Footbal Injustice - Bring it back

In the early days of football, H-shaped goalposts were planted at the front of the end zone, four fixed obstacles within the field of play. There they remained until 1927, when overseers of the National Football League had a notion – move the goalposts outside the end zone, where fewer players would slam into them.

In 1932, however, goalposts were for some mysterious reason moved back to the goal line, where they remained until 1974 as hazards to the players and an impediment to red zone scoring. To gauge how much human progress can be made in roughly that amount of time, consider that in 1926, Robert Goddard launched the first liquid fueled rocket. In 1969 – five years sooner than it took the NFL to return goalposts to the back of the end zone – human beings walked on the Moon.

Like their predecessors, the people who run the NFL today aren’t exactly rocket scientists, yet the league remains an invulnerable juggernaut of ratings and revenues. Somehow, everything turns out gold for the NFL brain trust, even their missteps, which usually end up having more entertainment value than their considered efforts to improve the game.

For years, I wondered why I was finding pro football progressively less enjoyable than I used to. As this season began, I found myself fondly remembering last season’s referees’ strike, and the hue and cry it caused. Say what you will about the strike (and it was a debacle caused by the NFL front office), it restored to prominence a historic element of the game that the league has tried hard to eliminate – injustice created by human shortcomings.

Let’s face facts about football. For starters, most games are uneventful contests between teams that are either mismatched or are both not very good. Moreover, the live action on field comprises just 14 minutes or so of a 3-hour broadcast. Now consider football as a purely visual experience. While the highlighted excerpts of long passes, big hits, and breakaway runs are as visually compelling as vibrant cinema, about 90 percent of the 14 minutes of live action consists of images of extremely large men running a few steps and falling to the ground. Put in cinematic terms, it would be as if The Godfather consisted of Sonny Corleone’s assassination at the toll booths and 2 hours and 50 minutes of Clemenza, Luca Brasi, and Captain McCluskey wrestling in shiny pajamas.

How to make this feast for the eyes more compelling? In 1999, the NFL’s mandarins implemented instant replay. Ever since, any time something the slightest bit compellingly contestable occurs, the momentum of the game comes to a standstill while the cameras focus in on a middle aged man watching television. We in the audience then spend several minutes watching the referee ascertain what only the dimmest among us have not already figured out from the replays we’ve been shown. And then we cheer or boo the referee’s TV watching prowess.

Why wouldn’t it be better to go back to the old ways and let the refs make a call that we all have to live with, right or wrong? Excitement is what football sells. Injustice is exciting. Watching referees watching TV is not.

I know how great football can be – I was in the Orange Bowl for the classic Dolphins/Chargers playoff contest in 1982, supreme exhilaration ending in heartbreak for the home crowd. Yet my second favorite football memory is of injustice, specifically of the 1978 playoff game between the Oakland Raiders and Denver Broncos. Its turning point was described succinctly by Bill Williamson:

In the AFC championship game on Jan. 1, 1978, [Rob] Lytle, a tough running back with a nose for the end zone, fumbled at the 2 and Denver scored on the drive, giving Denver a 14-3 lead in the third quarter.

The problem was that television replays (these were the days long before NFL challenges) showed that Oakland safety Jack Tatum forced a fumble in a mid-air collision before Lytle scored. Oakland nose tackle Mike McCoy scooped up the ball and was bringing the ball back for an easy score.

But it didn’t count. Lytle's touchdown did and Denver won 20-17, advancing to the Super Bowl against Dallas.

I was watching the game at my boyhood home in Miami Beach. It was winter, and all the neighbors’ windows were open. Behind us lived the Kaufmans. Patriarch Howard was a coarse, opinionated, and contrarian local political gadfly, whose bullheaded and palpably otiose efforts to mold his daughter into the next Chrissie Evert on the local public tennis courts constituted a prolonged public demonstration of child cruelty.

Kaufman was a passionate fan of the Oakland Raiders. Today’s Raiders home games seem like nothing so much as Halloween at the penitentiary, but back in the 70s, the team had more of a Brown Shirt appeal – a thin veneer of discipline, a thick threat of spontaneous thuggery.

