Anybody watching League of Denial on PBS?
From NYMag:
… One of the more startling revelations from the film is that football players don’t need to sustain any kind of freak, horrific blows to the head to become afflicted with CTE, or chronic traumatic encephalopathy, which causes depression, mood swings, and memory loss, and has been blamed in the suicides of a number of former players. You don’t even need to have ever suffered a concussion. The sport itself — the repeated trauma to the head that is an inevitable part of the gameplay — is the culprit. And you don’t even need to play for very long…
Much more, including a rather gruesome clip, at the link.
Elliott
This is why I can’t watch football anymore, I used to enjoy it.
PsiFighter37
I would say that based on the the medical knowledge and history that’s coming out about the head injuries, the NFL should be a sport that would be outlawed within my lifetime.
Of course, that won’t happen. Why? The non-profit NFL is taking in money hand over fist. C.R.E.A.M. indeed.
MattR
I don’t know what level of head trauma is necessary for CTE, but I am surprised that the NFL has not tried to discourage coaches and players from slapping people on the helmet as encouragement or congratulations. Even if those slaps are not causing any damage, it would send a much stronger signal that they are taking things seriously.
mclaren
So the national brain damage festival misnamed “football” finally gets revealed as modern gladiatorial games — as I’ve been saying for half my life.
So why not just ban sports entirely?
Get rid of ’em. If fools want to damage themselves, let ’em sign a waiver and do it on sand lots. The rest of us can get on with our lives, and the brain-damaged minority can super-glue their teeth and end up shooting themselves in the chest when they can’t stand their seizures and headaches and inability to concentrate anymore.
Good riddance. People who dote on sports are the no-neck mouth-breathers of American society. The faster we get rid of ’em, the better.
David Koch
lamh36
Just finished watching Sliding Doors, the one Gwenyth Paltrow movie I generally love. I’ve seen it umpteen times when it was on my Netflix queue. Even knowing the ending, I still get a little “misty-eyed” at the ending. I def recommend it. I love this movie, and my Paltrow hate tends to know no bounds. Shoot, the best thing about Contagion for me was Paltrow’s characters ultimate fate.
Sliding Doors – Trailer
http://youtu.be/j3xufuIJJxg
Mandalay
@Elliott:
Ditto boxing, including women boxing….
schrodinger's cat
@lamh36: I like it too. Right now I am watching Parade’s end.
fka AWS
The entire show is online at the Frontline website.
luc
Hopefully a few more people will recognize, that football is a horribly designed game ???
Tom the First
Yes, watching. One word comes to mind: damning.
NotMax
Ah, Open Thread.
Mother Jones summarizes some of the rollout problems of Massachusetts’ state health care from back in the day.
(emphasis mine)
Cassidy
@mclaren: So what exactly is your plan for giving young minority boys and girls hope they can escape poverty and attend college?
NotMax
@NotMax
No idea why nor how link to MJ in #13 got borked, but here it is again.
Forked Tongue
@Cassidy:
Gee. I can’t imagine. Like, prepare themselves to study medicine? Law? Community organizing? Some profession that has room for more than a few superstars?
Forked Tongue
@mclaren:
Thank you for telling the truth even though Cole won’t like it.
Dolly Llama
@PsiFighter37: HAH! Are you fucking kidding? When fucking BOXING is outlawed, come talk to me. Football’s nothing except slower, and more spread out, and more of an “equal opportunity destroyer” all over the body and not just the head. But we can’t outlaw fucking boxing, the only sport [sic] left where the explicit point of the match is to leave your opponent so injured he cannot continue. Well, that and MMA and all that shit. Football? The only greater shame of it is that a much, much larger number of people participate in and condone that shame. I’m as guilty as the next person, a great Georgia Bulldogs fan. But I write this as a Dawgs fan who watched one of the greatest running backs and two of the greatest receivers in the country go down with season (and who knows, career?) ending injuries in a single game. And, hell, given what we know about ongoing, chronic trauma connected with the game of football, maybe it’s a blessing to them.
Dolly Llama
@Mandalay: And Mandalay beat me to it.
KG
@mclaren: sure, and then we can ban movies and violent TV, because who needs those? And fuck, might as well get rid of the internet and cat videos. Sports are a form of entertainment. You don’t like them, that is fine, don’t watch them. But fuck you for suggesting that those of us who do are all that is wrong with the world.
As for football in particular, the game is violent and there are always risks. The game was almost banned 100 years ago because of the violence. Guys had broken skulls. The reformed the game because of it. It will survive, it may be changed, but it will survive. More and more the people who play will know the risks. Just as boxing has survived, just as wrestling has survived, and have all the other sports, football will likely survive for decades more.
Just Some Fuckhead, Thought Leader
Wow, it sounds like you don’t even have to play the game.
gnomedad
liberals hate football
catclub
@KG: “More and more the people who play will know the risks.”
Especially those eight year olds in the pee-wee leagues. Well informed participants.
a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)
I had to recuse myself from watching football after Chris Henry. It’s too personal. He matured, handled his local legal troubles sensibly – I was peripherally involved on his end, which resulted in some genuine affection on my part – and seemed to be making better decisions. Then I watched him return to behaving as if he had.no.sense. Still, not suspecting (naively) a neurological basis for his poor judgment, I was hopeful that he’d continue to mature and make better decisions.
Then he died. And the pm exam of the tissue showed the extent of the brain damage, which explained the neurobiology that underlay his erratic judgment. I was finished as a football fan in that moment. It’s too personal.
Helen
Malala Yousafzai is on Jon Stewart. And she’s making me cry she’s so good.
fleeting expletive
Helen, I completely agree. Most inspiring person in a long while. And he was respectful and responsible in the interview. I’m going to see if my library will get her book.
Eric S
This has been out there in the reporting on CTE for a while. Maybe a couple of years, I’m not sure, but definitely for a while. The Frontline reporting may bring it to more people’s attention. The sport may change in some ways to limit the damage. But unless mass numbers of parents start to accept the damage that could be done to their children and start keeping them out of peewee leagues and not letting them play high school ball I believe the sport will continue to thrive.
