March 16, 2012 - the day of two fifteens

Quick question. What is the team name of Lehigh University?

I'll give you a moment.

Did you guess Mountain Hawks or did you know?  I'm wagering you didn't guess.

They beat Duke in basketball this evening.

You know, the Blue Devils.

That's a 15 seed beating a 2 seed.  That hasn't happened in NCAA history in... oh, let me look it up... nearly four hours.

I think this now can be counted as the maddest day in March Madness history.

It's Friday afternoon of the first weekend and my bracket is crushed like an itty bitty bug.

This was the scene at Norfolk State on Sunday when they found out they would be in the NCAA Division I tournament for the first time in their school history, a 15th seed against #2 Missouri, a great team who has played great on the road this year. As the cliche goes, they were just happy to be going to The Big Dance. But now at just before 4:00 p.m. Pacific, they have pulled off one of the biggest upsets in history, only the fifth 15th seed to beat a 2nd seed ever.

I had Mizzou winning the whole thing.  My bracket is complete crap now.

But you've got to be happy for these kids.  This is one of those games that will be remembered for a long time, like Michigan losing to Appalachian State in football or more locally, #16 seed Harvard beating #1 Stanford in women's basketball, even more humiliating because it was played on the Stanford campus at Maples Pavilion in 1998.

Whether they make it to the Sweet 16 or not, this has to be the upset of the tournament, one of the biggest of all time.

UPDATE: Okay, this is the biggest upset of the early afternoon.  Got one just as big if not bigger this evening.  See the other post labeled "Two major upsets".
 

This doesn't make up for January 3, 1971...

but it will have to do for now.

January 3, 1971 won't mean much to most folks, but that was a chance for a young Bay Area football fan's dream to come true.  The Raiders traveled to Baltimore to face the Colts for the AFC Championship and the 49ers hosted the Cowboys at that old rat trap Kezar Stadium.  If everything went perfect, we'd have a Raiders-Niners Super Bowl.  Instead, everything went to crap, the Colts beat the Raiders and the Cowboys beat the Niners.

The winners went on to play Super Bowl V, one of the sloppiest championship games in any sport ever, a game whose only charm was that it was close, the Colts winning on a late field goal, 16-13.

(Photo by Paul Sakuma/AP)

Today wasn't championship week, but the 49ers hosted a playoff game in that old rat trap Candlestick Park.  The Niner defense is stunning and the Niner offense suspect, so to see them win a game 36-32 in regulation was not what anyone expected.  The lead changed three times in the last two minutes and was won on a fantastic Vernon Davis touchdown catch.

(Photo by Elise Amendola/AP)

The Raiders didn't make the playoffs this year, but the hated Denver Broncos did.  Tim Tebow, possibly the most over-rated flash in the pan in American professional sport since Mark "The Bird" Fidrych, had another one of his truly crap games against a strong defense and Tom Brady, a local boy made very good for the Pats, tied the playoff record with six touchdown passes.  New England won 45-10 and it really wasn't that close.

Maybe, just maybe, some of Tebow's fans will realize that God is not actually betting on the Broncos, but sadly, many Christian zealots can explain away anything.  Maybe, just maybe, Tebow will improve to becoming a middle of the pack quarterback with a lot of hard work, but he was the 31st best quarterback in terms of yardage, he threw as many interceptions as touchdowns and was the only starting NFL quarterback who did not complete half his passes.

Goodbye, Broncos.  You won more games than you deserved at 8-8 this year, and unless Tebow makes a commitment we have not seen yet, he will never be a premier passer in the NFL.  And just to be clear, "making a commitment" does not mean turning his life over to Jesus.  He's already done that and it's come up craps.

What Tim Tebow did not say today.

Hi, my name is Tim Tebow.  I play professional sports.  I am a Christian and my faith informs all aspects of my life.

My team, the Denver Broncos, won six games in a row, many in exciting comebacks in which my play was key.  I praised God and other Christians put me forward as a sign not only of Christ's love but of Christian superiority.

The Broncos have now lost two games in a row. The first loss was to the honestly superior Patriots.  I ran for two touchdowns but passed for none, and our defense was unable to stop the Patriots.

This week we played the Bills, a team that on paper should not be our superior.  I ran for a touchdown and threw for another, but I also threw four interceptions and was as instrumental in causing this loss as I was in causing several wins.

The reason is simple.  God cares little who wins sporting events.  God does not root for Notre Dame or Texas Christian or the people who always give him praise.  God does not root against those who forget to point skyward or fall on one knee after a touchdown.  He has more important things to do than care if a field goal is kicked true or is pulled to the right.

God loves me when I win and when I lose.  There are people of faith rooting for any given team playing a sport in America, and God does not plan a win to raise the victorious fans up or plot a loss to cause grief and teach humility to His faithful who root for the loser.

It's just a game and there are more important things in life.  Most important is how we treat our fellow man.

======

I'm not Tim Tebow, I'm Matthew Hubbard. Tim Tebow did not write this.  He's too rock fucking stupid to realize this.

Here endeth the lesson.  Happy holidays.

Complex football for November, both real and imaginary.

I promised to get back to my readers, assuming the species still exists, about the prospects for the local football franchises come early December. It's late November and I can confirm what I thought to be the case in early October. 

This could be the year. 

The 49ers are not mathematically a lock to be in the playoffs yet, but they are statistically a lock. They could still have a massive collapse and one of the teams in their division could catch fire. Because I am a cautious person, I will say the chance of a Niner collapse is remote but possible. I just can't see any team in their division starting to play well enough to catch them. The most likely 49er outcome is breezing to the division title and at least one home playoff game in January. In other words, the brie eating, chardonnay drinking 49er fans get to be as smug as they were in the heyday. 

