abused or information shared for anything but the express reasons of fighting 'terrorism', ensuring 'national security' and since we are all gentlemen you subjects can of course trust us and besides we know where you live and have a surveillance camera somewhere on your street.

As it happens, the House of Lords was today debating the Counter Terrorism Bill which wants to extend the time 'suspected terrorists' can be held without charge to 42 days. If they extend that to merchant bankers I suspect the public would have little trouble with it, but at worst I suspect most of the bankers involved will simply be held without claret for Lent instead.

The thing that amazes me is that 'Hank' Paulson hasn't been able to get anyone locked up and their assets seized already. There must be a few million poor homeowners who've defaulted and are trying to terrorise the Paulson's of this world by threatening their bonuses. At least they got rid of Elliot Spitzer in the Clinton mode, rather than trying to persuade New York he was an Islamic terrorist, like Barack Obama. But seriously, is there any doubt that legislation like the ATA2001 is INTENDED to be used for political convenience, and that the whole spectre of 'terrorism' (or 'terrism' if you're Shrub) has taken on exactly the same all-purpose mantle of generating fear and leveraging political expediency that 'communism' (or 'commonism' if you're JEdgar Hoover) did for the generation before?

SHRUB AND MCCAIN MAKE SENATE SEE SENSE, SAVE USA!

2008-09-26T16:24:00.007+01:00

Apart from the somewhat surreal idea of Henry Paulson on his knees begging (and the extreme unlikelyhood that anyone said 'get up off your knees and give us something more substantial than a blowjob') the most interesting things about the White House crisis meeting was the reaction of John McCain and some of the Republican right.

The latter are against the bailout for the simple reason that, particularly if taxpayers actually get the equity position the Congressional proposal included, it's SOCIALISM. In fairness, Senator Jim Bunning (pictured above) also believes any bailout would be creeping communism, and appears to be the kind of true believer who is willing to follow the baloney about free markets all the way to the crash, while ignoring the government handouts that made big business big. Unless you believe guys like him are just holding out so they can tell their constitutents that they fought til the end, got dragged into the plan by the democrats but fought to get them whatever benefits may accrue. It's like they've been pushed out of a plane and refuse to open a parachute because they believe the law of gravity doesn't exist. Which, since many of them are creationists, they may not. Gravity, like financial markets, is not self-correcting.

The other funny thing was John McCain insisting on skipping campaigning to sit in on the meetings and then keeping shtum throughout, and to the press afterwards, to the point where even Joe Lieberman couldn't speak for him. (BTW: Is Lieberman angling for Secretary of State, or National Security Advisor in a McCain cabinet?). Anyone who might suggest that Schmidt and Rove have the Manchurian Candidate positioned to make some political and debate hay out of the crisis would surely be 'haters', as the straight talking expresso wouldn't tonight try to claim that he found the middle ground, or protected Americans, or brought everyone together, especially when no one could contradict him except with facts and not until after the debate. When you argue facts during a debate, you just seem churlish, which Goebbelsian style Rove surely learned watching Nixon. In a way, I'm glad I can't see the debate: I keep hearing fiddles and smelling smoke.

YOU HAVE EVERYTHING TO FEAR, SO FEAR ITSELF

2008-09-25T11:17:00.013+01:00

One thing our crypto-fascist teacher, Mr Squibb, taught us in our American government classes at Milford Academy was that the Great Depression was brought on by panic. (He also taught us that FDR was a Russian communist socialist agent, but even at 16 I knew better.) Which makes the smirking chimp's performance in his address last night even more despicable.

What President Shrub was out to do was scare the population into demanding their legislators pass the $700 billion bailout the merchant bankers need, to reward them for doing exactly what the regulations passed in the FDR years, and repealed under a Republican congress and a 'third-way' Democratic president with a merchant banker Treasury Secretary (Robert Rubin, lest we forget) only 12 years ago, used to stop them from doing. This will come as news to John McCain, who has just discovered those greedy bad apples, decades after he tried to bail out his wife's business partner Charles Keating (note too that a major beneficiary of the Keating bailout was the third of the three Bush brothers, Neil, the one too dumb to even go into politics, who escaped with a reprimand and a 'stiff fine' of $50,000 after letting his buddies loot $330 mill from Silverado Savings & Loan) when the newly-deregulated savings-and-loan banks were doing the same sort of thing on a lesser scale, and somehow escaped Senate censure.

Twelve years was all it took for the supposedly 'self-regulating' markets to self-destruct, and the main reason Bush is now trying to fan the flames of financial fear is to stampede Congress into passing the bailout, which might well be the best course of action, but isn't the only alternative (see James K. Galbraith in the Washington Post, linked here). Plus, the Bush package comes without any commenurate protection for the future. He and his treasury secretary, Henry Paulson, another merchant banker(and isn't it funny how, when they want to make these guys seem like humans they give them nicknames, now he's 'Hank' Paulson, a la 'Ken' Starr, just regular guys), don't want Congress demanding an equity position in the banks the taxpayer bails out. They don't want a return to the days of strict oversight that might prevent such a meltdown in the future. They don't want controls on excess rewards for bankers taking ridiculous risks with investors' money. And they certainly don't want any taxpayers' money going to help, uh, taxpayers themselves. They want to keep government off their backs until they need taxpayers' money, and they want to keep that money away from the people who worked for it. Note that Congress has already pushed aside the $50 billion economic stimulus package which included increased food stamps and state medicaid funds, in their hurry to toss cash at the guys in the gated communities.

Warren Buffet knows what's going on, and he bought into Goldman Sachs, in order to reap the harvest. As Buffet once said, 'If there's a class war going on in this country, my class is winning.' William Grieder in the Nation had the best solution for any buyout: If taxpayer money is used, we want the same deal Buffett got." Buffett's deal was preferred stock with 10 percent annual return and the right to convert to stock if the stock takes off after the bailout. Taxpayers should get the same deal.

Bush and Rove live in the Goebbelsian world of the Big Lie, where Fear is the best motivator. Remember FDR saying 'we've nothing to fear except fear itself'? Contrast that with Bush: 'FEAR!'

WHY I LOVE THE RYDER CUP

2008-09-24T18:15:00.009+01:00

It isn't because the golf was pretty fantastic: my brother was watching it fanatically so I saw more of it than I usually would, and really admired the play. The Ryder Cup format reveals far more about a golfer's make-up than the usual tournament play...where you're usually out of the real running early, and rarely playing head to head for a title.

But my return to Britain reminded me that there's more truth in the agony of defeat than the joy of victory. Here's a typical reaction story in the English press:

Injection of needle after Poulter and Westwood accuse US of dirty tricks

There are few events that bring out the innate hypcrisy of our English cousins much better than the bi-annual fest of Euro-brotherhood and anti-Yankdom. Remember, that for 723 out of every 730 days, the English indulge in a festival of controlled xenophobia, couched behind their self-regarding faux-modesty, or not in the case of those with shaved heads, bulldog tattoos and union jack underpants. This includes a subtle dislike of all things French, WWII putdowns of all things German, and mildly racist condescension toward all things Mediterranean.

