Mundial

Global commerce has surely ground to a halt as people the world over are hunched in front of their computers, tantalized by the World Cup and paralyzed by indecision over which fist to shake in righteous slightly xenophobic sports anger (ergonomists would say to alternate except when you need double-barreled fist shaking action for particularly odious soccer-playing nations). The World Cup is by far the world's greatest sporting event, with the possible exception of September Northwestern games against uncomfortably plucky FCS teams under the watchful eyes of dozens of fans disguised cleverly as more than 17,000 by the Northwestern Ministry of Comical Soviet Statistics.

Comparison of Northwestern's reported home attendance for the
Towson game versus other important world phenomena. Note
that the Cooper's Hill Cheese Rolling Competition and Wake
was canceled last year due to overcrowding after local officials
literally begged people not to attend. An unauthorized cheese
rolling took place to a crowd of only 500 rebellious cheese rolling
enthusiasts.

The Cup has provided plenty of drama so far, with late goals and goal differentials deciding who advances past the knockout stages while the rest of us hold our breath for a breathtaking FIFA lot-drawing ritual. The most entertaining part of the World Cup so far has been the Shakespearean collapse of the French team featuring a brooding madman, insults that are much funnier when comically translated into clumsy English (although nothing can top "I prefer the whore that is your sister" for inelegantly transcribed soccer-related zingers), the always crowd-pleasing division of the team into opposing camps, and the occult mystery of astrology.

The FFF has been blamed in keeping the despised Domenech around
because he carried the burden of the glorious French mustache
throughout his playing days. His reign bears certain similarities
to the also gloriously-mustachioed French President Jean Casimir-Perier,
who lasted only six months as president in 1894 before resigning, claiming
that he had been marginalized by the ministers who taunted him with
unnecessarily mean-spirited legislation such as "resolved: this legislature
moves to level the President's comically lopsided head"

Casimir-Perier only took the reigns of office because of the horrific assassination of Carnot, who I will venture to guess was the last modern head of state that was actually stabbed to death. Carnot found himself enmeshed in an endless whirlwind of anarchist vengeance. The whole episode stems from the guillotining of anarchist bomber Ravochol, which prompted a retaliatory bombing from another anarchist named Auguste Vaillant, who was then executed and avenged by bomber Émile Henry whose death along with Vaillant prompted Sainte Geronimo Caserio to take a dagger to President Carnot in an act of brutal simplicity that would have immensely frustrated a nineteenth century French version of Frederick Forsyth.

BIOPIRACY

It is time to turn from the depressing notion of anachronistic assassination techniques and turn to the far more exciting world of botanical piracy. In 1876, Henry Wickham returned from the Amazon with an unheralded find that would eventually give Britain control of the world's rubber supply and destroy the Brazilian economy. That find was 70,000 seeds of the hevea brasiliensis plant, the world's most bountiful rubber tree.

Joe Jackson's The Thief at the End of the World describes Wickham as a sort of bumbling over-eager botanical agent working for a sinister Kew Gardens hell-bent on gaining control over valuable plants the world over (of course, as far as I'm aware, Kew is no longer an international center of botanical intrigue; the only piracy there is the ridiculous demand of £13 just to get in the place). Jackson excellently evokes the Amazon as a vast cornucopia of horrible tropical illnesses and incessant attacks from tiny organisms that live only to attack or lay eggs in the last places that a human would ever want eggs planted by anything. Wickham's act of piracy itself involved a rather disappointing lack of swashbuckling, as he managed to successfully secret the seeds onto a fortuitously empty freighter-- unlike the gloriously apocryphal Robert Louis Stevenson pirates who menaced people with an eighteenth century Cockney argot or even submarine-using South American drug navies, Wickham's theft involved a lot more monitoring of moisture levels than the futuristic Johnny Mnemonic theatrics that the term "biopiracy" would suggest.

It would in fact be even more shocking if a
nineteenth century person who gained notoriety
for practicing devious botany did not have a
spectacular mustache

Wickham never gained much financially from transporting rubber trees and spent his life moving increasingly to the fringes of the British Empire in a perpetual state of financial ruin. The seeds he brought back eventually became forests in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), while any attempts to tame the rubber tree in the Amazon fell into ruin. The most amazing attempt came from Henry Ford, who purchased 2.5 million acres of rainforest in order to create a massive rubber plantation that he humbly named Fordlandia. In typical Ford fashion, he sought not only to turn the chaos of the Amazon into an efficient natural factory, but also make it a vast city where he could mold workers into his idea of moral and model employees. Inspired by its vast success in the United States, Ford instituted prohibition in his borders; workers and locals cleverly circumvented this by erecting a series of taverns, brothels, and other houses of vice just outside Ford's jurisdiction and hilariously named it the Island of Innocence.

