My daughter's first Bruins game

My daughter and I made our first trip together to the TD Garden last month, where we saw the Bruins take care of the Carolina Hurricanes, 3-2 in overtime. I wrote about my thoughts about her first game compared to the games I went to when I was a kid in a column for the Eagle. 

The Tropicana Field Experience

As a fan of an American League East team, Tropicana Field has figured in my imagination for years, though before the Joe Madden era it was mostly as just that dump where the Sox could pick up a few wins — though I also seem to remember that something about the place made Pedro Martinez mental. It is the architectural odd-man out in our division, which includes old classics like Fenway and Yankee Stadium (the old one, that is), as well as new places like Camden Yards, which completely changed the way we think about new baseball stadiums, and the Skydome (or whatever they call it now), which everyone thought was really cool for a few years when it was new (until said Camden Yards revolution happened). 

Last week, on a quick trip to Florida, I had a chance to catch the Sox down there, and seeing a game there was just as weird as I always imagined it would be.

The strangeness begins on the interstate, as you head into St. Petersburg from Tampa and the stadium appears before you, like some kind of giant, lopsided wart. It is near the highway, which is good I guess, but apparently everyone is convinced it is too far from most of the population of the Tampa Bay region, which is bad. Its neighborhood feels very lonely — in one of those marginal neighborhoods Sun Belt cities seem to have with undesirable and possibly empty office buildings, lots of parking lots, multi-lane boulevards, and no sign of human life outside of vehicles except the guys waving stadium traffic to the lots.

As is critical in that part of the country, there is lots of parking. And since the weather is always nice, there was some actual tailgating going on when we arrived. But even for a parking lot, it's pretty bland, save for the tall palm trees and the long mosaic on the pavement that leads through the lots to the stadium entrance from... nowhere. 

There is a main entrance rotunda, which bizarrely lets you into the outfield seats (and which, more bizarrely, the team claims was inspired by Ebbets Field). The inside tunnels are fairly spacious, with creatively packed with ways to spend money. But the walls are all painted cinder block, and there is something temporary about it all. It feels like one of those semi-permanent structures you find at fairgrounds. 

We sat in the 200-level, just beside press box on the third base side. Since it is a rare case of a baseball-only indoor stadium, it feels about the right size. And the sight lines for baseball were great. But it was very hard to put out of your mind how strange it is to be watching a game indoors when the weather outside is so nice. Sure, there are lots of showers and storms in the summer, but it is still hard to make peace with having a roof over your head for baseball. Or the massive air conditioning ducts lining the upper level. The Trop makes it worse by having such a strange roof, with its concentric circles of catwalks that have occasionally gotten in the way of the game. I have no idea how fielders play there, because just watching, I lost every fly ball that went up. 

I imagine it is a little easier for Rays fans live with the place now that the team has some history to build on. All over you see lots of photos from those encouraging recent years, but I fear that winning hasn't translated into any greater passion for the team. Attendance was very poor when I was there, and there was a very strong presence of Sox fans. By that, I mean close to half the obvious fans I saw were supporting the visitors. My section got very loud when Stephen Drew's grand slam blew the game open in the third inning. 

There's been a lot of chatter down there about getting a new ballpark, preferably somewhere more central in Tampa, with a retractable roof. But thanks to the fiasco of the Marlins new stadium down in Miami, the team probably can't count on much taxpayer help. I think the Trop will be around for awhile. And since tickets are affordable, the place is comfortable, and the team is decent, that isn't a disaster.

One nice thing about a very long winter

Prospect Mountain, Vermont. March 19, 2013

My ill-informed Euro 2012 preview!

Euro 2012 kicks off this evening in Warsaw, and I've spent weeks trying to plan my schedule to maximize how much of it I can watch. This is my favorite football tournament — probably one of my favorite things in sports period. It is small (16 teams), quick, easy to figure out. Every match matters, and there is plenty of room for surprises.

Here are a few quick thoughts, with the usual caveats about my track record on predictions....

Group A
Poland — Lewandowski! Lewandowski! Lewandowski! The Polish striker will have a breakout tournament, and fueled by home crowds, they get through the group.

Greece — Are they only here to make easy Euro 2012-Eurocrisis jokes? As usual, their matches will be unwatchable, and it will be awesome when they disappear.

Russia — Expect the flyin' Dmitry Karamazovs to turn in another astonishing performance. Arshavin will make you wonder where he has been the past four years, and his burgeoning career as fashion designer and United Russia hack will be pushed back another few years. Igor Akinfeev's asking price on the transfer market will jump dramatically.

Czech Republic — Peter Cech may start thinking about retirement after this.


Group B
Netherlands — You know, I'm sick of these guys. Yea, Cruyff, "Total Football," all that poetry and history! Time to move on. This is the team that crapped itself against Russia in '08, became a national embarrassment in '10, and Arjen Robben's sucking in the Champion's League Final still... sucks. They'll get through, sure, but I don't care.

Denmark — Yea, they're there. Didn't they used to have a captain who was in a motorcycle gang?

Germany — Will quietly dominate everyone they meet. Certain to make the finals.

Portugal — Nice thing about football is that world-class players like Ronaldo occasionally have to play on national teams that are only marginal contenders. He won't get them through the group stage.


Group C
Spain — The favorites! the greatest generation! winners of the last two major tourneys! Can they repeat? Nah. Watching the tail end of the La Liga season showed most of these guys have nothing in the tank anymore. Also, Fernando Torres is still soft and washed-up (that goal against Barcelona, once and for all for god's sake, only happened because he got lucky when caught way out of position).

Italy — Hmm, match-fixing allegations, a lack of identity, police raids at the training camp.... watch out world, Italy is on! The drama queens of soccer only play well with operatic levels of melodrama. They're my pick to win it all at this point.

