Sure, we got a billion bucks lyin' around someplace

 Looks like the shoe is finally dropping in Buffalo and WNY, regarding the future of the region's NFL franchise: the team's owners, Terry and Kim Pegula, are floating the idea of a new stadium to replace the team's existing venue, which would be publicly funded to the tune of over $1,000,000,000.

Hold on, let me count the zeroes to make sure I have that right...thousand, million, billion. Yup, that's right.

Newer reports have the team citing possible other locations for the franchise if the stadium doesn't happen. Locations like Austin, Texas.

My position on this is simple: I am against any public funding for stadiums at all. None. Not one penny.

A sports team is an investment on the part of billionaires that in almost every case ends up making many more billions for those owners. If someone who is worth a billion dollars wants something that costs a billion dollars, well, let them put up their own money for it. The notion that the public should put up the money so the owner can reap further billions is ludicrous.

And don't come at me with "Stadiums spur development!" and "Stadiums create jobs!" We all know this is complete nonsense. Study after study after study has confirmed it. I live less than a mile from the local stadium, and believe me when I tell you, the area around the stadium is not a hotbed of massive economic development. There's about half a dozen bars, a convenience store that was a 7-11 once, a Tim Hortons, and one of those really seedy motels where people who, ahem, are required to register their whereabouts and living arrangements with the local constabulary (and whose presence might be communicated to local parents) go to live.

I consider spending a billion dollars on a single project that will literally benefit a small number of people and enhance the profits for literally one family, and I think of things like...local schools. Parks. Water and electrical infrastructure. Libraries. Museums and arts projects. Streetlights. (This last one sounds prosaic, but I think of it every time I drive through another city that has streetlights on its main expressways. Buffalo does not.)

On a larger point, I am sick of living in an economy which is largely organized around the precept that the natural and preferred course of money is ever, ever relentlessly upward. The idea of giving money to people at the bottom of the economic spectrum is seen as socialist nonsense, but the idea of public money being spent in gigantic amounts so that a single married couple can pocket more millions in profits before eventually selling their investment for a gargantuan return is never even questioned.

When sports stadium talk comes up, I think of Atlanta, Georgia. In the early 1990s, an aging facility--Atlanta Fulton County Stadium--served both the NFL's Atlanta Falcons and MLB's Atlanta Braves. The state of Georgia funded the building of the Georgia Dome for the Falcons, which opened in 1992, and the Braves got their new park, Turner Field, four years later when the stadium build for the 1996 Summer Olympics was converted to ballpark status.

In the last few years, both of those venues, built not just in my lifetime but in my adulthood, have been replaced, and for all the usual reasons cited, each and every one of which could be reduced to one very simple reason: the teams' owners could make more money if they had new venues.

And now here come the Pegulas, the owners of the Bills. When they bought the team they tabled new stadium talk for several years, even though everyone around here knew the subject would come up, if not by them then by the NFL itself (which is an organization that is made to further the football-related investment goals of the owners). As the team is finally good again after many years of not being good, it's clear that the Pegulas basically wanted to wait until the local mood was favorable toward the Bills again. It's no accident that the year after the team went 13-3 and nearly made the Super Bowl that the owners are shaking the money tree for a new stadium.

Where will it be built? Current discussion is a new stadium pretty much across the street from the current one, so at least we seem to have abandoned the notion of building it in downtown Buffalo. But still: local money? Over a billion dollars of it?

This local citizen says no. And if the Bills move to Austin (or Toronto, or San Antonio, or Portland, or anywhere else), this local citizen says, "Thanks for the memories, good luck." I saw the point being made all over social media the last couple days that the Bills "bring Upstate NY together" and that the Bills shape the local mood, and that losing the Bills would be an irrevocable blow to the local psyche. This seems deeply unhealthy to me. Plenty of successful and fine cities exist in this country with no major sports teams. It is my firm belief that we can have a very nice and vibrant city, with all of the things that nice and vibrant cities have, without major-league sports teams. I like sports and I get excited by the prospect of Josh Allen leading the Bills to a championship too, and I'd like to see the hockey team stop being awful and win a Stanley Cup...but I'd hate to lose the Philharmonic, the Albright-Knox, Shea's, or our waterfront much, more more. I'd hate to see local schools get worse and for jobs and people to keep migrating away.

Regional identity, self-image, self-worth, and major economic policy should not be based on the existence and/or the performance of local sports teams.

If the Pegulas want it, let them build it. And if they can't afford it, well--Terry Pegula once boasted that if he needed more money he'd just drill another well.

Start drilling, Terry. Better start now.

And now, a Timeless Sports Moment

 Before the Long Dark Time of Boring Russian Men began in 1992 in Albertville, lasting for eighteen years, there was Brian Boitano in Calgary.

Why this, today? Why, indeed....

Super Bowl trivia questions!

 It's THAT weekend, again! If you need some Super Bowl trivia questions for your socially-distanced Super Bowl Party On Zoom, here you go! These are recycled from last year, with revisions to two questions based on the results of last year's game and this year's champions (I can no longer say that no team has ever played a Super Bowl on its own home field!). Answers are in the comments (with one question's answer having changed after last year's Super Bowl result).

1. What is the highest combined point total in a Super Bowl?

2. What is the lowest combined point total in a Super Bowl?

3. What winning team scored the fewest points?

4. What losing team scored the most points?

5. What is the oldest existing venue to have hosted a Super Bowl?

6. What is the oldest existing stadium that is home to an NFL team to have hosted a Super Bowl?

7. What is the last Super Bowl to be played in a stadium that was not home to an NFL team?

8. According to a Super Bowl-related episode of THE SIMPSONS, who are the favorite teams of Homer Simpson and Moe Szylack?

9. Three American Idol winners have performed the National Anthem at Super Bowls. Which ones?

10. These two teams have met in three Super Bowls.

11. These teams have each met in two Super Bowls.

12. These three teams are 1-0 in the Super Bowl.

13. This is the only team to be currently undefeated in multiple trips to the Super Bowl.

14. As of 2021, this team has gone the longest without returning to the Super Bowl.

15. As of 2021, this team went the longest between Super Bowl victories.

16. To date, this is the only Super Bowl whose participants played their home games in the same state.

17. Following each of this team's last two Super Bowl victories, the starting quarterback for both games retired. Name the team and the two quarterbacks who retired as champions.

