Newsflash: Tiger Woods is NOT back

For the past five years, the talking heads at ESPN have talked about the same thing over and over and over: when is Tiger Woods coming back?  Five years ago they said it would be the next year; four years ago they said it would be the next year; three years ago they said . . . you get the idea.

As the saying goes, a broken clock is right twice a day.  After five years of predicting that Tiger Woods was about to win a golf tournament, he finally won a golf tournament, winning the Tour Championship in Atlanta.

According to the talking heads, this means Tiger is back.  He’s BACK, baby!  One of the talking heads said that Tiger Woods is now the prohibitive favorite to win the Masters’ next year, an opinion reflected in the wagering.  Frankly, I’d love to get a piece of that action; anyone who wants to put money on Tiger, give me the field.

Tiger went from being a player who hadn’t won a tournament in five years, to a player who has won one tournament in five years.  It’s an improvement, but unless he does parlay this win into a winning streak it doesn’t improve his winning percentage by that much.

Plus, Tiger is still 42 years old and, unless he has made a deal of some sort with Beelzebub, he will continue to age.  Barring injury, players don’t suddenly flip a switch at some age and go from great to hopeless; their skills gradually diminish as they age.  People generally remember Willie Mays’ tenure with the Mets as a disaster, but in fact he posted one of the 20 best seasons for a player over 35 in MLB history.  The fact that Willie Mays could still hit a home run at age 41 did not mean he could hit 50; the fact that Tiger CAN win a golf tournament does not mean he is going to start winning multiple majors for the foreseeable future.

There is also the fact that Tiger entered the Sunday of the Tour Championship with a three-stroke lead.  This is important as Tiger has never won a tournament in his career by coming from behind (and, conversely, he had never squandered a three-stroke lead on a Sunday).  That means he has to be a front-runner; one bad round (even one bad hole) on Thursday, Friday or Saturday and his chances of finishing first diminish dramatically.  He has a narrow window, and the chances of making that window get smaller and smaller as time does its inexorable thing.

And I haven’t even mentioned the knee surgeries, back surgeries, and other physical ailments that have plagued him.  He has pronounced himself to be physically fit before only to have his body break down soon after.  Things that are surgically repaired tend to break down again and need re-fixing, and they never come back better than before.

Bottom line: Tiger woods won a golf tournament.  Good for him!  Will he make a habit of it?  I doubt it.  He’s played in 18 tour events in 2018 and finished outside the top ten in 11 of them, which does not sound like someone dominating the circuit.  Tiger is JAG: Just Another Guy.  He isn’t back to being Tiger, despite what every talking head on ESPN will tell you.  He’s an over-the-hill duffer with a spate of physical ailments, and once in a while his body will cooperate and give him a taste of past glory. 

But it’s not going to happen on a regular basis.

The Emmys are Broken

So, the 70^th annual Emmy Awards are in the books and I couldn’t care less.

It’s finally gotten to the point where there is so much TV out there, from so many different platforms, that putting shows into the existing Emmy categories is not just comparing apples to oranges; it’s comparing apples to salamanders to meteorites.

On the one hand you’ve got shows like Game of Thrones on a premium channel like HBO.  The show has been derisively referred to as “dragons and tits” because a large amount of the appeal of the show (particularly for young men) is the fact that they show CGI dragons and comely young women who regularly find themselves disrobing for reasons that are often (but not always) compelled by the plot (it’s always young women; if Diana Rigg ever does a topless scene, let me know).  It is hardly fair to put a show like Game of Thrones in the “best drama” category with a broadcast network show like This is Us.  Being a show on one of the financially strapped broadcast networks, it can’t afford the CGI to create dragons; being on broadcast TV it can’t show tits. 

For those of you interested in trivia, the last broadcast network show to win the Emmy for Outstanding Drama was 24 way back in 2006.  For the past 12 years the winner for best drama has either been on basic cable (Mad Men, Breaking Bad) or premium cable (Game of Thrones, The Sopranos, Homeland).   Since 2011, the two nominations for This is Us have been the only nominations for Outstanding Drama by a show on a broadcast network (not counting Downton Abbey on PBS).

