From Black Sox to Sorry, Seahawks: Sometimes, Cheaters Win--Part I

Sometimes the cheaters win.  Let that sink in for a moment.  Most of us over age 5 already know this.  In fact, we know that in some areas of life the cheaters nearly always win.  Look around you.  Forget the big stuff, like stolen elections and corporate scandals.  Look at your life and the people you know.  Look at the winners, the ones who always seem to get what they want.  Do they play entirely fair?  No, of course they don't.  But it's still not much fun to get reminders thrown at us from the sports world that, yup, all too often, the cheaters win.

This past Sunday, within the game, the Seattle Seahawks lost the Super Bowl to the New England Patriots (who are unholy and disgusting and do not deserve any of the love my fellow Red Sox fans give them) because of the single dumbest play call in the history of the NFL.  That the Patriots were there at all, though, may, just might, be due to massive, ridiculous cheating in the playoff game that got them there.  They certainly have a documented history of massive, ridiculous cheating.  As an Eagles fan, I just try not to think too hard about the implications (What if they cheated in our Super Bowl?  What if?  What it? What if?), because this isn't the Olympics, which will straight up take away and re-assign medals ten years down the line if someone is found to have cheated (Please, NFL, think about it?  Signed, St. Louis Rams, Carolina Panthers, Philadelphia Eagles, Seattle Seahawks, and Their Fans).

Elementary school teachers in (at minimum) Indianapolis and Seattle, you have an example that will be viscerally effective for years to come of why cheating is bad and wrong and hurtful and should be punished.  Elementary school teachers in New England, well, good luck.

Now, I know (much though I might like to believe otherwise) that the Patriots are not some sort of anomaly on the football landscape.  I've been watching sports for the better part of 35 years, the last 20 or so of those in the more or less certain knowledge that in every game I watch, at least someone on each side is cheating, somehow.  That's just the reality of any endeavor involving human beings.  But. But.  Maybe I'm wrong to view it this way, but to me it just feels different when you have individuals here and there getting tempted and breaking the rules versus an organization deliberately, systematically setting out and planning to break or at least subvert the rules.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, given what I teach, my worldview is pretty medieval. I believe wholeheartedly in The Wheel of Fortune--you're up sometimes, but inevitably you'll go down again, and then inevitably you'll be up again, and then inevitably you will yet again be down, and round and round it goes.  No one gets to stop The Wheel.  No one.  Teams like the Yankees and Patriots and Soviet pairs skaters find ways--very often not above-board--to stop The Wheel, and that's why a lot of people don't like them--it's nothing so modern and petty as "jealousy" but something much older and more primal.

One of the (maybe stupid) things that's comforting to me about sports is how, often in very strange ways and at long distances of time, if you pay close enough attention, Fortune's Wheel completes a turn and you get to see scales balance (another ancient and very useful metaphor).  In 1977 and 1978, the Phillies lost back-to-back National League Championship Series against the Los Angeles Dodgers.  In 2008 and 2009, the Phillies beat the Los Angeles Dodgers in back-to-back National League Championship Series.  In 1984, Canada's Brian Orser won the Olympic silver medal behind the USA's Scott Hamilton.  In 1988, Orser very narrowly lost the men's Olympic figure skating gold medal to the USA's Brian Boitano--silver again.  Of course as an American skating fan I'm still delighted about both of these outcomes, but Orser has always seemed like a good guy, so I was just as delighted for his sake in 2010 when his student Kim Yuna won the ladies' Olympic gold medal and again in 2014 when his student Yuzuru Hanyu won the men's title.  Kim should have had another gold in 2014 as well, but I'll rant further about official cheating in figure skating in Part III.

And sometimes it doesn't even take decades.  In 2003, the Red Sox lost a soul-crushing American League Championship Series to the Damn Yankees on a walk-off homerun in Game 7.  The next week, the Yankees lost the resulting World Series.  Balance.  The next year, the Red Sox came back from an 0-3 ALCS deficit to crush the Yankees' souls (presuming they have any) in a Game 7.  Balance.  In that same beautiful, magical 2004, the St. Louis Cardinals, who had won I think 104 games in the regular season, basically failed to show up for the World Series, which the Sox swept for their first Commissioner's Trophy in 86 years.  Two years later, the Cardinals got a World Series of their own.  Balance.  There is of course a multi-decade thing happening here with the Red Sox and Cardinals, because that is how sports travels around and around on Fortune's Wheel.  During those 86 years in the wilderness, the Red Sox lost two World Series to the Cardinals, 1946 and 1967.  They've now won two against the Cardinals, 2004 and 2013.  Balance.

