No More Fox Mulder, Fox

I would worry about the FOX network, if I was one to worry about a heartless multi-billion dollar corporation run by brain dead hacks.  That they are desperate for programming is proven by the fact they have yet again renewed Sleepy Hollow, despite the show not being good since the first season and that it killed off one of the two partners whose relationship made the show run. The fact is that Sleepy Hollow is one of the better pieces of programming scheduled by the network, which is a testament to the profitability of pandering to the lowest common denominator.

Along the same lines (the network wanting to renew a show I used to love that is running on empty), reports are that FOX would like to produce more episodes of The X-Files after the 6 episode run shown in February.  Of the 6 episodes I would rate one as good, two as mediocre, one as bad and two as jaw-droppingly awful, which is not a good average.  But again, this is FOX, so they have committed to more episodes depending on the availability of David Duchovney and Gillian Anderson.

That might be a problem, surprisingly.  Well, Duchovney’s show Aquarius, which was inexplicably renewed by NBC, premiered to "dismal" ratings, so it may not last much longer (although NBC is almost as desperate as FOX).  But Anderson has signed on to a Starz series based on Neil Gaiman’s novel American Gods where she will play Media, the god of telecommunication (or so I understand, the news reports are a little unclear and I am not familiar with the novel).  Heaven knows what counts as a hit for Starz, but Anderson might be tied up for a while, unless her role is small enough to allow her to do other projects.

One problem with the return of The X-Files (aside from atrophy in Chris Carter’s brain and the apparent fatigue of the stars) was that times have changed since The X-Files premiered.  In 1994 if you thought the government spied on you, you were a nut; in 2016, if you don’t think the government is spying on you, you are a candidate for the funny farm.  The nature of paranoia was one of the millions of things that changed on 9/11.

The man with his finger on the pulse of current paranoia is Sam Esmail, the creator of Mr. Robot.  Mr. Robot tapped into the angst of modern computer insecurity, the fear that nothing was safe from a determined hacker.  We rely so heavily on digital information, but the easier it is for us to utilize it, the easier it is for someone to steal it.  Mr. Robot exemplified all the various ways our security can be compromised; defeating on-line encryption, lying to gain access to password information, cloning phones in the proximity, tricking someone into running an infected disc. 

The X-Files is the face of the past in urban paranoia; Mr. Robot is now.  Mr. Robot barely stayed ahead of current events, like the Ashley Madison hack.  Its final episode had to be delayed because an on-air attack that occurred in real life was too similar to a scene that had already been filmed for the finale.  Few shows had the currency that Mr. Robot had in its first season.

Generally speaking, TV shows rarely get better once they are past their expiration date; hence the phrase, “jump the shark.”  Once a show has become desperate enough to resort to having The Fonz water ski over a Great White, the initial creativity that made the show worth watching in the first place is gone. Even great shows like Modern Family begin to struggle after a while as the characters and their situations become familiar.

Bringing back The X-Files was about as topical a move as TBS producing a parody of Lost 12 years after its debut (Mel Brooks only waited ten years to do a Star Wars parody). It was nice to see Mulder and Scully again, but I’d prefer it if in the future I saw them on DVD or streaming, and not in new episodes.  Chris Carter had his moment, but his brand of paranoia is so 20^th century.

NBA's conspiracy factory

Each of the three major sports leagues in America has its own personality.  Baseball is . . . boring.  Bud Selig was a used car salesman from Milwaukee, and Rob Manfred hasn’t exactly been a boost in charisma.  Football is . . .  incompetent, run by a bumbling doofus who screwed up the Ray Rice investigation, screwed up the Deflategate investigation, and bollixed a number of other issues.  Basketball is . . . sneaky.

Maybe it dates back to the infamous “frozen envelope” that got the NY Knicks Patrick Ewing in the first NBA draft lottery.  Maybe it’s the constant drumbeat of teams conspiring to “game” the lottery by tanking.  Maybe it’s the fact that it is the only major American sport to have a referee found to be affecting the outcome of games.  Basketball always has to deal with conspiracy theories.

The latest, believed by (among others) disgraced referee Tim Donaghy, is that the league suspended Golden State Warriors’ player Draymond Green for game 5 of the NBA Finals in order to extend the series past 5 games.  Why do I believe this theory?  Three words—I’m from Sacramento.

