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Bruins-Rangers: A Curious Rivalry Renewed

Bruins-Rangers: A Curious Rivalry Renewed

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The Boston-New York sporting rivalry, one-sided though it often is (Hub fans invariably care more about beating anything NYC than the other way around), has traditionally taken a backseat on ice. Still, it beggars belief that Bruins v. Rangers — a battle of Original Sixers separated by just 200 miles — has become such a non-entity, largely because the two combatants have not played a single playoff series since 1973, despite having always competed together in the Eastern Conference, or some randomly named facsimile thereof.

That streak ends Thursday night with Game 1 of the NHL’s Eastern Semifinals at the TD Banknorth Garden, and perhaps it will light a fire going forward. If nothing else, it will serve as a stirring flashback for hockey fans of my vintage who remember a time when this was a proper rivalry and home teams wore dark uniforms in their own barn — a practice that had long prevailed back in the day, was abandoned by the NHL in the mid-1970s, but has recently been restored.

The Bruins’ blood rivals are, of course, the Canadiens, whose decades-long torture of Boston peaked just as the Rangers rivalry fell away, in the late 1970s. Those Montreal teams were all-timers, star-studded winners of four straight Stanley Cups (1976-79). The B’s, though very good throughout the ‘70s, simply could not slay them. Even in their heyday, when they netted a pair of Cups, in 1970 and ‘72, the Bruins were never obliged to beat the Canadiens in a playoff series.

Montreal had many rivals during that period, and it only stoked Boston passions further that peut-être Les Canadiens didn’t care that much about beating the Bruins. Today, recent form and some incendiary incidents of thuggery have perhaps stirred in Montreal fans a hatred that matches that of Bruins Nation.

[Indeed, much of Canada has every right to loathe the current B’s following their organ-removing defeats of heavily favored Vancouver in the 2011 Stanley Cup Finals, and Monday’s unlikely Game 7 dispatch of Toronto’s Maple Leafs, in overtime — the Bruins had trailed 4-1, with just 10 minutes remaining. No Canada-based club has won the Cup since 1993, a fact that continues to gall hockey purists (read: 90 percent of the population) north of the border. Maybe derision of the current Bruins can be that one elusive thing all of Canada can agree upon…]

The Bruins of the early 1970s were not so villainous. They were Big and Bad, in an admirable way, and the Rangers — more of a finesse team, built on the refined skills of Rod Gilbert, Jean Ratelle, Brad Park and Vic Hadfield — proved compelling foils. Boston beat them to win the Cup in 1972. Their last playoff meeting was a Ranger victory, the 1973 conference semifinals. As a young Bostonian, I vividly remember resenting the Rangers for unseating the defending Cup champions, a loss that kicked off one of the most frustrating runs of near misses in hockey history. (Boston would lose the 1974 Cup final to Philly before dropping a dizzying succession of playoff series to Montreal, each one more gut-wrenching than the last.)

But any resentment of the Rangers didn’t last.

Terry O’Reilly and his crew famously went into the stands at Madison Square Garden to punch up some Rangers fans in December 1979, but the lack of playoff confrontation — who could imagine it would last fully four decades? — effectively defused the rivalry. The 1975 and 1976 trades that shipped Phil Esposito, Ken Hodge and Carol Vadnais to New York, in exchange for Ratelle, Park and “Nifty” Rick Middleton, further blurred the line between bitter enemy and mere foe.

Montreal became the fixation.

It’s funny how that works: The best rivalries become a sort of long-term competitive obsession, to the exclusion of teams that might well be torturing or otherwise beating you in the moment. Boston endured 39 years between titles (1972-2011), and in that seemingly interminable span they were beaten back by several great teams of longstanding: the Islanders of the early 1980s, Gretzky’s Edmonton Oilers… Yet we Bruins Fans never stopped hating on the Canadiens exclusively.

[Another great piece of nostalgia prompted by this year’s playoffs: the return of the Islanders after a long post-season absence. Just seeing their uniforms, admirably unchanged from the glory days, stirred strong memories of Bossy, Gillies, Trottier, Nystrom, Smith and Resch. The Nassau County Coliseum — scene of so many vintage Bruins telecasts delivered via rabbit ears and Channel 38 — remains impossibly small, dark and retro. Their current star, John Taveras, wears no. 91 and, for a brief moment during their first-round loss to the mighty Penguins, I mistook him for Butch Goring…]

The Rangers famously went 54 years without a Stanley Cup before winning one in 1994 (deploying a goodly number of former Oilers, it must be said), and I’ve no idea whether Ranger fans brought with them on that long and painful journey a particular rival, or developed one. Maybe, for a time, it was the Islanders. Maybe it has become the Washington Capitals, whom the Rangers seem to have faced, in the playoffs, every year for the last two decades (though it’s hard to develop a rivalry with a team that has never won anything, ever).