It gets more confusing the deeper you dive into the award categories.  The 2018 winner for Outstanding TV Movie was “USS Callister,” which was not a TV movie but an episode of an anthology show, Black Mirror.  The same thing happened in 2017 with a previous episode of Black Mirror, “San Junipero,” and in 2016 an episode of the BBC series Sherlock, “The Abominable Bride,” won for best TV movie.  So, it’s been four years since a TV movie has won the Emmy for Outstanding TV Movie.

The category for “Outstanding Limited Series” is equally confusing, as many “limited series” (which originally referred to a single production over multiple episodes, like Roots or The Winds of War) now play out as regular series.  In 2017 the third season of Fargo was nominated for Outstanding Limited Series, despite the fact that after three seasons it is hard to see what is so ‘limited” about it.

The entry of streaming platforms such as Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon into television production further confounds analysis.  Mini-series, or “limited series,” used to play out over several nights, and sometimes produced the biggest audiences in TV history (such as the final episode of the original Roots).  Now Netflix will dump a new “series” out all at once, and no one has any idea what the “ratings” are because Netflix doesn’t release that information.  If enough people watch it, like Stranger Things, then it comes back and it is a dramatic series; if not enough people watch it, then it ends after one “season” and becomes a limited series after the fact.

The most recent development that annoys me no end is that now shows are taking the lead from Mad Men (I believe they were the first to do it) and dividing their final season of 13 episodes into two 6- or 7-episode seasons, which they then break up to compete in the award periods of two different seasons.  The result is that actors may win an Emmy in 2018 for acting they did in 2016 for a show that was scheduled to be shown in 2017. 

Calling six or seven episodes a “season” borders on ridiculous, especially when looking back and realizing that TV shows used to be expected to produce 28-30 shows per season.  The present standard for broadcast network television is 22.  This is another disadvantage broadcast network dramas have competing against premium cable shows; it is much easier to maintain high quality over 8 episodes rather than 22.  But broadcast networks must fill 3 hours a day, seven days a week with programming; HBO can simply rerun the same episodes of Game of Thrones over and over and over. 

With the vast ocean of programming out there, the process of choosing five, or six, or even ten nominees in each category becomes futile.  How can those responsible for selecting the nominees possibly watch even a small percentage of those eligible, even looking at screeners submitted by the actors?  Netflix alone produced 50 new series last year.  With such a cacophony of various shows vying for attention, how do you pick out the five or six or even ten “best” performances by a supporting actor in a comedy? 

What is an Emmy “snub” anymore?  How can you get upset over the failure of Aya Cash to be nominated for Best Actress in a Comedy for You’re the Worst, or likewise Kristen Bell for The Good Place?  And those are just some examples I know about—maybe there is a show streaming on Hulu, or on some small cable channel that I’ve never heard of, that has the best actress in a comedy but the show got no buzz so I (and almost no one else) even knows about it.

And don’t even get me started on people from Saturday Night Live winning Emmys as supporting “actors” when all they do is perform in sketches.  That’s not acting, that’s doing comedy.  It may be funny (usually it’s not), but it isn’t creating a three-dimensional character from a script.

At the Westminster Dog Show you have Labradors competing against poodles competing against sheepdogs, but at least they all have four legs and bark.  The current Emmys are like a literal Miss Universe pageant where you are evaluating the attractiveness of humans, Venusians, and Alpha Centaurans.  It almost makes me want to go back to the good old days when only broadcast network shows competed for Emmys and shows on cable had to be content with the Cable ACE Awards. 

