Forced and Erroneous: 16 Notes on the 16-Year-Old Movie "Wimbledon"

Last night, as I contemplated falling asleep, I instead stumbled upon the movie Wimbledon. Then I woke up and wrote the following, which I believe constitutes the most time anyone has spent thinking about Wimbledon since it came out sixteen years ago.

Spoiler alert: In the text below, I discuss many “plot points” from the “film” Wimbledon.

1. The meet-cute in the 2004 romantic comedy Wimbledon happens the day before Wimbledon begins, when our male lead, the never-quite-made-it-big British tennis player Peter Colt (Paul Bettany), is assigned the wrong hotel room, and accidentally walks in on rising American tennis star Lizzie Bradbury (Kirsten Dunst) while she is the shower. Lizzie is surprisingly chill about this situation—she never for a second seems even vaguely surprised or worried. I get that the screenwriters are trying to suggest that she’s cool as a cucumber and doesn’t have hang-ups about her body or whatever, and later it’s revealed that she knows who Peter is because she’s seen one of his matches. But I have to think that even a super-sex-positive, tennis-aware woman with icewater in her veins is going to display at least a moment’s shock when a tall male stranger walks into her hotel room. Regardless, the audience reaction to a meet-cute probably shouldn’t be “why the hell isn’t this woman calling security?”

2. Lizzie Bradbury would be a much better name for a girl detective than a women’s tennis player. 

3. A young Jaime Lannister appears in the movie in the “wisecracking buddy” role. He’s supposed to be German, but I initially thought he was trying and failing to sound Irish. Just let the man be pretty and English—that’s why God put him on the Earth.  

4. Any sports movie is going to face the problem that Hollywood actors aren’t actually built like athletes, but sometimes it’s at least plausible—Kevin Costner as a minor-league catcher; Denzel Washington as a aging playground hoops legend; Geena Davis as a line-drive hitter—these are concepts you can believe if you squint. As for Wimbledon...yeesh. Paul Bettany is tall, so that’s good, but he’s more than a little doughy if you mentally compare him to Rafa Nadal. And Dunst, God love her, was far too much the ingénue circa 2004 to be believable as an elite athlete, particularly in a sport that requires the raw explosiveness of 21st-century tennis.

5. And then there’s the problem of Dunst’s tennis form, which is terrible. During the tournament montages, they mostly mask this problem with clever editing, but there’s a scene where Dunst and Bettany play flirtatious pantomime tennis in the park, and when she fake-serves it looks like the Elaine Benes dance from Seinfeld.  

6. There’s a whole plotline about how we know that Peter is a good guy because he looks worried when ballboys get hit by errant serves. That seems a low bar to clear.

7. Peter and Lizzie spend a lot of time driving around England on picturesque dates. To be clear, they are doing this in the middle of the Wimbledon tournament. I know that players have off days, but I really doubt that Roger Federer is taking romantic strolls through the countryside the day before the quarterfinals.

8. In real life, ten out of the eleven tournaments staged between 2000 and 2010 featured at least one Williams sister in the Wimbledon final. On four occasions Venus and Serena played each other in the final round, including the two years immediately before this film came out. I bring this up because I cannot recall a single black person appearing in the movie Wimbledon.

9. It’s a romantic comedy, so there is of course an airport scene early in the third act (Lizzie and her father are flying home while Peter plays in the men’s final). Bear in mind that this is an airport scene in 2004, depicting two people waiting to board an international flight from Europe to the US. Now consider that Lizzie and her father just straight-up abandon their bags in the terminal. I was genuinely more interested in knowing how long Heathrow got shut down for the bomb-sniffing dogs than I was in who won the match, but alas, my questions were never addressed.

10. Late in the second act, Lizzie tells Peter that she does not want to continue seeing him because tennis needs to be her first priority. After some hijinks involving trellis-climbing, he breaks into her apartment the night before a big match and she seems...surprisingly okay with it. Being down with having her privacy violated appears to be a core trait of Lizzie Bradbury’s character. Anyway, the next day she plays badly and gets knocked out of the tournament, at which point she breaks things off with Peter and leaves town. Later, Peter gives her a big public apology, but the apology is quite vague, and it could easily be read as him apologizing not for breaking into her apartment, but for rocking her world so thoroughly that it made her bad at tennis.