But then, like National Brotherhood Week, along comes the Ryder Cup and WE'RE ALL EUROPEANS NOW! Every London cabbie is pronouncing Jose-Maria Olazabal with a Castillian lisp. A few years ago, after another American choke-fest, I walked into my London post office and the Pakistani clerk chortled and said 'we beat you good!'. WE? I said. It was an ITALIAN who hit the winning shot. He didn't care. I don't know how Oswald Mosley was with a mashie niblick, but I suspect he would not have approved from the old-format Ryder Cup, which excluded the non-British or Irish.

Then there's the assault on America. The golfers are too agressive. Their Stepford wives are too, well, Stepford: though Will Buckley in the Guardian confessed his embarassingly intense love for one golfer's wife in a very funny column. But most importantly, they TAKE IT TOO SERIOUSLY. Their wives celebrate a winning shot before the other golfer has taken his shot. Their fans cheer misses. They make fun of Colin Montgomerie's excess avoirdupois. They just don't understand sportsmanship. Now, when European crowds stomp their feet on the aluminium bleachers at Valdarama, or cheer American misses that's something different.

But the best part of the Ryder Cup is that when the Americans win, the English fall back into the default mode of whingeing. It's very hard to feel sympathy for the Aussie point of view, but on this sort of occasion, one can see their point. The Yanks, who, when the Euros win, are accused of not taking the Ryder Cup seriously enoough, all of a sudden are taking it too seriously.

Anthony Kim actually BARGED past Ian Poulter, like he was a soccer player. Paul Azinger was actually encouraging the crowd to cheer, partisanly. (I have't yet heard a negative comment about Sergio Garcia's claiming a contorted stance was a normal one, in order to get a drop, as he would've got if it were, say, the British Open, but he's not an American, and for Ryder Cup purposes he got a pass on being a nasty cheating Spaniard and became an English gent.)

Here's the thing though. James Corrigan's article, whose headline appears above, suggests that Kim 'will be a target' at the next Ryder Cup, in Wales two years from now. My question is, if American behaviour is so damn unsporting and we fail to follow the gentlemanly behaviour of the English: WHO THE HELL IS GOING TO TARGET KIM? And with what?

There's losing and there's good losing and then there's English losing, and that's what the empire was all about!

AMERICA IN HIS WORLD: TIM MONTGOMERIE'S CALL FOR MORE WAR, MORE LIES, MORE BUSH

2008-08-29T10:30:00.013+01:00

Tuesday's Guardian (26/8) featured an op-ed titled 'The Kind Of Cop We Need' by Tim Montgomerie, promoting a new website called Americaintheworld.com. As you might guess from his mugshot, this is not the Tim Montgomerie who was once the world's fastest man and married Marion Jones. He's the one who was PPS to IDS, the man behind the Statue of Liberty in a burqua and other fear-mongering ads on a defunct internet TV channel. Why the Guardian feels compelled to offer plug space to the creator of the website ConservativeHome is an interesting question, unless it falls under the category of 'know thy enemy', or more likely it's a question of style not substance in the op-ed pages.

The thrust of the piece was that Europeans like Barack Obama more than George Bush or John McCain, but if America goes all European by electing him, they will be turning their backs on 200 years of peace and freedom and we will all drift back into the dark days of Clintonism, where the world was beseiged by Islamic terrorism. I may be sugar-coating it, but you get the drift.

Montgomerie was quick to blame 9/11 on the preparations Al Queda made 'while Clinton was still in office'. He's slow to recall that when Clinton actually took steps against Osama, it was the American rightwing mainstream, not the Europeans, who accused him of 'wagging the dog' to distract the country from the far more pressing issue of Monica Lewinsky.

He somehow manages to blame the US propping up of a military dictatorship in Pakistan on European 'realpolitick', US support for the absolute monarchy in Saudi Arabia on European 'appeasement' and the efforts to stop Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons as European 'multilateralism'. He then credits the 'surge' for reducing violence in Iraq, and posits that someday it may be 'one of the the Middle East's most stable nations'. Given what Bush policies have done to the region, that's highly likely as everyone else descends into chaos ...but then he flips his own argument around and argues that the very policies he criticised as 'European' have kept the region stable. Huh?

In Montgomerie's world, Bush's invasion of Iraq, built on lies and costing hundreds of thousands dead and trillions of dollars lost or transferred into the hands of his political allies, have caused Syria to withdraw from Lebanon (civil war and a Hizbollah strengthed by the reaction to the Iraq invasion had nothing to do with it), Pakistan's nuclear secrets being exposed (you figure that one out), and whatever problems there are have been caused by US incompetence, which amazingly began only AFTER the invasion was launched.

I checked out his site, which basically trumpets the American dream of democracy, and the American myth that emerged post-World War II of the country as international saviour as the riposte to any glimpse of reality that sees the US presence in the world as narrow and self-serving, prone to wanton violence, and defined by the morality of the Bush White House, their torture, their assaults on democracy and civil liberties, their profligacy in aid of the wealthy, their fraudulant election-fixing, their brutal campaigning, and their total contempt for whatever ideals we still believe America might stand for.

Amazingly, he calls for a strong America to remain true to 'the values of Kennedy and Reagan'.This would be the JFK who was assassinated before he could withdraw from the Vietnam war? That would be the Reagan who negotiated weapons to Iran in exchange for holding Americans hostage until AFTER the 1980 elections, the Reagan who sold those weapons to Iran and used to profts to launch his own illegal war in Central America, whose allies in that war were shipping drugs to the US to feed America's massive addictions. That would be the Reagan whose first campaign speech attacked racial equality at the site where three civil rights workers were murdered, who praised the SS who ran the concentration camps. That would be the Reagan whose corporate attack ads condemned Kennedy as a commie for his nuclear test ban treaty with the Russians. God bless.

Sure it would be nice to believe in American ideals again. Barack Obama seems to me to be asking Americans to see reality, to realise they cannot pretend to be a beacon of freedom for the world while they pursue the policies of tyranny which the Bush regime has committed in their name. This is a little closer to the Kennedy myth than Ronald Reagan was: Reagan was asking Americans to believe everything was just like one of the movies he'd been in in the 1930s, the nation obliged by ignoring reality as long as they could, and now, despite the corruption of the Reagan regime, the worst presidency since Harding's, we are asked to look at him as the template for the American presidency.Certainly eight years of Cheney should have cured us of that. The City On The Hill preached tolerance and freedom (while enforcing Puritan values).The Bush version preaches intolerance, hate, and curtailing of freedom, in the name of freedom.The central issue in the current election is whether the US can survive four more years of this blinkered world view: survive it not just abroad, but at home.