18. These teams have won at least four Super Bowls.

19. These teams have lost at least four Super Bowls.

20. This player is the only special teams player to have been named Super Bowl MVP.

21. The team with the NFL's season rushing champion has advanced to the Super Bowl only four times. Name the players, the teams, and the Super Bowls.

22. Since the NFL adopted a 16-game regular season, seven teams have posted records of 15-1 or better. Only two of those have won Super Bowls, however. Name the two champions, and the remainder of the teams and their results.

23. This is the only team to win the Super Bowl after being outscored during the regular season.

24. Over the course of 12 months, this city hosted the NHL Stanley Cup Finals, the World Series, the Super Bowl, and the NCAA Final Four. Which city was it, and which Super Bowl was hosted?

25. Four coaches have each lost the Super Bowl four times apiece. Name them.

26. Which of the following has never happened in a Super Bowl: a punt return for a touchdown, two wild-card teams meeting in the Super Bowl, a play from scrimmage over 90 yards, or a head coach winning a Super Bowl with two different teams?

27. Name the four teams that have as yet never reached the Super Bowl.

28. In only two Super Bowls did neither team commit a turnover. Which ones?

29. The closest geographical proximity between the two cities represented in a Super Bowl was 164 miles. Which two cities, and which Super Bowl?

30. What is the earliest in a Super Bowl that a winning team has taken its final lead?

31. No team has ever won three consecutive Super Bowl championships. What two teams came closest to doing so?

Enjoy, and go Chiefs! Evil Tom MUST be denied a seventh victory. ON THIS ALL DEPENDS.

From the Books: THE BOYS OF SUMMER, by Roger Kahn

 

My years with the Dodgers were 1952 and 1953, two seasons in which they lost the World Series to the Yankees. You may glory in a team triumphant, but you fall in love with a team in defeat. Losing after great striving is the story of man, who was born to sorrow, whose sweetest songs tell of saddest thought, and who, if he is a hero, does nothing in his life as becomingly as leaving it.

--Roger Kahn, The Boys of Summer

I was once a huge baseball fan, mainly during the 1990s. It started with the Pittsburgh Pirates' string of three consecutive National League Eastern Division championships (they were in the NL East back then, before the realignment that created the NL Central), each of which was followed by a heartbreaking loss in the NLCS. Those three years gave my father and I a lot to talk about and a rooting interest in common, which was a lovely thing. (It's not like we especially needed that; it's not as if we had a wounded relationship that was somehow healed by baseball or some shit like that. But a shared interest and joy is always good!) Looking back, it's amazing how my college years were grounded by sports heartbreak: I'd watch the Pirates lose an NLCS in October, and then three months later I'd watch the Bills lose a Super Bowl.

As the 1990s came to an end, I still loved baseball even though by this time the Pirates had become bad (in an epic stretch of badness that would go on for twenty years), but as the 2000s arrived I had less and less opportunity to watch baseball on teevee, because we didn't have cable. I never lost my admiration for the game itself, though. I loved its rhythm, I loved how it created moments of fantastic tension without the breakneck pace that lots of people seem to think is essential to an exciting sporting event. And I loved how baseball, for some reason, lent itself to wonderful writing. Good sports writing abounds all over the place, I have to admit, but there's just something about baseball that makes it fodder for great writers.

I think it has to do with how much baseball there is. Each season lasts for six months, with games nearly every single day; unless there's a no-hitter or a perfect game or some other kind of highlight, few individual games linger in the mind, which means that an entire season can take on the feel of a long epic struggle that feels sad when it ends, whether your team finishes as World Champion, or a pennant winner, or as just another also-ran along the way.

And it's not just that the seasons are long; baseball itself has been around seemingly forever, too. The history of baseball lasts to around the time of the Civil War, if not before that, and its rise echoes evolutions of so much of America: the urbanization of our society, our ongoing struggles to find some semblance of racial justice, and the desire so many feel to hang on to aging traditions as our society seems to relentlessly speed up.

Baseball careers last a long time too, at least compared to other sports. A typical football career lasts, on average, only four or five seasons. A good baseball player, who manages to avoid catastrophic injury, can play ten, fifteen, even up to nearly twenty years before the inevitability of age takes its toll. And there's also the progression from the minor leagues to the Majors to take into account: a poetic questing nature seems to apply to players who toil on and on, always chasing the dream.

Roger Kahn, regarded as one of the finest of all baseball writers, died in 2020 at the age of 92, and when he passed, many paeans to his most famous book, The Boys of Summer, showed up online and elsewhere. I had never read Boys, so I added it to my reading list, and I finally got to it just a couple of weeks ago. (Hooray for borrowing e-books from the library--but that's for another time!) I finished Boys just a couple days ago, and it really is every bit as good as its admirers claim.

Kahn's book is billed as a chronicle of the Brooklyn Dodgers over a remarkable period in which they were always very good and yet only won it all a single time, but the book is more than that. It opens with a long reminiscence of Kahn's family life, of how he learned and grew and learned some more and eventually came first to writing and then to writing baseball. We don't arrive with the Dodgers until some time in the book, and if you expect the kind of long telling of a great team's championship season, well...that's not what Kahn is up to here. He writes about baseball in the larger sense, with baseball's dual feeling of being something unending, through which individual men come and go. In the book's latter half, Kahn catches up with many of the stars from those Dodgers teams, the last ones to play in Brooklyn before the team's eventually forsaking of Ebbets Field and Brooklyn for Chavez Ravine in Los Angeles.

Kahn doesn't draw much attention to the way time is a constant theme in his book, but it is always there. Everyone whom Kahn profiles here is now dead, and the first edition of The Boys of Summer came out in 1972. The oldest players in baseball today were not even born when this book came out, chronicling baseball events that were already decades old. Baseball keeps on keeping on, doesn't it?

