Downtime and the Silver Screen revisited

Anyone that reads my stuff knows two basic facts about me -

1. I'm not too big on sports outside of football and baseball so this downtime between seasons is ...well...downtime.
2. I'm a movie buff. I love movies. Enough of one that I minored in film while in college and was stunt coordinator for a video shot in Rhode Island for the Kelly Deal 6000 back in 1996. I will enjoy films that I recognize as bad films.
   

That said, this is what I wanted to address...

I wanted to do the ten best sports films to hit the silver screen. I've done top ten lists of sports films before, waxing poetic about films like The Natural, Breaking Away, and Chariots of Fire. But I haven't done the list like this. This is going to be a list of the ones not traditionally thought of as sports films.

The most important rule of this list is that it involve some sort of competitive sport, or the link to sports that is integral to the plot of the movie.

And here's the list, along with the relevant sport and a little something about the film...

10. Better Off Dead (Skiing) - 1980's comedy cult-classic featuring a young John Cusak as Lane Meyer. Meyer loses his girlfriend to the captain of the high school ski-team and spends the movie exploring a variety of suicide options. The movie climaxes with a ski race between Meyer and Stalin, the captain of the ski team. For those of you who have not seen the film, there's a great Howard Cosell reference/running joke through the course of the film.

9. Bananas (Howard Cosell, announcing) - This might seem an odd choice, but the early Woody Allen comedy has two absolutely genius scenes with Cosell. The scenes bookend the film with Cosell announcing two wildly inappropriate activities that have virtually nothing to do with sports.

8. The Quiet Man (Boxing, horse racing) - I'm not a John Wayne guy. I just never really got the fascination. I am, however, a fan of John Huston and I have always had a soft spot for this film. Wayne plays a retired boxer returning to his familial roots in Ireland. While the fight choreography is not to today's standards, the brawl at the end is good fun.

7. The Blood of Heroes (Random made-up future sport) - Ah. The sport of juggers. I love this film. It's part of the low-budget post-apocalyptic society movies of the 1980's in the vein of The Road Warrior. The movie focuses on a brutal sport that pretty much entails two teams of five vying to put a dog skull on a stake.

6. Ong-bak: the Thai Warrior (Competitive muay-thai) - Realistically, the plot of this movie is almost a martial arts cliche. The bad guys offend a temple and its greatest student tracks them down to restore the honor of the temple. The martial arts, however, are phenomenal. Some of the best scenes take place in a bar with people betting on matches. Worth a look for any martial arts fan. And if you are a MA fan and have yet to catch Tony Jaa, then you're missing out.

5. Jet Li's Fearless (Wushu, athletic association) - One of the last of Jet Li's martial arts epics, this one is based in the foundation of the Chin Woo or Wushu Athletic Association. The film is shot beautifully, on par with other martial arts epics like House of Flying Daggers or Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. The film ranges from street fights to tournaments, thus the inclusion on the list.

4. Gladiator (Gladiatorial games) - Let's face it. They were referred to in ancient Rome as "The Games." The blood-sport in which these athletes engaged is at the roots of a number of modern sports from football to boxing.

3. Unleashed (Underground fighting) - Known by the title Danny the Dog in Europe, this little movie is about a man conditioned from boyhood to be a thug's guard/attack dog. This makes this list for two sequences in which Danny is forced into unsanctioned underground fights in order for his "owner" to make a few extra bucks.

2. Marathon Man (Running) - This classic about Nazis in hiding, diamonds, and a guy in the wrong dentist chair at the wrong time could easily have been number one. Featuring Dustin Hoffman as a runner training for the marathon in the Olympics, his studies and training end up horribly interrupted when he accidentally stumbles into his brother's (Roy Scheider) second life. Not for the faint of heart, nor those who already have a fear of dentists.

1. Fight Club (Bare-knuckle brawling) - Clever, this film is largely built around split personalities and illegal blood-sport. Well...that, and soap. If you've seen the film, you understand.

Well...those are my ten. I'm sure I missed a few, and would love to know which ones you think I might have missed. I have to admit, I considered both The Odd Couple, and Mighty Aphrodite as they both feature sports writers.

Happy New Year!

For those of you who don't know, we are entering the year of the rat based on the Chinese lunar calendar.

Last night I participated in a Chinese cultural show here in Maryland to celebrate the Chinese New Year (I'm center in the traditional Kung-fu uniform, and the two in the yellow tee-shirts are two of my students).

