For the second time in three years, the football gridiron program of the University of Hawai‘i has been exposed as a fraud by a professional sports franchise major university’s team.

Commentators on last night’s (5 December 2009) 51-10 shellacking of Hawai‘i by the University of Wisconsin had fun early on with the walk-on status of the UH quarterback. Who promptly demonstrated why he was a walk-on (leaving aside the matter of “academic transcripts”, which in this world doesn’t matter anyway until one is caught) by ending his team’s first two possessions with interceptions.

(For those of you who don’t follow American college gridiron, a “walk-on” is a student who joins a team without having been invited, and therefore has to pay for his education rather than receiving wages and perks a full scholarship as do the invited players. So – among other things – while his teammates were chowing down at the training table, this young man, who by rule may not partake of the training table’s goodies, was driving around town delivering pizza.)

When it became apparent that the Hawai‘i team defense was going to provide no more of an impediment to the Wisconsin running game than a thin layer of mud on a pavement would to a herd of stampeding elephants, it was obvious that the Aloha State’s gridiron fans were in for a long night. Your Friendly Neighborhood Amoeba made it a short one.

I am sure that if I were to waste any time with the paid shill that is “the voice of University of Hawai‘i sports”, I would discover that the failings of the UH gridiron squad were all linked to money.

The facilities are lousy. (Tell it to the Psychology Department.)

The recruiting budget is miniscule. (Most university departments have had their budget for graduate student stipends slashed, often by as much as two-thirds of 2008 levels).

Salaries for coaches are noncompetitive. (The current UH head coach makes $1.1 million, merely tenfold what full professors make in most academic departments – but his Wisconsin opposite number makes $1.5 million, in a city where the cost of living is about half that of Honolulu, and coaches in the really big schools make, like, $3.5 million. Not counting endorsement income, support from “boosters”, etc. etc. …)

I reckon it’s time for Hawai‘i to smell the same coffee as Hofstra and Northeastern universities, and close the gridiron program in favor of other pursuits. Like, finding a building to house the Psychology Department.

Of course, any such move would probably close the University of Hawai‘i, or at least the flagship campus at Mânoa. But We the People of the Great Nation State of Hawai‘i are doing that anyway, by slow strangulation. May as well come right out and get it over with.

I mean, the people of the Mânoa Valley never wanted the campus in their backyards anyway. And most of the worst-in-the-nation rush-hour traffic congestion that plagues Honolulu has been tracked to people getting to and leaving UH Mânoa. Close the campus? Problem solved!

Hey. Do this, and the city won’t even need a rail line.

  - O Ceallaigh
Copyright © 2009 Felloffatruck Publications. All wrongs deplored.
All opinions are mine as a private citizen.

“Dude! Did you see that?“

“Of course I didn’t see it, dude. I had my head in the fridge, getting your beer. It’s baseball, y’know. I could go to the fridge six times between plays and miss nothing. And if by some chance something did happen while I was doing something useful, they’ll still be replaying it when I get back.”

“How come everybody’s got instant replays but the umpires? They’re the ones who need it most, the way they keep blowin’ calls. How come they don’t get instant replay?”

“Because they’re not playing a video game?“

“Huh?“

“It’s a live game, played by live people. And live people make mistakes. If the ump’s making mistakes deliberately, I wanna know about it. Otherwise, welcome to the human race. You want everything to be perfect, you want to watch a video game. And when that day comes that you can’t tell a video game on your hi-def TV from a real one, I’m goin’ to be real scared. And you should be too.”

“But don’t you want the umpires to get it right?“

“Yeah. Which is why you train them to be super attentive. You tell them that they don’t have to be super attentive, ’cause the Big Umpire In The Sky is watchin’ over them, they start relying on that Big Ump more and more. And pretty soon, they’ll get rid of the humans altogether, and you’ll have robot umpires. And after that, robot players. And, eventually, just virtual players.”

“Football’s got instant replay.”

“Yeah. And what are you watching while they’ve stopped the game to stare at video screens?”

“Um … commercials?”

“Right the first time, dude. The games already last four hours thanks to TV times out, and they need more? The umpires and referees are ‘getting it right’, all right. Right out of our pockets.”

  - O Ceallaigh
Copyright © 2009 Felloffatruck Publications. All wrongs deplored.
All opinions are mine as a private citizen.

Of late, Your Friendly Neighborhood Amoeba has been indulging in a rediscovered pleasure, dating back to time, a couple tens of years ago, spent living in a country that its citizens humbly called “Godzone“.

Australian rules football.

Which a certain US fourletter network has been making available, on one of its many websites, to amoebae with moths in their wallets where the dollar bills should be. I’d tell you which network, but it hasn’t offered to replace any of those moths with coin of the realm, and if Quilly isn’t advertising anybody’s wares for free these days, I don’t see why I should be.

One of the great joys of watching Aussie Rules football on your telly or computer screen is that you actually get to watch football, instead of a string of commercials through which a ball flies on occasion. I am convinced that if any media executive tried to impose the “television timeout” on Aussie rules telecasts, of the sort that We the People have allowed to ruin gridiron, basketball, ice hockey, and even volleyball, for crying out loud, the citizenry would go out on strike and shut down the country.

(I read that TV times out [sic; not timeouts, for God's sake] do occur in Aussie rules after a goal is scored, but these occur during a natural break in the game, whereas American TV stoppages often take place where interruptions were never meant to be.)