I can only conclude that this lumping of Obama with Europe is part of the right-wing's Kerry-style smearing of Obama as an effete European. Remember, Kerry was out of touch because he'd married a millionaire heiress; McCain's millionaire heiress wife with more houses than he can recall doesn't make him out of touch because, uh, he was a POW. What next? Attack Obama because people like him? Oh, they've already done that.

There is money to be made by trumpeting the 'values' of the right, the 'special relationship' and US/NATO militarism. A website like AmericaInTheWorld can't help but attract cash from think tanks, government agencies, and corporate sponsors. More power to him. But I am an American in the world, and I'd suggest Tim Montgomerie visit this planet before supporting America in whatever alternate world he's living in.

THE REAL OLYMPIC SCOREBOARD

2008-08-25T13:52:00.007+01:00

Not that the Olympics is a celebration of nationalistic chauvinism--after all 'Olympism' teaches us all the higher aspirations of cooperation, sportsmanship, and the joy of competing for its own reward, rather than winning for financial gain or glory, right?--but it is inarguable that the 'medal table' can have a powerful effect: in the case of the British press causing an almost universal case of collective amnesia about the stories they went to Beijing to cover (pollution, Tibet, lack of democratic dissent) in favour of Union Jack waving.

But the medal table has a serious flaw: virtually everyone seems to rank the nations involved by their tally of golds--which seems unfair. I can recall old listings which ranked teams by the total medal tally, with the medals weighted, so I went back and computed the standings using the two methods which used to be standard--the 5-3-1 (gold-silver-bronze) and the 3-2-1 methods.

The results are interesting. China, of course, were the overwhlming winners in gold, but behind the USA in total medals (100-110). Figuring the standings by points reveals they narrowly scrape through as Olympic 'champions', while among the top six nations, only two reverse positions.

Here are the top six countries by golden haul: China (51) USA (36) Russia (23) GB & NI (19) Germany (16) Australia (14). Here's how they stand with the 5-3-1 method: China (346), USA (330) Russia (206) GB (149) Auss (132) Germ (125).

I prefer the 3-2-1 scoreline; the placings remain the same but they are tighter: China 223, USA 220, Russia 139, GB 98, Auss 89, Germ 83.

The bad news for the Brits is that any way you look at it, the Aussies move up to fifth. Even better, if you prorate the points totals by population, Australia becomes the per capita champ of the top six, with 4.3 points per million people, against Britain's 1.5 or China's 0.4.

But the overall per capita champ, at least among countries with at least one gold medal, must be Jamaica with just under 10 points per million (26 points on 6-3-2 medals, and 2.7 million people). Of course that breaks down to 6.75 points for Bolt, and 19.25 points for the rest of the country, but we won't take that any farther. If half a dozen runners can turn Jamaica into the 'real' Olympic champions that's good enough for me.

US TRACK AND FIELD SENDS IN THE CLOWNS

2008-08-22T09:57:00.008+01:00

The 2008 Olympic Alfred E Newman 'What Me Worry?' gold medal is presented to:
Bubba Thornton, of the US track and field 'coaching' staff. Asked during their pre-Olympic training why Tyson Gay was not working out with the relay team on their passes, Bubba opined thusly: 'There will be plenty of time for that in Beijing'.

Or not, as the case might have been. The double-drop disqualifications in their heats of both the men's and women's 4x100 relay teams should not have caught anyone by surprise. Earlier in the week, when I heard the Jamaican coach worrying that his sprinters hadn't been practising together, I said to Kirsten, who could care less, 'he ought to talk to the Americans'.

Because far from being a shot out of the blue, bad baton skills are a tradition among American sprinters. Just to go back to the last Olympics, the women's sprint replay team again flubbed the passing, and didn't medal, while the men performed a skilled imitation of the Three Stooges handling a stick marked TNT with a burning fuse, and lost the gold medal to Britain. When you consider that the fastest British runner had a slower personal best than the slowest American,
that took some doing.

This is a disgrace, and it's the same at every major competition. It is a problem, because it's not like this is a college team, where you practice together all the time; these guys are professionals who have their own programmes. But at some point along the line, someone at US Track and Field has to wake up and realise that turning the world's fastest runners into a sideshow act from Coleman brothers circus is not in the best Olympic interests of the team or indeed the runners themselves.

Perhaps they could hire Calvin Murphy, one of America's top baton twirlers in his pre NBA days, to help out. Perhaps they could practice with electric cattle prods. Perhaps the could hire my high school track coach, a French teacher who'd learned all he knew about track from books. I ran track my senior year, since the school had given up lacrosse and I had given up on baseball (big strike zone, slow swing). Ed Emery tested my heart beat and determined I should run distance. A few days of watching me lug my 185 pounds around on my short legs, and I'd moved to the 440, where I could chug at top speed as long as possible. Amazingly, I also ran the second leg on the 4x220 relay, and here is where Mr Emery's study proved its worth.

If you get the baton pass right, you not only accomplish the obvious, and avoid disqualification, but you can start your leg already moving at top speed. Watch the US sprinters who turn, take the baton, turn, gather themselves up, and start running. Proper technique has you looking straight ahead, getting up to speed, and taking the baton in the sequence of pumping your hands, so you waste no movement. For a slow starting runner like me, this was a built-in advantage.

Has no one ever explained it to the US Olympic team? Can't they see the advantage? Haven't they run film of some of the great relay teams, of Bob Hayes' 8.6 in Tokyo, or even the Brits' flawless handovers in Athens. One of the first rules of sport is DON'T BEAT YOURSELF, but in track and field, the US had a noble tradition of doing just that. Remember too, in the Olympics there never is 'always next year'.

By the way, back in 1968, my best time in the 440, running on grass, was 54.0 (and I finished second in that race). Mark Fitzpatrick, who would win the state AAU the next year, and I finished 1-2 in 8 of our 9 meets, and I actually elbowed him and won once. My last year of college I ran a 58 second quarter in football cleats, with helmet and shoulder pads on, and when I was 27 I lost a bet at Parliament Hill, saying I could still beat one minute and running it in 61 seconds.
Don't ask me to even consider one lap today. But if US Track and Field want to hire me as a relay coach, I'm ready.

UPDATE: This is what makes the Olympics the Olympics...you couldn't script this stuff! My thanks to 'Team GBR' for botching the final handoff, as Craig Pickering, for some reason running the anchor leg, overran his changeover box before getting the baton from Marlon Devonish.
What makes this better is that Team GB has apparently invested more than £500,000 in their relay squads (buying custom batons? bicycles built for four?) and brought in an Australian coach,
Michael Khmel, to transform the Olympic gold medallists into USA-style butterfingers. I hearby withdraw my suggestion US relay teams be forced the watch the Brits in action, but I also hereby extend my offer to coach relays to Team GBR for the 2012 Olympics. They won't even have to pay relocation expenses.