It was an interesting experience.

It reminded me of something that we, as sports fans, tend to take for granted...

The ability to perform in front of a large group of strangers.

From a young age I participated in organized sports - little league started when I was in Kindergarten or first grade, when I was in third grade I was in youth soccer, by fifth grade I was playing street hockey in a league, by the time I was thirteen I was training in karate and fourteen, participating in tournaments. I ran track in high school, and played football and soccer. There was always some sort of crowd watching the games, at the tournaments, or at the track meets - whether parents, local community reporters, or other family members, or participants waiting between events, it didn't matter who - there were always spectators.

In spite of this, I had an issue with stage fright while growing up. I was horrible at delivering oral reports for this reason. It didn't occur to me at the time that my ability to perform in the athletic arena should have been no different. Except for the fact that execution on the athletic field had always been in front of a crowd. Execution in the academic arena had not.

I digress.

I bring this up because neither of the two students that performed last night were athletes. I spent as much time before the performance assuring them that there was nothing to worry about as I did tweaking their form. And in spite of all the panic and worry they showed before going on stage in front of several hundred people, the two performed well.

I think it's easy to forget that performing at the highest levels in professional athletics in front of huge crowds comes with a pressure most of us never feel.

Don't get me wrong - I'm not making excuses for the highly regarded who fail at the highest levels of athletics when the pressure is on - particularly since that is the living they chose and they have trained to get to that point, usually their entire lives. I can get where a highly regarded prospect coming into Major League Baseball can crash and burn - until they hit the majors, they're never in front of a crowd in the minors like they see in the majors (unless the guy plays for some team in Florida). I'm less understaning of football wherein most division I college teams play in front of crowds larger than the crowds they see in the NFL - which is why I have to tip my hat to Giants tight end Kevin Boss, who went from playing in front of crowds no larger than 6,000, to crowds larger than 60 thousand.

Then you have other sports - like Olympic gymnastics, figure skating, tennis, and sometimes even golf and soccer - where an enormous amount is expected at an unrealistically young age. Then we end up with people like Freddy Adu and Anna Kournikova who are considered disappointments in their respective sports before they even reach the age of 21.

My personal favorite whipping post of the young crowd has been Michelle Wie. But if you go back and look at what I have said about her, it usually relates to the special treatment she gets at the hands of the press and the tournament sponsors who grant her exemptions as though her career has shown that she has earned the special treatment. Ultimately, though, it appears that her problems come from how she has dealt with the pressures that have gone along with the expectations, both internal (from her family), and external (the media and fans) that she has faced.

As for the teams that I follow...

It's a hard thing to play in places like New York or Boston, where the media and the fans will absolutely crush a player - and it takes a special mentality to pull it off.

The changing face of the sports media

Please bear with me on this - I will get to the sports side of things.

It's more than the sports media. There has been a trickle down effect.

News has become entertainment.

It is why a couple of reporters did something for the Washington Post in the 1970's that could never happen now. It is why the press has failed in its responsibility as a watchdog over politics and industry over the last decade. We read about some nut-job woman from Atlanta who bails on her fiance and runs to Vegas for almost two months, but watch the press treat the current administration largely with kids gloves in spite of the myriad of Constitutional offenses that the current group appears to be guilty of.

The closest we've seen to Woodward and Bernstein in the last 30 years has been Fainaru-Wada and Williams in the case of Barry Bonds.

Hard hitting reporting is a dying breed in favor of the Fox Newsettes, the pretty faces that have taken the place of your Walter Cronkites and Charles Kuralts. The sons of Walter Winchell, the preachers of the gossip column have taken control.

An unfortunate and fortunate side-effect of the overall impact of the Washington Post's Watergate reporting has been that public figures' private lives have become public. It has become more important for the media to cover things like Tony Romo spending a weekend with Jessica Simpson, or the fact that Bill Belichick wears a hoodie on the sideline, than what's happening between the hashmarks. It's more important that we know that Jenna Bush is getting married or publishing a children's book than it is that our vice president may have been directly involved in the dismissal of federal District Attorneys for nothing more than political reasons.

And the reason is that we, as a news consuming public, eat it up. We demand the fluff stories, writing off the important news of the day as boring.

It runs from the hard news through to the sports news.