11. Indeed, to that last point, the question of how sex the night before a match impacts one’s tennis performance is discussed frequently in the movie. The film suggests emphatically that sex makes men better at tennis, but it makes women worse.

12. At least that’s its opinion regarding hetero relationships. The film has gay and lesbian characters, but they are all queer quippy sexless sidekicks of the sort that future film historians will be led to believe were omnipresent from 1998 to 2005.

13. Peter wins the Wimbledon final. His opponent is portrayed as a bad guy, though his bad guy bona fides are that he is cocky, he is slightly less concerned than Peter is when ballboys get hit in the face, and he makes a pass at Lizzie at one point (though unlike Peter he stops pursuing her when she says she’s not interested). He also has really good hair. He is, to put it mildly, a poorly realized villain.

14. I would not have guessed at the time that the actor in Wimbledon who would have the most Hollywood success over the next sixteen years would be Jon Favreau. But then, who could have foreseen Baby Yoda? I also don’t think I would have guessed that Kirsten Dunst would end up engaged to Landry from Friday Night Lights. Crucifictorious forever!

15. Both our leads have “wacky families.” There is the inevitable wisecracking sibling, and an overprotective yet wise father. Also, Peter’s parents are in the middle of a madcap marital dispute that has led to Peter’s father living in a treehouse—that’s like ten percent of the film. The movie would have been much better if most of the family stuff had been removed, in no small part because then it only would have been about forty minutes long.

16. The sports movie/rom-com hybrid is truly a mutant hellbeast, combining as it does two of the most formulaic movie genres. Bull Durham is the only example I can think of that is especially good. So is Wimbledon more successful as a rom-com or sports movie? It’s honestly a tough call. What it has to say about romance is more offensive, but the way it imagines sports is considerably dumber. Guess we’ll just have to score it a deuce.

April 8, 2020

Right around midnight, I took a walk through my neighborhood in the middle of the 38th-largest city in the United States, and I’ve never heard anything so quiet in my life. There’s no wind, and there’s no traffic. It’s 70 degrees out, so there isn’t even the hum and clank of climate control. I was alone with the rabbits and the neighbor’s cat, and when I stepped on a twig I suspect it was audible 200 yards away.

In years to come, there will be poems and movies and novels and songs about these weeks, but if they don’t at some point try to evoke that silence, they won’t be capturing all the truth of this moment, which has not shocked us with explosions or rubble, but has pressed down like a smothering pillow.

And yet, it is so, so beautiful tonight. The moon is full and the trees are balls of pink perfume. We Missourians only get so many perfect nights a year, and this is the first. I’m a professor of modern poetry, which means that I’m obligated every now and then to ask twenty-year-olds what it means to say that April is the cruelest month. The truth is that I myself never had an answer I didn’t get out of a textbook until tonight.

Beauty that doesn’t seem like that it ought to be there; incongruous loveliness; new life that reads as a tawdry joke—that is what can make April feel cruel.

Soon the wind will kick up, and someday the people will stir and the cars will roll, and I might live fifty more years and never again hear the silence I heard tonight. But right now it’s hard to hear anything else.

Davey's Uptown Ramblers Club at 34th and Main, 1950-2020

The destruction by fire early this morning of Davey’s Uptown Ramblers Club is, simply put, a tragedy. The bar had operated continuously in its current location on Main Street in Kansas City for 70 years (and in a different location for 25 years before that). It has long been a vital performance space for the local music scene. The shows I attended there tended toward the alt-country/Americana end of spectrum, but it was also a key venue for punk and metal. You could drink cheap; you could play pinball; you could smoke in the side room long after that became illegal. When I was there, I always ran into a friend I hadn’t planned to see. Mokie, who ran the back bar, is the Platonic form of a bartender. There were framed photos of Royals long-retired, and the price of a pour was written in sharpie on the whiskey bottles. The city around it shed several skins as the decades passed, but the neon at Davey’s kept glowing.

And now Davey’s is gone, and it’s irreplaceable.

A few months ago, when I listed my ten favorite shows of the 2010’s, I hadn’t even noticed that Davey’s was the only venue I listed twice. My #1 show of the 2010’s was the tribute show Rex Hobart put on the night that George Jones died. This obviously hadn’t been planned in advance, but word spread quickly enough that there were 100 or so people there. The room sounded great, Rex sang the shit out of songs he cared about deeply, and I say with all sincerity that if you care about American popular music and you weren’t there, I wish you had been. It was beautiful. Perhaps the best thing you can say about Davey’s is that George Jones would have been honored to know that people raised a glass to sing “The King is Gone” in a bar like that.

