Photo by bikesnotscott via Flickr

Sports fans have been inundated this week with speculation — scientific and otherwise (all at the same time!) — about Bill Belichick’s decision to try to convert on fourth down, deep in his Patriots’ own territory, with very little time left in the game. And sure, it might have been a stupid call — or it might have been a brilliant call — but, his players failed to execute, his opponents got the ball back, and the rest is recent history. (Cue insanity all over sports talk radio.) For NFL pundits who’ve been itching to rip apart Belichick for his supposed arrogance, it was July 4 — all fireworks, picnics, and celebration. And though the event was certainly worthy of notice, what’s been lost in all of the gleeful post-game Belichick hate is that New England is still 6-3. Still in first place in the AFC East. And still — barring total collapse — playoff-bound, a status that has, let’s remember, been awfully kind to the franchise since 2001. Which is to say that the gutsy, brilliant, but ultimately failed effort from this past Sunday is illustrative of one thing only: That Bill Belichick is still the only reason to watch football.

If the past decade of sports history has taught Boston sports fans a single lesson it should be this: In the course of a game — or a series of games — there is no true predictable outcome. Oh sure, we can ogle the crap out of stats; use them, for example to vindicate superficially poor decisions, say — or explain why solid play from what might have seemed like an unlikely source, wasn’t really all that unlikely after all. But the truth, the real truth that belies even statistical analysis, is that we just don’t know what’s going to happen until it actually does. This is, as they say, why they play the game — and it’s why we watch it. Frankly, there’s a reason that only the most diehard fans can sit through a blow-out. I mean, who cares if the thing is over — the outcome predetermined — before halftime.

Early on Sunday night, the Patriots got off to a strong 24-7 lead. By the fourth quarter, it been extended to 31-14, and the game looked, at least from the comfort of my couch, as if they were in the bag. (Eff you, Colts — what’s the Manning face for crap, there goes my undefeated season?) Then it was 31-21, and then 31-28. 4th and 2. Go for it. Turn it over on downs. Bring on the Manning face for hey, thanks for helping out.

And now we’re supposed to believe that the air of infallibility that surrounds the Belichick name has been befouled. Maybe. But frankly we don’t give a fuck. After all, this is entertainment. And though the hooded genius may have received some kind of cosmic comeuppance, or dealt his team a Greek tragedy of a loss, he did so in the process of entertaining me and you. For that, he retains the must-watch title.

At least until he goes back to dealing in blow-outs.

Photo by IYM via Flickr

A week ago, Yanina Wickmayer, the world’s 16th-best female tennis player (according to rankings) was suspended for violating a portion of the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) code. To be clear, no one has directly accused Wickmayer — who, at 20, had a breakthrough run in this year’s U.S. Open — of using a performance-enhancing substance. Nope. What’s got officials miffed is the fact that the Belgian phenom broke the agency’s reporting rules, according to ESPN, “three times within an 18-month period.” If you believe Wickmayer, the year-long suspension was the undeserved result of a rules mix-up and a few crossed e-mails and postal wires. If you believe the World Governing Body of Tennis, “[i]t is recognised [sic] and accepted that No Advance Notice Out-of-Competition Testing is at the core of effective Doping Control, and without accurate information as to a player’s whereabouts, such testing can be inefficient and often impossible” — so Wickmayer’s failure in this regard is detrimental to the anti-doping movement. Either way, Wickmayer’s punishment and that of fellow Belgian Xavier Malisse — who was found guilty of the same bureaucratic oversight — came as a surprise, and there has been some speculation that the harsh penalties they received were more directed at a former player than anyone currently touring.

In so doing, the various sporting powers that be have given sports fans another reason to question the purpose of WADA — and, really, why, in the face of such ridiculousness as that which Wickmayer and Malisse have fallen victim to, any of us spectators should care at all about whether or not players in any sport engage in doping.

