Whose Shake Is This!!?

I made a list of things to write about this week from the sporting world that taken as a whole have little to do with one another. But as usual, this does not stop me from trying to find some common thread. There simply HAS to a fearful symmetry somewhere in the interstices between Joey Barton’s Hitler Moustache and Kyle Busch winning the Triple at Bristol last weekend. I know that F1′s return to the track at Spa foretells some crazy cuckoo cosmic connection to Nationwide’s return to Circuit Gilles Villeneuve. And hanging over it all like a sultry ol’ moon is the headline, torn from the broadsheets of terrible reality HOTSPURS BUGGER YOUNG BOYS 4-0.

So…let’s go see how right, or how grievously wrong I am.

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Germany 4    England 1

They played like dopey wankers. They were old, they were fat, they were slow, they were a bit too full of themselves as individual stars to play together as a team, and in the end, they were sent packing back to England by a younger, quicker German squad. Sure, Lampard got cheated out of a goal that would have equalized the match in the first half. But nothing in England’s play throughout this match and most of the World Cup gave any indication of team that could win, when necessary, at any cost. They had talent, but not the right talent. They had stars, but as well as Rooney, Terry, Lampard, Garrard and the rest play for their Premier League clubs, putting them together on the same team was not going to get the job done. They were star-crossed from the get go….from the John Terry/Wayne Bridge drama ahead of the World Cup to Wayne Rooney’s petulance on the pitch. And even though they showed some heart on occasion, they really honestly played like a bunch of dopey wankers.

England might have been served just as well or better if they’d sent an NPower League 1 team out there….the Milton Keynes Dons, or Dagenham & Redbridge. Heh. They might as well have…at least there would have been more team spirit.

But….it takes more than just team spirit to win…

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I’m not sure if this brief interlude between posts meant that I needed the time to absorb some vital or essential knowledge about motorsports, football, poetry, music which I hate, science fiction which I also hate, or whether this interlude simply resulted from laziness or a lack of courage. Perhaps all of the above. Or none of it. The NASCAR Hall of Fame inducted it’s inuagural class, a pantheon of spectacular brilliance: Bill France Sr, Bill France Jr, Richard Petty, Dale Earnhardt, and Junior Johnson, and I watched every moment of it. The All Star race came and went and vanished into memory with a tumultuous finish. Kurt Busch grabbed the glory and the Million Dollar Check. I went and grabbed (the next day at The Firehouse) a tall glass of ice and a bottle of Miller Lite for the quintessential Polish Victory Lap that is my custom when Kurt Busch wins a race. And Kurt’s younger brother Kyle, whose hopes of winning the aforementioned race were dashed during the final moments while racing his teammate Denny Hamlin for the win, when Hamlin squeezed him up into the wall, and a few laps later Kyle blew a tire and that was the end of it. Or would have had Kyle not threatened to KILL his team-mate Hamlin. (More on THAT in a moment)

So all of the above, and all the stars in the sky. All of that and the REAL Super Bowl…the UEFA Champions League Final. Last Saturday in Madrid. Barcelona 2  Bayern München 0. Yes…the glory and grace of the game, and the glory and grace of Venessa Redgrave in the movie Letters To Juliet. Nothing and everything to think about. I watched the countless stars as they vanished, like the words I’m writing now.

I toss these words off into the darkness like little stones skipping across the moonlit water.  Hoping against hope that they might rise up into the sky and shine there for at least one or two descending series of moments before dropping into the murky depth. After all, not many people take the time to dive into the deep water, to plumb the darkness for the sparkling treasure hidden there.

But lets go see what’s down there.

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Betty White vs. NASCAR

The Lady In Black did her level best to leave no one unscathed at last night’s Southern 500 at Darlington. Jimmie Johnson was swept up in her hateful arms on lap 180 by the intrepid A.J. Allmendinger whose brake rotor exploded.  That was good to see. It kept the deal interesting. The race roared to a thrilling finish with Denny Hamlin and Kyle Busch and Jeff Gordon duking it out, 10-12 laps to go…..but WAIT!! Betty Freaking White is hosting Saturday Night Live and she’s so gosh-darned cute these days at 88 years of age….so the end of the Southern 500 vanished into “LIVE from New Y0rk, it’s Saturday night!” The ultimate clash of cultures!! Betty White vs. NASCAR. No doubt about the outcome of that, sorry to say. Sorry Denny Hamlin, Betty White takes that checkered flag.

But it was all good in the end, I suppose. Denny Hamlin, the stealth driver of NASCAR….so good and consistent that you tend to forget he’s even there, Denny Hamlin, scored an impressive and hard fought win. It was his third win of the season…and the fact that he’s recovering from ACL surgery on his left knee makes his accomplishments all that more remarkable. Last season, I didn’t even realize he made the Chase until he finish 5th in the points. This year, I’m definitely keeping him on my radar and in my peripheral vision. He tends to be overshadowed by his more extroverted and jovial teammate Kyle Busch. But as the season moves along, Hamlin will definitely be a man to watch. He is currently in 6th, 14 points back of Matt Kenseth.

