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.

End the beanball wars

There is one argument that I hate more than any other, and that is justifying some policy just because of “tradition.”  The name of the football team in Washington is obviously racist, yet the owner and thousands (millions?) of fans refuse to change it because of tradition.  Homophobes hide behind religion to mask their bigotry, all the while saying they support “traditional” families.  The argument is basically that just because were done a certain way yesterday, they should be done the same way today despite all of the ways the world has changed since yesterday.

Baseball, the sport steeped in the greatest amount of tradition, is the one most susceptible to accepting tradition as an excuse for idiocy. For 150 years batters have been commanded to stoically trot around the bases after a home run, lest they be found guilty of “showing up” the pitcher.  It used to be even worse—I remember when a player would hit a home run, and then next batter would inevitably get plunked.  The pitcher had to punish the next batter because the previous batter had somehow insulted the pitcher by doing his job.  Hey, pitcher, you don’t want to be “shown up”?  make better pitches.

I also recall the furor when a Mets rookie named Lastings Milledge came up in 2006 at hit his first home run in his home ballpark, and he high fived fans in the stands as he went to his position in right field. “That young man will learn how to play the game right,” intoned the announcer, who couldn’t have been more disgusted by this spontaneous outpouring of exuberance if it had included photos of Roseanne Barr naked.

Things may be on the verge of changing.  Reining AL MVP Josh Donaldson hit a home run against the Minnesota Twins.  Obviously this was an insult to pitcher Phil Hughes, who greeted Donaldson with an extremely inside pitch in his next at bat.  Hughes next pitch was behind Donaldson, but plate umpire Ripperger didn’t even issue a warning to Hughes.  Donaldson’s manager John Gibbons came out f the dugout to complain and was ejected for his efforts.

Maybe, you say, Hughes wasn’t deliberately throwing at Donaldson. Maybe the two pitches just “got away” from Hughes.  Right.  Hughes is a professional pitcher, someone who makes his living throwing a baseball accurately, but after Donaldson hit a home run off of him he threw a pitch four feet off the plate behind Donaldson?  I’ve heard of nibbling at the corners, but missing a target by four feet is more than a little “off.”

Of course the Blue Jays aren’t innocent; later in the game they hit Minnesota catcher Kurt Suzuki in the bottom of the inning.  That’s always the way with these beanball wars; you always HAVE to retaliate.  The logic is this: if I throw at you, you will be intimidated, but if you throw at me, I’ll retaliate.  It never occurs to anyone that if they would retaliate if they were thrown at, then the other team will retaliate when THEY are thrown at.

A baseball is a weapon. Using a weapon against another person is wrong.  If you want some idea of what a baseball can do when thrown, look at what happened to pitcher Ryan Vogelsong when he was hit by a pitch (not intentionally).  Okay, pitchers want the inside part of the plate, but Hughes apparently wanted the batter’s box to count as a strike zone.

If pitchers insist on enforcing “the code” and throwing at players who run out a home run too slowly, or too quickly, or admire their homers for too long, or not long enough, then they deserve to have the inside part f the plate taken away from them by the umps.  Managers ordering retaliatory plunkings should be summarily ejected. 

I know there was one umpire who didn’t believe in enforcing the rule to eject pitchers who “intentionally” threw at batters because, he said, how could I possibly read the pitcher’s mind? The rule says “intentionally” so it must assume it is possible to infer intent.  Did the batter homer in the previous at bat?  Did the prior batter homer?  Was one of the pitcher’s teammates hit by a pitch after homering?  It isn’t rocket science.  And if occasionally a pitcher is ejected for a pitch that did get away from him, well, he should be a good enough pitcher not to let that happen.

It is time to end the beanball culture in baseball.  Maybe pitchers used to know how to throw at batters, hitting them with a change up near the rump, but today’s pitchers do seem to have less control; throwing behind a batter is extremely dangerous (batters tend to instinctively back up when they see a pitch coming inside).  Knock off the macho posturing and play ball.

TV Review--Houdini & Doyle

TV Review—Houdini and Doyle

When a TV show is an unexpected hit, there is a rush to replicate it.  Lost triggered a deluge of TV shows with confounding mysteries and vaguely sci-fi happenings, and they all had one thing in common; they failed rapidly.

The X-Files debuted 23 years ago, and its basic premise—two investigators, one a Believer, one a skeptic—still shows up in the DNA of series hoping to mine the same vein that Chris Carter has been milking for 23 years (and is still milking, if the moderate success of the six-episode X-Files arc is any indication).

