2016

As everyone knows, today it was announced that Rio would host the 2016 Olympic Summer Games. As a Chicagoan, I'm super disappointed. But if my Facebook newsfeed is any indication, I'm the minority. It is littered with gloating comments about how happy everyone is that Chicago didn't get it.

Lately, it has become popular, in Chicago at least, to oppose the Chicago bid. It is mostly opposition to the amount of money we would have to spend. Yes, the taxpayers would most likely have to contribute a bit. But it is easy to forget about all of the positive aspects of getting the games. Jobs. Lots of jobs, actually...seven years worth of hundreds of construction jobs to start. Improved housing market. Improvements to the public transportation system. A sharp increase in business for local hotels, restaurants, catering businesses, and taxis. Revitalization of South Side neighborhoods that badly need it. A chance to show that we're cooler than New York and Los Angeles. Maybe they finally complete the Chicago Spire. Increased tourism for years to come. Plus, you get to tell your kids and grandkids about it.

As far as the negatives of hosting the Olympics is concerned, it is no secret that hosting the Olympics costs a lot of money. China has to spend $9,000,000 per year to maintain the famous Beijing National Stadium (the 'birds nest') it built (for $423 million) for the 2008 Summer Olympics, and it only held one event there this year. However, Chicago had nothing nearly as extravagant planned, and many considered the plan's biggest strength to be the fact that so many of the structures needed to host the games already exist. They needed to build a large stadium for the opening ceremonies and a variety of events, but it was going to be a temporary structure needing no ongoing funds to maintain.

Something else to consider is how many of the funds needed to host the Olympics are private funds, and how much of those funds are spent locally. I've had several friends cringe at the $60 million spent on the Chicago bid, but every dollar of that was private donations. A bunch of rich Chicagoans lost a lot of money, but none of that was going to be spent on public projects anyways. Another consideration to make is that a lot of that money was spent on local services anyways. VSA Partners, a local mammoth graphic design firm, was hired to make the logo. Ogilvy Chicago was hired to create the Chicago bid web campaign. I'm sure lots of the money spent to make the numerous banners and bus ads that covered the city were designed and printed locally. Point being: it isn't like we sent $60 million to Copenhagen, never to be seen again.

It is easy to talk about how much Daley sucks, and how much money the taxpayers would end up having to pay, and how all of the mobsters would corrupt the whole thing, and how annoying all of the construction would be. But the fact of the matter is, we just lost the chance to host a once-in-a-lifetime event that would instigate some major improvements to the city and pump a lot of money into the local economy. And that sucks.

This Is Why Soccer Is Lame

I personally wish American's would embrace soccer a bit more. It is the most popular sport in the world for a reason, even if it is low scoring and dull at times. However, too often you see someone get slide tackled, fall down, act like someone just amputated their leg, get taken to the sideline on a stretcher, then immediately reenter the game when a yellow card is or is not given. This following video might be the worst fake injury I've ever seen:

Rodney Mullen

When I was in my early teens, I took up skateboarding. I wanted so badly to be good at it and I practiced obsessively for a brief period of time. Now, I'm a pretty coordinated guy, and I've played a lot of sports in my day, but skateboarding just didn't come easily to me. At my peak, I could cleanly land a single kick flip probably about 10% of the time, and not while moving, and I was damn proud of it. So when I first saw a Rodney Mullen video, I had the same reaction as I would have had if you would have shown me a video of someone slam dunking on a 20 foot tall hoop or someone hitting an 800 ft home run. His moves just didn't seem possible. I have high hopes that I will live to see skateboarding as an Olympic event (based on the success of snowboarding and its international popularity and the fact that it seems to take as much skill, coordination, and athletic ability as most other Olympic events [I mean, lets face it, it is probably more deserving than Trampolining or Curling], but I'll save that for another day) so that guys like Rodney Mullen can enjoy the same kind of fame as Shaun White. Until then, enjoy this video:

The Baddest Man on the Planet

Mike Tyson is a terrifying man. He always was and always will be, and I've always had a fascination with him. It started with Mike Tyson's Punch-Out!! for Nintendo. It was the first video game I ever owned that incorporated a real life human being. And for those of you that have experience with that game, he was apparently some sort of super human. You had to have serious skills and a good hour and a half of free time to get far enough to face 'Kid Dynamite', and when you finally got there it would most likely be over in less than 30 seconds. It was like the game sped up to double speed or something. He was impossible to beat. [Side note: during winter break in college I made it my goal in life to go back to that game and beat Iron Mike, and I finally learned his timing and beat him, and it was one of the most satisfying experiences of my life]. It was enough to convince me that Mike Tyson was the most powerful man on earth.

