Life is more about dealing with failure than success. In spite of popular tropes about winning at all costs and nice guys finishing last, even the most competitive and skilled in any high risk profession fall flat on their face now and again and over again. For every success story we are subjected to there are countless stories of failure that litter the landscape that go unheard and ignored. But really, the toughest to handle is incredible success that is met with ultimate failure when the stakes are, as they are in professional sports, clearly marked in black and white. At the root of Moneyball is that rare expression of frustration and despair we all feel when we get so close to what we want only to have it vanish before our eyes like a mirage in the Sahara.

Whether located in Philadelphia, Kansas City, or Oakland, the Athletics have basically been a farm team for the richer teams in baseball. Except for four three-year stretches sprinkled over a century when the team would go to or win World Series in bunches, the A’s have been a perennial middle-of-the-pack team that has had to sell off its best players to stay in the black. So, in the winter of 2001 after a two-year stretch of division titles that ended in crushing five-game losses to the Yankees, and free agency picking off his best players, A’s general manager Billy Beane decided to roll the dice and try an unorthodox, but mathematically based, way of evaluating talent bornmore out of necessity and desperation than strategy and cold calculation.

We get to see a tension-filled possible reality that played out inside the bowels of the Oakland Coliseum. Nothing in the atmosphere speaks to optimism, only persevering through a constant state of nervous dread mixed with fleeting moments of miniature successes. Remember, baseball is a brutal world where players are one short man-to-man meeting away from selling insurance and the best players still fail seven out of 10 times at the plate.

From the start Beane is resisted by almost his entire cadre of scouts and baseball men, especially his dismissive and traditionalist head scout and his reticent and ultra-orthodox manager. At every turn Beane must face down his own staff because, as he reveals later, it’s more about changing the mindset and overall approach than explaining the why. “Don’t explain yourself,” he says. This thread is constant through the film and acts as its center.

At the heart of Beane’s choice to try something different are flashbacks to Beane’s own failure as a professional baseball player. In 1979 he was considered by many to be a can’t-miss prospect and was drafted by the Mets who envisioned him as a Hall of Fame caliber center fielder. He chose the Mets and a decent signing bonus over a full-ride scholarship to Stanford. Instead of anchoring an outfield that should have included himself, Lenny Dykstra, and Darryl Strawberry, he failed miserably. This colors how he runs his club. His head scout challenges him with this sentiment in a heated exchange where he essentially tells Beane not to blame traditional scouting for his failure as a player. Beane fires him. After he has assembled the team he wants, he forces his manager to play those players by trading away any potential replacements he could put on the field. It’s an exercise in power and will and when the team turns its fortunes around, the people who resisted him the most are given the credit by the press and Beane just doesn’t give a shit. He has more important things to worry about, like finding a left-handed reliever.

Moneyball carries the distinct taste of fear and dread and fighting against failure and this is where Miller really delivers. Beane never watches the games in person. He disappears into the weight room of the stadium and furiously works out or drives to the middle of dirt lot while catching snippets of the games on a television or a hand held radio. He throws chairs through windows in a fit of rage and overturns his desk when Howe doesn’t do as he’s told. He firmly chastises a past-his-prime David Justice and calmly convinces him to be a team leader. He breaks his personal code of not getting too close to the players by personally instructing them and, most importantly, we get to see him deal with his fragile and gifted daughter who seems to be his only outlet from the insular and obsessive world he lives in.

In the end, Beane’s work does not go unrewarded. Yes, the A’s lose another heartbreaking playoff series after they shocked the baseball world with a 20-game winning streak, but he is wooed by the Red Sox in the off-season and offered their GM position and a staggering $12.5 million salary with the promise of unlimited resources at his disposal. Beyond that, in the last 10 years the theories of Bill James have been embraced to a certain degree by the established baseball world because Beane proved it could work. Yet, in the end, he chooses to stay in Oakland, which he lovingly refers to as a “dump” in a way that only someone who can see through the bullshit can.

Being human is a pain in the ass, but to steal a little from Rod Serling, who we are is defined by what we do when we are scraping the bottom of the black pit that houses our greatest fears and are desperate. The rewards, as such, that we receive when we get out of the pit are relative and Moneyball’s study in this element of humanity brilliantly brings that to bear in the final scene. After Beane tells his young protégé Peter Brant, wonderfully played by Jonah Hill, that he has decided to stay in Oakland, Brant shows him a clip of an overweight catcher hitting. The player belts the ball and chugs to first base, but as he rounds the bag he slips and falls and tries to scramble back to the bag before the throw comes in from the outfield. Only then does everyone tell him that he has in fact hit a homerun. The player laughs and the opposing team playfully tease him as he rounds the bases and Beane says, “how can you not love baseball?”

The Fall of Tiger Woods

Never has an athlete fallen so fast, completely, and satisfyingly. Touted at once as a history-changing black man and the whitest man on the planet, he has managed to disappoint his most ardent supporters by being, well, black in their eyes. In the course of a long weekend he went from being the bright-eyed savior and living embodiment of the game of golf to a tabloid joke sending sports writers like Rick Reilly into hissy fits and hand-wringing worthy of a neurotic Jewish grandmother. Read between the lines of the commentary and you’ll find the khaki and loafer crowd dipping their heads in disappointment as the one black guy to whom they could all relate let them down by having even worse taste in whores than they do.

Andre Agassi’s Open

Most jock books follow a basic formula of airing some dirty laundry about fucking broads on the road, telling a coach to fuck off, and doing drugs in the bullpen. Rarely do they eviscerate the essential myths that hold up the construct that being a professional athlete is a dream come true. Andre Agassi’s blistering portrayal of himself is nothing less than exhilarating and refreshing and gives me reason to enjoy the sports world again. For all the bullshit and pomp we’re subjected to, sports are not simply unscripted competitions that challenge the essence of human endurance and focus, they are entertainment for the masses. Agassi’s frank admission that he not only spent an entire year on the ATP tour smoking and snorting meth while he tanked matches, but absolutely loathed the game of tennis, is an affirmation that not only is the grass not greener on the other side, but that your neighbor’s yard hides far more bodies than you would care to imagine.

LeBron James: King of the NBA

The general conceit is that professional athletes are childish dunces incapable of making any decision that does not revolve around choosing which club trollop they want to bring home each night. LeBron James is the best and brightest hope for destroying the myth that because you can play ball you cannot make moneymen do your bidding. Shortly after entering the NBA, James fired his professional handlers and agents and replaced them with friends and associates who were deemed amateurs and rubes. Now, one year away from free agency, those same rubes and supposed hoodlums have helped put James on everything from billboards to Nike commercials while helping to put him in position for the greatest free agent contract in the history of the NBA. Make no mistake; James is the greatest business talent to enter the NBA. Michael Jordan needed David Falk. James only needed himself.

18-1

Hubris is the enemy of success and the Patriots, of all teams, should have known better. Never before had a team come so far and done so much only to lose it all when it mattered most. The New England Patriots were on the doorstep of becoming the greatest team the NFL had ever seen, but they spent the lead up to their Super Bowl match up with the New York Giants inviting them to their victory party and talking about how the trip to Arizona was more like a vacation than a business trip. Whereas John Matuzsak and the Raiders spent the week before Super Bowl XV taunting the Eagles by brandishing their cocks and drinking Jack Daniels on Bourbon Street, the Patriots spent theirs granting interviews to Sports Illustrated behaving as if greatness was owed to them and speaking as if the Giants were rejects from the USFL. When they lost, Bill Belichick didn’t even have the decency to shake Tom Caughlin’s hand proving that the character of a man is displayed best when he fails, not when he is successful. Especially when he brings it upon himself.

Kobe Fucks a White Girl in the Ass

In the summer of 2003, Kobe Bryant traveled to Colorado to undergo some routine surgery on his knee. At the time, he was as big as Tiger Woods. He was doing McDonald’s commercials in Italian and was gracing Wheaties boxes, but after he fucked Katelyn Faber in the ass after she made it clear that her pussy would suffice, he was reduced to a childish dipshit who blew his slim chance to supplant Michael Jordan as the most popular basketball player of all time. Then, after the Lakers traded for Karl Malone and Gary Payton and financed the private plane rides back and forth to Colorado to deal with the courtroom drama, Kobe had the nerve to make public comments about Shaq doing the same sort of the thing but just paying the women off. In the end, Kobe got what he wanted – being the man in Los Angeles – but he lost everything he could have been.

Barry Bonds

Oh, Barry, my old friend, every time I think of you I smile. Sometimes I think back to that magical season in 1998 when Sammy Sosa and Mark McGwire were stealing your thunder. Remember how you were the best player in the game, but two piece-of-shit hitters with huge holes in their game supplanted you in the press and dominated the headlines? Remember when you literally said, “fuck it,” in 1999 and did what every other asshole in baseball was doing and decided to go on the juice? I do. I loved every page of the leaked grand jury testimony that I read. I loved every second of the BALCO scandal. And I was in absolute rapture as you broke both the single-season and career home run marks while Bud Selig sat watching helplessly. And my heart sings every time I think of you because, without you, I never would have gotten to hear some pontificating dummy named Lance Williams from the San Francisco Chronicle tell me that it is crude to think that athletes will do whatever it takes to win no matter the legal consequences or the threat to their image or legacy. Barry, you will always be my hero.

The End of The Curse

Losing is an art, and for 85 years, no one did it with more style, class, panache, and inventiveness than the Boston Red Sox. Giving up game-winning home runs to overgrown midget shortstops, bumbling managers starting an ace on two days rest, letting Bob Stanley warm up – much less pitch – in a World Series game, selling Babe Ruth, humiliating Jackie Robinson during a tryout; yes, that was the Red Sox. However, in 2004 the greatest practitioners in the art of choking, fucking up, blowing it, and shitting the bed came all the way back from a 3-0 deficit to the Yankees in the ALCS to shock every sports fan on the planet before easily winning their first World Series since 1918. In game four, after decades of bad jokes and horrendous insults, you could actually hear the baseball gods say, “Enough is enough” and swing the momentum Boston’s way. Before anyone knew it, the Yankees were on the wrong end of the greatest comeback in the history of sports leaving their fans in the Bronx depressed and physically ill. That role reversal made for easily the most tangible proof that the world is not all evil.

Charlie Weiss: Charlatan, Con Artist, Fat

Notre Dame never knew what hit them. After being part of a coaching staff that won three Super Bowls in four years, Charlie Weis parlayed devising offensive game plans for Tom Brady into running one of the crown jewels of college football. After the Irish dumped Tyrone Willingham three years into a rebuilding project, Weis was feted as though there was a bidding war for his services even though no other team in football showed the slightest interest in hiring a guy who just had bariatric surgery and needed to be driven around in a gold cart. During his first two years, using talent procured by Willingham, Weis managed to convincingly lose two BCS bowl games and secure a 10-year multi-million-dollar extension. Over the next three years he embarked on a journey of mediocrity and failure that ended with him alleging on national radio that Pete Carroll was shacking up with 20-something-year-old grad students at the beach while he, of all people, was hounded by 60 Minutes for using foul language. There’s bitter and disappointed and then there is just plain classless, untalented and dumb, with Weis illustrating perfectly that success is not dependent on saying the right things at your first press conference. Not bad for a guy who never even played Pop Warner football.