A second remarkable thing about the Aussie rules football telecasts. The head umpire (officials are called “umpires” as in cricket and baseball, rather than “referees”) wears a microphone as he roams across a ground that’s about twice the size of a gridiron field following play, and that microphone is “live” throughout the telecast. Treating the viewer to a constant stream of the most powerful, devastating, shocking language imaginable.

Please. And, Thank you.

No. Seriously.

Sam’s got a free kick, Trevor, stand five metres clear, please. Thanks, mate.

That’s the conversation that the microphone records, practically nonstop through more than 80 minutes of on-field action. Sure, there’s probably a sound technician somewhere who is zapping all the F-bombs, but still. There can’t be a lot of them to zap, else there’d be too many conspicuous gaps in the patter.

Can you imagine such a line coming out of the mouth of a Major League Baseball umpire, or a National Basketball Association referee, in the heat of the moment during a game? It would likely break the jaw of the official trying to say it, and the shock of hearing it would probably drop any ball player within earshot and get him hauled out of the arena on a stretcher.

Mind you, the lines that do come out of the mouths of referees, and players, during the course of games in America explain how come these folks are not equipped with microphones, or, if they are, they aren’t turned on very often. The kind of mutual trust and respect that allows an Aussie rules umpire to broadcast his management of a match to the world is rather in short supply when it comes to American game officials.

As the National Basketball Association referees are finding out. In case you haven’t heard, the NBA is preparing to lock out its whistleblowers in a contract dispute, and replace them with scabs.

Your Friendly Neighborhood Amoeba worries about this. If the Big Business that is professional sports in America gets away with trashing the wages and working conditions of such a high-profile group of employees, doesn’t that send a signal to the rest of Big Business? As if they need it. Doesn’t that say to, for example, Ph.D.s in the sciences, “You’re next, buddy. Minimum wage or you’re fired.” Isn’t this, like, a big-time red alert? For all of us?

Apparently not. For most of those of We the People who follow basketball – at least, those of Us whose comments are getting published – are saying to the referees, “Off with your heads!” You’d think we were reenacting 1981, with the NBA refs in the role of the air traffic controllers union, and David Stern of the NBA starring as President Ronald Reagan.

The NBA has pinned the labels of “too rich, too fat” on its referees – just like the “Great Communicator” did to the air traffic controllers. Furthermore, thanks to Tim Donaghy, the NBA can add the tag “too crooked”. And We the People, in callous disregard for our own safety, are buying it.

Those folk who think that the scabs will magically do a better job controlling the roid-raging illiterate megagazillionaires on the NBA’s courts than the incumbents need to recall the consequences of Reagan’s 1981 strikebreaking. The scabs in that instance somehow managed not to turn America’s skies into a demolition derby, but only by sharply reducing the volume of air traffic that those skies could handle for the (from memory) two years that it took for the replacements to come up to speed. It was the worst air traffic tangle in American history until September 2001, when the professionals showed us how to snarl things up for real.

I just hope that the officials who work the Aussie rules games are paying attention to the current roilings of the NBA and its referees, and, in response, maintain their integrity and comportment on the field of play, so that fans and players will stand with them, not against them, when their Big Business comes calling with the wage hatchet.

I don’t wish to read about the decline and fall of the roaming umpires.

  - O Ceallaigh
Copyright © 2009 Felloffatruck Publications. All wrongs deplored.
All opinions are mine as a private citizen.

The other day, a neighbor invited Quilly and me to a party. A football gridiron party. More specifically, a college football gridiron party, to celebrate the kickoff of the local team’s season.

Neighbor had no way of knowing that Your Friendly Neighborhood Amoeba had just received the following message from the library system of the local team’s university:

The 4% cut plus the most recent cut of 6% mean a total reduction of $1.7 million to the Library’s working budget.

[The cited cuts are to University academic programs, decreed as one consequence of the ongoing squabble between the University and the Governor Legislature People of the State of Hawai‘i over funding for educational programs.]

To address the reduction, the Libraries have cut student employment hours, cut casual hire staff, reduced hours of service, and restricted or eliminated entirely other internal expenditures. The reduction has also affected the purchase of library resources such as books, journals, audiovisual materials and databases.

The rest of this message is to inform you what changes have been made to the available resources. Some of these measures will be felt immediately, while others will not take effect until 2010. We have:

* Ceased getting automatic shipments of books from our major vendor.
* Distributed minimum amounts of money for new book purchases.
* Cancelled some expensive, low use databases.
* Cancelled journals, microfilm and newspapers from various publishers. [This includes online access as well as paper copies.] We will also lose access to some titles from publisher X previously available through a consortial arrangement, because X has changed access rules and increased the pricing for the consortium.

Need I point out the salary of the school’s head gridiron coach? A bargain at a mere $1.1 million.

Yeah, yeah, he took a 10% pay cut this year. It wasn’t exactly voluntary. One of the rest of us pulls that kind of stunt, we’re fired. ‘Course, the point is moot. The coach can’t keep his starters healthy, he can’t recruit worth beans so his team has no depth, and his team will be lucky to win five (out of 13) games. So at the end of the year, he’ll be gone for committing the one unforgivable sin.

Losing.

Not that that’s going to help the library. After all, someone else will come in after him and demand more money to lose games. And We will demand that the University pay it.

Ah well, at least we know where the People’s priorities are.

