MAX MERCY HALL OF FAME #5

I didn't want to do this, but I feel I owe it to intellectual honesty. Jason Whitlock has to be inducted to the Max Mercy Hall of Fame. It's difficult for me because I really like his writing in general. I was glad to link his piece ripping the Mavericks and Dirk Nowitzki for all the whining they did following their collapse against the Heat two NBA Finals ago. But no one can write a sentence like this: "No one in America writes more provocatively and intelligently about football than yours truly."

If George Orwell (who wrote more provocatively and intelligently than any other writer about everything) had written about sports, he couldn't make that statement and look himself in the mirror. If Chinua Achebe (not dead, but my favorite living black author) wrote about sports, he couldn't make that statement. If Dr. Martin Luther King had written about sports, he couldn't make that statement. If Frederick Douglas had written about sports, he couldn't make that statement. No one who writes about sports can make that statement.

Hell, no one who writes about anything can make that statement. No one with any sense of propriety or intellectual moral rectitude can say that they write anything about anything more provocatively and intelligently than every other writer in America. How big does your ego have to be to make a statement like that?

This is obviously a delicate area for me, not so much because Jason Whitlock is the first African American writer to receive this dubious honor, but because I am calling a writer's ego into question when humility is not one of my virtues and when I have devoted a shocking amount of space in a blog primarily about the Boston sports landscape to defending Terrell Owens who has quite an ego of his own.

I think the difference between TO's man crush on himself and Jason Whitlock's boasting is that TO has to step out on a field and prove his worth against 11 guys on the opposing team who want to rough him up every time he touches the football. Jason Whitlock has to type up a column, get it past an editor and hope emotionally stunted people with social problems stumble across it on the Fox Sports website. There are objective criteria against which TO's performance can be measured to see if he is earning the right to his arrogance. That isn't exactly the case for Jason Whitlock.

The sad thing is, if you took the time to comb through all 194 posts on this blog, I'm sure you'll find instances where I did basically the same thing. Particularly if I'm whining about the CHB or Mariotti being paid handsomely to write garbage whilst I labor in obscurity. Of course, my standard defense is that I abhor all forms of hypocrisy but my own. Even more depressing, I published my 100th post in early March of this year. So in those 5 months and 10 or so days, I've published 94 times. I really need to get a life.

I don't know if you happened to catch any of the Tigers Yankees game this afternoon. I was grievously offended that MLB allowed Clemens to return from suspension and overshadow Curt Schilling's quest to win for the first time since coming off the DL on August 6th. And as for that nifty little play where Clemens struck out the batter at the plate and then Posada deked the runner on third into the third out, that was but a silly little farce. Varitek and any of the Red Sox pitchers could do that at will if they weren't about such tactics which pervert the spirit of the game, or if they had the brains to think of something like that.

It's funny to see the way professional sports franchises operate sometimes. The Celtics sinking ship let Sebastian Telfair go because his off court behavior gave them a convenient excuse to drop him without much fanfare. The Patriots reversed field on their operating mantra during this season's draft weekend, forsaking the traditional high character guys fans have grown accustomed to over the last decade and a half for riskier, sketchier players. The NBA equivalent of a chicken running around with its head cut off is trying to take the high road while the NFL's shining city on a hill is suddenly trying to recycle bad citizens. Funny, indeed.

Of course, we all learned recently exactly how significant the decision to cut Telfair is. Bob Ryan emerged from his lair and wrote yet another piece to kick a man while he was down. Anotine Walker, Butch Hobson and Nomar have all merited this treatment in the past, and now it's Telfair's turn. The only thing that amazes me in all of this is that it took an eminent basketball mind like Bob Ryan nearly 10 months to see the flaws in Sebastian Telfair's game.

I suppose I am being somewhat unfair to Mr Ryan and not presenting his entire argument, but this is my blog and I can say what I want. And anybody who has read any of my past material probably can anticipate where this post is heading. Cutting Telfair is just one more in a long line of spectacular personnel failures in this Celtic regime.

The Sebastian Telfair catastrophe is one more step Ainge has taken to step out from under the albatross that was the Antoine Walker trade. Ainge didn't like Walker's game, so he traded him to Dallas for Jiri Welsch and Raef LaFrentz. Jiri added very little value. And Raef's contract was such a nightmare that Ainge unloaded him for a glass menagerie of failure and helped enable Portland to pull off a draft day coup and land Rookie of the Year Brandon Roy.