The Oakland Raiders

Warren Sapp, sage, said it best: “Al Davis knows football. 1970’s football.” The problem with historical success is that when failure comes, you think it’s not your fault. Surrounded by pathetic enablers and yes men, Davis has provided some of the finest entertainment in sports by essentially firing Jon Gruden, re-hiring Art Shell, drafting JaMarcus Russell, and gracing us with the spectacle that is Tom Cable. Davis was once an iconoclast whose instincts and willingness to gamble brought him enormous success, but his dementia and his family’s unwillingness to put him a home has reduced the Raiders to a laughingstock on par with the Clippers. It’s sort of sad to see his corpse propped up and dressed in tacky tracksuits, but there is no better window into what the future ultimately holds for Jerry Jones.

Roger Federer is a Boring God

Not since Bjorn Borg wielded a wooden racket and wore grape smugglers has a player so dominated the game of tennis the way Roger Federer has. Though he is now on the wrong side of his prime, but still formidable, there was a five-year stretch where he was simply unbeatable. While players like John McEnroe, Borg, Andre Agassi and Jimmy Connors were painfully human and easy to root for because of their respective emotional outbursts and personal foibles, Federer has cultivated a business-like persona centered around the calm perfectionism, faux class, false modesty, and rigid professionalism that oozes from his perfectly tailored warm up suits and monogrammed socks. Winning his 15th Grand Slam title rocketed him into the stratosphere of the greatest professional athletes. His game is versatile, well-rounded, effective on all surfaces, and essentially perfect, but watching him – save for his matches against Rafael Nadal – is passionless, boring, disaffecting, and devoid of soul, making Ivan Lendl look like a rock star by comparison.

Adendum: Sports Related Youtube of The Decade

One of  my old neighbors was a contemporary of Agassi’s in the 80’s and was one of his training partners at the Bolitterri Academy when they were kids. He washed out of the tour before he was 24 and when I met him he was engaged to a beautiful ad executive and worked as a tennis pro giving lessons to spoiled children in Rowayton and Greenwich, CT. At the time, he was getting ready to move to Florida to open his own tennis school. I asked him once if he was jealous of Agassi or if he wished he had what he did. He said he never did and without mentioning the rigors of the tour or the physical grind, he immediately described Agassi’s father. Unprompted he said he was a mix between Attila the Hun and the Ayatollah and described Andre as self-loathing and insecure. He said, “I wouldn’t trade what I have for that and $100 million if you put a gun to my head.” Even though he seems happy now? He said, “You didn’t know Andre back then.”

That was in 2002 towards the end of Agassi’s epic late-career dominance. By then, he had had been Number One (the oldest in history) in the world for umpteen weeks, was one of the favorites in every tournament he entered, and was considered one of the best clutch players on the tour. For a while at least, armed with maybe the best service return and baseline game in the history of tennis, Agassi was arguably the best who ever lived. Disciplined, focused, in better shape than men 10-years younger than him, and married to Stefi Graf – one of the few women in the world who could understand the pressure and strain he was under – Agassi dominated. This was an incredible transformation for him because only a few years before he was one of the worst players on the planet even though he possessed more raw talent than just about anyone save for Pete Sampras.

By the time he retired, he was not only a crowd favorite, but also someone who genuinely loved the attention and had become incredibly sensitive and empathetic towards his fans and respectful towards his place in the world of tennis. He not only won Grand Slam titles, but won an Olympic Gold Medal, competed in the Davis Cup, and became a gracious interview subject, a dramatic development considering that five or six years before, many in the press thought of him as a raging idiot with an inferiority complex. With the revelations of his book Open, all of the assumptions we had about him and the speculation that surrounded him seem foolish. What’s more, the revelations go a long way towards humanizing Agassi.

It seems so long ago that Andre had a frosted mullet and wore electric pink neon compression shorts. He listened to Richard Marx and Yanni, but sports writers insisted on calling him punk rock. He was 16, 17, 18-years-old with a white Corvette and sportswriters seemed shocked that a relative child from Las Vegas would be spending money on cars and clothes and a bachelor pad. It was absurd. Even after his win at Wimbledon in 1992, his reputation was that he was incredibly talented, but incredibly lazy and gutless. He cracked during break points; melted during tiebreakers, practically shit his pants in Grand Slam finals, and was recognized more for the Canon “Image is Everything” commercial than he was for his service-return. According to the popular press of the time he was an enfant terrible, a jackass wasting his talent, and a punk who spit on the conventions and strictures of tennis.

However, in Open, he admits in candid and stark terms that he considered himself a fraud and that he not only hated tennis, but also had no concept of who he was or what he was really doing. The clothes, attitude and hair were all a cover. He was incredibly self-conscious and naturally shy to begin with, but psychologically he could not shake the voice of his father Mike screaming “Hit harder!” at him in the backyard nor the memories of a machine he called the dragon spitting 120 mph serves at his six-year-old self. He was also going prematurely bald. His gloriously tacky mullet was a weave with a hairpiece stuck in place like an animal pelt. On 60 Minutes he admitted that during the 1991 French Open Final he was more worried about his hairpiece staying in place than winning the match. That means he won Wimbledon with the greatest hairpiece in sports since Joe Pepitone’s.

Throughout the early 90’s, Agassi had played second fiddle to the likes of Boris Becker, Jim Courier, and the cute-and-cuddly-but-annoying-and-arrogant Jesus-freak Michael Chang, all of whom dismissed Agassi as a wunderkind moron. In 1994, Agassi was unseeded going into the U.S. Open. When he began winning in the early rounds, Mike Lupica wrote that the tournament was his to lose and that he would find a way to lose because he’s not a champion. Agassi won the Open going away beating Michael Stich in straight sets. By the end of the year, he was Number One in the world and in 1996, even though he was beginning to slide, he won a gold medal at the Olympics in Atlanta.

He had dated Brooke Shields by fax and eventually married her in the quintessential match made in hell, and he shaved his head. But by 1997, everything had come apart. He was depressed and despondent, barely saw his wife, was injured, dropping out of tournaments, tanking matches, smoking meth with some cat named “Slim,” and falling to 141 in the rankings, the equivalent of being the Detroit Lions of tennis. He later failed a drug test, sent a cloying, apologetic letter and luckily faked out the folks at the ATP and got off without a suspension.

After coming so close to personal and professional disaster, Agassi pulled himself together and started over with the help of his trainer and father figure, Gil Reyes, and his coach, Brad Gilbret, reconstructing his game from the ground up. He rededicated himself to conditioning and started all over again by playing in challengers, low level professional tournaments and qualifiers where players eat rubber chicken, operate their own scoreboards manually, shag their own balls, and first place pays $3,500. For the next year he tortured himself with grueling workouts and by the 1998 French Open, he was number eight in the world, and oddly, the further he and Shields grew apart, the better his game got. By the beginning of 1999, they were divorced.

Almost immediately, his comeback seemed to rocket him off the tabloids and back into the upper ranks of tennis culminating with his win at Roland Garros in ’99 making him only the third man to win a career Grand Slam and the only one to have a Golden Slam (Olympic Gold Medal). He also did two things very quietly: he opened a new charter school in the middle of the worst neighborhood of Las Vegas (donating the proceeds earned from selling his old wedding ring in Shields’ name) and began courting Stefanie Graf. Then, almost as if out of nowhere, Agassi was Number One in the world again, and the oldest to ever do it, and was winning big. In a nanosecond he became an elder statesmen, top-notch champion, and all-around good guy. And when he still couldn’t get past Pete Sampras in a Grand Slam final, no one called him a loser; they just wrote that the better player won.

Agassi’s roller coaster of an autobiography is dramatic and fascinating, not just because he persevered through it all while growing up in an incredibly unorthodox home, maturing in a fishbowl, and developing into a functioning adult while being hounded by the press and partying very hard, but because he never once advocates the life of a professional athlete nor spends any time bragging about his sexual conquests. Instead, all he wants for as long as he can remember is a normal life. Remember, Agassi, unlike say, Madonna, Derek Jeter, or Alex Rodriguez, did not choose his life in the arena. It was chosen for him by his father making all the barbs, criticism, and judgments about his character especially bizarre and most certainly difficult to take considering that he was raised to do only one thing: Hit a tennis ball really hard and make a lot of money doing it.

All things being equal, Agassi’s life is a triumph not because he won eight Grand Slams or developed into one of the finest tennis players this country has ever produced, but because he spends 386 pages carefully deconstructing the myth surrounding his carefully crafted and cultivated public image. Tremendous comeback by a player bound and determined to reclaim his rightful place among the all-time greats? Nope, he really just had nothing else he could do for a living and by that time he had a charter school to support and his family relying on him. He was an eighth-grade dropout. There was nothing else. Coupling that with the way he expanded himself beyond the lines on the court, Agassi has become a giant in the sporting world for being the one thing athletes are never expected to be: honest.

Minnesota Twins vs. New York Yankees

The assumption is that the Yankees will blow the Twinkies out in three games. Trust me, they should. Minnesota’s staff “ace” is Carl Pavano who was last seen being pelted with rotten fruit on his way off the mound for the Yankees after he cashed almost $40 million in checks while on the disabled list. Minnesota has an anemic lineup, a cut-rate pitching staff, and fields a group of slap hitters who all look like second basemen from the 70’s. The Yankees on the other hand boast a $238 million (or whatever the fuck it is now) payroll that features C.C. Sabathia. A.J. Burnett, Derek Jeter, Jorge Posada, Mo Rivera, Robinson Cano, Hideki Matsui, Mark Texiera, and Alex Rodriguez and quietly won 100 games because George Steinbrenner is now catatonic and being fed baby food.

Now, name five Twins who aren’t named Joe Mauer, Joe Nathan, Carl Pavano, and Justin Morneau (who happens to be out for the year with a bad back). They have a couple things going for them that are always pointed out, but are incredibly important. First, they don’t give a shit who they’re playing. A week ago they were behind Detroit, and after a 1964 Philadelphia-style choke job and one of the best one-game playoffs ever, they are on their way to New York. For them this is like an early Christmas present. Second, they have the Metrodome and the Yankees have, uh, a stadium that looks like a really clean toilet bowl. The Metrodome is one of the all-time greatest home field advantages in the history of sports, so the Twins have one last chance to use it.

But it doesn’t matter because unless Sabathia, Burnett, and Andy Pettitte have epic meltdowns or Phil Hughes starts choking in the eighth inning, the Yanks are looking primed for a deep run. How far they go depends on if they draw Los Angeles or Boston in the ALCS, but they take this series in no less than four.

Boston Red Sox vs. Los Angeles Angels

While the Angels have the Yankees’ number, the Red Sox have theirs. Maybe it’s the last few ghosts of 1986 floating around or the specter of Donnie Moore rattling his chains and moaning in the bullpen, but for some reason, even when they get a big lead, the Angels cannot seem to get past these guys. My heart wants to believe that this is the year that they finally drive a stake through the heart of Beantown and slay this rotten dragon, but until they do, I gotta stick with the fact that they wilt against Boston.

So, with the hex-related bullshit out of the way, they keys to the series are whether the Angels can get into Boston’s bullpen before the seventh inning, Boston can shut down LA’s running game, and if the Angels’ closer Brian Fuentes can get over his late season case of the yips. Basically, the entire series is going to come down to a total of about five at-bats in what should be a series of close games, and if it swings to the closers, which it will, the Red Sox have the advantage. This is the only series where I am not using my head in the pick though, so I’ll take the Angels in five.

