But think about the story we’re being sold: The National Enquirer pubs a story saying Tiger is stepping out on his wife. A couple nights later, at two or three in the morning, Tiger decides to leave the house for no apparent reason. While trying to back out of the driveway – stone sober, the reports insist – he manages to wrap the Escalade around a tree. With me so far? Good. Then his wife comes out and tries to “rescue” him by bashing out the windows with a club.

If none of this smells a tad overripe to you, call me. I’m working a sweet real estate deal – waterfront property in south-central Florida, as it turns out – and am looking for partners.

Anyhow, we’re not here to snark over the fact that Woods lives in a town with the most gullible CSI unit in America. We’re here to discuss what this case tells us about the brave new world of public relations and crisis communications in the land of the ubiquitous, 24/7/4ever tabloid news cycle.

The Ugly Choices

Say you’re a PR counselor. And you represent a client who encounters a personal crisis of the general shape and/or size of Tigergate. What do you do?

You say this:

Client, you have a choice, and I can’t make it for you. On the one hand, you have a right to privacy, despite what the howling jackals of the free press would like us to believe. You’re entitled to say nothing and to deal with your personal life behind closed doors. They may stalk you for the rest of your days, but you may, if you choose, ignore them. You don’t even have to acknowledge their existence, and if they get out of line you can get restraining orders and hire security to keep them out of your immediate personal space.

Or you can face the music.

Now, if you choose option B, you’ll need to be fully forthcoming. If they smell a lie, a dodge, a rhetorical two-step, any hint at all that the truth they’re getting is even slightly varnished, well, it’ll be worse than if you’d stonewalled them. And a calculated, cynical faux press conference event like the one staged by that Tiger look-alike robot a couple of weeks back? Yeah, I’d avoid that like I would pigeon tartare.

So option B = 100% transparency. Think about all the things that means. Like, what’s your self-respect worth? How you feel about being on your knees before the drooling, unwashed masses?

If you opt for route A, though, understand something – and this is critical. Your brand is going to take an epic nard-stomping. It may never recover. Even if it does, it may take a very long time. If your livelihood depends on your public reputation, the question becomes how much money do you need to live on? How much are you willing to sacrifice? And I mean this literally, Client. This is a math question – how many dollars do you have, how many do you need, and how many are you willing to forego?

Hell Hath No Fury

Sadly, options A and B are more or less mutually exclusive. That sucks, I know. It’s not fair that a person should have to make this kind of choice. But that’s the world we live in.

Once upon a time a newspaper arrived in the morning and the news came on TV in the evening. Like a dog that knows dinner time is 6pm, the public was acclimated to this information rationing routine. In that world a pro like me could control the flow of data. Gatekeep like a sumbitch, you betcha. Top-down, one-to-many them until the cows come home. Rover is going to eat at six, and he’s going to eat what I put in front of him, by god.

Those days are gone, though. With the ubiquitous tabloid infotainment cycle in which we now find ourselves morally adrift, you’re no longer facing the well-heeled family dog from your basic ’50s sitcom. These days Rover rolls with a posse and an attitude. Kibble at six? Fuck you, master. I’ll eat when I want, and if you don’t like it I’ll head over to the Johnson place. Dogs are a too-rare commodity these days, and unless you’d like me to become the neighbor’s faithful hound, there better be something tasty in that dish around the clock.

Forgive me if I’m torturing the metaphor, but hopefully the point is clear. In a world with 24-hour “news,” always-on Internet and now an exploding mobile landscape, where that ubiquity is never further away than your pocket, the rules have changed. And not in your favor.

Your Life May Belong to You, But Your Brand Belongs to the Public

See, today’s public has gotten entitled. They’ve gotten accustomed to the immediacy, the comprehensiveness of the on-demand infocycle. Key word: demand. Something happens, they find out within seconds. And if it’s even remotely interesting, there are dozens (hundreds, even thousands) of outlets and individuals on the trail, relentlessly scouring the story for every minute scrap of detail, no matter how banal or trivial.

It’s their right to know … well, whatever the hell they want to know. Information wants to be free. Information is power. They’ve paid for their phones and their cable and they endure the ads on their favorite Web sites because they want content. All of it. Now, bitches. Understand that, at least subconsciously, they feel like they have paid for the right to know whatever they want about you. Your private life is their property. You’re public domain now. That may seem perverse, but there it is.

If you get righteously indignant and insist on option A (that’s the “respect my privacy route”), Client, one of two things is going to happen. On the one hand, people may respect your courage and principles and give you the space you need to get your life back tog…[snzrrrk...hrrf...BWAHAHAHAHA....] Hoo. Thanks, thanks. I’ll be here all week. Remember to tip your waitress.

Aherm. So no, I was just kidding. That’s not one of the things that might happen. I just wanted to see that cute little glimmer of hope leap into your puppy dog eyes again. I know, I’m a hateful, soulless bastard. You knew that when you hired me, though.

Seriously, though. One thing that might happen is rampant outrage. How dare you clam up on us? Hell hath no fury like a consumer scorned. They’ll carry on like you betrayed them personally, even though they may never have been in the same time zone with you.

This will be very bad. But not as bad as the other thing that can happen, which is that they move onto some other shiny thing and forget about you completely. That yawning sound you’re hearing is the sound of your personal brand sloughing onto the heap of permanent irrelevance. It’s a very different sound than the clink of gold coins being dropped into your pockets, isn’t it?

This Is Your Life

I’m sorry, Client, I’d say. This is all I have. I can explain the landscape, detail your options, and execute like a hall of famer along the course you choose, but I can’t pick that path for you. This is the rest of your life we’re talking about. You have to decide which cup of poison to drink.

I mean, sure, if you were Tiger and I had a hot tub time machine I’d be happy to jacuzzi back a few years and try to explain to you the deleterious impact that unsanctioned cocktail waitresses can exert on your cash flow position, but let’s be honest. You’d listen to me about like Senator Fatback listens to a lobbyist who shows up empty-handed, wouldn’t you?

And in truth, we can carp about the system all we want, but if it weren’t for this over-the-top, completely ludicrous system your brand probably wouldn’t be a percent of what it is today, anyway, right? Live by the sword, die by the sword.

I know none of this is what you want to hear, Client, but you called me to manage the crisis. Which means I arrived shortly after we lost control of important parts of the game. So now we play the hand we’re dealt.

There is an edict that was always true about crisis management, but it’s about a million times more important today than it once was: the best way to deal with crisis is to avoid it. The lesson is a simple one. People will find out. So if you don’t want to see it on TMZ and YouTube and Facebook and Twitter, don’t fucking do it.

As I say, simple.

Then there’s the fact that there are virtually no interviews. Well, there are always a couple on the BBC, usually of any UK winners, which this year there was exactly one of. That was the delightful Amy Williams in the delightfully named skeleton. And some discussion s on the finer points of curling, which in our household was appreciated. Eurosport has the occasional interview, but usually with a past winner of the biathalon or something, which usually meant it was in Russian or Norwegian or something, so it was short, and often translated (barely). So that’s what we got. What we didn’t get were those extended heartwarming biographies of (usually, but not always, American) athletes (and their friends and family) that the US broadcast media seems intent on shoving down everyone’s throats about the current hot teenage snowboard sensation, or another Ohno profile. Not having to watch all that just makes me glow. Did I mention no (or painless) commercials? If anything, however, the BBC and Eurosport announcers and commentators are getting a bit too American—too much shouting. And the second commentator in the US/Canada hockey game gave a really good imitation of Fred Willard. But still, that’s a small price to pay.

And the sports shown are just great. There’s some of the usual hot stuff, figure skating and whatnot. But the focus in on European sports, that is, sports that Europeans across the continent like to do. So there’s little in the way of national heroes (or extended profiles of them). What we generally get, especially on Eurosport, is extended coverage of one event. And Europeans love things like biathalons and cross-country skiing. So we’d get the whole race, no matter how long it was. This is the way to see it. Because you actually do get into the rhythm of the event—things speed up, things slow down, and you have a chance to see when what you’re watching is pure effort, or strategy or the athlete just scoping things out. It’s a revelation on some of these sports. Cross-country skiing is interesting to watch. Who knew?

So it all turns into an extended Zen thing. We sit there, Mrs W knits, I do Sudokus or catch up on the pile of accumulated magazines, and we watch the skiers, or the speed skaters, and occasionally things get exciting with a lot of yelling (especially at the finish of whatever the event is), but generally it’s a pretty restful affair. Of course we get caught up in the drama—there’s always drama. But it’s wonderful to learn that the drama of these things is textured, and to learn something about the nuances of the different ways that people conduct themselves under the stress of competition at this level. With no (or hardly any) commercials.

So I’m looking forward to Russia in four years. Especially the biathalon. And the high points this time around? Well, that was some hockey game, wasn’t it? And the women’s 30K cross country—to race flat out for an hour and a half, over 30 kilometers, in difficult snow, and to be separated by three-tenths of a second at the finish—that was astonishing.

So today S&R leaps into the fray with some recommendations for new sports we’d love to see added to the 2014 Winter Games.

• Bobcross: We love skicross. We love snowboardcross. We love bobsledding. Give us four sleds and a course carved out of the side of a mountain of ice – first to the bottom wins. We think you’d need a two-man (men’s and women’s, of course), a four-man and an eight-man coed competition. Trust me, ain’t nobody beating Jimmie Johnson, the driver of the US-1 sled, to the bottom of the hill.
• Nude Luge: We really can’t wait for the mixed doubles here.
• Men’s Pairs Ice Prancing: Hell, we’re 99% of the way there already. To make it interesting, teams will be paired with contestants from Project Runway on the costume design portion of the competition. Tim Gunn can coach the US team and judging will be handled by Heidi Klum, Nina Garcia and Topamericandesignermichael Kors.