Toward the end of the book Kahn discusses, almost in passing, the team's move to Los Angeles. Though he doesn't underline the point, it's hard not to sense a disapproval on Kahn's part of what he might describe as the corporatization of baseball. Even that, however, must be viewed through the lens of time. When Kahn was writing, Ebbets Field was still a living memory. Now, the Dodgers have been in Los Angeles over half a century, and the then-shiny and new stadium at Chavez Ravine is one of baseball's oldest and most beloved venues. Baseball keeps on keeping on.

Finally, I close with a few specific passages that struck me. Roger Kahn is, among other things, a hell of a storyteller and wordsmith. An anecdote about Gil Hodges, who played first base for the Dodgers before becoming a manager:

A sense of strength stays with a man. When Hodges managed the Washington Senators, he learned once that four players were violating a midnight curfew. Hodges believes in curfews and he convened his ball club and announced: "I know who you were. You're each fined one hundred dollars. But a lot of us are married and I don't want to embarrass anyone. There's a cigar box on my desk. At the end of the day, I'm going to look into that box and I want to see four hundred dollars in it. Then the matter will be closed." Hodges gazed. At the end of the day, he looked into the cigar box. He found $700.

As Kahn travels around the country to meet personally with the retired stars of those great Dodgers teams, he finds himself often well off the beaten paths in towns that were once something but which are now just doddering along. The town that I grew up in is one of those, a onetime "city" in New York's Southern Tier that is now just another small town with a lot of closed factories and empty buildings, but still enough people to keep the place being a place. Interestingly, my town--Olean, NY--is name-checked in The Boys of Summer, as the location of a tryout camp for guys who maybe wanted to play baseball. I have trouble imagining such a thing now, but that camp was Gil Hodges's route to the big leagues.

This passage, about Newport, PA, rings very true to me. The towns of my youth were very much like this town.

The reasons for which Newport was built died along with the tannery and ironworks. A river bend no longer makes a town and jobs are so short at the Penn Central that only men with twenty years' seniority survive recurrent layoffs. But Newport is not dying; the petrified village may even grow. It is a refuge for certain whites, raising young families, who talk about "the niggers stealing America." No black man lives in Newport, Pennsylvania. None wants to come and none is asked. A few blacks who work for Bethlehem Steel have built a cabin near Lost Creek Gap, but the Newport elders say these aren't bad ones.

And finally, a quote about the inevitable shifting of the world and how it appears to those living in as it shifts:

There is only so much space on the planet. Fathers perish to make room for sons. At the end, some go with grace, but the middle years--and these Dodgers are striding through middle years--shake with contention. Jack and Jackie Robinson; Clem and Jay Labine, father and son circling one another in a spiky maze of love.

It is too easy to lay griefs on the end of summer. Once I wrote the poet Robert Graves, asking, among other questions, how it felt to be seventy years old. He could not tell me, Graves responded, because in his own mind he was still twenty-one.

In The Boys of Summer Roger Kahn writes about the lives of baseball, and the way that baseball looms larger in those lives than maybe it should, since the baseball part takes up, what, one fifth or one-sixth of a life? Baseball isn't a bad way to mark the time, though.

(Photo via)

Super Bowl Trivia Questions!!!

So the Big Game is coming up, and you'll probably want some trivia questions for your Big Game party! In that spirit, here are some for your freebie use. I have not grouped these in any way, nor am I ranking them by any idea of difficulty. Answers are in the comments for the post. Enjoy, and may your preferred team end the game with more points than the other one!

1. What is the highest combined point total in a Super Bowl?

2. What is the lowest combined point total in a Super Bowl?

3. What winning team scored the fewest points?

4. What losing team scored the most points?

5. What is the oldest existing venue to have hosted a Super Bowl?

6. What is the oldest existing stadium that is home to an NFL team to have hosted a Super Bowl?

7. What is the last Super Bowl to be played in a stadium that was not home to an NFL team?

8. According to a Super Bowl-related episode of THE SIMPSONS, who are the favorite teams of Homer Simpson and Moe Szylack?

9. Three American Idol winners have performed the National Anthem at Super Bowls. Which ones?

10. These two teams have met in three Super Bowls.

11. These teams have each met in two Super Bowls.

12. These three teams are 1-0 in the Super Bowl.

13. This is the only team to be currently undefeated in multiple trips to the Super Bowl.

14. As of 2020, this team has gone the longest without returning to the Super Bowl.

15. As of 2020, this team went the longest between Super Bowl victories.

16. To date, this is the only Super Bowl whose participants played their home games in the same state.

17. Following each of this team's last two Super Bowl victories, the starting quarterback for both games retired. Name the team and the two quarterbacks who retired as champions.

18. These teams have won at least four Super Bowls.

19. These teams have lost at least four Super Bowls.

20. This player is the only special teams player to have been named Super Bowl MVP.

21. The team with the NFL's season rushing champion has advanced to the Super Bowl only four times. Name the players, the teams, and the Super Bowls.

22. Since the NFL adopted a 16-game regular season, seven teams have posted records of 15-1 or better. Only two of those have won Super Bowls, however. Name the two champions, and the remainder of the teams and their results.

23. This is the only team to win the Super Bowl after being outscored during the regular season.

24. Over the course of 12 months, this city hosted the NHL Stanley Cup Finals, the World Series, the Super Bowl, and the NCAA Final Four. Which city was it, and which Super Bowl was hosted?

25. Four coaches have each lost the Super Bowl four times apiece. Name them.

26. Which of the following has never happened in a Super Bowl: a punt return for a touchdown, two wild-card teams meeting in the Super Bowl, a team playing a Super Bowl on its own home field, or a head coach winning a Super Bowl with two different teams?

27. Name the four teams that have as yet never reached the Super Bowl.

28. In only two Super Bowls did neither team commit a turnover. Which ones?

29. The closest geographical proximity between the two cities represented in a Super Bowl was 164 miles. Which two cities, and which Super Bowl?

30. What is the earliest in a Super Bowl that a winning team has taken its final lead?

31. No team has ever won three consecutive Super Bowl championships. What two teams came closest to doing so?

Enjoy, and go Chiefs (although a 49ers win would not leave me unhappy)!

Football fandom is weird.

Here’s some math. An NFL game takes roughly three hours to play. So if you watch every single play of each of your team’s sixteen regular-season NFL games, at season’s end you will have watched 48 hours of football. That’s two entire days of your year, spent watching the games.

