Brazil Goes to the Map Room

My favorite movie is Raiders of the Lost Ark.  My parents dragged me to it when I was six years old.  I say "dragged" because I wanted to see Clash of the Titans instead.  Based on the picture of Indiana Jones in the newspaper wearing a Middle Eastern headdress,* I feared that the movie was going to be an extension of Sunday School, which I was already mature enough to find boring.  Two hours after being forced against my will to go into one of the theaters on 29 in Charlottesville, I came dancing out, convinced that I had seen the best movie in the history of the world.  Three decades later, I will admit that there might be other movies of superior technical quality, but no movie has surpassed Raiders as my favorite.

* - Showing a similar mentality, my five-year old described our neighbors' nativity scene as "Jews, a camel, and a donkey."

One of Raiders' best aspects is that it is stuffed to the gills with iconic scenes.  Indy running away from the boulder.  Indy's travels being tracked by a red line on a map.  Indy shooting the swordsman in the Cairo market.*  The Ark melting the faces of Toht and Dietrich.  The Ark being buried in a government warehouse along with who knows what.** 

* - If there is a better 30-second metaphor for colonialism, I'd like to see it. OK, maybe the fact that the locals cheer the Westerner who uses technology to defeat the skilled, but outdated native cuts against my conclusion, but leave me my attempt to find meaning in a pulp classic.  Also, it's interesting to me that two of the best scenes in George Lucas-affiliated movies - the swordsman scene in Raiders and the "I love you." "I know." scene in Empire Strikes Back - were both improvised by Harrison Ford.

** - The perfect metaphor for government waste.

For me, the best scene in the entire movie is the Map Room.  Indy takes his right-sized staff into the Map Room at the right time, waits for the sun to hit the right spot, and then looks on with amazement as a brilliant beam of light strikes the location of the Well of the Souls.

Two qualities make the scene.  The first is John Williams' score, as the Ark's theme rises to an inspiring crescendo.  The second is Harrison Ford's expression of wonder at the show of light.  The cynicism of a world-weary archaeologist with the weathered leather jacket and fedora - the guy who said earlier in the movie " I don't believe in magic, a lot of superstitious hocus pocus. I'm going after a find of incredible historical significance, you're talking about the boogie man" - melts away now that he realizes that he is in the presence of the ethereal.  Steven Spielberg's movies are often noted for the moment of realization that his protagonists have.  (Think about Roy Scheider's face in Jaws when he realizes the size of the shark he's hunting, or Liam Neeson's face when he finally realizes the extent of the Final Solution and its effect on children in Schindler's List.)  The definitive moment of realization is Indy in the Map Room as his face changes to a wide-eyed gape.

I had Indy's expression in mind when I read Tim Vickery's pieces about the lesson that Brazilians should take from the hiding that Santos took from Barcelona in Japan.  With the world title on the line, Santos brought in a team that had been strengthened after winning the Copa Libertadores and was led by two burgeoning stars: Neymar and Ganso.  With the Brazilian domestic league in good financial form after signing a lucrative TV deal and the currency doing well against the failing Euro, this seemed like the time for a Brazilian club side to show its strength against a European champion.  Instead, Barca won in embarrassingly comfortable fashion, breaking out to a 3-0 lead at the half and then coasting home.

Vickery, who has been preaching about the failings of modern Brazilian futebol for as long as I have been reading and listening to him, could have viewed the match as a confirmation of his hypothesis that Brazil has given up the ability to produce passing midfielders.  Here is what Vickery wrote for the BBC:

Like watching Muhammad Ali against some outgunned challenger, Barcelona's destruction of Santos was as joyful as it was clinical. Xavi, Andres Iniesta, Cesc Fabregas and Lionel Messi ran rings round Santos as if the Brazilians were traffic cones in a training exercise.

According to the dominant current of thought in Brazil in recent years, this sort of thing is not supposed to happen. The physical evolution of the game, it was thought, had made it impossible. In this modern football of reduced space, the central midfielders need to be six-footers, big and strong enough to win the 50-50 balls and protect the defence.

And there was no point in possession football - a move with more than seven passes had a reduced chance of ending up in a goal. The way to win was to block the middle and look for quick counter attacks and set-pieces.

And the quality of the play? "If you want to see a spectacle," says Santos coach Muricy Ramalho, "then go to the theatre." Or maybe go to watch his side taken apart in such style by Barcelona.

In football the idea comes first. And the line of thinking helps explain the type of players produced. In Neymar Santos could count on a Messi equivalent. But where is the Xavi or the Iniesta? Brazilian football no longer has them because it is not looking to produce them. They do not fit the mould.

And here is his similar description for ESPN:

Sunday's match was not decided by a financial imbalance. It was the imposition of one footballing philosophy over another, a victory for the skilful little guys with the low centre of gravity, a triumph for the spectacle and self-expression of pass and move - a win like many that South American football has enjoyed in its glorious history.

The value of defeat is always in the lessons that it can teach. Perhaps the big lesson that Barcelona have taught in Yokohama is this: if Brazilian football wants to keep on winning not only titles but also hearts then it would be well advised to get back in touch with elements of its own tradition. There is an argument against the view that possession football is outdated and that the central midfielders should be unimaginative giants. Its case was made loud and clear in Japan this Sunday.

If Spain's triumph and Brazil's failure in South Africa was not evidence enough, Sunday's result in Yokohama should be Brazil's trip to the Map Room.  It should be enough to convince the cynics who have led Brazil astray ever since the beautiful 1982 iteration to the Selecao - led by Zico, Falcao, and the late Socrates - was upset by Italy (ironically enough, in Barcelona at Espanyol's old ground) that technical ability in the central midfield is more important than brawn.*

* - As Jack Lang of Snap Kaka Pop was marveling at Thiago - Barca's latest midfield prodigy and the son of a former Brazil international - and expressing regret that Thiago has declared for Spain instead of Brazil, I was tempted to respond with "maybe he didn't want to become a fullback."

To come back to this blog's favorite topic, the Map Room analogy has me thinking about similar episodes in college football, instances where one striking result caused an epiphany from a team or a conference.  These are the examples that came to mind, but I am all ears for more:

1.  After getting his tail kicked in by Florida State and Miami in a series of Orange and Fiesta Bowls, Tom Osborne decides that he needs defensive players who can run.  He recruits Texas and California more heavily, thus producing the dominant team that won national titles in 1994, 1995, and 1997.

