Baseball caps and tourists

 

Not long ago a friend from the library times asked me whether people here wear baseball caps.

It was a text. I answered, but not really. I find texting unnatural and brief. Of course twitter was bought by a Nazi.

Words have to breathe.

Lots of lots of lots of lots of words.

Words everywhere.

In a text one can only answer one way, one thing. But every answer has twenty versions.

I didn't get to this answer because one can only poke at one's phone for so long.

And it is this:

At first it would seem like only tourists wear baseball caps here, and this town is full of tourists. 

But tourists have more humility than anyone thinks.

The problem with cities are the locals.

Yes, French people wear baseball caps.

ONLY French people wear baseball caps!

And how can I tell?

Every baseball cap anyone wears here is a Yankee cap.

Only if those people went to New York would they behave properly.

I saw Messi, or the more things change, the more they stay the same

 

I saw Messi and it was...

nice.

In the mid-1970s, when I was a child, I became obsessed with a baseball player named Rod Carew. He played for the Minnesota Twins and was eventually traded to a team not far from where I lived—the California Angels. With my parents, I had the chance to go see this legendary hitter in person, someone whose career I had been following closely. I remember bringing along my little Instamatic-style camera and taking a picture of Rod Carew as he walked toward the dugout.

I don’t have that picture anymore, but I’ve recreated a pretty good facsimile of it, and I’m going to show it to you here.

Curiously, something very similar happened decades later when I went to see another athlete I’d become fascinated with—Lionel Messi. Like Carew, I had followed Messi’s career closely. And when I saw him live in the stadium, I found myself—just like every other fan in the crowd—pulling out my phone and taking picture after picture of him. This is not a facsimile, but an unaltered picture I took of him that day.

The amazing thing is that, looking through those photos later, I realized that the best ones of Messi, as above, looked remarkably like that old picture I once took of Rod Carew nearly 50 years ago, or at least as I remember it. There’s something sweet about that—about not changing, about some thread from my childhood resonating all the way into the present.

I don’t remember whether I saw Rod Carew get a hit that day with the Angels. But I do know I saw Messi score a goal in a stadium in Minnesota—and I was lucky enough to be there because my friend Jim took me to the game.

Both players, I think, were past their peak when I saw them in person. That made the experience a little bittersweet, seeing them after their most brilliant moments had already passed. But it also felt like a kind of acknowledgment, a completion of something, to witness them with my own eyes. And for that, I’m grateful.

The agony of defeat

 

In the big giant massive annual library puzzle contest today, with 36 (mostly) 4-person teams competing, I told the 4th place team that they finished in third place by six seconds! But little did I realize that the real third place team had pipped them to the bronze by five seconds! 

Three teams finished within 11 seconds of each other!

Anyway, I felt bad about it.

The fourth place team was pretty bitter about it too when it was all straightened out.

"So we don't get any trophy?" One of them asked.

"No. I'm sorry." I replied. "But you're welcome to this puzzle you just finished."

They took the puzzle. 

And hopefully I'll be over it myself in a few weeks.

Every four years

 

I try not to repeat myself around here... much, but the Olympics tend to evoke a similar reaction in me, and they come around every two or four years. So I sort of forget and am yet again inclined to come here and say:

I really like the Olympics.

I get a little obsessed by the Olympics.

In the pre-cursor version of Clerkmanifesto, from the mid nineties, there was my cartoon: I. E. Skin's Guide to All There Is to Know. And even back in 1996 this was all true, and I was compelled to go on about the Olympics in precisely the same way I am now.

For your reference:

Not much has changed in my feelings from this from 28 years ago. In fact, I even have the heat rash of concentric circles on my forehead again! The wonders of human achievement are as enthralling to me as they ever were. Indeed, the biggest difference is that the technology has changed and made everything even better. On my computer right now I can pull up any event. I can watch them in replay at any time I want. I can watch them with subtitles if I need to. I can watch them on my phone in the library stacks. I (mostly) have no commercials. I can watch four events all at once, shifting my focus wildly to take in the peak moments of each competition. It is all amazing! 

But it is also far, far worse. There is vastly more to see now of the Olympics, and my little cartoon joke about barely having time to go to the bathroom is all the more true! With the deciding set of a live archery challenge in play, it would be better to just... hold it.