And if you are a Buffalo Bills fan, and if you have been faithful enough over these sixteen years to watch every Bills game even while they’ve been mostly stinking the whole time, that’s two days spent per year for sixteen years. That’s thirty-two days of watching mostly bad football. Which is more than a month.

Hey, it's your time. Far be it from me to suggest that you might consider spending it doing something that doesn't bring more annoyance than joy.

Mr. Bolt finds your efforts amusing

Great sports photography is always a joy. Take, for example, this wonderful shot of Usain Bolt, enjoying himself while his competitors...don't.

Man, all that photo needs is a twinkle in his 1000-watt smile.

A couple other nifty photos from the Olympics:

(photos via)

Pre

I'm not a huge fan of Buffalo News sports reporter Bucky Gleason, but he writes a nice article today about Steve Prefontaine, the great track runner who died in a car crash 41 years ago. I'm not entirely sure of the chronology, but I think we were living in Oregon at the time. I would have been all of three years old and some change, so I had no idea about any of this, but Prefontaine worked at a sports business that went on to become Nike. I do remember something of the rise of Nike -- when we moved to Western New York in 1981, Nike was just beginning to become a national company, and I remember people around here saying "Nike" as if it rhymed with "bike".

Anyway, check out Gleason's piece.

A Farewell to Football

It's been fun, football, but I can't do it anymore.

I've been sensing this moment coming, with every single death of a former player. My enthusiasm started to wane with the suicide of Junior Seau...or maybe it was Mike Webster's passing...or Dave Duerson...or...well, it doesn't matter. For years we've known that life expectancy for former NFL players wasn't great, and that former players often had to live with significant health and body issues for the rest of their lives after retirement. For years I said what everybody else says: "They knew the risks. They signed the contracts. They made the money."

I can't say those things anymore. Not after reading what Darryl Talley's wife had to say.

"Our daughters and I spent a few years frustrated and concerned with Darryl’s anger, erratic behavior, insufferable mood swings, impulsivity, depression and memory loss," Talley wrote. "He’d been more and more frequently asking how to spell elementary words. He lost keys, wallets, reading glasses, and television remotes regularly. Where he once would have retraced his steps and been able to find a misplaced item, he wasn’t able to do so anymore. He had no ability to concentrate or make decisions."

Janine Talley says her husband sometimes struggles just to walk to the bathroom in the morning. He'll occasionally be eating and just drop his fork or glass on the floor because he has no feeling in his fingers. Excruciating pain often makes it difficult for him to sleep or sit in a chair.

Once, Talley came out of the house for a trip to the store, and Janine noticed his hand was missing a chunk of flesh and bleeding profusely. He hadn't noticed.

"When we got to the store and he pulled out his wallet, with it came his razor," Janine Talley wrote. "When he finished shaving, instead of putting the razor back in the cabinet, he’d unknowingly put it in his pocket. The mystery of how he’d cut himself was solved. His not knowing he’d put the razor in his pocket and not having enough feeling in his fingers to realize he’d sliced chunks of his flesh off of them repulsed and infuriated me."

I can't read stories like this and conclude that it was all worth it. I can't read accounts like this of a post-football life amounting to decades of pain and emotional turmoil and tortured family life. I can't see those things, and many more like them, as a worthwhile price to pay for a game.

Sport is the act of demanding things from our bodies that they're not really built to provide. I get that, and I'm sure every sport leaves its mark. But football is something else. Football is a meatgrinder of an industry that asks children to put their brains at risk in hopes of getting on the high school team, then asks the high schoolers to do the same in hopes of getting to play in college, and then asks the college players to do the same in hopes of getting to the NFL. With each level, the percentages shrink dramatically, and with arrival in the NFL comes...nothing more than that. You play your time, you get used up, and you leave.

I can't support this any longer. I can't cheer these young men on the field, knowing that in twenty or thirty years a good many of them will be suffering horrible physical ailments and may be struggling for money. (Talley's family has had fundraisers to pay for his surgeries. Fundraisers. For a former NFL player who made "millions", which weren't enough. And that's not Talley's fault.)

I can't support this sport any longer, with my feeling that it's a matter of time before a player dies on the field.

I can't buy the excuses anymore. Don't tell me they know the risks; don't tell me they sign the contracts; don't tell me they get paid a lot of money. Just don't. Nobody who reaches the age of, say, 40 looks back on their 22-year-old self and sees a paragon of risk-assessment. Likewise, don't tell me that money makes it all better. In a lot of cases, the money doesn't last, and in more cases, even if it's handled intelligently, the money runs out eventually. Those few millions dwindle quickly once the career is over and the medical bills start to mount.

I'm sure that a lot of former players, even the ones who are suffering the most, will say that it was worth it to them. That the high they got from taking the field is more than worth the years and decades of agony that come later. And maybe, for them, it is. That does not justify the industrial ruining of lives for the sake of The Game.

Watching football has brought me less and less cheer over the last few years, and now, it seems to bring no cheer at all. I look at football highlights and all I see are men being paid to hit each other as hard as they can.

So it's been fun, football, but I'm done. I no longer root for the Bills or hate the Patriots. I find the whole game a depressing thing for everyone concerned. Including the children who will see their fathers dwindle long before their time.

The difference between our bread-and-circuses and those of the Romans is that our gladiators aren't dying on the fields or in the Colosseums. They're doing it at home, alone, and sometimes they're doing it with a pulling of the trigger as their final act.

Is that worth a Lombardi Trophy, in any city?

For me...no. Not anymore.

You're not fooling anybody, Canada!

I've long suspected curling of not being a real thing, and now Cal goes and confirms it, with this bit of "commentary" on Facebook (in response to this photo of what we're told is the outcome of a curling match, but we know better, don't we):

AN EIGHT ENDER???

I always ask the same questions when I see one of these pictures.

How the hell did the other team miss your rocks EIGHT FUCKING TIMES because they ALSO get eight rocks to throw. You got all your eight rocks to count but they did nothing to prevent that from happening. It's like humans playing against squirrels when a eight ender occurs. They never show the other team who allowed EIGHT FUCKING POINTS to get scored against them because the shame is so great that their images will not even register on film.

