esrosedotblog

Of all the sports I know nothing about, hockey would be the foremost. Or least most.

But I still got behind and enjoyed today's film

Red Army (2014)

which is about the best hockey team in Russia and the world in its time.

The men who were there (and one or two wives) tell their story along with many clips of the action.

What sets it off is the way the team was a propaganda force for the old Soviet regime and, in the period covered here, became "free" in the sense that the old Union dissolved with perestroika.

But it is really a human interest film, people. Which is the best kind.

I will give it a 3 out of Netflix5. I enjoyed it and once is enough for me.

Labels: films, sports

For those of us who have sat on the bench all our lives, this stuff is just a complete mystery.

Aaron Hernandez conviction: Gambling on risky players is an NFL reality

Football has always seemed brutal to me. Even when I tried to play touch as a kid. The hard tag. The grapple. The sudden fights that would flare up with kids who had a "hot temper".

Just a game? Not for these kids.

We did not have football at the tiny school I went to. MIT did not have football. I had one son who went out for it and got a shoulder injury. Maybe that was in the little league or whatever it was. I was happy it cut his career short.

I could never watch a game. But I have trouble with all the television sports. It is not in my nature to care about this activity.

I ran, I swam some, I have gone to the gym forever. But competitive sports filled me with performance anxiety. When I was a kid, gym class was a horror.

So I am not a player.

I have missed out on watching this crazy ass macho behavior up close.

So I suppose, as a bona fide sissy, I do not get to comment on something like this. But fuck that. This is just the point.

I realize that hundreds of jocks have had small and large careers without having this violent streak. OK. Gentlemen.

But it is really scary to me when grown men who are not jocks gather round and cheer on the gladiators as though they are in the pit themselves. It is just bad. Ugly.

Everyone who cheered for this guy is part of the guilt. Sorry. I cannot see it any other way.

Labels: football, sports, violence

Today, I have worked to put all my ducks in a row.

First, we saw jackets around here. Ducks.

Then we saw newscasts. Ducks.

Who are these Ducks? What kind of name is that for a sports team?

I cannot really answer either of these questions nor do I want to.

What I do know today as there are two Ducks. Hockey ducks from Anaheim, of all places. And football Ducks from Oregon. University of.

Jesus.

The sports world sows nothing but confusion for me.

It started when they said I didn't know how to hold a bat. But then I learned that to an extent and could even get some hits. But I couldn't field very well so they put me in right. I couldn't catch because the ball stung my hand even if I could get them on the ball.

Football? We didn't have it although some boys played "touch". I liked that part but all the rest, too many rules. What is a "down"?

Basketball? I could not dribble to save my ass. I could make foul shots because Butchy DeFuria and I used to wile away the hours doing that at his house.

Anyway, I am a stereotype in that department of gay lore. A sports sissy. I guess that would be a non-sports sissy as I know a few gay men who are deeply sportified.

Here I am at the other end of my life with no knowledge and no interest in any professional or amateur sports.

Oh I did run. And ran pretty well. I could finish a half marathon. But winning never crossed my mind.

Labels: sports

It is hard to make yourself look good when you don't know fuck all about what you are doing.

But "looking good" doesn't seem to have bothered George Plimpton much.

He famously made a journalism project by becoming a rookie with the Detroit Lions football team and wrote a book about it. Paper Lion.

It was a great book. I read it almost immediately after it was published. And so did everyone else.

Then he went on to do all sorts of amateur things with hard bitten professionals. Even boxing.

This is all captured nicely in a film made to celebrate his spirit.

Plimpton: Starring George Plimpton as Himself

It is a pretty good film. Plimpton was a privileged rich boy who wasn't very good at sports but as part of the role was expected to play anyway. Participate, goddam it! Which he did.

His sense of humor served him well and this shows in his first and later books.

The film goes a fair way to demonstrate that he was an unusual participant in life. Gregarious. Willing to try things.

I enjoyed it.

