Dana Blankenhorn

Replacing the Sports Page

What is the most heavily subsidized business in America today?

Sports.

What other business routinely blackmails cities, counties and states into building billion-dollar palaces for its use, then giving these over to billionaires, complete with all the revenue, and no accountability?

What other business can control its own press coverage to the extent sports does?

"Any rebroadcast, reproduction or other use of this game without the express written consent of Major League Baseball is prohibited."

Imagine if Rod Blagoyevich could have enforced something like that!

Yet the biggest subsidy for the sports industry does not come from government, but from journalism.

Every newspaper sports page is a commercial for the teams it covers. Reporters don't actually pay to cover games, the way TV and cable outlets pay to broadcast games, but they are more important than either. Because, as Mark Cuban admitted at his blog this week, they bring in the casual fan.

With local print journalism about to go extinct the industry is losing its connection to the casual fan, who brings with him (or her) an acceptance of all the other subsidies. Without the acceptance of the casual fan, how can cities be blackmailed into building sports palaces and giving them to team owners, or how can university alumni be blackmailed into putting millions of dollars into coaches' pockets in hopes that alma mater will get a mention on ESPN?

Newspapers provide more than coverage to sports. They provide cover. By giving sports prominence alongside government, crime, and Dilbert, they create the illusion that the results of such contests are serious news, and that a championship is "making history." Take away the illusion and it's just a TV show.

Cuban's own proposals on this front are, frankly, pretty lame. Subsidize beat writers through some central authority? And how do these reports then reach the casual fan?

It's not the writing that's the problem. It's the distribution, the wide distribution newspapers provided for over a century. Some of that is held by TV, but local TV news has been losing share as fast as the newspaper industry, and it has been cutting its sports coverage as outlets like ESPN take a greater hold on the imagination.

If newspapers had made better use of the Web we might not have this problem, at least not to as great a degree. We would have it, still, because there are still people who don't go online for whatever reason. But publishers ignored every piece of advice from everyone with A Clue for too long, and now lack the capital to command their online markets even if they had the skills.

The answer, for both sports and newspapers, is the same. Or was. (The cost of doing this goes up every year even while the chances of success decline.) It's a single word.

Directory.

Black Camelot

It is almost certain that, in the next few years, Broadway will mount a re-staging of the Broadway musical Camelot, probably with an all-black cast.

This will happen regardless of the election results. If Obama wins, it's an echo of the Kennedy era. If he loses it's in keeping with the play's actual plot, which is that Camelot is destroyed.

How do I know? This is how Broadway rolls. They reprise musicals 50 years after their opening. Kiss Me Kate re-opened in 1999, The Pajama Game in 2005. Camelot, which first opened in 1960, is due.

That's sort of forgotten these days because, in its first run, Julie Andrews took it over. It was all about the singing. She was a marvelous singer. But at that time, she wasn't a great actress. She wasn't ready to play the villain.

That's what Guenevere is, the villain. And that's what she will be when the play is re-staged.

Why an all-black cast? Because, frankly, there are more really talented black folks ready to grab these parts right now than white ones. (Brian Stokes Mitchell doesn't count. He's played both Coalhouse Walker, a black man in Ragtime, as well as The Man of La Mancha and the lead in that Kiss Me Kate I mentioned earlier. If you want to re-do Flower Drum Song I'm sure he'd be great.)

Rather than concern ourselves with the details of the re-staging (what might be added, or dropped, what might the costumes look like, or the staging) it's far more fun to play that great Hollywood Game -- I wanted, I'd take, I got.

As in I wanted Laurence Olivier, I'd take Dick Van Dyke, I got Dom DeLuise. Only to make this game even more sporting, let's play it this way. Who plays the role on Broadway, who gets it in the Hollywood motion picture, and who goes about touring it in the sticks?

Revolt of the Sports Fans

Over the weekend my daughter and I decided to visit a local bar and watch the footy. Italy was playing Spain somewhere in Austria, and we thought it would be fun to spend time together before she travels to Italy for a summer semester later this week.

The place was mobbed. We couldn't get a view of the TV. Had to come home.

This is no longer unusual in America. It's seldom remarked upon, but it may be the most important sports story of the decade here. Ordinary Americans are dropping their obsessions with baseball, NASCAR and basketball to cheer on a bunch of guys in shorts doing what their kids do on Saturday mornings.

Now some of these people are immigrants. Some of these people are kids who grew up on soccer. But I'm beginning to believe, increasingly, that some of it is political.

How Far Has U.S. Soccer Come?

This far.

I'm pissed we lost to England. At Wembley.

The game was over by the time Landon Donovan was scratched, ostensibly with a groin injury, but in fact so as not to detract from teammate David Beckham getting his 100th (and last) cap for England. Becks later set up the first English goal, then showered and wore a nice suit during the second half.

He wears a suit well. More on that later.

Without Donovan, we had nothing to offer in attack. We had Euro-scrubs, guys like Eddie Johnson and Carlos Bocanegra who couldn't play for Fulham, guys from minor leagues in Belgium, Holland and Germany. Our back line of Cherundolo (too old), Bocanegra (too slow) and Onyewu (too ponderous) could do nothing with the English attack, and Coach Bob Bradley did nothing about it.

