Football on TV

Picture a college football game: it’s a kaleidoscope of light and sound, of organized bellowing, of overwhelmingly blaring music that is one of the three types of music that are allowed to be played at a college football game: popular songs from five year ago, the AC/DC catalog, and martial music from the early 1900s played by students dressed like Habsburg infantry. The stands are full, the stadium quakes, the pads clack under the din, the smells of roasted meats waft in from the parking lots. This is the image of college football that you see in television commercials.

And then there is the true soul of college football in most stadiums which is two teams desperately trying to qualify for the Imitation Truck Testicle Bowl in stadium that are half full and look like they might be foreclosed upon, listless blowouts, mudpuddle punting exhibitions, the universally despised Red Hat Television Official. The vast majority of college football games are wonderfully ephemeral things that almost no one cares about that are barely sports stories and that pass unremarked upon outside the participants' own fans and somehow this is worth a billion dollars.

I don’t understand how any of this works, but apparently college football games are so valuable that advertisers are willing to spend astronomical sums of money to show you the same fifteen commercials you will see so often during a college football season that it will actually turn you against the products they are selling and in fact only become willing to purchase something that will let you virtually enter the Fansville Universe and lay waste to it with a Grave Digger. It is either so valuable that networks can command top dollar for commercials that air during a Rutgers-Northwestern game that only I and the guy who shaves Rutgers welcome to the Big Ten into his body hair cares about or the big games between the vanishingly small amount of name brand teams that anyone cares about are so overwhelmingly lucrative that advertisers are willing to spend unfathomable amounts of money to put truck ads on a broadcast of a Rutgers-Northwestern game watched exclusively by people that should probably not be legally allowed to operate a truck as long as they also get to sell those trucks in prime time.

The money is clear: college football is a television show. The stadiums, the bands, the drunken students in body paint or dinosaur costumes are all extras, the head coaches are all played by grimacing 55 year-old character actors that have appeared in 155 films telling Steven Seagal he is not allowed to become a rogue operative. The Big Ten will make about seven billion dollars under its new television contract that starts next year. Its games will no longer appear on ESPN, but instead air on Fox, CBS, the Big Ten Network, NBC, and a variety of streaming services associated with these networks. The number is astonishing, not only because of the sheer amount of money involved that will still not go to any of the athletes directly but because the current model where the networks are negotiating with conferences means that the they are sending money planes into Rosemont for approximately six games of national interest per season and roughly 900 games that no one cares about between mediocre teams doing fullbacks at each other in 11:00am sleet storms, and this includes every single game that the team that this blog is about has ever played.

The new TV deal does not mean that Big Ten teams will all of a sudden find themselves on network TV. It is likely that when one of these teams manages escape velocity from Big Ten Network Regional Action, they will find themselves shunted onto some associated steaming service that will be even harder to find than those non-conference games that the Big Ten has the balls to ask you to pay for even though they should be paying you and in fact sending you free psychadelics if you are willing to watch Illinois vs. Ball State. I suspect that within the next five years, a crucial Hat Game will be only found on gas station TV.

At some point the whole edifice feels unsustainable.  With this much money at stake, it seems impossible to believe that networks will buy college football packages not based on a team's draw or popularity but because they chose to join an athletic conference at a time when college football involved unloading a train car full of a school's most cauliflower-eared toughs and letting them literally stomp each other to death before the spectators would end the game with a riot that involved throwing wagon wheels at each other or trying to poison each other's mustaches.  At some point, the television networks will want to pick the teams that will make the most money and leave the rest of them to shove each other around on an app.  But then again, maybe this exactly what the networks deserve.  After years of shunting shows onto an increasingly byzantine and expensive series of streaming services, maybe airing Northwestern games to an audience of sickos is the equivalent of making TV networks pay for Paramount+. 

AN INTERNATIONAL INCIDENT

I have no idea what the people of Ireland did to deserve this, but Northwestern and Nebraska will open the season in Dublin.  This will be the seventh NCAA football game in Ireland-- most of these games have predictably revolved around Notre Dame or Boston College with the exception of a bizarre game between Penn State and UCF and the truly chaotic pairing of Pitt and Rutgers inflicted on 20,000 people in 1989.  I am genuinely confused by why this is happening, why two teams that certainly have little recognition outside the United States (and in fact one that has most Americans scratching their heads to locate it) and that are known for playing the absolute dumbest football game you have ever seen have been sent overseas to spread the magic of football.  The best explanation I can think of is that a Northwestern-Nebraska game has quietly been banned in the United States.

