Silenced summer

I wrote this today for my old employer, the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette.  Please subscribe, on account of local journalism is a vital public service and has never been more so than now.

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So now we know, finally, and here is another hole in our Plague Summer.

There will be no baseball this year at the corner of Ewing and Jefferson. Game called on account of respiration.

Respiration is how COVID-19 spreads and it’s what it affects, and so minor-league baseball, which dawdled until the shadow of July hoping it would abate, finally pulled the plug Tuesday. The minors are shuttering the season, and that means the TinCaps are shuttering the season, and that means the lights are not going to come up in Parkview Field this summer.

This is more than just a shame. This is a financial hit that will resonate far beyond 2020.

Part of that is because the minors do not have the chunky TV deals that clubs could use to sustain themselves if protocols dictate they must keep their ballparks empty or half-empty. And part of it is because Major League Baseball, which never saw a dime on a sidewalk it wouldn’t stoop to pick up, figures it hasn’t yet shaken enough coin out of the Fort Waynes and Lansings and South Bends.

And so last fall, MLB decided to put the squeeze on. It rolled out a plan to kick 40 or so minor-league teams -- and their communities, of course -- out of the affiliate club. That’s almost a quarter of all minor-league affiliates.

In other words, MLB didn’t want to just prune the minor-league tree. It wanted to cut the damn thing down and chop it up for firewood.

Then came the plague, of course.

And now a lost summer.

And now the likelihood MLB will use the resulting financial distress to strong-arm a better deal out of the minors.

Lovely. Just lovely.

And in the meantime?

In the meantime, our summer evenings are full of tumbleweeds.

There will be no lights, no camera, no action. No one will be dropping into JK O’Donnell’s or Rudy’s or O’Reilly’s or the Sidecar for a postgame drink. Jake the Diamond Dog will not be eliciting “awww’s” from his legion of admirers; the Zooperstars will not be bobbling around the place; the Bad Apple Dancers will perhaps take a crack at ballet.

Worst of all, there will be no September 14.

There will not be the late-summer dark coming down and the joint  rocking and Robert Lara coming to the plate in the bottom of the 10^th, the score tied and the season teetering. There will not be a pitch, a swing, a tiny white dot sailing into the black night.

Coming down, finally, in the lawn seating beyond the center-field wall, out there among the dads and the moms and the kids on their spread blankets.

Game over. TinCaps win the Midwest League semifinals, three games to two. Eleven years ago.

It was the first summer in Parkview Field and the best summer, full of magic and wonder and a championship, and a downtown stirring from its long slumber. And that September 14 was the best of the best, with the baseball growing smaller against the night and the place erupting and Lara screaming for joy after he crossed the plate.

A photo of that moment hangs in the hallway outside The Journal Gazette newsroom. I used to pass it every morning as I came upstairs.  Every time I did, it made me smile.

I’m smiling now, just thinking about it.

 

And then I’m not.

The conscience of the coin

So Mississippi will excise the wink to white supremacy in its state flag, and here is more Erasing Of History or Political Correctness or whatever fiction those who wink themselves choose to advance.

Truth is, this is not so much about erasing history as it is restoring it. The ones who did the erasing went to their reward a hundred and more years ago, comforted by the assumption they would rest for eternity in the shade of Lee and Jackson and other monuments to neo-Confederate revisionism.

That came to be after the Klan and other Confederate dead-enders violently killed Reconstruction and birthed Jim Crow, which was just slavery with its shoes on. And with it came this odd notion that the War was about states' rights and federal overreach and the tyranny of a government hell-bent on telling everyone how to live.

Which, for the states of the Confederacy, included the proposition that human beings of color were not human beings at all, but property. And that whites were the superior race, and we'll mount Lee and Jackson in the town square and put the Stars and Bars on our state flags to remind y'all of that.

Corrective measures had to wait a good long time, but at last they're coming. And as usual in America, it's straight cash that's greasing the wheel.

Don't be fooled. When Mississippi lawmakers voted Sunday to remove the Stars and Bars from the corner of their state flag, it wasn't because they had a blinding revelation or a sudden attack of conscience. It was, at least partly, because of something a gentleman named Greg Sankey said a week ago.

Sankey, you see, is the commissioner of the Southeastern Conference. And what he said was the SEC would no longer bring any championship events to Mississippi until the state got rid of that vile little wink in its flag. And with those events, of course, would go the revenue they generate.

One day later, the NCAA joined in, expanding its Confederate flag policy to prohibit its own championship events from states continuing to cling to white supremacy's standard of choice.

And there went some more potential dollars flapping out the window.

And a week later, the Mississippi lege decides, by golly, maybe after 155 years it's time we let go the symbol of a dead quasi-nation built on oppression and murder.

Funny how that works.

Inevitable providence

You know what happens next, of course. Come on, now. This one's easy.

What happens is Cam Newton goes to New England with a one-year deal hung with incentives like ornaments on a Christmas tree, and becomes 2015 Cam again. His bum foot will come around and he'll play like 21 instead of 31 and for the love of God, will someone please make this stop?

Sure, sure. He hasn't played a full season since 2017 and the conventional wisdom is he's been mediocre at best since his 2015 MVP season, but that's not entirely true. In 2018 he threw for 3,395 yards and 24 touchdowns in 14 games and completed 67.9 percent of his passes, and ran for 488 more yards with four more TDs, averaging 7.2 yards per carry.

So if the foot comes around and he doesn't get hurt again, the Patriots could once again luck into a pretty sweet deal. And of course they will, because they're the Patriots. So Cam will probably throw for a gazillion yards and run for a gazillion more and score a pile of touchdowns and, I don't know, leap tall buildings in a single bound or something.

You thought the Patriots were done when Tom Brady walked out the door?

That rumbling you hear is Belichick chuckling.

Dammit.

Proceeding skeptically

Roger Penske was as right as ham-on-rye, when he said what he did last month. The Indianapolis 500 without the usual Sea O' Humanity is not the Indianapolis 500 at all.

The fans are an integral part of the whole Greatest Spectacle in Racing, because it's not a Spectacle without them. They are wedded to the event unlike any other sporting event in the world. Run the race without them, and it's just a pile of shrieking exotic machines going really fast in a circle for three hours.

So Penske announced there would be no 500 without the fans. And he was right.

I'm not so sure about what he announced yesterday.

Which is, the race will go off on August 23 as scheduled, and, yes, there will be fans in the stands. As a concession to the Bastard Plague and public safety, however, the Speedway will only allow its storied grounds to be filled to 50 percent capacity.

The obvious mean thing to say here is "Oh, so it'll basically be the NASCAR race, then."

Which isn't exactly true, mind you. What it actually will be is the NASCAR race times about two.

But put aside for now the Brickyard 400, which was social distancing before social distancing was cool. This is about the 500. This is about as many as 175,000 humans occupying the same place on August 23, and the advisability of that.

Because here's the thing, see: The Bastard Plague isn't going anywhere.

Yes, we're two months out from August 23, and, yes, a lot can happen between now and then. But no rational person can look at what's happening in the country right now and think the Bastard Plague is going to be anything but an even more widespread pandemic than it already is.

The Speedway's announcement, after all, played out in a nation that seems largely to have decided the Plague is over and so it's back to doing whatever you want, whenever you want, because "Freedom!" It is bulwarked in this by an administration that has largely decided the Plague is over, too. Its complete divorce from reality, and that of a good bit of the nation's, seems irrevocable.

Our leaders, such as they are, insist the Plague is under control and the nation is on the rebound, even as the number of cases mushroom again and rock-ribbed conservative governors shut down their states once more. But, hey, no worries!

And don't tell me I have to wear some damn mask, because God and Bill Gates and 5G and Fake Media and sex traffickers and the Democrats.

Meanwhile, the European Union, not noticeably afflicted with our madness, is contemplating severe travel restrictions on those crazy Americans. And the 500 will go on, if not like always then something resembling it.

What the Speedway has going for it in this venture is its very size, which so massive and sprawling 175,000 possibly infected souls will not be like 175,000 souls anywhere else. Social distancing should not be a problem when it takes you a good 20 minutes to hike from the hinterlands out in turn three to Gasoline Alley. And the Speedway will hand out masks and sanitizer to everyone who enters the grounds.

But use of the masks will only be recommended, which means most of them likely won't get used. Social distancing might be observed, but it's hard to see -- again, given how sprawling the place is -- how the Speedway will be able to keep people from congregating. And, well ...

And, well, the Blob is compelled to be Debbie Downer again.

I don't think August 23 is going to happen. I don't think the Plague will have abated enough, if at all, for it to be feasible for 175,000 to gather in one place, albeit a really, really big place.

