An American story

 The U.S. men's soccer team put on another fine show yesterday in the World Cup, smothering Australia 2-0 and winning its group after Panama clipped Turkey 1-0 later in the day.

Know what that makes our guys?

It makes them the first USMNT in history ever to clinch a spot in the knockout rounds with a group match still to play.

It also makes them about as American as America gets, for anyone who might have forgotten what America is and always should be.

This iscbecause the player who headed in the Americans' second goal in the waning minutes of the first was a 21-year-old named Alex Freeman, and you may have heard of his dad. His name is Antonio Freeman, and he has a Super Bowl ring. Won it as a stickout wide receiver for the Green Bay Packers in 1996, with whom he spent most of a career in which he caught 477 passes for 7,251 yards and 61 touchdowns.

His best season came two years later, when he was Brett Favre's go-to guy, snagging 84 balls for a league-leading 1,424 yards and 14 sixes.

In other words, his kid gets his athleticism honest.

He's fast, he's got quicks, he has a gymnast's ability to control his body in the air: Sound familiar?

So here, on America's team, you've got a young man who grew up around American football but took its DNA to the soccer pitch. And another young man (Weston McKennie) who was an Air Force brat who started playing soccer in Kaiserslautem, Germany, while his dad was stationed at Ramstein Air Force base. And yet another young man (Folarin Balogun) who grew up in London the son of Nigerian parents, but who chose to play for the U.S. because he happened to be born in Brooklyn.

Balogun scored two goals in the USMNT's 4-1 win over Paraguay in its World Cup opener. Which, as a friend of the Blob pointed out, is the best argument for birthright citizenship in a nation whose leaders want to get rid of this very American fundamental right.

On this American team, there are players who hail from 11 states, everywhere from Massachusetts to Texas and California to Delaware. There are players whose hometowns are London, Nuremberg and Almere-Stad in the Netherlands. It is, in other words, as remarkably polygot a team as America itself.

Sometimes, especially in these fractured days, we forget that. We forget that America is and always has been a patchwork of cultures, belief systems and backgrounds whose best self is our common striving -- and whose worst self is embodied by those who use fear and loathing to divide us into two camps: Americans, and some treacherous Other. 

Well, guess what, boys and girls?

In this country, we are all Others.  It's the American story right down to the ground.

As a certain soccer team keeps reminding us these days.

Open reform

 Took a peek this a.m. at the 36-hole scores in the U.S. Open at Shinnecock Hills, and, wow, apparently the USGA learned its lesson. Not a windmill or clown mouth in sight, unlike eight years ago.

No, this time around Wyndham Clark leads by four strokes at 7-under and nine other players are under par for the tournament. This is a marked contrast to 2018, when the USGA tricked up Shinnecock with everything but NHL goalies and pin placements in Manhattan, and reduced both a beautiful natural course and the best players in the world to laughingstocks.

Well, not this time. This time the USGA apparently decided to let Shinnecock be Shinnecock, which is plenty. Between the seaside wind ("If it's nae wind, it's nae golf," the Scots like to say), and the typically jungle-y rough, the course presents enough of a challenge without being ridiculous about it.

Which is what the USGA, which runs the U.S. Open, did eight years ago at Shinnecock. And rightly was ball-peened for it from just about everybody.

Well, not this time. This time, they're letting golf be golf, without any usual artificial ingredients.

Call open reform at the Open, or something. And hooray for it.

Erasing history, Part Infinity

 (In which the Blob again tunnels out of Sportsball World and is on the loose. Post your APB here if you don't want to be want to be subjected to, ugh, names and dates and demon hist'ry)

Today is Juneteenth National Independence Day in America -- Jubilee Day, Emancipation Day, Freedom Day, etc. -- and once again some folks will celebrate with picnics, barbecue, music and seminars, and other folks will make snide remarks and wonder why the hell we have to mention slavery again when President Trump says it's verboten.

This is our country now, sadly. It always has been, really -- Americans have forever been a squalling, contentious lot, a melting pot that never completely melts -- but now the divide is more stark and unhinged than ever, having been given the seal of approval by the Unhinged One himself and his various toadies and bootlicks.