The obsessive coverage of U.S. athletes has not gone away completely, but it is so avoidable that I hardly notice it. I'm even willing to cheer for some American athletes. Although in rooting for the U.S. women's gymnastics team as they won their gold medal, I could not help but note in all the jubilation that I never even saw who won the bronze and silver. I was kind of hoping Italy did well. I might have to check out some of the replay.

Finally, as to cartooning not being an Olympic sport, well, blogging isn't either. But all these years later I'm far more comfortable with that. All my Nobel Prizes keep me company. One can't win everything.

Too much winning

 

In my adventures in following soccer, I have mostly experienced losing. My chosen National team was losing the World Cup simultaneously with my interest bursting onto the scene. My newly discovered club team circa 2014 swiftly emerged as the best in the world at that time and won everything while I still only partially understood what was happening. And then followed increasing heartbreaks for a decade. In this past year my chosen club team won nothing. Even following excellent teams, when it came down to it at the end of a season or tournament, I mostly had to wallow for days in the bitterness of catastrophic defeat. When one thinks of it, that's how sports are. In any single year or tournament, out of twenty or thirty teams, only one team can win.

That's a lot of people losing.

Sports, like the lottery, is all about losing, all while we dream big. It's the losing that is what's normal.

Until Argentina kind of stopped losing... anything.

A few years ago the major South American tournament, that had eluded Argentina and Messi through his whole career, came along.

And they won!

It was amazing.

It was glorious.

It was everything I had been suffering for in soccer all those years.

 Or almost everything.

Because next came the World Cup. The real prize. And Argentina won that too. The greatest triumph for any player or team in all of soccer, maybe even in all of international sports!

And it was heaven.

Soccer accomplished! 

The debt of all my pain paid off in full, with interest at a good return!

And then a month ago the Copa came again. The final was just last night.

And Argentina won again.

So, I guess that was nice. 

I mean I already have so much money, so to speak, with all the lottery wins.  I'm not complaining, it's just that it would have been so great for Colombia, who lost. And to be honest I don't really know where to put another one of these trophies of my winning team. They're kind of heavy, and have a tendency to pile up. But I guess I can pick it up and maybe throw it in the back of some closet somewhere?

Surely I'll need it eventually?

We have always been at war with Oceania

 

As I have been extolling here the pleasures of the Olympics I have thus far managed to avoid discussing its enormous shadow: These games are a bit of a shitshow.

Covid restrictions, a superevil totalitarian government production, some sketchy officiating, lack of interest among an overstimulated audience that was never maybe that keen on Biathlons to begin with, mildly miserable Olympic Village conditions, and an IOC hopped up on the Capitalism of it all like meth addicts.

And so if you're not watching it, and I know vastly more people that are not watching it than are, I am not here to cast aspersions on your choices. You have a raft of reasons not to watch, a smorgasbord of sometimes excellent options to do absolutely anything else with your time.

But I do want to speak to the dourness and disaffection that has undercut this Olympics all along.

And so we come to the title of this piece: 

We have always been at war with Oceania.

China is hosting this Olympics. 

We have always been at war with China.

 

Wait, what happened to Russia? 

Well, yeah, them too. Plus, did you see Putin at the opening ceremony with Xi? Anyway the Russians bought off the Republican Party so we need a villain we can all agree on.

 

We need something all Americans can agree on!

We have always been at war with China.

Finally! Across America, from red state to blue state, crossing the terrible line between black and white, and encompassing the entire range of political thought all the way from the Center-left to the far right, everyone finally agrees; China is terrible. 

China is the enemy!

Well I mean, they always have been.

Iran? What are you talking about? 

Cuba? Iraq? Afghanistan? Venezuela?

Don't make me laugh.

France?

Hey, lay off of France already!

And the beauty of it is: China actually is terrible. Genocidal. Totalitarian. Opressive. And on top of all that their President doesn't like Winnie the Pooh. Piece of shit.

In short they are wicked. Evil.

Can anyone in the audience tell me the name of some other wicked countries in the World?

I'm sorry, your answers have been disqualified for a variety of reasons. A nice, long variety of reasons.

But at the very least maybe you shouldn't go around calling countries "wicked" even if they do some bad things. Just a word of advice for when you're discussing evil countries other than China. Let's keep it civil, eh?

And so the Olympic miasma has been cast: It is the evil China Winter Olympics. What do we do?