LIBRARY CLOSURE, phr. Book burning by other means.

We declined our neighbor’s party invitation. YFNA is in no mood for gridiron.

  - O Ceallaigh
Copyright © 2009 Felloffatruck Publications. All wrongs deplored.
All opinions are mine as a private citizen.

So now we hear, that, in 2008, two security staffers working in the clubhouse of the Boston Red Sox professional baseball team were fired for possession and use of anabolic, androgenic steroids. All involved have denied any connection between the staffers and Red Sox players. Nevertheless, coming on the heels of the Ramírez/Ortiz revelations, the news is ominous.

Even more ominous is the attitude of the commentator featured (featured) by ESPN in response to the story:

Nobody cares about the steroid use from six years anymore. Nothing is going to happen unless caught again. They were not banned in 2003 at the time, so sorry, no championships are going to be taken away, no asterisks are going to be used, baseball games are still going to be played today, so stop your whining and deal with it.

“So what”, right? Riiight. Tell it to the kids.

When the Mitchell Report on steroid abuse in professional baseball came out, a couple of years ago, the Red Sox escaped attention. What did not escape attention was that George Mitchell, the “Mitchell” of the Mitchell Report, was a once and future Red Sox employee. Wonder what he’s thinking now …?

The below, from Felloffatruck Publications, was originally posted on 16 December 2007.

===============

On the day after the Mitchell Report detailing the scope and extent of “steroid“, HGH, and other illegal performance-enhancing drug abuse in American Major League Baseball was released, I heard the lead author of the report, George Mitchell, speak to the press.

I was listening to a radio news report, so I didn’t hear all, or even most, of what Mitchell had to say. What I did get to hear was enough. Mitchell, in effect, blamed baseball’s drug crisis on the Commissioner, the team owners, the players, and the union representing the players.

My first thought: You forgot someone.

After all, as anyone who has spent more than five minutes listening to sports talk radio (and yes, my hand’s up) has heard, any time the topic of how We the People can tolerate Alex Rodriguez making as much money in a day as a university professor, or any four full-time McDonald’s employees, make in a year comes up, “baseball is a business”.

“And a business exists for why, dude?”

“To make money, dude.”

“And where does that money come from?”

“From the people who buy stuff from it, dude.”

“So if people were really pissed off about baseball players using performance-enhancing drugs …”

“Baseball’d go broke. Dude.”

“And is it?”

“Hell, no.“

Dude. Indeed, when the press asked Bud Selig what the impact of the Mitchell Report would be, his reply was “We expect to break attendance records again this coming year.”

So tell me again why we’re prosecuting Barry Bonds, instead of handing him a medal for promoting The American Way Of Profit?

For that’s what we’re doing, any time we go to the ballpark, or turn the TV or the radio or the computer to the game, or buy My Favorite Team’s Official Gear, or even mention the Curse of the Bambino – or the Billy Goat – in a blog. We the People are voting for steroids in baseball.

Yes we are. Forget polls and sanctimonious pronouncements. The only – the only – way to get steroids out of baseball, not to mention the rest of professional and amateur sports, is to stop supporting those sports. To make them go broke unless and until they clean up their acts.

Every once in awhile, I would hear a caller on sports talk radio call for a boycott of sports for this reason or that. And the station hosts would immediately come down on that caller like the proverbial ton of bricks. “It won’t work. If you don’t want your seat, someone else’ll take it. Why hurt yourself for nothing?” Of course they would say those things, they like their money too. I wonder if they even take any callers like that any more? Somebody lets that idea onto the airwaves, it could hurt the station’s bottom line. No faster ticket to poverty for a sports salesman announcer.

Or a university professor, for whom the success of his school’s football team is his last hope of ever getting his leaky, burned-out building fixed.

Dammit, there are times when I like nothing better than to watch a good game. But I haven’t set foot in a stadium since that day in 1981 when I sat next to a faculty wife in a famous university’s gridiron house. An opposing player had crossed the 50-yard line during a game that the home team was winning 33-0, and she was angry, yelling for her side to “Spear him! Spear him!” Yes, spearing is illegal, and it has killed people.

I remember when John McEnroe rose to prominence in professional tennis. Because at that point, I stopped watching tennis, and have never gone back to it. Because John McEnroe’s artistic temperament was more than a match for his athletic talent. Not for him the unruffled demeanor of a Björn Borg – born of a father who, at the first sign of a thrown racket, grounded his son and made it absolutely clear that any repeat would doom forever his dreams of playing the game. A game in which manners mattered.

Why? Because its inventors, and the inventors of similar games, recognized that sporting events are rituals. Specifically, ritualized combat. Rituals that connect us with the other animals on this blue sphere, all the way back (at least) to the cartilaginous fishes of 450 million years ago. Rituals that permit the stronger of two contestants to be identified without exposing both to potentially lethal attacks except when absolutely necessary. Rituals whose rules serve to minimize the risk of mayhem, murder, war.

Well, screw the rules. John McEnroe would express himself.

And American tennis boomed.

Pete Sampras in his prime most likely would have given John McEnroe a good ol’-fashioned whupping on the tennis court.

But Pete Sampras played like a gentleman.

And American tennis went broke. Pete who??