On his watch, per his executive order in March of last year, it's now official policy to scrub the nation clean of any history Fearless Leader deems insufficiently worshipful of 'Merica. This of course means keeping quiet about slavery, America's original sin and one of its  messiest and most defining legacies -- i.e., the very essence of what history is, and what it's supposed to teach us about ourselves.

People with a reverence for the past understand this. The people driving the bus in America now do not.

And so the National Park Service, on orders from the very top, has either removed or ticketed for removal signs and exhibits at dozens of sites. Not surprisingly, most of the removals involve slavery, the civil rights movement, America's erratic and often murderous policies toward indigenous peoples, and the trashing of the environment.

In other words, anything that suggests American history isn't all seashells and balloons, as Al McGuire used to say.

The latest erasing happened just a week or so ago, when the NPS removed several panels at Bunker Hill with quotes the Regime deemed inappropriate. These included a Vietnam War era quote suggesting the U.S. should "cease to build memorials to death and begin to glorify life", and a quote urging that immigrants should take "no second place" in America.

And another?

An editorial from the abolitionist paper "The Liberator" chastising freedom-loving Americans for also embracing slavery.

Now, none of those, obviously, is remotely controversial to any rational human. Of course we should choose glorifying life over romanticizing death. Of course the immigrant should not take a back seat in a country built by immigrants. And of course the contradiction between freedom-loving Americans and the institution of slavery is central to our national narrative.

 But, again, rational humans aren't driving the bus anymore.

This includes the woman who claimed a Bunker Hill display about the women's suffrage movement in America was -- I swear I'm not making this up -- "woke" feminism. Yet her lone complaint set in motion the aforementioned erasures.

So one nutbar says something irredeemably stupid, and the Park Service commences scrubbing. This is our country now.

It's a country where our leaders pine for either the 1890s or 1950s, when history textbooks still advanced the false catechism of  the Lost Cause, teaching a generation of young minds that most slaves were happy and, anyway, the Civil War wasn't about slavery. And it was a time when no one questioned how bizarre it was that United States military installations were named for Confederates who waged war against the United States military.

Juneteenth?

A national holiday, but one of which a disturbingly large part of the nation seems disinclined to make too much. It's OK to celebrate the end of slavery in America, but not to talk about slavery itself. Better to keep it locked in the national attic with your crazy Uncle Fred.

On the other hand ...

On the other hand, here's something I wrote on this occasion three years ago. Very little has changed, sadly. Which only means it's still a relevant way to wrap all this up:

Juneteenth ... is rightly celebrated, but you can't fully discuss it without acknowledging the backlash that followed. It led to freedom, and then the ballot, and then to representation in Congress -- and then, as night follows day, to the violent overthrow of Reconstruction in favor of the reconstruction of slavery in the form of Jim Crow.

And then to the black Holocaust of lynching and racist violence. And then to the civil rights movement, the backlash-to-the-backlash whose gains the usual suspects are now working overtime to undo.

You can't properly teach Juneteenth without mentioning that context. And yet it's everything those usual suspects are trying to suppress in the name of  -- to use one of their arguments -- not stirring up resentments that divide us. 

Know who else used that rationale?

Well, in Adam Hochschild's history of the years 1917-21 in America, "American Midnight," there's a passage describing domestic Military Intelligence chief Ralph Van Deman's strong-arming of the black press. His excuse was that they were running exposes about lynching, and that pieces like that might create "a feeling of disloyalty" among blacks.

Hmm. Sound familiar?

Windmills and clown mouths

 The U.S. Open returns to Shinnecock Hills in the Hamptons today, and for the sake of golf we can only hope the USGA doesn't turn it into Omaha Beach again. Or, failing that, Pirate Pete's Treasure Chest Mini-Golf, complete with windmills and clown mouths and the notorious Walk The Plank hole.

That's pretty much what the USGA did eight years ago, which was the last time it brought the Open to Shinnecock Hills, a lovely windswept course that surely deserved better. As did the golfers who had to play it.

