Media Day

We are nearing August, when football training camp begins in earnest and the Wildcats begin the 2015 season, or as I call it, HATRIBUTION '15.  This week, Big Ten coaches will meet with the media to address hard-hitting questions about whether or not they are excited for football to start.  Big Ten officials will field questions about expansion, because in the rapacious Enormous Ten, the goal is to capture as many television markets as possible in the United States and abroad.  Expect Jim Delany to strut around asking reporters if they had ever seen such a big ten in their lives and who has a bigger ten than him.

Pat Fitzgerald is scheduled to speak Friday.  Those who can't wait can read Skip Myslesnski's interview that addresses the uncertainty on the roster, not only a quarterback but up and down the depth chart.  Fitzgerald doesn't give up much and Myslenski is reigned in instead of the florid, lyrical Myslenski that injects training camp stories with much-needed elements of the introduction to Conan the Barbarian movies.  Though I am writing this before Fitz has spoken, BYCTOM moles have obtained a transcript of his remarks, and he is expected to delight the crowd with references to Our Young Men.
 
Pat Fitzgerald expects fireworks after last year's revolutionary speech 
when he scandalized the football media by vowing to take things one 
game at a time, drawing heckles from disbelieving football personnel used 
to taking things two or three games at a time. Jerry Kill denounced 
Fitzgerald as a sick, sad man and Kyle Flood leaped through a plate glass 
window

Yesterday, Illini football coach and man who doesn't need your advice about opening that pickle jar just give him a second ok Tim Beckman spoke to reporters. Let's check in on Beck Man.

Usually, this is a time for Beck Man to stand astride a podium, cape fluttering in the fan he has brought, while he denounces Northwestern and issues boasts and taunts from the anti-Wildcat underground, but this year Beckman immediately found himself dealing with reports about player abuse allegations.  The Chicago Tribune recently spoke to 50 Illini current and former Illini players about the allegations.  It is clear that Beckman will continue to face questions that he'd rather not answer when he should be preparing for a Soldier Field hat defense.

Big Ten media days are a pointless, ridiculous exercise in nonsense.  None of the coaches will say anything particularly noteworthy about his program and none of them want to be there when they could be screaming at teenagers to run into inanimate objects in the sweltering Midwestern sun.  On the other hand, media day means that we draw ever closer to football season and the attendant miseries.   

BRITISH SOCCER MOVIE REVIEW

What happens when a group of race car conman billionaires takes over a sports team, attempts to rocket them to glory, turns into a global cabal of Steinbrenners, and hires someone to film it?  The end result is The Four Year Plan, directed by Mat Hodgson about the rise of Queens Park Rangers to the Premier League.

The film covers the 2007 purchase of Queens Park Rangers by a consortium of billionaires including F1 racing honchos Bernie Ecclestone, Flavio Briatore, and Alejandro Agag and Indian steel magnate Lakshmi Mittal, rescuing the club from bankruptcy.  The investors were interested in QPR because of its history (founded in 1882), location in West London, and presumably a whimsical name that brings to mind an ambitious episode of Walker Texas Ranger where he traverses the Atlantic to jump kick English cattle rustlers.  Their goal: to raise QPR from the second-tier Championship to the lucrative Premier League.

FLAVIO: We need to work on our set piece
ECCLESTONE: We should set a piece of this stadium on fire and collect 
the insurance money
BOTH: ho ho ho ho ho ho ho

The face of the operation is Briatore (referred to exclusively in the film by his colleagues and angry, chanting detractors as "Flavio"), an anthropomorphic radish who spends most of his time at QPR plotting to fire all of the managers.  Scandal has dogged Briatore wherever he has gone; he spent several years dodging prison from numerous fraud convictions in Saint Thomas and, if Wikipedia is to be believed, spent portions of the 1980s as an Italian Elmore Leonard character:

In 1986, in Milan, Briatore was sentenced to 3 years for fraud and conspiracy for his role in a team of confidence tricksters who, over a number of years, set up rigged gambling games using fake playing cards. The judges described these as elaborate confidence tricks, in which victims were invited to dinner and then "ensnared" in rigged games that involved a cast of fictional characters and realised enormous profits for their perpetrators.