The Raiders are not as clear a lock, but they are on top of their division and playing well. They have real hope of making the playoffs here in late November, instead of their recent pattern of sucking and making their fans miserable.

Doesn't suck to be a Bay Area football fan.

 

And then there are the Mutant Mercenaries, my fantasy football team. From 1-4 in early October to 7-4 now, in second place due to favorable tiebreakers.

The bad news is the next game is against my brother Michael's team, Cruel Dave, top of the league and on a ten game win streak since I traded Aaron Rodgers to him. (I swear to Lenny, it looked like a good idea at the time.)  If I lose, I can wave goodbye to second place with only one week left.  On the other hand, the chance to make the playoffs looks solid.

Still, the moral of this story is simple.

Winning football, real or fantasy, feels pretty good.

Joe Frazier, 1944-2011

Joe Frazier, who won the undisputed heavyweight crown by beating Muhammad Ali in Madison Square Garden in 1971, has died at the age of 67 of liver cancer.

I will readily admit my money was on Ali that night and for many years I thought Frazier was ungracious towards Ali. In retrospect, it was Ali who treated Frazier unfairly, labeling Joe an Uncle Tom when he was anything but.  It wasn't Frazier's fault that the people who hated Ali needed someone to root for and their was no Great White Hope on the horizon, so many bigots had to pin their hopes on Frazier.  Frazier had also given Ali financial help earlier in their careers, so Ali's taunts were a very personal betrayal to Joe.

There's a line in the movie Gattaca about a competition between a genetically engineered man and his normal brother.  They are swimming out from the shore and the normal brother leads his allegedly superior sibling all the way.  When the genetically engineered brother finally gives up and asks how he lost, the normal one answers "I had no plan to swim back to shore."  This is a metaphor for Ali-Frazier I.  Frazier won a very hard fought battle that night and was never quite the same. Joe beat guys like Jerry Quarry, Ron Stander and Jimmy Ellis after this, but the rest of his career is defined by losing to both George Foreman and Ali twice.

Many boxing fans now consider Ali "The Greatest", his nickname for himself. This is in large part because Ali was lucky enough to be in his prime at a time when there were other great fighters at their peak who could test him.  When I was a kid, Rocky Marciano was revered because he retired undefeated.  Nowadays, Marciano is usually ranked under Ali even though Ali lost several times, largely because Marciano never had that great fight against another top boxer in his prime.

In the beginning of his career when he was still Cassius Clay, he faced a hard hitting Englishman named Henry Cooper who decked him. He also fought some underrated fighters who were tough as nails like George Chuvalo and Oscar Bonavena. (Frazier beat Chuvalo despite being decked twice in the second round.)  But if Ali is The Greatest, it's because he proved it against great fighters in their prime, most notably two other deserving champions, Joe Frazier and George Foreman.

Best wishes to the friends and family of Smokin' Joe Frazier, one of the toughest and hardest hitting heavyweights who ever lived, from a fan.

Complex football: Both imaginary and real.

There's a scene in Moneyball where Brad Pitt as Billy Beane goes to the dugout and says to the then struggling A's, "This is a winning team. Now go out tonight and play like it."

I wish I could assemble the Mutant Mercenaries and tell them the same thing, but so far, no dice.

I won the award for the best draft. I have since made some pick-ups on waivers and trades that I think make my team better. Still, after five games we are 1-4 when we could be 3-2 or even with some luck 4-1. Instead, the luck has been almost all bad and we now have to struggle to get into the playoffs when I had hopes we might be trying to get enough wins to get a bye week.


And then there are the local teams, who have both been bitter disappointments for about ten years now. The Raiders and the 49ers both won their first games of the season, beat the uninspiring Broncos and Seahawks respectively. Then came week two, when the Raiders lost late to the Bills and the Niners lost late to the Cowboys, both those opponents seeming less than prepossessing at the time.

Since then, the Raiders have gone to 3-2, beating the Texans this week in an ugly game but nevertheless a win barely 24 hours after Al Davis' death. The 49ers have won three straight, including impressive drubbings of both the struggling Broncos and the allegedly solid Buccaneers in the past two weeks.

The Raiders are in a tougher division and they may have to hope for a wild card spot unless the Chargers go into a nose dive. This week's game hosting the Browns will go a long way in answering the question about whether they are contenders or pretenders.

The Niners on the other hand are in a Group of Cake rather than a Group of Death, and even if they lose on the road to the newly resurgent Lions this week, if they can go 10-6 in their division, they are pretty much a lock to get int the playoffs with a home game, especially since they still have five games left against the Seahawks, Rams and Cardinals, all of whom are somewhere between sad and laughable.

I really do think the Niners could be a playoff team this year. With a little luck, I think the Mutant Mercenaries and the Raiders might join them.

It's nice to have some hope in early October. I'll check back in early December to see if it all was just a mirage.

Sweating the small stuff: A mathematician reads Moneyball.

A friend has invited me to the opening night of Moneyball this upcoming Friday evening and lent me Michael Lewis' book to read. I'm not as keen on it as I was on his more recent book The Big Short, and this is because I know more about baseball history than I know about Wall Street today. Still, Lewis is an exciting writer and baseball is so interesting, even a book with flaws can be endlessly entertaining.

Let me be immodest for a moment. Lewis can appreciate math and I can actually understand it. If we compare math to its nearest (and superior) rival, he's a music critic who can write well and I'm a musician who can write legibly. It's Frank Rich vs. Salieri. It's more fun to read Rich (and Lewis), but Salieri (and I) have some inside information the other guys don't have.

