Bryan Joiner

November 2, 2011

Tim Tebow and “Leadership”

The Tim Tebow experiment is, at its core, about “leadership.” If “leadership” exists, and one leads maximally, can one succeed in the NFL, despite a lack of talent? Obviously for those people who wish to assign qualities of “leadership” willy-nilly—basically everyone involved in the football/industrial complex—it would be wonderful if Tebow succeeded. He won’t, and his failure won’t be protracted or debatable. The noble experiment will end quickly and violently.

Will this stop NFL pundits for looking for the next great “leader?” Of course not. It’s alchemy, and alchemy is what they’re trained in. Guys like Peyton Manning and Tom Brady make their jobs boring by being quite good at their own jobs, and they are repeatedly knighted with leadership qualities when what they really have is talent. It helps that unlike in baseball, where the average fan can understand the game quite well, football is beyond the comprehension of even some people who study it for a lifetime. Watching football on TV will hardly get you closer to the truth of what’s happening out there, and why: it’s like digging with your hands to get to the Earth’s core.

Instead of taking an industrial core driller to the game, TV pundits are content to serve up the softest stories imaginable. It’s basically the Today show for dudes, and it’s hard to blame them. You can always pin the glory on a particular player, and you can nearly always spread the blame to another one. It’s a shell game in which we’ll only hit on the truth by accident.

There are a really just a handful of announcer types. They are:

a) The surface-level guys

b) The parrots

c) The guys who actually try to explain what’s going on

d) The moralists

Taking them one, by one:

The surface-level guys

This is almost everybody, from really good announcers like Mike Tirico to really bad ones like everybody. They describe game action without describing the game itself. There’s enough game action, and more, to fill the time. There’s nothing wrong with this approach, but it should be the baseline from which we strive to learn more, not less. Instead it usually works the opposite way around, and we think we know shit-all about football because we have the volume on. It’s just not true.

The parrots

I’m sticking with the Monday Night guys because it’s a Tuesday morning, but Ron Jaworski, who is awful, awful, awful, is a parrot. The parrots describe to you what you just saw. They do nothing more. They assume, implicitly, that your eyes do not work. Jaworski is getting worse at this, if anything. Maybe he feels like he’s being pushed aside in the X’s and O’s department by…

The guys who actually try to explain what’s going on

I can’t remember who said it, but I read on Twitter last year that “Jon Gruden likes football the way a kid likes dinosaurs,” and that couldn’t be phrased any better. Gruden believes in both halves of the equation, the Tebow-esque mysticism and the deep-cut diagramming, but it seems like he’s been actively discouraged from the second. He can’t help himself sometimes, however, and before you know it you’re thigh-deep in the intricacies of the Tampa-2 against four-receiver sets from seven to nine yards between the hashmarks. Cris Collinsworth is one of these guys, too, and better at it than Gruden, but less hilarious.

The moralists

Daryl Johnston, specifically, but almost all of them at one time or another. The strange thing about the moralists is that they’re fairly easy to tune out. They’ve become such a part of football that moralizing is essentially background noise until a guy like Tim Tebow shows up, and everybody starts doing it.

It’s clear that people want Tim Tebow to succeed, for reasons that are flimsy projections of their own self-images, and that a delusional 50.5 percent of the Broncos’ fanbase has hijacked the impressionable franchise the same way 50.5 percent of the populace steered the world into nonsense seven years ago. Why did they do this? In both cases, it was the invisible quality of “leadership” as embodied in an evangelical Christian. The difference is that Tebow doesn’t have a four-term. He’ll be lucky to last four days.

You might think I’m writing off the quality of “leadership.” I’m not. I just don’t think Tim Tebow is a leader in the NFL. Leadership in the NFL is about talent and preparation, and Tebow looks unprepared out there. Let’s agree to learn from Tebow, and let’s learn that football is a lot harder than it looks, even when it looks simple. Tim Tebow is very good at a specific type of football, but pretty much every player in the league is better than Tim Tebow at NFL football. Some of these players are leaders. All of them are very, very good at what they do.