Also in my top ten was a show by the Iron Question, a “supergroup” composed of several local musicians who mostly play in other bands but get together once a year between Christmas and New Year’s to cover various punk obscurities (full disclosure, they're friends of mine, but that too is the point of Davey’s). In some ways, it was the opposite of the George Jones show—the mix was not amazing; a couple songs went sideways; one musician did indeed get in a fight with the sound guy. But there were also a lot of songs that sounded really damn good. In its silliness and anger and sparks of beauty, that show felt like family at the holidays, and Davey’s, more than anywhere else in town, was where you wanted to be for a show that felt like family.

My literal family has also played at Davey’s—my brother and my future sister-in-law brought their band through town a few years back for a show that was a lot of fun. It was a night that ended at Buzzard’s Beach, so...yeah.

Ben Summers (who’s in the Iron Question) also played that night, and I’ve seen him play at Davey’s as part of The Grisly Hand more times than I recall. And since I ought to have a clip of something to play us out, here’s The Grisly Hand, one of KC’s great bands, playing at Davey’s nearly a decade ago:

Street Legalese: Robbie Fulks' 16

A couple years ago, alt-country stalwart Robbie Fulks announced that he was going to release a track-for-track cover of Bob Dylan’s 1978 album Street Legal. My immediate reaction was: “But Street Legal sucks. Its songs are rambling and pointless. It kicks off Dylan’s infamous lost decade(s). It sucks.” Then I thought for a moment, looked up the track listing, and realized that I had never actually listened to Street Legal. I’d heard a couple songs here and there, but I’d read of the terribleness of the album so many times that I’d never bothered to listen to the whole thing.

 And seriously, critics savaged Street Legal. Robert Christgau, in a C+ Village Voice review, wrote “This divorcee sounds overripe, too in love with his own self-generated misery to break through the leaden tempos that oppress his melodies, devoid not just of humor but of lightness--unless, that is, he intends his Neil Diamond masquerade as a joke." Meanwhile, over in Rolling Stone, Greil Marcus was even nastier, saying of the song “Is Your Love in Vain?” that “The man speaks to the woman like a sultan checking out a promising servant girl for VD, and his tone is enough to make her fake the pox if that’s what it takes to get away clean.” Also delightful is this bit of faint praise from Marcus: “While most of the singing on Street Legal...falls short of creepiness, it’s simply impossible to pay attention to it for more than a couple of minutes at a time.” Indeed, Marcus’ review is so scathing that Jann Wenner, who never encountered a celebrity ass he could leave unkissed, issued a corrective positive review a month later.[1]

Listening to Street Legal now, those reviews seem a bit harsh. I don’t think anyone would mistake it for a top-shelf Dylan album, and if you’ve never delved into Dylan this sure as shit isn’t the place to start. But it’s honestly pretty good. He makes you wade through the whole thing to get to the best two songs, but the penultimate “We Better Talk This Over” would be a solid Drive-By Truckers album cut, and the closer “Where Are You Tonight (Journey Through Dark Heat)” is almost good enough to justify its ridiculous title. Certainly it’s quintessential Dylan: the organ cascades; there are some great turns of phrase; and Bob sings like he decided to give a shit that day. What else you want? And there is plenty of enjoyable stuff elsewhere on the album. “Changing of the Guards” is a much better impersonation of mid-60’s Dylan than most performers ever achieve; “Señor (Tales of Yankee Power)” is one of the more successful of Dylan’s various attempts over the years at frontier atmospherics; and on “True Love Tends to Forget” he tries to sound like Van Morrison, and it isn’t nearly the disaster that it should be.