In the end, I am somewhat disappointed that the Celtics have let Telfair go. He was paid too much, produced too little and served to remind the last few people that really care about the Celtics that the team was in the hands of incompetent morons. Every time he took the floor for the Celtics he was a walking dilemma. He either embodied the fact that the people running the team have no practical conception of how to assemble a basketball team or that the people running the team are deliberately assembling a bad team. Either way, it suited me.

And now the Patriots are rolling the dice with Randy Moss, who has promised to revert to the Randy of old. People can take that one of two ways. Randy Moss will either burn up the league, catching passes, scoring TDs and delivering in big situations or he'll burn down Gillette Stadium. I am more inclined to believe the latter than the former, although the fact that the CHB has thrown down a gauntlet on this deal makes me far less certain of that than I was at this time last night.

I am not now, nor have I ever been a Patriots fan. And even though reports have Moss wowing the assembled luminaries by clocking in at an impressive 4.29 in the 40, I do not find myself convinced that the Patriots are the prohibitive favorites in the AFC. I remember the old Randy from his days with the Vikings. Nobody could run like he did, catch the way he did or terrorize defensive backfields the way he did. But there was always something missing. I think it was courage.

At least, by that I mean the courage to go out and put everything on the line to win a big game. Say what you want about Terrell Owens being a miserable, selfish cancer. But let's not forget that he came back from a broken leg in a month and a half to play in the Super Bowl, signed a waiver and outplayed eventual Super Bowl MVP Deion Branch. And let's not forget that there is no moment like that in the Randy Moss highlight reel. There are no postseason moments in there at all.

That's the Randy I remember. As I talked to my man who is a Patriots season ticket holder, I couldn't help but think of the Randy moments I will never forget. And none of them involved that famous Monday Night game where he punished the Cowboys for passing on him in the draft.

No, when I think of Moss, I'll remember the day a dreadful Giants team earned the right to be destroyed by the Ravens. They shut out the Vikings 41-0. And in all of that, rumor has it Randy sulked all game and didn't perform because he was upset that the powers-that-be in Giants Stadium wouldn't let his kid on the sideline. Truly that is the heart of a champion.

Then there was the tail end of the 2003 season when the Vikings needed to beat the Bears in Chicago to clinch a playoff spot. The Vikings drove down into the red zone, in a goal to go situation, and they looked to Randy Moss on a corner route. The TD would give the Vikings the lead, which would have put them in prime position to make the playoffs. And what happened? Charles Tillman, an unheralded rookie at the time, took the ball away from Randy, who didn't put up much of a fight for the ball and the season, in the end zone. The Bears won the game, the Vikings got a jump on the offseason.

Maybe all the optimism is warranted. Maybe the Patriots can awaken in Moss the fire that never seemed to be there when it really, really, really mattered. Or maybe his production over the course of the regular season will be enough to get the team in prime position for a first round bye and home field throughout the playoffs, so it won't matter if he disappears in the playoffs. Or maybe he won't enjoy playing in balmy Foxboro in November, December and January. Not to mention trips to Buffalo or New York in the dead of winter.

If he is so fragile that he coasted through two dismal seasons in Oakland because he wasn't happy, what will Randy Moss do if he experiences any adversity in New England. Will Stallworth be able to play a full season and be productive? Will Kelley Washington play up to his potential? Will the fact that the Patriots did nothing to shore up a weak offensive line come back to bite this team when they have to play the Colts again this year?

Only time will tell the answers to those questions, and the other fascinating conundrum... can Teddy Bruschi and Mike Vrabel combine to form a serviceable linebacker since they have lost very nearly two steps at this point? And before any Patriots fan reminds me that Matt Light contained Shawne Merriman and was a Pro Bowl alternate last season, think back to how that line held up against the Bears and Colts last season. I think I have a better chance of smiling at the end of this season than Patriots fans do.

This draft was very compelling, and not just because of Brady Quinn's humiliating Green Room experience. It seemed to me like a group of teams got together to see who could make the most spectacular mistakes. Kansas City may very well have pulled it off, passing on Joe Staley to take a wide receiver when they desperately needed to replace Willie Roaf and Will Shields more than they needed a wide receiver. But I think Philly took the cake, trading down to the second round to take Kolb, who looked to have a big future in Canada.