Ireland — I saw them play on Monday! Wasn't overwhelmed. If they don't take care of Croatia on Sunday, which would entail doing stuff like attacking and trying to score goals instead of clutching on for dear life, they're doomed.

Croatia — The plucky Croats have always been a personal favorite of mine. But too many injuries this time. They'll go out, meekly.


Group D
Ukraine — Ugh, these guys. The faster that washed-up Yanukovich supporter Andriy Shevchenko can finish this up and announce which MLS team is buying him the better.

Sweden — Another team I resent for their poor performance containing Russia in '08 (were they intimidated by the giant Peter the Great banner the Russian supporters rolled out?) Also, Ibrahimovic... nice fellow.

France — Thank Domenech's still somehow working lucky stars to get stuck in this group. Does anyone really have to come out of this one?

England — In the day, I used to pull for England. Really, I read British papers online and they were the easiest major team to follow. But watching the "greatest generation" fizzle on the field, the WAG drama play out off it, and seeing John Terry sad and angry was just too entertaining. This year, with the idiocy of the Rio Ferdinand drama, it will particularly fun to watch them stumble. It's just too bad everyone expects it this time around. 

Magyarország-Írország, at Puskás Ferenc Stadion

The view from Section 'E Jobb'

I was hoping that on what will probably be my only trip to Puskás Ferenc Stadion I'd be able to make some notes about the scene ― the crowd, the pregame atmosphere, the stadium itself, which was the scene of some of the greatest moments in Hungarian football. But alas, the weather ensured that most of what I remember are scurrying through puddles and wondering what would happen if lightning hit one of the enormous light towers. But it even wasn't enough to make me not notice what turned out, for a warm-up friendly, to be a pretty exciting game.

Monday was warm, a bit hazy, and the air was heavy and damp. It was the kind of day that you knew would end in rain, but so many around here this year have been like that and nothing happened. So even as I checked out the Hungarian meteorological service's website, and watched on the radar feed the line of rain and lightning punching up along Balaton toward the capital, I remained hopeful.

Bus 75 goes from near my apartment over through Angyalföld, past Varosliget and ends all the way at the stadium. I waited to meet the friends I was going with outside the Stadium metro station. This was not only my first international football match, it was easily the highest level match I've ever seen. Heck, the first professional match I'd ever attended was only about a month ago. I was surprised at how diverse the crowd was ― always surprised to see girls at sports events. There were a good number of Ireland fans around, and everyone seemed in a good mood.

As we made our way around the Papp Sportsarena toward our entrance, which was clear across the other side from the station, the rain began. And it was a real summertime downpour. The kind of rain when you're soaked and can't see and have to wait under a tree for a few minutes. It was under that wall of water that we found our gate, had our bags searched, presented our soaked and crumbling tickets. This is the part in which I which I could have been paying attention, because we had to run across the field to the stadium to get under the eaves as fast as possible.

It is hard to imagine a more plain stadium design. It is a giant oval, laid north to south. The east end has a covered stand and boxes, and is where the benches and field entrances are. The west end is all business, row upon row, in two levels, of seats on a very slight slope. For our game ― and I imagine for most games for the past few decades ― only the lower level was open. The grace of the place's design is its simplicity — this is a space for packing in a mass of people to watch something at one time. It's charm, as it were, comes from its history, but that only goes so far.

Taking cover while waiting for the lightning to pass

Our seats were on the north-west end, above the corner flag. We could see the entire field pretty well, but the main complaint was the sheer distance. With a track oval in the field as well, it felt like we were miles away. We weren't able to go down to our seats right away because of the flood, and almost everyone was crammed beneath the upper section, watching an astonishing amount of water come pouring from the upper level gutter into a storm drain. The game itself was delayed because there was still lightning in the area.

For the poetry of it, I'd defer to Keith Duggan's match report in Tuesday's Irish Times:

Noon-day sunshine had given way to storm clouds by late afternoon and as the visiting fans began to appear on the metro lines, the sky over Budapest began to look almost Celtic: Moody and darkening.

As the teams warmed, the Hungarians chanted the odes which have been echoing around the stadium since Puskas was the dashing young matinee idol of the city and the Magyars were the jewel of continental football. The Irish responded with more familiar refrains.

Then, just as the players were leaving the field after their preliminary warm-up, the sky growled and lightning flashed, eclipsing the floodlights, and a spectacular rainstorm swept through through the stadium, tap-dancing across the running track, ruining summer shirts and dresses and leaving the players huddled in their dressing rooms.

When it got underway, the rain went away and it was a good time. The fans were loud and engaged, and the game itself was pretty good. Even though it ended in a 0-0 draw, it was a pretty exciting, back-and-forth match, especially in the first half. The wave of substitutions in the second half gave the match a little bit of a disjointed feeling, but it certainly kept your interest.

I'd have liked to spend a little more time at the scene, but it was late when it wrapped up and we didn't want to get stuck in the crowd. You really feel how ancient and crumbling the place is when you leave at night after the event. You go from from the bright lights through the tunnel, and down the steps. You are aware of the hulking upper section over your head, but there are practically no lights. You see only shadows and concrete as you file down the steps, which end when you splash into a four-inch deep mud puddle at the bottom, and slosh your way through the swamped grass to the street.

The old Népstadion certainly has its history. But when a new stadium appears ― no doubt around when that other mythic public works project does ― I don't think it will be much missed.