Colorado Rockies vs. Philadelphia Phillies

I don’t know if it’s the power of Christ that compels the Rockies to make this sort of run seemingly every other year or if it’s the Dodgers inability to close out a season without sending their fans into tailspins of despair and doubt, but the Rockies are looking shaky and Philadelphia is going to bring them back down to earth hard. Colorado just lost their best pitcher, De la Rosa – who won 16 of his last 19 decisions – to a groin injury that could possibly keep him out of the entire playoffs. Beyond that, Jason Marquis did his annual second-half nose-dive that got him landed in the bullpen. No wait, he’s starting game four! Good luck. That leaves Ubaldo Jimenez and Aaron Cook on the mound to handle one of the best lineups in baseball in two parks that are built to accommodate home runs in bunches. Conversely, the Phillies get to trot out Cole Hammels and Cliff Lee along with possibly Brett Myers and Pedro Martinez who should be okay for about five innings. The one danger for the Phils, and the key to the series, is Brad Lidge who has become one of Ray Bradbury’s firemen. If the Rockies can keep it close, they could flip what I think is going to be a Phillies sweep into a demoralizing Rockies 3-1 series win. Watch this one drunk.

St. Louis Cardinals vs, Los Angeles Dodgers

St. Louis has the Dodgers’ number this year and the Cardinals are a trendy choice to knock off the Yankees in the World Series. Oh, and Manny Ramirez can no longer hit either because he’s off the juice or he inexplicably developed a conscience and has been racked with guilt and self-doubt over the steroids flap or his transsexual lover left him for a rich Brazilian man. Seriously, Juan Pierre is a better option right now. Toss in the double-barreled butt-fucking that is the inexperience and low self esteem of Jonathan Broxton and Clayton Kershaw and you have all the makings of the Dodgers pulling a Cub-like disappearing act in the opening round. I don’t think that will happen because Joe Torre is pretty good at manipulating a clubhouse, but everyone said the same thing about Chicago the last two years.

Anyways, St. Louis got scary good over the last half of the season and since they have The Best Player in Baseball at first base, it’s safe to assume that everyone around Albert Pujols will be seeing decent pitches to hit. Chris Carpenter is back at peak form, Adam Wainright is the best pitcher no one has seen, Albert Pujols is Jesus Christ, Matt Holliday is hitting again, Rick Ankiel is safely tucked away in the outfield, and the Dodgers have completely stopped hitting.

Cardinals in four flushing out my dream of a Freeway Series so the Angels could shut up those obnoxious assholes in the Manny wigs.

I’m sure some part of you wishes you led the life Steve McNair did, or at least the life he led until one of his mistresses, Sahel Kazemi, stood over him with a loaded 9mm, no doubt crying hysterically, and followed through on the age-old crazy lover’s threat that “if I can’t have you, no one can.” Hell, you’d probably accept the untimely demise if it meant you got to live like he did until Kazemi punched his ticket. He had women, fame, the respect of his peers, a possible spot in the Hall of Fame awaiting him, and enough money in the bank to finance a thousand trips to Tahiti.

In the aftermath of his unlucky tryst the national media and his peers began an awkward dalliance with how to frame the life of a man who in every way possible had it all, but in the end seemed to just hit the jackpot in the wrong way. Is he a football god or a philandering miscreant? Was he a Hall of Fame-caliber player who should be mourned or is he a cautionary tale? Or was he simply just a man enjoying the fruits his life bore? The reality is that in the end, being Steve McNair was pretty awesome, perceived flaws and all, because seriously, what’s the point of being one of the best quarterbacks of the last 20 years if you can’t have four women at once?

He was an ebony god in Nashville with his own soon-to-be opened fried chicken joint, enjoyed an impeccable reputation as a humanitarian and all around great guy, and was a reputed family man who reputedly only fucked his wife. His reputation was so immaculate that even white sportswriters wrote about him in reverent tones usually reserved for the likes of Joe Montana, Peyton Manning, and John Elway. He was the first black man to win a share of the NFL MVP as a quarterback, almost won a Super Bowl by himself, and willed himself through games with injuries that would put the rest of us in traction for eight weeks. But in the end Steve McNair will be remembered more for getting mixed up with a delusional and suicidal waitress from a shitty restaurant chain no matter how many highlight videos NFL Films puts together and teary testimonials his ex-teammates record for posterity, and that’s exactly how it should be.

It’s become clear that in the days and weeks leading up to McNair’s death, things were either going very well or very badly for him, depending on your point of view. Various media reports and police interviews show that not only was McNair involved with Sahel, but at least one other woman whom she began stalking shortly before the murder/suicide – and possibly more. His wife, Mechelle, whom many people have described in the press as a borderline saint, was either oblivious to her husband’s wandering phallus, or willfully ignoring it as so many long-term marriages become more business arrangements than life-long love matches. Something that is painfully obvious considering that McNair had at least two rented condominiums in the Nashville area and in the previous eight months was openly spending at least two or three nights a week at Kazemi’s apartment, had taken her on a half-dozen vacations (while he had entertained his family at the Dave & Buster’s where Sahel worked as a waitress), co-signed for a loan on an Escalade, and fed her the oft-used line about divorcing his wife. As it is with almost all crazy women, the pussy must have been incredible.

How many men have multiple girlfriends? How many men cheat on their lovely wives? How many wish they could? Now, think about how awesome it is to be a top-flight quarterback in the NFL and the smorgasbord of top-shelf vajayjay (or piles of beefcake, depending on your preference) passing before your eyes. You know that unattainable beauty you see at your office every day? She’s an afternoon snack for a pro quarterback, so you can understand why McNair had to beat them off with his prodigious and oft-used member before ending up involved with a delusional club trollop who was looking for a sugar daddy.

You won’t see any players or league officials condemn McNair for straying from the marital bed since most of them partake of the same pleasures of the flesh that he did. Former teammate Eddie George and coach Jeff Fisher stepped into the breach to cover for him by insisting that McNair had trouble adjusting to life after football to explain away doing what comes naturally (fucking 20-year-old hotties because you can) and focusing on the positive aspects of McNair’s life on the football field. Meanwhile, most players in professional sports have probably been talking a little shop about each other’s mistresses, comparing notes, and in some cases, if they’re smart, breaking off contact with the smoking hot nutjob they met at the club five months ago. Meanwhile, Steve’s wife, who has been described as lovely and perfect, has been pumped full of sedatives, visited by a string of preachers, sequestered from the press, and surrounded by police, Tennessee Titans officials, and lawyers since her husband’s demise at the hands of a hotter piece of ass. Expect her full story and expert advice on homemaking, child rearing, hacking into your husband’s PDA, and cashing in on his violent death to come out in a slapdash biography on the Oprah reading list within five months.

The shame of this is that Sahel makes crazy ladies look bad. Big, dramatic murder/suicides are usually perpetrated by loser guys who think (sometimes correctly) that they’ll never get another piece of ass as sweet as the one walking out the door. Most crazy women just drink all of your booze, crawl through your bedroom window at 3:30 am, threaten to kill you or cut your balls off, and make complete fools of themselves in public during a psychotic breakdown after they sense you’re pulling away. But to actually buy a gun and then shoot you after you fall asleep on the couch? That’s elite-level crazy. But to then take it a step further and position yourself to fall on your dead lover when you blow your brains out? That’s the Heavyweight Champ of Crazies, Steve, and I gotta give it up, you got the big trophy that escaped you on the football field.

He permeates the game like a bad case of chronic halitosis in an elevator. His grimy fingerprints can be found all over shady business deals and litigation across baseball. His words are hollow, his cries for fairness and a level playing field are defy reality, and he is as arrogant a liar as Pete Rose. And even though he left the business years ago, he still dresses and acts like a slimy used car salesman trying to pawn a lemon off on some unsuspecting rube. His name is Bud Selig, and he is the archenemy of the grand old game of baseball.

There have been dumber commissioners, Bowie Kuhn chief among them. Kuhn not only lacked the foresight to recognize a shift in the way the game was being played, but he stubbornly resisted the realities of free agency. There have been more dictatorial ones. Kenesaw Mountain Landis was an ardent racist who felt it was more important to keep the reserve clause intact and black folks in their proper place while reminding everyone he was the ultimate arbiter of any dispute. Bart Giamatti, the very model of arrogance, was a pseudo-intellectual twerp who used to quote Greek philosophers in an attempt to mask his own vanity, lack of originality, and overt sense of superiority.

Yet, throughout the history of the game, there has never been another commissioner as self-serving and able to speak out of both sides of his mouth as Bud Selig. At once he has said baseball is going through a golden age while also lamenting the supposedly insidious intrusion of steroids – under his watch, no less. He pisses and whines about inflating free agent contracts, but sits back and secretly sighs with satisfaction as every club grows in real value every single season because of the increasing value of the players – the game’s very commodity – that he publicly vilifies.

When a city balks at building a new stadium, he bitches about how the game cannot survive anywhere where the locals aren’t willing to dig deep and finance a cathedral to the game of baseball. He then has the nerve to turn around and say that the game is there to serve the fans. He hypocritically shuns Pete Rose, would rather pretend Barry Bonds, Mark McGwire, and Roger Clemens didn’t exist, and behaves as if the nefarious Donald Fehr and the MLBPA have robbed him and the rest of the owners of their rightful profits. He likes to trump the success of the wild card in baseball, bleat the virtues of the World Baseball Classic, and rambles on about how wonderful the game is. Yet, at every turn Bud Selig has proven himself to be one of the more disruptive and mendacious commissioners the game has ever seen.

Selig got his start in baseball as a minority owner of the Milwaukee Braves in the 1950’s. When the Braves moved to Atlanta in 1965, Selig divested himself of the team and began actively lobbying for a new team in Milwaukee. In 1969 he reached an agreement to buy the Chicago White Sox, but after American League officials caught wind of his intent to move the Sox to Milwaukee, the deal was nixed. Instead, in 1970 he purchased the bankrupt Seattle Pilots and moved them to Milwaukee where he renamed them Brewers after an old minor league club that dated back to the 1880’s.

For most of their history the Brewers were a profitable, but shitty franchise. They made the playoffs in 1981 and the World Series in 1982, but beyond that, they were at best a mediocre team. Selig was a competent and profitable owner and even considered a hero by some folks in Milwaukee for giving them a team while successfully fleecing them for a new stadium. But as commissioner, he raised the art of being a sneaky fuck to new heights, especially when it comes to labor relations.

From the mid-1970’s forward, the players have beaten the living shit out of the owners at the negotiating table. Mostly it was because Marvin Miller was 10-times smarter than any of the fools he was sitting across the table from. Miller, a shrewd and sophisticated labor lawyer, had been a part of trilateral negotiations between steel workers, the government and US Steel in the 1950’s and had been involved in some of the most complicated contracts the free world has seen. By comparison, men like Bud Selig and the rest of the owners were dogshit on the heel of Miller’s shoe. After Miller retired, the players union was taken over in 1985 by his lieutenant, Donald Fehr, a bare-knuckled negotiator in his own right who continued the union’s winning streak through the 80’s, 90’s and today.

After badly losing to the players in 1981, the owners colluded against the players mid-decade and made a gentlemen’s agreement in blatant violation of the collective bargaining agreement (and the law) not to sign anyone else’s free agents. Selig and White Sox owner Jerry Reinsdorf were the chief architects of the strategy and when Fehr took the owners to court, the owners ended up having to pay $280-million in damages to the players. While Selig never publicly admitted to collusion, his fingerprints were everywhere and Fehr quietly chuckled.

In 1992 labor relations flared up again. Commissioner Fay Vincent — the last real commissioner baseball has seen — pissed the owners off to holy high heaven when he gave an honest assessment of the owners he had been hired to represent at the negotiating table. “The Union basically doesn’t trust the Ownership,” said Vincent, “because collusion was a $280 million theft by Selig and (Jerry) Reinsdorf of that money from the players. I mean, they rigged the signing of free agents. They got caught. They paid $280 million to the players. And I think that’s polluted labor relations in baseball ever since it happened. I think it’s the reason Fehr has no trust in Selig.”

