Category Archives: Sports

Super Bowl XXI and Vicarious Living

28 Saturday Jan 2012

Posted by in 1, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, Mount Vernon High School, Mount Vernon New York, New York City, Pop Culture, Sports, Youth

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New York Giants as underdogs, January 26, 2012. (BlasBlasB via http://Flickr.com). In public domain.In little more than a week, my New York (football) Giants will play against the New England Patriots in Super Bowl XLVI, and hopefully win their fourth NFL championship. It’s good for me to watch this process unfold — again. Only without the significant emotional and psychological attachment I had to my Giants back in the days of Bill Parcells, Phil Simms, Mark Bavaro, Phil McConkey, Joe Morris, Lawrence Taylor, Leonard Marshall, Carl Banks, Elvis Patterson, and Harry Carson, among so many others.

It’s been twenty-five years and three days since my Giants won their first Super Bowl, against John Elway and the Denver Broncos in Super Bowl XXI. Or, as Dick Enberg put it over and over again, “the man with the golden arm,” who looked like Tim Tebow most of the game against the Giants pass rush. At times after that win on January 25, ’87, it seemed as if that was the only thing that went right for me that year.

Of course, that wasn’t true. After all, this was also my senior year at Mount Vernon High School, about to graduate and move on to the University of Pittsburgh that fall. But at seventeen years old, in the middle of my obsession with Crush #2, and feeling the pressures of life at 616, the ridicule of some classmates at MVHS, and the need to grasp my future, I needed many forms of escape.

The Giants had served as one major form of escape for me since the ’83 season. Yeah, their 3-12-1 season. I was neither a Giants nor a Jets fan, but after watching what had happened with both teams that year, I felt sorriest for the Giants. With a first-year coach like Bill Parcells not knowing yet how to coach his team, I just felt they had nowhere else to go but up. They hadn’t won a championship since ’56, and didn’t look like they were going to win one anytime soon.

Just like me. As an underdog in life, I already was rooting for teams that no one else would care to talk

Mark Bavaro after touchdown catch in Super Bowl XXI, January 25, 1987 (note the kneel down that people now attribute to Tebow). (Walter Iooss, Jr. via http://nypost.com).

about. The Jets just looked like a team that squandered talent, they had Richard Todd, and they never played as hard as the Giants. So by the end of the year I didn’t care to watch them anymore.

I watched or listened to my Giants play football virtually every Sunday from that point on, but that didn’t interfere with my studies. It often helped me remember obscure information, especially as my ability to study at 616 complete deteriorated. Through a visual cue, like Phil Simms throwing a touchdown pass on a crossing route or post pattern to Mark Bavaro, I could remember how to solve a specific function or recall a series of “if-then” statements for a Pascal program.

Then, after disappointment in the playoffs in ’84 and ’85 at the hands of the 49ers and the Bears, the Giants won Super Bowl XXI, blowing out and brutalizing each team they faced along the way. My underdog team had become a juggernaut in three seasons, meaning that there was hope for me yet.

But it would take me a bit longer to see myself as a winner, a champion, someone deserving of a victorious life. When I did, a couple of years before the Giants’ second Super Bowl victory in January ’91, I realized that I didn’t need to live and die with any team I was a fan of in order to validate the meaning of my own life. Rooting for the Giants, win or lose, has given me a small degree of joy over the years, like a kid just enjoying the excellence of his team. How it translates for my own life is immaterial. It’s up to me to decide how much victory in my life I’m willing to fight for, and how much success I can stand.

Fans of Delusion

25 Tuesday Oct 2011

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Redskins Country Stop Sign display, October 25, 2011. (http://www.amazon.com).

In the past couple of years, in my down time between teaching and occasional consulting, I sometimes listen to ESPN 980 Washington, DC. I get a perverse pleasure out of it, especially this time of the year. With football season on, there’s nothing better than hearing Washington Redskins (hereafter known in this blog as Deadskins) fans whine and complain and kvetch after a loss. It’s not just because I became a New York Giants fan when I was a teenager. Nor is it because I’m also a Pittsburgh Steelers fan. No, there’s something different about these Deadskins fans, something that might be related to the personality of this area.