Let's not leave Miami out of this, either. Going with Ted Ginn Jr. will come back to haunt them. They faced a similar situation as the Radiers did this season. Both teams made the wrong QB decision last season, Oakland passing on Leinart and Miami signing Culpepper over Drew Brees. This time out, Oakland owned that mistake and took Russell over Calvin Johnson. Miami didn't own that mistake. In fact, they made it again. Instead of taking Quinn, they took a college receiver who will have more impact returning kicks than catching passes and went with the Mormon Chris Weinke in Round Two.

We also have a tool of note segment or three before I wrap up tonight. First, to Chicago fans who are enjoying the fact that Pat Riley gave them an easy victory in their opening round series, here is an action shot of the broadcasters of the second team in Second City performing the song "Summertime Blues" at a benefit concert. I get the feeling that this song probably made things worse for any one who found themselves feeling any blues, regardless of the season.

There there is this ____________ on Myspace. I really don't know which insult out of my vast store of insults to apply here. This tool transcends words like spaz and dork and tool and fist magnet. Maybe it's because he's Australian. Maybe this is considered cool Down Under. Either way, you'll have to supply your own insult for him, I am just too baffled.

And finally, there is this loser having a go at the eating of meat. Apparently eating meat is not eco-friendly. Apparently it takes too much energy and produces too many carbons. Just for the sake of argument, I wonder how many carbons it takes to produce the synthetic protein supplements that vegetarians often take. Not to mention the fact that there would be a bunch of cows running around once people like me stop eating them. And chemical castration is ever so much more humane and natural than killing them outright and feeding them to people like me.

Orwell himself had very little esteem for vegetarians, whom he deemed "food cranks." In The Road to Wigan Pier, he wrote:

"This kind of thing is by itself sufficient to alienate plenty of decent people And their instinct is perfectly sound, for the food crank is by definition a person willing to cut himself off from human society in hopes of adding five years on to the life of his carcase; that is, a person out of touch with common humanity."

Eating meat is part of what it means to be human. My ancestors scratched and clawed and invented their way to the top of the food chain. And they didn't do it so I could eat lettuce and pop protein pills. And I wonder how much energy and how many carbons will go into caring for generations of vegetarians living to be 100 when all the meat eaters like me have kicked off from coronary thrombosis at age 60.

It seems every so often someone has to come out with a list ranking something. God forbid anything stand on its own. Everything has to be ranked and compared and contrasted. It helps writers of columns and magazine/web content editors fill up space on short notice with a minimum of effort. The list that is bothering me at the moment is Moviefone's list of the top 25 sports movies of all time.

Among my many problems with this list is that I don't really consider Jerry Maguire (ranked number 15) a sports movie. Yeah, the title character is an agent, and Cuba Gooding would go on to win Best Supporting Actor playing a character who is a wide receiver. And there are somewhere on the order of 1 million athletes who make cameo appearances. But the movie is only peripherally concerned with sports, and at that it comments on the crass commercial aspects of the sports industry. It's more about the agent's personal growth set against the backdrop of professional turmoil than about sports.

My real problem with this list is the film at number 3. It's Bull Durham. I hate to be the one who breaks this to the American sports fan, but that film sucks. Before you cough and splutter and stutter "S-s-s-s-s-sucks" like Judge Smails from the underrated (based on this list which placed it at number 6) Caddyshack, that's right. I said Bull Durham sucks. And it gets worse with age.

Every person who defends the movie feels compelled to dismiss the fact that a three year old girl could play a can't miss minor league pitching prospect more plausibly than Tim Robbins at some point in the conversation. Even worse is the name the writer bestowed on him. Nuke LaLoosh? Why not name him Douchebag, Total Tool, Fist Magnet or some other similar name?

Then there is the famous Kevin Costner speech. If you are a Baby Boomer looking back on your life and realizing that you've done nothing worth doing, and might just as well not have existed in the first place, then that speech about baseball and the small of a woman's back is right up there with now is the winter of our discontent. But if you can, in fact, while away the hours talking with the flowers (an elaborate way to say you have a brain), then the speech rings hollow as it should.

This piece in Salon described the movie as a "pastoral vision for hipsters". That is most likely correct, and it's also what's wrong with the movie. Nobody talks like Kevin Costner in that sequence. When do you ever get a chance to get across a 3 paragraph pick up line? If it's going to work, that probably means that you were in to begin with, and the odds of getting a woman to change her mind by lecturing her have to somewhere in the millions to one against range.