No brag. Just fact.

With Moneyball, Lewis didn't start out with the intention of canonizing Billy Beane, the general manger of the dirt cheap but competitive Oakland Athletics, but that's how the book reads. In an afterword, Lewis explains that baseball insiders hate Beane for the book, not Lewis. Some of them think Beane wrote the book himself.

No one with a brain ever said baseball insiders had big brains.

And that's the point of Moneyball, much like it is the point of The Big Short and The Blind Side and most of Lewis' best-selling non-fiction. Insiders in the systems he studies don't really understand the system, and the outsiders who make honest scientific attempts to understand are widely despised.

There's the obvious and compelling core of every best-seller Michael Lewis has ever written.

Consider Billy Beane, the hero of this story. It is very common in Hollywood versions of "true stories" that the movie star is way prettier than the person being protrayed. I submit that Brad Pitt might be a little prettier than Billy Beane, but he's way too small. Young Billy Beane was a freaking Winklevoss twin, 6'4" tall, lean and supremely talented. Scouts salivate when they see a high schooler like Billy Beane.

Some may actually do more than salivate in private. I have no proof of this, but it is the strong subtext of the first few chapters of Moneyball.

Billy Beane knew the scouts of baseball didn't know shit. His best evidence was that they fought like bobcats over Billy Beane. When he became available for the baseball draft, it was either him or another Southern Californian, Darryl Strawberry, that HAD to be the first round pick that year. Strawberry became an honest to Pete baseball superstar until drugs brought him down.

Drugs weren't Beane's downfall. It was pride instead.

Beane could have played football or basketball, but he chose baseball. Beane hated to fail and hated even more to be shown up in public, and that is a nearly impossible character trait to overcome.

After they are drafted, Strawberry rises and Beane sinks, and the scouts and the best baseball minds are at a loss to know why. Beane gets violently upset when he fails, and he cannot turn this rage into positive action. Strawberry becomes a star in short order, but Beane bounces around, finally becoming roommates with Lenny Dykstra, a prospect with a tiny percentage of the promise Beane has.

The thing is, Dykstra has the small talent combined with the attitude of Babe Ruth. He ignored his failures like they didn't happen and reveled in his successes. Beane's attitude of hating failure is more like Ted Williams or Joe DiMaggio, but not quite at their godlike levels of talent.

Williams and DiMaggio truly hated to strike out, and they changed their way of batting to avoid it. Beane couldn't figure out how to avoid strikeouts and still to be feared at the plate. Had either Teddy Ballgame (good nickname) or Joltin' Joe (very inaccurate nickname) had the same "I don't give a shit" attitude about looking bad at the plate that Babe Ruth had, they might have made a serious run at the career home run record.

Neither did. Joe DiMaggio ended his illustrious career with 361 home runs, barely half of Ruth's 714. Williams, who missed prime seasons due to being a Marine pilot in both WW II and the Korean War, hit a home run in his last at bat, which brought his to a still remarkable 521 for his career.

Back to our main story.

Billy Beane, the failed Adonis, is still a baseball insider, but he listens to the baseball outsiders, the guys who think the statistics have been accurate but useless since the late 1850s.

Not a typo. 1850s. Before the American Civil War when players were not allowed to wear gloves.

I love that Lewis blames Henry Chadwick, a cricket fan from the 1850s, for inventing the "modern" baseball boxscore. There's actually a lot of math of that era that is still considered modern. The difference is that mathematical logic, group theory and quadratic reciprocity are still paying dividends, while the baseball box score is getting in the way of progress.

In Chadwick's original system, a base on balls is an error on the pitcher. Like other errors, it does not count positively towards the batter's numbers, but unlike errors, it now counts as zero instead of negative. It never occurred to him that it might be a skill of the batter to avoid bad pitches and only swing at good ones.

Some people cry in the wilderness that baseball is being mismeasured. It isn't until the 1970s that a guy named Bill James actually has the stick-to-it-iveness to shout this every year, at first to an audience of less than 100 people reading his self-published book.

In Lewis' mind, this is the beginning of baseball's salvation.

More on that tomorrow.

Stuff I like: Ball FourPart 5: The real taboo topics.

I've been reading online more stuff about Jim Bouton and his book Ball Four. There were a flurry of stories last year on the 40th anniversary, and apparently nearly all is forgiven. In a post script from 1980, Bouton said he was never invited to Old Timers games, but that has changed. Now, fans give him a rousing ovation. The main reasons for the decade or more of hard feelings stem from three things in the book, worse than the profanity or discussing sex and drugs.

1. Bouton writes about money. Back before free agency, the major leagues were willing to publicize how much they paid the superstars, so the $100,000 or more contracts given to the likes of Willie Mays or Mickey Mantle or Ted Williams were in the newspapers. They did not advertise how much they were paying everybody else, and the answer was "peanuts". Bouton always drove a hard bargain in negotiations, and even though he was a 20+ game winner on the perennial World Series participant New York Yankees, he never made more than $30,000, and by the end of his career, his salary was closer to $20,000. This was a good middle class salary in the late 1960s, but ballplayers often had to deal with moving expenses when traded, or maintaining a home for the family in some town away from where the club played. In the space of one season, Bouton has to move from Seattle to Vancouver to Seattle to Houston, with his family making two of those moves, then his wife and kids going to Michigan to live with family while he plays ball in Houston. Bouton claims some credit for swaying opinion towards the players in this era just before free agency becomes the law of the land, and he might very well have a point.