To those who don’t read my blog regularly, I’ve only been a DC/Maryland resident consistently since August ’99 (I did live in DC briefly in ’95 while doing my doctoral thesis research). I grew up in Mount Vernon, New York — the greater NYC metropolitan area, not upstate, just in case — for the first seventeen years and eight months of my life. I went to school and lived and taught in Pittsburgh for twelve other years. Not to mention spent the equivalent of five weeks in the Bay Area, three weeks in Atlanta, and two weeks apiece in Chicago and Boston. From a sports perspective, none of these areas and cities have fans as delusional as Deadskins fans, at least, not on a game-by-game or week-to-week basis.

The best way to show the difference is to take the same scenario and apply it to each city or area in which I’ve lived. The hometown team has just lost a game, in the ugliest possible way. Tune into a sports talk show or read the headlines for each team in their respective cities/areas, and this is what you’d read or see:

After a Giants loss:

“They suck! They suck! Did you see what Eli did with that throw! I’m tired of these guys screwin’ up! I want Coughlin’s head on a f–ing pike!”

That would go on for a day, maybe two, and if it’s really bad, maybe for three or four days. Then eventually, the Giants fan base settles down to, “What do we have to do to win this week?”

After a Steelers loss:

“My God, man, what happened out there today? Maybe we’re gettin’ too old, maybe Ben’s still playin’ hurt. You know, maybe this just ain’t our year.”

This would go on for a couple of days. Then, like the little engine building up momentum, the Stiller’s talk would turn to, “What do we have to do to win this week?”

After a Deadskins loss:

And this goes on all week long, every week they lose, and through every off-season. Until talk show hosts like the great former Georgetown coach John Thompson literally cuts callers off due to their “high levels of ignorance.”

It’s not as if the other places I’ve lived and the teams I’ve rooted for haven’t seen any hardship. Heck, the Steelers went through a twelve-year decline between their fourth Super Bowl win in ’80 and the hiring of Bill Cowher in January ’92, the last five seasons I witnessed first-hand. Not a single fan jumped off a bridge because of a loss, or took a rocket up to the moon over a victory. Maybe the realism that Pittsburgh as a city had to live with, including the loss of their industrial base for jobs, had something to do with their realism around the Steelers.

As a Giants fan, I appreciated their realism, and it helped make me a Stillers fan, too. Coming from an area where my team had one their first Super Bowl in ’87, only three years removed from a 3-12-1 season in ’83, I thought that some Johnny-Come-Lately types expected too much in a strike/scab-shortened season. But, even with that, the cycle of Jackie Gleason-esque fits of rage, followed by calm rationalism, were a reflection of the New York City I knew in the ’80s, sometimes ugly, but usually manageable. Even in troubled times.

This cycle also made the Giants fans of the ’80s more psychologically stable than the average Deadskins fan, then and now. Yes, it’s a reflection of an area of the nation that is also out of touch, as the worst effects of the Great Recession aren’t equally felt. As the expectations of Deadskins fans are as realistic as it was to believe that Mayor Vincent Gray could move DC government in the same way as Adrian Fenty, only without the ruffled feathers.

This form of delusion, though, otherwise known as bipolar disorder, where the highs are euphoric and lows can make you suicidal, may be catching on. For it shows our expectations of the economy and our politics.

“Dr. K All the Way…” & Other Fall Classics

28 Wednesday Sep 2011

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Dwight Gooden, aka, "Dr. K," Shea Stadium, 1986. (Source/http://itsonbroadway.wordpress.com/2011/05/16/dwight-gooden-aka-dr-k/).

While the country waits to see whether Congress and the President will find a way to entertain us with political gridlock and endless compromises and capitulation, I realized this week that I have a twenty-fifth anniversary this month. It’s been a bit more than a quarter century since my New York Mets won the NL East division title (their first since ’73), one more brick in their World Series wall that year.