If it’s been the Bruins all along, I feel sorry for them, because we never really noticed.

FootGolf? Yes, FootGolf. Where Do I Sign…

FootGolf? Yes, FootGolf. Where Do I Sign…

 

Here’s all I have to say about the advent of FootGolf: “It’s about freakin’ time.” Anything that essentially combines my two favorite participatory sports — and knee-high argyle socks — has my full attention and support.

I knew there was something out there like this, but until I read this piece, I had no idea it was so well developed, and so intrinsically awesome. As a devotee of disc golf, I embrace the game in all its alternative forms. But this one takes it to a new level. There’s even a rule book, to be consulted in the event one’s approach hits the pin and ricochets backward into a lake. (Of course, if that should happen, the ball would be floating on the surface and could presumably be retrieved, prior to a legal drop).

Soccer and golf have a long and distinguished history together. There’s the dreaded foot wedge, of course. And there was that time Alan Shearer played through our group at Gleneagles. I’d love to see him hole out with a proper foot wedge and run the length of the hole with his signature hand held high.

Check out more information here. There’s apparently a FootGolf facility in Las Vegas, but that’s awfully far away. If anyone out there knows where this activity can be pursued here in New England, I’m all ears. After all, there was a FootGolf World Cup held in Hungary in 2012. I now have my sights set on 2016.

With Paterno book due in August, A Question Nags

With Paterno book due in August, A Question Nags

One thing’s for sure with the Joe Paterno/Jerry Sandusky/Penn State scandal-saga, which re-emerged to dominate headlines this week upon release of Louis Freeh’s damning report: I’m glad Jerome Carboni didn’t live to see it. If the father of my college housemate, Dennis Carboni, had not passed away a few years ago, this Paterno debacle would surely have killed him.

The Carbonis were a hardcore football family and though it hailed from Meriden, Conn., hundreds of miles from Happy Valley, Mr. Carboni worshipped Joe Paterno and Penn State football. Dennis hinted to me that it might have had something to do with a shared Italian-American heritage, but let’s be honest: There was a lot for a 70something football fan to admire in the way Paterno conducted his affairs at Penn State. The perceived emphasis on academics. The pointedly unflashy blue-and-white uniforms. The long tenure. The absence of scandal.

Joe Posnanski is 50something, but he was clearly similarly drawn to this Paterno story-myth. Starting in early 2011, Posnanski, then a Sports Illustrated baseball writer, went so far as to secure access to Paterno and his family, relocate to State College, Pa., and set about researching a biography. The idea, as detailed in his own book proposal, was to “tell the remarkable story about a man who could have been anything but decided that the best way he could help change America was one college football player at a time.”

Like Jerome Carboni, Joe Posnanski was a true believer.

The contents of this eagerly awaited book — scheduled for release in August — will be all the more anticipated for the author’s pre-publication seclusion. Posnanski has said or written next to nothing about the project since going underground shortly after the scandal broke in November 2011, other than to acknowledge the obvious: The tenor of said book has changed dramatically. He’s also been under the gun; Simon and Schuster moved up publication of the book some 10 months to cash in on the salacious topicality of the subject. (Since leaving SI to write it, Posnanski has found time to partner with Major League Baseball on a web venture that involves USA Today, apparently).

I have nothing against Joe Posnanski, but I’ve read pretty much everything I can find online about his peculiar role in this ongoing drama (which, at the risk of sounding melodramatic, certainly qualifies as tragic), and nowhere does Posnanski offer, nor does any journalist care to ask, the nagging question here: What did Joe know and when did he know it?

I wrote about this in November 2011. With every passing day, it gets harder to believe that a professional biographer was ensconced in State College doing research for months ahead of November 2011, and never got any wind of the allegations against Sandusky. People in the Penn State community knew what was going down. Janitors. Administrators. Journalists. Grand juries, the likes of which leveled the charges against Jerry Sandusky back in November, don’t get called or conducted in a vacuum. Word gets around. Consider all of Sandusky’s alleged victims across the community… You’re telling me they were all so cowed by Paterno, so deludedly intent on avoiding damage to the school’s football “brand”, that no one would have taken Posnanski aside and said, “You should read what this guy Mark Madden’s been writing in the Beaver County Times”? A conversation like this one and a single Google search would have revealed to Posnanski this kernel.

Maybe these sources were indeed too intimidated to have that conversation with an SI reporter on book leave. Freeh’s report indicates that janitors in the locker rooms witnessed many damning things but never reported them, so fearful they were for their jobs. That’s logical, that Paterno would wield enough power to deter a janitor from reporting a child rape in a Penn State locker-room shower. And, as we’ve read in Freeh’s report, Paterno did know about what had happened and moved concertedly with administrators to keep it hidden.

