NBA Playoffs - Consider the Following Investment Possibility

Phoenix +280 to win the series.

Bynum's hurt.  Kobe's hurt.  Phoenix played better down the stretch than the Lakers by a half dozen games.  Phoenix had a larger points scored/points allowed margin than did the Lakers; Phoenix's playoff scoring margin is far above the Lakers during this year's postseason. 

I picked Phoenix to win this exact series, in this exact scenario at the top of the playoffs - it's not a strong pick, but I do believe they are more likely than not to win. 

And when you see a +280 dog who you believe is better, not a lot better, but right now, for the next couple of weeks, just a little better - that's an investment opportunity.

Just throwing it out there.

1st and Ten: The Weekly Tendown, May 9-15 2010

Dear Internet:

My mom asked who the Countess's date, Courte, from this week's Real Housewives of New York reminded me of (actually, I think the way she put it was "who does this remind me of" - which would save all of us time; I've found this in my teaching as well; I'm teaching US History this quarter, and what I'd really prefer pedagogically is to expose students to multiple historical interpretations - for example, the dominant historical view of the Spanish-American War is it was an imperialist break with the isolationist tradition of US foreign policy; in contrast with the more radical view that it represented an unbroken line of expansionism best understood in the generations spanning Native American cleansing; in contrast with the view held by most Americans in 2010 which would be "what's the Spanish American War" - and while that's kidding on the square, the only view of US history available politically to everyone on the right and a healthy majority of those who are nominally considered on the left is that the US has been an unadulterated force for good throughout its history and anyone who would claim otherwise is insufficiently patriotic and hates the troops and the Baby Jesus.  I'd like to be able to consider the nuances of all of those positions, evaluating the evidentiary support for all and the current political realities which shape our views of the past - but I'm 39 years old and teaching 7 courses and my house doesn't have air conditioning, what I have energy to do is say "here's what you should believe, write it down" and then move to the next thing).

So, who Courte from this week's Real Housewives of New York reminds my mom of is a cross between Jackie Rogers, Jr. and Greg Norman

It's Tendown 26.  Let's Get it Poppin'!

First: The Middle

Eventually, this will be about LeBron James.  I don't know how long it will take to get there.

I don't fetishize the middle of the country; I live in South Florida, I grew up in Northern California, I went to school in Ohio - people are people wherever you go; there is good and bad, in everyone, but if we learn to live, learn to give each other what we need to survive, together ali-i-ive.

What?  A Martin Short picture and an Ebony and Ivory reference before the jump?  Apparently it's Hot Tub Time Machine Tendown.  Modern Family ended this week's Hawaii epside with a wedding vow renewal set to a ukelele version of Eye of the Tiger - which saved that scene from shark jumping; as a trope, the wedding vow renewal has worn me to the bone; there's one on deck for the New York Housewives finale (Ramona has taken the curious posture that 17 years is the longest imaginable time any two people could be married) and I'm only willing to watch if it includes someone playing I Love Rock-n-Roll on the spoons. 

I don't think the people in the flyover states are any more or less American than the people on the coasts; whenever I see a Republican give a speech in Topeka with the theme being "you are the real heart of this country; the true, real Americans and you want your country back" - I hope they see the pandering the same way I did in high school every time someone unleashed a "you are the future of the country; this is your time to shine" on me.  I have rhetorical strengths and weaknesses as someone whose most marketable professional skill is standing in front of a room of people and talking, but one easy place I don't ever rest is the "hey, give yourselves a round of applause" line of bullshit.  A club teachers of all levels and disciplines like to pull out is "I learn so much from my students every day" - which is good egalitarian/we're all just in a community of learning, I'm no different from the kid in the 4th row stuff, but almost entirely meaningless; I've got X minutes to give that student enough information about Mark Twain's reaction to the Filipino resistance to US occupation that he's got a fighting chance on my midterm; I don't have time to slather him in my recognition of his personal struggle.  If I'm working in a grocery store in Des Moines, I'd much rather have a politician tell me he's in favor of a constitutional amendment requiring a living wage so I don't need to keep ever increasing credit card balances just to cover my montly nut than bathe me in platitudes about how my morality is the one true morality.  But that's why he says it, of course.  Sarah Palin doesn't want to cut into the profits of her corporate paymasters so she pacifies me with a strawman of some socialist in Washington DC or a homosexual in New York City or a deceitful immigrant from Mexico - in the way American colonial leaders looked to pit the interests of poor white farmers against Native Americans or the way the slaveholding planation class looked to pit house slaves against field slaves - Republicans today are operating from a playbook even older than the republic - marginalize fringe groups, keep "out" groups in constant animosity toward each other - distract with intangible puffery about an imaginary afterlife where the goodhearted people who have to toil in this world will be rewarded - anything to keep her audience not focused on the economic truth of the United States - that our society is deliberately structured to serve the interest of the wealthiest few - that the role of virtually all of us is to spend the only life we will ever have working constantly to produce wealth for others.  We can read all the books we want, get all the degrees we like, devote our lives to work and service and still wind up in foreclosure - still wind up just a breath away from the dustbin - still wind up just chum in the oil soaked waters of the plutocratic states of America.