Yes. When We the People call for spearing hapless opponents, or 73 home runs a year out of a bottle, or thrown rackets and F-bombing referees at a tennis match, or chest-bumping and F-bombing referees at an NBA game, or for Terrell Owens to pull his cell phone out of his pocket in the end zone after scoring a gridiron touchdown, we are voting in favor of all of these things. All of which stretch the rules of the rituals. No stretching? Boring! And it’s only boring – a moving target, constantly moving towards the bleeding edge – that can lead to a sporting event going broke.

Trouble is, when the rules of ritualized combat break down, there’s only one thing left.

The real thing.

Tell me again, how much was the Bush Administration asking us to pony up to support the war in Iraq? This week?

  - O Ceallaigh
Copyright © 2007, 2009 Felloffatruck Publications. All wrongs deplored.
All opinions are mine as a private citizen.

In December 1919, after a series of on- and off-the-field incidents that had to make you wonder what the reform-school orphan was taking, the Boston Red Sox professional baseball club sold pitcher/outfielder George Herman Ruth to the New York Yankees. As every citizen of Red Sox Nation knows, Babe Ruth led the then-moribund Yankees to fame and fortune, while the Red Sox pinballed from “hard luck” to disaster. Thanks to the notorious “Curse of the Bambino“, the Red Sox wouldn’t win a [gasp, choke, wheeze] “World” Series until 2004 – 85 years after Ruth was dealt to New York (and 86 years after their previous Series win).

In July 2008, after a series of on- and off-the-field incidents that had to make you wonder what the Dominican superstar was taking (vide infra), the Red Sox traded outfielder Manuel Aristides Ramírez Onelcida to the Los Angeles Dodgers. As every citizen of Red Sox Nation knows, Manny Ramírez is part of a newly-minted baseball juggernaut in Los Angeles, while the Red Sox struggle to score runs, and appear to be headed for a new Slough of Despond, a new Curse – The Curse of the Mannino.

But this new Curse threatens to take away, not only the future, but also the past. The past that, so the city of Boston used to think, had finally exorcised the Bambino’s curse. The past that includes two World Series wins – wins that were, it now appears, made possible only by illegal injection.

In a poignant – and prescient – article back in May 2009, sports columnist Bill Simmons (of ESPN) imagined the agonies of having to explain to his son how it was OK for the Red Sox to win the 2004 Series when at least two of the team’s headline stars (Ramírez, David Ortiz, Pedro Martínez) were cheating. In May, Simmons was speculating, based on the 50-game suspension for substance abuse that Ramírez was then serving. Today (30 July 2009), what Simmons entitled “his worst nightmare” seems to be coming true.

Or maybe it’s his second worst nightmare.

After all, the son, instead of peppering his father with barbed questions, could have shrugged his shoulders and said, “So what?”

That’s what a lot of folk who write in to the sports websites have been saying about this revelation, indeed the whole “steroids in sports” topic. At least, those folk whose comments the sports websites will let you see. “So what? Who cares what these guys are shooting, so long as we get to see the home runs on SportsCenter. Bring on the homers!”

A horrible attitude, you say? Careful that what you say matches what you do.

Do you go to professional baseball games? Do you watch them on television, follow their websites online, sign up for Red Sox Nation? You’re saying “So what?” to the steroid issue. Along with the millions of people who have been hearing all about it and have still been packing the stands and driving the TV ratings up. Unless you live in New York, where the damned gall of the stadium owners finally got to be too much for even you to swallow.

Do you wring your hands with the preacher at church about the plight of sweatshop workers, and shop at Wal-Mart and Target anyway? You’re saying “So what?” to those $1 a day sneaker makers.

The professionals in business are professionals for a reason. They know how to make money. They know that a million pious words are instantly negated by one swipe of the magic plastic. They will sell you that balloon mortgage because they know they can.

And it’s not their fault. Because, not only can they, they have to. Or the people who own stock in their company will sniff an infinitesimal drop in the company’s profits (read their dividends), and drop those stocks like primed grenades. Bring on those homers, baseball guys, or we’re watching football gridiron. Or American Idol.

There is, has been, and will be a lot of pious folk blaming The Big Cheeses for steroids in baseball, the economic downturn, all that stuff. It’s not their fault.

It’s ours.

And, your friendly neighborhood Amoeba suggests, it will continue to be our fault. Unless and until the day comes that sports owners field teams in which the players are clean of drug cheaters, rapists, racketeers, etc. etc. Because crime doesn’t sell.

Until the day comes that supermarket checkout stands stock Scientific American because that magazine sells, and Cosmopolitan doesn’t.

Until the day comes that television news programs actually report the news, because in-depth reporting of the roots of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict sells, and fourth-hand rumors of possible child molestation by a priest who was 90 years old in 1956 do not.

As it is, we now have the world that we have made for ourselves. A world of baseball players who have learned that the ka-CHINGs of the cash registers easily drown out the screams of agony from parents whose children have died from steroid abuse. That it is how it is, is no one’s fault but our own.

And we can all go to hell in it together.

  - O Ceallaigh
Copyright © 2009 Felloffatruck Publications. All wrongs deplored.
All opinions are mine as a private citizen.

I hear tell that the college basketball tournaments are underway now (19 March 2009). The famous, not to mention ubiquitous, March Madness. NCAA Men, NCAA Women, NIT …

How could I miss knowing about this, you ask?

