Anatomy of Loss

Once, I was taller than the sky. And now I am lower than Christ's nails. And nothing ever seems to matter until it does. And wanting to believe is more than what it is.


I digress from a point I haven't made. A month ago, I lost $2,650 in a craigslist scam. Lost everything I had and way more. Nothing good has happened since October of last year and it all culminated with my bank calling me and reporting me to a collection agency despite my pleas to live a normal life. And the Celtics were me. No, sports aren't some beautiful metaphor for life, but they are this one time. This one time, the team that played lesser basketball for most of the time won and this once the guy that just wants something good to happen-- just wants someone to believe in him and pay him for something he loves-- lost.


No, this isn't a lament for Celtics fans. We've had enough championships. No, this isn't an anti-Lakers rhetoric piece, they deserved it. Thing is, everyone deserves it. This guy I know, he works in a pizza shop and his coworker's father died and loved the Lakers. And this guy I met, he was a big Derek Fisher fan because his daughter had cancer too. And this other guy, his mother was wearing a Celtic jersey the day of her open-heart surgery. And me, I am at the end of my rope. I am bereft of feeling. I got a letter from a collection agency I didn't know in June. And instead of breaking down (see, it was a different agency that wanted money I didn't actually know I owed), I laid down on my floor and laughed. The previous night, the Celtics had blown out the Magic.


I am a man who knows bad news. I practice for it. I practiced telling my family my dad died. He was sick but recovered. I am the man who will break bad news. I am the man my family leans on and will continue to. I want to be the last man to whine about the trivialities of life. This once, though, I got selfish. Just once. Even with a -$2000 bank account, even facing homelessness, I smiled at my friends and told them I couldn't afford a beer. I was just there to support their engagement or their birthday or what have you. I saw them at their happiest and put on the brave face. I always want to do that. I just want to do that, forever.


***

I turned off my phone for the Finals. It is still off. I don't want to turn it on ever again. I can't face this news. No more bad news. Please. I am Napoleon facing his last stand, but with the news there will be more of them. I am news of bad weather for the weekend. I am the day off spent doing laundry, standing in line for the DMV, or talking to a creditor when there are better things to be doing.


I know, sports are dumb. They are pointless displays of jingoism, determinism and overall pointlessness to the societal need. I know. I am a smart man who reads books, writes poems and wants your approval. But just once, I needed something and it failed. I'm not mad or even really disappointed. To be honest, the Celtics floated above the waves, dug hard into the Earth, made lives better, while I am in flux and make my friends' lives harder by asking for couches, demand their love, make them believe in me despite my obvious flaws. I am the man that asks more than they have and the Celtics are the ones that demand more of themselves. They are better men than me because when I learned I was less than my task, I stared at my future like a gun. They gave their all and I have complained for fouls.


I should have been thrilled that the Celtics made the finals. I'm sorry I wasn't. I am sorry that I wanted more. I am sorry that I wanted more money. I am sorry I wanted to write “Zagat Reviews” (the aforementioned con was centered through them) to finally achieve my goal: to have people care that I wrote something. I am sorry that I went outside my means. Please, though, I don't want to be sorry that I cared about something trivial. It was just that, for once,. I got to talk about something people cared about. They wanted to hear me talk about basketball. For once, the 2650 reasons I had to hate humanity melted away.


I feel fantastic for Laker fans. I do. The serenity that comes to the survivors, the champions, the idea that nothing feels better than believing, the idea that the Lakers' fans finally got theirs over the Celtics-- I get it. I really do. It's just that, the idea of belief is hard to grasp when no one believes in you. And now, at my lowest point, I needed more than distraction. I needed belief. And I had it for three fleeting quarters of some basketball game. Now, I am back to where I was: languid against the face of defeat. I am the man I knew I would be when I was fifteen; the once and future failure. And so are the Celtics. At least, though, they believed. I am not sure I do. The two are not mutually exclusive, belief and failure, except maybe this once. Believe in what you want, but basketball is my one ideal. And it failed me. I am a victim, and I will continue to be one, but it is a part of loving sports. It is also a part of believing in people. For me, at least, sports has paid off once in awhile. Faith, for the most part has not. Such is life.

A Pretty Special Day

Today is Sunday, May 9 and, unless you were hatched, a pretty important day. It's Mother's Day, and you should call your mother and express your disdain for her bringing into this horrible, terrible world. There's no unemployment in the womb, you know?

But today is also special for me, personally. Today, a man turns half a century. Fifty years old. This man was instrumental in making the greatest game on Earth fun for a little boy. He gave me my internet handle. And today, he makes me feel really, really old.

Most of you know Tony Gwynn as the - umm - very rotund baseball coach at San Diego State, and sometimes color analyst at TBS. Sure, he's a legend in San Diego, but to many he's a nasally voiced island of a man. That's too bad, because in actuality he was a lithe, 56-base-stealing point guard who still holds the SDSU all-time assist record. He was drafted by both the Padres and the San Diego Clippers (now in Los Angeles) on the same day.

When I met him and got his autograph at Coors Field a few days before his birthday in 1996, I wished him a happy birthday and told him I was going to bring him a card, but I forgot it. He stopped signing his name, looked up, and smiled.

Tony Gwynn didn't hit a lot of home runs. He never won a World Series. But he was my favorite baseball player, and he'll be that when he's 50, 80, or 500. He was - and is - a badass. And that's the truth.