Scholars & Rogues supports the ongoing mission of the International Olympic Committee to grow the Olympic tradition. In fact, I personally am already in training for the 2016 Summer Games, where I hope to medal in the Walking Down to the 7-11 to Grab a Quick Cup of Coffee competition.

I was pretty hard on Bode Miller after his no-show in Torino four years ago, about as hard as I’ve ever been on anyone who wasn’t in a position of political authority. Looking back, I don’t regret a word of it. He established himself as the archetype of American sports marketing, and his all-hype no-results performance was about as embarrassing as anything in the history of the US Olympic team.

And while I didn’t write about her, my friends certainly heard some choice words on the subject Lindsey Jacobellis, who decided that showing her ass was more important than winning.

Lately, as I watched both athletes seeking Redemption^® (Copyright 2010 by NBC; all rights reserved) in the Vancouver games , I’ve thought back on their various self-indulgences. Both are four years older. Miller has a kid now and seems a little more responsibly minded. Jacobellis seems duly chastised (and why not – for the last four years she’s been the sports world’s version of Miss Teen South Carolina, such as). The truth is that I was rooting for her to win this year. I’ve also been pulling for Miller, and was really happy when he finally won a gold yesterday in the Super-Combined. Unfortunately for Jacobellis, she crashed again (this time while actually racing).

Still, I’ve been thinking less about them per se than I have my own reactions to them. After all, the worst you could possibly believe about Miller and Jacobellis is that they’re just two clueless jocks. They haven’t killed anyone. They haven’t ruined the economy. Heck, as far as I know they haven’t even used steroids (and given the rigors of Olympic drug-testing, they’re probably cleaner than an obsessive-compulsive’s lunchbox). In an average day I come across stories about people a zillion times worse than they are, what? … a hundred times? A thousand?

And yet, all you have to do is read one of my Bode posts, linked above, to understand that their behavior damned near twisted my nipples off. I think I’ve figured out why.

It has to do with opportunity. The fact is that these two kids have been blessed with fantastic opportunities. They were born athletic and they were fortunate enough to find themselves in situations where they could develop their skills. There’s no question that they worked hard – I don’t care how gifted an athlete you are, you don’t get to the Olympics without working. Finally, as a result of this rare cocktail – native ability, a context that allowed them to practice, and lots of hard work (pretty much the archetypal trifecta that Malcolm Gladwell talks about in Outliers, in fact) – they found themselves on the brink of glory. And what did they do?

When opportunity knocks, piss on it.

Bode and Lindsey together were presented with more opportunity in a few short days than all the residents of some American towns and cities put together see in a lifetime. And they didn’t respect the opportunity. They didn’t recognize the gift before them. So instead of jumping it like a starved alley cat on the last fishstick on Earth, they blew it off. They partied. They hotdogged. And when they were called on their stupidity, each treated America to an epic exhibition of whatever.

I’m like a lot of people, I guess. What wouldn’t I have given to have that kind of talent and to get that kind of crack at Olympic success? What wouldn’t a lot of us give for a gold medal?

Better yet – what wouldn’t a lot of us give for a fraction of the money that comes with athletic success? How many people could feed their families for a week on what Bode flushed in Torino’s nightclubs the night before an event? What could a lot of poor school districts do with the endorsement dollars a gold would have brought Jacobellis (or that she got anyway, because in that culture, some assign street cred to that kind of “rebellious” fucking around)?

In short, there aren’t enough incredible, life-changing opportunities to go around, and to a guy who’s worked pretty hard for the chances he’s gotten, it’s simply unfathomable that you’d treat one of those golden tickets with anything short of pure reverence. They weren’t actually cheating me, but my feelings about opportunity are such that I couldn’t help taking it personally. And yes, I know that says more about me than it does them.

I can’t say what Bode and Lindsey really think deep inside, although I imagine Bode is probably pretty happy about that redemption meme that NBC has worked so hard to establish. Maybe some of the media pose we’ve seen in the past was a defense mechanism. Maybe they were beyond humiliated and they’re just trying to cope. I know I’d be, but who can say what others are thinking? And like I say above, I wish them both well. There’s a narrow window for an Olympic athlete, and Miller’s was probably damned near shut when he jumped out of the gate yesterday. Jacobellis will be 28 in four years, and it’s hard to say whether she’ll still be at the top of her game at that point. A lot can happen in four years.

More than anything, the message here is for the rest of us, and especially for those who are still young enough that most of their lives (and opportunities) lie ahead of them.

When opportunity knocks, open the door. And treat it with the respect it deserves, because this may the only time it comes to see you. Ever.

Most importantly, his apology will be carried live by CBS. By NBC. By ABC. By CNN, CNBC, HLN, Fox News, Fox Business and MSNBC. That makes it a bigger story than health care. It’s bigger than the guy who crashed a plane into the IRS building in Austin. It’s bigger than Iran’s nuclear ambitions. It’s even bigger than the Winter Olympics, which are offered on tape-delay.

And it’s sure as hell bigger than this assortment of crybaby hippie socialist bullshit. Democracy. Survival of the planet. Will you whiny bitches please shut the fuck up?

As my colleague Dr. Slammy is wont to say, welcome to the Fall of Rome. Will somebody pass me the Dom?

Last night I was watching the Men’s Moguls competition from Vancouver. Absolutely fantastic fun, lots of drama, the thrill of victory, apeshit Canadians, etc. But this particular event, probably moreso than anything this side of parkour, drives me bonkers. (No, figure skating and synchronized swimming aren’t sports. Anytime you can trigger controversy because your tutu is trimmed in fur, whatever you’re doing isn’t a sport. Period. Let’s move along.)

Here’s the problem.

What part of hurtling a zillion miles an hour down a double-black mogul field isn’t good enough for you? I mean, powder, skis, a steep mountain and a stopwatch – that sounds like a pretty good sport to me. In fact, it sounds like some other time-tested sports, plus the complication of all those cruciate-buckling bumps. Pass me a beer and turn up the volume, eh?

So why do they have to add the gratuitous element of judging? Seriously. Why, at various intervals, is it necessary to insert jumps – which are to skiing moguls as beat poetry is to yak-dressing – unnecessarily complicating the affair with style points?!

Imagine if the same pot-addled hippie slackers had invented track and field. You’d have an event where you sprint 30 meters, then do a ten-yard tumbling run. 30 more meters, then you do a couple backflips off a minitramp. Then you sprint the rest of the way. Six judges (at least one of which hails from a nation you’re at war with) score your tumbling from zero to six points each (factoring in degree of difficulty and artistic impression – so fur is a plus here), and that number is combined with your time to the finish line to yield your final score.

We call it the “100-meter dash.” And you don’t even want to think about what these people would do to the 5,000-meter steeplechase (but it involves a stop at Starbuck’s).

Look, bitches. We let all your wack-ass skate-punk X Games derivations into the real Olympics (granted, this was mainly because the TV folks desperately needed something that Americans could win at), baggy pants, bad posture and all. And admittedly, the results haven’t been all bad. Hell, we freakin’ love snowboard-cross, and it’s hard not to jam on a guy whose nickname is “The Flying Tomato.”

But can we please leave well enough alone? I get that some sports require judges (half-pipe, freestyle, etc.), but when you have an event that works just fine as a real hell-for-leather race, can we just, you know, race?

Next time around, I want the moguls to involve young people with no instinct for self-preservation whatsoever jumping off the side of a mountain, and the first one to the bottom who doesn’t explode one or more knees wins. Period.

Thank you. We now return you to your regularly scheduled programming, already in progress.

There is no good way to die, especially when you’re only 21.

I’m like the rest of you: before yesterday, I’d never heard of Nodar Kumaritashvili. But something about his fatal crash in Vancouver hit me just so, at once blindsiding a place inside me where the beauty of life, the exhilaration of competition, the glory of human achievement, the searing pain of sudden death, and the dull ache of a lost lifetime of opportunity all improbably intersect.

There is no good way to die when you’re 21. But if you have to go at such a young age, I suppose the best way would be quickly, while doing the thing you love.

And later, to have the world bow its head for you for a few seconds. Finally, to have KD Lang offer up a heartbreaking rendition of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” in benediction…

Rest in Peace.

Click here to view the embedded video.

The purpose of the ad, of course, was to change people’s opinions on the issue of abortion. I don’t know how effective it was overall, but in my case it was successful. Before the ad I was pro-choice. Now I’m pro-abortion.

Thank you, and good night.

“What do you mean?“ I asked back. “Because like everyone, there are two of me: the good me and the evil me. Which one are you interested in?”

“The evil you first,” he replied.

“That’s easy,“ I said. “The evil me is the way I am because I have an older brother.”

Glenn is 14 months my elder, the perfect age gap. For him. 14 stupid months. That doesn’t seem like much now, but when I was 10, that extra 1.2 years gave him a decided advantage in every enterprise.

“Daddy!” I screamed, in 1965. “ Look at this bluegill I caught. It’s as big as my hand!”

“Daddy!” screamed Glenn. “Look at this catfish I caught. It’s a long as my arm!”

“Boys!” replied The Dad. “Look at this watch on my wrist. It’s time to go.”

