CAN SPORT COMPETE WITH WAR?
This is a very bad week for the American nation, and next week will be even worse. The Kansas-Syracuse game was barely over when I learned to my horror that the United States Marines were randomly murdering British and American journalists in Baghdad.
Five journalists have died in Iraq so far, and not one of them was killed by Enemy Fire. They were shot down like dogs by U.S. military personnel, killed and wounded and mangled by Americans, who drive American M1 Abrahms battle tanks and eat all-American pie, just like the rest of us. American troops are killing journalists in a profoundly foreign country, for savage, greed-crazed reasons that most of them couldn’t explain or even understand.
What the fuck is going on here? How could this once-proud nation have changed so much, so drastically, in only two years—almost three, to be sure. In what seems like the blink of an eye, this George Bush has brought us from a prosperous nation at peace to a broke nation at war. And why are we killing each other at point-blank range on the other side of the world—with big guns and big bombs that kill everything in reach?
Indeed, there is something going on here, Mister Jones, and you don’t know what it is, do you?
Bob Dylan said that, and he is still right, now more than ever. Hell, there is nothing really new about American cops and American soldiers killing and brutalizing innocent American citizens. It happens with depressing regularity. But at least the bastards used to have the decency to deny it.
That is a big difference, sports fans, and that is why I feel so savagely depressed tonight. When the Pentagon feels free and even gleeful about killing anybody and Everybody who gets in the way of their vicious crusade for oil, the public soul of this country has changed forever, and professional sports is only a serenade for the death of the American dream. Mahalo.
* * *
Another big loser last week was the CBS-TV network, which did a credible job and put most of the games on TV—but the invasion was impossible to compete with, and ratings for the Big Dance were down almost 30 percent overall. I was not among the quitters, but I still had a hard time staying focused on basketball. The total war against Evil dominated every waking moment of our lives.
War has always been a hard act to follow, and this rotten little massacre in Iraq is no exception. It is like that permanent shit-rain that Ronald Reagan talked about in his letters to Frank Sinatra. They both believed very deeply in the book of Revelation. Reagan even went so far as to say to his buddy, “We are screwed, Frankie. We are the ones who will have to face the end of the World.”
They had a good time for sure, those rogues. They were lifelong sports fans, but Wars kept getting in their way.
I used to laugh when good old Dutch said ominous things like that—but it is becoming clearer and clearer that he was right, dead right, if only because he was drawing up the blueprints himself, right in front of our eyes, and we loved him for it.
I had a soft spot in my heart for Ronald Reagan, if only because he was a sportswriter in his youth, and also because his wife gave the best head in Hollywood.
The war news from almost everywhere clamped a mean lid on coverage of the NCAA tournament this year, but that didn’t prevent us hoops junkies from getting an adult dose of high-speed, high-style heart-jerking college basketball last weekend. Two of the three Final Four games in New Orleans were serious ball-busters, even for those of us who had long since abandoned all hope of victory in the big-money bracket-bashing “office pools” that littered the newsrooms of the nation.
TV ratings fell 30 percent overall, and none of the favorites survived the Final Four, which left me with no hometown favorite to focus on, once top-ranked Kentucky was scraped off the floor after Marquette diced them up in the Midwest region finals.
Nothing had really surprised me until then (with the glaring exception of those whimpering sots from Wake Forest, who failed so horribly against Auburn that I swore to myself, even before that vulgar game had ended, that I was going to drive at once to the sleepy fat village of Winston-Salem, NC, and release a swarm of 900,000 full-grown Vulture fleas somewhere in the middle of the campus, or maybe in the basement of the team’s practice facility.
You can get anywhere from 250,000 to a million commercially grown breeding fleas—or ladybugs or chiggers or moles or even Black Widow spiders—for what might seem like a generous price, but your purchase will definitely Not be the end of it.
