From Ben Roger’s biography of the analytical philosopher:
It was at another party, given a little later in the year by the highly fashionable clothes designer, Fernando Sanchez, that he had a widely reported encounter. Ayer had always had an ability to pick up unlikely people and at yet another party had befriended Sanchez. Ayer was now standing near the entrance to the great white living-room of Sanchez’s West 57th Street apartment, chatting to a group of young models and designers, when a woman rushed in saying that a friend was being assaulted in a bedroom. Ayer went to investigate and found Mike Tyson forcing himself on a young south London model called Naomi Campbell, then just beginning her career. Ayer warned Tyson to desist. Tyson: ‘Do you know who the fuck I am? I’m the heavyweight champion of the world.’ Ayer stood his ground: ‘And I am the former Wykeham Professor of Logic. We are both preeminent in our field; I suggest that we talk about this like rational men.’ Ayer and Tyson began to talk. Naomi Campbell slipped out.
Generally I don’t expect the recipient of one of my nasty and unsolicited emails to respond but Brin-Jonathan Butler took the trouble to write me back after I accused him of being a “rightwing shit”. This was after I spotted a piece by him on Salon.com that described Cuba as “terrifying”. As it turns out, I did not even read the article but was reacting—violently—to the blurb that the editors tacked on to the article: “I came to Havana to film a documentary about a local boxer — and found a country by turns beautiful and terrifying.”
I suppose my only excuse was having fallen into a state of high dudgeon from reading a bunch of affidavits written by Cuba dissidents supposedly subjected to electroshock treatments in the 1980s. They had been collected in 1990 by a Freedom House researcher, who is now with the Defense Department in charge of “atrocity prevention”. Given the number of Pakistani children that have been killed by Predator Drones and the half-century long economic blockade punctuated by sabotage and invasion directed against Cuba, I was feeling more than a bit defensive when it came to attacks on the socialist island’s reputation from any quarter. Although I would readily admit that there have been human rights abuses in Cuba over the years, the affidavits did not pass the smell test.
After upbraiding Brin for ignoring the fact that a CIA-backed terrorist who had blown up a Cuban airliner had been freed from an American jail on a technicality, he wrote me back:
I cited the US courts for releasing and housing the man who blew up that airliner in my piece. Did you note that? And mocked the US for calling Cuba a “state sponsor of terror” despite their position regarding domestic terrorism against Cuba with that airline bomber.
After reading that, I said “oops” to myself and read Brin’s article, something I should have done from the outset. After reading it, I wrote him a note offering an apology—something that eventually led to breakfast with this altogether committed and serious student of Cuban society, and more particularly the role within it of Cuban boxers who have defected to the U.S.
Brin has written three articles for Salon.com, all of which are a cut above the usual fare and that share a focus on the sport of boxing. As a veteran of the “sweet science” who now trains mostly well-heeled clients to supplement the money he makes from writing, Brin writes from hard experience. In addition to an interview with Mike Tyson, his other two articles describe a documentary in progress titled “Split Decision”, a profile of Guillermo Rigondeaux who was one of Cuba’s best fighters before he defected in 2009.
The article that I had not bothered to read had this passage:
Along the Prado they used to sell slaves on the auction block, too. Before Fidel, when segregation was in full swing, the Cuban apartheid meant many clubs and parks still refused black Cubans entry. Famously even Batista, the president of the country before Fidel, was forbidden membership to a country club because he wasn’t white enough.
Maybe this was one of the reasons Guillermo Rigondeaux’s own father, living on a coffee plantation in the east, disowned his son after the first failed attempt at defection in 2007, blaming him for betraying a society that helped so many like their own family climb out of the vicious conditions that existed before the revolution. Or maybe Rigondeaux’s father was another brainwashed Fidelista oblivious to all the failed promises.
And while I know Cuba’s meaning is perpetually up for grabs, whose isn’t?
Now there’s a story really worth telling.
In the course of my conversation over breakfast with Brin, I learned that he had a very strong connection to Cuba through its boxers and that his interest in defectors (reflected deftly in “Split Decision”, the title of his film-in-progress) is very much engaged with perhaps the key question of our epoch, namely the difficulty of reconciling one’s personal and family obligations with broader social and political principles. If there is anything that involves “contradiction”, the nub of Marxist dialectics, it is the decision Cuban boxers must make when faced by the lure of big money in the U.S., even when it entails a break from everything held dear.
The website for “Split Decision” states:
The boxer’s struggle in Cuba is the Cuban struggle. All Cubans struggle from birth and they see the boxer’s struggle as a metaphor for their own.
Fidel Castro banned professional sports in Cuba in 1962. His decree created a difficult choice for boxers—stay in Cuba and fight for national glory or defect to a country where their talents could make them rich. In the 70s Teofilo Stevenson won three Olympic gold medals and turned down five million dollars to defect from Cuba and fight Muhammad Ali, asking those promoters who made the offer, “What’s a million dollars compared to the love of eight million Cubans?”. In the 90s Felix Savon won another three Olympic gold medals and turned down tens of millions to travel to the US to fight Mike Tyson. What Fidel Castro was trying to use his boxers to prove was not just that his boxers were defeating Americans in the ring, but that Cuba and her system were defeating America itself, most noticeably in their sacrifice of financial reward for service to their country…
February 2009, Rigondeaux risks his life to defect with smugglers via Mexico City, into the waiting arms of Miami exiled-Cuban promoters. A legal battle between his Irish manager Gary Hyde and the Miami promoters begins for control of Rigondeaux’s career before it even has a chance to begin. Rigondeaux’s career stalls as the power struggle over his career persists. He is nearly 30 when the issues are resolved and he finally signs a contract with Bob Arum, the largest boxing promoter in the world.
Rigondeaux discovers that the biggest obstacle to his career’s success lies in the fact that the 95% non-black exiled-Cuban community in Florida offer no support of black Cuban fighters. As Bob Arum points out, “Cuban Olympic champions can’t sell out the front row of a dancehall in Miami.”