2. Superstars displayed in a negative light. You might think the story about Ted Williams in the batting cage doesn't show Ted at his best, but while it shows Williams as being somewhat vain, he had plenty to be vain about. No, the meanest stories Bouton tells are about the lack of hustle in superstars like Roger Maris and Carl Yazstremski, or the stunts Whitey Ford resorted to when his fastball wasn't as scary as it used to be. These were the things many ballplayers and sportswriters really objected to.

3. Bouton and authority. In Seattle, Bouton doesn't show much respect to his superiors, but the real problem for him is that he isn't getting straight answers or the information he needs to help the team more. In Houston, his attitude improves markedly. While Harry "The Hat" Walker has a reputation as a tough guy and a screamer, most of the stories he has about run-ins with Walker end with "You know what? Harry was right." Bouton actually does respect being treated like an adult, but that treatment was rare in the major leagues back in the day, and I'm not sure how prevalent it is now. The other coach he writes about with reverence is his old pitching coach Johnny Sain, once a star pitcher with the Boston Braves. Nearly every quote of Sain's is treated as a pearl of wisdom, and Bouton is always glad to talk to him and get his advice on situations Bouton faces as he makes the transition from fastball pitcher to knuckleball thrower.

In conclusion, I'm glad I returned to this book some 41 years after I read it first. While I don't think the obscenities will be as shocking to readers now as they were then, it's still a very entertaining book that does a great job of trapping a time and place very different from the 21st Century in a snapshot, a testament to Bouton's honesty, humor and innate skills as a writer.

Stuff I like: Ball FourPart 4: Sex, drugs and Jim Bouton.

Many people had written sports diaries before the publication of Ball Four, but Jim Bouton told a lot of truth about being on a ball club, and this pissed off sportswriters and the baseball establishment to no end. Bowie Kuhn, the commissioner of baseball when the book came out, was especially upset about sex stories that weren't really about sex and drug stories that were completely legal.

Lemme 'splain.

The Seattle Pilots, like sports organizations throughout recorded history, thought that making fun of homosexuality was the height of wit, so guys started kissing other guys when on the bus to a game or in the clubhouse. When it started, the perpetrator would put his hand over his intended's mouth and kiss the back of his own hand. Hilarity ensued. But later, guys stopped putting their hand on the other guy's face, so actual lips to face or lips to mouth action occurred, sometimes followed by fist to jaw action going in the other direction.

This deeply annoyed Bowie Kuhn.

Kuhn also was outraged by the idea that some guys came to the game still hung over and played, sometimes remarkably well.

Bouton also talks about real sex, though he doesn't name names much. He talks about the women who are available, known as Baseball Annies. He also talks about stewardesses, known as "stews". He says the stories are true. He also brings up a few fine points. Taking a Baseball Annie out for dinner and drinks is considered bad form, but it is fully expected if a ballplayer is hooking up with a stewardess. While someone had to be taking advantage of the Baseball Annies and the stews, Bouton snitches on no one.

The closest he gets to naming names is a practical joke where a paternity suit letter from a fake New York City law firm is sent to Fred Talbot, a guy Bouton kind of hates, and the guy goes into a serious funk. Bouton didn't do it, but everyone knew the letter was coming, except of course Talbot himself.

And then there's the drugs. Alcohol is completely accepted and provided after the game by the club, but the drugs whose legality are something of a gray area are amphetamines, known in the book as greenies. Some clubs provided them to the players free of charge. The clubs that didn't allegedly frowned upon them, but every club had a supplier, either a player or a guy on the coaching staff or clubhouse crew. Bouton writes that greenies are great. No one in the book is snitched as an abuser of alcohol or greenies. It's just relaxation and enhanced performance without consequence.

Forty years later, many in baseball have forgiven Bouton for his trangressions, and now that he is allowed to show up for Old Timers' games, the fans always give him a rousing ovation. But the greatest of his transgressions had nothing to do with sex or drugs, but instead the real taboo topics of sports: money, stardom and the chain of command.

More on that tomorrow in part 5.

Stuff I like: Ball FourPart 1: Introduction.

I've been doing a lot of review recently, watching movies and TV shows I liked when I was younger, re-reading favorite books. This week, I was able to get Ball Four by Jim Bouton out of the Oakland Public Library, opening the pages again forty one years after it was first published. It was a must-read book for any teenage boy in 1970 who liked sports even a little bit. Two friends of mine from high school, Andy and Steve, sometimes check in on the blog. They both read it back in the day. We talked about it for weeks. I would overhear conversations in the hall and on the school bus between guys I barely knew, and I'd hear them repeat stories and jokes from the book. We didn't use the phrase "water cooler material" back then, but that's what Ball Four was for adolescent males in 1970, provided your parents let you read it.

The book is the diary of Jim Bouton recounting his 1969 season playing for several teams, both in the majors and in the minors. Sports diaries had been published before, but Ball Four was significantly different in two major ways.

1. Bouton had been a top pitcher for the Yankees, but when this book is written, he is nearly washed up and struggling to make the club on The Seattle Pilots, a first year expansion team. (The team didn't work out in Seattle and move to Milwaukee the next year, changing the name to the Brewers.) Most diaries before this were by stars or superstars on winning teams, often teams that won the pennant in the year in question.

2. Bouton told the truth. He told about all that he saw that he found interesting: the funny, the petty, the ridiculous, the crude. Like other adolescents loved Catcher in the Rye for its raw language, my friends and I loved Ball Four, not only for the jokes and new permutations of obscenities, but for the stories it told and the characters we met.