In the United States, questions about performance-enhancing drugs begin with Lyle Alzado. Alzado was a defensive linemen for the NFL’s Denver Broncos, Cleveland Browns, and — most memorably — the Oakland Raiders. He died at the age of 43 in 1992, after a battle with brain lymphoma, a rare form of cancer that he blamed on his use of anabolic steroids. As ESPN put it, “ Although there is no medical link between steroids and brain lymphoma…[h]e became a symbol of the dangers of steroid abuse.” Eventually, the NFL began testing and suspending players for the use of a host of so-called “banned substances.” The fallout from that program — instituted here for the sake of saving future Alzados, even if the real solution to football’s heath crisis has little to do with anabolics — has lead to multiple four-game suspensions for players who, like Wickmayer and Malisse, don’t necessarily test positive for a performance-enhancing drug (PED). Diuretics, for example — which the NFL considers to be evidence of guilty system flushing — seem to lead to more penalties than PEDs themselves.

Next up was baseball, which — thanks to the efforts of Jose Canseco — eventually found itself before Congress. When it did, the question wasn’t so much who was using but who wasn’t. And, as repeated leaks from a 2003 positive test list seemed to be confirmed by ritualized mea culpa after ritualized mea culpa, it indeed became apparent that — among stars at least — baseball’s collective use of PEDs was rampant. Still, even after all of this reckoning, the lingering effect isn’t one that will ensure a level playing field for future generations. Rather, it is the assumption that the multi-millionaires who benefit from performance enhancement will find ways around whatever testing protocol is instituted, no matter how rigorous it is; an air of suspicion that brings on the sort of Kafka-esque environment where non-PED using athletes find themselves condemned for small bureaucratic infractions — and the real WADA targets get away with their drug use.

Just to be clear: This goes for every sport. Wickmayer, Malisse, and Joselio Hanson of the NFL’s Philadelphia Eagles have all, in the past week, found themselves suspended for the mere appearance of improper medical enhancement. This, while two weeks ago, two admitted steroid users helped lead their team to baseball’s world championship. Until WADA and the various sports governing bodies that subscribe to its program can figure out a way to evenly, fairly, and responsibly enforce anti-doping rules, there seems to be no reason that any one should trust their rulings. And because science will no doubt provide athletes intent on finding a way to artificially enhance their respective performances a way to do so ahead of whatever testing there is to stop such activity, it seems as though the only folks who’ll get caught up in all of this are (and will be) innocent of any direct PED crime.  Which is to say that maybe, we’d all be better off without any of it.

Photo by bikesnotscott via Flickr

This morning’s edition of the New York Times features a story about the most recent study to connect playing time in the National Football League (NFL) with some forms of dementia. In it, reporter Alan Schwarz ledes with the very disturbing — for NFL vets, at least — point. “A study commissioned by the National Football League reports that Alzheimer’s disease or similar memory-related diseases appear to have been diagnosed in the league’s former players vastly more often than in the national population — including a rate of 19 times the normal rate for men ages 30 through 49,” he writes.

But it’s not until about halfway through the first electronic page that he gets to the operative portion of his coverage — a skeptical quote from Dr. Ira Casson, co-chair of the NFL’s committee on Mild Traumatic Brain Injury (MBTI), also known as the Concussion Committee. “What I take from this report is there’s a need for further studies to see whether or not this finding is going to pan out, if it’s really there or not,” Casson tells Schwarz. “I can see that the respondents believe they have been diagnosed. But the next step is to determine whether that is so.” Granted, the study, performed by researchers at the University of Michigan, relied on over-the-phone interviews, a method its own authors seem to think of as less-than-ideal. And most of the third-party physicians that Schwarz interviewed seemed to think that nothing covered by UM represented a conclusive argument for or against the idea that playing professional football could be linked directly to brain injuries. But, this cold response from Casson — coupled with the NFL’s history of ducking the issue — seems to speak volumes. Indeed, even now — after having been pressured into contracting for an independent look at what happens when a football player’s head makes contact too many times with something hard, and confronted with a bit of negative evidence — the league keeps … punting on delivering any sort of significant response.

A move that continues to guarantee that there will be more Ted Johnsons. Johnson, whose picture was included in the Times‘ coverage but whose story (which had been nicely documented by Schwarz for the Times and the Boston Globe) was strangely absent, spent 10 years playing linebacker for the New England Patriots. “Ted Johnson helped the New England Patriots win three of the past five Super Bowls before retiring in 2005,” wrote Schwarz in 2007. “Now, he says, he forgets people’s names, misses appointments and, because of an addiction to amphetamines, can become so terrified of the outside world that he locks himself alone inside his Boston apartment, in bed with the blinds drawn for days at a time.” At the time, Johnson was just 34.

