It is cruel that we can't have sports right now.
It would be good to have some box scores, something for the highlight shows. It's good to have something meaningless we could argue about and invest our emotions in. Three months into this house arrest, I still tap the ESPN app on my iPad every morning, expecting highlights.
Sure, there's Korean baseball. There's the odd kick-boxing/grappling thing — what professional wrestling would look like if it were real — that I don't watch for fear I'll get addicted to the blood and snapping heads of Dana White's Ultimate Fighting Championship. There's the odd vintage game you can dial up — I watched eight innings of Don Larsen's World Series perfect game the other day, a black-and-white kinescope with Mel Allen and Vin Scully and Hank Bauer looking all the world like Larry from Accounting who could really bomb it in Tuesday night's co-ed slo-pitch. There are lots of baseball games from this century available for streaming, but I wish someone had figured out how to re-broadcast, say, the entire season of the 1977 Atlanta Braves.
The Braves were terrible that year. Hank Aaron was long gone, replaced in right field by the slugging Jeff Burroughs, and Dale Murphy was a 21-year-old catcher who'd play in fewer than 20 games. Gary Matthews was in left, but hadn't developed into the player he would. Their best pitcher was knuckleballer Phil Niekro, who was 38 years old. (Niekro would play for another 10 seasons but that seemed unimaginable then.)
Looking over the 1977 Braves' roster, the most interesting player might have been first baseman Willie Montañez, who I'd forgotten was ever a Brave. They acquired him from the Giants a few weeks before the 1976 all-star break. He played 103 games for the Braves in 1976, and was their only All-Star in 1977.
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That doesn't mean Montañez was their best player; in fact, according to the Sabermetrics baseball statistic WAR (wins above replacement player), he was a slightly below-average first baseman. (Burroughs, who finished 16th in the Most Valuable Player voting that year, was a slightly above average right fielder.)
But Montañez was highly entertaining; the flashiest, if not quite best, fielding first baseman I ever saw. He played the game with a panache and enthusiasm that might be better appreciated today than it was in his era, when he was often dismissed as a hotdog. His (admittedly risky) snap-catch, where he snatched an incoming throw out of the air rather letting it passively settle into his mitt, was the bane of fundamentals-stressing old-school baseball coaches everywhere.
From this distance, it seems like a fun team to watch, even if it did only win 60 games. And most, if not all those games must be archived somewhere, for 1977 was the first year Ted Turner's SuperStation WTBS broadcast the Braves' games nationally. (It was also the year that Turner, who owned the team as well as the station, got mad at his manager Dave Bristol and sent him on "a scouting trip," during which Turner put on a uniform and managed the team for one game. (They lost.) When the baseball commissioner informed Turner that a manager could have no financial stake in the team, Bristol was recalled.)
I missed that season the first time around because I was out of the country (playing baseball) for most of 1977. But the nature of baseball is such that it would be more rewarding to dig into a complete full season of a less-than-mediocre baseball team than to rewatch the occasional "landmark" game from earlier in the 20th century.
A lot of people miss the day-to-dayness of following baseball, of noting the daily tweaks and how different players evolve over the course of a season. Baseball is a long-form sport, meant to be consumed over what Jim Brosnan calls in his book The Long Season. It can be fascinating to watch an individual game, but a game is a snapshot, an arrested reality too influenced by the random to serve as reliable proof.
I'd watch the 1977 Braves if they'd run all the games; with baseball, at least, a season is the primary unit. Maybe that's less so with basketball, simply because with a shorter season — the NBA's regular season is 82 games, as opposed to 162 for Major League Baseball — every game means more. But I'd still rather see a team develop over the course of time than take a core sample.
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I assiduously followed the Los Angeles Lakers throughout their 1971-72 season again, in which they won 33 games straight and ended up winning the NBA title. I watched nearly all those games as a kid in my room on a little 6-inch black-and-white TV.
The TV games were simulcast with the radio announcers, Chick Hearn and Lynn Shackelford, with the road games broadcast live and the home games on tape delay, starting after the local news. I didn't miss more than a few minutes of that season, and when I've occasionally watched some of the old footage on YouTube, I've experienced the same sort of temporal displacement Marcel Proust had when he dipped that Madeleine cookie in his cup of tea in À la recherche du temps perdu.
Gail Goodrich's head-fake, side-step, up and under move? How often did I practice that in the driveway? I watch Happy Hairston leap and I remember the felty nap of the old brown Army blanket I used as a bed sheet.
At least part of the allure of something like the 10-part ESPN series The Last Dance, a chronicle of the Chicago Bulls' dynasty through the lens of the final championship season in 1997-98, is that it provokes a similar nostalgia in those of us who remember the Bulls; it's understandable why so many people who grew up watching Michael Jordan insist he's the greatest ever to play the game.