That said, it isn’t hard to hear what Christgau and Marcus were reacting against. The album is very, very busy. Virtually every track slathers on horns, keyboards, noodly guitar solos, and choruses of bluesy ladies upon choruses of bluesy ladies. Jeremy Winograd claims that a big part of the problem was that the mix on the original Street Legal vinyl pressing was incredibly muddy, and assuming that he’s right, I can see how that would wreck the whole thing—on a twenty-first century digital remaster, the band sounds pretty tight, and there’s a lot of band to hear, so I’d hate to lose that.[2]

Even when it sounds good, though, Street Legal has some core issues with lyrical silliness that a remaster isn’t going to fix. On “No Time to Think,” a substantial portion of the lyrics boil down to everyone in the studio singing nouns as loudly as they possibly can. “China Doll!/ Alcohol!/ Duality!/ Mortality!” A winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature wrote that shit. Also, he wrote “Socialism!/ Hypnotism!/ Patriotism!/ Materialism!” I can keep going if you’d like, because Dylan kept going for eight minutes and twenty seconds. There’s also a lot of tortured feminine rhyme (e.g., “travel on” rhymed with “Babylon”—woof), and the rhyme schemes tend to be a tad fussy by rock standards (there’s a lot of aabccb). It was 1978, the triumphant moment of punk’s minimalist reaction to the bloat of corporate rock, and here comes Dylan with a dog-eared rhyming dictionary and a 27-piece band. It’s no wonder Christgau and Marcus hated it.  

*****

Given the album’s less-than-stellar critical and popular legacy, Robbie Fulks’ decision to cover the entirety of Street Legal in a vinyl-only limited edition produced by Steve Albini can only be construed as a passion project of absolute and possibly ludicrous purity. It is one of the more uncareerist moves of an uncareerist career, which has, since the mid-90’s, moved from a honky-tonk phase to a countrypolitan phase to an austere folk phase. The “Oh Brother” phase a picker as accomplished as Fulks could have embraced around 2001 was decidedly eschewed, as he instead put out a self-released album of frequently-keyboard-driven narrative experiments called Couples in Trouble (which alienated many of his several fans, and is also, by the way, goddamn brilliant). Fulks has acquired a small group of very devoted listeners, and doesn’t seem to be adding many more—when he plays KC, it’s always the same 2/3-filled indoor Knuckleheads space, and I’m pretty sure it’s always the same people (it appears he’s playing there June 18, btw, so if anyone wants to hang out that night, that’s where I’ll be). The Venn diagram overlap of “Robbie Fulks die-hards” and “people who are down for some late-70’s Dylan” is no doubt a small group of bookish white midwesterners with indifferent hair. We should stage a meet-up in a conference room at a Days Inn outside St. Louis sometime—it would probably be fun.

It’s interesting to compare Fulks’ Street Legal cover album (which is called 16—more on that later) with the recent Old Crow Medicine Show cover of Blonde on Blonde (which is called 50 Years of Blonde on Blonde, which is what you’d call it if you wanted someone to buy it). The Old Crow album, to be clear, is good. It’s a group of talented Americana musicians covering the arguably-greatest album of rock’s probably-greatest songwriter, and they take the task seriously and have a lot of fun with it. It’s also a very savvy move: Old Crow is from Nashville, Dylan recorded Blonde on Blonde in Nashville, and there’s a lot of new yuppie money running around Nashville, so why not book the Ryman and scoop up some of that sweet nostalgia cheddar?

Fulks’ 16 is a considerably weirder record, and is perhaps inevitably less fun, inasmuch as nothing on Street Legal is a cover-band layup like “Rainy Day Women” or “Absolutely Sweet Marie.” But the Fulks album is much more interesting, and not just because of the degree of difficulty. The opener, “Changing of the Guards,” is one of the most beautiful, restrained recordings of Fulks’ career, as Dylan’s horns and backup singers are replaced with an incredibly spare arrangement. Making Dylan’s lyrics easier to understand is arguably not to the song’s benefit—it seems to be about exotic bazaars and virgin sacrifices or something? I don’t have the patience to go the full Christopher Ricks on it, but Fulks’ recording is so pretty that it doesn’t really matter.

Another highlight on 16 is “Baby, Stop Crying,” which was one of the songs most frequently lambasted in the 1978 reviews of Street Legal. The key difference is that Fulks is capable of delivering the line “Baby, please stop crying” in a way that sounds like he cares about the addressee and would like to help them be less sad, whereas when Dylan sings it, he just sounds annoyed that someone is bothering him with their stupid fucking feelings.[3] Or, to be less harsh, Dylan wrote an excellent blue-eyed-soul song that he is not well-suited to as a singer, but it happens to be right in Fulks’ wheelhouse. It’s not like it’s the first time a cover of a Dylan song has trumped the original.