Hodgson's cameras follow Briatore as he stalks about the club.  He denounces managers as idiots.  He disparages players in the stands with Director of Football Gianni Paladni.  He orders substitutions from the owner's box.  He walks around in hilarious European rich person puffy jackets presumably invented to prevent a disgruntled peasant from stabbing him with the jagged edge of a stale baguette.  Briatore, who goes through no less than five managers in his first two years with the club, comports himself like a ludicrous and incompetent dictator. 
 
Gianni Paladini enjoys a soccer game. Paladini comes across in the movie as Briatore's lackey, but 
had actually been a powerful agent who had purchased a stake in QPR in 2003. In fact, in 2006, he 
was involved in a bizarre incident where he claimed that a minority owner had hired a gang of "hard men" 
to intimidate him into selling his stake during a match.  You should read that whole article as it is 
completely fucking insane and something that Hodgson doesn't mention at all in the movie.  
Flavio Briatore is the angry man gesturing behind him.
In an related note, that is pretty much how I watch all sporting events

The best part of the movie by far is when QPR fans revolt.  They chant "FUCK FLAVIO."  They angrily sing "we want our Rangers back" to the tune of La Donna e Mobile while scuffling with police, their blood-curling aria echoing through the streets of Shepherd's Bush.  Briatore tells a group of fans that he will sell the team and leave it to rot while obsequious hangers-on beg him to stay.  He demands names.  What Flavio Briatore would possibly do with the names of people who boo him is unclear; I like to imagine he will use his billions to set up a fake sweepstakes luring them to his private island where they will be hunted for sport, not by Briatore, but by a group of Robert Muldoon-like characters he has flown in while he hovers over the island in a helicopter denouncing them as shitty, incompetent hunters using the speaker system from Apocalypse Now.

The other major figure who emerges is Amit Bhatia, an investment banker and Mittal's son-in-law.  Bhatia comes across as a slick but enthusiastic bean counter who acts as the more reasonable counterweight to Briatore.  He becomes the central face of ownership after Briatore steps down, tainted by an F1 match-fixing scandal.  Shortly after, QPR poaches manager Neil Warnock and rockets to the top of the table.  Yet, even the team's greatest triumph remains mired in allegations of cheating.  The Football Association launches an investigation into an illegal transfer.  The FA threatened fines and a points deduction that would strip QPR of its championship and automatic promotion to the Premier League.  It is entirely in keeping with the spirit of the film that the most touching moment of catharsis is not the team's  locker room celebration after clinching the championship, but Paladini jubilantly sprinting through the stadium screaming "NO POINTS DEDUCTIONS!"

The film is an odd window into a deliriously dysfunctional sports organization.  Again, Hodgson remains upfront that the funding for the movie came primarily from the ownership, which he depicts as operating with operatic absurdity (it never acknowledges the various scandals and corruption allegations floating around Briatore and Ecclestone and their role in Britatore's exit).  Though the movie has the rhythms of an underdog sports movie, we rarely see the players and have little sense of what is going on on the field.  We keep track of the team's progress by seeing them moving up and down the table and through montages of the owners celebrating or angrily calling for the manager's head.  Managers get more screen time, but come across like teenagers in the first 20 minutes of a slasher film, given veneers of personality before they are inevitably axed.  Hodgson is more concerned with showing how Bhatia saves money by purchasing less ostentatious food and floral arrangements than why QPR has gone from mid-table embarrassment to champions.  But that perspective is more compelling than the traditional narrative, not only because it is a part of sports not often captured, but also because Flavio Briatore comes across as irresistibly loathsome.
 
Manager Neil Warnock celebrates the 2011 championship.  Ecclsteone quickly sold his share 
to an ownership group headed by Malaysian airline magnate Tony Fernandes.  Fernandes 
fired Warnock into his first season in the Premier League, but QPR continued to scuffle 
and was relegated back to the Championship after only one season

The Four Year Plan resonates because it illustrates the helplessness of sports fans when it comes to ownership.  The movie depicts a team saved and backed by the unexpected largesse of deep-pocketed owners, but kept in chaos by volatile, impetuous, and incompetent management.  Capricious owners have been around since the concept of owning sports teams was invented, but the almost unimaginable expenses and profits associated with modern professional sports and the globalization of leagues has amplified effects.  Fans of teams with meddling, boorish, incompetent owners have no recourse other than futile chants and angry arias.  The exception remains the Green Bay Packers, and I hate them so much that I hope their team is purchased by a Habsburg who moves the team to Jacksonville and changes the name to the Muskie Haters.

