The Grumpy Owl

“I may have been fierce, but never low or underhand.”

-Ty Cobb

Greatest Moments In Sports (A Poster Show).

“I believe in the Church of Baseball. I’ve tried all the major religions, and most of the minor ones. I’ve worshipped Buddha, Allah, Brahma, Vishnu, Siva, trees, mushrooms, and Isadora Duncan. I know things. For instance, there are 108 beads in a Catholic rosary and there are 108 stitches in a baseball. When I heard that, I gave Jesus a chance. But it just didn’t work out between us. The Lord laid too much guilt on me. I prefer metaphysics to theology. You see, there’s no guilt in baseball, and it’s never boring… which makes it like sex. There’s never been a ballplayer slept with me who didn’t have the best year of his career. Making love is like hitting a baseball: you just gotta relax and concentrate. Besides, I’d never sleep with a player hitting under .250… not unless he had a lot of RBIs and was a great glove man up the middle. You see, there’s a certain amount of life wisdom I give these boys. I can expand their minds. Sometimes when I’ve got a ballplayer alone, I’ll just read Emily Dickinson or Walt Whitman to him, and the guys are so sweet, they always stay and listen. ‘Course, a guy’ll listen to anything if he thinks it’s foreplay. I make them feel confident, and they make me feel safe, and pretty. ‘Course, what I give them lasts a lifetime; what they give me lasts 142 games. Sometimes it seems like a bad trade. But bad trades are part of baseball – now who can forget Frank Robinson for Milt Pappas, for God’s sake? It’s a long season and you gotta trust. I’ve tried ‘em all, I really have, and the only church that truly feeds the soul, day in, day out, is the Church of Baseball.”

-Annie Savoy

“Well, my dad taught me that there’s three parts. There’s hitting, there’s defense, and there’s baserunning. And as long as you keep those three separated, you’re going to be a good player. I mean, you can’t take your defense on the bases, you can’t take your hitting to the field, and you can’t take your baserunning at the plate. But defense, is number one.”

There might have been some good reasons to protest these Olympics but there’s no need to continue protesting them.  These Olympics are protesting themselves.

As Napoleon once said: “Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake.” And make no mistake, Vancouver is making some huge mistakes.

The whole thing has been a mess and a disaster.  It might be the worst Olympic games ever staged and Canada has come out of the whole thing looking like a hypocrite, a bully and an incompetant.  Our mask has slipped.

Because we’ve decided to use the rules and technicalities to cheat other nations of practise time, any of our wins are meaningless.  Only our losses have meaning. Our losses say that even given a major and unfair advantage, Canada still can’t “own the podium.”  It’s like losing with a head-start.

These Olympics had a head-start on losing.

Before the opening ceremonies had even begun, a mixture of Canadian carelessness, stupidity and greed for gold killed a Georgian luger.

Since then, ice has failed, concession stands have been shut down, thousands of ticket holders have been turned away, the poorly designed medal ceremonies have been unattended, the opening ceremony was marred by malfunctioning hydraulics and a performance by Bryan Adams, there’s been a lack of zambonis and snow, events have been cancelled due to completely seasonal weather, our media has revealed itself as a cheerleading team instead of reporters and Canada, in spite of its cheating ways, has still failed to “own the podium.”

Any sensible protester would have to ask themselves what exactly are they protesting here?  The public failure of their enemies?  What more could they possibly add to this clusterfuck?   Can they make the Olympics look worse than the Olympics have already made themselves look?  I don’t think so.

At best, they could be scapegoated,

It’s so bad that I spent four years looking forward to Olympic hockey –the only hockey that I really love– and now I can’t bring myself to cheer the Canadian team.  The arrogant hubris, the desire to win at the expense of fair play, all of these things make me regard Canada with an even deeper loathing than before.

Whatever my problems are with this country, hockey has always remained untouched.  These Olympics touched it.  Touched it right in its special place.  And it makes me feel dirty.  Not even dirty in the good way.  Dirty in the I need sixteen hours in the shower type of way.

I just can’t say: “Go Team Canada.”  I just can’t feel it.