It’s complicated, but Posnanski is damned if he did and damned if he didn’t. If he knew something and sat on it, yikes… If he didn’t know anything, what sort of research was he doing all through 2011? A lot of sitting around the kitchen table with Joe Paterno, apparently.

The latter is certainly less damning on the ethical scale. There’s no moral lapse in setting out to write a sports hagiography; they are written all too frequently. But if he was truly caught unawares, the surface nature of Posnanski’s research becomes embarrassingly clear when we consider the massive powder keg he failed to notice.

Celts v. Heat: Plenty of Glamour and a Few Grudges

Celts v. Heat: Plenty of Glamour and a Few Grudges

Welcome back to Glamour Profession, the NBA podcast here at halphillips.net. Last year at about this time, the Celtics faced off with the Heat in Game 5 of their second-round playoff series, trailing 3 games to 1. Your pod host, Hal Phillips, was in New Zealand. Heading out to play the back nine at Kauri Cliffs Golf Club, some 17 hours ahead of Eastern Standard time, he checked the Game 5 score in the clubhouse — Boston led Miami by 8 with 2 plus minutes remaining. Standing over his approach on no. 10, his playing partner consulted the Blackberry and reported the game and series were over — the Celts having failed to score in those last 2 minutes. Well, here we are again, this time in the Eastern Conference finals. Both teams are beat up, short-handed by major injuries and seemingly inferior to either team contesting the Western Conference Finals, San Antonio and Oklahoma City. We caught up with the GP’s resident sage, Jammin’ Jim Jackson, at halftime of Sunday night’s Spurs-Thunder game to discuss that match-up and the pending Heat-Celtics series, which kicks off Monday night.

One Week: To Restore the NFL’s Competitive Morality
12 41 2 Get Sports Alerts Sign Up Submit this story Ines Sainz, the Azteca reporter who was allegedly harassed last summer while interviewing Mark Sanchez at a New York Jets practice, returned to cover Super Bowl XLV at Tuesday's media day in Dallas.

One Week: To Restore the NFL’s Competitive Morality

Patriots practice squad player Malcolm Williams high-fives a Mexican TV reporter after taping a vital interview on Tuesday.

Settle down, people. Thank you. Let’s get started, shall we?

Good morning, and welcome to this year’s Pre-Super Bowl meeting of the Bert Bell Memorial Support Group. Yes, it’s been a long season in many respects but we’re almost there! [Half-hearted applause] With each other’s help, we can survive another NFL season with our families and psyches in tact. My name is Rudy, and I’ll be your enabler this morning.

I can see we have some unfamiliar faces this year. Great to see you; you’re welcome here. Are there any questions? … Yes, you can leave that Colts paraphernalia in the coat check room… Okay, sure: The trash can is down the hall, around the corner… No, but that’s an excellent question: This is not an NFL-sanctioned meeting. This is important people, so listen up: Our group is not affiliated with the league office in any way.

This isn’t about the league, people; it’s about you. As we are each week during the NFL season, we’re here for your benefit. The fans’ benefit…

We have a busy morning planned. Today we’re going to discuss chip-to-dip ratios and the merits of large-screen television rentals. Those will be round-table discussions. We’ve also set aside some time for role-playing; our topic this week is, “Can I bring my wife? No really, I’m serious.”

But before we get started, we have a special guest speaker. I’d like to introduce Hal Phillips; he’s vice president pro tem of SWACO, Sports Writers Against Corporate Omnipotence, and he’s here to talk about scheduling.

Mr. Phillips?

[Light applause]

“Thanks, Rudy. Nice to see you back in football, putting that Jesuit education to good use… Good morning, football fans.”

GOOD MORNING, MR. PHILLIPS.

“Before I get started, I want you to know that we at SWACO are just like you. We love football and that’s why we want you to look back — back to January 2000, when the NFL in its momentary wisdom chose to conduct the Super Bowl exactly one week following its conference title games.

“As you know, the league routinely extends the period between its  conference championships and Super Sunday to a full fortnight. But that year, 2000, was different, and look at the results: The game itself was superb, a last-second tackle at the goal-line to preserve a 23-16 Ram victory over the Titants — not the anti-climactic blowouts we’ve come to expect.

“Further, the ‘short’ week automatically reduced the drone of media hype by half, leaving in its place actual anticipation for the game itself. Imagine that! Less insipid pre-Super Bowl prattle AND a competitive championship game that fits into the time-honored scheduling parameters to which pro football teams have adhered for 80 years.

