Richard Nixon looms over the twenty-first century. There is Nixon as a cultural kitsch object, with his gestures and his catchphrases and deeply unsettling television appearances and his damp paranoiac scowl that makes for an easy punchline. There is Nixon now, in 2019, invoked as government hearings and special prosecutor's reports swirl around us-- former White House counsel and Watergate witness John Dean recently testified, and former Nixon ratfucker Roger Stone flaunted his Nixon tattoo and victory pose after his arrest. But Nixon casts a larger shadow in politics. In Nixonland, Rick Perlstein uses Nixon as a stand-in for American polarization along new axes, divisions based on apocalyptic language and violence. Nixon, in Perlstein's depiction, serves as an odd symbol of the political chaos of the 1960s. He comes across as a ruthless striver (an Orthogonian, as Perlstein calls him using the name of the club of outsiders from college that Nixon formed in contrast to the natural, wealthy, elite Franklins-- Perlstein uses Orthagonians and Franklins throughout the books in a device that loses its novelty long before page 700). Nixon is not a fanatic, but an opportunist-- he rises from obscurity by riding the wave of anticommunism in the Alger Hiss case, strengthens his anticommunist bromides by yelling at Nikita Khrushchev, and aligns with the hard right burbling in the Republican Party represented by Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan only when it becomes his path to victory in the 1968 Republican primary. Nixon certainly made decisions to intensify the tensions rivening Amercians-- his law and order campaign language that implicitly privileged police violence against protesters, his deal with Strom Thurmond to undercut integration efforts and by implication all civil rights, his vice president Spiro Agnew's operatic denunciations of the press in the mode of a hammy stage villain with an unreliable false mustache. But it was Nixon's efforts to prolong and intensify the war in Vietnam as the horrific effects of the bombs and fading justifications for American involvement became more apparent that most dangerously divided the country. As bombs devastated Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, Americans became further enraged either in disgust for the war or entrenched in support for it. Perlstein's biggest challenge in Nixonland comes from the fact that he is writing about the Turbulent Sixties, a time that exists in some readers' living memory or for younger readers, the endless discussions, reproductions, and omnipresence of The 1960s in culture as the Baby Boomers came of age and devoted a large percentage of media to building 1960s simulacra. This is a strange situation. While certain distorted elements of the past have been reconstructed and commodified (the "old west" springs to mind), the combination of readily accessible television and recording archives and media executives' decisions to prioritize this particular era for nostalgia has left entire subsequent generations marinating in The Sixties. As we speak, someone somewhere is splicing "For What It's Worth" into a documentary. The Rolling Stones are still on tour, and Danny Boyle has just made a movie about how Beatles songs would still vault a performer into superstardom that can be read as boomer cult of immortality. What can Perlstein write about the Nixon-Kennedy debates after they've been so solidified into pop culture that the popular understanding of them can be summarized in 30 seconds on the Simpsons? The toughest thing for anyone writing about the Nixon era not only involves historians' normal difficulty gathering sources, making sense of them, and assembling material into something that provides fresh insights or sells books, but also involves grappling with a time that has been churned over and calcified into a Gump-hued caricature that everyone already thinks they know about. In Nixonland, the familiarity of headlines is part of the reason why the book is so compelling. Perlstein weaves them all together with an emphasis on what people were reading in newspapers and watching on television to give a sense of the chaotic and overwhelming events and how they were all almost immediately subsumed into some sort of political narrative. Perlstein also highlights now-obscure issues that were a big deal at the time and now exist as since-forgotten ephemera. In one case, Nixon, grappling with the Moratorium movement against the Vietnam War that had organized a massive, national protest in 1969, decided to do some PR by personally responding to a letter from a college student. That student responded to Nixon's speech about the democratic process by denigrating it because he was the president of the Ignatius J. Reilly-esque Student Monarchist Society, and he demanded the iron fist of some aristocrat riven with inbreeding. While Nixonland is about more than Nixon himself, Perlstein does spend enough time with Nixon to capture his own own innately bizarre Nixonness. Nixon, preoccupied with his image after the 1960 election, spends his time obsessively shaving like he's some sort of damp werewolf. Nixon, bingewatching Patton while marinating in scotch. Nixon figuring out his greatest political asset, according to Perlstein, was his talent to get the sniffy elites and protesters despised by the voters he courted to hate him. During a campaign for the 1970 midterm elections, Nixon and his press office arranged to show him abused by large crowds. At a stop in San Jose, Perlstein writes that Nixon chief of staff Bob Haldeman arranged for protestors to have time to surround Nixon's motorcade. "Nixon lept up on the hood of his bulletproof limousine, made the two-handed V-salute, and jutted out his chin. He told his handlers 'That's what they hate to see!'" You hate to see it Here Nixon echoed one of the most important moments of his career, an attack on his motorcade in Venezuela during a 1958 tour as vice president. For this moment, and several other early Nixon episodes, the strangest accounts were those left by Nixon in a desperate, last-ditch attempt to sell himself. SIX CRISES Nixon released Six Crises in the wake of his loss in the 1960 presidential election. Six Crises is by no means a good book-- like most politician's tomes it is boring, self-serving, largely ghost-written, and meant exclusively to pump up the author's profile before an election (it came out as Nixon was running his ill-fated 1962 campaign for California governor). The ostensible point of the book is a manual for crisis management through Nixon's various humiliating fuck-ups, times people tried to bludgeon him to death, etc. Through it all, the point is to describe how Richard Milhous Nixon is a cool customer and always acts with propriety in the interests of the United States despite unscrupulous political rivals and vicious communists trying to foil him at every turn. Nixon's posturing in Six Crises in 2019 serves as its own punchline because we all know how the story ends, with a Seventh Crisis, the series of political smears and setups and the bumbling boob-henchmen and the botched robbery and the coverup and the tapes that are all just Nixon sitting around the oval office grumbling about those bastards and hot pants and everything else that has been subsumed into the larger grotesquerie of Nixonia. "Friday, November 7 was a bleak day at the start of a long, cold, Washington winter," one paragraph begins jackwebbically. "It was a particularly cold day in the fortunes of the Republican Party and of Richard Nixon." According to his publisher Kenneth McCormick's New York Times obituary, Nixon wrote that section on the 1960 election himself and I would have really enjoyed an entire book in that style, just Nixon freestyling on meteorological portents and referring to himself in the third person: The wind whipped through parade as the boos cascaded around the limo like the leaves cascading from the trees. But there was one man who was not whipped: Richard Nixon. The thermometer said it was boiling but nothing on the face of the Earth was as hot as Richard Nixon as Khrushchev rained another blow on the Maytag. Most of the crises in the book unfold with a series of meetings, negotiations, speeches and television appearances. The most interesting chapter, though, involves violence and thrilling escapes. In the spring of 1958, Nixon was sent on a tour through South America. There, Nixon finds himself spat upon, screamed at, and attacked in what he describes as a series of literal communist plots. "This paper [the Tribuna Popular, the Venezuelan Communist Party's organ] contained a particularly vicious attack on the United States and a front-page photograph of me, doctored so my teeth looked like fangs and my face like that of a war-mongering fiend." During a parade in Venezuela, Nixon's motorcade got ensnared in a road block and attacked; Nixon did find himself in legitimate physical danger. My favorite passage in the book comes earlier in the Caracas chapter. There, Nixon also meets with protest in Lima, where he describes shoving his way back to his hotel through a hostile crowd. In this section Nixon reveals the funniest possible Nixon, Tough Guy Nixon:
Just as I reached the hotel door I came face to face with a man I later learned was one of the most notorious Communist agitators in Lima. I saw before me a weird-looking character whose bulging eyes seemed to merge with his mouth and nose in one distorted blob. He let fly a wad of spit which caught me full in the face. I went through in that instant a terrible test of temper control. One must experience the sensation to realize why spitting in a person's face is the most infuriating insult ever conceived by man. I felt an almost uncontrollable urge to tear the face in front of me to pieces. [Secret Service agent Jack] Sherwood deserves the credit for keeping me from handling the man personally. He grabbed him by the arm and whirled him out of my path, but as I saw his legs go by, I at least had the satisfaction of planting a healthy kick on his shins. Nothing I did all day made me feel better.
