I’m in Hour Two of a twelve-hour long suspension from Twitter because I broke one of its rules. The suspension happened very quickly, so obviously I didn’t manage to render my thought in poetic enough fashion to not trigger Twitter’s content bots against violent content or something. I deleted the tweet, but the 12-hours are still imposed. Oh well!
Not that big a deal, and if you’re wondering what got under my skin, it was a series of things Green Bay Packers quarterback Aaron Rodgers said about his current COVID status and how mean the NFL is to not consider his essential-oils-and-homeopathic-bullshit regimen as “immunization” equivalent to being fully vaccinated. He started off with saying something like “I’m going to be done in by Woke People and by Cancel Culture.” Now, I’ve recently adopted the personal policy of filing such citations of “Wokeness” and “Cancel Culture” under the same category as when people claim to be “Politically Incorrect”: After that, I stop listening to whatever it is they’re saying.
But one bit of dumbassery Rodgers said did manage to actually tweak me. He was babbling about “his own research” and “his own immunization regimen” and a whole lot of crap, but then he was quoted as saying something about how “liberals hated vaccines when 45 was President but as soon as Biden took over they loved them”. This is so mastadonical in its rhetorical turd status that I couldn’t help myself, so I fired off a tweet expressing my hope that Mr. Rodgers tear his ACL as soon as he steps on the field next.
Yeah, not my best hour. Shouldn’t have said it. I grant that.
But it’s still complete bullshit.
I’m no expert on all the details, but my understanding is that Operation Warp Speed, the program spearheaded by the 45 administration to facilitate vaccine development, was pretty much a success. There’s a reason why all those vaccines were ready to go not long after Joe Biden’s inauguration. No one with half a brain seriously credits the Biden Administration with the entirety of the US vaccine response.
And there was a time when the right (and I assume now that Aaron Rodgers is one of those) believed the same thing. There was a brief time when they were really trying to push giving credit to 45 for the vaccines. Someone, I think it was Geraldo Rivera, said something like “Let’s call it the Trump Treatment!” The idea that the American left would be suddenly vaccine-hesitant if 45 had won re-election and everything else had been the same is a pleasant fiction, but there’s no doubt that if 45 had won a second term and everything else had been the same, FOX News and everyone else would be trumpeting the vaccines as one of the greatest humanitarian triumphs in history, all because of the greatness of President 45. We know this because they actually did start talking like this, before they collectively decided that no, the real victory lay in pulling back on their pro-vaccine talk, instead defending the honor of Ivermectin and amplifying anti-vaccine voices as much as they could (while privately making sure that each and every person working for FOX News is vaccinated).
In short, Aaron Rodgers is a deluded dope who has no idea what he’s talking about. But on Twitter, you can’t wish him a season-ending injury. OK. Message received, Twitter.
But this site right here is my site and I get to say whatever I want on my site, so: Hey, Aaron Rodgers! I hope you blow your knee out!
Swimming in the rain. Via benchandcompass.tumblr.com
Sometimes people cite the lack of browsing as a reason why it sucks that the independent bookstore has fallen on hard times in these, the Days of Amazon and other online retailers. And that’s true: one of the great joys for me, as a bookish person, is wandering through the shelves of this bookstore or that, seeing what random things I may find that I didn’t even know I wanted (while likely carrying around a stack of things I already knew I wanted). Well, indie bookstores seem to be rebounding of late, but there’s another place where you can get your Serendipitous Finds Whilst Lazily Browsing game on, and those places are libraries.
A couple weekends ago I had occasion to be in the Hamburg, NY public library. It’s a lovely place, recently renovated and a member branch of the Buffalo and Erie County Public Library, so my library card works there, too! I wasn’t planning to leave that day with six books under my arm, but that’s what happened. Among them was Why Se Swim by Bonnie Tsui.
Tsui is an Asian-American journalist who has written on issues of interest to that community, including a book called American Chinatown that was a bestseller and won an award for Asian-American journalism. (I have not read it, but on the strength of Why We Swim, I may.) Why We Swim is her second book, and it is quite simply exactly what its title suggests: a look at why human beings, evolutionarily descended from sea creatures but no longer of the sea, are so strongly compelled to the water. Swimming is one of the most common things we do as humans, despite the fact that this obsession with the water so often brings us to harm. We keep coming back. Why?
There are a number of basic reasons, Tsui argues, and she boils them down the sections of her book. We firstly swim for survival, and she opens here with an examination of an Icelandic fisherman who survived alone the capsizing of the fishing boat on which he worked. He swam three miles through icy seas after his mates either froze or drowned, and he lived to tell his tale and become a folk hero for the people of Iceland.
Next Tsui discusses how swimming heals us and how swimming regularly contributes to our overall fitness. She writes about the effects of regular swimming in cold water and how some competitive endurance swimmers turned to their activity after suffering illnesses or injuries.
