Sports posts

In the wake of Katie Ledecky's dominating 12-second win in the 80m freestyle, Joe Posnanski has put together a top 10 list of the single most dominating performances in American sports: So Don Larsen's perfect game in the World Series, Carli Lloyd hattrick, Bob Beamon's '68 long jump. Ledekcy herself comes in fourth. 

And No. 1? An EL favorite:

1. Secretariat, Belmont, 1973
It's probably not right to put a horse at the top of this list, but let's be honest: When you think of dominating American sports performances, the image is of Secretariat. The image is of jockey Ron Turcotte looking back and seeing all those horses a million miles behind him. The image is of the announcer Chic Anderson growling “he's moving like a tremendous machine!”

The extraordinary thing is that Secretariat was basically running for something we will never fully understand. He was all but guaranteed to win the Belmont. He was such a dominant horse that year that only three other horses even entered against him in that Belmont. Secretariat won the race by 31 lengths and so no other horses were pushing him. Turcotte was not pushing him either.

Still, Secretariat ran.

So what made Secretariat run so fast? His 2:24 Belmont time is not only the record, no horse has approached it. When American Pharoah finally won the Triple Crown in 2015, he ran it in 2:26 and change – meaning he would have finished some 12 or 13 lengths behind Secretariat. The amazing Seattle Slew won the Belmont by four lengths to finish off the Triple Crown in 1977. By time, he would have finished 25 lengths behind Secretariat.

“I have goals,” Ledecky said before she raced in the 800m freestyle, and afterward she admitted that her spectacular swim met those goals. One wonders if Secretariat met his goals.

The other day, I read this to my mother, who has loved horses all her life but isn't online. Made her happy.

Me, I'm all in with the pick. Have never seen the numbers on how far American Pharoah and Seattle Slew would've finished behind Secretariat. Amazing. 

Caveat: Chic Anderson growling, Poz? More like singing. 

Secretariat, meeting goals

From my man Joey Poz in Rio:

Monday, I watched a Chinese gymnast named You Hao grab two rings that were dangling from ropes, pull himself up, flip around, do a handstand, hold out his arms and turn himself into a human cross and them flip around some more and dismount with like two flips.

My jaw should have dropped to the floor like they do in cartoons.

Instead I thought: “Eh, he didn't keep his body straight enough.”

That is what the Olympics do to us.

This is his lead-in to a piece on the balance beam and how unforgiving it is. I know what he's talking about, above, even though I've barely watched any of the Olympics this year; I've just been following it through social media. The world at an even further remove. But I do try to refrain from the “Eh.” I do try to remind myself that the worst player in Major League Baseball is one of the best baseball players in the world. It's good to keep that in mind. It's fair to keep that in mind. 

Joe Posnanski has a nice piece on how Muhammad Ali came to light the Olympic torch in Atlanta in 1996, with a key exchange coming between the Atlanta Olympic Committee, who wanted Atlanta's own Edwin Moses, and NBC's Dick Ebersol, who suggested the 1960 Olympic gold medalist in heavyweight boxing:

“I think I have a better choice,” Ebersol said. The Atlanta people leaned in.

“Muhammad Ali,” he said.

The three men looked at each other. Finally, one of them spoke up.

“Wasn't he a draft dodger?” he said.

Ebersol, and Poz, go on to explain why Ali wasn't a draft dodger—he didn't dodge anything, he stood firm and upright—and how Ebersol convinced the Atlantans that Ali was the man. Poz then writes how the reporters gathered that night tried to figure out who that final torcher bearer would be. Mark Spitz? Carl Lewis? Janet Evans?

“There were undoubtedly some people who suspected that Ali might light the cauldron,” Poz writes, “but I didn't know any of those people.”

I was in Seattle, watching it on TV, back when we all watched the same thing at the same time, and, like everybody else, I too was ticking off the candidates. I think we saw each of the above run with the torch and hand it off to someone else. Didn't we? Anyway, as the possibilities ticked away, I searched back and asked myself this: Who is the most famous American athlete who is also an Olympic gold medalist? Who is the best representative of American athletic prowess? That's when I thought of Ali. And not only did I suspect it would be him, I would be angry if it wasn't him. He was the perfect choice. I just didn't know how much work went into making others realize it.