Six Crises is clearly meant to prop up the seemingly dead political career of Nixon, and therefore he portrays himself as statesmanlike, at times even courtly. But Nixon was also not going to write an entire book without sticking a few shivs into his variegated enemies. The Caracas chapter, for example, ends with reports of his rival Nelson Rockefeller landing at his estate in Venezuela a few months after Nixon's escape and telling the crowd there "I have nothing to do with Nixon." Nixon writes "I had received a cable from Nelson Rockefeller which read 'your courage and determination have inspired democratic forces throughout the hemisphere. We all feel a great sense of pride in your action. Congratulations." That is the end of the chapter. The section on the 1960 election allows Nixon to get in all of his jabs at Kennedy again, blasting him as inexperienced at foreign policy and able to get away with waffling on key issues all because he did not go on TV in the debate and look like he was going to crawl through the set and eat Americans the way Nixon did. Nixon magnanimously concedes defeat for the good of the country while also presenting readers with a numbered List of Election Irregularities. He alleges that Kennedy used privileged information about plans to train insurgents to depose Castro to trap him in an impossible position. Nixon, in the 1968 edition that I have, continues the argument in a vindictive footnote that ends "beyond this I have no comment. My book speaks for itself." IN NIXONLAND
"Our nation stands at a fork in the political road. In one direction lies a land of slander and scare; the land of sly innuendo, the poison pen, the anonymous phone call and hustling, pushing shoving; the land of smash and grab and anything to win. This is Nixonland. America is something different," Adlai Stevenson said in a speech during the 1956 campaign. But Perlstein disagreed. He saw Nixonland as intrinsically wrapped up in America. "Nixonland," Perstein writes, "is the America where two separate and irreconcilable sets of apocalyptic fears coexist in the minds of two separate and irreconcilable groups of Americans." Division, dirty tricks, and acts of political violence are not novel to the Nixon era, but are foundational parts of the country, what Philip Roth called the "American berserk." However, there are novel features of the American landscape that Perlstein calls attention to: the specific realignment of partisan politics that has recontoured political parties into their modern form, the importance of television, the Nixonian attacks on the media emanating from Agnew and Nixon's dead-eyed Munster castoff Watergate-era press secretary Ron Ziegler. And while Nixon looms large, Perlstein himself would caution against reaching too literally into the past. Don't you dare fucking tweet at Perlstein that some political event is exactly like Nixonland like you're comparing the Denver Nuggets to Game of Thrones. Nixon's brand of corruption surely reminded contemporaries of the past figures while few people before him could envision his own brand of flinty-eyed, Haldeman haircut paranoia, the past not repeating but echoing into grotesque distortions unimaginable until they already happen.
At least the Super Bowl, the NFL's great spectacle of football and bizarre halftime entertainment and people huddling in house parties to see how a truck is going to be sold to them does surround a football game-- one that decides which team gets rings, the parade, and a special on NFL Network where one of the available Baldwin Brothers will growl-narrate how that tough loss to Carolina in Week 10 was the turning point of the season that brought them together. The NFL Draft, though, is the league's greatest achievement in Verhoeven spectacle, a three-day extravaganza of people reading a list of football players that subsumed no less than three entire television networks full of suit guys screaming made-up words like ELITE EXPLOSION-FACTOR. The NFL brings out former players to yell about the picks, along with inspiring children and military personnel; eventually it devolves into inexplicable, demented skits such as this one about murderous hail of footballs:
The NFL Draft is so compelling to me because it is the NFL distilled to its essence. The Super Bowl represents the NFL making its case as an institution woven inextricably into the American fabric, an unavoidable event that has turned itself into a secular holiday and must hold everyone's attention with things that Americans unequivocally like: musical extravaganzas, commercials where animated animals blast farts at each other. The draft, on the other hand, is an even weirder phenomenon, a bizarre and arcane morass of scouting and salary cap esoterica involving amateur players that 95 percent of the audience has never heard of; the NFL has willed this into an unfathomably popular avant-garde television program. The NFL has done this because the NFL exists in a strange bubble where the NFL draft and its celebration of tape-eating and incomprehensible scouting lingo and screeching about "elite measurables" and "questionable attitude" because a college player wore a coat or headbutted someone is the most important thing in the world. The NFL draft is extremely popular. It exists on network television instead of broadcast on close-circuit television in a grubby OTB next to some depiction of that ubiquitous internet drawing of monkeys swordfighting unfolding in real life. Thousands of people filled the streets of Nashville for the event in garish face paints to react in triumph or agony or, after the first round, general bemusement since they've never heard of the vast majority of the players and so they just do some generic football yelling. Fans gather in bars or even their own stadiums to watch the draft on television solely, as far as I can tell, to generate internet memes when their team reaches for the wrong quarterback. Few things in the NFL draft will ever be as funny as when the Bears invited Mike Glennon to their official draft party so he could watch them trade up to select his replacement before he sheepishly bobbleheaded his way out of there in embarrassment.