Which evidently appealed to Kaufman. He lived in South Florida at the height of the Miami Dolphins’ Don Shula era successes and then in their bitter aftermath, when the Super Bowl teams’ core players jumped ship for the World Football League. We Floridians didn’t much care for the Silver and Black.

            When the football was jarred from Lytle’s grip during that championship game, I remember hearing a mounting cry from over the hedges. “Fumble! Yes! FUM-BLE!!,” Kaufman screamed. “FUMMMMMMMBL…wuhhhh? What? What? WHAAAAAAAAAT!” A few seconds of silence as Kaufman took in the momentousness of what had just happened to his Raiders, and then: “F%*^&*#@^*&^*^$#^%! F&(&(*#@$#$%! NO! YOU CAN’T! YOU CAN’T! You mnnn….gmm…fnnf…..nnnnnn….

            “NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!”

            It was the most satisfying schadenfreude I have ever experienced, because Kaufman’s anguish added not a droplet of pain to the ocean of genuine human misery. Had I witnessed Kaufman getting popped in the face by one of his daughter’s forehand returns, sure I would have enjoyed it, but would also have felt a little small. Not so with the non-fumble. In a manner that did not violate my humanitarian principles, I was able to think: “[Expletive] you, Kaufman, you and your [expletiving] Oakland Raiders.”

            The supreme pleasure of such moments is precisely what has been lost in the effort to make everything fair. If there had been instant replay in 1978, the fumble call would have been reversed and I would remember nothing of the game or of that day. What I remember 35 years later is that I had fun. Personally, I don’t recall a thing about last year’s AFC championship, save that the Broncos won.

As do films, plays, and literature, sports offer an arena in which we can choose a hero and enjoy his successes, defeats, and even the injustices that befall him. Why? Because we are willing to suspend disbelief and immerse ourselves in the made up logic of an alternate world that can affect no genuine harm on any of the things that we hold dear. By trying to make sports fair by eliminating human error – at the cost of imposing boredom upon us – the powers that be have acted in the spirit of Nahum Tate, a 17^th Century writer whose claim to fame was rewriting Shakespeare’s King Lear so that it ends happily. We recognize Tate’s impulse as misguided – why not official review?

So try paying attention to some of the calls affected by official review. Maybe some of the few bad calls (the refs usually get it right) will go against your team. Maybe some will go in its favor. I’m guessing things will balance out, as historically they seem to. Old timers like me might remember, for example, the Pete Banaszak “fumble” that won the Raiders a game the season after the Lytle non-fumble.

Then consider the entertainment value of meaningless outrage – both your own and others’ – as opposed to the egalitarian bureaucratic soul suck of watching referees watching TV week after week.  I believe injustice, injustice shall you pursue. 

Old School?

My 7-year-old son’s assignment was to read aloud the following passage while being timed to see how many of the 136 words he could accurately read in one minute.

Old School

Long ago, schools were only for boys. Most schools had just one room. Boys of all ages sat in the same room. The boys learned about reading. They learned about math. In history, they learned about kings and queens and wars. Paper cost a lot of money, so they wrote on little chalkboards called slates. The teacher was always a man. He could be very mean. He could whip the boys if they were bad. There was no place at school to cook lunch. The boys had to bring their own lunches from home. There were no lunchboxes like we have. They used pails or buckets to carry their food. Most people did not go to school for very long. Only rich men went to college. We are lucky to have schools where everyone can learn.

                The line about all teachers being men was the first thing that struck me as odd. I wondered whether all those Western movies with a “Schoolmarm” character were wrong, or whether my son’s assignment was misleading. But the next lines really rankled: “He could be very mean. He could whip the boys if they were bad.” Surely there were teachers worth mentioning who were wise, kindly, tough but fair, or primarily concerned about uplifting their students mentally, socially, and morally.

Generally, I’m not one to see liberal bogeypersons under every rock, but I am familiar with the arguments of Christina Hoff Summers, whose book War Against Boys critiques contemporary education as anti-male. So, as an involved parent, I further examined this little history lesson, which was produced by a publisher of Common Core educational materials (www.secondstorywindow.net) and assigned to all 2^nd graders in my son’s Land That Time elementary school.