Looking back, I think the main reason that I was so drawn to Mike Tyson is that he was both the hero and the villain. Little Mac was the traditional hero, because you controlled him, and thus, you were him, and you are always the hero in any video game. But what other intellectual property on earth is named after, endorsed by, and stars a real life villain? There isn't one. Sports games that are named after athletes always feature athletes that you idolize, but Mike Tyson was an athlete that we idolized and feared. Even now, when I see the image (above) from the title screen, it both excites me and scares me just a little. I think every kid that played Mike Tyson's Punch-Out!! wishes that just once they could control Mike and beat the living shit out of Little Mac.

Of course, it was important that Mike Tyson's image from the game was perfectly mirrored in reality. The game was released in 1987, and on August 1st, 1987 he became the first heavyweight to own all three major belts (WBA, WBC, and IBF) at the same time. On June 27, 1988, Tyson knocked out Michael Spinks (who had been the heavyweight champion just two years earlier) in 91 seconds. He would win 3 of his next 5 fights by knockout in the first round. And these were heavyweight boxers who had been training for months. It seemed that if he were to punch a regular man, that man would likely be dead before hitting the ground. Perhaps this is what earned him his many nicknames, including "Kid Dynamite" and "The Baddest Man on the Planet". He was a machine.

Then, in 1992, he was convicted for rape and served three years of a six year prison sentence. Needless to say, this enhanced the 'villain' side of Mike and diminished the 'hero' element. But there was still a mystique that surrounded him. He regained the WBC in March 1996, and on November 9, 1996 he fought Evander Holyfield for the first time, losing by TKO in the 11th round. The rematch on June 28, 1997 set a pay-per-view record of 1.99 million paying households that stood for nearly 10 years. Of course, this was the fight in which Mike bit Holyfield's fucking ear off and spat it onto the mat. It was clear that he had gone from being a machine to being an animal. Or more likely, he had always been an animal, but he didn't need to resort to cannibalism when he could easily outbox his opponent. Once his skills started deteriorating a bit, he simply resorted to a more unorthodox approach to defeating his opponent. I was no longer a kid afraid that Mike could kill me with a single punch, I was now a teenager who was afraid that Mike Tyson might possibly try to eat me. This might also have something to do with some post-fight remarks Tyson had to Lennox Lewis in 2002, "I want your heart, I want to eat his children". Granted, I was 22 at the time and no longer considered a scenario in which Mike Tyson tries to eat me a realistic possibility, but what kind of man thinks threatening to eat his opponent's children is an acceptable form of trash talking. Then, in early 2003, he got a facial tattoo and pretty much secured his legacy as the most frightening man that ever lived. But to me, he'll always be 'Kid Dynamite' from Punch Out!!, and I'm always going to wish I could turn things around on Little Mac and beat the shit out of him as Mike Tyson.

Maroon

In honor of tonight's College Football National Championship, I'd like to ask what the deal is with so many college football teams using maroon (burgundy/dark red/whatever) in their uniforms. I have reached the point where I automatically root against any team with maroon as their color. I'm not talking about having maroon in combination with another color. That is fine. There aren't THAT MANY good colors for sports teams, but there are just so many teams with maroon and white uniforms. For example:

Those are the uniforms of Alabama, Texas A&M, Nebraska, Stanford, and Oklahoma. And if you look at the uniforms Arkansas and Louisville, you'll notice they are barely different. Then there are a few teams that are very close like Ohio State, Wisconsin, and North Carolina State. Even if you just add in a little gold—it's unoriginal (see USC, Boston College, and Arizona State)—but at least it is something. It seems like half the games taking place on any given Saturday is the white team versus the maroon team.

The thing that is strange is how underused green is in basically all sporting uniforms. Perhaps it just isn't very masculine? Of the 4 major sports, the only teams I can think of that use green as their primary colors are the Oakland A's, the Boston Celtics, the Dallas Stars, and the Green Bay Packers. I can definitely think of more than 4 professional sports teams that use maroon for their colors.

There isn't really anything wrong with using maroon, I'd just like to see a little bit more originality out there. 

