The Safety of Clichés

Sometimes, it's good enough to just call someone a "clubhouse cancer," as despicable and irresponsible a term as it may be. It's a bromide by now; any time a player is an asshole (excepting short, pudgy and overrated catchers from Brooklyn) he's labeled as such. In fact, as Section IX of the Implicit Sports Writer/Reader Contract actually states:

Reader shall ignore the visceral connotation of referring to a human being as a "cancer," and instead accept that "cancer" in the context of the sports section implies something much less serious; heretofore, "cancer" should be considered a slur on part with "petty annoyance," or, "somewhat cocky dude."

It would be nice if writers would stick to the basics when breathlessly trying to convince readers that an egotistical and rude athlete is worthy of public scorn. Maybe offer a little anecdote about some perk the player receives — "Can you believe he has his own post-game spread?!? And that it's all Flax?!?" — maybe run an anonymous quote from a teammate who describes in breathtaking detail how the story's subject didn't high-five him once after a homer, and then a mention of the old warhorse cliché, "clubhouse cancer." That way, the reader can then put down the paper, puke up his undercooked eggs in the sink, and head off to work safe with the knowledge that X is one bad hombre.

But every so often, a sports writer — usually a columnist — will try and find the door to the matrix, and take things well beyond the limits of taste. This is one of those times:

Despite their apparent need for a power bat/corner outfielder, and SI.com's recent speculation that Petco Park represents (Barry) Bonds' likeliest landing spot, the Padres have narrowed their search to exclude indicted sociopaths.

Sorry, you might have missed the part of that paragraph that's got my man-tits in a ringer. If I may, with a little more emphasis:

Despite their apparent need for a power bat/corner outfielder, and SI.com's recent speculation that Petco Park represents (Barry) Bonds' likeliest landing spot, the Padres have narrowed their search to exclude indicted sociopaths.

In case you're wondering, the author is Tim Sullivan, and the rest of his weekly insult to U-T subscribers can be found here. Maybe you want to read the column for yourself, because you don't trust the Diesel. But, if you want to save the 5 minutes of your life that you'll never get back, allow me to distill the column's main points for you:

• Sports Illustrated wrote that the Padres were the most likely destination for Bonds;
• Bonds has a psychological condition that is considered on par with psychopathy (Some would say that the causes of sociopathy are environmental [a.k.a.: "Learned Behavior"] as opposed to a genetic underpinning in the case of psychopathy, however the vast majority of mental health professionals still use the two terms synonymously) that generally involves an inability to function within society and a lack of impulse control that can manifest itself in violent outbursts and/or premeditated violence;
• Kevin Towers/Sandy Alderson think that any benefits of having Bonds' still awesome bat in the lineup would be outweighed by actually having Bonds on the team at all other times;
• The Padres, thusly, should not acquire Mr. Bonds.

Frankly, I'm exhausted by the "not-on-our-team!" shit columnists have been churning out ever since the Giants announced they were cutting ties. If I still had free access to Lexis-Nexis, I'd look up how many times the search terms "Barry+Bonds," and, "not+worth+it" have appeared in sports pages in the last year. And, it's usually bullshit — which I suspect columnists know, but pretend otherwise — because fans would get behind Pol Pot if he could slug .600 and draw 100+ walks.

But let's say Sullivan's right, and that Bonds wouldn't be a worthwhile pickup for the Friars. Can't he just say that without stating that Bonds has a mental disorder? Would he like it if I attributed his shitty, malinformed columns to paranoid schizophrenia?

Yeah, I know what some of you are thinking: "Boy, that literal definition of Bonds sure does sound a lot like him." No, it doesn't. Bonds is an asshole, dickhead, cocksucker ... name your epithet, and he probably fits it. Maybe he's the least approachable or sociable player in the majors. It doesn't matter. He's not a sociopath, because he hasn't fucking killed any of the sports writers who insist on saying the most outlandish shit about him daily. Maybe I'm being a little bit of a stick in the mud, here, but saying something like "Bonds is a sociopath!" isn't funny, or clever. It's an indictment of Sullivan's ability to understand the difference between a column in a major metro sports section and a drunken rant.

