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The Collective Wisdom of Individual Ignorance

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January 20, 2017
America, Basketball, NBA, Politics, Sports
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Photograph:A painting shows George Washington giving a speech on the day he became president in 1789.

Tompkins Harrison Matteson/Library of Congress

In theory, democracy is a relatively emotionally detached system, a utilitarian tool for selection based on preference which, at its conclusion, yields the most popular choice for a given role. In practice, of course, it isn’t so simple, as voting methods and the different weights assigned to certain swaths of the voting populace tend to skew results one way or another.

All of this is entry-level political science; you certainly don’t need anyone reminding you of the way things are, especially on this of all days. It seems overly simplistic to just say that sometimes things don’t break the way they should, the way most people think they should, but then, it becomes hard to explain other voters’ tendencies[1] without reverting to childish name-calling and inflammatory rhetoric.

On Thursday, the NBA announced the starters for this year’s All-Star Game. Russell Westbrook, currently leading the league in scoring while averaging a triple-double, was not among them.

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Ciudad de los Reyes

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January 18, 2017
America, Soccer, Sports
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image1-1

Photo courtesy of the author, in the shadow of Nino Heroe Manuel Bonilla in Miraflores

In the work of literature to which I return most frequently, Eduardo Galeano writes, “There is nothing less empty than an empty stadium. There is nothing less mute than the stands bereft of people.”

He goes on to describe the sounds of games past, the echoes of Wembley from ’66 or the Camp Nou at any time when you’re unfortunate enough to miss Messi’s magic in real time, but he could have just as easily been describing any of the myriad pickup games that my oldest, not older, brother and I saw happening in Lima on and around Christmas, the holiday season be damned for anything but an occasion on which to kick around. People certainly invoke God enough to demand some time, after all.

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Sitting on a Barbed Wire Fence: The TwH 2016/17 Megathread

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December 31, 2016
America, Basketball, Music, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Religion, sexism, Sports
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Brian Kraker / Tuesdays With Horry

Brian Kraker / Tuesdays With Horry

Right from the very start, 2016 stood to challenge us. From the very start, we knew it wasn’t going to be a run-of-the-mill annum, from North Korea’s interstellar aggravation to the deaths of every stranger we thought we knew, from our laughter at nationalistic shortsightedness abroad to the joke turning on us with an apolitically exhausting election cycle that, even now, seems interminable, this year has cast shadows into every corner and fear into every heart, asserting its overwhelming pessimism past the point of absurdity and into realms of dystopian ennui.

But then, light is said to shed out of darkness; without the light, we wouldn’t know dark from darker, and pitch blackness would be broad daylight. As historically low as some of the valleys insisted upon going, a great many peaks, more than we’ll care to recall, shot up with a distinctly human, distinctly empathetic vitality. 2016 was the equivalent of the Gordie Howe hat trick: a goal first, an assist next and one giant, inevitable fight, with indescribable rage having finally boiled over to manifest itself in hideousness antipathy. It is with this in mind that we at TwH look back, one final, bitter time at the insanity of the preceding twelve months, with an eye toward what society has constructed as 2017. If Earth is really dying, and if we’ve only got five years left to cry in, U better live now.

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The Eternal Brace.

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December 6, 2016
America, race, Religion
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slager

Brace, as defined by the dictionary, as a verb: prepare (someone or oneself) for something difficult or unpleasant.

Sometime last week, I saw a tweet from the Michael Slager trial where he (Slager) alleged that he never received proper training on how to de-escalate situations (Okay, I don’t have the verbatim. I’m not a journalist, so please just trust that I have the gist of things). If you are unfamiliar with Michael Slager, he is a former cop in North Charleston, SC, who was on trial for the murder of Walter Scott (Also, if you’re unfamiliar with Michael Slager, tip of the cap to ya! I consider myself a pretty connected person, but this story might have been pretty challenging to avoid, especially in South Carolina. So, I mean this when I say that it’s impressive to *not* have known about Slager or Scott in any capacity.)

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In the Clamor and the Clangor: Reflecting on “Gilmore Girls”

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December 2, 2016
America, Pop Culture, Television
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Saeed Adyani/Netflix

Aside from my Abercrombie #8 perfume, Gilmore Saturdays were perhaps the most defining aspect of my early teenage years. In 2004, I was 12 and had just transferred to a new school. My less-than-stellar adjustment to this foreign environment prompted my interest in the more naïve and enjoyable world of Stars Hollow. Every Saturday, three consecutive reruns of Gilmore Girls aired from 7 to 10 pm. My dad ordered pizza and watched with me. Like any good father, he was Team Dean.

Eventually, as I came into my own, Gilmore Saturdays became a thing of the past, but my love and affection for the characters did not wane. I loyally collected every season of the show on DVD and faithfully watched every episode over and over again. To this day, after a frustrating week, I always return to the show as a sort of medicine.