However, the best part of the book is a barely mentioned aside discussing Wickham's family. His great-grandfather, a minor aristocrat, lost his estate due to royal treachery. The comically villainous George IV, who spent most of his adult life as the Prince of Wales fending off his father's bouts of insanity and iron will to live, dealt with his position by becoming a bloated, gout-ridden pox on British society. In this case, the Wickham ancestor foolishly made a wager with the Prince on a horse, in a time when horse racing was so spectacularly crooked that skill in picking the ponies more often than not corresponded directly to skill in hiring unsavory underlings that could most successfully cheat. The Prince's men put weights in the jockey's pockets; even though the cheating was discovered before the race, the hapless punter was done in by either misfortune or, as I would wager, some other sort of undiscovered skulduggery such oat manipulation or using horse psychiatry to rob the horse of its equine self-confidence. The details of the race were published in Gentleman's Magazine, a publication that no doubt prided itself on showing different ways to cheat at horseracing until two people were forced to shoot each other in the most dignified and civilized way possible.

Both George Cruikshank (left) and James Gillroy portrayed George IV as
a corpulent, scheming Jabba the Hutt-like figure, with the title of
Gillroy's painting effective eulogizing the hefty monarch as "A
voluptuary in the horrors of digestion"

Championship and Realignment Emporium

The big story in Chicago is of course last night's thrilling over-time Stanley Cup victory for the Chicago Blackhawks over the Philadelphia Flyers. This is a good thing for Mayor Daley, who can successfully horde the thousands of pounds of foodstuffs he bet against Philadelphia's elegantly named Mayor Nutter. Apparently, the plan was to assail Philadelphia's food bank-using population with arteriosclerosis; the ridiculously voluminous list of wagered items included 500 slices of cheesecake, at least 60 deep dish pizzas, something called "toasted macaroni," and enough beef to startle the late Upton Sinclair including 1,961 Vienna Beef polish sausages and 2,010 hot dogs. The package also included an appearance by four tommy-gun wielding gangsters, three crooked aldermen, and a personalized dressing-down from Ozzie Guillen.

The win has galvanized a city behind the only competently run professional sports franchise in town compared to the impotent Sox, incompetent Cubs, gormless Bears front office, and coach-punching Bulls brain trust. The Cubs have been maddening to the point where Lou Piniella has developed a spectacular beard implying an enthusiasm for box car-based transportation that should come off when Hawks players shave their grizzled attempts at facial hair.

In the Big Piniella Mountains
The Riot always walks
And Zambrano only smashes
With his left hand after balks


There's a crowd to roar
And a run to score
And you can bellow to an umpire
That his mom's a whore
In the Big Piniella Mountains

Lou would do best to shave the beard but leave his upper lip alone if he wants to join the Chicago Distinguished List of Mustachioed Coaching Champions.

The mustache is a prerequisite for Chicago coaches who want to win it all. Note that
Ozzie Guillen is grandfathered in because although he won the 2005 world series
with a Van Dyke style goatee, he did sport the tremendous 'stache seen on the right
when he played shortstop for the Sox in the 1980s but also out of fear that
neglecting him would somehow land me as a footnote in Guillen's Nixon-like
enemies list including Magglio Ordonez, Jay Mariotti, "Cowboy" Joe West, The Sox
marketing guy tasked with preventing him from making death threats over twitter,
and the late Sonny Dogole.

REALIGNMENT

Nebraska is expected to join the Big Ten and start a complex chain of realignment that will leave the Big 12 a dessicated husk of a conference. Nebraska's membership might be the beginning of more teams in the Expanding Ten until it gains subsidiary conferences across all levels of college athletics including the NAIA and junior colleges (which will be known, of course, as the Littlest Ten). The addition of the Cornhuskers is no doubt motivated largely by the scintillating rivalry with Northwestern ignited at the 2000 Alamo Bowl. And who could blame the fanbases after the teams were pitted against each other with the prestigious Alamo Shaped Trophy at stake to determine a marginal increase in the arbitrary post-season college football rankings?

A chart showing the importance of the Northwestern-Nebraska rivalry to the new
Big Ten with a rating of zero Pacinos indicating a general unawareness of the
existence of Northwestern football

Nebraska has not been to Evanston since 1931, where they suffered a 19-7 defeat at the hands of the Wildcats who no doubt took advantage of the comically archaic 1930s football rules including time fracture wickets and the Pernicious Poem Place. Including the disastrous Alamo Bowl, the 'Cats are 1-3 all time against the Lads from Lincoln, which will give them incentive to finally avenge that 12-0 shutout from 1902.