Selig and Reinsdorf went completely apeshit and demanded Vincent’s resignation. At first Vincent told them to eat a dog dick, but in the end the owners held a no confidence vote. By a score of 18-9 Vincent was effectively pushed out and in his place went Selig on an “interim” basis that lasted for six years. He passed on “ownership” of the Brewers to his daughter to avoid a conflict of interest, but anyone who believes that Selig was anything less than fully involved in his team’s finances is more delusional than someone fucks crack whores and thinks he got dick warts from his wife.

Throughout the next two years Selig and the owners cried and whined to anyone who would listen that the players were sucking them dry while agents were holding guns to their heads and forcing them to give guys like Bobby Bonilla and Matt Young inflated long-term contracts. The owners needed to be saved from the nefarious clutches of the evil Donald Fehr and a salary cap had to be put in place to save teams in smaller markets such as Kansas City, Oakland, Minnesota, and of course, Selig’s and Jeff Dahmer’s home town, Milwaukee.

In 1994 with labor relations at an impasse, Selig and the owners decided to lock horns with the Players Association again. This time the owners were determined to win at all costs, even if it meant canceling the World Series for the first time since 1904. So they did. After the players went on strike that August, the owners refused to negotiate in good faith and waited until September before canceling the season and the playoffs. In turn, Selig successfully played the media, blamed the players for being greedy, was complicit in destroying a relatively well run and locally owned franchise in Montreal, and helped devastate attendance figures and the game’s popularity across North America. Then, in the ultimate insult to paying fans, Selig and the owners tried to field replacement players at the beginning of the 1995 season.

No less a legendary figure than Tigers manager Sparky Anderson refused to go along with the charade. Calling the replacements everything but a group of wannabes, retards and baseball invalids, Anderson refused to even manage the Tigers in Spring Training. Calling the tactic shameful for the game of baseball, Anderson called a press conference, announced he was going home to play golf, driving off into the sunset to sip scotch and try to fuck his wife until the lockout was ended.

Eventually, as happened in 1972, 1981 and 1985, the owners got their asses handed to them, but not until after they tried to game the system one last time. Selig and the owners tried to wipe out the existing collective bargaining agreement and abolish free agency in one fell swoop by declaring it null and void. Except they forgot about the National Labor Relations Board and had their asses handed to them in federal court when a judge put the old agreement back in place.

He loves to take credit for the Wild Card entries, which have been phenomenally successful providing five World Series champs since its inception in the mid-90’s. However, Selig was an ardent opponent of the system while Fay Vincent was in charge. Vincent was looking to institute the idea in the early 90’s, but Selig and Reinsdorf undermined Vincent’s authority at every turn only to implement ideas he championed after the fact. Selig loves to talk about the success of small market clubs. Yet, it was only a few years ago that he commissioned a “Blue Ribbon Panel” that carted out a lot of specious numbers that said small market teams were unable to compete under current economic conditions. When asked about the Oakland Athletics ability to win 90 or more games year in and year out, Selig called them an anomaly. When the Twins did it, he called it a fluke. When the Marlins won the World Series in 2003, he called it a great story about a scrappy underdog. When the Tigers turned their franchise around, he called it heroic or some such shit, but he has never backed off his stance that baseball needs a salary cap to control spending despite the fact that teams like the Yankees, Mets and Dodgers may spend in bunches but don’t automatically win the World Series.

During the 2001 labor battle Selig contended that Major League Baseball needed to contract two clubs – the Montreal Expos and Minnesota Twins – for the financial health of the game. Of course Selig was remiss to mention that Twins owner Carl Pohlad, one of the richest men in baseball and one of his Selig’s closest friends, was demanding that the state of Minnesota along with the cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul needed to build him a new stadium without him contributing a dime of his own money. Pohlad was bitching that the Twins were at a competitive disadvantage because they did not have a baseball-only stadium. Selig also failed to mention that the owners were going to buy Pohlad out of his stake in baseball with an over-valued cash payout while falsely claiming that fans in Minnesota didn’t give a shit about
the club enough to come to games.

The case surrounding the Expos was even more heartbreaking. For years Montreal management regularly drafted, acquired, signed or developed some of the best raw talent the game has seen in the last 30 years. Andre Dawson, Gary Carter, Steve Rogers, Jeff Reardon, Andres Gallarraga, Cliff Floyd, Moises Alou, Tim Raines, Vladimir Guerrero, Pedro Martinez, Jose Vidro, Larry Walker, John Wetteland, Ken Hill, Randy Johnson, Tim Wallach, Michael Barrett and Marquis Grissom all passed through Montreal on their way to stardom, riches and in some cases, World Series titles.

From 1979 through 1983 the Expos were among the attendance leaders in baseball. The team was locally owned, well run, profitable, and winning. In the early-90’s Sports Illustrated wondered if the World Series would be an all-Canadian affair as the Toronto Blue Jays won consecutive titles and the Expos were knocking on the door and armed with the best farm system in baseball. In 1994, with one of the best young lineups ever assembled, the Expos were poised for a pennant run and had the best record in baseball. Armed with Pedro Martinez, Ken Hill, Walker, Moises Alou, Grissom, Wetteland and a very young Cliff Floyd, the Expos were dominating the National League while also lobbying the local government for help with a new stadium.

Yet, with the cancellation of the post-season the Expos lost all support for a new stadium, watched their attendance shit the bed, and the local owners were forced to sell off their best players to stay solvent. Shortly thereafter, the owners sold the team to an art dealer named Jeffrey Loria who immediately demanded, with the explicit support of Selig, that the provincial government completely finance a new stadium to replace the white elephant Olympic Stadium, and then began to hint that he would move the franchise if he did not get what he wanted. In the end, Selig allowed Loria to sell the club off to Major League Baseball at an inflated price, buy the Florida Marlins and then literally strip the Expos of everything of value that wasn’t bolted down including the office furniture and computers before the Expos were
awkwardly taken over by MLB and forced to play with both hands tied behind their backs. Even when the club competed the team was not allowed to make stretch run trades or September callups that might have kept the team in the pennant race. However, the owners had no problem with sending the Expos on road trips for extended periods by having them play “home games” in fucking Puerto Rico, of all places, all but ensuring the club would be exhausted, spent and dull when it came time for them to play “contenders” that they out hustled, out worked, outplayed and out-thought all season long.

To make up for it Selig hired Omar Minaya as general manager of the team, making him the first Latino chief executive in baseball, Selig cynically made it impossible for Minaya to make significant changes to the club. Except for trading blue chippers Cliff Lee and Grady Sizemore – and two of Cleveland’s current cornerstones — for Bartolo Colon; Selig and the rest of the owners hamstrung Minaya. It took years, but the Expos were finally relocated to Washington DC where Peter Angelos had to be paid off with the blood of 500 first-born male children before he would allow another club into his competitive territory. Now, the Nationals are maybe the worst team in baseball. What’s more, a community that was reasonably loyal to the club was robbed of their team while the owners pocketed hundreds of millions of dollars while
jiggering the competitive balance of the game.

As for steroids, everyone, including Selig, the sportswriters, the players, the fans, the general managers, the mangers, everyone who is involved in and loves the game is to blame for this one. No one is saying that Selig and the owners actually peddled dope to the players. Guys were juicing up long before Selig took the stage. But let’s be honest, when the home runs were being jacked, the tickets were being sold, and Mike Lupica was licking Mark McGwire’s balls, no one gave a shit that Ken Caminiti was pumping himself full of Mexican horse hormones to fuel his MVP season in 1998. When Brady Anderson hit 52 home runs from the leadoff spot after never hitting more than maybe 15 in his entire life, no one lifted a finger to bring an end to steroid use, least of all Selig. Of course he would cart out the usual chestnuts about how there needed to be comprehensive testing and that the game needed to be clean and that the world will collapse unless he and the owners could check the blood, urine, spinal fluid and hair strands of every player in baseball for any illicit substances. But in reality, the owners shrugged, collected the cash and then pointed the finger when the rumors started flying.

The popular sentiment is to blame the Players Association because for years both Miller and Fehr resisted drug testing, and rightfully so. It’s an invasion of privacy and the only reason the owners ask for it is so they have more leverage with the players during collective bargaining and free agent negotiations, not to keep the game “clean.” If it was all about fair play and keeping the game clean, blacks would have been playing in the majors back in 1924, the reserve clause would have been abolished during the 30’s, and Curt Flood would not have had his life ruined for having the nerve to demand the right to sell his services to the highest bidder instead of being sold like chattel.

No, the owners, with Bud Selig championing their cause, applauded the players during the 90’s as record profits rained down and the game’s image was re-established, but when the bill for it came due they pointed the finger at convenient targets like Jose Canseco, Barry Bonds and Mark McGwire and claimed that it was the players who “did this to the game.” Ironically, Selig and every one else was willing to smile and clap until Barry Bonds came along and knocked Big Mac out of the all-time single season home run record. When Bonds hit number 71 everyone in baseball began to look at each other out of the corner of their eyes and go, “what the fuck do we do now?” It wasn’t because he was black, per se, but more about him being a vile person that no one liked, the zeal of FBI agent Jeff Novitzky’s investigation of BALCO, and Congress sticking their nose into the business of baseball instead of investigating torture allegations during the middle of an illegal
military occupation.

As it stands now, Selig has the nerve to ignore Barry Bonds after he achieved baseball immortality and smashed Henry Aaron’s all-time home run record and denounce all the players upon whom his finances have been reliant. Selig, who is on the record as a close personal friend of Aaron’s, has tried to keep himself above the fray even though he is swimming in money earned from the halycon days that baseball is enjoying. This last year alone saw Selig earn over $18 million in salary and bonuses from the owners. He also has the audacity to tell Newsday, “I don’t want to hear the commissioner turned a blind eye to this or he didn’t care about it. That annoys the you-know-what out of me. You bet I’m sensitive to the criticism. The reason I’m so frustrated is if you look at our whole body of work, I think we’ve come farther than anyone ever dreamed possible. I honestly don’t know how anyone could have done more than we’ve already done” while saying that
Alex Rodriguez of all people has “disgraced the game.”

While the players are certainly responsible for the choices they made, and while the debate about the philosophical implications of steroids can go on forever, this entire mess ultimately falls at the feet of the person who claims to be the head of baseball and repeatedly bleats his own accomplishments while shouting down any criticism. Selig and the owners effectively went back on an agreement to keep the 2003 sample steroid tests confidential, have denied their own culpability for baseball’s problems, and have used the Mitchell Report (a wholly incomplete and one-sided document) to absolve themselves of any responsibility for the problems baseball faces.

The problem here is that Selig helped spearhead and champion this entire situation. Whether he wants to admit it or not, he did look the other way, he was not okay with steroid testing for the good of the game, but rather okay with it as a tool to break the union. He is not sensitive to the needs of the fans, nor does he really give a shit about the communities that support them. This is and always has been a money deal for him, and even the hardest core of fans needs to understand that these leagues and sports are not about the ideal of fair competition of dream fulfillment nor even representations of the best in people, they have gone way beyond that. These sports leagues are multi-billion-dollar monopolies that will be guarded by those involved at all costs and are being helped along by our own
legislators.

After seven years of incessant bitching and whining on both sides, the Red Sox finally traded Manny Ramirez – who won the World Series MVP during the year The Curse was broken and has been maybe the best slugging right-handed hitter in a generation – and two minor leaguers for Jason Bay in the middle of a pennant race. Apparently, Theo the Boy Genius and his bosses had just gotten exasperated with a guy who speaks broken Spanish, rolls around in the outfield after tripping over blades of grass chasing fly balls, and demands trades more often than George Steinbrenner used to piss and whine for a new stadium.