We also swim for community, and Tsui describes impromptu swim clubs that formed after the fall of Baghdad in the Iraq war. She also discusses the sad history that racism played in the destruction and dismantling of public swimming pools in American cities, during the decades of white flight from urban centers for the suburbs. It’s another example of the fact that no matter how hard we try in America, we can never get far from our deplorable history of racism and the racist motivations behind some of our oldest public policy choices.
These are all practical reasons for swimming, but Tsui saves the most profound reasons for the latter portions of Why We Swim. Water is almost a psychological need for humans. She reports that hospital patients report better sensations of well-being when the decor of their rooms includes water imagery, and she notes that Henry David Thoreau included a great deal of swimming in his treks to Walden Pond and the woods where he went to live deliberately. The water calls to us and guides us, even if we are no longer a part of it; we recognize that some part of us comes from there.
In this passage, Tsui relates a bit of personal history in how swimming played a part in forging connections with her family-to-be. The book is full of beautiful passages like this.
Once upon a time, I fell in love with a family and a lake. In the ritual of swimming, the connection of one body to another, of one person to another, there is flow of a different sort to be found.
The first summer we were together, Matt took me to visit his grandparents at their cottage on the northern shores of Lake George, five hours north of New York City. Ted and Shirley met on a swimming raft on that lake, in 1939, and got married after the war. Their safe harbor was the tiny hamlet of Silver Bay and the grand old YMCA resort that had been there since 1899. Matt and I were young ourselves on that visit, just out of college, and would not be married for another eight years. But that liquid-mercury lake–framed by evergreens in the picture-postcard view from the screen-in back porch–would be a touchstone from the first.
Everyone in the family had a particular way of crossing the lake. Grandpa Ted had a special affection for tooling around in fishing boats. He owned three in his life: The Ultimate Folly I, II, and III, each larger and more elaborate than the last. No one could remember him having ever actually caught a fish.
Uncle Chris, all six feet five of him, folded himself into a kayak before paddling across. Matt’s mom, Robin, loved to float around in a rubber dinghy–she wasn’t a frequent lake crosser, but she was a spirited shore dabbler. Her husband, Jan, a marine surveyor, traversed the waters on a windsurfer and, later, on a stand-up paddleboard. Uncle George, a National Outdoor Leadership School instructor and all-around outdoorsman, like to sail; Matt’s little brother, Jesse, had just earned a license to pilot the thirteen-foot Boston Whaler.
One morning over breakfast and his daily crossword puzzle, Grandpa Ted casually mentioned that he and his friends used to swim the mile from Silver Bay across the lake to Diver’s Rock, for generations the spot where children have made a heart-stopping jump into the water. “That was the thing to do back then, like swimming the English Channel,” he said, his eyes sliding over to me before returning to the crossword, each completed square lettered in unwavering ink. “If you said you’d swum across the lake that day, that was something.”
My ears perked up. I smiled back at him. This was something I knew how to do, and he knew it. I loved the idea of joining the generations of lake crossers before me, in a way that was me. He was handing me a personal invitation.
That afternoon, we pushed off from Silver Bay, Matt swimming and me beside him, paddling Grandma Shirley’s old blue kayak, so he wouldn’t get run over by speedboats.
We made our way past the sailboats and motorboats bobbing in the harbor; past the raft at Bay Beach, where Ted and Shirley first set eyes on each other; past the tiny island of Scotch Bonnet, where Matt’s parents were married; past a man in a boat who yelled at us through a megaphone, “Swimming in the lake is hazardous to your health,” what with all the boats and Jet Skis racing about. Forty-five minutes later, we arrived at Diver’s Rock, the stone-faced cliff where each member of Matt’s family has made the jump. It was a veritable water tour of his family history at Lake George.
After we performed the solemn ceremony of jumping off the ledge, it was my turn to swim back across the lake. I tried not to think of the speedboats and trusted my man in the blue kayak to keep me safe. When I beached myself on the shores of Silver Bay, I felt initiated. I thought I finally understood something about what the place meant to Marr and to the company of lake crossers before us.
Eight years later, we continued our Lake George swim, the day after our wedding, with forty of our closest friends in the flotilla. Both sets of our maternal grandparents were there to witness it, and I suppose you could say that I swam from one family into another. We returned, year after year. Even after we moved across the country to San Francisco, we kept going back–sometimes in fall or winter, mostly in summer. There have been variations on the swim. One New Year’s Day, our bare feet stinging in the snow, Matt and I held the first and only meeting of the Silver Bay Polar Bear Swim Club (total members: two).
In the years since, Grandpa has gone. Jesse, too. When we go back now, it’s the fireflies and the stars that get me every time. Much of modern life is filtered out through the dense trees and mountains on the winding approach to the lake. Those winking lights, bobbing along the ground and filling up the night sky with their impossible density, send a signal. It’s a reminder to slow up and be awake to the real connections we have while we have them.