LT
I’ve got to have this condition. I didn’t play any sports, but fucking hell, I have seriously hit my head on way too many times. The kind of blows where I’ve actually heard and felt a crack.
I think non-footbal people should look into this too.
JordanRules
One of my best friends a linebacker for 8 years in the league made the decision to walk away while he could still walk and money was still on the table. Smartest thing he ever did. He’s said he won’t let his son play either.
A future hall of fame running back I worked for years ago used to have to wake up in the middle of the night during the season to take pain killers. He’s retired now and I imagine he’ll be hurting forever.
My idyllic vision of sports was forever shattered after I read Bill Rhoden’s “40 Million Dollar Slaves” though. I am admittedly still somewhat attached but it’s not the same.
LT
@mclaren: For myself and a whole bunch of others: Fuck you. You asshole.
? Martin
@NotMax: Anyone in the tech field is mystified by the outrage here. Apple, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, EA, Blizzard – they’ve all had poor service launches. One of the techniques which has become common with massive service launches is doing it by invitation, so you can steadily increase the load on the system, and limit the damage when problems develop.
A buddy of mine was one of the project leads on Battlenet when World of Warcraft launched. We basically didn’t see him for a year after WoW dropped (he got a big-ass house out of it for his trouble). WoW was running on HP blade servers, and Blizzard had bought all of them. After the South Korea launch he had a couple of guys at the factory where the blades were being made, who would take them each day as they came off the line, fly them to South Korea, and install them that day, then go back for more. I asked him why did they launch in South Korea when they knew that, like with the US launch that demand would overwhelm them, he said “There was no way it wasn’t going to break. We set a launch date and we launched.”
Big, non-trivial service launches are fucking hard, and smooth roll-outs are the exception rather than the rule. So much so, that almost nobody tries them any more. The US government doesn’t really have that luxury – they can’t do a by-invitation roll-out. But they said they’d launch Oct 1 and they did.
Ash Can
@Eric S:
This is exactly what needs to happen. I’m happy that Bottle Rocket has never expressed any interest in playing football, because it means we’ve never had to argue over it (there’s no way I’d let him play). I think parents who let their their kids play tackle football in grade school and high school have rocks in their heads.
SatanicPanic
@mclaren:
Those mouth breathing ping-pong fans! And don’t get me started on those sick fuckers who watch rhythmic gymnastics!
Fair Economist
@Eric S:
Count me in. My son wants to play tackle football. He’s not going to. And here in my part of California the community football leagues are almost all flag now, which means I’m not the only one.
SatanicPanic
But seriously, I can’t really watch football anymore. Everyone who is like “well duh, the players should have known” can suck it. Sorry we’re not all brain surgeons.
Redshirt
Tom Brady often headbuts his receivers after a touchdown. I’ve always winced.
The prophet Nostradumbass
@SatanicPanic: we should probably get rid of that hippity-hop music that has the kids all atwitter. It’s completely unnecessary, and encourages such things as “twerking”, or so I am led to believe.
JordanRules
@? Martin: Indeed. I’m not surpised and don’t see the worst that can happen as a result, temporary bad press, as that serious. As I said this morning, once it works, it works. Next.
Whoa! Blades on demand. I find the stories behind huge tech endeavors fascinating. Seeing data centers that support massive architecture that enable peoples world to turn while nobody thinks twice about, so cool. I’m usually on the PM side so not very technical, but I know just enough to continually be awed.
MikeJ
@? Martin:
It’s a pre-internet problem. When I worked at AOL, content partners hounded us non-stop for promo spots on the front page, Half of them got clobbered and couldn’t handle the traffic when we put them up for 10 minutes.
fuckwit
@mclaren: Unrealistic and naive. People want sports. Sports also solve a deep seated human need for battles and war and tribal struggles. Sports are violent, true, and dangerous, and people die from it… not not nearly as many as die from wars, oppression, and genocide. Soccer hooligans in Europe have nothing on the actual hooligans who decimated Europe a few generations ago. I’d rather they play soccer instead. Same here: better that people from different states send their football teams to battle each other than to send each other’s young men to shoot at each other.
As for sports safety, better that the risks be known, and the people playing, and their parents, to know what they’re getting into. Once humans grow out of the need for tribalism and conflict as entertainment, sports may die off. Also, our political media will be a lot better, since everything won’t be fucking horserace– politics as sporting event– and instead might focus on serious problems and how to solve them. I sure won’t be around by the time humans evolve to this level; I’d say that’d be a multiple-millennia process of cultural evolution.
Though it’d be great if sports went away, in many ways. Marx thought that religion was the opiate of the masses, but I disagree– I think sports is the opiate of the masses. Imagine if all the people watching ESPN were watching CSPAN instead. We’d not be in the mess we are now, for sure.
Amir Khalid
One thing that American football culture is short of (it seems to me) is a mentality of strictly policing violent or dangerous play. Indeed, at times American football seems to positively celebrate it. You never see the weekly roundup shows for the English Premier League, or any other pro league in association football, featuring the hardest tackles of the weekend’s matches with admiring remarks from the pundits. I think that’s where the gridiron sport needs fundamental change, and not just with respect to preventing head injuries.
Mandalay
@? Martin:
Speak for yourself, not others. Did you actually try to use the web site? I develop web sites, and I also tried to sign up, and I was astounded at the number of ridiculous avoidable problems I encountered.
Poor response or no response are entirely understandable, but there were typos on the web pages, error messages that were obviously unrelated to the problems, drop lists with no entries, all entered data being discarded after an error, etc. And how many other web sites have forced you to enter your nine digit zip code FFS?
Yes, going live on a big project is hard, but some of the avoidable issues I hit were simply because it was a mediocre implementation.
Now maybe some of those problems were state specific (FL for me), but the web site was absolutely pathetic, even if you ignore load/response issues.
Why not? Why couldn’t they have picked a pilot state and delayed rolling out to all the other states for a few days? Would there be a legal issue with that approach?
goblue72
@Cassidy: Monetization of the tears of purity.