FROM GDR TO GBR: A NEW PERSPECTIVE ON BRITAIN'S OLYMPIC SUCCESS

2008-08-20T22:22:00.009+01:00

Since bean counters run every other facet of life in our Private Finance Initiative United Kingdoms, it's not surprising that cash from the national lottery, the ultimate regressive tax on stupidity, has received so much credit for Britain's (actually the UK is listed, with great geopolitical awareness on the part of the IOC, as GB & NI, or GBR in Olympic coding) amazing tally of medals. And amazing how quickly a country's media can turn from celebrating individual effort, valiant falling short of the ultimate prize, competition for its own sake, and abhorrance of rampant nationalism every time the American or Russian or Chinese anthem is played, to flag waving triumphalism of the likes this island hasn't seen since they were desperately trying to fix events in the 1908 Games!

The cost accountants have done a remarkable job. They realised quickly that there is no real point in pouring money into sports where every nation has a sporting chance, like athletics. All it takes is somewhere to run, and you can become a track star. Ditto team sports: all those competitors, all that time, all that money, and it results in just one lonely medal. You need to target your money where it will haul in the most gold.

Britain has always done relatively well in the rich man's events: showjumping and sailing, sports where you need to own a horse or a boat in order to succeed. In most of the world, the only people who own boats are busy using them to desperately seek the few fish left swimming round our seas. Funding poured into those areas would find competition relatively thin on the ground.

If the sport can be helped by technology, so much the better. It's no coincidence Britain's biggest gain in this Olympics has been in track cycling, all graphite wheels and aerodynamic helmets. Why not pour money into road cycling? Well, in road cycling all you need is a road and a bike: cyclists come from all over the world. Track cycling, more medal intensive anyway, requires a velodrome: no banked track to practice on, no track cycling team.

It occurs to me that we had seen this all before: the same ethos that powered East Germany to its disproportionately great Olympic record. They homed in on events like the luge in the Winter Olympics: technology, specialist course (of which there were only nine in the world in those days) and lots of available medals. I wrote the obituary of Manfred Ewald, head of the East German Olympic committee, for the Guardian (you can read it here) and pointed out that, despite being disgraced, in the end he had won, because the entire sporting world followed down the path he had blazed.

But the parallel wasn't perfect, because a key factor in the success of East Germany was, shall we say, biological enhancement, everything from sex changes to doping. At least Team GB hadn't gone down that road, I thought with relief. Cue Christine Ohuruogu's win the 400m hurdles. I am not by any means saying Ohuruogu did not win clean, but I will suggest that, had an East German, or indeed any foreign, runner been banned for life after turning in her fastest times dodging three separate drug tests, and then been re-instated and won Olympic gold, I suspect the British press would react to her victory in a somewhat different way.

It is typically British that the immediate reaction to all this success is for the 2012 organisers to remind everyone that there will be no extra money taken away from the property speculators, construction companies, architects, and consultants who will bleed the taxpayers dry, in order to increase funding for the 2012 athletes, and ensure more triumphant nationalism where it will do the most good: in London. Money talks, and no one walks (except the Mexicans: are they fantastic in the heel and toe, or what?). In the meantime, enjoy the medal tally and remember: from GDR to GBR is only a very small change of one letter.....

HOW I MISSED THE BEIJING OPENING CEREMONY (clue: I waited for highlights on the BBC)

2008-08-10T13:54:00.010+01:00

I'm afraid I missed the opening ceremony from the Beijing Olympics. Or the next closest thing: I watched the BBC's edited highlights package that evening at 7pm. It opened with a five minute intro to Olympism by British medal heroes Steve Redgrave, Matthew Pinsent, and Michael Johnson (?) then proceded to a barely 20 minute edit of what was probably the most spectacular opening ceremony in history. Full credit to the Chinese, and the IOC: totalitarianism has always been the best way to go for Olympic games (which reminds me, it was nice to see that old Francoisto, HRH J.A. Samaranch, in the VIP section, enjoying the largesse).

The ceremony made up about half the edit, followed by the entrance of teams, which included Iraq, at which point the Chinese proved they have a sense of humour by cutting to the King of Iraq, George Bush, as the Iraqis entered. Thanks to the BBC for leaving that bit in! They showed the US team, but not the moment when the flag-bearer passed the reviewing stand, to see if he'd dip it or not. They also bothered to show the Australians (though not the Kiwis, Canucks, South Africans, or any Europeans apart from Greece, who march in first) because of that strange masochism that seems to annoit Aussies as honorary Brits unless they're actually winning the Ashes or the rugby, or whatever.

Having cut the actual ceremony short, we were then treated to the aesthetic reactions of Colin Jackson and Sharron Davies, which reminded me of the celebs drafted in to comment on the Macy's float in the Thanksgiving parade 'I hear they spent $2 million on it, Colin, nice intit?' followed by exciting highlights from the earliest of the Olympic events.

Now call me crazy, but I would have thought that to please your 7pm audience, which would have a high concentration of those non sports fans whom the Olympics usually attracts, and who prefer the ceremonies to the sport, you would've shown AS MUCH OF THE CEREMONY AS POSSIBLE and as little of the sporting stars trying to become commentators, much less the relatively minor events scheduled before the opening ceremony. I'm a pretty big sports fan, but I still wanted to see AS MUCH OF THE CEREMONY AS POSSIBLE.

I've worked at nine Olympic games. Favourites: Montreal and Barcelona, Lake Placid and Sarajevo. Least favourite: Moscow and Atlanta (the Moscow of the South). I regretted missing Lillehammer. I'm pretty blase about ceremonies, especially after watching all the rehearsals while I worked in the Coliseum in LA, but I will confess the closing ceremony in Barca was suitably OTT. But I did catch a couple of minutes of the Beijing ceremony live in passing, and was actually looking forward to seeing more. I remember over the years missing the volleyball final because Britain's show-jumpers will be in a seventh-place playoff match, or suffering through ancient athletics commentators telling me what a lovely shot some ten foot gimme is in basketball (in fairness, John Amechi provides some good analysis in this year's tourney--though the edit of the USA-China game oddly omitted the bit where the lead changed hands in favour of the US extending their lead), but I really did expect that the opening ceremony would be fitter grist for BBC highlights mill.

THE TIMES FINALLY SETS THE JFK ASSASSINATION RECORD STRAIGHT

2008-07-26T07:49:00.004+01:00

After years of obfuscation about the Kennedy assassination, the New York Times has finally set the record straight. In today's obituary of Paul Bentley, the Dallas police detective who arrested Lee Harvery Oswald at the Texas Theatre, and whose masonic ring allegedly caused the shiner Oswald sported after that arrest, the paper makes an important correction. When Jim Leavelle was escorting Oswald through the basement of the Dallas jail, and Jack Ruby killed Oswald, the hat Leavelle was wearing was NOT a Stetson, it was a Resistol. Resistols were impermeable, just like the Times.

OH THE SHARK BITES....GREG NORMAN, CHRIS EVERT, ANDY MILL PLAY MIXED TRIPLES

2008-07-18T14:58:00.010+01:00

Best quote of the British Open golf so far, from skier Andy Mill, re the curiously rejuvenated Greg Norman (first day leader and second day second place) and Mill's ex-wife and Norman's fellow 80s celeb Chris Evert: “Greg Norman at one time was my best friend and a year-and-a-half ago I would have taken a bullet for this guy,” he said. “But I didn't realise he was the one who was going to pull the trigger.”