An eight ender? This is about the worst real thing I can imagine happening. Four people with two rocks each on the other team couldn't prevent this insult from occurring. How do you numnuts miss EVERYTHING in the house? Are you infirmed? Did none of your rocks even cross the hog line? I have to know. I HAVE TO KNOW!!

Yeah, there's no way that's a real sport! We're on to you, Canada!

“I know who I am, and I know what I want.”

In 2009, the Buffalo Bills were in need of pass rush on their defensive line, and they had the ninth overall pick in that year's draft, which pretty much gave them the pick of the litter in terms of defensive talent. They selected a guy named Aaron Maybin, who had just finished a very impressive year at Penn State. Maybin was supposed to be the next great defensive talent, but it turned out that he wasn't. In fact, his career in Buffalo went so poorly that he was gone a few years later, after pocketing an immense amount of money. (This was before the current CBA, with its structured contracts for rookies.) Fans hated Maybin for his perceived lack of production and/or effort; fans derided the Bills for once again managing to bungle what should have been a golden opportunity to draft a fine player. In all honesty, as a fan at the time, I fell in both camps.

Maybin landed on a couple other NFL rosters over the next few years, and he had what looked like a decent season for the Jets, although a case can be made that his good sack numbers that year reflect the quality of the Jets' defensive backfield that year (which was awesome). But Maybin still never caught on anywhere as a productive regular player, let alone a star, and he's been OOF -- Out Of Football -- for a few years now, mostly forgotten except by masochistic Bills fans who like to bring up the name, every once in a while, of one the biggest draft busts in franchise history.

In today's Buffalo News, however, writer Tim Graham has a remarkable story on Maybin's life since football and the factors that shaped his experience within the game. It's a pretty amazing piece, and I highly recommend reading it.

The Bills drafted Maybin 11th overall in 2009. Two years, one vainglorious rap song, several flamboyant hairstyles and zero sacks later, the Bills cut him. He was out of the NFL after four seasons.

Maybin isn’t solely to blame. Rare are the instances when an athlete’s inability to meet grand expectations is his fault alone.

Maybin, after all, led the 2011 New York Jets in sacks and tied for fifth among all NFL players in forced fumbles. He retired with an offer from the Indianapolis Colts on the table.

But with the Bills, he was miscast, mismanaged and misunderstood. He was unfinished when he arrived, and still unfinished when the Bills discarded him.

I've seen my feelings on football shift significantly over the last five years or so. I admit that it's easy to take a second look at one's fandom when the favorite team is constantly bad; maybe if the Bills had been a regular playoff team or even a Super Bowl contender, I'd be a lot more of a fan right now. But maybe not. It seems to me that football's ugly side has really come out in recent years, from the constant fleecing of taxpayers for the building of stadiums* to the way the game tends to leave its former players with lasting brain damage. I find myself more and more sympathetic to the increasing numbers of players who have walked away from football, while seemingly in their prime and with millions of dollars potentially left to earn.

The fact is, we tend to view our teams as singular entities with interchangeable parts called "players". Graham's article on Maybin serves as a valuable reminder that the "parts" are, in fact, human beings, and as such, they bring all their various challenges and difficulties and quirks along with them. In Maybin's case, it's a good dose of poor decision-making, coupled with some hard-ball contract negotiating by the team, coupled with life experiences that add to the difficulties. Maybin also had great physical difficulty simply gaining weight to be the proper size for an NFL player, and he happened to be struggling with all of this at a time when the franchise was experiencing massive turnover in the front office and in the coaching staff. All that can wreak havoc with a young player who is still trying to grow and learn the game, and to me, it's no surprise at all that Maybin eventually decided that he just wasn't all that emotionally invested in football at all.

What is Maybin doing now? He's a painter.

Maybin’s garage is full of finished canvases, leaning on each other in rows.

There are portraits of Nelson Mandela, Muhammad Ali, Joe Paterno and Tupac Shakur, unhinged erotica, challenging images of gladiatorial sport and slavery, inner-city reflections on death, oppression and strife.

“All my painting I do from the soul, and very rarely does somebody understand it,” Maybin said. “But everything you see me create came from me.

“The beauty in art is that it has so many interpretations. I just want you to feel something to the point of starting a conversation.”

I'm not equipped to say whether he's a good one or not, but I do like what I've seen of his art. We often hear that there is life after football, but it seems to me that sports fans don't always like to admit that there is life instead of football, too. In fact, there are times when I think that fans should not only realize that there is life instead of football for the players, but there is life instead of football for the fans. Yes, I hated Aaron Maybin as a player.

And then I realized what a colossally stupid reason that is to hate someone.

* Want to know how insane the stadium thing is? Take the case of Atlanta, where the football Falcons will begin play in a new stadium in 2017, replacing their existing stadium which opened in 1992. That's twenty-five years. And the baseball Braves? They're moving that same year to their new ballpark, replacing a stadium that opened in 1997. They didn't even get a combined FIFTY YEARS out of their existing facilities. That is batshit crazy.

Who cares, they all look alike anyway.

Syracuse had an Ironman triathlon thing the other day, and participants who completed the course were awarded this medal:

Yup, they got that beautiful medal for completing a triathlon. In Syracuse.

Because completing a triathlon is an accomplishment. In Syracuse.

One wonders, then, why the medal features the skyline of...Rochester.

Oops.

Lord of Cups

More info here!

Here's hoping this thing, the King of Trophies, eventually finds a home here in Buffalo.

Tank You Very Much

Is it ever OK for sports teams to lose on purpose?

I'm sure we'd all say, "Probably not". After all, there's a very real reason that gambling is strictly forbidden in baseball, and there's a very real reason one of the game's greatest players -- Shoeless Joe Jackson -- will likely never get in the Hall of Fame. It has to do with losing on purpose.

But is it OK for a team to be purposely assembled by management with the goal in mind of being bad?

Well...if you're in Buffalo, the answer is almost certainly a resounding "YES!!!"