It is easy to swallow. Nothing bad happens and, other than his own hurt pride, there is nothing to surmount either. Plimpton has a willing spirit which, when you think about it, is a life skill. He just was able to apply it in a number of spectacular ways. He was also rich enough, just from having money, that he could fool around.

I identified with this dilettantism. I tried a lot of stuff. I had to give a lot of stuff up. But I did the best I could and I got experience. Which they say is "the best teacher". "Them" again. "They" always have these sayings.

I wouldn't want to see this movie again but I enjoyed it a great deal and remember Mr. Plimpton fondly. He died at 71 in 2003. So he was a contemporary. Five years older than me.

Labels: sports, writers

WORLD CUP

Booker and I have been watching the preparations for

The World Cup / International Pentathlon

It is just up the street headquartered in the baseball stadium and in the playing fields adjacent. Also the swimming pool. And the pavilions. Two big venues for large meetings. Really large.

Fencing, Shooting, Riding, Swimming and Running.

It is hard to see inside but the street and sidewalk levels on the one side reveal that there are horse facilities in one field along with hurdles and that kind of thing.

We did go past one side where they were exercising horses and, at least I, could see the horse head and rider.

Booker got very excited. When he was at the Airedale holding place, they had horses and he saw them every night.

I wish I could have lifted him up to see but he knew they were right there.

Guess how. And then we passed a dumpster filled with horse shit.

The photo is of the British team.

Labels: Booker, sports

FUNNY FOOTBALL

Guy Branum tells those SF Forty Niners where they live.

No. You don't need any background to see this.

You don't even need to be gay although it is funnier that way.

And you sure as fuck don't need to live in SFO because all of us gay people, "the gays" live in SFO even if we don't live there.

Labels: gay culture, gay fun, sports

THE MAN

A hero*.

Stan Musial, One of the Game’s Greatest Hitters, Dies at 92

Stan the Man.

It seems that he has been around all my life and, of course, that is damn near the case.

I always liked him, secretly, because he was the only well known man, at the time, who had the same name as my middle name which I didn't want anyone to know. Now I do not care.

Other than that, me being a quasi baseball fan, I mostly appreciated his manners and personal charm.

A gentleman.

I remember that the last I saw him was when he went to the White House for Obama to pin a Medal of Freedom on his chest.

“There is only one way to pitch to Musial — under the plate,” Leo Durocher, the manager of the Brooklyn Dodger and New York Giant teams that Musial often victimized, once said.

* a hero has hit 90 years of age and is personally admired

Labels: hero, sports

BOYCOTT

Well, not really. But yes. I am going to quit wearing New Balance.

I have been a loyal buyer over a number of years but, it turns out, they are now owned by a right wing christian bigot and that is all it takes for me to bolt.

I originally went to NB for a "cause". They were one of the few, the only perhaps, manufacturers that still made athletic shoes in the USA. Union.

That is no longer the case.

I have been thinking about the shift for awhile, but a son has made the switch and mentioned it and that was my tipping point. Thanks Tom.

I am going back to an old favorite. Asics.

I ran with Asics for years.

Now I will walk. In a few days I will be getting my first pair. The ASICS Men's GEL-Tech Walker Neo Walking Shoe

Labels: gym, sports

SPORTSARAMA

Labels: fun, sports

FIRST IN OUR HEARTS

Last night, the MIT men's basketball team competed in the Division III Final Four game for the first time ever in its 112-year history.

The Engineers, one win away from the National Championship round, were riding a 13-game winning streak into the showdown with the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater, a Division III power making their fifth trip to the Final Four.

They lost but gained.

The final score.

This team has been moving forward every year in the last five.

Most MIT teams are not considered top of the line. It used to be champs at fencing. But none of the watched sports.

It is great to see this happen.

Now. Back to the books.

Labels: MIT, sports

BLOW

I hear that today is the super bowl and that the New England team is playing. There is only one, right?

Beyond that I do not know about it.