The dark, eerie west stand at night

Caring is bad for you

On a molecular level, that sucked. Over here, the Super Bowl began after midnight. And perhaps out of habit, but to be honest, out of superstition, I went to the same Scottish pub near Jokai ter where I'd survived watching the AFC Championship game. When I left the apartment, it was -8 degrees F.  The bar was more crowded, I spent a good two quarters listening to an outrageously, obnoxiously drunk guy babble to anyone who looked at him, and to make the wretched first quarter even worse, the bar managed to run out of chicken wings.

Unless your team truly and visibly sucks from an early point in the schedule, the end of the football season is the most vicious kind of gut punch. It is spread over hours, not days, and there are always it seems a handful of moments on which everything hinged which you can spend your leisure hours mulling over. Pats fans have had a good run of years of putting up with this.

The worst part about the 2011 season is that we got drawn in. No one began this season expecting much, when the big offseason acquisitions were Albert Haynesworth and Chad Ochocinco. No one could have foreseen that Hernandez and Gronkowski would emerge as superstars, or that this random grabbag of a secondary would bend and not break for an entire season. It was only towards the end, when the wins started piling up, when the other big dogs in the AFC started to stumble, and when we began to see weird bounces, shanked opponent field goals, and other explosions of luck to  offset the team's screw-ups that we began to think something was up. It felt, in a bizarre way, like 2001 again. Things were lining up.

And then, you know, nevermind.

I love sports, but do I like being a fan? One thing I enjoy about being over here is getting to watch lots of super high-quality football (that's soccer, in American English) at a reasonable hour. And not having a sincere rooting interest is a kind of bliss. Of course, you pick a favorite on a case by case basis, but you can enjoy what's happening, and leave it when it's over. I can do this with football, with ice hockey here, with cricket. I even did it with water polo for crying out loud last weekend.

There is great joy in detachment. So I pray that I can avoid thinking for a moment about this disaster when I'm finished writing this post. Right.

A la recherche du Pats perdu

Over at the Times Union blog, I try to explain why this trip by the New England Patriots to the Super Bowl isn't just about football.

The prodigal Bruins fan

The puck I caught at a game at the Boston Garden in 1988. It came into our section off Gary Galley's stick.

I've been following the Bruins very closely these past few years, but very quietly. Mostly out of shame that I couldn't face everyone who has been with the team through these rough years. I feel like the hockey equivalent of those Pink-Hat crowds that showed up at Fenway in 2003.

But it still feels great to be back. And to have that unusual feeling, first time since 1990, of caring about the Bruins' season when it is 90 degrees outside.

The reasons I drifted away are quite common around here, as hockey in general and the Bruins in particular went through a pretty rough patch. Foremost, I had a lot of qualms with the direction Gary Bettmann took the league -- trying to turn a regional passion more like candlepin bowling into a ready-for-primetime mass market entertainment product. This was quixotic at best. When I was younger I developed a theory that you couldn't watch hockey on t.v. unless you played hockey yourself -- this was the days before huge plasma screen HD t.v.'s. I remember watching games with my uncle, a basketball fan, who would leave the room. "I don't even know what you're looking at," he would say. Bettmann's effort also came with a desire to pull the game from its heartland and force it on the Sun Belt. I've always maintained, and frankly, I still do, that hockey doesn't belong in places that don't have naturally occurring ice.

There were a host of aesthetic problems as well with the game in the 90s. The dreaded neutral zone trap was as bad a problem as we all remember. The league's effort to clean-up the goonishness may have gone too far, taking away a lot of the game's personality. And the fact that every team suddenly decided it needed teal and a cartoon character on its jersey made it a giant circus.

But ultimately, there are a number of reasons why Boston fans in particular might pull away. The Jacobs family, the consummate skin-flints they were, were unable to put a decent product on the ice. I loved the Garden, flimsy seats and obstructed views and all. I only went to the TD Bank Fleet Center Whatever-you-call-it one time, and it was more than enough. And we lost a great rivalry when the Hartford Whalers moved.

More than that, we fans had gone through a lot. We'd lived through Cam Neely's freak injury, and watched loyally as Ray Bourque's career fruitlessly ticked away. When the team hit hard times, it was really hard to go through emotionally. Don't forget, we were all tortured Red Sox fans as well. And the Celtics were going through the very hard post-Bird, McHale, etc. years. And the Patriots, though already on showing signs of life, were still the comprehensive laughing-stock of the NFL. At some point, there's only so much you can put up with.

So many things combined to restore an idea of what the game could be. The most important was my daughter. I've been conscientiously bringing her to all manner of sporting events at Williams, getting her to understand what they are and hopefully begin to decide what looks right to her. Her favorite by a wide margin is hockey. She can happily plant herself on my shoulders and get through an entire game, which knowing a preschooler attention span is remarkable.

And this past winter, I started playing again. Just pickup hockey around the rink a few times during the week. Just enough to get my legs back and remember how bad I was at it. Still, it's been great. It reminds you of how fun life was up in New England when hockey is a part of it.

World Cup High Comedy Edition

The bidding process for the World Cup, much like the process for the Olympics, feels like a scandal-in-waiting. But the details of the back-scratching and other funny business isn't as interesting at the moment as the fact that now, Russia and Qatar are going to have to actually go through with this.

My first thought on Russia's successful bid is amazement at the scale of the job ahead. There is presently only one top-grade football stadium in the country -- and that is Lokomotiv Stadium, which is in a hard-to-reach corner of Moscow and only seats 28,800. Nearly every other stadium is an awful Soviet-era pile built to host track and field competitions, with concrete bowl seating and distant sight lines. The nation's premiere stadium, Luzhniki, has hosted many big football events, and always with a lot of bitching by everyone involved before and afterwords.