You may have never heard of Sacramento; capital of the most populous state in America, stopping spot for people traveling from San Francisco to Lake Tahoe, home of the Gold Rush in 1848.  Sacramento is also the victim in possibly the most widespread conspiracy theory in sports—that the NBA rigged the 2002 Western Conference Finals because they didn’t want the ratings nightmare that would ensue if the NBA Finals featured a team from Sacramento.

Sacramento had a 3-2 lead in the series.  Game 6 was played in Los Angeles.  The NBA assigned three refs to the game—who just happened to be a) the referee with the biggest reputation as a “homer” who favored the home team; b) the referee with the second biggest reputation as a “homer”; and c) the referee with the third biggest reputation as a “homer.”  Not surprisingly, a number of calls went against Sacramento in the fourth quarter and the Lakers came back to win in overtime.  The “erratic” refereeing persisted in game seven in Sacramento, and the glamorous LA Lakers advanced to the Finals.  The Kings have never been close to that good since (and despite being terrible for over a decade, Sacramento has never drafted higher than #3 and then only once; maybe the draft lottery is not above suspicion).

Fast forward to 2016.  In the Western Conference semi-final green kicked Oklahoma City Thunder player Steven Adams in what is euphemistically referred to as “the man zone.”  The foul was upgraded to a “flagrant foul” and Green was fined, but despite the, um, flagrancy of the offense Green was not suspended.  The Warriors came back from 3-1 down and won the series, eliminating a team that the NBA wants in a final maybe even less than Sacramento (memo to Kevin Durant: you won’t win a title until Oklahoma City is some place the NBA brass want to spend time in).

Fast forward again to the finals.  What looked, theoretically, like a classic matchup turned out to be a rout.  The Warriors crush the Cavs in three games, with only a hiccup in a home game in Cleveland preventing a sweep.  No game 6 and 7 means less advertising revenue for the NBA.  But what can stop the unstoppable Warriors?  Not LeBron James and the inept Cleveland Cavaliers.  But the league has more power than any team.

Green got tangled up with LeBron James on a play.  It was clean and no foul was called.  But the league decided that it was not a non-foul, but a foul, and then bootstrapped one more step and upgraded the foul (which wasn’t called by the refs) to a flagrant foul, even though the foul was so non-flagrant that no one saw it at the time, including the refs.  Green was suspended for game five, and to no one’s surprise the Cavs won.

Green has said if he had played in game 5 the series would be over, and he is right.  If the Cavs win game 6 at home they will force a deciding game 7 in Oakland, and the NBA will be richer.  Fans will get a game 7, and with a couple of lucky bounces (and with Andrew Bogut out) the Cavs could pull off a major upset and LeBron can bring a championship to Cleveland, despite the fact that the Warriors are a vastly superior team.

Is this conspiracy theory as far-fetched as the plot to kill JFK? Not really; the NBA had means, motive, and opportunity to influence events and extend the series.  That’s all they ever need on Law & Order.

Is two years too much for Sharapova?

Meting out justice is always hard.  NFL Commissioner Goodell rightfully took a lot of abuse for his vacillation on the appropriate punishment for Ray Rice (two games, no a lifetime ban, no six games).  Baseball Commissioner Rob Manfred has had to make Solomonic decisions on how long to suspend players who participate in brawls.  Sports don’t often have hard and fast penal codes spelling out the length of punishment for a transgression, and what constitutes “justice” is often in the eye of the beholder (just ask the judge who is under fire for sentencing a Stanford swimmer to six months in jail for a sexual assault).

Maria Sharapova has been suspended for two years for using an illegal drug, Meldonium, which sounds like a substance that a super-villain needs to build a super-weapon and not a real life pharmaceutical.  She has announced an appeal, but the best case scenario is that she won’t play another competitive tennis match until she is past 30 years old.

In handing down the sentence, the governing body said that a four-year suspension would have been normal but they were showing Sharapova mercy because she argued that she hadn’t opened the e-mail announcing that the drug that she’d taken continuously for 10 years had been banned starting on January 1, 2016. That makes very little sense; if that is an exonerating fact, then why suspends her at all?  Any more than the layoff she has already had, I mean?

I suspect the stern two-year suspension is meant to punish Sharapova for finding a loophole in the drug policy.  The policy only bans the use of drugs on a yes/no binary basis.  You can’t take this drug; you can take that drug.  Sharapova continually took a heart medicine, which had a side effect of increasing the body’s ability to process oxygen, which was intended to be used for 4-6 weeks.  The substance wasn’t banned, but she wasn’t using it as directed.