…
Pablo Neruda wrote Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair, published when he was just nineteen; he uses aquatic imagery to depict the intoxicating gorgeousness of being in love, the loss of control when we’re immersed in it. The ninth poem in the collection, “Drunk with Pines,” is my favorite, for its vivid conjuring of a pair of swimmers caught together in the outer waves; two passionate, parallel bodies, one yielding to the other, “like a fish infinitely fastened to my soul.”
What are these if not stories of love?
Why We Swim is a wonderful book that made me think, most of all, of the fact that I really do miss swimming. I could claim that there’s not much opportunity for swimming around these parts, but come on: I live in a city that’s near one of the Great Lakes. That notion doesn’t pass the smell test, does it? I don’t remember a time when I wasn’t aware of at least some way of how to swim, when I was uncomfortable in the water. I remember public pools like the one in Hillsboro, OR, where one summer I had diving lessons; I remember pools at the colleges where my father taught. I remember sandy-bottomed ocean beaches and rocky-bottomed lakes, lakes full of seaweed and other lakes where the water was warmer than the morning air, even in August. Lakes, two oceans, and rivers whose names I don’t remember. Small streams that don’t even have names. All of it, water.
I was good at swimming in grade school, sufficiently so that my school’s swim team coach would occasionally say to me, “Hey, goin’ out for swim team this year?” I always laughed and said no. I assume he was kidding around with me.
Thing is, that’s one decision I’d like back…because now, I’m not so sure he was joking. And what a thing that would have been….
It’s been my experience that any baseball fan will hate at least one of New York City’s two teams, either the Yankees or the Mets. I’ve never really hated either, which makes me an outlier, I suppose. I just like New York City too much to hate on its teams (though that can’t be the only factor, as I adore Boston the city and yet I’d like to see all of its teams fired into the sun*). Back when there were only four divisions in Major League Baseball, the Mets were in the same division as my team, the Pirates, and for a couple years there, the Mets were a thorn in the side of the Pirates as they strove to win three division titles in 1990, 1991, and 1992. Since then they’re all in different divisions, though, so the Mets don’t figure too much. And the Pirates are usually terrible, so what’s to root against? Fifth place?
One of my best friends is a Mets fan, which might seem a bit odd living in Buffalo, where all baseball fandoms basically boil down to a whole lot of Yankee fans, some Red Sox fans, and then a fan or two of everybody else. My friend came by his Mets fandom honestly: he grew up in the days of 1980s cable television, when every local provider had a couple of indie stations from NYC (WOR and…another one), and on one of those stations resided the Mets. Since they were what my friend saw most often, that’s what he came to love, and to this day he roots as hard for the Mets as he ever has, though I’ve noted over the years a certain jaded amusement at the Mets fortunes (which are more often misfortunes) and a general feeling of “Hey, what did you expect” when the Mets flirt with something wonderful only to end up losing.
I’ve seen this same attitude from other Mets fans I’ve known: a certain even-keeled acceptance of their likely fate, which oddly allows them to have more fun in the face of their team losing than other fandoms out there. In all honesty, it’s my sense that a lot of sports fans could learn from Mets fans. They get as deliriously happy when their Mets win, obviously, but they avoid the soul-crushing despair and rage that comes of losing. (Mostly. I mean, it’s still sports, and when you lose the NLCS four games to two because your pitcher walks in the winning run in the bottom of the ninth in Game Six, well, no amount of baseball zen is going to keep you from wanting to take a chef’s knife to every teddy bear you can find.)
The Mets are that odd duck of a sports franchise: they haven’t won a ton (two World Series titles, and five total National League pennants), but still, they’ve won enough in their nearly 60 years of existence to make them rank just a bit above the “lovable losers” thing that the Cubs once managed to hold down for over a century. Mets fans aren’t long-time sufferers the way, say, Bills fans are. Because they’ve won, and because Mets fans seem to choose not to suffer in the first place.
When we traveled to New York City for Thanksgiving in 2015, I thought I’d grab my friend a Mets souvenir when we went into this big NYC gift store in Times Square. Place was huge, loaded with every NYC-related gewgaw and tchotchke you could want, including stuff for the Yankees, the Rangers, and the Knicks. And there wasn’t a single Mets-related item to be found anywhere in that store. Which was really weird, because the Mets are still a NYC team, they have some lore, and they had just won the NL pennant that year. Just six weeks before our visit, the Mets had hosted World Series games in New York City, and this gift shop didn’t have anything. Not a single pennant, shot glass, poster, snow-globe with Citi Field in it, nothing.
In America’s biggest and most important city, one of two resident Major League Baseball teams is a beloved institution of American sports history, and the other is a niche interest, like indie comic books. Weird.
Anyway, a new book came out earlier this year called So Many Ways to Lose: The Amazin’ True Story of the New York Mets, the Best Worst Team In Sports, by Devin Gordon. That’s a great title that sets up the tone of the book to follow: Gordon’s walk through Mets history is (mostly) warm and humorous. It’s Mets history not as a scholar would relate it, or a sportswriter striving for “objectivity”; this is the history of the Mets that you would hear from a Mets fan, and that’s what makes the book special.
