On Jim McMahon and "Honor Codes"

So the Brigham Young basketball team has dimissed one of its top players for a violation of the school's "honor code." This is nothing new--either the honor code or the dismissal of an athlete for violating it, and no one is really arguing that athletes who attend BYU should be required to adhere to said code, ridiculous as it may seem to those of us who reside in someplace other than Victorian England. If these are the dictates of their religion--and if BYU subsists as a private school--then that's their business.

But it should be noted that BYU has not always abided by its own rules. It should be noted that in the early 1980s, when Jim McMahon attended said university, both he and his father made it abundantly clear that they had no real interest in the tenets of Mormonism, and that McMahon was matriculating at BYU because Lavell Edwards had constructed a prolific passing offense.* Specifically, McMahon claims that he spent nearly every weekend partying up the road at a different college campus, that he surreptitiously managed to chew tobacco and purchase alcoholic beverages, that, at one point, he had a campus police officer stationed outside his apartment to ensure that he did not violate the honor code.* That McMahon and his university so clearly used each other to advance their profiles (and, if I may, you can read much, much more about this relationship in a certain book that is now available for a discounted rate at Amazon.com) could be blamed on either party, but it proves that, while BYU may have its own dictates, it is not above engaging in the same hypocrisy that every major college athletic program in America has, at one time or another. That it happened to occur with one of the four or five greatest players in school history--a player who may have singlehandedly raised the profile of his school more than any other, while simultaneously laying the moral groundwork for his own outrageousness--is something that many at BYU are even now reluctant to acknowledge. 

*"My son's going to school to play football," Jim McMahon Sr. reportedly told one of the school's lead recruiters. "I don't want him to take all those religion classes."
**My favorite McMahon quote was relayed by his high-school teacher, who, upon informing McMahon that he would have to take a class on the book of Mormon while at BYU, told her, "That's all right. I like fiction."

On The One Super Bowl Week That Wasn't a Bore

I wrote this piece for GQ.com.

In commemoration of the most ostentatious and overhyped seven days in American sports, let us hearken back precisely twenty-five years, to a time that was both more and less innocent, to a moment when, thanks to one man, Super Bowl week overcame its stultifying reputation and became, ever so briefly, a tabloid bonanza. Let us recall the apostate known as the Punky QB, who strode into the holy land of New Orleans and, over the course of a few short days, rendered the Super Bowl his own personal bacchanal, a montage of drinking and fighting and mooning replete with plot twists involving a rogue acupuncturist, Bob Hope, public urination, and a controversial radio interview that never actually took place. It was so tacky and improbable that even the producers of Entourage would question the plausibility of it all.

Of course, the Super Bowl, at least since Joe Willie Namath's overhyped guarantee of victory, has always been more "event" than event. Few men could rise above it. For years—with the exception of a cocaine-addled Dallas Cowboys linebacker named Thomas "Hollywood" Henderson questioning the intelligence of the Steelers' Terry Bradshaw*—the week leading up the Super Bowl, post Namath, had been positively boring. And then came the Bears, who were already national icons, who had already recorded a pulsating rap song proclaiming their intention to win the Super Bowl, whose gap-toothed defensive lineman was guzzling Big Macs and scoring touchdowns and reveling in his girth, whose blustery coach had been arrested for drunk driving after getting toasted on the team plane, and whose quarterback had gone on Letterman and declared he had no intention to pay a fine levied by the commissioner for wearing a headband bearing the logo of a German shoe company.
James Robert McMahon Jr. was the quarterback's name, and despite the significant contributions of sidemen like Ditka and William "Refrigerator" Perry, Jim McMahon was the frontman for the Bears' short-lived pop-cultural explosion.

Read More http://www.gq.com/sports/profiles/201102/jim-mcmahon-super-bowl-weekend-chicago-bears-1985#ixzz1CoobyfE0

On The Space Shuttle, 25 Years Later

One of the challenges of writing a book about sports that's actually a book about American culture is figuring out a way to transition from one element to the other. I'm not sure how successful I was at it, but it was surprising to me how seamlessly the pieces often seemed to fit together. For instance, most people probably don't remember that the 1985 Bears never made it to the White House to celebrate with President Reagan because a couple of days after they won the Super Bowl, the Space Shuttle Challenger imploded in mid-air. I have vivid memories of both, and I didn't think I could write a book about the era without writing at least a little bit about the Challenger disaster, an indelible event that occurred twenty-five years ago today. It was actually one of the hardest sections of the book to write, as I wanted to capture the moment without sacrificing the tone of the book--looking back on it, I have no idea if it actually worked. So here is the end of Chapter 5 of Bigger Than the Game...and the beginning of Chapter 6. 