2.  After a favored Ohio State team gets obliterated by Florida in the 2006 national championship game, the Big Ten moves towards the spread offense.  Ohio State shows a run-based spread with Terrelle Pryor, Penn State deploys the "Spread HD," and Michigan hires Rich Rodriguez. 

3.  After Danny Wuerrfel is beaten to a pulp by Florida State at Doak Campbell Stadium in November 1996, Steve Spurrier relents on his long-standing opposition to the shotgun.  The Gators bury the Noles in the rematch and the 'gun is a feature of Spurrier's offense from that point forward.

4. After the SEC was dominated in the 1980s by conservative, run-the-ball-and-play-defense coaches like Vince Dooley and Pat Dye, Spurrier arrives in 1990, destroys a highly-rated Auburn team in 1990 48-7, wins the Gators' first SEC title in 1991, and then sets himself on a path of destruction through the conference.  The rest of the SEC enters the Map Room and emerges with the David Cutcliffe offense at Tennessee, the Air Raid at Kentucky, and the quasi-spread run by Terry Bowden and featuring Dameyune Craig at Auburn.

Others?

My Sentiments Exactly

If you haven't figured it out yet, I grew up in Macon and a lot of my choices in life and my disposition have been formed in rebellion against that experience. There were aspects of Macon that I liked. It was relatively safe. Our synogogue was a warm, familial place. The Macon Mall was a nice space to kill a couple hours. Stratford Academy did a good job of preparing me academically for bigger challenges. All that said, I found the mentality of the place (and especially the social scene at my high school) to be backwards.

Macon's attitude was visible in a number of different respects - the local paper, the political scene, etc. - but the one that stands out in my memory is the fact that the only options for buying books in Macon were B. Dalton's and Waldenbooks at the Mall. For a metro area of around 250,000, this was something of a problem. To me, it signaled a place where people simply were not interested in ideas. For an adolescent with a burgeoning interest in World War II, this was a source of major frustration.

Throughout my childhood and adolescence, the oasis in this desert was Oxford Books in Atlanta. In contrast to the options available in Macon, Oxford Books seemed like a university unto itself, a huge store in the Peachtree Battle Shopping Center where I could get lost for hours. For me, a perfect summer weekend was going with my family to Atlanta, staying in a hotel, taking in a Braves game, eating dinner at Mick's, and spending an afternoon at Oxford Books. When I left Macon for college in 1993, my plan was to go to Michigan, then law school, then come to Atlanta to become a lawyer. Oxford Books helped to form my perception of Atlanta as a place where I would want to spend my professional life.

Likewise, my decision to go to Michigan was formed, at least in some small part, by spending the summer before my junior year of high school in Ann Arbor for debate camp (like band camp, only nerdier). Ann Arbor was exactly what I had imagined a college town to be and a major reason was the original Borders, located at the intersection of Liberty and State Streets. (The conservatives on campus joked that Liberty ends at State.) Borders was like Oxford Books, only with two levels instead of one and instead of having to drive eighty miles to see rows of shelves, I could walk from my dorm whenever I wanted to do so. In the same way that Oxford Books helped form my impression of Atlanta, Borders helped form my impression of Ann Arbor.*

* - It also helped that I didn't get into Dartmouth. My impression of Hanover, New Hampshire was formed when my Dad asked a random passer-by on the street for hotel options and the passer-by used the word "panoply" in response.

That's a long introduction for me to say that I heartily co-sign on John U. Bacon's post on his feelings regarding Borders' passing. As someone who believes that a love of reading is one of the most important values that a parent can instill in a child, it seems clear to me that a great bookstore makes its community better. It gives an outlet for readers to browse and then to learn about subjects that might have never crossed their minds before. As such, a proper bookstore is tool for self-improvement. (Now I sound like a Whig.) Without them, the world is a little darker.

I had a similar experience to Bacon in my last visit to the Borders on Ponce. I lived in the neighborhood for six years before Mrs. B&B and I started procreating and even now, it's not far from our house. Being a geek, I bought my groomsmen books on a Friday night at that Borders and had a great time scouring the shelves to find something that spoke to seven different personalities. I bought my first history of the Eastern Front - Alan Clark's Barbarossa - there and devoured the book on flights while the future Mrs. B&B and I were dating long distance. When we had kids, the children's area of the store quickly became one of our boys' favorite places (although our youngest is more interested in the toys and Mrs. B&B isn't always amused when I say "can I just go check out one book really quickly?" and then disappear for 15 minutes). Walking out the doors one final time was an emotional event. It's great to live in a world where a 12-year old in Macon can now order any book under the sun online at a reasonable price and have it arrive at his doorstep within a matter of days, but we're also losing something when the experience of aimlessly flipping through titles before picking out a tome on a previously-unconsidered subject becomes rarer and rarer.

The NCAA, Wal-Mart, and Fourth-Grade Inferences

I suspect that Brian Cook wasn't intending to provide commentary on Wal-Mart v. Dukes when he wrote about the NCAA's new stance of making inferences of violations, but the following paragraph from MGoBlog's piece on Oregon overpaying for scouting reports is actually very timely in Supreme Court world:

The question the NCAA is going to have to answer soon is "how obviously fishy does something have to be before we punish someone?" Each of the three items above falls at a different place on the you-expect-me-to-believe-that scale:

Actual car purchases by Ohio State people checked out by governmental organization: not that fishy in and of itself. Add the loaners and the memorabilia and the cuddly relationship and there's still a cocktail of NCAA violations, but the actual sale of vehicles that were apparently sold for book value or above in most cases is plausibly on the up and up. The sheer concentration of sales and murky value of used cars makes it unlikely there wasn't some extra benefits going on, but proving that seems required if that particular slice of the Ohio State issues is going to produce anything.

Greg Little's ever-rotating license plate from guy serving time for money-laundering: there might be some level of plate and car swapping that is reasonably explained. Little clearly exceeds that and is hooked up with a guy who was in some dirt. Other schools monitor traffic/parking infractions closely; if UNC did so they would have ended up suspending Little a lot sooner. This should be the ground for a failure to monitor charge, one that will be part of a more general hammering for John Blake's clear knowledge of Marvin Austin, et al., and their magic carpet rides.