The Dad didn’t like to fish. But it wasn’t just fishing, it was everything! Glenn could throw a football farther, could shoot a basketball better, he could even beat me at horseshoes! Now, I’ll give him the football and basketball, since he had an extra year of practice on me. But horseshoes? Who practices tossing horseshoes? Glenn could drill me in tennis, won all my marbles, and had a poker face that left him with my entire allowance week after week. I even tried to learn croquet just so there would be something I could beat him at. I practiced at night so nobody would see me with my little mallet and my yellow striped ball. For two months I did this, but when I suggested it as a new game to play at the Park, he won easily. Then he held me up to public ridicule for suggesting we play a French girl’s game. Then he hit me with his mallet.

“It’s not really a French girl’s game,” said my reader who isn’t my therapist. “Croquet can be quite challenging.” But I wasn’t listening to him. I was back in childhood.

And the girls, dear lord, the girls. They flocked to Glenn. All he had to do was shake his nasty black mane, and they appeared like a magician‘s doves. To this day, whenever I travel home and meet some girl from high school, the first thing she asks is “Have you seen Glenn lately? Do you have his phone number?“ I lie and tell them nobody has seen Glenn since he ran off with a carnival in 2001, and they coo and ahh about how romantic that life must be.

By 1969, I didn’t need anyone to tell me I was a loser. I already knew it, since I lost to Glenn all the time. Any self-assurance I had about anything was sucked out of me by the time I was 14. I was worse than empty. I was a vacuum rimmed by loss. Losing was all I knew.

“Fascinating,” said the reader who isn’t my therapist. “But that’s enough about the evil you. Sibling rivalries can be intense. But what about the good you? Where did he come from?”

“The good me came from ping pong,” I said. “It’s a long story.”

“Well, you are paying me by the hour,” he replied.

I discovered ping pong in 1971, and I was a natural. OK, that part’s not true. I was actually no better than average, but Glenn was the worst ping pong player I had ever seen. He was terrible. He couldn’t slam, he couldn’t block, he couldn’t go from forehand to backhand without dropping his paddle, and he couldn’t move three feet sideways. So it naturally followed that he refused to play me.

But one day in 1973 when he was home on leave from the Army, Glenn and I were at a party hosted by one of the hundred girls who had a crush on him. She had a ping pong table in her basement. I picked up a paddle and began to bounce the ball casually. Glenn and his latest squeeze came in and I suggested a game. Just for fun. Glenn chuckled.

“What my little brother doesn’t know,” he mumbled, “is that I’ve spent the last two years practicing. I won second place in the 1972 Fort Sill Table Tennis Invitational. Shall we play for money? I got $20 that says I can beat you.”

“There’s no need to play for money,“ I laughed. “Let’s just play for the joy of competition. All our friends are here to watch. Just a friendly game to 21. OK?”

It was great. Either Fort Sill was home to the worst ping pong players in the country, or his confidence was undone by our audience. I won 21 to 6. He demanded a rematch, but I pointed to my watch.

“Sorry, but I have to go,” I said and left. Oh, I gave him the rematch he desperately wanted… 15 years later, in 1988.

By then, all the pretty girls of our youth had married. We had too, so when I went to visit him to celebrate the birth of my daughter Katie, he surprised me with an offer to play a game on his new ping pong table. We batted the ball back and forth for a few minutes, then he suggested we have our long awaited rematch. One game to 21. I agreed. There was no crowd this time, just the two of us. Glenn had gotten better, but when his last serve went into the net, I won 21 to 15.

“I don’t suppose,” he whispered, “I could interest you in a rematch?”

“Sorry, but I have to go,” I said. I left him there, shaking and sweating. “You don’t look well. You should probably see a doctor about that twitch.” We didn’t play again until 1999.

The funny thing about all this is that I didn’t play any ping pong between our matches. I didn’t practice at all, though it was obvious Glenn did. He had the finest table, an expensive paddle, top of the line ping pong balls. He even paid for lessons from a guy named Dr. Kwon, who stood behind Glenn with his arms crossed like a James Bond villain, during our match. But when the match was on the line, Glenn was lost, and when he stood there after I won, he muttered and cursed and looked kind of crazy. Dr. Kwon screamed something in Mandarin, slapped Glenn’s head and stormed off. That last match in 1999 broke something inside him. He was close, so close, but in the end I won 21 to 19.

“I guess… you wouldn’t… be interested in a rematch?“ he hissed. His voice careened on the glassy edge of insane. I almost felt sorry for him.

“Sorry, but I have to go,” I said. And that’s the last time we played.

“So,” said my reader who is not my therapist. “When’s the rematch?”

“What makes you think there’s going to be a rematch?” I asked. “There’s no rematch. Barring a Don King pay-per-view spectacular or the return of Wide World of Sports, there‘s never going to be a rematch. I’m old and fat now. I haven’t picked up a ping pong paddle in eight years. If there was a rematch, I could lose. When you compete, the only game that matters is the last one and the next one. There’s not going to be a next one, so I will bask in the glory of my last win forever. I intend to take my last victory to the grave and beyond to eternity.”

“I think I’d like to talk to your brother about this,” said my reader who is not my therapist. “Could you give me his phone number?”

“I would if I could,” I replied. “But the last time I heard from him, he’d joined a carnival on 2001.”

Despite reports to the contrary, Scott McCarron would like to clear up his thoughts on Phil Mickelson: He never called his fellow player a “cheater.”

In a statement released Monday, McCarron discussed his original comments to the San Francisco Chronicle regarding Mickelson and other players using Ping-Eye 2 clubs that have grooves which no longer conform to USGA and PGA Tour standards, but are still considered legal because they were grandfathered in two decades ago.

“I responded, ‘It’s cheating and I am appalled Phil has put it in play,’” McCarron stated. “I never called Phil Mickelson a cheater. That being said, I want my fans, sponsors, and most importantly, my fellow players, to know that I will not be silenced and I will continue my efforts to get the groove issue resolved.”

So, if you’re keeping score, McCarron didn’t call Lefty a cheater. He said that what Lefty is doing is cheating.

By the way, I want it understood that if, in the future, I say that someone here is fucking pigs, that does not mean I’m calling you a pigfucker. Big difference.

Katsumi Yamada doesn’t have it easy. The 44-year-old Hyogo native alienated his family, lost his full-time job, and completely devoted his life to training for the sport he loves.

He’s a classic case of a tragic hero. Peaked too soon. Fell too soon.  Never seemed to ever pull himself back up after suffering more embarrassing defeats than any athlete or bodybuilder should know.

But no matter how many failures he posts – 23, to be exact –  he keeps coming back for more.

His love for the sport isn’t mutual. It continues to spit back in his face and kick him to the curb. Some may argue that it’s even ruined his life. Yamada’s lust for victory has left him with a bruised body, bruised ego, and bruised spirit.

You’ve probably never heard of him. That’s OK. Neither had I. Until three years ago.

The Rise of Katsumi Yamada

Yamada made his debut on American television in 2007. G4TV added Japan’s “Sasuke” Tournament to its lineup under the name “Ninja Warrior” and, along with it, Katsumi Yamada. Complete with English subtitles, it became America’s first exposure to Sasuke, which had been airing in Japan since 1997.

Put simply, Sasuke is the world’s most difficult obstacle course. Made up of four stages and 100 competitors, the tournaments are held semi-annually atop of Mount Midoriyama. The course tests physical and mental endurance, speed, strength, stamina, and balance. Sasuke continues to evolve as new obstacles are added to the course, making it progressively more difficult with each passing tournament.

Obstacles include jumping up a 16-foot wall, grappling across a suspended curtain, and navigating across a ledge with only your fingertips for support. Additionally, the First, Second, and Fourth Stages must be completed within a certain time limit. Don’t worry about falling – there’s a pool of water underneath each obstacle to rescue competitors.

Think it sounds easy? Check out some footage from Stage Three.

Sasuke remains widely popular in Japan while developing somewhat of a cult following in the states. Since ’97, there have been a total of 24 Sasuke Tournaments. Thousands of athletes, celebrities, personalities, and fan favorites continue to attempt the course. Three have completed all four stages. Only a handful know what Stage Four holds in store.

Among them? Katsumi Yamada.

Yamada appeared as the 92^nd competitor in Sasuke’s inaugural tournament. A delivery boy from humble beginnings, he instantly became a fan favorite and was one of a few athletes who made it to the Second Stage. The 32-year-old built a reputation on his unparalleled mental focus and impressive upper-body strength.

He followed up his first performance with another Second Stage failure in Sasuke 2. Determined to become the first competitor to clear all four stages, Yamada launched himself into a new training regiment that would eventually consume him. Sasuke became his passion, his career, his existence.

The training paid off the following year. Yamada reached his peak at Sasuke 3, conquering the first three stages and becoming one of five competitors to make it to the finals. The task seemed simple enough – scale a rope and reach the top of a 50-foot tower in 30 seconds or less. Craving total victory, Yamada vowed to leave the tournament as champion.

But the challenge proved too much for him. Yamada made it within feet of the top but relied too heavily on upper-body strength alone to carry him through. With 30 seconds passed, the rope released from the top of the tower and dropped a defeated Yamada to its base.  The crowd’s gasps and moans mirrored his own emotions. He sat on his hands and knees –fists clenched, teeth gritted, eyes painfully squinted to conceal tears.

It would be Yamada’s first and last taste of Stage Four.

“Mr. Sasuke”

Despite failing the Final Stage, Yamada’s popularity skyrocketed after his Sasuke 3 performance. He became hyped by fans, critics, and producers as the contestant most likely to complete the entire course. His devotion and ability in the tournament earned him the nickname “Mr. Sasuke.” Or, as Americans like to call him, “Mr. Ninja Warrior.”

