in response to paul

My good friend Tsikitas has joined our football blog group in a radical attempt to bring an outsider’s view into the fray. He’s challenged us to see that sports do not matter and that even cavemen can provide sports analysis. Well, I feel a need to answer this.

I’m not going to argue for the importance of sports too much. I’m also not going to argue his cavemen theory, especially after listening to sports radio for years, especially out here. For the love of God, 90 % of Los Angeles sports media members need to shut the f--- up. So yes. There are a lot of stupid, stupid people who like sports. I won’t argue that.

But simply liking sports does not make you stupid. Lots of intellectuals have enjoyed them and even participated in them. The more involved I get in the film industry, the more I am aware that I am part of a growing movement to create something. And so are they, in a different light.

Let me explain my background on this. In high school, I was immersed in sports all the time. I played varsity football (poorly, I’ll admit, but they didn’t have cuts), I played intramural basketball and soccer, and many of my best friends were on the basketball team. I wrote for the school paper all four years in the sports section, and served as editor for the sports page during the last two. Even though I was taking AP classes in literature and math, I wanted to be a sportswriter. I dreamed of going to a school with a good journalism or communications program. I headed to La Salle hoping to be the east coast version of Marc Stein, a nerdy white kid who loved basketball and got to write about it.

But I was burned out. I had grown tired of Lancaster and everything about it. During my frosh year at La Salle, I was first introduced to underground movies and music and comedy. These inspired me like nothing had before. I was immersed in the arts like never before and toyed with the idea of throwing sports away, after having been so heavily involved with them during high school. I quickly changed my focus from sports writing to creative writing / media and eventually scriptwriting. As with the rest of my pre-college life, I wanted nothing to do with them.

But since then, as I have grown, I have come to understand that while sports do not matter in the long run, and they're really just another form of entertainment for us, how can we overlook them and yet champion other forms? For example, I will soon likely be working at a talent agency in Hollywood. My job will to be to find the most talented person for the job and get them in there. Movies work because producers find the people they need to make the movie they want. If a director can’t hack it, or an actor, or any other position, they are fired and we bring in the next best person who can do it. Well, how are sports any different? The executive brings in the best person to create the product. In this case, the product is a game. Or it could be a movie or show or play. It doesn’t matter.

Now, that’s the business end of it. Certainly, using that model, sports aren’t much different from any form of entertainment. But as you might know, I hate business. I’d rather be a pure artist. And I know Paul doesn’t see sports as a pure art as much as other forms. To which I say this: it’s how you look at it. Yes, I think you can say that sports are sometimes like a Bon Jovi album or an Adam Sandler movie. Lots of meatheads love them, and everyone can understand them. Sports are often instruments for the masses.

But there’s more to it that that. You can say the Eagles suck, or that Mike Piazza is a “gay fag” as I did on the radio out here, but why? Intense analysis often shows a more complicated side to things than you think. Piazza’s defensive statistics reveal that he’s an average catcher, which is his main job, but a good hitter for his position. Thus, you have to gamble that he’ll be adequate defensively and good enough offensively to make up for the difference. But people wanna talk about who sucks and who’s a bitch and they make terrible gay jokes and women jokes all the time. I say that these are simply the same people who go see Adam Sandler and Chris Rock movies. You wouldn’t hold it against Wes Anderson for their crimes, so why hold it against athletes?

Sadly, it’s even worse today because sportscasters take their entire audience for idiots. Phil Simms once said how he doesn’t try to explain too much because it will confuse the listeners. Phil, come on. “How many people know the difference between a nickel and dime defense or what it is?” he once said. Uh, it’s not that hard once you break it down, Phil. A nickel defense has five defensive backs, hence the term. You use this when you expect the offense to use a bunch of wide receivers, like when they’re down late in the game, or when it is third down and a long distance to go. Dimes are worth more than nickels, so dime means there are even more defensive backs. There. I just explained it in one paragraph.

Okay, I’m rambling now. Getting back to the point, I see sports as a great performance. James Brown made great performances. Kevin Spacey made great performances. And Michael Jordan made great performances. You can say that because his skills are physical, that his art is lesser than the intellectual strides Spacey made. But body and mind are two different things. As an academic, I’d like to say that the mind matters more, and I think it does. But his physical brilliance was astounding. And it wasn’t just a physical act; he had to know what to do. He was a great defender, besides all the points he scored. Defense takes smarts and effort, not just talent.

Quarterback play exemplifies the most of this. You might wonder why teams keep up with awful quarterbacks and why they can’t find better ones. It’s because it’s really, really, really hard to play in the NFL. You have to know a playbook that can contain more than a hundred variations of what to do, what every player does on each play, and where everyone is on the field. All this while 300 pound men are chasing you. This is why many people fail. Pure athleticism doesn’t give you anything in the league. You have to be smart in football to play.

Think about Kurt Cobain. He was socially inept, uninterested in any part of life besides music, and yet no one would argue with calling him a musical genius. He’s like the rain man of music. He’s a savant. So why should we hold it against people whose calling is sports?

Okay, you say, that’s for the players, but this is about the fans. Well, educated fans realize this. Educated fans realize that a properly executed football play is more than pigs in mud hitting each other. A play requires 11 people to do 11 different things correctly while another 11 people do everything in their power to stop them. Sometimes, when I’m not working on a script or making lists of movies, I like to draw up football plays. It’s more fun than you think. You can get really creative in shaping an offense or defense. Creative minds like Bill Walsh, Mike Martz, Dick LeBeau, Buddy Ryan, and Dom Capers did great as coordinators (not so much as head coaches, for some) because they thought up new ways to organize those 11 people. Today, their work remains in the league in many places. Half of the league uses offenses that Walsh created.

And we can admire that. We are educated and artistic minded people on this blogspace, and we can appreciate football. We can see that Vince Carter’s first dunks were art, and that there’s a reason why Oakland can compete with the Yankees despite having a quarter of their payroll. We can study it like reasonable people, not drool over it and whine.

I could go on and on about this forever, as you can see, so I’ll wrap it up and allow Paul to make the next move. I like this debate. It’s one I’ve had with myself many times.