Big time

Sports in America have a strange dynamic compared to the rest of the world. As much as you think your friends are fanatical, they do not compare at all to the rest of the world, namely with European soccer club fans.

When Malcolm Glazer bought Manchester United a few months back, people were literally calling for his death. Fans of that team were brining effigies of the man to the game. You may never see anything like that here. And it’s not just in the interest of a Yank buying the most famous franchise on the planet being a big deal to get news, it that this kind of stuff is common.

The closest thing to Hooligans we have in America is Raider Nation. At best, these guys are a high school booster club compared to the fans of these teams. They are that strong, loyal, and completely insane. Euro fans are so fanatically tied to the team itself and less to the players in the sense that they are only to serve means to an end. They just follow the team. They live with the team, and they do so with far more passion. It may be that in Europe there really is only one sport, and that’s Football (soccer), and they obsess the year about it. Same with Canada and Hockey. It’s in the blood of these people.

In America, we are tied more to the idea of singular athletes. It’s undoubtedly a byproduct of America culture of hero worship. We are more about the individual than we are about the team. And by a huge margin. Sure, we have Red Sox nation, Cubs fans, Yankee zealots. When t comes to the college sports, it’s solely about the team. But years in these examples are mostly tied to players, the stars. Most American sports fans have a team in the major three sports, and about a fifth have a hockey team. Only basketball and hockey completely share seasons.

With the exception of the Yankees, no sports franchises in America are iconic worldwide.

For instance, it was not the NBA being a good product that allowed the league to become a worldwide phenomenon; it was the Dream Team, filled with all of America’s top stars.

Because of the notion of the American dream of one man overcoming the odds to rise to the top, our leagues are not made with parity and competition, but on the strength of the individual.

With the exception of the Patriots of the last 4 years, the 98 Yankees, the 02 Angels, and the 04 Pistons, it has always been about the players who were the leaders, not the dynamic of the team playing the game the right way, it was about tailoring a franchise to a star player. From Jordan and the Bulls, Shaq and Kobe with the Lakers, Barry Bonds and the Giants (not winners, but you get the point), Tim Duncan and the Spurs. Teams are built around the individual.

This is not a bad thing per se. It rather ruins the entire notion of competitive spirit as a whole for a sport, but this is what Americans are drawn to, the hero. I personally would like to see a shift, especially in the years when the stars are weak (like the years in the NBA after Jordan), but I am still a fan hopelessly lost in the American system. We as sports fans are inherently tied to a team from our youth, but we remember the select few more than we do the teams.

We hinge our years on the rare specimens who somehow find their way to a franchise. And as much as we focus on winning, we tend to care far too much about stats than winning.

There is a hallowed canon of magical numbers in sports.

56 hits
61 homers
6 championships and 6 NBA finals MVPs.
72 wins
21 straight games
49 touchdowns
2000+ yards
92 goals in a season
44 point average for a season
7 straight Tour De Frances

And so on. We are obsessed with numbers in America. From the Dow, to the box office, to weight, calories, height, 40 time.

America has something going for it that the other countries don’t with sports, a free press that has provided some of the most magical writing about competition ever spun. The list of great books about sports is 95% to 99% composed of American books. It may be audience demand, for this, but the quality of writing about sports is so far above any other media of the world, it is like comparing Hemingway to Brett Ratner.

Read David Halberstam, George Plimpton and Don DeLillo, and see how American writers who do not do sports for a living seem to nail the pure nostalgia of our kind of sports. Read Peter Gammons and Bob Ryan and their columns of the Boston sports of the last 30 years; read Bill Simmons and his take on all things pop culture and sports as it means to everything; read Peter King or Len Pasquarelli and their long take on football. These authors have a knack for capturing the beauty of the game as well as finding a way to make sense both the individual and communal experience of fandom.

Most every newspaper in the country follows a simple formula for the sports page. They tend to use the AP newswire for national stories, they have beat writers covering local sports, and they have at least two highly opinionated columnists (usually one that is a detractor of everything the local teams do, and one that gives a lighter side of sports). There is the news, the murmurs, and an argument.

And most any one who reads the sports page walks away with a similar experience. The small, quaintness of the paper is still there. Even if some of the writing is mechanical to a fault, America has two things going for it, the press it self and the occasional writer like a Gammons, Peter King, or Len Pasquarelli who break the sport down so well, that we read the newspaper for them as much as we do for the news. It’s like having another friend in your group who understands your passion for the team.