Well, for one thing, here in Hawai‘i, all the games are over by lunchtime. Maybe once upon a time, Hawai‘i was laid-back enough so that working people could just skip work and watch the hoops. Not anymore, not in the land of dead aloha. The mainland tradition of dinner, a brewski, and a game on the tube doesn’t exist here, for the simple reason that, by the time it gets dark in Honolulu, the only sports on television are reruns of poker tournaments or the 1999 World’s Strongest Man “competition”. The experience of turning on the car radio at 7 PM in O‘ahu (where, back in civilization, you’d find the tipoff at the Boston Garden or the first pitch at Fenway Park), and being treated to programs intended for Pennsylvania long-haul truckers at 2 AM – well, it’s a must. If you don’t have a just-painted wall to watch instead.

For another. If I hear Dick Vitale yell out “Sweet Sixteen” or “Final Four, baby!” one more time …

For a third …

Y’know, back when elephants had fur, I used to like basketball. I even lettered in it in high school. As the team manager. You think white men can’t jump, you can imagine what it’s like for an Amoeba. But I kept the stats, and the official scorebook during games, and sometimes ran the clock. Sometimes (it was a small town I grew up in) I ran the clock and kept the official scorebook. And the best part – someone else had to deal with the oranges that the players got during halftime (this was way before the Gatorade era). I’m hoping I did somebody some good, and I thoroughly enjoyed the experience.

Well, maybe except for the time we lost in the playoffs and I lost it in the locker room …

Or the time we won an away game in a hardnosed town and somebody stoned the bus while we were en route home …

Or the year the team went Ganga 1, School 0 (speaking of getting stoned) and the town found out that the coach was gay …

But at least, back then, the game started at the beginning and went to the end, with no interruptions except at the end of each quarter and the three (maximum) times out awarded to each coach to keep the players from killing each other, the refs, or the fans. Not that there were many fans (see “small town”, supra).

Now?

Every five minutes (you watch), just as the teams are actually getting to the point where they’re getting some flow, some momentum, where they’re actually playing the game, a little red light goes on in the stands and …

TWEEEEEEET!!

Time out.

Cut to the Cialis ad. And the Verizon, and the Lexus, and the MetLife, and … and … and …

By the time the ads are over, you’ve forgotten who’s playing whom, and why. Hell, the players and coaches have forgotten who’s playing whom, and why. By the time they’ve figured it out again …

TWEEEEEEET!!

If March Madness were still about basketball as it was meant to be played, I’d be happy to spend some time with it.

March Adness, no way. The pitchmen can just keep their sticky little fingers the hell out of my pockets. They’ll disturb the moths.

Besides. If my pockets did still, by some miracle, have coin of the realm in them, I’d use it to support places where the athletes (and their coaches, their fans, their administrators, their agents, etc. etc. etc.) have not yet forgotten how to spell S – T – U – D – E – N – T.

And, just maybe (yes, I know I’m dreaming), haven’t yet learned how to spell Cialis.

  - O Ceallaigh
Copyright © 2009 Felloffatruck Publications. All wrongs deplored.
All opinions are mine as a private citizen.

According to today’s [6 August 2008] local paper, which I could stand to read for about 30 seconds on the bus TheBus this morning, the State of Hawaii’s Department of Education has been persuaded to make a mandated US$1 million in public-school budget cuts someplace other than the sports programs, which they had originally targeted. In Mr. Dave Reardon’s opinion, this is A Good Thing.

Sure it is. For elevating the blood pressure of amoebae.

Public school teachers here in, um, Paradise have the lowest pay in the United States, measured in terms of purchasing power. And a scheduled pay raise has been blocked over a dispute between the Governor and the teacher’s union over who is going to pay for a legislatively-mandated drug testing program. For the teachers, of course, not the government. Or the kids. Or their parents. Want to see a drug-testing program go away, real quick? Propose that parents/guardians have to be tested as a requirement for enrolling a child in school …

Say what you will about the No Child Left Behind program, but by its measures, a frightening percentage of Hawaiian school children are being left behind. Mostly in the most money-poor schools, of course. Like it or not, a significant infusion of resources is needed to stem this tide. Just ask anyone who has looked for more than five minutes at the strong correlation between student performance and the personal and institutional financial resources available to that student.

Instead, the word is cut. The public schools are too expensive, We the People are told, We need to cut programs, cut staff, cut whatever and wherever We will allow.

And what program is it that We the People of the Great State of Hawai‘i refuse to allow to be cut?

Junior varsity sports.

Junior [expletive deleted] varsity sports.

As a career option, sports is an abysmal choice. Let’s see. The National Football League has 32 teams. Each team pays 50 players each year (I think it’s actually 53, but I’ve rounded off for simplicity). Let’s assume that the average player has a five-year career, which means that, in any given year, each team is looking for 10 new employees. The NFL has a monopoly on the American football gridiron industry. Thus, there is a grand total of 320 paying jobs available in the United States for gridiron players each year.

Let’s say there are 128 NCAA Bowl Championship Series (formerly Division 1A) college gridiron programs. (I haven’t bothered trying to count; see TheBus, supra.) In each school, there are 100 players on the team, a quarter of whom are seniors. (Again, I’m simplifying, leaving things like redshirt freshmen out of the equation.) These schools thus provide 32,000 potential applicants for jobs in the NFL each year.

If you’re one of those applicants, you have a 1% chance of getting a job. And that is after spending four years at a college/university studying gridiron. Can you imagine what the odds are for a second-team linebacker, or point guard, or shortstop, or (heaven help us) gymnast, at Hekawi High? You wish to help your kid make a million dollars, you’d almost be better off investing in a weekly Powerball ticket. (NB: I said almost.)