So, if I were a politically well-connected building contractor today, I would have passed out at the news. A lot of things are going to be built in the next eight years, and there is little cause for hope that Russia can do it without massive amounts of fraud, waste, and corruption. And it remains to be seen whether or not Russia can actually pull off an event this size. The Sochi Olympics in 2012 may well turn into a disaster, and if I were FIFA, I'd have at least waited to see just how bad the damage is before placing this bet. But who knows why the judges judged as they did...

And furthermore, it is my long-standing belief that Russia has no business hosting any serious international event until it completely overhauls its Soviet-era visa requirements. The present hybrid system of police-state bullying and organized shakedowns is unfit for a country with such high aspirations. Plus, you know what else would be nice? hotel rooms. Not Ritz-Carltons and absurd high-end ones, but normal, affordable hotel rooms where you can be reasonable sure you won't get robbed.

As for the 2022 Qatar Olympics, I can only stifle a laugh. I'm waiting to know if someone will open a book with odds that this will mark the first World Cup in which a player actually drops dead on the pitch during a match. Again, who knows why the judges judged etc etc etc.

The Unfolding Tragedy of the Blown Call

The Call Everyone is Talking About gives us a perfect example to talk about a weird quirk of American sports culture. There are lots of inexplicable things about American sports -- like how league structures here prove how socialism works great for rich people -- but in particular, we still hold a naive and weird understanding of officiating.

Somehow, somewhere, we developed a bizarre positivist sense of what an umpire or ref is supposed to do: that they are in the same category as doctors and scientists in determining Right and Wrong on the fly. This is childish, and an unreasonable expectation

This is one of the hang-ups I think Americans have towards "soccer" -- that it requires a more sophisticated sense of reality. In soccer, you have two side judges who solely monitor offsides and boundary violations -- just because the one referee can't see the angles. And everything else is handled by one fellow who is huffing and puffing up and down the field all match like everyone else, watching for fouls, keeping the official time. And he doesn't see everything, and trying to fool him is part of the game (thus, the much derided on this side of the Atlantic art of flopping).

But we insist on Truth, and that if the human factor can't solve it video replay should. Which raises logical questions about why not just install a ball and strike machine to make the calls -- the technology exists after all (as Slate explains). Why shouldn't we do it? because the human factor is important. The size of a strike zone, how it changes from game to game, pitch to pitch -- these are the things that make baseball interesting and not just an elaborate math problem.

Which brings us to what happened in Detroit. Obviously, by that point in the game, umpire Jim Joyce should have been incredibly prejudiced to give Armando Galaragga the benefit of any doubt, no matter how small. That would be the human thing to do. The fact that he didn't is the big mistake. If he had erred in calling him out -- even by a good few feet, no one would be freaking out right now. That's the game.

The agonies of Cleveland

One of the surest ways to my heart remains to bring me back newspapers whenever you go somewhere. Even though I'm over them, as it were, I think they remain the best way to take a core sample of a place and a time. Over the weekend, my wife's trip home from a conference took her through Cleveland, and she brought me the Sunday Plain Dealer. What I learned is that, boy, I'm glad I don't live in Cleveland.

The front page featured three stories. Two-thirds of that was one big story -- a detailed look at LeBron James' possible future by sports writer Brian Windhorst. It was a detailed accounting of what his options are, who the likely suitors will be, and what the timeline looks like from now until free agency begins in July.

The undercurrent of the story is so thick and heavy it needn't be spelled out. One of the fascinating things about this moment in time is the amount of anger and unease the nation is feeling, and the ways it is coming out all cock-eyed. We saw this with the Conan O'Brien debacle earlier this year. Somehow, a celebrity who -- let's face it -- kinda sucked at his particular job and got a multimillion dollar kiss-off became a parable for how ordinary, loyal, hard-working employees felt pushed around by inept, greedy, and selfish companies. The human urge to create narrative and sense out of high-profile situations often overwhelms the details. And the LeBron situation appears to be part of all that. The story is really about a small-market town, down on its luck, with a homegrown superstar who they can't keep away from the brighter lights. It is about the decline of an entire region, and seems to present all the swirling forces that are shaping American life today in an easy to understand story.

What is interesting abotu Sunday's Plain Dealer is how the rest of the front page communicates this malaise as well. Another story is what appears to be a long column by Steven Litt about the Cleveland Museum of Art's search for a new director (its third in ten years) as it precedes with an important building and redesign program. That's what the story is actually about, but it is instead framed by looking at how a much smaller, more nimble Sun Belt museum is building a bright future for itself (the headline: "N.C. art museum gains from strong leadership"). "Seeing it is enough to shake assumptions about whether Sun Belt cities outside California and Texas will always remain in the cultureal shadow of northern cities such as Cleveland," Litt writes. The article explains how museums like Cleveland's benefit from deep stores of cultural heritage and large endowments. About their museum has size and a breadth of collection that smaller, newer museums can't match. But in terms of their mission going forward, in contemporary art, in cultivating new donors and shaping their mission, these newer museums are doing much better.

One of the things that struck me is that the Cleveland Museum, which appears to have such a headstart, was only founded in 1913. It makes you wonder to what extent all that cultural capital is a brief, fleeting thing. If that old alignment that made what we now call "the Rust Belt" such a powerhouse of the American experience was just a blip of the Industrial Revolution, which is now over and done. And if that in turn means that the clock is running out, for good.

The third story on the front is more mundane, but just a part of the drumbeat of soul-sapping news. It is about the federal corruption investigation into a county commissioner, which sounds like it has been painfully dragging on for years toward some eventual, inexorable conclusion. "Even the public is growing weary of the demoralizing drip, drip of the corruption investigation, which flares up in the media each time somebody new is hauled into courty," the story reads.

Sales of Tums must be way up across northeast Ohio. And for the record, I don't think there is anyway LeBron is anywhere other than New York next season.