DON'T DESPAIR IT IS NEARLY FOOTBALL

If there is one thing more arbitrary and absurd than professional sports ownership, it is the NCAA.  We are only about a month away from the season opener against Stanford, quarterback-related anguish, silent home snap counts, and hat vengeance.   

Spring Post

The Wildcat basketball season came to an abrupt end at the hands of Rhode Island, ending my plan to fill my home with Northwestern NIT champion merchandise. The Wildcats can now use the summer to get healthy and try to make next year's NCAA tournament in a race with New Hampshire and Bethune-Cookman to avoid being the last Wildcats left without a Dance appearance.

Welsh-Ryan auditorium spends the summers as the site of the
nationally renowned Bill Carmody Youth Gesture Camp

And as we turn slowly towards spring, or at least that teasing week of spring that inevitably ends in one of those freak April blizzards hanging like the cloud of Damocles over the Midwest, football season has begun in earnest, for what better harbinger of spring is more telling than no-necked men with crew-cuts yelling at teenagers to hit immobile objects. In order to get properly motivated for football season, why not head over Nusports.com and read what I am calling Myslenski/Fitzgerald I. The interview is surprisingly subdued and I think that we all agree that in the best of possible worlds it would look something like this:

Myslenski: The gruesome ballet of bloodthirsty brigands; the footwork of fullbacks flustering fearsome linemen; Spartans, Badgers, Commodores, all come pillaging, biting, ruining: What is best in life?

Fitz: Our young men are going to compete. We're going to accomplish goals.

Myslenski: But oh ! that deep romantic chasm which slanted
Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover !
A savage place ! as holy and enchanted
As e'er beneath a waning moon was haunted
By woman wailing for her demon-lover !

Fitz: One game at a time

Myslenski: On a mountain of skulls in a castle of pain, I sat on a throne of blood. What was will be, what is will be no more. Now is the season of evil! Find me a child that I might live again!

Fitz: Fist pump

MANAGERIAL STYLE

Though Fitz might not be the most exciting of interview subjects, he's handicapped by his choice of profession. After all, football coaches are all about diagramming the complex machinery of football plays, molding men, and the other sorts of serious life lessons involving coaxing young people to smash into each other at high speed in order to maintain possession of an oblong ball. They can't match the suit-wearing, modish machinations of the NBA coach or the mustachioed machinations of their counterparts in the NHL.

While the NHL and NBA share a strategy of debonairly
sending in the goon, the NHL is more of a Fop league
whereas the NBA is full of Dapper Dan men

The best interviews, of course, come from baseball managers; unlike their more animated counterparts, baseball managers tend to sit placidly, almost zen-like, amidst the sunflower seeds and spent Gatorade cups and dried saliva piling up around them. But when they spring into action, they are astounding, wobbling up the dugout steps on spindly legs propping up an ample belly made of chicken wings and tobacco juice, getting two inches from the umpire's face and jerking their heads around in an unnatural manner that looks more like a gesture from the mating dance of a tropical bird than anything a human being would ever do. Sure, there are animated coaches in every sport, such as Kansas State's Frank Martin, who looks like he's constantly gunning for a supporting role in this yell-based motion picture. But these coaches tend to look like normal, yet relatively angry men, while baseball managers look like red-faced, tweaking muppets.

The angry coach is part of the heightened theatricality of baseball. Possibly because of the relative lack of action compared to other inferior sports that feature boring concepts like contact, possession changes, and continuous running, baseball managers infuse their meltdowns with an epic level of buffoonery. Infamous minor league meltdowns by Phillip Wellman and the baseballically named Joe Mikulik are what happens in a sport where managers can clumsily charge the field to register their disgust and umpires can toss players with gestures that would be over the top when used by villains in gladiator movies. There's a quixotic grace to the baseball manager attempting to protect players from questionable calls and defend their honor against the opposition, then men in blue, and the dastardly Philly Phanatic.

