October 2004 Archives

I'm a sports fan largely because I'm a history fan. I grew up reading books with catchy titles like Great Linebackers of Pro Football and Strange but True Basketball Stories and Great Pennant Races of Major League Baseball, and from them I got an understanding that what was happening on the field at any given moment was part of a grand sweep of events that had begun before my birth and would continue indefinitely.

I learned about "medical miracle" Jerry Kramer, the Packer guard who thanks to a childhood accident spent much of his life and career with two enormous shards of wood in his body, working their way toward his internal organs. I learned about the 1960 Pirates, whose fans rallied around a painted frankfurter called the Green Weenie for good luck. I learned about the greats--the guys with one name like Russell, Koufax, Grange, DiMaggio, Brown, Chamberlain, Maris & Mantle--and the near-greats and not-so-greats: Ralph Branca, who threw the pitch that Bobby Thomson turned into the Shot Heard Round the World in 1951; Gale Sayers, the stunning Bears halfback felled by injuries before he reached his full potential; Pete Gray, the one-armed player for the St. Louis Brown; Y.A. Tittle, the Giants quarterback who created the alley-oop pass; and Roy Riegels, the Georgia Tech player who picked up a fumble during a big game and ran like hell for the goal line--his own goal line. (A teammate tackled him before he could score, but he was known as "Wrong Way" Riegels ever after, at least until Jim Marshall did the same thing in a Vikings game years later and got into the end zone.)

All these facts and numbers and dates still rattle around in my head thirty years later--games I never watched, players I never saw with my own eyes. If I'm lucky, though, I'll sometimes see something, usually on TV, that I know will fit into the pantheon of historic sports moments: Lorenzo Charles grabbing an errant shot from Derrick Wittenburg and slamming it home to win the 1983 NCAA Tournament for N.C. State... an aging John Elway running for a Super Bowl first down and getting helicoptered by a Green Bay defender, but holding on to the ball... or Mookie Wilson's grounder rolling, impossibly, between the legs of Bill Buckner...

Most of the historic moments I've seen have come in UNC basketball games: Walter Davis's 35-foot buzzer-beater against Duke, capping the greatest comeback in college hoops history... Michael Jordan's heavenly elevation to swat away the last-second shot of Maryland's Chuck Driesell... Phil Ford's sterling 34-point performance in his last game in Chapel Hill... and of course James Worthy's bewildered reception of Georgetown guard Fred Brown's colossally misguided pass at the end of the 1982 NCAA Finals. But I've gone over those so many times already, and will do so again in my essay in Basketball in America: From the Playgrounds to Jordan's Game and Beyond.

Instead I'll focus on something I've done only three times: seen an official Major League Baseball game. In 1975, we visited my godfather in Atlanta and took in a Braves game; they were playing the Reds. I don't recall a thing about the game save that there was a 715 painted on the outfield wall, where Hank Aaron's record-breaking home run had flown into history. I know I saw Aaron play that night, and Johnny Bench, and Joe Morgan, but I don't recall the details of the game, not the way I can recall Tar Heel games from even earlier. I went to minor league games after that, usually in Durham, or sometimes Fayetteville or Savannah, but it wasn't until 2002 that I got back to the show, crossing the Roberto Clemente bridge to PNC Park, where I watched the Pirates fall to the Cardinals. Who did I see? I can barely remember; I was there with my debaters, keeping an eye on them.

But this past May, with my friend Greg and a pair of debaters who'd qualified for Nationals, I took in a game at Fenway Park, and that I'll remember. Red Sox vs. Mariners. Pedro Martinez was on the mound, a tiny figure barely visible from our crappy seats in right field, and he didn't have his best stuff--he gave up three homers, as I recall. Luckily, the Sox were thumping the ball, too. Manny Ramirez knocked a solo shot over the Green Monster, and a few innings later, David Ortiz came to the plate with the bases loaded and took the ball deep into right. We saw the ball coming toward us, and Seattle right fielder Ichiro turning and running for the wall... and then he was leaning over the low wall, half in the bullpen, and the ball was beyond him. A grand slam. The Sox went on to win, 8-4.

So in this most magical year, when pigs are flying, Satan is ice skating, and the Curse of the Bambino has been retired at last, I can lay claim to having seen the world champions with my own eyes. Before they were the heroes of the World Series, I watched Ortiz, Pedro, Manny, Johnny Damon, and the rest of Terry Francona's squad in the heart of Boston. That's something I'll be able to recall for my grandchildren with pride.

