I found this paragraph in a notebook of poems, thoughts, and other random musings. It was written 2/19/2008. Not sure I want to expand on it, but I wanted to post it here to maybe foster some deep ponderment.

We worship sport like gods. Football our Mars, basketball our Venus, etc. The rise of sport and industrialization pulled us apart as a nation and drove us into small affiliations. Only fitting then that the battles of sports, the cut-throat of industrial capitalism, and the vile polarization of politics spawned from our civil war. It is not over – we only re-channeled our nation’s natural-born aggressiveness. Sports and political vitriol are releases of the hostility and societal pressures borne from our precious democratic industrial capitalism.

From what I know of hunting, most people sit in “deer stands” and other strategic positions and wait for their prey to mosey across their path. That’s not hunting.

That’s sniping.

There is no sport to waiting for your target to pass before blowing their brains out.

Hunting should be sporty. There should be a certain chance the prey could live. Hunters should have to track down their prey like the old Indian trackers of yesteryear. I’d like to see hunters have to pass a certain block of tests before donning their camo and rocking their rifles.

They should have to do at least some of the following:

- They should be able to identify animals by their feces.

- They should be able to hear the ground and tell when an animal – any animal – is within 100 yards.

- They should be able to differentiate between the tracks of the male and female species of the animals in which they want to hunt.

- They should be able to walk for 5 miles. If golfers can walk, so can hunters. As a matter of fact, the only activity with less activity than some hunting is fishing, which is basically aquatic sniping.

- They should be able to identify which type of weapon is most effective to kill an certain type of animal.

Or if they do want to stay in one place and snipe their prey, they shouldn’t be able to shoot anything until they are in their position for at least five days. They should have to lay in the mud and wallow in their own waste.

They should have to have to prove they really want that turkey.

Also in the same conversation with the same friend, he told me there are people who purposefully hunt bear with a pistol. And then they complain they had to shoot the bear repeatedly before it dies or they brag about how they outran a pissed off bear with a bullet hole.

Seriously.

Kinda like John Candy’s “Bald Ass Bear” in “The Great Outdoors“.

There is no point for that.

Either pick the weapon you need or leave the damn bear alone.

Personally, if I was hunting bear, I would use something automatic or a rocket launcher. And if I missed, I’d call in an air strike.

Perhaps even a napalm strike like in “We Were Soldiers”. I’d burn Smokey and the rest of the bears before I let one bear chase me.

Maybe that’s why I don’t hunt. Not only am I unwilling to smell turkey poop, but I don’t have any napalm.

You know, maybe that’s why I usually don’t have good mornings.

As I summarized on YouTube:

“My trip to Tropicana Field for the Tampa Bay Rays home opener on April 1, 2011. I like to think this video fully captures the essence and environment of the Rays faithful both before and after the game. Special appearances by Tug Haines, Santa Rays, Chris Harris, the fiddler, Ferg’s Sports Bar, lots of folks with crazy hair, the guy who gave me a beer, and hundreds of Rays fans.”

The idea of heroism is one our society often struggles with. I remember when I was nine years old my fourth grade teacher asked our class if we read about any heroes in the local newspaper. I raised my hand and said “Yes, Mookie Wilson almost hit an inside-the-park homerun for the Mets and they won last night.”

As to be expected, my teacher informed me that despite Mookie Wilson’s actions on the baseball field, he was not in fact “a hero”. He then introduced the class to a local firefighter who had saved a young girl from a burning house.

That incident taught me a few things. Most importantly, I learned the importance of leaving a burning house as soon as possible. But I also learned that using the term “hero” to describe an athlete is not something that should be done lightly. Sports heroism is a slippery, often treacherous concept that should seldom if ever be used.

Over 20 years later, I still see people mixing and matching sports heroes with real-life heroes. And while it’s bad enough for a kid to confuse the accomplishments of a baseball player and a life-saving fireman, for grown-up sportswriters and other media types to do so is a slap in the face to those people who put their lives on the line for the betterment of society.