Gordon, like my friend, adopted the Mets as his favorite team from an early age, and he’s been with them since their rise to late-80s powerhouse and beyond. Gordon is also an experienced writer, and not just about sports, so he knows his way around telling stories with flare and a good viewpoint. Gordon writes like what he is: an erudite fan who can spend a couple of pages breaking down just why Willie Mays’s “Catch” is as great a baseball play (for many, it’s the greatest baseball play) as it is, while at the same time using chapter titles like “Fuck the Yankees”.
Buffalo’s own sportswriting market is awash in talented writers and journalists who undermine their own work by beating everyone over the head with their heated insistences on their own “objectivism”, so it’s frankly a relief to find a book like this where fandom is admitted and embraced and allowed to shine.
I honestly had a great deal of trouble selecting a passage to quote from So Many Ways To Lose, because it’s packed with great passages. I thought about his lengthy breakdown of the Willie Mays catch, which he uses to prelude what he considers an even greater outfield catch (by Endy Chavez). I considered some of the passages in which Gordon speculates on why discussion of Darryl Strawberry and Doc Gooden tended to focus on drug use when the topic of other players’ drug use never seems to come up much (you don’t really need to think too long to figure that one out), and there’s a passage about the design and construction of Shea Stadium that is helpful because it’s frankly always helpful to remind ourselves what an asshole Robert Moses was.
Instead, I’ll go with this, from early in the book, when Gordon is making the case why the Mets are “the best worst team in sports”, even though they have done something at least twice that a lot of other perennially losing teams have not, i.e., actually win.
Now, there may be some fans of trash teams out there who have read this far and who think I’ve been too cavalier in dismissing their body of work. They’re wrong, but I suppose they deserve a fair hearing, so let’s go through the top contenders, if only to condemn them to yet another defeat.
The Detroit Lions might be the worst team in sports, which is to say: they’re not even good at being bad. They’ve never won a Super Bowl, never been to a Super Bowl. They’ve played (lost) in a conference title game once, and that was before we all had cell phones. I don’t have to consult the Internet to know that the Lions have never had a memorable postseason moment, because if they had, I’d remember it. It’s been nothing but decades of cold, slushy, uninterrupted losing. Even their uniforms, bluish-gray and grayish-blue, are colorless. Playing for the Lions is such a demoralizing experience that the two most gifted players in team history, running back Barry Sanders and wide receiver Calvin Johnson, both retired in their primes rather than spend another season with Detroit. They didn’t just quit the Lions, they quit football.They ghosted. After Johnson walked away in 2016, at age 30, the Lions’ front office demanded that he return a $3.2 million roster bonus, which is sort of petty for a team owned by the Ford family. It also means the Lions now have a frosty relationship with at least 50 percent of their franchise icons.
The Cleveland Browns have a better claim to the “best worst” throne, because unlike the Lions, they are easy to like, and unlike the Lions, their postseason defeats are so infamously excruciating that they have names like The Fumble and The Drive. The Browns have only made the playoffs once this century, despite starting 29 different quarterbacks over the course of 20 years. For three years in the 1990s, the Browns ceased to exist because their greedy, heartless owner, Art Modell, may he rest in peace, hated it so much in Cleveland that he tried to move the team to Baltimore. Nest he fired his head coach, Bill Belichick. Now that’s some first-rate ineptitude. The problem with the Browns’ case may be Cleveland itself. It’s too grim. The 21st century hasn’t been good to the city, and every unlikely defeat, every clumsy failure is cut with rust and resignation. You can laugh at the Mets all you want. If you take pleasure in the Browns’ misfortune, you’re a dick.
Same goes for all of Minnesota’s crappy teams, the Vikings in particular, who have been waiting decades for the chance to lose another Super Bowl. In 2020, the Minneapolis-based sportswriter Steve Marsh compared the NBA Timerwolves’ Mets-ian flair for comic incompetence to a night of experimental dining–“Maitre d’, surprise us!”–but even he admits that in a city famous for its losers (the Vikes, Walter Mondale), the Wolves can’t get no respect. Their losing, while admirable, is just too small-time. Ditto for the Cincinnati Bengals, another small-batch loser, whose principal resume for “best worst” champion is the Icky Shuffle.* In order for the Bengals to be the Mets, Cincinnati would have to be New York. This is yet another case of small-market franchises getting overshadowed and disrespected, to which I can only say boo-hoo. To win at this level of losing, you need a big canvas.