I hope I'm wrong. I hope the country regains its sanity before then. But I'm not holding my breath.

Though that's probably a good idea right now.

A picture is worth ...

Well, well, well. So a storyline that got knocked into a cocked hat now gets knocked into another cocked hat.

Possible reactions to the photo of the noose in Bubba Wallace's garage from the Grassy Knoll/Those Black Folk Are Always Making Everything About Racism contingent:

"Pffft. NASCAR totally photoshopped that."

"That doesn't even look like a pull rope. Totally fake."

"You can tell that ain't Talladega."

"That's not a noose. A noose looks like this (displays photo of something that looks exactly like the noose in Wallace's garage)"

And of course:

"BUBBA WALLACE DID IT HIMSELF."

Look. You can say all of that. You can assume NASCAR's leadership is comprised entirely of soulless, morally bankrupt individuals who'd actually concoct something this vile themselves so they could exploit it for ratings. You can say they're straight-up, bald-faced lying about checking out all the garages on their circuit and finding only 11 whose pull ropes were fashioned in a loop, and only one done up like a noose -- garage No. 4 at Talladega, which just happened to be assigned to Wallace's team for last weekend's race.

You can say all that.

Or you can wonder how such a thing escaped notice last October, a semi-legit question.

You can wonder that even though it clearly didn't escape notice, because someone obviously told the investigators about it.

You can wonder who fashioned that pull rope into a noose, and if that person was trying to send a message in doing so or was simply making some sort of stupid sick joke. And if no one said anything about it at the time because everyone just assumed it was some sort of stupid sick joke.

You can wonder, finally, if someone maybe did tell NASCAR about it at the time, or if a NASCAR official actually noticed it himself -- which, as someone who's spent a fair amount of time in a NASCAR garage area, is not as likely as you might think it is.

But if NASCAR did know about it?

Well. Then we need to be asking who assigns the garages.

Because it's a little hard for me to buy that Wallace's team just happened to be the team that was assigned to the garage with the noose hanging in it. That's a bit too much of a coincidence for me to swallow.

But then, I have a suspicious nature sometimes, too.

Your downer post for today

Look, I want it all back just like everyone does. I want baseball and football and basketball and all those other assorted Sportsballs.

And so like everyone I cheered the news there will be a Major League Baseball season after all, even if it's a sawed-off 60-game season. The NBA is still moving ahead with its Weird Thrown-Together Thing in Orlando. NASCAR is back, sort of, and IndyCar, sort of, and, across the pond, Premier League soccer, sort of.

Good news all around. Except ...

Except I see a massive separation from reality here, from a White House that abandoned it some time ago down to all the mask-less folks cramming into bars elbow-to-elbow because the Bastard Plague is, like, over, man.

But it is not over. In fact, it's raging hotter, in a bunch of states, than it was a couple of months ago.

States that disdained prolonged lockdowns, and even sought to prohibit local regulations regarding mask-wearing and such, are seeing record numbers of cases. Arizona's hospitals are at capacity. The nation as a whole is again approaching its all-time high for daily new cases, and the body count is at 124,000 and inexorably rising. By October it could be closing in on 200,000.

It's gotten so bad in Texas, one of the hotspots, that even the state's right-wing governor is telling people to for God's sake stay home if at all possible. In Texas, he's saying this.

And yet we go blithely on. And therefore the Blob has a prediction no one wants to hear right now:

In the coming Sportsball vs. Bastard Plague tilt, the Bastard Plague is going to win.

I will be shocked if baseball makes it through 60 games and an asterisked World Series without having to shut down again, given that multiple players are already showing red for COVID-19 and some states are restricting travel from viral hotspots like Texas (home of the Rangers and Astros), Arizona (home of the Diamondbacks) and Florida (home to the Rays and Marlins.) And who knows when Canada will re-open the borders currently closed to those traveling from the U.S., thereby isolating the poor Blue Jays.

And basketball?

Both the NBA and WNBA are setting up their 'bubbles" in Florida, for God's sake. A number of WNBA players have therefore already said they're sitting out the planned 22-game season. And the NBA, like baseball, has already had players test positive -- among them Malcolm Brogdon of the Pacers.

College football? The NFL?

Starting to think those are pipe dreams, too.

At Texas and Kansas State  and elsewhere, preseason camps had to be shut down before they'd barely begun when multiple players tested positive. That only figures to get worse when the students come back, as multiple universities are unaccountably deciding it's safe to do.

NFL, same deal. High school football, same deal.

There's a bill in Congress now, for instance, that would bully school districts into putting your kids back in the classrooms by threatening to cut off their federal funding. Your tax dollars at work.

Look. I hope I'm wrong about all of this. I hope the Bastard Plague doesn't continue to feed on our mindlessness. I hope it burns itself out by fall, or just goes away the way Our Only Available Impeached President seems to think it will.

But given the circumstances, I think the chances of that happening are zero.

And the chances Sportsball World will live long and prosper in 2020?

Well, not zero. But not much more than that.

Cynics' carnival

Some days I look at it, this strange curdled place we're in, and I wonder when it happened.

I wonder when, and how, this hardened newsroom cynic got passed by the World At Large.

I don't remember the World At Large coming up on my shoulder, and feeling its straining breath ... and seeing it out of the corner of my eye ... and then the side of my eye ... and then right in front of me, drawing away with every stride.

I had such a big lead, I thought. No one was going to out-sneer me.

But today the happy news comes down that Bubba Wallace apparently was not the victim of a hate crime, that his team just happened to be assigned a Talladega garage stall with a pull rope that someone, last fall perhaps, had fashioned into a loop for convenience sake. Looked like a noose, yes, it did. Apparently wasn't.

Let the cynics' carnival begin.

What obvious shenanigans by NASCAR to gin up its ratings ...

How could anyone have looked at that and NOT known what it was?

Whole thing was a hoax, a farce, another "racism" false flag ...

There goes the Media again, jumping to conclusions ...

All that and worse. Bunch of people howling with far more passion than they ever did when we all thought it was a despicable act of hate directed at Wallace. Almost doing a gleeful little victory dance that it wasn't, because they knew all along this racism stuff was a big put-on.

Talk about cynical. But allow a now second-place cynic to back up the truck a bit on all this.

Here's the situation: You're NASCAR. You've just banned the Confederate flag from your venues, incurring a vicious backlash from the diehards and the rednecks and the heritage-not-hate folks. The guy who pushed you into banning the Stars and Bars, and brought down the backlash, is the only Black driver in your top series. And suddenly someone notices a pull rope fashioned into what surely looks like a noose in that driver's assigned garage.

Why, that couldn't possibly be a "message" aimed at your only Black driver, could it? Especially given the circumstances and the national mood right now?

So, yes, NASCAR's poobahs jumped to a conclusion, but it was an exceedingly short hop. And they released a statement -- which they probably shouldn't have done, but, again, the circumstances and the national mood and what other conclusion could rational minds have drawn?

So they sent out a statement. The media duly reported it, therefore making the same short conclusive hop. Maybe some reporter should have said "Ah, this sounds like BS" and taken 24 or 48 hours to thoroughly check it out -- but given that it looked, again, like a thoroughly credible story, and that every media outlet in the country was climbing over each other to break it, that's not really realistic.

After all, no one said "hold the presses, we've gotta make sure it wasn't just a mistake" when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. Media outlets went with it instantly, because in this case a rush to judgment was hardly a rush to judgment.

So the media reported it, and then it reported that there was going to be an investigation, and then it reported what that investigation found. Please explain to me what they were supposed to do that they didn't do.

The irony here is the people shouting loudest about a rush to judgment are rushing to judgment themselves, and worse. Why, they just know it was all a setup by NASCAR. Look at the ratings the race got on Monday! Look at what great pub they got from that little sideshow before the race!

Well. I'm still cynical enough to think some of the folks saying all that might have their own agendas. 

In any case, however it played out, it doesn't diminish an iota the spectacle of every driver and crew member walking Wallace's car to the front of the field, because even if what happened wasn't an act of hate everyone believed it was. That moment was real. Bubba Wallace's tears were real. Eighty-two-year-old Richard Petty showing up to, as he said, "hug his driver," was real.

And if it was all a reaction to something that apparently turned out not to be true?

Irrelevant. Because it remains a clear, eloquent statement about where NASCAR is and where it's going, backlash be damned. 

Cynics, too.

The stubbornness of grace

You forget, sometimes, that theirs is a brotherhood of experience. That not everyone knows what it's like to climb in a bellowing beast and drive for three-plus hours at cartoon speeds, while 40 or so others whirl around you at the same speeds.

They fuss, these stock car boys. They occasionally fight. But in the end, it comes to this: Racers be racers.