By the time the tournament organizers got done tricking up Shinnecock, see, the place featured everything but land mines and machine gun nests with interlocking fields of fire.  They always do this at the Open, the goal being to make the tournament "a true test of golf" or some such thing. It's why the green are always slicker than a bald man's head and the rough is a Brazilian rainforest.

This time, however, the USGA outdid itself. And in the process made laughingstock of both a proud track and the Open itself.

What it did was, it took the best golfers in the world and turned them into Merle Fleenor The Carpet Cleaner, hacking his way around Dirt Clod Country Club on a Saturday morning. How ridiculous was it?

It was so ridiculous no one broke par for the tournament. Brooks Koepka won with a 72-hole total of 1-over.

It was so ridiculous Tommy Fleetwood, who finished second, shot a 75 and a 78. 

It was so ridiculous Dustin Johnson, who led at the 36-hole turn, shot a 77 in the third round. Rickie Fowler shot 84 the same day. Rory McIlroy didn't shoot anything, having missed the cut after putting up a fat 80 in the first round.

And Phil Mickelson?

Well, in the midst of shooting 11-over 81 in the third round, he pulled big ol' Merle. Slid a putt wide, then trotted after his ball and swatted it back the other way before it stopped rolling.

Polo, anyone?

It's the Blob's considered opinion he should have been disqualified for that sorry little stunt, but on some level you could understand it. Professional golfers always complain about U.S. Open courses, mainly because they're professional golfers. A more pampered lot you'd be hard-pressed to find.

But eight years ago at Shinnecock, they had more than a point. And once again we were compelled to wonder why the USGA thinks golf fans flock to the Open to see Rory shoot 80 or DJ shoot 77.  Omigod, Martha, DeChambeau's workin' on an 85! Let's hustle over to 18 to watch him come in!

Yeah, no. If golf fans wanted to see that, they'd just head out to Dirt Clod to watch Merle chili-dip a wedge -- and then fling the (bleep-bleep) piece of Calloway (bleep) into the nearest pond, shouting "Hope you can swim, you (bleep-bleep) son of a (bleep)!"

Or maybe he'd just pull a Phil Mickelson. A true golf fan can never get enough polo, after all.

Or windmills. Or clown mouths.

Change of ... something

 So after all that ...

Brendan Sorsby said, "Nah, just messin' with ya."

He is not going to play quarterback for Texas Tech. He is not going to be Joe College for one last year. He's gonna go pro -- if that phrase is even relevant anymore in a world where Joe College is already a pro thanks to Name, Image and Likeness deals that could choke a horse.

Brendan Sorsby, for instance, was set to make $6 million from Texas Tech's NIL for his one season in Lubbock.

But again: Nah, just messin' with ya.

This after Sorsby announced he's entering the NFL's supplemental draft, after paying a bunch of suits heaven knows how much to drag the NCAA into court. He drew a friendly local judge who might or might not have been wearing a Texas Tech jersey under his robes, and scored an injunction on the grounds that Sorsby was a compulsive gambler and denying him one more year of eligibility would do serious harm to his mental health.

In other words: You can't bar Brendan Sorsby for being a compulsive gambler who bet on college football -- including, at Indiana, his own team -- because he's a compulsive gambler who bet on college football.

I know. And believe me, that's not going to sound less wack no matter how many times you read it.

But after paying lawyers and getting Judge Go Red Raiders to sign off and putting Texas Tech in the crosshairs of virtually everyone in college football -- and after Tech embarrassed itself with a cringe-y video defending Sorsby, and itself ("We're not either letting a compulsive gambler play for us just because we need a quarterback!") -- Sorsby's decided to tell Tech this: Sorry, guys. I've had a change of ... well, something. Have a good one!

Now there's some gratitude for ya.

This likely had much to do with the state of Texas threatening the Big 12 with a lawsuit if the conference tried to punish Texas Tech on its own hook. The Big 12 basically said "Bite me" and rolled out its own team of lawyers, who were prepared to argue the conference had every damn right in the world to enforce its own rules.

Suddenly the NFL had all sorts of appeal, one imagines. And so off to the NFL supplemental draft Sorsby will go. 

Will someone take a chance on him?

 Probably.

Will it be a hard sell given that Sorsby has an acknowledged gambling addiction and the NFL is notorious for shunning players for far less than that? 