The Emmys have always had a plethora of difficulties.  Unlike the Oscars and the Tonys, shows continue on for years and actors can get “automatic” re-nominations for the same role long after they’ve started phoning it in.  The development of hour-long comedies such as Northern Exposure and Ally McBeal blurred the distinction between comedy and drama, something pushed to extremes with “dramedies” like Gilmore Girls.  The ability of premium cable shows to do grittier material with no content controls on nudity and profanity put network shows at a disadvantage.  And now the glut of shows produced by streaming services threatens to overrun the entire industry.

Can the Emmys be fixed?  I don’t see how.  They’ll continue on, because the entertainment industry loves giving out awards.  But their relevance will fade until the show itself becomes a Netflix special.

Who Will Miss the Hall of Famers?

There’s an old expression, “Don’t shoot the messenger.”  Usually it is good advice.  But sometimes the messenger is responsible for creating the impulse to shoot in the first place.

There is a legitimate message to be disseminated about ex-football players and their post-career health and financial problems.  Many players played in the NFL for only one or two seasons, incurred minor to serious injuries, and then had to struggle with finding work in occupations that didn’t pay as well as “pro football player.”  The NFL teaches incoming rookies about financial prudence, but it’s hard to be prudent when you go from an unpaid college player to a pro making 6 or 7 figures a year and then after only one or two seasons you have to enter the mundane workforce.  Few of them can leverage a short and mediocre football career into a seat in the analyst’s booth or secure a high-paying gig as an assistant coach in the NFL or in college.

That said, the demand issued by certain football Hall of Famers that they be provided with health insurance coverage and paid a salary or else they will boycott future HoF induction ceremonies creates the impulse to start firing away with both barrels. 

Those making the demands, led by Eric Dickerson and including superstars such as Joe Nameth and Lawrence Taylor, sent a letter to Roger Goodell contending that they are suffering from health issues related to their playing time, and financial problems, and that the cost to the NFL of providing health care for all living Hall of Famers would be around a mere $4 million per year (if the cost isn't that much, why don't they buy it for themselves?).  I don’t know if they provided an estimate for the cost of the “salaries.”

These players are in the Football Hall of Fame, meaning they are the best of the best; these are elite players who had long careers in the NFL and, at some point, signed lucrative contracts after their rookie deals had expired.  These players certainly earned more money than those rank and file players who, well, AREN’T in the Hall of Fame.  Yet they contend that they, and not the rank and file players, need financial support and health care after they retire.

Okay, maybe there are a good number of Hall of Famers who played the bulk of their careers before television money made the NFL what it is today, basically a license to print money.  In baseball, it is always mind-boggling to go back to when the Dodgers refused to negotiate with Sandy Koufax and Don Drysdale simply because they had an agent (and they demanded $100,000), or when the Pirates told the league’s top home run hitter Ralph Kiner that he was getting a pay cut and that if he didn’t report to camp they’d lose just as many games without him as they had won with him.  Many of these older Hall of Famers may be in financial distress because they played when even great players were exploited by the owners and weren’t paid what they were worth.

But still these are, by definition, the most successful football players of all time.  If anyone should have been able to save their money and buy some post-career health insurance, even for people with pre-existing conditions such as former football players, it should have been these people.  These are also the players who could leverage their former celebrity and make money by doing endorsements, making public appearances, and signing autographs.  But instead of doing any of those not-very-taxing jobs, they want the NFL to cut them a check, which would basically an appearance fee for them showing up at the HoF induction ceremony each year.

You could make the argument that what the Hall of Famers are demanding is the tip of the camel’s nose in the tent, that once they get these benefits they can start lobbying to make them universal.  But it’s not the right messenger for this particular message.  Don’t start with the players who shouldn’t need help, start with the ones who do. 

The NFL is immensely wealthy, and legalized sports betting is only going to make them wealthier.  Providing post-career health care and financial support for those players not lucky enough to play for a decade and who didn’t earn huge paychecks would cost million, but the NFL is making billions, and it is making that money on the backs of the rank and file players.  Eric Dickinson was a great player, but he had no-name linesmen blocking for him and unknown linebackers chasing him, and his success is in part due to those other players.