However, the Red Sox just cut loose a guy who hit 25 home runs in 95 career post-season games partially because, in part, he cold-cocked a deserving Kevin Youkalis, shoved a sixty-something-year-old traveling secretary, wouldn’t kneel before Peter Gammons, refused to do publicity shots with retarded kids during Spring Training, and every year made it clear that if the Red Sox didn’t trade him he would make them the sorriest mother fuckers who ever lived. All of this provides ample justification to the legion of sportswriters who have alternately called Ramirez one of the best players to ever don a uniform and one of the biggest embarrassments the game has ever seen.

It’s also a bunch of bullshit.

It’s not that I feel that Manny Ramirez is some innocent or that he does not deserve his share of scorn – he did sign an eight year contract and cashed all the checks – but when so-called experts like Peter Gammons start pretentiously bleating hyperbole about how Manny Ramirez has defiled the Great Game of Baseball, we can officially call bullshit on the charade. Ramirez is a ballplayer, an entertainer, and a diva. He is borderline retarded, impulsive, and a grade-A flake, but he is seemingly concerned with just two things in life: hitting a baseball really, really well and making as much money from that esoteric skill as humanly possible. Which is not unique, but right now he is the It-Boy for all of baseball’s problems.

Coming from the Red Sox, this all seems a bit dubious considering the team’s history. In his day Ted Williams spit on fans when he wasn’t practicing his swing in the outfield while fly balls whizzed by his head. Jim Rice was one of the surliest bullies to ever roam a locker room. Long-dead out-and-out racist owner Tom Yawkey yelled “Get that nigger off the field!” when Jackie Robinson tried out for the Red Sox shortly after World War II. Carl Yazstremski repeatedly dogged the last two months of any season the Red Sox were out of a pennant race – Carl being Carl if you will. The holy Theo Epstein started a tasteless power struggle with Larry Lucchino and when he didn’t get his way immediately, he left Fenway in a gorilla costume to avoid the press after his hissy fit. Yet, none of them ever won a World Series without Manny hitting in the three-hole, but they are all revered by the sporting press as the epitome of all that’s right with the world of baseball in Boston in spite of their huge character flaws.

From a baseball standpoint, the trade is somewhat flawed. The Red Sox just traded their best hitter and justified it by saying he’s a disruptive force in the locker room and a petulant child who takes bathroom breaks in the Green Monster during the middle of an inning, doesn’t follow team rules, and acts like a jackass, not because of declining production or even because he is maybe the worst defensive left-fielder in the history of the game. Then, to bolster their case, reports came out of Boston that Ramirez and his agent, Scott Boras, engineered this trade by burning all bridges and actively threatening to sabotage Boston’s season sparking a debate about whether Bud Selig of all people should get involved. If the Red Sox are trying to save face or make Manny look bad, it won’t work because neither Boras nor Ramirez cares what you think.

The player they got in return, Jason Bay, is a solid enough player and is a Boy Scout by comparison in regards to demeanor and hairstyle, but in the heat of a three-way pennant race in the American League East against the incredibly talented Tamp Bay Rays, and the hurt, but still dangerous Yankees, the Red Sox are at a decided disadvantage since their lineup has been depleted by the decline of Jason Veritek, nagging wrist injuries to David Ortiz, inconsistency from Mike Lowell, spotty performances from the starting rotation, and a near implosion in middle relief. In one stroke the Red Sox significantly reduced their chances for the pennant and turned the Dodgers into the odds-on-favorites to be the only team in the National League West to finish over .500 and gave Joe Torre a big gun to seriously challenge the Cubs and Phillies for the pennant.

It’s plausible to say this was inevitable and probably should have happened years ago. Ramirez never really fit in Boston even though the fans worshiped him. After coming up with Cleveland, Ramirez and his agent Scott Boras cashed in on the free agent frenzy of 2001 when owners handed out lavish contracts like the nouveau riche picking up trophy brides, cocaine, and gaudy art. It was a big move for a franchise desperate to win a title, and it paid off handsomely but cost the team its sanity.

After signing a $160 million contract over eight years, Ramirez began to grate on ownership, and vice versa, almost from the get-go in spite of the tremendous numbers he posted. For years the two sides played chicken with each other. Manny would get fed up with the weather, would miss some decent Latin food, or just plain want out, and throw a silly temper tantrum like a five-year-old screaming for a popsicle and the Red Sox would try with all their might to either accommodate his eccentricities or try to trade him. It got so bad that Ramirez was placed in irrevocable waivers, but because of his ridiculous contract, not one team claimed him. However, in the end, Ramirez would generally deliver big and all would be forgiven, especially when he helped eradicate The Curse bringing Boston to orgasmic joy after the Red Sox overcame a three game deficit to beat the Yankees and sweep the Cardinals in the World Series. In the cosmic baseball ledger book, that alone is worth the headaches.

But in the end, player movement is not about loyalty to a city or a team or even common decency; it’s about leverage, unfortunately. In this case, Ramirez used the only leverage he had: threatening not to play – which is among the gravest sins in sports – to force the Red Sox hand and ship him out of town before they could exercise their $20 million option on him so he could get one more big free agent contract before his skills and numbers sharply decline. It’s really no different from a team extorting a city by threatening to move if the municipality does not construct a new stadium. Owners and GM’s have held players out of games to prevent them from triggering performance clauses in their contracts, but you don’t see too many heartfelt columns being written about them messing with the integrity of competition or being money-grubbing bastards who get public subsidies to conduct business.

Manny Ramirez may be a complete cock smoker of the highest order, but he’s far from the scourge on humanity that Gammons and his ilk make him out to be. It’s just that they are jealous. Ramirez carries the same bastard-gene many of the owners do in that he’s willing to do whatever he has to maximize his wealth. He was also smart enough to hire Scott Boras. He’s a Baby Huey man-child who would be a flunky garbage collector or construction site gopher living in Washington Heights picking up underage girls at low-end Salsa clubs if it weren’t for baseball, but since he can hit a baseball better than 99-percent of the guys in MLB, he can do something that a lot of people wish they could: Dictate his own terms.

I was in a bar in Manhattan watching the Patriots and Chargers duke it out for the AFC Championship. Under the big screen on the other side of a passageway were a bunch of Patriots fans hooting and hollering and carrying on. During commercial breaks they went into the usual song and dance about how Tom Brady is the best quarterback who ever lived, that Bill Belichik is better than even Vince Lombardi, and that this version of the Pats was not only the greatest single-season team ever, but that this dynasty trumped all others in the history of football, if not sports. They were loud, obnoxious and saying that it didn’t even matter who won the NFC Championship Game.

When the Giants ended up winning a classic game played in arctic conditions in Green Bay by stopping Brett Favre in the last minutes and with Lawrence Tynes redeeming himself in overtime, Vegas rolled out an astounding and incomprehensible 14-point spread before Tynes could even finish his post-game interviews. After coming this close to knocking off the Pats just three weeks before, the Giants won three playoff games on the road behind an increasingly confident and efficient Eli Manning, a stifling pass rush, and a collective energy that just oozed that special something that doesn’t come from discipline and whip cracking, but from talent congealing into focused action. This wasn’t the 1985 Patriots lucking their way through three road games in the playoffs into a chance to get slaughtered by the Bears; this was an extremely talented and skilled team peaking at just the right moment, and it was shocking that they got so little respect from not only the odds makers, but the so-called professionals who talk so much shit about football.

But to be fair, during the pre- and post-game analysis that Sunday, everyone, including me, ceded the Super Bowl to New England weeks before. While some were calling for a huge blowout, privately I figured the Giants would come out on fire and score the first 17 points. But I also assumed Tom Brady would lead a storybook comeback and win a shootout with Eli 34-31 on a last-minute drive, immortalizing him in various children’s’ books for all eternity. But during their post-game interviews after the Chargers game, Belichik, Brady, and the rest of the Patriots seemed a little too happy. They got cocky, drank a little too much champagne, and actually started talking about the possibility of a perfect season and their subsequent place in history, and after 20 weeks of focusing on the here and now, they publicly looked past an opponent and didn’t take the Giants seriously. Mike Vrabel offered this nugget to Mike Reiss of The Boston Globe: “Not to have anyone take this the wrong way, but you’re away from your kids for a few days, so it’s a dad’s vacation. It’s not a golf trip; we have business to do at the end of the week, and we will prepare for that, but you can play cards, play dominoes, go to dinner, and really enjoy what you’ve done all year” — a statement that should have tipped everyone off that the Patriots were fucked before they even got on the plane to Phoenix.

Early on I privately chuckled at the fans and prognosticators who predicted a huge blowout. Publicly I called for a blowout up until the Wednesday before the game, but I wondered to myself what everyone had been watching for the last 10 weeks. Yes, the Patriots were dominant. Against Washington, Buffalo, the Jets, Miami, (whom Belichik cynically said still had a chance when they were down by more than 20 back in Week Seven) and Pittsburgh they were otherworldly. But for all the juggernaut talk, teams had been bringing their A game to the Patriots for weeks and had been hitting them in the mouth, coming close to beating them, and exposing huge chinks in their armor along the way.

First, Philadelphia proved what a lot of people secretly suspected all along: The Patriots were vulnerable at offensive tackle and shitty — I mean really shitty — at picking up outside pressure, especially on blitzes. Matt Light and Nick Kaczur are great players and incredibly efficient in drive blocking, but they can be beaten outside by superior defensive ends. And I don’t mean just someone like Dwight Freeney who can beat pretty much anyone you line up against him; I mean guys like Trent Cole and Jevon Kearse or Trevor Pryce and Terrell Suggs, combinations that are really good, but not out of sight, which must have had Michael Strahan and Osi Umenyiora drooling. Combine that with outside blitzers or safeties striking on the inside, and the Patriots had a glaring deficiency that people avoided talking about. It was as if it were taboo to criticize Brady’s vaunted offensive line, or his running backs’ glaring inability to pick up blitzers, or Bill Belichik’s amazing devolvement into Mike Martz when it came to protecting his All World quarterback.

Second, the Patriots’ linebackers are not just skilled, but experienced and very capable of stuffing opposing running games given the right circumstances. However, aside from Adalius Thomas, they are also old, increasingly terrible in pass coverage, and subsequently wear down as games progress. All year long I wondered why no one went right at those guys by throwing a double team at Thomas and just making Tedi Bruschi, Mike Vrabel, and Junior Seau haul those old bodies all over the field to make plays and hit people over and over again. The popular notion that this was a collection of venerable perennial All Pros still excelling at a high level was a season-long mirage. They benefited from the offense’s scoring so many points that it took away the other side’s running game. Hit those old men again and again and make them chase down people, and you can beat that defense down. Easier said than done, of course, but you have to try.

Third, Rodney Harrison is the most overrated safety in football. Most folks like to describe him as a stylized version of Jack Tatum, a hard-hitting strong safety capable of changing games with his energy and ability to separate a receiver from the ball. The only problem is that Harrison is just a dirty player, a football version of Bruce Bowen who has a tendency to get called for a lot of dumb personal fouls, goes for his opponents’ legs (hello, Trent Green) and tries to get away with shit (including blatant headhunting) that should get him thrown out of games. And that’s before we even get into his use of HGH. Go at Harrison and make him actually play football, and you can pierce that defensive backfield. He’s a weak link and can be exploited like a pimp picking up a teenage runaway at the Port Authority.