He put together a string of respectable performances in following tournaments, overcoming new obstacles and returning to the Third Stage once again in Sasuke 4 and Sasuke 6. After the fifth tournament, producers rewarded Katsumi Yamada with the title of Sasuke All-Star. To this day, he remains one of only six competitors bestowed with that honor.

But what was left of Yamada’s personal life took a serious toll after the sixth tournament. The factory he worked at shut down, leaving Mr. Sasuke without a full-time job and a steady means of income. To mask his shortcomings in the real world, Yamada devoted all of his time to training for Sasuke. He pushed his body beyond his limits, practicing the course on makeshift obstacles with fellow competitors.

He did it all without the support of his family. Prior to the seventh tournament, Yamada competed with the blessing of his loved ones. But they soon urged him to retire from Sasuke and start rebuilding his career. With the scent of victory still lingering, Yamada ignored their pleas and alienated them from his life.

Sasuke 7 and Sasuke 8 only brought more disappointment. Obstacles grew more difficult, causing Yamada to lose his center of focus and post consecutive First-Stage failures. Furthermore, a new All-Star arose – in Sasuke 4, Kazuhiko Akiyama surpassed Katsumi Yamada and became the first competitor to clear the entire course. One era ended. Another began.

Yamada ended the eighth tournament in shambles. Timing out on First Stage’s Warped Wall obstacle, he stood at its base and simply stared for an eternity. Then, with an unexpected burst of energy, Mr. Sasuke lifted himself over the wall and finished the final obstacle with ease.

Hands clasped over his eyes, Katsumi Yamada announced his retirement from Sasuke with no intentions of ever returning.

The Draw of Victory

Yamada’s retirement didn’t last long. In fact, it barely even took off — he returned to compete in the ninth competititon, breaking his losing streak and making it back to the Second Stage. The draw of victory proved too great. Even greater than family, friends, and security.

A small ray of hope was injected back into the Sasuke faithful during the tenth tournament. Yamada returned to the Third Stage once again and became the only All-Star to advance past Stage Two. But the Pipe Slider obstacle prevented him from scaling the tower for a second time.

Though still recognized and respected in the Sasuke community, Yamada began to lose the support of his fans. New competitors with even more potential began taking on the course. Some even made consecutive visits to the Final Stage. The once dominant Yamada found himself standing in the shadows of younger, faster, and stronger talent.

Sasuke 12 slammed the proverbial nail in Yamada’s coffin. He nearly achieved Second Stage victory for only the second time in six tournaments. All things considered, he completed every obstacle and cleared the stage with enough time remaining on the clock. Could Mr. Sasuke have finally returned?

The stars were aligned against him. Competitors are required to wear gloves during Stage Two’s first obstacle: the Chain Reaction. These gloves prevent competitors’ hands from chaffing or bleeding. After completing the Chain Reaction, competitors must remove their gloves before reaching the Spider Walk obstacle.

Yamada did not remove his gloves. And he didn’t realize it until completing the course. He was disqualified on account of a technicality and not allowed to compete in Stage Three.

Physically humiliated. Mentally humiliated. Warped Wall. Spider Walk. Rope Climb. Twelve toiling tournaments ultimately accounting to nothing. Love the sport. But it can never return that love. Never.

Katsumi Yamada did not return to Mount Midoriyama for Sasuke 13.

The End of Mr. Sasuke?

Yamada slowly acclimated himself to life without Sasuke. Eager to rejoin the workforce, he took a job as a steel worker at a factory owned by his wife’s family and scraped toward some sense of dignity. He spent more time with his loved ones and concentrated on building a family of his own.

Life became calm for Mr. Sasuke. He settled into a normal routine, surrounded himself with normal people, and began setting normal goals for himself. That’s the real world. That’s reality. That’s what he should be doing.

But one lingering piece of unfinished business continued to haunt him. One thought remained in the back of his head and in the depths of his soul. His calling. His passion. His very being.

A sense of renewal swept Yamada, casting aside his insignificance and lifting his spirits. After more than a year of searching for answers, he realized there was only one. Sasuke.

Yamada spent months preparing himself for Sasuke 14. He knew he needed to train more than ever to go toe-for-toe with even newer obstacles and a new wave of competitors. His regiment became stricter than ever.

The idea of coming out of retirement didn’t faze him. There’s no Japanese word for Rocky. There’s no Japanese word for Brett Favre. He wasn’t returning to Sasuke for anybody but himself.

His comeback ultimately fell short. Instead of advancing far into the tournament, Yamada added yet another battle scar with a wipeout on the Jump Hang obstacle in the First Stage. A shaky start didn’t help Mr. Sasuke’s confidence, as he almost fell off the course on two separate occasions. Not even the help and advice of his fellow All-Stars could help Yamada overcome his demons.

It became painfully obvious — Yamada’s best days were behind him. Eleven tournaments had passed since he reached the Final Stage. The course became harder and harder each time. Yamada simply couldn’t keep up the pace.

But his problem wasn’t strictly physical. The pressure of completing the course broke him down mentally. And now, the pressure of passing the First Stage continued to mount.

A man can only take so much abuse. But despite his mountain of failures, Yamada buried his suffering and pressed on.

Cue Fade Out

There appears to be no happy ending in sight for Katsumi Yamada. Granted, he’s competed in every tournament after Sasuke 14. But he’s failed the First Stage 11 consecutive times since. And even if he did pass the First Stage, the subsequent ones have become more difficult than he’ll ever know.

The potential he once held, the hype surrounding him, his vision for the course  – it all evaporated. He’s not the first competitor to complete Sasuke. Nor will he ever be the second or the third. Fisherman Makoto Nagano conquered the course in Sasuke 17, and shoe salesman Yuuji Urushihara defeated it in Sasuke 24.

At 44 years of age, Yamada passed his peak many tournaments ago. Fans have come to expect failure from him, and some may say he’s come to expect failure from himself. His place among Sasuke’s All-Stars has been called into question. Some even suggest that he seek therapy to fix the mental damage the tournament thrust upon him.

Yet he still continues to train for Sasuke as if victory is still within grasp. He still spends most of his time fantasizing about glory and ways to achieve it. And he still hasn’t found another full-time position, working odd jobs as a hot-dog vendor and steel worker to fund his training.

For Katsumi Yamada, it has and always will be about Sasuke. Until he’s kicked off, injured, crippled, or pronounced dead. He has nothing else. It’s his life.

And nobody can retire from that.

_______

Alex Cole is a freelance writer and recent graduate of St. Bonaventure University in New York. He currently resides in Syracuse, NY.

Let’s see how our 22 articles of foresight are holding up, one at a time.

1: Researchers will develop either a vaccine or a cure for AIDS by 2020. However, it will be expensive enough that the disease will plague the poor long after it has become a non-issue for the rich and middle classes (although this is one case where political leaders might fund free treatment programs). The end of AIDS will trigger a sexual revolution that will compare to or exceed that of the 1960s and 1970s (unless another deadly sexually-transmitted disease evolves, which is certainly a possibility).

Too soon to tell on the cure, although I suppose it’s still possible. We have treatments that can extend the HIV victim’s life indefinitely and any number of research programs are working on the problem so let’s call this a maybe. As for part two of the prediction, that one’s looking pretty likely, isn’t it? Part three I stand by, no matter when the disease is finally cured.

2: The first quarter of the century will see the assassination of a professional athlete during a competition.

Hasn’t happened yet, but there’s no reason to think it unlikely. Fans still have unprecedented access to athletes in some sports (in most NBA arenas front-row fans might as well be sitting on the bench) and it seems to me like it’s only a matter of time.

3: By 2015 a major corporate executive will be assassinated. As a result, top executives of American companies will have to live with security precautions we once associated only with top political leaders.

Again, hasn’t happened yet, and for the life of me I can’t figure out why. Lay, Skilling, Ebbers, Madoff, Nacchio, the Rigas, Koslowski, half the bankers on Wall Street – it’s damned near unfathomable how none of these deserving pillagers have been whacked by one of the people whose lives they ruined.

In any case, put me down for “when, not if,” even if I miss my 2015 target date.

4: By the end of the 21st Century humanity’s evolution into posthumanity will be all but complete. We will be bigger, faster, stronger, smarter, and our average life span will approach (and perhaps surpass) 100, all as a result of technology’s colonization of the flesh. These changes will result from medical advances (including pharmaceuticals, genetic engineering, and gene therapy, and possibly even nanotech) and computer interface innovations designed to link our minds more closely with the boundless information resident in the Internet. We will be fundamentally different from humans born 200 years ago – CyberHumans in the year 2100 will have less in common with humanity at the turn of the Millennium than we now have with Cro-Magnon humans from 10,000 years ago.

This is a long-term, too-soon-to-tell item, but I can’t imagine that it won’t come true. The impact of technology on the human physiology and human cultures proceeds at an insane pace, with the innovation curve being nearly vertical. So let me get on record as being more confident now that I was even a decade ago.

5: Columbine-type outbursts of school violence will continue to strike large, middle-class suburban schools. Intermediate steps to increase security will turn schools into armed compounds, and will deter all but the most serious conspiracies. However, these measures will only intensify the core disease infecting these environments, and unless major steps are taken to reduce the size of these schools (and hence the anonymity factor), some student or students will eventually succeed where Harris and Klebold failed, killing hundreds of their classmates.

We haven’t had a case that surpassed Columbine (although if we broaden the scope to include universities, Virginia Tech is comparable). We’ve seen no move to address the school size issue, so on the whole I’d say that I’m on track with this one.

