^{Richard Sherman  blocking a pass to 49ers’ Michael Crabtree. (Photo by others)}

When you’re a public figure, there are rules. Here’s one: A public personality can be black, talented, or arrogant, but he can’t be any more than two of these traits at a times. After Richard Sherman’s outburst, after the biggest game of his career – so far – after the biggest play of his career, the word ‘thug’ had cropped up 625 times on TV. From articles in- on? – Deadspin.

I don’t know very much about Professional Football, I used to, when I was a big fan and followed it on a daily basis but, today, I would describe myself as a lapsed fan . I don’t follow it all season and only start during the playoffs but, this year, that is enough to get me interested again.

It has become a much more complicated game, back in the days when I rabid, it was easier because the different leagues – after the AFL-NFL merger, different conferences –  had different styles of play. The AFL favored wide open play and the defenses often countered with a bump and run pass defense over a zone. I usually knew who to key off of.

But now everybody has evolved – and continues to evolve – and evolution favors the generalists. As an aside, the elephant and the panda do what they do extraordinarily well while the coyote does lots of things pretty well. The elephant and the panda are endangered and coyotes have spread to all 50 states. End aside. Today, nobody runs off of tackle as well as Lombardi’s Packers did but everybody can run off tackle pretty well, run a Bill Walsh type, short pass, crossing pattern pretty well, and go deep, occasionally, pretty well and, for somebody not paying attention until a month ago, telling who is doing it best is hard to tell.

Fortunately, these are good times to be unknowledgeable, the play by play and analysis on TV – for every game – make it easy for everyman to follow, even if you are not sure where the nickleback should be playing or who he is keying off. I used to be very dismissive of magazines like People or Us because they talked about people rather than ideas. However, as football styles have become more universal, the people who are embodying those styles become the easiest way into what is going on. So, like everybody else that doesn’t know the details, I am now following the people.

Following the people , takes me down the road of pitting Denver’s offence, led by Peyton Manning, against Seattle’s defence, symbolized by Richard Sherman or, maybe, the cerebral Broncos symbolized by Peyton Manning, against Seattle’s emotional defence led by Richard Sherman. I almost always go with the cerebral guys over the emotional guys which is why I liked the cerebral Bill Bradley over the more populist Al Gore. As an aside, that is why I think that Obama’s being black helped him in the primaries. He picked up almost all of the black vote which would normally go with the populist candidate plus the cerebral voters, like me. The combination put him over the more populist Hillary. End side.

I started rooting for the AFL – then its AFC descendant – team in the Super Bowl because , if it wasn’t the Raiders, it was a team that had beaten the Raiders in the playoffs and, if they won, I could interpret as proof that the Raiders were, at least, number two and probably would have been number one if the refs hadn’t made all those wrong calls; then it became a habit. So both my habit of going with the AFC and my leaning towards the cerebral should lead me to root for Denver, but I can’t.

During the last two weeks, I have become very fond of Richard Sherman and through him, Seattle. First off, Peyton Manning is from Louisiana and played for the University of Tennessee, while Richard Sherman is from Compton and played at Stanford; I always like to go with the locals. Second, under all the emotion, Sherman is an intellectual – he graduated with a 3.9 GPA – and is a student of the game. He says that he has only mediocre NFL physical tools but makes up for it with meticulous attention to detail.  Lastly, during the last twenty years, or so, the NFL has done everything they can to hinder the defence and help the offence, making the offence the underdog and it is always nice to go with the underdog.

Hopefully, this will end up being one of those games that go to the very end. Before any Super Bowl, all the signs point to it being a classic, great, game; the two best offenses in football going at it, or the two best defenses, or – in this case – the best offence against the best defense. Maybe this year will actually be one of those great games, we will know Sunday night. Go Seahawks!

We are at Peter and Ophelia’s in Boise Idaho – for a very long weekend – for Michele’s birthday. When we arrived Wednesday, on the first commercial prop plane I have been on in – maybe – 49 years, it was snowing but not sticking.

Yesterday, it was clear and warm – not warm for the Bay Area, but warm for here – so we took a walk near the Boise River. As we were getting ready to go for the walk, I thought maybe I should wear my gloves because I was sure it would be cold in the shade. What I hadn’t counted on is that there wouldn’t be much shade because the trees had all dropped their leaves.

One of the complaints that I read about the Americanization – for lack of a better word – of America is the homogenization of  our culture. Driving down the freeway, every offramp has the same fast food places and Starbucks. The Piggly Wiggly,  National Tea, Skaggs Cash Stores, Devan’s, and their ilk, have been replaced with Whole Foods. We watch the same TV at night and everybody, everywhere, pretty much dresses the same, divided by class – or pay scale – more than region.