Oregon paying 25k for perfectly useless paper: if you had purchased a $25,000 vehicle and found out it was in fact a rabbit, you would get your money back. You would instruct your credit card company not to honor the charge or sue or something. You would not go on your way, maintaining a positive relationship with the man who sold you a rabbit he told you was an Escalade. This is fishiness that should rise to the level of a major NCAA violation in and of itself, a clear quid-pro-quo with no plausible explanation.

The NCAA dared to make inferences in the USC case, something that forms the basis for much of the Trojan outrage surrounding the case. They made a leap of logic many fourth-graders could make. Oregon obviously fails the fourth-grader test. North Carolina likely does. In this instance, Ohio State does not; with the loaners they do.

Brian's analysis is timely because the Supreme Court just grappled with a similar question, namely whether statistical and anecdotal evidence can be used to certify a class of discrimination plaintiffs. Writing for the majority, Justice Scalia rejected the attempts to certify an enormous class of current and former female Wal-Mart employees. Here is the money paragraph of Dahlia Lithwick's criticism of the decision:

As the Lily Ledbetter case showed, the court's devotees of strict construction and plain meaning are so enamored of the printed word that they often seem inclined to accept no other type of evidence of pay discrimination. Just as Ledbetter never received an embossed letter from Goodyear indicating that she was being systematically underpaid, so, too, the hundreds of women with claims about sex discrimination at the hands of Wal-Mart must be wrong: After all, the company's announced policy forbids it, and the perpetrators of the discrimination don't often admit to doing it. The whole purpose of this type of class action civil rights suit is to smoke out unwritten policies and unspoken bias. The women of Wal-Mart will now have to sue as individuals, or in smaller classes, or by way of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Most of them will not be able to afford to litigate it alone, and some of them will be unable to prove it alone. Allowing women in this situation some effective means of justice is one of the rationales of class action litigation.

The federal courts and the NCAA face similar problems in addressing what to do when they see smoke, but no fire. In the Wal-Mart case, the plaintiffs sought to rely on an analysis of statistical evidence that concluded that "Wal-Mart paid men more than women, promoted males over females, and did so in numbers that could not be readily explained away." According to the plaintiffs, the aggregate numbers, along with the anecdotal evidence that they compiled, showed that Wal-Mart must be discriminating against women as a class. Scalia rejected this argument, noting that Wal-Mart devolves authority to make employment decisions to local managers, so the plaintiffs cannot certify a class when they are complaining about thousands of discrete decisions that were not made under a common policy or scheme. This is a fascinating question for which there are no easy answers, hence the fact that it ended up as a 5-4 decision at the Supreme Court.

The NCAA is faced with a similar dilemma. In the Oregon case, the Ducks paid Willie Lyles $25,000 for a report on recruits who had already matriculated at various schools. The payment was obviously not for the report, unless you accept the notion that Oregon coaches are permitted to waste Phil Knight's millions with impunity. That seems like a reasonable inference, but then the question becomes "OK, so what was Oregon buying with the $25K?" A generally favorable relationship with Lyles? A quid pro quo that he would whisper in the ears of recruits "Eugene is great!" Was he a pass-through for money to the recruits (or, unless Lyles and Oregon were buffoons, relatives of the recruits)?

It's no accident that the Supreme Court broke down on ideological lines in the Wal-Mart case. The conservative bloc of the court (Scalia, Alito, Roberts, and Thomas) sided with business; the liberal bloc (Kagan, Sotomayor, Ginsburg, and Breye) sided with employees; and Justice Kennedy cast the deciding vote, in this case for tightening the rules on class certification in the discrimination context. For me, the interesting question facing the NCAA is what its preference is with respect to rules violations? Does it come at North Carolina, Ohio State, and Oregon with a mindset of "we are tired of bad press and we are going to throw the book at these schools to get everyone else back in line?" Or does it come in with the mindset of "because there is so much money at stake, we need to see fire before we throw the book at these schools." The verdict in the USC case indicates that the NCAA is taking the former approach, but was that motivated by a general sense that a crackdown on violations is needed or was the NCAA just furious at USC specifically for the school (and Mike Garrett, in particular) thumbing its nose at the investigation? And, like the Supreme Court, are there factions at the NCAA pushing in different directions?

66 Years Ago Today

At Least We're Number One in Something

America's Gayest City!

Yes, Boston, you have all those championships, but we'll kick your ass at brunch!

We're #1...in an Arbitrary, Meaningless Way!!!

In the aftermath of President Obama winning the Nobel Peace Prize, Jonathan Chait has penned an entertaining attack on awards. Happily, there is college football content:

Some years later, Gino Toretta of the University of Miami won the 1992 Heisman Trophy, which goes to the best college football player. Toretta was approximately the third-best player—at his position, within his state. He was probably one of the worst starters on his own team. Toretta went on to be selected in the next-to-last round of the NFL draft, where — without suffering any major injuries — he completed a total of five passes in his career.

There is also a passage that hits a little close to home:

Yet awards provide emotional responses — gratification, victimization, schadenfreude — that makes the ritual perversely compelling. Understanding that the process is fatally flawed, or even corrupt, seems to do nothing to diminish its appeal. Those most convinced that, say, the Oscars do a horrible job of rating films are the very people who cling to their emotional investment in the outcome.

How is it that I have complete disdain for the Heisman Trophy and yet I frequently find myself arguing about the injustice that no Tennessee or Alabama players have ever won it? If the award is a meaningless statue given to an unjustifiably small subset of college football players and is governed by a set of irrational and indefensible rules, then why do I care?

And this observation was especially interesting to me:

Our mania for awards stems from a desire to sift through a chaotic world and impose linearity and a singular winner.

Can't we say the same thing about our desire to label one team as a "champion" at the end of a season? After all, what is the national title but another award? Dozens of college football teams play dozens of games for four months and then at the end, because we have to impose order on a disordered world, we declare that one team is the "champion" and then spend decades arguing about whether the right team won. American pro sports are worse, as they all involve a long regular season followed by a short playoff, at the end of which there is an arbitrary "champion" that is often demonstrably inferior to other teams in the league.

Why do we feel the need to have a defined champion at the end of a season? Is it because we feel the need to impose the structure of an individual game upon a season, such that there must be a winner? Is it because we want sports to mimic society and society is governed by laws? Is it a nefarious plot on the part of apparel companies, who would have a hard time selling "Georgia: Really Good Season in 2007" shirts? Is it, as Chait suggests, an attempt to impose order in a world where chaos reigns?