The last time I experimented with this kind of political action, the controlled release process got away from me and bad things happened.… It was long after midnight when we crept the iron cherry picker across the backyard and as close as possible to the tall brick chimney pipe that towered over the pompous, colonial mansion on the outskirts of Aspen.
Our job, our mission, was to sneak up on the large family home of a crooked politician, not far away, and dump a halfmillion fully grown Muscatel Fleas down the huge Greek chimney into his plush living room.
Ah, but that is another story. I was talking about Sports and the NCAA drowned in the war news.… Marquette Self-destructed.… Now back to the Championship.…
Syracuse beat Kansas last night for the U.S. college championship of the world. It was a wildly exciting game that came down to a failed final shot, but it hardly seemed to matter, compared to the horrible news from Iraq, and basketball faded away. There was bigger entertainment on the screen, primarily in the form of bombs dropping on people—mainly foreigners, of course—and newsreaders from CNN said we were winning. Is this a great country or what?
—April 9, 2003
The Doomed Prefer Oakland
Good news is rare these days, and every glittering ounce of it should be cherished and hoarded and worshipped and fondled like a priceless diamond. The “war” in Iraq is all around us like one of those San Francisco death-fogs that never go away. Your immediate instinct is to flee, but to where? It is a lot easier to just go back to bed than to get in the car and look for a place where there may be no fog. The odds are stacked against you, so why even try?
That is the nervous American reality in this downhill spring of the year 2003, and I am keenly aware of it. Something is missing here, and I can’t say what it is, can I?
Maybe it is spring fever, or maybe just the end of another tainted basketball season—but wait!
Ah ha! The basketball season is not over. It just seems that way, because the brittle hysteria of War has overwhelmed all sport in America, just like it did the Super Bowl and March Madness and the dismal, almost invisible beginning of another vaguely distracting baseball season. The relentless Bombing News from Iraq commanded all the front-page headlines and all the TV news shows, which drone at us 24 hours of every day. Many people don’t have time to even read the sports section, much less focus on it and gamble.… It is impossible to truly concentrate on anything when your wallet is empty and your heart is full of fear.
But so what? Never mind the war news.
NFL Films came to my house last week, and I felt like Alice in Wonderland. It was beautiful and even historic. For a lifelong, totally committed, fun-loving football addict like me, it was like being taken into the Football Hall of Fame.
A man called Tuckett led the weird expedition that resulted in my insanely ambitious attempt to explain, in vast detail, the exact Meaning and History of my intense and sometimes tangled relationship with football and gambling and Al Davis and Max McGee and Richard Nixon and Bill Walsh and, quite specifically, with the early days and legends of what is now the Raider Nation.
Indeed. I have spent far more time that I can even remember with all those violent people who surrounded and even Created the monstrous legend of the mighty Oakland Raiders in all their blighted glory.
About 40 percent of the original Raiders were criminal by nature and deliberately dangerous brutes. They were professional athletes who got paid every week to hurt people. The worse you hurt them, the more you got paid—especially if you could damage or cripple another team�
��s Quarterback and put him on the Disabled List. That made you an automatic hero of violence, for a while, and entitled you to throw your weight around in downtown Oakland with whores and cops and animals. You were almost above the law. It was nice work, if you could get it, and winning championships made it even nicer. Being a natural-born Raider was Fun. Ho ho ho.
I fell into that groove quite naturally, back in my outlaw days. I was a fun-loving, well-paid Sportswriter. I seemed to have a bottomless expense account. Yes sir. Me and the Oakland Raiders were a match made in heaven.
But “seems” is a dangerous word, in my business, and having those brutes on my Account quickly led to trouble—not for the team or the players, but for me and my professional reputation.
Let us remember, people, that all of this happened many, many years ago, well beyond any statute of limitations. It is ancient history now, and we can talk freely. For me, it is vaguely like watching a documentary film about a young journalist frolicking with the Hell’s Angels. It was definitely weird and even perverted to some tastes, but what the hell? It is over now, lost and gone like the snows of yesteryear. Mahalo.