One suspects that if the heart medicine had the side effects of facial legions or hair loss she wouldn’t have taken it for more than five minutes no matter what her heart condition was.

Sharapova had no real medical reason for taking the drug (her doctor’s explanation that it was for treating recurring viral infections doesn’t make any sense), but she took it and gained an advantage over her competitors.  It didn’t help her in her last 18 matches against Serena Williams, who beat her 18 consecutive times, but drugs can only do so much.  It wasn’t a banned substance before, but she failed to disclose that she was taking it on forms she was required to fill out before matches, and her excuse was found by the tribunal to be “untenable.”

How much of an advantage did she gain?  You can’t quantify things like that, any more than you can quantify how many home runs Barry Bonds would have hit without assistance from a druggist (unless the number is the number he hit, if you think he is clean).  Sharapova is a talented athlete, and she would have been a top player without Meldonium.  But it gave her an edge, and now she’s paying for it.

Can she come back?  Two years off means returning at age 31, which is traditionally rather old for a women’s tennis player.  However, Serena is going strong at 34, and many tennis players compete into their 30’s.  But this isn’t like a running back who may come back stronger after a year off from pounding.  Two years away from competitive tennis is going to leave her with rust, even if she keeps her game up playing on her own.  The list of women players who have won slams after reaching 31 is sparse. Serena has done it six times, no one else more than once.  There were three back in the 1970’s (the legendary trio of Billie Jean King, Margaret Court and Virginia Wade), one in the 1980’s (Chris Evert at the 1986 French), and one in the 90’s (Navratilova at the 1990 Wimbledon).  In the past 25 years the only two women to win a slam after age 31 have been Li Na at the 2014 Aussie and Flavia Panetta at the 2015 US Open, both of whom almost immediately retired.  Sharapova has talent and has won majors before, but winning at 31 after a two-year layoff would be a tall order.

Maria Sharapova would have the world believe that she took a medication for ten years because she had a weak heart, despite the fact that she was a professional athlete who worked out constantly.  She took a drug with known endurance-enhancing qualities (that is now banned) for ten years, despite the manufacturer’s directions that it was only to be taken for 4-6 weeks.  A two-year suspension at the end of her career may seem steep, but Sharapova had the benefit of an advantage for ten years.  

Besides, she still can sell calendars and candy.

In Memoriam: Muhammad Ali

We live in an era where the backup point guard for the Detroit Pistons probably calls himself, “The Greatest” (I am being rhetorical; I have no knowledge of who the backup point guard for the Pistons even is).  Making a claim to being “The Greatest” is practically in the job description of NFL wide receivers.  What was unique about Muhammad Ali was this: he was right.

Ali practically created the blueprint of the modern athlete.  Braggadocious.  Self-promoting.  Transforming sport into theater.  Participating long after he should stop putting on a uniform (boxing trunks are a uniform, right?).  That describes 80% of all athletes in America today.  You can almost hear Ali’s voice when LeBron James uttered his famous, “not four, not five, not six, not seven rings. . .” speech.

But Ali was different.  Is different.  First, it was not an act for him; it was who he was.  It was developed over time (partly due to the fact that, according to ESPN, during the three years he was unable to box he made his living speaking at college campuses) but it came from inside him.  He wasn’t flamboyant in order to get attention.  He was flamboyant, end of story.

Second, there is a strong argument that he WAS “The Greatest.”  Until Mike Tyson he was the youngest heavyweight champion, and his victory over Sonny Liston was a hundred time more shocking than the Broncos defeating the Panthers in the last Super Bowl.  He was a 7-1 underdog.  A documentary at the NY Times website features a reporter who says he was told to be ready to go to the hospital nearest the arena after the fight because that where it was assumed Ali (then Clay) would end up after the fight.  Ali rocked Sonny Liston, and then rocked the world.

Ali held the title through a myriad of opponents until he met one he couldn’t beat with one punch—the US government.  Ali’s claim to be a conscientious objector to serving in the military because of his faith as a member of the Nation of Islam was denied and he was convicted of draft evasion.  After over three and a half years the case was thrown out by the Supreme Court.  Of all great athletes, the only comparable example is Ted Williams losing three prime years during World War II and another two for the Korean War.