When you're blindsided by Trubisky Why is the NFL draft so popular? I have no idea. The Internet Style Guide suggests I should simply take my own bizarre reasons for watching this and throw a "we" in the headline so I could write something like "We Watch the NFL Draft for The Excesses of Grotesque, Corporate Pageantry And Also To See Who Will Select Clayton Thorson" or, even better, "Stop Watching the Draft So You Can Write About It At Length for your Blogspot Website." The Philadelphia Eagles select Clayton Thorson in the fifth round in the background of a Street Fighter II Guile Fight Part of it, if I were to venture a guess, comes as a part of the NFL's imperial domination of American sports discourse. Part of it also comes from the excitement of player selection, where fans who support the lowest, shittiest teams can look at 45 seconds of some fifth-round guy shredding MAC defenses who had a very impressive time in the Cone Drill and imagine him doing the same thing to the Cincinnati Bengals. And part of it is because even though a very small number of people watching have any sort of mechanism to scout players even by the dubious methods used by professionals, a consensus emerges before the draft about the top players and it is very fun to collectively mock teams for departing from it. A TAXONOMY OF FOOTBALL TALK My favorite part of the draft is its bizarre argot. Not only does the NFL draft have its own stupid and incomprehensible jargon where very serious men with tie knots the size of an infant's skull come up with a dumber way to say that someone is big or fast, it also incorporates all of the numerous and idiotic ways people talk about football and sports in general in the twenty-first century. Here is a brief taxonomy: 1. Football-Knower lingo that is used by television personalities who have spent so much time around football that they have no idea how normal human beings talk and by non-professionals who really want everyone else to know that they have seen the All 22 footage. The greatest exponent of this is Jon Gruden. There's an old profile of Gruden from the New Yorker most notable for the impossibly ludicrous New Yorker diaresis dropped on the phrase "offensive coördinator" that details how he gets up at 3:17AM to spend hours and hours in a storage shed watching tape to prepare for his broadcasts in order to explain to viewers that (chuckle) lemme tell ya, this Peyton Manning is a heckuva quarterback. 2. Scout Talk about Motors, and Get-offability, and all of that nonsense. A few years ago, the word they kept using was "sudden," which was a genuine literary invention-- you can imagine Mel Kiper, Jr. reading from a new short story to his writer's workshop "It only took an instant for the clouds to break over Richard 'Dreadnought' Grench's face or for a joke to curdle into a sulk. He was sudden--just like his swim move that let him lead the Big Twelve in Quarterback Hurries before the plantar injury against Baylor." The weirdest thing about Scout Talk is when they start sizing up player's bodies by talking about "adding to their frames" and doing Butt Phrenology. Every year, they come up with a sillier and more abstract way of saying the same thing but invent clumsy new term to make it sound more technical and complicated. The NFL loves sounding technical and complicated. Football fans love when their Football Men do Football Talk. The result is a David Mamet play breaking out in between footage of some Big 12 receiver scoring touchdowns and mascots standing underneath a fighter jet. I genuinely wonder what these draft expert goofballs are like outside this milieu, whether their bromides about twitchy motors is just some schtick they can turn off or whether they spend all their time bellowing at each other about elite get-off moves in diners or when being fitted for enormous pin-striped suits. 3. Advanced Stats analyses that exist mainly to throw cold water on the Scout Talk and to remind everyone about how essentially random the draft can be while simultaneously peddling numbers that actually correlate to draft success. The Advanced Stats dialect exists mainly to heap scorn onto general managers who select quarterbacks based on them being tall and having strong jawlines and to explain that ninety percent of what happens in a football game is luck and will eventually regress to the mean. 4. Dumb Guy Analytics, which is when square-headed Football Guys clumsily try to repackage their anodyne Football Guy insights as some sort of advanced stats like when you get one of the infinite varieties of Trents Dilfer donning an extra large accounting visor and standing quizzically in front of a chalkboard that says Trent's Advanced Stats while he comes up with Quarterback Wins. This is one of the best things about football and should only be encouraged. 5. Asset Chat that is part of the financialization of all things sports. The new buzzword in the NFL draft is Draft Capital. The idea that drafting is far more random than the TV guys want to think and that the best strategy involves just getting as many picks as possible makes sense. At the same time, the invention of complex charts about pick depreciation and analyses that examine the draft based entirely on byzantine pick swap strategies all read like this clip of a professional wrestler who is also wearing head-chainmail for reasons I have no interest in exploring: There are plenty of other insane things about the NFL draft-- the militarism, the overwhelming and preening presence of Roger Goodell even as he gets showered in boos, the draft's devolution from ludicrous self-seriousness to bizarre skits, the inevitable and wearying tedium of the draft's final day-- but none of these things can ever be as strange and inexplicable as the existence of the draft and its attendant spectacle itself.
It is impossible to write anything more evocative on Northwestern's tortured, miserable, last-place basketball season than this gif of Chris Collins on all fours slapping the floor, his eyes glazed with a sheen of madness. This might be my favorite basketball gif of all time. Collins is no longer coaching. He is not drawing a play. He is not giving an inspirational speech about rebounding. He is watching his team hang tough with the number two ranked team in the country, he has seen a foul called, and he is reacting as if he is Charlton Heston and the University of Michigan has erected a Statue of Liberty in the student section. One of the funniest things about sports, and college sports in particular, is the dichotomy between the figure of the coach as stern disciplinarian, here to shape athletes into better people under his or her gruff tutelage and the fact that we allow them to spend games in a maniacal reverie that would be otherwise baffling and unacceptable in any other context. Successful coaches are allowed to parlay their fame into getting paid to go into a grain silo accessories sales executive convention and talking about Leadership and Discipline and Being A Winner Who Wins Like A Winner and then getting onto a field or a court to scream at an official while their heads flash red like an airplane wing light and their faces swell and bulge into an impression of the world's least subtle mime acting out a dogbite on the groin scenario and this is apparently fine. There's a reason to draw a thread between Chris Collins's on-court histrionics and Northwestern's rough season because Wildcat fans are searching for a reason for a slew of early departures that have ravaged the team since Collins took over. If there is one common theme for the Chris Collins era other than the triumphant 2017 tournament berth, it has been departure. Several of Collins's recruits have transferred to make way for other players; one player alleges in a lawsuit that he was essentially thrown off the team and encouraged to give up an athletic scholarship via methods that included being barred from practice, remanded to landscaping duties, and getting accused of shirking through time cards that look like they had been forged and doctored because the person filling them out could not successfully spell his name. This week, three graduated players with eligibility remaining have decided to leave as graduate transfers. Barrett Benson, a presumed starter at center, graduated in three years in order to hasten his departure. It is, I suppose, not fair to speculate on why players are leaving the program-- they may all have their own reasons, and the timing could be a coincidence-- but I do not think it is unfair to at least ask some questions about the guy above who looks like he's taking a foul call less well than the villainous cartoon character Skeletor. The swirling mass of transfers has created an air of crisis around Northwestern basketball beyond its usual crisis of being Northwestern basketball. The 'Cats had already graduated two all-time great players in Vic Law and Dererk Pardon, both of whom had been instrumental in getting the Wildcats to the tournament for the first time; Pardon's last-second layup to beat Michigan and clinch the tourney berth is the greatest Northwestern basketball play that did not take place in the 1930s and did not involve someone building a catapult to launch the ball towards the basket under the rules of the time.