 

...people stood and gawked at the big screen in Marshall Field’s, this time at the images of a space shuttle carrying seven astronauts—among them a New England schoolteacher named Christa McAuliffe—launching into the sky above Cape Canaveral, Florida, and then fracturing into pieces. The city froze; the nation froze. At a restaurant in downtown Chicago, a law-school student stared lockjawed at a television set and uttered a single baleful sentence.

“I thought the entire system was infallible,” he said.

--- 

 At a news conference, Mr. Reagan . . . also blamed the January 28 loss of the Challenger and the seven astronauts aboard on “a carelessness that grew out of success.”

—The New York Times, June 12, 1986

   

On the morning of January 28, 1986, President Reagan took a meeting with the Democratic House speaker Tip O’Neill, during which he relied entirely upon partisan talking points gleaned from four-by-six cue cards prepared by his staff. It was a tactic that Reagan had used before, and even his Republican allies found it distasteful; this was Reagan at his worst, robotic and detached. He lamented the work ethic of “the fellow on welfare,” telling O’Neill, “These people don’t want to work.” O’Neill and Reagan were generally civil, even friendly, but this time, the Speaker came back at him hard, his patience worn thin. “I’m sick and tired of your attitude, Mr. President,” he said. “I thought you would have grown in five years.”

On the Power of Nostalgia, Punky/Non-Punky QBs, and the 2010 Jets

"It's incredible. If we said words back when I was playing, we'd have to stand up in front of the team and take about a one-minute berating from the coach. Now, it's coming from the coaches.''
-- CBS NFL analyst Phil Simms, on the volume coming from teams critical of other teams in football these days. (via Peter King)

 

I cannot blame Phil Simms for engaging in revisionist history. I do it. We all do it. We turn back to the events of some bygone era in order to proclaim that the modern world has been turned on its ear. This kind of nostalgic thinking is what drives our culture, and our politics, and our national dialogue; it is what defines us as Americans. But in this case, Phil Simms is clearly blinded by idealism. In this case, Phil Simms is simply ignoring the fact that the hodgepodge of braggadocio and poppycock that comes screaming like a scud missile out of Rex Ryan's id was actually born in the era when Simms himself was an All-Pro quarterback.

 

On the surface, nothing about the 2010 Jets is ground-breaking. You could argue that self-aggrandizement in sports was born with Babe Ruth, or with Ali, or with Namath...or you could argue, as I would, that the modern formula was perfected twenty-five years ago, when the 1985 Bears streaked onto the cultural landscape, rapping cacophonous rhymes about the Super Bowl before the playoffs had even begun. Much of that was driven by a raucous and untamed locker room--and, I have argued, by a quarterback who didn't care much for the social mores of his position--but it wasn't like the coaches were innocents in this drama. Forget Bart Scott's histrionic WWE lunacy: At one point, you may recall the Packers took out a hitlist on the Bears. Rex Ryan's father was a master of the psychological screw-job, and Simms' own coach was one of the most cruel and Machiavellian figures in football history.

 

So, on a basic level, Simms is wrong. And yet in a strange way, he still seems kind of right.

 

There's something about the way the Jets carry themselves that does seem unprecedented. They're messy; they're all tangled up in tabloid culture in ways that even that '85 Bears team never really was. If the Bears were the cultural equivalent of Eddie Murphy, the Jets seem more like Joan Rivers. Things just move way faster now, and that's part of it: The acceleration of media in the time between the '85 Bears and the 2010 Jets is about a hundred times what it was in the era between Super Bowl III and Super Bowl XX. But there's something else going on here, too: Just as Jim McMahon did with his hero Joe Willie Namath, the Jets are repurposing their influences. The Bears were more like a dysfunctional family: The defensive coordinator hated the offensive coordinator, the offense hated the defense, and they channeled all this negative energy against their opponents. The Jets are more like a cabal of obnoxious bloggers: They are immature and playfully narcissistic and intermittently entertaining. They say what they think without processing it; they act as if they are more talented (and more influential) than they actually are. They are very much of a piece with their era, which is why Phil Simms' astonishment, while factually incorrect, is emotionally accurate.