I'm only about a quarter of the way through, but it's a quick read and I should be finished soon enough, probably by the weekend. I can honestly say I am getting more out of it now with the gift of hindsight than I did when I first read it when it was fresh.

When I was a kid, I thought it was funny and I still do. This may be because my sense of humor is still at the stunted adolescent level, I can't be sure. Here's a way to test yourself. Sing the following lyric.

Summertime.... and your mother is easy.

If you laughed at that, you'll laugh at Ball Four.

But the big thing is that when I was a kid reading about the escapades Bouton the adult and his teammates, the emotional tug wasn't the same as it is now that I'm a man far past the age of thinking about breaking into the majors, reading the words of a man in the twilight of his career.

In any case, get ready for about a week of posts about Ball Four, a honest book about flawed people, including the author, disguised as a filthy, funny book about sports.

Spike Lee has a point.

Everybody knows Spike Lee has a mouth on him. He's full of opinions and he isn't shy about expressing them. He has a theory on why actors are usually so messed up. Here's a quote from a recent interview in The Hollywood Reporter.

“You’re out there buck-naked and that is hard," Lee said. "The reason why actors are fucked up; can you imagine having a job where someone is, ‘No, no, no. Your butt’s too big, your head's too big, you’re too skinny, your nose is too big?'”

He's absolutely right about this. I saw the movie Beginners last night and I thought about what Lee said. Everybody in this film looked fantastic.

Forgive me if I give away a few plot points.

Christopher Plummer looked great, even though he was playing an old man in poor health. Ewan McGregor looked great, though his character is depressed. The Jack Russell Terrier Cosmo is a little scruffy compared to Eddie in Frazier, but it is impossible not to adore him.

And then there's Mélanie Laurent, who American audiences might remember best as Shoshonna in Inglourious Basterds. She is beyond adorable in this film. In her first scene, she is supposed to have laryngitis, so it's just close ups of her not speaking. She has stunningly beautiful eyes and a lovely face, every feature is wonderful and the camera loves her.

But consider this picture of her from a red carpet. The haircut isn't flattering. She has two moles, one on her neck and one in the middle of her collarbone. If just one of them is visible, it's not too bad, but if she's on camera and both of them can be seen, it's distracting.

She was terrific in both the movies I've seen her in, but I don't know if she is going to become a big movie star, all over two moles.

Here's a young woman in a different situation. Hope Solo, goalkeeper for the women's U.S. national soccer team, now playing in the World Cup in Germany.

How does she get judged? She gets judged on how many goals she gives up. So far, the United States has won two games by shutout against North Korea and Colombia. So far, Hope Solo is perfect, but every game from now on will be a tougher test, including the final game in the group stage against Sweden.

She was also judged four years ago on her performance as a teammate. She was benched against Brazil in favor of Brianna Scurry and the U.S. lost 4-1. She criticized the coach and she was benched also for the third place game. Obviously, she has returned to the good graces of the team.

And, oh yeah, Hope Solo is a very attractive young woman. Women in sports are obviously being judged on their looks, and sadly there have been some second tier female athletes given ridiculous amounts of attention for their looks in spite their lackluster performances, like Anna Kournikova in tennis and Danica Patrick in auto racing. But the standard for attractiveness for female athletes is not as unforgiving as it is for other entertainers, and more importantly, it isn't the bottom line. She and the other women on the team have chances to get endorsements, but the most important component is to become champions like the previous generation back in the 1990s when the international game began.

The long wait is over.

The Dallas Mavericks beat the Miami Heat in convincing fashion to become this year's NBA champions. While it is not one of the greatest upsets in sports history, the Heat definitely looked better on paper. Their three stars, LeBron James, Dwayne Wade and Chris Bosh, are all in their seventh seasons playing, which would put them in their prime. The stars of the Mavericks were all at least ten year veterans and their starting point guard and playmaker Jason Kidd was in his 16th season and 38 years old, making him one of the oldest players in the league currently.

By winning, this gives Kidd his first championship in his long career, almost all of it as a starter, ten times on the NBA All-Star team. By an odd coincidence, if the Heat had won it would have been the first championship ring for Juwan Howard, also in his 16th year and also 38, but Howard is now a bench warmer and not considered a major factor.

Another famous All-Star in his sport who waited a very long time for his first championship was John Elway. He had been in the league 15 years before his Denver Broncos won the Super Bowl, and just to show it wasn't a fluke, they repeated the next year in his 16th season, after which he retired.

Unlike the other players on this list, Elway played for the same team his entire career.

But the longest wait for a championship I've heard of, and a tip of the hat to my friend Art Velasquez for remembering it, is hockey's Ray Borque. Widely recognized as one of the greatest defensemen ever to play the game, Borque played twenty one seasons for the Boston Bruins, was traded to the Colorado Avalanche late in the 2000 season, then helped the Avalanche win the cup in 2001, the culmination of his 22nd and final season.

Congratulations to Jason Kidd, who is a Northern California product by the way (St. Joseph's High School in Alameda, college at Cal), for joining this remarkable list of persistent and talented athletes.

The best football team ever?

Barcelona beat Manchester United 3-1 at Wembley Stadium in London today to win the Champions League final, to the surprise of no one. This was more like a coronation than a sporting event, the way some Super Bowls are or when Michael Jordan's Bulls were in the NBA Finals.

I hadn't seen Barcelona play this year. I was amazed. They controlled the ball 70% of the time. The game was tied at half, but it was a mirage. Man U scored one goal on one shot on goal by Wayne Rooney. That was it.