I like it when the sports scales balance.  The Yankees' title drought of nine whole years (i.e. an eyeblink to every normal fan base that understands The Wheel) in the 2000s was balm to my soul.  The Phillies' 2008 World Series victory closed a hole in me that I didn't realize until that moment had been open and bleeding since their World Series loss in 1993.  If  you figure, as I do that, in addition to 2008 balancing 1993, 1980 balances 1950, then you'll agree with me that some day in this universe, three more Phils' World Series victories are coming to balance 1915, 1983, and (oh, my heart) 2009.  Just last month, the Dallas Cowboys (motto: the Yankees of the NFL) were eliminated from the playoffs on a controversial call precisely one week after they'd eliminated the Detroit Lions on a controversial call.  The scales, they balance, and it is oh so sweet when they balance in favor of the good guys.

The Scales of Sports also, sometimes, seem to have a moral element.  The White Sox didn't win a World Series for forever and a day, and that was a just punishment for the Black Sox Scandal (coming in Part II).  I always took the whole "Giants can't quite get there to win a World Series" situation as the baseball gods' punishment for letting the whole Barry Bonds situation happen.  But then the last five years happened, and I wonder.  Over the last few years in football, I took comfort in the knowledge that the Patriots hadn't won a Super Bowl since they got caught cheating with the cameras, but then Sunday happened (possibly as a reward for . . . more cheating?), and I really wonder.  So I am moved to reflect on my watershed "The scales don't always balance, dammit.  The cheaters often win, and nobody does anything about it, and oh, why do I care?" moments with all the sports I love that, every now and again, love me back.

Part II will discuss how the Black Sox are not quite as anomalous as we make them out to be.

Happy Anniversary Phillies and Good Luck Royals!

At 11:29 PM (yes, I had to look it up, but my memory was only eight minutes off) tonight, it will be 34 years to the moment since Tug McGraw struck out Willie Wilson and the 1980 Philadelphia Phillies won the World Series--the franchise's first in 97 years of existence, 77 of those in the World Series era.  I was a week shy of six months old, but I swear on some cellular level I remember this.  It's probably just the fact that I grew up in the Philadelphia suburbs seeing the highlights on TV a million times, but the image of Tug McGraw lifting his arms skyward and dancing off the mound resides in my brain.  The second out of the ninth inning was also pretty exciting--the bases were loaded, and there was a routine foul pop, and catcher Bob Boone* went over to get it.  It banked off his glove . . . but first baseman Pete Rose had gone over to back the play and caught the ball for the out.  The announcer then uttered what remains to this day my personal catchphrase at times of close calls: "Don't worry, Pope**, he'll get it!"  The Phillies only got into that World Series by winning an insane white-knuckler of an NLCS against the Houston Astros.  Four of the five games (LCSes were best of 5 then) went to extra-innings, including the winner-take-all Game 5, which the Phillies only won after an eighth-inning come-from-behind rally against some pitcher you may have heard of, Nolan Ryan.  I swear that this level of stress, broadcast on every radio and TV for a hundred miles, seeped into my baby brain and made me the way I am. 

The Philadelphia Phillies live pretty near to the core of my soul.  My grandparents--who were "West Philadelphia born and raised" long before Will Smith--went to a Phillies-Brooklyn Dodgers game on their New York honeymoon.  They got married April 19, 1947, so I finally put it together that they would have seen Jackie Robinson, who had made his Brooklyn Dodgers debut April 15.  My grandfather attended a game of the 1950 World Series*** (unfortunately a 4-0 sweep by the New York Damn Y****** [the only real profanity here is asterisked]).  My grandparents--and later I--always had a Phillies game on the TV or radio between April and October.  We were on the phone to each other the moment after a win to rehash things throughout my teens.  Later when they moved in with us, I joined them on the couch every evening to watch the game, my mother exclaiming, "Baseball again?" as we left the dinner table in a line.  I have always drawn great comfort from the fact that the Phillies were in first place in the NL East when my grandfather died.  I remain saddened that my grandmother missed 2008 by two lousy years.  One of my first thoughts after Lidge struck out Hinske for that Phils' Series win was, "I hope the man who sat across from her in dialysis and always wore his Phillies hat made it to today."  Among my most important possessions are the stuffed Phillie Phanatics my grandparents gave me years before I seriously followed baseball, my grandfather's 1980 World Champions Phillies T-shirt, and a photo of my grandparents in Ebbets Field seats in the history wing of the Baseball Hall of Fame. 

