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BYCTOM may have missed all of the exciting sports action, hurriedly-researched history, and of course gratuitous mustaches from the past several months. Nevertheless, sports certainly don't lend themselves to immediacy; it's far better to experience sporting events through the magic of hindsight after they are no longer so boringly relevant, so please join me for a new BYCTOM feature entitled:

THOSE WERE THE THINGS THAT HAPPENED THEN: PART I

Northwestern managed its most successful post-season run in the history of Wildcat basketball by making it within one overtime period of the vaunted NIT Final Four at Madison Square Garden (I'm going to exclude the Big Ten champion teams from the 1930s because, while I recognize that team's accomplishment, I also am pretty sure that basketball in the 1930s did not involve recognizable aspects of the game such as the 24 second clock, leaping, and passing-- ball movement at that time primarily revolved around encouraging a teammate to give up the ball through cogent argument and rhetorical flourishes).

Modern basketball players are more quick to dismiss claims for
the ball as spurious without strong enough evidence. Here Aaron
Gray is shocked by a teammate admitting to the irresponsible
use of hearsay and anecdote

The quarter-final game against Washington State was a heartening comeback led by Northwestern basketball legend Juice Thompson, with the last minute being one of the most astounding endings to a basketball game that I've ever witnessed, in which the following occurred:
1. Northwestern ties the game on a Washington State goal-tend
2. With no time remaining on the clock, Northwestern is called for a foul giving Washington State a rare opportunity for a walk-off free throw.
3. The Washington State player improbably bricks both free throws, sending the game into OT.

The last minute of this game therefore featured two of the three worst ways to possibly end a basketball game-- on a goaltend or foul with no time left (the third worst way is of course to have one or several players wade into the stands and begin pummeling spectators. I suppose the absolute worst way to end a game would be to have the basketball court annexed by a hostile nation that does not play basketball and immediately have the players replaced by a team handball squad or a triumphant troupe of net-ball all-stars, but that's unreasonably hypothetical).

An illustration of a problematic end to a basketball game also doubles as a tribute to
the world's most placid cameraman. Nenad Krsitc would probably have benefited
from Troy Hurtubise's Project Troy armor, a suit that came initially from his
never-ending quest to stave off rampaging bears, but, as his Wikipedia page
succinctly put it, "the process has developed ideas and technologies whose purposes
go beyond simple bear attack protection"

Unfortunately, the Wildcats faltered in overtime, disappointing Northwestern fans, but relieving the Evanston Police Department from having to plan for quelling an NIT victory riot that would grind the city to a halt with a deafening chorus of huzzahs and unrefined sherry guzzling.

PRETENDERS TO THE CROWN

With a decade of increasingly improbable bowl defeats and three consecutive losses in the NIT, Northwestern fans are getting hungrier for a title of some kind in football or basketball. The Athletic Department deserves recognition for bringing the historically woeful programs to the post-season, the very upper tier of mediocrity. Therefore, Northwestern fans should demand a fraudulent NIT title.

From now on, as far as I am concerned, Northwestern is the 2011 NIT Champion. No one remembers who actually won the NIT, outside of a few fans of the winning schools, most of whom keep their NIT Champion merchandise in a closet with their Worldcom stock certificates. Northwestern can hoist a fake banner to the rafters, print up t-shirts, digitally alter the homepage of the Daily Northwestern, make every reference to the team feature the phrase "2011 NIT Champions," and use connections at ESPN to burn tapes of the actual NIT championship game and replace it with a game featuring the Wildcats squaring off against a group of theater students told that they are staging a dramatization of the tragic story of the Washington Generals. The university can rent out Madison Square Garden for a morning and encourage New York-based alumni to masquerade as a raucous NIT crowd by moving them around the arena and exchanging false mustaches. Within a half-decade, who would you believe: the university that actually won the NIT or Northwestern, endorsed by the American Association to Resist Shams as the nation's third most hoax-averse university, although it should be pointed out that I've just made everything in this sentence up, and my AARS link goes to the American Association of Railroad Supervisors, which offers derailment investigation seminars and promises that "our members are able to get the inside track on the latest in the railroad industry."

Juice Thompson and Northwestern fans celebrate a completely
legitimate and fairly earned NIT title as far as you know

PROUD TRADITION OF PRETENDERS

By taking up the mantle of a false NIT championship, Northwestern would fit into a proud tradition of pretenders to the throne. There are a variety of ways to claim legitimacy. All of them involve finding thousands of sword wielding accomplices. One particularly strong move is to wait for a child in line for power to die and then pretend to be him or her several years later. Another is to revive an older usurped bloodline that had been usurped by a new throne or some sort of popular government, like the swinging pendulum of the French Monarchy in the nineteenth century.