Yes, I know fans say crazy shit all the time, myself included. As I'm fond of pointing out, my college buddies and I used to joke that a rarely-used Arizona basketball player who went AWOL for a while had AIDS. It retrospect, it's not really funny, but at the time we thought we were a riot. Amazingly, though, no one made the leap to writing something even remotely that baseless and libelous in one of our sports columns in the student newspaper, because we all understood that there's a big difference between what you can say to your buddies and what you can put in an information-based news delivery vehicle. It saddens me that a bunch of beer-addled 20-year-olds who got in trouble on an almost-daily basis with our paper's advisor understood that basic principle better than a veteran hack like Sullivan.

Or, more bluntly, it's a good thing for Timmy that the U-T didn't narrow its search to exclude serial killers.

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One more thing: I didn't notice this at first, but did anyone pick up on the fact that Tim Sullivan is actually suggesting, thanks to his inability to punctuate sentences properly (or his copy desk's unwillingness to wipe up his typographical slobber), that Bonds has been indicted of being a sociopath? Man, I heard prosecutors could get an indictment against a ham sandwich, but I didn't know they could actual compel grand juries to offer psychiatric evaluations as well! It's a brave new world out there, kiddos.

Blog-to-Blog Resuscitation

Today, it’s Three Guys Who Never Agree, as Pepe and Diesel have so graciously allowed me to enter their space for a college football discussion. A But what about the kids?? Part II, if you will…

Much discussion, amongst the media and amongst me and my friends and family, the last few days has centered on the latest round of the college football carousel, which has lost all kind of control ever since Tommy Bowden left his undefeated Tulane squad between the final regular season and bowl game. Ironically, Rich Rodriguez was his offensive coordinator then, and he has recently done the same, this time leaving West Virginia, his alma mater, for Michigan. Another non-stop discussion on the radio dial has been Atlanta’s Bobby Petrino “quitting” on his team “in the middle of the season,” which implies there was more than the actual three games remaining of a wash-out season. Because we apparently have nothing else to listen to, and it’s football, blowhards nationwide have overreacted to both of these instances, calling these men “quitters,” “traitors” and, perhaps most comically, “guys I wouldn’t want my son to play for.”

In my best Chris Rock voice, Can we please cut the fucking shit already?

An annoyance I have is our continual holding of athletes to a higher standard than everyone else, even though, time and time again, we are reminded of how idiotic this is. It’s now crept into us holding coaches to higher standards, as if these “leaders of men” are any different. We’re avoiding the idea that coaches, just like us simpletons, want to max out their potential and have the best possible life, just like we hope to. The only difference is their window to do that is exponentially smaller than ours, based on simple time frames, pressure and short attention spans.

Plenty has been said about Bobby Petrino, so it would be redundant for me to bring them all up here – these mainly center on the outside influences that destroyed the season before it began for Atlanta, an average to slightly above average team at best heading into the season if none of those things happened in the first place. Is it wrong for Bobby Petrino to leave Atlanta during the season to head for Arkansas? Perhaps, but it’s not necessarily his fault – if he wants to move to Arkansas, he has to get started right away. By staying for those three final NFL games to see out the season, he would have lost at least one season in Fayetteville, all because of the NCAA’s reluctance to push National Signing Day, which is the root of all the December coaching changes, back a little bit.

The gap between the end of the regular season and the bowl games is too precious to lose when going after those final pieces to the recruiting class, so schools like Michigan and Arkansas have their hands forced into “stealing” other teams’ coaches while the season is still going on. It’s the same reason why Arizona had to go and get Mike Stoops, even though he was the defensive coordinator in a national championship race at the time. But that’s the business timeline the NCAA has set up. The NBA doesn’t open the free agent market on May 1st for a reason, yet college football wants everything signed and sealed by February 6th with battles taking place well before that. Teams don’t have any time to lose.