And who did Willie Wilson play for, back in 1980?  Who did the Phillies beat for that first Commissioner's Trophy?  The Kansas City Royals, of course.  In 1985, the Royals won their own first World Series--a nice bit of scale-balancing.  They had lost for us to have our day, and not too long afterwards, they got their day.  Baseball at its best turns on Fortune's Wheel: you may be down now, but someday you will be up again.  For decades after that, of course, I was pretty sure that neither team was ever going back to the World Series.  The Phils just seemed terminally incompetent (you would have won big money in about 2000 betting me that Terry Francona would someday manage a team to a World Series victory, let alone my other favorite team in historic fashion), and the Royals disappeared into the haze with all the other small-market teams in the Steinbrenner-Y****** and TBS-Braves era.  The Royals, and particularly Zach Greinke's time with them about 10 years ago, are among the reasons for today's expanded-even-beyond-the-wild-card MLB playoff roster.  So are teams like the Pirates, Twins, and arguably Cubs and White Sox.   The Royals and Pirates have managed to take advantage of this; the rest of the not-quite-invincible teams just have to keep at it.

So I've always had a particular affection for the Kansas City Royals.  I've lived through a 14-year playoff drought, a 15-year World Series appearance drought, and a 28-year World Series victory drought.  I know what it is to stick with your team even when they're out of the pennant race by June and that one dream you hold onto just seems impossible.  I know what it's like to watch the playoffs year after year and think, "Why not us?  Can it please be us someday?"  And I know what it is the moment that dream finally, finally comes true, and it's better than you ever dared hope. 

The Royals, starting tonight, are going back to their first World Series in 29 years.  During Game 4 of the ALCS, while they were finishing their sweep of the Orioles,**** One of the crowd shots panned over a guy who had to be about my age.  He had made a sign by attaching his child-size 1985 World Series Champions jacket to a posterboard with the message, "I need another one.  This one doesn't fit anymore." I cried.  This is what sports fandom is, at its purest.  Your place, your time, your people.  Being faithful to something all your life, even though most of the time it's either nothing special or downright awful.  Loving the same thing that your friends, neighbors, and total strangers at the grocery store love.  Knowing that wherever you go, some piece of you will always stay planted there--Kauffman Stadium for them, the corner of Broad and Pattison for me. 

The San Francisco Giants, the Royals' World Series opponents, and their so-called fans with their ridiculous (and occasionally terrifying--like seriously the way that Burger King thing is terrifying) Panda***** hats, understand none of this.  A franchise that left their city (when I side with New York, you know it's serious), let the whole Barry Bonds thing happen, knocked my boys out of the 2010 playoffs, has just won 2 of the last 4 World Series and does not need another one, and just generally exist to irritate nice people, don't understand any of this.  They can't understand any of this.  I have immense and long-standing respect for Bruce Bochy as a manager, but just . . . this Giants things needs to be stopped.  They play in a vacation spot with kayaks behind the right field wall.  The Royals, like the Phillies, play in a regular place in front of regular people.  Nothing shiny.  Just baseball.  Just faith.  Just love.  

Just win, Royals. Just win.  Like my guys did 34 years ago today.  For all the right reasons and all the nice people.  Just win.

Happy Anniversary, 1980 Phils.  So many of you are gone now.  The stadium you won in is gone.  The voices that called your games, but not your Series (and became the very reason local announcers now do get to call post-season games), are gone.  But your memories?  This day?  Here phorever.



*No, I haven't forgiven his son Aaron for the 2003 ALCS.  I never will.
**The late Paul Owens, then General Manager of the Phillies, looked like Pope Paul VI and was thus nicknamed "The Pope."
***I don't care that this happened 30 years before I was born.  I'm not over this one either.  I never will be.  Don't even ask if I'm over the 2009 rematch of that Series.  I do, however, have faith that someday (somedays, really), far in the future, maybe with my great-great granddaughter watching, the scales will balance and my Phightin' Phils will defeat the Damn Y****** in the World Series.  Twice. 
****And though I also have a team in the AL East, I do hope the Orioles get another crack here soon.  Showalter has done something really special with that team. 
*****You went and Google Imaged it, didn't you?  I told you--terrifying!  You'll never be able to look at another panda again.  It's your own fault. 

For Better, For Worse, Philadelphia

I wrote this today during a free-write exercise with my students.  It's not polished, or finished, or even Shakespeare-inclusive, but it is true.  Enjoy!