Gordon goes on a bit, discussing why several other prominent never-winners in American sports can’t beat out the Mets for “best worst team ever” status, but curiously, he doesn’t mention a few other franchises known for their relentless losing. Surely the fact that the Chicago Cubs won a single World Series a few years ago doesn’t blot out their entire century of losing from our collective memory, does it? Or how about the Arizona Cardinals, a team that until its single Super Bowl appearance (which they lost in heartbreaking fashion despite a superhuman effort by their Hall of Fame quarterback and one of the greatest receivers ever in that very game) had to admit that its greatest moment in franchise history was a fictional moment that happened in the movie Jerry Maguire? And how about the Buffalo Bills, whose four consecutive Super Bowl losses from 1990 to 1993 still boggle the mind of sports fans to this day?
The Mets have done a lot of losing, sure–but they’ve done some winning, too. I’m not ready to grant the Mets the title of “best worst team” just yet, but Gordon does make a compelling case for his team, and that’s what it’s all about, anyway. And really, one of the great subgenres in sports writing is when gifted writers take on bad teams.
In the last year, I’ve read two great baseball books. First was Roger Angell’s iconic The Boys of Summer. Now I have So Many Ways to Lose.
I wonder if it’s time to start watching baseball again.
Looks like the shoe is finally dropping in Buffalo and WNY, regarding the future of the region’s NFL franchise: the team’s owners, Terry and Kim Pegula, are floating the idea of a new stadium to replace the team’s existing venue, which would be publicly funded to the tune of over $1,000,000,000.
Hold on, let me count the zeroes to make sure I have that right…thousand, million, billion. Yup, that’s right.
Newer reports have the team citing possible other locations for the franchise if the stadium doesn’t happen. Locations like Austin, Texas.
My position on this is simple: I am against any public funding for stadiums at all. None. Not one penny.
A sports team is an investment on the part of billionaires that in almost every case ends up making many more billions for those owners. If someone who is worth a billion dollars wants something that costs a billion dollars, well, let them put up their own money for it. The notion that the public should put up the money so the owner can reap further billions is ludicrous.
And don’t come at me with “Stadiums spur development!” and “Stadiums create jobs!” We all know this is complete nonsense. Study after study after study has confirmed it. I live less than a mile from the local stadium, and believe me when I tell you, the area around the stadium is not a hotbed of massive economic development. There’s about half a dozen bars, a convenience store that was a 7-11 once, a Tim Hortons, and one of those really seedy motels where people who, ahem, are required to register their whereabouts and living arrangements with the local constabulary (and whose presence might be communicated to local parents) go to live.
I consider spending a billion dollars on a single project that will literally benefit a small number of people and enhance the profits for literally one family, and I think of things like…local schools. Parks. Water and electrical infrastructure. Libraries. Museums and arts projects. Streetlights. (This last one sounds prosaic, but I think of it every time I drive through another city that has streetlights on its main expressways. Buffalo does not.)
On a larger point, I am sick of living in an economy which is largely organized around the precept that the natural and preferred course of money is ever, ever relentlessly upward. The idea of giving money to people at the bottom of the economic spectrum is seen as socialist nonsense, but the idea of public money being spent in gigantic amounts so that a single married couple can pocket more millions in profits before eventually selling their investment for a gargantuan return is never even questioned.
When sports stadium talk comes up, I think of Atlanta, Georgia. In the early 1990s, an aging facility–Atlanta Fulton County Stadium–served both the NFL’s Atlanta Falcons and MLB’s Atlanta Braves. The state of Georgia funded the building of the Georgia Dome for the Falcons, which opened in 1992, and the Braves got their new park, Turner Field, four years later when the stadium build for the 1996 Summer Olympics was converted to ballpark status.
In the last few years, both of those venues, built not just in my lifetime but in my adulthood, have been replaced, and for all the usual reasons cited, each and every one of which could be reduced to one very simple reason: the teams’ owners could make more money if they had new venues.
And now here come the Pegulas, the owners of the Bills. When they bought the team they tabled new stadium talk for several years, even though everyone around here knew the subject would come up, if not by them then by the NFL itself (which is an organization that is made to further the football-related investment goals of the owners). As the team is finally good again after many years of not being good, it’s clear that the Pegulas basically wanted to wait until the local mood was favorable toward the Bills again. It’s no accident that the year after the team went 13-3 and nearly made the Super Bowl that the owners are shaking the money tree for a new stadium.
Where will it be built? Current discussion is a new stadium pretty much across the street from the current one, so at least we seem to have abandoned the notion of building it in downtown Buffalo. But still: local money? Over a billion dollars of it?
This local citizen says no. And if the Bills move to Austin (or Toronto, or San Antonio, or Portland, or anywhere else), this local citizen says, “Thanks for the memories, good luck.” I saw the point being made all over social media the last couple days that the Bills “bring Upstate NY together” and that the Bills shape the local mood, and that losing the Bills would be an irrevocable blow to the local psyche. This seems deeply unhealthy to me. Plenty of successful and fine cities exist in this country with no major sports teams. It is my firm belief that we can have a very nice and vibrant city, with all of the things that nice and vibrant cities have, without major-league sports teams. I like sports and I get excited by the prospect of Josh Allen leading the Bills to a championship too, and I’d like to see the hockey team stop being awful and win a Stanley Cup…but I’d hate to lose the Philharmonic, the Albright-Knox, Shea’s, or our waterfront much, more more. I’d hate to see local schools get worse and for jobs and people to keep migrating away.