Football, college and pro (and, who are we kidding, high school), is business - a fact that everyone acknowledges but fails to understand. Everybody thinks they can contend for a national championship, even though it’s proven every year that it is arguably the hardest goal to accomplish in team sports. There are far too many obstacles to overcome and, unlike the NFL, there are no equal playing fields when it comes to competitive advantages and disadvantages.

Which brings me to Rodriguez, who’s become the latest “traitor” on the paving the path to a successful career in coaching football. Nobody bats an eye when an assistant coach, who has a far closer relationship to players than the head coach and is often the one making promises, leaves to take another job, yet we all get up in arms when the head coach moves to greener pastures.

Whether you think Rodriguez’s career move is great or deplorable, you have to understand that the timing of his decision was neither his nor Michigan’s fault. College football has the longest offseason in sports, yet there’s little breathing room between the end of this season and the beginning of next. In fact, they overlap, and the loser in most cases is the end of this season, because next year, of course, is the year we win it all!

But what about the kids? they always say. Seems like one set of them is going to be neglected either way. They should be expecting it by now - it’s the nature of the beast for college football hires to be handled like this. But it doesn’t have to be, does it?

The Ninth Level of Dante's Hell Is Reserved For Sanctimonious Sportswriters

I've been trying to avoid discussing the Michael Vick indictment because it seems too easy and everything's already been said, then some. But I just can't take it anymore. I've heard more sanctimonious, hyperbolic horseshit out of the sports media in the last few days than I have since, well, take your pick: the height of the Bonds grand jury, the Duke lacrosse case, the Kobe case (which I am loath to even mention since Ryan tried to bludgeon me with his Blackberry last time it came up), or even O.J.

This post could make a lot of different points. Off the top of my head:

I could talk about the role of race, which I do think is a factor in the coverage, but probably not in the investigation itself, and not nearly to the degree of the aforementioned issues.

We could discuss the hypocrisy involved in all this hand-wringing by meat eaters over dogs being electrocuted. (Please, somebody get all pissed and say, "but cows and chickens don't get electrocuted or hung or beaten." Pretty please. If you take this tack, your only real argument is, "but dogs are cute!" Unless you want to be one of those armchair animal psychiatrists who claims to understand the intelligence levels of all animals on a sliding scale, and further to construct an equation that derives the value of their pain from their relative intelligence.)

I could talk about the fact that the predominant response from the sports media thus far has been to moralize and bleat, rather than trying to figure out what other athletes might be involved: As ProFootballTalk pointed out (no way to link directly to the relevant section -- search the page for Dorsey Levens, about 1/6 of the way down as of this writing), maybe when ESPN had Dorsey Levens in the studio the other day, they should have asked him why his dog training company has Michael Vick's picture on its "Satisfied Celebs" page. Maybe they should have asked him if he attended dogfights. Maybe they should have asked him for more than his opinion on the matter, and maybe they would have, if they weren't busy pumping out opinion columns and asking everybody from Emmitt Smith to Vinny in North Jersey to give their opinion. Opinions first: they've got their priorities.

But I'd rather just focus on the sanctimony itself, because this has long been one of my primary complaints about mass sports media. I'm on vacation and have been trying to avoid the coverage of this issue as much as possible, but thus far I can remember hearing the following.

First it was Romy on the radio describing in grisly detail a scene involving Mike Vick slamming a dog on the ground repeatedly until it was dead. He proceeded it with a perfunctory "if it's true," the classic copout of opiners who need an excuse to sermonize: what always remains unspoken in these situations is the baseline assumption that it is, in fact, true. If they really allowed for the possibility that it wasn't true, then they'd have to shut their traps, and that wouldn't fill fifteen minutes of their show, or fifteen inches on the page. Never mind the fact that the indictment (available here) doesn't actually, technically, say that Michael Vick slammed a dog on the ground repeatedly until it was dead: saying it sure lights up the phone lines.

Then I heard some other radio hack essentially saying that it must be true, because the Feds don't take cases to court if they can't win. The Feds win something like 90 percent of their cases, he said. That's almost a definite. And, in horseshoes, hand grenades, and sports journalism, almost is enough.

