Hey! Wha Happen?

Sometime on Saturday afternoon, Northwestern lost a football game to the Southern Illinois Salukis.  I did not know this happened.  I spent the day oblivious to the ominous things happening just up the Lake Michigan coast as the 0-2 Football Championship Subdivision SIU Salukis were painstakingly taking apart Northwestern in their home stadium in front of what I can presume were several Northwestern fans.  I taped the game, intending to watch it that night, but instead I checked the score and there it was: SIU 31, Northwestern 24.  I have not watched a single second of this game.

 

I had Werner Herzog listen to the broadcast to tell me what happened, but I am not sure I believe him when he says that everyone was murdered by the cold, unfeeling hand of nature

This is not the type of blog where I pretend to be a Football Person who analyzes the All 22 and tells you about blocking schemes and look at that guy fire off the line of scrimmage there, see he's just using the classic claimjumper's squat there with his outside leverage.  I have written blogs off of illegal streams, radio feeds half listened to by cleaning, and obsessively following one of those ESPN game casts where the little football moves around on arrows like a Family Circus cartoon.  But I don't really feel the need to analyze this game to see what went wrong when the thing that went wrong is that Northwestern lost to Southern Illinois.

I would say that this game, combined with the Duke game, and combined with the fact that the Wildcats' big win over the world-famous Nebraska Corn Huskers is looking less and less impressive as it becomes obvious that they are a bad team that was being held hostage by a maniac coach who was only there to demand his ceaseless Barf Tribute, augurs poorly for Northwestern, but the Wildcats are not a team that tends to augur.  Northwestern has gone to bowl games coming off seemingly impossible losses; this is by my count the third time Northwestern has handed a steel briefcase full of cash over to an FCS school and then gotten embarrassed by them in recent years.  In the past, it seems like nothing that happens in the non-conference season seems to matter to a Pat Fitzgerald football team.

One of the problems with rooting for Northwestern is that it bypasses one of the most joyful parts of college football fandom, which is people with absolutely insane takes hooting and hollering about football because there are so few fans that no one really covers them.  No one is too upset that Northwestern loses to an FCS team at home because for some reason everyone always expects the Wildcats to be bad even though it's been almost 30 years since they were putrid and Northwestern does not have nearly enough fans to get people to call into sports radio and go absolutely nutso.  

Some of the greatest pieces of audio art ever assembled was the Doug Buffone and Ed O'Bradovich Bears postgame show after the Bears inevitably got completely destroyed in a prime time game.  They were irate.  They were upset.  The callers were incoherent.  Everyone was screaming over a low din because they were inevitably broadcasting from an Elmhurst car dealership.  One time, they played the Giants and Jay Cutler got sacked nine times in the first half, and I discovered that the phrase "he got sacked nine times in da first half" was perhaps the greatest Chicago accent shibboleth that has ever been devised.  There is something satisfying and incredibly funny about people absolutely losing their minds over a sporting event that has gone badly. 

The idea of someone getting upset over a Northwestern sporting event is actually funny.  We got a meme out of it.  It's not like the Greater Chicagoland Region is bereft of maniac sports takes; the Chicago Bears alone are one of the most psychically deranging forces operating in the United States right now.  Would it be useful or satisfying to be able to tune into a sports radio station and hear someone braying trubinskyishly that Pat Fitzgerald is a fraud who was propped up by Mike Hankwitz?  Would it be interesting to hear eight different people call in all demanding to start a different quarterback, at least one which graduated six years ago?  Would it be tremendous to hear someone go on the air and criticize Pat Fitzgerald for wearing shorts?  

Actually that probably would not be very useful, as funny as it would be.  Now Northwestern is heavily favored over another team in a non-power five division that is coming into Ryan Field to ruin the Wildcats' day.

TIGERBLOG

It's 1997 in Primorye, a lightly-populated outpost in the far eastern outskirts of Russia in the taiga and a man is dead.  There is no doubt what has happened to him because only one thing looks like that.  It was a tiger attack.  The victim had been a poacher, the tiger the most valuable commodity available.  The question that immediately comes up among the local community and to the Inspection Tiger team that comes to investigate the attack is why the tiger had come for this man, why it waited for him, and whether it would be satisfied with this kill or come back.   