The Big 12 is essentially gutted, with Colorado, Texas, Oklahoma, Texas A & M, Texas Tech, and Oklahoma State expected to join the Pac 10. Other major realignments will certainly affect the rest of college football, including Notre Dame, which is expected to disband its football program live up to its Fighting Irish moniker by creating North America's top-flight hurling program and eventually challenge powerhouse Counties Kilkenny and Cork.

THE WORLD CUP

The World Cup may be the world's greatest sports spectacular, but it does itself a great disservice by limiting itself to countries that actually exist. Congratulations are in order to Padania, the winner of the 2010 VIVA World Cup fought amongst nations that have been denied international recognition, bond over a common language across international borders, or incorporated into France in 1486. This year, the VIVA World Cup, designed for national soccer teams not associated with FIFA, involved six teams competing in Gozo: Padania, Iraqi Kurdistan, Occitania (a new-comer that had participated in the Europeada 2008 contest for Europe's national minorities such as Danes in Germany, Catalans, Sorbs, Roma in Hungary, and the North Frisians), Provence, the Two Sicilies, and Gozo.

Obviously, I fully support the N.F. Board and their tournament, but six teams is not nearly enough, especially since someone needs to rise up and challenge the Padanian juggernaut, which has dominated the tournament since they joined in 2008 (the inaugural tournament featured Sapmi pummeling Monaco 21-1). The tournament should expand to absorb non-FIFA competitors such as the 2006 Elf Cup that featured Crimea, Găgăuzia, Tibet, Greenland, Northern Cyprus, and Zanzibar (Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan also participated but are actually FIFA members, so they sent their futsal teams). More importantly, the Cup needs to expand to North America so that Newfoundland can send a team.

Newfoundland was, in 1919, technically a British Dominion, equal in status with Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa. Newfoundland never equaled the prestige of its sister dominions, partly because it did not join the League of Nations and send representatives to demand German reparations at Versailles. Hit hard by the worldwide economic crisis of the 1930s as well as a spectacularly corrupt and useless government, Newfoundland was about to default on its loans. With its back against the wall, Newfoundland did what any small country would do in its situation: attempt to sell Labrador to Canada, presumably asking what do we have to do to put this fish and iron-ore rich Atlantic region in within your federal authority today. Canada didn't bite and in 1933, Newfoundland accepted a loan from Britain with the caveat that it give up its Dominion status to a Commission of British and Newfoundland representatives. British representatives found dealing with the shiftless and embattled government taxing, with one frustrated representative writing to a friend that: "I am sorry; I can only say I have done my best, but this infernal place is a hopeless proposition; the sooner it sinks into the sea, the better."

Newfoundland Prime Minister Richard
Squires managed to rebound from a 1923
arrest on corruption charges to regain the
government in 1928. He was ousted from
power again in 1932 when accusations of
corruption sparked a riot in St. Johns.
He was not reelected

Newfoundland joined with Canada in 1946, but can almost certainly put together a powerhouse soccer team that can take on upwards of three Sicilies.

A BOUNTEOUS TIME FOR SPORTING FANS

With the Crosstown Classic, the NBA Finals, the World Cup, and the Rod Blagojevich trial in full swing as well as the pillaging excitement of college football realignment, it's almost too much excitement to handle. Obviously, realignment puts the resurgent Wildcats in a precarious position with the addition of more powerhouse teams to the conference, but worse comes to worse, if things sputter out, they can form a tournament for Conferenceless FBS Teams in non-sanctioned football events.

May Update

T.S. Eliot's specific problems with the month of April have been well documented by lazy sportswriters on deadline, the same sorts of hacks that cleverly allude to the exact number of acts in American lives, and start out blog posts with obtuse and clumsy references to various English language literary figures. Eliot, of course, had more immediate concerns, as has been noted in this Stefan Collini review of the hotly anticipated volume of Eliot's letters illuminating his struggles with his wife's mental health, the problems of interwar banking, and running The Criterion literary magazine that left him in fear of retribution from neglected contributors as the following quotes reveal:

Conducting a review after 8pm in the back room of a flat, I live qua editor, very much from hand to mouth, get myself into all sorts of hot water and predicaments, and offend everybody.

I can only say that there are others – in fact nearly all of my contributors at one time or another – whom I do not dare to meet in the street.