It's funny: I liked the Jets when I watched them on Hard Knocks. I liked them in the abstract, as a team that seemed determined to break the mold, to cast away the stereotypes of football coaches as crusty authority figures and football players as soulless automatons. I think Rex Ryan is a charismatic goofball, and part of me truly wants him to succeed. But I can't bring myself to actually root for them on Sundays, and I don't know why. The only thing I can think of is that I'm a little bit like Phil Simms myself, that somehow I'm so wrapped up in my own nostalgia that I would prefer not to acknowledge that the world I grew up in is not exactly the same as I remember it to be.

(Photo: AP)

On An Anniversary Worth Noting

Yesterday marked 24 years since the most overtly theatrical and baldly dramatic game in college football history.* Unfortunately, Penn State marked this anniversary by enduring (potentially) one of the program's most ignominious weekends in recent memory.

I prefer to remember the good times.


Two decades later, and the real world has been kind to the quarterback, even if no one can remember his name. He lives in what can only be described as a sprawling manifestation of the American dream, an enormous stucco house on a tree-lined cul-de-sac in a tony New Jersey suburb. He has a wife, and he has four children, and he has a den with a wet bar and a pool table, and until recently, when corporate restructuring rendered him a temporary stay-at-home father, he had spent 18 years as a star at Merrill Lynch. 

John Shaffer. The name, like the way he played quarterback, is bland and forgettable, which is why few people outside of the state of Pennsylvania even recall it anymore. When he graduated from Penn State as an academic All-American in the spring of 1987, he had a national championship ring and a reputation as a solid citizen who had no legitimate shot of making it in the National Football League. He went to training camp with the Dallas Cowboys as an undrafted free agent. By the end of August, he did something that many football players could never muster the courage to do: He asked to be cut. He had a degree in finance, with an internship waiting on Wall Street. He had another life to start.

Read the rest of the story here. Read lots more here.

*This is a matter of opinion. But in this case, given the research, my opinion is unquestionably correct.

On LeBron, Nike, and the Deconstruction of America

You've probably never heard of Jim Riswold,* but I could make a case that he's one of the most influential figures in modern sports. Riswold is an ad-man--or at least, he was; now he's a really clever pop artist--and in the 1980s, he worked at Wieden and Kennedy, the Portland firm outsourced by Nike to devise its ad campaigns. It was Riswold who came up with the idea to marry Spike Lee and Michael Jordan; it was Riswold who came up with the catchphrase "Bo Knows." It was Riswold who helped shape and define athletes through commercial imagery, and sell a generation on both shoes and subversiveness; it was Riswold who would admit to me, years later, that he essentially created a monster.

I thought of Riswold when I watched this new LeBron James advertisement. It is an homage to the work he did; it is the natural descendent of this utterly brilliant Bo Knows ad from 1992, when Bo, rehabbing from injury, faced the inevitable end of his career. At that point, the notion of an athlete deconstructing his own career in his own advertisement seemed subversive to the point of mutiny; there's a moment in that ad when Bo actually stares down the logo of the shoe he's trying to sell. In 1992, that was unheard of. In 1992, this was the closest Nike could come to rebelling against itself, and what company in its right mind would do that?

Now, of course, all we do is deconstruct. Most of us don't actually believe LeBron James to be a terrible person; we just think he made a terrible PR decision, which, in this day and age, seems to be almost as inexcusable an error as actually doing something terrible. This is how we see things now. Turn on any cable station and tell me how much time they spend judging the political effectiveness of any given campaign's image versus the actions proposed by any given candidate. It's the reason Chris Matthews has a career.

Which is why an international conglomerate like Nike, and an international brand like LeBron, can get away with a commercial like this. It's because men like Jim Riswold, unwittingly or not, set us on this path, of athletes become constructs, and of us becoming as interested in the construct as we are in the people themselves. "What should I do?" LeBron asks, and these days, everyone has an answer to that question. These days, the best way to rebel is to stare down your own image.

*Unless you happened to somehow come across this book.