I was watched at a packed bar in Oakland. Early in the second half with the game still tied, someone asked about the overtime rules in Champions League. I said, "Don't worry about overtime. This is surgery, not football. It won't stay tied." Not more than two minutes later, Lionel Messi drove home a wicked twisting shot from 25 yards out to prove me right.

To be fair, I don't think Messi actually heard me and proving me right was not his main concern.

I could not believe how far outmatched mighty Man U was. If this was World Cup football, this would be like Germany versus Australia in 2010 or Brazil versus Japan in 2006. With all the squads spending all the money they have, it's hard to fathom one team can be this much better than everyone else. Their passes don't miss. There's always someone open. They finish strong and make a goalie's day a nightmare. If you stop Messi, their little Argentinian thunderbolt, then you have to deal with the native Spaniards Pedro and Xavi and Iniesta.

It's just not fair.

Congratulations to FC Barcelona, without question the best football team in the world today and arguably one of the best of all time.

The quality heartbreakers.

Over the past four decades, bay area pro sports fans have had it pretty good. We've had championships produced by the A's, 49ers, Raiders, Warriors (yes, it's true, youngsters; you can look it up) and most recently and currently, the World Series Champion San Francisco Giants.

I do not tire of typing that phrase.



That would leave exactly one major pro team out of the mix, our hockey squad the San Jose Sharks. Ironically, the Sharks are currently the best franchise in the bay area, what I define as a quality organization, a team that can produce a streak of seasons with not only playoff appearances but also advancing past the first round. (One could say the Giants have started on a streak of one season of playoff appearances and they are leading their division, but the season is still young.) The Raiders were that kind of organization for decades until their complete collapse early this century. The Niners were quality for most of the 80's and 90's.

But right now, if you want to enjoy a playoff game in the San Francisco Bay Area, you'll probably have to drive down to The Shark Tank in San Jose.

The Sharks have built a team around Joe Thornton and Patrick Marleau, and have been either the first or second seed in the Western division of the National Hockey League for five straight years.

With a total of zero appearances in the Stanley Cup finals.

This year, the Vancouver Canucks stand in the way of the Sharks making it to the finals, and even diehard fans have this feeling that somehow, someway, the Sharks will find a way to screw this up.

Come on, Sharks! This is your year. Show the league you can choke on the biggest stage in all of hockey. I know you can do it. You are the quality heartbreakers.

You've been the Cleveland Browns for long enough.

It's time to become the Buffalo Bills.

Sir Henry Cooper: 1934-2011

Muhammad Ali's butt met the canvas only three times in his career.

The last (and easily least) was when the grotesquely out-matched Chuck Wepner stepped on Ali's foot and hit him at the same time. The referee missed it, so it counts to this day as a knockdown instead of a trip or slip. Besides this act of clumsiness or cleverness, Wepner has two other claims to fame: he is the model for Rocky Balboa, a third rate club fighter facing the greatest champion of the last half century, and his wonderfully and horribly accurate nickname The Bayonne Bleeder.

The second time Ali was knocked down was by Smokin' Joe Frazier in the first of their three epic fights, the one Frazier deservedly won on the biggest stage in boxing, Madison Square Garden, following the biggest hoopla for a boxing match in this country from then until now.


The first time he took a seat involuntarily in his career, Muhammad Ali was still Cassius Clay, and the brash kid from Kentucky had traveled all the way to London, England to meet the British Commonwealth champion Henry Cooper, later to be known as Sir Henry Cooper. Clay was already running his mouth as he would throughout his career, and in the pre-fight lead-in called Cooper "a bum". Cooper said he put lead weights in his shoes to make it to the heavyweight limit of 175 pounds that night, and no one disagrees that Clay was both taller and heavier than Cooper.

Clay was also a once in a lifetime athlete, a natural 200+ pounder with the speed of a man 50 pounds lighter. Cooper could not believe how deftly the bigger, younger fighter kept away from his blows, but at the end of the fourth, Cassius Clay met 'Enery's 'Ammer, the nickname the British sportswriters gave Cooper's vicious left hook. Clay got lucky and the ropes kept his noggin from bouncing on the ring floor, else he might have been out for the count.

The story gets better. Between rounds, Angelo Dundee, Clay's trainer, put smelling salts under his fighter's nose, which isn't legal. He also saw a small tear in Clay's glove and made it bigger, so the ref gave him some extra time to repair the glove. Cooper claims it was an extra two minutes, "all the time a fit man needs". In any case, Clay was ready to go the next round and opened cuts on Cooper's face that forced the fight to be stopped in Clay's favor with Cooper ahead on all cards.

After the fight, Clay took back all the unkind things he said about the plucky British bomber and the two men were fast friends ever after.


Once Clay beat Sonny Liston, became the champion and Muhammad Ali all on the same night, he decided to give Henry Cooper another chance. Older and wiser, Ali used his superior size and reach to jab Cooper's face and once again open cuts. This time, he didn't play around. One encounter with 'Enery's 'Ammer was enough. Ali later said Cooper hit him so hard "my ancestors in Africa felt it".

Ali fought several times in Europe, most notably against the Brit Brian London and the German and European champ, the southpaw Karl Mildenberger, but that first fight against Cooper truly stands out.


I have only once heard a discouraging word about the great Henry Cooper, and I only heard since he died yesterday. He never gave the Canadian heavyweight George Chuvalo a shot at the Commonwealth championship. The two fighters were about the same age and it would have been a great contrast in styles. Cooper was known for getting cut easily, the weakness Clay/Ali exploited twice, but he had one of the most feared punches in the game. Chuvalo was not as powerful, but he was as tough as a cheap piece of meat fried on a railroad tie. Some clever Trevor at the time said that if they still let heavyweights fight for 55 rounds like they did back in Jack Johnson's time, George Chuvalo would have been the undisputed heavyweight champion of the world.

