Saturday Evening Meandering

It's finally going to rain in Austin, and to be honest, I’m struggling with what to write here. The stove is not hot, and I am not going to busy myself with statistical analyses or projections for a while longer. So, until I read something else that takes me down a line of thinking or until I sit down to write a few of the longer pieces I have in mind, I’ve got nothing. Which is to say that I need to ramble a while and see what happens.



To be honest further, I didn’t even mean to write for A & I tonight. I meant to work on another writing project. Except, I just don’t have it tonight, and it’s not the sort of thing I can force. So I have put on The Fragile from Nine Inch Nails because I just bought tickets for their March show, which reminded me that I hadn’t listened to this album in a long time. At the time this album slipped largely under the radar, but it deserved better because it’s not just good but also fascinating. I cooked pancakes with blueberries and raspberries and something called marionberries, which are delicious it turns out, and now the music is going and I’ve sat down to put something out so the night is not wasted.

I knew I’d be staying in tonight, even though it’s Saturday, because I went out Wednesday and Thursday instead. Wednesday night it was happy hour jazz and then Thai food and then a new band with a new EP playing at the Lucky Lounge. Thursday it was Bettye Lavette, a 59 year old soul and blues singer who has been in the business since she was 16, recently re-acclaimed, if that’s a word, winning awards and getting back to notoriety with two recent albums.

Ms. Lavette was at the Continental Club, and before she went on I eavesdropped next to a man telling a woman that he had settled in Austin for the time being while he decided what to do with his house in New Orleans, the first floor of which had flooded. We were standing near the door, and she had not had enough money for the cover charge ($12), so he had given her a $5, and once she had gotten inside she had gone to the ATM and then bought him a drink, sapphire and tonic. Then I heard him say that his mother had sang with Ms. Lavette decades ago, so he wasn’t going to miss this show. Awesome.

Ms. Lavette came on later and summoned a presence on stage that a younger woman could not possibly accomplish, and blew the entire room away. There is soul music and then there is soul music sung by a woman with nothing to prove who wants to be there singing for a crowd, to take you on her journey, and this was the latter. It was fantastic. Fantastic, but also late, so last night I went to sleep after the Spurs beat the Heat and tonight I’m staying in as well. So be it. I’m already getting tired.

I finally got around to reading some of last week’s Tuesday Morning Quarterback, in which Gregg Easterbrook brought up something I was not going to mention, but now that he did I feel like it’s worth dwelling on a moment longer:

“Boo! Boo! The Soldier Field crowd was lustily booing Rex Grossman in the second quarter, when he had two passing yards. Barely a month ago, the same crowd lustily booed Kyle Orton and chanted GROSS-man, GROSS-man.”

I noticed the same thing, and I thought to myself, So, it’s not just Cubs fans with this short attention span and an attitude bordering on blood-thirstiness, but I tempered my reaction because I do not follow the Bears closely enough to make an informed judgment about, well, anything – including their fans’ attitude. I thought it might have been just me.

I object to the booing, of course, especially since in August everyone would have been happy with this season, and when Grossman went down everyone would have been content with much less. I mean, ten wins in fifteen games with Kyle freaking Orton? But, like I said, I am not any sort of authority or even an informed source, so here is my only question: how does this sort of booing help? Is it cathartic for fans? Is it supposed to help motivate the players? What’s going on there? Is it some sort of demonstration of support?

In general, this business of support has me thinking, and I turn to the Bulls from last season, who also overachieved. I watched them sometimes even during the really bad years because I am an NBA fan as much as time allows, but last year I watched them more and made time for them because they were playing good basketball most games, and getting as much as they could out of their collective talent. Not that they were perfect, but I thought that they pushed the edge of their limitations, and squeezed out more than we anticipated.

One evening, about a year ago, I had the bartender at my favorite dive bar down the street put on the game, and I sat at the corner of the bar away from the pool table and watched. A couple of guys sat down at my end when the other end got full, and before too long the third quarter sucked them in. Both were older than me, and both talked fondly of the Jordan era. Both said that they hadn’t watched a minute all season. I convinced them that this team was starting to show signs of being alright, and the Bulls pulled out the game at the end. They cheered with me.