On Insightful Critiques of Terrible Ideas

I've already expressed my regard for Dan Wetzel's ability as a columnist on this forum, and I had a chance to read an advance copy of his new book, written with two talented Yahoo colleagues: Josh Peter, who wrote a book about professional bull riding that I've been meaning to read for years, and Jeff Passan, who regularly manages to craft the kind of baseball stories that someone like me, who's fallen out of love with baseball, still finds fascinating. And then Dan and I spoke about the book and GQ's Devin Gordon transcribed the whole thing. It doesn't really matter if you agree with these guys or not; if you care at all about college football, this is a book you really should read. Because I guarantee there are at least two or three completely insane facts about the BCS in here that you have absolutely no idea about.

Anyway, here's Devin's intro, and the first question. Follow the link for the rest, and then buy the book:

Like all great works of investigative reporting, this one began with a question: everyone knows that college football's Bowl Championship Series—a.k.a. the BCS—is the stupidest thing in sports, so why can't we get rid of it? The answer, like in all great works of investigative reporting, is complicated. Fortunately Dan Wetzel, an ace writer for Yahoo! Sports, and his co-authors Josh Peter and Jeff Passan, took the time and did the leg work to unravel it. Death to the BCS: The Definitive Case Against the Bowl Championship Series, Michael Weinreb, whose new book, Bigger Than the Game: Bo, Boz, The Punky QB and How the '80s Created the Modern Athlete, is the fall's other must-read sports book. delivers exactly what the title promises, bolstered by exhaustive reporting. It is a must-read for passionate fans of college football; just be prepared to be infuriated once you're done. The upshot? Yes, the BCS is as craven and foolish as you think. No, it isn't going anywhere, not for a while. To explain why, Wetzel got on the phone with another ace sportswriter who is similarly addicted to college football and despondent over the BCS:

After the jump, Wetzel and Weinreb pick apart the system and explain why the myths about its worthiness persist, how we can possibly get rid of it, and exactly how much bandleaders get paid for bowl appearances by their schools. (Yes, even they get paid.)

Weinreb: Your book is a great read, and there was a ton of stuff in there about how the BCS works that I didn't know about at all. And I think that's true for most fans of college football. None of us know this stuff.
Wetzel: We didn't either. The book started a few years ago when we decided to figure out why we really don't have a playoff system in college football. The excuses that they pop out—"We don't wanna inconvenience the cheerleaders"—is clearly not a reason. We've heard the propaganda for 14 years. And nobody believes it. So what's the real reason? Well, this is America, so you follow the money. We literally went through thousands of pages of tax documents, university contracts, talked to accountants, everybody. And at various times the light bulb would go on and we'd be like, "Wow, I hadn't thought of this." So where we ended up with the book was not where we started.

 

Read More: http://www.gq.com/blogs/the-q/2010/10/death-to-the-bcs-sportswriters-dan-wetzel-and-michael-weinreb-destroy-the-stupidest-system-in-sports.html#ixzz12S1uSKLm

On Inconsequential Things That Matter To Me

1. Promotional Notes

ESPN Chicago ran an excerpt of Bigger Than the Game, as part of their '85 Bears commemoration. Also, Daniel Brown of the San Jose Mercury News quoted my book in evoking comparisons between the Alex Smith-Singletary confrontation and the back and forth between Ditka and Jim McMahon (see Chap. I, Section II, which you can read online or on a Kindle for free).

2. Knee-Jerk Contrarianism, Part I

I credit Dave Jones of the Patriot-News for his provocativeness, but to me, this proposition is the equivalent of randomly altering the punctuation in The Sun Also Rises. Some of us happen to like 1950s milk bottles, Mr. Jones. We don't need silver, and we don't need additional swooshes (the blasphemy of adding one to the greatest outfit in sports was egregious enough), and those Nike combat uniforms (above) look like Phil Knight conjured them during a fever dream. The only acceptable addition to Penn State's uniforms would be to add back the numbers on the helmets, as it was pre-1974. Sometimes, old and staid is the best possibility of all.

3. Knee-Jerk, Contrarianism, Part II

I could take issue with many of the points Slate's Jack Shafer makes about the media criticizing athletes for hanging on too long (and I even agree a few things he says), but when he says Michael Jordan's years with the Wizards were "great and meaningful," he loses me for good. Somebody might want to send him a copy of this book.

On Inconsequential Things That Matter To Me

1. In case you're in the vicinity: I'll be reading/signing on Thursday evening at the excellent Varsity Letters Reading Series in Brooklyn, along with Dave Zirin and Dan Epstein. I also did an interview with Gelf, which you can find here.

