An air of resignation has settled over Sacramento in regard to the loss of the city's NBA franchise, the Sacramento Kings. Our mayor, former NBA player Kevin Johnson, has publicly stated that there is nothing more that the city can do to retain the team. The Kings will only stay in Sacramento if negotiations to move the team to Anaheim collapse. No one thinks that such an outcome is likely, and the more cynically minded believe that an agreement for the team to play in The Pond, the sports arena in Anaheim, has already been reached, concealed for the purpose of ensuring high levels of attendance in Sacramento until the end of the season.

For Sacramento, this is the best possible outcome, although the mayor will persist in efforts to construct a publicly subsidized entertainment facility. In the absence of the Kings, and Governor Jerry Brown's effort to redirect state redevelopment funds towards education, as given expression by his remark that we have to put education first and entertainment second, the probability of such a project going forward has dropped significantly. Without the Kings, it will be even more difficult to persuade the public to support any subsidy, and, without redevelopment funds, it will be hard to develop a plausible financial plan to pay for building and operating it. Upon being asked specifically about the use of redevelopment funds to build stadiums for football teams, such as the San Francisco 49ers and the Oakland Raiders, Brown stated, Private enterprise should be able to survive on its own, as witnessed at Pac Bell Park. His reference to Pac Bell Park alludes to the fact that the owners of the San Francisco Giants built a stadium south of Market in the 1990s without the use of such funds.

So, instead of directing municipal resources towards a redevelopment scheme that will require millions of subsidy dollars to enrich the owners of a sports franchise, Sacramento can now rationally attempt to address the needs of the city's people, such as indigent health care, recreational activities, assistance for the homeless, who, by the way, just got evicted from their self-governed camp along the river, treatment for the mentally disordered, police and fire protection and affordable housing, among others. By liberating itself from the neoliberal insistence that the city must be gentrified with municipal funds to provide a comfortable entertainment playground for middle and upper middle class people who predominately live on the city's periphery, Sacramento can focus its resources upon improving the city's quality of life, not just for people who can afford events at a glamourous entertainment facility and patronize the upscale restaurants and bars associated with it, but for all of the people who live within the various communities within its boundaries. In this, Sacramento can set an example for other cities around the country to emulate. Yes, there is life after the loss of a professional sports franchise, and a pretty good one with possibilities that were foreclosed by the demands of the team's millionaire owners and their fans.

But, beyond this, there is an interesting social question. Over the past couple of weeks, I have perused the Sactown Royalty website, where local Kings fans have expressed their dismay over the prospect of losing the franchise. While some have expressed a predictable right wing anger towards those who would dare suggest that the city should use its funds to assist the homeless instead of subsidizing an arena for the owners of the Kings, the wealthy Maloofs, many others say that they will be adrift without the Kings and the NBA. Much of their life away from work appears to have been centered around going to Kings games, watching Kings games on television and following the NBA more generally. It is easy to dismiss them as a subculture of obsessed fans, but I think that this is mistaken. There are a lot of people who believe that Sacramento is nothing without the Kings, and have a limited concept of fulfillment through participating within the larger community around them. Instead, they conflate their gratification with the ability of the Maloofs to enrich themselves while providing an entertainment facility for them. The notion that their lives might be better in the absence of their deference to the Maloofs doesn't occur to them. Fans have accepted a neo-feudal identity demanded of them by the Maloofs and the NBA. As a result, we are subjected to fans complaining on local radio sports talk shows about what the Maloofs have put up with, as if the Maloofs have been victimized because of the city's failure to subsidize their basketball team.

Of course, it is easy to ridicule this, but, if we do so, we miss something more important. Professional sports are serving the purpose of atomizing society in such a way as to impair the ability of people to see themselves as part of a larger collective. Or, perhaps, more accurately, professional sports have substituted an innocuous collective identity for one that would encourage people to understand how they could work together and challenge those who take advantage of them and worsen the conditions of their daily lives. Embedded within this fandom is a tendency to induce people to accept a conservative, socially Darwinian vision of society that they might otherwise never accept, hence, the willingness to cast the Maloofs as victims of a government that refuses subsidize them. The means by which we can overcome the allure of this branded form of social identity is not readily apparent. For those of us on the left, we should consider how to confront this dilemma, a dilemma that is central to the persistence of neoliberalism, and, possibly, capitalism itself.

Labels: California, Neoliberalism, Sacramento, Sports

Sacramento, it seems, is on the verge of losing its only professional sports franchise, the Sacramento Kings of the National Basketball Association, to Anaheim. Most people here could care less. But, for those who have sought to transform the downtown into an upscale entertainment district, the prospect of losing the Kings has engendered an outbreak of hysteria. Sacramento, you see, is nothing without professional sports and the service economy associated with it. Arco Arena, the home of the Kings, will go dark, and there will no venue capable of hosting concerts by Lady Gaga, Beyonce, Metallica and U2. Upon the departure of the Kings, Sacramento will become, in their words, a cow town, a bleak nowheresville, a place that will be permanently deserving of its recent designation by Forbes as one of the most miserable cities in the US.