You come after one of them, you're coming after all of them.

And so a day after a noose was found hanging in Bubba Wallace's garage stall at Talladega , placed there almost certainly by some Neanderthal insider angry at NASCAR for joining the 21st century, this happened. They surrounded Bubba Wallace's car, and they escorted it to the front of the field.

Drivers. Crew members. Officials. All of them.

I don't know what message the despicable creature with the noose thought he was delivering. But it sure wasn't the message that was received.

Good on ya, NASCAR. Good on ya, indeed.

 

Update: The FBI has determined the noose in Wallace's garage was actually the garage pull rope looped in a noose, and has been that way since last fall. It was only dumb luck that Wallace's team happened to be assigned to that garage.

 

The Blob's take: Thank God.

 

The Blob's further take: Although it was an easy assumption to make that Wallace was targeted, given the national mood, the howls of protest from certain quarters over NASCAR's banning of the Confederate flag, and the fact you couldn't swing a dead cat outside the track without hitting some yokel with a Confederate flag Sunday.

 

The Blob's further, further take: This does nothing, zilch, zero to diminish the NASCAR family's reaction Monday to a perceived attack on one of their own. Still NASCAR's finest moment ever.

The stubbornness of legacy

The Confederate flag flew high over NASCAR again Sunday afternoon, despite NASCAR's best efforts to finally shed it. Some social distancing just can't get distant enough, it seems.

What happened was, some joker got his hands on a plane and trailed a banner over Talladega (Ala.) Superspeedway. The banner had the Stars and Bars on it. It read DEFUND NASCAR.

And so the South, or at least some people's South, rose again, deep in the aorta of a state stained with the blood of racial justice martyrs. And NASCAR was once more flung back to the days of spiritual Jeb Stuarts high-tailing it around mean little rings of dirt in moonlighting likker cars.

It also gave the lie to something the Blob wrote a little over a week ago.

It wrote then that NASCAR wasn't NASCAR anymore, that it was "no longer a regional curiosity thick with Lost Cause wistfulness." Turns out that was only half-true.

NASCAR, see, is no longer a regional curiosity within its boardrooms, and no one there wishes it to be. But the Lost Cause wistfulness remains, at least among a certain segment of NASCAR's  constituency.

They package it now as "heritage, not hate," but nobody's fooled. Ask them what heritage it is they're celebrating, and invariably what emerges is a barely veiled yearning for the day of Jim Crow and "White" and "Colored" drinking fountains and the back of the bus. No one will say it that way, but get down to the guts of it and it's nostalgia for the "states' rights'" that bulwarked white hegemony, and the gun and the club and the noose for anyone disposed to challenge them.

Which brings us to something else that flew Sunday over NASCAR, in a manner of speaking.

Someone, somehow, left a noose in the garage of Bubba Wallace -- who just happens to be the only African-American in the Cup series, and who just happens to be the man who pushed hardest for NASCAR to banish the Confederate flag from its premises for good. And whose 43 car displayed a Black Lives Matter paint scheme last week at Martinsville.

All of this was apparently too uppity for Lost Cause Nation. And so one of them -- presumably one of them -- left the age-old dark warning.

What's a mystery is who it was, and how they managed to do it. Understand, no one just walks uninvited into a NASCAR garage; try it and you'll be greeted with a "Get the hell away from the car!" snarl. They hold their cards tight against their chests, these NASCAR folks. State secrets are less neurotically guarded than the secrets of speed.

So it's hard to see a scenario in which someone from the outside was able to deposit a noose without being seen/challenged/told to get the hell away from the car. I suppose it depends on where, exactly, the noose was discovered. Or when exactly it was placed there.

In any case,  all those words written these past weeks about how NASCAR has truly changed and, boy, what a great day of turning this is, now become forfeit. The most shameful aspects of the sport's legacy are, it seems, as stubborn as lemon balm. You can dig it up by the roots, but the roots somehow grow back.

In which case, the only solution is for the roots themselves to refuse to grow back.

In the week or so since NASCAR disavowed the flag of white supremacy and racism for good and all, more than a few Lost Cause types have said they'd never watch NASCAR again. The diehards showed up with their Confederate flags anyway Sunday -- the streets outside the track were a virtual parade of Stars and Bars -- but NASCAR can only hope they really are diehards, and that the stubborn clingers to an oppressive and disgraced legacy are as good as their word.

In other words: So leave, already.

Worst year ever, Part 1,348

And now Jim Kiick is gone.

Jim Kiick: Who was either Butch Cassidy or the Sundance Kid to Larry Csonka in the Sidekick Backfield for the fabled Miami Dolphins of the early '70s. And who posed leaning against the goalpost with a big you-know-what-eating grin on his face in the equally fabled Sports Illustrated cover in which Csonka gave America a sly finger.

Oh, 2020. That's a real nice house you've got there.

Be a shame if something happened to it.

Worst year ever, Part 1,347

Thaaat's right, 2020. Keep it up. Juuuust keep it up.

You've given us the Bastard Plague; and the deaths of a bunch of beloved figures both foreign and domestic, in sports and otherwise; and marching in the streets from people who are fed up with alleged officers of the law acting as judge, jury and executioner on people of color.

 

You really are cruisin' for a bruisin', 2020. Don't even think we're just gonna let you walk out the door at midnight on January 1. We're gonna launch your ass into space.

 

Because you just won't stop doing ... things.

The latest comes from Siena, Italy, and might be the worst. Word has come that Alex Zanardi is fighting for his life after suffering serious head trauma in a collision with a truck during a Paralympic handbike race.

Let me tell you why this is an especially dick move from an especially dick year.

If you don't know who Alex Zanardi is, here's his story: He was a Formula One and IndyCar racer of some repute who lost his legs in a horrific accident in an IndyCar race in 2001. Then he launched a truly amazing second act, becoming a premier Paralympic athlete who won four Paralympic Games gold medals competing on the handbike in 2012 and 2016.

As such, he became the living embodiment of the old adage that when God closes one door, he opens another. And of course he also became an inspiration to those with physical disabilities everywhere.

Now this. Now he's back fighting for his life again after another horrific accident.

You are an unfiltered son of a bitch, 2020. And several other things the Blob will not repeat here.

Tackled for a loss

By now, we all know who Dr. Anthony Fauci is. He's that annoying parent who periodically shows up to tell us to eat our lima beans or we won't get any dessert.

He's the national scold who fengs our shui, harshes our mellow, crashes our Pretend World party with a six-pack of Reality Beer -- which is even more gross than that cheap crap you drank in college.

(He's also, according to the Grassy Knoll People, the errand boy for the Medical Deep State. Which as we all know really exists and is run by Bill Gates, who wants to use a COVID-19 vaccine to Implant Microchips In Our Bodies and Control Us With His Evil Vulcan Mind Meld. I think Hillary, George Soros and the Klingons are involved, too, but frankly I can't keep up with the crazy.)

In any case, here the good doctor was again the other day, and this time he went too far. This time he went after football.

Said, sorry, dreamers and Domers, but if the NFL (or the colleges) don't figure out a way to play in a COVID-19 "bubble," they probably shouldn't play at all. Because the Bastard Plague isn't going anywhere any time soon, and in fact is staging a massive comeback in states that decided it was a violation of their citizens' constitutional rights to wear a mask or practice social distancing, and so (with a wave of their magic wands, presumably) declared the Plague to be over.

Which brings to Texas, of course.

Where the Texas Longhorns football team arrived on campus this week to begin voluntary workouts, and immediately ran into a snag. Thirteen players tested positive for the Bastard Plague and immediately went into quarantine, along with 10 more identified through contact tracing. So 23 of the 58 players who showed up are now unavailable to head coach Tom Herman.

You don't need major cognitive powers to see how this ends, especially with university presidents and governors declaring that, by golly, our college campuses will be open for business this fall. The students will come back and, being college kids, largely ignore the good-faith protocols put in place by their universities. And they'll start contracting and spreading the virus.

Minus Dr. Fauci's bubble, they'll mingle with some of the football players, who will then also start showing red for the Plague.

Which will mean more quarantining.

Which will in turn further disrupt preparations for the season.

Which will in turn force schedules to be altered, games moved or canceled, the entire season thrown into a big fat jolly ball of hot mess.

Of course, this is just theoretically speaking. But how you can not see it going down this way?

And so if there's going to be football, it's going to have to be all kinds of different. Circumstances will compel it. There's simply no other rational way to look at it without retreating to Pretend World, where the virus will magically disappear the moment they tee it up, because by God no Bastard Plague is going to take on football.