Ali reclaimed the heavyweight crown twice more.  In his youth he used quickness and agility, something unheard of in the heavyweight class.  When he was older, he used strategy and guile.  His famous “rope-a-dope” strategy caused George Foreman to expend his energy punching Ali, who let the ring’s ropes absorb the energy, leaving Foreman vulnerable in later rounds.  Most of his later bouts—with Frazier, Foreman, Norton, or Sphinx – were epic pieces of ballet. 

I can’t even name the current heavyweight champion.  All I know is that a few weeks ago he lifted his shirt at a press conference, and ESPN’s Frank Isola said it was a sign of how far boxing has fallen when the champ raises his shirt and bears a resemblance to Seth Rogan. 

Modern athletes who aspire to be like Ali ultimately fail, because they lack his intelligence, his talent, his charisma, and his authenticity.  In this social media world we live in, with pampered athletes gaining fame and wealth at young ages, I don’t think there ever could be another athlete like Muhammad Ali. It’s too easy to create fake ones.

Rumble, young man, rumble.

Are we expecting too much perfection?

One of the standard tropes you see a lot is that we don’t teach kids how to win anymore. Everybody gets a trophy for “participating” and winning is so meaningless the point of keeping score is lost. Excellence is not rewarded.

But is that really the case?  I wonder if we, collectively as sports fans, are shifting to only rewarding perfection, to tilting the table to where most champions should end the year undefeated if they are really a “champion.”

Look as college football, where there is a national rending of garments if it appears that at least one team entering the national championship game isn’t undefeated.  The debate over who is number one used to revolve around debating what 2 or 3 loss team had the easiest schedule, but now unless the match-up is between an undefeated team and a one-loss team, it’s seen as illegitimate.  

Arguing against this is the fact that—by adopting a four team playoff system—the NCAA is giving a team ranked as low as #4 a shot at the championship, something that happened the first time out when Ohio State, which had been ranked as low as #22, made the playoffs as the #4 team and ended up winning the national title.  I would reply that Ohio State was a one-loss team and the fact that it was rated so low proves how much perfection is valued; a single early loss makes a team appear unworthy of a championship.

And let’s not even talk about how major programs schedule "cupcakes” to play during the season, all the better to approach the post-season without a loss.

Look at college basketball, where the NCAA playoff was seen as mediocre coming in because there was no undefeated team like 2015’s Kentucky having a chance to win the tournament and end the year undefeated.  Of course the two teams playing in the final, Duke and Wisconsin, only had three losses in the regular season, but compared to zero, three is a big number.  As with football, an single loss early in the season can send a team’s ranking plummeting.

My suspicion, for which I am too lazy to collect any evidence, is that increasingly college, high school, and pre-high school sports are increasingly tilted to where the champion in any league or division is likely to be undefeated, or very close.  If you think about it, if every favorite defeated every underdog in the NFL, then every season would see one 16-0 team and one 0-16 team.  This rarely happens, but that doesn't mean we don't expect it.

Of course this doesn’t apply to baseball, where, as the old saying goes for the pros, every team wins 60 games, every team loses 60 games, and it is how the other 42 come out that matters.

I think the result of this trend towards expecting perfection of winning sports teams is that the best players are not exposed to losing, and are ill-equipped to handle it.  Look at Kyle Lowry of the Toronto Raptors, whose team was losing to the Cleveland Cavaliers and instead of playing harder he had to go to the locker room DURING THE GAME to “decompress.”  After he left the game the Cavs went on a 12-2 run and the series was effectively over. Lowry played college basketball at Villanova, which lost only three games in his final season, but he had some experience with losing with the Memphis Grizzlies.

Look at Cam Newton, who last year finished a nearly perfect 15-1 season for the Carolina Panthers, a record built on the fact that they didn’t play a single team with a winning record at the time of the game.  He was so upset at losing in the Super Bowl that he couldn’t speak with reporters after the game.  He expected to win; he was wrong, and he couldn’t handle it.

Look at Russell Westbrook, who (when the Oklahoma City Thunder had a 3-1 edge on the Golden State Warriors) was asked if he thought Steph Curry was a good defender, and he laughed.  He’s probably still laughing as he watches poor defender Steph Curry and the Warriors take on the Cavs in the NBA finals.

OK, I get it, athletes have to have confidence. I can even forgive the kid on the Detroit Pistons who insisted he was “in LeBron James’ head” as the Pistons were swept by the Cavs.  But no one is perfect.  No one is invincible.  No one wins every game.  But that is what it seems like an increasing number of players believe.