Tebowned

Faith is a word that gets bandied around all the time in sports. You put your faith in an owner. They put their faith in a general manager. They put their faith in a coach or manager. They put their faith in the players. They put their faith in the fans to cheer them on, and the fans put their faith in the players to make the right decisions. The players put their faith in the coach or manager to put them in a position to make the right decisions. The coach or manager puts their faith in the general manager to let them handle the players the right way. The general manager puts their faith in the owner to allow them to build a team they think will win. The owner puts their faith in the fans to come out and watch.

It's the circle of sports life.

Rarely have sports faith and real faith intersected so publicly and controversially as they have with Tim Tebow, the Heisman-owning, God-fearing, championship-winning, circumcision-performing QB drafted 25th overall by the Broncos Thursday night.

I choose to keep my faith strictly within the sports realm, where I see results. That's how I see the world, how it's chosen to open itself up to me. I certainly don't begrudge anybody else their right to believe what they want to, so long as they don't force those beliefs on anybody else. Did Tebow do that at Florida? Only his teammates know for sure. He may or may not have with his personal faith, but there's no doubt that he did with his sports faith. He was a winner, and that is inarguable.

Do I believe he'll be a winner in the NFL? I don't. I don't think he'll ever be a viable quarterback in a pro system where he's required to consistently and accurately throw downfield. I think he should be more concerned with Mike 39 Razor than John 3:16. My "personal" faith in him is low; I don't think he's the "Mile High Messiah." (Or as BorL put it the other night during the Nuggets' loss to the Jazz, "You're the most negative fan I know.") But this isn't about my personal faith - it's about my sports faith. It's about believing that Josh McDaniels, Brian Xanders, and Pat Bowlen have watched hundreds of hours of tape, and presumably know what they're doing because they know their team, and they know what direction it should go. It's about believing.

I believe Tim Tebow will bust his ass. I believe he'll work as hard as he possibly can, while under the employ of the Broncos, to make the orange and blue winners, in whatever capacity is asked of him. That's about all you can ask for as a fan.

To borrow from something called ChaCha, I'm going to call Tim Tebow "Tim Tivo." In ten or fifteen years, I'll either want to rewind and watch all the highlights, or I'll want to fast-forward past all the misery and the horrors. Tim Tivo needs to pause, take a breath, and play. It's sink or swim time, now, for the Jesus fish of the NFL. There is no middle ground, no gray area. There never is when it comes to a leap of faith.

Way to go, TWWL

So, when ESPN isn't making grammatical gaffes, they're plain reporting the outcomes of games wrong.

True story. I was watching this game with my buddy, a Sharks fan. At the start of OT I said, "the only way this can really end is with the Avs losing on a fluke goal."

He countered, "or we just score on ourselves."

Five seconds later - BAM.

Crazy.

A Letter to the Denver Nuggets

Dear Denver Nuggets,

You are all a bunch of pussies. You have no heart. You have no balls. You have no guts. You have no spine.

Instead of rallying around your coach - who's gone because he's fighting FUCKING CANCER - and deciding to do the one thing he's tried to get you to do since he got there, the one thing that would take you from a very good team to a legitimate, scary, championship contender ... instead of doing that one thing that takes effort, and sweat, and blood - you choose the easy way out. You want the spoils of winning, but you don't want to put in the work.

Pussies.

On the second night of a road back-to-back, in a game against a good offensive team, in a place you haven't won at in almost six years, in a game you need to win to assure yourself the Number 3 seed and home-court advantage for the first round of the playoffs, you do the worst possible thing: you decide not to do the one thing that would give you a shot - play defense.

I could bemoan your unwillingness to pass the ball, which any idiot with at least one working eye could tell you is increasingly to your advantage. I could bemoan Adrian Dantley's inability to do anything resembling coaching. I could bemoan the fact that none of your top three players - MVP "candidate" Carmelo Anthony, proven "winner and quarterback" Chauncey Billups, and only legitimate "big man" Nene - show any willingness, desire, or ability to lead by example.

You are all lazy. You play horrible pick-and-roll defense. Your switches and close-outs are slow and pathetic. You allow far too many and-one layups, because you have no idea how to foul hard at the rim. Your two legitimate defenders are banged to shit (Kenyon Martin) and a two-guard (Aaron Afflalo) - neither of which will help much in the Western Conference playoffs.

You all have a chance to give the sports world one of the best stories in the last decade - rallying around a sick coach and his son (which the team just signed and who also has beaten cancer) by finally getting his message he's been preaching for years - but you're going to piss it away.

You bitch and moan at the refs far too frequently (even when, unfortunately, many of the calls seem to go the other way). You take horrible shots and are way too inconsistent (looking right at you, J.R. Smith). You cannot win unless you're shooting the lights out of the building.

And, once again, you play absolutely zero fucking defense. It's no coincidence that no "D" in Denver = enver = never, as in Never Win An NBA Championship.

You're all just a bunch of fucking pussies with a giant inflated ego where your heart should be and no fucking balls and tonight I'm ashamed to be your fan.

Sincerely,

Phony Gwynn

And Now, a Simple Link to Something Fantastic

The Pretzel Factory's own bearded man-child, Business or Leisure (AKA Jeff Laughlin), recently attended the final round of a riveting Masters down in Augusta, Georgia.

TheAwl.com was nice enough to let him write his thoughts and musings on what seemed to be an incredible fucking day.

Enjoy.