Golf

I was thinking about golf today.  This isn't a common occurrance; mostly it came up because Joe Posnanski wrote a typically brilliant piece about "the next great golfer", and well, Mr. Posnanski often inspires me to think.  Golf is a sport I've never played, unless you count some Pitch and Putt (and by "Pitch" I mean "groundballs hit with a pitching wedge"), but I've thought about trying it, as both my brothers play.  And it seems like one of those sports you can get into at an advanced age. But the Tiger Woods thing is kind of crushing.  I play sports in the sense that I can win, that I can beat the game, that there's something to figure out and do right and then you're fine.  Golf, tho, always wins in the end.  Tiger probably came the closest to "beating" the sport - him or Jack Nicklaus, and at the very least it seemed that Tiger would prove the equal of Jack.  But he couldn't do it.  Age, a bad knee, a woman... some combination of everything brought down the Tiger, and there was golf again, standing victorious.  Tiger looked terrible at the PGA, and I'm losing confidence that he can win again. So what does the sport leave us with?  Nobody I care about doing well; some Euros who annoy me (this means you, Rory McIlroy) winning some stuff, and one no-name winning the PGA because another no-name faded terribly.  That's not an interesting sport; that's the Nationwide Truck Racing Series. Golf may have won, as it always does, but in terms of my fandom, beating Tiger is a Pyrrhic victory.

"You Know How I Know You're Gay?"

There's a new Coldplay song out.  Other than a weird guitar riff that sounds like it was lifted off a club track, it kinda sounds like Peter Gabriel's popular late 80s material (Salisbury Hill, In Your Eyes). Coldplay is kind of an odd band.  For a while there they looked like they were going to become huge, but they ended up settling back into being just "big".  There's always a bit of difficulty in projecting exactly what any huge UK artist is going to do when they cross the pond - Oasis certainly had a good career here, but not at the level of "bigger than the Beatles" like they claimed in England, and Robbie Williams was one of many failures in America.  Biffy Clyro seems to be the Brit band that's getting that push here, but I'm still waiting to hear radio play of any song other than Many of Horror (which still makes no sense to me as 3 words in a row like that). Back to Coldplay.  I couldn't stand them at first - Yellow is one of those grating, let me strangle the singer songs that belongs in the same dustbin in Hell with songs like James Blunt's Beautiful and Daniel Powter's Bad Day.  What an awful slice of music history that grouping was.  Then they released a bunch of songs that all kind of sound the same - Clocks (which has a cool mariachi remix if you can find it, they played it at my cousin's wedding), Fix You, The Scientist, Speed of Sound, In My Place.  I really can't even tell the last three apart. It was during this time, of course, that The 40 Year Old Virgin came out, leading to the title of this post.  I'm not sure how much that had to do with them never being supermegastars, but it probably didn't damage them as much as Stewart's shirt on Beavis and Butthead damaged any respect anyone had for Winger (seriously, if that shirt had said Slaughter or Firehouse or something, would we feel differently about Winger?). Their last album actually had some good music.  From what I remember of music news at the time, they were trying to become transcendant with it, using Viva La Vida as the driver.  I actually heard Violet Hill first, and liked it better.  They also had that Lovers in Japan song which kinda sucked, and Lost which had a nice guitar.  Anyway, this stuff was pretty big a few years ago, but didn't stand up (all the Amazin' Crazy Cryin' Amazin' songs I listed above still get radio play, these don't).  I haven't heard any ridiculous pronouncements from Chris Martin (I guess he leaves that up to Gwyneth anymore) so hopefully they've given up their delusions of grandeur and just gone back to trying to write music.  That's how it should be - as long as they don't make another song that sounds like Yellow.

Ref Bitchin'

I've got a well-deserved reputation amongst my friends for hating on sports officials.  I don't disagree with it; I certainly complain about them often enough.  But I think there's some misconceptions about both the level of my analysis and the reasoning behind it.