Those not-so-Amazing Mets were a juggernaut that year, having won 108 games and run away with the division lead by the end of June. Gooden was Dr. K., and, along with Ron Darling, Sid Fernandez, Bob Ojeda, and Jesse Orozco, led the pitching staff. While Darryl Strawberry was the straw that stirred the drink on offense, along with Lenny Dykstra, Gary Carter, Howard Jones and Keith Hernandez. God, I really loved that team!

Darryl Strawberry home run, Shea Stadium, July 2, 1988. (AP Photo/Mark Lennihan).

I really did. I imbued the Mets with all of my hopes and dreams, and saw their wins as a way to see myself as a winner. And whenever they lost a game or a series, I saw myself as having lost as well. I was aware of all of this on some level, that making my life circumstances a parallel story to that of a major league baseball team was, well, a bit childish.

But given my life since the age of eleven, I needed that outlet, that room to be a child, if only for two or three hours a day. In between watching my four younger siblings, washing clothes at the laundromat in Pelham, dealing with my alcohol father and my idiot stepfather, running back and forth to the store, applying to colleges, and facing the hell that was my senior year at Mount Vernon High School. Especially with three AP courses, a touch of senioritis, and a number of classmates at each other’s throats. Including my own.

As the season took forever to wind down (the Mets clinched the NL East division on September 17, more than two weeks before the end of the season), the pre-WFAN station for the Mets (WHN-AM, a country oldies station until the 24-hour group took it over in ’87 and renamed it WFAN) started playing their World Series-or-bust promo, “Dr. K All the Way! — Let’s Go Mets!” So silly, so goofy, so geared toward long-suffering Mets fans. “Is that the best you can do?,” I thought every time I heard the ten-second spot. Apparently it was, and it didn’t matter either way, because fans are usually too fanatic to sweat the goofy stuff.

I became even more involved in rooting for my team as they moved into the playoffs. I’d listen to games in class, between classes, even in between questions, it seemed, in my AP Physics class. To say the least, my grades suffered, and more than a few of my non-Mets-fan classmates berated me in the process. But how could I explain to them the psychic bond I felt to this team? A feeling that somehow, if they, the downtrodden Mets, could pull off the ultimate victory and win a World Series, that I, a nobody, could make my life a victorious one as well. My more affluent and too-busy-being-cool classmates wouldn’t have understood that. As it was, I barely understood it myself.

Fast-forward twenty-five years. I’m no longer a baseball fan, and have no intent to fall back in love with a game I find boring, and with an institution that represents culture and race in America that is so pre-Civil Rights Movement and twentieth century. Most of my Mets still have their rings, even if key players on that team have been or are in prison, recovering drug addicts, and have made and lost hundreds of millions of dollars speculating in the snuff and stock markets (see Lenny Dykstra ’09 HBO Real Sports interview excerpt via The Young Turks).

But I still have that child-like sense of hope and yearning. I just don’t place it in anonymous others anymore. I haven’t lived or died with a team since my Knicks came within a missed 3-pointer by John Starks of winning the ’94 NBA Finals in Game Six. But I do place it in myself, because between God and me, and the others I’ve met and befriended in my life, I’ve been able to move mountains.

Which is why it does and doesn’t matter if the job stimulus passes in whole, in part or even not at all. I need to take that same optimism, that same hope, convert it to more hard work, and find a way to infuse it in my son, so that he can run the race, even if and when I can’t. In the process, I hope he find heroes he can look up to in the fall, even if they are fleeting ones.

Larry Glasco and the Suzy-Q Hypothesis

20 Saturday Aug 2011

Posted by in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, Eclectic, Pop Culture, race, Sports

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Hostess Suzy-Q's 8-pack with Reggie Jackson baseball cards, circa 1979, just the way I remember them (made with lard), September 24, 2007. (Source/http://www.flickr.com/photos/wafflewhiffer/1436601166)

I sometimes think that me being a weird dude — because I often spend my time in contemplation — often attracts people in my life of all types. Including people weirder or more eccentric than me. As those closest to me can attest, I’ve awaken many a morning with ideas to write down, with dreams to interpret and deep epiphanies to discuss. All while still needing to pee and brush my teeth — so I multitask!