And by god, Bill Buckner had better be throwing out the first pitch at Fenway in 2005. History demands it.

1:53 PM

I've been playing Scrabble for longer than I can remember, but I'm assuming I started it some time after I learned to read. Given that it took me a few years to develop a decent vocabulary, and also that my grandmother loves to play and wouldn't have wasted any more time waiting on me than was absolutely necessary, I'd bet I've been playing it for three decades.

Am I any good? That's harder to say. I've got a decent-sized vocabulary, but as any good Scrabble player can tell you, that's not the primary qualification for winning Scrabble games. It helps, sure, but knowing a lot of words isn't as important as a) knowing how to lay down your tiles for the greatest effect and b) knowing how to keep your opponent from doing so. A key skill in achieving a) is knowing the short words--of two and three letters--that can help you build off the words already on the board. I've got most of the several dozen two-letter words memorized, though there are inevitable gaps in my memory: AA, AB, AD, AE, AG, AH, AI, and so on. (The most useful two-letter words are the Greek letter XI and the Vietnamese monetary unit XU, which can get you a lot of points if you can find a triple-letter square on which to play your X.) A true Scrabble maven works on memorizing the far more numerous three-letter words, which I've never attempted.

As you'll discover from a reading of Stefan Fatsis' delightful Word Freak, the primary strategy among the Scrabble elite is built around the bingo, that triumphant play in which all seven tiles are placed on the board simultaneously. Not only does this usually produce a good score in and of itself, but a bingo also gets a fifty-point bonus. It's thus by far the quickest way to get ahead (or to catch up), and if you can lay your bingo across a double-word or triple-word square, which is more likely with such a long word, you can make serious points.

I don't remember the first bingo I ever played, but I recall vividly the first one that ever got played on me. I was probably just into adolescence, playing against my fiercely competitive grandmother at her house in Beaufort, when she played JAGUARS on me. I was astonished. I was also about 75 points further behind than I'd been mere moments beforehand. Mama Lea has never believed in letting inferior players win, but rather approaches games of all sorts with a sort of Darwinian calm, reasoning that she's one of nature's instruments for weeding out the sick and the lame. At the very least, when you beat her, you know you've achieved something. I'm not sure I've ever beaten her, though.

I've got a couple of regular opponents on campus. Paul Vickers, chemistry teacher, They Might Be Giants fan, and kayaking expert nonpareil, is an excellent player against whom I tested myself regularly during 2003's Appalachian Service Project. I won roughly one third of the games we played during that week, though I kept most of the losses fairly close. Paul just had too great a knowledge of the short words for me to keep up unless I got lucky with a passel of bingos.

Nowadays my usual partner is physics teacher Greg Jacobs, my next-door neighbor. I definitely have the vocabulary edge on Greg, but he knows the two-letter words cold and has a significant portion of the three-letter words committed to memory; he also takes time to study seven-letter combinations so that he knows all the possible bingos that such a rack of tiles might produce. By playing him frequently, I've been forced to become more adept at using short words, but also of thinking a rack or two ahead, holding onto useful letters (the S, or the combinations of -ER or -ING) in hopes of building a bingo. It's been educational.

Usually both of us can manage to score 300+ points, which is sort of the Mendoza line of Scrabble; I've broken 400 against him on one occasion, and he's done it to me several times. A good tournament Scrabble player won't be satisfied with a score of under 400, and will usually need more than that to win. Tonight I managed to beat Greg without clearing 300, but we both had off nights; had he not slipped up and played DEBATER right next to a triple word score, he probably would have won; as it was, I had the last S in my hand and built MUGS off the triple, scoring 63 points and pulling away. I'm pretty sure my lifetime record against Greg is still under .500, but hey, I'm improving.

I play Kelly pretty evenly; she has a bigger vocabulary than I do--especially weird words dealing with textiles and medicine--but my superior spatial sense usually allows me to get more points from the words I lay down. And of course, by playing Greg, often when I'm over at his place watching football or baseball, I also get to practice more than she does. Still, whenever we visit her mother, we almost always try to get a few three-person games in, and those can be fairly vicious--let's just say that my grandmother isn't the only deeply competitive retired woman in the family. Unfortunately, we've all three learned to play very defensively, refusing to open up the board for the other two to make big plays, so high-scoring games are rare.