Eliot never knew if his next foray to the corner shop could
lead him into a brow-beating from Wyndham Lewis or a
cudgel-wielding Ezra Pound

May, however, is a fairly dry time for a blog concerned with Northwestern and Chicago sports, with the football and basketball teams off and the Cubs enmeshed in early-season doldrums that leave fans with no choice but to decide whether a burgeoning appreciation for Carlos Silva is largely the result of Stockholm syndrome. Late spring is, of course, a time for Finals, with the Northwestern Women's Lacrosse team steamrolling their way into a sixth consecutive NCAA championship game, the geopolitical ramifications of a Slovenia divided against itself in the Goran Dragic/Sasha Vujucic rivalry, and the minor matter of Chicago's ice hockey team playing for the Dominion Hockey Challenge Cup originally created at a time before Canada's Dominion Status would be brutally challenged by the high-handed actions of Governor-General Byng.

This photo, which has been running all over the Chicago Tribune's website all week in
order to drum up interest in the Hawks' Cup run, has revealed the troubling
transformation of Rocky Wirtz into reliable movie villain Eric Roberts. Roberts is has a
top ten menacing IMDB resume as evidenced by the following selection of Eric Roberts
movies consisting of two words: Dead End, Rude Awakening, Blood Red, Descending Angel,
The Grave, Most Wanted, Hitman's Run, Killer Weekend, Depth Charge, Royal Kill (bonus
points for being also known as Ninja's Creed), The Butcher (in which he apparently plays
a character named "Merle Hench"), and Making Sandwiches.

GRAVE ROBBING

In 1875, James "Big Jim" Kenally found his counterfeiting operation threatened by the arrest of Benjamin Boyd, the main source of his fake currency. Kenally had not reached the pinnacle of becoming a minor regional criminal kingpin without being able to hatch schemes, and he soon came up with a cunning plot of elegant simplicity: hire underlings to break into Lincoln's tomb, steal the president's body, and hold it for ransom until the federal government agreed to release Boyd who would then, presumably, resume his position in the Kenally organization.

Thomas Craughwell's Stealing Lincoln's Body enumerates the pitfalls of presidential grave robbing for ransom schemes. The most interesting chapters, though, are the early ones detailing the history of American counterfeiting and the rise of the Secret Service as a way to combat it. The list of counterfeiters involves characters such as Mother Roberts, described by Craughwell as a "shapely widow" who got caught by an undercover Secret Service agent after an inopportune striptease revealed a cachet of counterfeit bills secreted in her bustle.

Chicago became a natural hub for counterfeiters. After all, this was the Chicago of "Bathhouse John" Coughlin and Mike "Hinky Dink" Kenna, where the line between politician and criminal mastermind was as porous as the line between Nicolas Cage and human cartoon (incidentally, the two funniest things about Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans other than every single Nicolas Cage facial expression is his consistent inability to constrain his amusement that a low-rent criminal henchman has the street name "G" and his attempt to shake down a goateed, purple-shirted Kool-Aid man).

A collage of Cages for your home or garden. The final Cage is of
course from international blockbuster Zandalee, immortalized
in this fantastic review that contains clips of his spectacular
entrance scene which will forever change the way you use the
phrase "you got the power tie."

Needless to say, the nineteenth century Chicago underground is a goldmine of tremendous nicknames including "Red Jimmy" Fitzgerald, "Hungry Joe" Lewis, who successfully swindled no less than Oscar Wilde, and "Foxy Ed" Cullerton, who completed the crooked alderman decathalon by securing nomination in 1892 by both the Republicans and Democrats, reassuring his constituents that they are in safe hands because he has stolen enough already. Among counterfeiters, the key players included a boodle carrier known only as "The Flying Dutchman" and his arch-rival Lewis "Mysterious Bob" Roberts who successfully created the definitive ambiguous but clearly up to no good nickname-- the only mystery is whether Bob would be most likely found passing dirty money, creating a complex numbers racket, or using a diverse stable of poisonous animals as an undetectable means of assassination, baffling detectives unable to understand how a dozen asps, three funnel web spiders, and a Portuguese Man o'War successfully entered a Cincinnati tenement.

THWARTING GRAVE ROBBERS

The book is also a valuable resource on presidential grave robbing in the nineteenth century. According to Craughwell, a disgruntled gardener made a run at Washington's skull after being fired from Mount Vernon's crew in 1830; in 1878, thieves made off with the body of John Scott Harrison, the son of William Henry Harrison and father of Benjamin Harrison, selling it to a medical college. Vengeance, money, ransoming prisoners-- proof that nineteenth century grave robbing covered the entire gamut of human motivation.