Let me call this a quibble. The travel costs would have been a lot for either Chuvalo or Cooper, and neither had the name recognition of an Ali or Joe Frazier.

I come to praise Cooper as others bury him. I write this post because a horrible cowardly villain died yesterday and the press can't stop talking about him. A brave and honest man, beloved in his nation to this day also died, dead from a broken heart at the recent loss of several loved ones.

Best wishes to the friends and family of Sir Henry Cooper, from a fan.

Repeat after me: Prediction is difficult, especially about the future.

Well, the first weekend of the NCAA men's basketball tournament has come to a close and my bracket is out of the running. It wasn't complete garbage, more like mediocre with 31 correct predictions out of 48, but mediocre ain't gonna get you in the money.

You might think that predicting the outcomes of win-lose games would be a 50%-50% gamble, but in our set of 127 brackets, the average number of correct prediction was 30.8 of 48, or around 64%. One of the big reasons for the improvement over flat out guessing is seeding. When a #1 seed plays a #16, it's crazy to pick an upset. Likewise, #2 vs #15 is pretty much a done deal as well and #3 seeds went a perfect 4-0 in the first round as well. If you picked all the #1, #2 and #3 seeds to win in the first round, that's 12 correct predictions and just 36 more "tough" games to choose. If you go 50%-50% on the rest, that's 30 correct without getting very lucky or clever.


Let's switch to a guessing game that is much tougher to do and hard to figure the odds on mathematically. Alt.obituaries, a newsgroup I used to subscribe to when the Internets were young and so was I, has a deadpool each year. Before January 1, you have to submit a list of 40 famous people who you think will die before the next January 1.

I had never done this before because I don't actually care for predicting people will die, but now that I'm running The Other Blog, I figured I'd make a list of 40 out of the people marked for death and right soon by the vultures of the gossip world.

I'm not really doing this for fortune or fame. There is no entry fee and first prize is a bottle of Moxie, an East Coast brand of root beer.



I entered the deadpool under the nom de mort Brave Last Dave, a pun on the "Brave Last Days!" headline the tabloids use so often in cases like this. Given how badly the tabloids did in 2010, six correct out of sixty six predictions fatalities, I figured Brave Last Dave would be near the bottom of the standings all year long. But on Jan. 3, I got my first hit, in fact the first hit of the year, with Anne Francis, the lovely blond who starring in Forbidden Planet and Honey West. I started getting the idea that maybe I'd get about a hit a month and actually have a chance to get that free bottle of Moxie, favored fizzy drink of the now departed Ted Williams.

But since then... nothing. In February, the tabloids were absolutely certain Zsa Zsa Gabor and Miss Elizabeth Taylor would be on the other side of the lawn before the month was out, but Spring is about to sprung and both of those lovely women are still with us. Zsa Zsa is pretty stunning. 93 years old, broken hip, found in a pool of blood, leg amputated, infection set in so the leg was amputated even further, had a stroke and is still clinging to life.

I tell ya, that old bird is tougher than a two dollar steak.

The tabloids lean very heavily on former TV stars when they predict someone is going to die, so there was no chance I was going to get a hit with the recently deceased Secretary of State Warren Christopher or even Dodger great Duke Snider. They could have mentioned Jane Russell before she died, but that's aiming slightly older than their target demographic. It's much more about Mike Connors (still alive and best wishes) than it is about Michael Gough (recently deceased and best wishes to his family and friends).

Yes, Spring is nearly here and though there are many months left, I expect that if I'm ever going to have any Moxie, I'm going to have to buy it my own damn self.

It's 4:00 p.m. PST on Saint Patrick's Day...

and I am stone sober and my bracket is already crap.

As for the first anomaly, I work this evening so I will still be sober until well after 7:00 p.m.

As for the second situation, having a bracket go to crap really doesn't count as an anomaly with me.

Yes, I know there are bigger troubles all over the place, but if the Leader of the Free World can put together an NCAA bracket, I think a broke-ass math professor should have the right as well.

Here's hoping things are going better for you.

Demeaning and offensive. But not for the reasons you might think.

NBA commentator David Aldridge wrote on the CNN website that the weekend of the NBA All-Star game is known as "black Thanksgiving". Though CNN has taken it down, it has been posted in many places around the Internets, with lots of comments on websites from black folks who had never heard the phrase before.

Of course, it's demeaning and offensive, most especially since the NBA All-Star Game is often the same weekend the Daytona 500, the opening race of every NASCAR season.

Or as it is known in the former Confederate States of America...

Cracker Christmas.

Sunday Numbers 2.0, Vol. 1: Return to football and mortality.

Over the past few weeks, I've received e-mails from readers saying they missed the Wednesday Math posts. I was a little surprised, but I did do 130 of them, so I could see how folks felt like it was part of the routine.

Right now, prepping classes is cutting into my precious blogging time during the week, so I am going to resurrect the Wednesday tradition on Sundays instead, calling it Sunday Numbers 2.0 to distinguish these new posts from the first set of Sunday Numbers in 2008 that used my system called Confidence of Victory to predict the result of the presidential election, predictions that were remarkably close to the actual landslide electoral victory of Obama over McCain, thank Odin, Krishna and the li'l baby Jesus.


About a year ago, I did a couple posts on professional sports and mortality. This week, a fellow named Jim Zimmerman who runs oldestlivingprofootball.com added a comment to the thread from last year, so I gave his site a visit.