So what in pluperfect hell are we doing spending what we’re constantly told are scarce education dollars on sporting activities that offer so few job prospects? Not to mention that the activities abuse children via catastrophic sport-related injuries, illicit recreational and performance-enhancing drugs, gang crime, and the development of character an entitlement mindset.

Oh. I get it. Where does everybody in town go on a Friday night these days? To the local high school gridiron game match. To see Junior play. To support the home team. For a night’s entertainment – if you can call fighting for a parking place and a seat entertainment.

So. We the People are sacrificing the future of our children for the sake of a night out.

Shouldn’t we be [deleted] ashamed of ourselves?!?

Of course, exercise is a good thing, especially given the morbid obesity of so many American children these days. For that, we used to have a school-wide daily calisthenics regimen. Chinese school children have done this for decades. Americans, today? You must be kidding. Somebody would sue …

Those of you who follow Quilly’s blog know that she is an accomplished elementary-school teacher, with a decade of documented qualitative and quantitative success in teaching financially- and culturally-disadvantaged children on her curriculum vitae. But after a year of education-system hell here on O‘ahu, she is working elsewhere.

I think that no progress will be made on improving the primary and secondary education system in these Untied States until every teacher, in every system, public or private, similarly walks away. Thereby closing the schools, all of them, and keeping them closed until we have completed a national dialogue about our schools and what is needed, at all levels of society, to get them working. So our children don’t have to shell out tens of thousands of dollars a year to our universities to learn what they should have learned, for “free”, in junior high school. Before the last American job departs for China, where people are willing to ensure that their children are properly and effectively educated.

For what it’s worth, I would close all private schools permanently. The proper and effective education of children – all children – is the common property and concern of every American. Persons of means who recognize this deserve to be treated with respect and consideration – which, sadly, I don’t think they receive. It’s almost like they were teachers … and if I were subject to the kinds of abuse I’ve seen people get, just for having the (mis)fortune to be successful, I’d probably retreat behind a guarded wall too. But I will be God damned if I permit a system where a privileged few gather disproportionate educational resources to themselves, and toss everyone else into slave shacks.

We can afford that even less than we can afford to be spending Our money on the junior varsity.

   - O Ceallaigh
Copyright © 2008 Felloffatruck Publications. All wrongs deplored.
All opinions are mine as a private citizen.

Just in case you’re visiting from Mongolia, or Mars, and don’t know (you’d be about the only ones who don’t), tomorrow (3 February 2008) is Super Bowl Sunday. Everybody will be glued to the tube, watching the endless pregame shows, and the million-dollar-a-minute commercials, and maybe even the football game. Everybody.

Well, almost everybody.

I won’t.

But don’t tell Quilly, who’s planned the game-time menu.

And don’t tell anybody in Maine, who, like the rest of New England USA, is gloating over the unbeaten Patriots. Along with the World Series-winning Red Sox. The top-of-the-league Celtics. The one-goal-away-from-the-championship Revolution. Hell, even the Bruins are in contention for the Stanley Cup. In the year 2008 of the Common Era, Nirvana is being a follower of professional sports cheating in Boston.

You heard me.

Oh? You didn’t read today’s story about the former Patriots assistant who hints that illegal videotaping of opposing coaches has been part of the New England modus operandi since 1998? And why was the National Football League in so much of a hurry to claim authority over the cheating allegations, and then to destroy the evidence of the Belichek-led surreptitious surveillance?

And yes, it would be nice if Our Elected Representatives would care to pay attention to the minor issues before them, like passing a national budget, and bringing the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, etc. etc. etc. to some sort of positive conclusion. Rather than sticking its sandstone-and-marble edifice into the National [sigh] Football League’s business.

But on the other hand, Congress doesn’t usually go where there aren’t stories to be told that might win them votes. Sports fans are a minority in these Untied States, Super Bowl statistics notwithstanding. You can hack them all off and still prosper on the second Tuesday in November if the story’s juicy enough. So what is the NFL hiding?

Besides steroids, that is. Remember them, Boston sports fans? What? No real Red Sox were implicated in the Mitchell Report? We wrote off Roger Clemens in 1996, you say; all that needle stuff happened while Roger was a Yankee? And Eric Gagne was a rent-a-player, and a failed one to boot, he doesn’t count? Eh? OK. So who wrote the Mitchell Report, again? George Mitchell? A once and future Red Sox employee?!? Hmmm …

And meanwhile, the NFL and NBA are heeding the advice of their lawyers (which baseball did not) and refusing to investigate performance-enhancing drugs in their leagues until told to. After all, they have drug screening in place. To catch those who are least informed, least wary. Like [ahem] Rodney Harrison. The heart and soul of his team’s defense.

The New England Patriot defense.

Bill Belichek is famous for his ability to say nothing. And to get his players to say nothing. They have that kind of discipline in the Cosa Nostra. Hmmm ….

You know how New England sports fans are going to feel when they discover that all their new-found success is about as real, about as authentic, as professional wrestling?!?

We used to ask that question in the playground all the time, when one of us got trapped in something terminally embarrassing.

“How do you feel?”

“Cheap.”

Which is how your wallet feels after you’ve shelled out – if you can – for a seat in the arena for a major league game.