Regional identity, self-image, self-worth, and major economic policy should not be based on the existence and/or the performance of local sports teams.
If the Pegulas want it, let them build it. And if they can’t afford it, well–Terry Pegula once boasted that if he needed more money he’d just drill another well.
It’s THAT weekend, again! If you need some Super Bowl trivia questions for your socially-distanced Super Bowl Party On Zoom, here you go! These are recycled from last year, with revisions to two questions based on the results of last year’s game and this year’s champions (I can no longer say that no team has ever played a Super Bowl on its own home field!). Answers are in the comments (with one question’s answer having changed after last year’s Super Bowl result).
1. What is the highest combined point total in a Super Bowl?
2. What is the lowest combined point total in a Super Bowl?
3. What winning team scored the fewest points?
4. What losing team scored the most points?
5. What is the oldest existing venue to have hosted a Super Bowl?
6. What is the oldest existing stadium that is home to an NFL team to have hosted a Super Bowl?
7. What is the last Super Bowl to be played in a stadium that was not home to an NFL team?
8. According to a Super Bowl-related episode of THE SIMPSONS, who are the favorite teams of Homer Simpson and Moe Szylack?
9. Three American Idol winners have performed the National Anthem at Super Bowls. Which ones?
10. These two teams have met in three Super Bowls.
11. These teams have each met in two Super Bowls.
12. These three teams are 1-0 in the Super Bowl.
13. This is the only team to be currently undefeated in multiple trips to the Super Bowl.
14. As of 2021, this team has gone the longest without returning to the Super Bowl.
15. As of 2021, this team went the longest between Super Bowl victories.
16. To date, this is the only Super Bowl whose participants played their home games in the same state.
17. Following each of this team’s last two Super Bowl victories, the starting quarterback for both games retired. Name the team and the two quarterbacks who retired as champions.
18. These teams have won at least four Super Bowls.
19. These teams have lost at least four Super Bowls.
20. This player is the only special teams player to have been named Super Bowl MVP.
21. The team with the NFL’s season rushing champion has advanced to the Super Bowl only four times. Name the players, the teams, and the Super Bowls.
22. Since the NFL adopted a 16-game regular season, seven teams have posted records of 15-1 or better. Only two of those have won Super Bowls, however. Name the two champions, and the remainder of the teams and their results.
23. This is the only team to win the Super Bowl after being outscored during the regular season.
24. Over the course of 12 months, this city hosted the NHL Stanley Cup Finals, the World Series, the Super Bowl, and the NCAA Final Four. Which city was it, and which Super Bowl was hosted?
25. Four coaches have each lost the Super Bowl four times apiece. Name them.
26. Which of the following has never happened in a Super Bowl: a punt return for a touchdown, two wild-card teams meeting in the Super Bowl, a play from scrimmage over 90 yards, or a head coach winning a Super Bowl with two different teams?
27. Name the four teams that have as yet never reached the Super Bowl.
28. In only two Super Bowls did neither team commit a turnover. Which ones?
29. The closest geographical proximity between the two cities represented in a Super Bowl was 164 miles. Which two cities, and which Super Bowl?
30. What is the earliest in a Super Bowl that a winning team has taken its final lead?
31. No team has ever won three consecutive Super Bowl championships. What two teams came closest to doing so?
Enjoy, and go Chiefs! Evil Tom MUST be denied a seventh victory. ON THIS ALL DEPENDS.
My years with the Dodgers were 1952 and 1953, two seasons in which they lost the World Series to the Yankees. You may glory in a team triumphant, but you fall in love with a team in defeat. Losing after great striving is the story of man, who was born to sorrow, whose sweetest songs tell of saddest thought, and who, if he is a hero, does nothing in his life as becomingly as leaving it.
–Roger Kahn, The Boys of Summer
I was once a huge baseball fan, mainly during the 1990s. It started with the Pittsburgh Pirates’ string of three consecutive National League Eastern Division championships (they were in the NL East back then, before the realignment that created the NL Central), each of which was followed by a heartbreaking loss in the NLCS. Those three years gave my father and I a lot to talk about and a rooting interest in common, which was a lovely thing. (It’s not like we especially needed that; it’s not as if we had a wounded relationship that was somehow healed by baseball or some shit like that. But a shared interest and joy is always good!) Looking back, it’s amazing how my college years were grounded by sports heartbreak: I’d watch the Pirates lose an NLCS in October, and then three months later I’d watch the Bills lose a Super Bowl.