A website full of numerical data sorted in an easy to understand way.

Honestly, I couldn't be happier if you sent me beer.

I took a couple hours to get the data, change the dates of birth and death to years instead of specific days and sorted it both by year of death and year of birth. Here are some of my early findings.



How has the Age of Steroids effected mortality of NFL players? This chart shows the average age of players who died in the years from 1980 to 2010. The general public started noticing steroid use in the late 1990s in baseball, but the premature deaths of John Matuszak and Lyle Alzado a decade earlier made steroid use in football a topic of conversation then. I took the average age of football players who died in the years from 1980 to 2010, and as we can see, the general trend is upwards, as it is for the public in general.

There is a fact that skews the in favor of longer life expectancy in more recent years that has nothing to do with improved health. More football players are living to be 90 or more because there more professionals as time goes on. If a man died in 1980 and he was more than 90, he had to be born in 1890 or earlier. If a man in his nineties died last year, he was born between 1910 and 1920, and probably played football in the 1940's or 1950's. There are more football players in that era than in the earlier era simply because the league started in the early 1920s.


Are more football players dying young as we move forward in time? Again, I looked at the years of death 1980 to 2010. If someone died in 1980, they likely played the game in the era from 1950 to 1980, which was not the age of steroids. For those who died young in 2010, their playing days would have been in the era of 1980 to 2010 when steroid use is assumed to be more prevalent. Looking at the graph to the left, we see the percentages of NFL players dying before the age of 50 fluctuates quite a bit year by year and the trendline (or line of regression) is almost flat. More than that, the correlation coefficient is incredibly weak, so the data does NOT let us state that steroid use has been a significant factor in premature death of the population of NFL players.

How do the ages at death of NFL players compare to the general population? For this question, I needed some sample from the general population that would be fair to compare to the list of NFL players who died in 2010. My method was to look at recent obituaries from the Associated Press. Both these data sets would be very different from a list of the deceased at a hospital because neither of the lists of celebrated people are going to have any infant deaths or deaths of teenagers. In the A.P. obituaries, I excluded anyone whose celebrity was being the Oldest Living Person, and I only took the obits that mentioned the age at death in the first paragraph. Here are the statistics I used for my tests.

2010 deaths of former NFL players
n = 134, average = 73.28, standard deviation = 16.82
% under 50 = 10.4%
% between 50 to 59 = 9.0%
% between 60 to 69 = 19.4%
% between 70 to 79 = 16.4%
% between 80 to 89 = 32.8%
% over 90 = 11.9%

100 deaths from A.P. obituaries, late 2010 to early 2011
n = 100, average = 77.65, standard deviation = 14.99
% under 50 = 5%
% between 50 to 59 = 7%
% between 60 to 69 = 13%
% between 70 to 79 = 23%
% between 80 to 89 = 28%
% over 90 = 24%

5% of celebrities who died were under 50 compared to 10.8% of football players. Is that significant? Good question, hypothetical question asker. With sample sizes this small and splitting into two groups for each set, under 50 and 50 or over, the chi-square test does not give us a test statistic that reaches even the 90% significance level. (test stat = 2.278, 90% threshold = 2.706.)

If instead we do a chi-square test and split both data sets into six categories, (Under 50, 50-59, 60-69, 70-79, 80-89, 90 and over), we get a test stat that does cross the 90% threshold, but not the 95%. (test stat = 10.368, 90% threshold = 9.236, 95% threshold = 11.071). The categories that add the most to the test stat are the over 90 numbers, and this can be at least in part attributed to league expansion. In 1960, the American Football League began, effectively doubling the number of professional football teams. When the leagues merge in 1970, there were 26 teams. There are now 32, but this increase is not as significant as the big jump ten years earlier.

The general celebrity list had an average age at death four years higher than the NFL list from 2010. Is that difference significant? Yes, it is. The test statistic t = 2.093 does get above the 95% significance threshold. Part of this is because of the greater percentage of celebrities dying over the age of 90 than football players over 90 dying, and again that can be partly attributed to league expansion. If instead we try to factor this out by looking at only the deaths at ages of 89 or less, of course the average ages of both groups go down dramatically. Here are the new numbers for those two data sets.

2010 deaths of former NFL players, 89 and younger
n = 119, average = 70.52, standard deviation = 16.0

deaths from A.P. obituaries, late 2010 to early 2011, 89 and younger
n = 76, average = 72.45, standard deviation = 13.32

Besides the averages going down, the difference goes from 4 to 2, the data sets get smaller and the standard deviations shrink slightly. The shrinking standard deviations would tend to increase the test statistic, but that small pressure to go up is overwhelmed by the smaller difference and sample sizes. The test statistic t = 0.911, which is not statistically significant at all.

What if we leave the NFL players alone and remove half the over 90 deaths from the A.P. list? Hypothetical, that's not a bad idea of how to adjust the data to compensate for league expansion. Let's give that a shot.

2010 deaths of former NFL players
n = 134, average = 73.28, standard deviation = 16.82

100 deaths from A.P. obituaries, late 2010 to early 2011, half the over 90s removed
n = 88, average = 75.65, standard deviation = 14.66

The new test stat is t = 1.11, not statistically significant at these data set sizes.

==

I want to thank Jim Zimmerman once again for maintaining this very nice website for mortality statistics of former professional football players. I still have all the info in an Excel file, so there may be more data mining in the future for my Sunday Numbers 2.0 posts.

Whew, that's lotsa 'splainin'. Glad it's a Sunday.

Next week: Perpendicular.