Two years ago, Collins stood in front of a jubilant Welsh-Ryan crowd talking about beginnings. Now, he will spend an offseason scrambling to find enough players to fill out a roster. It's not all doom and gloom; there are several good young players who will have an opportunity to find their footing in the Big Ten and, like his last team, learn how to play together to get back to the tournament or the NIT or one of those weird tournaments where there are no rules and are played in torchlight and the hoops are hollowed out cattle skulls. A REVIEW OF NORTHWESTERN'S FANCY ARENA Of course Welsh-Ryan is far nicer now. They have seats now instead of bleachers. There are new videoscreens. The whole building is slick and new and covered in purple like the an arena on an alien spaceship. It glistens. There are somehow luxury boxes, even though the person who wants to watch Northwestern basketball but in a luxury box is impossible for me to fathom. The thing it does most effectively and depressingly is to finally destroy the quaint illusion of Northwestern basketball and put it right in line with the bizarre and inexplicable spectacle of big-time college sports. Opposing fans always loved to grumble that Welsh-Ryan was a glorified high school arena. That's not necessarily fair-- it was bigger than a high school arena and also sometimes had halftime entertainment like live The Simon Says Guy-- but it was certainly stripped down in comparison to sleek Big Ten buildings. The first basketball game I ever saw at Welsh-Ryan was a high school game, and Welsh-Ryan seemed just like a natural extension of what you'd expect to see-- bleachers, but more of them; a dot scoreboard, but one that could display cartoon ads. I didn't watch college sports when I was younger so the idea of a college team playing in an arena that was basically the gym except without a bunch of side baskets made sense. Old Welsh-Ryan arena just before tip-off for a Big Ten game Northwestern basketball is big time college sports collecting the same insane checks as every other Big Ten team, but it was easy to pretend that it wasn't. Welsh-Ryan was a creaky old barn where you could literally bump into Chainsaw Nick Smith on the way to the bathroom. And for a long time, Northwestern was not very good at basketball. Opposing fans would take over the arena, loudly complain about it, watch their players dunk for a couple hours and go home. Even in the years when Northwestern was decent under Bill Carmody, they seemed to be playing a different sport filled with gangly goofballls doing slow motion backcuts and undulating zone defenses. Of course, that is illusion: college sports are the same insane, exploitative spectacle even if the team plays in a dumpy arena that's biggest selling point was minimum distance from Gene Keady and even if the team was historically bad tournament-missers. And yet, the spectacle of college sports, especially the NCAA Tournament which was built to allow people to get fully invested in obscure teams featuring guys named like Benton Wrench somehow beating NBA players, is absolutely incredible. That is the dichotomy of the Tournament: a delightful show plowing along as it always, and if a few minutes' scrutiny makes it impossible that it can continue for another minute before collapsing under its own contradictions that feels like just about everything right now. THE CHICAGO CUBS ARE AN ABSOLUTE BUMMER NOW The Chicago Cubs have been in three of the last four National League Championship series. They won 95 games last season. A Cub was runner up in the MVP vote, a different player from the Cub who won MVP just two years earlier. They are only three seasons removed from the greatest in team history, culminating in a championship that generations had been waiting for. Also they appear to be in complete crisis and everyone is angry with them. Part of this comes from the Cubs completely punting on the offseason. They gleefully joined nearly the entirety of baseball in deciding that baseball players were too expensive and sitting out the Bryce Harper and Machado sweepstakes. Beyond that, though, the Cubs did nothing else. They fired a bunch of coaches and brought in a utility infielder and a couple of relievers as the Cardinals, Brewers, and even the basement-dwelling Reds improved. While the Cubs could certainly bounce back into form with the return of a healthy Kris Bryant and Yu Darvish, there seems to be a sense of treading water. The PECOTA projections picked the Cubs to finish last in the NL Central. Hilariously, Joe Maddon is using this as bulletin board material without stopping to think that PECOTA is literally a math formula and there is no one to gloat over if the Cubs win more than its projected 79 games unless he is secretly funding a project to implant the PECOTA formula into a host body to assume corporeal form and then invite the shambling monster to the Cubs dugout to get humiliated by disco music and crotch-thrusting dance moves after the Cubs win their 80th game. It appears the Cubs seem poised to fire Joe Maddon, their most successful manager since Frank Chance, because everyone is just sick of his shit. But the more dispiriting Cubs stuff has been a parade of scandal and an accretion of generalized rich people mania thrust into public display. If there's been a single thing the Cubs have committed to in the offseason it is disingenuous apologies-- those from Addison Russell, who remains on the team for some reason, those from the Ricketts family after the publication of Joe Ricketts's bigoted emails. The Cubs will be donating money and working with groups and raising awareness this season. The most recent spate of Cubs e-mails published by Deadspin are less inflammatory. In this case, they delve into the various shady accounting practices the Ricketts family used to purchase the Cubs, but they also include various embarrassing levels of vaguely Habsburg-level family intrigue where they all sent e-mails to each other instead of threatening to invade the Low Countries. While Tom Ricketts complained that there was no money left to sign free agents, fans can rest assured that the family was all buying up local railroads to they could all try to destroy each other while sending long email chains where they are all dressed in nineteenth-century sidewhiskers. "How am I supposed to tell my children that it is not their uncle alone who owns the Detroit, Toledo, and Ironton railroad, but the entire family has banded together to crush the operators, buy out their stock, and divert their cargo of precious pig iron to our own depots?" reads one email And yet, the Cubs still have Javy Baez doing Javy Baez things, a healthy Kris Bryant, and a first game that was just a general annihilation of a tanking Rangers team featuring pitchers named "Kyle Dowdy." It has been a long, impossibly cold, and miserable winter. Baseball is an incredibly dumb sport that makes no sense and it one of the best wastes of time ever invented. Let's hope the Cubs and the odious, bumbling family that owns them don't continue to find reasons to make us forget that.
