538 reports that Vegas is taking bets on the poem Amanda Gorman is scheduled to read as part of the Super Bowl festivities.
I'm not gonna lie: the idea of gambling on a poem about sports combines three of my six or seven favorite things, so I am intrigued. But the betting options on offer strike me as not all that interesting. For instance, I'm baffled that "neither" is not an option for which team name Gorman uses first. I would bet every penny of revenue generated by this blog on "neither."
So here, for your home amusement, are the EG Revue's wagering proposals for the Super Bowl poem. Note that I don't know how to balance odds correctly, as I am not an actual bookie, so the number are rough.
1. The first end-rhyme in the poem will be:
A. Masculine [last syllable of rhyme stressed; i.e. shade/wade] (-130)
B. Feminine [last syllable of rhyme unstressed; i.e. inherit/repair it] (+110)
C. There will be no end-rhyme (+1000)
2. Over/Under on usages of the word "field" (this includes "field" embedded in compound nouns, like "battlefield"):
A. Over 1.5 (-110)
B. Under 1.5 (-110)
3. Which of the following words will appear first in Gorman's poem:
A. Charge (+160)
B. Light (-150)
C. Brigade (+1000)
D. None of the Above (+120)
4. The primary denotative meaning of the first usage of the word "Montana" will be:
A. The state of Montana (+250)
B. NFL Hall of Famer Joe Montana (+800)
C. Al Pacino's character from Scarface (+30,000)
D. The poem will not use the word "Montana" (-350)
5. Which will be longer:
A. The length of the poem, in seconds, with the timer starting when Gorman speaks the first word of the poem (+220)
B. The length of the first scoring drive of the game, in seconds of elapsed game clock, as recorded in official box score (-200)
Yesterday, when I wrote about the poet Carl Phillips, I
quoted the following from his poem “Archery”: “To have timed your arrow/
perfectly meant watching the air for a moment/ seem stitched throughout with a
kind of/ timelessness.”
I very much doubt that Phillips had English soccer even the
slightest bit in mind when he wrote those lines, but I’ll admit that when I
read them, one of the first things I thought of was this:
Talk about timing your arrow perfectly.
I promise I’m not going to go the full John Updike and
pretend that sports are literature. That said, if you’re a fan of either soccer
or poetry, you’re deeply familiar with the experience of feeling time grind
away as you watch ideas come to nothing and real risk get eschewed for easy,
cynical ploys. Trust me: any lover of poetry or soccer who has read Longfellow
or watched the Colorado Rapids knows this shit can be boring. But if you’re
into it, you keep waiting in the hope of some moment of grace—the
perfectly-weighted pass, the unexpected turn of phrase—that will make time jump
and stand still all at once. The page and the pitch are blank, brutal spaces,
but every once in a while someone transforms that nothingness into beauty.
Over the past few weeks, as the Premier League has started
up again in empty stadiums in England, one of the best players in the world has
been an American: Chelsea winger Christian Pulisic. Just watch what he does here
against a Manchester City team that gets paid roughly $200 million in total salary:[1]
On the occasions when American players have done big things
in big games—both men’s and women’s—they have tended to rely on sheer physicality
and effort: the speed of Landon Donovan, the strength of Abby Wambach, the
tenacity of Clint Dempsey. And while Pulisic is a remarkable athlete, possessed
of excellent speed and agility, what jumps out in this clip is his tactical
foresight, his well-timed risk-taking, and how calm he is finishing a
high-pressure shot. And yet, somehow he’s from Hershey, Pennsylvania rather
than Argentina or Italy.
2020 has been a sad, tragic, and embarrassing year in
America. I can’t imagine you need me to list the reasons why. And of course the
fact that a kid from Pennsylvania is good at soccer changes absolutely none of
that. But still, it’s been nice that for a few hours each week, at least one
American is excelling on a global stage.
[1]
Just so we’re clear, Chelsea pays its players around $165 million. No one in
that clip is poor.