We call for changes to the games, to the leagues...as long as the team we root for is kept out of it. We revel in the embarrassment of the other teams, and more often than we should, act as though our teams are innocent of wrong-doing. As fans, we have the arrogance to believe that we root for people that are clean.

And when our teams our caught, our favorite players nailed, we circle the wagons. Bonds apologists will claim that steroids have no real impact on the sport, but be unable to explain why, then, players use them.

Fans of other teams go on the attack, in spite of the fact that everything in the history of sport shows us that at the worst possible time that those same teams that people are fans of will have some scandal of their own - multiple criminals like the Bengals, a pleasure cruise gone awry in Minnesota, a number of different baseball players representing almost every team in the majors on a list of steroid and HGH users, a boxer's name being linked to an illegal HGH ring shortly before a title bout.

Sometimes the players are caught in off-field shenanigans like Alex Rodriguez, or going on an innocent vacation with their girl-friend in what should be non-stories for the sports page, but they take on a life of their own because we dig in like jackalls.

People complain about the press, but we keep coming back, because what they give us is what we (as a society) want. It's what sells the papers. The irrelevant. The stupid and innocuous.

Reporting about sports was once about great feats on the field of play, and the occasional trade. Now it's as much about business and gossip as anything else.

Is it jealousy? Possibly. Great resentment festers in the light of great success. It's why in the 1970's there were people who hated the Dallas Cowboys, and, more recently, the Yankees of the 1990's, and right now, the Boston professional sport scene.

I have no problem with the resentment. I just wish we would focus on the sports, on the facts, and tell the press we're done with unsubstantiated rumor and innuendo.

Merry Chismakwanzuka!

Being a fan of a sports franchise inherently makes it easier on loved ones purchasing holiday gifts. To wit - my wife purchased for me a Richard Seymour jersey. It is the first jersey that I have owned with a currently active player's name on it.

Allow me to explain.

I'm cheap.

I own two Bledsoe jerseys and a Ben Coates jersey, all of which I got on clearance racks for a combined total of less than $45.00. The Bledsoes I bought in a show of support for both the Patriots and the man's career while playing for the fightin' flying Elvii. The Coates jersey was the first that I purchased, just to have a Pats jersey (and I liked the player, even though he had moved on by the time I bought it).

And as much as I like the Seymour jersey, on Saturday night I will be found in my living room wearing the same silver number 11 as I have on 15 other weekends of this season, watching the Pats play the Giants. Why? Because I am just as freakishly superstitious as most fans and athletes.

Throughout high school, as a sprinter for my track team, I wore the same bandanna on my left ankle to every track meet I ran in over the course of the four years I ran. By my senior year, it was little more than a tattered green scrap of cloth, but I continued to wear it.

Back to the gifts...

My wife's parents got me a grey Pats hoodie that feels like it's fleece-lined. It's nicer than most of my winter gear.

Heck, on Sunday, as I was pulling on my ratty Bledsoe jersey, my five-year-old daughter asked for a jersey of her own to wear on "football days." I'm already looking for her for her birthday.

Then, of course, there are the gifts that come from unexpected sources - particularly if you're a New England/Boston fan of at least a particular age...

As I have mentioned before - if I had been sitting in a bar back in 1992 watching that atrocious Pats team, and the current day me had gone back and told 22-year old me that the Patriots would dominate the first decade of the new millennium with three Super Bowl wins, that in 15 years they would be the best team that football had ever seen, and that the Red Sox would have won two World Series, I would have kicked the crap out of me for mocking my pain as a Boston fan.

But how's this for a Christmas present for fans of the Hub's sports franchises -

• Red Sox 2nd World Series of the decade.
• 15-0, and on the verge of the best offensive performance in a season by any football team, ever - and with the potential to finish the season with both the number one offense and number one defense.
  
• Resurgent Celtics and Bruins franchises that look like they could compete beyond this year.
• Harvard's Ivy League title in football.
• Boston College's 10-3 flirtation with a national title, and potential Bowl win in the upcoming game.
• New England Revolution Eastern Conference champions.
  

Happy Holidays Hub Fans, know that the nation hates us right now!

Cheating and fan hypocrisy

With the Patriots due to play the 3-10 New York Jets on Sunday, a lot is going to resurface in regards to Camera-gate, Tape-gate, Spy-gate, or whatever you want to call it. In the wake of every game, some fan of some team puts their foot in their mouth and wants to yell about the Patriots as cheaters.