Well, we could refuse to buy all that crap that is made in China, so, like a quarter of all our stuff. We can start manufacturing our own garbage at fair wages, and we can just pay more to buy it and sell it and ship it. We can find it from somewhere else, and do a lot of research all the time for everything, and have principles, and be conscious, and tax the rich, and put our own house in order, and go without even if it's something we need desperately, and in all of that build our character and our independence.

Or,

Or! 

(Don't worry, I've got you)!

We can not watch the Snowboarding Halfpipe Event!

Which we weren't going to watch anyway. 

 

So that works then. Job done!

And that kid who has been snowboarding off cliffs for eleven hours a day since they were eight, and who can now flip so miraculously in the air that they might be a better and more exotic version of a human being, well, they'll be all right.

Their dream is bigger than us.

 

Curling: The olympic's slow wonder

 

In the pre-opening days of this Olympics there really wasn't much to watch besides Curling. The only things to see at that point were the events that there was so much of that they spilled out of the normal Olympic bounds. I did catch a little of the Women's Hockey Prelims with all their foregone conclusions, but mostly, before the Opening Ceremony, it was Curling Curling Curling.

And there's been quite a bit of it after the opening too!

I am not going to explain too much about how curling works, except to say it is an ice variation on any number of games of its type; bocce ball, shuffleboard, horseshoes, petanque. The last few times my friend Grape and I backpacked we would invent similar games to these using rocks. They were perfectly diverting.

This does not mean that Curling is not a game requiring real skill, clever strategy, and great composure.

But it does mean that it is the one event that anybody looks at in the Winter Olympics and says "I could totally do that! I could be an Olympic Curler!"

And sure, maybe you could. Good luck on that one.

Curling is very different than all the other Olympic events. It is slow and sedate and thoughtful, I mean, except for the part where you yell instructions at your teammate(s). Though its rules are complex enough that I can't be bothered to explain them here, they are simple enough that one could pick up virtually all of them after watching any random fifteen minutes of a match.

Curling looks like it's going to be very boring to watch, but it has a pleasant, strangely hypnotic quality to it. So one may start out thinking they'll be turning it off any second now and yet end up completely formed into the shape of one's couch. Just talking about it makes me want to check out how the Mixed Doubles Italian team is doing today, perhaps with a bottle of wine, and then follow that up (continuing to work on the wine) by checking in on the Canadians and Swedes. The Italians been the big surprise of the tournament so far, but anything can happen when we get to the medal rounds.

And when I say "anything can happen" I mean the same things will happen pretty much exactly as we've seen a thousand times, but with endless, slight variations. More like chess or backgammon than one might expect of an Olympic event.

My very favorite part of Olympic Curling though is the language. There is a lot of yelling in Curling as teammates have to communicate, sometimes urgently, up and down the long course of ice. And here one gets to clearly hear all the various team's languages; Chinese, Norwegian, Canadian, Swedish, Italian, and even, sometimes, Minnesotan.

Or maybe my favorite part of Olympic Curling is how it has become the bass line of the Winter Olympics for me. After the astonishing jumps, the daredevil skiing, the tireless skating; the grace and drama, it can be a strange, comforting relief that there is always some kind of slow burning, chill and cerebral, curling to fall back on.

Women's Normal Hill

 

In my hopeless to the point of delusional attempt to watch every bit of the 2022 Winter Olympics (I'm seeing about two percent so far) I caught what was one of the first medal events; The Women's Normal Hill in ski jumping.

I really like ski jumping. There's something heroic about it with those oversized skis, the almost momentary quality of each attempt, the heave and great flight, and that glorious still suspension in the middle where the skier sails through the air and time seems to almost stop for a moment, a photograph of a miracle.

One thing amazing about the ski jumping is that everything is equalized, everyone has the same chance, equipment, conditions, and everyone is excellent and well trained, and yet the top jumpers will somehow sail 30 meters farther than the bottom ones. It is a massive difference to result from minute perfections.

Somewhere early in my viewing I became very impressed with the Slovenian team and hitched my horse to them. It's dangerous to get emotionally involved because before long I was extremely judgmental about, well, the judging.

To be honest, I still don't really understand ski jumping. Yes, the distance is extremely important, but there are also style points from the judges. I prefer an Olympic sport to be absolute as much as possible: Who ran 1500 Meters the fastest, who lifted the most weight, who skied down the hill the quickest. And to my uneducated mind ski jumping seems perfectly well suited to this simplicity. As pretty as the sport is, with their strange, flying postures and their graceful landings, I don't care if they look like a confused bat hurdling down the hill if they can go farther than anyone else.