While I’m not suggesting that Robert Caro write 136 word essays for second graders, history, at any level, should provide context and be specific and factual. Talking about things that happened sometime in the “long ago” and that have trouble meeting a simple standard of accuracy (the teacher was “always” a man, kids didn’t have lunchboxes) don’t cut it as “history,” even for 2^nd graders. In any case, my son is not learning about the history of education, and I suspect his next assignment won’t be about the Montessori Method. For the pedagogic goal of his assignment to be achieved, the subject could have been “Our Woodland Friend, The Beaver.”

The essay posits an educational dystopia different from the contemporary system that, as the writer concludes, “we are lucky have.” The writer explicitly details what he or she believes are the consequences of a system that only serves the needs of males. Okay, so the boys learn reading and math, but when it comes to history, what male instructors taught is the lives of kings and queens (the powers that be) and of wars (militarism). I hear in that assertion echoes of the academic rivalry between traditional and revisionist historians – the “great personage”/”key battles” approach to history is disparaged in left-leaning academia, which focuses more on history as a struggle between the elites and the marginalized.

Then, the essay gets provocative – after saying the teacher was “always a man, ” the first thing we are told is that this man “could be very mean,” with the prerogative of administering corporal punishment upon his charges. The word used is “whip” – a harsh word with many unpleasant connotations. Slaves were whipped. Abused children are whipped. Historically, would “paddle” have been more correct than “whip”? Certainly corporal punishment was only part of the story, and likely a small part – so why go there first, and to 2^nd graders? What image of the past is author trying to put into their heads?

Next, the narrative gets weird: “There were no lunchboxes like we have. They used pails or buckets to carry their food.” The writer is clearly thinking of the terms “lunch pails” and “lunch buckets,” both of which are defined in the dictionary as “lunchboxes.” Could the writer, and all the educators who reviewed that passage prior to publication, really be that clueless?

Finally, there is the non sequitur bit about “only rich men” going to college. This brings class into the equation, and since gender and class are two of the great bugbears of the Left, I cannot read this essay outside of an ideological context.

The historical inequities the essay points out were remedied long ago – today, more women than men receive college degrees. Why not talk about the progress our society made since the one-room classroom? Conversely, why not talk about some of the great achievements performed by American lads who came from such benighted circumstances? Because tremendous things were accomplished in this country, and why shouldn’t our children be learning about the positive values that made those achievements possible, giving them the chance to internalize those values instead of the language and logic of grievance?

In any case, the essay doesn’t exactly persuade me that there isn’t a war against boys in public school. I have been unpacking the story with my son in an age-appropriate manner, and using it as a teaching tool to help him understand the importance of asking questions and thinking independently. This way, when he is ultimately assigned Howard Zinn’s “A People's History of the United States: 1492 to Present,” he’ll be prepared.

So I went to a funeral

Last Sunday, I went to the funeral of a woman in the community I knew a little. She had appealing flower child energy, a sharp mind and kind of a sharp tongue. She died of cancer at age 57, which was about my mother's age when cancer took her. She had a boy, 19, and a girl, 15-16, which were my and my sister's ages more or less when my mother died. They both spoke well and together sang "Stand by Me," with the boy laying down a doo-wop rhythm that the girl's sweet mezzo soprano floated over. Nice kids.

The funeral brought me back 31 years, and I remembered how I didn't feel like a kid at the time, and wasn't treated like one (although it's likely that I pushed away the people who tried to). These two will probably get better care - their uncle is a well-known doctor and their grandparents seem like they'll be able to step up, at least in the short one). My sister and I were pretty much alone emotionally. What happened to us over the next three years was that I was adrift in NYC, drinking alcoholically, and my sister was married to a 35 year old man and had a baby on the way. For us, that seemed par for the course, but I couldn't help thinking that if in three years that's where these two kids ended up, I'd consider it, if not a tragedy exactly, than a bad outcome. So I at least had to consider what happened to my family in that light, and it made me very sad.

When I was in my mid-20s and leaving NYC for Miami Beach, my psychotherapist sat me down at our last session and gave me the best advice anyone ever gave me. In fact, it was so astute, so perfectly tailored to precisely what my problems stemmed from, and so clearly a strategy that, if followed, would spare me a world grief, of course there was no chance in hell that I would follow it.