Shortly after signing his contract in April of 2010, Rigondeaux is nearly knocked out while sparring in Los Angeles with a very limited youthful amateur. He promptly severs ties with his trainer, Freddie Roach, and returns to Miami. From his corner, Roach chillingly points out, “Someone was exposed here today.” At the most important moment of his life, Rigondeaux stands on the brink of either a championship or total professional and personal collapse. After 6 successful fights, Bob Arum steps forward to offer a contract to Gary Hyde, dangling a title shot. If he wins, the American dream could still come true for Rigondeaux. If he loses, he could become just another defector from Cuba who’s lost everything in search of that dream. Like nearly all the defected Cuban fighters who came before him, the biggest opponent Rigondeaux faces is coping with American life. Every time he steps into battle in an American ring, Rigondeaux wears the flag of the nation he has left behind on his trunks. Just what Cuba he is fighting for remains a mystery.
As a long-time boxing fan and an observer of Cuban society going back to 1962, when most Bard College students including me wondered if we were about to be swallowed by a mushroom cloud, I must say that I am anticipating the completion of this documentary with bated breath. So much so that I am now putting my money where my mouth is and contributing $50 to the film’s completion at https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/306344/contributions/new. I strongly urge all my readers to chip in there since I view this project as both a major contribution to educating people about Cuban reality as well as the sort of theme that young filmmakers should be dealing with.
For progress reports on the film, check the website and Brin’s twitter accounts: @BRINICIO and @_SPLITDECISION.
For those who have seen “Hoop Dreams”, arguably the best documentary about sports ever made, it should be sufficient motivation to see “Head Games”, a documentary about the link between sports-related concussions and permanent brain damage including early Alzheimer’s, simply by pointing out that they are both the work of director Steve James.
Opening yesterday at the AMC Empire 25 in N.Y. and the Laemmle in Los Angeles, as well as through video on-demand, the film is focused on the crusading work of Chris Nowinski, who played football at Harvard. They say that 9/10ths of the success of any documentary is based on the presence of a compelling personality. That being the case, Nowinski’s presence throughout the film should qualify it for an Academy Award. After graduating Harvard, Nowinski landed a spot on a TV reality show where his macho brawn and Ivy League degree served to make him a villain. After the show ended, he parlayed that into a career as a professional wrestler—a bad guy who taunted the crowds about his superiority. Professional wrestling turns out to be a dangerous sport despite the fact that it is fake. Nowinski explains that a headfirst fall to the mat—or worse to the concrete floor below—that is off by an inch can lead to a serious injury. After experiencing one such fall, he suffered a headache and dizziness that lasted for months. A visit to neurologist Robert Cantu revealed that he had suffered a major concussion.
Eventually Cantu and Nowinski teamed up to form the Center for the Study of Traumatic Encephalopathy at the Boston University School of Medicine that has been in the forefront of understanding the impact of sports-related concussions and agitating for reforms, particularly in the NFL. As anybody who follows professional football can attest, there have been major changes. For example, the N.Y. Jets’s star defensive back Darrelle Revis was required to sit out at least one game after receiving what was described as a mild concussion. In the past, the only way a player was kept off the field is if he suffered a blow that would have left him unconscious for a minute or so and transported off the field on a stretcher.
What “Head Games” reveals is that a revolution in sports rather than piecemeal meliorist reforms might be required. For one thing, there is a strong possibility that what can be described as “sub-concussions” can lead to brain damage just as easily. These are the dingers that leave a player woozy for a minute or so but not impaired enough to be sent to the bench. Some medical experts estimate that someone having played football from high school into the NFL might have suffered dozens of such blows throughout their playing time.
The other problem is that NFL type standards, including a physician assigned to look for the evidence of concussions at each and every game, do not apply to amateur sports. Most high schools can hardly afford to keep a team on the field nowadays let alone pay for the presence of a doctor. Furthermore, the risk of concussion does not just apply to male sports. Young women playing soccer risk injury simply by “heading” a ball.
I first wrote about Chris Nowinski back in January of 2010 after seeing him on Brian Gumbel’s HBO Real Sports program. It is worth repeating what I said then:
I also recommend that you take a look at Chris Nowinski’s website (http://www.chrisnowinski.com/). With his Harvard degree, he is not the typical jock. As a professional wrestler, he took time to speak out on young people getting involved with politics, particularly through registering to vote. You might also be aware that professional wrestling not only requires immense physical gifts; it also requires the ability to craft a persona for yourself. Initially Nowinski styled himself as a villainous snob from the Ivy League (not that hard to do!) and even used the ring name Chris Harvard. While it is difficult to figure out whether this was meant to shore up his villainous image in professional wrestling, Nowinski also assumed the role of “race traitor” akin to the hero of “Avatar”, as his wiki page indicates:
On the May 26, 2003 edition of Raw, Christopher Nowinski helped Rodney Mack defeat Bubba Ray Dudley in a “White Boy Challenge” and joined Theodore Long’s group “Thuggin’ And Buggin’ Enterprises”, a group of African Americans who worked a race angle in which they portrayed themselves as being victims of racism and being held down by the “White Man”.
A remarkable character, to say the least. Let’s hope that his six concussions do not eventually rob the world of his talents as spokesmen for the gladiator victims of the bread and circuses in today’s version of the Roman Empire.
“They Call it Myanmar: Lifting the Curtain” opened at Lincoln Center yesterday as well as theaters in Louisville and Santa Fe. Director Robert H. Lieberman’s film is not exactly what I would describe as leading edge politically or cinematically but it is worth seeing since it really does lift the curtain on a country that has been as isolated as North Korea in many ways.
Lieberman’s model seems to be the sort of show that you can see on the Travel Channel, especially Anthony Bourdain’s “No Reservations”. The format consists of a bemused visitor from the West visiting the boondocks and asking the natives “How come you like to eat raw rats?” Lieberman’s presence throughout the film revolves around two questions: “What is life like for you in Myanmar?” and “Why are you wearing that funny stuff on your face?” The funny stuff turns out to be thanaka, a powder made of ground bark that has a cooling effect on the face and arms.
That being said, Lieberman is a lot more intelligent and interesting than Anthony Bourdain. He came to Myanmar to train young Burmese how to make films rather than to taste raw rats. From the Cornell University website:
Robert H. Lieberman, a Cornell graduate and member of the physics faculty since 1980, directs the LSC Physics Help Center and its staff of 15 course assistants.