Of course, you know the solution. The city of Sacramento and its citizens must, to mix sports metaphors, step up to the plate and publicly subsidize a new arena facility in which the owners of the Kings, predominately, the Maloof family, receive the profits from its operation. Revenue sources that could be used to preserve city services in the face of substantial losses of funding from the state must be diverted to the construction of an entertainment complex operated by the Maloofs, a family of millionaires unwilling to put much of their own capital at risk. Most proponents, aware of the publication of studies that have found that subsidized sports arenas are not financially beneficial to the communities that build them, don't even attempt to justify it on economic grounds. It is, rather, a quality of life issue, and, in the absence of the Maloofs and their basketball team, they pretty much imply that it is going to turn to shit.

As you might have guessed, this is the struggle over neoliberalism fought at the local level, much like the 2010 Winter Games in Vancouver, and, in this instance, as in Vancouver, we stumble across one of its defining features. For the proponents of both the Games and new Kings arena, the community and the quality of life associated with it are narrowly defined. For them, the community consists of middle to upper middle income people with sufficient disposable income to patronize these events and the bars and restaurants connected to them. Entertainment is no longer a matter of personal preference, but an entitlement, so much so that local governments are obligated to subsidize its availability for them, and transform neighborhoods through redevelopment policies and law enforcement practices so as to render the areas in which these facilities are located reassuring enough for them.

Hence, the construction of $3000-$4000 a month loft apartments on 16th Street a block away from the capital grounds, and an emphasis upon opening money losing restaurants and an IMAX movie theatre nearby on the east end of the K Street Mall that require Sacramento Housing and Redevelopment Agency funds to survive, with Downtown Business Association guides, disparaging known as bumble bees because of their bright yellow outfits, spending much of their day playing cat and mouse with the homeless. Meanwhile, on the west end of the mall, the light rail line runs past empty storefronts, vacated by long established businesses, such as a used record and video store and a clothing store that sold jeans and overalls, in anticipation of glamourous projects that never progressed past the high concept stage. About a quarter mile from there, where the Capital Mall approaches an old bridge that crosses the Sacramento river, there is still an large empty hole where the old Sacramento Union newspaper building was located, empty for three or four years now, because a preposterous high rise condominium project, a project in which the state employee pension plan, CALPERS, invested, quickly revealed itself as an economic absurdity. Dave Jones, a former city councilmember, predicted that the redevelopment of the downtown would fail unless enough people were attracted to to the downtown through the construction of affordable housing, but, predictably, given the lack of investment return associated with it, his warnings went unheeded. Undeterred, the city is proposing the expenditure of millions on the relocation of a light rail station in this area so as to divert the primarily lower middle income and low income population of color that use it away so as to purportedly enhance the appeal of the location for redevelopment.

Another former city councilmember, Robbie Waters, has estimated that the city has spent approximately $500 million dollars over the last couple of decades in its failed pursuit of the gentrification of downtown Sacramento. You would think that such an abject failure would induce caution when it comes to financing an even more extreme redevelopment project in the guise of a new arena for the Kings, but you would be wrong. The appetite of the neoliberal community for entertainment must be fulfilled, even if it is done at the expense of the rest of us excluded from it. But there is a problem, an insurmountable one. There is not enough public subsidy to finance the project, especially as it appears that the real problem for the Maloofs is an urgent need for additional capital investment to enable them to absorb losses from their ownership of the Kings and their casino business. Beyond this, there is the inescapable fact that it is no longer possible to finance such projects off the profits of ancillary residential and commercial development, as was attempted with an arena proposal at the state fair Cal Expo site a couple of years ago. Furthermore, in 2006, city voters rejected measures that would have authorized the use of public funds to facilitate the project. In 2011, in a city with many public sector workers laid off or on furlough, with class sizes increasing in the public schools and recreational programs either eliminated or reduced, the public is likely to perceive any such proposal as incendiary. A city with an reported unemployment rate of over 12% is not going to respond favorably to providing more corporate welfare.