Fulks gets weirder elsewhere, notably on “Where Are You Tonight,” but for the most part he tilts toward arrangements that are either stripped to meditative quiet, or built on larger ensembles that owe a fair amount to the originals. The quiet ones are definitely the highlights—they mine something out of the songs that Dylan didn’t, and they’re also the most in line with what Fulks’ own best material has sounded like over the past decade.

******

Fulks calls his album 16, which on its face is kind of odd, though there are a couple interpretations that come to mind. The first word of the first song on Street Legal is “sixteen,” so it could be that simple. More significantly, Fulks was fifteen when Street Legal came out, which means that he may well have been sixteen when he really got to know it, or, if you want to get technical, Street Legal came out in Fulks’ sixteenth year.  

On the back of the album sleeve for 16, Fulks writes the following about his listening habits in the Seventies:

I had an intense relationship with the records. Like a lot of teenagers, I’d save my money, travel a great distance to a store that had perhaps 2000 records, choose a couple, and go home and play them until memorized. Scarcity and mystery...and the artists played into them. Certain ones seemed to invite you to connect with them, spiritually. They adopted interesting masks; their recordings were replete with quirks, mistakes, eccentricities, holes you could fill in yourself. Eventually, you owned the music, since you were one of its creators.

That’s lovely. I think I understand what Fulks is getting at, or at least I can remember that kind of intensive relationship to works of art, which admittedly in my case was the relationship of an eventual scholar and critic rather than an eventual artist. Still, obsessive attention is obsessive attention.

By the time I was a teenager in the early Nineties, the economics of music listening had not changed much. CD’s were the coin of the realm rather than vinyl, but that just meant that the local record store maybe had 4,000 of them rather than 2,000. You still had to save up, and the decision to buy something was still fraught with risk. You went home and dug deep into the weirdness of whatever you bought, because the alternative was leaving your room. My own Street Legal—which is to say a middling album by a great artist that I swam into neck deep—was Lou Reed’s Magic and Loss, which happened to come out when I was fifteen. This is not one of the Lou Reed albums esteemed by history. Allmusic.com’s ratings put it well outside Reed’s top ten, as does the Rolling Stone Album Guide, and Christgau’s review consists entirely of a frowny-face emoji (and this at least a decade before Americans used the word “emoji”). However, I had picked up the idea from somewhere that an aspiring rock snob should know of Lou Reed, and Magic and Loss was the album that was on sale at the Best Buy in Springfield in 1992, so I grabbed a copy.

And the thing is, when you’re fifteen and growing up on a tree-lined street in southern Missouri, even mediocre Lou Reed sounds like it’s being beamed in from another planet. It sounds like mean streets and weird nights and big feelings shrugged off with a snarl of casual irony. Even Magic and Loss—an album that deals mostly with chemotherapy—sounds like that if you never happen to have heard Transformer. So I think I get where Fulks is coming from in his fixation on a Dylan album that you could only be obsessed with if it entered your life at the ideal moment for such obsessions. At the very least, I know what it’s like to be a hick teenager unaware of his own drawl parsing the musical ramblings of a middle-aged northern Jew in an attempt to figure out whatever the big something was that I very much suspected they weren’t telling me about in school.

Thankfully, sixteen isn’t the last time a person can have a musical revelation. There were many more to come for me, including the time in college when I went to an alt-country festival primarily to see the Old 97’s but stumbled upon a set performed by a gangly, verbose, Buck Owens-obsessed smartass and thought, “This, apparently, is the thing for which I did not know I had been waiting.” It’s wild to think that at this point I’ve been listening to Robbie Fulks for more than half my life. He and I don’t seem all that old, at least not to me, but there you have it. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that Fulks is my favorite singer/songwriter of the last 25 years (though he’s up there), but he is the only singer/songwriter I can think of who has gone that long without ever boring me. And being interesting for 25 years is a hell of an accomplishment.

---

[1] https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/love-in-vain-dylan-and-the-stones-in-the-seventies-68036/

[2] https://spectrumculture.com/2016/08/22/revisit-bob-dylan-street-legal/

[3] I’m not sure who I’m kidding with the pronoun game here. When Dylan is being an asshole in the 70’s, the addressee is definitely a woman.

My Ten Favorite Moments from Three Championship Runs: Sporting '13, Royals '15, Chiefs '19-20

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.