He was a star so young, and got old so fast, and was silent for so long, that it was a surprise to me that Muhammad Ali was only 74 when he died yesterday.

In the 1970s, when I was growing up, we weren't a boxing family, and I wasn't a “Wide World of Sports” guy, and I had that Minnesota aversion to braggarts, but Ali was ubiquitous. When I became aware of him he was already champion a second time. When he did it an unprecedented third time, I kept the newspaper. That was the world I grew up into: Harmon Killebrew always hit two homeruns, the Vikings always lost the Super Bowl, Muhammad Ali was always champion of the world. I thought it was stable. 

I remember seeing a news report about the Soviet Union in the late '70s, early '80s, maybe about the refreezing of the Cold War. People on the streets of Moscow were being interviewed; one young Russian man, 20s, wore a Muhammad Ali T-shirt. I loved that. I felt such pride in that. The things that transcend geographical and ideological boundaries. I thought: Here is our power.  

We'll hear a lot of effusive praise over the next few days, weeks, years, but it's worth remembering that Ali was once disliked by many Americans. Despised even. Bill Siegel's documentary “The Trials of Muhammad Ali” begins with this hatred, and it's startling, the invective, spoken right to his face, by David Susskind: “He's a disgrace to his country, his race, and what he laughingly calls his profession”:

His true heroism is right there, taking those blows, staring down that invective. It's in the sacrifice he made. Most of us compromise in the shitty jobs we have so we can keep those shitty jobs, while here was a guy who was the best in the world at what he did. Undisputed. And he gave it up, in his prime years, for a political/religious stand, and despite the hatred and invective that it brought down upon him.

“When We Were Kings” is a well-known, much-recommended doc on the Ali-Foreman fight. Less well-known is Norman Mailer's excellent book, “The Fight.” I also recommend his essay on the first Ali-Frazier fight, “King of the Hill,” which begins with a word that describes both writer and subject well: Ego! Ali lost that fight, but it went 15; and Mailer, with his usual gift for prognostication, writes at the end:

The world was talking instantly of a rematch. For Ali had shown America what we all had hoped was secretly true. He was a man. He could bear moral and physical torture and he could stand. And if he could beat Frazier in the rematch, we would have at last a national hero who was hero of the world as well...

David Remnick wrote a great book on Ali, and here's his thoughts this morning. Here's a post from Joe Posnanski. Here's the '70s song that only me and Jim Walsh and the Gear Daddies seem to remember.

1954, 1967, 1996.

I was simply looking to see if Secretariat was Sports Illustrated's Sportsman of the Year in 1973 and got lost in SI's coverage of its covers: every Sportsman/men or Sportswoman/women of the Year between 1954 (Roger Bannister) and 2015 (Serena Williams). It's an interesting list.

First, no Secretariat. No animals. Just people. That year they gave it to Jackie Stewart, the race car driver, rather than the horse who won the Triple Crown with times, in each race, that still haven't been broken. 

Some titles, you assume, SI would want back: Lance Armstrong in 2002, Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa in 1998, Joe Paterno in 1986.

That's another thing: More than a few coaches here, mostly college, mostly basketball and football. No baseball managers made the cut:

• 2011: Pat Summitt and Mike Krzyzewski
• 1997: Dean Smith
• 1993: Don Shula (the only pro coach)
• 1986: Joe Paterno
• 1972: John Wooden (shared w/Billie Jean King)
• 1963: Pete Rozelle

Billie Jean King was the first woman, by the way, 18 years after SI started it, and she had to share with a man. The first solo woman on the cover was Chris Evert in ‘76. The next was Mary Decker in ’83. The third, Serena, in 2015. Bit of a gap. 

The first African-American? Rafer Johnson in 1958, followed by Bill Russell in 1968, followed by (about time) Muhammad Ali in ‘74. So in the first 20 years, 1954-73, only two African-Americans were honored.