S.S. Milazzo have weathered heartbreak in the fourth division of Italian soccer. Their quest to leave the mud-soaked pitches and empty bleachers in this soccer Siberia for the Holy Land of third-division soccer with slightly drier pitches, slightly larger stands, and maybe even their own van had been derailed by two heartbreaking extra-time collapses: one knocked them out of second place and automatic promotion; a second eliminated them from the playoff and doomed them to another season dodging elbows from part-time gym teachers and performance shorts salesmen. They press on close to financial ruin. The club is weighed down by hefty contracts paid to star players because the manager is sentimental and cannot part with those legends who have so nearly brought the team to glory. None of them exist. Football Manager exists on a bizarre halfway realm between reality and fantasy. There is an S.S. Milazzo in real life; the game features hundreds of real soccer teams across the planet from the flea-bitten amateur ranks of Britain's seventh division all the way to the juggernaut glamor teams where you can actually attempt to purchase a Digital Ronaldo or get angry at some unholy rendering of Chris Wondolowski. But for me, the most satisfying way to play is with a tiny regional team and have the program invent all of the players, not only because the algorithm was designed by a genius to spit out names like Paolo Pasta, but because it creates bizarre parallel universe where the world's best player is an Austrian named Dolph Tobaggen. The legend And it is always fun that, with gameplay that remains pretty much the same whether you're playing as AFC Headbuttston or Real Madrid, you can now find out that the titanic promotion battle that you are fighting in the sixth division while fending off the barbs of a rival manager and other teams trying to grab your top players is all taking place for teams whose real life setup resembles a storage shed with a meat pie concession. The home ground of Redditch United, a team that I took over after it was promoted from league so low that that you are not allowed to play into the seventh tier and got it to the the second-tier Championship. Because I play an old version of the game, the league that S.S. Milazzo is in literally no longer exists The genius of Football Manager is that it somehow balances a diabolically complex system of controls where anyone monomaniacal enough can assign unique training schedules to all of hundreds of players in a youth system or futz with dozens of obscure sliders that spell out each players' specific role with randomness and utter chaos. Other sports games allow a human to control at least one player in the field and therefore take over the game; a skilled player or one at least savvy enough to figure out that the NCAA video games have no idea how to stop a cornerback under center who can run very fast can ride those exploits to victory. Football Manager leaves the game results up to a program that leaves the player to the whimsical vagaries of chance. The most determined player who has studied hundreds of pages of the various guides that players have put on the internet to form a sort of Football Manager folklore can still watch a Ballon D'Or-caliber superstar make an idiotic glory-tackle in the box in a crucial Champions League tie or players commit errors so egregious that they are either the result of a computer glitch or an uncannily perfect simulation of an oafish bartender stumbling around in the fifth division. It is in fact that inability to directly control the players that makes it so gratifying or infuriating. When a person, for example, takes a team to a championship in an NBA game, it is because he or she has taken control of them directly and run the same pick and roll that the game has no idea how to stop over and over again; these digital Darkos and Luthers Head have no apparent agency in this process. When a Football Manger player named Antonio Crescendo hits a crucial away goal to advance to the next preliminary round of a cup, or someone named Walter Poplar-Stodge flails ineffective to stop a breakaway, it happens passively onscreen in a way almost directly parallel to how we already watch sports. And Football Manager also puts in shadowy forces above the player as well. Each team is controlled by a board that operates according to its own whims. The manager can do nothing without the board-- it sets budgets, must be appealed to in order to improve facilities or even prevent the pitch from gradually turning into a treacherous dirt pit, it can unilaterally cancel player transactions or sell top players out from under you with no warning. And in the end the board can fire you. There is no game over as far as I can tell in Football Manager. Once you get fired from a team, you can try to take over other teams by sending out job applications; I once got fired from two bottom-division teams in close succession (I am not good at this game) and started simulating to see who would hire me next. I kept fruitlessly applying to be the manager in any league that would take me while years flew by because I was curious whether at some point the game would force me to retire or go into real estate or die. --------------------------- Football Manager's baroque interface, intimidating options, and repetitive gameplay would make an impossible and awful game if it did not manage to tap into the insane and frightening ability for human beings to inject pathos and emotional stakes into anything that can be vaguely related to human endeavor. The lack of control in the Football Manager universe turns players into goal-blasting heroes or disappointing losers that are randomly-generated parts of some code. I spent several seasons in the game in legitimate fear of a computer-generated player named "Ian Sidebottom" who regularly tortured my team in the dregs of the semi-pro Conference National. Football Manager brilliantly abets this by encouraging users to emotionally engage. A crucial part of the game involves finding which types of pep talks certain players respond to. The game also simulates player disgruntlement-- players argue about playing time, demand transfers to larger clubs, and generally irritate you. It encourages you to argue with other managers through the fictional media. These interactions on my old version (2012) get boring and rote quickly, but I'm floored that there's an option to add your own text to interactions-- this does absolutely nothing in the game other than give you the satisfaction of calling a string of code that presents as Liam Tradgough, Manager of Brundleswain-Upon-Pants a bloviating pig fucker to absolutely no one. Sports video games that have no outside plot other than winning the game count on players to instinctively engage with them the same way they do with sports. I've put my team in financial jeopardy by having a hard time selling old players because they've become club legends. I've worried briefly about what recruiting a superior point guard on a college basketball team will do to the old stalwart on the roster even though the game has no mechanism to simulate this and a player will start, sit on the bench, or get cut and sent to a digital afterlife of swirling ones and zeroes presided over by the whims of a game genies with no effect whatsoever. This phenomenon even spills over to games with real-life players; who has not had some sort of lingering affection for some otherwise obscure player that had somehow starred for you in a video game and otherwise has been consigned to the dustbin of Remembered Guys? On the one hand, it is a little strange and even disturbing how easy it is to reproduce the feeling of rooting for a sports team that has real buildings and people and eleven dollar beers with a digital edifice that, no matter how complicated, is essentially face painted on a volleyball. On the other hand, it's also gratifying that sports games allow anyone inclined to graft all of the emotions and ludicrous habits of watching sports onto what is essentially a nest of interlocking spreadsheets. There is a way of playing Football Manager bloodlessly, of accepting the fundamental fact that its soccer universe is a cardboard diorama and it's just a matter of figuring out what buttons to press to make the numbers go up, but to put hours into the game doing that without becoming attached to players or angrily and short-shortsightedly selling a player that has done something annoying or even, with full control of one's faculties, writing to a rival manager that he should live as long as it takes for humans to master cloning and shrinking so that he can finally climb up his own ass even though this insult is going to an entity that does not exist, is more insane.