#5: Sinovic’s game-tying goal, 2nd Half, Eastern Conference Semifinals

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

Star Wars: Nothing but Star Wars

Over the past ten days, I have rewatched every Star Wars film in anticipation of the release of Episode IX: The Last Star War Until the Next One. I have written one mini-essay per film (which was also one mini-essay per day). They’re going to seem a bit negative at first, but I’m starting with Episode I, so that’s inevitable. Stick with me.

Episode I: The Phantom Menace (32 BBY[1])

A Google Books Ngrams search reveals that usage of the word “problematic” spiked dramatically at the end of the twentieth century. Coincidentally, The Phantom Menace was released in 1999.

The lightsaber fights are still very fun to watch.

Episode II: Attack of the Clones (22 BBY)

Yoda and Yaddle have more sexual chemistry than Hayden Christiansen and Natalie Portman. “I don’t like sand” is, of course, the infamous moment, but two things really jumped out at me in this viewing.

First, there is the scene where Padme talks about a boy she dated way back when she attended the “Legislative Youth Academy.” I’m no science fiction expert, but it seems to me that if you want to engross your audience in a legendary galaxy of heroism and intrigue, you don’t have your romantic leads tell stories about this one time at band camp.

Second, Anakin’s horniness from jump street is really something to behold in this movie. Very early in the film, during an elevator ride where he tells Obi-Wan how excited he is to see Padme for the first time in a decade, Anakin is what my students five years ago would have called “thirsty af.” He knew Padme when he was like eight. That’s way too long to have a crush on your babysitter.

Episode III: Revenge of the Sith (19 BBY)

It’s fun to dunk all over the prequels. Indeed, you might have noticed me doing so for the previous 200 or so words. But one thing that I’ve always genuinely admired is Ewan McGregor’s speech at the end of Obi-Wan’s climactic duel with Anakin/Vader. I find it as moving as anything in Star Wars outside of the original trilogy. That McGregor is the best part of the prequels has frequently been stated, and it’s true. Most of that is just down to the fact that he’s the only actor who seems to be having any fun at all, but he also deserves credit for the work he does when he’s given a scene with more emotional weight. Given how much everyone makes fun of everything from these movies, you would think that lines as self-serious as “You were my brother...I loved you!” or “My allegiance is to the Republic...to democracy!” would catch a lot of hell. But McGregor sells it. God love him, he even does as much as he can with “I have the high ground.”

Solo: A Star Wars Story (10 BBY)

I honestly don’t get the hate for this movie. Yes, some of the jokes are corny, and no, Adrian Ehrenreich is not as charismatic as Harrison Ford. But on the other hand, Donald Glover is  as charismatic as Billy Dee Williams, there’s a bunch of fun spaceship stuff, Lando has a whole room for capes, the droid rebellion takes the idea of sentient willful servant robots to a logical if hyperbolic conclusion, there’s an ass-kicking femme who proves quite fatale, Woody Harrelson plays himself, and Chewbacca fucks up a lot of people. I recall reviews proclaiming variations of, “why do we need a story that just fills in a bunch of background?” Well, by that logic, why did we need Paradise Lost or The Godfather: Part Two? If you claim to like Star Wars  but didn’t have some fun with this silly little low-stakes summer-release ramble through the back alleys and dive bars of the outer rim, consider the possibility that the problem is you.

Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (0 BBY)

I’ve watched this movie a couple more times since I saw it in the theater, and it’s only strengthened my opinion that this is the third-best Star Wars movie. Felicity Jones is effortless in conveying the “tough but vulnerable” thing that’s been at the heart of a lot of the best performances in these movies, going all the way back to Ford and Carrie Fisher. The story starts a bit slow, but once the big heist starts, the film really cooks all the way through the third act, and the tension is heightened by the fact that, unlike in other Star Wars films, the characters are entirely bereft of plot armor. Indeed, it’s pretty impressive that Rogue One is as tense as it is given that we know the mission to steal the Death Star plans has to be successful.

There is one particular frame of this film that really sticks with me: the Death Star rising like a moon over the horizon of Scarif. It’s breathtaking, uncanny, and frightening all at once. Hollywood action blockbusters often strive toward and almost always cheapen the Burkean sublime, and the Star Wars franchise in particular has been guilty of this. But this one image is simultaneously beautiful and eerie, and the effect is achieved simply because someone thought to ask, “what would a Death Star-rise look like if you were a lowly little human standing on a planetary surface?” It’s that terrestrial vantage point that lets the image embody what the entire movie is about. Luke Skywalker will soon get to zip triumphantly towards a well-lit Death Star in the cockpit of a souped-up starfighter, but the Rogue One characters are relatively ordinary people who will only ever see this superweapon half-obscured in the sky, awesomely huge and unassailable. Their heroism is inseparable from their insignificance.