A Brave New World Post that Doesn't Cover the Braves

Last night, I waded through Paul Starr's long essay on the decline of American newspapers and the unfortunate consequences for our democracy. The difficulties of the newspaper industry do not pose the same dangers for sports that they do for honest government and business. I can live without a number of reporters following the Braves or reporting on the Final Four on-site; I prefer not to live without the AJC properly staffing its coverage of the goings-on at the State Capitol or the behavior of our elected officials in Washington. That said, Starr's description of a world with fewer metropolitan newspapers did have some parallels to the world of sports:

Metropolitan newspapers have dominated news gathering, set the public agenda, served as the focal point of controversy, and credibly represented themselves as symbolizing and speaking for the cities whose names they have carried. They have tried to be everyone's source of news, appealing across the ideological spectrum, and to be comprehensive, providing their readers with whatever was of daily interest to them. Some newspapers, a smaller number than exist today, will survive the transition to the Web, but they probably will not possess the centrality, the scope, or the authoritative voice--much less the monopolies on metropolitan advertising--that newspapers have had.

The news media emerging in the digital environment seem likely to be more concentrated in some respects and more fragmented in others. Readership is already becoming concentrated in a national press. The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post seem well-positioned to capitalize on the abandonment of international, national, and cultural coverage by regional newspapers. The likely closing of some papers, or their retreat from daily to weekend print publication, should only intensify this shift. In Europe, the press has long been dominated by national papers; now American newspapers are moving in that direction.

If the sports media follows this progression, what will our world look like? More consumption of national sports media and therefore more focus on a few national teams. There is a common complaint in England that the football clubs in smaller towns have a hard time drawing new fans because all the young people in their villages want to support Manchester United or Arsenal instead of the local club. In an American sports landscape dominated by an increasingly national media, we could be headed in the same direction. Just wait for the composition of the crowds when the Red Sox and Yankees come to the Ted this summer. A lot of the support for the rapacious northern teams will come from transplants, but a lot of it will also come from locals who chose to support those teams instead of the Braves.

The major factor cutting against a nationalization of sports issues will be the proliferation of blogs devoted to one team. Blogs can cover a local team far more obsessively than newspapers ever could. Blogs can also be totally forthright in their assessments because they have no access to guard. If we get our sports news from blogs instead of newspapers, then there's no reason why local teams won't get plenty of interest.

On the other hand, the Internet permits a fan access to the obsessive blog coverage of teams around the world. 20 years ago, I would have had no option to read in-depth daily coverage of teams outside of those covered by my local newspaper. Today, if I want to be an intense fan of F.C. Barcelona, I can read blogs about the team, as well as English-language articles from a number of publications about the team and its rivals in La Liga. I'll admit that I'm odd, but the decline of the metropolitan newspaper and the shift of news consumption to the Internet doesn't simply imply that the Cowboys, Lakers, and Yankees are going to become more popular; it also implies that they are going to have to compete with Manchester United, Barcelona, and AC Milan. In the end, metro areas will rally around one team with far less frequency.

Starr also predicts a greater gap between news junkies and the rest of the populace:

For those with the skills and interest to take advantage of this new world of news, there should be much to be pleased with. Instead of being limited to a local paper, such readers already enjoy access to a broader range of publications and discussions than ever before. But without a local newspaper or even with a shrunken one, many other people will learn less about what is going on in the world.

We can already see this phenomenon in the world of sports. Nuts like me end up with obsessive knowledge about our teams, while the average person, who normally would have known a little just based on having a paper including a sports section delivered to him home every morning, is left behind.

Ten Things I'm Excited About

With the economy in the crapper for the foreseeable future, this seems like as good a time as any to think positive thoughts. So, without further introduction, here are ten things I'm eagerly anticipating in the world of sports:

1. Don Sutton calling Braves games again. The past six years have been death by a thousand paper cuts as everything that made the Braves unique have gone out the window. Maddux, Glavine, Smoltz, Andruw, Schuerholz, Skip, Pete, the Bravo Club, winning divisions, etc. Don's return will be a little slice of nostalgia for the decade when everything was great from April to September.

2. Duke's inevitable exit to a lower seeded, more athletic team. The NCAA Tournament doesn't officially start until a Duke player is crying his eyes out on a Thursday or Friday night in the second week of the Tournament. Greg Paulus, come on down!

3. The NFL Draft. It's such an odd feeling to have confidence in the Falcons' decision-maker. That confidence is buoyed, of course, by the team's decision to play hardball with Keith Brooking.

4. Josh Smith's first dunk in a home playoff game. I nominate Udonis Haslem as the dunkee.

5. The Copa del Rey Final. As I was mocking a Manchester United friend for the fact that United inevitably play boring finals, I realized that Barcelona have played exactly one final this decade. (I'm excluding meaningless games like the World Club Championship, the Spanish Supercup, and the European Supercup.) Thus, Barca's date with Athletic Bilbao (which ought to be re-named the "Who hates Fascist Real the most?" Cup) will be something exciting.

6. Terrell Owens' first interview after being cut. I'm sure that Stephen A. Smith is working the phones with T.O. as we speak. I'm also sure that Owens will be circumspect in his comments and wouldn't dream of throwing his teammates under the proverbial bus.

7. Liverpool losing at Old Trafford. 1990 was a long, long time ago.

8. Spring practice reports. There's nothing so exciting as the inevitable "Player X who has never seen the field before is tearing it up!" noise that comes out of every spring practice. We all manage to banish the thought that Player X is tearing it up against his own teammates. G-d help my sanity the first time I hear "Tate Forcier can [insert quarterback skill] much better than Steven Threet ever could!"

9. My friend Ben predicting an undefeated season for Georgia. It's a rite of summer. He's already thinking that the Dawgs are going to win 11 games. By May, that number will creep to 12 and by July, he'll reach 14-0. It's good to be friends with Pangloss.

10. Another Nadal-Federer final at Wimbledon. I'm not a tennis fan like I was when I was a kid, but the Wimbledon final last year completely sucked me in. I'd be very disappointed if there isn't a sequel.

