Chowin' down

Joey Chestnut won the Nathan's Famous Fourth of July hot dog eating contest again yesterday, and if there's a more purely American narrative than that I've yet to see it. A humble lad from Westfield, In., gaining fame and fortune for stuffing his face?

Why, it's the stars-and-stripes, the rocket's red glare and Lee Greenwood singing, "And I'm proud to be an American, where at least I know I'm full."

(Or maybe it's "free." I  forget.)

Either way, the point pertains: Nothin' says "America" like gluttony, excess and crass spectacle. And Joey Chestnut inhaling 70.5 dogs and buns in 10 minutes is all three wrapped up with a red-white-and-blue bow. 

That's what he did to win his 17th Mustard Belt (yes, there's actually a title belt, as if Joey were Sugar Ray Leonard or Muhammad Ali re-imagined), and it was something to see, if not entirely describable. I mean, have you ever watched a guy eat 70.5 hot dogs in 10 minutes? It's kinda gross, actually.

Every time I see clips of it, I'm reminded of one of Carla's wisecracks from "Cheers", where she's describing something disgusting. "It was like watchin' old people eat," Carla opines.

Or watchin' Joey Chestnut eat, had Carla and "Cheers" come along 30 or so years later.

And, look, this is not to disparage Joey and his mandibles o' death. More likely, it's the Blob's tendency to look at the world sideways and backward, and to find weirdness in virtually everything. And seeing how fast you can wolf down hot dogs or shrimp or, I don't know, Twinkies or Ho-Hos, is weirder than whatever odd notion poor addled Uncle Donny is floating from the White House today.

(His latest: To commemorate the nation's 250th birthday next summer, he wants to stage an MMA fight on the White House lawn. And, no, I'm not making that up, to issue the standard disclaimer. As crass spectacles go, it might challenge cramming hot dogs down one's gullet for the world championship, if not for the suspicion that Teddy Roosevelt would be all in on the idea.)

Anyway ... chowin' down as a sport is not much of a sport by the Blob's lights, although it might be more of a sport than, say, juggling hand grenades. The mortality rate is much lower, for one thing. Plus no one wants flying body parts in their spectacles.

Still, that wouldn't be as brashly in-your-face as people eating at warp speed while half the world goes hungry. That, too, seems to be as American as America gets these days, regrettably.

Which is why my favorite eating contest is not the Fourth of July hot dog contest. It's one that actually doesn't exist.

It's the pie-eating contest Gordy dreams up in "Stand By Me", in which a fat kid his town calls Lard-Ass gets his revenge by chugging castor oil before taking his place at the Big Table. He proceeds to buzzsaw his way through five blueberry pies before the inevitable happens: It all comes rumbling back up the other way.

Which of course sets off a chain reaction of symbiotic upchucking -- or, as Gordy puts it, a "complete and total Barf-O-Rama."

Now that's a Fourth of July extravaganza, by golly.

The fragile Fourth

 Today we celebrate our nation's 249th birthday, and there will be flags and speeches and burgers and 'dogs on the grill, and somewhere your drunk Uncle Carl, all jazzed up on Busch Light and patriotic fervor, will come thisclose to blowing off four or five fingers or toes.

The American Experiment meets "ER." Happens every July 4.

What doesn't always happen is the American Experiment meeting madmen who would undo it in the name of saving it.

It has become almost cliche in these bizarre times to say America has become a dark place hijacked by the aforementioned madmen, but as with most cliches much truth attends it. This is not, demonstrably and fundamentally, the America envisioned by our founders. Whatever truths they held as self-evident have become Fake News under our current regime, which traffics in the paranoia, fear-mongering and false grievance that always fuel autocratic governments.

Everyone's out to get us, according to the Regime. And so it's America's duty -- its patriotic duty -- to get them before they get us. America First, right?

This is how gardeners and laborers and people just living their lives become enemies of the state. It's how winners of the Purple Heart are forced to self-deport. It's how others -- so many others -- get snatched off the street and disappeared because they had the bad luck to be born with an Hispanic surname, or committed the misdemeanor of crossing the border without the proper papers five or 10 or 20 years ago. 