John Vaillant's The Tiger is about this attack, but it is also about Primorye and about the relationship of human beings to tigers and whether people's innate desire to destroy is an innate part of millenia living as prey.  It shares a lot with the other tiger attack book I reviewed earlier in this blog, Dane Hucklebridge's No Beast So Fierce about the infamous Champawat tiger that has traditionally been blamed for more than 400 kills in India and Nepal around the turn of the twentieth century.  Both books share a fascination with the horrifying efficiency and brutality of tigers as predators.  Both center a search and hunt for a maneating tiger.  Both use goofy sports analogies: for Hucklebridge a tiger is the middle linebacker of the animal kingdom, while Vaillant describes the tiger's head and limbs as a basketball team with the jaws as the center, the front paws as the forwards and the back limbs as the guards.  And both books seek to situate tiger attacks in the context of environmental change and despoliation and the political and economic changes that began to pressure tigers into more conflict with people.

For Hucklebridge, the main force that created the Champawat tiger and other man-eaters was colonialism as British policies increased cultivation and decrease the tigers' natural habitat that sent them in an increasing collision course with villages.  For Vaillant, the chief issue is perestroika, liberalization of the Soviet economy under Gorbachev, and the general chaos that came with the Soviet Union's dissolution in the 1990s.  Vaillant describes Primorye, at all times a hardscrabble border area, as one where the very meager supports from Soviet logging and energy companies in the 1980s completely collapsed and left many residents in a desperate struggle to survive off the taiga by foraging nuts, hunting and trapping whatever game they could find, and poaching.  Tigers came to represent a massive windfall.  Some hunters, according to Vaillant, referred to them as "Toyotas" because that was the amount of money they could expect to get for killing one and selling it over the border in China.  This practice was incredibly risky-- not only was tiger hunting illegal, but an attempt to kill a tiger that does not succeed results in just about the worst thing the hunger could possibly imagine.  That's what Vladimir Markov, the tiger's victim, unfortunately proved.

Where the two books differ is that the attack on Markov happened relatively recently.  Vaillant was able to travel to Primorye and meet the people involved (interestingly, Vaillant reveals in the acknowledgements that he did not conduct the interviews himself because he does not speak Russian, so they were all conducted by a research assistant, which lends an interesting coloring to the immediate you are there narration).  He also could draw on a documentary about the incident.  Hucklebridge, on the other hand, relies a lot more on conjecture and has no living witnesses to speak to.  Vaillant also structures the book differently.  While Huckleridge's account of the Champawat tiger reads sometimes like a monster movie as the tiger terrorized an entire region unsure when it would strike next, Vaillant's book reads more like a detective novel.  Here the central question revolves around trying to figure out the tiger's motive, which requires him to spend a lot of time trying to understand exactly what a tiger's motives are, how tigers think, and the fascinating question of whether a tiger is capable of vengeance.

One interesting concept that frames Vaillant's attempts to understand the tiger is the umwelt, a term coined by Jokob von Uexkull.  As Vaillant describes it, the umwelt is an organism's bubble of relevant things it can sense, understand, and perceive as important; within each umgebung, von Uexkull's word for the natural world, each creature has its own umwelt.

In the umebung of a city sidewalk, for example, a dog owner's umwelt would differ greatly from that of her dog's in that, while she might be keenly aware of a SALE sign in a window, a policeman coming toward her, or a broken bottle in her path, the dog would focus on the gust of cooked meat emanating from a restaurant's exhaust fan, the urine on a fire hydrant, and the doughnut crumbs next to he broken bottle.  Objectively, these two creatures inhabit the same umgebung, but their individual umwelten give them radically different experiences of it.

Vaillant argues that the residents of Primorye who depended on the taiga necessarily had to learn about the tiger's umwelt and generally could come to an uneasy peace with the tigers by understanding the tigers' boundaries and limits and their own place within the tiger's kingdom.  Markov also understood these things, but Vaillant suggests that he became desperate enough to believe he could overcome them.

If you are going to read one book on tiger attacks, I recommend The Tiger. Vaillant makes the story more suspenseful, he's closer to the people in it, and the questions he asks about people, the surrounding environment, and the functions of human behavior are more interesting.  The way he switches from flinty detective prose surrounding Yuri Trush, the local head of Inspection Tiger to lyrical contemplations about the meaning of human beings' descent from trees onto deadly ground is a better read.  It also feels to me that a lot of the scientific points Vaillant is making are sort of bullshitty, but I am not an animal behavior scientist, so that doesn't bother me.  There's also a harder edge and intensity to The Tiger and the prose is less forced.  There's nothing wrong with No Beast So Fierce.  These are two different books trying to do two different things and covering vastly different scales of time and polities.  At the same time, the politics and issues of conservation and of people's role preventing the eradication of tigers from the face of the Earth in both books converge in a fascinating way as two books that spend an inordinate amount of time discussing tigers as monsters and detailing the various unpleasant ways that a person encountering an angry tiger will be crushed, disemboweled, and devoured end up coming to the conclusion that people should do everything possible to keep them around.

