Getting Nowhere Fast

So I took the month of August off.  Seems like most everyone around here did.  And it's a little difficult trying to find a new job in that kind of climate, when your e-mails go out and you don't even know if they ever got to where they were intended to go.  But that's not what this story is about.

Back to September, back to school, back to yes, NFL Football.  The megalithic spectacle of contemporary American sport.  The beast that devours all American television programming, and in many ways, all American culture.  I have been an NFL fan since I was a child, and I always look upon the beginning of a new season as a chance to indulge in hours and hours of... pretty much the only thing I really watch on television anymore.

This past weekend was Kickoff Weekend of the new NFL season.  And boy, was it ever boring.

One of the enduring axioms of the grand old criminal racket known as Boxing has always been that "styles make fights."  The entertainment value of a fight is related to the tactics each fighter uses in battle.  Two guys do the same thing, you get a boring fight.  Well, that's football now.  Everyone does the same thing, and it looks very technical, but it achieves surprisingly little.

I have in front of me the Sports Illustrated NFL season preview.  Oh, the fireworks it promises!  The breathless enthusiasm!  "Why no record is safe!"  Quarterbacks and receivers throwing, catching, pirouetting in an endless ballet of airborne majesty and orgiastic touchdown scoring.  But it's not true.  Yes, they're throwing more than ever.  But they're doing less with it.

An astute stat-based website, Cold Hard Football Facts, points out that even though more passers are throwing more than ever, and they're doing it more accurately, this is not the highest-scoring era of NFL football.  That time was actually the 1950s... an era most consider a dinosaur age of passing football.  But in those times, teams ran the football to move it down the field, and threw it... to score.  Today's passing game appears to be, throw the football to... look as busy as possible.  You know someone where you work who does that, don't you?

I watched, at length, possibly the highest quality matchup of the weekend.  The San Francisco 49ers at the Green Bay Packers.  High-scoring Green Bay, at home at legendary Lambeau Field, quarterbacked by the record-setting reigning NFL MVP Aaron Rodgers.  Let the fireworks begin!  And yes, the intent was there.  Green Bay played virtually the entire game on offense with four or five receivers.  Rodgers in the shotgun.  They often had a receiver playing the running back position!  Yet against the monolithic and methodical 49ers, they played the entire game from behind, and lost.

In theory the whole thing works just like the "Four Verticals" play diagrammed above.  You dispatch a bevy of fleet mustangs to race downfield and confuse the defenders, and gash them with rainbow throws to spots they can't possibly cover.  The scoreboard explodes.  But in practice, everybody runs around, the quarterback picks the safest guy to throw to... who is usually within five yards... and the defenders swarm him before he can go anywhere.  And you punt.  Again.

The whole thing looks like:  ineffective token run; short pass; short pass; get off the field.  Know what that is?  Canadian football!  That's why I stopped watching Canadian football in the first place!

I got excited once.  Late in the third quarter, the 49ers, nursing a slim lead, took a penalty and faced 2nd-and-15 near their own goal line.  The crowd smelled blood.  But the 49ers rolled to the left and sent a roiling phalanx of massive bodies blasting a path for the running back, seventeen yards to a fresh set of downs.  A RUN PLAY.  One which the putrid Packer "defense" was completely unable to stop, because apparently football isn't played that way anymore.  (To be fair, the Packer "defense" appears to be unable to stop any kind of football which is played.)  On the next play the 49ers did it again, only to the right side.  30 yards on two run plays!  Bodies flying like bowling pins!  Oh, now this was fun!  Time for a killer drive.  Time to put the foot on the throat, run the ball steadily down the field, impose your will and take over the game and put it to bed.

Two plays after that, the 49ers' offensive coordinator, unable to control his innovative brilliance much longer, called for a long pass.  Which of course failed miserably.  As did the inevitable expected far-too-short pass on third down, which handed all momentum back to Green Bay.  Indeed, Rodgers managed to throw a touchdown pass on the next drive.  But by the end of the day, he simply didn't throw enough of them to have made the (extraordinarly pretty) effort worth it.

I've been a football fan for a long time.  But this is merely turning into a lot of guys jumping in the air every 30 seconds, which I believe used to be called basketball.  And it's not doing what it tells everyone it's supposed to, which I believe is still called a scam.  Football, you're on notice.

I'm done now.

The Greatest Thing I Ever Did See

"I've seen things you people wouldn't believe..." - Roy Batty, Blade Runner.

I can tell you which teams played in every Super Bowl, and who won.  I poured a beer over my own head when Joe Carter hit the home run that won the World Series.  The picture of me on the right is actually a picture of me next to Terry Bradshaw.  I'm a sports fan.