In order to detail the securing of the Lincoln tomb, Craughwell looks at other burials, especially George Pullman. Pullman, known as the inventor of the Pullman Dining Car and a hard-heartedness towards strikers that is tough even by the standards of nineteenth century captains of industry and their truncheonous negotiations, declared that his grave would feature an eighteen inch thick slab of concrete and a steel cage proving that the true measure of the success of a man is if he is so hated at his death that he is actively concerned with corpse desecration.

The Pullman Crypt, c. 1897

With an endless stretch of months until the football season blessedly resumes and a season of baseball mediocrity on the horizon, expect what has been described as by the literary heirs of T.S. Eliot and his Criterion cronies as a "cruel summer."

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.

NIT Bound

Somehow it all came together. It may have taken a train full of spices from the Orient or an incriminating photo of a selection committee member performing deviant sexual acts on illegally harvested organs filled with narcotics and pirated intellectual property or the use of psychotropic drugs and Air Willie or maybe even a combination of all three involving Air Willie illegally harvesting organs while secreting illegal narcotics through its porous plastic tongue and blaring a bootleg Time records-- regardless of how it happened, the Wildcats are in the NIT.

A look at Northwestern's NIT credentials

They face off Wednesday against Rhode Island in their second consecutive NIT road game after last year's dispiriting loss to Tulsa. Northwestern joins fellow Big Tenners the Illinois in the tournament; it also has a chance to potentially avenge itself in Madison Square Garden against the Golden Hurricane and jump-start a rivalry (the only thing more satisfying than a trip to the NCAAA Tournament is surely a fierce annual showdown with Tulsa in the NIT) and is set up for a potential Northwestern-Northeastern game that has fans ordinal directions leaping out of their prescription loafers. Despite disappointment at coming up short of that elusive NCAA bid, Northwestern fans can savor at least one more opportunity to celebrate an improbably exciting season in a tournament where the teams are not expected to show up with their own basketballs, sweat mops, and 24 second clocks, officials, and 2 Unlimited CDs.

MAKING AN IMPRESSION

No matter how a president is captured, be it a candid photograph, heroic oil painting, or lithographed into a terrifying bejowelled lion/president hybrid that would haunt the nightmares of Skip Myslenski, each only gets one chance to have an official portrait. By custom, presidential portraits are presented after a president gets to leave an imprint on the country, ideally leaving a sort of idiosyncratic footnote to his administration.

For such a tradition, the presidential portraits showcase a surprising amount of variety of poses, props, expressions, and styles. More importantly, they force a decision about which president looks like your favorite Dracula.

Official BYCTOM president to Dracula conversion chart

A common early style focused more on the president's head before shifting to more dynamic scenes that could show the president interacting with bundles of paper or in the vicinity of a globe.

Early portraits focused on the president's expression. To the left, James
Madison gives his best "how are you gentleman" face most commonly
used to demand from some defunct international body like the League
of Augsberg a sum of silver ducats and the Duchy of Warsaw
lest he destroy Europe with the early moderm equivalent of a space
laser which I guess would be a giant wooden rod painted red, whereas
James Monroe demonstrates the sonic power of his stereo equipment

Of all of the many showcasing the standing around with bits of paper motif, none is better than John Tyler, who decided that his legacy is best described as distraught newspaper crumpling.

Tyler looks like he just saw William
Henry Harrison drift ghoulishly into
the Oval Office to punish Tyler for his
coat-disparaging taunts

Washington and Taylor are the only armed presidents, although Washington looks far more prepared to use his sword as he gestures peevishly at some unseen man from Porlock. Other presidents chose to go outside, such as Truman enjoying some sort of veranda and McKinley, demonstrating a high-pressure front moving in on Receda and urging citizens to get out their galoshes in this time of national crisis.

Rutherford B. Hayes and Chester A. Arthur demonstrate the importance of
a dramatic setting, whether it is the middle of the apocalypse or in a
Scarface mansion filled built on a sound combination of pimping and
bear-baiting

The whole spread of portraits are available here, along with some helpful anecdotes about why Theodore Roosevelt seems even more pugilistic than normal, although it leaves as a riddle why Buchanan has the only round portrait, why Grover Cleveland did not get two non-consecutive portraits done, and how Taft's portrait artist was left with no choice but to lapse into Impressionism.