“Simply put, football enthusiasts — even those who, like you, don’t have meaningful lives outside of football — don’t need two weeks of pre-Super Bowl ‘coverage’. The litany of reports (‘on location’, where desperate pundits literally scrounge for meaningful ‘news’) is nauseating enough after three or four days. Two weeks of this piffle is completely over the top. We at SWACO further believe that if football fans, fresh off 21 days of fawning playoff coverage, aren’t by then familiar with the respective Super Bowl combatants, surely they never will be.

“Make no mistake: This extra week isn’t there for teams to ‘get healthy’. It isn’t there because the two teams couldn’t fully adjust to the gravity of their Super Bowl moment in a single week.

“No. The extra week is there so the NFL’s corporate partners will have 7 additional days to foist their products upon us, via television, radio, web and the print press. [Circumspect murmurs float through the crowd]

“To support the thousands of Super Bowl-oriented advertisements, to synergize with the ubiquitous and tedious Super Bowl contests (which are essentially corporate fronts for still more advertisements), media outlets are obliged by their corporate sugar daddies to ‘preview’ and analyze this single football game for two solid weeks.

“This sort of rehash, while unnecessary and invariably annoying, is obligatory during the week directly leading up to the Super Bowl. We at SWACO understand and accept this. However, we feel it’s craven and superfluous to jam this piffle down anyone’s throat a full 12 days before kickoff.

“Even more important, however, we at SWACO believe the two-week break is competitively amoral. Yes, you heard me right. Pro football games aren’t meant to be played every other week; they’re meant to be played on consecutive Sundays, one after another, until a champion is crowned.

“Let’s be very clear about this: Professional football is predicated entirely on a team’s ability to prepare for an opponent — physically, mentally and strategically — in one week’s time. Bye weeks notwithstanding, regular-season records, playoff position and playoff qualification itself are determined on the sole basis of this 7-day framework.

“To throw it out the window for the Super Bowl — the most important game of the season — perverts the entire process.

“Think about it: The two-week layoff is one reason Super Bowls are traditionally lopsided, mind-numbing affairs. It’s a pretty simple equation: Give a superior team two weeks to prepare and the possibility of a walkover is only enhanced.

“Keep it to a week and anything can happen.

“Exhibit A: The absorbing Rams-Titans game in 2000.

“Exhibit B: The previous Super Bowl to be contested just one week after the respective conference championships — the 1990 affair, when the Giants claimed a similarly thrilling 20-19 victory over the Bills.

“Indeed, the Super Bowl’s average margin of victory when employing a two-week layoff is 17 points; with a week’s break, the average margin is a mere 7 points. Isn’t that what we want? A game where the conclusion isn’t forgone? A game contested in the same way as those preceding it, under the same competitive strictures? Was the Giants’ win over the Cowboys on the last game of the regular season this year any less important, in the great scheme of things, than this Super Bowl? The Giants wouldn’t be in Indianapolis right now if it weren’t. That game was contested with a week’s preparation. Why should the Super Bowl be any different?

“Corporate America has already perverted football in too many ways to count. Witness the plethora of mandatory television time-outs, the most offensive being those book-end commercial breaks following points after touchdown. You know the ones I mean: the PAT, three minutes of ads, the kick-off, then three more minutes of ads. The new kickoff-from-the-40 rule results in so many touchbacks, rarely does the return even represent actual game content. It’s outrageous!

“Citizens: You may think this policy is set in stone, but it’s not — not if we act immediately, with purpose, together. The sanctity of the Super Bowl depends on it.

“Thank you.”

The NFL’s New Rules re. Playoff OT: Safety First?

The NFL’s New Rules re. Playoff OT: Safety First?

So, I’ve got a question: Following a week when one team lost 24-2, and another ended abruptly under new playoff OT rules, what happens when an NFL playoff game goes into overtime and, under these new rules, an opening possession results in a safety?

We were informed, as OT loomed in Denver on Sunday, that the only thing that could end the playoff game without both teams getting the chance to possess the ball was a touchdown on the opening possession. However, it seems to me that a safety on that first possession should also end the contest. Indeed, it must end it, by my reckoning.

We all got a glimpse of the new rules governing OT during the Broncos’ Wild Card victory over Pittsburgh on Sunday.

In short, the old system had been pure sudden death: If you won the toss, got the ball, moved into field goal range and made said kick, the game was over. The first score of any kind won the game, in other words.

The new rules were devised to address what was believed to be an unfairness: the idea that your season could be ended, by an opposing field-goal kicker, in overtime, without your team ever having touched the ball. The new system says:

•  if you win the toss and score a field goal, the other team gets the ball and has a chance to tie with a field goal — in which case the game proceeds in pure sudden-death fashion from the moment the second field goal is kicked — or win the game with a touchdown.

• if you win the toss and fail to score, the game essentially proceeds in pure sudden-death fashion from the moment you punt or otherwise turn the ball over.