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October 31, 2011

BREAKING: Patriots Sued by Switzerland

“F[***] neutrality,” Switzerland’s ambassador to the United Nations, Manuel Sager, tells me over the phone in more or less crystal-clear English, which I find amazing given the lather into which he’s worked himself. The mother tongue tends to return, for everyone, in moments of blind rage, but Sager sounds like he’s lived in Los Angeles (where he lives) for his whole life. He also sounds like he’s been up for hours, but it’s 8 a.m. on the East Coast and, well, do the math.

He has certainly done the math, and the math says this: Heath Miller had 97 receptions in a single half against the New England Patriots yesterday, Ben Roethlisberger 241 completions, and the Steelers put up an unprecedented 163 points against a New England team that just nine months ago was two home games away from the Super Bowl. In those nine months, the seven billionth person on Earth was conceived and born, and it’s a legitimate question to ask if the Patriots will have a pass rush before the eight billionth shows up in the form of Rob Gronkowski II.

But that question goes on the back-burner while the Patriots’s legal team—aided by that of the NFL—deal with the unprecedented litigious action of a sovereign nation against a sports franchise. Sources say employees in the Patriots’s front offices were walking around in a such stupor Monday morning that they didn’t notice Antonio Brown regularly whizzing past them on donut runs.

Their remorse won’t satisfy Sager. If the Pats’s D is more porous than Swiss Cheese, is a renaming in order? New England Patriots’s Defense cheese doesn’t sound appetizing, but it could stand to net the franchise millions of dollars in licensing fees, and Deadspin is reporting that someone with an IP address in Foxboro trademarked patriotscheese.com two weeks ago. A spokesperson for Owner Robert Kraft denied the report after it was picked up by Foxsports.com, but Sager isn’t taking any chances. An independent estimate shows that cutting the “Swiss” out of “Swiss Cheese” could put a big enough hit on the Swiss economy that it would be forced to apply for entry into the floundering European Union.

“That is NOT an option!” Sager yells, and there’s little doubt that anyone else in his house is awake at this point. “What we have here is a travesty of American, international and culinary justice.”

Anthony Bourdain, reached for comment, asked a reporter pointedly if he or she was working for The Onion and if they knew anything about the hours of the restaurant business, and what time they were calling, and the appropriateness thereof, after which point the connection went dead. A return call from what appeared to be Bourdain’s number asked a reporter to perform an unprintable act with a specific bakery item prominently featured in a digital short of a popular late weekend night variety show a few years back, at which point the line went dead.

Greg Aiello, a spokesperson for NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell, had no comment on the pending litigation, but told reporter via email that there was “no way those Krauts [sic] can win this lawsuit” and that the comment was “of the record.”

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October 29, 2011

The Ring and the Echo

In the end, Arthur Rhodes did not back into a championship ring. He was on the winning side, the one in St. Louis, not the losing side, of his former team in Texas. The same can’t be said for Colby Rasmus, the one-time phenom who was shipping out of St. Louis in the summer. Exiled to Toronto, he earned a championship ring tonight through the television. Adam Wainwright, dressed from head to toe in Cardinals white, won one too, one season after he finished second in the Cy Young award voting, throwing 230.1 innings—230.1 more than he’d throw in this, the championship year.

David Freese earned his ring and his MVP trophy, and Chris Carpenter, José Alberto Pujols Alcántara, Lance Berkman and Yadier Molina, among many others, can feel like they’ve done a lifetime’s worth of a job well done tonight. These things stick. They are intractable in a way a ring isn’t. You can’t sell having won a World Series on eBay. If you could have, Jose Canseco would have tried it long ago.

On the losing side, the Rangers gained something they’ve lacked for the first 50 years of their existence: an identity. They are, now, the great losers. Their talent and zest is undeniable, but the fissures upon which the organization stands have opened at precisely the wrong instances too many times in a row to be ignored. Ron Washington said he told his team that they were champions, but they were not. They were the other guys. The line in this series was as thin as it’s ever been between the two—I’m sure we’ll find out tomorrow or on Monday if, in the World Series alone, the Cardinals’s comeback was the most implausible in history. Mets and Angels fans might be ready to object, but the numbers will tell their warm story soon enough.