Baseball has dominated. That surprised me:

Tiger Woods was tapped twice, in ’96 and 2000, which seems a bit much, particularly considering who never got it once: Willie Mays, Hank Aaron, Mickey Mantle, Barry Bonds, Jim Brown, Johnny Unitas, Walter Payton, Wilt Chamberlain, Martina Navratilova, Bjorn Borg, Roger Federer. The only male tennis star was Arthur Ashe in 1992, i.e., right before his death, speaking out against racism in sport. No Mark Spitz, either, which seems odd. No Carl Lewis, either. 1972 went to Wooden/King, ‘84 to Edwin Moses/Mary Lou Retton. 1980 went to the U.S. Olympic Hockey Team, a good choice.

Trivia question: Who was the first black baseball player to get the title? Answer: Willie Stargell in 1979, and he had to share with Terry Bradshaw in a “Pittsburgh champions” cover. Stargell was indicative in one sense: He was the World Series MVP that year, and most of SI’s baseball SOTY have been World Series MVPs:

It's interesting checking out when it didn't go to the World Series MVP. In ‘57, Hank Aaron won the NL MVP, the Milwaukee Braves won the World Series, and in it he hit .393 with 3 homeruns and 7 RBIs but didn’t win the MVP because Lew Burdette had one of the greatest Series ever: 3-0, 27 IP, 2 earned runs, 0.67 ERA. Burdette was Christy Mathewson for a week. So why not Burdette? I guess because his season was good but not great: No Cy Young votes. So why not the guy who was the best position player on the champs and who was also NL MVP? Why choose the guy who finished second to him in the MVP voting and whose team didn't even make the Series? You know why. Business concerns, too, probably. You don't want the South rising in anger again, as it did when SI dared to put Willie Mays on the cover with manager Leo Durocher and Durocher's wife.

It's tough to argue Yaz in ‘67 but Bob Gibson did go 3-0 in the Series that year. Seaver? Best player on the upstart Mets, but he went 1-1 in the Series when his team went 4-1. No Clemente in ’71 or Reggie in ‘77. Lee Trevino and Steve Cauthen, respectively. As a result, the only African-American baseball player to be honored without a white guy next to him was Derek Jeter in 2009. Jeter had a good season that year, finishing third in MVP voting, but led the league in nothing. He also had a good postseason, and even hit .409 in the Series. But the better postseasons were had by A-Rod, who kept crushing homers, and Hideki Matsui, the World Series MVP, who batted .615 (you read that right) with 3 homers and 8 RBIs. But Jeter was the face of the franchise. He also sold magazines.  

The list is often reflective of its times, and most likely of SI’s readership: the big three + golf. It ignored women and black athletes for too long, then fumbled trying to make it up to them, then seemed to lose interest at least where women were concerned. Until last year, that is, when, for the first time, it chose a black woman. And what happened? Readers thought it should've been a horse. Plus ca change. 

Meadowlark, with his game face on.

I first knew him as part of a Saturday morning cartoon show, “Harlem Globe Trotters,” which debuted in September 1970, and which, I suppose, is how I came to know basketball. What I didn’t know: He wasn’t doing his own voice (Scatman Crothers was), and it was the first regular network cartoon to feature a mostly African-American cast—beating “Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids” by two years. But I was a kid, and truly color blind then. The blinds came off a few years later.

I also remember him from the live-action variety show “The Harlem Globetrotters Popcorn Machine” (“And now/Rodney Allen Rippy, take a bow”), which debuted in 1974, as well as all of those commercials he did. He shilled for Vitalis, stacked Whoppers for Burger King, squeezed the Charmin. The Globetrotters even solved a mystery with Scooby Doo and the gang.

I also remember seeing them once in person in the early 1970s at, I believe, the Met Center in Bloomington, Minn. I think I expected the up-close “wow” factor of the cartoons and was slightly disappointed to be so far away from them and their antics.

Of course you could never forget his name: Meadowlark Lemon. So mellifluous. So beautiful.