The dilemma gets even worse when people use war metaphors to describe athletes. Adding soldier, warrior, general, or any other combat or conflict descriptor to sports conversations confuses the cause and in some cases draws more attention to the word choice than to the cause for celebration.

Unfortunately, these tired clichés are used so often many athletes now honestly believe them. They feed their warrior personas by calling themselves a “solider”, saying they would “go to war” with their teammates “in the trenches”, or even portraying military fighters or secret agents in commercials. In generations past, athletes would have never compared themselves to war figures.

Back in the day, before self-aggrandizing became the norm, the only athletes who dared call themselves soldiers were those who actually served in war. One can only imagine what would become of a ballplayer daring to call himself a soldier or a warrior during the days of Ted Williams, Joe DiMaggio, and Bob Feller – stars who put their career on hold for the defense of the nation.

Somewhere along the way, and I am not sure exactly when, the hero/warrior/soldier cliché became somewhat accepted. While there is still an unwritten imaginary line mentioned by some writers on occasion and a stink might be raised for a week or two in some cases, by and large, comparing athletics to martial combat is accepted, if not embraced. Although it is still taboo in baseball – perhaps because no one has quite filled the venomous cleats of Ty Cobb – it is par for the course in NFL discussions, and has also made its way to NBA conversations.

In the NBA, the concept of a “warrior” is particularly interesting. Although we often associate warfare with a field (i.e. “the field of battle”), NBA warriors fight for glory on a court, a term normally associated with rule of law, a civil forum where compromise and discussion win the day.  Yet there are those players who have transcended the court and brought to mind the ideals of combat, where victory must be attained at any cost.

But the label of warrior has always been awkward. Was Navy sailor David Robinson a warrior because he was once in the military? What about 7’2 300+ lbs of Shaquille O’Neal? Or does his size automatically preclude him from being tough and determined? Do warriors have to have a pinch of underdog in them? What about the new school athletic prowess of Dwight Howard or Blake Griffin? Are they tough enough to be in the warrior class?

Outside of Allen Iverson, few who play the guard position have been referred to as warriors. Kobe Bryant has never been fully accepted as a warrior, despite playing a soldier in a recent commercial. Guards belong to a different martial class – that of generals, snipers, and long-range bombers whose purpose is to spread the offensive attack. No matter how much players with those labels contribute, they are never held in as high esteem as warriors.

Whereas some guards are described in martial terms, the majority of the NBA is not. Many of these players form the NBA’s statesmen class. They are the players who perform admirably, represent their teams well, work to win, but stay out of the trenches. They don’t cheat, they represent fair play, when the game is over, they’ll extend friendly handshake.

Despite our glorification of NBA warriors and the claims that they engage in some sort of athletic warfare, we are still uncomfortable when the warrior/soldier class tramples on our sense of fair play. We cringed when esteemed warrior Kevin Garnett insulted the medical condition of a fellow player, although we know we would have probably made the same comment if it meant getting ahead in the game.

The fact that Garnett’s psychological attack was questioned, first on twitter, and then all over the media, reflects our glorification of war but our reluctance or fear to experience the trenches.  We want our warriors to act with a certain decorum or level of civility, although we know that’s not what wins wars.

(The exception to this cultural rule is the interesting case of Michael Jordan. Jordan played like a warrior, shot like an assassin, but his aggression was swept under a veneer of corporate-generated statesmanship.  Jordan was able to cover his war-like tendencies with a Gatorade and a smile. His hatred for his opponents wasn’t vilified, rather it was glorified.)

By now we should accept the fact that sports warriors like Kevin Garnett are a lot like legendary general George S. Patton. Even though he was among the gruffest, hard-nosed, driving generals in American history, we like Patton. He was a hero. George C. Scott played him in an award-winning movie. But a majority of us would have hated to be under his command – to have to march sun-up to sundown, to be called a coward when fear strikes, or to face Patton’s classic stern no-nonsense demeanor.

