Asshole of the Century

Wednesday, July 14, 2010

The Mediocre, The Beautiful, and Those Who Love Them

Of the many functions that sport has provided in my life, perhaps the most edifying is as a conduit for my seemingly fathomless hate. Now that I’ve reached a point where I’ve managed to surround myself with generally decent people, this has become more than an academic exercise. There used to be a time when all I’d have to do was walk outside my front door, and some trivial dickweed would inevitably succeed in earning my enmity, at least for a moment or two. But that doesn’t seem to happen much anymore. I’ve successfully been able to tighten my circle of acquaintances to the point where I really don’t actively hate anyone anymore (at least anyone other than my sister’s ex-husband, but that’s another story). The brain, like any muscle, has got to be used or it atrophies, and my mind has a carefully refined sense of who and what to hate that I don’t want to lose. Sporting teams offer an easy target on which to practice these skills.

Let’s face it; there have been a lot of teams to hate over the two score years of my sporting life. But a few stand out: The 1969 Mets, who took out my beloved Cubs and Orioles (probably my two favorite teams as a child); the Miami Hurricanes during the Jimmy Johnson era; the Dallas Cowboys during the Jimmy Johnson era; the New York Yankees just about anytime George Steinbrenner pulled out his wallet and stocked the team with enough players to buy himself another championship.

I am generally not too parochial in my hatred. Midwesterners tend to spend a lot of energy hating the team next door. For instance, Bears fans typically profess to hate the Packers, and Blackhawks fans hate the Red Wings. But I like the Red Wings and the Packers just fine. We are all under the same Middle American sky. Why can’t we all just get along? Or at least have a brat and a beer together. It takes some objective evil, something greater than just being in the same division, to trigger my righteous anger.

For instance, the Dallas Cowboys have to always be near the top of my list of potential clubs to hate, if for no other reason than that their fans have the arrogance to believe that they are “America’s team,” and that their stadium had a hole in the top “so God can watch them play.” The phrase “America’s team” implies that a big chunk of folks outside your home state actually like you and root for you, and that has not been the case for the Cowboys since at least the mid-70’s. The Saints, the Colts, the Steelers, the Packers, all at different times over the past decade seemed to capture the hearts of much of the country. So did the Cubs and the Red Sox at various points when they were making a run to break their respective title droughts. And so did the Bulls during the Michael Jordan era. Not that everyone liked these teams, just that they had a significant reservoir of support outside their own region of the country. But the Cowboys were not then, are not now, and never will be “America’s team.” While they haven’t really been good enough to hate for at least a decade, at the height of the Jimmy Johnson era, when he brought all the thuggery and shenanigans, along with his penchant for winning titles, from Miami to Dallas, he united two despicable traditions into a monolith that seemed to stain not just a team, but the entire sport. Oh, I would seethe over them. I pretty much quit watching playoff football, their victories put me in such a bad mood. And while Tony Romo, a swaggering, celebrity-loving cock-of-the-walk worthy of the Cowboy tradition, is pretty easy to hate, I actually like watching Cowboy playoff games these days, because it is a lot of fun to watch them lose.

I grew up in Southern California, and the first team I remember hating was the USC Trojans football squad. Admittedly, there was something parochial in this hatred. But there was also something tawdry in the University of Spoiled Children and the hold it had on the sporting life of my city. My dad and I used to sit there with my mom’s family, many of whom were USC boosters, including an older cousin who would go on to play offensive tackle for the Trojans, watching the epic gridiron battles between USC and UCLA. We would sometimes be the only UCLA Bruin fans in the room, as they squared off against O.J. Simpson or some other superstar tailback, led by an offensive line that inevitably outweighed the Bruin line by an average of 30 pounds. We would root that the Bruins, standard bearers for our city’s great public university, the one where the education was first class but the business connections only ordinary, would find a way to win the game through some combination of pluck, skill, and guile. And every once in a while this would happen. But mostly it was a case of watching guys like John Sciarra or Mark Harmon struggle in vein, overmatched against our crimson nemesis.