I don't know that I'll ever try a competitive tournament, because I'd probably get my head handed to me. For one thing, they give you only a certain amount of time to look over your rack between plays, and I can be very slow. For another, I'm not sure I want to find out just how I stack up against expert players, especially since I have plenty of other arenas in which I can learn how much of a greenhorn I am. But I admit there's a great satisfaction to hefting the bag of rattling letters, to picking up the pleasantly chunky wooden tiles, and to laying down long or unusual or ribald words that surprise and demoralize your opponent. I'll never say never, but I suspect that right now, my favorite seven-letter Scrabble word is AMATEUR. It's only nine points, plus the fifty for the bingo, but if you can play it so the M is on a triple-letter square, you can open up quite a lead.

4:46 AM

I have been a writing machine lately.

Granted, I haven't gotten to work on the novel for a week or two, but I've definitely been putting fingers to keys like mad. For example, let's consider Friday.

1) At approximately 4:15 a.m., I finished writing my review of Richard Rhodes' new Audubon biography for OnEarth Magazine. It was good that I finished, since the review was due on Friday. Ordinarily I don't like to work quite that close to deadline, but this was a fairly sudden assignment--the editor had contacted me only about a week beforehand. She express-mailed the book, John James Audubon: The Making of an American, and I had to dive into its 500-odd pages with relatively little time for lingering over every word of Rhodes or of mine. I'm very happy to have gotten the assignment, though--a magazine that publishes Ursula K. Le Guin can call me with a last-minute request any time.

2) After a few hours of sleep--very few--I went off to class to review Much Ado About Nothing with my juniors, whose midterm is coming up Monday. After sending them off, I knocked off the last two college recommendation letters I had to turn in by the 15th--again, a good thing, since Friday was the 15th. Now I get a bit of a breather before the next batch of recs is due--the ones for the kids who aren't applying early anywhere.

3) I spent 45 minutes writing down notes on the videotaped oratories of my speech students. It's always a painful process for them, watching themselves speaking. It's worse when they've never done it before, because so many things are revealed to them with such pitiless clarity: the weird things they do with their hands, their fidgety posture, their habit of trailing off at the ends of lines... all there on tape for God and everybody to see. I have to find that happy medium between stern admonition and avuncular encouragement; alas, sometimes I end up rare or well done.

4) I wrote a bunch of emails Friday, but I don't suppose they really count.

5) I came up with what I must consider a pretty decent one-line review after stumbling across an excerpt from The Surrender, Toni Bentley's "erotic memoir" about rapturous discovery of the joy of anal sex. I'm not qualified to criticize Bentley's judgments about anal intercourse, but I do feel qualified to critique her prose:

"I became an archetype, a myth, a Joseph Campbell goddess spreading my legs for the benefit of all mankind for all time."

My review: "This is just The Bridges of Madison County from behind."

6) Finally, I wrote my weekly NFL game predictions for the WAFFL(E) website. For what it's worth, I'm picking the Patriots over the Seahawks in the big game, the Bills over the Dolphins in the Game of the Winless, and the Rams over the Bucs on Monday night.

7) And a day later, I wrote this journal entry. Am I kicking butt or what?

2:33 AM

I think I promised a fantasy football entry at some point, didn't I?

Well, even if I didn't, here it is, ready or not.

This year I'm playing in three different leagues, which is probably at least one too many.

My old pals in FLOGG (Fantasy League of Gentlemen/Gentlewomen) are up and running for the fourth consecutive season, and as usual, I'm finding new ways to achieve mediocrity. My biggest step in this direction was my impulsive decision to draft Michael Vick in the second round. He's such an exciting player that I somehow neglected to notice that he's not so good from a fantasy persepective--he doesn't score that much, and he rarely makes big throws to his wide receivers. To compound this, I drafted Peerless Price, the Falcons' "number one" wideout, who has done almost nothing. My hope was that by owning both Vick and Price, I could get double the points for every completion, and that has in fact been the case--it's gone from squat to double squat. My only real strength is at running back, where Ahman Green has anchored me, but where Travis Henry and Duce Staley have been sources of frustration--Duce in particular, as he has run for plenty of yardage, but has been replaced by Jerome Bettis every time the Steelers get near the goal line. You can't win in FLOGG if you're not getting any TDs from your backs. My Fighting Coelacanths are 2-2, and hoping like hell Vick gets it into gear against the Lions this weekend.