Schwarz goes on to detail the grim turn in Johnson’s life, where depression and serious cognitive problems seem to have lead to a dependence on the amphetamine Adderall — a prescription for which Johnson was abusing at, writes Schwarz, a rate of “two to three times the dosage authorized by his doctors.” When the drugs ran out, Johnson would shut “himself inside his downtown apartment for days and [communicate] with no one until a new prescription [became] available.”

When the notoriously media-shy (-savvy?) Patriots head coach, Bill Belichick, and team trainer, Jim Whalen — who Johnson accused of allowing him to return to play after suffering multiple concussions — refused to comment for Schwarz’ story, it wasn’t exactly a shock. And when, two months after Schwarz’ piece was published, the NFL finally claimed that it would — as ESPN put it — “retool” its approach to concussions, the action also seemed to fall in line with what could have been a compassionate (not to mention logical) response.

But now, faced with an opportunity to make some changes that could positively impact what will be the already-creaky physical lives of future players, the NFL seems unready, unwilling, and unable to make that call. This should come as a shock. Unfortunately for Johnson and his like-suffering retirees, it doesn’t.

Nogochocinco? The NFL Wants To Kill Fun.

At the end of this past August, Cincinnati Bengals wide receiver Chad Ochocinco announced his plan to circumvent National Football League anti-tweeting regulations. For Ochocinco (nee Johnson) — a guy already responsible for an impressive list of self-branding antics — it was just another brilliant marketing move: Each week, in advance of every game, he’d pick one luck fan and fly him or her out to wherever his Bengals were playing so that he could — through a set of pre-arranged hand signals — indeed tweet from the field. But for the NFL it was some kind of threat, and less than a week later they had Ochocinco ready to delete his Twitter account. Critics might argue that this is the worst kind of showboating — that Ochocinco, through his actions (they’d say), so misdirects the focus of the game from the team (they’d say) on to himself that the ultimate goal (winning, they’d say) is lost in the shuffle. This is total horseshit. And, thanks to all of the various anti-showboating regulations put in place by most of the major North American sports leagues — the NFL in particular — fun is fast disappearing from the sporting landscape.

Funny, then, that the sport most associated with spectator boredom remains the last, best hope for truly spirited competition. What the NFL misses in such folly as its ridiculous treatment of Ochocinco, and the NBA loses in similar misguided attempts to control the personalities of its players (the NHL still doesn’t count as a major sports league), Major League Baseball — despite its best efforts — fully, unabashedly exhibits in the brilliant celebrations that often accompany the walk-off home run.

Take Manny Ramirez for example. In his time as a member of the Boston Red Sox, the … mercurial left fielder was overshadowed, at least in the clutch, by teammate David Ortiz, whose ability to orchestrate a walk-off was the main reason that team was able to overcome 86 years of futility in 2004. But orchestrating a walk-off and turning the event into an epic celebration are two different things. And, insofar as the latter is concerned, Ramirez was king — mostly thanks to this. For those of you unwilling to click, that is a photo of Ramirez standing at home plate, arms straight up, feet planted as he watches a playoff-game winning home run sail out of Fenway Park. Best part? He takes so long to begin his home run trot that the opposing team’s catcher can be seen walking off before Ramirez has even left the plate.

Recently, however, big-bat first baseman Prince Fielder and his entire Milwaukee Brewers’ squad surpassed even the great Ramirez. Check out this clip from a game against the San Francisco Giants. Here, after hitting his game-winning shot, Fielder rounds the bases, heads toward a mob of waiting members of the Brew Crew, jumps in the air, and watches as his whole team falls over when he lands on the plate. Brilliant. Simply fucking brilliant.

And — here’s the operative part — it’s wholesome. The showboat haters would have you believe that this stuff is bad for sport — that any amount of extraordinary celebration detracts from the rest of the game in such a way that it cheapens the experience for fans and stars alike. But they’re wrong. This sort of thing is the only way, in this era of instant athlete millionaires and super-agents, that we can all get on the same plane and share in the base-human enjoyment of a brilliant moment. Which is to say: The NFL shouldn’t just reinstate Ochocinco’s Twitter account; it should make every player, coach, and trainer sign up for one, too.