There have been a lot of different takes on the revival. I do not pretend to stand apart from the thousands of other fan girls (and guys) who waited with bated breath and took to Twitter immediately following those final four words. My sentiments are surely repetitive and have already been proclaimed through eloquent think pieces and less eloquent social media posts. During a time when the term ‘echo chamber’ takes on increasingly polarizing meaning, there is none more righteous or as passionate as that which Gilmore fans inhabit.

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The New Normal

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November 30, 2016
America, Basketball, NBA, Sports
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Peter Homann

Since October 25th, when the NBA season began, a few things have changed. Some are minute; perhaps you switched from white wine to red, took up yoga or bought a new pair of dress shoes that you’ll save for just the proper occasion. Others, less so, but you can read about that in the oblique, unchecked vacuum that convinced you the world was one way when, in fact, it’s the other, at least to a large enough plurality for that to matter.

Much of what we presumed to be true is shaken, even stirred, while the rest is magnified to such an extent as to be distorted beyond reasonable comprehension. What we face now, in basketball as in life, is adjustment to the new normal.

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Chimes of Freedom

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November 23, 2016
America, Blues, Folk, Music, Politics, Religion
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Let’s say, for instance, you were at the forefront of popular culture in the free world, soon to be deposed and cast to a life of relative reality. If you were to host a party celebrating, commemorating and memorializing the occasion in the United States of America, who would you invite? With a good head on your shoulders, and among your own personal favorites, you would attempt to speak to the populace, who have chosen against you in the years ahead, allocating goodwill while bracing for the impact of an unforeseen, unpredictable regime.

On Tuesday, President Barack Obama bestowed what will presumably be the final twenty Presidential Medals of Freedom of his record-setting Presidency, in which he dispensed more than any other in history. The man knows how best to leave a party, it seems. In returning to that question, who would play your societal funeral?

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The Second Quarter: Is Everything OK At Home, Football?

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November 11, 2016
America, NFL, Sports
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Marcio Jose Sanchez/AP

Has anyone else noticed that something seems a little off with professional football, lately? Sure, the NFL is still showing up to work on time, and credit is due, it now even shows up on three days a week instead of just two. Technically, it is still doing its job just fine, and it is definitely not disrupting anyone else’s job either. Hell, it even cracked a smile a few times last week, but… there is just something missing.

This league used to be so passionate about its job. Now it seems to be punching the clock and waiting until the end of the year to really put in the real effort. There is some noticeable sloppiness too: more penalties, a drop in primetime ratings and two ties in one year. That is just not the league everyone has learned to count on for so many years. That’s not the real NFL. Without prying too much, is it time to ask the league some tough questions about its performance?

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The Mystique of Mystic Mac

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November 10, 2016
America, Fighting, Sports
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mcgregor_conor

On Saturday, November 12th, combat sports make its return to the floor of Madison Square Garden, although this time in an octagon, not a ring. It has been 9 years, 5 months, and 3 days since the last (sanctioned) punch was thrown in the historic venue, and Saturday’s UFC 205 will be the first legal Mixed Martial Arts event in New York since a state ban in 1997.

The fight for legalization is an incredible story in its own right, full of drama, political corruption, casino employees, culinary unions and Las Vegas business quarrels. On paper, the card is quite possibly the best one ever assembled in the history of the UFC. Sporting three championship bouts, and sixteen of the twenty fighters on the main and preliminary cards are ranked in the top ten of their respective weight classes. UFC 205 is all but guaranteed to be one of the best displays of MMA the world has ever seen.

However, one man at the top of the fight card is, has been and seemingly always will be commanding the attention of the fans, fighters and media. That man is “The Notorious” Conor McGregor.

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Next Year Is Now

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November 4, 2016
America, Baseball, MLB, Sports
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Chicago History Museum

If sports are meant to be a reprieve from reality, an excuse not to talk about the infinite ills and endless hatred which plague society, then they have rarely been more important than in 2016. This calendar year has contained some of the worst displays of what mankind has ever had to offer, with more undoubtedly in store as we roll into 2017. Humanity has collectively pulled at threads, undoing the sweater before lighting it on fire. And yet – Leicester City staged the most improbable run at a championship in the history of the world’s biggest sport[1]. Villanova hit a last-second buzzer-beater in the national championship game. The Cleveland Cavaliers, well – you know.

A tricky roller along the third base line, fielded perfectly, followed by a dart to first base, all while Kris Bryant was sporting a grin as wide as the Chicago River. With that, a bitter impossibility became an undeniable reality. After all of that – “that,” of course, encompassing 108 years of the most intense and self-hating misery in North American professional sports – the Chicago Cubs are the World Series champions.

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