When Evert filed for divorce from Mill, she cited 'irreconcible differences', which would make a great new nickname for the Great White Shark. Although Mill might find Shark appropriate too.
And I've got to ask: are his teeth REAL or was he taking the nickname too seriously?

Apparently Mill is a shoo-in for the US Ski Federation's Spider Sabich Unlucky In Love award.

And exactly how many husbands do you have to go through before you stop being America's sweetheart?

Meanwhile, let's discuss in an adult fashion the Evert-Norman relationship: fuzzy balls v dimpled balls, balls in holes, balls in cups, flagpoles in cups, two-handed backhands, second service, foot fault, putter, mashie niblick, fast greens, in the rough, love-forty, ad-in, backswingers, serve and volley, chip shot, mixed doubles, dogleg.....

Have I missed anything?

REVERSING THE RED SOX CURSE (or THOSE WHOM THE GODS WOULD DESTROY, THEY FIRST LET PICK UP STRIPPERS)

2008-07-08T23:40:00.011+01:00

The revelation that stipper Candice Houlihan distracted A-Rod with the second of their two nights of brief sex and extended talking during the 2004 ALCS loss to the Red Sox doesn't really explain the Yanquis' monumental foldo, but it helps. It doesn't help explain why 32 year old A-Rod would be buzzing round the 133 year old Ayesha-clone Madonna either. Vanity Fair ran a picture of Madonna a couple of months ago, in their ecology issue, bizarre as that seems, with the caption 'Timeless Beauty'. I suppose in the sense that plastic and silicone never decay they were right! This isn't like Nuke LaLoosh desperately seeking Susan Sarandon (oh wait, she married Tim Robbins, so it IS!)

Meanwhile C-Rod, who saw rod and reeled in Lenny Kravitz in Paris (nous sommes seulement bonnes amies, he said), is back and filing for the big D. Michael Strahan is probably laughing all the way to the TV studio as he wonders what Cynthia Rodriquez is going to get out of this one.

It may not explain the Red Sox winning their first World Series since 1918, though with a name like Houlihan she's got the credentials to be a Sox fan. But it does reinforce Rodriquez's quest to become the highest salaried wuss in history. It's not so much that his wife was pregnant with their first child (she got pregnant with number two while they were repairing their marriage after ARod got caught with a different stripper). It's that they talked about the fact that this stripper was a former basketball player, and he found that 'weird'. That the conversation got THAT deep may be considered a surprise if this is any indication of the depths of the distaff side, explaining why she slept with the Yanqui even though she knew he was married:

“It was killing me and I felt bad after,” Houlihan said. “I’m not a bad person. I know how it feels to be cheated on, it sucks. But a couple of drinks later, I didn’t notice all that much, to tell you the truth.”

If they ever want to bury Rodriquez wrapped in a Big Papi jersey underneath the new Yanqui stadium, he can have an honour guard of stippers lining the way. Bring back Derek Jeter and Mariah Carey Yanqui fans probably regret Rodriquez's wife wasn't using him to order human growth hormone, like Debbie Clemens. But put it this way: if Madonna shows up outside Fenway looking for Manny Ramirez this September, someone tell Manny: just say no!

OLD CLICHES NEVER DIE, THEY JUST KEEP ON DANCIN'

2008-07-07T14:22:00.009+01:00

I was almost pleased to see the headline in yesterday's Sunday Times over an article about Brazilian players in English, Scottish, and Faroe Islands football. Yes, the Faroes; it's worth a read. But the headline was classic, restoring my faith that none of the old prejudices and stereotypes that made Fleet Street great have really died. You can see a picture of two of Chelsea's latest recruits alongside this column.

'SAMBA STARS ON THE WAY', bringing back the image of a conga line of dancin' Stepin Fetchits juggling footballs with their toes while jiggling to a beat that's far beyond Land Of Hope And Glory. I mean this is nothing as bad as the back page headline from the Daily Mail back in 1983, when Scotland's Alan Welles placed fourth in the World Athletics Championships' 100m to three Americans. WHITE LIGHTNING! screamed the Mail, informing us that Welles had just become the 'world's fastest white man'. I am not making this up, by the way.

Of course the Times means it innocently enough, they know that we all know Brazilians are naturally talented, great dancers, laugh a lot, are some of Rupert Murdoch's best friends and so on and so on and scooby dooby dooby. Different strokes for different folks, as it were. We can only guess what their reaction might be were the Brazilian press to label English players Cloggy Morris Dancers, plodding round their soggy pitches.

But headline aside, I recommend the article, by Jonathan Northcroft. In its sidebar it also includes an interesting 'League Of Nations' table, which points out that there are 14 Brazilians in the English Premier League. But what is interesting is first, that of the 525 players who appeared in the EPL last season, only 184 were English, or roughly 35%. That's not promising for English football, though it is for English spectators.

But what was even more interesting to me was that America was represented by only one fewer player than Brazil. 13 Americans played in the EPL, more than the 12 Dutchmen or 11 Portugese, and just behind Scotland (14) Spain (14) and Wales (16). That's pretty good for a nation which can't understand soccer. Believe me, that whole 'the sport the Americans call soccer' chiche is a topic for another post.

But remember, in the 2002 World Cup, the Americans got to the quarter-finals where a Scottish referee handed Germany a bitterly-fought match, while no one in particular at home watched or cared. Meanwhile, in England, our heroes were the subject of months of 24/7 media hype and attention, and they got to the quarter-finals and rolled over like whipped dogs before the, uh, samba skills of the Brazilians! As a supporter, which situation would YOU rather be in?

And don't forget, the US national team did every bit as well as the English in the recent European championships, didn't they?

IRRESISTIBLE TARGETS

2008-07-06T17:56:00.006+01:00

I started this blog as an experiment and exercise, and the first thing I learned was that it would probably be more useful for me, trying to reach an audience, if the format were more specific...so I'm trying a second blog, for crime fiction reviews and maybe some other things.
It's called Irresistible Targets, from the John Stewart song, and it's available at

http://irresistibletargets.blogspot.com

I've opened with the Pelecanos piece as blogged here, and links to a couple of Crime Time reviews.

My imaginary dialogue with Robert B Parker and my rant about the Guardian's review of Fred Vargas last year will be posted soon....

SIX DEGREES OF EXECUTION

2008-07-04T15:35:00.006+01:00

The French army shootout in Carcasonne was an easy way to play the Kevin Bacon game, as anyone who remembers Animal House will appreciate. According to the reports I read, the one soldier with live ammo may have been the one chosen not to have blanks, for reasons no one could explain. Perhaps they were trying for the inverse of a firing squad, where one member is traditionally given a blank so that all of them can pretend they might not have been the executioner. I'm not sure that held true in Germany between 1939-45.