• if you win the toss and score a touchdown the game is over; the other team does not get a chance to respond — as indeed The Steelers did not following the Denver’s 80-yard TD pass on the first play of overtime Sunday.

My question is — and I think the answer is both byzantine and self-evident — what happens if you win the toss and your QB is sacked in the endzone for safety?

It says here that this eventuality must also end the game immediately, under the new rules, as the result of a safety means  the scoring team gets the ball back… right?

 

 

Paterno? Forget that… What did Posnanski know?

Paterno? Forget that… What did Posnanski know?

For a cringe-inducing sports podcast experience without peer, it’s hard to beat Jonah Keri’s Nov. 3 Grantland Network pod with Sports Illustrated writer Joe Posnanski, who, prior to sitting down for this lengthy interview, had apparently spent the last several months ensconced in State College, Pa., researching a biography of Joe Paterno.

Subscribe to the Grantland Network via iTunes, listen to the first 18 minutes of this interview, then note its issue date: Nov. 3, 2011. It was recorded/aired roughly 48 hours before the college football world was rendered slack-jawed and the Fiefdom of Joe utterly torn asunder by revelations that Paterno’s longtime defensive assistant had, before retiring 12 years ago at age 55, allegedly been molesting young boys under the cover of a philanthropic foundation he administered — one that shared facilities with and operated with the imprimatur of JoePa’s storied football program in State College.

By now the details of this story and these allegations are widely known. However, listening to Posnanski on Nov. 3 is nothing short of surreal: One would never have gathered the slightest inkling that any of this was about to come down. Set beside the events of more recent days, the contrasts and ironies of this interview are myriad, stunning and puzzling.

No one can forecast the future, of course. On Nov. 3, 2011, the story had not yet been broken nationally.

Still, one has to wonder what sort of research Posnanski was doing all that time in State College. These rumors had been circulating in the local press since April 2011, as we’ve since learned, and it seems strange that a writer of Posnanski’s professional standing could immerse himself in Penn State culture and know absolutely nothing about it.

Further questions come thick and fast.

Is this merely an intersection of art and commerce? To be sure, the writer of this sort of book has a stake in building up the subject, not tearing him down. That’s part of the reason he did the interview with Keri, to promote the book. There’s nothing inherently wrong with sports biographies, or promoting them, but it strains credulity that Posnanski could have been researching one while unwittingly sitting atop one of the biggest powder kegs in American sports history.

Forget Paterno. What did the writer know and when did he know it?

Posnanski isn’t saying, not directly. He posted on his SI blog Nov. 8, with the clear implication that he will not be elaborating further. This story “needs time”, he wrote. Two days later, on Nov. 10, he apparently spoke to a Penn State class called “Joe Paterno: Communications and the Media,” during which he had this to say. [This tweet and other’s like them have been scrubbed; here’s a lesson for you journo students out there: always link and reproduce the tweet in the body of your story, for posterity].

For his part, Posnanski is sorta damned if he did know and damned if he didn’t. If he knew anything about what was going down and sat on it — in order to secure continued access to and cooperation from Paterno and Penn State; in order to protect his investment in the book project — it’s not unreasonable to question his ethics.

If he didn’t have a clue, it’s not unreasonable to question his research methodology and motivation.

Journalists don’t like to spell this out, but motivation drives research. It’s perfectly reasonable to expect that an uncritical, hagiographic book on Joe Paterno would never delve deeply or critically enough into the subject to produce revelations like those we’ve seen in the last two weeks.

Some in the Penn State community, some in the local media clearly knew what was going down. Grand Juries aren’t called out of thin air (its report was what busted this story wide open on Nov. 5). Prior to Nov. 5, all but a few locals surely treated this as a highly classified state secret, especially when an SI reporter was in their midst.

Posnanski’s situation would be a lot less complicated if he admitted that it was never his intention to write anything but a puff-piece biography on Paterno. That sort of motivation would explain his never having conducted enough real research to learn of this mess ahead of Nov. 5, 2011. He might simply maintain that he took on this project because he clearly admired Paterno and everything he’d built at Penn State (you can hear this esteem coating everything Posnanski said about the coach, the program, State College and PSU during his pod chat with Keri) and because Paterno would soon be passing Eddie Robinson for the all-time record in Division I college football victories, something that indeed did take place on Oct. 29, 2011 vs. Illinois.

From a sentimental, hagiographic and pecuniary standpoint, this is just the sort of formula around which obsequious sports biographies are routinely written, published and sold. (No one could have dreamed that record-setting victory would be Paterno’s last game as a Penn State employee.)

But that’s not what Posnanski is saying.