YellowJournalism
@lamh36: First movie Hubby ever took me to see. It has a wonderful supporting cast, too. And the soundtrack was great.
Tommy
My grandfather was a doctor. Just a small town primary doctor. When I was a kid in the 70s and wanted to play football he told my parents not to allow it. That getting hit in the head wasn’t good. I don’t mean to belittle what these football players deal with, and as best I can tell the NFL didn’t so much care, but honestly it isn’t a new idea that getting hit in the head time and time again has a lasting affect.
fleeting expletive
Could be, Mandalay. Why would they dangle that carrot (disparate impact or whatever) in front of the mouth breathers?
Suzanne
@fuckwit:
I would have no problem with sports if the culture at large could accept that these are just….games. Really. It really doesn’t matter who wins or loses. There’s nothing wrong with enjoying watching sports or with playing them, but when I read a statistic that something like 80% of people would rather have their favorite team win the Super Bowl than have their chosen candidate win the presidency, I am convinced that sports culture has a disease. Why, for the love of Pete, has any athlete ever been referred to as a “hero” without everyone just busting up into hysterical laughter? People pour more passion into a bunch of rich dudes running around on some grass playing a game than into real things that they actually do themselves with people they love in real life. The fact that that is not considered evidence of a mental disorder or at the very least a very sad existence is pretty pathetic.
Malala is amazing. Yet more people know who Tim Tebow is than Malala in this country. Hell, even I know who Tim Tebow is, and that brain space should be filled up by something more important.
SatanicPanic
@fuckwit:
Half of them would be watching FOX and we’d be no better off.
@The prophet Nostradumbass:
I’m not trying to defend the NFL, but people like McLaren scare me. Humans like sports. Not all sports are evil.
Suzanne
Also, my friend’s husband, who is an ex-military undereducated gun owner dudebro, just posted some crap on his Facebook page about how the possibility of a military coup if military benefits aren’t paid on time. As if discussing the potential for sedition is reasonable and prudent and patriotic in response to a delay in pay.
Tommy
@Fair Economist: My parents put a tennis racket and a golf club in my hands. It wasn’t even up for conversation I’d play football. No chance and as I noted in another comment this was in the 70s. I didn’t like it at the time but alas I am happy they did, cause tennis and golf are sports I can play all my life.
Now with that said I have to admit I am a huge NFL guy, but finding it harder and harder to support the sport. HBO’s Real Sports has been reporting on this topic for years and years. It is heart breaking when they interview somebody that is say 52 and they can’t walk. Can’t complete a sentence.
? Martin
@Mandalay:
I think the original expectation was that more states would have developed their own exchanges and not put so much on the Feds. You have to admit, it’s pretty fucking stupid that the states that hate ACA the most as federal overreach are the ones that are most dependent on the feds for this. Not sure how it would have been received if only some states launched by the feds and not others. They could have let states running their own exchanges go, but that wouldn’t have told them anything. CAs exchange is an entirely different deployment than the feds.
That said, CA got 30K signups. NY got 40,000. Was interested to see that CalState got a grant to help sign up their students on the exchanges. They have a decent number of students too old to be on their parents insurance, so it’s a legitimate problem in need of a solution. But the exchanges with a more narrow focus are moving past their problems. The Fed exchange is much more complex.
SatanicPanic
@Suzanne: I must respectfully disagree here. Tony Gwynn is one of my heroes even though he was just a baseball player. He’s not Ghandi, but I admire certain aspects of how he played and how he made career choices. Again, doesn’t make him MLK, but it’s worthwhile for society to point to certain people an say “hey, we should aspire to be like that.” I agree, most of the people the media tries to paint as heroes are anything but heroes, but let’s not throw the baby out with bathwater, or set the bar for herohood so high that you have to set yourself on fire or die in a war to attain it.
The prophet Nostradumbass
@SatanicPanic: oh, I know, my comment was aimed at mclaren as well, more of an amplification of other comments.
Tommy
@? Martin: My state (Illinois) did this. Well it was a joint partnership, one of the few I think, but there was no info for me until healthcare.gov launched. But the state next to me and where I get my media from that isn’t online, MO, not so liberal, yet info about their rates and such were out days in advance.
Suffern ACE
@SatanicPanic: the players the young kids see and look up to are healthy. That’s part if the problem. The ones that have debilitating issues aren’t going to be giving interviews on TV. There’s a reason that the parents don’t know. Not many of them know former football players.
? Martin
@Suzanne:
You should let him know that considering who most military supported, the coup would involve arresting John Boehner and occupying much of Texas.
Suzanne
@? Martin: Actually, that doesn’t sound too bad.
The prophet Nostradumbass
You know what really grinds my gears? I have a package that is supposed tone delivered by UPS. I got a tracking umber from the shipper, and didn’t think much of it. The package has an “adult signature required” on it.
I looked at the tracking history last night, and it said that the driver tried to deliver it on both Friday and Monday, and that I was allegedly not home. Well, I’m pretty sure I was home both times. So, today, I made damn sure I was home all day. At 3:42 PM, on the tracking history, the driver claimed to have tried to deliver the package again, and nobody was home. Well there were three people here at the time.
So, I called UPS, and eventually managed to get ahold of a real person who was somewhat perturbed that the package wasn’t delivered. She sent a message to the local office, and shortly got a call from someone there, who asked me if the upriver had left a tag on the door. Well, no, there was no tag. She told me she would have the driver come by again after 5:00 PM. Well, of course, it’s now 9:50, and no package.
Yatsuno
@The prophet Nostradumbass: UPS sucks. And I’m not just saying that as a former employee of FedEx.
Chris
@Suzanne:
“The president’s blatantly unconstitutional behavior will eventually go so far that our brave military heroes will have no choice but to remove him” has been a fantasy on right wing blogs pretty much since Obama was first elected (alongside impeachment, Glorious Wolverines Revolution, and having his presidency declared invalid by proving he was born in Kenya). It usually goes along with an approving comparison to the Pinochet coup in Chile.