And lastly, Randy Moss needed to be physically challenged. All year long he did whatever he wanted. He galloped through secondaries, made spectacular catches, just fucking ate up defenders, and broke Jerry Rice’s single-season touchdown mark before nonchalantly saying it was no big deal even though Rice set the record in only 12 games. All the while I kept asking myself if anyone had looked at game film from the 2000 NFC Championship Game, when the Giants hit him in the mouth, shut his ass down with double teams, and reduced him to a whimpering, whining bitch before the first quarter was over, pacing the sidelines and blaming everyone else for the Vikings’ getting blown out. Leaving the most physically gifted and smartest receiver in football in single coverage, free to run through soft zones, is suicide.

You have to put a hat on him every play. During the playoffs, everyone caught on and made a concerted effort to take him away from Brady. Antonio Cromartie of the Chargers spelled it out to Mike Reiss of the Boston Globe: “I think everybody knows you can’t let Randy Moss get down the field. That’s a big part of his game and with a free release, he’s that much better,” Cromartie said. “Going into [the AFC Championship Game], we felt like we could jam him and beat him up down the field, with the idea that it would make [Tom] Brady throw the other way once he sees him jammed up.”

Moss had two catches for 32 yards and zero touchdowns against San Diego and Jacksonville. It got so bad that Wes Welker became Brady’s go-to guy. The omens were not good for Moss against New York — even though he did torch them in Week 17 — because he had not made a meaningful play in over a month. Yes, you could say he was due for a breakout, but there was no reason for the Giants to not continue the trend of doubling him until it was to their advantage not to.

What’s more, each of those weaknesses were exposed at one time or another by, in succession, Dallas, who threw the ball all over the place before Brady, Welker, and Moss just outscored them; Indianapolis, who shredded their linebackers and showed everyone you could outrun those old men; Philly and Baltimore, who blitzed the Patriots mercilessly from the edge and put Brady on the turf; the Giants, who did all three in Week 17; the Jaguars, who took Moss out of a game for the first time all year; and the Chargers, who got in Brady’s face and picked him off three times, took away Moss, and if they had been fully healthy, probably would have avenged the terrible loss they suffered in San Diego last year. Instead, the focus all year was on Tom Terrific’s uncanny ability to destroy lesser teams by tossing alley-oops to Randy Moss over 5’9” corners, killing defenses underneath by going to Wes Welker, and looking good in milk ads that made it look like he took a money shot on the mouth. It got so bad that no one wanted to even discuss what that team’s actual weaknesses were, because it would break from the storyline. It was all about making history, matching the 1972 Dolphins, breaking offensive records, Randy Moss’s incredible comeback from irrelevancy, Tom Brady’s joining Joe Montana on top of the quarterback mountain, and Bill Belichik’s surpassing Lombardi, Shula, Walsh, and Noll before the Super Bowl was even played. For weeks, no one even gave a shit that the NFC might produce a credible opponent. And now, the Giants’ winning is some huge shocker, when in fact, it was all right in front of us all along if we had just been paying attention.

In the two weeks before the Super Bowl it’s becoming increasingly clear that the Patriots showed up unprepared, cocky, and more concerned about their post-game party plans than actually winning the game. Yes, it’s been widely reported that the Giants showed up in black suits to celebrate the Patriots’ funeral, but Amani Toomer went on the record to ESPN that players from the Pats came up to him and derisively said he could come to their victory party after the game. Even if it was just a little good-natured ribbing, that’s far beyond Plaxico Burress’ or Steve Tisch’s guaranteeing a victory. That’s truly calling someone out, and not one media outlet reported it before the game. Imagine what probably went through Michael Strahan’s mind after Toomer mentioned that little nugget to him. Brady, the untouchable Queen of New England, was photographed in New York bringing flowers to Giselle after Tony Romo got shanked by the press for having the nerve to go to Mexico for a couple of days with Jessica Simpson. Brady was framed as a man in love with this lame “awww, isn’t that cute” moment while everyone took photographs of the walking cast on his foot and speculated about whether it was just gamesmanship on Belichik’s part. During press interviews the week before the game, the Pats seemed a little tight, but oddly arrogant and condescending, acting as if the Giants didn’t even exist. It was as if they truly believed all the bullshit the press was writing about them and felt that greatness was already theirs. Meanwhile, Burress was getting shit on for his prediction of a 23-17 win and reminding everyone that there was another team in Arizona. Brady then sarcastically wondered to the press, “We’re only going to score 17 points? OK. Is Plax playing defense?” Yeah, Tom, in this case Plax overestimated you.

For anyone who saw the Giants’ first drive, those illusions of easy greatness were shattered very quickly. It was obvious that not only were the Patriots getting blown off the ball at the line of scrimmage, but also that absolutely nothing was going to rattle Eli Manning. Deftly moving downfield with an almost 50/50 split of running and passing plays while converting a Super Bowl record four consecutive third downs, picking up every blitz the Pats threw at them, and chewing 10 minutes off the game clock, the Giants marched to the most dominating three points I have ever seen. As the special-teams units jogged onto the field, I saw exactly what I had been waiting for all year: Junior Seau, Mike Vrabel, and Tedi Bruschi with stick marks from the Giants’ offensive line in their ear holes and sucking wind like they just received a marathon buttfucking. After Lawrence Tynes drilled the field goal, there was Bill Belichik personally coaching his linebackers, and those three old men sat on the bench, helmets strewn about their feet, elbows on knees, torsos bent over, heads dipped down with sweat pouring off of them, and all of them visibly, unmistakably exhausted.

The Patriots quickly regrouped on offense and drove downfield for the game’s first touchdown, but nothing seemed right about it. The Giants were flying around the ball, and interestingly, Michael Strahan looked about eight years younger. It also became evident that Brady was not on his game. He missed open receivers, was ignoring Moss, and was getting an enormous amount of pressure from — you guessed it — the edges. For the first time in a very long time, Brady looked perplexed and confused as if he were thinking, “What the fuck are they doing out there?” Moss was seemingly double-teamed on every play and the pass coverage looked like a swarm of hornets. Brady, who is one of the best ever when it comes to checking down receivers and hitting the open man, looked like he was processing shit that had taken him completely by surprise. I mean, how often do you really see Strahan drop into coverage so TWO safeties can blitz your ass? But he was still moving the ball, and on a third down deep in Giants territory, Brady got nailed by Strahan, but unleashed a perfectly thrown ball that bounced off of Ben Watson’s helmet as Antonio Pierce was called for pass interference, putting the Pats on the one. Two plays later, Lawrence Maroney fell into the end zone and the Pats were up 7-3 two plays into the second quarter, but the die had been cast. The Pats were in for a very long night.

Around this time, I sat on my barstool and was hit with a vision: Joe Gibbs sitting in his living room with a glass of milk quietly watching the game with a small smile creasing his God-fearing face just soaking in the sights. Back in week eight the Patriots demolished the Redskins 52-7, but what was unique about that game was that the Patriots kept pressing the Redskins well after the game was out of hand. Here they were in the fourth quarter, already up 38-0, and Tom Brady was still winging the ball all over the field. In a show of supreme arrogance and cruelty, Belichik kept sending Brady out and kept calling midrange and deep balls in a humiliating and unnecessary show of ultimate power. You know, the sort of shit people don’t forget, especially when you perpetrate it against one of the most respected coaches in all of football. Afterward, while Gibbs publicly praised Belichik, Redskins linebacker Randall Godfrey lost his composure and told NBCSports.com, “I said something to [Belichick] after the game. I told him, ‘You need to show some respect for the game.’ You just don’t do that. I don’t care how bad it is. You’re up 35 points and you’re still throwing deep? That’s no respect.” Belichik’s response to a reporter’s query afterwards was, “What do you want us to do, kick a field goal?”

Now, in front of 97 million people, it was Belichik’s turn to eat a shit sandwich. And everyone’s champion this day, from San Francisco to Miami to Buffalo to Washington to Miami to St. Louis to Los Angeles to New York to Detroit, seemed to be Giants defensive coordinator John Spagnuolo. Putting together the pieces that Monte Kiffin, Rex Ryan, and Ted Cottrell had laid out, he blitzed relentlessly, mixed up his coverage packages on every down, double-teamed Moss, and never, ever showed the same look twice. After he established a pattern of having no pattern, he even had the balls to just leave Moss alone at random times, daring Brady to try and find his favorite target. Instead, Wes Welker became the primary receiver making 11 catches.

Late in the second quarter, Brady began to move the Patriots downfield, but on first and 10 from the Giants’ 44 with 22 seconds left, Brady dropped back, avoided the rush and stepped up to heave a deep ball. However, Justin Tuck came from behind and slapped the ball from his hand as he cocked the throw. With no tuck rule to save him, and no backside blocking to speak of, Osi Umenyiora was there to pounce on the loose ball, ending the threat. Off the opening kickoff of the second half, Brady drove the Patriots down to the Giants’ 44. On a fourth down punt, Belichik noticed that a Giants player did not make it off the field before the snap and challenged the play. The booth officials looked, and lo and behold, there was a 12th man on the field after the snap. And just like that, it looked like the Pats got the break they desperately needed. But the drive stalled, and on third down from the Giants’ 25, Strahan sacked Brady setting up a potential 49-yard field goal attempt. However, instead of taking a chance on Gotkowski, Belichik inexplicably went for it on fourth and 13 and watched Brady’s pass to Jabar Gaffney fall incomplete. After the game Belichik told the gathered reporters that he went for it at this critical juncture because Gotkowksi had never hit a 50-yarder before. Ah, the genius speaks.

Now his quarterback — as people had wondered openly about after the Washington game — was beginning to pay the price. After piling on points, running up scores, arrogantly dismissing questions about his sense of sportsmanship, and generally acting like a dick, many wondered if teams would begin taking cheap shots at Brady in retaliation for Belichik’s behavior. Instead, the Giants became all of football’s avenging angels and got all up in Brady’s shit fair and square, making him pay for the Patriots’ arrogant sense of entitlement. Knocking him down or just laying hands on him seemingly every time he dropped back to pass, Brady looked scared for the first time in his career. All through the second and third quarters the Giants harassed him endlessly in ways he has never seen before. Brady was sacked just 20 times this season. On Sunday night he was sacked five times and knocked down another 14, pressured constantly, and spent most of the game trying to avoid blitzers before ending up on his back gauging the crowd’s reaction to find out the result of his pass.

When the fourth quarter started, even though the Giants were outplaying the Pats on both sides of the ball, and the score still standing at 7-3, the popular sentiment — including mine — was that the Patriots would somehow find a way to win, no matter what happened. But I’d like to attribute what happened instead to the Furies deciding to punish the Patriots without regard for leniency or mercy, reminding them that hubris, arrogance and contempt are answered with cold retribution when the books are balanced.

Eli took over at his own 20 and out-Bradyed the All American Super Model Fucker. The key play being a 45-yard catch and run by Kevin Boss on the first play of the drive beating, you guessed it, Rodney Harrison. Then, on third and four from the New England 29, Manning found Steve Smith for a 17-yard gain, and before anyone knew it, Eli found David Tyree in the end zone to put the Giants up 10-7.

But with 7:54 left in the fourth, the Patriots took over from their 20 and started what looked like their inevitable march to immortality. With Moss no longer flying down the field, but rather cutting over the middle, Brady’s options opened up and once again he looked like the best quarterback in football. The Pats had finally figured the Giants out, and for the first time all night, the Giants pass rush was neutralized, giving Brady time to pick them apart one play at a time. Throwing passes on all but one snap, Brady spread the ball around to four different receivers on the 12-play drive. Here it was Wes Welker for 10 yards underneath, there it was Kevin Faulk on a swing pass, and, holy shit, Moss going over the middle for 10. On third and goal from the Giants six, Randy Moss shed his defender — who slipped on the turf — and caught an easy touchdown pass from Brady to put the Patriots up 14-10 for what seemed like the capper to their claim as the best team ever with just 2:47 left in the game.