One Time in London I'd Gone out for a Walk

My apologies for the dearth of posting recently. Things have been hectic at work, sandwiched around a three-day trip to London for the Fourth of July weekend. Since I know you're all on pins and needles for my thoughts on the trip, here's a brief photo diary:



This has to be the most inexplicable advertisement I've ever seen. I took this shot in an elevator at the Covent Gardens tube stop. I still can't decide whether this is some sort of joke and English gays know that South Carolina isn't noted as a haven of tolerance for...just about anyone or if it's just the worst idea ever. Come to think of it, you could do a pretty good movie in which gay Londoners go to Myrtle Beach, only it would be a little derivative of this:



Needless to say, I know what picture is going up on the blog on the Friday before the Georgia-South Carolina game.



This is a shell from the largest gun that the Wehrmacht produced during WWII. The gun required a crew of 1,400 to operate, it took six weeks to assemble, and the Germans fired about 45 shells from it for the entire war. If you ever wanted a perfect example of German over-engineering, this is it.

The shell, incidentally, can be found at the Imperial War Museum, which currently has a bitchin' James Bond exhibit on the occasion of Ian Fleming's 100th birthday. Sadly, because photos were verboeten in the exhibit, I don't have pictures of the nuclear bomb from Octopussy or Ian Fleming's desk or the note that Stalin sent to Fleming denying a request for an interview. I didn't know much about Fleming before going to the exhibit, so I was interested to learn that his passions were golf, gambling, drinking, smoking, and women. Sound like any fictional secret agents we know? I also found it interesting that Fleming's father died in WWI when Fleming was eight and Fleming then found a father figure in Rear Admiral John Godfrey, Fleming's boss in WWII when Fleming worked in naval intelligence. Accordingly, M is supposed to be Bond's father figure in the books, which makes Dame Judi Dench's casting in the role a little interesting. Speaking of the Dame, here's the trailer for Quantum of Solace:



Other than the fact that there are some parallels to License to Kill, one of the weaker Bond movies, it looks good.



Yes, that is in fact a man playing a guitar in a trash can. I took this shot in Cambridge.



This is pretty much the only sports-related picture that I snapped in London. Behold, the outside of the Emirates from a train speeding by! I was pretty far removed from the world of sports while I was across the pond, with the exception of watching the extended highlights of the Federer-Nadal match. I'm not going out on a limb when I say it was one of the best tennis matches I've ever seen. It's rare to see a game/match in which the two teams/players are both at the top of their game. The closest college football parallel I could think of was the Texas-USC Rose Bowl. I was a tennis fan as a kid, but had lost the fever as an adult. Now, I'm certainly looking forward to the U.S. Open.



This is proof that I am, in fact, a 14-year old. I am quite confident that the term means something different in England than it does to the Beavis and Butthead generation in America.

A Brief Political Digression

What would the media's reaction be if we replaced Scranton with Birmingham or Columbia in this story:

Barack Obama’s campaign opened a downtown office here on March 15, just in time for the annual St. Patrick’s Day parade. It was not a glorious day for Team Obama. Some of the green signs the campaign had trucked in by the thousands were burned during the parade, and campaign volunteers — white volunteers — were greeted with racial slurs.

Actually, there is a bit of a sports parallel. We often complain about the media sticking too closely to its narratives about games and teams, but that tendency shows up in politics as well as sports. Racism is often treated as a specifically Southern phenomenon, so when open racism makes an appearance above the Mason-Dixon Line, it doesn't register. That said, racism in Scranton doesn't come with the same legacy of slavery and Jim Crow, so maybe the different narrative isn't entirely irrational.

A Little Heavy Reading

A couple articles caught my fancy this morning. One is a New York Times article describing an academic paper published by Justin Wolfers, a Wharton School professor, and Joseph Price, a Cornell grad student, that concludes that NBA referees are affected by subconscious (we hope) racial bias when assessing fouls. The authors conclude that the racial composition of an officiating crew can have a non-trivial impact on player performance, although the effect can really only be seen over the course of the 82-game schedule.

The NBA has done a counter-study that finds no racial bias. I like David Stern and the NBA, but does anyone really take this study seriously? Does anyone think that if the NBA commissioned a counter-study and it replicated the finding that referees have subconscious racial preferences, the NBA would then release that study? The one advantage that the NBA study has is that it can use a data set that takes into account the specific referee making a given call. (Wolfers and Price could only analyze the effect of the racial composition of a crew as a whole, since they did not know which referees made particular calls in a given game.) Naturally, the NBA will not make its data available, citing confidentiality concerns. If the NBA had a real interest in determining whether subconscious racial bias exists on the part of officials, it would make that call-specific data available subject to a confidentiality agreement, a tactic that is used all the time in litigation when competitors produce proprietary information to one another. My guess is that the NBA, in places that David Stern doesn't talk about at parties, will quietly increase the number of African-American referees over the next several years.

What interests me so much about the study, other than the fact that it jibes with my view of modern racism as being very subtle, is the fact that sports can be such a valuable ground for empirical analysis because of its defined outcomes. The results of a basketball game can be tangibly measured, so factors like racial bias can be measured with some degree of precision. This is why I quite enjoyed seeing Rush Limbaugh's demise as an NFL pundit. When Rush is "analyzing" political issues, he can get away with whatever he wants because of the imprecision with which most political issues are analyzed. When he brought his agenda to analyzing the NFL, he was exposed as a fraud within weeks because he went off on Donovan McNabb and his claim that McNabb was a media creation could be easily debunked with numbers. McNabb's merits can be reliably measured in a way that Barack Obama's cannot. This isn't to say that our analysis of the performance of sports figures is perfect (hence Michael Vick's multiple Pro Bowl appearances and Derek Jeter's multiple Gold Gloves), but it's certainly better than the measures of issues that, you know, actually matter.

[Update: John Hollinger makes a pair of good points in response, noting that: (1) the actual disparity in fouls is quite small; and (2) teams with more white players did well because the smarter teams picked up on the fact that European players were undervalued.]

I also enjoyed this opus by Jonathan Chait, a senior editor at The New Republic (and graduate of the University of Michigan), on the Netroots movement, which I view as similar to having Claude Lemieux on my team: their methods might not be totally ethical, but I like having them doing my dirty work for me because the other team has Ulf Samuelsson and if my team doesn't have a pest, then we're going to lose. I'm mainly thinking about the conclusion of the article, which describes how the Netroots have managed to put pressure on the mainstream media from the left that had never existed before.