Hillsborough

“I was still on the road when the match began, and after two minutes the radio commentator said that something was wrong. There was trouble on the terraces behind the Liverpool goal. There was a sad, not-this-again feeling in his voice, a quality of resignation, that the supporters, especially those from Liverpool, were sacrificing a game of football to pursue their own violent entertainment: again.. The play continued, but you could tell that the commentator was not watching it, that he was trying to figure out what was happening on the terraces. He couldn’t definitely say that it was crowd trouble, but it was something serious, and the police were gathering near the spot. And then, in an instant, that was it: the game was over. The referee had been told by the police to stop play. That was about the time I arrived home. The stadium was about to become the most famous in the world.” -- Bill Buford’s description in his 1990 book Among the Thugs of hearing about the Hillsborough stadium disaster, twenty years ago last Wednesday, in which 96 fans were killed.

There were lots of opportunities to think about what sports means last week. Wednesday marked the twentieth anniversary of the Hillsborough disaster, when 96 Liverpool FC fans were crushed to death as an FA Cup semifinal against Nottingham Forest got underway. There are many layers to what happened, particularly about tragedy and memory, but also about sports' changing place in society. There are many interesting things about how the 96 victims are remembered. In many ways it fits in with how other major public tragedies are remembered -- particularly the emphasis on ritually reading aloud the names of the victims, which you see in memorials to Sept. 11, and the Vietnam war. There is also an active and vibrant set of conspiracy theories that abound, and the belief that justice has not yet been served. And the the tragedy's legacy includes many unique quirks, such as the way that the Sun newspaper remains hated in much of Liverpool to this day due to its lurid and unfounded allegations of Liverpool hooliganism at the tragedy. But at the same time, the entire event seems tinged with a bit of self-pity -- 1989 was the absolute low ebb of English football. It was serving out a ban from European competition at the time as punishment for the Heysel Stadium disaster in 1985, in which Liverpool fans played an unfortunate role. But unlike too many tragedies, this one’s long-term legacy is positive: the investigation into what happened, the Taylor Report, produced a list of recommendations that essentially gave football a chance to start over. They recommended such things that seem so obvious -– like having seats in stadiums, instead of just pushing people into terraces which, as Buford notes, police actually referred to with the same language as moving herds of cattle: “pens,” “cages,” etc. It marked the start of the modern game: a big-money generating, largely respectable, family-friendly form of entertainment. It is a little ironic that the anniversary –- widely noted in Europe but ignored here in the States -– came just as the New York Yankees inaugurated their current fortress of capitalist bounty: its new $1.5 billion, taxpayer-supported stadium whose most expensive seats are $2,500 and have teak armrests. All this points out the strange paradoxes of sports, that is at the same time nothing more than and much much more than watching grown men play childrens' games. What it all means, and who cares about it, is always subject to change and cycles. English football changed dramatically one afternoon in 1989 – but even so, a 2007 poll found an overwhelming majority of fans want standing terraces to return. And here already, the new Yankee stadium is a monument to another era -– of leveraged capital projects, unchecked greed, and blissfully entertaining unreality. Yet another of the fascinating things about this economic crisis is to see what role sports will play in society at the other end.

My talking head debut

Just like my favorite blogging media personalities, I now have the chance to make a cross-platform promotional post: I'm slated to appear on the Russia Today channel this evening to discuss tonight's Russia-Netherlands quarterfinal at Euro 2008. Watch me try to pronounce "Diniyar Bilyaletdinov" and "Demy De Zeeuw" on live teevee.

Stuff on teevee

Very busy couple of days here in Moscow. To my real amazement, it seems the Champions League final at Luzhniki on Wednesday really did go off without any trouble. The cops even put on their dressy uniforms, with the dress jackets and clean white shirts rather than their day-to-day paunch-enhancing light blue blouses.

The game was on western European time, so it didn't get underway until about 11 p.m. here, and didn't wrap up until nearly 2 a.m. as a result. Then I had to write my column about it all. I had already written something about Saturday's Russia Cup final between CSKA Moscow and Amkar Perm -- specifically about the way it ended in a penalty shoot-out. But since the big game ended the same way, I felt there was no way I could avoid hashing it in. (UPDATE 5/24: I wish I'd had more time to think through my column about the game. The commentary about the nature of these kinds of events has been very interesting, like this and this. I think I may be on to something.

It very much feels like we are going through a great clump of big events right before the slow, dull dacha season arrives. For example, this weekend we have the Eurovision finals in Belgrade. Last year, I was able to watch my first Eurovision, and was swept away by its unapologetic cheesiness, circus-like nationalism, and phenomenally curious voting patterns.

Alas, this year, I'm a bit depressed about it, especially since Ireland's entry -- a singing turkey puppet named Dustin -- was dismissed, I don't see anyone carrying the torch for us ironically-inclined viewers. Plus, I've actually heard that Russia's Dima Bilan is tipped as the favorite, which makes my head hurt. For those of you who don't follow Russian pop closely, Dima is the owner of Russia's most famous mullet -- which is saying quite a lot in this mullet-mad nation. He is very popular with teenage girls -- and apparently with certain kinds of older men thanks to some risque photo shoots in his impressionable youth.

The very fact that he became Russia's selection this year demonstrates the scandalous web of influence-peddling and nepotism that ruins the spirit of competition and international friendship behind this long-running event (pfff... tryin' to keep a straightface). Dima already had his chance in 2006, and brought shame and dishonor to the Russian people with his embarrassing second place finish. This year is nothing more than his management's effort to make another futile push into the wider European market.