In his temporary farewell blog item, Posnanski does not take that tack. He appears determined to portray Paterno as a complicated figure of longstanding — as someone whom people have always simultaneously revered and despised. It was this complicated personality that attracted him, Posnanski writes.

Well, complicated figures have detractors. If Posnanski was motivated by the complicated nature of Joe Paterno’s story, it’s hard to imagine during his long sojourn in State College he didn’t sit down and chat at some point with Mark Madden, the Beaver County Times columnist who has been following this story all along, or simply read Madden’s April 3, 2011 column online. That’s all it would have taken not to have been blindsided by the Nov. 5 Grand Jury report.

For a guy who could be damned either way, there’s a strong likelihood that Posnanski will come out of this smelling like a rose. The terminus of this story is nowhere in sight, but Posnanski will surely be weighing in, eventually, with a book — a very different sort of book than he’d planned, one that stands to be far more prurient, far better promoted, far better read, and far more lucrative than the fawning bit of treacle he was promoting on Jonah Keri’s podcast Nov. 3.

I don’t know what that is, but it ain’t justice.

Born to Run? A ‘This American Life’ Experience

Born to Run? A ‘This American Life’ Experience

The temptation when giving it up for the routinely superb This American Life is to lavish too much praise on Ira Glass. I mean, could he really have purposely, out of sheer genius, slotted the show on Sunday nights when my family (and presumably lots of other families) were driving home from a weekend at their parents’ house, obliging anyone with any sense (and more than an hour to kill) to make some lemonade of the journey by flipping on a show that more or less required one to give himself over to something longterm and really listen? Not hardly. But pretty much everything else about This American Life is, when you had the time to pay attention, consistently quirky and captivating.

I recalled the moment this dynamic became clear to me a few days ago, upon reading Christopher McDougall’s thought-provoking piece, The Once and Future Way to Run”, in the New York Times. The subject here is the contention that early man ran more efficiently than we do today, barefoot, and that modern running technique and athletic footwear have conspired to rob humans of the ability to run long distances, and to do so without injury.

I was sorta surprised the story didn’t cite a 1997 This American Life story, “Running After Antelope,” an amazing tale from Scott Carrier about his efforts to personally prove what was then a new, less accepted anthropological theory: that bipedalism is an adaption for long-distance running, that early man hunted deer and other game, not by throwing spears, but by tracking animals over long distances, essentially running them down, tired and silly — then sticking them with a spear or even a blunt object.

It’s a fascinating topic and this was the episode of TAL that first hooked me. My wife and I sat spellbound, listening ever more absorbedly as we drove north on a darkened Interstate 95, the kids asleep in the backseat. I’ve always been a radio guy, but I’d never heard anything like this — a discursive, dreamy narrative told by a guy, Carrier himself, whose nasal, warbling deadpan was not the sort voice one heard much on the radio, and whose gripping story was equal parts personal quest and anthropological daring.

This is the stuff we’ve come to expect from Ira Glass and TAL, of course. I never manage to make time for the show on Sunday evenings; maybe he wasn’t such a canny scheduler after all. But whenever I do make that time, I am rewarded. Whatever you do, whatever you think of my observations or me, listen to “Running After Antelope.” It’s a mind bender.

Insomniacs Take Heed: Must-See Rugby This Weekend

Insomniacs Take Heed: Must-See Rugby This Weekend

Full-throated Pumas belt out the Argentine national anthem.

I’m just back from Asia where the Rugby World Cup was televised live, every afternoon, via the most basic hotel cable packages, in rugby hotbeds like Ho Chi Minh City and Danang. It was as refreshing to see it routinely beamed there as it is depressing to mull my current situation: stuck in the United States where the games go on at 3:45 a.m. EST, where even the semifinals are available only via some Direct TV channel and/or PPV. Bars are not an option at that hour, of course, so I’m scrambling today in order to sort the situation on my home TV — so I can record the games and watch the next morning. I mean, tonight’s Wales-France semi should be epic, while Saturday night’s New Zealand-Australia semifinal (played at 9 p.m. Sunday night in Auckland) will be cataclysmic, the reverberations sure to be felt across the southern hemisphere. I visited NZ in May and the vibe I got there is clear: If the All Blacks don’t win this game, and the title, on home ground, the entire Kiwi nation will go into the fetal position.

I love the rugger. It took me several months to fully understand what’s really happening in the course of a game. Unlike soccer and basketball, whose rules (if not their respective nuances) are fairly self-evident, and more akin to cricket or baseball, rugby is a game that must be learned at the knee of a rugby person — not an expert necessarily but someone who can explain exactly why they’ve awarded the various penalties, why they’ve kicked it away just there, why possession seemed to have changed hands arbitrarily in that scrum situation, but not the time before. I learned at the knee of my two housemates at the University of London, both rugby guys who thought soccer to be a game for working-class oiks. They were joking, of course, but only just.