Tommy
@SatanicPanic: For me it is Stan Musial. I don’t know as much about Tony Gwynn.
Stan enlisted to fight in WWII. When the Cardinals, one of the last teams to integrate an African American, the players are reported to have almost refused to play. Stan said he refused to play with any of them if that was the case. Baseball fields all around me have his name on them. I am not sure anybody ever had a bad word to say about him. I mean heck his nickname, “Stan the Man” came from a team he hit over .400 against. It is said Brooklyn fans were heard saying “here comes that man” when we went to bat.
I once saw him in St. Louis a few years ago. Up on the “Hill.” I don’t normally walk up to any famous person I see cause well I expect they’d like to go out in public and live life without somebody like me coming up to him. I gave him a thumbs up and said “you’re the Man!” and kept walking. He stopped me to chat.
He was just a nice person.
The prophet Nostradumbass
@Yatsuno: I probably should have asked the local office person to have the box held there so I could pick it up myself.
goblue72
None of this detracts from the enjoyment of the Red Sox treating the visiting locker room in Tampa Bay like a leather bear bar at 2 AM in the Castro.
? Martin
@The prophet Nostradumbass: They’re going to the wrong address.
No, wait. They’re the free market. They’re going to the right address, you’re just living in the wrong house.
Another Holocene Human
@Cassidy:
Are you serious?
Btw, didn’t get the chance to say I loved what you said the other day about resentment and the ‘work til you die’ ethos of North Central Florida.
Another Holocene Human
@a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q):
I never got started because I was watching NFL football with the fam and watched three people get carted off in stretchers in one half and I was done. I’m sorry, but the sports I’m into have their issues but nothing near that injury rate. I was an athlete back then, too. Sports is about a lot of things but hauling people off to the ER every game is not one of them. Sorry.
The prophet Nostradumbass
@? Martin: I suspected that, but the UPS people both confirmed that the package has the correct address on it. I suppose it’s possible that the driver is an incompetent boob, but I’ve never had a problem like this before.
The prophet Nostradumbass
On another subject, this Is an NHL goal. From a 19-year-old rookie.
Suzanne
@SatanicPanic: I think some athletes can certainly be people to admire. But to be a hero, to me, entails some significant self-sacrifice or risk on behalf of others. I’m (almost) an architect, and there are plenty of architects whose work and passion who I think are great people who do great work. But heroes? “Hero” is a high bar, IMHO. Having said that, I don’t know who that baseball player is, and he may very well be an awesome person, and maybe even a hero. But athletic prowess is no measure of a person’s greatness.
Origuy
John Madden says that if you play one game in the NFL, your body will never be the same.
Another Holocene Human
@Suzanne: Some of the people I know who are sports junkies find political or crime/economic news too painful to follow closely.
In the past, I would have said that some of them are pinheads, but all the pinheads (no offense to carnival geeks) I know these days can’t shut up about whatever idiocy they heard on Hannity, Meet the Press, or fucking CNN.
And it’s not just pinheads… fucking ancient aliens on Saturday. Guy told me it was arrogance to say our technological age was the only one… ya… so… therefore aliens did it… ma foi!
The prophet Nostradumbass
@Suzanne:
This statement by you is your clue that you possibly should have thought twice about commenting at all.
Yatsuno
@The prophet Nostradumbass: Holy shit. And I thought Sidney was a baby. 19 in the NHL???
Another Holocene Human
@SatanicPanic: McClaren has mental health issues that would either be alleviated by the good drugs or by moving OUT of the rickets capital of the US, since, ya know, Vitamin D is needed to make hormones that make your brain work like a well-oiled machine instead of cranking and wheezing on the rocks of depression, paranoia, and bile.
Apropos of nothing, Chomsky is coming to Florida. I guess I’m going to disappoint everyone by giving him a miss, I mean how many Chomsky dialogues does one need to imbibe in one lifetime? I grew up next to the source, y’all partake, I’m good, really.
The prophet Nostradumbass
@Yatsuno: he had a four-goal game tonight. Sharks 9, Rangers 2. Heh heh.
JordanRules
@Origuy: It’s like a car accident every game and your body is the car.
Suzanne
@Another Holocene Human: I know a few of those people, too….who say that actually being aware of social and political forces and events is “too depressing”.
None of those people are intelligent. Nice people. But kind of dumb. They also seem to have a tenuous grip on happiness and fulfillment, anyway.
Suzanne
@The prophet Nostradumbass: Oh. Right. So until I memorize every athlete who’s ever played in any major league sport, I suppose I can’t have an opinion about a major force in the culture within which I live.
Another Holocene Human
@The prophet Nostradumbass:
I think it’s more likely that the driver has a girlfriend on the route who is home during the day.
The prophet Nostradumbass
@Suzanne: you passed judgement on someone’s choice of a hero, when you know absolutely nothing about the person in question. There’s nothing arrogant about that, at all.
Another Holocene Human
@Suzanne: That’s sounds pretty condescending but I’m going to give you the benefit of the doubt that the people you know aren’t minorities (racial, sexual, religious, etc) living in a hostile region of the country where the news inevitably means bad news and the opinion page is dehumanizing.
The prophet Nostradumbass
@Another Holocene Human: well, the shipment has wine in it, so I’m beginning to suspect that the shipment has already been drunk, by someone else.
Mary G
@The prophet Nostradumbass: I ordered a birthday present from eBay on June 25. The birthday was July 8, so I thought that was plenty of time. They sent it UPS (from their warehouse that turned out to be 66 miles away from my house) on June 27. UPS drove it through the town I live in on the freeway that’s a block and a half away from my house and 70 or so miles in the other direction to their main facililty. After a few days it ended up back in the local distribution center and went out for delivery on July 3. No problem, right?
No package, I keep checking the tracking and it’s out for delivery still. I try to reach a human being or send an email and just get nowhere, because the estimated date of delivery isn’t until July 5. Finally on the 7th, the tracking shows that the package just left Dallas, Texas! The new estimated date of delivery is July 10. It came on the 11th.