Our NHL team in these parts, the Sabres, is virtually beloved. It's entirely possible that hockey fandom is a bigger thing here than football fandom, although I suspect that's because the Sabres had a brief period of being awesome eight or nine years ago while the Bills have been crappy for fifteen. But right now, the Sabres are awful. With one more loss, they will clinch the worst record in the NHL this season, and most fans here are fine with that.

Why?

Because the NHL Draft has not one but two astonishing prospects lined up to very likely go first and second in the first round. If the Sabres finish dead last, one of those two kids will end up playing in Buffalo. These guys (Connor McDavid and Jack Eichel) are referred to almost universally as "generational" players, the kinds of players who only tend to come along once every ten years or so. We're talking Sidney Crosby and Mario Lemieux territory here.

But why would the Sabres be interested in both of those guys if they finish dead last? Well, that's because the NHL does not do what the NFL and Major League Baseball do with their drafts. Those leagues slot their drafts strictly according to order of finish: the top pick goes to the team with the worst record, second pick to the second-worst, and so on, using various tie-breaker formulas to distinguish between teams with identical records. The NHL, instead, uses a lottery to determine the top pick, so this year (the lottery rules change next year, for some reason), the team that finishes dead last has only a 20 percent chance of picking first, that team is guaranteed to pick second if they don't get the top pick. Which means that the team finishing dead last is guaranteed one of these two amazing players, who are both the type of talent that hasn't resided in Buffalo in many moons, or maybe ever.

And the Sabres this year are bad. Really bad. Cataclysmically bad. Some sports people have determined that the Sabres are, statistically-speaking, historically bad. Ouch.

And they're this bad, this year, on purpose.

Is that wrong? Is it wrong for a sports team's management to purposely field an awful team?

Well, here's the thing: I don't think it is.

First of all, there's nothing new at all about this. In hockey terms, they call it "tanking", but a football team would likely refer to the phenomenon as "bottoming out"; you see it fairly often, when football teams whose rosters are aging and getting prohibitively expensive have a big purge of talent, resulting in a pretty bad team that has decided to go into "rebuilding mode". Rebuilding almost always involves being pretty bad for at least a year or two (or so the team hopes; NFL history is replete with rebuilding projects that failed, resulting in another rebuild three or four years after the first one). "Bottoming out" is a pretty common idea in the NFL, and in fact, in recent years a lot of local sports commentators have called for the Bills to "bottom out", so they might pick higher in the draft and maybe land on the best quarterbacks.

Meanwhile, the Sabres are definitely rebuilding. They have jettisoned virtually every high-priced player and every player who was due to become an unrestricted free agent, often in return for draft picks. This, too, is nothing new; baseball teams have been doing this for years. Over there it's commonly called "having a fire sale", when baseball teams that are pretty much out of contention start trading away players who are either going to be free agents or who command a high enough price in return that a team can use a trade to restock its minor league system with prospects. Are such teams "embracing losing", as some have accused the Sabres of doing? I find it hard to see how. Same with the football teams who have elected to enter a rebuilding process. Is it "embracing losing" to enter into a period where losing is almost certain?

And why is it that sports commentators -- columnists for the Buffalo News are notorious for this -- so often call for rebuilds, call for "blowing it up and starting over", call for "bottoming out", only to harshly criticize the team when the process of rebuilding, blowing it up and starting over, or bottoming out results in a period of losing?

Who knows, but it seems to me that there are conflicting impulses at work here. We expect the players on the ice, or the field, or the diamond, to always put out their best effort. But the problem is that sometimes the best effort of management actually involves being bad for a while. The players may expect to win each time, but management has a different job, and sometimes it means being bad for an entire year in hopes of landing a very, very good player on the other end of it.

"I wonder why that guy won't talk to the media!", or, Great Moments in Buffalo Sports Journalism

Here's a thing that happened. Last weekend, the Buffalo Bills' 2014 season ended with the team out of the playoffs. Locker cleanout day was last Monday, and then the team dispersed for the offseason.

Fast forward to this past Saturday, two days ago. Rookie wide receiver Sammy Watkins, a high-profile player because not only was he a 1st-round pick but the Bills traded up to get him, sends out this tweet:

Trying to see what activities I'm doing today city so boring 💯💯💯

— Sammy Watkins (@sammywatkins) January 3, 2015

This caught the eye of Buffalo News columnist, and eternal claimant to the title of Official Source Of All OBJECTIVE Knowledge In Buffalo, Jerry Sullivan:

Maybe Sammy Watkins could actually try to discover some of the culture that Buffalo has to offer.

— Jerry Sullivan (@TBNSully) January 3, 2015

There was, as you might expect, a miniature pile-on directed at Watkins for saying that Buffalo is "so boring".

Only....

To all you clueless page stalkers who have clearly nothing else to do but watch my tweets I'm not in BUFFALO wasn't referring to BUFF

— Sammy Watkins (@sammywatkins) January 3, 2015

Ayup. The guy wasn't even here.

Sullivan wasn't the only person to offer up an assumption that Watkins was dissing Buffalo as "boring", but he was, so far as I could tell, the only professional journalist to do so.

I hope he'll remember this some time next summer or next season when he whines about how Sammy Watkins avoids the media.

Peanuts and Cracker Jack

So the World Series kicks off tonight. I know, that's the wrong metaphor. Sorry. I used to be a huge baseball fan, and I still find the game itself utterly beautiful to watch unfold, a game of moments where things happen one thing at a time. Baseball may be the last major sport that isn't a constant flow of motion. As for rooting interests, as the League Championship Series started in each league, I noticed that of those four teams, none were a team I dislike in any major way. Generally, my approach in such cases is this: when there are no teams left for whom I have a rooting interest (be it rooting for a team to win or for a hated team to lose), I root for the remaining teams in order of how long it's been since they won. In the AL you had the Orioles versus the Royals, whose last World Series wins were in 1983 and 1985, respectively. The Royals haven't even made the postseason since then. (The Orioles have, but have not won any pennants.) As for the NL, it was the Cardinals and Giants, two teams who have each won it at least twice in the last few years. So no matter who won the AL pennant, I would root for the AL champion in the World Series. Hence, go Royals!