I should pause here and acknowledge that the response has not been completely one-sided: the requisite chiding "wait and see" columns have sprung up as well. Screamin' A held up an open hand the other day. ESPN's coverage has been atypically muted, as exemplified in a worthy effort by Mike Sando (which also outlines how air-loose a grand jury indictment can be).

By and large, however, the response has been shrill and condemning. Vick's hometown paper even has a photo retrospective of his career posted on its website, as if he were dead. But maybe the single most flagrantly self-righteous piece of writing I've seen about Vick came from Philly's own Bill Conlin. I don't do the FJM bit often -- indeed, I've objected to it on this blog before -- but I'm going to do it here, because I've been itching to rip Conlin, and because I think his latest screed is an extreme example of the sanctimonious tendency I'm describing, as well as its most common and most bothersome undertones (I'll explain what those are later). I'll try not to take anything out of context or make any cheap shots, two tendencies of the form which I usually object to most.

NFL can't really let Vick play, can it?

SEE, HERE'S the thing with Michael Vick and the heinous crimes for which he has been indicted.

Right to Life activists have a history of blowing up abortion clinics and reaching "out-of- court" settlements with pro-choicers that, in some cases, involve extreme prejudice.

Two paragraphs in and already he's comparing killing dogs to killing people. I want to establish this right now, because the opposite belief is a major crux of a lot of the anti-Vick vitriol, and one Conlin (and others) rely on: killing dogs is not the same as killing humans. Human lives are more valuable than those of animals. As far as I'm concerned, that's a moral absolute, one I would hope I don't have to explain.

Remember this human/animal issue, because it arises later in interesting ways.

The animal-rights folks take similar umbrage to people who engage in the abuse or wanton slaughter of animals. They really, really get upset about the breeding of dogs for the sole purpose of mauling each other in a blood sport depicted as a deeply rooted and "traditional culture" form of entertainment.

Guilty or innocent, the Atlanta Falcons quarterback, massively marketed as the new breed of multitalented National Football League star, has become the face of an activity so vile that a long prison term is not punishment enough for those at the rotten core of dogfighting.

While I understand what he's trying to say here, the way he phrases this last paragraph reveals much of his agenda. First of all, "guilty or innocent" shouldn't be treated as a throwaway matter, as it is here. Second, I think calling him a "new breed of multitalented star" sounds suspiciously like something coded. And we all know dogfighting is vile and rotten. But amid all that rhetoric, all this sentence really says is that Michael Vick has become the face of dogfighting. If you separate what Conlin is saying from what he's suggesting, you realize that he's not saying very much, and he's saying it very carefully.

There should be a level of Hell in Dante's Inferno reserved for humans who aid and abet the unspeakable horrors that attend this barbaric "sport." It should be very close to the circle reserved for death-camp commandants and terrorists who blow themselves up in crowded public places.

This is hyperbole of the grossest kind. Dante? "Unspeakable horrors"? And are we seriously supposed to lump dogfighters in with death-camp commandants and suicide bombers? Is it necessary to invoke, even obliquely, the Holocaust and September 11th every time something bad happens? You're talking 11 million and 3,000-plus murdered people, respectively, and relating it to the killing of eight dogs. Let's take some responsibility for the words we write, to ensure that they continue to mean something: sentences like that cheapen the words inside, the ideas they represent, the author, and the paper they're printed in.

And don't tell me, "Lighten up, it's only a dog . . . " I'm more dog-tolerant than dog-loving, but this story and its ramifications transcend outrage even for somebody who has never wished the companionship of man's best friend.

So, the first thing NFL commissioner Roger Goodell should do is guarantee Michael Vick's safety. This fresh-faced voice of a long-overdue morality should assign 24-hour security to a man about to surpass Barry Bonds, O.J. Simpson and Pete Rose in the Hall of Infamy's jock wing. He should protect Vick from the reach of potential vigilante justice. It's going to take a few more news cycles for the full impact of this story to hit home. But it will hit harder than anything since O.J. was leading the Freeway Grand Prix in his white Bronco.