It's how we get to a place where the President of the United States, the governor of Florida and the Armband Barbie running Homeland Security pose in front of cages in a concentration camp, and yuk it up at the thought of some poor migrant who's never harmed a soul being eaten by alligators.

This is not America, friends and neighbors. This is, rather, America turned upside-down, a mean, alien land where cruelty is seen as strength and the most despicable elements rule. Where we afflict the afflicted and comfort the comfortable, short-sheeting the most vulnerable in our society in order to shove more wealth into the hands of those already sitting on an Everest of wealth.

Where we allocate more money than some nations spend on their armies to paramilitary street punks cosplaying as law enforcement.

America as police state? Seems we're right around the corner from that now.  

And, sure, maybe that's me plunging off the deep end like the rest of the country, but maybe it's also me seeing things through history's lens. Truth is, none of what's happening in America now is new, and there are numerous examples of where it leads. And if we're going to be honest about it, America has at times been one of those examples.

We are a nation of lofty ideals, but we're also a nation that has occasionally strayed from those ideals. Lady Liberty may hold her lamp high, but the anti-immigrant mania we're seeing now is merely the latest thread in a long and ugly tapestry of bigotry. Hispanics, primarily, are its targets this time around; at other times, it's been the Germans or the Irish or the Asians or the Eastern Europeans -- and that doesn't even get into the  holocaust of slavery and Jim Crow that kept the Africans who built America in chains both literal and symbolic.

Land of the free and home of the brave? Pretty words, but not always true.

And yet ...

And yet, for all of that, I will wave my flag today. I will do it for the founders and for their vision, no matter how many times it's been vandalized. I will do it for those Americans who understand that vision, and who do what they can for the marginalized and disadvantaged left eating the Regime's dust. 

I will do it for the America that stood up to Hitler and Tojo, and went to the moon, and  spearheaded the Berlin Airlift. I will do it for the America that once reached out to alleviate suffering around the world without asking what was in it for us.

That's the America I still believe in, not this one. Not this I-got-mine Regime that decided money spent to tend to the world's sick, hungry and impoverished was a giant scam because the Regime wasn't getting a proper cut.  

Those people I won't think about today.  Instead, on this most fragile of Fourths, I'll do what I always do: Cue up the Declaration of Independence episode of the HBO series "John Adams." Only this time I'll come at it from a different angle.

This time, I'll watch it not as an affirmation of America, and what makes it America.

This time, I'll watch it wondering how we get back to that.

Speed on screen

 Went to see "F1: The Movie" the other day, and you know what it got me wondering?

It got me wondering why there aren't more racing movies like "Ford vs. Ferrari." 

It got me thinking the best movies in an admittedly tiny genre tend to be the ones ripped from the pages of history -- like, well, "Ford vs. Ferrari," or maybe Ron Howard's "Rush." Real life, or a reasonable facsimile, tends to be yea more compelling and yea less formulaic on most occasions, it seems to me. And its surface in this area has barely been smudged.

For instance: Re-reading "Driving With The Devil," Neal Thompson's chronicle of the woolly early days of stock-car racing in the American south, made me wonder why no filmmaker has ever told the story of Lloyd Seay and Roy Hall. It's a hell of a tale: Two wild boys from rural Georgia wheeling Ford V8s loaded with 'shine on the twisty moonlit road from Dawsonville to Atlanta, in the meantime becoming the infant stock-car racing circuit's first glittering stars.

What Seay didn't win, Hall usually did.  Together with former bootlegger/huckster/semi-legit businessman Raymond Parks, they formed the first kinda-sorta team in what was then, in the late 1930s and early '40s, barely a kinda-sorta sport.

They were two entirely different men, Seay and Hall, the former quiet and calculating and the latter flamboyant and reckless to the point of madness. The story of both, however, is the story of two men who could never quite move on from the hills and stills that formed them, and who were ultimately ruined by it.