In any context, providing support for former players makes sense.  In the context of ailments like CTE, not to mention the lesser physical traumas suffered by players when 280-pound linemen fall on them, the moral obligation becomes even greater.  Throw in the fact that contracts in the NFL (save for elite quarterbacks) are not guaranteed and that players can be (and are) cut at any time, and the necessity for the NFL to take care of its own is overwhelming.

As for the Hall of Famers?  Let ‘em walk.  Terrell Owens skipped his own induction ceremony, and no one really minded.  Go ahead and let Joe Nameth clear up one weekend on his calendar.  Maybe he can use the time to make some money at an autograph show.

Urban Meyer is who he is

There is a story I recall (I’m not sure it happened; memory’s funny that way) that in 2006 Nick Saban repeatedly denied that he was going to quit as head coach of the Miami Dolphins to take the head coaching job at Alabama.  Then, he did quit and took the job at Alabama.  When he was asked why he lied, he said, “I didn’t lie; I said something that, in retrospect, turned out to be inaccurate.”

Urban Meyer (and the panel that investigated the situation) is exhibiting the same ability at semantics regarding his 3-game suspension at Ohio State.  He released a statement concerning his suspension over his handling of an assistant coach’s domestic abuse allegations, and in it he says that he didn’t lie at media day.  Indeed, the report says he didn’t “deliberately lie” but that he did make false statements.  Lie, false statement, potato, po-tah-to.  The report states that Meyer said things at the media day that were “plainly not accurate,” and Meyer cited this as proof he didn’t “lie.”  Meyer also claimed to have ongoing memory issues, which I would think would be a liability for a head football coach making millions of dollars for leading one f the highest-profile programs in America.

I guess my biggest take away is this—why would anyone expect Urban Meyer to care about a battered woman, any battered woman?  He’s a college football coach, all he cares about is winning football games.  Oh, I guess for a few weeks each year after the season ends he checks in and makes sure that his wife and kids are still alive, but the rest of the year it’s football.  When he was coaching at Bowling Green in 2001 I’m sure his first thought upon hearing about the World Trade Center attack was, “I hope this won’t distract the team . . . .”

There is an old saying, “Never try and teach a pig to sing; you’ll frustrate yourself and annoy the pig.”  Trying to teach Urban Meyer to tell the truth, care about other people, and not hire people who beat their wives is trying to teach a pig to sing.  The bottom line he’ll do whatever he has to (within the parameters of what he perceives to be “the rules”) to win as many football games as possible.

Monomania is often the key to success for some people.  I knew Tiger Woods was done as a dominant force in golf when I heard him say that before his little accident, if he had a choice between hitting a bucket of balls or having dinner with his kids he’d hit the balls, but now he’d stop and have dinner with his kids.  Hitting those extra balls was one thing that gave him an edge over those less devoted parents who went home to read to their kids before tucking them in.  You know, the losers.

Urban Meyer wants to win; so does Nick Saban, Bill Belichick, and for that matter Hue Jackson of the Browns (he’s just not as good as them).  I am not saying Meyer should be absolved of responsibility for not taking the situation of his assistant coach’s wife more seriously; I am saying that people should not be shocked that he doesn’t and shouldn’t expect him to behave differently.  If Urban Meyer ever made looking into domestic abuse allegations regarding his staff a priority, Ohio State would fall out of the Top 25 on the NCAA rankings.

So stop being outraged about Urban Meyer’s three game suspension and his lack of contrition over the events that occurred.  Even if he was forced to go through some sort of “sensitivity training” he’d come out the other end as the same man he was went he went in, namely a highly successful football coach whose main priority is to win games this year and recruit excellent players for next year.  Nothing else will ever matter to him, not global warming, not the plight of indigenous peoples in Southeast Asia, not the prevalence of domestic abuse in America. 

That pig will never belt out a chorus of American Pie no matter how much you try to teach it.