THIS IS ALL RELEVANT SOMEHOW

Although the NIT is not necessarily a springboard to Big Ten domination in the next season, it is hard to imagine that the success in this tournament will not help build confidence for next year. Though the Wildcats lose Nash, the heart and soul of the Northwestern defense, the experience gained by "Juice" Thompson, Drew Crawford, and the inevitable merging of Shurna and Coble into a spindly mass of limbs that will act as some sort of Vishnu of offensive production builds up expectations for next year. But with the unpredictability of injuries, the grind of a tough Big Ten season, and the fact that Northwestern's basketball team plays for Northwestern, it is best to enjoy the fact that, like the football team, Northwestern is establishing the post-season of any sort as an attainable goal and something to build on for the endless array of next years in the program's future until the Rutherford B. Hayes Apocalypse.

The Madness of March III

For Northwestern, NCAA Tournament hopes are unnatural, so it was somewhat surprising to see them galvanized into a living, lurching, monosyllabic monster wreaking havoc against non-conference opponents only to be inevitably caught and subdued by the angry, torch-wielding Big Ten teams. Which is why it was suddenly shocking that Northwestern went from an NCAA bubble hopeful to a team that needed a win over Indiana in the Big Ten Tournament in order to salvage a shot at an NIT berth. This is partly because the NIT is run by a group of fatcats who enjoy dangling prestigious and lucrative NIT spots to athletic directors and no one knows their selection criteria as they walk into an arena knowing that all eyes are on them with their shiny spats and their suspenders, and their gilded canes "you play your cards right, we might have room for you on ESPNU," they say, hooking their thumbs in their suspenders, "heck maybe you can even play at home, get yourself a couple postseason victories, maybe a big ol' banner for those rafters you got there. Be a mighty shame to sit home and watch the NIT on television, yes sir," before laying a meaty paw on a shoulder in an uncomfortable display of false bonhomie and whisking away to a private rail-way car on the Union Pacific that reeks of cigars and broken dreams.

We all enjoy disparaging the NIT and even suggesting ways to spruce it up by playing it in a single day until a team either wins the tournament or fires Richard Dawson into a subterranean billboard, but the NIT is far better than the any alternative. Missing the NIT would qualify Northwestern for a a variety of quasi-underground basketball tournaments such as the CBI and the CIT, which share a bill with the World Series of Cockfighting and some guy in the corner playing a saw.

Oregon State defeats Tulsa in last season's CBI with a strong
showing in the basketball, pie-eating, and mutton-bustin'
events

REANIMATING DECEASED SPORTS STORIES

Last month was the NBA trading deadline which is the second greatest trading deadline in professional sports. Baseball, of course, has the superior deadline because of the delayed gratification that occurs when some journeyman relief pitcher is offloaded for some minor league offal that might miraculously turn out to be some sort of Roy Hobbsian phenom in a few years. There's nothing more exciting than the mysterious player to be named later who is always somebody that no one, not even the type of scouts that are so grizzled that they actually sleep in a cocoon of tobacco juice and pine tar, have ever heard of. Unfortunately, as the information age has made it possible to instantaneously find someone who has an opinion on pretty much any minor league player that is not an organizational position coach who says things like "he's a good kid, live arm, needs to get that fastball down a little" even while choking to death on a mouthful of sunflower seeds, that random spark of hope dies a little.

NBA trades are great not because of the players actually involved but because the whole system is so convoluted and filled with arcane and mystifying rules that are mainly about shuffling around a proud fraternity of crappy players like the status of Poland at any international treaty negotiation. I enjoy any sport that encourages stockpiling as many overpaid bench-warmers as possible in order to look forward to not paying them, or trading them to other teams that are equally determined to stop paying them in the near future. And despite all of the bizarre baseball rules such as the Rule 5 draft (there's a great post on the Rule 5 draft at Joe Posnanski's blog, the only sportswriter who has published a poem about Kyle Farnsworth in a place other than the walls of a creepy apartment), sandwich picks, and the like, the NBA collective bargaining agreement is so byzantine that the only person who seems to have mastered it is a computer programmer who splits his spare time between his CBA expertise and his Tom Skerritt lookalike society.

The NBA CBA has a little known "Gooden Clause" where Gooden can be
traded to any team regardless of salary cap implications in an effort to get
him on all thirty NBA teams before he eventually becomes more than fifteen
percent beard. While searching for a beard worthy of comparison to Gooden's,
I came across Zach Wilcox, who might qualify for the world's most grizzled
obituary as it contains the phrases "did a great deal of prospecting," "with a
pet parrot seated on the handlebars," and "was called the 'crown prince' of
whiskered gentlemen;" being singled out for having a crazy beard as a civil
war veteran is an astounding achievement in and of itself. My favorite part
about the obituary, however, is the theories about why he grew his beard.
One is that he lost an election bet. The superior theory offered by the article,
however is "exasperated by a dull razor he vowed never to shave again" which
is what I want written on my tombstone

Under these complex machinations, Gar Forman traded away $5.8 million worth of John Salmons for a number of other contracts connected to basketball players, none of whom the Bulls are interested for their ability to play basketball, with the possible exception of future Slamball champion Joe Alexander.