Even now, at this hour, my inbox is pulsing with emails from fans angry about Ron Washington’s intentional walks. It’s enough, they say, to have turned their allegiance to the Cardinals. I wished I shared their joy right now, because the National League leaves me cold in almost every instance. I find it near-impossible to share in their joy. You know the exceptions.

Tonight doesn’t seem like the night for lessons, but what could we learn, anyway? The Cardinals were the best in 2011, and that’s all that matters. Next season isn’t so far away, if you look real hard. It’s across the winter, and before you know it, it’ll be time for pitchers and catchers, and the pretentiousness that accompanies their arrival to retirement communities.

I don’t see the beauty of spring training. I love October baseball. It’s over, and it’s time to say goodnight everywhere but in St. Louis, where they’ll shield their eyes from next season, and even the next sunrise, for as long as possible. The National League’s steadiest institution has done it proud. As an AL fan, I’m begrudgingly respectful. The Cardinals came through when it mattered. I don’t know why that’s something I have to live with, but it is.

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October 28, 2011

Octoberfest

At some point during last night’s Sam Adams Octoberfest haze—it was the last keg of the stuff for the season, they said—I became aware that I would be a lot more emotionally invested in the sixth game of the World Series if I hadn’t been hangin’ with some buds, as the Budweiser ads implore us to do. Baseball’s fictional element breaks down when the mind is distracted, and it’s hard not be distracted when the game is broadcast scattershot alongside a ridiculous 9-8 Winnipeg Jets win and Thursday Night college football. It’s the slowness of baseball that makes it the darling of writers everywhere, including most recently Chad Harbach and Jane Leavy, who have eloquently and correctly expounded on how its pauses and emphasis on lingering facial expressions leave ample room for one’s imagination to operate.

In a sports bar, these pauses and emphases are wiped out. Alcohol does its part too. Alcohol pushes you to root for one team or another for an elemental reason you can’t quite put your finger on. It erodes the brilliance of sports-hate narratives to a simple “Fuck them.” It becomes personal instead of playful. Or should I say it does for me, anyway.

To me, there’s no better way to watch a baseball game than alone, in front of my television. Sports are a fiction, and fiction is best and almost exclusively consumed by oneself, allowing you to fill the pauses in the action, an elaborate Mad Libs playing on your senses of loyalty, heroism, good and evil. There’s no right or wrong way to love sports, but there’s always a better way. That’s why we talk about them so much: we’re refining.

This year’s World Series ratings aren’t great, but this year’s World Series is great, one of the greatest in memory. It has been at times grand and at times patently absurd. Despite what we are told, it is hard not to believe we’re seeing the best two teams in baseball. In an alternate universe, the Yankees and Phillies might be onto their seventh extra-inning game, the sixth having been won when Chase Utley bunted for a walk-off grand slam. That scenario would barely top last night’s Rangers/Cardinals game, with its endless assortment of gags and false endings, like a well-constructed but poorly written mystery novel. The hometown boy wins it. We’ll see you tomorrow night.

Tomorrow becomes today, and the words cascade. I wait for Will Leitch the Cardinals fan, Jonah Keri the steady, caustic and sarcastic observer and Joe Posnanski the master to weigh in. I search my own clouded headspace for a narrative, and realize that I drowned it. I’m not the only one. I wasn’t even the only one at my table.

At some point today the last Sam Adams Octoberfest will be poured from Ditmars Station Ale House. At some point today a mob of men will meet around a home plate or pitcher’s mound in St. Louis, throwing their caps gloves in the air in celebration, and maybe ripping someone’s jersey off. At some point today a series of disparate men and women will attack their keyboards all across the world, explaining what they saw. And at some point the fog will lift and I will know what I think happened in the 2011 World Series, and I’ll take my conclusion out to the masses, looking to defend, alter or disown it. And then I’ll do it all over again.

Fiction exists for a reason. It helps us learn about life through a shared experience. Its power comes from its texture, which is different from one book to the next. Sports are the same. Baseball is the best. The World Series is the best baseball has to offer. This is one of the best ever. Enjoy it.