In the meantime, in the real world, 120,000 Americans are now dead of the Plague in less than four months. That's more than twice as many Americans as died in Vietnam in 15 years. And the death toll keeps rising by roughly 1,000 a day.

Which means the good doctor is probably right, dammit. It's gonna be football in a bubble.

And we're not talking about the bubble screen, either.

Horse senseless

The 152nd Belmont Stakes goes off late Saturday afternoon, and I for one am as pumped as a guy can be considering it's not the last leg of the Triple Crown, but the first, and not the longest of the three races, but the shortest.

This is because of the Bastard Plague, of course, and so permit me once again to sneer at its Bastard self from behind my stylish Vera Bradley-ish mask. Y'all done ruined everything so far this year, BP. And now you've gone and shortened the Belmont and slotted it out of order.

Every year until this one it was the grinding 1 1/2-mile finale that separated the magnificent beasts from the mutts, but not this year. This year, because it's the first of the Triple Crown races, it's been shortened to a paltry 1 1/8 miles.

Secretariat would have covered that in about 30 seconds.  And it would have beaten Sham by only, oh, 20 lengths instead of 31.

Because of that, and because of the disjointed nature of things this year, the Blob has not invested its usual amount of research, speaking of 30 seconds. It can only tell you that Tiz the Law is going off as the 6-5 favorite this morning, and his trainer, Barclay Tagg, has a name that fairly drips with tweed. Add a Roman numeral or three and he's the Duke of Earl.

Tiz the Law comes out of the same stable as Derby and Preakness winner Funny Cide, and I've seen Funny Cide in person, so there's that. Also, if Tiz the Law wins, he'd be only the fourth New York-bred horse to win the home leg of the Triple Crown since 1882. Fans of the Chester Arthur presidency take note.

Fans of mutts, on the other hand, will want to drop some coin on Jungle Runner, whose Thursday morning odds are 50-1. Jungle Runner's jockey, Reylu Gutierrez, has never run the Belmont before. But apparently Jungle Runner barely runs, either, so they should make a good match.

So who's got the best shot at winning, aside from Tiz the Law and Barclay "Duke" Tagg?

Well, Tap It To Win's the second favorite, and his trainer, Mark Casse, won the Belmont last year with Sir Winston. But the Blob, a noted history nerd, likes Max Player, even though he's a 15-1 shot in the morning line. That's because Max Player's trainer is Linda Rice, and if her horse wins she'd be the first woman trainer to win the Belmont.

Sign me up.

Words 1. Actions 0.

They all say they want baseball, the people who can make that happen.

The players are begging for it. The commissioner assures us that the owners whose interests he serves are 100 percent committed to it. The peanut vendor, the beer guy, Joe Blow down the street in his throwback Seattle Pilots cap: They're all on board.

Of course, there is on board, and then there is on board.

And so Rob Manfred, the owners' man in the commish's office, said the other night that, golly, the owners really want to launch some sort of truncated season, but those darn players are being so darn greedy. They want their full prorated salaries, darn it, and the owners just can't do that.

Why, look at them over there, huddled in the soup line in their raggedy Armani. It's enough to make a strong man weep, isn't it?

In the meantime: "It's time get back to work," the head of the MLB Players Association, Tony Clark, says. "Tell us when and where."

"I'm not confident," Manfred rejoins.

Which invites this question: Then why are you commissioner?

Because, listen, a real commish would step up to the plate and take his cuts, to employ a painfully lazy baseball metaphor. Yes, the players will make goo-gobs of money if Manfred did that. But (also yes) the owners are making goo-gobs of money, too, and will continue to do so. Not even the small-market owners are going to have to subsist on PBJ if baseball gets going again.

Let's take my own crummy baseball team, the crummy Pittsburgh Pirates, as an example. The Pirates are no one's idea of big spenders, and yet they're paying Greg Polanco $35 mill over the next five years. They're paying pitcher Chris Archer $25.5 mill over the next six years. And Josh Bell, one of their few bonafide stars, will rake $4.8 mill in one season.

You can look at this two ways.

You can say, "See, these salaries are out of line, and small markets like the Pirates can't afford to pay them."

Or you can say, "How can these owners say they can't pay these salaries when they're paying them?"

See, the truth is, none of these owners, small markets or behemoth markets, is exactly destitute. So getting their man Manfred to hem and haw and stall is simple greed, too.

Which is why it's time for Manfred to stop doing that, and act like a commissioner.

It's time for him to say this to the owners: "You know what? I'm the commissioner. We're playing. Now. We owe it to the fans, and it's in the best interests of the game, which is part of the commissioner's historic mandate.

"If you guys don't like it, fire me. But as long as I'm commissioner, this is what we're doing."

He might not last five minutes, saying all that. But it would be a glorious five minutes.

No longer that 'Merica

Back in the mythic day, Coach would have made the kid run gassers 'til his lungs collapsed.

Talk back to Coach? Tell him oh, hell, no, this is not acceptable?

Shoo.  Coach woulda made him do up-downs until he not only surrendered his lunch but yesterday's, too. He'd have thundered MY WORD IS LAW, SON. He'd have told him he was THE COACH, and he'll wear any damn T-shirt he pleases, and if he wants the kid's opinion about that he'll TELL HIM WHAT IT IS.

But ...

But this is not back in the day.

This is a different day, a new day, a day in 'Merica when those who've traditionally had to keep their mouths shut and their heads down have decided not to do that anymore.

And so when Oklahoma State football coach Mike Gundy turned up in a photo rocking a One America News Network T-shirt, his star African-American running back, Chuba Hubbard, took issue with him on social media. Said he "will not stand for this." Said it was "completely insensitive to everything going on in society, and it's unacceptable."

Chuba Hubbard never ran a single gasser for doing that. Which no doubt dismayed that segment of America who think the country hopped on the handcart to hell the day Coach was told he couldn't drag a kid around by the facemask just for looking at him funny.

But Hubbard had a point. OAN, you see, is not really a news network. It's a toystore for fringe righties who see the evil hand of George Soros behind everything Our Only Available Impeached President screws up. It's a loony conspiracy site currently favored by OOAIP himself as his go-to "news" source.

One of the loony conspiracies OAN is currently spinning from ether is that the Black Lives Matter movement is a "farce." Given the current national mood, you can imagine how seeing Coach pimping the site went over with the African-American players who thickly populate Coach's roster.

Even Gundy, not notably the sharpest tool in the shed on occasion, seemed to get that. And so instead of making Hubbard drop and give him twenty, he called a meeting with his players in which he kinda-sorta apologized for being so tone-deaf to "a very sensitive issue."

He didn't have a choice, really. No sooner had Hubbard hinted that he was essentially going on strike ("I will not be doing anything with Oklahoma State until things CHANGE") than his teammates, and even former players, began weighing in with messages of support.

So Gundy had a nascent player revolt on his hands. He'd also ticked off some extremely well-off alums, such as NFL players Justice Hill and A.J. Green III.

The latter, to be frank, might have motivated Gundy more than the former. Money, after all, still talks loudest in major college football. So you never want to make the guys with the fat checkbooks unhappy.

And back in the mythic day?

Well, back in the mythic day -- 1969, to be exact -- a group 14 African-American football players at Wyoming were kicked off the team simply for asking to wear black armbands against BYU, whose players had subjected them to racial epithets the year before. It was hardly a demand; the players all agreed if head coach Lloyd Eaton said no, they'd play anyway. Their presence alone as African-Americans would be their protest.

Eaton wasn't buying. He told them they were defying him simply by approaching him with the request, told anyone who tried to speak to shut up, and kicked them off the squad, saying they could go to (traditional black colleges) Grambling or Morgan State or go back to "colored relief."

Of course, he could do and say those things. First of all, it was 1969. Second, there were only 14 players involved, and no one else stood up for them. And, third, the administration, fans and alumni largely backed Eaton's play.

Fifty-one years later, a few things have changed, clearly.

And thank God for it.

How media works*

(* -- Though not really.)

Logged onto my old employer's product Sunday, and I was again reminded why "the media" is an evil cabal of liars and degenerates.

OK. So, no.

What I was actually reminded of is why we have a First Amendment, and why journalism done right -- especially local journalism -- is a vital cog in the machinery of a free society. What the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette did, see, was enlist local athletes and coaches to write guest columns, from a variety of perspectives, on why racial justice is itself vital to a free society.

Entitled "Voices For Change," the package did exactly what good journalism is supposed to do: Inform, enlighten and provide, yes, a voice for the too-often voiceless or drowned out. It made me proud to have worked there for 2/3 of my professional life.

It also got me thinking about the massive disconnect between the way media works and the way the public -- especially the part so easily manipulated by the demagogues among our leaders -- thinks it works.