The latest is a Fox series called Houdini and Doyle, and yes, that is Harry Houdini and Arthur Conan Doyle.  The latest manifestation of the “quirky companion to law enforcement” meme has well-known debunker Houdini teaming with spiritualist Doyle to investigate crimes dealing with the supernatural.  They are aided by a female constable who is so integral to the plot that I shan’t mention her again in this review.

Houdini and Doyle fails on a number of levels, but let’s start with casting.  Steven Mangan plays Doyle with all the seriousness of a music hall comic.  He completely lacks the gravitas necessary to play the creator of Sherlock Holmes, who was as quick witted as Holmes and pompous enough to think he could kill off Holmes to concentrate on “serious” writing.  The same problem plagues Michael Weston, a fine actor in small roles who can hardly fill Houdini’s larger than life persona.  Oscar winner Adrian Brody did a much better job playing Houdini in a TV movie last year; it is probably unfair to compare character actor Weston to an Academy Award winner, but that’s what happens when you take the role.

The script is confusing, hemmed in between having to appear to be a crime with supernatural elements to draw Doyle’s attention, while being ultimately mundane to satisfy Houdini’s belief.  A medium gives Doyle a clue that seems to be legitimate, but then later she is shown to be a fraud.  A ghostly apparition appears to Doyle, but it’s revealed to be Houdini’s assistant on a wire even though the ghost was clearly transparent.  It all makes very little sense. 

Better examples of mystery TV shows set in the same era abound, from the BBC’s Ripper Street (apparently resurrected from cancellation) and CBC’s Murdoch Mysteries, about to enter its tenth season.  These shows try to recreate the Victorian era; Houdini and Doyle are content to put modern characters in funny clothes and have them speak the occasional aphorism that sounds olde-timey.

I cut pilot episodes a lot of slack, but I don’t foresee Houdini and Doyle getting much better.  As someone once said (I can’t remember who), casting is the one mistake you can’t fix in post-production.  Mangan and Weston are both terribly wrong for their roles, and the fact that the roles are written as a modern buddy comedy with lots of quips and banter just makes it worse.  As we enter the doldrums of summer, I may give some more episodes a try just because, well, Lucifer is off until next season.  When you make Lucifer look good by comparison, your TV show is not long for this world.

A Risky Draft for the Rams and Eagles

There is a line from the move Citizen Kane (most of life’s situation can be summarized by a line from Citizen Kane) where someone says a news story isn’t worthy of a banner headline, and Kane replies, “If the headline is big enough, it makes the news big enough.”  The Los Angeles Rams and Philadelphia Eagles are apparently applying this philosophy to quarterbacks—if you pick someone at number one or number two in the draft, that MAKES them deserve a number one (or number two) pick.

Supposedly The Rams and the Eagles expended a truckload of draft picks in order to draft Carson Wentz of North Dakota State and Jared Goff of Cal with the first two picks of the NFL draft.  This despite the fact that ESPN rates both prospects outside of the top ten in potential.  Both the Rams and the Eagles apparently believe that taking Wentz or Goff at the top of the draft will magically turn a moderate pro prospect into another Peyton Manning or Andrew Luck.

First of all, prospects who WERE in the top two often turn out to be busts; exhibit A is Ryan Leaf.  At the end of the college season neither Wentz nor Goff were considered top flight talent; neither was invited to the Heisman Award ceremony, and neither competed for the national championship.  But now two teams desperate for a quarterback have traded away their futures on these two athletes being able to not only succeed in the NFL, but succeed immediately despite never working with a pro-style offence.

This is logic born of desperation.  The Denver Broncos proved you really don’t need a quarterback to win it all in the NFL (a lawn gnome could have played as well as Manning did in the Super Bowl), but the QB is still the most important cog in any NFL machine.  If you can’t acquire one through free agency, the only other avenue is the draft.  But what do you do if there is no quarterback project in the draft?  Instead of taking a QB prospect with the 15^th pick, at which point Goff might have been available according to ESPN, the Rams gave a bunch of picks to the Titans and now will draft Wentz or Goff number one. 

This is an example of what economists call the “greater fool” theory.  In some economics experiments, people will bid more than a dollar for the right to own a dollar, if they believe there is a bigger fool than them who will bid even more.  The Rams believed someone else (the Eagles) would take Goff or Wentz too high, and then neither would be available at 15, so they traded to be number one.  This proves that they are an even bigger fool than the team that considered taking Goff in the top ten.

Goff was not a terribly successful QB at Cal, and North Dakota State didn’t exactly play Notre Dame or Alabama.  Yet these two quarterbacks will be drafted one and two and be asked to immediately step in and lead an NFL team to a winning record.  Both Marcus Mariota and Jameis Winston, two QBs who earned the #1 and 32 draft slots, struggled to adapt to the NFL, so how will two supposedly less qualified QBs adapt?