International college football games in 2022 are still rare enough to be a novelty but not so rare that they are an event.  Teams in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century played in Canada and expanded to Cuba and Mexico.  In the 1970s, several teams played in West Germany and Austria, and the 1980s featured a series in Japan.  But the most incredible international game planned that never came into existence was an attempt to send USC and Illinois to play in Moscow in 1989 in a game called, astonishingly, the Glasnost Bowl.  According to the Glasnost Bowl Wikipedia page, the game inspired puerile interest from Soviet audiences who wondered if football players routinely died in the violence; a five minute program explaining football had been planned to air before the game. The teams planned to transport all of their equipment and several thousand pounds of food, but USC planned to find a local Russian horse because they could not fly the actual USC horse overseas.  

But the game never happened.  Raycom, the game's organizer, ran into a maze of Soviet bureaucracy and could not get guarantees on hotel rooms and other accommodations.  Apparently, they also failed to sell many tickets to Americans because the game and travel packages were expensive and (presumably) featured Illinois football.  The game was cancelled just months before it was scheduled and moved to Los Angeles, a backup plan in case "any unexpected flare-up in the fading Cold War tensions prevented the game from being played in the Soviet Union."  Its legacy may be these two incredible Wikipedia Sentences that could only exist on that website: "The attempt to use Moscow as the venue for an American football game can be viewed as an element of intense dialogue among Russians and Americans in the late 1980s. This exchange dialogue cut across many elements of culture and served as an important step in the political transitions leading to present day Russia."

The 1989 Illini, an excellent team, ended up upsetting the Trojans in their own stadium but if I am reading the Glasnot Bowl wikipedia page correctly, they also are responsible for the fall of the Soviet Union.

The insane pointlessness of this Dublin game is the highlight of the football season for me.  Northwestern football is often ignored and hidden and now it is unavoidable.  You want college football, well here comes Pat Fitzgerald standing wistfully in the land of his ancestors and meaningfully punting.  Here comes Scott Frost, a man who is desperately clinging with the very tips of his fingernails to a job no football coach in his right mind would want.  This game is largely an excuse for fans of both teams to take a trip to Ireland, for Northwestern fans to pretend to read Ulysses in the stands and for Nebraska fans to show up in massive numbers as they do at every away game to marvel at how many of them there are and congratulate each other for coming up with the idea of leaving Nebraska.  But in my mind, I'd like to think there is a group of die-hard Irish Northwestern fans who are coming out in homemade Justin Jackson jerseys and arguing with each other about the 2013 Tax Slayer Gator Bowl.  I would like to see Northwestern football as a small but important detail in the background of the next Sally Rooney novel, much like how Nebraska football has become a touchstone of an important part of 2022 pop culture.

 

Northwestern and Nebraska have routinely played football games that are not good but exciting and down to the wire.  The major exception was last year, when a horrible Northwestern team got absolutely thrashed by an atrocious Nebraska team.  Northwestern fans are hoping that last year was an aberration and that the Wildcats have gotten into a 2010s San Francisco Giants pattern of only being good in even years.  Nebraska fans, I presume are hoping that the football team will be able to finish a game without wandering into a series of bear traps or accidentally gluing themselves to a kicking tee.  I would say that Big Ten and TV officials are hoping that this game can go into the NU/NU Vortex and end on a series of laterals or hail marys or lateral that lead to a hail mary and 14 overtimes but they probably don't care because they already got paid and the game could consist of the ball getting stuck in the field during the opening kickoff and then both teams try to dig it out for the next three hours only pausing to get into shoving matches.

Who will be Northwestern's quarterback? Pat Fitzgerald will not say.  There is nothing Pat Fitzgerald loves more than to not tell you who is playing quarterback.  He would sooner die.  He will tell you who the quarterback is only if you show up in formalwear at an appointed time and crawl through a tiny door into a room that holds a live alligator.  Fitzgerald's meatheaded cloak-and-dagger routine is one of the funniest aspects of Northwestern football now, especially considering that this may be a year where they use like 15 quarterbacks over the course of the season and manage one touchdown pass thrown by a wide receiver who played quarterback in high school.

It may be strange and perversely funny to send two extremely undistinguished teams to play in a foreign country as ambassadors of the sport, but it also kind of rules.  If you're going to pay seven billion dollars for Northwestern and Nebraska football, they should be opening the college football season in Ireland.  Send Illinois to Ulaanbaatar.  Let Rutgers and Minnesota battle it out in front of the Great Pyramid of Cheops.  They already bought it, they might as well make it look great on television.