Am I the only one who remembers a theme song for him? Because I can’t find it anywhere online, and almost every pop cultural scrap is online now. It went something like this:

Meadowlark, Meadowlark
Dah dah dah dah dah
He’s so dah, and so dah
Dah dah dah dah dah
And everybody’s sayin’
Oh Meadowlark Oh Lemon
Everybody loves you, Meadowlark

Probably to the tune of “Sweet Georgia Brown,” per the Globetrotters own theme song. Anyone?

The Washington Post has a nice obit on the man born Meadow George Lemon in 1932 in Wilmington, N.C., which doesn’t mention the cartoon show; so does The New York Times, which does. Both obits tell me more of what I didn’t know: that before they were a pop cultural phenomenon, the Harlem Globetrotters were a cultural one. I.e., before they regularly played their foils, the Washington Generals, in games that were mostly antics, they played college All-Stars and NBA championship teams in games that were mostly serious. It was a segregated era, and the Globetrotters regularly beat the best white teams, and helped integrate basketball as a result. The first black player signed to an NBA contract was Globetrotters center Nat “Sweetwater” Clifton in 1950. Four years later, Meadowlark joined the Trotters and quickly became its leader and star.

They really were basketball’s good-will ambassadors. One wonders if the sport would’ve become the global phenomenon it’s become, as quickly as it’s become, without them.

This Times article is from 1950: 

This one is from 1959:

Eventually their performances, perhaps out of necessity, because less serious, more comedy. For some, it was out of step in an era of black power. They paved the way but were criticized by those for whom they paved it.

There was a fall throughout the ’70s, and bottom may have been the made-for-TV movie, “The Harlem Globetrotters on Gilligan’s Island” in 1981. Meadowlark had left the team by then over a contract dispute, and was making his own name on TV (“Hello, Larry”) and in movies (“The Fish that Saved Pittsburgh”). But he more or less disappeared from mainstream media by the mid-1980s.

The most startling quote from both obits comes from Wilt Chamberlain, who played with the Globetrotters for a year, in 1959, and who said the following before his death in 1999: 

Meadowlark was the most sensational, awesome, incredible basketball player I’ve ever seen. People would say it would be Dr. J or even Jordan. For me, it would be Meadowlark Lemon.

There’s a good documentary to be made here.

Admittedly not a very scary costume, even if, once upon a time, the Vikings' defense was known as the Purple People Eaters. I was a small, sickly kid who never played football and could barely do the three-point stance. But I did love this team. 

Purple People Eaten.

Memory tells me I began to get into the Minnesota Vikings the year Gary Cuozo led them to a 7-7 record, but Football Reference tells me my memory sucks. The last year Cuozo was the Vikings' main QB was in '71, when they went 11-3 but lost in the divisional playoffs to the Dallas Cowboys. It was the next season, the first with Fran Tarkenton as QB again, that we went 7-7 and didn't make the playoffs—the only season between '68 and '78, actually, that the Vikings didn't make the playoffs. I believe the above photo is from that 7-7 season. 

There was an early karmic symmetry to the Super Bowl that I noticed back then and relied upon in some sad fashion. It went like this:

• The loser of the first Super Bowl, the Kansas City Chiefs, won Super Bowl IV three years later. 
• The loser of the third Super Bowl, the Baltimore Colts, won Super Bowl V two years later. 
• The loser of the fifth Super Bowl, the Dallas Cowboys, won Super Bowl VI a year later. 
• The loser of the sixth Super Bowl, the Miami Dolphins, won Super Bowl VII a year later. 

So it was my assumption that when the loser of the fourth Super Bowl, my Minnesota Vikings, played the Dolphins in Super Bowl VIII, we would finally get our due. It would be our time for cosmic, karmic rebalancing. Right? Or at least, for God's sake, in Super Bowl IX against the Steelers? Or, c'mon, for fuck's sake, against the Raiders in Super Bowl XI?

Still waiting. 

That, and “walk it off.” Literally. 

There's been nothing but reaction to the Seahawks loss in Super Bowl XLIX. Generally the immediate reaction—“What the FUCK!?!”—is still the reaction; but anger leads to ache, and ache lead to soul-searching (as a way to remove the ache), and you wind up with thoughts like these from my friends.