And this is coming at a time when Sports Illustrated has run a couple of pieces on why there is a chasm between the college game and the pros.  Could Wentz really run a wide open offense at North Dakota State (school motto: yes, we are part of America) and then learn to run a complex pro-style system?  If he was the 12^th pick in the draft and had time to learn the system, that would be one thing; to pick him #1 and let him start on day one, that would be a huge set of baggage for him to carry.

Okay, stranger things have happened.  A gangly back up QB from Michigan State drafted in the sixth round is now considered one of the best QBs of all time.  But as Damon Runyon warned, “Remember, the battle is not always to the strongest, nor the race to the swiftest; but that’s the way to bet.” 

The Cleveland Browns, surprisingly, made a smart choice to trade away their #2 pick.  They need everything, so multiple picks will help.  And if you are going to take a chance on Robert Griffin III as a free agent, there is no need for a backup plan; if he succeeds, you don’t need a QB, but if he fails you’ve got a high draft pick in next year’s draft.  If this is Hue Jackson’s influence, then he just may be the coach to turn the Browns around.

Goff and Wentz may prove worthy of their #1 and #2 draft statuses.  One or the other or both may show un-demonstrated skill at checking off pass rotations or reading NFL defenses.  But neither has done so yet.  And doing it with the burden of expectations that come with a high draft pick for a quarterback?  That has crushed more promising prospects (seriously, you do remember Ryan Leaf, right?).  There haven’t been many of these mega-deals to move up to the top of the draft, mainly because they almost always help the team collecting the draft picks.  It will probably be a frustrating, but exciting, season for the Rams and the Eagles.

The many Mr. Holmes

It has always fascinated me that two of the most popular characters in popular fiction are Sherlock Holmes and Mr. Spock.  Both are idolized for their ability to perform logical analysis, yet this is a capacity every human being has, save for the mentally ill and the brain damaged.  It’s as if the world decided to embrace a superhero whose superpower was to distinguish right from left.

The character of Sherlock Holmes was created nearly 130 years ago in 1887 with the publication of A Study in Scarlet.  The next story, The Sign of Four, began the series in earnest and also displayed Arthur Conan Doyle’s incredible laziness as to details—he has Watson say he was shot in the shoulder during the Afghan campaign in A Study in Scarlet, but in the leg in the sequel.  Watson says Holmes knows nothing of philosophy, then later says Holmes discussed current philosophers like an expert.  The mistakes became more egregious when Doyle had resurrected Holmes after his attempt to kill him off failed, and he resigned himself to cranking out Holmes tales for the money.

There are currently two television series with Sherlock Holmes as a character, the CBS show Elementary with Johnny Lee Miller as Holmes and Lucy Liu as undoubtedly the most attractive Dr. Watson ever, and the BBC series Sherlock with Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman as Watson.  Both series have proven quite popular, and the BBC version has won several Emmy awards.  But how accurate to the original text are the remakes?

The quick answer is, not very.  In both series Holmes is portrayed as misanthropic, ill-mannered, curt, insulting, and contemptuous of nearly everyone.  In Elementary his addiction to cocaine has Holmes label himself as an addict; he comes into contact with Watson when she is hired to be his “sober companion.”  The BBC production has not focused on his drug use, but in several episodes Holmes refers to himself as “a high-functioning sociopath” (in one episode he makes this declaration immediately before he shoots someone on the head). 

A reading of the original canon reveals a completely different Holmes.  Yes, he is sometimes smug, but mostly at the incompetence of Scotland Yard’s Lestrade and not at his own superiority.  He is unfailingly polite, solicitous of his clients, and is able to extract information from strangers through flattery or subtle cajoling.  His drug use is only mentioned in passing, and then rather sparingly.

Are these differences wrought by those updating the series to reflect modern society?  Cocaine was legal and seen as medicinal in 1880’s London; would Holmes today indulge in an illegal narcotic today, as he does in Elementary, or would he find a more socially acceptable outlet for his addictive personality, as Holmes seems to do in Sherlock?  For the definitive discussion of Holmes’ drug use, see the wonderful film “The Seven Percent Solution” written by Nicholas Meyer.

Is Holmes abrasive personality in the two current TV shows a commentary that we live in a time that is far less civil than 1890’s London?  Is the Holmes of Elementary and Sherlock more flippant with insults because in these days being insulting is such socially acceptable behavior that Presidential candidates can trade venom that would give Don Rickles pause?  Only the showrunners can say how much they have deliberately altered the character to fit in with modern society.