So like 13 days to go 66 miles. I finally sent UPS a nasty email on Facebook and got back some weasel words like, yeah we messed up, whattayagonnado, and no apology or anything. Ugh. Opening a package with a picture of a tablet isn’t nearly as nice as opening a package with a tablet in it.
And this is what the wingnuts think is better than the post office, which has actually never lost one of my packages, and I buy a lot of stuff from Amazon because I’m disabled and it’s easier.
Suzanne
@The prophet Nostradumbass:
Uh, I even said in that same sentence that the guy might be a hero.
But if he is a hero, it doesn’t have shit to do with his ability to run around on a field or hit things with a bat.
Comrade Jake
Baseball’s really not all that violent. Go Sox!
Mandalay
@Suzanne:
I had wondered whether sports junkies I knew (all men) were in unhappy marriages, but time and again they seemed to be in wedded bliss as far as I could tell. But I’m sure that all sports junkies have the need to belong to something larger, and isn’t that also why we post here?
So far from being weirdos, the junkies fulfilling their need to belong are exhibiting normal human behavior. They’d probably think we’re weirdos, constantly writing to people we’ll never meet.
Suzanne
@Another Holocene Human: No, the only people I know who disengage from politics and current events on the grounds that they are “too depressing” are white women who just want everyone to get along all the time and spend an inordinate amount of time on Pinterest.
Tommy
@The prophet Nostradumbass: You know I wanted to comment on your comment from the start. Say you know there is this thing called the USPS. But I realize maybe you didn’t have that shipping option.
I just am on a rant about the USPS lately.
My dad self-published a book and ordered and paid for 400 of them himself to send them out. Sign them. Control things. He is going on and on to me about the best way to mail them and I am like (1) you know there is a thing called “media mail” and (2) the Postal service has next day delivery. He was like but I need to factor in their zip code. It hurt my head I head to explain to him, and man far, far smarter than I am, that the USPS has a flat rate.
JordanRules
@Comrade Jake: It is not, yet another reason McLarens comment was looney. Decent union too.
Suzanne
@Mandalay: But I think most of the posters here use this “space” to spur real action in real life, be it donations of time, money, letters to the editor or their congresscritter, or talking to/engaging in their real communities. That’s one thing about sports fandom that I find strange—the vast majority of those people watching spend dramatically more time watching than playing any sport themselves.
John O
@Suzanne:
I understand your point that plenty of great athletes were and are shitty human beings therefore far from heroes, but not all of them were or are.
And few people can imagine the skill (genetic or divine, it doesn’t matter if it isn’t wasted, right?), hard work and sacrifice it takes to make it to the professional level in any sport. That’s at least narrowly heroic to me. Generally, they understand the risks and are rewarded handsomely for their efforts. I don’t really see the problem with sports as a cultural phenomenon.
That said, I personally draw the line at “sports” where the stated goal, or winning, is defined pretty much by how bad the other person got hurt. Those make me sad.
Tommy
@The prophet Nostradumbass: Oh I should note those 400 books were shipped by UPS. Nothing went right with that shipment. Clearly he knew nobody was going to leave 400 books outside his house so he wanted to ensure he was home. He kept checking the tracking number and nothing made sense.
I kid you not I think when trying to track the packages, and my dad isn’t so good on a computer, they installed a toolbar on this browser. I have to admit I was a bad son and I should have looked at what happened more closely, but alas I provide so much tech support for my family members at times I can get pissed.
NotMax
Loosely tied to the subject of sports and of heroics –
He may never have been a star on the diamond during his long baseball career (sometimes dubbed the ‘scholar athlete’), but his activities as a spy make the tale of Moe Berg a fascinating one.
Dunno if the biography of him written by Nicholas Dawidoff is available for Kindle users, but it was a good read.
SatanicPanic
@Suzanne: He’s a hero to me. I just admire the way he did things. He didn’t do anything notably physically courageous or even all that mentally courageous, he just made a career doing things his own way and in the process entertained a lot of people and represented my hometown in a respectable way. I aspire to live a life like that myself. Not all of us can be Cory Booker. Some of us have to settle for more modest goals, but I don’t see what the point is in arguing over what word we use for that.
I mean, being a hero can be anything from being a nice person or a good dad or it can mean leaving your village and killing the toughest guy in the next village. The word has meant a lot of things, and I just think we’re too uptight about it in this country. People save others from getting hit by trains and the first statement out of their mouths is “I’m not hero!” Shit, I’d be like “yup, I am a hero! Didn’t you just see what I did?”
JordanRules
@Suzanne: Yeah having no skin in the game per se, but acting like it’s the end all be all is rather annoying.
Mandalay
@Suzanne: Good point – the two activities are qualitatively different. Posting at BJ is (usually) sociable and interactive, but staring at a football game on TV is about as passive and anti-social as it gets.
I think the line you don’t want to cross is to have sports (or BJ) as a really important part of your life.
SatanicPanic
@SatanicPanic: I guess I am arguing over the word though. Oops
The prophet Nostradumbass
@Tommy: I don’t care for UPS, but the USPS are legally barred from shipping things like wine. The source chose the shipping method. Perhaps they should think about using FedEx instead, I dunno.
Tommy
@John O: I paid my way through college playing golf. I get what @Suzanne is saying, but I think she misses a little. There was a five year period where I missed playing golf four times during the summer when out of school. I played in the rain. I hit balls until my hands bled.
Now I am not a hero. In fact I am nothing close. But that will to work I often think sports folks use it to do greater things later in their life. I think that just needs to be said.
Mandalay
@The prophet Nostradumbass:
Actually I think that is true for UPS as well if the destination is out of state and the sender isn’t a merchant. When I tried to ship a bottle of wine from FL to CA I told the UPS guy what was in the box, and he told me that he was going to unhear what I had said…
Tommy
@The prophet Nostradumbass: File that under something I didn’t know. When I talk to smart people I often joke I learn something new everyday.
Yatsuno
@The prophet Nostradumbass: There’s always DHL…
(yes that was a joke)
@Tommy: You just reminded me of a trumpet player I went to college with. Played on the golf team and got his pro card his senior year. Never did see his name pop up after though.