So why weren’t they following sooner? The Bulls were really bad for a couple of seasons, sure, but is that enough of a reason to totally forget about their existence? OK, Reinsdorf and Krause dismantled the team immediately after the 1998 season, and by this time in January 1999 Michael Jordan had retired, but did they betray us? Is that even possible after assembling so great a team for such an era?

(Aside: MJ on Krause & Reinsdorf in For the Love of the Game: My Story with help from Mark Vancil:

“What went on between Jerry Krause, Jerry Reinsdorf, and me during the 1985-86 season was something I never got over. I now look at that situation as a test, maybe the biggest test of my professional career. But it also gave me a very clear view of Krause and Reinsdorf. They were businessmen. They were not sportsmen and they didn't have a true appreciation for the game. They made business decisions and basketball just happened to be the business.”

Although, for what it’s worth, it was clearly more than a business for Reinsdorf last fall regarding the White Sox.)

I guess I’m starting to wonder why people follow sports so much in the first place, if they’re so ready to be disappointed as to boo a Bears team in the first half of an unexpected playoff game, and to forget that the Bulls were playing even when they were playing well again. Of course, all of this is just anecdotal evidence and shaky interpretation and nothing more. And there are a lot of people who are a lot more die-hard than me, although that sort of feels like the exception that proves the rule or something.

I took a date to a Bulls game last December, at which point they were 3-14. It was somewhere around our 4th date, and I sloshed a little of her beer onto her leg returning to my seat. She made a sarcastic comment, then caught herself because of course you don’t want to be too sarcastic when you’re just starting to date someone or they’ll think you’re, you know, like that or something. I’m not normally klutzy, either, and it was my first beer, but in any case the episode was not a dealbreaker for either of us; that came later, in the form of “You know how I said I thought I might quit my job and move to Austin to write? ...”

That game, in the upper deck we sat next to a couple of die-hards, an older man and his son who was also older than me. I talked with them a bit because they knew a lot about the team and I was learning from them. I had watched about half the games casually, and they had obviously watched a lot more closely. The Bulls won, beating Minnesota by a sizable margin, and moreover they looked like a good basketball team, leading from start to finish.

Over the next few months, this woman – who had never watched NBA basketball, although she went to Marquette and had gotten into the Dwyane Wade team – began to follow the Bulls, even when she wasn’t hanging out with me, because she got caught in the story of a young team carving an identity for itself. So if this woman up in Evanston – meaning no disrespect because she’s a great girl – but if she could get into the Bulls, where in the world was everyone else in Chicago those mid-season months?

It bothers me in general because Chicago is such a great sports city, and it bothers me in particular because Chicago teams are my favorites. It’s also the case that Chicago is where I was living, so it’s where I was observing this stuff; it might not be a local problem. I’m also not trying to facilitate an us-and-them sort of divide in fandom. What I think it comes down to is that as I recall sitting next to those guys at the UC, I realize that I missed having fans – strangers – like that to talk about the games with. It’s become rarer and rarer for me to sit down and find myself among fans that can lend insight and teach me about the game, even at Wrigley, where I have often heard sophisticated insight. It happened the last couple of seasons, but less. Or at least that’s how it seems as I think back. Part of me wonders if the people who might have had something to say weren’t saying it because there’s so much white noise in the form of everyone else’s chatter. And booing.

It must sound like I’m a whiny self-righteous crank. I hate that. Sometimes a critic, I am not usually a whiner, and I like to think I’m more even-tempered than self-righteous, besides which I am way too young to be a crank. It’s just that this stuff – sports – matters. It matters to those of us who invest time and heart but it also matters as a measure of culture. Culture is loosely the traditions and patterns and limits of behavior, and sports is one of the most prominent realms in culture, so what fans do and what fans accept is not isolated only to sports. It’s the reason Elaine did not want to date Putty when she found out he was a face painter.

I guess maybe it comes down to this: such shifty attitudes and expectations make it impossible for anything to ever be good enough, and while no one wants to see complacency, there is a difference between complacency and acknowledging a job well done. Unless I’m way off in my understanding of what constitutes a job well done, some good teams are not going to get their due when those of us who would applaud a team are drowned out so mightily by booing or by the silence of former fans who no longer follow. And when that happens so quickly as it has been, maybe sports like baseball will no longer be – or at least will not feel like – the noble institution that drew many of us to them in the first place, because pride and support are not capable of being fleeting.