I’m fairly certain I have not seen this fact written anywhere, but here goes: Kansas City is the only city that has won championships in three of the five largest North American team pro sports leagues since 2013 (those five being NFL, NBA, NHL, MLB, and MLS). This is particularly impressive since Kansas City only has teams in three of those five leagues--every KC team has brought home a title within the last seven seasons. Even if you list total combined championships won by a city since 2013, KC looks impressive:
MOST COMBINED CHAMPIONSHIPS SINCE 2013 IN THE BIG 5 LEAGUES
Boston 4 (3 Patriots, 1 Red Sox)
Bay Area 4 (3 Warriors, 1 SF Giants)
KC 3 (1 Chiefs, 1 Royals, 1 Sporting)
Seattle 3 (2 Sounders, 1 Seahawks)
Chicago 3 (2 Blackhawks, 1 Cubs)
Or to come at it another way, all three of Kansas City’s teams have won a championship since the last time the greater New York City area got a title from any of its eleven total teams across the five leagues (the last one was the Giants’ Super Bowl win eight years ago). So the next time a New Yorker puffs their chest in your general direction about the bagel water, remind them that the Yankees suck (recently).
As recently as October of 2013, the Royals were a permanent farce, the Chiefs were a five-act tragedy, and Sporting was the team with a shiny new stadium where they had previously lost their biggest playoff games. And now we’re titletown, thanks to three crazy playoff runs, every single one of which involved bonkers comebacks from highly-likely defeat. It was the greatest decade in KC sports history. We were privileged to watch a team precisely engineered to be good every year (Sporting), a team that caught lightning in a bottle (the Royals), and a team that drafted the most talented player of his generation (the Chiefs). I can’t imagine we’ll see the likes of it again.
And so, while the giddiness is fresh, here is my celebration of my ten favorite moments from the playoff runs of Sporting in 2013, the Royals in 2015, and the Chiefs in 2019-20. I’m defining “moment” a touch loosely, but these are the ten that stick with me. It was not easy to narrow it down.
#10: Mahomes to Hill, 3rd and 15, 4th Quarter, Super Bowl
I’m grabbing this stat from ESPN, but it’s the craziest damn thing. On 3rd and 15 in the regular season and playoffs, Patrick Mahomes was 13 for 17 for 299 yards, 3 TD’s, and 0 INT’s. That’s an average of 17.6 yards per attempt. He averaged a first down completion on 3rd and 15. That shouldn’t be possible.
I’ll freely admit that around 9 minutes to go in the Super Bowl, I was approaching the acceptance phase. The 49ers were leveraging every obvious advantage they had, and KC had no answers. But all year, the Chiefs have converted crazy 3rd-and-longs, and on this one, with the season on the line, Mahomes took a shotgun snap and then dropped back an additional 8 yards (because why not make it 3rd and 28?) and then he threw the ball 60 yards downfield to a wide open Hill. It was still a 20-10 lead for San Francisco, but if you had watched KC all season you knew that for the first time all night the Chiefs looked like the Chiefs.
#9: Feilhaber steal and assist to Bieler, Extra Time, Eastern Conference Semifinals
Benny Feilhaber was exactly what Sporting Kansas City needed when they signed him in 2013. They had a good core, with Matt Besler, Graham Zusi, and CJ Sapong, among others, but they had a good core of Boy Scouts. They needed a magnificent bastard, and that bastard was Benny Feilhaber, the platonic form of the guy who sits in the high school parking lot in a sports car from his dad’s dealership, waiting to make a pass at your girlfriend. In this case, he stole a pass from the New England goalkeeper in the 113th minute of the second leg of a cup tie, and then fed a perfect pass to Claudio Bieler, who had his one great KC moment and scored a goal that broke a 3-3 aggregate draw and sent Sporting on to the Conference finals. I was there, I was freezing, I lost my shit.
#8: Colon drives in go-ahead run, 12th Inning, Game 5 of World Series
I’ve written about this one elsewhere. Suffice it to say that when the RBI that turns out to be the decisive run of a World Series is #8 on this list, it’s been a fun time to be a sports fan in KC.
#7: Cain scores from first on a single, 8th Inning, Game 6 of ALCS
This was an objectively huge run--it ended up being the pennant-winner against the Blue Jays--but the craziest thing about it is that Lorenzo Cain going first-to-home on a single was not a crazy decision. In fact, he made it by a mile. Cain running the bases was one of my favorite things to watch in KC sports this decade. He moved with remarkable grace for such a large man. As my own feet got progressively worse as the decade progressed (to the point where I eventually needed surgery) it was a joy to watch a runner who seemed to be able to fly.
#6: Williams’ clinching TD run, 4th Quarter, Super Bowl
Speaking of my post-surgical feet, I was somewhat surprised by how rapidly I moved after Damien Williams ran 38 yards to put the Chiefs ahead 31-20 late in the Super Bowl. I vaguely recall that, after Williams scored, I said something about needing to “take it to the streets” and I grabbed my cousin’s Chiefs flag and shot out to door to run around for a while while the people up the block set off fireworks (my cousin soon followed behind me with his much larger house flag). It was the fastest I’ve moved in quite a while. I felt it a bit the next day, but still, it was lovely.