Professional Sports hold the last arenas in America where someone can be recognized and lauded simply by doing good and working harder than someone of equal talent. Granted it may be for hitting a ball 6% more often than the league median. It may be something as previously unseen such as dunking from the free throw line (which may have been the first sound of the sonic boom that happened for the NBA during the Jordan years), or it could be something like what happened with the Suns last year, as playing the sport in an older way, being a point guard who is able to set up for others, not for himself. The sports press notices these things. Quality does stand out.

It’s routine, daily, and seasonal. Most years writing is like the years before, unless there is a singular event like a championship or a record chase. When this happens on a local scale, the town gets a little more excited, the paper hypes it a little bit more, maybe moving a blurb to the front page. Succeeding in sports will almost always make someone stand out in America. One can tie this to the hero culture. But it is also a light on the media itself, who are starved for something to break the doldrums of monotonous seasons. As soon as something happens, they double their efforts in coverage. They bring in talking heads to argue the points, who quite often are more loud than informative. The coverage is as natural as Steven A. Smith is subtle. (Sorry for one last digression. Seriously, has a Jim Rome controversy is my constant clone ever gotten this far before. But the reason he has a show right now is because he sold his name, not his quality. At best, he is an aggressive questioner; at worst, he equates controversy with the volume of his voice. I can only think of Puff Daddy for comparison. Blandly untalented, yet both sold their name and style that the substance doesn’t mean jack.)

We in America are as loyal to some sportswriters as we are to the teams. While it may not be in a name, we focus more about the teams and stars (in shows, news, videogames, and my surprise killer witness for my argument, the fantasy league) than we do the games themselves (note this is for a whole sum of the people, not everyone). The fact that Americans would actually focus on the stats of Kobe Bryant as it pertains to their standings in an office league when the totally despise the man and the organization they love is a point no one should miss.

In terms of fans, I would much rather have Arsenal supporters with me at a match than Pacer’s fans. They are not only more fiercely loyal, they follow the game itself in the process with a fantastic level unseen here. Maybe the fact that there are four sports in America vs. One dominant. The rest of the world plays almost nothing but soccer. We play seasonally. They know the game better be osmosis because the game they follow is all they know from playing.

And so while one group focuses on strategies they have known and practiced, the other fixates one person when they break the game open. They follow the game, we follow those playing it.

When the steroids scandal began to break about a year ago with the BALCO leaks that condemned Barry Bonds and others, it was not Americans who truly cared. There was no coverage or reports of fans protesting games outside of stadiums because they believed the game was being tarnished.

Before the Congressional Hearings this year, Tony Kornheiser and Michael Wilbon of ESPN’s Pardon the Interruption continued to asked when covering the topic, “Is this just a media issue? Does America care about the truth, or the product.”

After the hearings, and then last week’s bombshell of Rafael Palmeiro, perhaps the curiosity of the American people had finally been piqued after months of attention. Finally, we could no longer sit by an not question the events of the last few years, with ever faster runners, new home run records, and athletes with hyrdocefalaphyic (sic) size.

But even with all of the media attention, I don’t think America is ready to discount the records yet, or care enough to walk away or call shenanigans on the leagues. I think we have all known that they were doing something else, because we were willing to admit they were already that much better than the average man. Can you diminish the records of a man who magically made himself 10 –20% better? Maybe, if he was the only one who did it.

Which in my opinion makes this a media matter, because they, like every other American, are tied to their childhood icons, and do not want to diminish something they themselves believed in. They all are for iconicide, or bringing down a kingdom; just as long as it is not theirs’.

If I were to take steroids, I still could not compete in any professional sport. No two ways about it. I hasten to call bullshit on some records because I know it’s still something amazing. Barry Bonds is an asshole, and I have no doubt that he was using in one form or another in the 2001 season. Yet, I cannot remove myself from the memories of that season, which has to stand with 1998, 1951, 1961, 1927, as one of the 10 best in history of the game. That season, from the home run chase, to the World Series, the introduction of Ichiro, the Mariners trying the record for most games won in a season, and so on, stands as one of those years where I followed the game not just for my teams, but because the season had something about it. I will, and have, argued that Barry Bonds does not deserve to be the outright winner of the crown of greatest home run season; yet I still know that during the year, he homered in games when he was only given one pitch to hit in 4 at bats. Puffed by steroids or not, what he did was to hit almost every pitch that could have been a home run pitch to it’s full potential. He capitalized on every error. That should be not forgotten even if it is diminished.