As it happens, on the day of the shooting we were driving from Ceret, close by the Spanish border, to Cuq Toulza, between Toulouse and Castres, and as we headed up from Castlenaudary, a convoy of about 10 APCs passed us going the other way (direction Carcasonne, as the French road signs say, invariably only after you're on the right road). Kirsten asked what they were up to and I guessed there had been a sighting of a New Zealand Greenpeacer in Carcasonne. Little did I know.

I remember as a kid watching parades of military stuff with great delight, so I suppose I shouldnt be that surprised that the French were staging a show of 'anti-terrorist' tactics as a pre -Bastille Day diversion. Since all of us are potentially terrorists in the brave new Bush/Blair/Sarkosy world, it's probably useful to see. It's also fun to watch the new French right-wing Prime Miniature going head to head with the military because he didn't show them the proper respect after they'd shot up one of the country's prime tourist towns. Luckily no one was killed, including a child shot in the heart, but don't mention that either, because then you're just Michael Moore entranced by the French health system. Their tax system, as we heard from the hoteliers in Coq Toulza, is something else indeed!

happy Fourth of July! Le 14eme s'approach!

US ELECTION FACT

2008-06-18T22:18:00.006+01:00

A small fact gleaned from Harpers:

In the last four US presidential elections, the candidate who served in an overseas war has lost each time. That's Bush to Clinton, Dole to Clinton, Gore to Shrub, and Kerry to Shrub. Three of the four losers (Bush I, Dole, and Kerry) received combat medals, were, in effect war heroes.

Not many ways to tar Bubba and Shrub with the same brush, are there?

Could the electorate be punishing those who serve? According to the media, Americans idolise soldiers.

CELTICS WIN: MIKE'S SPIKE PRESENTS RED AUERBACH'S GUARDIAN OBIT

2008-06-18T21:37:00.007+01:00

They weren't my first sporting love: that would be Yale football, or my second, that would be the New Haven Blades, but the Boston Celtics weren't far behind that. Bill Russell, Bob Cousy, Tommy Heinsohn, Satch Sanders, Bill Sharman, Sam Jones, KC Jones, Losty in their low black Converse; every kid I knew who played basketball had to have Converse; would spit on US Keds, and those of us in the know wanted black ones. My parents wouldn't cough up the extra dough for Cons, not until I could make up the difference myself, and black ones weren't easy to find in those days. Not like now, when they're style accesories, and of noticeably cheaper build since they've become that and Converse was bought out.

Is there an American man alive who would know what 'parquet' meant were it not for the floor of the Boston Garden? I mean the old Gahden, not the TD Banknote North or whatever it's called arena. Note to the sponsors: you want me to remember the name, you better sponsor ME. And above it all hung the cigar smoke of Red Auerbach.

The Celtics winning their first title in 22 years, their 17th overall, and stopping Phil Jackson from breaking Red's mark of 9 as coach had a certain emotional power to it. Not that I feel for the team as passionately as I did in college, when I watched them deflate the hearts of my Philly and LA fan friends (Moid and Jay, you know who you are). Bailey Howell, Don Nelson, Larry Siegfried, Willie Naulls. Nor the Dave Cowens-JoJo White-Don Chaney era teams, nor the exceptional days of the 80s, when Bird, McHale, Parrish, Ainge, DJ, Wedman, Walton, Sichting, Westphal may have been the best NBA team ever. You don't believe me, watch a few clips on YouTube, which I did late one night last week: it's amazing team basketball.

I was worried the team was cursed. Red's legerdemain in getting Len Bias in the draft was erased by his cocaine OD the next day. Then draft steal Reggie Lewis died. No team could bounce back from that. I thought they had sunk to levels of mediocrity that would turn Red pale. So give Danny Ainge immense credit for bringing in Kevin Garnett and Ray Allen. For assembling the supporting cast (was Rajon Rondo the MVP of game six or what? Was Posey great? Is Big Baby the kind of guy the old Celts would love). Doc Rivers may be the second coming of KC Jones as a coach, who knows?

I may not be as passionate about the Celts, because I'm not as passionate about basketball (the game seems more athletic but less interesting than I remember), and because I don't see many games (when you stay up to broadcast, it's harder to make yourself stay up NOT to broadcast!) and because the mystique seemed to be gone, but this team certainly brought some of that feeling back. There isn't a whole lot of mystique in sports these days. There's lots of hype.
There's lots of image. But mystique? It's as rare as a Johnny Most interpretation of a call that was biased in the Celtics' favour.

But it is as if Red were still there. Loads of the Old Celts were there, and someone noted that in Boston, only championship banners are hung from the rafters. None of this 'Atlantic Division runners up' crap you'll find in Hooterville, Florida or Georgia.

In honour of the Celtics' being NBA champions once again, and all (well, maybe not all, but all things basketball) being right with the world, I'm going to post a gem off Mike's spike: an obit of Red Auerbach which was commissioned by the Guardian, but never used. In the end, someone always felt Red's brilliance wouldn't translate to a British audience. See if you agree. And remember, I left out all the good stuff that would have taken too long to explain!

Here it is:

RED AUERBACH: ARCHITECT OF BASKETBALL'S GREATEST DYNASTY
In the late moments of basketball games at the Boston Garden, often with the outcome apparently still undecided, Boston Celtics’ coach Red Auerbach would lean back on the bench, and, with elaborate pretence, light the cigar ever-present in his mouth. This ‘victory cigar’ cued a roaring wave of Churchillian triumph. It also produced hostile rage from visiting players, coaches, and fans, but crucially, that rage would be directed at the short, balding man in the loud jacket, whose team would, more often than not, beat theirs.
Auerbach, who has died aged 89, was professional basketball’s greatest coach. Between 1957 and 1969, his Celtics won 11 NBA titles, a dynastic dominance un-matched by baseball’s Yankees or ice hockey’s Montreal Canadiens. Auerbach coached the first nine champions, then as general manager oversaw the next two, and two more in the 1970s. In the 80s, as team president, he built another nascent dynasty, with three more titles; one which, but for tragedy, might have extended into the next decade.
You can compare Auerbach to a number of legendary football managers. His taunting cigar was the prototype for the Mourinhos or Fergusons, bosses who deflect attention from their players, leaving them free to concentrate on their games. It led to Greg Kite, a reserve whose entry into a game usually signified its wrap-up, being nicknamed ‘the human victory cigar’. Like another football manager, Brian Clough, Auerbach possessed the rare ability to judge talent, constantly stealing other teams’ under-valued journeymen or aging veterans, who then blossomed in his system. Red’s seemingly uncontrollable temper, however, put even Clough‘s to shame. Unlike Clough, Auerbach‘s outbursts, including fist-fights with players, fans, and even an owner, were always directed at opponents. He was as canny a handler of players as Alf Ramsey or Bill Shankly. ‘You don’t handle them,‘ he said. ‘Players are people, not horses’. Auerbach drove the happy-go-lucky Tom Heinsohn relentlessly, yet allowed star centre Bill Russell to rest through virtually all practice scrimmages. And Red could boast the dress sense of Don Revie.
Having grown up Jewish in Brooklyn, where his father, an immigrant from Russia, ran small businesses, Auerbach’s experience of prejudice put him in the forefront of basketball’s integration. He selected Chuck Cooper, the first black player drafted by the NBA, in 1950. Ten years later, in a league whose unwritten rule was ‘2-3-5‘ (‘start two black players on the road, three at home, but play five when behind‘), he started the NBA’s first all-black lineup. After his record ninth championship as coach (since matched by Phil Jackson), he named Russell the NBA’s first black head coach.
Auerbach was a hustler, always looking for a edge, and usually finding it. Small ones, like keeping the visitors’ dressing room in Boston Garden small, dirty, and unheated. And bigger ones, like arranging to choose Russell whose defensive and rebounding skills would prove crucial to the Celtics’ success, in the 1956 NBA draft. Celtic owner Walter Brown controlled the Ice Capades; Auerbach offered Rochester, who held the draft’s first pick, extra dates in their arena by the profitable show in return for passing on Russell. Knowing Hawks’ owner Walter Kerner, who held the second pick, was wary of bringing a black star to segregated St Louis, he offered a star player in return for the pick, and, when Kerner insisted, threw in his current starting center too. The Celtics soon beat St. Louis to win their first NBA title. But it was Russell’s triumphs over Wilt Chamberlain (whose Guardian obit I also wrote) that became the stuff of legend. Only the slender 6-9 Russell could keep the massively talented 7-2 Chamberlain in check, though never completely. But year after year, in the playoffs, Russell seemed to rise to the occasion, and the Celtics with him. So when Philadelphia made Chamberlain the NBA’s first $100,000 player, the otherwise frugal Auerbach gave Russell a contract for $100,001.
Auerbach’s road to Boston began at Washington’s George Washington University, where he played for three seasons. He coached in Washington DC high schools, and taught at a reform school, before serving in the Navy during World War II. In 1946 he was named coach of the Washington Capitols, for the NBA‘s inaugural season, and compiled three winning seasons. After the only losing season of his career, with the Tri-Cities Blackhawks, he was hired to coach the hapless Celtics in 1950, and immediately led them to their first playoff appearance.
Over the years Auerbach would risk drafting players committed to other sports, like baseball’s Danny Ainge, or, like superstar Larry Bird, who could have re-entered the draft the following year. By convincing San Francisco he would draft a player they coveted, in 1980 he extracted Robert Parrish and the pick that became Kevin McHale; with Bird they completed the greatest frontcourt in NBA history. He repeated the chicanery to draft Maryland’s Len Bias just after Boston won their last title, with Auerbach as team president, in 1986, but Bias died of a cocaine overdose two days later, which signalled the end to the Celtic’s dynasty, a signal reinforced by the sudden death from heart failure of another shrewdly-drafted star, little-known Reggie Lewis from Boston’s Northeastern University.
Auerbach remained with the team, even once forcing out an owner by threatening to join the New York Knicks unless he sold the club. Three days before his death Auerbach attended a ceremony at which he was honoured with the US Navy’s ‘Lone Sailor’ award. He died of a heart attack before he could travel to Boston for the season’s opening game; the Celtics will dedicate their season to him, though these post-Auerbach days, that is hardly a tribute. His wife of 54 years, the former Dorothy Lewis, died in 2000; he is survived by two daughters.
Arnold ‘Red’ Auerbach born 20 Sept 1917 Brooklyn
Died 28 October 2006 Washington DC

EUROPEAN CHAMPIONSHIP DRAW FIXED? OR JUST STUPID?

2008-06-16T18:09:00.005+01:00

What is it with international soccer tournaments? I've been watching World Cups and European Championships for more than 30 years, and I even took charge of the world feed for the 94 World Cup matches in Chicago, but I've never understood the prediliction for formats designed to maximise either negative play or unfair matchups. With Germany playing Austria tonight, I was reminded of their 1982 World Cup match where they played to a nicely weighted 1-0 win for the Germans, just enough to sneak both past Algeria, who had played earlier in the day. Round robins in groups of four are always going to produce clunkers in the final games, especially in the era of the three-point win, but it's unlikely the round-robin groups will ever be any larger.

But the current Euro format has a crucial flaw: the quarterfinals seed teams was the same groups into the same semifinal bracket...Group A and B have their winners and runners-up cross-paired, with the winners meeting in the semifinal. This creates the possibility, for example, that Portugal, having beaten Turkey 2-0, might have to play them a second time 18 days later to reach the final.

This is particularly unfair to the two teams that escape the so-called 'group of death', Holland, Italy, France, and Romania. Indeed, with Spain being joined by either Sweden or Russia, you could argue that half of the draw is far stronger than the one which boasts, coincidentially enough, both host countries, Switzerland and Austria, and their German cousins.

If I were a Dutch supporter, which would I prefer--Spain or a repeat match with either Italy, France, or Romania? Or would I rather face, say Turkey or Croatia?

Strangely, with Croatia, Poland, and the Czech Republic added to those three, six of the eight
teams in that half of the draw are what we might consider Mittel European, while the other eight traverse most of the continent. Was the fix in? Try to keep those home teams in as long as possible? Make sure Germany has a good shot to stay alive, in case they don't.

Or is it just unthinking complacency to miss the anomalies? It would be a simple thing to mix the second place teams from groups A & B aginst the first place teams from C & D, and fairer by far. But of course, once you put those little cards with the country names on the board during the draw, you have to keep the lines running straight. Or else you'd be offside.

MY GUARDIAN OBIT OF TIM RUSSERT

2008-06-16T07:36:00.010+01:00

My Guardian obituary of Tim Russert is in today's paper.

This wasn't commissioned until after I'd posted Saturday morning's quick reaction to Russert's death, and I wrote it Sunday.

It has been edited slightly: I liked his line, after testifying in the Libby trial, that it was easier throwing grenades than catching them, and I also gave him credit for recognising Ohio as key to the 2004 election. I had included a quote from Nicholas Lemann, describing how his book is not really about his dad, but about validating the likeable, just-folks, Russert 'brand'.

There was also a bit describing the apotheosis of the celebrity/inside problem, pointing out that the April Clinton-Obama debate, where Charles Gibson (celebrity chat show host) and George Stephanopoulos (ex political insider) took their imitation of the Russert method to near-parody in their embarrassing chase of the 'gotcha' moment through trivial question after question. It was a valid point, but for a piece on media, not for Russert's obit, and I'm glad it was lost. The lead bull isn't responsible for every word from the herd.

One thing I didn't write, but I can't help thinking, and the photo the Guardian used reinforced my thought, was that if you were going to hire an actor to play Russert, it might be WC Fields.
Or vice-versa.