2. I also did an interview with the War Eagle Reader, an awesomely eccentric, hipsterish Auburn-centric site, in which I discussed all things Bo.

3. I had an interesting conversation (about 35 minutes in on here) with David Sirota, a prominent political journalist, on his radio show this morning. Sirota is also writing a (very different) book about the '80s, and he has a theory that the notion of athletes as roguish outsiders who in fact embrace celebrity, a la Jim McMahon and Brian Bosworth, parallels the political evolution that began with Ronald Reagan and has now culminated in the public persona of Sarah Palin*. It's a fascinating thought, and maybe explains the fact that athletes who make millions of endorsement dollars can still claim a "lack of respect," and that politicians who raise millions of dollars in contributions can decry the insider culture in Washington. In both realms, it would seem, it is a strike against one's image to be seen as a tool of the establishment, even if, in fact, you're obviously part of an establishment. Which could explain why insane people are winning primary elections, and why LeBron feels like he needs to keep a blacklist. 

*Though in the interest of balancing the political spectrum, it should be noted that Barack Obama marketed himself as a political outsider from the very beginning.

On Famously Picky Critics

Jonathan Yardley of the Washington Post, who once panned Salinger's "execrable prose" in Catcher in the Rye, reviews Bigger Than the Game. It's not the friendliest review I've ever gotten, but Yardley is kind of a legend, so I suppose he's earned the right to call me whatever he wants.*

*Though I should note, the photo above is of my copy of Murray Sperber's College Sports, Inc., which Yardley, in his penultimate paragraph, presumes I've never read. I neglected to include it in my endnotes, in part because I didn't quote directly from it, and in part because I just forgot.

On Hometown Papers

My first actual job in journalism was at my hometown newspaper, The Centre Daily Times in State College, Pennsylvania. I worked on the Metro desk, making phone calls about the local calendar and rewording press releases about gypsy moth spraying. The CDT (or Seedy T, because every newspaper has a derogatory alternate title utilized by the locals*) is a small paper, focused largely on Penn State and the surrounding communities, and its overall quality has waxed and waned over the years, but it is my hometown paper, and for that reason alone, I will defend it to the death.

I grew up reading the CDT. I still have the layout of the comics page memorized (oh, Family Circus, how you marred that upper left-hand corner). In the fall, I cut out the entry for the weekly football picks contest and mailed it in**. I wrote one of my first published pieces for the paper's community page, which (for some reason) ran stories written by high-school students. I discovered Dave Barry on the opinion page. 

I don't know if kids still care about their hometown papers anymore. I presume they don't read them, except maybe a stray article that slips into their social network feed. Newspapers are losing their connection with their communities, for reasons that often have little or nothing to do with quality. In truth, the CDT is a much better newspaper than it was a generation ago. It doesn't have many resources--what newspaper does in 2010?--but it's a prime starting spot for young talent, like Heather Dinich (now at ESPN), and Jeff Rice, who's covered Penn State football for the past few years.

Today, Jeff wrote some nice things about Bigger Than the Game, and it still felt weirdly cool to see my name in the pages of my hometown paper. I suppose, for better or worse, mine will be the last generation to feel that connection.

*My paper in Akron, the Beacon Journal, was sometimes referred to as the Akron Leaking Urinal.
**I did not win. Not once.

On Inconsequential Things That Matter To Me

1. Only a Game

I just recorded an interview for NPR's most excellent sports show Only a Game, which runs on more than 200 public radio stations (list here). It should be airing this weekend.

2. Louie Louie You're Gonna Die 

Are you watching Louie? Because let me tell you, if you're not watching Louie, you should be watching Louie. You may find it disconcerting; if so, I completely understand. I've never seen anything quite like it, a series of semi-comedic, moderately to highly uncomfortable set pieces that vary in tone from moderately horrifying to absurd. Last week's episode was like a stoner comedy in miniature*; this week's episode was like a Raymond Carver story. If nothing else, it is the most interesting television experiment I've seen in a long time.

3. Orchestrated Violence

I do understand why Antonio Cromartie's seeming inability to recollect his prodigious reproductive history was the big blogosphere takeaway from HBO's Hard Knocks last night, but my friend Chuck did raise an interesting quandary: Is it odd that Rex Ryan essentially orchestrated a fight in order to motivate one of his players? I do understand that there are far worse things that take place in professional football, but it does seem a little craven to orchestrate a throwdown in a sport that is just beginning to deal with the repercussions of excessive violence. Or maybe I'm just not swearing enough to understand the ethos.