Seay was just 23 and at his peak as a racer when he was shot dead by a deranged cousin in a moonshine deal gone sideways. Hall spent most of his racing days on the run from the law, until finally his seeming compulsion to self-destruct landed him in prison for a six-year stretch.

When he got out, he tried to go back to racing, but Bill France had squeezed stock-car racing in his iron fist by then, and the lawless days in which Hall had flourished were past. One last crash left Rapid Roy with severe head injuries from which he would never quite recover.

So, drama, conflict, tragedy and car crashes, all wrapped up in one neat package. Pretty much your recipe for box-office gold.

If only the box-office gold didn't have to be vetted by Hollywood first, that is.

Studio heads are as skittish as kittens in a roomful of rockers when it comes to getting behind projects it considers iffy, and "Lloyd and Roy" would have iffy crawling all over it. Any racing movie is a gamble -- the appeal is hardly as broad as a movie about pirates or mobsters or former Navy SEALs out to avenge some horrific wrong -- so if you're going to drop significant coinage on one, it better have Brad Pitt or Matt Damon or Tom Cruise in it. 

And if it's Based On A True Story, as they say, it better be a True Story with which the general public is at least semi-familiar. And outside the Deep South, who except incorrigible gearheads has ever heard of Lloyd Seay and Roy Hall?

Better to put Brad Pitt in a racing movie, and go with the standard formula: Struggling  team owner brings back an old racing buddy who washed out of Formula One years before. Pairs him with a brash young rookie who's not about to take advice from a relic. Conflict ensues ... the old racing buddy does some crazy cowboy stuff that intensifies the conflict ... eventually everyone learns to work together. 

Oh, yeah: And somewhere in there, the old racing buddy beds the attractive female chief engineer despite her hard-and-fast rule about mixing business with pleasure. Because of course he does.

It's all as predictable as sunrise, which is why none of the above violates the Spoiler Rule. Heck, you see it all coming from a mile away, especially the bedding-the-female-chief-engineer part. You know what's going to happen there the first time she appears on the screen.

None of this, mind you, means "F1" doesn't work. It does. It's all enormously entertaining: The racing scenes are state-of-the-art, Brad Pitt is Brad Pitt, and, as in John Frankenheimer's groundbreaking "Grand Prix," actual F1 drivers and team principles make cameo appearances.

Hell of a ride, all-in-all. Best fictional racing film since "Grand Prix," in the Blob's humble opinion. Not to mention a neat two-and-a-half-hour infomercial for F1.

Still like to see Ron Howard or someone tackle Lloyd Seay and Roy Hall, though. Still like to see that.

Oopsie

 Look, maybe it's an Indiana thing. Good an explanation as any, I suppose.

I mean, here we are, living in our supposed Dark Age isolation in Flyover America, still a land of Native Americans living in tepees and coonskin-capped Dan'l Boones for all the rest of the nation knows. Has electricity made it out here yet? Do we have indoor plumbing? Are beef jerky and pemmican still staples of the Hoosier diet?

No one knows, out there in the wider world. To the rest of America, we're just the following refrain: "Hey, isn't there a state between Ohio and Illinois? And what's it called again? Oh, yeah, Indiana. You mean people actually LIVE there?"

Well ... yes. Yes, we do.

And we hoop, by God.

A hundred and a quarter years ago -- maybe more -- we discovered James Naismith's humble peach-basket recreation, and we made it our own. Naismith didn't invent it here, but we took it national. It's one of the rare things America knows us for, along with the Indianapolis 500, a president (William Henry Harrison) who died of pneumonia because he was too dumb to come in out of the rain, and various vice-presidents.

And yet ...

And yet, we still don't get any respect. Even as the cradle of buckets.

This brings us, in the Blob's usual meandering way, to what happened last night, when the Indiana Fever played the Minnesota Lynx in the championship game of the WNBA's in-season Commissioner's Cup tournament. The Lynx were were a league-best 14-2, playing at home and 10.5-point favorites. The Fever was 8-8 and playing yet another game without all-everything guard Caitlin Clark, the ATM of the WNBA.