I am a Philadelphia sports fan.  That is to say, when it comes to sports, metaphorically, I have spent the last 30-some years smacking myself in the thumb with a hammer and saying, “Gee, that hurt.  Let me get a series of increasingly heavier hammers and do that again for the rest of my life.”  I have sat by and watched a Phillies closer give up the home run that gave the Toronto Blue Jays (yes, that’s a real baseball team, apparently) a second straight World Series.  I have watched, helpless, while the Eagles forgot they were in the Super Bowl and let a very winnable game go into the mincing clutches of the insufferable Tom Brady.  Oh, and the three years before that, they lost the blessed NFC title game that would have put them in said Super Bowl.  I have watched my beloved Phillies roll over and let the horror that is the San Francisco Giants sail through the playoffs to a spectacularly undeserved Series title and watched the unholy New York Damn Yankees take a winnable World Series from us.

And that’s only when our teams actually manage to make the playoffs.  Most of a Philadelphia sports fan’s life consists of the low, steady whine of mediocrity.  The Phillies were the first 10,000-loss franchise in professional sports history.  The Eagles have a bad habit of making the Cowboys look good.  The Flyers have let two Stanley Cups slide away since I was in high school.  Most of the time, if you want to see a Philadelphia team in first place, you have to read your newspaper upside down.  I’ve spent the last three NFL seasons head-desking over Michael Vick-related drama.  My city lived through 100 professional sports seasons between its last two major championships.

And through it all, we are there.  Philadelphia fans have a nasty reputation as “boo birds” because we often let our teams hear it when they aren’t working—but we let them hear it because we are there unlike some other cities I could mention ATLANTA.  We are loyal.  We commit for better or worse and we live up to it.  If I didn’t leave the Phillies over a bad decade, I won’t leave a friend over a bad fight.

And occasionally the hammer misses my thumb and hits its target.  The day the Eagles won the NFC title game that took them to that ill-fated Super Bowl was a thing of pure, shining joy.  The Phillies beating the Braves in the 1993 NLCS is one of the dearest memories of my childhood (even if the next week’s World Series brought some of the worst).  When Lidge struck out Hinske and the Philadelphia Phillies became the “2008 World Champions of baseball,” I could have died happy.  For better or for worse does sometimes mean for better, and I am a Philadelphia sports fan for better, for worse, forever.  

Henry IV Part II: Stratford-upon-Avon, Summer 2000

That same summer study abroad program referenced in the previous post also included another theater trip, which was never going to be the life highlight that seeing Hamlet at The Globe was, but it was wonderful nonetheless.  This portion of the program took us to Stratford-upon-Avon, with time to look around the Shakespeare house/museum, visit Holy Trinity Church, where Shakespeare is buried (and where photo-taking is not permitted, but postcards with photos may be purchased, because apparently only tourists' flashbulbs will steal The Bard's soul), and have dinner before heading to Henry IV Part II at the Swan Theatre, a Royal Shakespeare Company venue.

I am the first to confess that Henry IV Part II is just not one of my favorites.  I love Henry IV Part I and of course, like all reasonable people, I love Henry V, but the middle play has just never done much for me.  I recently admitted in a formal academic venue that I regard Henry IV Part II and The Empire Strikes Back as the theatrical Brussels sprouts I have to choke down before I am allowed the double chocolate cake of Henry V and Return of the Jedi.

All joking aside, I realized that it was a great gift to see a Shakespeare play performed in his hometown, within touching distance of his birthplace and final resting place.  I was also, unfortunately, a bit sick to my stomach for some reason (though luckily for me, the intermission period proved to be the one and only time in my life thus far that the home remedy of a glass of red wine actually worked--thank you  British theatres!) and really just wanted to get back on the bus and get back to the dorm.

So I was tired, a little bored, and a little sick (and to be honest, by this time in the trip getting a little bit homesick, because seriously England, there do not need to be potatoes at every meal and there does need to be LIQUID laundry detergent in the supermarket).  I was ache-y and vulnerable, like the aging king in the play's title (though unlike the character, I would survive the evening), when the house lights went down, the audience settled in, and suddenly black-cloaked actors representing Rumour slid from among the seats and ran toward the stage while delivering the play's opening lines.  For me, anyway, the fourth wall was effectively broken; the surprise and creation of an ominous mood completely worked.

