The NBA's Pantomime Villainy and the Chicago Bulls

The best parts of Face/Off are when Nicolas Cage, playing a heroic FBI agent who had his face swapped with his sworn enemy using biotechnology and Windows 95, realizes that he has become, to the outside world, his own archnemesis and the only way to cope is to adopt his enemies' criminally insane behaviors, thus becoming what he hates-- and to show this internal emotional conflict by making extremely Nicolas Cage faces.  This also describes what the Chicago Bulls have done this offseason to their bewildered fans.

It was not enough for Gar Forman and John Paxson to send the faces of the team to New York and subject Bulls fans to maniacal Joakim Noah dunk screams in the hated uniform of John Starks and Patrick Ewing.  They also signed Dwyane Wade and Rajon Rondo, the Bulls' own archnemeses.  Every time Wade grabs at his eye imploring the refs to call a foul or Rondo sourly walks away from Hoiberg in the middle of a timeout and then gets in a tiny scooter and just drives home in the middle of a game, Chicago fans will instinctively start to boo them only to realize they are on the Bulls now and so they are forced to imitate Cage's simultaneous weeping and maniacal leering out of sheer confusion.  

Travolta is clearly doing an impression of a maniacal Cage for most of the movie while Cage 
has to pretend to be a reasonable man forced to impersonate a maniacal Cage so the effect is 
like Being John Malkovich where all the leads are just maniacal Nicolas Cages making this face 
and blowing up vehicles at each other for 138 minutes.

The qualified Per Synergy Sports basketbloggers can explain better than me how Wade and Rondo make no sense for the Bulls.  Neither fits with Hoiberg's pace and space philosophy that exists on a chalkboard somewhere in the bowels of the Advocate Center.  Wade shot less than 16% from three last season; Rondo does not seem willing to shoot under any circumstances and appears to be modeling his game on the time Ricky Davis futilely shot at his own basket to get a triple double.  It has been about two weeks since Gar Forman justified the Rose trade by claiming the Bulls would get younger and more athletic. Now, he has acquired two players in their thirties with a history of knee problems.  But that is immaterial.  The Wade and Rondo moves are disasters because they the are two of the Bulls fans' most hated NBA players and I hate their jerk faces.

Rondo's crimes against the Bulls date back to the epic 2009 Bulls/Celtics playoff series when he threw Kirk Hinrich into a table like a professional wrestler and bludgeoned Brad Miller about the face.  A wobbly, dazed Miller could not hit his free throws.  Compounding the humiliation, the primary video evidence of the hit has been uploaded by a person named "patsfan000026" with NOT FLAGRANT superimposed on the bottom of it in such an obnoxiously-implied Boston accent that my computer has become infected with a virus and screams about Tom Brady being railroaded at random intervals.  Rondo managed to quit on a playoff team in Dallas so egregiously that they pretended he was injured.  His time on the Sacramento Kings, less a basketball organization than a boiling cauldron of insanity, climaxed with an ejection for screaming homophobic slurs at a referee.

The most interesting subplot on the Bulls this season will be the ways that Rondo manages to psychologically break Fred Hoiberg, who coaches with the intensity of a substitute math teacher.  Perhaps Rondo will humiliate Hoiberg in Connect Four in front of the entire team.  Perhaps he will convince Ol' Fred that everyone on the team is growing mustaches in November and then when Hoiberg walks into the advocate center as the only person with a mustache he is greeted by pictures of Ned Flanders plastered to the walls with a legend that says "HOIBERG."  Maybe Rondo will re-edit Hoiberg's game film, switching out the coach's beloved inspirational '80s movie scenes for horrifying Cronenbergian body horror while Hoiberg yells C'MON YOU SAID YOU NEEDED FINAL CUT PRO FOR FILM STUDY at him.