And the ridiculousness continues. Can we just stop here and consider the fact that this man just said Mike Vick is going to surpass O.J. Simpson in the "Hall of Infamy," whatever the fuck that is? He invokes the Juice twice! Just come out and say it, Bill: you think killing dogs is as bad as killing people.

You think I'm kidding? What this man is accused of doing - one count in the bill of indictment accuses Vick of supervising the multigrisly killings of eight dogs - is a grenade tossed at more than 70 million American dog owners.

I hope you're kidding, because it's not a grenade. In no way is Vick's indictment comparable to throwing a grenade at anybody. Just stop it.

Imagine if the Falcons had a game scheduled this season in Cleveland, against the Browns. With the sound system blaring "Who Let the Dogs Out." With all those hirsute crazies in their dog masks . . . It will be bad enough in stadiums where Rover is not the symbol of a team's tenacity and ferocity.

Except the Falcons don't play Cleveland this year, so your vivid little scene doesn't work. We might as well be imagining what would happen if the Falcons had to play the Canton Bulldogs. And does it really matter if the mascot is a dog? Would those fans take more umbrage at actual dogs being killed? I'm a psychotic Philly fan, but I don't recall ever tracking down and fighting any eagle poachers.

And that's why Michael Vick must never play again in an NFL uniform - until the indictment has run its legal course and he is acquitted by a jury. And try to imagine the jury-selection process if the quarterback's legal team fails to reach a satisfactory plea bargain: "Do you now own, or have you ever owned one or more dogs?"

Hey, there were people who supported the Vietnam war who wanted to impeach Lyndon Johnson when he was photographed holding up his beagle by the ears. I think a few million John Madden video games featuring Michael Vick just became the equivalent of your old eight-track tapes.

Hold on just a second: "Michael Vick must never play again in an NFL uniform -- until the indictment has run its legal course ..."? What does that mean? He should never play again in an NFL uniform for six months? A year? That's not never! So don't begin by making a statement like he should never play again and then immediately hedge it into nothingness. If you're going to say it, say it. Otherwise, don't.

There is already a Greek chorus of bleeding hearts calling for Vick to be allowed to continue overthrowing receivers and running around like a very fast rat in a maze until he has his day in court.

And here's where the human/animal confusion takes on some very obvious and very disturbing overtones. I'll only say this: no white quarterback would ever be described in a large national newspaper as a "very fast rat in a maze," regardless of what he did or which animal he allegedly electrocuted.

That due process-rooted sentiment confronts the unofficial national religion with a public-relations disaster of unprecedented scope.

Ah, yes, the unofficial national religion, that beacon known as the NFL. The sport more Americans watch than any other, in which men -- humans, not dogs -- hit each other so hard and so often that players' brains turn into sponges, until they retire and get put out to pasture for a meager pension. The electrocution of dogs is a stain on this religious institution.

I love the NFL as much as anybody I know, but let's not pretend it's a noble institution.

Goodell has been suspending the NFL's growing list of social misfits at a heartening rate. Vick's alleged involvement in caninecide should draw a suspension - for involvement in illegal gambling? - that carries beyond the legal resolution of the case. When a law-enforcement officer or teacher is accused of a crime, aren't they put on "administrative leave" pending an in-house investigation? Let the NFL investigation begin - but proceed slowly.

One of Franz Kafka's most chilling short stories is called "In the Penal Colony." It involves the use of an instrument of torture whereby the sentence imposed on a prisoner is carved into his body in an ornate script.

In the case of anybody guilty of involvement in the killing of dogs used for this illegal blood sport, a simple brand would suffice:

"Dog Killer." And make the letters big . . . *

He closes with a suggestion that Vick -- "if guilty," of course, only "if guilty," if not he takes it all back -- should be branded. Not jailed, not electrocuted or slammed on a floor -- not even eye for an eye -- but branded.

You know, like they do to animals. Like they did to slaves. So tell us, Bill Conlin: in your column, which is Vick, the (alleged) dog-killer, supposed to be?