On the field of battle we want fewer statesmen and more conquerors. We don’t study diplomats as often as we do heroes of war. The negotiator and the politician don’t capture the public imagination. Stories are not told of the great peacemakers.

The problem with many wartime generals, like those of sports warriors, is they often have trouble conveying their thoughts to a non-combat audience. Off the field of battle, they are public relations disasters waiting to happen. Take for example the comments by Stanley McChrystal, former commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, in a 2010 Rolling Stone interview.

The list of athletes known for their aggression who have put their foot in their mouth is long and prestigious. In the most high profile cases, Garnett, Kellen Winslow, and John Rocker have all faced judgment for comments that didn’t translate well to the public. That is when we look at them different. We start to see that they aren’t the type of people we want to emulate. They have been so corrupted by their single-focus lives that they do not fit in with the world around them. And if their sin is so egregious that they become disdained, it might never matter again what they do on the field. Our admiration for them will be gone forever.

And they may never be a mistaken for a hero by a nine year old.

To be honest, I have never been to Russia. I know they have bears and Red Squares and they lost to the US in hockey in 1980. That’s all I know.

However, following Russia in 2022 is a country I have been to. One of the three countries I have visited outside of the United States. A country I went to last year, Qatar.

Because of its diminutive size and lack of sports infrastructure, a lot of people are disappointed in the selection of Qatar.

(Here is NY Times writer Nate Silver questioning the pick.)

Others even went so far as to use buzz-word heavy, search-friendly terms for their headlines.

Now, I don’t know enough about soccer and the World Cup to know if Qatar will make an acceptable host. But I do know some of the neat places in Qatar. Such as:

• local suks where you can buy jewelry for dirt cheap prices
• pearl dealers who get their goods directly off the boats
• a Chili’s right outside the Doha International Airport
• the amazing mall with the gondola inside and fascinating ceiling artwork that made it look like night and day depending on the area of the mall you were in
• and finally, the absolutely fantastic Islamic Museum of Art

So in an effort to educate or inform people or some of the sights of Qatar, I decided to post a lot of my pictures on Google Picasa. Feel free to take a look.

Jordi’s Qatar pics

Not to be outdone, here is National Geographic’s web photo album of some of the other beautiful areas in Qatar.

Using Cork’s example, every so often I am going to take a look back at what I wrote on my old site, The Serious Tip, on any particular day. For lack of a better term, I’m going to call them “flashbacks”. Of course, because I didn’t write everyday over there, I can only “flashback” on anniversaries of days I wrote something, unless I want to celebrate writing nothing. Sort of like an “un-birthday”.

Two years today for example, I wrote a post entitled “Hey, Wait, I’m Blogging Sports Complaints“.  Inspired by then-Deadspin.com editor and Nirvana fan Will Leitch, I compared many of the first generation of sports blogs to the grunge bands of the late 1980s and early 1990s. I postulated that both early sports blogs and grunge bands had similar do-it-yourself chutzpah and “revolutionary” tendencies as well as a desire to “stick it to” the way their interest (music/sports) was packaged by the mainstream.

Of course, after I sent the finished post to Will Leitch, he posted a link to The Serious Tip on Deadspin.com and my post was read by thousands of Deadspin readers, one of whom wrote possibly the best comment I ever received in nearly four years of blogging:

Anonymous said…

I think 99% of the time this blog sucks complete ass. This though, was spectacularly average.

So swing on by and check out one of my favorite posts from The Serious Tip:

Hey, Wait, I’m Blogging Sports Complaints

So in honor of Hammer, today’s post title is a paraphrase of the “U Can’t Touch This” lyric: “I’ve been around the world/ from London to the Bay/ It’s Hammer, Go Hammer, MC Hammer, Yo Hammer/ oh, the rest can go and play/ U can’t touch this”.