A recipient of the John M. and Emily B. Clark Award for Distinguished Teaching, he holds a joint appointment as a Senior Lecturer with the Physics Department and the Center for Learning & Teaching. Since 1990 he has been a Faculty Fellow at Cornell’s Risley Residential College for the Performing Arts.
In addition to his work in science, he is a novelist and film writer/director. His latest novel “The Last Boy” is a story that deals with the subject of Global Warming. His most recent films include the feature comedy “Green Lights” and the documentary “Last Stop Kew Gardens.”
Prior to joining the Physics Department, he was a professor of Engineering at Cornell. He has held two Fulbright Lectureships in film and creative writing. The most recent was in association with the Mowel Film Fund in the Philippines. Prior to that he was at the Academy of Performing Arts and Film in Bratislava. He presently serves as a Senior Specialist with the Fulbright Program.
Despite the concessions made to the Travel Channel prejudices of his ostensible audience, Lieberman does provide useful information on the country including its long history of despotic rule predating the Generals who ruled and ruined the country in the name of socialism. He points out that when Cyclone Nargis hit Myanmar in 2008, the Generals initially prevented outside aid for political reasons despite the fact that the storm would cost the lives of 138,000 of its citizens. Given the secrecy and isolation that typified its rule, Lieberman was taking genuine risks by interviewing its people, who for their own safety remained unidentified throughout the film.
Much of “They Call it Myanmar” consists of interviews with Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, the country’s Nelson Mandela. Filmed before the country’s thaw, it does not foreshadow her liberation from house arrest and return to politics.
U Thein Sein, a reformer who has given approval to her party’s re-entry into the electoral arena, currently leads the country. The N.Y. Times has urged the Obama administration to ease sanctions against the country in light of the progress that has been made.
While I can recommend “They Call it Myanmar”, the best film about the country so far remains “Burma Soldier”, a film I reviewed back in May 2011 that appeared originally on HBO and can be still be watched there on-demand. For those appalled by the crimes of Green “socialism” in Libya or Baathist “socialism” in Syria, it is a reminder of how that word can be so obscenely appropriated by those with nothing but a lust for wealth and power as I pointed out in my review:
General Ne Win, who came to a power in a 1962 coup, proposed a “Burmese Way to Socialism” that blended Marxist verbiage with outright nonsense. For example, the film describes his 1988 fiscal measures, taken on the advice of an astrologer. Win devalued the currency according to a formula: any monies divisible by the number nine were now invalid. So devastating were consequences for the poor and the working class that the seeds for today’s pro-democracy movement were implanted. Sometimes it is easy to forget that the main reason the Burmese people want the right to elect their own leaders freely is because that is a way to address economic exploitation, even that which occurs in the name of socialism. As a tarnished symbol of a degraded system, General Ne Win had much in common with Libya’s Qaddafi. Win claimed that his socialist system would mix Marxism and Buddhism, while Qaddafi’s recipe included Islam instead of Buddhism. In either case, you ended up with a despotic system that sparked a wholesale revolt.
As I work my way slowly through the more than 50 dvd’s I received from the studios for NYFCO’s 2011 awards meeting, a pattern emerges. The more a film is hyped, the more I find it lacking. Some I can sit through like “The Artist”, the recipient of NYFCO’s best movie of the year award, mostly out of a morbid sense of curiosity. Others, like “The Descendants”—a close runner-up, get tossed into the garbage can after 15 minutes or so.
Among those received from the major studios, “Undefeated” stood apart as a truly moving experience even though it was not hyped at all. A product of the Weinstein Company, it slipped into local movie theaters today even though it was submitted to us for a 2011 best documentary award.
Just to make sure there is no confusion, this is not the documentary about Sarah Palin with the same name. Instead, it is fairly straightforward account of a high school football team from inner-city Memphis that was traditionally the doormat of the league but managed to vie for the state championship in 2009 against all expectations. When you first start watching it, you will be instantly reminded of the plucky underdog human interest stories found on HBO’s Real Sports show hosted by Bryant Gumbel. It also evokes “Friday Night Lights”, a highly regarded weekly show about high school football on NBC that had its final show last year. Finally, there are similarities with “Blind Side”, the simply awful movie starring Sandra Bullock as a southern housewife who rescues a Black teenager from poverty in a calculated bid to help the home team win a championship. The same sort of thing happens in “Undefeated” but is totally devoid of the kind of paternalism found in “Blind Side”. The primary interest is not winning a championship but tutoring the kid so he can get into college on a football scholarship.
The thing that makes “Undefeated” so powerful is the personalities of the principal figures, starting with the volunteer coach Bill Courtney who looks like a young John Madden, especially around the girth. Courtney is a white southerner who loves football more than anything in the world. While driving to work one day, he noticed some kids on the football field at Manassas High School nearby the lumber yard where he worked as a salesman. After making some inquiries, he found out that they needed a coach and he applied for the job.
I saw the movie in November, at the peak of the anger and disgust over the Penn State pedophilia scandal. As repulsive a figure Joe Paterno was, the film reminded me of why he was also revered by so many football players and students. There is something about the bonds between a coach and young men that can bring out the best of all involved in athletics, even though I never participated in team sports myself and acknowledge the way that amateur sports in the U.S. follows the cash nexus and fosters bad behavior all around.
One scene in particular made this point for me in spades. One of Courtney’s players has tremendous anger issues. He has also just gotten out of jail. After a flare-up with another player on the team at practice, he decides to quit on the spot and begins walking home. Courtney drives up alongside him with two wheels on the sidewalk and two on the street. As the youth glowers in anger and refuses to engage with him, Courtney continues to plead with him about the good of the team and about how playing football will help him deal with other problems in life. It is far more compelling than anything I have ever seen in a movie about sports and a reminder of why documentary beats fiction films on its own turf so often. If you are interested in human drama, why waste time with artificial melodrama of the sort found in “Blind Side”. Ordinary human beings are far more interesting, especially the remarkable kids and adults in “Undefeated”.
“Undefeated” is playing at the Landmark Sunshine Cinema on the Lower East Side and at the AMC Loews Lincoln Square Theater. Trust me, you won’t find a more powerful or a more likable film anywhere in New York right now.
