In her weekly column looking at the best and worst in sports writing, Shannon Proudfoot takes a close look at Anthony Calvillo and Peyton Manning, the Cards’ Game 1 loss and the players’ strike at Louisiana’s Grambling State.
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Jeff Passan writes a glorious take on the absurd ugliness of Game 1 of the World Series, opening with Cardinals pitcher Adam Wainwright in the visitor’s clubhouse cringing through the “snuff film” of his own performance even before the game was done. “For an elite pitcher, it was the sort of fiasco that lingers like smoke on a jacket. Wash yourself of it or it won’t go away,” Passan writes, before going into finger-licking detail on the rest of the embarrassing nightmare of a game. He quotes manager Mike Matheny sounding both horrified and resigned to the fact that “You’re going to have games like that periodically,” but as Passan points out, Game 1 of the World Series is a pretty crappy time to have one.
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Bruce Arthur looks at what’s made Anthony Calvillo “the perfect sort of CFL star” – and why walking away may be his best option now. Calvillo suffered a concussion in August, and the 41-year-old told the Alouettes last week that he won’t be back this season. He was the unlikeliest CFL star in the first place, Arthur writes – born to Mexican parents and raised in California, he was unaware the Canadian league even existed. But ultimately, Arthur writes, “He embraced stardom in this little league, signed autographs, volunteered for charity work – he came to relish the compromise, as Grantland’s Michael Weinreb once wrote.” But like too many others, his memory got slippery and, spooked by the collisions of bone and flesh, he retreated to a “chuck-and-duck” playing style. And now, though he didn’t get to choose his time to exit – that last hit may have written the final page of the script, like it does for so many players – it may be best for “the beating heart” of the Alouettes to bring to an end his dignified little version of football stardom.
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Dave Zirin writes about that Grambling State strike, in which football players refused to take the field last Saturday to protest the appalling conditions in their program, taking issue with the idea that it’s a simple “mutiny,” as everyone has described it. “From unsanitary locker room conditions that have led to multiple cases of staph infection… to 750-mile overnight bus rides before games… to having their popular coach, former Grambling quarterback Doug Williams summarily fired, this is a team of young people that has simply had enough,” he writes. Zirin sees this as part of a long – though rare – history of student athletes taking a stand, motivated by injustices ranging from their schools not feeding them before games to racial tensions and bigoted policies to the Vietnam War. And he predicts there could be more coming. “The NCAA will also have to stop using so-called student-athletes like expendable pieces of equipment, people with arms and legs but without minds of their own,” he concludes.
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Joe Posnanski explains, in a column published before last Sunday’s return of the prodigal son who was run out of town, why Peyton Manning means so much to Indianapolis. In the time of darkness a local sports columnist describes as “BM – Before Manning,” the Colts were so bad that Posnanski writes, “You could call ‘worst team in football’ their natural state.” Worse than that, the team was spiritually irrelevant to Indy – people in town still called them the Baltimore Colts. But then dawn broke on the time known as “AM – After Manning,” and kids in schoolyards were gesturing and screaming like their pleasingly dorkish quarterback, and he was racking up big numbers and playoff berths even while yukking it up on Saturday Night Live. Manning did that enduring, almost mythical, thing singular players do for young franchises without much else to hang their hat on – and that’s why Jim Irsay was so far off the mark with the cheap shot he may or may not have made in the week before the game, Posnanski argues. “The truth is that Manning gave Indianapolis something more than the Super Bowl ring. He gave Indianapolis a football identity,” he writes.
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Phil Mushnick wears the dunce cap (again) for a pair of columns that are so “Hey you kids, get off my lawn!” ridiculous, they tip into the sublime. He opens the first with, “Sometimes it’s hard to believe I’m actually writing what I’m writing,” which is just an excellent sign. What follows is a 1,000-word, free-form gripe-fest on all of the following and more: Baseball box scores are too small to see now on TV; commentators make up fancy and meaningless terms for football plays; baseball announcers don’t know their history; Magic Johnson sucks on TV; and, President Obama really ought to speak to Jay-Z about what he “very publicly and commercially calls black men and young women.”
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In the second column, Mushnick grumps about The History Channel abandoning its dusty, leather-bound mandate in favour of fare like American Daredevils, a smash-em-up extravaganza of redneckery. It’s obvious how tragically misguided Mushnick is when he sneers about cretins who think of “anyone being hit in the crotch by anything as funny.” Everyone knows that’s the highest form of comedy—remember this guy? (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f-wHhADhiaQ) As for griping about TV channels descending into the brain-rotting stupidity, nobody tell Mushnick that the only thing you can pick up on The Learning Channel these days is how to profit from your sequin-encrusted toddler’s misery – he will lose it.