That disconnect has never been greater, because America's chief demagogue inhabits the White House, where his absurdist rhetoric has been dismayingly un-presidential. When you consistently label the free press "the enemy of the people" and insist it traffics only in Fake News, that is not the language of the leader of a democratic republic. It's the language of totalitarianism -- strikingly similar, in delivery, tone and theme, to that of every tinpot strongman who ever goose-stepped down the pike.

The problem with this sort of rhetoric, of course, is that it works. It's the rhetoric of the aggrieved, directed at the aggrieved. And it preys on every dark suspicion and prejudice the aggrieved cling to. They need someone or something to blame for what they perceive as America's troubles, and demagogues like Our Only Available Impeached President are only too happy to provide it.

And so on the same day the JG ran its Voices For Change package, I stumbled across a Twitter thread that was all too familiar these days. In it, those convinced the news media really is a cabal of liars and degenerates claimed that wearing masks to combat COVID-19 was entirely "media-driven."

Which always makes me laugh, because I know how the sausage gets made. But it also made me daydream a bit about how a good portion of the public believes it gets made ...

(An American newsroom. Four o'clock on an ordinary afternoon. Budget meeting to determine what will run in the next day's edition of the Daily Blab.)

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF: OK, what do we have on mask-wearing today? We haven't been driving enough people to look silly in the supermarket lately with media-driven stuff about mask-wearing.

METRO EDITOR: Well, we've got this doctor here we totally made up saying that wearing masks in public during this pandemic really does cut down on the spread of the disease.

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF: Totally made up? I like that. What are we calling him?

METRO EDITOR:  Dr. Miguelito Loveless.

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF: Wait. Wasn't he a character in the "Wild, Wild West"?

METRO EDITOR: Yeaaah, but ... no one's gonna remember that.

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF: I did. Let's change it. Let's call him "Fauci." Dr. Anthony Fauci.

METRO EDITOR: Well ... OK.

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF: Good. Now, where's our national reporter? He hasn't made up anything good about Trump lately. Remember, our No. 1 priority is making Trump look bad. Keep in mind our journalistic creed: "A day without making Trump look like the swaggering buffoon he is is like a day without sunshine."

So what do we got?

METRO EDITOR: Well, we've got a pretty detailed piece here about Trump claiming a 75-year-old peace activist is actually an Antifa terrorist who faked his own skull fracture. And we've whipped up some footage of him saying no one since Lincoln has done more for African-Americans than him, and how he, a former B-list reality show star, knows more than all his generals about military strategy.

Also, we've got some great stuff  about him having some people in a park pepper-sprayed so he could do this photo op where he holds a Bible upside-down and pretends he knows what's in it. And claiming America has no racial issues while hiding in his White House bunker, behind a big fence, because Americans are marching in the streets over racial issues.

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF: What? Oh, come on. Surely we've got something more believable than that.

ASSISTANT METRO EDITOR: Hey, I know. How about we do a story where Trump wears a clown suit, rides a unicycle and plays golf in Florida with his buddy Kim Jong Un? We could have one of them say he shot a 22 and the other say he shot a 21.

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF: Run that baby!

Swinging and missing

I walked past the Wildcat diamonds by Arlington Elementary the other day, and of course there was no Wildcat baseball going on. No tiny kids with batting helmets wobbling atop their heads likes bowling balls on pencils. No bats resting on frail shoulders like I-beams. No "hey-battah, hey-battah," the soundtrack of summer rising into the blue summer sky.

There were only the diamonds, deserted and weedy. The sun had dried them out, and now the infield skin was white and corrugated with flakes where the rain puddles had been, like peeling sunburn or the scales of some preposterous fish.

Add the weeds sprouting everywhere, and it was a desert moonscape, desolate and sad in the way empty places are always sad. I looked once and then looked away, and kept walking.

All of which is to say is it's June and I miss baseball.

The Bastard Plague has stolen it like it's stolen so much else, but other sports are finding ways around it. In NASCAR they're racing masked up in empty venues. The NBA has concocted its Weird Thrown-Together Thing, although that might be in jeopardy now as Plague cases begin to spike again.

Baseball, however ...

Well. It's June and there's still no plan.

This is because the owners are pig-headed and the players are pig-headed and the well is poisoned with old grudges and ancient bad faith. Everything is about payback for slights forgotten by all but the principals. It's gotten so bad the owners never even bothered with a counter to the players' latest proposal; instead Major League Baseball simply rolled out a perfunctory "schedule."

No one was fooled by this. As things stand now, there isn't going to be a 2020 season, and more and more of us are becoming resigned to that.

We're also cursing time, which is the culprit.

Too much of it, see, has passed since the 1994 strike that wiped out half the season and the World Series. It's been 26 years since that lost summer, and half the current players weren't even alive then. They don't remember how it wrecked the game for five years. And the owners don't care, because few of them are baseball people; the game is just a line on the investment ledger to them.

To hell with 'em. To hell with all of 'em.

The problem with all this

We'd all like this to be over.  We would, right?

We're tired of masks, tired of hand sanitizer, tired of social distancing. We're tired of being cautious -- or incautious in the case of those whose patience is on E while their dipshittery is on F.

We're Americans. We're spoiled. We want to do what we want when we want, and we'll scream "Tyranny!" at the top of our voices if we don't get it.

Which must be uproariously funny to those in the world who actually suffer real tyranny.

In any case, we'd all like to be like Our Only Available Impeached President, who's retreated into a Pretend World in which the Bastard Plague has been vanquished. Declare victory and go home, that's his play. COVID-19? It's gone! It's over! It's yesterday's Fake News!

Except.

Except it's not.

Not gone. Not over. Not any day's Fake News.

America may be opening up again, but the Bastard Plague is, too. There are spikes everywhere now, hospital wards filling up again, healthcare resources stretched to the breaking point again. And that's especially true in states that re-opened earlier and more cavalierly than others.

Case in point: Texas.

Which is now seeing COVID-19 make a comeback, predictably. And which is home to the University of Houston, where voluntary workouts for its student-athletes have been suspended after six of them in various sports tested positive for the virus.

Houston, it should be noted, is one of the places in Texas that has seen a recent uptick in positive tests.

And therein lies the problem.

It's all well and good to declare victory, and to open the gates to college campuses again (in a lot of cases, primarily to benefit the athletics cash cow), and to move ahead with resuming play in our professional sports. But more and more this looks divorced from reality. It's pretending the Plague has dissipated when the numbers increasingly indicate otherwise.

And so we can look forward to the NBA launching its Weird Thrown-Together Thing, and then shutting it down when the positive tests start showing up. We can look forward to more Houstons on our college campuses. And we can pretty much bank on the Indianapolis 500 getting shoved back to October, because the recent surge in COVID-19 cases makes a full house on August 23 seem far more iffy than Speedway officials are willing to admit.

For now, they remain cheerily optimistic. And damn your numbers.

Our Only Available Impeached President, meanwhile, is pushing ahead with his rally in Tulsa, Okla., and he wants a full house, by God.  He wants people sitting, and standing, elbow-to-elbow. Because COVID-19 is over, remember?

Which doesn't explain why Trumpies wishing to attend the rally will be required to sign a waiver absolving the Trump campaign of liability should any of them contract COVID-19.

Only the occupants of Pretend World could untangle the cognitive dissonance there. But then that's how Pretend World works.

Now this from the WTTT*

(* -- Weird Thrown-Together Thing. Not available in stores.)

In any case, when last we left the NBA's Weird Thrown-Together Thing, the league was announcing the 2019-20 season would "resume" on July 31, even though it's not really the resumption of anything but, well, a Weird Thrown-Together Thing. Now here are the details the Blob has neglected to include so far:

1. The Weird Thrown-Together Thing will include only 22 of the 30 NBA teams.

2. There will be an eight-game End Of The Regular Season that will eliminate six of them.

3. There will be a possible play-in tournament for the eighth seed.

4. The "NBA Finals" are scheduled to begin Sept. 30, which is almost October, which is traditionally when next season begins.

5. The time commitment for the Weird Thrown-Together Thing will be a maximum of 53 days (nearly two months) for 14 of the 22 teams, and at least 67 days (more than two months) for the final four teams.

This just gets sillier and sillier.

Said it so you won't have to.

A shift in the wind, Part Deux

And now I want to see the confrontation.

I want to see, now that NASCAR has officially banned the Confederate battle flag from its premises after taking a weak run at it in 2015, what happens the first time some GI Jethro shows up at Talladega with his army gun and his army suit and the Stars and Bars fluttering in the breeze from his SUV or pickup truck.