I hope it doesn't work. This song, which I've seen a couple times on the music channels, is so awful that it stops being funny. It is in English, but that kind of Eastern European cheese-pop English that you don't recognize unless someone tells you, "hey, I think this song is in English!" I can't tell what the hell the lyrics are about, but judging by the video, it is about a very sick and incredibly picturesque little boy. Judging Dima's interest in him and the obviously Western quality of care at the hospital where he is staying (no nurses demanding bribes for painkillers, the floors look like they've been cleaned since the Andropov era, etc etc), I guess he is the son of a well-placed oligarch, but that's neither here nor there. The point is he is awfully sick, in a Dickensian sort of stoic heart-stirring way, and Dima organizes a "beneficent" concert for him at a hockey arena. He performs this song about hope and shit with some dude pretending to saw away on a fiddle and a fashion photographer hovering around. The coup de grace that makes this about everything wrong with today's Russia arrives when jackass ice skater Yevgeny Plushenko makes an appearance and twirls around to inspire everyone or whatever.

And this thing is tipped to win the whole thing. I am so profoundly disillusioned that I almost can't be ironic anymore. I think I'll skip the crappy songs and just watch the voting -- which seriously ought to be the subject of a colloquium at the Council on Foreign Relations or something. Fareed Zakaria ought to write a book about it.

And you know who definitely can't be ironic? Russia's state-run First Channel, which will broadcast the final. They've been running a promo with a definite message. It shows the Russian national hockey team winning the World Championships in Canada last week, plus Zenit St. Petersburg winning the UEFA Cup this month, and ends with Dima's quest for glory. So you see, Eurovision -- just like international sports -- is really about proving the amazing super-awesome glory of Russia over all the suckahs. Take that Estonia! Shove it Ukraine!

UPDATE (5/25): Ungh. Dima's "live" performance, and the nationalist backwash here the morning after, have been even more loathsome than I had imagined. The 12-year old girls of Europe have let mankind down. I voted last night -- only because how often do I get to vote in the Eurovision finals? -- and was ready to go with Azerbaijan, whose entry included men dressed as angels and a guy sitting on a throne pouring fake blood on a writhing dancer. But I chose to go with Spain's entry, which seemed in the light-hearted spirit appropriate for things like this.

In the footsteps of Grantland Rice...

With the new year comes a new gig: I've been talked into writing a sports column for The Moscow News.

As the old song goes, good times never felt so good

I still can’t believe the Monday we just had. On Saturday night we set our clocks back here, a week ahead of the States, and when I realized that meant Game 4 of the Series would start at 3 a.m. instead of the usual 4 a.m., I decided it would be best to just stay up for awhile. So I moved the laptop to the kitchen, put on a pot of coffee, and watched Goodfellas dubbed in Russian on NTV while reading everything I could find on the Interwebs about the Series. Game 4 began, and what can I say? Worth every sleep-deprived minute. My mom, who was visiting for the week, managed to get up for the last two innings. And once Papelbon nailed the final out, I opened a bottle of Guinness we’ve had lying around for awhile to celebrate. It was a great postseason with the perfect ending. I think I’m kind of going to miss these ridiculous middle of the night wake-up times, when I’m alone in the sleeping apartment with just my laptop and my sunflower seeds. And it is such a good time to be a Red Sox fan, which you realize when you think about fans of the other teams. In watching the games, I came to feel a little bad for Cleveland’s fans. They had a very good team, and since they haven’t won the pennant since 1948, they are approaching operatic degrees of sports fan suffering. On the other hand, I don’t have a lot to say about Rockies fans. The team only started in 1993. History counts, and a tough, heart-breaking, through, beating like this is the kind of thing that lets you build one. It is the circle of baseball life, and I have to think that somewhere in Colorado is a kid that will remember Tulowitzki-Holliday-Helton-Atkins the same way I remember Boggs-Barrett-Buckner-Rice. Once the game was over, and I’d watched most of the online postgame show, I collapsed into bed. The sun was already up (I think, it had been an impossibly dreary and grey October here), and it wasn’t long before my little girl woke up and started cooing – shaking her head mischievously at her mom and I when we asked her if she was indeed the birthday girl that day. Little scamp. Olga graciously let me sleep a few more hours before I woke and celebrated my little one’s first birthday, which included visits from friends and family and all the usual trappings. All day I kept thinking about what a freakishly good day it was. I had a lot of time to think about the world in which she was born, getting to see the Red Sox win a Series in her first year of life. I’m happy for her, and happy that I will have to explain to her how nerve-wracking it was in 1986, 1995, 1999, 2003, and how wonderful 2004 was. Much has been made about how allegedly Red Sox fans wallowed in their misery all those championship-less years, but every real fan I know was simply eager to see our team win at last – like any other fans of any other teams – with the sole added baggage of wanted to put an end to the “Curse of the Bambino” industry once and for all. We certainly didn’t build our identity on it, as much as sports columnists wanted to think we did. In 2004 we were happy to have won, after a very long wait, and to have put all that nonsense behind us. But 2007 is pretty darn fantastic itself. I keep asking whether 2004 or 2007 was better, and I just can’t figure it out – each is a thing unto itself. Of all the things I read about this team, what I liked the most was Charlie Pierce’s essay in Slate after the ALCS. It was about Manny Ramirez, and he took the contrarian stance of unabashedly praising the “Manny being Manny” phenomenon. When the Sox were down against the Indians, Manny famously said something to the effect that losing wasn’t the end of the world, and there was always next year. The sports media flipped out, but most Sox fans knew precisely what he was talking about.

“It was impossible to watch the Red Sox over these last three games and not see Ramirez’s words in vivid action. Boston did not play an inning of baseball in which the team was not cool, and loose, and utterly in command of the circumstances. [...] This was a team that realized that losing wasn’t the end of the world, and therefore, losing was nothing of which to be afraid. Manny saw that first and brought the rest of them along.”