Besides being Jewish, terminally neurotic and a bit of a clown, there’s one other thing I have in common with Woody Allen (of course, his clowning ended 25 years or so ago); I am a big fan of the N.Y. Knickerbockers. Now I would never be in a position to buy a ticket for $100, their going price, but I follow them closely even though it has been almost two decades since I was in the habit of watching them play. That was the team that included Patrick Ewing at center and John Starks at guard. While they never won a championship, they were in the words of Marlin Brando in “On the Waterfront”, a real contenda.
The Knickerbocker team that did win championships was about as accomplished as any team in the past half-century. That was the team with Willis Reed at center and Walt Frazier at guard that won championships in 1970 and 1973. In one of the most legendary games in the franchise’s history, Reed started game seven in 1970 despite a torn muscle in his right leg against the storied Los Angeles Lakers led by Wilt Chamberlain.
The Knicks went through a dry spell until 1985 when they drafted Patrick Ewing as the number one choice in the draft that year. Ewing was a real warrior who was born in Jamaica and starred at Georgetown University. Unfortunately he never had anybody of Walt Frazier’s caliber to co-lead the team. John Starks was a good shooting guard but often took ill-advised 3 point shots when he was cold, just as the case with Knick forward Carmelo Anthony today. Greg Anthony was the point guard who had even weaker shooting skills than Starks but was good on defense. In fact that was the best thing you could say for Patrick Ewing’s Knicks, they knew how to play defense.
Here’s John Starks’s most memorable play, getting past Michael Jordan to dunk in the playoffs with Chicago in 1993.
The Knicks went through another dry spell that has continued pretty much until now. James Dolan, the team’s owner, hired Isiah Thomas in 2003 to run the team. Despite Thomas’s great skills as a player for the team-oriented Detroit Pistons, he never had any sense of how to put a team together.
Thomas’s approach was to sign very expensive contracts with big-name players without regard to whether they complemented each other. While all sports require teamwork, there is none in my opinion that puts as much of an emphasis on it in order to succeed as basketball.
If the team was an embarrassment on the court, it was Thomas’s off-court behavior that really tarnished the franchise’s reputation almost beyond repair. In 2006 Anucha Browne Sanders, a top female executive for the Knicks, sued Thomas and Madison Square Garden, the team’s owner, with sexual harassment. Thomas and his boss James Dolan practically made a joke out of the suit. The court decided it was no joke at all, awarding Sanders $11.6 million.
Mike Lupica, a sports writer for the N.Y. Daily News with generally liberal attitudes on issues beyond sports, sized up the outcome on September 21, 2007:
Imagine Anucha Browne Sanders not thinking she was in the presence of true genius working with somebody like Thomas, who has the largest payroll in his sport and has had it for years and has not yet produced a single playoff victory.
“Stop talking right now!” Mills quotes James Dolan as saying to Browne Sanders in the famous meeting where he supposedly decided she wasn’t as smart as all the other geniuses in the room.
In that moment Dolan sounds like what he is and always will be: a spoiled rich boy. He eventually decided he didn’t want Browne Sanders around anymore and that was that, he didn’t need to listen to lawyers. And Thomas? You think he was ever going to listen to some pushy woman who refused to see things his way?
Here is a quote from a story Christian Red and T.J. Quinn wrote in this newspaper last year, about Thomas’ days running the Continental Basketball Association into the ground. It comes from a woman named Diane Bosshard, who owned the La Crosse Bobcats with her husband before selling the team to Thomas:
“He ruled with intimidation. It was just like, ‘If I swear enough or if I act like I’m tough enough you’re going to back down.’”
Anucha Browne Sanders didn’t back down at the Garden, doesn’t back down in 23A, where they want her job performance to be on trial. That shouldn’t put jurors to sleep. It should have them rolling in the aisle.
A year later Thomas was replaced by Donnie Walsh, a 67 year old former president of the Indiana Pacers who had a solid track record, even managing to get some use out of Isiah Thomas who coached the Pacers for a while before moving on to the Knicks. Walsh’s goal was to clean house at the Knicks, first of all by unloading the expensive but unproductive talent and secondly by enforcing higher ethical standards—a fairly easy goal to accomplish in light of the fact that anything would be better than the cesspool Thomas ran.
Walsh’s first executive decision was to hire Mike D’Antoni, the former coach of the Phoenix Suns. Although the Suns never won a championship, they were always in the playoffs. D’Antoni was committed to offense-oriented play that involved a high tempo running game and the so-called “pick and roll”. Rather than try to explain it, I’ll refer you to the clip below:
Not long after hiring D’Antoni, Walsh offered Amare Stoudemire, one-half of the Phoenix Suns’ pick-and-roll team, a fat contract. With a group of young, newly drafted talent, the Knicks were finally starting to look respectable. But in a calculated bid to lure people to the Garden, team owner James Dolan traded most of these new players to the Denver Nuggets in order to land Carmelo Anthony, a flashy shooter with few defensive skills. Once the Rockets unloaded Anthony, they began playing better than ever.
This year the Knicks started off abysmally, a function mostly of lacking a true point guard who knew how to distribute the ball. Lacking such a player, Carmelo Anthony got a green light to hog the ball, making other players less effective than last year, including Amare Stoudemire.
What the Knicks needed was somebody like Steve Nash, who was not only a terrific basketball player but politically courageous. In 2003 Nash had the guts to oppose the war in Iraq during a time of war hysteria that nearly ruined the careers of the Dixie Chicks and Bill Maher. Considering the close ties between professional sports franchises and the national-security state, Nash was putting his career on the line as Common Dreams reported:
APPARENTLY A COUNTRY music concert is the wrong place for a war protest, the Academy Awards show is OK as long as you keep it short, and a basketball game … well, that’s still up in the air for debate.
When the lead singer of the Dixie Chicks told a London audience that she was ashamed that she and President Bush are from the same state, many Texas radio stations refused to play the group’s songs. She quickly apologized. Former Santa Clara and current Dallas Mavericks star Steve Nash, though, has not apologized for his anti-war comments and said fan reaction to his stance has been “unbelievably positive.”