Or paid enough in satellite dishes, and high-definition screens that take up half of your house, and speakers that will blow down half the neighborhood, to justify the gall of television networks to charge a million dollars a minute for advertising time. And for the advertisers to pay it.

The gall that permits the sports networks, like certain computer software providers that shall go nameless, Bill, to rack in billions of dollars for shoddy, corrupt, dishonest products.

While half of Waianae lives in a shoe, or on the beach. To say nothing of New Orleans, New York, the entire state of Michigan …

Some of whom might count themselves fortunate to have access to the bowl I do expect to be visiting sometime during Super Bowl Sunday. Considering its importance to the modern middle-class American household, I guess I could call it Super.

Flush.

  - O Ceallaigh
Copyright © 2008 Felloffatruck Publications. All wrongs deplored.
All opinions are mine as a private citizen.

… iam pridem, ex quo suffragia nulli
uendimus, effudit curas; nam qui dabat olim
imperium, fasces, legiones, omnia, nunc se
continet atque duas tantum res anxius optat,
panem et circenses.

… Already long ago, from when we sold our vote to no man,
the People have abdicated our duties; for the People who once upon a time
handed out military command, high civil office, legions, everything – now
restrains itself and anxiously hopes for just two things: bread and circuses.

     - Juvenal, Satire 10.77-81

As I write this, the New England football gridiron Patriots are playing the New York football gridiron Giants in the last regular-season National Football Gridiron League game for both teams. The Patriots, in case you live in Iceland or something, have not yet lost a game, and are trying to complete an undefeated regular season.

I actually sat down to watch the game. Yes I did. I mean, it’s not as if you could miss it if you tried. It’s on three, count ‘em, three separate television networks.

I lasted all of five minutes.

Long enough to see a Patriots wide receiver score a touchdown and get his team penalized fifteen yards for excessive celebration. Which the receiver and his teammates did. Yes, the play broke three league records. Too bad. It’s not exactly a new rule. And supposedly, the rules are the rules.

But not to the commentators. Who ragged endlessly on the referees for “interfering with the game”.

And it’s not as if the penalty was harmless. The Giants scored a touchdown on the ensuing kickoff – made possible in large part by the fifteen yards the kicking team had to give up. Who is at fault? The receiver and his teammates for not abiding by the rules? Or the referees who are charged with enforcing the rules?

Click.

… sporting events are rituals. Specifically, ritualized combat. Rituals that connect us with the other animals on this blue sphere, all the way back (at least) to the cartilaginous fishes of 450 million years ago. Rituals that permit the stronger of two contestants to be identified without exposing both to potentially lethal attacks except when absolutely necessary. Rituals whose rules serve to minimize the risk of mayhem, murder, war.

Trouble is, when the rules of ritualized combat break down, there’s only one thing left.

The real thing.

Like when the Christians got tossed to the lions in the Roman circus. Or gladiators fought to the death.

Ave caesar! Morituri te salutamus!
Hail Caesar! Those about to die salute you!

And Roman gladiators didn’t even get paid like the modern ones. Who make twice as much in a week as the average school teacher makes in a year. Like the one sitting next to me, working on school materials on a Saturday afternoon.

My telling you about a teacher who is working for free might get the attention of a few dozen of you. About the same number who, the stats say, read about the (now) $225 million in deferred repairs to academic buildings at the Central Pacific university that is sending its gridiron team to the Sugar Bowl. Meanwhile, the ESPN webpage dedicated to the Patriots-Giants contest had 7,000 comments. Before the first half ended.

Rollerball, anyone?

   - O Ceallaigh
Copyright © 2007 Felloffatruck Publications. All wrongs deplored.
All opinions are mine as a private citizen.

It’s official. In all of “Bowl Championship Series” American collegiate football gridiron in the year 2007 of the Common Era, there is exactly one undefeated team.

The Warriors of the University of Hawai‘i (UH).

For which achievement, the Warriors have been ranked 10th among all of America’s minor league professional college gridiron teams, and will play the University of Georgia in the 74th Sugar Bowl on New Year’s Day 2008, in front of a nationwide television audience and those less-well-moneyed citizens of New Orleans who are still living in FEMA trailers – if Our Government hasn’t yet tossed them out onto the street.

Needless to say, today there is joy in Mudville Mānoa. Not to mention the rest of Hawai‘i. Everybody’s all excited. Not least about that ranking. “Whaddaya mean 10th, brah? Did anybody beat us? Did anybody else go unbeaten? Why aren’t we playing for the National Championship?”

Well, there are reasons. For one thing. Yes, the Warriors played 12 games and won twelve games. Great. Too bad most of the opponents had names like the University of Las Vegas Grandmothers. Two of those teams took the UH into overtime; two others took leads over the UH into the fourth quarter. The UH played one major-conference opponent, the University of Washington, which was one of those teams that had a lead into the fourth quarter. On the Hawai‘i home field. And the Huskies finished their season with four wins and nine losses.

For another. The National Championship Game pays out between $14 and $17 million, which goes to the athletic programs of each school in the conference to which each of the actual contestants belongs. Not the schools, the athletic programs. Remember that, there’ll be a quiz later. That’s a few dinero. And the people who set up the payout assumed that only those schools whose athletic programs have spent big money will be in a position to get the big money.

The University of Hawai‘i hasn’t paid the ante.