So my hatred goes way back, and I think that it is generally well-founded. Which is why my recent lack of hatred had me worried that I was getting old and soft, and why I was energized by last week’s announcement that LeBron James would be signing a multiyear deal with the Miami Heat. O.K., I know that the contempt foisted upon James over the past few days has been a bit over the top, and I’m not plowing any new ground here, but the combination of arrogance and vanity that surrounded the entire proceedings were stunning. And as a result, three of the biggest stars in the sport that I probably play best will ply their skills in that capital of arrogance and vanity, Miami, Florida.

Compounding this, you have Rush Limbaugh and his ilk applauding the move, bloviating about how it will save LeBron hundreds of thousands of dollars to live in this low-tax state. Well, all we have to do is look south into Latin America to see what happens when the rich get to keep all their money, when there is no sense of community, no sense of shared sacrifice. You get a huge underclass, poor public schools, and little opportunity for upward mobility; the rich live in armed compounds and drive around in bulletproof Mercedes; and what middle class there is just tries to keep their heads down and survive. This is what the douche bags on the right are essentially advocating. They are the cheerleaders of the American apocalypse, rooting that we finally give up any notion of a shared community and become just another banana republic. Florida is only a dry run for the real thing, which these free markets zealots will no doubt try to foist on the rest of the country at some point in the next couple of decades. So the Miami Heat have now become the poster children of the pending American apocalypse. Even if it weren’t personal, you still have to hate them, just for everything they symbolize about our devolving republic.

A few days after the LeBron announcement, Spain won the World Cup soccer final, 1-0 in extra time over the Netherlands. And, in case you missed it, Spain was also voted one of the most “beautiful teams” by beautiful people.com, a dating website where your photo has to be approved by the other members of the site before you can be let into their little club. Actually, Spain finished second in the voting to Italy. Meanwhile, England, Serbia, Algeria, and North Korea were among those chosen as the “most ugly” teams in the poll.

I doubt these results came as a shock to anyone, but let’s break them down a bit. The two most “beautiful” teams are from the Mediterranean, literally meaning “the middle ground” of what at the time was the known world. And it is not just the location of these teams that are middling. The guys on the Italian and the Spanish teams are generally neither short nor tall, neither thin nor bulky, neither pale nor dark. They are pleasing to the eye precisely to the degree that they do not offend. Studies show that we are attracted to someone who is a little different from us, but not too different, from their looks down to the pheromones they release.

The Italian soccer team, I admit, is almost always stocked full of guys with that classic Mediterranean look, with tan bodies and symmetrical faces. In fact, they are one of the few European teams who typically don’t have any ethnic minorities on their squad. Everyone is prototypically Italian. I find the Spanish squad, in contrast, a little weird looking. First, there is Carles Puyol, who looks like a cross between Kenny G. and a guitarist for an 80’s metal band having a bad hair day. And Andres Iniesta, who scored the winning goal in the championship game, looks to me like a hairless hobbit, this balding imp of a man with the eyes of Bambi. But with Italy out, all the lovers of Mediterranean men had to find a new team to ogle at, and I think the Spanish were the beneficiaries of this attention.

Meanwhile, all of the “ugly” teams on the list were from countries on the periphery, from England, from the Balkans, from North Africa, or East Asia. A lot of black folks fret about how light-skinned women are more accepted and more likely to be considered beautiful than their dark-skinned sisters. But maybe their’s is just the flipside of my story, that a bulk of the planet prefers mediocrity to distinction, café-au-lait over straight black, dominant genes to red hair and freckles. Hey, I could be the handsomest redhead on the planet (and I humbly submit that I am towards the upper end of that curve), but I recognize that fewer folks are going to be aroused by me than some doe-eyed Mediterranean who more closely approaches the golden mean of the human gene pool.