It all started with Nash wearing a T-shirt to All-Star activities in Atlanta that said, “No War. Shoot for Peace.” Nash continued his protest of the war, as reporters asked him about his shirt and his beliefs, up until and after the first U.S. bombs hit Iraq last week. Those who haven’t been receptive to Nash are those that don’t think a basketball player should be using his forum to speak out on politics, especially a Canadian basketball player.
“From the start, I spoke out just because I don’t want to see the loss of life,” Nash told ESPN. “People are mistaking anti-war as being unpatriotic. This has nothing to do with the fact that I’m from Canada. This is a much bigger issue. But now that we’re in battle, I hope for as many lives to be spared as possible (and) as little violence as possible before a resolution.”
The Knicks were short on money under a salary cap that NBA teams must adhere to, so their top choice for a point guard was one Baron Davis, who can best be described as someone from the remainder bin. He used to play with Lebron James on the Cleveland Cavaliers but has been inactive for over a year because of a herniated disk. In his place, the Knicks have used guards with no experience playing point, like Toney Douglas, or men with experience but who are over the hill like Mike Bibby. The net result was a dismal start that had fans clamoring for Mike D’Antoni’s firing.
Out of desperation, D’Antoni decided to let benchwarmer Jeremy Lin play the point guard position on February 4th. The results can be seen here:
Knicks commentator Walt Frazier can barely contain his enthusiasm.
In the five games that have featured Lin as point guard, he has achieved a status equal to some the greatest players of all times. The N.Y. Times’s Nate Silver came up with some revealing statistics:
The New York Knicks’ Jeremy Lin has scored at least 23 points in each of his last four games, including 38 on Friday night against the Lakers. He has also recorded at least seven assists in each game, and he has been efficient, shooting at least 53 percent from the field each time.
Just how common is something like this? I searched basketball-reference.com for other streaks that were in the same general ballpark: players who scored at least 20 points, had at least six assists and shot 50 percent over a period of four consecutive N.B.A. regular season games.
Since the 1985-86 season, 41 players have had such a streak in addition to Lin.
It is an extremely impressive list. All but seven of the players made at least one All-Star appearance in their careers, with about two-thirds of them selected to the All-Star team multiple times. The list includes nine Hall of Famers — and a number of other players who are sure to make it once they retire. The players on the list account for 17 of the last 28 M.V.P. awards.
Now this would be impressive enough on its own merit, but the real eye-opener is how unexpected this all was given Lin’s background. He was a Harvard University graduate, where there is no such thing as a basketball scholarship. Most basketball players come from powerhouses like Duke, Michigan State and UCLA, not the Ivy League. Since 1954, there has only been a single professional basketball player from Harvard and that is Jeremy Lin.
The other remarkable thing is his ethnicity: Chinese-American. The last stand-out Chinese player in the NBA was Yao Ming, who was forced to retire because of repeated foot injuries. Lin’s background was totally unlike that of Yao Ming, who was part of China’s well-oiled basketball machinery heavily reliant on state funding.
The Times once again commented on how he came out of left field:
Some coaches have wondered whether Lin, who is of Taiwanese descent, did not receive a closer look by recruiters because of his ethnicity. Coaches have said recruiters, in the age of who-does-he-remind-you-of evaluations, simply lacked a frame of reference for such an Asian-American talent.
Another big reason for the lack of interest might have been because Lin never possessed jump-out-of-the-gym athleticism. That made it hard for recruiters to pick up on his quick first step, his passing skills or his uncanny sense for the game simply from watching him at an Amateur Athletic Union tournament or in a high school playoff game.
“I just think in order for someone to understand my game, they have to watch me more than once, because I’m not going to do anything that’s extra flashy or freakishly athletic,” Lin said in 2010.
Because he is a fervent Christian, some have been led to speculate whether he is going to be basketball’s Tim Tebow but if you listen to Lin’s comments after a basketball game, he tends to credit his coach and his fellow players rather than God.
There’s been a bit of a controversy growing out of boxer Floyd Mayweather’s twitter on Jeremy Lin: “Jeremy Lin is a good player but all the hype is because he’s Asian. Black players do what he does every night and don’t get the same praise.” Well, maybe so, but they weren’t doing it for the N.Y. Knickerbockers.
UPDATE
Dave Zirin’s really good article on the differences between Jeremy Lin and Tim Tebow.
Frank Brady: Endgame, Crown Publishers, New York, ISBN 978-0-307-46390-6, 401 pages.
HBO Documentary: Bobby Fischer Against the World (presently available on-demand).
Searching for Bobby Fischer (available from Netflix).
(Swans – June 20, 2011) Endgame is a riveting 401-page biography of Bobby Fischer that I read in one sitting, starting at page one in a passenger’s lounge in the San José, Costa Rica, airport and ending about an hour before landing in New York. Although the strange story of the rise and fall of a madman/genius would be compelling on its own terms alone, Frank Brady is ideally suited to tell this story. He is the chairman of the Communications Department at St. Johns University in New York and author of acclaimed biographies of Orson Welles and Aristotle Onassis. He is also president of the prestigious and rather snooty Marshall Chess Club in New York that frowned on the young Bobby Fischer when he made his first appearance there in jeans and a flannel shirt, as well as the founder of Chess Life, a magazine that Fischer used to read cover-to-cover the way that other children his age read comic books.
Unlike professional baseball, basketball (and football) has a salary cap. That means that deep-pocketed owners cannot go out and buy championships like the NY Yankees. So-called smaller market basketball teams like San Antonio and Detroit can reach the top provided the managers know how to spend their money wisely. This is also true of baseball, despite the lack of a salary cap. But teams with a total salary below $60 million (Pittsburgh Pirates) tend to be at the bottom of the standings from year to year while those in the $100 to 140 million range (Philadelphia Phillies, Boston Red Sox) can win a World Series. The NY Yankees, who epitomize corporate greed, spent $206 million this year.
The premier players in all sports tend to be complete jerks, especially Alex Rodriguez who is paid $33 million per year by the Yankees. In a lurid biography of the slugger by Selena Roberts, she reveals that he wipes his mouth with $100 bills, signals to opposing hitters what pitch is coming for the return favor that swells his personal statistics, and requires clubhouse attendants to have a toothbrush squirted with toothpaste waiting for him. This is not to speak of his long time use of steroids.