It is not supposed to be chilly and rainy in San Diego. Football teams are supposed to win games that they lead 20-3. Northwestern is not supposed to score 28 points in a quarter, and Utah players are supposed to have played a football game in wet weather before instead of performing as if the game had been relocated to a functioning hog rendering plant. The Wildcats are supposed to melt down in bowl games at the hands of a superior opponent or a ludicrous hail of onside kick return touchdowns that I didn't even know were legal. For an entire season, Northwestern was supposed to finally lose and conform with conventional wisdom, the advanced numbers, and the aura of losing that pervades the team even though it's been nearly a quarter century since the Wildcats were in the throes of their notorious streak of football abominations and have since been more or less ok. Instead, they continued winning after a heinous loss to Akron came to define their season as they became Northwestern-Which-Lost-To-Akron, a name that became funnier and more absurd as their feats became more impressive-- Northwestern-Which-Lost-To-Arkon Hangs Tough With Michigan was one level; Northwestern-Which-Lost-To-Akron Advances to Big Ten Championship Game was most bizarre football sentence that could be constructed. My favorite part of this wild season was the Wildcats' emergence as the numbers-noids of the Big Ten, racking up victory after victory even as advanced metrics kept spitting out spreadsheets saying that they were terrible. Northwestern, a 9-5 team with a division championship and bowl victory finished the season as the S&P+ metric's 79th best team in the country (the Associated Press ranked them 22; the coach's poll, which is filled out from what I understand, by a coach wadding it up and throwing it out of a truck window while crossing state lines to buy illegally caffeinated Monster Energy drinks and then sending a graduate assistant to spend several hours looking for it by crawling through storm drains in the hope that someone had filled it out had them at 19). The Wildcats finish the season the traditional Treble: The Big Ten Western Division, Holiday Bowl, and Hat The numbers seemed to catch up to Northwestern when Utah (S&P+ rank 16) came out and obliterated them in the first half. The Wildcat defense, depleted by injury, and configured in the generous zone defense designed to smother the run and dare some truck suspension Big Ten West quarterback to throw a pass directly at Montre Hartage, got sliced up by Utah's passing game. The Utes flummoxed Northwestern's run game and swarmed Thorson. Top receivers Flynn Nagel and Bennett Skowronek left the game injured. And then whatever unholy force it was that propelled Northwestern all season kicked in and set off the greatest single quarter of football I have ever watched. An interception thrown directly to Blake Gallagher. A couple of monster blocks springing Chiaokhiao-Bowman to set up a touchdown. A Gaziano strip has Jared McGee flying down the sideline. An offensive lineman catches a pass and somehow trips for 12 yards before belly-flopping into the endzone. A confused Utah team that keeps falling down and flinging the ball at Northwestern players. In the end, Northwestern put up 28 points in one quarter and that was it for the day save for a couple more hideous Utah turnovers and Pat Fitzgerald's decision to kneel out the clock so much that they literally turned the ball over because Pat Fitzgerald would like nothing more than to score a touchdown and then kneel so hard that he burrows into the core of the Earth.
NUMBERS To anyone who somehow managed to follow this blog website for the entire season, Northwestern's success this season in the face of some advanced metrics became a running theme. I appreciate the epistemological project to bring some scientific order to college football rankings, which are now based on branding, recency bias, shadowy cabals of bureaucrats, and ineffectual screaming at the radio. On the other hand, football, and college football in particular, is subject to many bizarre vagaries and bounces that it remains nearly impossible to predict, and to have the team I like continuing to frustrate math was funny and also weirdly inspiring. Fifteen years ago, anyone attempting to follow sports on the internet subjected him or herself to a profoundly moronic culture war between the statheads and the rumpled newspaper columnists and flinty-eyed coaches on television wearing the absolute largest sports coats that could be fashioned by human hands. This phenomenon, in its original baseball origins, weighed so heavily for the argument that fairly basic stats like on-base percentage were better than weird nineteenth-century stats in the face of counterarguments that consisted of "shut up" and "you live in a basement" that the statheads became sympathetic protagonists. More than a decade later, the statheads have easily triumphed. The empirical case became nearly impossible to argue against in sports as teams that leaned heavily on numbers won. As front offices began to adopt analytics wholesale, the media shifted to hire people who could write about them; the annihilation of the newspaper sports columnist as a job in the face of buyouts, layoffs, and ill-fated pivots to video took out most of the holdouts. And yet, as a person who enjoys reading about sports on the internet, it is difficult to see the triumph of the advanced analytics movement as an altogether positive thing. The grouchy, cigar-chomping columnist performatively photographed with a typewriter in 2004 has given way to the lanyard-clad Sloan Analytics Guy who is here to talk about Assets. Advances in stats and use of new kinds of data from player tracking cameras has unveiled a lot of novel and interesting wrinkles in sports. And yet, while knowing how fucking hard Javy Baez drilled a home run or how many miles Jimmy Butler runs during a basketball game is enjoyable, advanced analytics are not really for the fans, but for the front offices, and now more than ever the discourse in sportswriting revolves almost entirely around value and efficiency. Here are some of the things that have happened as a direct result of broad analytics movements in sports and sportswriting: convincing fans that watching a complete and utter garbage shit team do Wile E. Coyote plans for years at a time is not only the smart way to enjoy sports but any other way is for neanderthal dimbulbs who call into sports radio shows with names like Headbutt Stan; looking at the same trades where shitty basketball players move around because the NBA's salary cap is a miserable rube goldberg contraption as genius moves because now players and draft picks are called "assets"; podcasts where people basically list how much money everyone makes for hours each week. The broad revolution in sports information that comes from analytics and the internet has had two deleterious effects on following sports. One is to frame everything in terms of what front offices value, which is money. Yes, it is important for a writer covering a sport to understand the ins and outs of salary caps and taxes in order to understand what front offices are likely to do but it is exhausting to constantly read about how players fit in and out of these dumb and artificial caps in leagues where the only penalty to signing whoever they want is for some third-generation yacht guy to spend slightly more money. Second, the analytics movement identifies more efficient ways to build teams and play that quickly become correct. This is true in baseball, where the three true outcomes have triumphed and in the NBA, where teams increasingly gravitate towards the threes-and-layups offenses. In many cases, these strategies proliferate because they are effective-- the extra point available on three pointers has made it an unassailable strategy not to jack them as often as possible-- but they flatten and homogenize the game in a way that can be less pleasing, aesthetically. These strategies have also emerged in team building, where the owners' overwhelming concern with maintaining low salaries have made it all but impossible to consider building a winner that doesn't rely on underpaid young players in every sport. It was absolutely good that the stat nerds won their culture war because the people on the other side were ridiculous oafs. At the same time, the analytics movement has loosed a torrent of irritating spreadsheet-mongers and payroll calculators on sports that have warped the discourse in other bizarre ways. There will probably never be ways to analyze sports that aren't inherently stupid because the amounts of money and attention paid to these games remain unfathomable and ludicrous. Sports have become too lucrative to risk on weirdos and suboptimal strategies.