Having had so much fun over the past few years, I decided my kids might enjoy fantasy ball, so I formed the Woodberry Adolescent Fantasy Football League (Electronic), or WAFFL(E). With nine faculty sons on board, I chose to form my own team so that there'd be competition for them every week, but since I didn't want to take advantage of their NFL naivete, I picked last in every round of the draft. When I won my first game, I worried that I'd still picked too well, but now that I've lost three straight, I'd say that concern has been alleviated. Injuries to my main running backs (Deuce McAllister, Domanick Davis, and Quentin Griffin) have caused me a LOT of trouble, and it didn't help that substitute QB Kerry Collins earned negative one (-1) fantasy point during starter Matt Hasselbeck's bye week last Sunday. With my fourth RB, Thomas Jones, on a bye this week, I've had to make some changes on the waiver wire in order to provide a modicum of competition. This week I'm playing Ian; I can't decide yet if I'll be happier with a victory or not. On the plus side, Dixon's 4-0.

And speaking of 4-0, there's my third league, the Number Crushers. Devised by mad genius Mike "Waffle O'Cheeseman" Beard, this is a league by stat freaks for stat freaks. The typical fantasy roster has 15 or 16 players, seven or eight of whom are kept "on the bench" during each week's game; the starters usually consist of a QB, two running backs, two receivers, a tight end, a kicker, and a defensive team (which plays as a unit--the Buccaneers D or the Patriots D, say.) By contrast, each NC owner must draft 25 players, and each defense is formed from individual players, not whole squads--Ed Reed, Brian Urlacher, Antoine Winfield, Dan Morgan, etc. This all requires a lot more preseason research; you've got to study up on at least 50% more players to make reasonable draft choices.

And the draft is automated, to boot. You have to set up a list of the players you want, in the order you want them, and when Commissioner Waff presses the "Draft" button, the computer assigns you players. This is time-consuming. You have to figure out not only who you want, but who your opponents are likely to go after; if you're crafty, you can list a player higher than he really ought to go and be certain of getting him, but you may also lose your chance at getting a popular player. I used this technique to land Peyton Manning in round two; I figured everyone would draft running backs first, so I listed my top ten backs (and got Priest Holmes--whoo hoo!) and put Peyton at #11. Sure enough, he came into my arms. Alas, I couldn't work the mojo to get Peyton's partner, Marvin Harrison, and my wide receiver corps isn't my strongest suit. Still, the extra time I put into prepping for the auto-draft did give me a far stronger team than I got from either of the live drafts.

But now we're playing--how does that work? It's complicated. The Crushers award points for everything. Imagine a play where a QB completes a 15-yard pass to his tight end, who is then hit by a safety and fumbles; a linebacker then picks up the ball and runs nine yards before being tackled by the QB. The QB will get fantasy points for the completion and the 15 yards; the tight end will get FPs for the catch and the yardage, but will lose points for the fumble; the safety gets FPs for forcing a fumble; the linebacker gets points for the recovery and the nine-yard return; and finally, the QB will actually earn points for making a tackle. In short, every play counts, and scores are high as a result; a typical winning score is 300 points, though you can score 300 and still lose.

Moreover, 21 of your 25 players are starters every week. On offense, each team starts two quarterbacks, three running backs, three wide receivers, a tight end, two kickers, and four "flex" players, who may be TEs, RBs, or WRs. On defense, everyone starts two defensive backs, two linemen/linebackers, and two other defenders of his choice. This gives you VERY little room on your bench; if a good player is on a bye week, or is injured for a couple of games, it's a considerable handicap. If you cut him, one of your opponents can pick him up and use him against you later. (This happened to me with Steve McNair.) You can't just draft well and stockpile your big guns--you've got to gamble a bit.

Careful observation and strategizing will allow you to win such gambles, though. Back in Week Three, I noticed that the Ravens had two youngsters who did well against the Bengals--RB/kick returner B.J. Sams and WR Randy Hymes. In Week Four, I found myself short of good runners and receivers, and I did a little thinking: since return yards count in NC just like any other yards, a good return man can actually be a good investment--they'll often pick up 20-30 yards on every kickoff. Moreover, the Ravens were playing the Chiefs--a team not known for tough defense, but one that scores (and therefore kicks off) frequently. I gambled and picked up both Sams and Hymes. As Monday Night Football opened, I was trailing my opponent by 40 points, hoping Priest Holmes would have a big game. As is happens, he did, but it wouldn't have been enough to win it for me; no, I had to rely on Sams, who ran for 250 yards and a punt-return TD, and Hymes, who caught a 57-yard flea-flicker for a touchdown.

