Category Archives: Sports

Women’s Flat Track Roller Derby Time

Americana, Around home, Art, Current Affairs, Games, Sports,


We went to a Women’s Flat Track Roller Derby meet last Saturday night with almost no preconceived ideas. It was delightful.

I first heard about the revival of Roller Derby in an article titled Revolution on Eight Wheels by Diane “Lady Hulk” Williams – the Lady Hulk part is very important, it turns out – in which she talked about going to a match thinking it might be exploitation and falling in love with the sport and the team. After going to one game, it seems easy to do.

I am fascinated by the way our culture is changing – especially in regard to women and minorities – and I am fascinated by the way that change is reflected back into the culture by our public stories, like Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I know, technically, that Joss Whedon wrote Buffy so it could be called non-public, but Buffy ran for seven season because it resonated with society’s changing image of women. So going to a Women’s Flat Track Roller Derby match? game? roll-off? seemed right up my alley. It was in Oakland and we went with Courtney Gonzalez.

Courtney , Michele, and I met for dinner at a local pizzeria called Pizzaiolo – although calling Pizzaiolo a pizzeria is a little like calling a Bentley a car – and then went over to the Oakland Convention Center to see the B.A.D.’s – B.ay A.rea D.erby girls – All Star team, The Golden Girls, play the Austin Texecutioners _whose colors are black and blood – as part of a Roller Derby tournament. Dinner was slower than I expected and I was getting agitated that we would be too late but we ended up getting to the game just in time. I had expected that we would walk into a packed  house and not even be able to see the track.

 

It turns out that Flat Track Women’s Roller derby is not packing in the crowds…yet. But it will. It has everything, sexily dressed women, real hard-driving athletic competition, high scoring, and a warm family outing sort of atmosphere. Oh! and it is very casual: for example, each player, of course, has a number, but the numbers have no rhyme or reason. The San Francisco numbers are 11, 101, 666, 1619,16, Ohh, 170c, and so on. And each player has a stage name? porn name? Some of my favorites were Astronaughty, Ivy Profane, Huck Sinn, and Aunti Christ on the San Francisco team and Lucille Brawl, The Killa Sal Monella, Belle Starr – her number is 1889, the year of Belle Starr’s death – and Vicious Van GoGo on the Austin team.

The persona of Women’s Roller Derby – flat track, atleast – is of tough, maybe even nasty, women. It is anything but. Maybe because the teams are owned by the players, which means women, or maybe it is for some other reason, but the atmosphere is nonthreatening. Very nonthreatening in a counter culture way. It is as if they pretended to be  tough to hide their tender, vulnerable, welcoming selves. But the games are rough and tough. Women get knocked down, they get hurt, they get knocked out of the game.

Scoring is based on – very roughly – a jammer starting behind the scrum – for lack of a better name – fighting through the scrum, going around the track and catching up with the scrum, and then getting one point for each opposing player the jammer passes. Here are a few shots:

 

 

 

 

The Golden girls won by a landslide – the first time they have beaten the Austin Team.

 

 

 

 

 

‘

Adrian Newey and the theory of “everything is progressive”

Cars, Current Affairs, Sports

General Grant once said War is progressive, when he was accused of not following the old rules faithfully enough. I will go a step further and say Everything is progressive. Everything is built on the past which was, of course, built on its past. Especially in sports which are – when you think about it – war with a better set of rules.

Part of  Everything is progressive. is that nobody stays on top for long. Think football. Every decade, there is a Team of the Decade, but then new coaches come along and build on what was the newest latest thing but no longer is. For example, the San Francisco 49ers' Bill Walsh. He was a genius and he changed professional football, but, after a while, his opponents began to understand what he was doing, then how to stop him and then incorporate what he was doing and then build on it.

Like football, Formula One Racing is a team sport, and like football, a team is strong for a while, then another team comes along and replaces it. Except for teams that have Adrian Newey. Newey is an racecar engineer specializing in aerodynamics.
When he worked on CART cars in the United States he took Al Unser and then, Bobby Rahal to championships in the 1980s. In the 90s, he worked for Williams in Formula One and took them to several championships. Then he moved to McLaren F1 and they won. Now he is at Red Bull as the technical director and they are the fastest car, by far, this year.