As the 1990s came to an end, I still loved baseball even though by this time the Pirates had become bad (in an epic stretch of badness that would go on for twenty years), but as the 2000s arrived I had less and less opportunity to watch baseball on teevee, because we didn’t have cable. I never lost my admiration for the game itself, though. I loved its rhythm, I loved how it created moments of fantastic tension without the breakneck pace that lots of people seem to think is essential to an exciting sporting event. And I loved how baseball, for some reason, lent itself to wonderful writing. Good sports writing abounds all over the place, I have to admit, but there’s just something about baseball that makes it fodder for great writers.
I think it has to do with how much baseball there is. Each season lasts for six months, with games nearly every single day; unless there’s a no-hitter or a perfect game or some other kind of highlight, few individual games linger in the mind, which means that an entire season can take on the feel of a long epic struggle that feels sad when it ends, whether your team finishes as World Champion, or a pennant winner, or as just another also-ran along the way.
And it’s not just that the seasons are long; baseball itself has been around seemingly forever, too. The history of baseball lasts to around the time of the Civil War, if not before that, and its rise echoes evolutions of so much of America: the urbanization of our society, our ongoing struggles to find some semblance of racial justice, and the desire so many feel to hang on to aging traditions as our society seems to relentlessly speed up.
Baseball careers last a long time too, at least compared to other sports. A typical football career lasts, on average, only four or five seasons. A good baseball player, who manages to avoid catastrophic injury, can play ten, fifteen, even up to nearly twenty years before the inevitability of age takes its toll. And there’s also the progression from the minor leagues to the Majors to take into account: a poetic questing nature seems to apply to players who toil on and on, always chasing the dream.
Roger Kahn, regarded as one of the finest of all baseball writers, died in 2020 at the age of 92, and when he passed, many paeans to his most famous book, The Boys of Summer, showed up online and elsewhere. I had never read Boys, so I added it to my reading list, and I finally got to it just a couple of weeks ago. (Hooray for borrowing e-books from the library–but that’s for another time!) I finished Boys just a couple days ago, and it really is every bit as good as its admirers claim.
Kahn’s book is billed as a chronicle of the Brooklyn Dodgers over a remarkable period in which they were always very good and yet only won it all a single time, but the book is more than that. It opens with a long reminiscence of Kahn’s family life, of how he learned and grew and learned some more and eventually came first to writing and then to writing baseball. We don’t arrive with the Dodgers until some time in the book, and if you expect the kind of long telling of a great team’s championship season, well…that’s not what Kahn is up to here. He writes about baseball in the larger sense, with baseball’s dual feeling of being something unending, through which individual men come and go. In the book’s latter half, Kahn catches up with many of the stars from those Dodgers teams, the last ones to play in Brooklyn before the team’s eventually forsaking of Ebbets Field and Brooklyn for Chavez Ravine in Los Angeles.
Kahn doesn’t draw much attention to the way time is a constant theme in his book, but it is always there. Everyone whom Kahn profiles here is now dead, and the first edition of The Boys of Summer came out in 1972. The oldest players in baseball today were not even born when this book came out, chronicling baseball events that were already decades old. Baseball keeps on keeping on, doesn’t it?
Toward the end of the book Kahn discusses, almost in passing, the team’s move to Los Angeles. Though he doesn’t underline the point, it’s hard not to sense a disapproval on Kahn’s part of what he might describe as the corporatization of baseball. Even that, however, must be viewed through the lens of time. When Kahn was writing, Ebbets Field was still a living memory. Now, the Dodgers have been in Los Angeles over half a century, and the then-shiny and new stadium at Chavez Ravine is one of baseball’s oldest and most beloved venues. Baseball keeps on keeping on.
Finally, I close with a few specific passages that struck me. Roger Kahn is, among other things, a hell of a storyteller and wordsmith. An anecdote about Gil Hodges, who played first base for the Dodgers before becoming a manager:
A sense of strength stays with a man. When Hodges managed the Washington Senators, he learned once that four players were violating a midnight curfew. Hodges believes in curfews and he convened his ball club and announced: “I know who you were. You’re each fined one hundred dollars. But a lot of us are married and I don’t want to embarrass anyone. There’s a cigar box on my desk. At the end of the day, I’m going to look into that box and I want to see four hundred dollars in it. Then the matter will be closed.” Hodges gazed. At the end of the day, he looked into the cigar box. He found $700.
As Kahn travels around the country to meet personally with the retired stars of those great Dodgers teams, he finds himself often well off the beaten paths in towns that were once something but which are now just doddering along. The town that I grew up in is one of those, a onetime “city” in New York’s Southern Tier that is now just another small town with a lot of closed factories and empty buildings, but still enough people to keep the place being a place. Interestingly, my town–Olean, NY–is name-checked in The Boys of Summer, as the location of a tryout camp for guys who maybe wanted to play baseball. I have trouble imagining such a thing now, but that camp was Gil Hodges’s route to the big leagues.
This passage, about Newport, PA, rings very true to me. The towns of my youth were very much like this town.