(While it's reasonable to assume that most of the NBA players I grew up watching in the '60s and '70s would be too slow, small and unathletic to compete in today's game — Hank Bauer looks like a beer leaguer here — I'm not sure that David Thompson wasn't as good an athlete as Jordan, or that Wilt Chamberlain wasn't more dominant. And go make your "he won more rings!" argument to Bill Russell. It's almost as silly to assign superlatives to individual athletes in team sports as it is to works of art. But part of the charm of sports is that it produces tinder for these entertainingly empty arguments.)
The thing about The Last Dance is that it does show us new behind-the-scenes stuff, even if we kind of knew it already. Having read David Halberstam's books on Jordan, Sam Smith's The Jordan Rules, and my friend and former colleague Michael Leahy's When Nothing Else Matters, I get that Jordan is a — or can be — a cruel, selfish, disingenuous, dissembling jerk.
Or human. Maybe it's the same thing. Jordan participated in the making of The Last Dance; he knows it makes him look like a jerk, but it also makes him look like the demi-god of "Winning!" — the patron saint of Charlie Sheen and Donald Trump and the part of the human race that sees things in largely transactional terms. There are reasons bullies and despots succeed as often as they do.
"The fan never understands," sportswriter S.L. Price wrote in his 2007 book Far Afield. "The fan always asks, 'Really: What's he like? Good guy? Nice?' He sees his hero enduring, overcoming, waving a flag, happy, winning; he wants him to be kind too.
"The fan doesn't want to hear what I have to say: No. Your hero is not nice. The hero is never nice. Each of the great athletes or coaches I've covered ... bears at heart a cruelty that, unlike those of us who are taught to conceal it from an early age, is rewarded each time it is revealed. You can't be a superstar without this cruelty, because high competition demands it: Boiled down you are beating a man, revealing his weakness before millions."
It is this cruelty that makes Jordan fascinating, especially in light of how his branding was diametrically opposed, framing him instead as friendly, almost cuddly. Jordan famously transcended race to sell shoes to "Republicans too," and it's that part of his story that might be more fascinating than The Last Dance.
Before Jordan, black athletes were perceived in various ways — they could be political troublemakers like Muhammad Ali or quiet avuncular figures like Ernie Banks. They were either "dignified" like Hank Aaron or "natural" like Willie Mays. They could be loved or feared, valorized or demonized by the dominant media, marketed in the reductive way that sports figures often are.
But Jordan insisted — and insists — on being complex and problematic. He is a long read, not a soundbite. And he's deeply interesting even, or especially, to those who aren't his fans. I loved watching Jordan play for the kinetic art of his game, beautiful and elegant. I assumed he was a jerk, just as I assume Picasso was a jerk.
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I don't doubt that Lance Armstrong is a jerk either, and nothing in the two-part ESPN 30 for 30 documentary series Lance caused me to change my mind. Still, the man's psychology is fascinating, and his charisma is undeniable. I don't care that he doped to win races in a sport that was irredeemably dirty when he got there, but can't forgive his willingness to destroy others' lives to protect himself.
Still, I can't quite quit him; I need to find out how the story plays out. After he came back from brain and testicular cancer and won the Tour de France three years in a row, I wrote that "Armstrong's triumph was not a moral one; he may be a good person but his goodness has nothing to do with the way his blood conducts oxygen or the way his mind blocks pain."
Even though he was doping, Armstrong (his name so redolent of boys' fiction, his features angular American handsome) accomplished something like a miracle back then. I don't expect he has another one in him. But I want to see.
Jerks engage us; we need heels and villains and athletes like Tiger Woods and Armstrong, whose careers feel like they might have been scripted by Vince McMahon's writers room, make for good television — over the long haul.
Watching Woods and Phil Mickelson play golf in the rain with amateurs (and quarterbacks) Tom Brady and Peyton Manning a couple of weekends ago might have been the most entertaining sports event I've seen this year. Not because the quality of the golf was great — it wasn't, though Woods was excellent, all fairways and greens — but because it allowed us an almost inside glimpse at the way these competitors comport themselves.
Certainly the TV cameras change things, but we got to see the famously unflappable Brady tighten up with nerves, playing miserably, hitting weak fade after weak fade with his three-wood, only to hole out a shot late on the front nine to keep his team in the match.
It was also interesting to see the concessions the TV crews made to the vanity of the amateurs — I never heard anyone remark on the distances they were hitting their clubs (something all male golfers obsess over and most lie about). I really wanted to know if I could outdrive Manning, and if Brady's hole-out came from 140 yards or 100.
Mostly I wanted to see how this hit-and-giggle match turned out. I wanted to see who won.
Not because it mattered, but because it didn't in the least.
Email:
pmartin@adgnewsroom.com
Style on 06/07/2020