—April 17, 2003
The Tragedy of Naked Bowling
“Yo, little Suzie—how’s about me and you hookin’ up for some naked bowling tonight?”
“Say what? Get out of my face!”
Naked Bowling was once a sinister sport in America, but today it is making a strong comeback, very strong. Nobody except Waterheads will deny that the recent craze for bowling naked in public makes it one of the fastest growing sports in the free world.
Wonderful. It came in the nick of time. The whole nation was getting jittery from too much war news, and the sporting public was demanding wilder and wilder government-sponsored Sport spectacles to blot out the grim horizon, and then everywhere, all at once, it happened—The Great Cheerful Naked Bowling Boom of 2003.
My friend Omar, from up the road, is opening a national chain of bowling alleys where house rules require that all human clothing be checked at the door. “It keeps them from stealing,” he told me. “A naked person is an honest person. We have very low operating costs—free labor, no taxes, new friends in strange places and extremely addictive behavior five times a week.” Hundreds of thousands of otherwise decent people are already hopelessly addicted to naked bowling, which renders them all but useless for normal military work.
These Losers are like a plague of leeches on the body politic. They dim the brain as well as the body, and eventually the victim gets sucked dry and dies. That is very dead weight, which is fatal to a fast-moving army of tanks.
I have always hated bowling, and I don’t mind admitting it. I can’t even tolerate naked bowling, because of my tragic encounters with the “sport” and everything it stands for. The sound of a heavy black ball crashing down on anything made of wood makes me sick.
There would, of course, be no need to haggle about bowling at all—except that it is a recognized sport in this country, and I am a professional sportswriter, and I am watching a real-life naked bowling contest on my TV screen right now as I write this page. I see a team of extremely naked women with huge breast implants and fake lips going head to head with another naked team that would no doubt be wearing Hooters T-shirts if this were anything but a pure naked bowling contest—and let me tell you for sure, sports fans, that these women are really going at it. They are locked in a scoreless tie after 13 frames of pretty frantic bowling.
Sounds just about right, eh? Let’s all get naked and go bowling. Why not?
Where can I watch this stuff? The Answer is, On the Canadian Playboy channel, which presents a few problems in itself. It is costly, for one, and Two, a subscription to Canadian Playboy almost always causes trouble in families with underage children. Any child who can multiply 5 times 6 will also understand quickly how to cut right through any of the so-called Parental Controls or sex blockers or antiporno devices. These are standard equipment and therefore penetrable by any halfbright, low-tech yo-yo in the neighborhood. Your children will soon become sex addicts.
We had a minor scandal in Woody Creek not long ago that involved a network of pampered children ranging in age from 16 down to 9. They not only copied sex films from their parents’ TV, for sale at school, but made their own videotapes of each other having random public sex at home and at school and on pool tables with multiple partners, which they either sold or traded around the school like baseball cards.
Aspen High School has long been known for wildness and other quasi-criminal behavior, but even the most jaded parents in this glitzy resort town demanded police action when their 14-year-old daughters started turning up at local stag parties and Denver adult film stores.
“We haven’t seen a local girl turn up on the Orgy TV channel,” said the Coroner, “but it’s bound to happen sooner or later. These sex channels pay good money for explicit underage sex movies.”
Which somehow brings us back to bowling. All you have to do is cruise into your favorite local bowling alley and watch a while—and then smoke some fine hashish and think heavily about what kind of shuffling, screeching, hideous vision your favorite bowling alley would be if all those people were stark raving naked.
Okay, thank you for thinking. Are we clear on that?
Upon further study, I have concluded that Naked Bowling is not, in fact, a direct threat to the military security of the USA. But it should be restricted to Canada. Mahalo.