From Ben S.:

I woke up at 4 a.m. thinking about yesterday's nightmare Super Bowl. ... I spent the first 18 years of my life in Boston, the last five in Seattle. Would I trade the Emerald City for Beantown? The Olympics for the White Mountains? Top Pot Donuts for Dunkin' Donuts? Carroll for Belichick? Brady for Wilson? Blount for Beast Mode? Revis for Sherman? The Legion of Boom for whatever you call the Patriots' secondary? No, no, no, no, no, no, no, and no. The Seahawks are the most entertaining, rugged, soulful team I've ever rooted for. We'll be back.

From Chris K.:

I'm going to go out on a limb and not criticize last night's final play call. I don't think I'm alone in loving when the Seahawk's play calls have gotten creative, and the risks they take have worked out in their favor. ... If we start running Marshawn up the middle every time next year as a result I will be very disappointed - that is not a good lesson learned and I don't think it will work out for us. Go for the fake field goal, launch the wild 2-point conversion, throw the long bomb to the guy who hasn't caught a ball the whole season - those are exciting risks that winners take when they have faith in themselves and I love to watch it happen.

Here's Mr. B, longtime, long-suffering fan:

14-5. Back-to-back NFC Conference Championships. Gave the Patriots one hell of a game. I'll take that. I think 30 other NFL teams would, too. Thank you, Seahawks. See you in six months.

But my reaction is closer to Joe Posnanski's, who is both more empathetic and less forgiving:

The loneliest man in football was shell-shocked and disoriented, but he already knew what everyone thought. Pete Carroll had just lost the Super Bowl. He just had lost the Super Bowl with a decision that he could never explain well enough, a decision that even his players didn’t really understand, a decision that sports fans will talk about for as long as Super Bowls are played. ...

In the heat of one of the hottest Super Bowls, he had made an instinctual decision. Coaches are trained to take advantage of matchups. They are primed to counter their opponent’s moves. What seemed so obvious to more or less everyone else on earth – you HAVE to give the ball to Marshawn Lynch at the 1-yard line with the Super Bowl on the line – was in Carroll’s mind clouded by the moment, by the complications of football strategy, by the natural tendency every coach has to be just a little bit smarter. The Patriots dared him to pass. He passed. He lost.

I'm not much of a football fan. It's another 8x11 sport. You turn a piece of paper horizontally and that's your field: Team A on one side, Team B on the other, an object of some kind. The point of the game is to get that object into your opponent's goal more often than they get it in yours before time expires. That's hockey, soccer, basketball, football. They're all fundamentally the same. Metaphors for war.

I'd been a fan of football, in the 1970s in Minnesota, but that's enough to cure almost anyone. Three Super Bowls in four years, and blowout losses in each of them. Pain, over something I couldn't control. Eventually I thought, “Why care?” This thought coincided with both the decline of the Vikings and the rise of dealing with asshole football players in high school. “You mean these guys grow to be those guys?” So I got out. By the early 1980s, I caught a Super Bowl now and again but that was it. And every time I checked it out, I was confused or turned off. Wait, isn't that intentional grounding? Wait, defensive lineman now celebrate after every sack? Classy. Football was background noise for me. Deep background.

Seattle's love affair with the Seahawks finally won me over again. I'd talk to colleagues about the games, the team, the hopes. I'd see the city lit up—literally—a big “12” everywhere on the sides of downtown skyscrapers. It was fun. They were fun: a trash-talking, mostly black team in a staid, mostly white city. I began to learn player names. I began to care again. I began to feel—particularly after the Green Bay game—that I was putting all of those horrible Vikings Super Bowl losses behind me. Two Mondays ago, I even talked about the possibility of catharsis. It was finally going to be good.

Recently I've been reading Andrew Ross Sorkin's book, “Too Big to Fail” on the busride to work, so I've been thinking a little about risk lately. I admit that I don't risk enough in life. I'm too cautious: a worst-case-scenario guy. Which is why I never would've run a debt-to-equity ratio of 60-1 like Lehman Brothers, nor would I have done what Pete Carroll and the Seahawks did at the 1-yard line, down by 4, with seconds to go in Super Bowl XLIX; but then I never would never have been in a position to be there in the first place.