But for some reason never explained by the commentators, (and, grudgingly, I suppose there are good reasons as yet beyond my consideration) that's not how it works.

But I was able to get all through my reservations with this judging as the Slovenians kept nailing their jumps. And I loved seeing how happy they were when they did it. 

But here was far and away the best part:

When the Slovenian teammates did a fantastic jump, effectively costing the previous Slovenians gold and silver medals, those previous jumpers were still genuinely thrilled, I mean they were unmistakably joyful and emotionally moved by the success of their friends who were besting them. They rejoiced together, tearful.

The Slovenian women finished first, third, fifth, and ninth. And the longest jump of the day was by gold medalist Ursa Bogataj of Slovenia.

Just as it should be.

Olympic dreams come and go

 

As early as the Innsbruck, Austria Olympics (1976) I have had a dream. No, not the ones about being a great Olympic athlete. Though I may have had a few of those. I have had the simpler dream of being able to watch all the Olympics, unfiltered, complete, and at my fingertips.

You see, even back in 1976 I was frustrated with the obsessive Nationalism, the endless personal stories, and the glossing over of competitions I might like to see more of in favor of the more popular competitions that I, well, honestly, also wanted to see more of.

Have I mentioned that I am something of an Olympics fan? 

Over the years I have been able to watch more and more Olympics online, and though the technology has been there for awhile, this is the first Olympics where my dream has come true.

For a month's subscription of ten dollars to NBC's Streaming network, called Peacock, I am able to watch every single Winter Olympic event live, or, shortly upon completion, on replay. The interface is all a bit messy, but there it all is, the Olympics at my fingertips! If I want to watch right this second the Men's Preliminary Normal Hill Round in Ski Jumping that took place somewhere around dawn today, I can!

And I absolutley would like to watch the Men's Preliminary Normal Hill Round in Ski Jumping! But I'm working.

I may be able to sneak in a bit of it when I'm on the phones, and during lunchtime, but I'm working all day, and anyway when I do have spare time here I have to walk around the library pestering co-workers that still owe me money for the Olympic Betting Pool. I also have to write a blog post about the Olympics. When I finally get to go home I have to make dinner and eat it. I might need to go for a walk. I desperately will want to spend time with my wife, and I really do need to get to bed at a reasonable hour. 

But there may be a spare half hour in there to see some of that Ski Jumping. 

Maybe I'll even catch the whole thing!

Missing, alas, the other 372 events that are taking place right now, even as we speak. 

Olympic Teams

 

Yesterday, in the process of articulating the Winter Olympic betting pool I am running here at my library, I articulated how I have been crafting bespoke Olympic Teams for the participants. It is here where my penchant for embellishment expresses itself.

I have created teams of underdogs, teams where winning is everything, and teams where silver and bronze are especially valuable. I have created teams of teams, teams that are identical for two different players, and teams where instead of winning money one wins chocolate. There are teams where a person has at least almost one sure winner and teams where there are no sure winners but everyone has a pretty good shot. Each of these teams I have attempted to balance for similar odds so as to accord no overall advantage at the outset. And when I go home from work today I will have to come up with some more of these teams.

I am playing too, but I have yet to choose a team. I am thinking of taking a middle of the road sort of team, one with some mild favorites and some mild longshots. Then we can follow along here because why not? Team Clerkmanifesto!

And if we at team clerkmanifesto win we will use the money to, I don't know, put it in my pocket? Or maybe I'll use it to fix the groaning fan on my computer. The stuff dreams are made of!

Olympic Pool

 

Every couple of years I become consumed with the desire to run a betting pool at the library I work at. I'm in the midst of one now for the Winter Olympics. My free time is gutted for a little while as it's a fair bit of work, and this is why I am telling you about it instead of, well, about anything else. 

In fact, I might be telling you about it quite a bit in the days to come.

In the past I have run pools for Curling (in the last Winter Olympics), and for both Men and Womens' World Cups in Soccer. They were fun, but they had a few problems structurally that I am trying to fix this time around.