I was also amused by this paragraph:

In point of fact, the most successful bloggers have been pulled into the warm embrace of the political establishment. Moulitsas consults regularly with influential Democrats in Washington. Presidential candidates hire popular bloggers or court them with private dinners. Last year, numerous top Democrats trekked to Las Vegas to attend YearlyKos, the liberal blog convention, where they sucked up to the attendees as relentlessly as if they were software executives. The climax of the proceedings was a party for bloggers thrown by then-presidential hopeful Mark Warner, costing more than $50,000 and featuring chocolate fountains. None of these things, however, have softened the netroots' sense of grievance and exclusion.

I want to know when I'm going to get to nosh from a chocolate fountain purchased by The Orgeron at Swindlepalooza in Tuscaloosa.

And Now, for Something Completely Different

I highly recommend this article from Sunday's Washington Post. Although it takes a while to get through it, the article is well worth your time as a commentary on modern life, or at least on modern commuting. Maybe it resonated deeply with me because I can absolutely see myself leaving a subway station and ignoring a musician playing for spare change, even if that musician is one of the most accomplished violinists in the world. Five year of living in Midtown conditioned me to ignore anyone who might be begging for money and I don't think that's a good thing. Maybe the article resonated because I get zoned into my own little world when I'm commuting to work, as I focus on the road, the latest fire I have to put out at work, and my Teaching Company lectures. (I just finished World War I, so if you find me likening the Thrashers' defense to the French resistance at Verdun or a Bobby Cox decision as worse than the German decision to start unrestricted submarine warfare, now you know why.) Maybe the article resonated with me because I went grocery shopping yesterday with my iPod and wouldn't have known if Charlotte Church was singing in Aisle 6 next to the whole wheat pasta.

What I liked best about the article was that it provoked definite feelings for me. It made me want to download some of Joshua Bell's work, as well as Bach's "Chaconne." (Yes, I appreciate the irony that I want to download the music so I can draw myself off into my own world and listen to it, thus defeating the point of the article.) It made me want to pay more attention to what I see every day. (Cue Lester Burnham's "there's beauty all around us" speech from American Beauty.) And yes, it made me want to Google images of Greta Scacchi. So, as your reward for putting up with this rumination...

On my High Horse for the Red Army

I normally like to confine my criticism of Peter King to football-related topics like racial stereotyping, missing the boat on Michael Vick, and Northeastern provinciality, but today, we're going to dust off the ol' history degree and get after Peter on a new front: American-o-centric views of World War Two:

Until Sunday, this place, for me, was a Tom Brokaw book, a History Channel show. But as we talked with Nicholas on the hour trip back to Caen, we wondered what would have happened if the Germans hadn't been repelled from France. Would England have been next? And would the emboldened Germans then have crossed the Atlantic and tried to take America? Would our way of life, our football and our baseball, our corner bars and big universities, have been forever changed? The Super Bowl just monopolized the lives of so many in North America. It was one of the highest rated TV programs of all time. Imagine a world without it.

Peter is apparently unaware of the fact that the Americans, Canadians, and British faced roughly 20% of the Wehrmacht because the remaining 80% was almost entirely committed in the East. Moreover, by June 1944, the Red Army had essentially won in the East, as they were rolling towards Poland and had achieved massive superiority in terms of troops and tanks by this period. So, to answer Peter's questions:

1. The Germans were going to be repelled from France; it was just a question of whether the Soviets or the Western Allies were going to march under the Arc du Triomphe.

2. If the Germans couldn't attempt an invasion of England in the summer and fall of 1940, when they were not at war with the USSR or the US, they sure as hell weren't going to do so by 1944. And if they weren't coming across the English Channel, they sure as hell weren't coming across the Atlantic. So no, we wouldn't be the Western division of the Bundesliga if not for D-Day.

This is not to say that the US didn't do a good deed by forcing the Axis into a war. The US did do some good by degrading the Germans' industrial capacity and deflecting a few divisions away from the East. We also did some serious good in defeating the Japanese in the East and ending their genocidal activities in Manchuria (although they were ultimately replaced by Mao, so be careful what you wish for). However, my pet peeve is lionizing the D-Day invasions and ignoring the fact that the Soviets were the ones who really beat the Germans. The Soviets sustained 10,700,000 combat deaths as compared to the US's 407,000. It's cool that Peter King showed enough interest to go to the Normandy beaches and pay homage to our war dead. Most Americans probably couldn't find France on a map, let alone find their way to Normandy. That said, I get bothered that few in this country recognize the role that the Soviets played in defeating the Nazis (and I'm primarily talking about Soviet citizens, as their leadership was criminally inept for much of the war and doesn't deserve plaudits). Either that or I just like playing the role of history snob. It dovetails nicely with European football snob.

And now, for something completely different

You may think that a sports blog might spend the Monday after the Super Bowl discussing that event, even if Atlanta, for the 39th time in the past 40 editions of the Biggest Football Game Ever Played!!!, did not have a dog in the fight (although Georgia fans will point out that there was a Dawg prominently involved.) You might also think that someone who lived in Pittsburgh from ages seven to nine, his prime formative football era, and who draped an old Terrible Towel on his entertainment center for the game might want to discuss it in detail. But, I'm just not feeling it today, partly because the game was non-descript and partly out of guilt that I am a sports bigamist, rooting for the Steelers and the Falcons. The magic of blogging is that I get to write about whatever grabs my fancy and today, my fancy has been claimed not by the Super Bowl, but instead, by Munich, or more precisely, the criticism of the movie.

The wife and I trekked up to Shallowford on Friday night to complete the Herculean task of seeing the last of the five Best Picture candidates. I expected to be angry about the movie, based on the criticism that it paints too negative a view of the Israelis who are exacting revenge on the perpetrators of the Munich slaughter or too positive a view of the slaughterers. I came in with the opinion that Operation Wrath of G-d was an entirely appropriate response to the slaughter and I still hold that belief. That said, the criticism of Munich is of a movie other than the one I saw on Friday night. Either someone at the Regal 24 screwed up and showed a "Director's Cut" done by Shimon Peres or the critics are full of it. (Spoilers to follow.)