I want to see what happens when he's told he has to take the flag down. I want to see what happens when someone wearing the Stars and Bars on a T-shirt is told he can't come onto the premises wearing that thing. I want to hear the words come out of their mouths.

"I'm a proud American and I'll proudly fly the flag of my country's enemies if I want!"

Because that's essentially thelogic here, no matter how it would be phrased. And this from a demographic which likely polls high in the belief Colin Kaepernick was disrespecting the American flag simply by kneeling with his head bowed.

And, yes, I get it, it was Americans fighting Americans in that dark time, but I'm not going to re-plow that overworked piece of ground. Nor am I going to engage the "Heritage Not Hate" line of neo-Confederate thought. That ideology got its legs taken out the moment some coward in a white sheet and hood raised the Stars and Bars and went marching off behind it.

The Klan and the white supremacists, see, they know what that flag represents. So do the people of color they've terrorized, beaten and lynched lo these many decades. It's why no gathering of racists is complete without the Stars and Bars, and why people of color see it the way Jews see a swastika.

It represents slavery, repression and wholesale murder to them. And to the racists, it represents an America that was better when people of color could be enslaved, repressed and murdered wholesale. Not everyone who flies that flag would regard himself as a racist, but every racist is proud to fly it.

There's your "heritage," boys and girls. You can scream about it all you want, but the racists stole a march on you. It belongs to them now, as it always really has.

But not to NASCAR anymore. And that's because NASCAR is not NASCAR anymore.

It's no longer a regional curiosity thick with Lost Cause wistfulness, and it hasn't been for some time. It's a thoroughly corporate entity now, and it goes to California and Illinois and New Hampshire as readily as it does to the heart of the old Confederacy.

Its commercial appeal has been deliberately steered away from all that, because people in Fontana and Joliet buy Martin Truex Jr. gear, too. And of course its top series has an African-American driver now.

Can't really abide the Stars and Bars as a backdrop, given that. As Bubba Wallace himself pointed out this week.

The gist of his argument was "Really, NASCAR?", and NASCAR immediately responded. Would it have done this if it didn't now employ an African-American driver and others of color? Probably not with such alacrity. Which is the value of diversity writ large.

You hire a diverse workforce not because it's "politically correct," whatever that means, but because in theory it makes you a more agile and accessible business. It doesn't always happen that way, because prejudices are stubborn things and good intentions are frequently soured by them. And businesses are always going to hew to the bottom line first and everything else second.

But occasionally, the whole thing works the way it's supposed to. And that happened this week.

Of course, how NASCAR intends to enforce its ban is another matter, and that remains to be seen. I'm guessing there will be a fair number of confrontations, because Americans are Americans and don't like being told what to do, even if it's the right thing. So it's naïve to think there won't still be a few Confederate battle flags fluttering in the breeze among the motorhomes outside Talladega or Darlington or Bristol.

But they will be outliers now, not the semi-official wallpaper of an entire sport. And the people who fly them will mark themselves by doing so.

Scream to the contrary all they want.

A shift in the wind?

Here's hoping America doesn't forget again, now that George Floyd is in the ground. Here's hoping he's not Philando Castile or Walter Scott or Sandra Bland or those many other wronged names around whom righteous anger coalesced for a time as America promised to do better, and then forgot its promise.

Here's hoping it's different this time. Feels so, anyway.

Take this photo here.

It's a photo of a white man in a firesuit and a Bastard Plague mask, holding up an I Can't Breathe/Black Lives Matter T-shirt. He's doing this in Atlanta, Ga., in the very aorta of the old Confederacy. And he's doing this at a NASCAR race, in the very aorta of a sport that was at its inception a blaring revival of that Confederacy, good ol' boys making up for Gettysburg by hauling ass in liquor cars.

 A man holding up an I Can't Breathe/Black Lives Matter T-shirt in that NASCAR might not have seen sunset. But on Sunday?

On Sunday he was part of the crew for Bubba Wallace, an African-American who wore the shirt while the national anthem rang out.

On Sunday he was part of a spectacle that included NASCAR official Kirk Price, also an African-American, kneeling with his head bowed and his fist in the air during that same anthem.

And on Sunday, there was the president of NASCAR, Steve Phelps, addressing drivers and fans about racial injustice and how we all needed to "do better."

I can't say if that's the winds of change stirring. Or if it's even the suggestion of a breeze.

Confederate flags, after all, still fly in the parking lots and campgrounds outside NASCAR venues, with everything that implies. It remains a sport with an overwhelmingly white fan base and an overwhelmingly white workforce. And it remains a sport whose fans' sensibilities overwhelmingly ally (although maybe not as much now) with the white supremacy winkers in Our Only Available Impeached President's administration.

Had there actually been fans in the stands in Atlanta, you no doubt would have heard more than a scattering of boos when Bubba Wallace broke out his T-shirt and Kirk Price knelt and Steve Phelps spoke. So there's that.

There's also a whiff of pandering in all this -- of NASCAR, like every massive entertainment vehicle, jumping on the bandwagon to protect its market share.

But. But.

But NASCAR stands to alienate far more fans than it brings to the table by embracing the cause of racial injustice, even if superficially. And it does seem to be more than superficial in this case.

So there's that, too.

I can't say if the winds of change, or even the breezes, are blowing. But. But.

But NASCAR is speaking out against racial injustice.

But black Americans and white Americans and, yes, even police officers, are marching together in the streets.

But the other day I opened my news feed, and there were photos from Martinsville, In., of a Black Lives Matter rally there.

Martinsville: A place so notorious for its racist culture across the years that IU students of color routinely have been warned never to stop there if they can help it. A place whose grim reputation has been well-earned and always precedes it.

It's different this time.

Maybe. Finally.

In defense of the brotherhood

Well, now. I guess Dan Carpenter won't be the guest speaker at a sportswriters convention anytime soon.

This after the former Indianapolis Star columnist went all numbskull on Facebook recently, proclaiming "No sadder spectacle than a sportswriter weighing in on politics and history" in apparent response to Gregg Doyel's very personal piece about removing a Confederate memorial from Garfield Park in Indianapolis.

I've read it. And I don't know what Carpenter's problem with it is, other than the fact Doyel is a damn fine writer and professional jealousy tends to flourish like thistles in a fencerow among writers.

 

Perhaps that's unfair to Carpenter. I don't know. I don't know him except as a columnist for the Star, and he's a fine writer himself who now plies his trade for a number of other folks. So I won't accuse him of having a lazy intellect, even if stereotyping is one of its hallmarks.

 

And essentially telling a sportswriter to "stick to sports" when he or she strays beyond the world of games is the worst kind of stereotyping.

 

Look. I am biased here. I am also defensive. I was a sportswriter for 38 years in Indiana, and occasionally I strayed beyond the world of games myself. And so I've heard the "stick to sports" refrain more than I care to count.

 

What's dismaying is what Carpenter reveals with his unthinking observation: That it's not just the public that is chauvinistic in regard to sportswriters. It's almost as prevalent within newsrooms, too -- where the sports department has often been dubbed the Toy Department, with all the inherent lack of respect that implies.

 

I can't speak for the rest of my sportswriting brethren. But I got damn sick and tired of that "Toy Department" crap. We were reporters hired to report, same as any reporter. We were writers, same as any writer. We were educated at the same schools. A lot of times, some of the best and most perceptive writing in the newspaper came out of the sports department.

 

And, yes, also some of the worst and least perceptive writing. Always been a good-with-the-bad proposition, sportswriting.

 

The point is, the good ones were terrific writers not because of what they wrote about. They were terrific writers because they were in a lot of cases learned men (and women) with the perspective necessary for any writer of note. That what they wrote was often about what Coach was thinking on third-and-forever did not mean they didn't have the intellect or educational background to write about something else.

 

Like, I don't know, history. Or politics.

 

I wrote sports columns for 25 years at the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette. I also wrote a weekly op-ed column for a spell. I like to think I did a serviceable job at both, because my interests have always extended beyond the court or the pitch or the playing field.

 

And so when someone who should know better makes a snide remark about what a sad spectacle it is when sportswriters stray from their sandbox, it gets my back up. Because in our den here at home, an entire wall is taken up with a floor-to-ceiling bookshelf. Some of my part is devoted to books about sports; most is devoted to Bruce Catton and William Manchester and S.C. Gwynne and Jay Winik, and other writers of Civil War, political and military history.

 

So when I write about politics or history, I like to think it's not the sad spectacle Carpenter assumes it is. I like to think I at least halfway know what I'm talking about.

 

Which is halfway more than Carpenter knows about sportswriters, apparently.

A most necessary host

Let's hear it out there this morning, race fans. Let's hear it for this girl over here.

