Play with balls!

The less said about sporting ‘news’, the better. But the death yesterday of the completely horrible George Steinbrenner, owner of the equally repugnant New York Yankees baseball team, combined with the two dementia-inducing mass spectacles of the last few days—the World Cup and LeBron James’ contract announcement—has dragged our attention out of more serious things to the world of those who play games with balls for money.

Surely I am not the first person to marvel at the way people—men, usually, but far from exclusively—speak of these remote teams in the first person. ‘We’ will beat Minnesota or Ghana or South Bumfuck, they nod to each other in all seriousness as if ‘we’ were on the playing field or had anything to do with the dozen guys who were, with their athletic skills, their business investments, the corporation they work for or anything else about them except that their uniforms say ‘City X’. In most cases the athletes have nothing to do with the cities they play for and wouldn’t be caught dead socializing with their schlub fans except to have their feet kissed by them.

In fact, sport franchises should be forced to use inverted commas around the city names they pretend to represent in recognition of the entirely faux nature of the construct. We could celebrate the ‘New York’ Knicks or the ‘San Francisco’ Giants without pretending that the corporations running these outfits are in any way related to our own street addresses except that the same guy probably owns both the team and our mayor.

The one exception that comes to mind, of course, is Mr James who grew up in a housing project in Akron and therefore could be faintly credited with being ‘local’ talent on the Cleveland basketball team he played for. Don’t confuse me with someone who cares whether he plays for ‘Cleveland’ or ‘Miami’, but given the bizarrely fanatical devotion of many Ohioans to his oversized person, you’d think the guy could have rustled up enough class to make his departure a little less of a Hollywood ego-fest so cringeworthy that it would have embarrassed the audience at the Oscar awards.

And leave it to Jesse Jackson to worsen the punishment by turning the whole March of the Great Ones into a race issue by saying James’ ex-coach was treating him like a ‘runaway slave’. Thanks to Jackson, poor LeBron is not just the insensitive chump of the year, he’s now the black insensitive chump of the year. Just what we needed as half the country goes psychotic over the color of our current president.

Meanwhile, the World Cup was a remarkably sane event given the permanent, global psychosis generated by soccer throughout the known universe. The South Africans did a good job, celebrated all the teams in good spirits and introduced a noisemaker whose name sounds like a female body part into the global lexicon. Referees put in their usual excellent performance in fumbling key calls, but hardly any games were decided by the ridiculous custom of penalty kicks. And no one got murdered for losing.

The games held certain interest among the bar-goers here in New York as long as the U.S. was in the running. Once ‘we’ were eliminated by Ghana, the local tabloids thumbed their noses at the event, called soccer a ‘stupid’ sport anyway and went back to baseball.

Then Steinbrenner’s heart attack gave them plenty of distraction. Included in the news of this guy’s departure will NOT be included the following: how much cash in tax breaks the Yankees have scooped out of New York City to oil the building of the new Yankee Stadium; how the team fulfilled (or did not fulfill) the terms of its agreement by replacing (or not replacing) destroyed park land in the Bronx; why Yankee game attendees have to stand up in the 7th inning and sing a paean to ‘our troops fighting for freedom in Iraq’ or else face hostile action from burly guys sitting in the next row.

Derek Jeter is quoted in today’s Times with a story about how Steinbrenner chewed him out for being caught off third base and tagged. ‘Whether it was the players, the front office, the people working at the Stadium, it didn’t make a difference. He expected perfection’.

Oh, puke. If that’s how the big guys in professional spectator sports think, no wonder I find them such insufferable, screaming jerk-offs. That’s why I like baseball better than soccer: there are no ties, and one of the teams of guys playing with their balls always has to lose.