So what happened?

Well, the Fever, led by Natasha Howard, Aliyah Boston and a backcourt-by-committee that combined for 46 points, smoked the Lynx 74-59. But not before getting dissed once again because, after all, they are the Indiana Fever.

As reported on the website Awful Announcing, ESPN, which broadcast the game, teased an upcoming video about the Commissioner's Cup Final on its YouTube page. The title of the video was "Full Reaction: Lynx Dominate Fever To Win Commissioner's Cup." Problem was, they teased it while the game was still being played. 

Oopsie.

Oopsie ... but, hey, par for the course, right? Wasn't it just a little over a week ago that the Indiana Pacers, the Fever's NBA brothers-in-arms, pushed the hugely favored Oklahoma City Thunder to seven games the NBA Finals? And might have raised the Big Trophy themselves had Tyrese Haliburton, who scored nine points in the first seven minutes, not gone down at that point with a shredded Achilles?

Why, sure. And wasn't it the rest of  Roundball America who gave the Pacers no chance, zero, nada, before the series began?  Who were predicting either a Thunder sweep or a five-game series at best?

Why, sure. Dissed again.

But, you know, that's OK. We're used to it. And at least last night we got to laugh at ESPN and, by proxy, the rest of Coastal America.

Some things just don't get out there right away, I guess. Poor Coastals.

Here. Have some jerky.

A third-degree burn

 And now a new feature the Blob just made up, Today In Platinum-Grade Dissing, a purpose-built construct created only because Zlatan Ibrahimovic is, shall we say, a fairly plain-spoken dude.

Zlatan Ibrahimovic is not a Bond villain, an MMA fighter or a groundstroke monster from Zagreb working on his fourth or fifth Wimbledon title. He's an international soccer player who was a teammate of Lionel Messi's with Barcelona, and who still thinks very highly of the aging virtuoso.

What he doesn't think so highly of is the team he's playing for now, Inter Miami from the MLS.

Inter Miami just got booted from the FIFA Club World Cup by another of Messi's former teams, Paris St. Germain, in the round of 16. The final score was 4-0 (Adjusted NFL Score: 52-0). And Zlatan put the blame for that not on Messi but his Inter Miami teammates, whom he called a bunch of losers.

OK, so he didn't. What he actually said was this: "Messi plays with statues, not teammates."

"He's surrounded by players who run as if they were carrying bags of cement," Ibrahimovic went on in an ESPN.com piece. "If you put him in a real team, he'd go all-out. There are no coaches, no stars, not even players who understand how to move without the ball. If he were on a real team, any great team, you'd  see the real lion."

Gee, Zlatan. Tell us what you really think.

And, OK, sure, he was only saying out loud what a lot of European pros think about  MLS, which is that it's a league for schlubs and aging stars looking to scoop some coin before they hang up the kit. Presumably that's what Messi is doing with Inter Miami, considering he's 38 now and well down the slope of his career.

His return to play European sides in the Club World Cup sparked discussion of whether or not the Argentine master could still play with the big boys, which presumably sparked Ibrahimovic's defense of him.

Not to say his third-degree burn of Messi's current mates.

Who, by the way, became the first MLS club ever to beat European club in official play when they beat FC Porto 2-1 in the group stage. It made Inter Miami the only MLS club to reach the knockout round of the tournament.

So there, Zlatan. Or not "so there," considering the part about Inter Miami being the only MLS rep in the knockout round.

In any case, it's Lionel against the world by Ibrahimovic's lights.

"Messi plays alone because he loves the game, because he can still do what 99% of players can't," Zlatan said.

"Plays alone"!

Wow. Fourth-degree burn right there.

All hail the horseman

 D. Wayne Lukas went to the Big Shedrow In The Sky over the weekend, and if you don't know who that is it's because you never dropped coin on the nose of Glue Shu Pork in the sixth at Keeneland or some such thing. Because that was D. Wayne's world, and he owned it.