Baseball Maudlin Sentimentality Check-In

Willson Contreras was not supposed to be here. It was a Friday day game at Wrigley Field in the late summer, late in the game with the shadows ominously creeping up to the batter’s box and the three o’clock seagulls divebombing the outfield, and the park was filled with tourists and children enjoying their last weeks before school and a lot of people who, like Willson Contreras, were supposed to be somewhere else. Contreras should have been gone, traded to a contender for one or two babyfaced nineteen-year-olds, and he had spent the season as a ghostly specter haunting Wrigley but here he was fully corporeal in the eighth inning blasting a pitch into the left field bleachers and pointing to the ecstatic fans and ground as if to say “this is where I am” as the last-place Cubs took a 2-1 lead over the last-place Marlins.

 

The trade deadline on the North Side of Chicago has become an emotional time in recent years, but Contreras elevated it into a sublime melodrama. The past couple weeks have seen Contreras hold tearful press conferences, grab teammates in interminable embraces, soak in multiple ovations, and generally act like he is on a train platform sending his wispily muttonchopped sons to fight in the Civil War. It has been over the top but also very endearing. Contreras represents one of the last remaining World Series Cubs besides Kyle Hendricks and Jason Heyward– while I was writing this post, Jed Hoyer announced that Heyward has played his last game as a Cub and will be released next year and exists on the current team as an apparition. Contreras has spent pretty much his entire adult life in the Cubs organization, hit a home run on the first pitch he saw in the big leagues, won a world series his rookie year, and has been a fan favorite; regardless of how he might feel about the Cubs and its management, he sure made it seem like he would rather stay here in Chicago slopping around the bottom of the National League Central in beautiful Wrigley afternoons than getting to play in the playoffs, which serves as a full embrace of the Cubs lifestyle.

What makes more sense as a fan here? To root for two more months of Willson Contreras in a career year soaking up the adoration of the crowd as the Cubs plummet into yet another pointless toilet season? To get angry at the Cubs for not maximizing his value by dealing him earlier? To hope that the Cubs use a bunch of transaction arcana to somehow turn him into an extra draft pick next year? And what will the Cubs do with Ian Happ, whom they also declined to trade this year and will presumably submit to another deadline of trades and dugout speculation, and seeing his hair growth billboards get swallowed up into more Urlacher ones to the point that there are so many Brian Urlacher hair billboards that there are now meta Urlacher billboards commenting on the number of Urlacher billboards on the Jane Addams tollway?

Rooting for the Cubs means a clash between sentimentality and the bloodless calculation of baseball’s heartless marketplace and it is crushing to see that, as of this year, the spreadsheets have won in an absolute rout. The Cubs let their World Series heroes go and so far it looks like they made a brilliant baseball decision. Kris Bryant has spent most of his first season in Denver in traction and various walking boots. Javy Baez’s Detroit career, save for that disputed opening day walk off against the White Sox, has looked exactly like the horrifying scenario of someone turning Javy’s baseball mojo sliders down one notch. Anthony Rizzo, meanwhile, seems to be having a great time in New York playing for a chance for another ring, dinking baseballs over Yankee Stadiums short right field porch, and being in the enviable position as a respected veteran leader who is not important enough to the team that the tabloids will ruthlessly attack him with “Anthony Shizzo” puns instead of fending off the Pirates and Reds for fourth place in the NL North. It is a bummer that the Cubs decided to sell off their stars like they are the Oakland A’s; it is also upsetting that it may have been a good move.

BASEBALL'S CORN GAME AND MLB'S MACABRE DEATH OBSESSION

After two years of turning the Cubs into the Iowa Cubs, Major League Baseball manifested this transformation literally by making the team play in Iowa in their nationally televised Corn Game.  This year, instead of an exciting and up and coming White Sox team clashing with the flagship Yankees they got two tanking teams from the bottom of the shittiest division in baseball in the middle of cynical rebuilds headlined by the Reds owner opening the season by telling his fans they are like ants to him and they should go fuck themselves while wearing a jaunty red blazer during a parade.

As a spectacle, the Corn Game looks fantastic on television.  The players emerge from the stalks in perfect golden hour sunlight, the tiny stadium has been expertly art-directed to exude quaintness, the Cubs' uniforms featuring a crudely-drawn bear that appears to be confused how it obtained a bat were nice, and it is extremely cool when someone blasts a home run into an ocean of corn.  I'm not an enormous fan of what the game is trying to evoke with the sepia-toned paeans to some imagined bucolic purity; my preferred old-time baseball aesthetic would instead focus on the players' ridiculous nicknames and dirtbag ballplayer bullshit and the various elaborate ways that they would cheat and get rioted upon by fans, but I understand why MLB would not want to put on a Mustache Guy Chased From Brothels Game.