What’s more exciting as a fan: the score that breaks a tie to put your team in the lead, or the score that brings your team back to life after a period of near-certain doom? I would submit that it is the latter (indeed, the rest of these rankings exemplify that belief). Heading into November 6, 2013, Sporting was developing a reputation as a team that choked. Each of the past two seasons, they had lost to lower seeds in the playoffs, and they had lost their first match of the 2013 playoffs 2-1 in New England. They had one more game against New England back in KC, but very late in the match, Sporting was trailing 3-2 on aggregate goals.
And then, local boy Seth Sinovic, a professional athlete who is so Kansas City that his aunt lives across the street from me, a defensive player who is one of the worst shooters I’ve ever seen, cracked an absolute laser beam on a loose ball to save Sporting from impending elimination. Going into that match, I genuinely did not believe that good things could happen in the playoffs to Kansas City teams. That narrative started to change at exactly 78:02 in the second leg of the conference semis, when a kid from Rockhurst made the shot of his life.
#4: Mahomes’ Mad Dash, 2nd Quarter, AFC Divisional Playoffs
Assuming that we don’t all burn up or drown before then, sometime around the turn of the 22nd century an old man will be sitting in a Kansas City nursing home rambling on to his reluctantly-visiting great-grandchildren about how back when he was in elementary school he saw Patrick Mahomes play in the Super Bowl, and these whippersnappers you see on the field today aren’t half as good as ol’ Patrick Mahomes. Ol’ Mahomes could throw it without looking; he could sling it with both hands; he could stare down a grizzly bear and not rattle even a little. Hell, he could run through a whole damn defense if he set his mind to it.
The great-grandkids will roll their eyes and check their watches (which will be inside their brains, because it’ll be the future) to see how much longer they need to wait before they can leave without being rude. They won’t have any idea that great-grandad is absolutely right.
#3: Gordon’s game-tying HR, 9th Inning, Game 1 of the World Series
I once saw a young Alex Gordon hit a home run in the minors against the AA Springfield Cardinals. Based on a bit of box score perusal, I’m pretty sure it was in 2006, though he hit a couple in Springfield that year, so I can’t pin down the date. Gordon hit it a long way, too--it landed on top of that building out past the right field fence.
It was a fun moment, inasmuch as I got to stand up and cheer in front of the Cardinal fans, but we all knew what the deal was: they rooted for the team that won championships, and I rooted for the team that occasionally had a prospect who was decent enough that the Royals could develop him and then give him away for pennies on the dollar before he hit free agency.
Instead, Gordon made a career of it with the Royals, and nine years later, with his team trailing in the bottom of the ninth of Game One of the World Series, he hit it even farther than he did on that night in Springfield. The Royals were about to go down 1-0 and lose home field advantage; instead, KC rallied to win, and they set up a rent-free residence inside the Mets’ heads that would continue through late innings for the rest of the series.
#2: Palmer’s missed PK, Penalty Shootout, MLS Cup Final
While the Royals and Chiefs both won their championships in very exciting games (12 innings; fourth-quarter comeback), the actual championship-concluding play was not especially tense (strike out the side with five run lead; throw an incomplete pass to run out the clock).
For Sporting, though, it was tense right down to the end. And beyond the end. And even beyond the reasonable end of the tiebreaker penalty shootout. The shootout is supposed to take five kicks per team, but KC and Salt Lake needed ten to decide a winner (it’s still the longest championship game in MLS history).
There’s a case to be made that I should pick other moments from the MLS Cup Final--Collin’s game-tying goal in the 76th minute; Nielsen’s do-or-die save of Salt Lake’s 8th penalty--but I’ve never experienced anything in sports quite like the millisecond shift between wondering if this tie will ever be broken to realizing that it’s over, and KC has a champion, and that sitting out in the 25-degree weather for three hours was worth it after all. If all the beer hadn’t been frozen, I might have thrown it in the air to celebrate.