Some of the changes made for the TV shows are obvious, Watson being a woman being one of the slightly more noticeable changes in Elementary (interestingly, there is no sexual subtext in Elementary while over on Sherlock everyone assumes Holmes and Watson are gay).  Other changes may be deliberate, while others may be due to an unfamiliarity with the original canon.  Over the years Holmes’ personality has steadily coarsened; Basil Rathbone’s portrayal was polite but icy, while Jeremy Brett (the definitive interpretation, I believe) was more aloof and detached than the fictive original.  Portrayals in individual movies have tended to use a Holmes that is a carbon copy of a carbon copy until little of the original is left except his logic and his inhumanity.

I have watched the four seasons of Elementary, but I am becoming increasingly tired of Johnny Lee Miller (a wonderful actor who should have received an Emmy nomination for his work by now) presenting Holmes as a series of tics and idiosyncrasies that increasingly bear little resemblance to the eminently civilized sleuth in the books.  Sherlock is one of the finest shows being produced, and count me among the frustrated that are unhappy that Cumberbatch and Freeman are so popular that this year they only had time to make a single episode.  Of course, if they made more episodes, the quality would diminish. 

Elementary and Sherlock have their place, but for a representation of Holmes closer to the original you have to stick with the Jeremy Brett version.  Sherlock showrunner Stephen Moffet is a genius, but his Holmes is increasingly similar to the central character on Doctor Who, another show he was the showrunner for.  Better yet, I am re-reading the original canon.  Doyle really was a masterful storyteller, and there is no substitute for going back to the original source.

Fridays just got more Grimmer

Success in the television industry is a mercurial thing.  Sometimes a show can look like it will run for decades, but it is cancelled after 12 episodes (although Firefly is more prominent now in popular culture than when it was on TV in 2002).  Other times, a show about a bunch of sots in a bar in Boston (Cheers), or in Philadelphia (It’s Always Sunny) will debut with abysmal ratings and end up running for years.  You never now.

Five years ago NBC debuted an unpromising horror show from a former writer f Buffy the Vampire Slayer and gave it the Friday Night Death slot. The show had a clever premise, but a lead actor who was as uncharismatic as they come, a lead actress who was even blander, a backstory that wasn’t fully thought out, and they never did figure out what to do for the opening credits.  But here we are five years later and Grimm is being renewed for a sixth season.

When Grimm started it had two things going for it: a premise that put a modern spin on ancient fairy tales, and Silas Weir Mitchell, the sidekick Monroe who was a Blutbaden, a sort of wolf that looked human.  David Giuntoli, the titular Grimm who was a Portland detective by day and slayer, er, killer of monsters by night, was a dull character with a dull partner (Russell Hornsby) and a dull live in girlfriend (Bitsie Tulloch).  Mitchell was the only actor able to show any kind of emotion when strange things started happening and dead bodies started piling up.  The relationship between Giuntoli’s Nick Burkhardt and Tulloch’s Juliet Silverton (I didn’t know her last name until I looked it up just now) bugged me a lot; they were the typical TV couple who had absolutely nothing in common except they were both good looking, yet we were supposed to accept on faith that they were deeply in love.

Through the first two years of Grimm I longed to give the creators some advice, especially David Greenwalt who had worked on Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel.  I wanted to tell him that the secret to Buffy’s success was that the audience loved Buffy and didn’t just want her not to die, but to be happy, have a boyfriend, and enjoy herself.  Nick Burkhardt wasn’t given enough personality to root for.  The scripts were often clever, but while the monsters were excellent the human element was missing.

Grimm made some smart decisions.  The backstory involving some strange Middle European royalty made the stakes much larger, and also integrated Nick’s police captain (Sasha Roiz) to a greater extent.  The belated decision to let police officer Drew Wu (Reggie Lee) (possibly the worst character name in history) in on Nick’s secret life paid huge dividends.  And if you thought they couldn’t write romance, they added a love interest for Monroe (Bree Turner’s Rosalee) with whom he had real chemistry.  The stories were less about a case of the week and more about the maneuverings of secret societies on a global scale.  Tulloch was dispatched (temporarily) and replaced with long time guest star Clare Coffee, who’s character had a child with both Nick and Nick’s captain (don’t ask about the details).

Grimm still isn’t close to the Buffy/Angel comparisons in aspires to.  But the plotting has become faster paced, the characters deeper, and the monsters more imaginative.  However, the is still not much of an emotional connection with Nick, despite him now having a child and a much more promising relationship.  Nick is a homicide detective but relies on Monroe and Rosalee’s help far too frequently to solve his cases; just once I’d like to see Monroe look at his caller ID and ignore Nick’s call.

Grimm just passed its 100^th episode threshold, which is a milestone in television. An additional season makes it one of the longer running fantasy/horror shows in television history.  Not bad for a clever little show that never figured out how to do opening credits.