Twenty years ago, I was in deep thought almost every day going into my first semester of grad school. I couldn’t help it. It wasn’t part of my original plan to earn a master’s degree. And it was obvious from dealing with the folks in the Department of History at the University of Pittsburgh that many didn’t want me there (see “The Miracle of Dr. Jack Daniel” from May ’11). Either because of my familiarity with them, or because I was Black, or because I was still only twenty-one, or because they knew I’d study race more than class and neo-Marxist theory.

Whatever the case, I knew one thing for certain. That Professor Larry Glasco would end up being my advisor. Glasco was the only professor out of twenty-nine in the department who specialized in African American history, and he’d been there since the year I was born, ’69. He was likely hired in the midst of universities, fearful of black student groups and their protests over mistreatment and lack of diversity — hiring one Black here and one Black there to meet the protesters demands. Actually, not likely. Glasco, like the start of the

Larry Glasco delivering a special lecture at Carnegie Mellon University, October 12, 2007. (Source/http://www.chronicle.pitt.edu/?p=1002).

Black Studies (now Africana Studies) Department and the hiring of Dr. Jack Daniel, was all a response to protests and a major sit-in by the Black Action Society in the 1968-69 school year.

But I digress. I’d taken a history majors reading course with Glasco my junior year, and we occasionally talked. Other than that, I didn’t know much about the fifty-year old, six-foot-five and very light man.

Though I did begin to find out. Mid-August then and now is big in Western Pennsylvania, as it’s football preseason. Since my NY Giants had won the Super Bowl that January, I was satisfied and not at all in a football mood. I’d gone out that third Sunday in August to go to Hillman Library, continue my work on my multicultural education article, grab cheap grub at 7-Eleven, and sit at one of the benches outside of William Pitt (Student) Union to eat and smell the sulfuric air.

Glasco walked up and greeted me. We talked, mostly about how I planned to fulfill requirements like proficiency in a foreign language (I decided on Swahili, much to Glasco’s chagrin) and what my master’s paper should be about. I didn’t understand — and quite frankly, I still don’t now — why many professors practice this opaque way of giving advice to students, advice that can easily come off as commands.

Anyway, Glasco then chatted me up about the upcoming ’91 NFL season, about the Steelers and the injury bug. Some major draft pick had blown out his knee, torn ACL and MCL. Between that and what happened to then LA Raiders great Bo Jackson in the ’90 playoffs against Cincinnati, Glasco said, “Maybe it’s their diet. Maybe they’re eating too many Suzy-Q’s.”

My mouth fell to the table attached to the bench where I was sitting, keeping it from hitting the sidewalk three feet below. Over-trained muscles, steroids, Astroturf, vicious hits, and your answer is “Suzy-Q’s,” I thought? Really? I didn’t think that what Glasco had suggested was dumb, just weird. Really weird. I said, with a post-gasp chuckle, “Well, I don’t think that eating Suzy-Q’s has much to do with a ligament tear…” Before I could complete that thought, Glasco continued for another ten minutes about diet and how these athletes don’t watch what they eat compared to the guys in football in the ’60s and ’70s. I thought and said, “Really? Because I remember guys who’d smoke during these games, not to mention drinking and eating hot dogs.”

Of course, years of sports research and Sports Illustrated articles confirmed everything I learned from watching and playing sports by the naive old age of twenty-one. Not to mention a former wide receiver by the name of Marvin Harrison, who for years made a point of eating a pack of Suzy-Q’s before a game, only to turn in one of the all-time great NFL careers with the Indianapolis Colts.

But the bigger point from my conversation with Glasco was that I’d found a professor and advisor who was a nice guy, but actually weirder than me. And made me feel strangely comfortable with him and with being at Pitt for my master’s. Still, I sensed that I’d eventually need to go someplace else if I wanted to start and finish a doctorate or do something else educationally. A Suzy-Q hypothesis could only take me so far.

Follow Up: Montgomery County Parks & Poorly Maintained Basketball Courts

18 Thursday Aug 2011

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I-495 wall adjacent to Forest Glen Park basketball courts, Silver Spring, MD, May 27, 2011. (Source/Donald Earl Collins).