Curiously, this exceedingly fast and violent game is played by the upper classes in England. Soccer is and always has been a working class pursuit. In France, it’s the opposite — and, just as curiously, rugby is a game of the south, not the north where proximity to the English, who invented the game, would have made it more popular, one would have thought. And then there is the pure anthropological interest, for US nationals particularly,  in watching a game from which American football has sprung. When we consider the football of John Heisman and Walter Camp, this is the game they were playing.

It’s these funky shadings that make me more of a sporting internationalist with each passing day. I’m not some contrarian who ONLY digs the events that take place outside the insular American sporting scene. That would be extra-nationalist. I love all sport (my Red Sox are out, but I’ve not missed a single game in either League Championship series. I do, however, increasingly appreciate anything that pits nation against nation. It’s of particularly interest to me when the US is involved, but only a corpse could watch France win its RWC quarterfinal v. England and not be moved.

Though this Rugby World Cup tournament is seriously top heavy — strong rugby nations are so much better than mid-level sides that the entire group stage is even more useless than, say, the group stage at the FIFA or FIBA world championships — the gap is closing, but not fast enough to make anything pre-quarterfinal of much interest. That said, I did take in the one truly meaningful group-stage game, Scotland-Argentina in late September, in a Saigon sports bar called Phatty’s, alongside myriad Scottish and Irish expats (the Green had dispatched some guppy 70-6 an hour before). The experience proved such a strong argument for the sport, and this internationalist outlook: Both teams needed a victory in order to make the quarters and both played with desperate vigor; a late-try (the only one of the match) secured a 13-12 win for the Pumas, who are one of those mid-level teams poised to join the big boys; and the largely UK crowd was hard-drinking and vocal but gracious to the few Argie supporters in the crowd. Watching the gigantic front liners — 6’5″ 250-pound, V-shaped behemoths — run up and down the field without a break, beating the shit out of one another, one imagines this is what American football players, especially the linemen, would look like if they were obliged to play the whole game, on both sides of the ball, without commercial interruption.

I’ve often heard American skeptics dismissively brag that the US would dominate rugby if we could just poach enough U.S. football talents to play the game; indeed, I’ve heard Australians say the same thing. This simply doesn’t apply to the linemen:  A year’s rugby training/playing would cleave 100 pounds off Vince Wilfork or any of the huge interior linemen playing today. I don’t care what American football apologists say; they are simply NOT FIT. But it does apply to the other positions on a rugby pitch, esp. the backfield, the fleet fellows who mainly run the ball: LaDainian Tomlinson or Edgerrin James in their primes, taking the oversized ball wide, shedding and juking would-be tacklers and breaking into the open field? I’d stay up until 3:45 a.m. to watch that, too.

Brett Favre Needs a Smack, Followed by a Serious Career Re-evaluation

Brett Favre Needs a Smack, Followed by a Serious Career Re-evaluation

I’ve held my peace on this matter, publicly, for some time. However, it’s high time we all spoke truth to megalomania in the case of Brett Favre.

Has anyone ever faded into retirement more haltingly, with less class, candor or self-knowledge than our Ol’ Gunslinger friend, Brett? When he wasn’t dicking around his various former teams, teasing out his impending retirement charade on an annual basis (the hot breath on his neck being that of ESPN), he was literally showing his dick to distaff media types via his mobile phone.

But now, if that weren’t enough, Favre’s shoddy, delusional comments re. Aaron Rodgers have landed him back in the news. And so, it’s time that we leveled with Brett Favre:

You’re a fraud. A media creation. A compiler of yardage and touchdowns at the expense of titles. A man who stands but a hair’s breadth — a single kickoff-return-for-touchdown — from being the second coming of Dan Marino, or Fran Tarkenton, or Jim Kelly.

Let’s recap, shall we? Here’s the entire offending quote, delivered during a radio interview this week with Atlanta’s 790 The Zone:

“He’s got tremendous talent, he’s very bright and he got a chance to kind of sit and watch and he saw successful teams do it right,” Favre said of Rodgers. “And so he just kind of fell into a good situation. And on top of that, he’s a good player. I don’t think anyone would question now the talent around him is even better than when I was there. So I really was surprised it took him so long. Really, the early part of last season, it hadn’t quite clicked yet and I didn’t know if it would. I just figured at some point, when they hit their stride, they’re going to be hard to beat. And that’s what happened.”

That there is a very nuanced bit of damnation via faint praise, and there is so much to take issue with:

• The Packers team that won it all last year had more talent than the back-to-back Super Bowl teams Favre quarterbacked in the late 1990s? Um, I don’t think so… Green Bay limped into last year’s playoffs at 10-6, got hot and won it all. They are arguably a better team THIS year, compared to last, but they were certainly no juggernaut in 2010-11, nor in the three years Rodgers led the team following Favre’s departure.