In other sports news last week—the Los Angeles Lakers vaporized the Minnesota Timberwolves in a terrifying warm-up for their next foe in the NBA playoffs, 117–98.… My man Allen Iverson went wild and scored 55 beautiful points against New Orleans and single-handedly made me a winner, 98–90, just barely covering the foolish 7-point bulge spread that I had given in a moment of weakness, while Anita and I were watching the Naked News from Canada that comes in on a different signal receiver on the same big-screen ABC broadcast of the NBA games.
Frankly, I am having a hard time staying constantly on top of the latest sporting action, mainly because ESPN has not yet delivered my upgraded HD-TV equipment for watching the basketball games.… I try to watch Baseball, but the hard little white ball keeps disappearing in the ever-changing maze of action between naked people dancing and small men running desperately between bases.
Weak broadband signals are to blame for my failing TV reception, and my signals are getting weaker and weaker by the day. Is it even possible for the Pentagon to occupy half of all available Bandwidth in the stratosphere?
You bet it is, Bubba. Everything in what the Brits and the Yanks call the “Free Western World” has been “freed up” for military purposes, with no explanation, due to the Military Emergency. Is this a great country, or what?
—April 17, 2003
West Coast Offense
My own Marriage was the subject of extreme excitement and big news around here last week. It dwarfed everything else, including the NBA play-offs, the Kentucky Derby, Kevin Millwood’s no-hitter, Naked bowling, and the feverish search for Saddam Hussein in Iraq. A bold headline in the Aspen Daily News said, “Congratulations to Woody Creek’s Royal Couple,” flanked by photos of me and Anita smiling out at the Reader.
Surprise surprise, eh?
It was done with fine style and secrecy in order to avoid the looting and drunken violence that local lawmen feared would inevitably have followed the ceremony.
I know nothing about planning even the simplest wedding, nothing at all, and neither does sweet Anita, who is now my Wife … So we did it the Buddhist way. We drove straight to the County Courthouse on a stormy Thursday morning and were happily married by noon. Sheriff Bob performed the ceremony, his wife took pictures, and a black priest from Sicily handled the video camera. It was fun.
Our honeymoon was even simpler. We drank heavily for a few hours with Chris Goldstein and accepted fine gifts from strangers, then we drove erratically back out to the Owl Farm and prepared for our own, very private celebratio
n by building a huge fire, icing down a magnum of Cristal Champagne, and turning on the Lakers-Timberwolves game until we passed out and crawled to the bedroom. Omnia Vincit Amor.
The Lakers made another crude mess of the Minnesota Timberwolves on Tuesday night, as most of the home crowd left early because of the hopeless beating San Antonio did to Phoenix, mauling the Suns in another one-sided game full of failures and errors and unacceptable botches.
So it is all but certain now that we will be watching some genuinely savage basketball between the Spurs and the Lakers next week—along with what will no doubt be another epic series of battles between Sacramento and Dallas, seeded number 2 and number 3 on the betting charts in the West.
San Antonio should be favored by four or five, playing the first two games at home against the number 5 Lakers. Derek Fisher and Robert Horry will have to be red hot in that first game—and the second—for LA to come out of Texas with even a 1–1 split. With Rick Fox gone for the year, Phil Jackson will need all the karma he can crank up, if his defending NBA champion Lakers hope to come out of this one alive. Beating the Spurs four times in two weeks would be impossible for the best teams in the league—especially for the shorter, slower Lakers, who played San Antonio four times this season, and lost all four.…
So what the hell? I’ll bet on the Spurs this time, and call it four games to one. I will go far out on the limb and say No four-peat for Hollywood’s team this year.
I might even go so far as to predict an all-Texas (Western) final coming up, which would make the White House very proud. We would never hear the end of it: TEXAS ÜBER ALLES.
The only way to avoid that nightmare is for the high-powered Sacramento Kings to whip Dallas—which will take seven brutal games, for sure, and leave the Kings so drained and exhausted that they will be helpless against San Antonio, losing in five games.
Hey Rube Page 20