6: The popularity of professional baseball will continue to slip. The pace of the game, already slow by late-20th Century standards, will fail to win over younger fans, who are increasingly attuned to video-game levels of sensory stimulation, and the continuing divide between big market and small market franchises will deprive fans in all but a handful of cities of the ability to emotionally invest themselves in the hope of winning. If Major League Baseball adopts a serious salary cap and revenue sharing structure in the first decade of the century the decline of the game can be delayed. But by the year 2100 America’s Pastime will be the third or fourth most popular spectator sport in the U.S., at best.

Ratings and attendance appear to be trending downward. A lot can happen between now and 2100, of course, but for the time being this prediction looks like a strong one.

I’m not terribly happy about it, either. I’ve played a lot baseball in my day and watched a lot more, and I love the game. I hope I’m wrong and that the game thrives in the future. But there are so many obstacles. The steroid scandals hurt the credibility of the game (although baseball has bounced back from scandal before), but nothing poses quite the threat of the rich/poor gap – and I say this as a fan of the Red Sox, the second-worst offender behind the Yankees. As long as supporters of 80% of the teams know they have damned near no chance to win, the sport is going to struggle.

7: The explosion of technological innovation and development we witnessed in the 20th Century (especially during the latter half) may plateau in the second half of the 2000s. Whether the leveling off occurs sooner or later will hinge on the feasibility of nanotechnologies. If nanotech proves as viable as many researchers (and science fiction writers) currently think we could continue to see the development of technological marvels we can barely imagine, and the plateau predicted here might not occur until late in the century, or even early in the 22nd. Otherwise, the nearly vertical innovation curve we’ve seen in the past few decades should be flattening out substantially by the middle of the century.

Perhaps more than any other item on the list, this one I’m not sure about. We could see a plateau – that has been the lesson of history – but our current pace is so explosive and shows no signs of doing anything except picking up more steam, so this prediction may wind up in the Nostraslammy’s loss column when all is said and done.

8: Artificial life will evolve, although not as a result of Artificial Intelligence projects. Instead, the massive growth of computing power, coupled with the development of the global communications web, will result in a ubiquitous network of connected information, and Information Life will occur when the concentration of information reaches critical mass, in a process not unlike the spontaneous eruption of organic life billions of years ago. Two things to note: first, given the non-physical, non-organic nature of this InfoLife, humanity may well not recognize it when it happens; and second, it may not recognize humanity as a life form, either.

This hasn’t happened yet, as far as we know, but I continue to believe this the most likely path to the evolution of AI/A Life. Not everyone agrees with me, including my friend and colleague Anne Foerst, who knows a frightening amount about AI and is convinced that it must arise within an embodied context. My counter is that the path I’m theorizing is the one that’s most like the evolutionary spurts we’ve seen throughout history.

We won’t know until we know, but mark me down as still confident in this prediction.

9: Public rhetoric about the democratizing power of the information economy notwithstanding, the rich-poor gap will not close, but will instead widen. It is unlikely that anything short of a major revolution will alter the underlying structures of power and wealth, which are robustly self-perpetuating.

Damn, this prediction is looking good. Of course, this was probably the most obvious one on the list.

10: The Neo-Luddite Movement will become increasingly violent. Cultural dislocations resulting from the rapid pace of technological innovation and deployment in the next 20 years will fuel increasing levels of resistance against “progress.” The Neo-Luddites, already well established and with spiritual leaders firmly in place, will eventually feel compelled to abandon rhetoric in favor of drastic action. At first the technoresistance will focus its energies in terrorist strikes against machinery and facilities, but will eventually graduate to widespread terrorism against technologists themselves.

We have not had outbreaks of violence tied directly to any overt neo-Luddite movements, but I’d argue that a lot of the terrorist acts we’ve seen have had at their core the same reaction to technopoly that characterizes our self-identified neo-Luddites (like Kirkpatrick Sale, Mark Slouka and others). For instance, I’d file any and all terror by religious fundamentalists under this heading, including 9/11. Fundamentalisms are ultimately about the displacement of religious institutions as the final arbiter of morality and ethics in a culture (and a hefty fear of the rampaging change brought on by technical innovation). Take something like abortion (or any question of reproductive rights), for instance. Isn’t abortion a direct artifact of the world of medical technics? And what happens to our ability to intervene in affairs on the other side of the globe if we strip away our technological superiority?

I believe this neo-Luddite impulse goes even further – I think there’s a great case to be made that the violence of the Unabomber (read his manifesto) and Harris and Klebold are essentially reactions against a technological society run amok.

So I’m declaring victory on this prediction and believe that the problem is only going to get worse so long as our technology evolves more rapidly than our ethics.

11: The Red Sox and Cubs will each win a World Series.

We knocked half of this one out in just a couple of years. Can the Cubs win it all in the next 90 years? I think so. They’ve shown signs of life in the last decade and I think it’s only a matter of time before they win one despite themselves.

12: Despite the growth of the Internet and other interactive modes of entertainment, the film will survive and thrive in its current form for the foreseeable future. Prognosticators who point to the power of interactivity and suggest that traditional one-way media are doomed may be right with respect to home-based media like television, but these dynamics don’t apply to film. First, it serves as a vital locus for social interaction (it’s an ideal activity for a date, for instance); and second, our thirst for the power and mystery of storytelling is in no danger of being extinguished (the most successful videogame authors have figured this much out already).

Anybody seen Avatar? It just cleared the billion-dollar mark over the weekend. Yes, we’ve seen an explosion in gaming and home-based entertainment offerings, but the movie biz looks stronger than ever.

13: By the year 2010, major universities will notice that their graduates lack many basic skills and will begin questioning the value of computers and the Internet in higher education. Some (but not all) will conclude that educational technologies place unproductive layers of machinery between student and teacher. This will spur a renewed emphasis on traditional educational strategies and basic literacy, organizational, and critical thinking skills.

Looks like I missed this one big time, didn’t I? In fact, it seems like precisely the opposite is happening at every turn.

Which is sad, because what I describe in the prediction is much needed. Our educational complex is in the worst shape it’s ever been in, and in so many cases technology is part of the problem, not the solution.

14: The U.S. population will migrate northward during the second quarter of the century. Rising average temperatures will fuel a move to milder climes. Air conditioning will insure the comfort of indoor living, but many people place a high importance on outdoor activities, especially during the summer months.

Too soon to tell, but if our scientists are right about climate disruption (and I think they are) this looks likely.

15: During the 21st Century we may finally learn that we are not alone in the universe. If intelligent extraterrestrial life exists, which seems plausible at least, humanity should soon reach the point where our technology will either allow us to find it (the Contact scenario) or encourage it to find us (the Star Trek: First Contact scenario). Hopefully our first meeting will be more like Close Encounters of the Third Kind than Mars Attacks!, and if we get really lucky our new friends might have technologies for scrubbing the atmosphere, purifying vast bodies of water, and curing male pattern baldness.

We haven’t found alien life yet, but we have found a lot more evidence of worlds with the conditions to sustain life (like recent discoveries concerning water on Mars). It seems like we hear a new report on alien worlds that are very Earth-like every month or two. As a result, I remain bullish on item #15.

16: The U.S. will elect its first female and minority Presidents. Sadly, they will prove as corrupt as the white males they replaced.

One down, one to go.

17: American media will become more vapid and less reliable early in the century, but the long-term impact could be positive. Between corporate ownership and the drive to maximize ratings at all costs, most major news outlets will be all but useless for the purpose of informing and educating the public by 2020 (with the exception of news services covering financial markets). Ironically, this could lead to a new age of subjective journalism. With the once-mighty press institutions either gone or discredited, and the ideologies of objective journalism along with them, a new breed of reporter may arise. This new journalist will be openly committed to advocacy, and will make his or her biases clear at the outset. The advocacy reporter would intersect perfectly with local populations whose disgust with the corruption and unresponsiveness of national (and even state) politics have driven them to seek involvement closer to home. It is possible that these dynamics could usher in a new golden age of civic engagement.

This one is a mixed bag at present. The first element is a gimme – this is worst moment for journalism since the days of Pulitzer, Hearst and Twain – and while I gave the legacy J establishment until 2020 to complete it’s full meltdown, it only seems to have needed half that much time.

The rest is unsettled. We could see the rise of a responsible, ethical advocacy press movement (see my series on the rise of “subjective” journalism), but there’s been no movement so far.

18: As hard as it is to imagine, commercial radio and the corporate music industry will suck worse in the next 25 years than it did in the last 25 years. The Internet will make it possible for unknown musicians to distribute their work, but in doing so it will massively increase the clutter of a media landscape that’s already over-saturated, making it harder for any particular artist to break through into the broad public consciousness. Since people love music, and since music will continue to serve as a gravity well for cultural and sub-cultural identification and bonding, mechanisms for sifting good from bad will become even more important. A service that fills this role will emerge on the Net. It may look like one of the currently developing music Web sites, or it may be a Web-based music journalism outlet, or it could be a type of service we haven’t imagined yet, but something will fill the void once occupied by commercial radio, and probably by 2010.

Part one of the equation – it would have been hard for me to be more right, huh? The part at the end looks like a miss – we’re still seeing all kinds of attempts at providing a reliable center, but so far most of our energies have been devoted to delivery systems (and it seems like it’s only a matter of time before Spotify or something very like becomes that all-songs-available-all-the-time uber-channel for us all). The filtering problem remains. Net radio and satellite are doing a nice job in places, but the only mass national music outlets are things like godforsaken American Idol, which really is the talent show at the Fall of Rome.