BUCK DUCKETT SECTION

You may have been wondering what has happened to the NCAA's teams of investigators looking out for illegal payments of free socks to college athletes after name, image, and likeness policies? Well, I have no idea. I did not do any research about this. But here is another installment of a running series this season of fictional vignettes about Buck Duckett: Rogue NCAA Pants Investigator.

1. 

There was not a lot of shade by the shuttle stop outside NCAA Headquarters and by the time the bus came, the official NCAA track suit I had that was issued to all employees was soaked.  It was supposed to wick away sweat, but it was outwicked, and my hair, which was recently trimmed to NCAA specifications, was not stopping it from trickling into my eyes and around my lips.  When the shuttle finally came, it felt like I had been thrown into a meat freezer.  This was around '18, back before the Reorganization.(1)

The orientation process had been a blur.  They flashed pictures of athletes wearing different pairs of pants at us and we had three seconds to determine if they were legal, illegal, or suspect.  They did not tell us how we did, but after four hours of this, about two-thirds of us were summoned into a room and told to gather our things and get on the bus to Plainfield.  

The NCAA's Pants, Shoes, and Apparel Processing Facility was temporarily located in Plainfield after the Tattoo, Jewelry, and Automobile section expanded.  It was a converted warehouse, and they had just screwed cubicles into the ground.  Everything echoed.  There was a single phone connected to the Section Head, Lynn Mealer who never stopped scowling about the relocation, and when it rang it sound like a piercing wail.  

Our job was simple, Mealer said to us, her voice booming like an offstage deity in a play.  We do not investigate.  We do not even try to investigate.  The Investigation Section back in Indy did all of the stakeouts, the following, the disguises, the shootouts on the docks.  We just watched.  All of us had a monitor and all day we looked at pictures and video of players' pants(2) and tried to determine if something seemed off.  If it was, we'd flag it and it would go to investigations for a second look.  At 9 AM you got your first feed.  No music, no radio, no conversation except for designated break areas.  You will learn how to differentiate brands and cuts of pants and you will know how much they cost and you will memorize the Pants Cost Matrix in the third tab of your binder, and if you start flagging too many normal pants, the investigators will come down here.  You don't want to see Duckett or talk to him, believe me.  You're the tip of the spear, she said.  When she was done, I asked to call my probation officer.  

My parents really wanted me to be good at football.  My father was all state in Ohio, my mom's brother's played DII ball, and I was good at running kids over in peewee football.  But I hated the game.  I hated the practice, I hated hitting people, I hated my dad, and I hated how Coach Tremppo told me I was lousy player and lousy kid and I was only on the team because he needed someone on the team to get shoved around.  What football did get me was access to players, and get me close to Price Glauker, who got me into pants.  Glauker's uncle was a booster with a pants warehouse.  Pretty soon, we had the whole team outfitted illegally and were moving onto the junior college the next town over.  The summer of my senior year, I spent the entire time driving from college town to college town giving away bags of pants and shorts to recruits and anyone on the teams who would take them, even the punters.  It was a punter that got me.  I didn't know he had washed out the team and got picked up the The A.(3)  The NCAA judge told me if I wanted to go to college I would be sentenced to working for the NCAA(4).

We all coped with the processing differently.  I started to see pants every time I closed my eyes.  Every time I left the Facility, I was immediately scanning everyone's pants and making notes.  At least four times, someone threatened to hit me, and that's when I generally stopped leaving the apartment complex. Gerry Wicks stopped wearing them altogether.  Even in the dead of winter, he was in shorts.  He was standing in a shin-high snow drift waiting for the shuttle from our Plainfield apartment complex, the Lamplighter, shivering, his legs turning red and raw but he would not put on a single pant, not even after a series of memos then meetings, then threatened legal action and counter-action.  Harry Denn was the only one who wanted to be there and he only talked about pants.  He checked into his station with a crisp pencil, he talked about pants on breaks, he talked about pants at lunch; I once saw him looking at pants Perry Crossing with a weird little smile on his face, his eyeballs sort of rolled up into his head.  It was like that for weeks before no one would talk to him anymore.  We just could not bear it.  He seemed to understand that, that his life would consist finding the exact amount of pants conversation anyone could bear before being relegated to his odd little world.  He would hit the buttons on his Feed with his eyes blissfully closed, and we could never figure out how he did it.  He hit the button and took small, strangled breaths.