I'm not, thank God, the only person who hates Bull Durham. Bob Halloran, whose work in the Metro has been criticized in this blog, wrote this surprisingly amusing and insightful piece on the awfulness of Bull Durham a few years ago. I'll have to keep that in mind when baseball season starts in earnest and it's time to rip the Red Sox just about every day. Maybe I'll have to be nicer the next time I write about a piece Halloran writes for the Metro.

More than any of the other deficiencies of this film, it's the Costner speech, or more precisely the manner in which it's quoted, that irritates me about Bull Durham. The movie came along at a time in the 1980s when the white collar fan took over sports. This new type of fan was college educated and felt the need to prove it. But how do you prove you're smart without proving you're a nerd in the process? The answer...quote movies.

I'm aware of the fact that I quote movies all the time in this space. I think the difference between me quoting a wide array of movies and the people who quote Bull Durham is that I usually quote movies that aren't widely quoted (how many people do you know who quote Die Hard or Miller's Crossing or Kelly's Heroes?) and they're much better than Bull Durham. In his second essay on Rudyard Kipling, Orwell ripped the imperialist faction because they "set Kipling on a pedestal, and some of his more sententious poems, such as 'If,' were given almost Biblical status."

That's what these fans have done with Bull Durham. It's become the Bible for the 40+ year old washed up never-was when they talk about baseball. I don't believe in the hanging curve. I don't care when you open your damn Christmas presents. Baseball isn't a metaphor for life. Baseball isn't even a metaphor for for baseball. It's just a sport, and a half-assed hipster movie about it is no better than any other half-assed hipster movie from that time period.

The number two was a strange choice, or at least I thought so. It was Raging Bull. For some reason, I just don't think of Raging Bull as a sports movie. I think it was a great cinematic achievement. But whether it's the black and white cinematography or the fact that it seems more influenced by European films of the 50s and 60s than American sports movies or the fact that its production values are so different from the other movies on the list, I just don't think of Raging Bull as a boxing movie.

Rocky was the number one sports movie of all time, according to the list, and I have no problem with that. But when I discussed this topic with a friend of mine tonight, he pointed out that Rocky's non-boxing life, and, in particular, his relationship with Adrian take up much more of the movie than the fight with Creed. That is true, but that doesn't bother me as far as classifying Rocky as a sports movie is concerned (even though I objected to Jerry Maguire on the basis that it was much more about peripheral issues than it was about sports).

Above all, Rocky is about a guy who becomes something much more than he was when the story began. And in a sense, that's what all good sports movies are about the Bad News Bears (#18) become more than an island of misfit toys. Roy Hobbs (#5) goes from being a never-was to the best there ever was for a year. The Hickory Huskers (#4) go from hicktown losers to David killing Goliath. And so on.

Courting Adrian is a part of Rocky's transformation from two bit legbreaker and loser to the guy who inspires a nation. Their relationship parallels the fight with Creed. He starts off a little slow, but he keeps going until the end. Winning her heart is one of the things which elevate Rocky from that dockyard thug that tried to fight Gazzo's driver.

Ladies and Gentlemen, I apologize for the delay in updating this fevered dream I call Sedition in Red Sox Nation. I do have my reasons. First, this blog was recently subject to review by the site that hosts it. I did not discover that until I tried to post and my computer crashed. I hadn't saved a draft of the post on which I was working at the time, so I was a bit angry. I didn't get around to redoing it as I had more pressing concerns at the time. After that, I went on vacation for a while. I am back now, and ready to get back to subverting the confederacy of dunces that is the Boston Red Sox.

I know I promised a new feature in one of my posts. I was working on it at the time of the computer crash. Unfortunately, anger and laziness have conspired to delay it still further. I simply am not ready to run with it yet. It does exist, at least on a conceptual level, as I write this. However, in my travels, I got the idea for a new segment which strikes me as more interesting at the moment. WIthout further adieu (and with nothing more than a working title at this point), here it is...

RANDOM THING I HATE INSTALLMENT 1:

I hate a great many things. The overwhelming majority of them are, in the grand scheme of things, trivial. Among them, you might have noticed (provided, of course, that you have read any of my previous posts) the Boston Red Sox, Red Sox fans and Danny Ainge. That is just the tip of the iceberg. I am a small and petty person, a bastion of negativity seeking to make other people unhappy.