The UH doesn’t belong to one of the “big” conferences that set up the National Championship Game. It doesn’t spend big money on its football gridiron program. Hell, in 1961, the UH cancelled its gridiron program because it couldn’t afford to pay for it. (It was restored in 1962). The UH pays its current gridiron coach only $800,000 per annum. The UH doesn’t …

What? $800,000 looks like big money to you?? Hey. I didn’t know I had any UH history professors reading this blog. Yeah, for academic types, $800K a year is “died and gone to heaven” money. For “big” college gridiron programs, it’s chicken feed. The going rate for head coaches in these schools, I hear, is more on the order of $3.5 million. Which, at the rate the US dollar’s value is shrinking on world markets, will probably be worth about 17 euros in 2009. But still.

And remember. This is just the head coach. There’s all the other coaches. And the scholarships for the players so they can pretend to learn to read while they’re playing a sport they can’t even give the right name to. Plus the costs of recruiting all those players. And the athletic facilities. For gridiron and basketball and hockey and track and field and water polo and …

Oh. Right. That quiz.

Question One. How much money does the typical college / university that runs a major intercollegiate athletic program give to that program?

Answer. None. Nada. Zip. Zero. The school grants permission for the program to use its name and have facilities on its premises. The dinero to pay for them, and their use, the athletic programs have to make themselves.

Question Two. How much money does the typical college / university that runs a major intercollegiate athletic program make from that program for use elsewhere in the university?

Answer. You guessed it. None. Nada. Zip. Zero. What the programs make (assuming they don’t get caught making it illegally), they keep. The treatment you mete out to others is the treatment you will receive.

That $14-17 million the conferences get from sending a team to the major bowls will pay for a whole hell of a lot of recruiting expenses. No wonder they don’t want a freeloader horning in on the goodies. Like the blasted University of Paradise. Don’t they already have sun, surf, coconuts, and mai tais? Let them use that stuff for recruiting.

What was that, Professor? Your roof leaks? You thought the purpose of a University was to pursue knowledge? You can’t understand how come the University can spend all this money on all-weather practice fields for the helmet squads, while you can’t keep a computer in your office because it gets soaked every time it rains? Because your office is on the list of the $120 million worth of urgent repairs to academic buildings that the University doesn’t have the funds for?

I used to wonder that myself. Until I learned about Kansas State University. Which, once upon a time, had one of the worst college gridiron teams in America.

The story goes that, in the late 1980s, when the losing streak was at its worst, the university president gathered his people together to lament the falling fortunes of the school. Enrollments were down, the credentials of those students who were enrolling were falling off, donations to academic and scholarship programs were down, and morale was bad among students, staff, and alumni. “How do we fix this?” the president asked. The considered answer: “Support the football team.”

So they did. They hired a new coach, gave him a mandate to build the program, and supported him with infrastructure and money. In short order, one of the losingest gridiron teams in America became one of the winningest. And the entire school rebounded. Money came in from all over, and to just about every program, not just the athletics. In the early 1990s, Sports Illustrated paraded the “K-State Effect” on its pages.

Which made it official.

The major college athletic programs – gridiron, basketball, baseball, lacrosse, and in some places ice hockey and volleyball – are massive advertising campaigns for their universities.

For whom the [gag] student athletes are paid mercenaries. Poorly paid. For they’re working for room and board. Their scholarships are mostly meaningless, for they’re too busy with sports to actually get the education they’re supposedly getting. Try telling a coach who’s making $3 million a year that you have to miss a practice to go to class. He’ll ream out that player, and then cross the quad and ream out the professor. Probably with the president in tow carrying dismissal papers if that prof doesn’t stop harming the university’s bottom line. And pronto.

I don’t know for sure, Professor, but it sure looks fishy that the UH started assembling that academic building repair backlog a decade ago, when the football team went 5-31 over three years, and 0-12 in 1998. When, I hear, opponents would be sending their second- and third-string players onto the field in the second quarter of games, and were apologizing for running up scores anyway. Clearly, none of those teams were being coached by Bill Belichick.

Anyway. The UH hired the current football coach in 1999. Nine years later, the Warriors are in the Sugar Bowl. And maybe, just maybe, some folks will be impressed enough to practice the giving of gifts to things like the UH building fund, and get your leaky roof fixed. And mine.

Yeah, I know, I know. Some people’s priorities. Remember Johnny Carson? But look on the bright side. At least anyone who tunes in to the Sugar Bowl this New Year’s Day has a chance of learning a little bit about Hawai‘ian culture.

Maybe they’ll start a trend. Just like these guys.

Or these.

================

UPDATE 25 December 2007: The local newspaper published its assessment of the likely costs and benefits associated with sending the football gridiron Warriors to the Sugar Bowl. Two alterations to the original post:

1) It looks like the UH stands to net around $2 million from the Sugar Bowl, a $4.5 million gross less around $2.5 million in expenses.

2) The report suggests that the UH does have the authority to spend Sugar Bowl profits on things other than the athletic programs – though if it entertains, even for a rational second, using any of that money on [gasp] academics, June Jones’s private jet will break glass leaving Hawai‘i for good, and the backlash from that will mean that the Zoology faculty will just have to get used to living in tents. Hell, the Chancellor might have to get used to living in a tent. If she does any damage to the one remaining excuse most people have for putting up with those damned university eggheads.

  - O Ceallaigh
Copyright © 2007 Felloffatruck Publications. All wrongs deplored.
All opinions are mine as a private citizen.