And the following are links you can’t touch. Unless of course you have an iPad, then touching them is highly recommended.

- Did you know May 17th to 23rd was National Hemp Week? If I knew that I would have bought a hemp necklace from a local hippie. Maybe even watched a little Cheech and Chong.

- Speaking of altered states of being, here is an essay on the powers of African mysticism and their possible effect on African World Cup teams. However long, it is definitely worth the read. Here is a sample:

Nearly all the supporters in the streets of Ouagadougou have absolute faith in the effects of black magic on football in Africa. Abdoul Kader, who sells loincloths, sees black magic not as the devil’s art, but as a form of medicine. He confirms that everyone in Africa uses it. “It’s like that even when there’s a friendly match between market stall holders. You weaken the opponent so that you can win.”
But the authorities deny there is any question of that.

- Also on the subject of soccer, the Congolese Soccer Team was expelled from Rwanda after a near riot broke out after a controversial call. One player may or may not have “disappeared” before being able to leave the country.

- Keeping it international, check out this post on a new Mongolian rock band called Jonon. At least I think this is the Mongolian version of rock.

Here is a YouTube clip:

- Bringing it way back to the US, the guys over at The Starting Five interviewed Ernie Johnson of TNT Sports. Johnson has been one of the best to do it for a long time and he shares some his experiences and knowledge in this great interview.

- Going even more local, check out this hilarious exchange between a Tampa-area librarian and local blogger/writer Clark Brooks. Clark doesn’t take to kindly to being told he has a stolen library card.

(Note about the Tampa-area libraries: they aren’t really user friendly. At least the satellite one by my apartment isn’t. Maybe in the main library they have more knowledgeable attendants, but the little old lady behind the counter in the one I visited looked lost behind a computer. She might know books, but information management and library science seemed way out of her league.)

- Finally, last but definitely not least, on Thursday, June 3rd, the University of Chicago will be screening Space Jam, starring Bugs Bunny and Michael Jordan. Although automatically of interest to the Chicago faithful due to the acting debut of Jordan, the screening has gained national interest on Deadspin.com due to the fact that it will also feature commentary by a professor who believes Space Jam has similarities to ancient Mayan texts.

If you think that’s weird, stay tuned for my upcoming 1,000 word treatise on Wile E. Coyote and the Roadrunner. It will knock your socks off.

It seems athletes of today are bigger, stronger, and one might even say better, than those who played professional sports years ago.  If this is true, then why do today’s fans not share a love for their favorite sports team as deep as fans of the past?  Perhaps the answer is that those involved in the business of professional sports have caused today’s fans to become angered and disgruntled.

One of the reasons of this anger is the high cost of attendance to sporting events.  Many fans cannot afford to spend a lot of money for tickets.  If the fans do purchase tickets, they know they will be paying outrageous concession prices.  For example, a soda could cost the fan between $1.50 and $3.00, a hot dog $1.75, and a team yearbook $5.00.  If the fan decides to bring his or her family, the cost could easily surpass $100.  As a result, fewer fans attend professional sports contests.

Even the athletes who play the sports have a profound effect on sports fans.  Professional athletes have always earned more money than ordinary citizens.  In the 1920-1930s professional baseball players made about ten times more money than the common citizen.  In the 1990s that number has increased to about fifty to a hundred times more.  This has caused resentment, even jealousy, towards the athletes.  Fans believe players should perform up to the value in which they are being paid.  When players do not perform up to expectations, they are mercilessly booed and jeered.

Many professional athletes’ attitudes have caused a wave of negativity from fans.  Many athletes are seen as distant and arrogant.  This idea stems from the fact that more and more athletes are turning down the title of  “role model”.  There have also been incidents in which professional athletes have belittled sports fans.  The arrogant attitudes and irresponsibility by professional sports athletes has definitely marred fans’ attitudes towards sports in general.