19: Killer storms will increase in number and intensity. Whether set in motion by industrial pollution or resulting from natural meteorological cycle, heavy weather is getting nastier, and the trend will continue. By the midpoint of the 21st century Category 5 hurricanes will hit the U.S. fairly frequently, and the mythical F6 tornado (which almost occurred for the first time in recorded history in 1999) will become commonplace. A Category 5 will hit a major coastal urban center in the next 25 years, resulting in near-total destruction of the city’s infrastructure. During the same time frame a city in the Lower Midwest will take a direct hit from an F6 or a strong F5 and will be annihilated.

Katrina was a lot closer to that Category 5 than we like to think about, and where destructive damage is concerned let’s remember that it missed New Orleans. All that damage happened on the back side of a Cat 3.

As with item #14 above, there seems every reason to believe that this prediction will come true, although it’s too early to put it in the win column.

20: Faced with mounting damage at the hands of increasingly sophisticated hackers, corporations will begin to see “black ops” (both online and real-world) as a necessary cost of doing business. The shift from “corporate security” to all-out “Info War” footing will accelerate by 2010, when it is revealed that a major online attack against an American company was sponsored by a foreign government. The U.S. government will be strategically, tactically, and morally unprepared to deal with this crisis, and the absence of policy leadership will result in the online equivalent of the Cuban Missile Crisis, only instead of three players there will be hundreds with the ability to spark a full-blown cyberwar. Needless to say, world stock markets will react negatively. When the dust settles, world governments and corporate interests of all sizes will work together to develop safeguards against activities that threaten the global economy. The most significant result of this accord will be to transfer most real power from public to private institutions.

This one is a mixed bag at best because there’s so much we don’t know. There is plenty of evidence that large corps have been hit in the way predicted (and an analyst like Winn Schwartau would tell you that foreign governments have provided all kinds of supports for the perpetrators). The problem lies with my prediction that this would all become public knowledge – that hasn’t happened, and in large part it’s because the companies involved have every incentive to keep it a secret. Further, if said companies (perhaps even with the help of our government) have launched black ops activities, that’s something else you’re not likely to hear about in a daily White House press briefing.

So all I can really do at this point is say that I failed to account for the need for secrecy, but at the same time I suspect most of the prediction was on the money. I may never be able to point to evidence that I was right or wrong, although I’ll be watching and listening with interest.

21: Sometime before 2075 a genuinely deserving artist will win a Grammy Award. Okay, so I’m out on a limb here…

This was mostly snark, but the underlying point is more valid than ever. The Grammys are almost as big a joke as the Rock & Roll Hall of Product Sales Fame.

22: Some form of nuclear fusion will prove technically and economically viable by 2015. If fusion and nanotech both happen by 2020, the year 2101 will bear no more resemblance to 2001 than 2001 does to 2001 B.C., and the specifics of the changes to society are nearly impossible guess at.

I have another five years before I have to admit defeat, but at this stage my chances look dim. I do believe that we’ll see widespread nanotech and commercial fusion in this century, but my timetable was too optimistic.

So there you go. A few wins, a couple of losses, some too-soon-to-tells and partial successes. On the whole Nostraslammy is doing better than the grandpappy of predictification, Nostradamus himself, and that ought to count for something, right?

See you in 2020.

We’ll stipulate up front that the witness has a credibility issue. He is, after all, a convicted felon, and one guilty of betraying the trust of the players and pro hoop fans around the world. Let’s go a step further – he betrayed the trust of every athlete in America by fixing what ought to have been fair competitions. Thanks to Donaghy, it’s harder than ever to make the case for the integrity of sport (at any level – and if you’ve played any sport that involved an official, you know what I’m talking about). So before we get started, let’s be clear: this post isn’t looking to canonize St. Tim of Donaghy.

This said, just because you’re a crook doesn’t mean that some (or even most) of what you say isn’t accurate. And for many of us, the story Donaghy is telling has about it the uneasy ring of truth. We might not buy the full-on conspiracy charges in their entirety (and we probably shouldn’t), but the disconcerting thing about Donaghy’s story is that we don’t have to in order to conclude that the NBA is putting a compromised competition on the floor.

In the opening moments of his interview with ESPN’s Mark Schwarz, Donaghy says that of all the pro sports in the US basketball is the easiest to manipulate because of the “subjectivity of the calls.” He says that games are changed “on a nightly basis,” and he goes into significant detail about how certain officials let their like or dislike of particular players, coaches or even owners affect the calls they make on the floor.

The NBA, obviously, disputes every word of it.

Donaghy points to several specific players who don’t get a fair shake and to at least one very specific instance – the treatment that Allen Iverson received after the league refused to suspend him for threatening an official – as examples. Some of it makes sense, of course. Refs are human, and when punks like Rasheed Wallace (who has never committed a foul in his life) are called out, you’ll hear no complaints from me. I’ve officiated a variety of sports, including well over 1,000 games in soccer, and not only is it understandable that refs treat problem children differently, it’s actually a good thing. Some players work very hard to get over on the refs and their opponents unfairly, engaging in behavior that runs the gamut from the disruption caused by unnecessary bitching to faking injury to overtly dirty play that threatens the physical health of other competitors, so NBA analyst Kenny Smith is right on the money when he compares officiating to parenting: treating everybody fairly isn’t equal to treating everybody the same.

The problem arises when these tendencies (and more extreme cases of bias, where an official calls things differently for some players simply because he or she doesn’t like them) lead to a predictable pattern of behavior that changes outcomes. This is the part of what Donaghy has to say that’s the most concerning.

In these interviews, Donaghy claims that inside knowledge allowed him to bet effectively. Specifically, he says his track record of success in betting games in which he was not involved was between 70 and 80%. This is against the spread, remember, so we’re not talking about betting good teams against bad ones. This is 70-80% on a level playing field. If he knew who the teams were and who the refs were, his intimate knowledge of who hated who made it possible to predict outcomes with a ridiculous level of success.

The killing blow here? His claims are backed up by the lead FBI agent who investigated his case, which addresses the credibility issue we talked about above. We don’t have to take the word of a convicted felon – we have the word of Phillip Scala, a highly placed, experienced law enforcement professional who knows his away around corruption.

Let’s be very clear here, then. We are not talking about a simple “refs are human” problem. That we can understand and accept. What we’re talking about instead is systematic, predictable, actionable bias. We’re talking about behavior that routinely changes the results of games in a knowable direction.

So ultimately Donaghy’s crime was less about game fixing and more about … insider trading? And you can’t effectively trade on unreliable or nonexistent inside information, can you? What Donaghy says he did, and what the FBI confirms that he did, is real.

Earlier this year I wrote about the five sets of rules you find in NBA games:

1: The official rules. Somewhere the official laws of the game are written down. No one knows why.

2: The interpreted rules. The official rules may say that X is a foul, but X can happen 45 times in a game and you never hear a whistle. The refs all have interpretations of what the rules mean, so don’t get hung up on what they say.

3: The home team rules. You get calls at home that you don’t get on the road.

4: Established star rules. If you’ve been in the league awhile – and especially if you’re a marquee player – you get calls that rookies and journeymen and lesser beings don’t get.

5: Late in the game rules. It may have been a class A felony in the first quarter, but all’s fair in love, war and the last two minutes of the game. After all, you have to let the players decide the game, not the refs.

It looks like I left one out: The rules for players the refs don’t like.

David Stern, the league establishment and the collected sports punditry that surrounds the game (an assemblage of networks, writers, former player analysts and so on, all of who have some skin in the game and a powerful incentive to make sure that the public doesn’t begin confusing the NBA with the WWE) can preen and declaim and damn the messenger all they like. But millions of people who watch the games are duly suspicious. They know what they see, night and night out, and not all of them – not all of us – are mindless paranoid homers.

One of these days a squeaky clean NBA ref or league official, somebody who’s disgusted by the arrogance behind the scenes, is going to step forward and confirm a lot of what Tim Donaghy is saying today. On that day, the old argumentum ad hominem approach that comprises the entirety of the league’s reaction at present isn’t going to work anymore.

And then the league is going to be facing a crisis 100 times worse than the Donaghy debacle.

Image Credit: The Guardian and tophatal1.

Growing up in North Carolina, one of the things I knew about Denver was the Barrel Man. The Broncos were frequently the late game on Sunday afternoon, and you could usually count on at least one shot of him every broadcast. His name was Tim McKernan, and it’s safe to say that he was as diehard a fan as any team could hope for.

The Barrel Man died in his sleep yesterday morning at the age of 69. Scholars & Rogues extends a heartfelt Mile High Salute to a community icon. Happy trails…

Image Credit: The Denver Post

“Sure, I’ll put The Finger on it,” I said.

“Enough with the stupid finger,” she replied. “I don’t want you to put your finger on anything, I want you to look at the car.”

“All right,” I answered. “But I can look at the car from here. It looks fine. Are you sure you don’t want me to go out there and put The Finger on it?”

She mumbled something and wandered away. I looked at the car. It needed a wash.

I guess I can’t blame my wife for ignoring the miraculous powers of The Finger. She was never a football fan, and even if she was, when The Finger made its foray into the miraculous, she was only eight years old and 358 miles away. Maybe I should start from the beginning.

When I was a junior in high school back in the autumn of 1971, I was part of something great. My high school football team started the season with four wins and all four were shutouts. We still hadn’t been scored on when we traveled east to take on the perennial powerhouse Maryville Rebels, and on the ride back home we had a fifth shutout to contemplate. They’d beaten us 14-0. But the next week, we shut out another opponent, then another. We were 6-1, with five shutouts, and the whole state was paying attention. Then we took a ride north to play a high school in Nashville that no longer exists. We weren’t afraid, since we’d beaten that same team, a senior laden squad, the year before by 30 points.