#1: Hosmer’s Mad Dash, 9th Inning, Game 5 of World Series
If anything defines KC sports in the 2010’s, it’s irrational confidence being rewarded. Renaming your soccer team after a club from Portugal and then hoping that people in the midwest are gonna buy into it still seems like a crazy idea almost ten years after it worked. The Chiefs, an organization long synonymous with choking, hired a coach long synonymous with choking, and then went all-in on a raw QB prospect who went 5-7 in his last season in college. And Eric Hosmer, who is not a notably fast man, decided that the ninth inning of a World Series game would be a great time to see if he could score from third on a delayed break on a groundout.
I’m sure everyone thought that the first person to eat a burnt end was crazy too.
Anyway, Hosmer scored. There was much rejoicing. It was my favorite unbelievable sports moment of a decade I still can’t quite believe happened.
Honorable Mentions: Dwyer’s goal in Eastern Conference Final; Collin’s MLS Cup goal; Davis’ Game 6 ALCS relief pitching appearance; Correa’s error in 8th inning of Game 4 of the ALDS; Mahomes’ TD pass to Watkins in 4th quarter of AFC title game; Mahomes’ 1st down pass to Watkins in 4th quarter of Super Bowl; Fuller’s interception in 4th quarter of Super Bowl
The Twentybens: Ben Celebrates the Best of the 2010's
One of the great charms of baseball is that, more than any
other sport, it affords the opportunity for unlikely heroism. It’s no great
trick to design a basketball offense where LeBron takes the lion’s share of the
shots, and Tom Brady throws all the Patriots’ passes (except, hilariously, when he doesn’t). But in baseball, once your best hitter bats, he doesn’t get
another shot until everyone else in the lineup takes their turn. And if the
game goes longer than expected, and a team runs out of all the pinch hitters
they actually want to use, they have no choice but to let the last guy on the
bench step up to the plate.
This brings me to Christian Colón, a local hero whose status
as folk legend is only made possible by the egalitarianism of baseball. Colón
absolutely should not be a mythic figure. He’s never been a regular major
league starter. He’s played in parts of five seasons, but in none of those
seasons did he ever appear in more than a third of his team’s games. He’s
posted no steals and only one extra-base hit since 2017. His career slugging
percentage is lower than his on-base percentage, which indicates a commitment
to slap-hitting that would be more at home in the 1910’s than the 2010’s. He’s
pretty good at defense, but he’s definitely not very good at defense.
Usually, when I am watching the worst professional athletes
on their particular teams, the thought crosses my mind that, even in their
high-profile failures, they are much better at what they do than I am what I
do. But I’m honestly not sure that’s true of Colón. Being a tenured professor
at the University of Central Missouri with a short stack of mostly second-tier journal
articles to my name is probably the rough academic equivalent of getting 355
career MLB at-bats and hitting .256 with one homer.
Except...and here again is the glory of baseball and the
privilege of athletes...on two nights, one in 2014 and one in 2015, Colón had a
shot to write himself into baseball history, and he bullseyed immortality both
times.
On the evening of September 30, 2014, Colón spent several
hours doing exactly what the majority of Kansas Citians were doing: he sat on
his butt and watched a baseball game. Indeed, if the Wild Card playoff game
against Oakland—KC’s first playoff game since Back to the Future came out—had ended in nine innings, Colón would never
have left the bench. But in the bottom of the 10th, he entered the game to pinch-hit
for another benchwarmer, short person Terrance Gore, who had come in to pinch
run in the 8th, and who is such a terrible hitter that he makes Colón look like
Mike Schmidt. Colón looked less Schmidtian when he was immediately asked to
sacrifice bunt, but at least he did so successfully.
His bunting complete, Colón went back to the dugout...and
then he hung out for a while. Gore had pinch-run for Billy Butler, which meant Colón
took Butler’s slot in the lineup, which meant Colón was now quite possibly the
least-fearsome Designated Hitter in the history of the American League. But the
game kept going and going, and in the 12th, Oakland took the lead, and KC had
to score to survive. Eric Hosmer, a large man who hits baseballs very far and
who once lived in a fancy apartment above a fancy restaurant that specializes
in selling marked-up offal to yuppies,[1]
came just a few inches short of hitting a game-tying homer, and he was standing
at third when Colón came up with one out. Then this happened:
As I study that replay, I’m pretty sure that after leaving Colón’s
bat, the ball makes initial contact with the earth approximately an inch in
front of home plate. Fortunately, the ball bounced very high, giving everyone
enough time to advance a base, and Christian Colón, a rookie backup infielder
with six career RBI’s to that point, was standing on first base with a
game-tying RBI in an extra-inning sudden-death playoff game.