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October 25, 2011

Costumes and Clockwork

A broken clock is, famously, right twice per day. Similarly, if I forget that I live in NEW YORK CITY during my commute, on the weekend, even when I see people peeing in public on the regs, there will be a couple things each day that remind me of what happens when this many people are crunched into this small of a space.

Take Eddie V. Eddie V. is a sales associate at a local Halloween store, which I visited for work today. I had some questions about Halloween trends, and he was eager to answer them. His brother, after all, owned the entire company, so I came to the right person! (I was told.) I asked him how to spell his name, and he told me. At the same time, he reached for his business card. Not uncommon when people want to make sure their names are spelled correctly, and his last name is alphabet runoff. Only the business card didn’t have his last name:

I DO work in Chelsea. Everyone here has their hustle, and I begrudge no one for trying, so I just kept asking about costumes, and he kept answering. (I didn’t see the web address until after, besides.)

Anyhow, did I know that his brother was second in line at the company for CEO? I hadn’t, because I had just been told he WAS CEO, but I didn’t mention it. I just asked whether he expected the store to get busier over the next week. He said that he did, but that he wouldn’t be there tomorrow or Thursday because his father had died yesterday and him and his brother had to attend the funeral. Makeup was a really big seller too, he added.

I thanked him for his time, offered my condolences, and walked away, and he seemed upset. He really liked talking about costumes.

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October 25, 2011

Theo: The adult no longer in the room

And… that happened.

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October 24, 2011

Why this Red Sox nonsense doesn’t happen with the Yankees

It’s easy to take any individual story from the New York Post during baseball season and shake your head at its stupidity. Stories like “Sources: A-Rod and Derek Jeter Don’t Have Sleepovers Any More” and “Video Shows Sheffield Scowling At Kitten” resonate in the public memory (whether I just made them up or not) precisely because they seem to have a news value of exactly zero, yet are repackaged in one form or another over and over from March to October, usually dwarfing the game stories and getting a second, third, fourth, fifth, and sixth life on ESPN. Nine for the kitten.

If the shitshow following the Red Sox collapse has taught us anything, it’s the functional utility of these stories. The culture of the Yankees extends beyond silly-on-the-surface rules like “No facial hair below the lip.” A player is, when signing in the Bronx, effectively relinquishing his right to privacy. It’s not in the contract, but that doesn’t make it any less true. It’s why the Yankees pay you more than you’re worth—in a very real way, it sucks to play for them, and everyone knows it.

The stories in the Post and Daily News, day after day, regularly trump anything the zaniest bloggers could come up with, and are legitimized by being printed on dead trees. The players have to talk about this stuff. It’s part of the job. It’s a small, constant distraction that seems wholly impractical, but if the Red Sox/Red Sox media (and really, they’re one and the same to the consumer) implosion has taught us anything, it’s that this sort of release valve isn’t only coldly practical, it’s actually kind of good. Red Sox fans fantasize that everything will be alright right up to the point it’s not, then point fingers at everyone. The media won’t report on drinking in the clubhouse during the season because they don’t know about it or don’t think it’s an issue if the team is winning. Their intention is not to rock the boat, it’s to ride it.

The New York media is not so callow. It knows its job is to sell papers, and if selling papers takes down the personal reputation of the GM, a manager, or star player, so be it. All in the game, homey. Even when Joe Torre got ridden out of town after a playoff loss, it was a story months in the making.

Boston fans can’t accept that the team just sucked for a month and lost because they got all this nonsense news they should have had way before their period of mourning. Correlation equaled causation, and that was that. Meanwhile, players who thought that they signed to play for a “new” Red Sox organization realize that they’ve been sold a bill of goods. The Sox are not the cuddly Yankees. They’re the backstabber, wannabe Yankees. The Yankees, as odious as they can be, are usually honest about their brutal intentions, and when they’re not, the media is honest with them.