Now, I have to be careful about this, because that school that no longer exists produced a lot of competitors who might be up for parole soon. I’m not going to come right out and say their roster were stacked with ringers, but the players who showed up at game time weren’t the same guys we saw on the game films. These guys were old, with wedding bands, beards and tattoos. It wasn’t a football game so much as a mugging, and the referees were in on it, since they rightfully feared for their cars in the parking lot. At the end of the first half, the score was tied 0-0.

Our coach gave a rousing and memorable halftime speech that started with a prayer for our safe deliverance from the stadium and ended with a plea for few turnovers. When we went out for the second half, I saw the other team smoking and drinking in the concession stand. It was kind of spooky, but we had another 30 minutes of football to survive. And though I didn’t know it then, I was blessed with The Finger.

We kicked off to start the second half. The ball fell into the hands of a guy who was, I’m not sure, but I think about 9 feet tall. He began a speedy lope down the left sidelines, made a cut here, got a block there, and he was gone. Surely, I thought, our safety would stop him. We always had one guy who didn’t charge down the field, but stayed back as a last line of defense to prevent a kick returner from doing what this leggy freak of nature was doing. Where was our safety? Oh, yeah. I was the safety. So I took off after him. He had speed, but I had a great line of pursuit. He was at the 40, but I was closing. At the 50, I was almost to him. At our 40, he was getting away. I only had one chance. When I knew I couldn’t possibly get any closer to him, I dove in the direction of his canoe-sized feet. I caught the back of his left shoe with the last digit of my index finger, and he stumbled and tumbled, and finally fell. I had prevented a touchdown, and kept out shutout record alive for one more week. Our coach was so overjoyed at the play that he completely forgot how I’d blown my safety assignment in the first place. They fumbled on the very next play. We marched 73 yards for the first of two second half touchdowns.

My tackle not only brought down their freakishly tall returner, but also all the other old guys on his team. After that kickoff, they weren’t the same. I like to think that in the great plan of reality, I did them a favor. I know people who spend their entire lives reliving the same play or the same game or the same season, as if their lives hit the highest point of glory when they were 17. I feel sorry for people like that.

Or maybe it was the beer and cigarettes they enjoyed at halftime, because once we were ahead, they became uncomfortably friendly, wanting phone numbers and other personal information. The final score was 16-0, and despite the promises I’d made to a couple of their defensive backs, I never went back to that part of Nashville.

It was quite a year. By the end of the season, we’d won 9 games and shut out our opponents 8 times. We had not one, but two running backs who rushed for over a thousand yards. I caught a pass and made several tackles. Ironically, the two games we lost were also shutouts, and those two teams, Milan and Maryville, played each other for the state championship. I neither know nor care who won that game, and if the universe cared then somebody from one of those teams would be writing this to gloat about it. But I do know that that year was a close as I would ever come to being a part of something that was truly great, and if we couldn’t taste the greatness of our season, then we could certainly smell it and hear it. It smelled like cut grass and autumn, like dew and Atomic Balm, and the sound of that season was as crisp as the snare drums in the band, and as loud the roar of the home crowd.

Sadly, The Finger hasn’t done much of anything since then, but I still think it has a few more miracles in it. Every November, I think back to those warm Friday nights, and the teammates I had, and the blocks and tackles and endless runs we made.

Last night, my son Joey came downstairs with a bad scratch on his knee. Between his sobs, he gave a rambling narrative about how he was surfing on the bed, but wiped out and landed on one of the few toys he still owns that hasn’t been recalled by the manufacturer. Now his knee had a scrape and it hurt him mightily.

“Do you want me to put The Finger on it?” I asked.

I did, and he stopped crying and fell asleep on my lap. Maybe my touchdown- saving dive wasn’t The Finger’s greatest moment after all.

But it was an amazing tackle. You should have seen it.

Initially, he was prohibited from competing against able-bodied runners on the grounds that, because they were a little too state-of-the-art, his prosthetics gave him an unfair advantage. (Of course, he was still allowed to crush other double-amputees.) Ultimately, though, he was cleared to compete against all runners. But the unfair-advantage issue is not a closed book.

At Sports Illustrated, David Epstein writes about a report in the Journal of Allied Physiology, in which two of the seven scientists belonging to the group that cleared Pistorius “now say that the so-called ‘Cheetah’ legs make Pistorius 10 seconds faster over 400 meters than he otherwise would be, a boost so significant as to make the difference between a mediocre high school runner and an Olympian.”

One’s first impulse is to think the advantage would be derived from his newfound ability to bound gazelle-like around the track. However, writes Epstein:

The researchers found that because the carbon fiber Cheetahs are about half the weigh. . . . of an able-bodied sprinter’s lower leg, Pistorius can swing his lower leg through the air between strides 15.7 percent more quickly [than an] average of five former 100-meter world record holders. “Oscar is off the charts,” said Peter Weyand, one of the researchers and an exercise physiologist at Southern Methodist University. “Clearly, with athletes with intact limbs, there’s a lower limit to how fast they can reposition their limbs.”

In fact, Weyand and the report’s co-author Matthew Bundle (emphasis added) “concluded that Pistorius has the highest stride frequency ever recorded because of how quickly the lightweight Cheetahs allow him to whip his legs through the air.” That also affords him, writes Epstein, “the liberty of spending more time with the foot of each Cheetah on the ground, generating force all the while.”

All told, said Weyand: “The muscular forces he has to generate are less than half of what an intact sprinter has to generate to go the same speed.”

In fact, if you watch Pistorius run (this video is just 10 seconds long), you’ll see that far from covering ground with great leaps and bounds while wearing the Cheetahs, his running style is earth-bound to the point of dead-legged. In other words, Pistorius’s advantage is totally predicated on stride frequency, or what they refer to in track and field as “turnover.” Stride length, Usain Bolt notwithstanding, is apparently of little significance. Think of the trundling style of the great Michael Johnson, for instance, who ran the same distances as Pistorius.

Running technique aside, his case shares some similarities with that of hermaphrodite 800-meter runner Caster Semenya, also from South Africa, who was recently allowed to keep her Olympic gold medal despite lingering questions about her sexual identity.

As Epstein wrote in an article on Ms. Semanya, a “professor of obstetrics, gynecology and molecular genetics, likened [her situation] to calling unfair a pituitary tumor that causes someone to grow to be 7-foot-5 and play in the NBA.”

The case could be made that the efficiency of the prosthetics Pistorius is allowed to use should be governed. After all, the number of spikes allowed in a track shoe is limited. But, since we’re dealing with the disabled, that would seem churlish.

In fact, is it too much to ask athletes poised to compete against Pistorius to act with maturity and learn to live with the situation? After all, like Ms. Semenya, Pistorius is an anomaly. Unless, of course, runners care to arrange an accident that results in the amputation of their lower legs. Then they, too, can obtain space-age prosthetics and become even more bionic than Pistorius.

Robert Enke, the goaltender for Hannover 96 (who currently hover in the middle of the German Bundesliga standings) and a potential member of next year’s German World Cup team, died the other day. His death was apparently a suicide.

“At 1825 (1725GMT) he was run over by a regional express train running between Hamburg and Bremen,” said police spokesman Stefan Wittke. “The train was travelling at the speed of 160-kph.”The player’s friend and consultant Joerg Neblung told reporters: “I can confirm this is a case of suicide. He took his own life just before six (pm).

Enke lost a child in 2006 and has left behind a wife and eight month-old daughter.

Most Americans have never heard of Enke, but they probably are familiar with Andre Agassi, a former #1 world-ranked tennis player who won eight Grand Slam events (in the process becoming one of only three men in the open era to win all four Slam events during his career). In his new autobiography Agassi describes how he became so despondent at the state of his life – which also included being married to Brooke Shields, one of Hollywood’s legendary beauties – that he turned to crystal meth.

At the core of Agassi’s despair: “I really hated tennis.”

Agassi has given at least a couple of interviews in recent days, including one that some of you may have seen on 60 Minutes (he also talked with Rick Reilly of ESPN). As this Gawker post notes, the Katie Couric conversation had to have been beyond humiliating.

I suppose a lot of us look at men like Agassi and Enke and have a hard time fathoming their discontent. After all, what are the things regular people worry about? Money? Finding love? Recognition, success, professional validation? How many men out there could have looked at Agassi’s life in 1997, when things really bottomed out, and concluded that obscene wealth, tremendous talent, ubiquitous fame, a career where you get paid to play a fucking game and a wife who was one of the most stunningly fabulous women alive … well, that all just seemed a little hollow. What if I inject radiator fluid into my aorta? Maybe that’ll give life some purpose. But as he told Couric, at the time he couldn’t imagine how this drug could make him feel any worse than he already did.

I don’t know a lot about Enke’s life, but on the surface of things it probably looked pretty good compared to what millions of Joe Sixpacks trudge off to every morning. Still, he threw himself in front of a train. And Agassi risked everything for something, anything, that would help him escape a life he hated, no matter how grand it may have looked to the rest of us.

Of course, these two cases are far from perfect parallels. For one, Enke took his own life and Agassi survived. For another, friends and family members say that Enke had long struggled with depression, whereas Agassi’s issues seem less clinical and more bound up with being forced into a career that he hated (Enke reportedly loved soccer). Uli Hesse-Lichtenberger notes that Enke’s struggle was hardly the first of its kind, rattling off a litany of European footballers who, like Enke, couldn’t seem to find happiness in what most would regard as a dream life. The same is certainly true for athletes in all other pro sports – he also points to the case of Boston Red Sox centerfielder Jimmy Piersall, for example, whose “autobiography ‘Fear Strikes Out,’ [was] later made into a Hollywood movie.”