This actually hurts me. Though I lack nationalism, I express my tribalist instincts through my support of sports teams.  It seems a safe venue for the feelings, which are natural, and I believe all that cheesy nonsense about how sport exemplifies the human spirit.  It does.

Sadly, these days. cheating to gain gold is what the human spirit is about.  Sports can’t change the worst or the best in us.  They just show it.  Just as the gladiatorial contests of Rome illustrate the cruel values of that society, the Olympics show the shallow, moronic and chintzy values of ours.

Blaming them for that is like blaming the mirror for your haircut.

The problem is not that the torch malfunctioned.  The problem is, the spirit has.  Although I should know better, I’m still disappointed.

Being old fashioned, I cling to the belief that it’s not whether you win or lose but how you play the game.  Bigger than any team, bigger than any athlete and bigger than any championship, accomplishment or accolade is the game itself.

The game must be respected.  It must be a fair and square match.  No one wants to win on a technicality.  No one wants to lose that way.  You want to play your best against an opponent who is playing their best.  And you want to win.

There’s no shame in being beat but there’s shame in losing.  Just ask any kid who dropped the ball. Ask any cheater if it was worth it.  If their victory was real.  Only a psychopath would say yes but, then again, only a psychopath would cheat.

Canada has forgotten this.  It only sees value in gold and none in how the gold is won.  As such, its victories are meaningless.  By granting our athletes more practise while limiting that of their opponents, we have only cheated them out of victory.  Not all the media cheerleading in the world can change that.

And I’ll cheer a lot of things but I will never knowingly cheer a rigged match or the team associated with it.  I’ll cheer a loser playing hard before I cheer a juicer breaking records and I’ll cheer a champion playing hard louder than either.  Because that’s sports.  That’s the Olympic spirit.

It’s a shame Canada forgot that and a disgrace that Canada cheers for it.

Tags: canada, olympics, vancouver

“It ain’t braggin’ if you can back it up.”

–Dizzy Dean

The Superbowl was on Sunday.  So I went to see basketball with my fiancée.

The Toronto Raptors gave Sacramento a good thrashing.  Since my fiancée is from Sacramento, it’s hard to say how this will effect my sex life.  I suspect that I’ll either learn to stop gloating or to enjoy sleeping on the couch with the dog.

But that’s fine.  I like that dog.

Beside which, I needed a nap between events.  It’s not everyday that I have to wake up before noon.  I was only kept awake by my pink suit and silver shoes.  As an interesting aside, sports fans are completely unperturbed by either.  Actually, they quite like the shoes.

I heroically awoke in time to go watch the superbowl at a sportsbar.

Watching football kinda makes me realize what it’s like to be in Robocop.  Everything is some sort of Dorito’s Dove for Men Super Play Countdown Extravaganza Brought to YOU by BMO and you just wave your cards in the air for a chance at a prize.   If corporatism could maintain these levels of awesome year round, I might like it more.

Since I know nothing about football and learning from your mistakes is a bit too much like admitting you were wrong, I decided to root for a different team than my fiancée.  She supported the Colts while I supported The Saints.

Here, the Saints aren’t doing so well.

And here, they are.

As you can see from my wildly varying expressions, I’m a real wild man.

At any rate, the Saints won.  More importantly, I managed to convince Shalome that it’s not the team you root for but the game.  It was a good game: a hotly contested and square match.  What more could you ask for?  Probably, another picture of me.

So here ya go.  (I think The Who was playing.)

Author, Garfoose creator, kick-ass twitter fiend and Toronto Blue Jays pitcher, Dirk Hayhurst will be having exploratory arthroscopic surgery on his right shoulder.  I can’t imagine why.  This certainly looks like a healthy hobby:

According to Hayhurst, the surgery involves using a shrink ray on superheroes and sending them into his arm, where they will  battle against the ninjas who have infested it.  His arm will, of course, be amputated and replaced with a bionic replacement but, for right now, the goal is to prevent the ninjas from reaching his brain. Should that happen, decapitation is the only option.  (The Garfoose, sadly, cannot be employed on this mission as it is impervious to all rays.)

I did my little bit to help out.  As requested, I sent a picture of a get well card with superheroes.  It’s now posted on his site and, also, on BlogTO.