One of my most popular posts is the one I did last October on the sad state of Montgomery County, Maryland’s parks, especially the basketball (see “Montgomery County Parks & Its Poorly Maintained Basketball Courts”). Well, this spring and early summer, Montgomery County Parks did renovate Forest Glen Park’s two full-length basketball courts. The workers put down fresh asphalt, new hoops and lines, and even managed to paint over the graffiti that kids had tagged on the wall that separates the park from I-495, the DC beltway.

This is good news. But this is hardly enough. Not for the children’s play area adjacent to the courts. Nor for the other basketball courts I discussed in my post last year. None of the other courts have been redone. No new plans are in the pipeline to improve the conditions of the basketball courts or other facilities that are part of the county’s parks.

In any case, below are my most recent photos of Forest Glen Park, taken May 27 and August 10, showing much improvement to these basketball courts since April. Still much more work to be done here, though.

For the Love of a Lockout & an Impasse

30 Saturday Jul 2011

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DeMaurice Smith watches as Colts player Jeff Saturday gives Patriots owner Bob Kraft a much-needed hug, July 25, 2011. (Source/NESN).

For the past few weeks, we’ve watched an NFL lockout and the political theater of a debt ceiling impasse play out in Washington, DC. Both have captured so much of the media’s attention that when an explosion occurred in Oslo, Norway on July 22, it initially ran as a ticker report on MSNBC and CNN (thank God for the BBC, then). It’s been Goodell v. Smith, POTUS v Boehner for most of May, June and July.

At least until Monday afternoon. When the decertified NFLPA unanimously agreed to continue the practice of compromising away their collective bargaining power to create significantly better employment conditions and even better pay for all of its players in order to make some money now for a chosen few. But none of that mattered. Everyone was giddy over the start of “real football” again. With wall-to-wall coverage on every cable sports channel, as well as not-so-insignificant attention on cable news. Players were hugging owners. And there were reports of a Washington Redskins trainer jumping into the arms of an ESPN 980 beat reporter on Tuesday after their facilities opened. Our long, 133-day national nightmare was over.

Well, not really. Not with the US Government three days away from defaulting on $14.3 trillion in debt

Boehner, Pelosi and President Obama in same room, The White House, December 9, 2009. (Source/Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images).

because Rep. John Boehner — another cheap Cincinnati-area, rich White guy — wants a balanced budget amendment and cuts to what remains of our New Deal and Great Society era social safety net.

For many, it appears that President Obama is all but ready to give him many of these cuts in Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. Provided that there isn’t a balanced budget amendment component in the plan. Even the idea of raising taxes on those who’ve robbed our nation blind and want to keep their riches has been given short shrift by Congress and by our news media.

What makes this situation as shitty as it sounds is the fact that this argument is occurring in what is officially a double-dip Great Recession and the most sluggish recovery in the US since the 1930s. Republicans think they’ve figured out a way to corner the President and the Democrats while simultaneously holding up principles they never had during the ’80s and the ’00s. President Obama’s been stomping around like he has an ace up his sleeve, but refuses to clue the public in on what he plans to do by August 2 if his repeated attempts at so-called bipartisanship fall apart with our struggling economy.

This is a serious situation, and it does have parallels with the NFL lockout. In both cases, billionaires have leadership in their pockets to keep the masses from getting a nanometer of what they need and want. In the case of most NFL players, who get pounded over and over again for a median salary of $325,000 a year, better pay, much better working and safety conditions, and better collective bargaining conditions. In the case of most Americans, some sense of economic stability, government responsibility and affluent Americans and greedy corporations paying their fair share in taxes.

But this is where the similarities end. The fact is, many an American tuned out the stalemate on Capitol Hill the moment Rich Eisen asked, “Are you ready for football?” Monday afternoon on the NFL Network. I mean, who cares that social welfare in this country, fairly meager to begin with, will be slashed severely? While the military-industrial complex and the Pentagon get a budget level that’s higher than over ninety percent of the economies in the world? Who cares that if the federal government doesn’t pay its bill, millions will be out of work, and the unemployment and other monies we all receive will be worth less, and could become worthless?