Re-reading it, I don't think I emphasized quite enough just how much agenda-setting Meet The Press could do, and, especially in the sense that Russert's tenure on the programme virtually paralleled the presidencies of Clinton and this Bush, how pathetic, how trivial, how tragic, that agenda-setting was. But perhaps that would be speaking too much ill.

Follow this link: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/jun/16/usa.television

GIVING IT A REST: STRAHAN, OGDEN RETIRE

2008-06-15T12:25:00.003+01:00

Two NFL players this week announced their retirements, and both are going to be sure-things for the Hall of Fame. The most attention went to the Giants' Michael Strahan, after all, they are coming off a Super Bowl win, and it is New York. Strahan is a lively personality, who
wasn't hurt in the eyes of the often-vicious New York press by either his early feud with coach Tom Coughlin, his Brett Favre-ish retirement dance before last season, or an acrimonious divorce, mostly because he remained such an open and good interview. He was very accomodating to us at Five both in Atlanta, when we did the Giants live, and in London.

I remain dismissive of Strahan's single-season sack record: the NFL were wrong to award the record-breaking sack to him not because Favre deliberately lay down for him but because Favre wasn't running a pass play: there were no receivers to throw to, and thus it was a run, not a pass. But I have never been dismissive of Strahan's skills. Always an explosive pass-rusher, he built himself up into a fine run defender too, and maintained that ability even as he deliberately lost weight to maintain his quickness.

What is most interesting is that, unlike most premium pass-rushers who play the right side, to attack the (right-handed) quarterback's blind side, Strahan always played the left, which is generally considered the spot for a run-stopper (most teams run more to their right). But when you think about it, putting your best rusher on the left gives you two advantages--first, he's rushing against the other team's second-best tackle, usually a guy considered stronger as a run blocker, and second, you're rushing in the QB's face...you can cause panic, watch his eyes, read passing lanes, and knock down balls. Yes, you lose the possible turnovers when you hit the passer from hism blind side, but I've always thought the advantages outweigh that.

Anyway, Strahan goes out on top with a Super Bowl win, and that's always a good thing.

Jonathan Ogden goes out after an awful season by the Ravens, in which he played hurt when he played at all, but that should not overshadow exactly how dominant a left tackle he was.

If QB is the most important position, the guy who rushes the QB is probably the second-most important, and the guy who blocks the rusher is probably third, which is why good left tackles get the big bucks, why the Dolphins decided to build their new team around Jake Long, and why so many tackles went in this year's draft's first-round. The logic was the same as when Ozzie Newsome decided to build the Ravens around Ogden, whom he took with the fourth pick of the 1996 draft.

Ogden wasn't the favourite of every scout, because he didn't fit the template of his sort of player. He was highly intelligent, from an affluent family, and skipped spring football to throw the shot for the track team. Plus, at 6-9, he was taller than the conventional upside for a tackle: extreme height makes it harder to generate leverage. It also helps explain why Ogden's toe injuries were so crippling. But Ogden made up for that with amazingly quick feet, tremendous hands, and smarts which allowed him to cut off most rushers before they'd finished their moves. Anyone who read John Feinstein's excellent study of a Ravens' season knows how much his teammates respected Ogden, and to me he's the second coming of Baltimore's great Jim Parker, whose legacy sadly rests with the Colts in Indianapolis, at least according to the NFL. It would be nice if Ogden and Strahan went into the Hall together, and maybe did a little one-on-one, just for fun.

FATHER'S DAY: IN NEW YORK, LA, AND ENGLAND

2008-06-14T11:00:00.001+01:00

My friend Bruce Tyson, who's only just younger than I am,
has had his second daughter, after a twenty-some year hiatus.

He wrote a touching blog on his reminiscence of father's day,
for the website of his breast-pump company,
Pumpstation (so it isn't like he abandoned the infancy thing
completely in the interim!)
here's the link:
http://www.pumpstation.com/pumpstation /dept.asp?s_id=0&dept_id=3434&mscssid=
Meanwhile, for my father's day I was brought coffee,
cards, and a little gift in bed by Nate and Kirsten. Nate asked
why Mommy's card was addressed to Michael, not Daddy?
Because he's your daddy, but he's my husband, Kirsten told Nate.
He thought about it for a second and then said, 'when I grow up,
I'm going to be your husband.' That's my little Oeddie!

RIP TIM RUSSERT

2008-06-14T08:54:00.002+01:00

While reading the eulogies for Russert, who by all accounts was a likeable sort of guy, and a Buffalo Bills fan, it is important to remember that he was perhaps the first of the political 'insiders' to move into a media analysis role, and all the way to celebrity status. Unlike, say, Cokie Roberts, he wasn't a hereditary member of the Beltway mob, but he opened doors for more staffers to move into punditry. It was no coinicidence that George Stephanopolous was, like Russert, at the center of punditry controvery during the debates. Criticisms of the questioning during this year's primary campaigns usually concentrate on party-partisanship, but beg the question of the bigger partisanship, which is the view from inside the Beltway, and the disconnect between there and the rest of America. It's hard to see what's really going on when you're in your Georgetown townhouse and moving for the summer to Nantucket alongside Jack Welch.

Instead, the insiders go on television and radio and use sex and gender and race to pander to their audience and set an agenda designed to serve as a red flag to a bull. It's the electorate that suffers.

In Britain, we're still in the stage of journalists doing political TV, sort of where the US was in the 50s and 60s, but because journalism has been an hereditary insider profession in this country for so long, there's actually more movement from journalism (or TV production) TO politics here.

Though British media does seem to regard it as their duty to provide a living for certain politicians after the voters reject them --such as Portillo (and his emanuensis, Gove) and Oona. Perhaps it's an Oxbridge thing?

HOLLAND 2 EUROPE 0

2008-06-14T08:46:00.001+01:00

Having just beaten the two World Cup finalists by a combined 7-1, the current Dutch are looking like their glory teams of the 1970s. It's not 'total football', there's more traditional positional discipline, but unlike the Dutch teams of the past decade or so, there's also none of the finger-pointing, Kobe Bryant-style, me-first attitudes that seemed to stymie those teams in the clutch.

The interesting thing about both games is how easy it would have been for either Italy or France to have drawn or even won the game, yet how dominating the Dutch have seemed. Of course France were helped by a German ref who seemed to think this was UFC, not UEFA, and the Makelele was actually Kimbo Slice.

Quite a contrast to the Italy game, where the Swedish ref and his linesman contracted a huge case of Testicular elephantitis and ruled Van Nistlerooy onside for his goal. Correctly of course. If you could play someone offside by leaving the field, you'd do it all the time. And when two teammates collide and one decides to play dead (I read in the Guardian that he was 'obviously injured', except he received no treatment, didn't leave the game, and continued playing, as you'd expect from a soccer player who was in a near-death state moments before, at full speed) it would be harsh to penalise the opponents who are attacking their goal.

Now if the Dutch were Italians, they would go out and lose deliberately to Romania, thus ensuring neither France nor Italy go through to the next round!