4. I'm the Man Who Has the Ball

Really, at this point, with the obvious exception of talent, is there any profound difference between Kenny Powers and Roger Clemens?

*With the added attraction of Josh Hamilton**, star of the funniest post-college film ever made.
**The other Josh Hamilton. Not this one. Though I would pay at least $38 to read a 5,000 word essay by Posnanski about that Josh Hamilton.

On Self-Promotion, Mingled With Random Thoughts

1. I'll be on Marketplace this afternoon, talking to host Kai Ryssdal, who has one of the greatest voices in the modern history of National Public Radio. Local stations and further information here. (Update: Here's the interview.)

2. F this. Seriously, I have no reason to believe that Tony Dungy isn't a far better human being than me, but he's a football coach, and in football, men bleed and break bones and do irreparable damage to their bodies in the name of a particularly American sort of glory. If I played in the NFL, I'd want my coach to swear, because when I'm playing center and some 340-pound defensive lineman inserts a sweaty fist under my facemask and jabs my eye with his sausage-sized finger, I'm going to swear, as well. And I understand that the NFL has to put up some kind of stern public face about this, but my hope is Roger Goodell is sitting at his desk in Valhalla laughing about this in the same way Pete Rozelle laughed at Jim McMahon when he put on that homemade headband, even as he kept throwing fines in his direction. Because the only thing worse than a football being associated with vile profanity is football being associated with Emily Post.

3. I did an interview with the NFL Gridiron Gab blog, which you can find here.

4. I don't know why Fantasy College Football isn't a more popular pastime. If fantasy sports are all about attaining new heights of nerderation, there is nothing quite so geekish as spending twenty minutes researching the top wideouts of the Sun Belt conference. Every year, come mid-to-late August, I find I've missed football even more than I did the season before.

5. Dan Wetzel of Yahoo!, whom I happen to believe is one of the four or five best general sports columnists in America, gave an extremely generous endorsement* of Bigger Than the Game in his summer reading column. (That Steelers book looks great, as well.) If you're not familiar with Dan's work, I recommend this amazing obit on Don Haskins (he also wrote Haskins' autobiography), and this masterful piece of deadline journalism on last year's BCS Championship game.

*One other selfish request: If you have read the book, and you're the type of person who doesn't mind writing Amazon reviews, my lonely page would certainly welcome them.

On Bigger Than the Game: The Deadspin Excerpt

Deadspin was kind enough to run an excerpt of my book this afternoon, between jokes about Brett Favre's anatomy. It is--what else?--a depiction of Jim McMahon's outrageous behavior during the week of Super Bowl XX.

On Today's Radio Schedule

As of this morning, Bigger Than the Game officially exists. And in case you're in one of these places, here's where I'll be stuttering away...

10 a.m. ET...FOX Sports AM 1340, Farmington, NM
4:05 p.m. ET...WHTK AM 1280 Rochester, NY
5 p.m. ET...WANI  AM 1400 Auburn, AL
7:05 p.m. ET...KFXX AM 1080 Portland, OR
8:20 p.m. ET...KCKK AM 1510 Denver, CO
8:40 p.m. ET...WCCO AM 830 Minneapolis, MN(Postponed: Favre)*

*Seriously.

On The Boz (and Other Self-Promotional Notes)

1. I wrote a piece for the Wall Street Journal's Speakeasy blog about Brian Bosworth and his relationship to the '80s hair-metal phenomenon.

2. You can sign up to win a free copy of Bigger Than the Game over at The Pigskin Doctors website.

3. I'll be making an appearance on the Scott Ferrall show on Sirius satellite radio tonight around 9 p.m. (Speaking of which, if you haven't seen Big Fan, I highly recommend it.)

(Photo: Everett Collection)

On JoePa, and How Coaches Speak

I guess you could say the first "real" event I ever covered in my journalism career was the Big Ten football media preview. We were in college, working for our school newspaper, and five of us would pile into a barely functional company car in early August, sweating McNuggets residue, and drive twelve hours from central Pennsylvania to Chicago, only to spend a couple of days listening to overzealous coaches drone on about nothing at all. We'd take copious notes and transcribe what we'd missed, because this is what you do when you're young: You presume that the stale platitudes of someone like Gary Barnett* carry some sort of deeper meaning that you don't yet have the sophistication to fully comprehend. I suppose this is why football coaches act like football coaches do: Because youth is easily swayed. Because we are not yet cynics.