And while I welcome any attempt to bring some sort of empirical debate to college sports, I also can enjoy a hitch in the system when the team I personally root for flummoxes the ratings and continues to win under an undulating crew cut maniac fist pumping the numbers straight into a garbage can.
Alabama and Clemson will face off yet again in the national championship after effortlessly humiliating the supposed third- and fourth-best teams in college football, and it sure seems like there is once again little point to a college football season with two teams leagues above all others. But actually caring about college football's championship is a sucker's game for the rubes who care about playoff positioning determined in smoking rooms full of athletic directors and war criminals; the essence of the appeal of the sport is the roiling chaos just beneath the lofty heights of the Playoff and playing out in delightfully pointless bowl games that are all called the "Big Boy" Chad's Regional Trash Compactor Bowl That Used To Be The Chugg Energy Drink Bowl and next year will be the PotMom.Com Legal Weed Bowl. Amazon says that this 10th anniversary micronpc.com bowl program is available for $21.00 plus $6.00 shipping The point of the Playoff, with its fancy embossed lettering and tacky crystal football is that those games matter, but the 345 other bowls all know that in the cosmic sense, all human endeavors are pointless and you might as well watch two teams throw interceptions at each other in the Cheez It Bowl because one day the sun will explode. Northwestern has made it to the Holiday Bowl, somehow. This is a consolation prize, a bizarro Rose Bowl between the two teams that lost in their respective Conference Championship Games, a reminder that somehow the Northwestern Wildcats Who Lost to Akron somehow played against Ohio State in Indianapolis in some insane fever dream. Even announcer Gus Johnson could not believe they were there, calling John Moten's touchdown for Wisconsin even though he was wearing purple and wearing a shirt that said (and this is a direct quote) "Northwestern."
No, Northwestern did not beat big, bad Ohio State and win the most improbable Big Ten Championship of the divisional era. They played well enough, but ultimately their tactic of shutting down the run and letting the quarterback beat them was less effective against Dwayne Haskins than the various oaf-quarterbacks of the Big Ten West, and the game got away from them in the fourth. In Week Three, Northwestern lost to Akron and all seemed lost. One could do the dismal bowl math and try to figure out where the other five wins would need to come from to even qualify for a bowl game held on a patch of disused mattresses in the middle of a field somewhere. Instead, they went 8-1 against the Big Ten and won the conference even as every single Numbers Analyst kept insisting they were shitty in one of the most dumb and fun football seasons imaginable and now I own a Big Ten West Champions T-shirt. HOLIDAY BOWL Northwestern's season will end with a bowl game in San Diego against Utah that is for some wretched reason being played on New Year's Eve to a nationally televised audience of people having the least amount of fun on New Year's Eve possible. Given the timeslot and the gray meat and lukewarm potato football played by both of these teams, it would be far more interesting to replace the game with an endless stream of people at terrible New Year's parties trying to feign enthusiasm for the "big game" because they don't want to go into the other room and continue having conversations about how much various things cost. Northwestern has played Utah twice, both times in Evanston. They won in 1927, presumably by dazzling the Utes with a halftime show featuring music from the recently-released Jazz Singer. Then in 1981, they lost 42-0 because it was a 1981 Northwestern game. Utah's football team is apparently an unstoppable bowl juggernaut that just wins bowls. Here's a 1927 season poster from Northwestern's likely depressing History of Northwestern Football exhibit
I am not going to lie to you and pretend that I have watched a single minute of Utah football this year or any other year or am watching film on them to break down how Northwestern will can beat them because I already know: it will be by shutting down their running game, daring their quarterback to have a meltdown, not getting penalties while the other team's fans slowly have an emotional meltdown because of Uncalled Holding, Isaiah Bowser battering people, and Clayton Thorson somehow magicking the exact one play that will give Northwestern exactly enough points to win. The Wildcats have won their last two bowl games. Until recently, bowl games had been another vexing and improbable part of the Lore of Northwestern Sports Incompetence as they kept collapsing in increasingly impossible ways; to anyone who says there is no point to winning bowl games, I would suggest rooting for a team that failed to qualify for one for 47 years, waited until they became ubiquitous enough to qualify for them almost every year, and still keep losing and losing and losing until finally pulling one out and see if your coach does not theatrically destroy a plush toy monkey. And yet, this bowl game may be the most inconsequential bowl game Northwestern has ever played. They already played their thirteenth game in Indianapolis for the entire Big Ten Championship. Does it matter if they triumph here or, by wriggling out of a festering Big Ten West, have they already proven their point? I can make one guarantee: this year has featured the most Northwestern football ever unleashed on this nation, the United States. BOWL GAMES The best part of bowl games is the shameless grift by a mysterious coterie of Bowl Executives and marketing people who are all in charge of skimming millions of dollars from exhibition football games put on by athletes compensated with a Playstation and a digital watch. The Washington Post has a wonderfully entertaining story about a man paid more than a million dollars a year whose only job is putting on the Outback Bowl that starts with this incredible, withering lede:
TAMPA — In the gated communities of
waterfront mansions north of this city, not far from mansions belonging
to the chief executive of the Tampa Bay Lightning and former NFL star
turned broadcaster Ronde Barber, there’s one particularly impressive
home, featuring a 600-bottle wine cellar, a wraparound shower with
massage jets, and a sizeable pool with a waterfall and jacuzzi
overlooking a lake. It belongs to Jim McVay, a sports executive who for
the past 30 years has run the Outback Bowl, a second-tier college
football postseason game featuring third-place teams.
But it's not a goofy make-work job for the man who invented the Bucs firing cannons after scoring touchdowns. The man is working hard. Every night, he has to hire James Brown's Cape Guy when he comes home from another backbreaking meeting in Rosemont.