I left football the year that I got hit in the face with a ball or maybe it was the year that someone scratched my dignity by pulling me down in the grass.

Maybe it was the year I realized I didn't know how to throw or catch the ovoid pig bladder. I guess it is the skin, huh.

Maybe I left when the other kids knew which side to run toward when there was a hike. A lineup. Whatever it is that goes on after the huddle.

I liked the huddle part.

People ran in all directions and I had no idea what was going on. If I was thrown the ball, I shrieked and ran away from it. Well, not really, but I often did run the wrong way. People quit throwing it to me.

So I quit playing. And as a result never learned the rules, the strategy and tactics or anything else about the game.

This continued life long.

My Dad wasn't interested in sports in general. At all. Football being the least of these. So. No role model. Not his fault. He liked professional wrestling and we even went to some local shows but that isn't sports.

I do not really understand basketball or hockey. A blur. Both of them. We had no ice and while we did play basketball, I never learned how to dribble. If I got the ball in gym class i would throw it away to someone else. Mostly I haunted the, ahh, what is it? The backcourt? I don't know.

So, it is really that I do not watch any professional sport and have no interest in it.

But football is everywhere now. Unavoidable. It used to be that if you were gay, you were inoculated against football fever. But no more. Half the guys I know will be cuddling up together today watching the tube. I suspect that it is to see the the commercials and the half time entertainment, Madonna!

But I can't stand her either.

This afternoon or whenever it is, I will be doing something else, somewhere else. When I walk Booker, the streets will be deserted. Fine. Another year has passed. Same reaction. I hope that the Patriots win because of my geographical orientation and that my family is into it.

Labels: sports

END ZONED

Americans can make a fad about anything and once that happens, a website is sure to follow.

I am fascinated with this.

My latest discovery is

TEBOWING

Football player, heavy christer, comes in toward the end of a game and performs miracles. Just like our lord and savior. Evidently. And in the spirit of the thing he drops to pray. The half kneel.

I know that you know all about this but I am writing for a few people who do not live in our christian country or, perhaps, as I, have no interest at all in the sport, or moreover, are repulsed by such behavior in public, reinforced at it is by his tiresome witnessing for the lord in post game interviews.

My interest is in the hilarious cult of "tebowing" in which people find the most amazing goddamned places to do the act and mostly, as far as I can tell, with a strong sense of irony and even mockery. To say nothing of irreligiosity.

Many are hilarious. All a lot of fun.

There are a shit load of them. I go to the site every day to keep up with the torrent of submissions.

Here is the man who started it all.

Labels: christist watch, fun, religion, sports

ONE HIT AT A TIME

I have sort of fazed out of baseball. Palm Springs' Power is in season now, a summer league no longer a farm team. The old Palm Springs Heat. Affiliated with the Angels.

I so wanted to go there when we came here but they left before we made it.

Any way, I still admire some of it from afar. The old guys. Some of the new.

This op-ed in the NYTimes really rang my baseball bells.

What Derek Jeter's 3000 Hits Really Mean

by Doug Glanviille, a good player and now an ESPN head as well as an author.

This is about the baseball that I know. No taint of the steroids. Just plain good ball playing.

And a very good metaphor for life.

Jeter’s career has been more like a plateau curve. He came on the scene at 20, made a near-instant impact, then stayed remarkably consistent and virtually injury-free year in and year out, cruising on a plane of excellence. In many respects, he spoiled us. When you progress on a flat line, outside observers are lulled into the tacit expectation that this is how it’s supposed to be. Players like this produce so deceptively that we miss the escalating work ethic required to stave off age, the sheer dominating focus it takes to be so steady at such a high level.

Now we are watching him slow down, finding out that not even Jeter can avoid the human condition. The fact that the Yankees won 14 of 18 games during his recent time on the D.L. is a reminder that even great personal accomplishment stands on shaky ground when it comes to a humming team machine. So Jeter has two ways to go. He could take his foot off the pedal and ride gravity down the gradual curve to the bottom. Or, it could end much as it began for him and he’ll go down as precipitously as he rose in the game, though his superhero status in the eyes of his supporters may grant him a parachute to soften the landing.