On this particular day some years past, she's wearing a Budweiser T-shirt that had once been white, near as anyone can tell. Mostly she's wearing infield.

It's mid-morning at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway and rain is coming down like God left the tap on, the sky an unrelieved gray and the garages back in Gasoline Alley shuttered tight. Boredom and, yes, copious amounts of Budweiser are the mothers of this invention, a touch football game played on a slick of grass-flecked mud just inside turn one.

And so here comes Budweiser Girl, football cradled in one arm, slipping and sliding and whooping loudly. She is Earth Mother Walter Payton, Swamp Thing Earl Campbell. And now she slips one more time and goes down with a wet sploosh and a shriek of laughter, and a guy in mud-smeared jeans plunks down on top of her, and now three or four others plunk down on top of them ...

And now you see. Now you see what Roger Penske is getting at.

Now you see Earth Mother Walter and the throwback Snakepit as a tiny slice of the mighty host that defines the Indianapolis 500, and always has. So many people descended on Indianapolis for the first 500 in 1911, Charles Leerhsen tells us in "Blood and Smoke," his chronicle of the birth of the 500, that the crowd became a story in itself, part and parcel of the event's narrative. Traffic trying to get into the track on race day came to a gridlocked standstill then; traffic trying to get into the track on race day still comes to a gridlocked standstill 109 years later.

It's an Indy tradition like "Back Home Again In Indiana" and a cold bottle of milk are Indy traditions.

And so when Penske says there will be no Indianapolis 500 without the fans -- that if the Bastard Plague makes it impossible on August 23, they'll bump the race to October -- it's because he understands the nature of the event. He's stood down there at 11 o'clock in the morning and looked up at that jaw-dropping sea of humanity along the frontstretch, seen it curling around the fourth turn to the north and disappearing around turn one to the south. And he understands it's what puts the Spectacle in the Greatest Spectacle in Racing.

To be sure, you can hear Penske say they won't run the 500 without the fans and figure it's just the Speedway trying to wring every last dollar out of the thing the way it always has. It's a cash cow, the 500 is, and the Speedway's overseers have always been excellent farm hands. No one fills a milk pail more efficiently.

But Penske saying no fans, no 500, is also merely recognizing an imperative. This is why you put him in charge of the place, because he is the Captain and he recognize imperatives. And if the 500 is the rising shriek of 33 exotic machines getting on it at the sighting of the green, it's also the hurricane roar of a quarter million voices that accompanies it.

Indy is not Indy without that moment. You take away the roar -- take away the sea of humanity and replace with a vast emptiness filled only with ghosts and the sigh of the breeze -- and it's not the 500 anymore. It's just a very fast drive on a Sunday afternoon.

The Captain says that won't do. Salute the man.

Today's Really Mean Thing To Say

So I see the Indianapolis Motor Speedway has decided to run its historic July 4 weekend doubleheader -- IndyCar and NASCAR, on the same card! -- in front of an empty house.

Both the IndyCar GMR Grand Prix and NASCAR Infinity Series race on July 4, and the NASCAR Brickyard 400 on July 5, will go off without a fan presence because of the Bastard Plague.

Which of course compels the Blob, despite biting its tongue nearly in two, to say this: "So pretty much a normal Brickyard 400, right?"

Mean. Sometimes I am so, so mean.

A cuppa mea culpa

I don't know how the man contains himself, honestly. Or maybe he doesn't.

Maybe Colin Kaepernick already has run into the street in these Days of Rage And Pandering, raised his eyes to the heavens and screamed "Gaaaaahhh!" at the uncaring sky.

First the Vice-President of the United States says, why, sure, we'll always support the right of Americans to peacefully protest, hoping we'd forget the way he stormed out of a Colts game over a peaceful protest.

Then Drew Brees, for God's sake, says he'll never agree with anyone who disrespects the flag, and then Our Only Available Impeached President says he shouldn't have apologized for Defending The Flag -- even though Brees knows FULL WELL well the kneeling thing Kaepernick started wasn't about disrespecting the flag, and OOAIP probably does too but makes it about that because he doesn't want to confront what the kneeling was about.

And now, boys and girls?

Now NFL czar Roger Goodell, who stood by and let OOAIP call his players (including  Kaepernick) "sons-of-bitches," says, gosh darn it, we were wrong not to listen to those players when all the kneeling was going on.

Well, gee, Rog. Way to take a stand there.

Way to wet your finger, hold it up, and determine how the wind is blowing. And then say you stand with your players because, well, it's safe to do so now. Oh, and Rog?

I think the horse went that way after it left the barn.

Doing what's right when it's popular, see, never carries the moral weight of doing it when it's unpopular, the way Kaepernick and the other players Goodell refused to defend did. And so saying now, long after the fact, that the NFL was wrong not to listen to them wins you no points. It only makes you look like the rank opportunists you are.

Over there, Rog. I think I saw the horse over there.

The Return. Or whatever.

Know what I'm wondering this morning, besides when precisely the New York Times became the Hooterville Light and Shopper?

(NYT Opinion Underling: "Hey, look, boss, we got a submission here  from America's foremost wingnut senator, Tom Cotton!" NYT Opinion Editor James Bennet: "Run that baby!" Underling: "Don't you want to read it first, boss?" Bennet: "Nah, I'm good.")

(Every Other Journo In The Country: "WHATTA YOU MEAN HE DIDN'T READ IT??")

Anyway ...

What I'm wondering is, what do we call this, now that the NBA has announced it's starting up again on July 31st?

Do we surrender to the League's own delusion and call it the resumption of the 2019-2020 season after a brief intermission of, um, 4 1/2 months?

Do we regard it as a kinda-sorta movie trailer for the 2020-21 season, which by the time the NBA "returns" will be less than three months away?

Or do we see it as some weird hurried-up, thrown-together ... thing ... independent of either?

The Blob votes "C." Or maybe "B."

But not "A." Definitely not "A."

Because, see, you can call an armadillo a duck, but that doesn't make it a duck. And when you're "resuming" after what's essentially an entire offseason, it's not really "resuming." You're either starting a new season or you're doing the Weird Thrown-Together Thing because you've got TV contracts to honor.

That's how the public is going to regard this, no matter how you try to sell it. You can call it "the 2019-2020 NBA Playoffs" until your larynx gives out, but the public will never regard whoever wins the Weird Thrown-Together Summer Thing as the 2019-2020 NBA "champions." They'll say "Oh, yeah, the Clippers. Didn't they win that weird thrown-together summer thing?"

That's why it's absurd they're even doing this, even if people probably will watch despite the fact it's basketball in August. People watch the NBA Summer League, after all. And that's pretty much what this will be, only with more bells and whistles.

The upshot of this, unfortunately, is that by "resuming" the season in August, you're rear-ending the beginning of next season. So you not only make an undefinable hash of the end of one season, you risk making hash of the beginning of another.

Look. Last season is over. It's been over for awhile. It's Appomattox, you're surrounded, it's time to go see Grant and sign the surrender papers.

And then, turn the page.

Conduct your training camps, start the new season early, end the new season early. Market it as the Double Season. Label the 2020-21 NBA Finals as Two Finals In One. Whoever wins will go into the books as the champions of both seasons.

I mean, if you're gonna call an armadillo a duck, you might as well make it the most realistic duck you can. Right?

Messaging overload

Drew Brees is getting knocked around right now like a fighter with his legs gone, and I'm of two minds about that. Which no doubt comes as a surprise to those who always suspected I didn't have one mind, let alone a spare.

Anyway, here's what I'm thinking:

One, Drew Brees is a good man with a good heart who's done incalculable good with the platform he has as a high-profile professional athlete.

Two, it's dismaying beyond words that someone with such apparent social awareness still is so utterly clueless about the whole kneeling thing.

He said the other day he would "never agree with anybody disrespecting the flag," and do we need to tromp around that mulberry bush again? Brees knows, or ought to know, that the players who silently knelt with their heads bowed weren't doing so to disrespect the flag or the anthem or The Troops. If they had been, they'd have been doing something that was actually disrespectful.

Kneeling in an attitude of prayer -- in some cases with a hand over their hearts -- was not it. In fact if you asked any of them who were kneeling, they'd probably agree with Brees that no one should disrespect the flag. 

But this is the problem with platforms, and the folks who have them. It's important -- some would say a duty -- to use that platform to advance causes about which one is passionate. It's important to speak out in times that beg for speaking out, as these times certainly do.

And those who say "Why should I care what some athlete/coach/actor thinks?" should remember that people still care what some B-list reality show star thinks. Because that B-list reality show star is President of the United States, no matter how clearly unfit.