I demand a rule that anyone who wins a Slamball championship
gets to change their name permanently to something Slamball
related such as Titus Slamballicus

BASEBALL'S UNBREAKABLE RECORD

The margins of professional sports are filled with athletes that cannot quite measure up to the standards of their leagues, much like Zack Wilcox's beard could not quite measure up to a man in the Dakotas who had one seventeen feet long which I think is ridiculous as no crazy facial hair should be able to reside in a separate room from its wearer. That is why today BYCTOM pays tribute to Lenny Harris, Major League Baseball's Pinch Hit King. In 2001, Lenny Harris replaced Manny Mota as the all-time leader in pinch hits, the same way Mota would regularly replace Pedro Borbón.

Baseball's Pinch Hit Kings in Game Action

Harris's record is one of the most difficult records to reproduce in sports. It required a delicate balancing act of not being quite good enough to play every day, and yet never becoming lousy enough to get sent down to the minors. In an eighteen year career, Harris only garnered more than 400 plate appearances twice, never hit double digit home runs, and achieved a league average OPS+ four times. By 1993, his hands gripped sunflower seeds more than bats and was more likely to slap another player a high five than an opposite field line drive. Yet, Lenny Harris endured. He even has a ring, after being fortuitously traded from the Cubs to the Marlins in 2003, although angry Cub fans can't hold a grudge against him since he only played in Marlins losses and did not get a hit in that series. No one will build a statue of Lenny Harris. No player will ever enter the Big Leagues wanting to break Harris's record. But then again, there's always a longer beard out there somewhere.

MAKING THE POSTSEASON SAFE FOR DEMOCRACY

Northwestern is of course not out of the NCAA tournament yet. A win in the Big Ten tournament earns an automatic berth to the Dance. Even so, a loss to Purdue on Friday still keeps the 'Cats in good position for the NIT and a lock for one its fly-by-nite freakshow offspring. But if the NIT should prove treacherous, Northwestern shouldn't fall for the CBI's extortion racket. Instead, it should form the rival Northwestern Postseason Tournament of Championship in which qualification is based on the following criteria: being Northwestern, or being a woeful team that Northwestern could almost certainly beat in a sparsely attended, lackluster home game including teams not sanctioned by the NCAA like the Washington Generals, the DePaul Blue Demons, and Fat Albert's Junkyard Gang. The winner of the tournament gets an attractive postcard, two giant foam Wildcat hats for casual and formal occasions, and a tearful One Shining Moment montage of people being embarrassed. That will show the NIT.

Northwestern Basketball In This, The Best of Possible Worlds

The most unlikely of basketball seasons is coming to its likeliest conclusion. For the past month, Northwestern basketball fans have been hunkered down in bunkers, counting their RPIs, reading Skip Myslenski, and occasionally sending the neighborhood children out for supplies of cigarettes, adding machine tape, and boxes of green visors in order to figure out if this was the year that Northwestern was going to make the NCAA tournament.

Northwestern plans its road to the Sweet
Sixteen

From the improbable upsets against mediocre major conference teams and a 10-1 non-conference record to the victories over Purdue and Illinois, to the crushing loss against Penn State, to say that the season has been a roller-coaster is to reach one too many times into the box of sports cliches that I keep in my sports blog bindle (I also have boxes for run-on sentences, seemingly unending parenthetical asides, and one labeled "gratuitous mustache reference"). Instead, the best comparison for the season is like accidentally walking into a rough dockside tavern and wondering how long it will take between ordering a beer and gaining pool cue as a permanent new appendage or finding an even rougher dock where Journey hang out and make you stare uncomfortably at the work of Steve Perry's periodontist. After long reflection, I've created a handy chart of Northwestern's season in pictorial form (Fig 1A):

Fig. 1A

So it appears that, barring a miraculous run in the Big Ten tournament (the 19th century political equivalent of a Henry Clay presidential run) Northwestern will experience the NCAA Tournament in the traditional way of watching on television until unable to tolerate a specific level of Vitale. Although it still is a bitter feeling to get as close as Northwestern ever has to the NCAAs and falter, fans should celebrate a remarkable season and chance to do some damage in the NIT. With Coble's return and the emergence of Crawford, Shurna, and Mirkovic, Wildcat fans should really look to next year for the inevitable heartbreaking disappointment as somehow things don't click for a team that could go down as Northwestern's best.