I disagreed with the play during the play. Wait, they're not handing off to Marshawn? They're throwing? It better .... And then it happened, and the reality of it sunk in, the unchangeable, awful reality, and I knew, immediately, that it would always be this way. Nothing could ever change that. And this ending would be talked about as long as people talked about football. That thought echoed inside of me until I began to ache from it. And as with my friends above, I searched for some way to remove the ache.

On the ride home from Ben's, I thought of the Peanuts comic strip above. (Also here and here.) They were famous comic strips. I remember reading them in “Peanuts” books long before I knew what game they referred to. Initially, I thought Charlie Brown was talking about any old game. But he wasn't. 

It was the 1962 World Series, and the San Francisco Giants were facing the defending champion New York Yankees. In the bottom of the 9th of Game 7, the Giants were losing 1-0, as Yankees pitcher Ralph Terry worked on a two-hit shutout. But Matty Alou led off with a bunt single. Felipe Alou tried to bunt him over, missed, and struck out, as did Chuck Hiller. But the next man up was Willie Mays, and he was thinking homer. Instead, he crushed a ball to right, which died in the wet outfield grass, allowing right fielder Roger Maris to cut it off. Mays wound up on second with a double but Alou only made it to third: third-base coach Whitey Lockman held him up. He thought the play at the plate would've been too close, and besides, Willie McCovey, the second-best hitter on the team, was coming up. Give him a chance, he thought. McCovey delivered. He rocketed another ball to right, but right at second baseman Bobby Richardson, who gloved it for the final out. Three feet higher and both Alou and Mays would've scored and the Giants would've won. Instead ...

Instead we got Charles Schulz's series of heartbreaking strips about the game. He published them throughout the long, cold offseason: Charlie Brown and Linus looking glum for three panels, and then in the last panel Charlie Brown cursing the heavens: “If only McCovey had hit the ball just three feet higher!” In the second, it's two feet higher. In the final one, one. The difference between victory and defeat.

That's what I was thinking about on the ride home. If only we'd handed off to Marshawn three more times. Two more times. One more time.

I get what my friends are saying above. I get the wisdom of it all. I get the “Bronx Tale” wisdom I posted about earlier today, too. Richard Sherman and Russell Wilson and Kam Chancellor make millions of dollars. They don't know about me, or care about me, so why should I care about them? I remind myself I'm a fair-weather fan, and fair-weather fans are supposed to go elsewhere when the weather turns foul. I think about Roger Kahn's great line about the Brooklyn Dodgers—how you glory in a team triumphant but you fall in love with a team in defeat—and wonder if this defeat will lead to something positive. Most of life is losing, I tell myself. You learn more from losing, I tell myself.

But in my mind I keep handing off to Marshawn Lynch.

I meant to post this last week but better late than never. It's the New York Times' Jan. 18 headline/blurb for one of the most thrilling/heartbreaking championship games in the history of the NFL. The one on the right:

Outlast? How about stun? Jujitsuflip? Mindboggle? Mindfuck?

I subscribe to and root for the Times, our paper of record, to make it through the digital times we're all stuck in. But c'mon, guys. Try a little. It's the dullest hed/synopsis imaginable for the most thrilling come-from-behind, unimaginable game I've seen. It actually makes me laugh. 

With 3 minutes left in the game, the Hawks were down 19-7, hadn't scored on offense (only through special teams), and FootballReference.com put their win probability at 0.1%. That's not 1%; that's point 1 percent. Which was probably higher than the percentage I was giving them. It seemed all but over to me. If I had been watching at home, I probably would've turned the game off. Thankfully I was watching at Ben's house. 

With 5 minutes left, Seahawks QB Russell Wilson threw to Jermaine Kearse over the middle, and the ball bounced off Kearse's hands and was picked off by Morgan Burnett who ran a few yards, and then, without a Seattle player nearby, slid to the ground. The Packers were thinking it was over, too. That's what you do when it's over. You cradle the ball like it's an NFC championship trophy and slide. Safe.  