Truth to tell, I would like to see the NASCAR season play itself out with epic storylines worthy of great German cinema. Bring on the Wim Wenders and Werner Herzogs!  I want passion and turmoil and beauty. Time and its terrifying wonder and mystery. I want the unexpected and poignant. And if NASCAR plays out the rest of the reel like it did last night at Darlington, I’ve got a good feeling that I’ll get what I want.

Jeff Gordon and Jeff Burton, if they spoke German, would sum up the Southern 500 thusly: “In Wieter Ferne, So Nah!” ((Faraway, So Close.)) It’s probably better to say that, than the English expletives their respective situations truly deserve. They share that fate with a few other prominent sportsmen this weekend as well whose fate was to finish close, but naught close enough.

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“According to THIS book, someday you will publish a photo of us on the Internet.”

Sometimes I just get caught up in my own format. It becomes a trap from which I can barely escape. Hopefully, by recognizing that and bringing it to light, I can indeed effect an escape. Format. Perhaps I should explain, and as always, I will try not to allow the facts to get in the way of the truth.

I’ve been using a format for my blog that primarily involves a synergy and/or a resonance with current anime shows that I have been watching. As y’all should have guessed by now, I stay on top of all the new shows. And I use screencaps from those shows for various expositional or comedic effects, or both. Also, I will sometimes dredge up an older show and go off on that. Format. Yes. Now the concept of format actually comes from my old SF Fanzine publishing days back in the late 70′s and into the 80′s when I lived in Minneapolis and published a Hogu Award nominated fanzine INTERGALACTIC STARBARN and also published zines for the two local APAs (Amatuer Press Associations, for those among you who are mundane — hee!), MINNEAPA  ((used various titles there, also published quite few zines ananomously there under the nom de plume of Mark Heifer)), and one for STIPPLE-APA, titled ZINE. I also published a zine, entitled MY ZINE TITLE for the Chicago fandom’s local APA, WINDYAPA….although my first zine published there was entitled The Johnny Callison Show which was written live from the Convention Suite of Minicon 17 on Saturday evening April 18, 1981, and then published in WINDYAPA #6.

Format. Typeface, Masthead, Colophon, Comments and the layout thereof. I would use a format for each of my apa-zines and try and stick to it consistently. It was a small little obsession that was, to varying degrees, shared with my fellow fans. It would prompt such comments, like my comment to Robin Beal in WINDYAPA 11 ((which btw features my cover drawing of myself and fellow Minneapolis fan, Mike Wood (the late Mike Wood, beloved by all in Minn-Stf and longtime editor of MINNEAPA) arriving in Chicago…Mike flying in in the guise of a wood-duck, and me sky-skiing over downtown Chicago being towed being a Northwest (Bozo)Orieinted Airlines DC-10)): “Well by golly, this format is a real wicked drug. [Hi Gretchen.] I like yours. real easy to read.”

Now am I clear about FORMAT!!??

Okay…onward!!

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The countdown clocks are ticking, ticking, inexorably ticking. Countdown to Daytona 500. Countdown to Rolex 24 Hours of Daytona. Countdown to F1 Practice in Bahrain. Countdown to the F2 Race at Silverstone. Time is running out and there is no hope left of stopping it. No hope of turning it back to the beauty and wonder that once filled its days and hours to the brim. No time to catch a breath of innocence and wonder, no time to hold it’s contemplative silence gently in one’s hands or heart. The clocks are ticking and they will not stop. There is no hope left.

A year ago, the ticking of the clocks was music to my ears. This time of the year was a-swirl with excitement and anticipation. Each tick of the countdown clock was bringing me closer to the excitement and exhilaration of a new season of racing. I couldn’t wait for the clocks to tick down to the respective zeroes and bask in the hallucenogenic roar of the engines as my favourite drivers and teams raced off into the on-rushing year with hope and determination with an almost  psychedelic furor not to end until the final checkered flag is dropped at Homestead or Bahrain.

Now, in this terrible year of 2010, I’d like to stop all the clocks and chronometers. Not forever mind you. But for the moment. I’m not looking forward to anything or any of this and I’d like to stop the ticking ticking ticking for long enough to salvage some hope from what seems to be a hopeless world.

“And under the oppression of the silent fog

The tolling bell

Measures time not our time, rung by the unhurried

Ground swell, a time

Older than the time of chronometers, older

Than time counted by anxious worried women

Lying awake, calculating the future,

Trying to unweave, unwind, unravel

And piece together the past and the future,

Between midnight and dawn, when the past is all deception,

The future futureless, before the morning watch

When time stops and time is never ending;”

from “The Dry Salvages” by T.S. Eliot

Now don’t get me wrong. I want to feel this excitement again. I want to be looking forward to the new season of racing. But somehow, somewhy, I’m not. And I don’t know if it’s the racing and what it’s become, or me and what I’ve become, or both. But right now I want it all to stop so I can unweave, unwind, and unravel the mess that this has become.