After telling me I needed some help to stop drinking, he asked: "Do you know what being an adult means? Being an adult means looking at a situation you are in, and asking yourself: 'What do I want out of this?' Defining what you want is crucially important and Sly - you should want something good. Then ask yourself: 'Am I going to get what I want out of this situation?' And if the answer is 'no,' then you must leave that situation behind and not look back. Do you hear me? Get out and don't look back."

About 90 percent of all the problems I've had since can in some way be traced back to not heeding that advice. About 90 percent of all the success I've experienced accrued by following his words. So I'm a big believer in the power of advice, etc. And since it was easy to imagine myself in the coffin last Sunday, I've been lavishing my 6 year old son with affection and words of wisdom.

I'll probably save the get out and don't look back advice for later, but here are the principles I've been instilling in him since he was 3 or 4 that might do him some good. I wish I'd heard them from someone who I loved, who loved me, and who had my best interests in mind. The last one is key, the one that holds all the others together.

1. Payback's a bitch.
2. Talk is cheap.
3. Life is unfair.
4. Be kind, because everyone you meet is fighting a great battle.

That last one is by some Jew named Philo of Alexandria, and I first encountered it when reading Lost in America by Sherwin Nuland (a book that I found difficult to read but that haunts me still - ai ai ai the scene when Dad wants Sheppie to take him to a motion picture). It changed the way I looked at people and denuded me of a lot of my viciousness (which has paid dividends in the personal life, not so many in the creative life, alas).

Some facts

Yesterday, I was bloviating about having misapprehended Obama's re-election chances because I read too many reasonable Conservative writers, while tuning out the Right-wing fringe voices that are clearly not ignored by people who vote. But at least I am aware of them, what they're about, and cognizant of the peril of indulging their pathologies.

What always amazes me about my friends on the Left is their lack of interest in the facts about the bad behavior enabled by their politicians' policies. They have no idea about how bad the behavior really is, how at odds it is with their values.

I was reading Taranto's column the other other day, about some TV journalist named Nancy Giles who said that white people who hold an anti-abortion stance are trying to build up the race. Taranto comments:

But a look at the numbers shows this to be nonsense. According to U.S. Census estimates, the overall abortion rate in 2007 was 19.5 abortions for every thousand women between 15 and 44. But the rate is much lower for whites (13.8) than for blacks (48.2). For women classified as "other"--neither black nor white--the rate is slightly above the national average (21.6).
The census table goes back to 1990, and the same pattern holds, though the rates were considerably higher than for both whites (21.5) and blacks (63.9). If one wanted to slow the increase in minority populations, one would urge more, not less, abortion.
Have you noticed how abortion proponents always seem to come up with amazingly strained theories about opponents' motives--they hate sex, they want to control women, etc.? Abortion opponents say they believe that unborn children are human beings with the right to life. One may disagree, but that belief is an entirely straightforward and reasonable explanation for why someone would take an antiabortion position.
Apparently the pro-abortion side fears if it acknowledged that position is sincerely held, that would be tantamount to acknowledging it may be true.

 As a Republican who subscribes to Bill Clinton's formulation that abortion should be safe, legal, and rare, I find the disparities in rates disheartening, as they indicate that abortion is not a last resort, but rather a form of birth control. Abortion as birth control is like using the emergency room for primary health care.

Why am I Republican? Because this outcome is exactly what the polices of the Left produce.

Four more years

Back in the 80s, someone elegantly defined for me just exactly what a Yuppie was - not someone who liked expensive mustard, or who had a "Baby on Board" sign on their car, or who embraced any of the accoutrement that people used to characterize Yuppie likes and behavior. No, my friend said, a Yuppie was someone who liked those things and wanted to be at party with 40 other people who liked the same exact things.

A very useful way to look at people. With that in mind, some opining about Conservatives. As  I see it, Conservatives you can talk to fall into three broad categories. (I'll not concern myself with the fourth category, the "there-are-Red- Chinee-massing-at-the-Mexican-border-I-tells-ya" Conservatives. Yet.)