Benny the Bull disdainfully showers Rondo with popcorn when Rondo 
was injured and therefore forced to hurl insults at the Bulls on a regional 
television broadcast

Wade has, as far as I can tell, never used a part of the arena to attack Kirk Hinrich.  Nevertheless, he earned the ire of Bulls fans as the ringleader of the hated Heat.  Wade feuded with the Bulls when they had Ben Gordon and Ben Wallace and he feuded with Derrick Rose before Rose's knees disintegrated like the guy who drank from the wrong Holy Grail.  Wade's sins are more prosaic than Rondo's.  He flops.  He moans at officials so operatically that opponents easily dunk on the next possession because the NBA doesn't allow players to assign ghost players to defend while they are berating Scott Foster.  More than anything, Wade has existed as a very good player on a team that consistently beat the Bulls for more than a decade, the grossest basketball evil that can be committed against a team.

At the very least, the Wade move has backfired on Pat Riley.  Riley, a basketball innovator who invented advanced strategies such as telling Anthony Mason to elbow people and telling Alonzo Mourning to elbow people, has been irritating Bulls fans since the 1980s.  Now Riley has seen his carefully-cultivated Miami family narrative upended by a power play gone awry, which should give him something to think about as he sinks into the hair gel sarcophagus he sleeps in every night.  Miami has cap room, but it will be useless if Riley's hard bargaining tactics scare off potential free agents.  It is at the very least gratifying to imagine Riley striking out with big name free agents and then angrily feeding some flunky to the shark he keeps in his mansion to use as a metaphor for winning.

A threatened Riley instinctively displays his Championship Ring the way a startled lizard 
deploys a skin-fringe or puffs itself up by inflating gaseous sacs

Sports fandom represents, at best, a crude pantomime of emotions for fans.  Players can be gone in an instant, teams removed at the stroke of a pen, and all of the billions of dollars for pyrotechnics and jumbotrons and irritatingly peppy people walking around asking a seven year-old to name their favorite player for a t-shirt and television networks and guys in suits who are paid unfathomable sums of money to scream KEVIN DURANT IN MY OPINION IS NOT MAKING A MAN'S MOVE, KEVIN I AM LOOKING AT YOU NOW AND YOU SHOULD BE ASHAMED, CHAGRINED, I AM GOING TO THROW HARD-BOILED EGGS AT YOUR FAMILY KEVIN and absolutely all of it is completely and utterly devoid of meaning.

Stephen A's speech threatening Kevin Durant is the funniest thing that has ever been on television

We can accept that and yet we will turn on a Bulls game to see the sneering face of Dwyane Wade and disgruntled surl-mugging from Rajon Rondo and wonder how this all happened. And when the Bulls play the Knicks next season, against Joakim Noah and Derrick Rose, we'll all feel as if we've seen the faces swapped, the tenets of basketball villainy undermined, the United Center filled with doves.  In an entertainment product as insane and capricious as professional sports, perhaps the most reasonable way to cope is to make Nicolas Cage faces and embrace the chaos.

Week 7: BIG TEN SLOBBERKNOCKIN' and the Laws of the Universe

For the past three years, the Northwestern-Michigan game has ended in a conflagration of unlikely football misfortune robbing the Wildcats of a victory over a depleted, languid Michigan team.  That did not happen this year.  Instead, Northwestern kicked off and then I'm pretty sure the field opened up and swallowed the Wildcats whole for the rest of the game.  I know that people come to this website for detailed play-by-play football expertise, so I've diagnosed some of the key plays in this video below (you might not want to blare this one at work):


The result was a 38-0 debacle that only became watchable once it mysteriously transformed into a festival of improbable Cubs bunts through the magic of television.  Northwestern's football Wildcats were utterly dismantled and are no longer undefeated.  Michigan put up another shutout and remains ascendant, insufferably. 

Losing to Michigan is annoying.  The rebirth of Michigan and the barely-disguised giddiness of national football pundits at the reestablishment of a Football Brand is annoying.  The incredible series of idiotic San Francisco 49ers skulduggery that exiled an excellent NFL coach and brought him to Michigan through a blood-red sky on a war chariot raining a pestilence of nose tackles upon the Big Ten is annoying.  Jim Harbaugh is profoundly annoying.
 