John O
@Tommy:
Man, you’re the only other golfer I’ve ever met out here! You must’ve been pretty good to get through school as a golfer. Good for you…golf is a wonderful sport.
I’ve been a single-digit guy in my life but just can’t do it that well anymore playing 15-20X/year. But I still love it, and consider the great ones heroes because I know how hard the damn game is. And most golf heroes have been pretty good people overall, despite their wildly conservative politics. :-)
Suzanne
@John O: I just think most athletes are normal fuckin’ people. Some of them are really good people. Some of them are assholes. Most are in between. I think we should admire people who are good people in general. Shit, I hope I’m a mostly good person. But I object to the aspect of celebrity culture that accords hero status to (mostly) ordinary people doing glamorous jobs for a shitload of money because they can entertain me. I just watched Jon Stewart interview Malala, FFS. She is a friggin’ hero. Doesn’t mean some athletes or celebrities aren’t admirable. But to me, “hero” is a high, high bar.
Maybe this is a semantic disagreement. I just think it’s important to have a term for those people and things that are incredibly special and brave and self-sacrificing. That is why when I hear kids say that their heroes are LeBron James or whomever that I find that depressing. Like….the best person that kid could think of is a basketball player.
Radio One
what;s up with baseball players in the playoffs completely shaving beards off below the jaw line? That;s not how beards work!
Tommy
@John O: Let me tell you a little story. I went to a Divison I school. A very small Divison I school. It took me like ten seconds to realize I wasn’t as good as others. That my dream of playing golf professionally was not a reality.I recall playing with Steve Stricker when he was at the University of Illinois. It was clear to me, and this is a Ben Hogan phrase, he was playing a game I am not familiar with.
The prophet Nostradumbass
@Mandalay: you may be right, but this is a shipment from a winery in Napa to Santa Clara county.
@Yatsuno: Ugh, that was really unfortunate. I remember seeing a segment on 60 Minutes about that. Grotesque.
Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)
@mclaren:
Yeah, that whole 100-meter dash thing is just bloodsport, ain’t it?
@KG:
Yeah, a little more than 100 years ago, and it wasn’t merely fractured skulls- guys were dying when they were trampled by the “Flying Wedge” formation.
I’ve been weening myself from the game over the last year or so. I haven’t played since middle school, when I realized that I was just too damned small for it to be safe for me. Switched to what the rest of the world knows as football. But I’ve always loved the American game, and I’ve been reading on the history of the game since I was 7.
It was originally a game for the rich sons of the Boston Brahmins. The kids brought back the Rugby school’s game in the late 1850’s and changed the rules a bit. There were quite a few injuries in those early years, and concerned citizens got the game banned from the Commons. But the rich boys continued to play it, and it seems as if the general attitude about the game was that it didn’t really matter if these boys broke legs or knocked themselves silly, because they would always get the gentleman’s C at Harvard or Yale, and they’d always have seats on the board of some bank or insurance company. But it took a while for the game to become popular with the unwashed masses: A factory worker’s son whose broken leg didn’t set correctly became a burden. It wasn’t until the Progressive Era, when wealth started flowing, when communities began buying insurance policies for their public schools so that an injured player could at least get decent medical treatment, that the game really took off.
And now we’re back to eating the poor…
NotMax
@Radio One
Gotta have something shaven (and also publicly acceptable for display) to score those Gillette ad gigs.
Suzanne
@SatanicPanic: Hey, I am not knocking that at all. He sounds like a really good person who’s done some inspirational things.
Guess we are having an argument over the word itself. I just want a word for “good person that I admire who didn’t cure cancer or free slaves, but is pretty darn inspirational” that isn’t “hero”. And I want our culture to recognize the difference.
The prophet Nostradumbass
@Radio One: here Is an athlete with a beard. Or Bigfoot.
John O
@Suzanne:
*shrug* That’s a completely reasonable POV to me.
I guess there are different kinds of heroes, or at least there are to me. Heck, there are canine heroes on the internets every day! But you’ll get no argument from me that young Malala is a…better?…higher degree?…hero than just about anyone.
? Martin
@Mandalay: Wine shipping rules are pretty much a clusterfuck. In pretty much all states you need a permit. In some states its a felony (or was until recently) to ship wine there. Some states allow no more than 24 bottles per year per address, so they actually have to keep track of each address and report quarterly to the state how many they’ve shipped to each address.
If you’re not a distributor, it’s almost certainly illegal to ship.
This is one of those things that Congress would lay down a common law, and the wingnuts would scream ‘tyranny’.
Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)
@Tommy:
An old friend played very well. I’m not much of a golfer, or even into the game all that much, but I trust my friends who told me that he was a really fantastic player. He went down to Texas to play for SMU. He returned home after four years a bit more than a bit humbled.
Goblue72
@Suzanne: Tony Gwynn isn’t some obscure player. He’s a first ballot Hall of Famer. 3000+ hits. 15 time All-Star, 7 Silver Sluggers and 5 Gold Gloves. 20 year major league career, spent entirely with the San Diego Padres, only hit below .309 ONCE in that 20 year career. Best pure contact hitter of his generation. He is, quite literally, one of the greatest ball players of all time.
It’s like opining about sports cars and not knowing what a Porshe 911 is.
People who rag on pro sports and know nothing about pro sports just get my goat.
? Martin
This Jason Jones segment is hilarious.
Mandalay
@Suzanne:
A hero is someone who is admired and respected (nothing more), and for a kid (boy) that is often the best player on their home team – LeBron James, etc. Isn’t that completely natural, and wasn’t it always like this? Who were your heroes when you were 11 – Keynes and Florence Nightingale?
Maybe I’m completely wrong, but I doubt if most kids would have Malala as a hero. They can intellectually understand her achievements and courage, and be aware that she is respected, but I don’t think there would automatically be a visceral admiration. The issue of the education of Pakistani girls just doesn’t (can’t) resonate with kids here. You expect too much.
But again, I could be completely wrong.
The prophet Nostradumbass
You know who my real heroes are? My parents.