The remainder of this post is a book review. My sports fandom is nowhere near what it once was, and I see little reason to expect it to rebound in any significant way in the future. That said, I do still enjoy good sports writing, and John Feinstein is one of the betters sportswriters out there. He has a new book about baseball, called Where Nobody Knows Your Name: Life in the Minor Leagues of Baseball, and it's definitely worth a look.

Minor-league baseball is sometimes seen as the more "pure" version of the baseball experience these days, where you can still go to the ballpark and take in a game for a few bucks, where goofball promotions are often used as enticements, where ads for local businesses still cover the outfield walls, where players still endure long bus rides from town to town, and where brushes with true baseball celebrity come mainly from young phenom players or Major Leaguers sent down to the minors to work their way back into the game after an injury.

Feinstein's portrait of the minors has all that, but he also captures something that a lot of fans may not come to realize: that the minors are, in addition to being a training ground for guys not yet ready for the Majors, a place of frustration. The fact is, especially at the AAA level, nobody wants to be there. This is a fact that everyone must acknowledge, and some managers come right out and say it. Nobody wants to be in AAA baseball, because AAA is the cusp of the Majors. When you're in AAA, your dream is almost there, constantly tantalizing you and torturing you with every single injury with the big club, with every time the manager's phone rings, with every invitation to spring training. Triple-A baseball is a land of players who are this close. For some, it's just a brief spot, while for others, it's a place to spend years without ever getting to "the show".

Feinstein focuses his book mostly on just nine men: six players, two managers, and one umpire. Some have made it and will make it back; others haven't made it yet; some have made it and will never make it back. The central fact of this book is that while dreams do come true, they don't always stay true. It's a hard lesson for some of these players, and it's very easy to understand why they keep signing up for one more year, why they keep trying to catch on someplace, even as they pass their 30th birthdays and start approaching their 40th.

It's interesting to me, as well, that Feinstein includes an umpire in his journey through AAA baseball. Fans don't think too much about umpires, really, and the only time their names really come up is when they screw up. If a baseball fan knows Don Denkinger's name, it's almost certainly because he blew a call in a World Series game; and even then, it's not like umpire's names stay in the memory for long. I couldn't tell you the name of the umpire who screwed up a call a couple years back that cost a pitcher a perfect game on what should have been the final out. (For the record, I still think that MLB should have reversed the call and credited that guy with the perfect game. The idea that umpire's calls are sacred and must never be changed, ever ever ever, is deeply bizarre to me.) Umpires work their way through the minors just like players do, hoping for that call to become an umpire at the Major League level. What I didn't know is that umpires' time is limited even more than players. A player can stay in the minors as long as some organization is willing to have him, but not so an umpire: you only get so many years, and if by that time the people who choose the Major League umpires don't think you have it, that's it: you're done. There are no career minor league umpires.

I was likewise surprised at the degree to which winning isn't much of a concern in the minors. They like to win, but winning is mainly seen as a function of playing well, and playing well is seen as the means to the end of reaching the Majors. Feinstein depicts the feel of a championship-winning minor league clubhouse as a pretty surreal place. It's an accomplishment that nobody much gives a shit about. This reminds me of the great movie Bull Durham, which spans an entire season and yet except for one brief segment in the middle of the movie, you get almost no sense for how the team's doing in the standings. No one cares. All that matters is who gets the call to go up, and who gets the call to go home.

Minor leaguers, it turns out, put up with a lot of crap. They'll fly with their team in the morning to a new city for a day game, only to be told as soon as they plane lands that the big club needs an arm for that night's game, so they're to turn around and get on another plane entirely. Mets pitcher Chris Schwinden, for example, got a call up to join the Mets in Toronto. After sitting in the bullpen, he flies with the team to Pittsburgh, where he's told that he's been sent back down already, so he has to turn around and get to Buffalo. At this point in the night, a direct flight from Pittsburgh to Buffalo isn't available, so they fly him to JFK, where he's supposed to catch a flight to Buffalo. That plane is delayed for two hours, so the team sends a car to drive him from NYC to Buffalo. After a series of mechanical mishaps with the car, Schwinden finally gets back to Buffalo eighteen hours after leaving Pittsburgh. This whole passage had me laughing, because you can drive from Pittsburgh to Buffalo in less than four hours.

Feinstein is an honest sportwriter, which means that he can't just depict baseball's poetic and pastoral beauty. Baseball keeps going, and as big as some players get, there is no player so big that the game can't keep being played once they hang up their cleats. Throughout the book, Feinstein makes clear that each and every person is aware that they are just minor cogs in the game's history and that the game will go on without them when they're done, almost as if they were never a part of it at all. At times this aspect of baseball can be bluntly heartless: near the end, when the umpire is finally told that he simply isn't good enough and that his career is over, one reason given is the time he has missed from umpiring. How much time did he miss? Two weeks once, for the birth of his own child, and two days one other time, so he could attend an uncle's funeral. That's pretty brutal.

The emotions go the other way, though, and Feinstein shows this as well in many passages. Why do these players work so hard to chase a dream that few will ever get, for whom the odds get smaller with each year? This passage, from the introduction, explains it perfectly.

Every player knows how much the first call-up means. Which is why there is almost always a celebration of some kind in a Triple-A clubhouse when someone gets the call for the first time. Everyone understands what an extraordinary moment it is in a player's life. Those who have been called up remember what it meant to them; those who have not know how much they want it to happen.

J.C. Boscan's story isn't quite the same as Jimmy Morris's, because he never stopped playing. He signed with the Atlanta Braves in the summer of 1996 at the age of sixteen and spent the next fourteen seasons bouncing around the minor leagues. He first reached Triple-A in 2002 but couldn't take the next step, because, even though he was a solid catcher, he just couldn't hit well enough to be regarded as a serious big-league prospect.

He left the Braves for a couple of years to play Double-A and Triple-A for the Milwaukee Brewers and the Cincinnati Reds. He signed back with the Braves in 2008, because the people running the organization had so much respect for him as a clubhouse leader and someone who would set a good example for younger players that they were willing to bring him back – knowing he was unlikely to ever play in Atlanta.

Two years later, playing in Gwinnett, he had his best offensive season. Nothing spectacular, but a career-high five home runs and a batting average of .250 – higher than his lifetime average of .222. Late in August, Boscan began to hear that he might be on the September call-up list.