And that, folks, is why my Scrub Jays are 4-0 and leading the Number Crushers right now. They may not stay there--they've got a touch matchup against the Sandmen this week, and Priest is on a bye week--but it's good to know success in some arena. And if I can get my Fish back in the water this week, I'll be in an even better mood.

4:06 PM

GETTING EXPERIMENTAL: this will be areal-time blog, with no edits, revisions, or second draftsa allowed. I wwant to see just how much drek I produce during the first run of a n idea. Thus all the typos, badly franed sentences and other troubles can be blamed eintirely on my inability to go back and clean up whta you folks don't usually have to see.)

It was not my intentin to leave ths ournal alone for nearly two weeks, but life just has this way of interfering with plans, y'know? I got myself distracted by such things as Thing One's thirteenth birthday, which we celebrated a few days late. Last Saturday we invited four thirteen-year-olds to spend the night. (As a friend noted, "Could have been worse--you could have invited thirteen four-year-olds.") Itw as a fairly easy gathering to manage; at that age they make their own fun, so you don't have to do much except buy the snaks, bake the cake, saty away from the TV and computer gaming, and ocacainsonally shout "Be quiet!" But yes, it's a little scary to realize that You Are the Parent of a Teenager.

Speaking of scary, I got to see about thirty minutes of ht e vice-presidential debate tonight, and DIdck DChenedy's not any friendier and more culddly today than he used to be, is he? I wasn't that impressed with Edwards, whose habit of not answerig the moderator's question because he wanted to answer a different question got pretty irritating by the end. Still, Cheney came off as a bit surly (even his failure to thank Edwards befre his closing statement seemed a bit like a childish snub, though I suppose it may have been a simple oversight--bt Edwards had just opened his own closing statement by thanking the moderator AND Cheney.) I was transfixed by the guy who wasn't there, though: I was unable to stop thinking about Bush's performance in the previous edebate against Kerry. Did Cheney seem more experienced and sober than Edwards? Well, yeah. But he also seemed a lot more experienced and sober than his own boss. By comparison, Bush looked like a lightweight boxing with an opponent--reality, in this case--with a far longer reach, a far heavier fist, and a far greater knowledge of the sweet science. Edwards apparently scored a lot of points on Cheney's & Bush's lack of candor with the electorate during the early part of the debaet, but hte last thirty minutes looked pretty lackluster. I give it to Edwards on points. And did you notice how fast Cheney ran away from any attempt to discuss the gay marriage amendment? He noted that marriageis traditionally regulated by the states, noted that Bush supports and Amendment, and shut up for gootd. Wouldn't even use his rebuttal time on the esecond question on the subject. Doesn't agree with the Boss, I think. But of course you can't disagree wiht the Boss in thi sadministration, can you?

The debates have been important to me, not just as a spech teacher, but as a voter and an American. I think they've allowed us to see something that the media has not done a good job osf showing us for the past three years: that they pepople in chrarge do not have our best interests at heart. They have an agenda that consists of taking power and holding it. Ocacasinoally they wieldit, but not on the gahbehalf of anyone other than themselves, that's for sure. When you can see Bush attempt to score points on Kerry by insisting that Poland is makin ga major contribution to bringing peace to Iraq, or watch Cheney expressig regret that the GOP has been unable to unite the country--and using Zell Miller as an example of a figure of unity!--it becomes a lot easier to see that we've gbeen giving these guys a free ride for too long. As long as Bush can hide behid hand-picked supporters at all his speaking events, he can pretend that everyone agrees withhim. In a debate, he can see--and WE can see--just how many people don't.

Well it's late--ive got papers to grade an d sleep to rack up. But if nothing else, my need for careful editing, not to mention my incessant use of the Backspace key, should now be apparent to all and sundry, like it or not.

Oh, and it looks like I'll have a book review coming out in a future issues of OnEarth Magazine--details as they become clearer. Am I delighted to have gotten an offer from a mag that has published Ursula Le Guin?

Oh, you damn betcha.

Goonight, all.

5:22 AM