Here's Charles Krauthammer's criticism of the movie. Krauthammer falls within the realm of conservatives whom I can respect and will listen to, partly because he's generally conservative on foreign policy/military issues, where I can see myself falling towards the right (or at least the center) and partly because he supports Israel. That said, he's off the reservation on Munich:

If Steven Spielberg had made a fictional movie about the psychological disintegration of a revenge assassin, that would have been fine. Instead, he decided to call this fiction "Munich" and root it in a historical event: the 1972 massacre by Palestinian terrorists of 11 Israeli athletes at the Olympic Games. Once you've done that -- evoked the killing of innocents who, but for Palestinian murderers, would today be not much older than Spielberg himself -- you have an obligation to get the story right and not to use the victims as props for any political agenda, let alone for the political agenda of those who killed them. The only true part of the story is the few minutes spent on the massacre. The rest is invention, as Spielberg delicately puts it in the opening credits, "inspired by real events."

True, but the subject of Operation Wrath of G-d is so shrouded in mystery that some license with the facts is necessary, and Krauthammer's criticism isn't with the "facts" set forth in the movie, but rather in the characterization.

By real events? Rubbish. Inspired by Tony Kushner's belief (he co-wrote the screenplay) that the founding of Israel was a "historical, moral, political calamity" for the Jewish people.

This is Krauthammer attacking the author of the script, not the actual content. And, he ignores the fact that the script was mostly written by Eric Roth and was based on a piece of history by George Jonas called "Vengeance," so attacking Kushner is something of a red herring, not unlike liberals blaming anything and everything on Karl Rove.

It is an axiom of filmmaking that you can only care about a character you know. In "Munich," the Israeli athletes are not only theatrical but historical extras, stick figures. Spielberg dutifully gives us their names -- Spielberg's List -- and nothing more: no history, no context, no relationships, nothing. They are there to die. The Palestinians who plan the massacre and are hunted down by Israel are given -- with the concision of the gifted cinematic craftsman -- texture, humanity, depth, history. The first Palestinian we meet is the erudite translator of poetry giving a public reading, then acting kindly toward an Italian shopkeeper -- before he is shot in cold blood by Jews. Then there is the elderly PLO member who dotes on his 7-year-old daughter before being blown to bits. Not one of these plotters is ever shown plotting Munich, or any other atrocity for that matter. They are shown in the full flower of their humanity, savagely extinguished by Jews.

This argument makes me wonder whether Krauthammer actually saw the film, or at least whether he didn't go to the theater assuming that liberal Hollywood is incapable of presenting the Munich massacre "fairly" and was going to pan it no matter what. Yes, we don't get a lot of background on the Israeli athletes who were murdered at Munich, but the movie opens with them being roused from their sleep by a bunch of raving lunatics with AK-47s and it ends with them being shot in a defenseless posture on helicopters. Their murder is accompanied early in the film by shots of Israeli families crying, Palestinians celebrating, and the victims' images being shown on a TV screen while "Hatikvah" (a really moving national anthem for a situation like this, but I'm biased) is played. How in the world is Spielberg not going to make us feel emotional about their murder?

And as to the point that the Palestinians are given "texture, humanity, depth, history," that's hardly true. The first victim is shown buying groceries, as if that is supposed to make me feel close to him. The second is shown with his daughter, but that image cuts both ways, as the Israeli team tries mightily to off the father without harming the daughter, a plain contrast to the terrorists who consciously tried to kill civilians. The remaining Palestinian targets are not shown doing anything that would make us like or respect them. Yes, the planning stages are not shown, but Spielberg (and the devious mastermind Kushner) have only a limited amount of time to tell their story (they use three hours, as is) and had to make choices. The fact that they chose to focus on the revenge, rather than the initial bad act, is a perfectly respectable choice.

But the most shocking Israeli brutality involves the Dutch prostitute -- apolitical, beautiful, pathetic -- shot to death, naked, of course, by the now half-crazed Israelis settling private business. The Israeli way, I suppose.

Yes, Charles, a Dutch prostitute who murdered one of Avner's (the Israeli protagonist) team members by blowing out the back of his head is "pathetic" and the Israelis are "half-crazed" for killing her after she killed one of their own. You've nailed it. And that scene where Avner wept over his dead friend, thus making the audience understand perfectly his reason for vengeance? Good job ignoring that little piece of evidence.

Even more egregious than the manipulation by character is the propaganda by dialogue. The Palestinian case is made forthrightly: The Jews stole our land and we're going to kill any Israeli we can to get it back. Those who are supposedly making the Israeli case say . . . the same thing. The hero's mother, the pitiless committed Zionist, says: We needed the refuge. We seized it. Whatever it takes to secure it. Then she ticks off members of their family lost in the Holocaust.

Spielberg makes the Holocaust the engine of Zionism and its justification. Which, of course, is the Palestinian narrative. Indeed, it is the classic narrative for anti-Zionists, most recently the president of Iran, who says that Israel should be wiped off the map. And why not? If Israel is nothing more than Europe's guilt trip for the Holocaust, then why should Muslims have to suffer a Jewish state in their midst?

It takes a Hollywood ignoramus to give flesh to the argument of a radical anti-Semitic Iranian. Jewish history did not begin with Kristallnacht. The first Zionist Congress occurred in 1897. The Jews fought for and received recognition for the right to establish a "Jewish national home in Palestine" from Britain in 1917 and from the League of Nations in 1922, two decades before the Holocaust.

But the Jewish claim is far more ancient. If the Jews were just seeking a nice refuge, why did they choose the malarial swamps and barren sand dunes of 19th-century Palestine? Because Israel was their ancestral home, site of the first two Jewish commonwealths for a thousand years -- long before Arabs, long before Islam, long before the Holocaust. The Roman destructions of 70 A.D and 135 A.D. extinguished Jewish independence but never the Jewish claim and vow to return home. The Jews' miraculous return 2,000 years later was tragic because others had settled in the land and had a legitimate competing claim. Which is why Jews have for three generations offered to partition the house. The Arab response in every generation has been rejection, war and terrorism.

This claim is simply ludicrous up until the final three sentences. Yes, Spielberg views Israel through the prism of the Holocaust, as do many Jews. The fact that he chose to justify Israel's existence through characters making reference to the Shoah is completely reasonable. It's true that Jews had been advocating that they regain their homeland for thousands of years before the Holocaust, but Spielberg (and the Israeli characters) are exactly right that the Holocaust was the spur that got the major powers off their ass to give the Jews a chunk of our Promised Land. The fact that claims had been made unsuccessfully for centuries prior to 1945 only bolsters the connection between Israel's founding and the Holocaust. And if Kushner is trying to delegitimize Israel, why on earth would he include numerous references in the script to the Holocaust, a subject that universally creates sympathy for Jews (except, I suppose, in Iran, where it is both a subject of glee and something that never existed.)