Throughout his time in Boston, Manny has been subject to ritualized bouts of heavy criticism, which manages to take his impressive numbers for granted and ignores completely just what he brings to the team. I remember thinking about it back in 2004, when Manny went out of his way to be demonstrably nice and friendly with tightly-wound reliever Byung-Hyun Kim – he didn’t need to do it, it wasn’t popular to do, and it didn’t work out so well, but it was the simple, decent thing to do. This kind of easy-goingness is probably also a critical part of what makes him one of the best hitters in history too. So all the clichés, about taking it one game, one inning, one at bat, one pitch at a time, turn out to be true. So to rephrase Billy Bragg, “I don’t want to change the world/ I’m not looking for a new New England/ I’m just looking forward to another season.” Now, if we can just re-sign Mike Lowell and steer well clear of a certain Scott Boras client, it should be a magnificent offseason as well….

The Sox win the pennant!

It has been a surreal postseason, not just all the waking up at 4 a.m. stuff and the subsequent sleep deprivation, but moments like in the bottom of the 8th inning in Game 6. J.D. Drew comes to the plate, and Joe Buck actually said something like: “This gives these Boston fans another chance to give Drew a round of applause.”

It was a weird feeling following this team so closely for the entire season without ever actually seeing them play until the postseason. I had read about this team’s unusual propensity to collapse. For four and a half games this team looked unstoppable. They practically ran a hitting clinic against CC Sabathia and Fausto Carmona in the first two games, and it wasn’t just Ortiz and Ramirez either – the whole lineup looked like they knew what they were doing. And then, all of a sudden, the lights went out, the door slammed shut, and the curtains came down. I’d never seen anything like that before – they just looked perfectly average, and it seemed perfectly impossible they could summon the heart to dig themselves out of a serious hole. So it was pretty amazing that the lights suddenly went right back on, and against a good Indians team they managed to pull it off.

Through the ups and downs I developed a routine. Setting my cellphone for 3:57 a.m., having a Red Bull, setting up my balky computer as comfortably as I can. Throughout the matches I ate “Ot Martinka” brand sunflower seeds – I think I went through a pound of them in the postseason so far. Russian seeds, semechki, are different than the little salt balls they have in America. They are simply roasted, and have a very distinct and pleasant taste, though they are a bit smaller than the American ones. I’d have a Bochkarev beer at some point, and I diligently kept score because I didn’t have anyone to talk to.

I’ve learned that watching the games over the Internet is a little peculiar. MLB.com has worked pretty well, I have to say, though I had some minor technical problems on my end. The ads are more irritating than need be, though. From the 2003 postseason, I have burned in my memory Ron Silver shouting “His father is the District Attorney!” over and over again from the promos for Fox’s ill-fated drama “Skin.” But I prefer that to this year, and if you’ve had to watch online you know why. I have had shoved into my head various lines from the trailer for sports melodrama “The Final Season” – “They have a tradition here. It is about playing the game right,” Sean Astin emotes. “We grow ballplayers here like corn,” Powers Boothe insists. I will never see this movie but I can’t describe how much I hate it. And another thing… MLB.com kept promoting this documentary about Tony Gwynn’s induction to the Hall of Fame. The spot starts with the moment he actually got the call he was in. We see him sitting on his couch, he answers his cell, puts it on speaker, a voice introduces itself as the head of the Baseball Writer’s Association, and he gives him the good news. Gwynn starts blubbering, his family rushes over to congratulate him, and then he just hangs up! How rude! I hope he apologized later.

Anyhow, I’ll put up with it gladly for another series. I don’t want to write anything potentially jinxy about the World Series. All I’ll say is that it would be criminal if fans of the 14-year old Colorado Rockies got to see their team win the Series their first time there. I believe history is terrifically important in sports, and they need to build some. Plus, their uniforms are hideous, and they do that that tasteless 69 different jersey and pants combos to maximize their merchandise revenue. Not cool.

I'll sleep in November

A very late night here in Moscow. For the playoffs, I paid MLB for the Internet feed of the games, and can justify the cost in lost sleep because it is October. Besides, Mila has her first cold and appears to be springing about four teeth at once, so it is not as if my sleep patterns weren’t screwed up already!

I didn’t get to see the team in action except back in April, so it is strange seeing these guys I followed so closely on paper through the year. The Sox look awfully good so far this postseason, like they finally started to play up to their full potential only in the past few weeks or so – especially tonight (this morning), when together Ortiz and Ramirez got on base ten times in five at bats each. Unlike the 2004 edition, they seem like a gang of stone cold pros.

I have to admit that since winning the Series in 2004, and with the Yankees making another ignominious exit, the postseason is much more pleasant than it used to be. I looked up the past Sox-Indians postseason series, and remember how excruciating it was. I remember 1995, getting over the novelty of a divisional series and staying up late with my roommate Adam for the 13-inning Game One that the Sox eventually lost. I remember well 1999, when Pedro game in Game 5 and there was a weird sense that our cosmic luck was finally beginning to change, that there was no way we could lose that particular game. I was also surprised to learn that Dave Roberts, hero of ’04, was on that Indians team in his first big league season.

I happened to see that Oct. 12 was the 40th anniversary of Game Seven of the ’67 Series, the sad ending to the “Impossible Dream” season. Bob Gibson threw a complete game – and hit a solo homer in the fifth -- for the St. Louis Cardinals at Fenway, for a 7-2 win. Jim Lonborg got the loss. What really stuck out for me in the box score, especially as tonight's game approached the four hour mark, is that amazingly, that game lasted two hours and twenty-three minutes.