He was a high school basketball coach who became one of the top horsemen of his age, and no one ever loved or cared for or knew the quirks of high-strung thoroughbreds better. The man trained mounts that won 15 Triple Crown races in his long career, including seven Preakness and four Kentucky Derby wins. If he'd been so inclined he could have carpeted his spread with the red roses and black-eyed susans his horses collected in those wins.

D. Wayne wasn't so inclined, however. He leaned more toward the rhythms of barn and stable and pasture, and loamy expanses of dirt. Almost until the day he died at 89, he was up with the dawn and on a horse to do the work, because the work was all. 

He was close friends with the other Rushmore trainer of this era, Bob Baffert, and best buds with Bob Knight and other like-minded folks. Knight, in fact, once called him the "Babe Ruth of thoroughbred racing."

If not that, he was damn close. Like his pal Knight, he was relentless, driven and obsessed with detail. Unlike him, the athletes he was charged with overseeing required more finesse to bring out their best.

From the Associated Press obit: "The whole secret of this game, I think, is being able to read the horse: Read what he needs, what he doesn't need, what he can't do, what he can do,"  Lukas said in May before his 34th and final Preakness Stakes. "That's the whole key. Everybody's got a blacksmith, everybody's got the same bed available, the feed man. We all can hire a good jockey. We all can hire a pretty good exercise rider if we've got the means, so what the hell is the difference? The horse is the difference and what we do with him in reading him."

In which case, D. Wayne Lukas was as literate as the next guy. And far more so than almost all of them.

That other guy

 Aaron Judge mashed his 29th and 30th home runs of the season yesterday, as the New York Yankees swatted the hopeless Oakland/Sacramento/Hooterville A's 12-2. 

Now, I don't know if 30 bombs by the Fourth of July is the same as corn being knee-high by the Fourth of July, but I do know Judge is breathing rarified air these days. The two-homer day was the 44th of his career, moving him into third on the Yankees' alltime list ahead of Lou Gehrig. Just ahead sits Mickey Mantle with 46 two-homer days; way, waaaay ahead is (of course) Babe Ruth, who hit two homers in a game a ridiculous 68 times.

The Blob can't add two plus two and come up with four more than about half the time, but by my calculation 30 home runs in his first 83 games means Judge is working on a 59-homer season. This is significant, but not half as significant as this: Even at his currently robust clip, Judge does not lead the American League in round-trippers.

No, sir. That honor belongs to Caleb John Raleigh, who goes by "Cal." And is a 28-year-old catcher for the Seattle Mariners who, until this summer, had made his mark in the bigs not as a big bopper but as a big stopper.

Won a Gold Glove last season, Cal did. Even won the AL Platinum Glove Award as the best defensive player in the league.

So far this season, though, with the Fourth still four days off, he's given 32 baseballs the long ride. The Mariners have 79 games left, same as the Yankees. This means Cal Raleigh is working on a 62-homer season.

And if at this point you're asking, "Who the hell is this guy?", there are several answers. One, for sure, would be "That other guy," as in, "That other guy who's not Aaron Judge."

Beyond that?

Well, let's start with the fact Cal Raleigh hails from Cullowhee, N.C., and he played his high school ball at Smoky Mountain High School in nearby Sylva. Went on to star at Florida State. Played for the Harwich Mariners in the Cape Cod League one summer. Arrived in the Show in 2021, and, before last weekend's games, he had a career batting average of .227 with 125 homers and 320 RBI.

Last season he batted just .220, with a slugging percentage of .489. But he hit 34 homers and drove in 100 runs, both of which were career highs.

This season?

Thirty-two dingers, as noted. Also 69 RBI. Also a .275 average and a .643 slugging percentage.

Oh, yeah. And one other tidbit about Cal Raleigh: According to Wikipedia, his nickname is "The Big Dumper." Which doesn't sound entirely complimentary, but what do I know?

Besides more about Cal Raleigh than I did before this morning, that is.