The Giants’ fans groaned. My roommate looked up at the television and said, “Eli, here’s your chance to be the toast of this town,” but there wasn’t much conviction in his voice. As I looked around the bar the mood was one of dejection, as everyone seemed to accept the cold, hard reality that the Patriots were going to win, yet again. The bartender just leaned on the bar with his head hung and ignored drink orders, the owners of the place sat quietly by the door and one of them said, “They came so fucking close,” while a small bank of Boston fans were in the corner laughing and giving each other high fives. There was nothing anyone could say, so everyone just let him or her have his or her fun. And, damn it, if I didn’t hear a faint mock chant of “Eli, Eli, Eli,” come up out of the crowd in Phoenix over the television set.

So, there was Eli. Taking over on his own 17 with 2:39 to play, Richard Seymour licking his chops, Adalius Thomas staring him in the face, Rodney Harrison taunting him, Bill Belichik glaring at him, and 97 million people just waiting to see him fail. Right away he completed a first down pass to Amani Toomer for 11 yards, then on third down found Toomer again in front of Harrison who stopped him short of the first. With the game on the line, facing a fourth and one, the Giants completed their first clutch play of the drive when Brandon Jacobs banged into the left side of the line and picked up two yards for the first. But no could have predicted what happened next.

On third and five from his own 44, Manning dropped back to pass and faced a vicious rush. Seemingly surrounded with nowhere to go, no less than three Patriots got their hands on Manning’s jersey, clawing at him, trying to pull him down, but also wrestling with the Giants’ offensive linemen in the process. Somehow, Eli broke free of the scrum and scrambled a couple steps back before unleashing a prayer of a pass downfield. Streaking up the middle of the field was David Tyree with Rodney Harrison right on his ass. As the ball came down, both of them went up in the air. Tyree got his right hand on the ball and began to pull it down while Harrison cleanly tried to break up the pass. Somehow Tyree pinned the ball against the top of his helmet, holding it there as he and Harrison fell to the ground. When they collapsed on the turf, Tyree’s back was arched over the body of Harrison, and there was the ball, still somehow stuck his helmet as if someone had Krazy Glued it there.

Anyone who wasn’t a Patriots fans went absolutely berserk. Even casual observers — like girlfriends and wives who never give a shit about football and only sit through it to be polite — leapt off their barstools and chairs and started throwing bar napkins in the air. The sound was deafening, and even with the televisions turned all the way up, it sounded like a 747 landing on top of my head as Joe Buck’s voice was reduced to a whisper in a wind tunnel. I turned around to find the bank of Patriots fans and saw masks of utter horror and shock on their faces as if they were thinking, “fuck, that’s only supposed to happen for us, not to us.”

After that, it became almost academic. With 39 seconds left, Manning found Plaxico Burress — who played all season on a torn up ankle and tore a medial collateral ligament in practice the week before the Super Bowl — wide open in the end zone on a perfectly executed fade route where he caught the ball in perfect juxtaposition against the Patriots’ living-room-sized logo. As the Giants celebrated and the fans leapt for joy, the camera cut to a shot that sent chills up my spine: Tom Brady warming up, then Randy Moss putting on his helmet. In that instant I saw Brady somehow finding Moss down the sideline and catching a jump ball between two defenders to set up a game-winning or game-tying play that would take the wind out of the Giants’ sails and set all right within New England’s universe.

Starting from his own 26 with only 29 seconds left on the clock, Brady started off with an incomplete pass to Jabar Gaffney. On second down, just as he was cocking to pass, Jay Alford drilled him in the midsection for a sack and a loss of 10 yards. Now, with 19 seconds on the clock from his own 16, and with no other choice, Brady went for broke. As he dropped back, everyone held their breath because they knew what was coming. And there he was, Moss streaking up the left side of the field with a step on the two defenders who were covering him. Brady’s pass went up and it seemed like the whole world went silent. As the ball came down, Moss put his hands out to catch the pass in stride, but somehow a defender got his hand on the ball knocking it away from Moss. On fourth down, Brady took one more shot at getting the ball to Moss and he launched another missile downfield where the ball fell harmlessly incomplete.

Bedlam ensued, and even though there was still one second left on the clock, Bill Belichik and Tom Coughlin met at midfield for one of Belichik’s famously brief handshakes. Completely outclassed, and outplayed, the Patriots had to be called back to the field to run out the final second on the clock before the celebration could begin, and when it did, everyone knew who was going to get the MVP. Though the entire Giants defense deserved the award, it was given to Manning in what seemed like poetic justice considering all the shit he’s had to put up with these past four years.

Afterwards, Belichik was especially curt. Looking harried, depressed, angry, and ready to commit violence, Belichik was as graceless in defeat as he’s ever been in victory. Delivering his answers in his signature monotone tinged with petulance, he came across as not only a poor sportsman, but also an even bigger asshole than anyone could have imagined. However, back on the field, the celebration was surreal.

Eli Manning is the MVP of the Super Bowl? The Giants just won? Is this real? Did that just happen? That was what was hanging in the air, and as the Patriots walked off the field with their heads hung, their loyal fans stood there with their hands on their heads in utter disbelief. Practically no one predicted this. A few people here and there said it would be close, but I think I found only one Giant fan that would even venture to say the Giants would win. Regardless, it happened.

Afterwards, the Patriots themselves were less than magnanimous. Understandably, most of them talked about the opportunity that they missed out on and how disappointed they were. But everywhere one looked, and everywhere one listened, there was this lingering sense of arrogance that permeated their behavior after the game. If I’m a Patriots fan, I’m thrilled, because it means they’ll come back hard next year. If I’m not a Patriots fan, I’m in hysterics at how blind they are to how complete this ass whipping really was.

It’s going to be a potentially ugly off-season in the greater New England area. If it turns out that former Patriots video assistant Matt Walsh is telling the truth and the Patriots spied on the Rams before their Super Bowl, this will turn into a full-blown scandal tainting the reputation of the entire franchise and calling into question the team’s legitimacy and its accomplishments. What’s more, with everything that’s happened this year, including the outrageous scoring and petulant attitude, the Patriots devalued themselves by acting with very little class in the first place. Every team generally takes its cues from the head coach, and while Belechik has been very successful at winning games, he has also been very successful at alienating his franchise from everyone else in football. Looking back on all the other dynasties in pro football, I cannot think of another one that has been more reviled league and nationwide than the Patriots. It’s not because they win; it’s how they win, and how they seemed to behave as world-beaters even though their margin of victory in championship games was smaller than Belichik’s dick.

However, Sunday proved Belichik right in one tangible way: When it came down to it, it really was everyone else against the Patriots.

When Alex Rodriguez signed his 10-year, $252-million contract with the Texas Rangers, morons across America claimed that it would be the end of baseball. The howls from the peanut gallery of sports writers viciously attacked Rangers owner Tom Hicks, claiming that he was a rube, a fiscally irresponsible retard, and a puppet on the strings of Scott Boras. What no one seemed to pay attention to was that Hicks had a pretty solid plan in place. He expected to use A-Rod as the centerpiece for a marketing plan designed to make the Rangers one of the preeminent sports franchises in the world. In essence, by paying A-Rod the equivalent of what he paid for the franchise itself in 1997, Hicks was making Rodriguez his business partner, an astoundingly progressive development in a business where the players have historically been treated as no more than chattel or replaceable parts.

On Rodriguez’s end, it was a brilliant move negotiated by the best agent in the history of sports. (More on that in another rant.) Boras leveraged his client as not only the best player in the game that day, but one who could be potentially be the greatest of all-time. Boras put together binders filled with projections that put A-Rod in the same company as Babe Ruth, Ty Cobb, Frank Robinson, Henry Aaron, Ted Williams, and Mickey Mantle. Then he took his client on the open-market and shopped him around. To the consternation of “purists,” he refused to give the Mariners a hometown discount and scoffed at their attempt to keep A-Rod, which apparently amounted to a 20-minute meeting over shitty coffee with the Mariners, basically expecting A-Rod to stay because Seattle was where he started.

At the time, the New York Mets were the heavy favorites to land Rodriguez. When Boras told the Mets that A-Rod would need a marketing team and office space at Shea Stadium, Fred Wilpon and Nelson Doubleday balked. Misjudging A-Rod’s play to be a real mover and shaker in the baseball industry as an attempt to cash on his vanity, sports writers (primarily in New York, but also around the country) jumped to the defense of the poor, put upon owners of the Mets and branded Rodriguez a selfish and ungrateful cur who was interested only in himself. That Rodriguez was acting as if he was above the team and that he was a callous mercenary who was only interested in himself. How dare a ballplayer be a forward thinking businessman and wish to be anything more than the best shortstop in baseball. How dare he encroach on the territory of the owners. How dare he strive to be anything more than walking jockstrap. How dare he wish to be more than just a commodity or a poster boy for the great game of baseball.

When Hicks put pen to paper and locked up A-Rod, eyes rolled. Why Texas? Why for $90-million more than any other bidder? Why, Tom, why are ruining baseball? Well, why not Texas? Especially when they are willing to give you $252-million and build their business around you and acknowledge you as not only the preeminent player in the game, but also the most marketable and bankable personality in the game. When you’re the best player in the game it only stands to reason that not only should you be the highest paid, but you should also have a real stake in the performance of the club. Top-end executives are given stock in a company, superstar columnists are usually put on the editorial board of the paper they write for, talented scientists are given enormous stipends from the universities they do research for. Why should it be any different for a ballplayer of the highest caliber? However, baseball bars players from owning a stake in a team, so big salaries are the next best thing.

The problem is that Hicks was very unlucky. Hicks made it clear he wanted to turn the Rangers into a big winner, and was opening his wallet on all fronts to prove it. He had Rafael Palmeiro and Ivan Rodriguez in the lineup, but during A-Rod’s tenure with the Rangers, general manager John Hart – who enjoyed enormous success in Cleveland – missed on a series of big contracts that doomed the Rangers to mediocrity. Ismael Valdez, Todd Van Poppel, and the infamous Chan Ho Park all failed miserably on the mound. Park especially hurt the Rangers when his arm blew out. He was supposed to be the centerpiece of a revamped pitching staff that was supposed to bolster the incredibly potent lineup Hart had assembled. However, when the pitching went to shit, the Rangers were a club that could hit, but couldn’t pitch, and needed to be completely rebuilt from the inside out, and fast.

The most logical solution was to trade Rodriguez for a package of players. Hart began shopping Rodriguez and had a trade lined up with the Boston Red Sox. Rodriguez, the alleged me-first mercenary, had even agreed to restructure his contract and leave money on the table to make the deal go through. However, the deal fell apart when the Players Union would not sanction the trade because it would set a bad precedent for players being traded in the future. You know, teams saying things like, “well, we’ll make the trade for you, but only if you lop off 15-percent of that salary so we can justify it financially.”