They both came from very lower-class families in Northern Ireland. My dad managed to get a scholarship to the local technical college, where he got a mechanical engineering degree. He got a job at Shorts aircraft, where he met my mom, who managed to get a job there out of high school. Convair aircraft came through Ireland in the mid 50’s and offered my dad a job in San Diego. He took it, and came to America at 27 years old. My mom followed him soon after, at 21. They had never been outside Europe. They married, and eventually moved to the Bay Area, where they had two children, me and my brother. I am very thankful they made that jump, and that I didn’t have to grow up in Belfast in the 1970s.
Suzanne
@John O: I see what you’re saying about admiring anyone who through will and hard work develops their talent/skills into being one of the best. I definitely concur that there is something exhilarating about seeing a master in action. In anything, really. Sports, art….whatever. I did gymnastics as a kid, and I still love watching it as an adult. I love watching people who are outstanding at something.
I just think that, culturally, we value being entertained/distracted too much, and we value making substantive change too little.
Gex
@The prophet Nostradumbass: I had tons of problems with the UPS guy at my new apartment. For some reason he would not leave a door tag on my mailbox when he left my packages at the leasing office. Yet I would see other mailboxes with door tags on them.
This occurred consistently in June, July, and August. I was ordering a ton of stuff having just moved. After over a half-dozen interactions with UPS to express my frustration, I started telling the people I ordered the items from that I didn’t receive the package. Fixed it right up. Turns out when the people whose give UPS business by selling online and choosing UPS as their shipping partner complain, they care just a little bit more.
If the problem doesn’t resolve itself, tell the place you ordered your wine from that you did not get it. If they have to ship you more they WILL be having words with UPS.
Yatsuno
@The prophet Nostradumbass:
Just out of curiosity, have you considered repatriation? NHS dude.
Gex
@Suzanne: I think there is a difference between admirable or inspiring and heroic. I can see holding the position that the word heroic is almost always the wrong word for an athlete. But I guess I don’t follow athletics enough to truly decide if I hold that position myself.
The prophet Nostradumbass
@Yatsuno: I have a British passport, so I can. I am also eligible for an Irish passport, but the NHS is better than what’s available in the ROI.
@Gex: oh, I am going to let the shipper know. I have lived in this house for 10 years.
Suzanne
@Mandalay: I think you’re absolutely right. Most kids don’t even know who Malala IS. But that’s because their parents and everyone around them who should know better talk more about sports and Miley Cyrus than they do about Malala. Our kids are the way we raise them to be. I don’t realistically expect any better from kids, but that’s because I REALLY don’t expect any better from adults. And I find that sad.
Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)
@Suzanne:
Go down to the Amazon rainforest, discover a tribe that has been heretofore uncontacted by “civilization” and get to know ’em. You’ll find out that they’re, as a tribe, much more happy than we are, that they appreciate a good storyteller or songwriter as much as they appreciate that one kid’s ability to run really fast and that other kid’s ability to do perfect backflips. You’ll also figure out that they aren’t working for change, and that they haven’t changed at all in ten thousand years.
MattR
@SatanicPanic: A buddy of mine from high school broke into the big leagues with the Padres towards the end of Gwynn’s career. I wasn’t in the close circle of friends so I didn’t get all the juicy details but in the stories I did hear he raved about what a good guy Gwynn was. IIRC, Gwynn bought my buddy a couple nice suits because he was sick and tired of seeing him wearing the same jacket and tie to every road game.
John O
@Suzanne:
Of course we do. I’d go so far as to say we are entertained/distracted for the purpose of devaluing substantive change. But it also seems to me our need to be distracted and entertained is pretty much hard-wired into the human experience.
MattR
@Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again): One of the things that has stuck with me from an Intro to Sociology class in college is that as societies have become more and more advanced, the members of those societies have to spend more and more time working in order to meet their basic needs.
Suzanne
@Goblue72: Show me where I ragged on pro sports as opposed to objecting to their outsize cultural influence relative to their measurable social importance.
JordanRules
@Goblue72: Can still talk about if cars are dangerous or held in such a high regard that might not be in porportion to their real world importance.
It’s easy for people not to know who he is regardless of how good he was. Lots of people don’t do sports or have a limited frame of reference. I know too many people that know him and couldn’t name our last 5 Vice Presidents.
Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)
@MattR:
Funny how that works, ain’t it?
Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)
@John O:
How did the first person to laugh at someone slipping on a banana peel explain it?
John O
@Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again):
I dunno, but it is surely true that a lot of humor and entertainment is derived from someone else’s suffering or misfortune.
MattR
@The prophet Nostradumbass: Just saw that on Sportscenter. Wow.
That guy is my hero ;)
Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)
@John O:
So…While we’re all African, our senses of humor are all German?
JordanRules
@Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again): I think we’re talking about the Goldman Sachs of sports here not the pick-up games which I still love. And then the extreme fandom with no skin in the game that we spoke to, I can see the tribal trail there but it’s still part of this business politics that bring most of us here. The idea of having no real power, again I must mention Bill Rhodens book. Great read.
NotMax
@The prophet Nostradumbass
When the Post Office took away our town’s ZIP code a while back (which it had been assigned from when the codes were first instituted), it made getting deliveries from any service (including the USPS) an adventure for far too long. Items were going to the next town over, whose code the town I live in was folded into, and from there either returned or into mail/parcel limbo.
Even today, when ordering online or by phone, have to correct the town name the ordering screen insists on displaying as a match to the ZIP code .
Mandalay
@Suzanne:
I don’t think I explained myself very well. What I am trying to say is that most American kids who are ten or eleven years old are incapable of considering Malala a hero because it is beyond them, regardless of their knowledge about her, or their parenting. Just like they can’t appreciate The Wasteland, or Rothko or Philip Glass or a fine wine. They simply haven’t lived long enough to grok Malala’s achievements (and “grok” is exactly the word to express what I am getting at).
And that general limitation is also what makes Malala so incredible. She breaks that mould, because when she was eleven she was blogging for the BBC about the plight of girls in Swat. She is just amazing.
Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)
@JordanRules:
Are we? A lot of people will watch a high school basketball or football game, a little league baseball game, just for the hell of it. Sitting around on a Saturday night and playing a game of D&D does just as little to make substantive change as watching the Homestate U. Fighting Chupacabras in the big game.
JordanRules
@Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again): Point taken. Everyone has their opiate I suppose.
That being said, big sports business like all the others has attributes that I find many otherwise like-minded folks won’t even question but would if it were say, banks.
Suzanne
@Mandalay: You bring up a good point, but, honestly, I don’t know if there’s any way to know if American kids could ever have a more sophisticated worldview because they swim in this fucked-up cultural soup from the moment they’re born. I made my nine-year-old daughter watch Malala tonight, because I want her to be aware of important things, but she might say, if asked, that Taylor Swift is her hero. (This kid, at age seven, wrote a Christmas list that asked for three things:1) A Nintendo DS, 2) the Percy Jackson books, and 3) “Barok Obama to be prezadint agian”.) But how many ADULTS would say that a sports star was their hero before they’d mention Malala? Too damn many.
Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)
@JordanRules:
I can’t and won’t disagree with that. It would be awesome if every sporting team was owned and run by a Bill Veeck. Hell, it would be great if there was just one of those these days.
The prophet Nostradumbass
Watch the Frontline episode. I haven’t seen all of it yet, but it’s completely disgusting. The NfL would be ashamed of themselves, if they were capable of it.
ETA: the NFL bear an amazing resemblance to the tobacco companies.
furklempt
Re: sports viewing as a sadly passive activity . . .
When I was in grad school, a friend and I were both out of our football teams’ markets, so we’d hit up the local sports bar of our choosing. There were several occasions when one of us would have the early Sunday game and the other would have prime time. These resulted in 10 or so hours at said bar interacting with each other, and generally socializing with other fans–buying beers, sharing TVs, celebrating, commiserating, chatting about real life during commercials and halftime.
It was the exact opposite of passive and anti-social.
And judging by the number of other people doing the same thing, there is a large percentage of sports fans who would ALSO take offense (however slight) at the suggestion that all of “our kind” are anti-social, mouth-breathing idiots.
If you don’t like or don’t get sports, fine. But implying that those of us who do are somehow disengaged barbarians, and immediately claiming moral superiority based on hero selection is rather more stupid, in my opinion, than a bunch of people gathering (or not) to just *enjoy* something. Working to change the world 24/7 is tiring, and it’s not my thing. I need a break. Good on you if you don’t, or if you choose a knitting circle or something else to accomplish same.
I won’t address the NFL’s problems–it has them. Huge freaking problems. I’m only talking about the presumption of idiocy in sports fans. You are free to find me cruel and inhumane for continuing to watch football. I can’t really argue differently about my affinity for that particular sport. But it isn’t the only one I like–not even my favorite.
WereBear
Football sucks money from the fans to make some players financially comfortable and a few dozen owners insanely rich.
I’ve got nothing against sports fans, and they certainly get value for the money they spend. Taxpayers who pay for the stadiums are not in the same boat.
It’s not like the owners are so smart or knowledgeable either… as I’ve been told by many sports fans. That’s the part that is so wrong. Onwers get outsized rewards and wield outsized power and casually destroy so many lives.
That’s what upsets me about this story.
libarbarian
YAY!!!
polyorchnid octopunch
@Tommy: If you want to instill the will to work, get them to pick up a musical instrument. I’ll put the amount of time and work I put into mine against the amount of time and work any athlete puts into their sport: I’d already rung up well over ten thousand hours by the time I hit twenty. At this point I estimate I’m closer to fifty thousand hours than forty.
And yeah, while it didn’t put me through school, it helped… and it still does now; I’m putting about ten k per year onto my income from it playing in bars. Makes my weekends a lot more fun too.
I’ll allow it’s a little hard on my hearing (according to the AMA, the two occupational diseases of professional musicians are tinnitus… and alcohollism) but being smart (earplugs) totally mediates that… though since I got my AC15 it’s not nearly as much of an issue as it used to be; it’s a lot quieter than my twin (and weighs a lot less too ;) )
polyorchnid octopunch
@Goblue72: Who’s Kyle Harrison, and what sport did he make a lasting contribution to? No googling.
Sheesh.
Cassidy
@Another Holocene Human: Unfortunately, I’m not kidding. Football, especially in the South, is one of the few ways young, black men see as a way to escape the poverty they grow up in. Take a look at the good football teams in Florida; they play hard for a reason.
Chief
1. When our now 43 year old son was of the age to play Pee-Wee or whatever football and up thru High School, his mom would not allow him to play. I went along with her.
2. As a senior in high school, in the fall of 1957, Hanover, MA high played Cohasset, MA hs in football. Cohasset, the eventual league champ, had a monster of a player named Walt Sweeney. Walt was an All-America at Syracuse and played in the NFL for many years for San Diego Chargers.
Here is the Wiki link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walt_Sweeney
The last time I saw Mr. Sweeney was about 10 -15 years ago. He was sitting at a desk and the questioner was off-camera. He complained about and obviously suffered from an inability to piece his thoughts together.
Long Tooth
[I wrote & posted the following without having first read this thread]
My mother is no football fan, but appreciates that others enjoy watching the game so much. She also listens to non-wingnut talk radio all day long, and so is remarkably well informed about the concussion issue. She believes the greatest threat to the NFL is the fact that parents (especially mothers) are not going to permit their boys to suit up and play organized football (i.e., with helmets and pads).
Former Oakland Raider linebacker Phil Villapiano was interviewed last week on a local sports station and alluded to just that fact. He lives in the same neck of the woods where he grew up (PA., I think), and mentioned that the number of kids signing up for Pop Warner nowadays has plummeted. He noted that when he played Pop Warner, there were a hundred kids that tried out for every twenty players that made the roster. Nowadays, teams are unable to find 20 kids per team to fill out the same rosters.
Considering that even Tom Brady’s father is on record as saying that were Tom a kid today he would forbid him to play, Mom just might be right.