This particular segment exists under the working title "Random Thing I Hate" because I can't come up with something better at the moment. It is random in the sense that it is something I hate that is not related to the stated purpose of this site. Basically, every day in my life is Festivus, this blog is my version of the Festivus Airing of Grievances and this particular segment is my way of telling those outside of Red Sox Nation that, in the immortal words of Frank Costanza: "I have a lot of problems with you people, and you're going to hear about them."

The first grievance I have is with the Benefactor. I cannot stand Mark Cuban. He's a fraud. He sold Broadcast.com to Yahoo at just the right time, which was quite lucky for him. I also have to give him credit for that. I will not believe that he's a latter-day JP Morgan until I enter the url for broadcast.com or broadcast.yahoo.com and see something. One cannot help but wonder where he would be if Yahoo held out just a little longer in the wake of the Broadcast.com IP, or he'd played a bit harder to get.

But I must temper my contempt for his business acumen by remembering that he did acquire Antoine Walker from the Celtics for what amounted to magic beans. I imagine that is a little harsh, after all, Raef LaFrentz is probably the best center to hover around the 3 point line and play defense once in a blue moon since Arvydis Sabonis retired. And Jiri Welsch was awesome.

His behavior in the crowd at games bothers me to no end. To put it plainly, I think he looks and acts like a jackass. He runs onto the court after playoff games to criticize officials. He flails and flops around his courtside seat each time a call goes against the Mavericks. For the most part, he conducts himself like a 3 year old in dire need of a time out.

As I watched him in this postseason, I kept remembering something I'd read. It took me a while to dig it up again, but when I did I think the author summed up Mark Cuban quite nicely. The author is George Orwell, and in his essay As I Please 6, he wrote about "the exceptional ugliness and vulgarity of the faces displayed" in the New Year Honours List (which as I understand it is, or was, a document issued in Britain to celebrate people who had recently been endowed with titles).

The particular quote that caught my eye in connection with Mark Cuban reads: "...I saw in Picture Post some 'stills' of Beaverbrook delivering a speech and looking more like a monkey on a stick than you would think possible for anyone who is not doing it on purpose."

I think that sums up Mark Cuban's deportment. He looks like a monkey on a stick. The question then must be asked: is he doing it on purpose? I think he is. After all, he has managed to become a B list celebrity. He had that awful show that ABC mercifully cancelled. He gets to hang out with George Clooney and produce movies that courageously stand up against McCarthyism 50 years after the fact. He reminds me of the little dog from the cartoons who is always yipping and yapping at the bigger dogs to attract their attention.

Personally, I don't care who is on the A list or the B List. Celebreality, in my way of thinking, is one of the worst TV genres to crop up in the last few years. I do not lose myself from my mundane concerns when I see the rich and famous acting with entitlement and avoiding responsibility. But I must confess, I did laugh like hell when I read that Mark Cuban got shut out of a trendy night club in New York. Apparently he even offered the doorman $1,000. Of course that is 3rd hand gossip, picked up from a New York tabloid via Wikipedia. It's not too hard to imagine the Benefactor trying to pass the bouncer a grand while 18 yr old Jersey girls who were on the list breeze past.

It might be possible for him to get in if his team wins the NBA title, but (as we know if we read his blog) the NBA conspires to deny Cuban the O'Brien Trophy. That is the only possible explanation. If the NBA allowed its officials to call the game as Dr. Naismith intended, Dallas would have 3 or 4 rings by now. Of course, based on the way he behaves in the crowd and "writes" in his blog, it seems to me that the only way to properly officiate a Mavs game is to have every opposing player start the game with 3 fouls. Perhaps the NBA could even work in a power play or two for the Mavericks.

I really don't know what to say about his grand gesture on fan appreciation night. It was awfully sporting of him and American Airlines to give the fans plane tickets. I know times are tough for the airlines, but you'd think the Benefactor could have done a bit better than a roundtrip to San Antonio, Houston, KC or St.Louis. Hell, he could probably have sent them all to Maui and not even have to think twice before asking for extra cheese on his next Texas Double Whopper.

I hate Mark Cuban. I am in a difficult spot, though, because I hate the Pistons and the Suns. For now, I draw some consolation in the fact that Antoine and the Heat are up 1-0 on Detroit who looks amazingly mortal. If Ben Wallace could get called for the occasional over-the-back and pick up a blocking foul when his feet aren't set, who knows what might be. I'm not enough of an optimist to believe that Prince will ever be called for 1 handcheck out of three. But maybe the Pistons will lose. There is always a chance.