With that deal scotched, George Steinbrenner stepped into the fray and ordered Brian Cashman to get A-Rod no matter the cost. Trading Alfonso Soriano was a small price to pay, and considering that the Rangers were so desperate to rebuild, they were willing to pay a huge portion of Rodriguez’s salary to make the deal, Cashman got him for a song. Then, voila’, A-Rod’s a Yankee, assholes in the Bronx are thumbing their noses at the Red Sox, and after John Henry cried foul, Steinbrenner’s released this gem on the wires:

‘We understand that John Henry must be embarrassed, frustrated and disappointed by his failure in this transaction. Unlike the Yankees, he chose not to go the extra distance for his fans in Boston. It is understandable, but wrong that he would try to deflect the accountability for his mistakes on to others and to a system for which he voted in favor. It is time to get on with life and forget the sour grapes.’

Talk about hubris. Or better yet, loading the bullet in the gun that’s aimed at your foot. George never was one for false modesty, but this was just beyond him, especially since his pitching staff resembled an old folks home before the Tuinal is handed out. Regardless of the fact the Yankees were weighed down with clods in Tampa overriding Brian Cashman’s baseball acumen, everyone else in baseball shuddered, shit their pants, and wailed about the coming apocalypse the moment this deal went down.

Yet, somehow it all went wrong. “How could this happen?,” bleated the morons in their knock off Mariano Rivera jerseys. “We’re the fucking Yankees, we’re supposed to win the World Series every fucking year!” With a team loaded with expensive, but aging sluggers, no one seemed to notice the cracks in the Yankees’ facade. They were old in the starting rotation, their middle relief was weak, and they no longer had a team full of patient hitters. It was a glitzy collection of big names that gave King George his false sense of bravado and arrogance, but whose starting pitchers had an ERA of 5.22, and outside of Mariano Rivera, were dogshit in the bullpen.

Regardless, the Yankees tore through the American League in 2004. Winning 101 games, racking up 242 home runs, slugging at a .458 clip, and scoring 897 runs, the Yankees were an offensive juggernaut.  However, he “underperformed,” hitting .286 with 36 home runs, 106 RBI, and a .512 slugging percentage while learning a new position, acquiescing to Jeter’s birth right to play shortstop, adjusting to a new ballpark and team, and handling the pressure of being “The Man” on a club full of superstars, overpaid talent, Crazy George, and harping fans. They dispatched the Twins in four games then jumped all up in the Red Sox shit in the ALCS, taking a three games to none lead, including a 19-8 win in game three at Fenway, prompting the newspapers to print banner headlines touting the “Boston Massacre Part II.” And how was A-Rod doing? He was hitting .429 and had just knocked in three runs, including a two-run jack in game three that essentially sealed the game.

Yet, it seemed as if the Gods of Baseball got really pissed off. It was if the Furies rose and after 80-something years of horror and devastation had been wrought upon New England, they finally saw the cruelty and hubris of the Yankee fans and decided that enough was enough. As Dave Roberts stole second, David Ortiz delivered the game winning hit in game four, Curt Schilling took out his tampon and put it on his ankle, and Pedro survived the seventh inning in game seven, everyone in Yankeeville stood around with their mouths agape, silently awaiting the Peter North of baseball to slide it in slowly, yet forcefully. It wasn’t just A-Rod, it was the whole fucking team. And somehow I’d like to think that the ghosts of baseball decided that the Yankees had had a fine run these last 100-years, but now it was their turn to suffer. For a very long time.

With the greatest post-season collapse ever etched in stone for all-time, thus displacing the legendary playoff collapses of the Cubs, Angels, and Red Sox, someone needed to take the fall. Joe Torre got his share of grief and almost got fired before Brian Cashman took a bullet for him and talked Mad King George out of it. Instead, Mel Stottlemeyer was later fired (after the 2005 season), Cashman was ordered to acquire an over the hill Randy Johnson, and Jeter sulked because Tino Martinez and Paul O’Neill were not there for the regular manage a’ trois in the shower.

But considering he slapped the ball out of Bronson Arroyo’s glove instead of running over the skinny little shit in game six, Yankee fans began to grouse about A-Rod, of all people. So did everyone else because it was convenient. Ignoring the glaring deficiencies of the club, everyone started in about whether Mickey Mantle would have slapped at the ball. Would Reggie Jackson have acted like a whiney cunt after he was called out? Fuck, no. Mantle or Reggie would have barreled through that skinny, cornrow-wearing little faggot, and if they had been called out for stomping on a pitcher’s nuts, both of them would have said, “I will do anything I have to to win.” That’s what Yankee fans want, not reality, nor a bitch who stands on second base behaving like a child who’s lying to his parents about breaking a lamp.

That was A-Rod’s sin. Instead of being a bad motherfucker, and putting an obviously flawed team on his back that swung at absolue shit, he was apparently exposed as a weak, little cocksucker and was branded as a player incapable of delivering in the “clutch” or on “baseball’s biggest stage.” That every other hitter in the Yankee lineup, including the “clutch” Saint Jeter (who hit .200 for the series), stopped hitting against the likes of Derek Lowe, didn’t matter. Nor did the fact that Kevin Brown and Javier Vasquez shit the bed, or that Jon Leiber was their best pitcher, and that an appearance by Mariano Rivera in the playoffs no longer meant an automatic win. No, now, it was Alex Rodriguez’s fault that the Yankees officially sucked Red Sox cawk.

A-Rod became the cause of all the Yankee ills. The locker room is disjointed and in disarray? Must be A-Rod’s fault because you know he’s not a vocal leader. A-Rod’s in a slump? Hey, he needs to man-up and pull himself out of it even if Jeter ostracizes him and poisons the well in the clubhouse because of some petty grudge. I mean, A-Rod’s the problem here, not Herr Captain, right? The pitching sucks? Well, we got A-Rod and he should be able to knock in three runs a night to make up for Randy Johnson’s flat slider that the Devil Rays are knocking all over the park. I mean, what’s he being paid all that money for, to jake it when I’m paying 100-bucks for these seats? For $252-million he better be winning the MVP every year and hitting .438 in the playoffs. We’re the Yankees damn it, and we deserve only the best!

And even when he tore the cover off the ball during the 2007 season, the criticism never abated. When he’d hit a game-winning walk-off home run, everyone would clap and cheer, then yell in each other’s ear over the din, “he’s gotta do it in October for it to mean anything!” When he’d make a gold glove caliber play, fans would just lean back and say, “what do you expect, he’s supposed to do that.” If he hit a slump, like every player does, he’d be booed incessently while the Bleacher Creatures would mutter, “he’s great and all, but he’s so fucking streaky.” It’s as if they expected him to be Reggie Jackson, Mickey Mantle, Joe DiMaggio, and Thurman Munson all rolled into one. I guess I can’t blame them, especially since Jeter’s obviously gay and not half the leader or hitter any of those guys were.

Meawhile, everyone is lining up to chug Jeter’s cock for half the production and the same amount of World Series wins A-Rod has since the great teams of the late 90’s were broken up: Zero. On top of that, Jason Giambi, a known steroid user, is embraced by Herr Captain and given public encouragement while A-Rod was ostracized for not wanting to take hot showers with him in the dead of night. Plus, the Steinbrenners make snide remarks to the press, four-year-olds boo you because their dads call you a pussy, and the New York Post thinks it’s big news that you occassionally fool around on your wife, just like every other ballplayer in the history of the game. Under those circumstances, I’d leave a guaranteed fortune on the table, tell the Steinbrenners to go fuck themselves, and shop for a new team too.

Somehow, Alex Rodriguez has replaced Barry Bonds as the most hated baseball player on the planet. A guy with preternatural ability that transcends the game and is on his way to demolishing the record books is now a maligned figure for, of all things, not being the ultimate Yankee. The contract is a special sort of monkey on his back, but that’s not entirely his fault. Rodriguez says some incredibly stupid things in public, and he’s pulled some real winners on the field. The purse slap is more comical than anything, but when he yelled at Howie Clark in Toronto, “mine!”, on a pop up, he came across as some busher. Guys on the Blue Jays had to be restrained from beating the mortal shit out of A-Rod because interferring with calls on pop flies can be dangerous to a fielder’s health. Pulling that kind of shit gets legs broken.

So when Alex Rodriguez opted out of his contract, it came as no surprise. That his agent, Scott Boras apparently sent E-mails to all the sports writers covering the World Series during game four, did. Buster Olney went so far as to call Rodriguez the most selfish player in the game and said that any team who signs him would be giving up their soul. Hall of Fame nose picker and baseball writer Peter Gammons went on a tirade on ESPN Radio bitching and whining about how A-Rod impeded on the Red Sox moment in the sun. Of course not one word has been spoken or written bringing the Yankees to task for carrying out their tasteless firing of Joe Torre during the fucking playoffs. It’s all been about firing Joe, not the timing, which flatly goes against baseball’s tradition and rules of avoiding major announcements until after the World Series. Nor has Hank Steinbrenner’s ridiculous grandstanding over the whole matter during the ALCS and the World Series been spoken about at all. It’s all been about the hiring of the incredibly overrated Joe Girardi while leaving out the fact that when he was brought in, Don Mattingly was promised the manager’s job when Torre either retired or was fired. With that fucking team, and the hideous Steinbrenner offspring, even if they are not in the World Series, they still have to be the center of attention no matter how fat, ugly, stupid, and out of place they are. They are the epitome of crassness and boorish behavior. If there is any justice in the world of baseball, the Yankees won’t win another World Series for at least 100-plus years.

As for Rodriguez, you can almost see the monkey crawl off his back. It doesn’t matter where he goes now, he’s going to make his money regardless of who signs him. Unless he has a streak of Griffey-esque bad luck, he’s going to demolish the career home run mark and easily collect 3,000-hits. Either way, he’ll never have to listen to some idiot in a 150-dollar Yankees jersey call him a cocksucker and a pussy because he couldn’t make up in one swing the eight runs Mike Mussina just gave up in the third inning.

Chances are he signs in a smaller market with a friendlier fanbase. To say he was not a New York guy is to ignore the unreal numbers he put up there. You tell me, have they ever had a better third baseman in the history of that club? How many right-handed hitters stroll into Yankee Stadium – a park built for lefties – and rip off 36, 48, 35, and 54 home runs? The motherfucker is going to win his second MVP in pinstripes, two more than that cunt Jeter ever has in 13 years, and that fucking closet case has a 10-year, $189-million contract, but no one ever complains because he’s the new “Pride of the Yankees” and women all over Manhattan get moist just at the sight of the cocksucker.

Bitch, please.

The fact is that the Yankees fucked this one up on all fronts. Far removed from the days when prudence and judicious thought prevailed in the late-90’s, the Yankees are a collection of sideshow freaks and geeks, and Rodriguez was the smartest man in town when he decided to take a walk. Whether he goes to Boston, San Francisco or Los Angeles doesn’t matter, that he left the Yankees does. While the Yankees will predictably posture and preen and say that A-Rod could never measure up to the expectations or the pressure, and the fans will deride him as a pussy and a choke artist, the inverse is true. The Yankees, for all their resources, could never put together a club that was complete and whole. Rodriguez delivered day in and day out, changed positions for Jeter, and killed the fucking ball, but the Yankees did nothing to support him besides sign the checks. As for the fans, they just pissed away four years of bitching about the best player (yes, better than Bonds) since Ruth, and instead bitched about him as if he were Danny Tartabull. What would you do, stay and try to prove them wrong while everyone incessently goes after you like a convicted child molester? Fuck that, I’m on my way to San Francisco for some of Peter Magowan’s cash and a piece of the team after I retire as I work on breaking Bonds’ record. Oh, and the Giants have better young pitching, no matter what you may think of Joba Chamberlain, Ian Kennedy and Phil Hughes.

As for the Yankees, enjoy The Curse of Alex Rodriguez. He may not win one, but until you atone for your sins – including running off the best player of this generation – you’ll never win another World Series. Bank it, bitches.