Fifty years of French politics, c. 1800-1851

One of my favorite pretender stories involves seventeenth century Russia, where a variety of False Dmitriys kept cropping up to menace the Russian throne during the Time of Troubles. The original Dmitriy was a son of Ivan the Terrible. Ivan's death led to the ascension of Feodor I, Dmitry's older brother, and figurehead for the machinations of professional intriguer Boris Gudunov. Gudunov had sent Dmitriy and his family into exile, as one does with politically inconvenient toddlers in 1584, but perhaps that was not enough--Dmitriy died in exile at the age of eight after being either assassinated or accidentally stabbing himself in the throat with a knife while suffering an epileptic seizure (what modern historians label the "Derrick Rose scenario"). As Gudunov learned, however, sometimes conveniently dead relatives can cause problems in entirely non-zombie related ways.

In 1600, a man claiming to be Dmitriy appeared, proclaiming that he had escaped from exile and returned to claim the throne. He gathered up a loose coalition of Poles, Jesuits, and miscellaneous enemies of Gudunov and began marching against Russian forces. Gudunov's forces successfully held off Dmitriy, but the death of Gudunov in 1605 allowed False Dmitriy to take the real throne. He lasted about ten months. Angered by rumors of his impending conversion to Catholicism, his enemies stormed the Kremlin, killed him, and fired his remains from a cannon.

False Dmitriy displays the same incredulous
expression that is on my face because I am not
right now forming a rock band called The False
Dmitriys

That was not the end of the Dmitriys. In 1607, another False Dmitriy popped up and began gathering his forces in future Moscow suburb Tushino. Like his predecessor, False Dmitiry II gathered support from the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, Don Cossacks, and various assorted rebels and overthrow enthusiasts. His forces were defeated by Russians with the help of their Swedish allies. He continued to campaign around Russia, but in 1610, a drinking companion and resentful flogging victim shot him, chopped off his head, and left behind a legacy of obvious there can be only one Highlander references.

False Dmitriy III appeared in 1611. He garnered Cossack support and, in the great False Dmitry tradition, began an assault on Moscow. He managed to stay upright for another year before captured and executed by Moscow authorities. The False Dmitriy phenomenon was part of vast power struggle in the first decade of the seventeenth century among various Russian dyansties that played out like a game show awarding the crown to whoever could stab the most people. By 1613, this chaotic time stabilized with the rise of the Romanov dyansty, and the Russian populace appeared Dmitriy'd out.

Apparently some Russian commentators have poked
fun at Medvedev as a "false Dmitry," but, as
this Economist article points out, "over the past few
weeks he has taken to sporting a khaki rollneck and a
bomber jacket emblazoned with the words 'Russia’s
Commander-in-Chief', perhaps to remind people of his
status"

As Wikipedia's List of Current Pretenders notes, there are a significant number of descendants to various monarchical lines floating around the world, ready to gather their forces and retain control of their families' empires. For example, Georg Friederich, the current head of the Dread Kaiser's House of Hohenzollern has chillingly threatened that "I do not see any reason for the political system in Germany to be changed," and "I have as head of the House of Hohenzollern no political role −- and neither do I aim at such."

THAT WAS A THING THAT HAPPENED BEFORE

Stay tuned for future BYCTOM updates on stuff that happened a few months ago clumsily compared to things that happened several hundred years ago as well as several more productive ideas about using falsehood and chicanery to claim things that no one could ever possibly want.

Get me Vaughn

The Jake Peavy trade has just fallen through for the Cubs after days of rampant speculation, which has shed a spotlight on the baseball winter meetings in Las Vegas. Unique to baseball, team executives gather around in order to provoke intrigue and double-dealing. The meetings are shrouded in secrecy as baseball writers leap to follow false trails, executives practice their dissumlation, and the players are moved around like risk armies as increasingly desperate GMs talk themselves into overpaying for journeyman middle relievers. The whole scene resembles the secret dealings of nineteenth century European diplomats, whose correspondence, betrayals, and secret alliances restitched the map of Europe, with less of an emphasis on epaulettes, points of honor, and occasional literal saber rattling as a senile aristocrat may unsheath his Mensurschläger and rattle it menacingly at a younger colleague whom he believed to be a conniving agent of the Pope.