I am defeated.  I have, to use Mike Leach's line from this week's Friday Night Lights, lost my inner pirate.

I don't think it's projecting to say that's the look I saw on LeBron James's face this week. 

It's almost always error to attribute character failings to sports losses, particularly when it involves existential talents like James - but it was hard to watch Game 5 this week and not wonder if he was okay.  By the advanced metrics, LeBron James has just put up the two greatest regular NBA seasons since Jordan's prime - and it's not just that the Cavaliers didn't win the title (I did pick them to win each of the last two years, you can see my playoff picks here; the two points in my own defense are these - one, I got the other 3 teams remaining in the playoffs right - and Phoenix was not exactly a popular choice to be the Lakers opponent in the Western Conference Finals a month ago; and two, I did offer a "as long as James doesn't get hurt" caveat. Now the Cavs are gone - I'm picking Orlando to win the whole thing.) it's the seeming listlessness involved throughout game 5 and portions of game 6.  I think it has to be injury; that 2 months from now LeBron has surgery and historically this becomes the postseason about his elbow and not one that revealed some sort of lack of killer instinct fundamental deficiency like we enjoy putting on superstars like Peyton Manning and Alex Rodriguez, right up until the second they win, and then we decide they've grown up, somehow ratifying all of our previous character critique.  So, I'm choosing not to believe any sort of emotional flaw was revealed this week - that instead it was an injury that manifested as a lack of, almost a lack of interest seemingly in being LeBron James this week, but it's a take that I understand.  I'm worn out too; the metaphorical Rajon Rondo is slicing past me for another layup, and I don't have a whole lot of intensity left to stop him. 

And who I felt badly for is Cleveland.  I assume there is a Cavs/Indians/Browns fan of the same level of tenacity as my Warriors/Giants/Niners interest; and that's a town that hasn't won a title since somewhere approximating Jim Brown's first day shooting the Dirty Dozen.  When you consider all three of those organizations as a quixotic combination of awful and heartbreaking, that is just a challenging sports fan life.  I'm sure there were those watching Game 5 and seeing this chance drip away who were just crushed - that Cleveland sports fan, clinging to his guns and his god and his games to escape confronting the structural inequities in his life - the society of which he is a part and probably believes in to a far greater extent than a professor who teaches we invaded Cuba in order to create a market friendly to United Fruit, has no interest in his life except as an entirely disposible unit of production, and the place where he's chosen to escape provides him years and years of endless empty - a Byner fumble, a Jose Mesa meltdown, and the best player in basketball about to leave town - about to leave flyover country - for a bluer coast.

Or maybe he'll go to Chicago.

After the jump - the rest of the Tendown.

1st and Ten - The Weekly Tendown, May 2-8 2010

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

That Dad

Mom, That Dad, Me, Dude giving me something:

                                                                                                               almost exactly 20 years ago today 


You know what I'm really getting into?

Fifteen days ago from a hospital he'd never leave, my dad posed that question. 

I didn't know the answer. 
I didn't know the answer because, well, it could have been anything. 

Ten years ago my mother and I were at Publix; the context has been lost, but mom said "that dad has more admirable qualities than anyone I've ever met."

We called him That Dad.  I've forgotten why that is also, other than it just suited him somehow.

Among those admirable qualities wasn't necessarily his joketelling, but he had a way with non sequiturs that my mom and I would retell for years.  It was not long after some procedure over the past decade that the three of us ordered pizza; he was taking some type of prescribed pain medication and was silent even more than usual - it had been, easily 15 minutes since he had spoken when the pizza arrived, and in a very matter of fact way as I brought it into the room he said, "Freak Out."

Funny to me.

You know what I'm really getting into?

Hell, I don't know.  Banjos?  The bankruptcy code?  Brutus the Barber Beefcake?  It could be anything.

I didn't know because I didn't know him that well.  I knew dad liked God and string theory and Tiger Woods and my mom, but beyond that, I didn't know him that well.