None of this matters to NY Yankee fans. If you listen to WFAN, the all sports station in NY, the only thing that interests both the on-air hosts and the men (mostly) who call in is whether the Yankees are in first place. Interestingly enough, the conversation usually turns to cash as the callers make suggestions about which superstar the Yankee management can spend another $20 million on. In the last couple of days, rumors swirled around the possibility that the Yankees would sign up Cliff Lee, one of the sport’s top pitchers. Even on-air host Mike Francesa, a gung-ho Yankee fan, found this objectionable. It turned out that Lee ended up with the Texas Rangers, the team run by George W. Bush in the 1990s.
Generally speaking, the men who own and run baseball teams are the worst of the bourgeoisie, epitomized by George Steinbrenner who is adored by fans for turning the franchise into the most profligate in professional sports. Now suffering from Alzheimer’s, he was the subject of a biography this year by Bill Madden that reveals him to be as big a jerk as Alex Rodriguez. A NY Times review recounts:
After the second game of the 1976 World Series, [team president Gabe] Paul recorded an incident when Steinbrenner suggested hiring the Black Muslims to deal with Mary Rivers, who he said was causing her husband, Mickey, to be distracted and go 0 for 9 in the series. On tape, Paul said: ”Black Muslims? This man will stoop to anything!”
Paul was astonished to learn from Steinbrenner’s wife, Joan, that her husband had barred her from eating in the stadium’s Yankee Club dining room. Paul said: ”He’s showing off with all his friends and cronies up there, but he won’t let her up there and I’ve got to try to explain to her why.”
One day, Madden writes, the organist Eddie Layton was practicing in an empty stadium when Steinbrenner startled him by shoving him and saying, ”Move over!” Steinbrenner began to play and told him: ”This is how you play the organ! You go walk around the stadium and see how the sound is and then come back here.”
New York sports teams are obviously scrutinized closely by the local media, which includes the NY Times and Rupert Murdoch’s trashy NY Post. Every little indiscretion by players or owners tends to come under a microscope. Also, if a player is not performing up to their salary, they tend to get raked over the coals. For example, Mark Teixera, the Yankee first baseman, is making $20 million per year but is only batting an anemic .243. The fans who call into WFAN get particularly annoyed by such underperformance since they have to pony up $300 for a good seat. Speaking for myself, I prefer to watch baseball played in Central Park. I can stand directly behind the catcher and don’t have to pay a penny.
But it was basketball not baseball that dominated sports talk in NY this week. The NY Knickerbockers had finally cleared enough salary cap to sign up Lebron James, the Cleveland small forward who is arguably the best player in the sport. NY was competing with other teams, who could offer the same salary given the sport’s egalitarian budgetary arrangements.
The job of freeing up salary had been assigned to Donnie Walsh, who had replaced Isiah Thomas in 2008. Thomas, unlike Walsh, had been a superstar with the Detroit Pistons but that did not help him pick the best players given the budget he was working with. In fact, he had a real knack for picking the worst players for the money, so much so that the Knicks got the reputation for being a toxic dump. This was a big step down from the team’s glory days when the starting lineup included future hall of famers like Walt Frazier and Willis Reed.
Thomas was not just unwise when it came to hiring talent. He was also a first-class skunk toward women, just like Jimmy Dolan, the creep who owned the team. In 2007 a federal jury decided that Dolan had to pay $11.6 million in damages to former New York Knicks executive Anucha Browne Sanders in her sexual harassment lawsuit. CBS News described the atmosphere that led to her legal victory:
Browne Sanders, fired from her $260,000 a year job in 2006, sued Thomas and Madison Square Garden. Her case presented the Garden as “Animal House” in sneakers, a place where nepotism, sexism, crude remarks and crass language were part of the culture.
The former Northwestern college basketball star characterized Thomas as a foul-mouthed lout who initially berated her as a “bitch” and a “ho” before his anger gave way to ardor, with Thomas making unwanted advances and encouraging her to visit him “off site.”
Walsh came in as part of a housecleaning exercise supervised by NBA officials who were embarrassed by the Knickerbockers. Born in 1941, the avuncular Walsh had helped to make the Indianapolis Pacers a first-rate team, depending largely on the talents of Reggie Miller.
His goal was not just to remove the stench left by Thomas but to lure Lebron James to the team. Supposedly, playing in NYC is some kind of sign that you have really made it.
To make sure that James would decide in favor of NYC, executives went out to Cleveland, the home of American Splendor comic book writer Harvey Pekar and about as apt a symbol of rust belt decline as can be found anywhere in the country, and tried to convince him that the Knicks salary was only the starting point. Since the city was the number one sports market in the country, he could expect to parley his playing with the Knicks into a range of lucrative sidelines including endorsements.
From that standpoint, it might appear that he would fit in well with the Knicks because he had professed a goal of becoming a billionaire like Tiger Woods. In 2005 he told the Seattle Post-Intelligencer: “In the next 15 or 20 years, I hope I’ll be the richest man in the world. That’s one of my goals. I want to be a billionaire.”
It wasn’t just the Knicks who were promising James that they would help him fulfill his ambitions. The new owner of the New Jersey Nets, a Russian billionaire named Mikhail Prokhorov, laid out his perspectives in a scene that had all the redolence of a James Bond movie:
The presentation of New Jersey Nets owner Mikhail Prokhorov has been designed to reach LeBron James on his deepest and most superficial of levels. The self-made mogul has carefully crafted a detailed and daring plan to make James a billionaire. The Nets will show him the map of the world, where the mogul has gone in China and India and Russia to make his billions and convince James that there’s a blueprint here for him too.
But the Russian plutocrat could not top the New York Knicks, as the trashy tabloid NY Post reported:
Led by owner James Dolan, team president Donnie Walsh and coach Mike D’Antoni, the Knicks held their long-anticipated meeting with LeBron James yesterday in the downtown Cleveland offices of James’ manager, Maverick Carter.
It lasted two hours, and the major themes were New York’s endless energy — and the chance for “The King” to reap as much as $1.94 billion in salary (from a five-year max deal) plus endorsements if he bolts Cleveland and finishes his career with the Knicks.