Every week, an assistant coach is tasked with assuring Harbaugh that he 
has not been thrown out of the domed settlement on the surface of Mars 
in Total Recall

Despite the disheartening clobbering, the Wildcats are still 5-1, still close to clinching a bowl berth, and in contention in the Big Ten West.  Their time in the national spotlight has passed; now Northwestern fans can retreat to the shadows comfortably away from college football bloviatrics and enjoy what still has the possibility to be an incredible season.  A repeat of the 2013 season, where a hot Northwestern start devolved into a series of inconceivable late-game meltdowns where the Wildcats found themselves turning into the opposing team on Friday Night Lights every week will hopefully not happen.
 
Listen up, we're gonna run the you scramble around for two minutes 
before heaving the ball up against their entire defense with no time 
remaining and I want you to throw that ball with metaphoric resonance 
about small-town football and triumphs and misery and what it means 
to be a man and I want you to do it while people scream in wide-eyed 
wonder in slow motion in the stands, what are you doing, don't you get
in that huddle without this post rock CD

But Northwestern will not contend for anything if they don't get past an undefeated Iowa team with its own designs on the West in a bloodthirsty Big Ten showdown.


BIG TEN FOOTBALL: THE NATION'S SHOVIEST FOOTBALL

Iowa-Northwestern games are technically football in that there are football teams and balls and crowds and everything.  But the games are also demolition derbies, where dream seasons from teams far removed from Big Ten royalty smash into smoldering piles of ligaments and animus.  Pat Fitzgerald broke his leg in the 1995 Iowa game, preventing him from playing in the Rose Bowl.  A dreadful Iowa team crushed Northwestern's chance at Pasadena in 2000, relegating the 'Cats to a share of the championship and a berth in the Alamo Bowl.  Both teams lost starting quarterbacks in consecutive years in 2009 and 2010. Iowa and Northwestern exist to ruin each other's seasons in complete anonymity because not a single soul outside Iowa City and Evanston is aware that these teams play each other every year on a regulation football field.
 
Artists' rendition: Iowa 12, Northwestern 7

The Hawkeyes are flying high with an undefeated season and the Wildcats are still recovering from the drubbing they received in Ann Arbor.  It would appear that Iowa should cruise to an easy win.  The Hawkeyes, however, have been hammered by injuries.  Star defensive lineman Drew Ott is lost for the season.  The offensive line is so beat up that Kirk Ferentz may suit up; he has spent the week lifting triangular weights, looking for his leather helmet, and practicing hand-to-hand combat against Soviet agents in preparation.  Iowa quarterback C.J. Beathard his also nurturing an injury, but he plans to counter by having the best football name since Army quarterback Trent Steelman managed to tactically subterfuge his way through Northwestern's defense some years back.

Northwestern's miserable outing in Ann Arbor exposed some problems that the defense had covered up.  They still have trouble moving the ball against good defenses.  The defense had trouble stopping Michigan's power running game, and Iowa's Jordan Canzeri has absolutely sliced defenses apart.  Last week against Illinois, the Hawkeyes simply stopped throwing the ball, giving it to Canzeri over and over again as he literally ran over the Illini to seal an Iowa victory.  Add in that Ferentz, long considered an ambassador of Big Ten Fuddy-Duddery has embraced a Cornfield Gambler persona that has the stereotypically staid Hawkeyes going for it on fourth down, embracing the forward pass, and occasionally eschewing a field-goal-and-safety scoring philosophy, and it is not hard to see why they are undefeated and favored.  This time it is the Wildcats who live and die with the defense, run the ball between the tackles, and try to punt other teams into submission in order to win football games while Ferentz mocks Fitz's conservatism from the groovy psychadelic bus where he now lives.