Maybe.

Shedeur Sanders, after all, went tumbling in the draft just because teams didn't like his attitude. Now a kid who bets on everything wants in the door?

Somewhere Paul Hornung and Alex Karras, who way back in the NFL's Before Time each got a year's sitdown for betting on NFL games, must be howling. 

But that was Pete Rozelle's NFL, and that was when the league considered gambling to be the third rail of heinous crimes. Now, of course, the NFL is in business with the gamblers, or at least their enablers. Hard to get past the cognitive dissonance of rejecting Sorsby because of his gambling jones when DraftKings, Bet MGM and lord knows who else are paying big money to sponsor your team's games on Sunday afternoon.

In any event, after all the hoo-ha, Texas Tech is out one quarterback, and the NCAA is out one headache. A rare W for an organization that turned college athletics into the Wild West by basically washing its hands of the whole NIL thing once it became inevitable.

"Go with God," you can imagine them all saying now.

With God, or with mammon. Hard to say these days.

Their Cup runneth even

 The thing about the World Cup is, a tie is not always like kissing your sister, as Bear Bryant liked to see. Sometimes a tie is a win -- or a loss, depending what side of the tie you're on.

"OK, Mr. Blob," you're saying now. "Zen break is over. Get on with it."

Alrighty, then. Let's talk about Cape Verde, then.

It's an island nation 350 miles of the west coast of Africa that used to belong to Portugal, but that's been independent for 51 years now. This year its soccer team, which includes expats from half the countries in the world, reached the World Cup for the first time. With a population just north of half-a-million, it's the third-smallest country ever to play in the world's biggest sporting event.

And yesterday it beat Spain, 0-0.

And, OK, so officially that made it a nil-nil draw, but that didn't mean it wasn't a huge upset. It was. It was, in fact, a monumental upset, given the fact Spain is almost everyone's favorite to win the World Cup and Cape Verde is ... well, lovely bunch of islands in the eastern Atlantic.

The Verde-ians (Verdettes?) did it with guts, determination, dumb luck and a 40-year-old goalkeeper named Vozinha, who made seven saves and immediately became the star of the tournament in its early stages. In 19 years he's played professionally in six countries -- including two stops in Portugal, where he's currently with Chaves in La Liga Portugal 2.

Before yesterday only hardcore soccerheads had heard of him. Now he has five million followers on Instagram.

This is what one shining moment will do for a guy in the World Cup, just as one shining moment In the NCAA Tournament will make people aware that a Maryland-Baltimore County, a Fairleigh Dickinson or a Mercer are actual schools with actual basketball teams. Upsets make the Madness, the Madness; upsets make the World Cup, the World Cup.

This is especially true in the latter case, because upsets like Cape Verde vs. Spain happen so rarely. Many more times than not, a Cape Verde-Spain result will look like Germany-Curacao (a 7-1 rout for the Germans), or Sweden-Tunisia (in which the Swedes paved the Tunisians 5-1).

Plus, the fans are nuttier in World Cup. They just are.

Oh, sure, college kids will paint their faces and sometimes their torsos in the colors of dear old Whatsamatta U., but what about the Australia fans who show up dressed in a head-to-toe kangaroo suit (in honor of their national side, the Sockeroos)? Or how about the Egypt fan who showed up for his side's 1-1 draw with Belgium wearing the head of Anubis, the Egyptian god of graves?

I don't know what the Cape Verde equivalent is to that, but I bet it would be cool. And I bet they partied long into the night in a distinctly Cape Verde-ian (Verdette?) way after their boys brought down mighty Spain, sort of.

Their World Cup runneth even, by golly. Raise a glass.

The Great Divide

 The President of these United States celebrated his 80th birthday yesterday, and to commemorate the occasion, Ivory Coast beat Ecuador 1-nil on the soccer pitch.

OK. So that's not right.

How about this: The President of these United States celebrated his 80th birthday yesterday, and to commemorate the occasion, the Carolina Hurricanes beat the Vegas Golden Knights 3-0 to win the Stanley Cup.

No?