Clemens von Metternich, left, whose machinations reset the balance of power in
Europe after the fall of Bonaparte. Brian Sabean, right, whose machinations may
well lead him to offer a $30 million contract to Ron Villone.

THE BASEBALL OFFSEASON: A TIME FOR BLOODSPORT

I recently came across this excellent treatment of cockfighting in a 1966 magazine devoted to the fine and gentlemanly sport. The magazine offers catalogs of fighting cocks delivered straight to your sweaty basement cockfighting den, reviews of cockfighting accessories, stories of cocks successfully fought, and editorials denouncing Lyndon Johnson. As the magazine puts it, "If you expect to fight coopwalked cocks against fresh farm walked cocks, you are kidding only one person - yourself."


A full catalog of fine fighting birds. You can
click on the picture for the full size for increased
legibility and so that anyone walking by who sees
the giant "POWER COCKS" in the picture can be
reassured that you are merely looking at
purchasing birds to tear each other asunder for
your own amusement while you shake money as
part of an incomprehensible betting system

The baseball link in all of this is, of course, Chicago Cub Aramis Ramirez who so enjoys a good cockfight that he found himself prominently featured in a Dominican cockfighting magazine. The issue came out during the fallout from the Vick trial, which drew a predictable pile of outrage. The New York Times found the idea appealing enough to send a reporter to the Dominican Republic to attend a cockfight who promptly began showing the restraint of a veteran J. Peterman writer:

At the Club Gallistico de San Martín, two armed policemen stand at the arena entrance and ask spectators to leave their guns in a locked chest. As the men file in to take their seats, the scene looks straight out of “Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome,” the 1980s dystopian classic.

Four rows of cascading seats surround the ring, which is bathed in flickering fluorescent light. Ceiling fans rattle. Those who could not afford the entry fee of 300 pesos, about $9, cling to metal bars that surround the arena. The fight starts when the birds arrive in plexiglass elevators that creak and lurch on a track above the crowd. Then they descend into the ring.

Two birds will enter, one bird will leave.

I'd like to think that immediately after writing that, the journalist quit his job, bought a shack by the ocean, a closet full of unbuttoned white shirts and linen pants , a panama hat, and a Dominican manservant while spending his days downing whiskey in the type of sweaty bar with a slowly rotating ceiling fan before becoming drawn into an anti-government intrigue by a beautiful woman and her mysterious connections to a leftist organization.


Aramis Ramirez direct from the pages
of a Dominican cockfight enthusiast
magazine preparing to enter his rooster
against the armored rooster denizens of
Bartertown

Personally, I find the sport of cockfighting a bit blasé and demand a return to the grand English tradition of bear baiting. As we all know, many of England's greatest theaters that served as the canvas for Shakespeare, Marlowe, and other Elizabethan luminaries to reshape the direction of modern drama also served as places to go to watch a bear reduce a pack of snarling dogs into a pulpy residue. In the seventeenth century, Bear Gardens became a popular, although controversial form of entertainment. An article from the PMLA journal from 1925 by J. Leslie Hotson contains a passage written in the 1630s by a man known only as "Honest William" describing the bear-baiting experience:



But, the bear-baiters had their critics as well, as D. Lupton from 1632 attests:


Perhaps D. Lupton would enjoy his bear-bait more if the Bears had a chance to take their righteous bear fury out on the humans who captured them and baited them for their own amusement. They could do so using Troy Hurtubise's anti-bear assault suit that he constructs in the film Project Grizzly. Project Grizzly is hands-down the greatest film ever made about a man who single-mindedly endeavors to build suit resistant to grizzly bear assault for some reason. The suit resists pummeling, mauling, biting, gashing, and all other manner of potential grizzly attacks including anti-flame insulation in case he runs into any firebreathing or torch-wielding bears. The movie itself is slow moving unless you're a fan of Canadians gathering in bleak poolhalls and shabby diners, and it never really answers the fundamental question of how Hurtubise intends to use the suit. In fact, the second half of the movie involves him stalking a grizzly for no apparent reason since his mobility in the suit makes a shambling Romero zombie look like an agile, mustachioed trapeze-man, and once he inevitably falls over he remains trapped on his back with no way out of the suit except with the potential assistance of the rampaging bear. There is, however, his dedication to buckskin, knives (used not for defense, but apparently to impress wayward mountain men that he may encounter) and comical methods of testing his suit. The following clip from the movie may be one of the most wonderful things ever put to film.


Note: The clip here has saberdance clumsily edited over it, but I'm pretty sure that the original movie featured the Robocop theme, which makes it infinitely more awesome.