Similarity and symmetry, these are the two cornerstones of human attraction. Personally, I’m fine with that, especially considering, at least upon reaching the age of majority, this dissimilar and unsymmetrical soul has never wanted for friendship, or for that matter the joys of more intimate companionship. But it still grates. There is part of me that is decidedly Gnostic in this matter, in that I sometimes think the strictures of our world, including the genetics of human attraction, are not just restrictive, but quite possibly an active malignancy, limiting our individual and collective destinies. Yet bubbling underneath all of this obviousness lies something perverse, in that it calls us to violate our own programming. It is a divine voice, whispering of noble things. But how do we follow this voice if we live in a world where only the obvious is commonly regarded as beautiful? I contend that the first step is too stop trying to conform to the mean. And the second is to start listening to our dreams.

Besides serving as a conduit for our collective emotions, one of the functions of sport is as a benchmark of relative power in the world. Take the Olympics. From the end of World War I through the early 1950’s, the United States tended to dominate the medal count, the one exception being the 1936 games in Berlin, when host Germany won the most medals. Then, in the 1950’s, the balance of power shifted, and the Soviet Union began vying with the U.S. for the most trips to the awards podium. In the 1990’s, China began making a move, and by the 2008 Beijing Olympics actually won more gold medals than anyone else for the first time (although the U.S. still edged them out in the overall medal count). My point is that these shifts in Olympic success have tended to correspond with shifts in national power.

In this vein, the triumph of Spain on Sunday represents the ongoing vitality of the Great Middle, of symmetry, of cleaving to the mean of our social and genetic norms. I would be the first to admit that the Cup final was an ugly game, due in no small part to the bevy of hard fouls committed by the Dutch. But for over 90 minutes, Spain showed only intermittent flashes of being able to break down the Dutch defense. Meanwhile, Dutch striker Robben could have easily scored at least one if not a pair of goals. In short, the Dutch counters had so far proved at least as effective as the Spanish attack. Then, with about 10 minutes to go in overtime, Dutch defender Johnny Heitinga was given a second yellow card, and thus an immediate expulsion from the game.

Upon replay, you can see that, while Heitinga did briefly pull on Iniesta’s shoulder, the Spaniard fell a couple of seconds later of his own accord, once it was clear that the ball had harmlessly passed him by. It begs the question why the Spanish were allowed to pull at Robben or, in the semis, bang into Germany’s Ozil, during much more dangerous runs than Iniesta displayed on that play. It makes me appreciate American football, where Payton Manning can flop on the turf all he wants, it’s not going to build him any sympathy, and even if it did, sympathy doesn’t win football games. But what the rest of the world calls football is susceptible to the vagaries of such things, and in those last 10 minutes of extra time, with the Dutch down a man, the space finally opened up and the Spanish were able to engineer a goal.

To be clear, the Spanish are a very good team, and any goal, even one facilitated to a large degree by a referee’s judgment call, beats having the championship of the world decided by penalty kicks. But what this sequence of events says is that image does matter, that the subjective interpretations of referees, themselves steeped in the myth of the “beautiful” Mediterranean, is alive and well. Combined with Italy’s win in the World Cup four years ago (which featured its own bizarre carding of French star Zidane), the Mediterranean remains triumphant astride the soccer world, and will do so for at least another four years (I will pause so that any female readers of this blog can make the appropriate cooing sounds).

In the midst of all this sporting talk, I wish to advocate for the resplendence of humanity on the periphery, of idiosyncrasy, of personal revelation. And I nominate Copernicus as our patron saint. A brilliant fellow, he was the first to reveal the heliocentric nature of our solar system, essentially changing the way we looked at the universe, all from his isolated perch in the Silesian hills. But he’s not nearly as revered as Galileo, whose most important act involved his public support for Copernican ideas. In essence, Copernicus was the genius, the one who did the heavy lifting. But Galileo was the Mediterranean, from that Middle Land that everyone knows and loves, so he got more than his share of props.

Sunday’s soccer game was a reminder that the most popular sport on the planet remains a fickle one in which image matters. And, while I don’t hate the Spanish or their team, I do hate the state of the world that helped make their victory so predictable.

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