Meanwhile, we’ve enjoyed the counting, hit by hit. And once my kids start to learn about numbers in the thousands, I will tell them that the story of Derek Jeter’s journey to 3,000 wasn’t about numbers at all. It was really about the infinite nature of human possibility.

It is about the hard work a day at a time. And staying with it.

All of our lives could be measured this way including the inevitable decline. I can tell you about that from my own experience.

At the end, you have to let the parachute take you down. And go with it.

And enjoy thinking about the trip that got me here.

Labels: sports

FOR OUR FRIENDS IN TORONTO

Labels: gay life, sports

HARMON KILLEBREW HARMON KILLEBREW HARMON KILLEBREW

He was my age. A natural hero. No chemicals. They said that he got his strength from lifting milk cans.

Eight seasons with over 40 homers.

I always liked him because I loved his name. I can't say it enough. Weird but true.

I don't know another thing about him.

Somehow this touched me.

Harmon Killebrew, Hall of Fame Slugger for the Minnesota Twins, Dies at 74

Maybe it is the "my age" part too.

Labels: sports

THE REIGN IN SPAIN

So, Spain beat the Netherlands for the World Cup.

I am sorry for my orange shirted friend of this morning.

I suppose that people will now feel sorry for me when I go walk the dog in orange. Inappropriately. But still. I will look sad.

Labels: sports

NETHERLANDS

We went on the long Sunday three guy walk today. John, Booker, and I. Me?

Along the way we met a guy who John has seen before. A nice young gay man with a poodle who adores Booker.

He asked me about the World Cup? Was I excited about the game?

I was clueless.

Then he pointed to his shirt and then at mine. Orange. Both of them.

I actually asked him which side that was. So totally out of the loop about this kind of thing.

But he was kind. Netherlands. He had a Dutch accent. I got it.

When I put out my clothes for the morning I just took the next tee shirt. Orange.

I picked the plaid pants that has some orange in it to go along.

No thought at all.

But now, me? I am excited about The Netherlands winning today.

He said the game is at 2. Or something.

Who are they playing? What color shirt are they going to wear?

Labels: sports

FRAMED

I don't have a lot of interest in the whole Tiger Woods thing.

I figure that anyone who is named Tiger from the get-go (his real name is Eldrick Tont Woods, so much the worse) has a rough row to how.

Tiger. Go get 'em. All that.

And I don't care for golf at all. Not a sport. They don't even walk.

But I have some empathy for the guy in his position.

Yeh, it is hubris in the most intense way. The mighty tiger has been brought down by his own pride. No that is lions, huh?

So now there is the new Nike ad.

There is a lot of finger wagging. The lame-brained news reader on CNN's morning news(?) show said it seemed "creepy" to her. Well, she should know about "creepy".

I don't think that it is creepy at all. Take a look.

I agree with this guy. I think that it is a fabulous piece of theater.

In defense of Tiger Woods' Nike ad

It is a show stopper. A WTF moment.

It doesn't apply to any of the memes that are out there.

They have let the media frame this thing and now they are taking the frame back.

What does it mean?

I await the followup to this. Nike has decided to double down on the Tiger investment.

Labels: culture, sports

AMAYSING GRACE

Pete Hamill writes like an angel.

A long time ago in America, there was a beautiful game called baseball. This was before 30 major-league teams were scattered in a blurry variety of divisions; before 162-game seasons and extended playoffs and fans who watched World Series games in thick down jackets; before the D.H. came to the American League; before AstroTurf on baseball fields and aluminum bats on sandlots; before complete games by pitchers were a rarity; before ballparks were named for corporations instead of individuals; and long, long before the innocence of the game was permanently stained by the filthy deception of steroids.