Well, it’s hopeless I guess.  The clocks are ticking. Daytona 500 is 21 days and change as I write this. Rolex 24 hours is 6 days and  change. Bahrain is 46 days and change. Sao Paulo tees off on March 14th but IRL thankfully has no countdown clock. So you might as well join me. I have no choice in the matter. The clocks are ticking. So come along for the ride.

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Yes, I know it’s the Holidays. Christmas, New Years and all that and I hope it’s happy. Also, it’s not only the end of the year, but also the end of the Decade. But if you’re expecting anything Holiday or Fin de Year/Decade related, or a sad parade of Top 10 Lists, well, best prepare yourself to be disappointed. Or at least, dispense with those expectations entirely and then you won’t be disappointed at all, and might, when all is said and done be somewhat pleasently surprised, albeit vaguely.

Most likely, I will leave the Decade Stuff, the Best O’ The Year Stuff, to better, simpler minds. There is one GREAT Best of The Decade List I saw recently, and i highly recommend it. Ben Cohen has complied a Top 10 Best American Sports Writing Of The Decade. This is GREAT reading. Fabulous stuff. If I could write 1/10th as well these sportswriters…well…I’m begging the question. Onward.

While having a beer at the Grumpy Troll this afternoon, I got to wondering about when, exactly men’s basketball shorts stopped being short. There had to be a moment, or a descending series of moments when that occurred. What got me thinking about that was that I was watching the replay of last night’s Wisconsin vs. UW-Milwaukee basketball game, and UW-Milwaukee has this big galoot trudging around out there, 6’7″ 310 pound (yes, you read that right) James Eayrs, who looks more like one of those Eastern Europeans sumo-wrestlers. Anyway, those basketball shorts on him looked especially ridiculous….you could’ve used them to wrap up a Minneapolis-Moline Tractor as a Christmas present. If fact, he looked like a Minnneapolis-Moline tractor. So it made me wonder…when did this goofy trend start.

Doing a little digging, I re-discovered my memories of University of Michigan Fab 5 from the 1991-92 season. The Fab 5:  Juwan Howard, Jalen Rose, Chris Webber, Jimmy King and Ray Jackson bagn the 1991-92 season as freshman finished the season by winning the NCAA Championship. They popularized and propelled the trend towards baggier and longer basketball shorts. When they first hit the courts in their long baggy shorts, and black shoes and socks…they were like nothing anyone had ever seen…and they played like nothing anyone had ever seen. Long and baggy became cool and pretty soon College and then NBA player began adopting the new look. BUT…

The look didn’t start with the Fab 5 however. While I haven’t pinned this down to the exact moment…the actual origin of the look began with the Arkansas Razorbacks basketball team during the 1990-91 season. Back then, the Razorbacks were not nationally televised and though a pretty good team that made it to the Elite 8 that season under head coach Nolan Richardson, they weren’t poised on the brink, so to speak. They didn’t have the flair and the style that Michigan had the following year.

Early in the 1991 season, Michigan assistant coach Brian Dutcher noticed his players pulling their shorts down to their hips and wearing their jerseys untucked. Remembering seeing the Arkansas team wearing longer shorts the previous season, he ordered shorts for the Fab 5 to wear that were about 2 to 4 inches longer than average. Juwan Howard liked them, and the rest, as they say, is history.

Well…it really IS the end of the Noughties…and as much as it galls me to spit those words off my tongue, I guess there is no avoiding the reality of it. And a dreadful decade it was from a cultural, political, economic, social, emotional, ethical standpoint. If not for sports, the Noughts would have been even more a total miserable hell than it already was.

Sports survived it all. Even the Milwaukee Brewers were able to rise above by the end of the decade.

And speaking of the Brewers…

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It all came down to one night, one race. The final race for the Chase. The Chevy Rock N Roll 400 at Richmond International Speedway. It was a mighty and terrible race with the blood of giants coursing through the veins of some of the drivers while from others the blood of giants spilled across raceway as the checkered flag fell and hushed the terrible roar.

And it was over almost as suddenly as it began. 26 races all came down to one mighty earthshaking night. There was an encore for Denny Hamlin who won, at last, on his home track. For him, it was better than if he’d won the Daytona 500. He’s been hard to pin down this season so far…it wasn’t until just before his win at Pocono that I even realized he was solidly in the Chase. If the blood of giants has been coursing through his veins this season, it has been, for the most part, the micronized kind.

Another driver however, who’s had the blood of giants running through his veins his entire career, ended the race in a pool of that blood.

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