I have not denied that the Pats were caught doing something they weren't supposed to be doing, nor would I. The irony of it is that the problem was that they were filming from the sideline. If they had done it from the coaches' booth, it wouldn't have been considered cheating (a stupid loophole, but a loophole none the less).

I would, however, point out to the Eagles fans, Steelers fans, Rams fans, and other groups that complain that the Patriots championships deserve an asterisk that, while the league frowned on the practice, the sideline camera wasn't officially outlawed by the NFL until this season. The Pats kept doing it. They got caught in the first half of the first quarter of the first game of the season.

They were nailed with an unprecedented punishment.

So it goes.

For those fans who want to continue this holier than thou farce, I give you the following -

2006-2007 Pittsburgh Steelers - in the spring, one of the team's game-day sideline doctors was fingered by a federal investigation into illegal distribution of HGh by one of Florida's anti-aging clinics. Despite claims by the doctor that the hormone was used for elderly patients, the Steelers dismissed the doctor. Considering he purchased through illegal channels, his claims come off as somewhat disingenuous.

2007 New York Jets - Accused of emulating the snap count on defense in a game against the Baltimore Ravens, a personal foul that should have resulted in at least one, if not multiple personal fouls for unsportsmanlike conduct, had the officiating crew noticed.

1998-2007 Indianapolis Colts - Repeatedly accused by opponents, including the Steelers, Jaguars, and Patriots (among others), of piping in crowd noise. In spite of the fact that the NFL absolved the team of wrong-doing in the most recent incident, rumors abound that a stadium employee has acknowledged the team's cheating.

2007 Washington Redskins - Multiple Redskins fans have blogged this season that the Skins are piping crowd noise into FedEx field. The claims are being made by people who claim to be attending the games and sitting under the speakers.

2007 Green Bay Packers - Still currently under investigation by the NFL for reports of defensive players offering "bounties." League rules prohibit teams and players "from offering or accepting bonuses to a player for his or his team's performance against a particular team, a particular opposing player or players, or a particular group of an opposing team."

2007 Dallas Cowboys - In mid-November a trainer from Plano, TX plead guilty to possession of illegal steroids. The man provided federal investigators names of FORMER and CURRENT Cowboys whom he claims to have supplied with performance enhancing drugs.

2007 New York Giants - Have faced recent allegations that certain coaching decisions have been dictated by the Las Vegas point spread. Granted, this is speculation based on Big Blue's recent game against the Bears, however, if the Vegas point spread is indeed dictating coaching decisions and proof can be found to back this allegation, this could be a bigger scandal than the NBA ref incident.

Those are just the ones that hit the fan in the last twelve months - but are the fans of the following clubs ready to give up NFC Championships, AFC Championships, and even Super Bowl wins for the following?

1997 San Francisco 49ers - According to ESPN, "Carmen Policy made secret side deals with Young and three other players to clear out some cap room for the team. This, too, crossed the boundaries, and it came to the attention of the NFL Management Council, an ownership committee.
"After hearing Policy's protestations of innocence, Jerry Jones reportedly asked fellow committee members, 'How many of us believe what he said?'
"The 49ers eventually reached a settlement with the league, which docked the club two draft picks and assessed fines against Policy and general manager Dwight Clark."

1996-1998 Denver Broncos - Found to be in violation of multiple salary cap issues, were fined $950,000.00 and a third round draft pick in the third round of the 2005 draft by the less strict Paul Tagliabue. During that same time period, Broncos coach Mike Shanahan was caught filming (gasp! Not filming!) a Chargers practice...during the week...from a hill overlooking San Diego's practice facility.

1999 DenverBroncos/1998 Miami Dolphins - According to an article at ESPN..."In an interview published in the September 1999 issue of Muscular Development magazine, Conte said BALCO had 'provided testing and consultation for over 250 NFL players, including the entire Denver Broncos Super Bowl championship team, as well the entire Miami Dolphins team.'
"A Broncos spokesman told the Chronicle that the team was never a client of BALCO's and that any players who used the company did so on their own. Dolphins strength and conditioning coach John Gamble said that in 1998 Conte tested all of the Dolphins players for mineral deficiencies and that he subsequently sent supplements to counteract those deficiencies. Gamble said, though, that he did not believe Conte was paid for his services."