Fantasy Football

So, yes, I get the whole fantasy sports thing. It makes games that you usually wouldn't care about matter all of the sudden. I once participated in an office pool called a 'Confidence Pool' where you picked a winner to every game and assigned points to each game based on how sure you were that a certain team would win, and whoever had the most points for the week won some money. If I were still involved in that, or had a fantasy player performing in tonight's Monday Night Football game between the Jacksonville Jaguars and the Houston Texans, I might actually care a little bit about the game, instead of not caring at all. But I think people have gotten a little TOO into the whole fantasy sports thing. I have a friend who is way into it, and he is all of the sudden obsessed with the Washington Redskins because he has Clinton Portis on his fantasy football team. So we'll be doing something completely unrelated to football, and he'll be checking his phone to see the score of the Redskins game. Then, if they scored a touchdown, there is a brief celebration, but then he has to find out HOW they scored, and if they scored in any way that didn't involve Clinton Portis, then there is anger. If I'm ever out on a Sunday night and Sportscenter is on, there are guys all around who have memorized the rushing statistics for some guy I've never heard of playing in a game completely unrelated to Chicago. Then there are the guys who are actually pulling against the team they normal pull for because an opposing player is on their fantasy team. Kind of fucked up, right?

Although the obsession with stats is annoying, it is the satisfaction people get by having a successful fantasy football week that is the weirdest. I understand that they are happy with what is essentially winning a bet, but these guys start to act like they themselves won the game. Like THEY are the real athletes, and the members of their fantasy football team are just tools that they work with. Or maybe more like they are playing a game of Madden where the real life Clinton Portis is nothing more than a collection of polygons with assigned attributes for size and speed to them. Of course, the whole thing seems like nothing than the luck of where you pick in your fantasy draft combined with a couple of choices. It is like a game of blackjack: always hit on 11 and lower, never hit on 16 or higher. In your fantasy draft, if you pick first you probably pick Adrian Peterson or Peyton Manning, or Tom Brady. You might have picked Tom Brady, and normally he would score a million touchdowns for you. You might have hit on 12 in blackjack and gotten a 10 and busted. It happens. Or maybe you get lucky and pick out this year's big breakout running back. Feel free to celebrate if you just got $100 from winning your league, but just leave it at that. Don't walk around acting like you should be an NFL General Manager just because you can identify that they guy who was the best quarterback in the league last year happens to be having a good year this year as well.

Another unfortunate side effect from the whole fantasy sports thing is that if you don't participate in fantasy sports, but are still a sports fan, you have to hear about it all the time, like it is its own legitimate sport. There are shows on ESPN completely dedicated to talking about fantasy stats. There are crawls at the bottom of the screen during football games just listing player stats for all of the fantasy players. There are extensive day-by-day injury reports on sports channels and websites so people can know who to play on Sunday. On espn.com, the first main tab at the top of the site is ESPN, then the second main tab is Fantasy, followed by each of the major sports. Then the other day I read a news article about a certain fantasy football event like this one. Hey ESPN, how about we leave the sports reporting to actual sporting events, and leave the stories about people betting on sporting events out for now. Unfortunately, I'm sure they have their site set up that way for a reason. Meaning: I'm sure that a large percentage of their visitors are there for fantasy reasons. Maybe one day we can go back to enjoying sports for the sake of sports, and lose the constant need to have a personal financial and emotional stake in every game. It worked for, like, at least 150 years. Maybe it will work again.

No Cubs No

How could the Cubs do that to me?

Everyone kept joking about how the Cubs were going to find a way to blow it, and I kept defending them saying "No, they are just too good this year. I'm not saying they are going to win the World Series, but they will certainly compete for it". Man, did they prove me wrong. I actually had a bad dream last night, but it was basically me just reliving the endless onslaught of ground balls that was the Cubs offense in the NLDS. I don't even know what to think anymore. How can I possibly get excited for next season? The Cubs won 97 games, and were the best team in the National League. Maybe I will get excited if they sign C.C. Sabathia, Johan Santana, Albert Pujols, Manny Ramirez, Cliff Lee, and Jonathan Papelbon...and win 140 games in the regular season.

A month or so ago, I outlined a dream in which the Cubs win the World Series, then Obama gets elected, and then Chicago gets awarded the 2016 Olympics. Now I'm worried that the Cubs sucked so bad that they will poison the other aspects of my dream. We should know in exactly one month.