BASEBALL PREVIEW

It is difficult for Cubs fans to get too excited about this year's season after last year's disappointment and few predicting a playoff berth for the Cubs. The NL Central is expected to be dominated by the hated Cardinals, who are difficult to despise with an affable superstar, a group of generally bland players, and a Molina brother. Fortunately, fans can dependably direct their ire against Tony La Russa, who never seemed to disagree with his genius label, best described by the opening to this story by Joe Posnanski from Spring Training in 2009:

La Russa has been the Mozart of overmanagers. There has never been an eighth inning he could not grind into the ground with an endless series of gratuitous pitching changes. There has never been a lineup good enough for La Russa*, and he will use pinch hitters no matter the score. He loves the bunt beyond all reason. He moves runners on the pitch more than any other manager in the game. He likes to say that players win games, but he manages those players like he's their puppeteer.

La Russa in dugout repose

La Russa is a mass of contradictions. He plays up baseball's cerebral elements in a sport fueled by dopiness as evidenced by the prevalence of chin beards, the rather astounding collection of injuries, and the involvement of Jose Canseco, who was transported to and from games via circus train (my favorite injury example is the Jeff Kent truck washing incident, not because the injury itself was anything more fool-hardy than one could expect from other sports, but it's an example of double dopiness where the best excuse he could find for himself involved washing a truck and because no one was nonplussed that a baseball player would be injured while engaged in truck washing. Baseball players have a remarkable relationship to vehicles-- of the myriad tragic deaths that have killed athletes, only baseball has a player who died in a dune buggy accident.)

Roy Oswalt has no chance; that bulldozer is
skulking around his property like claw-wielding
Christine

La Russa simultaneously represents the scientific method and feudal concepts of honor. He rationalizes his pitcher use and player substitutions, but he adheres to a complex and ancient
code of honor in pitcher retaliation. This article by King Kaufman for Salon.com looking at Three Nights in August the Buzz Bissinger hagiography of La Russa makes it seem as though La Russa orders a ball throw at Luis Gonzalez only because his henchmen don't have access to a horse's head on the road. Compare that with how Tommy Lasorda manager uses mathematics to trump retaliation:

I have never, ever since I've managed, ever told a pitcher to throw at anybody, nor will I ever. And if I ever did, I certainly wouldn't make them throw at a fucking .130 hitter like [Joe] Lefebvre...or fucking [Kurt] Bevacqua who couldn't hit water if he fell out of a fucking boat. And I guaran-fucking-tee you this, that when I pitched and I was gonna pitch against a fucking team that had guys on it like Bevacqua, I'd send a fucking limousine to get the cocksucker to make sure he was in the motherfucking lineup because I'd kick that cocksucker's ass any fucking day of the week.

The thing that really ties that Lasorda rant together is the fact that he's railing against someone named Kurt Bevacqua, a shitty ballplayer name that could not be dreamed up in the laudanum haze of a thousand baseball poets.

Bring Your Champions, They're Our Meat will return in May.

Season nearly underway

Northwestern football comes roaring back to Evanston this very weekend, as anyone who has been to a game and heard the Wildcat sound effect blaring over the Ryan Field PA system would attest. Incidentally, that sound is not an actual wildcat, but an approximation based on a digitally altered recording of a third grader making fighter jet noises after being hooked up intravenously to Ecto Cooler.

There is no better way to continue getting into NU football then to read Skip Myslenski at Nusports.com, as he apparently spent the summer strapped into a Clockwork Orange-style eyeball opening device that continually subjected him to the opening narration from gladiator movies. Last week's post, for example, entitled Hybrids, Griffins and Centaurs: The Superbacks, is not only written entirely in the second person tense, a literary feat accomplished only in books that also employ the "open the box labeled 'secrets of time, space, aliens, and the sparkly bits of the universe radiating out of the vaguely creepy goateed guy on the cover' pg. 35/open the box labeled Count Chocula pg. 72" style of fine literature, but he also invokes mythical creatures to explain the Wildcat offense. The only way I can enjoy the fact that Northwestern has hired someone to glorify Northwestern football through fantastically over-the-top columns would be if Myslenski showed up in the press box wearing a fedora surrounded by errand-running urchins with moxie and sprinted to shout into a pay phone anytime anything of note happened. Or as Skip would put it:

With you and yours, though, you just never know how that impact will be made.

You are hybrids, griffins, centaurs.

You are superbacks.

Sample title card from new gameshow Choose Your Own Adventure novel or Herbie Hancock album cover?

The superback position is versatile. In Northwestern's spread attack, they're used as extra blockers or used in situations that call for fullbacks or tight ends. As Myslenski notes, they're also in charge of wreaking havoc against plunderous ancient Greek adventurers and ensuring that opponents' women are lamenting properly.