Episode IV: A New Hope (0 BBY)

Way back when I was in college and the Special Editions came out, like all the other Star Wars dorks I was horrified that George Lucas altered the Greedo-Han cantina scene. As the decades have passed, though, my tune has changed a bit, and now whenever the old movies come out in a new format I look forward to learning what crazy shit old George has gotten up to this time.

I hope George Lucas lives forever, and that every three or four years, something else gets added to the Han-Greedo showdown, so that future generations can enjoy these alterations as their forebears have. Here is my humble submission for the next edition of A New Hope.

INT. MOS EISLEY CANTINA

Everything happens as usual. Then, once all the usual dialogue is over:

GREEDO

Maclunkey!

Greedo and Han shoot their guns simultaneously. Greedo’s shot goes ten feet wide, but Han shoots and kills the Rodian. Han stands up.

HAN

Maclunkey? More like M’clunk thee.

Han pauses, looks at the Bartender, and flips him a coin. The Bartender takes in the scene, then chuckles. The Bartender’s chuckle slowly evolves into a full-throated laugh. Han looks back, and tries to keep a straight face, but he then too starts to laugh. Both men continue in ever-escalating peels of head-tilted-back laughter, until Han shakes his head and, still laughing, exits the bar, turning to point at the bartender as he leaves. The bartender smiles and points back. A big lizard walks through the door. Wipe to next scene.

Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back (3 ABY)

This is one of two Star Wars movies that I think are better than the movie that won the Oscar for Best Picture in the year they came out. Ordinary People is good, but Empire is better (though Raging Bull, which somehow didn’t win that year, is better than both of them). The other Star Wars film that is definitely better than the Best Picture winner from its year is Revenge of the Sith, but that’s only because every movie that came out in 2005 is better than Crash.  

On this viewing of Empire, I was struck by how dependent the film is on reaction shots of Carrie Fisher. Repeatedly, moments of serious emotional weight are punctuated by wordless close-ups of Princess Leia’s reactions: Luke and Han not returning to Echo Base before nightfall; Han going into the carbon freezing chamber; Boba Fett escaping with Han; Luke in danger and communicating with Leia via the force. When you watch Empire after watching A New Hope the previous night, you see how much Fisher had grown as an actor from her “six different accents in twenty minutes” days. In Empire, every single one of those close-ups works, particularly the shot of her watching Boba Fett fly away with Han, where in one second she conveys despair, terror, and pure shock that for once the Rebels didn’t find a way out of a jam. It’s not an accident that the sequel trilogy staged several similar reaction shots for Fisher.

There’s obviously something gendered about Empire’s tendency to focus on a woman’s emotional response to things men are doing. But it’s important to note that Leia is anything but a passive watcher: she also commands armies, flies a spaceship, and shoots stormtroopers. Those reaction close-ups are essential to the arc the film has designed for Leia, wherein we see that she is a badass do-it-all leader who presumably suppresses her emotions because women leaders run the risk of undermining their authority if they are perceived as being emotional, but she has to balance that against the fact that she is a deeply feeling person in an emotionally taxing situation. In this way, Empire is one of the first “working woman/can she have it all” films of the 1980’s (it’s interesting to think of it alongside Broadcast News especially, but also 9 to 5 or Working Girl). To be clear, I’m not claiming that The Empire Strikes Back is some profound feminist statement—the film is far too okay with Han ignoring the word “stop” for that to be the case—but it is at least framing the problem of how complicated it is to be an ambitious woman in a man’s galaxy. I doubt Leia’s arc would have worked if the movie had been directed by someone as unsubtle as Lucas, and I definitely doubt it would have worked if so many of the film’s key emotional moments had not centered on a performer as on-her-game and inherently likable as Fisher.

Episode VI: Return of the Jedi (4 ABY)

These movies were imprinted on my brain at such an early age that now I often want to say the following words in a Darth Vader voice: “power”; “Luke”; “master”; “feelings”; “sister”; “what!?”; “no”; “complete.”