Last night on the Big Ten network, I watched the coach of the Minnesota Golden Gophers, Tim Brewster, address the media. I have no reason to believe that Tim Brewster is anything but an extremely decent and earnest man, but every time he opened his mouth, I thought of Eric Taylor. Brewster said he'd talked to his quarterback over the summer, and he'd been assured that his team had a uniform commitment to winning; Brewster said, with all due respect to his Big Ten brethren, that Minnesota now had the greatest football stadium in America; Brewster said every position on his team's roster was up for grabs, and that he'd told his players the story of Wally Pipp to assure them that he was serious. Every one of these statements sounds like the thread for a Friday Night Lights episode, except the producers would probably dismiss it as cliche.

But Brewster was not the reason I turned on the Big Ten media day replay last night. The reason I watched was for the man who succeeded Brewster on the podium, an especially suntanned octogenarian who spent much of his brief session in front of reporters addressing his IBS. On the surface, Joe Paterno looked great; he was thin, and he was bronzed, and nothing seemed different about him until he opened his mouth. And then, you could hear it; everyone could hear it. David Jones, the excellent columnist for the Harrisburg Patriot-News, could hear it, too. "How often do you infer a person’s intents, thoughts and condition based not on what they say, but how they say it?" he wrote.

In a back hallway, Jones tried to ask Paterno if he was taking any medications, if the slurring in his voice could have been a side effect. Paterno refused to answer. 

None of this means that Paterno is finished. He's bounced back so many times that to count him out now would be ignorant of his history. In fact, if you look back, there is a moment in every single decade of Paterno's career when it appeared as if he might be down and out, and he's endured. This is the signature of Joe Paterno: He endures by refusing to embrace the cliche. He still believes in the Grand Experiment. He is both intractably stubborn and surprisingly pliable. He went 6-6 his first season in the 1966, and people wondered; he endured some disciplinary problems in the mid-to-late '70s, and people wondered; he endured more disciplinary problems in '83, and people wondered;** he had his first losing season in 1989, and people wondered; the program briefly fell off the national radar in the late '90s and early '00s, and people wondered. The magic of Paterno's career is that he always finds a way to adjust to the times, that he has a wondrous ability to reinvigorate both himself and his program, to somehow decipher the next generation of youth while preserving his own body. And you hope maybe he has one more renewal left in him. And you hope that maybe his body and his mind will bounce back once more. But every time, it gets more precarious.

As I was writing this, I got an e-mail from my oldest friend in the world. I've known him since the first grade. We grew up in State College, and Joe Paterno has been a constant presence in our lives. "Did you see Joe last night?" he wrote, and I said I had, and I said this was the first time I felt palpable concern about when and where and how this whole thing might end. He wrote me back right away, a two-word response.

"Me too," he said. 

*Expect Victory!

**I'm told you can read more about that era in here 

(P.S. Here's hoping there's still more of this Joe left.)

On Me (Again? Enough Already!)

I did an interview with the Sports Crackle Pop blog, in case you're interested in such things.

(Also, here's my interview with the good folks at KGOW in Houston, in case you'd like to hear me stutter and say "sort of" a lot.)

On Bo

I've started doing interviews for the book, and one of the prime topics, unsurprisingly, is Bo Jackson. Everybody wants to know about Bo, about the sheer impossibility of his accomplishments, about the marketing and the myth and the man himself. I was fortunate enough to spend a day with him a couple of years ago, and I'm not going to lie--it was one of the most intriguing experiences of career. Bo is probably the self-contained athlete I've ever met. And it would appear USA Today's longtime baseball writer, Bob Nightengale, found the same thing when he interviewed Bo last month.

There's a lot of amazing stuff in there--stuff I wished I'd gotten myself, like the fact that Bo's license plate reads BROKE--but this is my favorite quote of all, because this sums up the endearing quasi-egotistical quasi-innocent individualism of Bo:

"When I was born, God gave me a natural greenie, a built-in steroid," Jackson says. "I was always faster than people, stronger than people. So when I found out what guys were doing, I figured guys were cheating just to catch up to where I was.

"But I didn't know. To be honest with you, I was so focused on what I was doing, people could have been doing steroids right under my nose and I wouldn't have known.