First, there are the congenitals, people whose basic personality type suits them for the political philosophy, the straight-laced social mores, the entertainment and institutions, and so forth. People like Rich Lowery and Jay Nordlinger of National Review. Fuddy-duddies, I guess you'd have to call them, who embraced their fuddy-duddiness and achieved a kind of wisdom, seemingly never tempted by allure of the left.

Second, there are the common sensicals, the call the spade a spaders to whom that quality comes naturally. You have people for whom that quality manifests itself as a fulcrum guiding their intellectual understanding and exploration of the world - think Victor Davis Hanson, V.S. Naipaul, or Thomas Sowell. Some are artists - think Clive James or James Taranto (who is an artist, a comic genius). Others are people from all walks of life who have the ability to see the world as it is because they had to in order to get along. People who really get Naipaul's first line to A Bend in the River: "The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it." People like my friend Xiji, who immigrated from China and who voted in her first election this year. When Mitt Romeny's comments about the 47 percent of Americans who wouldn't vote for him essentially because they were no-accounts, the Left exploded with outrage and most people on the Right either thought it was an unfortunate thing to at least say publicly or perhaps even to espouse privately (count me among the latter).  Xiji, on the other hand, said that was when Romney began to interest her.

I wish I had come to Conservative side through common sense. Instead, I fall into the third category, the wised up. Wised up are folks include David Horowitz (the paradigm) and David Mamet (the recent poster boy). When I first started doing cryptic crossword puzzles, I was instructed that the easiest way to figure out an anagram was to scramble the letters of a word and put it back together. For most of the wised up, I imagine conversions came after things that we had internalized or long looked at without questioning were somehow rearranged. Moreover, some tempermental proclivity or acquired cast of mind receptive to a conservative outlook guided the re-organization of facts and attitudes in question. For me, while I had long been attuned to the cynicism and perniciousness of the Left's social agenda, 9/11 turned me decisively Conservative - though perhaps I was trending that was by casting my first vote for a Republican to vote against Hillary Clinton for Senate in 2000 (but then, I voted for Gore, which seems inconceivable, not to mention embarassing, to me today). It was the explosion worldwide of anti-Semitism and anit-Westernism from the Left that changed me.

I had a traditional Jewish upbringing that shaped my values. Most of my friends are Jewish. Facebook has allowed me to connect with (or at least glimpse) many people from my past and get some sense of their directions in life, and I have to say, almost all the people exposed to the kind of Jewish upbringing I had identify as Conservatives. Most of the friends who didn't identify as Liberals. There are some exceptions, but not many.

I was dismayed by the recent election. I thought Romney had a much better chance of pulling it out, and I think I missed the boat so badly is the result of spending too much time in the echo chamber of wised up conservatives. What most of us wised up Conservatives didn't get about ourselves is the extent we have internalized the good things about Liberalism, such as they exist, and incorporated them into our personal definitions of Conservatism. We've made our peace with the fringe "Red Chinee at the Mexican border" type, who to us do not seem representative of our thinking. But to the uncoverted they seem part of our continuum of thought, much the way Barack Obama and Peggy Joseph seem opposite ends of one line of thinking.

The echo chamber did many of us in. One guy who was seeing it all clearly was Bret Stephens, whose article in WSJ Online "Earth to GOP" should be required reading for the wised up. He cites an earlier prediction that the GOP would lose:

 "It doesn't matter that Americans are generally eager to send Mr. Obama packing," I wrote. "All they need is to be reasonably sure that the alternative won't be another fiasco. But they can't be reasonably sure, so it's going to be four more years of the disappointment you already know.

His main point is that the social issues doomed the GOP. Since the wised up people I'd been reading are (like myself) pro-choice, pro-gay marriage, balanced about immigration, etc., etc. - yet align with Conservatives on Islamic fundamentalism, the economy, the welfare state, Obamacare, Federalism, etc. etc. We don't see any contradictions because we've made, like I said, a certain kind of peace with the people on our side who disagree with us on these matters. My criteria on social issues is whether someone can come to a position contrary to mine honestly. For example, I can imagine a good person with good intentions make a sincere argument against gay marriage. I can accept it and not feel threatened by it.

What we found out last week is that some people can't. That plus the 47 percent was enough to give us four more years of what we'd been getting.