That's eleven teams (including the Pats) over the course of the last decade against which serious allegations were made, or were outright caught. Eight within the last year alone. And that was just based on a cursory search on a handful of teams.

I didn't include recent allegations by Shawn Merriman that Jeff Fischer "ordered a hit," this past weekend for three reasons - one; the blocks he's complaining about were clean and legal. Two; he's a whiner. Three; he was nailed for steroid use and hasn't exactly been the force he was since getting nailed.

I am by no means condoning what the Patriots coaching staff did earlier this season. To the contrary, I think it was mind-bogglingly stupid and unnecessary. They got caught, they got punished - and they should have been punished.

My point here is different.

My point is that the sanctimonious fans of other teams need to get off their high horse. I have no problem with those fans screaming about the Pats cheating, as long as those fans are acknowledging that their own team isn't a group of saints either...well, except of course for the Saints fans...but you get what I mean.

There is no such thing as an innocent team, there are only the ones that haven't been caught yet - and if you don't believe that with millions of dollars on the line in coaching contracts, player contract, endorsement deals, and various bonuses are going to prompt the most competitive people in our society to cheat, then you are truly among the most naive in society. Remember, part of the idea behind cheating is to not get caught.

For those who scream, "what does this teach the children," it teaches them that professional sports is a cold, hard business in which winning is the bottom line. If these people are using professional athletes as roll models for their children, well they're just morons.

Cheating in professional sports is a long standing tradition - from Ty Cobb sharpening his spikes and sliding with his feet high in order to cleat an opponent's shins, to Todd Bertuzzi's ordered hit on ice, to NASCAR pit crews making alterations to cars that violate NASCAR's rules, every sport, every team has a dark side to it's history that it doesn't want to see dredged into the light.

The White Sox have, arguably, the darkest story in all professional sports being the centerpiece of the 1919 Black Sox Scandal. Rumors abound that the 1970's Steelers, one of the most dominant teams in the NFL during the Super Bowl Era, were practically pioneers in the use of steroids (note, I did say rumors, although at least one Steelers lineman from the 1979 team came forward in 2000 to talk about his steroid use). Baseball Hall-of-Famer Gaylord Perry admitted to throwing the spitball. In 1963 the NFL suspended Packer Paul Hornung and Lion Alex Karras for gambling.

If you have a big problem with cheating, then give up on professional sports. If you want to believe that what each of these teams is doing creates an uneven playing field (which all of this is intended to do), then maybe it's time for you to walk away from the games. If you're looking for a villain because you need a bad guy - that's fine too, but admit, at least to yourself that's what you're doing. But don't pretend that there's a team out there that isn't doing everything it can in order to get an edge.

On another note -

The weighing in - 185, down 3.5 from my start weight last week.

Why Bob Costas is Da Man...

From a report on today's AP wire -

A day after Barry Bonds called him a "little midget man who knows (nothing)
about baseball," broadcaster Bob Costas said he wasn't upset with the San
Francisco Giants slugger and responded with a jab of his own.

"As anyone can plainly see, I'm 5-6 1/2 and a strapping 150, and unlike
some people, I came by all of it naturally," Costas said Thursday in a telephone
interview.

I know that there are many out there who do not like Costas, but I have to admit to being one of his fans. As long as I can remember watching him, the man has been a good interviewer, demonstrated a quick wit, doesn't mince words or suck up, and seems to have an encyclopedic knowledge of the sports he covers.

Arguably, I would put him amongst the top five best prepared sportscasters/commentators I have ever watched. Amongst them I would include Peter Gammons, Mike Lupica, Will McDonough, and Frank DeFord. If I really thought about it, there are others that would make the list (rounding it out to a top ten), but those are the ones that pop into my head first - all of which often rubbed their reading or viewing public the wrong way at times, but they always knew/know their facts and their history.

Possibly the best thing about Costas is that he gets the joke.

He understands that as a personality - which is what he is at this point - that you can't take yourself too seriously. With appearances on Saturday Night Live, and the television shows New Radio, Arli$$, The Larry Sanders Show, and The Critic, not to mention parts in movies such as Baseketball, Pootie Tang, and Pixar's Cars, he has time and again reminded us that he is not the guy who is going to take anything too seriously. He gets that he's not solving the world's woes. He's just a sportscaster...and he gets the joke.