In the end, Lebron James decided to go with the Miami Heat, even though he would make less money than in New York. The Heat had recruited one other superstar already, Chris Bosh, to play alongside the team’s reigning superstar Dwayne Wade. The three players were good friends and had made plans long before the bidding war to team up and become a dynasty, something apparently that matters more than mere shekels. Whatever you want to say about Lebron James, who certainly strikes me as repellent as Alex Rodriguez, he still cares more about winning than money, which is not to say that he will end up a pauper in Miami.
The oddest thing about the press coverage is the tendency to accuse James of abandoning his fellow blue-collar Ohioans. (He grew up in Akron.) Josh Green, a senior editor at the centrist Atlantic Monthly, predictedthat the tea party movement would grow in Ohio if Lebron James left town:
Back to Ohio. The unemployment rate is well above the national average, nearly 11 percent. The state’s manufacturing base has been decimated, and those jobs aren’t coming back. And now, suddenly, the biggest star in the state — an economic engine in his own right, and a guy who probably single-handedly made Cleveland a recognizable sports mecca all over the world — has forsaken its residents. And not just forsaken them, but utterly humiliated them by forsaking them on a globally televised ESPN Special!
Would you be angry? I sure would be. And I’d be that much more amenable to the Tea Party message that everything is going to hell.
Back in 1968 or so, Derrick Morrison, a charismatic African-American Trotskyist from Detroit, was holding court in the headquarters of the NY branch. Playing the contrarian, he said that there would be no sports under socialism. He of course was being outrageous, especially since he was not just referring to the cesspool of professional sports but all sports. He thought people would be better off doing some exercises to stay in shape and motivated to improve their mind in their leisure. Who knows, given the general decline of capitalist civilization, from BP to billionaire sleaze-ball athletes, maybe the socialist world we are struggling for will look a lot more like Derrick’s than anybody would anticipate.
While not quite as frontal an assault on Nazism as Before the Fall, a 2005 movie about a young German boxer rejecting the system, the 2008 Nordwand (German for North Face, like the outerwear company) also uses athletics as a kind of portal into the twisted world of the Third Reich.
The athletics in this case is mountain-climbing. Based on actual events, this superb fictional film tells the story of Toni Schultz (Benno Fürmann) and Andreas Hinterstoisser (Florian Lukas, the star of Goodbye Lenin), two soldiers who tried to climb the north face of Mount Eiger in the Alps in 1936. For the Nazis, this attempt to “solve the problem of the Alps” became part of the national zeitgeist in the same fashion as the politicized Olympics that year. The two German climbers are eventually joined by a pair of Austrians, who are understood to be symbols of the coming Anschluss, or incorporation of Austria into the Third Reich. None of the climbers has the least bit of interest in politics. When in uniform, Toni and Andreas always respond to “Heil Hitler” with a simple “hello”. Like most German youth, they just got caught up in the totalitarian web. Their first love is mountain climbing, not fuehrer worship.
Most of the film is taken up with their incredibly daring venture and is filmed on location. Although movies about mountain climbing are not exactly my métier, I would say that no other movie has ever conveyed the terror of such a climb. In some respects, it has the tension of a horror movie with the mountain itself standing in for a killer. At one point a climber says that an evil spirit lurks in the mountain. This rings so true.
The other two major characters help to put the movie into a social and political context. One is a young reporter and erstwhile lover of Toni named Luise Fellner, played by Johanna Wokalek, who starred in The Baader Meinhof Complex. She joins her boss at the newspaper, a cynical Nazi supporter named Henry Arau, as correspondents at the base of Mount Eiger. They stay in a luxurious hotel that becomes an ironic counterpoint to the depredations occurring on the north face. Arau is played by Urich Tukur, the villainous baron in Michael Haneke’s The White Ribbon. At one point he comments to Luise that the climbers will only make the front pages if they make it successfully to the top or if they die on the way up. If they decide to abort the mission midway up, they will only earn a brief mention on page three. This kind of reporting is obviously common to both the Nazi and the “free” press. In the course of her first reporting assignment, Luise becomes disillusioned with Nazi values and eventually leaves the country. In the final scene, we see her photographing a Black jazz musician in the USA, an apt commentary on her evolution.
Nordwand is now available from Netflix and is highly recommended.
Although none of the sports writers alluded directly to this, the contrast between Cornell and the University of Kentucky was mostly about race. Cornell was an Ivy League school with a meager budget for basketball compared to Kentucky’s whose scholar/athletes were mostly white. Kentucky was just the opposite. Like most Division One schools, the best Kentucky basketball players would likely go directly into the pros without graduating while the Cornell athletes could look forward to professional careers. Seniors dominated the Cornell starting team, while the Kentucky players were largely freshmen. But finally it was about race just like Sylvester Stallone’s Rocky.
Cornell: a study in white
U. of Kentucky: not as smart; not as white
On WFAN, the NY sports talk radio station, all they could talk about a day or two before the Kentucky-Cornell game was how Cornell players could solve a Rubiks Cube in record time. A Youtube clip that went viral showed how it was done. A check on Google for “brainy Big Red” (the school colors) returned over 5000 hits. This from the San Francisco Chronicle on 3/26 was typical: “All the fan adulation and media hype shifted to Cornell this week after brainy Big Red (29-5) stunned the field with a run to the round of 16.”
Like many African-American basketball players who go to Division One schools, Kentucky’s John Wall—likely to be picked number one in the NBA draft—had eligibility issues stemming from payoffs from the school that he received through his agent. As David Zirin has pointed out, this is par for the course for the basketball factories that should be regarded as minor leagues for the pros and nothing else:
These “amateurs” are playing in a tournament where they are the content for a $6 billion television contract. They wear sneakers that enrich their coaches and athletic departments. The NCAA then owns their image in perpetuity, selling it for use in video games, advertisements and other assorted merchandise. Everyone gets paid except for them, and the NCAA is facing a steadily advancing lawsuit by former NCAA All-American Ed O’Bannon on this very question. If the goal is not to graduate but just to “make millions,” then let’s lose the charade and pay them some kind of a stipend for their labors.