Herd of sheep, July 30, 2011. (Source/zerohedge.com)

None of that’s important in our world of idiot, imperialistic, and secretly greedy Americans. “Give me football, give me football!,” is our cry. Let’s complain about Kevin Kolb’s contract with the Arizona Cardinals, and not Boehner’s contract on America. Let’s decry a standoff between billionaires v. hundred-thousand-aires. But remain as silent as tranquilized sheep while Congress and the President take our futures into the event horizon of a black hole. Is the mantra of it only takes hard work to become rich in America so strong that people who aren’t don’t know when the shepherd’s about to slit their throats? Yeah, I think so.

Hail To Pitt

27 Wednesday Apr 2011

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University of Pittsburgh Logo, April 27, 2011. http://www.pitt.edu

I can be hard on people, places and things, especially the ones I like and love. That’s as true of my undergraduate alma mater as anything else. Twenty years ago this date, I graduated from the University of Pittsburgh. I didn’t attend the cattle-call ceremony at the Civic Arena that Sunday in ’91. Almost none of my immediate circle of friends attended, either. My mother and my younger siblings, still in the midst of welfare, weren’t going to be there to see me anyway. The Penguins were on that day, in the middle of a dominant playoff run, with Lemieux scoring at will. And I had other things on my mind that day and weekend. Like, will I be able to go to grad school without taking out tens of thousands of dollars in student loans?

This was a time of major transition for me. Two years removed from the end of the reign of my ex-stepfather at 616, and four years after I graduated from Mount Vernon High School and my obsession

My B.A. degree, University of Pittsburgh, April 27, 2011. Note that this was Wesley Posvar's last graduation signature. The university president would retire the following month amid a $3 million golden parachute scandal.

with Crush #2. I was essentially the same person, and yet there was something inside me that had started clawing its way out over the previous year. It was a drive, a determination, a rage that I’d buried since my first year in Humanities and the summer of abuse that followed in ’82. I was going to graduate school, at least I hoped that I was. Or I was going to have to find a real job, something that made me feel like I had diarrhea.

I knew on my Pitt graduation date that the departments of history at NYU, University of Maryland and Pitt had accepted me into their masters programs. But NYU wanted me to make a signed commitment before they awarded me any financial aid. The University of Maryland conveniently lost my application packet during their graduate fellowship decision process. By the time my packet resurfaced, the department had awarded all of their fellowships, and decided to put me on provisional status. Not based on my grades, mind you, but based on how late they were in going through my application. Pitt had accepted me a couple of weeks before my graduation, but I was sixth on the alternate list for teaching fellowships that would cover my tuition and provide a stipend.

I felt a lot of anxiety about all of this uncertainty regarding my immediate future. It helped to have friends, even with my friends in the middle of their own uncertainty. My friend Marc was working at a Black newspaper, dreaming of law school but uncertain about his prospects. Three other friends, including someone I was sort of dating, were taking their last classes or unsure about grad school or law school. Even my summer job working for a project at the Western Psychiatric Institute and Clinic was shaky. It only paid $5.20 an hour, and I could’ve easily gone back to Mount Vernon and New York making $8 an hour or more doing the same work.

But as uncertain as I felt about things, this much I was certain about. The four years I spent at Pitt were ones that cocooned me in a way that none of my time growing up in Mount Vernon, New York did. I began to heal while I was there, academically, socially, emotionally. I was far from done learning how to connect to people, but I wasn’t the twelve-year-old neophyte keeping only the most rudimentary connections to humans either. My education was a valuable part of that experience. The friendships and other bonds I forms, the lessons I learned about trust, the efforts — however limited — the university made toward creating a campus climate that embraced diversity were all appreciated.

Even at the time, I felt comfortable at Pitt because it was the first place I learned to be comfortable in my own skin. It was a place where my friends, my acquaintances and others around me didn’t look at me like I was a freak because I listened to U2, sang in high-falsetto or walked at Warp Factor 3 to get across campus.

Those are the feelings, those good feelings, that I have about my four years of undergrad and two years of grad school (more on that in May) at the University of Pittsburgh. So, “Hail to Pitt,” and to my Pitt friends and folks from the classes of ’90-’94, Happy Graduation Anniversary Day.