In other words; He's a public figure. Drew Brees and LeBron James and Gregg Popovich etc., etc., are public figures, too. As such they have influence; as such they feel compelled to wield that influence.

Problem is, being compelled doesn't always mean you should.

And so in the wake of the civil unrest roiling the nation right now, athletes and coaches and team execs and commishes are weighing in, and not always because they feel passionately about what's happening in the country. For the latter two groups especially, it's more about keeping the image buffed to a high sheen. They must say they care, because not to do so might hurt their brand.

Of course, actually speaking out, as opposed to kinda-sorta speaking out, might also hurt their brand. And so you wind up with "official statements" that are so neutered  they're essentially meaningless -- and occasionally worse than meaningless.

Case in point: Was there anything more unintentionally hilarious than the Washington Football Club issuing a statement decrying racism? Really? Daniel Snyder stands with the protesters against racism, yet consistently says he'll defend his team's racist nickname to the bitter end?

To paraphrase the Good Book: Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak and remove all doubt.

Public figures take note.

Yet more vanishing

At some point, you know, this starts to feel personal.

At some point, you feel the bullseye on your back. You feel the eyes on you, and you alone. You get that ol' paranoid itch you can't scratch, sense your inner Travis Bickle stirring inside your gut.

You talkin' to me? You talkin' to ME?

"Taxi Driver." DeNiro. You remember.

And so: You talkin' to me, 2020? You talkin' to ME?

Because, listen, this has gone far enough. Every week or two weeks or month, it seems, you steal another piece of my childhood. You kill another of the Sports Illustrated covers I used to plaster on my bedroom walls. You take Al Kaline and Glenn Beckert and Mike Curtis and Don Shula and Jerry Sloan -- and now you take Wes Unseld?

Wes Unseld, who died the other day at the age of 74.

Wes Unseld, who starred at Louisville and then with the Washington Bullets, and who, late in his career, was the NBA playoff MVP when his Bullets finally won the title in 1978.

Wes Unseld: Who was listed at 6-7 but probably didn't clear 6-6, which was tiny even then for a center on the NBA.

Yet the man worked the low blocks the way Van Gogh worked in oils, and did it right out of the gate. His rookie year, 1968-69, he averaged a double-double -- 13.8 points and a staggering 18.2 rebounds -- and won both Rookie of the Year and Most Valuable Player, only the second player ever to do so after Wilt Chamberlain.

In his very first game, he scored eight points and pulled 22 boards. Thirteen years later, he finished with career averages of 10.8 points, 14.0 rebounds and 3.9 assists. He was inducted into the basketball Hall of Fame in 1988, coached the Bullets for a time, and was so universally regarded as an exemplary human being the requisite post-mortem tributes have focused almost more on those credentials than his credentials as a player.

Which is saying something.

 

What I'll say is I used to pretend I was Wes Unseld in my driveway, when I wasn't pretending to be Kareem or Oscar or Pete Maravich or John Havlicek. This was beyond comical, because I stood about 5-9 at the time. My weight was Hotdog Wrapper. Wes Unseld, on the other hand, checked in at about 250 and had shoulders like the Himalayas. So, yeah, it took some imagination.

 

And now, he's gone.

 

Now another part of growing up a sports-obsessed twerp in the 1960s and early '70s is part of the Great Vanishing.

 

Stop it, 2020. Please just stop it.

Games called

I want to return to my Sportsball World. I really do.

 

It is my stock in trade, my area of presumed expertise, the assembly line where I earned a mostly joyous dollar writing about high school kids and college kids and the assorted triumphs and outrages of assorted minor characters on the stage of the World At Large.

 

And so this morning I want to write about What The NBA Will Look Like When It Starts Up Again. I want to write about whether or not baseball will happen this summer. I want to write about how NBA commissioner Adam Silver looks more like Nosferatu every day.

 

But then I scan my news feed, and I see what's happening in America, and I see the spiraling descent of the President of the United States into Sieg Heil lunacy. And Sportsball matters seem as silly as kittens on ether.

 

And so once more today the kittens on ether get put aside, as Sportsball World itself has been put aside by the Bastard Plague.

 

I will write instead about an America I no longer recognize.

 

I will write instead about an America in pain to whom its leaders offer nothing but more pain.

 

I will write about a Mad King whose solution to everything is bluster and threat and schoolyard taunts, and political theater so cheap and obvious only those he plays for fools fail to see it as such.

 

While militarized law enforcement used tear gas and rubber bullets to drive back Americans in pain yesterday, the Mad King stood in front of a church and held up a prop Bible, then proceeded to prove he is wholly unfamiliar with its contents. He offered no comfort or understanding, only threats. He said he was the law-and-order President, and he'd send in the military if the Americans in pain didn't quit hollering about all this inequality business.

 

America needed a president. Instead he gave it Training Wheels Mussolini -- who will have his law-and-order, by God, if he has to shoot every last one of us to get it.

 

It was tantamount to declaring war on his own people, and history tells us he will be the worse for it. The Brits tried the police state thing here 250 years ago. It didn't turn out so well for them.

 

But the Mad King, no student of history, consistently chooses dead ends that are well-trodden. And again he has done so.

 

That he can't legally "send in the military" because it violates the Posse Comitatus Act doesn't matter to him. What is legal -- and more to the point what is proper and proportional -- hasn't mattered to him since he took the oath 40 months ago. Why would it now, with his presidency almost literally going up in flames?

 

Some with a firmer grasp of history have said the Mad King is using the civil unrest spreading across the country as his Reichstag fire moment, scapegoating radicals as Hitler did to consolidate his power. If so, it is almost certainly not conscious on his part. It is merely the overarching instinct for self-preservation that has informed everything in his immoral and utterly self-absorbed life.

 

The Mad King is about the Mad King. America is down the list a ways.

 

I used to think America was immune to Mad Kings. I used to think a pure demagogue would never gain purchase on political power here, because Americans would see through him. I used to think we would never, in America, see a lone student standing in front of a line tanks, ala Tiananmen Square.

 

Now I could see it happening tomorrow.

 

Know what else I used to think?

 

I used to think there would be an election in November.

 

Now I'm not so sure. Because clearly there is nothing the Mad King will not do to save himself. 

 

He says, half-truth-edly, it's radical left-wing terrorists who are burning down the country. But you know what?

 

Donald J. Trump beat them to it.

Presuming the position

So taking a knee is cool now, apparently. Colin Kaepernick must be so surprised.

He got drummed out of the NFL for doing it, and for inspiring others to do it. But now George Floyd is dead and Ahmaud Arbery is dead and Breonna Taylor is dead, and Christian Cooper is getting the police called on him for politely asking some Karen to leash her dog. And now, all over the country, people are taking a knee, and some of them are carrying signs and chanting George Floyd's name, and some of them are getting pepper-sprayed and tear-gassed for saying what Kaepernick and his NFL brethren were saying in their own silent, eloquent way.

Namely, that the authorities killing people of color, either heedlessly or blatantly, needed to stop. That the racial inequities baked into the every aspect of American life needed to stop.

And now the suits and the politicians and the corporate hacks are saying, yeah, that's right, because now the polling and the marketing numbers say it's safe to do so.

Why, the Vice-President himself even came out and said peaceful protest is the right of every American, hoping we'll forget that he walked out of a Colts game because he was so offended by a peaceful protest.

But that was then. And this is now.

Now, the country is burning, more than just people of color are outraged, and so kneeling is OK. And if Colin Kaepernick were a lesser man, he'd be shaking his head in disgust at this hypocrisy-fest.

He'd be thinking "WTF, Mike Pence?" He'd be wondering what aspiring novelist crafted the NFL's splendidly obsequious Official Statement, and inviting them to get that bleepity-bleep bleep outta here.

What the NFL said was this, essentially: Our "family" is "deeply saddened" by these "tragic events", and, by golly, we feel y'all's pain. And that's why the NFL (A fine, fine product! Keep watching!) is committed to doing whatever it can to address whatever this issue is.. Because the NFL (Again, a fine, fine product!) recognizes "the power of our platform", and we "embrace that responsibility and are committed to doing the important work to address these systemic issues together with our players, clubs and partners." (Because the NFL cares!)

Strangely, no mention was made of how the NFL blackballed Kaepernick from its platform for doing exactly what the NFL now says it's committed to doing. Or how the league cravenly stood by and let the President of the United States called him a "son of a bitch." This seems a pretty glaring omission until you realize A) it's the NFL, and B) its statement is neutered pablum that reads like it was crafted by a team of high-priced attorneys.

And if Colin Kaepernick were a lesser man, he'd be reading it and then rolling his eyes so far he could see his frontal lobe. Because, see, he assumed the position.

These guys are just presuming to.