The previous pools needed subscribers for every team participating, which meant they needed a set number of subscribers. Also, as people drew their team, much of the result was decided right in the luck of their draw, as surely the USA Women's Soccer Team made a person a massive favorite over the person who drew, say, Nigeria.

For these Olympics I am making bespoke teams consisting of five events and contestants for each participant. So a person might have on their team a Women's Curling team, a Russian Skater, an Austrian Skier, German Bobsledders, and a French Snowboarder. It's a one-of-a-kind personal team, and of the 28 I am putting together right now I couldn't say which one has the best chances to win the pool. I am doing my best to even the odds out on all of them. A person may have a favorite, a longshot, and three with a fair shot, or they may have something else entirely, but it will still be roughly equivalent in odds. 

The entry fee for the Winter Olympic Pool is $20 and I am trying to balance that differently than just big winners this time too. About half of the pot will pay off in easy wins, so almost everyone will win back something, which hopefully will feel just like winning outright if a person has written off their original twenty. I know I already have. The other half of that twenty goes to the top three jackpot winners, which still should produce a quite fun amount of prize money.

As ever I run to complexity in schemes like this. I have found that people are generally happy to play along, but they aren't keen at anything very convoluted or requiring a great deal of attention. So I am constantly shutting down my complicating and embellishing ideas. Nevertheless I have so many of these fancies that one or two tends to sneak through every rare once in awhile.

But we'll leave that discussion for tomorrow. I still have more teams to assemble. Tonight someone lucky is going to get Kamila Valieva on their team!

Drop me a twenty and you can still play too!

Baseball Season

 

One of my co-workers at the library is a baseball aficionado. He devotedly follows the Milwaukee Brewers. I followed baseball passionately as a kid and can still rattle off a small ton of pre 1980 Baseball trivia. Do you know what Ty Cobb's lifetime batting average is? Do you know who hit the most doubles ever? 

I do.

And so feeling it never goes amiss at work to take an interest in a co-worker's hobby, I took a modest interest in the Brewers. I particularly took an interest in the rising star of a player named Christian Yelich who grew up fairly close to where I grew up in Southern California.

As I watched, on my own, and through the information from my co-worker, Christian Yelich started tearing up the league the very year I started watching and tracking him. He even won the MVP that year! The next year, 2019 he looked about the same, and he was headed for likely another MVP award when he hit a foul ball off his kneecap and broke it. His knee he broke, the ball was fine. It was a bit of a freak accident, time consuming, but not a terribly difficult one to recover from.

However, when he came back the next season he suddenly could not hit worth beans. He had other physical problems as well, particularly his back. So we were waiting for this season.

This season he was even worse! However, weirdly, without their star hitter, the Brewers were brilliant, mostly behind some bizarrely good pitching, like, historically good pitching. The Brewers are currently sailing along to win their division, and they have one of the best records in baseball.

Also, Christian Yelich, who oddly reminds me a bit of Ted Williams, has finally, late in the season, started to hit again from out of nowhere. Most of the season he was an albatross around the Brewers neck, struggling to hit a miserable .200, a benchable offense, but how do you bench a player who you are hoping at any moment might become the best hitter in baseball again?

So with Christian Yelich hitting again and the best pitching in a new era of pitching dominated baseball, maybe we could see a Milwaukee Brewers World Series? 

It sure would be nice, and I like to see my co-workers happy.

But why am I telling you all this?

Oh, I have some baseball player pictures and I just got going on it out of nowhere. 

Sorry.

Here's the greatest baseball player ever, in my opinion. I asked him to sign his library card but he absent mindedly signed a baseball instead.

Maybe I was wrong up above there. Maybe the best player ever was this catcher below. When I was, er, taking this picture I felt a real fondness for the guy and his smile, and by all accounts Josh Gibson was loved by everyone, though how much of that is myth and legend I am not equipped to know. It's also pretty tough to judge a Negro League Player, but that he was one of the greatest baseball players ever seems profoundly evident.

This, below, of course is just a kid who comes to my library, but I know for a fact that he pitches in Little League. This summer he'd sometimes come in to the library in uniform after games. He seems a little depressed to me after these games, so maybe his team doesn't do so well?

He's always asking me if we have any books on Joe Shlabotnik, who, apparently, is his favorite player.

We don't have any books on Joe Shlabotnik.

And finally, I wasn't born when this photo below was taken, but late in this player's career I did see Willie Mays play for the Mets when they came to town to play my Dodgers. That's likely the best player I ever saw play in person, though he was a bit past it at the time, and I was a bit before it.