All that is true, but the differences are still there, just pick up the local paper. In the Idaho Statesman is an ad for the new Ford – one of the pioneering National brands – Idaho Center featuring Ford Idaho Horse Park, Ford Arena, and Ford Amphitheater; the ad features a picture of a guy on horseback shooting a balloon with a very bright muzzle flash. The last time we were here, on a Saturday afternoon, we went to the Idaho State Capitol building – pretty much in the middle of Boise – and just walked in; no guards, no metal detector, just an open door to a seemingly empty building (although the individual office doors were closed and, presumably, locked).

This morning, it is cold and frosty outside and I have already learned a lesson, never leave your shoes out overnight in Boise, in the winter.

During the last couple of days, I have found it hard not to keep bumping into Chris Christie. During that time, he has gone from ridiculing the very idea that shutting down the lanes leading to the George Washington Bridge was done on purpose, to admitting it – as the evidence grew – but denying he knew anything about the shutdown. It seems to me that the question of whether Christie knew or not isn’t relevant.

During the 1960’s and 70’s, I was a close-to-fanatic Oakland Raider fan. At the time, the Raider’s primary owner was Wayne Valley, the owner of the – then – very successful Besco home building company. Valley brought on Al Davis as Managing General Partner and Davis, as Managing Partner, turned the Raiders into one of the premier football teams of the era. At the same time, the 49ers were owned by the widows of the previous owners,  Josephine Morabito Fox and Jane Morabito. After a disastrous 2-14 season, the widows sold the team to  Edward DeBartolo Jr. who hired head coach Bill Walsh and the rest is history (at least in San Francisco).

When you read the history of the two teams during that era, the instrumental people most mentioned are Bill Walsh and Joe Montana, John Madden and Ken Stabler, along with various other players. Not much is said about the owners, but – I contend – the owners are the most important members of the team. The 49ers turned around because of Eddie DeBartolo. Under the Morabito widows, the 49ers had some great quarterbacks, like John Brodie and Y. A. Tittle, they had some great receivers and defensive backs, but they were never a great team.

When the Enron bubble burst, CEO Jeffrey Skilling and Chief Financial Officer Andrew Fastow got most of the credit but Ken Lay, the founder of Enron who claimed he knew nothing about the various frauds, was also charged and convicted as he should have been. As an aside, after he was convicted but before he was sentenced, Ken Lay died. He was vacationing in Snowmass, I guess when you steal as much as he did, you don’t go directly to jail. End aside. When Apple was run by John Sculley, it made some great computers but it didn’t become the Apple worth more than Microsoft, until Steve Jobs came back to turn the company around.

Steve Jobs didn’t do everything himself, but he set the tone. He created the culture, just like Ken Lay. Just like Al Davis and Eddie DeBartolo. And just like Chris Christie in New Jersey. Christie said that he fired his Deputy Chief of Staff, Bridget Kelly, because she lied to me. He didn’t fire her because of the traffic problems she caused or the because she acted in a petty and vindictive way; he fired her because she lied to him. Christie may be a governor that doesn’t like being lied to, but he has created a climate in which doing things that hurt the people of New Jersey is accepted, in which acting in a petty and vindictive way is accepted.

When Howard Dunaier emailed me about Michael Schumacher – the most successful Formula One driver of all time – getting hurt in a skiing accident, the day before New Year’s Eve, I think he was more upset than I was. At the time, I really didn’t have much of an emotional reaction and I still don’t. I am not sure why. There is no doubt that Schumacher is one of the world’s best athletes – even if you don’t believe that driving a car is an athletic endeavor, it is hard not to be impressed by his making a Billion dollars by doing it – but, for me, he has always been easier to admire than love.

As an aside. I said for me because I don’t know Schumacher – of course I have never met him, I haven’t even seen him drive in person – and all my reactions to him are my reactions, my projections. I don’t want to say for me in every paragraph below but please be aware that it is there. End aside.

Stirling Moss, probably the greatest race driver never to win a championship, said, To achieve anything, you must be prepared to dabble on the boundary of disaster. Schumacher, who won seven Formula One World Championships, almost never seemed to be dabbling on that edge. Sure, he  had great desire, speed, racecraft, and is relentlessly  fit, but his work ethic and ability to build a team around him are what set him apart. He was too invulnerable to be a warm and fuzzy, a lovable, kind of guy. He seemed unemotional, but nobody can drive as well as he did in his prime without being emotional and Schumacher, in the moment, over the years, he has done some very emotional, very dangerous, and very stupid things.

By all accounts, the way he skied on the day of the accident was not one of them. But, I am sure that Michael Schumacher does not ski like a normal 44-year-old man. Either way, he fell nine days ago and nobody is yet willing to say he is going to live. That, in itself, is pretty unusual. They have placed him in an artificial comma and have – somehow – reduced his temperature to below normal. I think that is also unusual for this period of time, so it does not look  very good.

In the strange way that life works, that has made Michael seem very vulnerable, for the first time.