It might seem a strange choice of superheroes but I figured that even super-villains should care.  It might also seem a strange thing for me to do but The Jays traded cyborg Halladay and weirdo Brandon League.  As necessary or good as those trades might be, it’s decimated my population of favourite pitchers.  Dirk Hayhurst having surgery just sucks.  I’m just hoping that nothing happens to Jesse Carlson.

And if you want to know why I like Jesse Carlson, well just watch one of the smallest guys in the big leagues take on the whole Yankees team.  That takes balls.

“Touch ‘em all, Joe! You’ll never hit a bigger homerun in your life!”

–Tom Cheek

“A pitcher needs two pitches, one they’re looking for and one to cross them up.”

–Warren Spahn

VIA

Joe DiMaggio at Griffith Stadium, Washington on Flickr – Photo Sharing!.

That record of hitting safely in fifty-six straight games seems as secure as any in baseball, but it does not awe me as much as the fact that DiMadge’s old teammates claim they never saw him commit an error of judgment in a ball game. Thirteen years, and never a wrong throw, a cutoff man missed, an extra base passed up. Well, there was one time when he stretched a single against the Red Sox and was called out at second, but the umpire is said to have admitted later that he blew the call.

–Roger Angell: The Interior Stadium

Now I know why Americans are so loud: To hear each other over the constant roar of monster trucks.

On Saturday night, in a move entirely unrelated to my recent shift from suits to work-clothes, I attended MONSTER JAM with my yank fiancée.

Never having been to a monster truck rally before, I had no idea what to expect.  (Other than crimped hair and bad teeth.)  I knew what monster trucks looked like but what do they do?

It turns out that they break.

A lot.

It might be a quality of the event or perhaps the Skydome is as hard on machinery as it was on Troy Glaus’ knees, but it seemed that every race was marred by a breaking truck.  The announcer would dutifully get us revved up and then explain why nothing was happening.  The show was beset by technical problems.

And usually not the fun kind of technical problems.  Not trucks flipping over and exploding while men emerge from the burning rubble like Haitian survivors, imploring us to “Fuckin’ Give Er!” one more time before they collapse, dead, to the ground.  Not those kind of technical problems at all.

Problems more like: El Toro Loco is having engine problems.    Or Bounty Hunter has a flat tire.  And both will no longer be competing.

Boring problems.

Aside from this, MONSTER JAM suffers from a complete lack of narrative.  The show is comprised of four acts:  A race, a motor cross, a free style and then a demolition derby.   But there’s no story holding all of this together.  It’s just one thing after another. More like a sport than a show.

Before attending, I tried to figure out what a monster truck rally must be like.  Knowing that the trucks had their own personalities and fans, I’d assumed it would be much like professional wrestling. That there’d be a story.  You have characters (some with cool names like American Guardian and some with lame names like Cult Energy Activator) so why not have a story?

I pictured a bleak, post-apocalyptic world where trucks have become monsters and men must engage in bloody thunder-dome type competitions to earn respect and, perhaps, to save their tribe from the other monster trucks.   Good guys, bad guys, smoke, pyrotechnics and some sort of narrative to the whole event.  Smack talk from the drivers about the other drivers.  Heroes, villains and costumes.

In a word, Detroit.

Instead, I got a motor-cross guy talking about track conditions, an announcer informing me that another truck had broken when he wasn’t imploring me to cheer.  Here’s an idea: Give me something to cheer for, asshole. We’re the ones who paid, maybe you should be cheering for us.

And you drivers, learn a bit a of fucking showmanship.  There’s not a Rowdy Randy Piper amongst you.  There’s not even a  Jake the Snake.

Instead of the tried and true approaches of the wrestling spectacle, MONSTER JAM relies heavily on a quasi-experimental, meta-comment on track conditions and its own technical problems.   It shuns a traditional narrative structure only to replace it with a sort of free-form, improvisation.  That might play well with the art school, jazz crowd, but I demand a bit more than that. I’m not trying to watch a college student masturbate here.  I want to see trucks doing shit that I care about.  Like exploding.

Although I can appreciate the underlying symbolism of machines that have become monsters and men who are dependant upon these monsters for respect and prestige, this is a symbolism that is never adequately explored.

As a show, MONSTER JAM is a failure.  As a sport, it’s a bore.