But the thing that is strange about the Corn Game aesthetic is that it is a grim and macabre evocation of death.  Field of Dreams is a movie about processing grief through the mechanism of baseball.  To MLB, the movie's ghosts represent baseball history and Kevin Costner's desire to play catch with his dead dad is a maudlin marketing gimmick about baseball linking generations, but if you look at it another way it is a Very Special Baseball Event about how you and everyone you love even if that also includes baseball players from the 1910s will die. This is a phenomenon unique to baseball, the oldest of the American major sports leagues, the one that makes a connection to history one of its greatest selling points, and the one where the limitless supply of documentary talking heads feeding baseball's nostalgia industrial complex are always ready to spring up in book-lined study to talk about how the sun was shining in Yankee Stadium when they went there to see the fictitious baseball player "Mickey Mantle" that they only remember because of a pervasive disinformation campaign targeting baby boomers by Ken Burns and Billy Crystal.  Major League Baseball is not the only sports league that appeals to history and nostalgia, but it is the only one where the theme of all of its newsreel grandeur is not look where we came from but look what he we have lost.  The Field of Dreams is a mausoleum.  I suppose that is why the most noteworthy feature of the game was holographic necromancy.

In 2020, when baseball chaotically returned in the middle of the pandemic and some Fox broadcasts used bizarre, poorly rendered computer graphic versions of fans to up the empty stadiums, I wrote that we had officially become a cyberpunk society.  It was not only the computerized fans on MLB telecasts, but also a feeling that the pervasive low quality zoom images everywhere suddenly gave all television the aesthetic quality of 80s and 90s movies about cyberpunk dystopias.  The Harry Caray hologram fit into that style.  It looked like a playstation cutscene.  It lurched unnaturally.  It glowed eerily.  The mouth movements were off so it seemed like Take Me Out to the Ballgame was being being dubbed over a demonic incantation in some dead, unholy language. In a setting where everything was supposed to evoke an old-timey feel to the point that the broadcasters all dressed like members of the rival "Hey Mister" and "Whaddaya Say Fella" gangs who were about to brawl on a streetcar, Fox decided to unleash a hologram of a famous 1980s drunk who has been dead for more than 20 years for what appears to be no reason whatsoever.  

This was such a strange and insane thing to do that I am glad they did it.  The hologram itself was an unsettling invasion from the Uncanny Valley, but I can't stop laughing about how many people had to approve it before it came lurching onto our screens like the woman from The Ring.  I can't wait to see other holograms they come up with: hologram Babe Ruth calling his shot, hologram Lou Gehrig saying goodbye to Yankee Stadium, hologram George Brett explaining how he shit himself on the Las Vegas strip to a bunch of hologram Royals rookies.  The possibilities are endless.    

MANEATING TIGERS

One thing that sometimes occurs to me when I walk by a fence and am briefly startled by the unexpected bark from a dog that is always at least thirty percent smaller than it sounds is the relative freedom I enjoy from being hunted and messily eaten by a predator. I have been thinking about this because I have been reading about the Champawat Tiger, which killed an estimated 436 people in India and Nepal in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century before it was finally killed in 1910 by the famed tiger hunter Jim Corbett.

I got interested in this while rereading the tiger essay in Brian Philipps’s Impossible Owls, where he goes on a tiger watching expedition in India, and figured I should probably read Corbett’s Man-Eaters of Kuamon. When I put that into the library search engine, though, it spit out a book with the arresting name No Beast So Fierce: The Terrifying True Story of the Chamapawat Tiger, the Deadliest Animal In History and immediately mashed that request button. The writer of the book is a newspaper and magazine journalist named Dane Huckelbridge who has also published a book on the history of bourbon, so I had no idea whether I was getting a decent book or a fevered J. Peterman catalog, and here’s what greeted me in Chapter 1:

Where does one begin? With a story whose true telling demands centuries, if not millennia, and whose roots and tendrils snake into such far-flung realms as colonial British policies, Indian cosmologies, and the rise and fall of Nepalese dynasties, where is the starting point? Yes, one could commence with the royal decrees that compelled Vasco da Gama to sail for the East Indies, or the palace intrigues that put Jung Bahadur in the highest echelons of Himalayan power. But the matter at hand is something much more primal– elemental, even. Something that’s shaped our psyches and permeated our mythologies since time immemorial, and that speaks directly to the most profound of our fears. To be eaten by a monster. To be hunted, to be consumed, by a creature whose innate predatory gifts are infinitely superior to our own. To be ripped apart and summarily devoured. And, with this truth in mind, the answer becomes even simpler. In fact, its golden eyes are staring us right in the face: the tiger. That is where the story begins.