The reasons for which Newport was built died along with the tannery and ironworks. A river bend no longer makes a town and jobs are so short at the Penn Central that only men with twenty years’ seniority survive recurrent layoffs. But Newport is not dying; the petrified village may even grow. It is a refuge for certain whites, raising young families, who talk about “the niggers stealing America.” No black man lives in Newport, Pennsylvania. None wants to come and none is asked. A few blacks who work for Bethlehem Steel have built a cabin near Lost Creek Gap, but the Newport elders say these aren’t bad ones.
And finally, a quote about the inevitable shifting of the world and how it appears to those living in as it shifts:
There is only so much space on the planet. Fathers perish to make room for sons. At the end, some go with grace, but the middle years–and these Dodgers are striding through middle years–shake with contention. Jack and Jackie Robinson; Clem and Jay Labine, father and son circling one another in a spiky maze of love.
It is too easy to lay griefs on the end of summer. Once I wrote the poet Robert Graves, asking, among other questions, how it felt to be seventy years old. He could not tell me, Graves responded, because in his own mind he was still twenty-one.
In The Boys of Summer Roger Kahn writes about the lives of baseball, and the way that baseball looms larger in those lives than maybe it should, since the baseball part takes up, what, one fifth or one-sixth of a life? Baseball isn’t a bad way to mark the time, though.
So the Big Game is coming up, and you’ll probably want some trivia questions for your Big Game party! In that spirit, here are some for your freebie use. I have not grouped these in any way, nor am I ranking them by any idea of difficulty. Answers are in the comments for the post. Enjoy, and may your preferred team end the game with more points than the other one!
1. What is the highest combined point total in a Super Bowl?
2. What is the lowest combined point total in a Super Bowl?
3. What winning team scored the fewest points?
4. What losing team scored the most points?
5. What is the oldest existing venue to have hosted a Super Bowl?
6. What is the oldest existing stadium that is home to an NFL team to have hosted a Super Bowl?
7. What is the last Super Bowl to be played in a stadium that was not home to an NFL team?
8. According to a Super Bowl-related episode of THE SIMPSONS, who are the favorite teams of Homer Simpson and Moe Szylack?
9. Three American Idol winners have performed the National Anthem at Super Bowls. Which ones?
10. These two teams have met in three Super Bowls.
11. These teams have each met in two Super Bowls.
12. These three teams are 1-0 in the Super Bowl.
13. This is the only team to be currently undefeated in multiple trips to the Super Bowl.
14. As of 2020, this team has gone the longest without returning to the Super Bowl.
15. As of 2020, this team went the longest between Super Bowl victories.
16. To date, this is the only Super Bowl whose participants played their home games in the same state.
17. Following each of this team’s last two Super Bowl victories, the starting quarterback for both games retired. Name the team and the two quarterbacks who retired as champions.
18. These teams have won at least four Super Bowls.
19. These teams have lost at least four Super Bowls.
20. This player is the only special teams player to have been named Super Bowl MVP.
21. The team with the NFL’s season rushing champion has advanced to the Super Bowl only four times. Name the players, the teams, and the Super Bowls.
22. Since the NFL adopted a 16-game regular season, seven teams have posted records of 15-1 or better. Only two of those have won Super Bowls, however. Name the two champions, and the remainder of the teams and their results.
23. This is the only team to win the Super Bowl after being outscored during the regular season.
24. Over the course of 12 months, this city hosted the NHL Stanley Cup Finals, the World Series, the Super Bowl, and the NCAA Final Four. Which city was it, and which Super Bowl was hosted?
25. Four coaches have each lost the Super Bowl four times apiece. Name them.
26. Which of the following has never happened in a Super Bowl: a punt return for a touchdown, two wild-card teams meeting in the Super Bowl, a team playing a Super Bowl on its own home field, or a head coach winning a Super Bowl with two different teams?
27. Name the four teams that have as yet never reached the Super Bowl.
28. In only two Super Bowls did neither team commit a turnover. Which ones?
29. The closest geographical proximity between the two cities represented in a Super Bowl was 164 miles. Which two cities, and which Super Bowl?
30. What is the earliest in a Super Bowl that a winning team has taken its final lead?
31. No team has ever won three consecutive Super Bowl championships. What two teams came closest to doing so?
Enjoy, and go Chiefs (although a 49ers win would not leave me unhappy)!
Here’s some math. An NFL game takes roughly three hours to play. So if you watch every single play of each of your team’s sixteen regular-season NFL games, at season’s end you will have watched 48 hours of football. That’s two entire days of your year, spent watching the games.
And if you are a Buffalo Bills fan, and if you have been faithful enough over these sixteen years to watch every Bills game even while they’ve been mostly stinking the whole time, that’s two days spent per year for sixteen years. That’s thirty-two days of watching mostly bad football. Which is more than a month.
Hey, it’s your time. Far be it from me to suggest that you might consider spending it doing something that doesn’t bring more annoyance than joy.