While I do post a lot of complaints about blown calls going against my team, I'm also quick to acknowledge when calls are blown in our favor.  Yes, John LeClair scored a goal thru the side of the net in the playoffs against Buffalo; we got away with on there.  Michael Jordan, whose Bulls teams I always pulled for, definitely pushed off on Bryon Russell in 1998.  The Sixers were the beneficiary of quite a few borderline calls against Milwaukee in the second round in 2001.  I'm probably not going to post it as a status, but yes, I do realize that for the most part these calls even out.  I do feel that subconsciously the officials are biased against the Flyers - nothing deliberate, but it's a product of their reputation (the same applies to the Raiders in football).  But in general the bad calls tend to even out.

What frustrates me about them is that every blown call in sports officiating is essentially the equivalent of tennis's unforced errors.  Players fail all the time (a hitter who fails 65% of the time in baseball is an all-star) but they fail in opposed situations.  Someone else is trying to make them fail.  When it comes to the refs, nobody is trying to make them fail.  They're just blowing their judgment calls.  There are equivalents to this in sports - watch JC Romero try to throw strikes sometime, half the time he's nowhere near the plate.  Guys missing free throws is the same way.  And it's all supremely frustrating.

But what really annoys me when the officials screw up is that the vast majority of people act like they should just ignore it.  You can watch situations where a blown call absolutely determined the outcome of a game and it gets completely glossed over, the blame placed elsewhere.  A good example is the 2008 NFC Championship game.  Donovan McNabb has taken the blame for the game for not being able to drive the Eagles down the field and win it at the end (alternately, McNabb supporters blame the defense for not getting a stop after the Eagles took the lead in the fourth).  But on fourth down, McNabb threw a catchable ball to Kevin Curtis, Rod Hood tripped Curtis and Curtis was unable to make the play.  That blown non-call clearly decided the game - it may not have altered the ending of the game (the Eagles might still have lost in numerous scenarios) but right there it ended the game.

This frustrates me to no end.  I don't particularly like the Braves, but I always hated how Tom Glavine got strikes 3 inches off the plate.  Even so, Livan Hernandez getting strikes 5 inches off the plate to beat them in 1997 (the worst home plate umpiring I've ever seen) was a more egregious failure.  The calls to give the Steelers the 2006 Super Bowl, the missed offside call that cost the Flyers the 1980 Stanley Cup, England getting robbed of a goal in the 2010 World Cup - all incredibly frustrating as a sports fan.  But there's an answer for it.

The answer is more technology.  "Purists" are idiots - they should be called "wrongists", because all they want to do is make the games more wrong.  I say "heck no" to that.  Replay everything.  Automate as much as you can.  Balls and strikes can be called with lasers.  Chips should be put on footballs and soccer balls so we know when they cross the goal line.  The best games are the ones where you don't notice the officials, because they don't screw up.  The more decisions you can take out of their hands, the better.

Furst (Stephen)

I'm going to ramble. I don't really always write with cohesiveness, or proper language, or any language, sometimes it seems. But I love to write. I've always loved to write, but I've gotten away from it. I don't know why. Perhaps it's because I've become a terrible writer; perhaps I've become a terrible writer because I've gotten away from writing. Any skill atrophies. Except my skill at using semicolons. This blog is going to be about sports, and it's going to be about pop culture, and at least a little bit, it's going to be about my life. I have no shame in saying Bill Simmons is my inspiration for this; grantland.com launched today, and I thought about it, and about doing something you love, and maybe somewhere down the road there's room for me to write for a living. But for right now, I'm writing because I love to write. I'm not normally a goal-oriented person, but I have a goal for this blog. I want to get one person reading because they like my writing. Not because they like me (that doesn't hurt), not because my mom pays them $5 a week to read what I've done, but somebody I've never met staying here and reading because they actually enjoy my style, and maybe even my opinions. It's not too likely I'll achieve that goal, but it's there. One person.