“It’s not a situation where he sits on his thumbs for three years,”
[Outback Bowl board member Steve] Schember said. “He goes up to Chicago a lot [Big Ten headquarters] . . .
he goes up the SEC offices . . . it’s an important job, maintaining
those relationships.”
"People don’t understand the bowl world. It’s very unique,” [Outback Bowl spokesman Mike] Schulze
said. “People are always going to say, ‘Gosh, I didn’t even know that
was a job.’ But we all work hard. We’re here every single day.” Here I would like to imagine the Outback Bowl Board and Outback Bowl staff sitting around a giant model of the Tampa football stadium with jewelers' eyes and then McVay says we're going to put the end zone here while everyone applauds and they all open up bottles of champaign and inhale powders made from the appendages of endangered animals. My favorite waste of bowl money this year is the Maker's Wanted Bahama's Bowl. This game, pitting Florida International against Toledo, was sponsored for $300,000 by Chicago suburb Elk Grove Village. I can't think of a funnier waste of taxpayer money than sponsoring a bowl game between FIU and Toldeo. As a person who has been to a bowl game, the most horrifying and awkward part of the bowl game is when the Vice President of Bowl Sponsorship or whatever gets to give a little speech only this time it will be some Deputy Comptroller who hopefully has a honking Chicago accent representing an industrial park in the shadow of O'Hare talking about how much it means to the residents of the Village's Little Toledo neighborhood. Bowls fit into a bizarre entertainment landscape where unending television money props up weird spectacles that no one seems to want. Television networks need football content so we have a proliferation of half-empty bowl games between listless teams pawing at each other or, occasionally, letting loose the sublime insanity that happens in college football. These bowl games aren't stupid or pointless or unnecessary for the players or the fans, but their existence also seems on the same plane as a Nic Cage movie released exclusively on Hulu Plus for the benefit of someone who is either unaware of the quality of the Eastern European Nic Cage canon, actively seeking it out for some bizarre B-movie sense, or is on a startling combination of drugs. The lesser bowls, propped up by unpaid players, executive-level hamburgling, graft, chicanery, and wrapped in a chintzy layer of pomp that usually involves a halftime show involving the Original Bassist from 311 are not some bizarre college football sideshow-- in this way, more than the oxygen-sucking Playoff, they are the very embodiment of this , ridiculous sport. https://twitter.com/BigTenNetwork/status/1069044507969110017 https://twitter.com/BigTenNetwork/status/1069044507969110017
For some reason the Bulls, an already crummy team ravaged by every single player tearing the same knee ligament, decided to fire gormless PTA Dad Fred Hoiberg. Hoiberg had little going for him as a head coach. At the same time, he faced bizarre circumstances where he was put in charge of a roiling, conspiracy-prone Three Alphas team that had little time for his pajama party bonding sessions because they were headed by veterans more concerned with invading Silesia. The next year, they tanked; Hoiberg also had a player just completely and utterly destroy another player's face and the organization decided that the guy crumpled on the floor deserved it. And then, just when Lauri Markkanen returned from injury and the team could be poised to Space and Pace as prophesied many moons ago from Ames, John Paxson and Gar Forman burst into his rumpus room and fired him out of nowhere because it was time for them to bring in a Bald Asshole. An extremely normal image that comes up when you google Jim Boylen The Bulls have a pattern for coaches that rotates between ineffective Hair Guys and Bald Assholes. They brought in Scott Skiles to scream at everyone about playing defense for several seasons until they had to stop players from assassinating him after practice. His replacement was Vinny Del Negro, a man with a glorious mane and a confused look on his face. Then they brought in the ur-Bald Asshole in Tom Thibodeau, a bizarre basketball monomaniac who spent all of his time sitting around in the same black track suit watching film and just vibrating with anger that somewhere a basketball player was not boxing out. Thibodeau, with his manic floor-bellowing, his complete inability to take a single play off even during a grinding 82-game season, and his Sipowicz-but-less-put-together aesthetic, fell into an unending conflagration with the front office that went as far as to involve rumors that coaches turned on fans because they feared their offices were bugged. It turns out that Derrick Rose's knee ligaments were the only things holding the fractious Bulls together. Jim Boylen is a classic Bald Asshole. He wants to talk about Defense. And Fundamentals. They're going to do Suicides. And he's going to scream at everyone until his throbbing skull glows red as a heating lamp over a 7-11 hotdog roller. He has been the Bulls coach for less than a week and has nearly incited a mutiny.
It's not Jim Boylen's fault that he looks like a crooked prosecutor who "strongly denies" involvement in a boat license entrapment scheme, but he made no bones about his public image and immediately decided it would be the hardass vice principal from Back to the Future. On Saturday, the hapless Bulls were utterly dismantled by the Celtics in their worst loss in the history of the team. Boylen reacted with hockey substitutions and pulling starters presumably so he could scream at them in practice the next day. The Bulls then started a group text about whether or not to even show up to practice because they did not want a pointy-headed doofus setting up dozens of desks so he could angrily clear everything off of them while yelling that they shouldn't have done the worst loss in the history of the team. Now everyone is saying what they need to in order to prevent Boylen from looking like an even angrier, redder asshole than he already did. What's next for Boylen? Will he stop a game in the middle and just leave? Move into Jabari Parker's house so he can tell him to pick his knees up for godssake pick your GODDAMN KNEES UP? Will he burst forth from Zach Lavine's chest while angrily tooting a whistle? Is there a worse archetype in sports than the Bald Asshole coach, the guy who decides he's not gonna have any LOLLYGAGGING around here? Is there anything more absurd in the NBA, where multi-millionaire adults are really going to listen to some glistening sausage casing who looks like the alderman's brother-in-law who is somehow on the payroll? And, this is a completely unrelated subject, but what are the odds that the Bulls have interim coaches named Jim Boylan and Jim Boylen and they are two different guys because honestly before Coach Tugboat came in there and started throwing things that simple fact broke my brain for several hours? The answer to all of those questions is John Paxson. Paxson loves this shit. A guy who literally choked a coach and who has spent the past two decades in Chicago playing dumb macho headgames absolutely loves it when he opens the door and some guy who is already putting fist dents into a filing cabinet has prepared a rhyme about how every player is dogshit DOGSHIT. Perhaps we can find a the biggest, baldest asshole humanly possible, just a smooth-headed maniac radiating spittle and sprouting auxiliary whistles, just a nine-foot colossus who is so angry that he must be wheeled around in a plexiglass box to prevent him from causing millions of dollars of property damage at all times to come in and yell at John Paxson two inches from his face while blasting on a whistle and punching the walls of his traveling prison-box and telling Paxson to stop running this basketball team like a goddamned opera.