And with that, I leave you for the day.

Go Brewers!

If you build it

 

There was a very eighties book and movie involving some guy building a baseball field in his cornfield in the middle of an Iowa farm. It was done so that dead baseball players could play a game of ball again, or something like that. It featured an era defining line that I found notably irritating back in those days: 

If you build it they will come.

 

If you build it they will come.

If you build it they will come.

I guess the idea with that ubiquitous quote back then was to say, just go for it. If you make the commitment, put yourself out there, lay it all on the line, model, invest, fashion, manufacture, build, produce, labor, and create, then surely you will...

 

Well, actually that was never clear.

It was the eighties. I think it had something to do with money.

Visit us at our palatial new digs at

Life is a Fountain!

There comes a time

 

There comes a time in everyone's life where they must write a blog post. For some people this happens but the one time, or even a little bit less. For me it has happened 3,100 times. So maybe I don't accord it the same gravity with which I once did.

On the other hand maybe I always accorded this little gravity to my blog posts. Maybe my blog posts have all the gravity of the moon! Maybe they

bounce

as if

in 

slow

motion.

Or, wait, get this: Maybe blog posts are like base hits in professional baseball. Did you know that it is widely considered that if one gets 3,000 hits in a major league baseball career one is guaranteed a spot in the Baseball Hall of Fame, baseball's greatest, most sought after honor? 

Maybe now that I have written over 3,000 blog posts my legacy is assured, and I am merely burnishing my legacy.

But the wise reader counters:

Ah, but a base hit on the moon has so much less value, for the ball travels farther at the slightest touch.

Let us think on this a while, as the ball flies.

The eight foot putt

Pandemic or no pandemic it's golf season again. And with it comes all the thrills, tension, and dodgy personal integrity that I can see out at my local recreational country club golf course.

For our first episode of the season, my dear golf fans, we are going to hear the thrilling tale of the eight foot putt. For those of you who have ever wielded a 9-iron it will surely evoke all your vast memories of golfing pain. For those of us who have never much dabbled in the game it's a grander story of the human struggle with adversity.

The Eight Foot Putt

From where I am I can't see the drive, and I'm not paying attention as it comes down the hill. But I do know where it lands, and where our real story begins, in the light rough to the right of the fairway. Not a terrible lie for our easy par three hole. Our golfer need merely clear the sand trap to make their way onto the generous green.

But alas nothing is easy for anyone in golf.

Underestimating the richness of the rough, our golfer hits the ball square, but with the head of the club much slowed by the grasses, and the ball arcs nicely, but weakly, and dies in the sand. 

Par suddenly looks very misty and distant through the fog of golf.

But our golfer does not give up. Our golfer does not despair. The ball sits up in the sand. With enough focus this golfer can surely put a clean shot towards the hole.

The golfer plants, balances, focuses, steadies, and settles. The golfer practices, lines up, and backs away. The golfer becomes aware of the other three players in the group starting to get a little impatient. The golfer plants, focuses, practices, and swings!

It's a beauty! It lands ten feet onto the green. It bounces. It's straight. It rolls. Can this be it?

It heads to the hole, quick and pure, an unforgettable shot. It dives at the hole. Pure, yes, straight, yes, clean, yes, but alas too quick, too strong. Not unforgettable after all, except maybe late at night when the golfer thinks of what might have been. The ball bounces out of the hole it hit, and manages to roll surprisingly far. 

Eight feet to be precise.

Pregnant pause.

Doable.

An eight foot putt is very doable. Nothing too tricky on this green, straight and a little downhill. Surely a manageable bogey. Yes, bogey is a little bit of a dirty word in golf. But most golfers, your average golfers know, to bogey every hole, all 18, would be a not particularly terrible day for them. Par is a triumph. The bogey is meat and potatoes.

An eight foot putt.

Let's go get that damn bogey!

The golfer lines it up. The golfer takes a few swings. The golfer plants. And the golfer hits it square.

It's right on line!



It's perfect.




But oh, the golfer forgot about the downhill lie.



And about the sunny day with the dry afternoon greens.

Yes.

It's too fast again.

It's the sand trap shot all over again. It hits the lip of the cup, bounces at a neat, aye perfect, right angle, and it rolls eight feet. 