On June 9, 1973, I was ten years old, and it was the greatest time ever to learn to become a sports fan.  (It's been said that every man thinks the greatest time ever in sports was when he was ten years old.)  I was watching Bobby Orr, and Johnny Bench, and Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier, and I would never see their likes again.  But something was about to happen that would change me, and sink deep into my soul, and which would affect the way I look at sport and life and ways of being, forever.

Horse racing was part of the culture in Trinidad, and my family brought it to Canada with us.  My granny was very much a fan of the ponies, and when she would visit relatives in Toronto she would usually take in an afternoon at Woodbine.  Granny's advice was to bet on a horse wearing green racing silks, for luck.  (To this day I scan a post parade for horses in green silks.)  But on that day in 1973, everyone was watching the Belmont Stakes - we at home on our (first!) colour TV - because no horse had won the Triple Crown in a quarter-century.

Orr.  Bench.  Ali.  Now Secretariat.  How could I not root for Secretariat?  He was big for a thoroughbred.  He was chestnut red.  He had three white ankles, and a white stripe down his nose.  He wore clean blue-and-white checkerboard silks, with blinkers.  Big Red was gorgeous, and more importantly, cool.  And he was fast, having already set records in winning the Kentucky Derby and Preakness Stakes, which still stand today.  The horse was like a thunderbolt from the right hand of god, and the sports world had been waiting for him, so the occasion was highly charged.  I knew very little of this, of course, being ten.  All I knew was that he was joining my list of heroes, and I was hoping for him to win the race.

The Triple Crown is a gruelling test for a three-year-old horse, three races run over a span of five weeks each spring, at three different distances.  The final leg, the Belmont, is contested at a distance of a mile and a half, a distance which is not often run, and for which many horses are not bred or fully trained to run.  In the Kentucky Derby Secretariat had broken from the gate last, then run each quarter mile of the race faster than his previous one, not taking the lead till the top of the stretch.  In the Preakness he'd again broken last, then - presumably outraged - gone from last to first around the first turn and never looked back.  He'd already executed markedly different feats of speed and stamina, but none such as what was to come today.

There are some who say a horse should not be considered an athlete.  Utter nonsense.  (Know who aren't athletes?  Poker players.)  Every animal is an athlete, none more so than a horse.  What is the most basic athletic feat one can perform?  To run.  Considering what evolution means in the development of life forms, the physiology of horses has evolved to do one thing better than anything else - move forward over land at a high rate of speed.  To run.

That day, Sports Illustrated writer William Nack was in the barn with Secretariat.  "I had never seen a horse so fit", he later wrote.  "The Derby and Preakness had wound him as tight as a watch, and he seemed about to burst out of his coat."  He did.  Facing a mere four other horses in the field - Secretariat went off at 1-10 odds to win - he blew out of the gate immediately, taking only his beleaguered competitor Sham with him.  After only six furlongs Sham tired, and Secretariat ran on alone.  What happened next jockey Ron Turcotte would never take credit for, because no reputable jockey would ever ask a horse to do it.

Secretariat got faster.  He widened his lead.  Then - again!  The other horses were no longer on the TV screen.  The horse ran alone, on his own, faster and faster, like an ancient myth.  TV announcer Chic Anderson's iconic call - "He is moving like a tremendous machine!"  He never stopped.  Going faster still, Secretariat hit the wire at 2:24 flat, yet today the standing world record for a mile and half on dirt.  He won the Belmont by 31 lengths.

I have nothing to compare it with, to put it into any perspective.  A car winning the Indy 500 by 50 laps, maybe?  A hockey player scoring 20 goals in a game?  The beauty of it was seeing this animal run a race by himself, not in a walkover, but magnificently.  The mystery of it was in wondering why.  I later heard that horses naturally race.  When they run in the wild, they run in herds, and in the best of them, their instinct is to naturally move to the front.  It's just what they do.  Secretariat, on this day, ran without hindrance, without obstacle, without competition, faster than any other horse ever had.  For no other reason, apparently, than that he felt like it.


Secretariat retired to stud at Claiborne Farm in Kentucky, and lived to sire numerous stakes winners.  In 1989, he contracted laminitis, a painful hoof condition which often proves incurable, and was euthanized at the age of 19.  The veterinarian who performed the necropsy, Dr. Thomas Swarczek, discovered Secretariat's heart to be "almost twice the normal size" of an average equine heart.  "And it wasn't pathologically enlarged.  It was just larger.  I think it told us why he was able to do what he did."

It's now 2012, and no horse has won the Triple Crown in the past 34 years.  Critics of the sport suspect that horses just aren't bred to be able to do these things anymore.

It's now 2012, and I can watch this race again, as often as I want to, on Youtube.  I don't.  It makes me cry every time.

I've seen things you wouldn't believe.  Nicklaus.  Wilt; Bird; Magic; Jordan.  LT, and Sweetness.  But when I was ten years old, I saw something I know I'll never see again.

I'm done now.