Fine. Here's one more:

 The President of these United States celebrated Pride Month yesterday, and to commemorate the occasion, a bunch of buff, sweaty, half-naked men brawled on the White House lawn. 

Excuse me?

Whatta you mean I'm being snarky about this?

You mean it was actually a celebration of Freedom, and the President of Freedom, and good old All-American Freedom testosterone? Strength and will and aggravated assault (but with referees!)? Everything that made America the greatest country in the history of countries, and last night's mixed martial arts card the greatest sporting event in the history of sporting events?

(Which, no lie, is how it was marketed)

Okey-dokey. Whatever floats your boat.

This is an America, after all, where there are any number of boats these days, and they're all headed off different edges of the world. Whatever commonality we have as a nation -- and, truthfully, it's never been as common as we like to think -- vanishes a bit more with every deranged social media post by Fearless Leader, his acolytes, and the fringier of his appalled opponents.

Either he's Jesus Christ, or he's the Antichrist. Either he's George Washington, or he's Attila the Hun. Either Michelle Obama is a thoughtful, educated former First Lady eminently worthy of every American's respect ... or she's a man.

Which is what one of the buff, sweaty, half-naked brawlers shouted last night after winning his fight. Right after he praised God, of course.

This not being a crowd well-versed in cognitive dissonance, they cheered.

And elsewhere?

Elsewhere, Japanese fans were observed picking up their trash after Japan and the Netherlands tied 1-1 in their opening World Cup soccer match.

Elsewhere (reportedly, because who knows these days), some Knicks fans stuck around to help sanitation workers clean up the New York streets after a night of revelry and mayhem following the Knicks first NBA title in 53 years.

Elsewhere, Carolina's ancient warrior, Jordan Staal, hoisted the Stanley Cup on enemy ice, and no one threw trash him, no one (at least within earshot) questioned his parentage, no one called his wife a man.

On Flag Day, in the midst of America's 250th year, the Great American Divide perhaps was never more starkly illustrated. To our eternal shame.

Respect vs. disrespect. Manners vs., well, something else. America vs. 'Merica.

On one side of the divide stands the crowd who believes in their heart of hearts that Fearless Leader is a Dark Lord intent on destroying every decent thing about this country, instead of what he is -- a half-senile bumbler surrounded by bumbling enablers who, yes, are intent on destroying every decent thing about this country, but who thankfully appear too stupid to complete the mission.

And on the other side?

They're the enablers, the hell-yeah bunch, the poor dupes who believe big talk and bombs equate to strength, and that God anointed the half-senile bumbler to be the GREATEST PRESIDENT EVER and save us all from diversity, inclusion and the Somali/Muslim/transgender hordes.

Oh, and from Michelle Obama, of course.

Anyway, that ensemble was on full display last night, in what was billed as UFC Freedom 250 but looked more like redneck cosplay. On the grounds of the People's House, they erected an MMA cage emblazoned with Bud Light logos. Dirt bikes sailed over jumps.  Not far away lay the trash heap that used to be the East Wing.

All that was missing were a rusted-out Chevy up on blocks and a giant oil stain in the driveway. The Ellipse as Cletus Bob's front yard, in other words.

And, yes, I know, that sounds insufferably elitist. It isn't meant to. And it's not like I'm some kale-eating dilettante who doesn't enjoy a little lowbrow culture himself on occasion. I'm a retired sportswriter, for God's sake. And so gimme a cheeseburger and a beer and dial up some stock car racing or professional axe throwing on the tube. I'm there.

This does not mean, however, that I have no standards. I do. And one of them, as a board-certified history nerd, is an admittedly pearl-clutching reverence for America's landmarks.

Civil War battlefields. Our national parks. Arlington. And, yes, the White House.

Turning its grounds into some garish Roman circus sponsored by Bud Light strikes me as obscene. I can't help it.

I suppose that makes me just another triggered lib to those on the other side of the Divide. So be it. Guilty as charged. But what else can I say, in this riven America?

You do you, in other words. And I'll do me. And maybe one of these days -- not soon, unfortunately, and maybe not before I shuffle off this mortal coil -- we'll all come to our senses.

Hopefully before Cletus Bob does some more urban renewal at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. Hopefully before then.