Once again exactly eight feet.

It's an eight foot putt.

Long pause, but really just one breath long as well.

The golfer walks over, holding the hurt feeling inside, stoic, unmoved, at least on the surface. The golfer bends and scoops up the ball in one hand. An eight foot putt? That's a gimme. Double bogey.


We'll win it back on the next hole.

Difficulty modifiers

I am not a big fan of sports in which success or failure is based primarily on judging. I'm not saying that gymnastics or ice skating or boxing or dressage can't be thrilling to watch, but when the bulk of the decision about who won comes down to a panel of judges I know I'm in for an exercise in frustration. The thing is, I don't generally agree with people. Even my fervent passion for football is hardly likely to outlive the miracle of Messi. The more games of it that I see the more games I find that come down to the entirely mercurial foul and penalty calls of the referees.

Nevertheless there is a brilliant element in the completely judged sport of Olympic Diving that I long to have applied everywhere, where anything is judged: 

Degree of Difficulty, or difficulty modifiers.

My badly interpreted version of it is this: Any good diver can execute a fairly perfect dive and get a good base score, but as twists and somersaults are added to the dive, as it becomes more and more difficult to do, that base score needs to be multiplied by a higher and higher number, 1.2, 1.3, 1.5, and so on. A perfect double twist dive must be worth considerably more than a perfect swan dive. And thus too, theoretically at least, if a diver executes a dive no one else in the world can do, but does it less than perfectly, it is still a winning dive over a dive pretty much anyone can do that is done flawlessly.

Of course this brings up all sorts of those same judging problems in all those sports that I hate. But are these problems worse than the fact that someone making a bad cross into the box in football that ends up bouncing off an opponents face into the goal is worth exactly the same number of points (one) as a backheeled pass to a teammate who brilliantly chips that ball in a soft loft over the goalie's head for a goal? 

I actually don't know anymore.

The thing is though that I find this difficulty modifier more useful outside of sports, like in the arts, which are already evaluated by less objective standards, having no goals, runs, or baskets to tabulate. You may have been dazzled by Joaquin Phoenix's performance as The Joker. He even won an academy award for it. But for any real student of difficulty modifiers there are many signals that he did not deserve to win any particular awards for the role. The fact that no fewer than four other actors in 55 years have played the same role to wild, fawning, and amazed acclaim suggests that the difficulty level of playing The Joker is insanely low. There may be no role that makes an actor look more brilliant, with the possible exception of playing a developmentally disabled person. I'm not saying Cesar Romero, Jack Nicholson, Heath Ledger, Mark Hamill, and Joaquin Phoenix aren't excellent actors, or that they didn't do a great job in all their respective, legendary, fawned over versions of The Joker, but that should be a "great job" times one-point-zero. Put any of those actors in a romantic comedy, where virtually no actor has ever won an academy award for best actor, and where incredibly few are ever lionized, except maybe by me, and then see what they can do. 

But don't forget to multiply it by 1.7 first.

Goat

Goat.

IAA, that is, it's an acronym. If you don't follow any sports you may, by the grace of god and your beautiful innocence, have managed to evade it. You haven't missed much. It means Greatest Of All Time. It's very popular in the chatter surrounding a lot of sports these days. But it's dangerously hyperbolic. 

And kind of silly.

I mean, you don't hear me going on about Caravaggio by constantly calling him "the goat" and putting little goat emojis next to his name every time I mention him. How can one possibly judge a talent against all of time and all of history? One can't. There are always too many variables; limitations of the era, personal tastes, cultural context. That's why when I get really excited while talking about Caravaggio and his painting I keep it more dignified and personal. I merely say: He's objectively the best painter ever, which is a

Wait. We're getting sidetracked.

I wanted to talk about Lionel Messi. Very recently he won his sixth Ballon d'Or. This means "Golden Ball". It's an award for the best soccer player of the year. No one has ever won six of these before. So it has thrown a great deal of fuel on the already burning fire about how Messi is the greatest of all time.

He is very good. Quite good really.

And I do have a bit of a soft spot for him, watching him, as I do, in every single game he ever plays in for years now.

But is he better than Pele? Is he better than Maradona? Or even Ronaldo? Ronaldo? And Ronaldinho? Or the man he nipped to the Ballon d'Or post this year: Virgil Van Dijk? 