With two outs, Colón stole second base, which is also
unusual—he still only has five career stolen bases. The steal was vital, since
it allowed him to score when Salvador Perez poked the biggest Royals hit in a generation into left field.
Perez and relief pitcher Brandon Finnegan are probably the
most-remembered heroes of that game, but nevertheless, Colón had played an
essential role in one of the unlikeliest victories in playoff history (per
Baseball Reference, the Royals had a 3 percent chance to win at the end of the
7th). Having accomplished this, he did next-to-nothing for the rest of the 2014
postseason, taking the field only to play defense for half an inning in Game 2
of the ALCS (the Orioles didn’t hit the ball his way).
Indeed, during KC’s magical playoff runs of 2014 and 2015,
after Colón’s game-tying RBI in the Wild Card game, the Royals played 282
innings of postseason baseball before he had another chance to bat.
That next at-bat was on a considerably larger stage: the 12th
inning of Game 5 of the World Series, with the Royals only one win away from
their first championship sincethe
year Cyndi Lauper released “The Goonies ‘R’ Good Enough.”[2]
The Royals had been in pretty dire straits in this game as well—the Mets had a
95 percent chance to win the game as late as the middle of the 8th inning. But
KC fought their way back via the idiot savant baserunning that had become their
hallmark. Colón came in to pinch-hit for the pitcher in a tie game with a
runner on third and one out, and this time he managed to hit the ball a bit
more squarely than he had 13 months earlier in the Wild Card game:
The Mets melted down at this point and the Royals ran out to
a 7-2 lead before they were done, but the fact remains that the go-ahead RBI of
a decisive World Series game was driven in by the player who was least likely even
to get into the game. He came around to score a run of his own when Alcides
Escobar drove him in, and then he went back to the bench and was replaced by
relief pitcher Wade Davis in the bottom of the inning. As with the Wild Card
game, Colón is not really the player lodged in the cultural memory of Game 5—in
KC, it’s remembered mostly for “Hosmer’s Mad Dash;” in Flushing, I’m sure it’s
the “Lucas F-ing Duda” game. But when called upon, Colón got it done.
Four years later, the Royals’ moment in the sun seems even
more bizarre as MLB has returned to being a league dominated by power hitters
and big markets. As for Colón, he did not play in the majors at all in 2018,
and he appeared in only eight games for the sub-.500 Reds in 2019. But if it
turns out that Colón is done, his postseason batting record will be forever
pristine: 2 at-bats, 2 hits, 2 RBI’s, 2 runs, 1 steal, 1 sacrifice hit, 2
pennants, 1 World Series ring. Not half-bad for a footnote.
[2] I
hadn’t realized it before, but 1985 was a heck of a year for Hollywood comedies
aimed at ten year-olds. Also, I know the following opinion is indefensible, but
“The Goonies ‘R’ Good Enough” is definitely my favorite Lauper song. Unlike Colón,
it’s a banger.
The Time The Situation Slammed His Own Head Into a Wall
The first time I watched this scene, Ruth walked in just as
it was happening to ask me a question about William James. To be clear, Ruth
and I do not typically sit around and discuss philosophy. Mostly we talk
about the dogs and the bills and what to do for dinner and all the other stuff
married people talk about. But in this moment Ruth wanted to interrupt my
viewing of Jersey Shore to discuss
the father of American Pragmatism.
Reader, I shushed her. I want to be clear that I do not
frequently shush my wife. I’m not claiming any special degree of wokeness; I
just happen not be the shushing type. But in that moment, I shushed her. In my
defense, the quintessential television scene of our epoch was unfolding before
my very eyes.
Behold the power of steroids, cocaine, and human folly:
It’s tempting to say that an angry white man willfully
slamming his head into a concrete wall is a perfect metaphor for America in the
2010’s. But at the same time, I don’t want to over-read this scene. Let the moment
be all vehicle, no tenor. It is what it is. It’s a ridiculous man smashing his
head into a wall. Hard.
I relish the fact that this happened in a foreign country,
since it no doubt allowed the Italian medical professionals to openly mock The Situation
while treating him. I’m sure that provided them with a measure of comfort.
Jwoww later asserts that “this isn’t funny anymore.” I disagree.
Based on recent seasons of Jersey Shore (yeah, I’m still watching), it appears that Michael
Sorrentino has changed his life for the better. We're grading on a curve here--he did spend the better part of 2019 in federal prison--but still, rehab seems to have helped, and I hope that it is not just the editing room making it look like he has
learned to be a bit more chill in middle age.