With two exceptions:  Jurassic Attack and Gravedigger.

Though I heard the people beside me say that they could not take Jurassic Attack seriously, I had to wonder:  Who the fuck is taking this seriously?   It’s a monster truck!  It looks like a monster!  What the fuck else do you want?  If you want a truck you can take seriously, go look at a practical vehicle with an eye towards gas mileage and trunk space.  Think about a minivan.

Besides which, Jurassic Attack never broke down, delivered one of the only two good freestyle performances and came close to tipping but never quite did.  That’s suspense.  And this whole spectacle needed more of it.

It also needed more Gravedigger.

Gravedigger epitomized the very best of redneck philosophy.  Graveigger fuckin’  gave ‘er and was also able to git ‘er dun.  (If I was writing Monster Jam, Jurassic Attack would be Gravedigger’s sassy lady friend.)

I can see why Gravedigger is so popular.  The truck from Kill Devil Hills North Carolina, driven by the infamous Downtown Randy Brown, is simply in a whole different league than the other monster trucks.  Without care for the truck or the person inside, Gravedigger delivered an amazing freestyle that went well over the time limit.

Do you think Gravedigger cares about a time limit?  Gravedigger is a maverick. Gravedigger only cares bout one thing:  Fuckin’ givin’ er’!

And gave ‘er, it did.  Right up until the moment it got ‘er dun.

We all crave a Gravedigger style maverick because, in reality, we’re all the placid  slaves of idiotic regulations written by ash-faced bureaucrats at the behest of the ever-panicking plebeians.  Even MONSTER JAM, that great bastion of American fuck you-freedom, is no exception.  Here, at a monster truck rally, where I am quite literally watching vehicles catch alight and spew poisonous fumes within an enclosed space, it’s still illegal to smoke.

Perhaps it would set a bad example for the children, who might be unable to reconcile the pro-safety message of the demolition derby with the madcap danger of having a cigarette.  It’s certainly can’t be a concern about fumes.  Because, you know, I’m watching a car that’s on fucking fire.

(But one should be careful not to complain. The likely government solution is not the allowing of smoking but the banning of demolition derbies.  )

So while I now know why Americans are so loud, there’s still much that I may never understand about our shared and vibrant cultures.  Like how do you take an idea like 10,000 pound machines jumping through the air and make it a disappointing bore?  Through safety, I suppose.

At least Gravedigger ignores that shit.  And it’s good to know that somewhere in Toronto, for two nights, someone was out there, fuckin’ givin’ ‘er until he gets ‘er dun. Then givin’ ‘er some more.  Then standing on his truck.

God Bless America.

. . . Has a blog?!

Looks like Roy Halladay has been traded to the Phillies.  We all knew it was coming but it’s still hard to say goodbye.   And, as of this writing, I don’t even know what Toronto got for him.  Not enough, I’m sure, but you can’t get enough.

Here’s Roy Halladay when he got drafted.

Look how young and goofy he is there!  Braces?

Who could guess that he’d grow up into the best pitcher in baseball?  Probably the best I’ve ever seen and ever will see in Toronto.  (And yes, that includes Clemens.  Fuck Clemens.  Clemens cheats.)  Doc was a surgeon on the mound.  Off the mound he was a quiet, hard worker.   A Mormon, I believe.

He came up through the Toronto organization.  It wasn’t an easy ride.  Although he almost pitched a no hitter in his second major league start, he completely fell apart in the next seasons.  Roy was sent back to the minors.

He learned to pitch all over again.  He managed to fight his way back into the majors while making himself  into a completely different pitcher.  A great one.  One who does not overpower batters so much as trick them.  But one that can still overpower them.  Watching him work is fascinating.

Over ten years after the beginning, the Toronto part of the Roy Halladay story is over.  At least it didn’t end with that dickhead GM turning Doc into a villain.  Doc didn’t deserve that.  It’s a credit to the Toronto fans that no one fell for it, everyone got angry and the GM lost his job.  Some things are just not done.

Doc deserves to play with a winning team.  Hopefully now he’ll be on one.

I just hope that next year I get to see Roy crush some Yankees in the World Series.

Goodbye Doc, good luck and Godspeed.