2.

The phone rang buzzed in the car.  Duckett still had a flip phone and the NCAA made him turn it on but he could not answer it.  He was motionless under a blanket and wide receiver Darryl Mant was about to get some pants from a booster from the trunk, but it did not have any pants, but had Buck Duckett ready to spring into action.  The phone buzzed again, but there was also a crack of daylight.

It was another meeting he had missed.  Duckett knew that he could not avoid the Reorganization forever by hiding out in the field, but he was going to try as hard as he could.  Duckett's section chief Ed Nackro had been telling him that things were coming crashing down.  "Duckett, it's over for pants," Nackro said to him.  But Nackro had been saying that since '05, when they moved Pants over to that warehouse in Plainfield, and here they were still reeling in busts and suspensions and vacating basketball games.(5) 

Duckett had tried to get out of pants once.  He wanted cars.  Everyone in the entire section wanted cars.  He put his head down and did his best with pants.  The Deputy Vice President of Investigations cited him for his "dogged pursuit of pants violators."  And when they announced the promotions to Automobiles the next year, he was still in pants.  Instead, the promotion went to Phil Prompt, who made fewer busts but was at more meetings.  Prompt was great in meetings.  He always wanted to add technology; Prompt actually created the idea of Processing.  Processing produced few leads, that is far fewer than Duckett's network of pants informants in athletic departments and malls, but the NCAA wanted to move towards computers while Duckett was still filing reports in carbon.  After that, he got put on another reorganization committee, but he could not stand the endless power points and the meetings, the whole time there were pipelines of pants shooting through underground networks while they talked about more efficient ways to fill out forms.(6)

Now, though, Duckett had heard that they were going to legalize it all.  Duckett could not think about it.  He came in every day and looked at his corkboards, and talked to his informants.  His sources did not have much to say anymore other than questions about why he was still doing this.  Every day, ominous memos about The Reorganization piled up on his desk.  

1. The Reorganization was a massive reallocation of NCAA resources away from its Invetigations and Processing sections to its Sponsorships and Marketing sections.  In one stroke of a pen, 14 section heads were merged into other departments, 13 were bought out, and one, the Tattoos Investigation Section head Luther Varnich, disappeared completely with a briefcase of sensitive documents which were later recovered at the crash site outside a regional airport in Honduras.  

2. The Feed was introduced in 2005 as a more efficient way to monitor athletes and prevent costly and dangerous undercover missions.  It came as a result of a bureaucratic war that saw Investigations Deputy Section Head Walt Malt arrested after trying to sabotage the Feed servers with homemade explosives.  The explosion took head of Feed Security Irving Luarent's right hand, which he replaced with a menacing but useless claw.

3. Employess of the NCAA referred to it at the time as "The A."

4. The case was the first known attempt by a judge to sentence a defendant to work for the National Collegiate Athletic Association.  This judge, A. Barbara Three, had run on a reelection platform of cracking down on pants.  The next time she tried it, it resulted in the landmark case NCAA vs. Oprock, which got all the way to the Supreme Court where the justices ruled 9-0 that this kind of sentencing was impossible and absurd.  The judge resigned.  Jimmy Oprock had lawyers and not parents who just told him to sign whatever they put in front of him.  Oprock later sued and won $468,000 for his trouble.  By this time, I had been finished with the Processing Facility for six years.

5. Buck Duckett's massive bust of the A&M Ring caused the school to vacate 22 wins in the season and take down an NIT Participant banner.  They gave Duckett a replica banner to hang in his office, but he never put it up.  It was the largest pants bust in NCAA history, with 75 pairs of illegal pants displayed for the TV cameras and Duckett grimacing through a press conference where he refused to speak.

6. To be more specific, the NCAA Investigation Section Reporting Meeting Series from April 2007 to February 2008 met to determine whether they should switch from the standard V-238 Violations Form for student-athletes caught with contraband which was then filed in a database to a V-500 Series report that was on a newer system and allowed tracking from other departments, which could be cross referenced into larger investigations and flagged for the Special Section, which would allow for much larger investigations and possible activation of the armed Enforcement Section.  The issue was whether the increased efficiency would be counterbalanced by the need to retrain all Investigation Sections and whether the availability of information would allow for investigations to be compromised.  This was not a concern when the Meeting Series was initiated in 2005, but in the next year, an internal NCAA mole connected to a powerful sports agency destroyed 38 active shoe investigations before the mole was chased onto the Chase Tower and he plummeted to his death.