Football season in Russia

The start of football season calls to mind crisp autumn days, lazy Sundays at home, tree-lined campuses on Saturday, etc. But when in the “third Rome” … football season is just coming into the homestretch, as the Russian league wraps up. Meanwhile, the European leagues are all getting their seasons underway – either way, football’s always on. So while I am reducing to following the Sox through the homestretch on ESPN Gamecast, there is plenty else for a homesick sports fan to distract himself.

Here in Moscow we get to see a good number of good overseas club matches and international matches. We have a pretty good state-run sports channel, but of course, as with almost everything here, you can’t enjoy it without feeling compromised. A few years ago, you may remember, television channel NTV was the only independent station that was still critical of the Kremlin. But in 2001, the state gas company forcibly bought them out, and many of the journalists took refuge at another smaller station called TVS. Two years later, the state snatched the station up on some trumped up tax issues. And they decided to turn it into a 24-hour sports channel. Bread and circuses indeed.

It is perhaps one of the ironies of the breakup of the Soviet Union that I think it took away the best footballers. Looking at the record, you have to conclude that it was actually the Ukraine that propped up the Soviet Union’s football reputation, and that in their absence has been nothing but primitive tactics and rampant corruption. Russian football – or as the state-run television channels call it, “our football” – is hard to watch. The game is blissfully unaware of the developments and improvements Latin players have brought – no individual flair, no quick graceful passes, no finesse. I think Russians like to believe they play a sound, traditional way, with strategies and tactics. But really, players just thump the ball across the field, run after it, throw a hard tackle, and eventually the big Moscow teams win more games than anyone else. The saddest part of this spectacle are the few foreign-born players in the Russian league – who are hard to miss, as like every other segment of Russian society, people of color stick out. You see them looking lost and forlorn as they play along with this crap, knowing full well if they took some initiative and tried to wing around a defender on their own, or executive a crisp short pass, their manager would hurl his thick Brezhnev era manual of tactics and strategies at his head, and his work visa would get revoked.

My approach to professional sports is multidisciplinary. I am interested in the places, the fans, the history and how all those factors relate to the game. I am not enough of a sports enthusiast to appreciate it for the “game itself.” Nor am I enough of a cynic that I regard it as a matter of interchangeable parts the way a gambler would. So whatever match I am watching I’ll pick a side and stick with them, and if I sat down and thought about it long enough I could probably systematize how I choose which side I support. I suppose I try to gravitate toward underdogs by nature, as an American raised on “Bad News Bears” movies. I always root against Italian teams because they play so ugly. I always root for Dutch teams because I read David Winner’s awesome book about the glory days of Dutch football, “Brilliant Orange,” last year. While I can’t really explain what’s so mind-bending about the way the Dutch play, it sure lends itself to good writing. I will always root against Chelsea because of that Abramovitch. I will lean toward Arsenal because there is something very much akin to them with the Boston Red Sox, in that they are a big-spending team that always seems to be outspent, and have an intensely suffering fanbase that somehow puts up with it year in and year out.

I thought for awhile about choosing a Russian team to follow. While I love the idea of AC Milan or Barca legging out an early Champion’s League qualifier against Luch-Energiya Vladivostock, I decided my team would have to be from Moscow. I married into a Moscow family, and I have always been a homer, so that’s that. And none of the suburban teams will do, so while Saturn could have made a case, they play in Ramenskoe and I don’t even know how to get there.

So we are left with a rather large choice, which is appropriate considering Moscow’s outsized role in Russian life. At the top of the list is Spartak Moskva, which has dominated Russian football since the Soviet breakup. They are clearly out, because in terms of league dominance and potent brand identity of their red and white colors, they’re the friggin’ Yankees. So screw ‘em. Screw ‘em to hell.

CSKA Moskva has made a compelling case, especially after winning the UEFA Cup in 2005, which was something of jolt in the football world because Russian teams suck in European competition. But they are the military pet team, and afrorementioned villain Abramaovitch gave them a multimillion dollar “gift” recently, so the stench of multiple rats is just too great.

We also have Dinamo Moskva, who have pretty spiffy blue and white and kit and a long tradition, but they were Dzerzhinsky’s team, and they were always closely connected to the MVD. So much so that their opposing fans call them “Musora,” which means “garbage” and is a very rude nickname for the police. So they are right out. FC Moskva is the newest kid on the block, but they are actually partially owned by the city itself, and Mayor Luzhkov, so forget it.

That leaves us with the best contender, Lokomotiv Moskva. They have a long association with the railroad union, and are still majority owned by Russian State Railways. They have a spiffy green and red kit, and generally I don’t see neckless hooligans wearing their colors on the subway, though I have seen bright-eyed young kids with jobs pretending to be hooligans on the weekends wearing it. So, in Moscow derbies, they are my squad, but frankly I don’t think enough of them to really take the ride. And I must confess, I kind of like not caring enough to get worked up about it!

But would he put mayonnaise on salad?

This may be just another effort by a multinational corporation to introduce a new processed snack food into a the market, but at its heart this ad is pure Russian kookiness. Brazilian football superstar Ronaldhino is in line at an airport, and tries to steal potato chips from a Russian girl. She recognizes him, and makes him repeat after her: "I love mushrooms and sour cream." Not only is this a flavor combo I think only a Russian could love, I especially like the aggressive pushing of native foodways regardless of how untranslatable they are (kind of like when Olga tries to get me to eat salo). I also don't think Ronaldhino's people told him what was going on when he showed up on the set, giving it all a certain method-acting realism. Although I've never had this flavor of Lays chips -- and don't plan to keep an eye out for them -- the 'bacon' and 'green onion' varieties are actually really good.