The Wildcats will honor the twentieth anniversary of the Rose Bowl team on Homecoming this Saturday.  They will be wearing throwback 1995 uniforms.  This marks the seventh different uniform combination Northwestern has worn this season: white helmets, white jerseys, Aggressive Wildcat Bite Helmets, Dracula Uniforms, Chicago's Big Ten Municipal Corruption Boodle Bag helmets, Lake helmets, Colbert Eyebrow uniforms, and Fake Opposing Uniforms to Convince an Overwhelming Away Crowd At Ryan Field to Root For Northwestern Uniforms.  Northwestern's marketing partnership with UnderArmour has been vital for building the Northwestern Brand, which is crucial for twenty-first century football programs who plan on using their Solid Brands to stop the option play.

THE CUBS ARE VERY GOOD AND YOU ARE GOING TO READ ABOUT IT IN THIS BLOG

There is a dumb comfort to fatalism.  When the seemingly-insurmountable lead evaporates through a series of miserable Rube Goldberg events, well it could never end well. It's not necessarily a belief in curses or goats or any sort of supernatural malevolence.  It is just the idea, lodged in the Neanderthal Cortex of a primordial human brain that if something happens a few times over the short course of a human lifetime, it is a truth from time immemorial.  The Cubs would never win anything and, if they did, they could never beat the St. Louis Cardinals, as ever-present at the top of the National League Central division as a sun shining the Right Way. 

The Cubs beat the St. Louis Cardinals in a playoff series.  They beat them and the St. Louis Cardinals are no longer able to play baseball.  They can go out and play some stickball or get together on the diamond to practice calibrating their baseball caps to avoid tilting them at morally unacceptable Strop levels, but these games will not be sanctioned by Major League Baseball and there is nothing anyone can do from disseminating accounts of them all over the Midwest.
 
The bizarre Costas diatribe against Strop after a disastrous outing is one 
of the funniest subplots of the season.  "KNOW THIS, STROP," Costas 
said, puffing out his bulging eye sacs to make him appear larger and more 
menacing. "WHEN YOU ARRIVE IN WHATEVER DAMNED AFTERLIFE 
WILL ACCEPT YOUR SHODDY RELIEF PITCHING SOUL, I HOPE YOU 
FACE AN ETERNITY SERVING UP MEATBALLS THAT WILL SOAR 
ACROSS THE HEAVENS TO DESTROY YOUR MOST CHERISHED 
MEMORIES AND WHILE THAT IS HAPPENING YOU ARE MOCKED 
WITH GRAVITY-DEFYING BAT FLIPS WHICH HANG FOREVER 
TURNING AND ECHOING DEMONIC LAUGHTER AT YOU, HERE I 
SHOULD NOTE I AM PROBABLY ALSO OPPOSED TO BAT FLIPS BECAUSE 
THAT SEEMS LIKE A REALLY BOB COSTAS THING TO GET ANNOYED 
WITH, THIS IS BOB COSTAS SIGNING OFF WITH UNEARTHLY CACKLING." 
 Costas then rode off on his High Horse, which is a normal, regular-sized horse.

The Cubs sent Jason Hammel, a pitcher sponsored by the American Meatball Council for the past several months, against the Cardinals in a potential series-clinching game.  Hammel immediately gave up a hit and home run to put them down 2-0 before fans even had an opportunity to aggressively point to their arms in an effort to remove Hammel from the game in world where it was possible to make citizens' pitching changes.  The move to keep him in seemed even more ludicrous in the second, when Maddon sent Hammel to bat with men on base.  Hammel responded with an RBI single, setting the stage for Javy Baez to homer home the go-ahead runs and for Cardinals pitcher John Lackey to argle-bargle his way back the mound in a delightful display of baseball fury.  A Cardinals rally (started by a scrappy backup catcher who hit .200 this season, whose crucial RBI double against the Cubs was fore-ordained by the Big Bang) was answered by thundering Cubs dingers including a Kyle Schwarber blast that affected the rotation of the Earth.