In fact, we might go so far as to argue that these two cases have nothing to do with one another. Perhaps one is a case of clinical illness, pure and simple, while the other speaks more to a cultural pathology surrounding how children are herded into sports (or acting, or when they reach college, medicine, or the law, or accounting, or whatever their parents have decided is best for them). If so, then let’s pause here to simply acknowledge the obvious: fame and wealth don’t make one immune to mental illness.

The Agassi case, though – I have to admit that I was surprised at my reaction. I’m pretty jaded about the world of pro sports and for a long time I wasn’t much of an Agassi fan. And I’ve never had much patience for rich jocks singing pitiful me songs. I know that money doesn’t guarantee happiness, but I’ve always wished for a little more perspective from those who are blessed to be free of the concerns that plague so many of us: Yes, your life isn’t perfect, but my child is sick and we can’t afford health insurance, so would you please have enough self-awareness to go somewhere and shut the fuck up?

Listening to Agassi tell his story, though, I was struck by his honesty, his humility, by his absolute refusal to blame others. More than anything, I was shocked by how very … normal his plight seemed. He clearly is aware of the apparent absurdity, of the contradiction, and he’s embarrassed by it. He’s not asking for sympathy – he’s simply telling a humiliating story because he must. And the result – here’s a rich guy telling a story that we actually can empathize with in a human way that transcends class and circumstance. With Agassi, money can’t buy happiness becomes something more than a cliché that the have-nots use to rationalize their own despair.

Tennis was something that he had been compelled to do because his father (an Iranian immigrant) saw it as a ticket up the ladder, and as a result he liked his job about as much as millions of disenchanted people in the US like theirs. It’s just something they do – each morning they get up and trudge off to serve the necessity of paying the bills.

If I were to sneer at Agassi for being unhappy, what would I do when I realized that my life looks as affluent to billions of people around the world as his does to me? What do I do? I sit in a nice office and write, and meet with people about business issues, and in general get paid well above the national income average to use my brain. I live in a modest house – except that it’s mansion compared to what most people have.

Still, I’ve spent way too many years hating my job the same way Andre hated tennis. A few years back I spent several months working in a position that I loathed. I joke that those nine months probably took five years off my life, except I’m not really joking. After I left, I realized that for the first time in months I could breathe. The stress I had been carrying around was making me physically ill, and even to this day I can hardly think about the experience without feeling a slight surge of anxious adrenaline.

Not long ago I wrote that “reality is making us sick, and fantasy can’t cure us.” In that essay I talked about the book Affluenza, which I’d just completed. Toward the end I said this:

So here’s my theory/hypothesis/question. We’re a hollow nation, a society that provides nearly all of us with rampant access to more material goods than we know what to do with. But we cannot find happiness in the material because there is not happiness in it. On the contrary – it’s a system that’s rigged to feed us a shiny, pretty lie that hollows us out some more, all the while whispering that only more of the lie will make us happy.

Is this something like the lie that drove Andre Agassi’s father to enslave his son to tennis? Is it like the lies of so many people I’ve known in my life who wanted to teach, perhaps, but did the “sensible” thing and became accountants? Or the lies that led how many of my classmates to become lawyers or doctors or MBAs because that’s what their fathers had been?

I have multiple sig files that turn up at the bottom of the e-mails I send out. One of my favorites – it has probably appeared in more than 100,000 of my e-mails through the years, and maybe more – is a quote from Joseph Campbell. It goes like this:

You may have success in life, but then just think of it – what kind of life was it? What good was it – you’ve never done the thing you wanted to do in all your life. I always tell my students, go where your body and soul want to go. When you have the feeling, then stay with it, and don’t let anyone throw you off.

Campbell is talking about living an authentic life, and I’m glad to see that Andre Agassi is, finally, doing just that. Or so it seems, from watching an exposé on television.

Like many of my fellow citizens, it’s probably safe to say that I am not living an authentic life. Not yet. When I get up in the morning there are things I want to do, things that would make me far happier, but I don’t do them. My discontent hasn’t led me to crystal meth, nor is it going to, but it does lead me to thinking about a day several years ago when I stood in l’Accademia in Florence overawed by The David. I’ve never shaken the sense that, among other things, Michaelangelo was making a point about living an authentic life. David is staring off in the distance, sizing up the Goliath of his age, and he is not afraid. He does not hate the life he is living. He does not hate the moment he is in. In fact, he seems to be looking forward to the battle in front of him.

He seems possessed by a calm resolve, by that feeling that Campbell is talking about and the confidence that comes with knowing that he will not thrown off of it.

Agassi’s Wikipedia entry notes that “he is the founder of the Andre Agassi Charitable Foundation, which has raised over $60 million for at-risk children in Southern Nevada. In 2001, the Foundation opened the Andre Agassi College Preparatory Academy in Las Vegas, a K-12 public charter school for at-risk children.” Wow – a dropout investing a medium-sized fortune in helping poor kids get an education.

There’s a lesson in here somewhere, and it’s too complex to trivialize it by tying it up into a neat platitude. At the core, though, lies the need to examine the relationship between our humanity and the material world that so often eats away at it.

I’m grateful to Andre Agassi for telling his story. I hope we can all learn from it, even if the story itself strikes us as so very unlikely…

Image Credits: The Brisbane Times, TheOffside.com and EagleVision Productions.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Now, any normal person could glance at me and see that I was a guy destined to play football. I looked like a football player, talked like one, and ran into things with a violence that suggested a natural linebacker. But I didn’t like football that much. Truth be told, I was just clumsy and always late. Hitting other people was OK, but getting hit by other people hurt. A lot. I was too cerebral for football, so I went to the Babe Ruth Baseball League tryouts for boys aged 13-16, and was drafted by the Elks Lodge, Post 1776.

But there were problems. The fact that I was 16 worked against me. Our coach wanted younger players who he could mold and train in the mysterious ways of the Diamond. This seemed altogether unnatural to me, since in football, the positions went to the biggest and the oldest. I was the second string center behind a guy who was the only player on our high school team who was divorced. But I didn’t complain because he was older and bigger than me and that‘s the way it was.

So sitting on the bench while a tiny, shy 13-year-old played center field made me bristle. I’ll admit I even ran into him a couple of times, accidentally, but he kept bouncing up and apologizing for being in my way. And every time we played, there he stood out in center field, and there I sat on the bench.

I guess I should add that I was a terrible baseball player. I could throw and I could catch, but I couldn’t hit a curve ball or judge a high pop fly’s trajectory. I was fast, but I had trouble rounding the bases, and so I always ended up in right field instead of between first and second. But to me, that didn’t matter. I was big, and that should have been enough.

So it was that on the fourth game of the season, I sat on the bench and watched the game. I had only been put into one game so far, as a pinch runner on third base in the last inning, and I was only there for one pitch. Our first baseman sent a fastball sailing into right field and I waltzed in, scoring the winning run without having to do much more than mosey down the base path. But I was determined to do my part. I knew that if I ever got into a game, I would dazzle the coach with my playmaking ability. I just needed a chance.

That chance came in game four. We were playing the Jay Cees, it was a pitcher’s duel, a 0-0 tie, and we couldn’t get a base runner who was fast enough to get into scoring position from first. So when Randy walked, the coach put me in as a pinch runner. I knew what he wanted, and I was going to do it. I was going to steal second base.

I took my lead. The Jay Cee’s pitcher had a glacial delivery, and their catcher was a guy from Chapel Hill who threw like a girl. This would be easy. The coach was doing something with his hands, I didn’t really know what. Maybe there were bees. The windup. The pitch. I was off.

I had never slid into a base before. I’d seen it a thousand times on TV though, and it looked easy. So when I approached the bag, I threw my feet forward, and hit the ground. But when I stopped sliding, I was still 15 feet from second base, so I got up, ran

some more and slid again. Then I was three feet from the bag. I covered that distance with a furious crawl, but the catcher could have walked the ball to second by then. The second baseman slapped my face with his glove and I was out. My coach was furious.

“Why did you try to steal second?” he demanded. “Our best hitter is up. I didn’t give you the sign to steal.”

“There’s a sign to steal?” I asked.

“Yes, there’s a sign to steal! What do you think this is?” and he did the bizarre hand gestures again.

“I thought you were being bothered by bees,” I replied.

“You don’t know any of the signs,” he screeched. “How am I supposed to let you bat if you don’t know the signs that mean to swing or take a pitch!”

“I have to let you tell me when to swing?” I asked. “But I’m right there. I see the pitch. I know when to swing.”

Alas, I was wrong. The coach knew when it was time for me to swing, and the time was never, since I never got off the bench again. I stuck around for five more games before I turned in my uniform. Baseball was too cerebral for me. It was just as well, since our football team’s first-team center had joined the Marines, so there was an opening on the offensive line that fall.

But I never forgot the main lesson of baseball: look for the signs. Signs are everywhere, and all we have to do is keep our eyes open and we’ll see them. I was explaining all this to my girlfriend, who was looking out her window and yearning for my dad’s car that would take me home. She mumbled something about needing to do her

homework, and then laundry, and then wash her hair, so she called six of my friends to come over and get me out of there. I spent a lot of time at her house, and I can still see her peering out the window. When she dumped me later that summer, I was shocked. I don’t know why it never worked out between us. Maybe I was too cerebral for her, too.