The owners of professional sports teams have also done their share to anger the common fan.  Many owners of today differ from the owners of the past because today’s owners seem to be concerned only with profit.  Owners of yesteryear concerned themselves with the welfare of the team.  It seems the owners of the past cared more about a winning team than turning a profit.  Today’s owners will do almost anything to earn more of a profit, including relocating a team to another city.  For example, in the National Football League, recent movements have included the Los Angeles Rams to St. Louis, Missouri, and the Cleveland Browns to Baltimore, Maryland.  These actions by the owners have caused many fans to disband their loyalty to sports franchises.

The media also has had a large effect on the disgruntled fan.  Today’s media is more intrusive into athletes’ lives than the media of the past.  The sports fan can easily find out which athlete has abuse problems, family problems, legal conflicts, etc.  This was not the case in the past.  In the old days, the media ignored athletes’ personal lives and instead opted to write about statistics and/or records.  This change in the media has swayed many fans’ views about professional sports athletes.

The result of the aforementioned factors is that less sports fans are truly fanatical about their favorite sports team.  The fan lives with the fear that his or her favorite team’s owner may move the team to another city, trade off the team’s best player, or even increase ticket prices to a level in which the fan can no longer afford to attend.  These fans can only hope for a better tomorrow in the world of sports,  a tomorrow that is more like the past.

Over at The Sports Economist, Skip Sauer quotes a governor’s office press release that the average attendance at spring training games this year set a new record, with 6,640 per game. Overall, the Grapefruit League saw a total attendance of 1,427,627. Although the total number is lowest since 2003, there have been several teams, such as the Cincinnati Reds and the Cleveland Indians, who have moved their spring operations to Arizona.

The next day, the blog aggregate service TampaBLAB reported that Tampa Bay Lightning ratings were up a whopping 27.7% this year and 22.2% more households watched games. Steve Lepore of the blog Puck the Media expects that number to go up even more next season.

A few weeks earlier, the Twitter account for the Lakeland Local blog mentioned that the Lakeland Flying Tigers had 744 people in attendance in a game against the Tampa Yankees. Curious, I asked if that was normal. Lakeland Local responded by saying “It’s better than normal. The Flying Tigers averaged about 380 a game last season.” That’s nearly 100% more people the 2009 average.

The Flying Tigers also drew 2,108 for their home opener, according to Lakeland Local.

So we have Spring Training attendance up, more people watching Lightning games, and a whole lot more people going to see the Lakeland Flying Tigers. Can this be explained or are the people of Florida becoming more involved in following professional sports?

(Note: I do not have any numbers on the Orlando Magic this year and last year’s numbers are slightly weird. They did really well in the Eastern Conference Finals against LeBron James and the Cavaliers, but their appearance in the Finals showed a decrease from the year before – granted, however, that was the Lakers vs. Celtics and all their associated history.)

Before we scream “hallelujah” about the spring training number, a few factors have to be determined:

1. Was there an increase in “snowbirds” between 2008 and 2010? How did the economy effect the amount of retirees spending their winters in Florida? Those people most definitely attend spring training games as they are in their winter homes from Thanksgiving to approximately Easter.
2. Did the number of statewide tourists in the spring months increase between 2008 and 2010? Whereas snowbirds are consistent visitors, a spike in tourism could drastically alter the annual numbers. Personally, I always meet a tourist or two at every spring game I go to.
3. The Strasburgh Effect – Did the Nationals see a large spike in their attendance due to the debut of 2009 #1 pick Steven Strasburg? How much of the increase was attributable to Strasburg?

Of course, the big unknown is are these rising numbers of attendance throughout Central Florida indicators that people all over are going to more events? What about the Tampa Bay Rays?

To be honest, I don’t think these few indicators will help the Rays and their attendance woes. The spring snowbirds have migrated back and Steven Strasburg has moved on. Surprisingly, the Rays didn’t do well attendance-wise or on the air in 2009 despite their 2008 World Series run.

Although there are a few small positive signs, we’ll see if those are exceptions or precursors to a growing trend.