"But you know what I always wondered, why the guys were drinking all of this milk after games. I'm going to have a beer or drink some water, and I'm thinking, 'Why are all guys drinking all this milk?' I found out later it was because they were coming down from greenies. I didn't even know what a greenie was. I swear to God I didn't know."

There aren't a lot of athletes I believe anymore. But I believe Bo.

On Bigger Than the Game: The First 759 Words

I've shown you the first draft of the introduction to Bigger Than the Game. So here, without further ado, is the final draft (with perhaps a few last-minute edits excluded) of the first five paragraphs. It goes on from there for a little while longer. And there are pictures (like the one below, courtesy of my old school newspaper, The Daily Collegian) in the middle!

And on a side note, the timing of this list seems fitting.

He came screaming into the picture from some faraway place, helmet in hand, a mongrel’s mane of spikes and curlicues and rattails glistening in the artificial lights of an aged football stadium. He may have been barking; on television, it was difficult to tell. And while it is true that he did not actually belong on this field at that particular moment, it is also true that he did not abide by traditional rules or social mores. His heroes had never been football players: He saw himself more as a modern-day version of Randle McMurphy from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, as an insurrectionist amid the asylum of organized sports. He drove a white Corvette, he wore an extremely large earring, and he had a standing appointment with a hairstylist. He had taken to calling himself The Boz.

New Year’s night, 1986: I was thirteen years old, watching the moment unfold on a nineteen-inch RCA television in a family room in State College, Pennsylvania. It was the second quarter of the Orange Bowl, and the winner between Penn State (my hometown team) and Oklahoma would take home the national championship; there was little understanding or concordance between the sides. And here was The Boz, the most dynamic linebacker in college football, looming and smirking on our screen, celebrating a University of Oklahoma touchdown pass (one that would ultimately win them the game) by smothering his quarterback in a bear hug, thereby guaranteeing himself a few extra seconds of screen time while his teammates boogied in the end zone. He was an inscrutable and terrifying figure dressed up in a crimson jersey, the manifestation of a flamboyant and calculating new-age dogma which I did not yet comprehend.

A few years earlier, Penn State’s coach, a Brown graduate named Joseph Vincent Paterno, had classified Oklahoma’s Barry Switzer, the son of an Arkansas bootlegger, as among the least honorable men in his profession. Paterno had since apologized and walked back from his remarks, but the contrast between their programs remained obvious: Oklahoma’s quarterback, a freshman named Jamelle Holieway, carried a Louis Vuitton purse (“my little clutch bag,” he called it) and wore a diamond stud and a gold watch and a gold chain, and had a tattoo on his arm that read JAMMIN’. John Shaffer, Penn State’s tin-can quarterback, possessed no such adornments; he was so slow and unremarkable that he had once managed to dislodge his shoulder from its socket while leaping up for a high-five. A few days before the game, The New York Times reported, The Boz—proper name: Brian Kenneth Bosworth—had passed by Shaffer underneath the Orange Bowl stands, wearing a pair of gold chains over his jersey, wearing sunglasses in a steady drizzle. And Shaffer eyed him from head to toe without moving his head, “not unlike the way hard hats once sized up hippies.”

All of this raised questions about whether a college football game could somehow mirror a social divide in the 1980s, about whether we were bearing witness, in the Orange Bowl, to a generational schism, about whether The Boz and his embrace of glamour and status on a football field was a sign of the impending breakdown of modern society, about whether Penn State and their prison-issue uniforms and their square quarterback and their seriousness were the last embodiment of a bygone era. “The Penn State players,” wrote John Ed Bradley in The Washington Post, “carry on as if on some dire, portentous mission of the soul.”

This book was born of the curious contrast displayed on my television screen that evening; the stories contained within are no doubt shaped by the visceral experiences of a teenaged boy coming of age in central Pennsylvania in 1986. But I would like to think that this is actually a story about how sports shaped and defined the cultural perceptions of a generation of American youth—of all those kids like me who grew up largely within the mythological confines of our own television screens, gawking at strange creatures like The Boz. It is a story that culminates precisely one year and one day later, on January 2, 1987, when Penn State again played for the national championship against a group of rogues and miscreants from the University of Miami. Each of these games was marketed and packaged as a morality play, and yet, as with most morality plays of the era, the personalities I grew up watching on that nineteen-inch RCA were not as nakedly uncomplicated as the imagery often made them out to be.