Krauthammer then makes a truly bad argument, claiming that because Iran's President correctly judges that Israel's right to exist (or at least the legitimacy of its founding) is bound up to a significant degree in the unprecedented slaughter of Jews in Europe and therefore feels the need to deny the Holocaust, that it's improper to work off the assumption that he's trying so hard to negate. If anything, Mr. Ahmadinejad's efforts to deny the Holocaust demonstrate its importance to Israel's justification. Krauthammer acts as if the Jews' long-standing claims to the land should be the justification, instead of the Holocaust, but our claim to the land is no different than that of the Palestinians. They had it, then we had it, then they had it, etc. That doesn't get anyone anywhere. We need it because numerous maniacs have tried to kick us out of countries or wipe us off the earth altogether? That's a justification that the Palestinians (and the rest of the Arab world) can't match, which is why Ahmadinejad has to try to change history to justify his call to wipe Israel off the map.

And Munich. Munich, the massacre, had only modest success in launching the Palestinian cause with the blood of 11 Jews. "Munich," the movie, has now made that success complete 33 years later. No longer is it crude, grainy TV propaganda. "Munich" now enjoys high cinematic production values and the imprimatur of Steven Spielberg, no less, carrying the original terrorists' intended message to every theater in the world.

Are you f***ing kidding me? This movie is more successful for highlighting the Palestinian cause than the act of bringing the Olympics to a halt by murdering 11 Jews? I'd expect that sort of overwrought rhetoric from NewsMax, not a respected opinionista. Do the Palestinians really want the re-telling of the murder of a number of bound athletes in a helicopter to highlight their plight? Wouldn't Kushner rather have made some sort of fictionalized account of the "massacre" at Jenin if that was his goal? After all, if he isn't bound by facts, that would be a good place to start.

This is hardly surprising, considering that "Munich's" case for the moral bankruptcy of the Israeli cause -- not just the campaign to assassinate Munich's planners but the entire enterprise of Israel itself -- is so thorough that the movie concludes with the lead Mossad assassin, seared by his experience, abandoning Israel forever. Where does the hero resettle? In the only true home for the Jew of conscience, sensitivity and authenticity: Brooklyn.

I understand that different people can take different messages from movies. My Mom thought that Schindler's List highlighted that there are good people in even the most horrible environs and events; my high school debate coach took from it an indictment of capitalism. That said, there's no way that anyone without a blinding agenda could watch Munich and think that it de-legitimizes Israel's right to exist. Character after character make the point that Israel has to defend itself and cannot let the massacre of its athletes go unpunished. It's true that Avner and most of his team members end up disillusioned by the process, but newsflash to Charles and the chickenhawks whom he often defends: war is a disillusioning process, even if the cause is just. Soldiers (especially those in the infantry who saw the killing up close) often come home feeling manipulated after having fought with their own hands. That's a natural reaction to an inherently unnatural situation. The best American war movies have made this point clear, but all Charles has to do for illustration is go to any support group for Vietnam vets. No one thinks that the U.S. is illegitimate because so many of our citizens go to war and find the process disillusioning. This is especially true for Avner, who did not fight men in Palestinian uniforms, but rather was forced to kill men who looked like civilians and his only basis for doing so was trusting his orders. Much as I love James Bond movies, Avner's reaction seems a lot more consistent with how I think someone in his position would react to doing his job than my beloved Mr. Bond would.

And thanks for mentioning that the movie ends in Brooklyn. Charles, I'm puzzled as to why don't you also mention that the final shot is one of the World Trade Center? If Kushner wanted to turn Americans against Israel, why make reference to an attack that Americans universally regard as an evil slaughter of the innocents and thereby connect it to Munich?

Getting political for a moment...

One of my pet peeves is the butchering of history. Our President did just that in Latvia this weekend by criticizing the Yalta Conference of February 1945 as a betrayal of Eastern Europe. (See the article linked in this post's title.)

Yalta, for those of you who had better things to do that read history books at age 10, i.e. those of you with friends, was a conference between Stalin, FDR, and Churchill in which the Allies agreed to Soviet control over Eastern Europe with the caveat that the Soviets would permit elections there. Stalin never adhered to that promise, as FDR and Churchill suspected he wouldn't, and the episode led to some Republicans alleging that FDR had sold Eastern Europe out with a secret agreement.

In ideal world, Eastern Europe wouldn't have been oppressed by the Soviet Union for the duration of the Cold War. However, the reality of the situation made that an inevitability. For one thing, the Soviets had already lost over 20 million soldiers and civilians in their conflict with the Germans. Given our strong response to losing 3,000 in the 9/11 Attacks, we can't say that we wouldn't have acted any differently than the Soviets did when they usurped Eastern Europe to ensure that they wouldn't be slaughtered in their own country again.

Additionally, the Soviets were already occupying almost all of Eastern Europe by the time of Yalta, so the only alternative would have been to root them out of Eastern Europe by turning the war against the Nazis into a war against the Russians. Maybe Bush, with his limited view of the world outside of the 50 states, doesn't know this, but in early 1945, the Soviets had more troops, more (and better) tanks, a greater willingness to take casualties, better tactics (as a result of having to face the best pieces of the Wehrmacht,) and better military leadership. In short, it's not at all clear that Eisenhower's forces could have beaten the Soviets in Eastern Europe if they wanted to, let alone the fact that victory would have required an enormous number of casualties that the English didn't have the resources or will to take.

(The irony is that Bush had to justify attacking Iraq and not Iran and North Korea, both of which are more evil and threatening to U.S. interests, on the grounds that we should do good where possible, but we can't take on every injustice in the world, especially when doing so would entail huge costs. The same rationale justifies Yalta.)

Oh, and as of February, we still had Japan as an unconquered enemy and were expecting to take six-figure casualties occupying Japan. I suppose Bush could agree with the lower estimates of casualties for the invasion of Japan advanced by liberal historians when they argue that Truman erred in dropping the Atomic bombs, but somehow, I doubt that.

In short, Bush took a gratuitous shot at FDR (and by extension, Churchill and Eisenhower,) probably to appeal to the part of his base who care enough about history to believe a distorted version of it. I hated the media's misuse of terms like "Stalingrad" and "Gulag" during the Iraq conflict, so I don't feel too partisan in ripping on Bush for the same.