Episode VII: The Force Awakens (34 ABY)

The best thing about The Force Awakens is that the cast is charismatic and seems to be having a good time, so it ends up being a fun, freewheeling confection of a movie. And to be clear, that’s no small thing. The worst thing about The Force Awakens, as millions of voices have cried out, is that it has virtually no new ideas. If you like movies where a ragtag group of misfits blows up a big evil thing—and we know you do—you’ll probably like this.

Nowhere is this combination of fun and dumb more on display than in the scene where the Resistance stands in a big circle and develops their plan to blow up the Starkiller Base. This is an archetypal Star Wars scene—indeed, at least four other movies in the franchise have a version of the planning/pep talk scene positioned early in the third act (ANH, ROTJ, TPM, R1). Some of the more memorable phrases in Star Wars have come from these scenes (“bullseye womp rats;” “many Bothans died;” “rebellions are built on hope”). But the version of this scene from The Force Awakens is mostly memorable for how slapdash it is. Usually in these scenes, it is implied that somewhere off-screen a team of robots and nerds has been crunching the data and cooking up a scheme, and now the military brass are announcing the plan to the cool kids so they can go be heroes. But in The Force Awakens, we get to watch literally the entire planning process, which boils down to, “Han and Chewie will land on the base, and there’s usually something to blow up so they’ll blow it up, and then the spaceships will shoot at this thing that is probably a weak spot that the enemy constructed for some reason, and then we meet back at Leia’s for a kegger. This should work.” The entire planning process takes a minute and 31 seconds. To put that in perspective, the Leeroy Jenkins World of Warcraft group spends a minute and 24 seconds planning their Waterloo. And I realize that Leeroy Jenkins is satire, but in this specific scene, it feels a little like The Force Awakens is too.

Episode VIII: The Last Jedi (34 ABY)

Won’t lie: I’ve been dreading writing about this one. The online discourse around The Last Jedi has been so poisoned by rampaging hordes of Edgelords, Memestains, and Twitquisitors that the movie is honestly not at all fun to talk about anymore. That’s sad for me, since talking about Star Wars movies has been one of my primary forms of recreation since I was in kindergarten.

But here goes. I really love the Rey-Kylo plotline in this film. Their scenes together are strange and riveting, and unlike anything else we’ve seen in a Star Wars film. It’s interesting to see a version of the attempted seduction to the darkside plot involve a hint of actual seduction. The “kill the past” stuff is intriguing (though I think it’s worth keeping in mind that the person who keeps saying it is the villain). Their lightsaber fight with the red dudes in the red room is very cool to watch. And I can’t imagine what is going through the heads people who were angry that Snoke got killed. Snoke sucked. Kill him. I hope they bring him back to life for five seconds in Episode IX so they can kill him again.

But beyond that, the movie is a mess. The casino planet would be ludicrous even if it weren’t for the fact that the entire plan is foiled because Finn is too cheap to park in a garage. The Oscar Isaac-Laura Dern stuff is the most remarkable waste of acting talent achieved in a Star Wars film since Natalie Portman and Samuel Jackson were apparently told “again, but stiffer this time.” Also, I’ve watched nearly five hours of this trilogy at this point, and I still don’t know what the First Order is. Say what you will about the prequels, but I at least have some sense of what the Trade Federation wanted.[2]

In Conclusion

I’ve gone back and forth on whether to throw a ranking out there. Star Wars fans hold their personal rankings as closely as a nun holds her rosary beads, but I guess I’ll put mine out there. Here’s how I’d rank them after my most recent binge. The tiers are used to suggest groupings of similar quality. Hence, I’d consider #4 through #8 to be pretty close to a five-way tie. Here goes:

1. The Empire Strikes Back

2. A New Hope

--tier break

3. Rogue One

--tier break

4. The Force Awakens

5. Revenge of the Sith

6. Return of the Jedi

7. Solo

8. The Last Jedi

--tier break

9. The Phantom Menace

--tier break

10. Attack of the Clones

Thanks for reading. You may fire when ready.

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[1] “Before the Battle of Yavin.” ABY is “After the Battle of Yavin.” Don’t blame me—this is the nomenclature.

[2] Trade, presumably.

Christian Colón: The EG Revue's Sportsperson of the Decade

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 since the 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.

---

[1] Fwiw, The Rieger is very good.

[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.