We were different; our interests, our passions, our ways of looking at the world - we were different; he was That Dad, private and solid and quiet and contemplative in that way that men can be, and I'm almost entirely locked inside my own head in a world that only tangentially has ever included people who are not me; we weren't a good bet for long talks about our insides.  We were neither close nor distant; I don't have a Great Santini story that has informed my character.  If we had an argument more recently than 1986 I can't recall it.  We were fine.  That doesn't have a lyrical quality, I recognize.   No sturm.  No drang.  No hurly. No burly.

My brothers are not me and they may have different stories to tell.  But they wouldn't have too many jagged edges.  I was describing that dad to my lady type friend at his service, and the best way I could do it was that there wouldn't possibly be any reason for anyone to dislike him.

I mean - I dig me, but others do not, and some for perfectly understandable reasons, and I recognized that when I was about eleven.  My lady type friend is my very favorite thing, but she's told me of prior co-workers who didn't like her and I saw how that could be.  They suck, obviously, and more likely than not could have benefited from better pre-natal nutrition.  But I get it.  I'll fight you with my fists if you say something bad about my mother, but I can absolutely see how, in a workplace setting, you could get on her bad side and get taken apart and leave that encounter muttering unkind things.  You should mutter them quietly and perhaps take it as a learning moment to improve at your job, but I could see how it might happen.  The qualities that I like, you do not.  Horses for courses, as they say. 

But that dad was just kind.  I mean, motivated by kindness.  He would give the last twenty in his wallet to the homeless and spent the last decade of his life ministering to prisoners.  He genuinely wanted good for people. There'd be literally no circumstance where anyone would ever say "what a jerkoff that guy is" - he just treated people the way he would want to be treated.  He didn't aspire to it - that's who he was.  He genuinely wished for you good things.

And for me too.  He liked when I won stuff or was otherwise recognized publicly.  He was glad that I found someone to spend my life with.  We didn't discuss any of that; I'm me and he was that dad and that's not how it worked.  But I knew.  I went away to college when I was 17; I take pride on paying for law school and grad school by myself, through a combination of loans and academic scholarships - but my parents covered the vast majority of my undergraduate degree; I don't get to have the life that I've had without his waking up at five AM to drive an hour to work every morning for a decade.  Neither of my parents had the luxury of spending their young adulthood on a campus; and the rural Ohio high school to which I went didn't place too many of its students in four year universities; that was not the culture in which I existed - but it literally never crossed my mind, even one time, that I wouldn't be going directly to college.  It was just assumed in my house, from as long as I could recall, that of course, I'd go from high school to college and of course I would do well.  I didn't have a thought contrary to that. 

That doesn't happen without that dad.  I don't get my life without him.  And we didn't discuss it.  And I hope he knew that I understood all of that and I was grateful.

My dad's been dead 15 days, and I'm teaching 7 classes and trying to find a house to move into before the bank takes the one into which I've sunk every penny I have; I'm busy every minute of every day except when I'm not and when I'm not it's just a crashing wave of sad.  He was 62 and there and now he's not and I have nothing of value to say.  It's crummy.  It's not redeeming or illuminating or prosaic.  It's crummy. 

You know what I'm really getting into?

My mom and I looked at each other.  'Cause it could have been anything.

Oatmeal.

And that was my dad.  He was just like that.

TBOR Athlete of the Month - April, 2010 (Plus 1993 Review)

Phil Mickelson. 

Runners-up: Brian Zubek, Ubaldo Jimenez, Vernon Wells

Mickelson joins the previous 3 winners in the race for TBOR Athlete of the Year.

Here's how that race turned out in 1993.  Jordan won the AP Award - and he won mine too - but in retrospect, Steffi Graf's 3/4 of the Grand Slam maybe should have gotten her the nod. 

Athlete of the Year - Michael Jordan

January - Emmitt Smith (Frank Reich, David Robinson, Troy Aikman)
February - Alexander Mogilny (Hakeen Olajuwon, Mark Price, Tom Kite)
March - Sheryl Swoopes (Mario Lemieux, Hakeem Olajuwon, Jason Kidd)
April - Hakeem Olajuwon (Bernhard Langer, Shannon Miller, Alexander Mogilny)
May - Wayne Gretzky (Curtis Joseph, Michael Jordan, Riddick Bowe)
June - Michael Jordan (Julie Krone, Lee Janzen, Steffi Graf)
July - Ken Griffey (Barry Bonds, Greg Norman, Miguel Indurain)
August - Steffi Graf (Tony Gwynn, Paul Azinger, Don Mattingly)
September - Barry Bonds (Mark Whiten, Jon Carney, Terry Pendleton)
October - Paul Molitor (Dave Stewart, Lenny Dykstra, Joe Carter)
November - Evander Holyfield (Jerry Rice, Glenn Foley, Hakeem Olajuwon)
December - Sterling Sharpe (Marcus Allen, Rodney Hampton, Steve Young)