If the Cubs can defeat the Cardinals, if they can make it to the National League Championship Series, then hell, why can't they make it to the World Series?  If all it takes to break through the playoffs is a team full of young people who do not realize they are Cubs, a manager who manages the team with cuddly zoo animals, and a lumpy, chin-bearded home run machine, then I suppose it is worth unmooring ourselves from an entire baseball cosmology and actually believe.  Or, do what I plan to do and miserably watch every playoff game, spending the most fun Cubs season of all time  in a protective flinch waiting for the other shoe to drop.
 
Playoff baseball makes Larry Kings of us all

IMAGINE DOING SOMETHING OTHER THAN WATCHING OTHER PEOPLE PLAY SPORTS THIS WEEKEND

Northwestern faces off at 11:00am in Chicago's Big Ten time slot against Iowa at Ryan Field.  Perhaps a return to confines of Ryan Field alongside the '95 team can shake the team from whatever hit them last Saturday at Michigan.  All that's at stake is a bowl berth, contention in the Big Ten West, and avoiding a Ranked Northwestern Death Spiral that has claimed so many other seasons.  The vestigial quasi-rivalry with Iowa, Homecoming,  and a stadium filled with hostile Iowa fans will certainly lend the game an intense atmosphere.

There is no fatalistic doom-and-gloomery that hovers over a Northwestern/Iowa game. Instead, it is a shared horror that both promising seasons can simultaneously implode by slobberknocking so hard that it causes some sort of rift in the slobber/knock continuum, throws the earth off its orbit, and opens the Big Ten West to be claimed by Purdue. After all, we are living in a world where the Chicago Cubs have beaten the indomitable St. Louis Cardinals in a playoff series and the Laws of the Universe no longer apply.

NBA Playoffs

The Bulls ended their epic seven game series against Boston last Saturday night in a disappointing conclusion to a series featuring overtime in four games and only two games that did not end in the final seconds. The most ridiculous game was Game 6, featuring three overtimes, Ray Allen's 51 points in a losing effort, and Noah's insane coast to coast dunk over Pierce with the requisite Joakim Noah banshee shriek. For a recap of Game 6, NBA.com turned the game over to its ace Foley artists Gary Payton and Chris Webber.

The Passion and Redemption of Brad Miller

The Bulls played well against a Celtics squad that had lost their defensive anchor and emotional leader Kevin Garnett, who was reduced to launching into hysterics on the sidelines and practicing his Street Fighter II victory poses. They also showed that they were a young team on the rise, with a nucleus featuring Derrick Rose, Joakim Noah, Tyrus Thomas, and first year head coach Lloyd Braun.

Vinny Del Negro's coaching strategy
depends on the twin prongs of serenity
and insanity

TELEVISED BASKETBALL

Basketball is one sport where playoff basketball actually attracts playoff-caliber national announcers. Locally, things do not often work out as well, such as the time the Bulls brought in Scottie Pippen as an analyst despite the fact that his low-timbred mush-mouthed delivery occasionally ventures into Sling Blade levels of incoherence (although nothing will ever top the time that Shannon Sharpe went into battle against the phrase "Billy Volek" during one of his spittle-drenched scat solo highlight narrations). The greatest Scottie Pippen moment of all time, however, is this astounding Mr. Submarine commercial from 1991, where evidently someone swapped out Pippen's script with a Christopher Walken version that had all of the punctuation removed.

this is one six footer I can't handle one on one ladies let's
have a party

For one of the games, I found myself subjected to Tommy Heinsohn's commentary from the Boston feed. Home team announcers are by definition homers at varying levels of obnoxiousness, but Heinsohn was maddening to the point that he would only accecpt a Boston foul if a scythe was prominently involved, a practice that can be best assessed using the BYCTOM Homer Announcer Tolerability Scale.