HYBRIDS, GRIFFINS, AND CENTAURS?

While one can certainly admire the choice of griffins and centaurs as go-to mythical creatures, they're not the most inspired decision. Fortunately, Wikipedia's List of Legendary Creatures provides some viable alternatives for those who prefer their mythical creature vindaloo to have a bit more spice. Of course, few of these creatures have the sort of hybrid characteristics that would make a viable mythology-related point about the role of the superback like they teach you in journalism school. For example, the Drekavac, a mythical Slavic creature related to dead, unbaptized children is not made of a hodge-podge of various creatures, but, as some fastidious Wikipedia contributor notes, "In some parts of Serbia and Balkans it is believed that one must first have a dream about Drekavac to actually encounter one. Also Drekavac can strangle people while they are sleeping, if they did something bad to it in life." More appropriate is the Cantabrian Fish-Man of Lierganes, a man-fish hybrid that "spends time lying in wait for girls and devastating coast villages" which seems like some sort of highly illegal form of third-world tourism.

The unholy joining of man and fish terrorized Cantabrians for generations
until he was caught and let go

My favorite legendary creature from the list is the Brazilian Headless Mule, described with a dashing disregard for the English Language as "the ghost of a woman that has been cursed by God for her sins (often said to be as Concubine or fornication with a priest) and condemned to turn into a fire-spewing headless mule, galloping through the countryside from Thursday's sundown to Friday's sunrise." In this case, the creature is a hybrid of a mule and a mature volcano or result of the collision of any two objects in an Indiana Jones move. Although the concept of a headless, fire-spewing mule is fairly sensible, the article then throws in this confusing tidbit: "Despite being headless, the Mule still neighs (usually very loud), and sometimes it moans like a crying woman. It also has a bridle tied to its non-existing mouth, and spews fire through its non-existing nostrils (or, in some versions, from its severed neck)," a passage that raises the classic zen koan of whether a creature spewing fire from non-existent nostrils can be said to have nostrils at all.

The Headless Mule tales have much in common with
the idea of a headless horseman, shown here celebrating
a goal at the mythical bogeymen polo match against the
Bonnacon, a horse/bull hybrid with the ability to emit
flaming dung, an elusive trait that has made this
creature a vital element of the the heraldic James Bond
crest

A final intriguing creature is the Japanese Konaki-jijī, which is apparently "an infant spirit that cries until it is picked up, then increases its weight and crushes its victim," which seems to be rather unsportsmanlike, although myths like this make Big Man Japan perhaps three percent more coherent. I also like that Wikipedia has a list of legendary creatures by type including categories such as Myslenski favorite Hybrids, Animals, Demons, the wonderfully vague Creatures associated with Concepts, and, under the "Shapeshifter" heading, the artfully descriptive "Existent non-human turn into a human."

PROFESSIONAL FOOTBALL

The Bears' preseason is well underway as they find themselves as a major national story due to the acquisition of Jay Cutler and the return of Kyle Orton to his protected mountain habitat. Quarterbacks have been dominating the news all offseason with the dramatic reinstatement of Michael Vick and the endlessly entertaining Brett Favre Vacillation Spectacular, which will be taking over for Tommy Bartlett's Waterski show until Lake Delton again exists.

Wisconsin Dells entrepreneur Tommy Bartlett offered a wholesome waterski
extravaganza and a gruesome portend of the coming robot apocalypse

As Favre has tortured me and my people for the football equivalent of generations, it is good to see the media finally turning on him, although I admit that I will immediately become a Favre fan if he calls a press conference and announces his retirement by following this precise sequence.

That is also how I exit all rooms on occasions when I am accompanied by my personal funk band, or when I need to get to the bridge.

Jack Webb's soul singing career was cut short after he disastrously
pleaded with the audience to "keep your hands near the ground and
shake them like you're gravely concerned."

So prepare your weekend tailgates for the impending crushing of Towson with your own hybrid creatures: a bacon cheeseburger, the Madden favorite Turducken, and an Upton Sinclair style Chicago hotdog made from pigs, factory scrapings, and body parts from Eastern European immigrants. Now allow me to make my exit as soon as the rest of the Good Time Funk All-Star Hot Pants Good God Y'alls get out of their van.