A FRESH PERSPECTIVE

The New York Times's Chicago News Co-operative scores again, this time with James Warren's take on Illinois and Chicago corruption. Warren, the former managing editor of the Trib and current publisher of the Reader, among other gigs, has a wonderful perspective on the state's maintenance of what I would describe as Hamburlgar democracy:

“Compare the corruption of an alderman who takes a few thousand dollars from a developer to the corruption of Abdul Qadeer Khan, the head of the Pakistan nuclear program, going around the world, selling atomic bomb technology to Libya, North Korea and Iran to make a buck,” said Moisés Naím, editor of Foreign Policy magazine and a former Venezuelan trade minister who writes about the ravaging impact of corruption worldwide. “Look at the differing scale of consequences.”

Warren offers a fresh perspective by pointing out that Illinois is a shining beacon of clean government, non-existent graft, and completely justified bulldozings when compared to organizations such as international drug traffickers, Russian robber barons, Somali pirates, and the state of Florida.

Sample posters for Illinois residents hoping to throw an at least
we're not as corrupt as party in their homes or places of business

This article should be seen as a proper throwing of the gauntlet, and I urge residents to vote on the next Illinois governor or Cook County trash commissioner based on whether he or she could top Mobutu, who began all newscasts with an image of him descending from the clouds, probably with a giant canvas sack of celestial plunder to deposit in his Swiss bank account.

DINKING THE HINK

Try as they might, no modern politician could pull off graft, chicanery, bribery, and other sordid manipulation of the political system for their own gain with more panache than a nineteenth century Chicago alderman. The cabal of "Gray Wolves" ran Chicago's Levee district in a selfless attempt to reach the Platonic ideal of municipal corruption. So confident were they in their shiftless feudalism that they brazenly adopted nicknames such as "Bathhouse John" and "Hinky Dink" from the Chicago Bureau of Disreputable Nicknames or Potential Harlem Globetrotter Aliases.

Gray Wolves "Bathhouse" John Coughlin and
Michael "Hinky Dink" Kenna in their watch-
chain, boater, cigar-chomp pinstripes, not to be
confused with Silver Foxes and their chain-smoke
Kansas flashdance ass-pants

Coughlin and Kenna owned Chicago's First Ward. Bathhouse John, the more flamboyant of the two, made speeches and composed bawdy lyrics for their decadent First Ward Ball thrown at the Chicago coliseum for the variegated criminal types in their constituency. Hinky Dink, meanwhile, tended to his fantastically named tavern called the Workingman's Exchange from whence he ran his innovative booze for votes program targeted at the local hobory. But this article from Time Magazine eulogizing his reign as he chose to forgo reelection in 1942 sums it up far better than I can:

For a nickel The Hink sold schooners as big as buckets to bums, roustabouts, prostitutes. They could always put the bite on him for two bits; he let the bums sleep in the back room. Once in a while he would go back to touch them on the head. He wanted to make sure they were not dead...On election days they voted as Hinky Dink wanted.

Hinky Dink and Bathhouse John ran an area of Chicago known as "The Levee," an area of the city rife with saloons, houses of ill repute, gambling, gangsters, book-makers, back-alley surgeons, trick handshakes, false mustaches, and unprovoked purple nurpling. Along with Johnny Powers of the 19th Ward, they became experts in "boodling," or basically awarding the franchise to operate public utilities to men who had adequately bribed them. In one case, they even invented a company called Ogden Gas in order to force the actual franchise holder to buy up its shares, which is pretty much the municipal corruption version of swashbuckling.

John Coughlin ready for ordinary boodling and preparing for the Odgen Gas
deal

Both Bathhouse John and Hinky Dink never got in much trouble for their showboating, sticky-fingered style of local government. Though their legacy lives on in clout and the old Chicago handshake which is like a regular handshake except that the recipient ends up with either a fistful of cash or nuclear green relish product, their milquetoast, unhatted prodigal offspring lack that Sandburgian swagger that made corruption as much a part of the fabric of old time Chicago as the constant stench of entrails.

PLAYING OUT THE STRING

With very little left to play for other than an NIT Home Game and some Big Ten Tournament momentum, Northwestern fans are suffering from a tournament hangover tantamount to waking up in the Levee, possibly with a knife as a new appendage in the ribs. On the other hand, the Cubs are preparing to do more lasting damage to Chicago's psyche than more than a century of graft-induced inefficiency by showing up to Spring Training. You can count on BYCTOM to keep you abreast of these and other crucial sporting news items with sporadic updates on nothing in particular.