Heinsohn is highlighted on the scale, which becomes more untolerable towards the business
end of the pitchfork

Heinsohn's infuriating ranting at least resonates with Boston fans, which is much more important to his job than not rankling Chicago fans watching on any illegal stream available, even if it is pro-Celtics or broadcast in one of several possible Slavic languages. And no matter what he does, he probably will not inspire the universal ire of Tommy Smyth, who is, according to this Guardian article, "possibly the most hated football commentator in history." Smyth, whose hoary bald pate has become the face of ESPN's soccer coverage, evidently spends most broadcasts buzzing around a match like a buzzard ready to pounce in with his despised "bulge in the old onion bag" catch-phrase every time a goal or goal-like situation has occurred. For this, he receives letters wishing his mother had had him aborted and even a death threat from a particularly vengeful Australian.

Smyth's over-the-top Irish accent has also made him few friends with Irish ex-patriates who take exception to his brogue, such as Cass Crockett, a co-founder of an anti-Smyth site, who claims that "In each of the years that he's left County Louth, his accent has gotten stronger to such an extent that he's now 94% angry leprechaun." Another Irish critic claims that his accent is "more embarrassing to expats than either Riverdance or the Celtic Woman show."

Other US soccer bloggers have called Smyth "Beelzebub's handmaid", a "pathetic and insulting blight", a "garbage commentator", a "ridiculous clown" and "the biggest tit on the air" who talks "incessant drivel" and "utters inanity after absurdity after stupidity". Others also opined that Smyth commentates as "if he is watching the game through an aquarium" and that he "needs to be tied to a goal post for Juninho to practise his free-kicks on".

Jubilant crowds celebrate the firing of Tommy Smyth. Incidentally, there's an excellent story
by Boston Globe reporter Brian Rogers investigating Hasselhoff's role in the fall of the Berlin Wall

PLAYOFF PRESENTATION

Although TNT has paid proper tribute to playoff basketball by allowing the husky histrionics of Marv Albert to resonate in 5.1 stereo, the playoffs do not feel right without an over-dramatic story narrated by Bob Costas followed by Roundball Rock and then an overhead shot of the arena accompanied by a Marv monologue about Jazz fans wondering if Karl Malone will come through in the clutch. TNT made an attempt with a highlight package using the ubiquitous orchestrated version of the theme from Requiem for a Dream that has spread like a plague across the sports highlight landscape, but it is bereft of overwrought narration and therefore unacceptable. Here, for example, is how NBC brought us Game 3 of the Eastern Conference Finals between Chicago and New York that not only rips Enter the Sandman, but also the phrases "Call it the Knicks worst nightmare" and "Headlines like these make it more than a game--it's personal" out of the Stallone movie trailer handbook.

My favorite of these is from before Game 1 of the 1996 Finals against Seattle, where Pippen and Kemp's showdown to determine the best hi-top fade in the NBA was so dramatic that an NBC producer picked up a red phone and dialed up the most dramatic theme music possible.

NBC took its musical cues from Detlef
Schrempf's haircut and his menacing demand for
Dick Bavetta's pants, jacket, and motorcycle

Do NBA broadcasts deserve a modicum of restraint and taste, or do they benefit from going into Adam West Batman territory from time to time when a series demands it? Can the overdramatic NBC style work in the twenty-first century or does it belong in the dustbin with pump sneakers, snap bracelets, and movies where the fate of the world rests in the curly locks of Jeff Goldblum? Perhaps mid-1990s basketball broadcasting can only work on mid-1990s basketball issues.

This summer, NBA on NBC presents
Carr vs. Robinson: This Dog is Only
Big Enough for One of Us
((in stereo where available))

The answer to these questions is perhaps unknowable, but the path to enlightenment surely involves an unholy combination of Nicolas Cage's maniacally vacant intensity, a series of increasingly hilarious clips from what is apparently a real movie, and a British interviewer's intrepid dedication to A Flock of Seagulls.