Boston fans want a fiction, and they are uneager to have that fiction disturbed during the season. They project their own fears onto the team more readily than any fans in sports and think it won’t effect the end product. They watch and spend money after all, right? It’s easy for the Epstein-era fans to be ignorant of a time that no free agent wanted to come to Boston, to the point that when Manny showed up, and even then only for an Edgartown’s worth of money, it was a shock to the system. Somebody chose to play in Boston? That was a new one. Yes, players wanted to play for Red and K.C.’s Celtics and now Belichick’s Pats, but those are exceptions—they have nothing to do with Boston culture. KG had to be convinced to play there, and then it worked only because people reminded him he never, ever goes out on the town.

It’ll be interesting to see the long-term repercussions of this fiasco, whether this is just a bump in the road or a reversion to the Boston sports culture pre-literally everyone winning. That’s not a happy place. If we can’t handle the truth about our players—if we don’t actively seek it—it’s the one we deserve. We care, and we have no business pretending we don’t, yet we do, over and over and over. Spread the pain out and it’s more manageable. Hold it in and it’s not.

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October 21, 2011

The Coolest City on the Planet

So Hamilton Nolan thinks GQ is ridiculous for big-upping Brooklyn restaurants. And sure, the subhead is cloying:

Don’t take that as a knock onManhattan, which is doing ust fine. But for the first time since, well, ever, you can spend every New York minute of your trip on the far side of the East River and never feel like you’re missing out. Here’s how to explore the place where everything’s happening before it’s happening.

I mean golly gee whiz doody, I may be just a small-town rube, but that looks like a pretty good list to me. I mean, the real “coolest city on the planet” for food is Queens, hands down, but I don’t see anyone publishing that issue, least of all Gawker. (Well, New York Magazine did it, but I trust them on Queens as much as Nolan trusts GQ on Brooklyn.)

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October 21, 2011

Justice

“I don’t care if half the league strikes. Those who do will encounter quick retribution. All will be suspended, and I don’t care if it wrecks the league for 10 years. This is the United States of America, and one citizen has as much right to play as another.”

Ford Frick, per Joe Posnanski, on a potential Cardinals boycott of a game versus Jackie Robinson’s Dodgers in 1947.

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October 20, 2011

Buds

It’s hard for me to make sense of this whole drinking-in-the-clubhouse-and-possibly-dugout story. I do not care, but apparently I am lonely in not caring. Unless I am just one of many, many people who do not care and continue to click on the articles, thus giving the (digital) impression that I care.

I think people are frustrated with the collapse, and are looking to pin it on booze, a Massachusetts tradition dating back to 1620. Let’s be clear: the beer drinking, if an issue at all, was a symptom of the collapse, not a cause of it. Doc Gooden announced this week that he missed the 1986 Mets parade because he was on a coke binge. If he was sober during the World Series, I will eat my backpack.

Yes, in the 25 years since then, baseball players have developed better training regimens. Often, these training regimens have included steroids, and it should be noted that the 2004 Red Sox—who openly drank Jack Daniels in the clubhouse during the playoffs—looked like a Marvel Comics lineup out there. What can we do? We won, and we’re not going to apologize. Now we lost, and the players must grovel and cop to substance problems they don’t have. If it’s that easy, it’s a fixable problem. Ban booze, and up goes banner number eight.

It’s not that simple. I believe it was the philosopher Kenny Powers who observed that “fundamentals are a crutch for the talentless.” You don’t get to the show without being able to play. You need to resist the temptation to give yourself to booze, but a 240-pound man drinking a beer with the alcohol content of Poland Spring? Come on.

This not to say there wasn’t anything fundamentally wrong with the 2011 Red Sox, by the end. This team lost all hope in a way a team this talented really never has before. Losing seemed like a fait accompli from the moment the downward drift started, but that doesn’t mean it was one. They came perilously close to making the playoffs as it was. They didn’t. Oh well.

The players have owned up to drinking beer, and called it a non-issue. It’s the one thing they’ve gone out of their way to stress means absolutely nothing in the context of the current discussion. The collapse, the sense of dread, all of it was real. The team pushed each other to fail, but it’s not life and death, and certainly bears no relation to 17th century ideas about drinking. End the witch trial, and watch the Bruins.

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