But not. The Packers went three and out and suddenly the Super-Bowl champion Seattle Seahawks, absent for most of the game, showed up. From their own 31, they scored in four plays. Except Marshawn Lynch was ruled out of bounds at the 9 on the 35-yard pass and run. So many of these calls went against the Hawks. It was a good call but it seemed more of the same. We just couldn't score.

Then we did—three runs later. 

Before the onside kick, Ben's teenage daughter asked about onside kicks and their probabilities, and we all agreed they were fairly improbable. 

Which is when the improbable happened. Then the impossible happened: run, run, pass, run, touchdown. Out of nowhere, from the depths, we were suddenly ahead by 1. Then we coverted another improbable 2-point conversion to go ahead by 3. The Packers got their field goal but they must've been stunned. They should've been walking off the field in triumph rather than heading out into the middle of it for a coin toss. We won that one, too, and started on our own 13-yard line. Four plays later it was 3rd and 7 at our own 30. Two plays later the game was over: a 35-yard pass to Doug Baldwin and a 35-yard pass to Jermaine Kearse over the middle. And Seattle, and the sports world, went crazy. Everyone went crazy except the New York Times headline writer.  

Outlast. I don't think I'll ever look at that word the same way again. 

See you Sunday. 

Announcer: Hey Michael Bennett! You and the Seattle Seahawks just won the NFC Championship Game! What do you plan to do now?
Michael Bennett: I'm gonna ride my bike!

Apparently it was a bike cop's bike. He just took it. He said when you go to the Super Bowl in Seattle you get to do what you want, and that's pretty much right. 

The game yesterday was the craziest, most unbelievable, most beautiful game I‘ve ever seen. I can’t remember a great team looking so bad for 55 minutes and so invincible for six. Everyone today in Seattle feels like they just won something. We‘re all hoisting Oscars aloft. We all want to thank our parents, and God, and Marshawn Lynch.  

I grew up in Minneapolis and became a football fan in the early 1970s when Fran Tarkenton led the Minnesota Vikings. That was a great team that lost three Super Bowls in four years but the toughest loss from was the year we didn’t go to the Super Bowl, 1975, when we lost in the first round to the Dallas Cowboys and the “Hail Mary” pass from Roger Staubach to Drew Pearson. No flag? What was that orange thing flying across the screen? (Turns out it was an orange peel.) But surely, surely, offensive interference. Nope. Nothing. Just stunned silence. Just an awful emptiness inside. I remember afterwards walking down 54th street in the cold and dim light of late December to Salk Drugs and just staring at the candy counter, and hearing some guy nonchalantly mentioning the Vikings loss, like it was no big deal, and hating, hating, hating. 

I stopped watching football before I graduated high school in 1981 (the Super Bowl now and again) but I‘ve been keeping track of the Seahawks this year. To me, yesterday’s game, the impossble come-from-behind victory, almost had the feeling of catharsis.

LINKS:

• Grantland: Packers-Seahawks Go Full WTF in NFC Championship Game
• The KIRO radio call of the final play of the game (NSFW)
• The postgame Seattle Times article
• Jayson Jenks on the emotions of the game
• Richard Sherman's injury? Apparently the ulnar nerve. But he says he'll play in the Super Bowl

I was walking in downtown Seattle yesterday on my way to Nordstrom to buy a dress shirt when I saw a hubub in front of the Grand Hyatt on 7th, between Pike and Pine. There were several chartered buses in front of the hotel and people, in groups, were rushing forward and then standing with smart phones held aloft for pictures and/or vidoes. “What's going on?” I asked the guy next to me. He nodded his head contempuously in the direction of the commotion. “Fucking Niners,” he said.

I'm not a huge football fan but it's tough to live in Seattle and not know that the Seahawks are in the playoffs today against the New Orlean Saints at CenturyLink Field, 1:35 start. In honor, a recently digitized slide photo from my childhood. That's my older brother Chris on the left, me on the right, little sister Karen with the ball. I think this was the toughest I've ever looked.