If Kentucky’s goal was to compete with other Division One schools for its share of the money pie, they couldn’t have hired someone with better qualifications than John Calipari. When Calipari was at the U. of Massachusetts, his star player Marcus Canby was revealed to have received $28,000 from agents. His next college gig was at the U. of Memphis where his star player Derrick Rose, like Canby a future pro, also got payoffs in 2008. Additionally, there was evidence that someone took Rose’s entrance exams for him. Despite having the most wins in NCAA history, the U. of Memphis had to forfeit its games that year.
In between the U. of Mass and U. of Memphis jobs, Calipari coached in the big leagues for the New Jersey Nets. When criticized by Newark Star-Ledger sports reporter Dan Garcia, Calipari called him a “fucking Mexican idiot” and was fined $25,000 by the NBA for his racist outburst.
Despite the sleazy character of basketball factories like the U. of Kentucky and the coaches they hire to ride them to the top, there is little doubt that Ivy’s like Cornell and my own employer Columbia University are up to the same kinds of tricks. Instead of banking on revenue from postseason appearances, the Ivy’s are all about collecting research grants from big corporations and government agencies, including the Pentagon. Between Nike and General Electric, perhaps your hands are cleaner when they are tying the laces of sneakers rather than conducting nuclear power feasibility studies.
Finally, a word should be said about another part of the Cornell experience that hardly gets connected to March Madness, even though it is certainly a kind of madness—namely the epidemic of suicides.
Since last fall, there have been six suicides at Cornell, a number of which involve victims hurling themselves over a bridge into a steep rocky gorge below. Every so often, a prestigious school seems to go through these problems. In 2003, 6 NYU students killed themselves, using an exposed ramp on a high floor in the main library as a launching pad.
Psychologists seem fairly united in explaining the suicides as a product of stress and depression, an occupational hazard of studying at expensive universities where you are expected to succeed. With the predominant ethic of bourgeois society amounting to “making it”, it is no wonder that more athletes are not involved in collecting baksheesh or young scholars throwing themselves off bridges. With all the other problems facing America in its imperial dotage, the corruption and self-destruction of its youth deserves its own spotlight.
As a long-time football fan, I root for the home team—either the Jets or the Giants. The Giants were widely expected to make a run for the Super Bowl this year, but their much vaunted “smashmouth” defense let them down. Meanwhile, the Jets did much better than expected under Rex Ryan, a new coach who had previously been defensive coordinator for the Baltimore Ravens. In an article that ironically appeared in the Christian Science Monitor, reporter Mark Sappenfield highlighted the talents that Ryan brought with him:
In the Jets vs. Colts AFC championship game Sunday, the New York Jets and Head Coach Rex Ryan will be trying to prove that smashmouth football can still succeed in today’s NFL.
But even amid some good fortune, Ryan has remained unsurprisingly unabashed: His goal is to bring the forgotten gospel of bloody knuckles and splintered teeth back to football, one grind-it-out Jets win at a time.
The most violent, but effective, player on defense for the Baltimore Ravens is Ray Lewis who is near the end of his career. Here he is in action:
Like most fans, including the hapless fictional hero of the interesting but uneven “Big Fan”, I got a kick out of such violent attacks on the football field without giving them much thought unless it resulted in the paralysis of somebody like Boston Patriots wide receiver Darryl Stingley who was left a quadriplegic after a brutal tackle by the Oakland Raiders Jack Tatum in a preseason game in 1978. Stingley eventually succumbed to heart disease aggravated by his paralysis at the age of 55. Here’s Tatum assaulting a wide receiver along the same lines as a Ray Lewis performance.
I don’t think I’ll ever watch another football game, however, after watching a segment about football concussions on Brian Gumbel’s HBO Real Sports program. It makes the connection between football concussions and the early onset of Alzheimer’s and highlights the role of Harvard graduate Chris Nowinski in putting pressure on the NFL to better protect its players. Nowinski suffered concussions as a football player at Harvard and as a professional wrestler after he graduated Harvard. Despite professional wrestling’s obvious fakery, you can get injured in the ring in the same way that a stuntman can get injured or killed during filming.
You can watch the HBO segment in its entirety on Youtube:
Watching someone like Ralph Wenzel, who is only two years older than me, suffering from Alzheimer’s is pretty hard to take. My mother, who passed away in a nursing home nearly two years ago, had all sorts of problems toward the end of her life but thankfully Alzheimer’s was not one of them. When I used to visit her, it was always hard to get past the sight and sound of Alzheimer patients in the ward who were in various stages of mental disintegration. Although I am of course frightened of the idea of developing Alzheimer’s, I accept that as a possible fate as I penetrate deeper and deeper into the heart of darkness that is old age (I turned 65 two days ago.) But if I became an Alzheimer’s patient at the age of 67 like Ralph Wenzel who once told people that he couldn’t count the number of concussions he had suffered during his career, I would feel like the victim of a crime not the natural process of aging. The corporate bosses who have forced such men to return prematurely to the football field after suffering a concussion belong in prison. In some ways, they are worse than murderers since they are responsible for robbing human beings of their most precious gift, the ability to think.
I also recommend that you take a look at Chris Nowinski’s website. With his Harvard degree, he is not the typical jock. As a professional wrestler, he took time to speak out on young people getting involved with politics, particularly through registering to vote. You might also be aware that professional wrestling not only requires immense physical gifts; it also requires the ability to craft a persona for yourself. Initially Nowinski styled himself as a villainous snob from the Ivy League (not that hard to do!) and even used the ring name Chris Harvard. While it is difficult to figure out whether this was meant to shore up his villainous image in professional wrestling, Nowinski also assumed the role of “race traitor” akin to the hero of “Avatar”, as his wiki page indicates:
On the May 26, 2003 edition of Raw, Christopher Nowinski helped Rodney Mack defeat Bubba Ray Dudley in a “White Boy Challenge” and joined Theodore Long’s group “Thuggin’ And Buggin’ Enterprises”, a group of African Americans who worked a race angle in which they portrayed themselves as being victims of racism and being held down by the “White Man”.
A remarkable character, to say the least. Let’s hope that his six concussions do not eventually rob the world of his talents as spokesmen for the gladiator victims of the bread and circuses in today’s version of the Roman Empire.