What disturbs me most about American society is the double standard we have with sports and everyone else. Not in the whole every one is lazy and no one rarely gives 100% at work (a point brought up very well by ESPN’s Page two after the Randy Moss quote about not playing full out every play) sense. But on a male vs. female level of greatness and notoriety. The media is always quick to call athletes on performance enhancement, yet 1/100 of this focus is given to Hollywood starlets. From boob jobs to botox, there is an epidemic of falsification that we accept. We may know that Jessica Simpson had substantial work done, or that Pamela Anderson continually has her breast size shifted for her publicity needs. Yet we don’t call out them for being immoral, or cheaters. They are, ad yet we roll with it. We all talk about the mystery of Lohan’s breasts, yet many still read about her.

Further, and a pet peeve of mine, how can we continue to let slip the fact that NASA technology is being used to make the Pussycat Dolls seem like decent singers, or that we hear not a performance of Missy Elliot, but a song edited in protools? (And this is a phenomenon of 90% of all music today) What about cinema SFX. When are we just going to protest or see the media attention we see with sports about films that are in no way real. It’s one thing to see film move to a painters medium (Like “What Dreams May Come,” a weak film that is cheaply, yet effectively and cogently stylized).

If there is a blowback about steroids in sports, I am not only calling for the hastening, I will be pushing for the witch-hunt to move to everything else. Marilyn Monroe was an icon for what she was originally, not for how she achieved her later. Let’s make a focus for discipline in craft and in our beauties, I would gladly take a one in a million like Raquel Welch than a plastic fantastic like the pornstars and Baywatch stars of our multiplex. Ask a woman, and I’m sure they would agree that they’d take a Gable over a Pitt, or a Cary Grant over Tom Cruise, and so too, would men.

But all of this never comes to a stop because there is a big but…

While I don’t like the fact that Mark McGuire was the one to set the record in 1998, I still can’t forget the sheer emotion I had when he hit number 62. I still remember it was a low line drive that just barely was over the left field wall. I remember him and Sammy Sosa hugging after the fact, and that the teams (Cubs and Cards, a bitter yet respectful rivalry more beautiful than any other in sports) stopped the game to cherish the moment. Big Mac then gave two great moments. After hitting it, he went over to the Maris family and shared the moment. He may have been catching the torch of the record, but he went over and shared the moment with the family of the later Roger Maris, allowing them to be in the moment and to be remembered instead of relegated to a footnote. After the game he talked about how he went recently to go see the bat that hit the 61 first homer of Roger Maris, and he said, “I reached out and touched it, *holding back tears of raw emotion*, and I touched it with my heart.” I couldn’t write that moment to be any better.

Staying with that year, I do not discount Sammy Sosa, even with his now steroid huge body, or his corked bat; for he was in that year, relatively skinny. Even if he was using then, I still believe that he only started to look like he was huge come 1999, his season looked like one where he caught the pitchers by surprise, and through a combination of luck and skill, he was able to belt 66. If someone asked me what the record for homers really was, I would probably say 61 by Maris, but not until I was given definitive proof that the 1998 stats were tainted.

American readers of the Sports Page are lucky. We are not only given a wealth of info, but we are given people who are masters of journalism craft who can elevate the sports column to near poetry.

We are not tied to the teams in America as the rest of the world. We associate ourselves with the individuals, and the ties grow stronger every passing year due to the intertwining of our past and the memories that link us to them, memories made more grandiose by our writers and their brilliance in chronicaling the past and mounting pedestals beneath the weight of the triumphant.

In both cases, I don’t think either wants to give up on the past. Both options discount the past all enjoyed.

Beauty and stats are able to compel like no other in this nation. I hope that the medias and forums or competition change in the future, so that one day we won’t question the authenticity or place of a remarkable feat. I hope that maybe America will evolve to a nation that respects the end result more, and not the end numbers or statistics. Even if/when this happens, do not ask me to forsake what happened before. It was the way it was, and I loved it all the same.