It's no longer enough for me to come up on a big occasion and watch our coach act like he's scared of the upcoming Barbados encounter. We've practically got an automatic, every quadrennial bid to the Big Dance now, and it's past time we got to the next level.

The next level, in this case, is beating teams like England, and Spain, and Argentina, in their own buildings, in front of their own fans, with fancy, fast, entertaining, high-energy stuff.

Does Politics Trump Everything?

I didn't intend on getting into this, but I had the Congressional hearing on, with Roger Clemens, and there's an important point which needs to be made. (Picture from 108 Red Stitches.)

Does politics really trump everything? Does the truth of something mean nothing? Or is everything just a function of which political party you belong to?

Let's be clear. Roger Clemens is a Republican, a staunch one, a charter member of the "jockocracy" who got rich off sports and thus identifies with the rich.

That fact should mean nothing regarding whether Roger Clemens used performance-enhancing drugs. The Congressional committee should be testing the evidence, and acting in an impartial manner as much as possible.

I don't know the truth, but I have suspicions. I know what Clemens looked like a decade ago. I know what he looks like now. His head is two sizes larger. That is one side-effect of steroid use. And his record over the last 10 years, his success in continuing to pitch well into his 40s, also has to be seen suspiciously. Especially in light of the specific allegations contained in the Mitchell Report, and the further evidence offered by former trainer Brian McNamee.

Every case of conspiracy is, as prosecutors say, a piece of shit. That is you depend on members of the conspiracy, criminals, to testify against others. You expect drug dealers to rat on their customers, customers on their dealers, and you don't judge guilt or innocence  based on party affiliations.

Do you?

Coach Lilly

What happened to the U.S. Womens World Cup team this week was sad, but pretty neat in a way.

Sad, because Coach Greg Ryan made a classic mistake, replacing his goalie for a semi-final, and he paid the appropriate price, in that the team was crunched, 4-0 by Brazil.

Pretty neat, because this is the kind of thing which happens to mens' teams all the time, and for once it got the kind of attention we give mens' teams.

The Frame

I recently finished Pete Hamill's 2003 work, Forever.

It's a great novel. Pete Hamill is a master. Hamill ranks alongside Jimmy Breslin as great journalists of the generation which preceded mine. And Hamill is a better editor.

But it seemed to me, in reading the book, that a lot of great stuff was left out. The final product is 640 pages, and it jumps 125 years with barely an explanation. Yet there are hints, in its final section, of stories untold.

They were left out, edited out, because they didn't fit the frame which was the book, the one that had to be sold.

Some Chinese Accountability Please

So I'm watching the Today show before I take my son to his bus stop, and there's Mattel CEO Robert Eckert ($43.6 million earned in the last six years) chatting amiably with Meredith Viera about his latest toy recall.

He does the dance executives have been doing ever since the Tylenol scare. Here's what we know. We're getting to the bottom of this. Trust us.

It's a model for corporate accountability, the experts agree.

And he defends his Chinese suppliers. The latest recall isn't their fault. It's a "design flaw."

What does this mean? It means Mattel designed tiny magnets inside breakable plastic toys deliberately. It wasn't a bug. It was a feature.

So what are bloggers saying about all this? They're worried about the company's reputation. They're talking, still, about China, although China had nothing to do with the 9 million toys recalled for having magnets in them.

Some consumer oriented-blogs are waking up. For the love of God, writes Fussbucket.  Where are the outraged bloggers, writes Robert Roger Anderson. Can regulation cure Mattel's problem, asks The Everyday Economist, before giving the answer no. (Since worthless regulation didn't help, that means regulation is worthless. Sheesh.)

The Collapse of Local Media

I missed a great story recently.

My son's recreation soccer team at TYSA got pummeled by a team from his old program at the local YMCA. I thought our coach was a great story, since he was also, at that time, editing The Lion, The Witch & the Wardrobe.

I was wrong.

It was the opponent who was the story. They were called the Fugees, as in the old musical group fronted by Wyclef Jean. They had game. They were respectful, good kids.  And after the game, I noticed, they didn't have snacks.

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution never wrote about them. I never did, either. Neither did Creative Loafing or any other media company, despite the team's cool Web site. It was left to The New York Times to get the story. (The picture is from that story.)

The Bowl Economy

For those who've missed me, we traveled to New Orleans for Rice's first bowl game since 1961, then on to San Antonio to visit relatives who are without Internet access.

So I took a brief vacation.

Let us start the return with good memories.  Given that many of us considered it a once-in-a-lifetime event (the last Rice bowl appearance was in 1961) about 7,000 Owls descended on New Orleans for something called the R&L Carriers New Orleans Bowl.

The Rice crowd was so passionate that when we arrived on the afternoon of the game they were completely sold out of Rice shirts, sweats, hats, scarves, and anything else referencing the event. (We eventually cadged some bowl t-shirts from a street vendor, after the game.)

But while 7,000 was a big impressive number to School President David Leebron, it didn't look like all that much in the 70,000 seat Superdome. Only the bottom two tiers of seats were sold at all, and the crowd on the middle dome tier was sparse. Even on the ground level the end zones were empty.