A Nike ad

Film, Games, Sports, Television

This Nike ad, -directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu, the director of Amores Perros and Babel, among other movies – is really an amazing short film. It is so quick and so frenetic that it is hard to follow at first. It took several viewings and some Cliff Notes before I got the story line.

The players envision real-world consequences of their plays….after
sending a pass that gets intercepted by Ribery, Wayne Rooney stares
himself down in a mirror and throws a bottle at his reflection; the
stock market crashes in England; the papers diss Rooney; he grows a
beard and a gut and winds up cutting grass in the stadium; he lives in a
trailer under a billboard of Ribery. Back on the pitch, we see Rooney
shake off this hallucination, chase Ribery down and tackle him.

I am not a big soccer fan and, like pro-football, I think that the vignetted scenes with Wagnerian music and a deep base voice-over make it much more dynamic than actually watching a game. But the world cup is a big, big, deal; maybe bigger than the Olympics.

Ferraris, McLarens, Mercedei, and Red Bulls, Oh my….the F1 season starts

Cars, Sports

Ferrari pit stop

The weekend, the Formula One racing season starts in Bahrain. I am thrilled. The favored cars are Ferrari, McLaren, Mercedes, and Red Bull. (For an earlier post that is a very short explanation of F1 – as it is usually called – click here or click here for a longer Wikipedia explanation.) The fact that Red Bull is one of the favorites just goes to show how much money can be made in the energy drink biz.

F1 is pretty much considered the pinnacle of auto racing. In an effort to slow the cars down and bring the costs back into some form of reasonableness – the top teams were spending over $400 million per season – the engines have been made smaller; but they are still staggering fast cars. They are now only 2.4 liter engines that can rev to 18,000RPM and put out around 700HP – in a car that only weighs 1334 lbs. They can go from 0 to 100 km/h (62mph) in about 1.5 seconds, and 0 to 200 km/h in about 3.8. Over and over again for a couple of hours. They have a top speed of about 225 mph.

One thing I like about F1 is how international the drivers are with 2 British, 6 German, 1 Australian, 2 Brazilian, 3 Spanish, 1 Polish, 1 Russian, 2 Italian, I Swiss, 1 Finnish, 1 Indian, and 1 Japanese driver racing this year. That is a total of only 22 drivers and they all must have a FIA - Fédération Internationale de l'Automobile -Super Licence.

The favorite drivers are Fernando Alonso, Felipe Massa, Jenson Button,Sebastian
Vettel, Lewis Hamilton, Michael Schumacher, and Nico Rosberg  shown below.

Nico Rosberg
 

The cars themselves are ridiculous in their complexity with all sorts of little areo devises to make them slip through the air – every team has it's own windtunnel – and inverted wings to push them down to the ground so they will hang on to road better. The cars are meticulously made, but the resulting design is an acquired taste at best.Red Bull F1

.Mercedes F1

 

The Blind Side

Americana, Books, Current Affairs, Film, Religion, Sports, What's a man?

Michael Oher and family

I just finished reading The Blind Side by Michael Lewis and I would recommend it to anybody who is interested in football, or US social policy, or the human potential, or race relations, or, for that matter, just wants a good read.I just finished writing about David Foster Wallace and how much I have enjoyed his writing and The Blind Side is the polar opposite.

With DFW, I am always aware of, and dazzled by, the writing. In the The Blind Side, the story is everything – more accurately, what is being told is everything. All the words, all the sentences are pushing a narrative forward. And I mean that in the best possible way. 

At this point, I think everybody knows the basic plot – how a poor black kid, Big Mike who become Michael Oher,  is discovered (not quite the right word, maybe found) by a very rich, white, Christian, family and how his life and their lives are changed. That does not do it justice. Michael Oher is a 350 pound, 6'4", freakishly quick, and astonishingly graceful black kid who is invisible.  He goes to school, sort of, but nobody cares if he learns anything – they just pass him on to the next grade where he is invisible again.  He is one of those kids we read about every once in a while that just slipped through the cracks. At 6'4" and 350 pounds!

Except that, when he is starting his junior year in high school, everything changed. Michael is very likable but he is very lucky. As the book says, among other things, Pity the kid inside Hurt Village who was born to play the piano, or manage people, or trade bonds. This book made me realize, again, that we, me and the people who read this blog, were all born on third base, at least, and, even on our best days, think we hit a double.We didn't we are just enormously lucky.