I mean, it's just sports. It's not like people have collected any statistics about them. It's not like anyone of note has expressed an opinion on it. 

It's not like we have any footage of these people in action.

So I guess we'll never know.

Impeachment fun

I am really enjoying these impeachment hearings. I thought maybe I'd find them dry, or unambitious, or far too limited, and I suppose they are, but that doesn't mean they aren't compelling. I rarely get to see or hear more than a half hour or an hour of them before I have to leave for work, or arrive at work, or go back to work, but every time that I do have to leave them it's a wrench. I am forced to tear myself away. I am hanging on every word and every moment.

The Impeachment hearings are like watching The Harlem Globetrotters. Team Democrat, in this case, is like the Harlem Globetrotters. Team Trump is like The Washington Generals. There's the Democrats being all clever like, making fabulous points, running circles around the plodding, villainous Republicans. Then the Republicans make some argument at great length. It seems absurd, irritating, disingenuous, and illogical, but before one has even worked out all that's wrong with this ridiculous Republican point, some articulate Democrat comes along and slam dunks on all its irrational, unsound, and flawed reasoning. 

I'm just saying it's good sport. With one side that is vastly better at it, and on the side of good, showing off their skill and virtuosity, throwing down the hoops in a lopsided tour de force. It's not competitive, but it does turn out to be a fun display.

The only part that gets me a little down is that when it's over for the day and all the referees come on to say:

"Let's just call that one a tie."

Positional awareness

If there is some skill or ability I enjoy most in watching sports it is probably positional awareness. I love positional awareness. In soccer it is that nearly magical ability to know where everybody is and where everybody will be in a second or two. It's the ability to know all of that even while one is super busy with other things, like maneuvering for position with another player, or kicking a ball, or both, all at the same time. The two athletes I've most enjoyed watching in my life were transcendent in this ability: Lionel Messi and Magic Johnson. Messi doesn't just thread the ball in a pass like it's going through the eye of a needle, he sends it through two moving needles to float into the perfect trajectory of a player hidden across the field who then, with open space in front of the goal, well, it wasn't a great Spring for his team so we'll just leave the story off there. Magic, in a very different game, would look completely away from the play and, functionally blind and operating purely from positional awareness, feed the ball into his onrushing teammate who would score, because basketball is different than soccer, and it's easier to score.


Curiously, positional awareness comes into play heavily in my job as well. I don't care that much about hard work, which is only relevant to me with surprising rareness and can be a bit of a scam anyway. I value accuracy and competency very much, but it can be a little hard to track it in all these many people I work with at the library. But the positional awareness of my colleagues makes a difference to me every day I work and it is the main thing I judge my co-workers on and value them for.

What is it?

It's knowing how many empty bins are left and whether we're likely to need them. It's knowing how competent the co-worker next to you at the front desk is and what the third person in line at the desk is probably there for. It's knowing where a book might be and what the whining squeak means on the automated machine behind you. It's knowing when you can walk away for 15 minutes and effect no one instead of leaving someone helplessly to do your job, who, after all, might be me, or you, or it might be no one at all. There is a momentum to the work of any institution, and positional awareness in it is all about keeping that immensely useful momentum going forward while essentially, at the same time, keeping everyone out from under its dangerous wheels.

But really, in the end, having a skill in positional awareness, whether in sports or in some occasionally grinding job, allows a fundamental, important, and valuable thing: When something comes one's way, one will be able to gracefully handle it according to it's value and importance, all while best complementing everything around it. Which is not a bad plan for life.





 





 

Requiem of a sports fan

Over the past five or so years I have seen a lot of soccer games. And in almost every one of them a team has lost. Even in the occasional tied game there is the lurking element that it is a kind of loss for both teams because ties in soccer are worth so much less than a win. So then let's just say that in every single one of this vast array of games I have had to watch a team lose.

It happened yesterday.

It happened today.

And it will, ugh, happen tomorrow.

I am too sensitive for this! I already bear a burden of grief. Where am I supposed to put all these losers? How big a heart do you think I have?

That last question was directed to god. I don't expect you to answer. Though go ahead if you like because god sure as hell won't be stepping up.

Excuse me. Let me just take a deep breath.

Okay. 

I am a strong person.

I think I could handle this. I have resources to draw on. I believe in myself.

I could probably endure a team losing in every game of soccer I watch. If only it wasn't so freakishly often the team I want to win.