• Rodgers sat on the bench and watched successful Packer teams do it right? Really? Rodgers spent three years as an understudy to Favre in Green Bay: In 2005, the Pack went 4-12; in 2006, they missed the playoffs. The following year Green Bay and Favre were admittedly superb, but the season ended in the NFC Championship Game when the Ol’ Gunslinger killed yet another playoff game-winning drive by throwing a foolish interception, in Giants territory, in overtime.

Indeed, while Rodgers may well have learned a lesson there — don’t be so fucking careless with the ball, so late in a playoff game — Favre, in his grizzled wisdom, did not. After retiring (following the OT loss to the Giants), then petitioning the league to join the Jets for 2008 (no playoff appearance ensuing), then pulling the same retirement charade again before joining the Vikings for the 2009 season, Favre similarly threw way his team’s chance at a Super Bowl berth by slinging an even more heedless interception in the dying moments of another NFC Championship Game, against the Saints.

Hey, Wrangler Boy: Sorry to be the one to level with you, but despite all your dramatics, all your meaningless yardage and consecutive-starts records, you are one of the great underachievers in football history. You are but a Desmond Howard return-for-touchdown away from being Marino, Tarkenton or Kelly — only worse, because 1) your teams were routinely better than Dan-O’s one-dimensional Dolphin teams of the 1980s, Tarkenton’s overmatched 70s-era Vikings, or Kelly’s Bills from the early 1990s ; 2) you blatantly threw away more playoff games with your impetuosity, something these guys never did; and 3) Kelly and Tarkenton, it should be said, each qualified their teams for 4 Super Bowls, something you did but twice.

•••

Let’s turn back the clock to January 1997, to the only big game Favre did win, Super Bowl XXXI vs. the New England Patriots, because I think we can already see that a great deal of his Hall of Fame reputation rides on this single result, the only Big One he ever one, on any level.

Of course, the Patriots have gone on to bigger and better things since that fateful night in New Orleans (amazing just how many Patriot highlights and lowlights have been recorded there, eh?). The Packers were, you will recall, an excellent team in 1996-97, clearly the better team. Pats poobah Bill Parcells was literally on his way out the door to coach the Jets, something the Patriots players knew and it undoubtedly affected their performance. Favre’s team was favored by 14 points (!) and Drew Bledsoe was the opposing quarterback…

And yet, the Patriots had every chance to win that game, and it wasn’t Brett Favre who won it for Green Bay. Midway through the fourth quarter, New England had driven down the field and scored a touchdown to make it 27-21 — The Pack and their all-World QB had been stuck on 27 points since late in the second quarter. Favre and the Green Bay offense were inert; one more defensive stop from the Patriots and that game was completely up for grabs. But then Desmond Howard returned the ensuing kickoff 99 yards for the TD that sealed the game.

“We had a lot of momentum, and our defense was playing better. But [Howard] made the big play,” Parcells intoned after the game. “That return was the game right there.”

Howard won the game for Green Bay. He totaled a Super Bowl record 90 punt return yards— most of them in the first half, utterly swinging the field position battle in the Pack’s favor. He would rack up 154 kickoff return yards, and his 244 all-purpose yards tied a Super Bowl record. He was the MVP, naturally.

It’s not stretch to say that, but for Howard’s performance and that one huge play, Marino, Tarkenton and Kelly would have company in the Greatest QBs Never to Win the Big One Club (GQBNWBOC).

[Note: My buddy Jammin’ has concocted an intriguing theory attached to this game, Super Bowl XXXI, and this particular play. The last player struck from the Patriots Super Bowl roster that year was none other than Troy Brown, then a 4th year reserve wide receiver and special teams player who would later become not just an all-pro but one of the most respected Patriots of all time. Why? Because Brown was a complete football player, catching passes, playing special teams, even stepping in to play defensive cornerback for the 2004 and 2005 Patriots. As Jammin’ argues, not unconvincingly, “If Parcells keeps Troy Brown on the roster to play special teams, he makes the play on Desmond Howard. Guaranteed.”]

I don’t want to minimize too much Favre’s centrality to what was an excellent Green Bay team, one that would go 13-3 the next year and win a second consecutive NFC championship. But here again, Favre failed to win the Big One. He and the Packers returned to the Super Bowl in 1998 as 11½-point favorites but contrived to lose to John Elway and the Denver Broncos, 31-24, thereby releasing Elway from GQBNWBOC ignominy.

So yeah. Favre is a fool. He’s retired and should just go away. And I wanted it noted, for the record, that I’ve laid out this entire argument and never once referred to Vicodin.