It was, then, the appropriate night for me to see this play for the first time.  All I really knew to (or forced myself to pay attention to) was the famous scene near the end when Prince Hal (later Henry V) accidentally takes his not-yet-dead father's crown, precipitating their final reconciliation.  It worked too.  Like Hamlet, though, this was not a performance that has stayed with me mainly for scholarly reasons but rather for more personal ones.  It was the first time I saw a Shakespeare play indoors.  It was the first time I saw a Shakespeare play performed on either stage or screen without reading it first (I do this all the time now, and I highly recommend it).  It was the first time--and not the last, I confess--that I dragged my sick self who should have been home in bed to the theater for Shakespeare.  It was the first time that I paid at least some faint attention to a Shakespeare play performance as a critic, not just an audience member.  It was also the day I got my "Out, damned spot!" eraser, which doesn't erase a damned thing, which is probably the point.

Hamlet: Shakespeare's Globe, London, Summer 2000

In the final term of my freshman year of college, I took an honors seminar in Existentialism and Literature.  The professor, one of the stricter graders in the English department, cast a bit of an intimidating shadow over those of us in the major who were serious about our studies and about possibly going on to graduate school.  Of course, being the type-A scholarship kid I was, I felt from the first day of class that I had something to prove.

A few weeks in, we were getting set to read Hamlet.  Our professor looked around the table and asked, "Has everyone read Hamlet before?"  Now, I was no Shakespeare neophyte: my high school preparation included in-depth study of Romeo and Juliet, Julius Caesar, The Scottish Play (I don't even type its name), and several of the sonnets.  We'd read Henry IV Part I and all of the sonnets in the British Literature survey I took earlier that same academic year.  But no Hamlet for me.      

I am generally too honest for my own good, and in any case my undergraduate campus ran on a strong honor code, so I wasn't about to lie to a professor in the middle of class.  Along with a few other students, I had to offer a sheepish "No."  I was prepared for that special species of public professorial derision that we all receive at some point or another.

No shame was forthcoming.  Our professor's face lit up, and he said, "Oh, you are in for such a treat.  I wish I could go back and encounter Hamlet again for the first time."  I let out a sigh of relief.  That moment was also a life and professional lesson for me--directly because of it, I am careful never to shame students for not knowing something.  Not reading or not paying attention earn my disapproval, but simply not knowing earns my support and encouragement.

What's relevant here is that he was oh so right.  Just as it's a bit dangerous to hand high school freshmen Romeo and Juliet (Here, kids!  Here's a story about teens your age who know each other for a week, run off together, and commit suicide for each other!), it's probably a bit dangerous to hand smart, idealistic 19-year-olds who are just learning that, yes, most of the time here in the real world, the underhanded scheming monstrous person does indeed win--and there is very little decent people can do about it--Hamlet.

Whatever the dangers, however strongly Hamlet resonated with my emerging sense of everything that was "out of joint" in the world, I also fell in love.  I read Hamlet during Spring Break, enjoying a leisurely, contemplative read that was Everything College Is Supposed To Be for me.  From the soaring verbal poetry, to the romantic, family, and political drama, to reading the famous "To be or not to be" speech in context, to the doomed, glorious, confident self-declaration "It is I, Hamlet the Dane," I found a mental and emotional home in the text and all its pain rendered into beauty.

I went on to take three more courses from this same professor, and it seems that Hamlet was a mental and emotional home for him as well.  Even in an American Literature survey or a Bible as English Literature course, he somehow worked a Hamlet reference in at least every fourth class meeting or so.  I can't blame him.  Hardly a day goes by in my own life that I don't quote Hamlet, either mentally or aloud.

Thus I was a receptive audience member indeed in that summer of 2000.  I had the great good fortune to see Hamlet at the reconstructed Globe in London as part of the Virginia Program at Oxford, a summer study program whose existence had been one of my major reasons for attending my college.  We sat on hard wood benches.  We were far away from the stage.  A light rain fell.  A crying infant and a plane passing overhead were both so disruptive at various points that the actors incorporated references to them into the dialogue.

And I didn't lean back once from the edge of my hard wooden seat.  And I mouthed the words right along with the actors (I did the same thing 11 years later in Staunton, Virginia, but that's another post).  And I caught my breath when Old King Hamlet's ghost did not look at or touch his son until the very last word of his first speech.  And I could barely make myself rise and rejoin the world when the post-play formal, slow jig concluded.

I can't give you anything more in the way of a critical reading of that performance.  Such things came later in my life, education, and career.  But I can tell you, as I tell my students every semester, that that experience was one of the top ten days of my life, and it remains with me as a person and a scholar.