In that vanished time, there was a ballplayer named Willie Mays.

The number of people who remember those times is diminishing. Fast.

Many baseball fans today have no literal memory for it and some have put the memories aside. Awash in the glitz of the present enterprise, nee game.

I don't know whether to write about Hamill or Mays.

Both are a vanished breed. The hero who needs a historian to tell the story of his times. The historian who needs heroes.

Well, either.

Hamill is older than me by two years.

He didn't write the book.

Willy Mays: The Life, the Legend by James Hirsch

He wrote the review.

I came into baseball by way of the sand lot. The neighborhood softball game. I was something of a sissie but I could play softball. I had my career highs. They let me pitch once on a desperate day. Mostly I played right field as a lot of us little closet homos did. It is an old story. It isn't that we couldn't play the game. It was the idea that if we felt like we did about our other team members we thought we couldn't play the game.

Years later, I played it fine.

In any case, if you played softball, you knew baseball. You had a team. You followed the team. You read about them in the paper. You listened about them on the radio. You listened to the games.

I was a Brooklyn Dodgers Fan. The opposite of a Giant's fan.

But everyone loved Willy. He transcended sides. He broke the barriers.

Hamill was probably in the same boat as I was. Same age. Irredeemably straight but we meet at the same point. Baseball. Willy. Actually his kid pictures look a little sissyish.

Stan Cheslock, an irredeemably straight pollock kid with a breathtaking body was my Willy Mays tutor. He was also, obviously, a Giant's fan. He lived over a store where I worked and was in my class at school. We would yak during breaks and when I was supposed to be breaking down cartons out back. Stan's Dad was the store's butcher.

When Stan talked, I listened. So I learned a lot about Willy Mays and the Giants.

Hey. Learning occurs as a result of various stimulations. Mine was talking to Stan with his shirt off while he was shooting hoops. He was also the school basketball star. And totally entwined with Effie Rider. When together they were seamless.

Funny but Mays had a build just like Stan. The same musculature. Another entwinement. But it helped make the story stick.

I started paying almost as much attention to Mays as I did to Stan.

I didn't discover Pete Hamill until I was reading the Village Voice in the old days. The 60s or the 70s. Before it got all weird and shit. Corporate. Like baseball, fucked and fucked up.

Hamill is a ballsy writer. A little like Stan Cheslock in print. Muscly. Spare. Could hit the basket, swish. Every time. A peerless workman. And a gift of gab that he could write out. Irish to the core. Ethnic. Poland isn't that far from Ireland. But Hamill is totally New Yawk. I never saw him with his shirt off.

Very nice. Willy and Mike. And here they are together on the same page. Stan couldn't make it, except in my mind'e eye. He is here in spirit.

I haven't read the review yet. I probably won't get the book. I am not much on bios and, I think, Stan Cheslock told me the entire story anyhow. They way I want to hear it anyhow.

Labels: books, nostalgia, sports

CHEERS

There don't seem to be as many home town moments in America as there used to be.

Maybe because we leave our home towns as soon as we can. Maybe because there is so much information pushed at us that we miss the little stories that mean so much. The ones about community.

I was very touched by this.

THIS LAND: For a Moment of Glory, Mastering a Million Details

The Olympian gold winner Hannah Kearney returns home to accolades from her townies.

I love that the story is not so much about Hannah but about the town that turned out for her.

It made me teary.

I live in a small city now. Well, 40,000 some people, half of whom are not here all year.

It ain't the same.

But I'm not the same either. I left my small town when I was 18 and I never went back.

Oh yes. I went home to visit my parents and a bare minimum of my extended family. But I was on my way. Busy. Headed in other directions all of which were labeled "away".

As far as possible.

But there are some kid memories of the community that still remain and feel good.

I found a lot of wonderful times in life "away" and I don't regret leaving but I can keep the small town memories green and be happy when I read about another small town that puts aside its differences for a little celebration of a once in a life time event.

Labels: nostalgia, sports