SAY IT AINT SO, AROID

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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?

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!

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

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!

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

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...

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

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:

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

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

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

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?

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

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

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!

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

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

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!