And yet, despite Huckelbridge’s various forays into Magazine Mode, I enjoyed this book. Huckleridge carefully and viscerally paints a picture of the various horrible ways that a tiger will fuck you up, and he puts it in ways that can be appreciated by readers of a sports blog. “...[the bengal tiger] is the middle linebacker of the animal world, the perfect melding of power and speed,” he notes Facendaishly. “To put that number into grisly perspective, the entire roster of the National Basketball Association evens out at around 450 players. So essentially– according to most published accounts– the Champawat very nearly consumed the entire NBA.”

Huckleridge does two things effectively in his account of the Champawat tiger’s decades-long rampage spanning two countries. First, he provides a compelling case linking manmade ecological changes and maneating in tigers. In order to do this, he unspools a compact history of the terai in western Nepal, a marshy area that serves as the bengal tiger’s primary habitat, and the Rana dynasty that emerged in the nineteenth century. The new government, according Hucklebridge, began to more effectively exploit the terai with farming methods that disrupted the tigers’ relatively harmonious relationship with the native Tharu. Simultaneously, tigers just over the border in India saw an even more dramatic attack on their habitat under British policies in the late nineteenth century as the colonial government gobbled up hundreds of thousands of acres of timber. The British also greatly increased the pace of tiger hunting as visitors with money demanded to hunt tigers as a tourist experience.

These ecological changes turned out to function as ideal conditions for churning out maneating tigers. Tigers, as Hucklebridge explains, tend to leave humans alone for whatever reason unless they become injured, displaced, or otherwise desperate and figure out people have virtually no defenses against them. The British program of destroying tiger habitats and leading endless tiger hunts that maimed tigers could not have been a more effective plan for unleashing a scourge of deadly tigers. According to Hucklebridge, the instances of serial maneaters like the Champawat along with equally dangerous leopards significantly increased during the twentieth century. Tigers are territorial, and one adult tiger can claim territory of 25 square miles to even 50, and tigers that lose that territory to a rival get pushed further and further out where they are more likely to encounter rapidly encroaching human settlements. These tigers are further from the environment they know and become desperate for new food sources; at best they can become a plague on livestock and at worst they become monsters that can besiege entire villages.

The second thing that Hucklebridge does well is to sell the tense terror when reconstructing Corbett’s hunt. Corbett’s own account from his Man-eaters of Kuamon (I ended up finding it on the internet) is only about 25 pages of plain-speaking bluffness, but Huckleridge provides a far longer and more dramatic account, using plenty of license and what I would affectionately describe as writerly bullshit to spice things up. There are a lot of probablys and would likely haves throughout this part of the book but Huckleridge is not just making things up to make them up but trying to convey two important elements of the story: one is the fraught politics of the situation that Corbett, who was born in India and speaks fluent Kuamoni and is coming to hunt a tiger on behalf of his own countryman, was still showing up as a representative of the British government who the people in Champawat had good reason to mistrust and hate; the other, which Corbett makes very clear and Hucklebridge reiterates, is that hunting a maneating tiger is in fact extremely scary.

Do you know a tiger is hunted? It is not some pith helmet guy out there crawling around like the predator except with embarrassing knee socks instead of dripping mandibles. As Phillipps writes about the experience of just trying to photograph them, tigers can be virtually invisible to human beings. Instead, what you do is organize an enormous party of dozens if not hundreds of people into what is called a “beat,” a large battle line of people and elephants making an enormous racket to rouse the tiger and scare the absolute shit out of it until it gets cornered or exhausted and the hunter is able to take a shot from the safe pachyderm perch.  Corbett did not have the luxury of an elephant and his beat was designed to lure the tiger into a ravine where he only had a few shots.  In Hucklebridge's telling, Corbett dropped the tiger only seconds from getting mauled.  And then there it is, the photograph of Corbett and the deadly maneater that looks identical to any number of photographs of British hunters from the era.

Hucklebridge taps into the primeval horror invoked by tiger attacks, but the real strength of the book is to contextualize it as a modern phenomenon.  His account of the Champawat tiger, presented as the forces of colonialism and environmental despoliation literally creating a monster, is an allegory almost too on the nose to be published if it was fiction.  But tiger attacks unfortunately persist, even as they have been driven into dangerously low populations and confined to nature preserves; unfortunately the tigers don't know where they're not supposed to go.