Every year on September 1, major-league teams can expand their rosters to as many as forty players (the regular roster size is twenty-five). Rarely do they bring up more than five or six players. Those who are brought up usually provide depth in the bullpen or on the bench of are young players being given a taste of the major leagues. Every once in a while, a team will give a player a "good guy promotion" – bring him up so he can make major-league pay for a month as a reward for being a good guy and not complaining about being stuck in the minor leagues.

Boscan had been in the minors for fourteen years and had never seen the inside of a big-league clubhouse except during spring training. At thirty, he was a long way from being the bright-eyed teenage prospect the Braves had brought to the United States from Venezuela in 1997.

On August 31, the word in the Gwinnett clubhouse was that the Braves were going to make their call-ups after the game. Boscan remembers being more nervous that night than at any other time in his career.

"I walked on the field that night, and all I could think was, 'If I don't get the call tonight, it's never going to come,'" he remembered. "I honestly thought this was my last shot and my best shot to ever get to the majors. I could barely keep my mind on the game. All I could think about was what was going to happen after it was over. I was praying to God to let this be my time."

When the game ended, Boscan sat in front of his locker and picked at the postgame meal. Hitting coach Jamie Dismuke had been designated by manager Dave Brundage to bring players into his office so they could be told they were going to make the thirty-seven-mile trip down I-85 to Turner Field. As Dismuke worked his way around the clubhouse, that thirty-seven miles felt more like a million to Boscan.

The first player called in was Freddie Freeman, the twenty-year-old phenom, who was hitting .319 and was considered a lock call-up. He came out of Brundage's office with a huge smile on his face and was engulfed in congratulations.

Dismuke continued his rounds. One player after another walked around the corner to Brundage's office and came out wearing the giveaway grin. The congratulations continued. No one had made a move to leave because this was a happy night – for those going up.

Six players had gone in to see Brundage – entering as Gwinnett Braves and coming out as Atlanta Braves – and there was no sign of Dismuke for a couple of minutes. Boscan's heart sank. That was it – six guys. His dream had died.

Dismuke appeared again, this time walking directly toward Boscan.

"Skip wants to see you, J.C.," he said. He wasn't smiling. Boscan panicked. Maybe Brundage had gotten the good news out of the way first, and now he was going to let Boscan know that the team needed him in Double-A to work with a young catcher. Or, maybe he was being released.

Brundage was, in fact, preparing that kind of speech for Boscan. "I was going to look very sad and tell him that sometimes things don't turn out the way you want them to in baseball," he said. "But when he walked in here, he was shaking. I couldn't go through with it."

The entire Gwinnett staff was in the room when Boscan walked in.

"Have a seat, JC," Brundage said, trying to look grim.

Boscan sat on the couch across from Brundage's desk.

"You ever been to the big leagues?" he asked – knowing the answer.

"No," Boscan said, shaking his head.

Brundage couldn't keep up the charade.

"I was going to mess with you, JC, but I can't do it," he said, feeling himself start to choke up. "This is your day. You're going up."

Boscan burst into tears. Everyone else in the room was fighting to hold tears back.

"I've been a minor-league manager a long time," Brundage said. "I can honestly say that was the best moment I've ever had."

After Boscan had thanked everyone and shaken everyone's hand and been hugged all around, he walked out of the office. Brundage's office is in a hallway that leads to the clubhouse area where the players' lockers are located. When Boscan turned the corner to reenter the locker area, the entire team was waiting for him.

Feinstein doesn't reveal what became of JC Boscan after he finally reached the Major Leagues after fourteen years of minor-league toil, because that's really not the point of his book at all. But I couldn't help wondering, so I looked it up. That's the thing about baseball: you can always look it up. He only had one plate appearance with the Braves that fall, in which he drew a walk to load the bases; he would then score a run when a subsequent hitter doubled. Over the next two seasons with the Braves and then one season with the Cubs, he appeared in a total of 17 Major-League games, collecting 7 hits in 28 at-bats, for a .250 average. He has 2 career RBIs, and zero home runs. After the 2013 season he signed with the Dodgers organization, and he's still there, playing Double-A ball with the Chattanooga Lookouts.

Baseball abides, man.

Tony Gwynn

The Law of Big Numbers seems to imply that someone out there hated Tony Gwynn, but it's telling that I've never yet met anyone who did. I've met people who hated Michael Jordan, and even Dale Earnhardt, but never yet have I met someone who didn't like Gwynn as a player. I'm sorry to learn of his passing.

If there's a heaven, I hope there's good baseball. Lord knows there should be.

Sunday Burst of OH GOD NO NO NO

I'm not sure I was aware that New Orleans even had an NBA team, or that it was called the Pelicans, until I read about its new mascot a few minutes ago. Behold the creepiest damn thing in the entire world of sports, anywhere, on the ENTIRE PLANET.

If anyone needs me, I'll be sitting in my bathtub, with arms wrapped around my drawn-in knees, rocking back and forth as I weep.

(via)

Evgeni

I've "hated" Evgeni Plushenko for years...not really, but in that sense of "hate" in which, if you were a Bills fan during the 1980s and 1990s, you "hated" Dan Marino, or in the way I "hate" Tom Brady now. You "hate" the guy who wins a ton while committing the crime of not being your guy.

But damn, Evgeni Plushenko has been a hell of a skater and competitor for a long time, and it's a shame that he didn't get to go out on the ice, but because he was -- as many athletes become -- just too damned banged up to keep going. And imagine being a football player and realizing you simply cannot go out on the field, minutes before kickoff in the Super Bowl. That's what happened to Plushenko: he was warming up for his Olympic short program, but realized...it wasn't happening.

Yeah, I "hated" Evgeni Plushenko. But damn, what a career he had! Good luck to him in the future!

No doing WHAT in your toilets, now?

Journalists aren't thrilled with their quarters in Sochi for the Olympics. Lots of photo of questionable stuff, but this one stopped me cold:

Can someone tell me just what the last panel there is demonstrating, by way of Things They Don't Want You Doing In Their Bathroom? I cannot figure this one out, folks. Help!