In any event, the Kings are probably already on their way to Anaheim as the Maloofs engage in the pretense of keeping their options open to keep Kings fans coming to games until the end of the season. But the failure of the redevelopment of the K Street Mall and the inability to construct an arena complex for the Kings provide an insight into a failed model of development that was seemingly global in scope. Sacramento is a charming, low density city, with many tree lined streets, that has many blocks and half blocks in which the original structures have been torn down in the last ten years. If you were so inclined, I could drive your around the downtown and adjacent Midtown, and show you numerous such locations within an hour or less. And, then there is the Tapestri zero lot home project in Midtown, where, after three or four years, units have gone up at a snail's pace, with 75% of the project's footprint still empty as the developers await the sale of a unit about once every 3 or 4 months. One might actually think that these empty lots resulted from some terrible, violent conflict, say, a secessionist war thirty or forty years ago. All of these buildings were demolished with the expectation that they would be replaced with new, exciting projects aimed, of course, at the preferred demographic of middle and upper middle income people that planners and developers wanted to attract to the central city. They readily dismissed the notion, as suggested by Dave Jones, that the city could be redeveloped along lines that would enhance the quality of life for people already living within it. Or, to put it in more Marxist terms, it didn't provide an opportunity for sufficient capital accumulation.

If he came to Sacramento, Owen Hatherley, a British author known for his modernist urbanism, would knowingly smile. He has seen something similar in the United Kingdom. In his provocative book, A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain, Hatherley exposes the failure of New Labour redevelopment, a program based upon the same arrogance that the lower middle class and lower classes must be replaced by the middle and upper middle classes in order to reinvigorate cities characterized as blighted. The dispersed empty blocks and half blocks of Sacramento find their expression in the aggregate in the massive Westfield Hole in Bradford, where a vast hole has been torn in the center of the city in expectation of a shopping mall that has yet to be built. Graffiti on one of the posters for the mall, put on the boarded fence that surrounds the hole, declares it Best Among Ruins. The miniature wasteland of the Tapestri project achieves monumental scale in the partially completed New Islington development in Manchester, where several architectural firms were assigned the task of replacing a 1970s low-rise council development. But in the face of this urban catastrophe, one that is admittedly not as bad as the attainment of the aspirations of the planners and developers intent upon a utopian, antiseptic gentrification, there remain signs of effective resistance, the creation of social alternatives. I'd like to think that Hatherley would appreciate ArtBeast, an art studio for children in a remodeled old, three story craftsman building in Midtown. It's not so much that the building has been remodeled for a community purpose, in this case, the playful use of the arts to assist in child development, although that is certainly admirable, but that the proceeds from the studio support housing and educational programs for homeless women with children. Here, we discover a positive circularity, wherein the redevelopment of a building for one socially beneficial purpose assists in facilitating an even more important one.

Labels: California, Neoliberalism, Sacramento, Sports

In his eccentric, pathbreaking book, Seeing Like a State, James Scott examined what he identified as the authoritarian high modernism of the 20th Century, a form of modernism marked by an extreme tendency to impose technocratic solutions upon a populace reduced to fungibility. Authoritarian high modernists had two obsessions: the rationalization of the city and agriculture. After the catastrophic failures of collectivization, they have, by and large, abandoned the countryside, leaving it to the ongoing encroachment of agribusiness, but their fixation upon the city remains.

Curiously, perhaps because its ostensible purpose is sports entertainment, the Olympics endures as one of the sanctuaries of high modernist urban aspirations, and this is evident in the 2010 Winter Olympics about to commence in Vancouver. Vancouver has a deserved reputation as a socially vibrant place, and, yet, it is precisely this vibrance that must be eradicated in order for the Olympics to go forward. In this respect, it recalls the famous example of the 19th Century reconstruction of Paris by Baron Haussmann, briefly discussed by Scott in State.

Just as Haussmann was driven to try to extinguish every aspect of social unpredictability and transgression, the International Olympic Committee and government officials must likewise attempt to sanitize Vancouver and the surrounding areas of such pathologies in order to make it suitable for the event to go forward. Of course, unlike Haussmann in Paris, they cannot rebuild many of the objectionable parts of Vancouver from the ground up. In the early 21st Century, that would be too costly and engender too much opposition. They must limit their developmental ambitions to the Olympic Village and the venues where the athletes will compete for medals. Furthermore, they understand, as Haussmann, and later, Le Corbusier, did not, that there is a limited correlation between the objectionable aspects of human behaviour and urban architecture. But they believe that they can achieve similar results through the imposition of social control measures, and this they have done without remorse. Indeed, we may fairly say that the substitution of intangible social control measures for the physicality of urban design is a defining feature of contemporary high modernism.

Internally, the IOC imposes strict controls upon athletes, spectators, and, implicitly, the people who work within the Olympic Village and specific competitive sites. Athletes may act only in accordance with one purpose, to compete in a way that glamorizes the Olympics and their corporate sponsors. They are not allowed to have any political or social opinions that run contrary to it, except for mild, innocuous expressions of nationalism. Spectators may only attend in order to enjoy the Olympics as a once in a lifetime experience and cheer for their favorite athletes. And, of course, the workers are there to ensure that the trains run on time. As observed by Jules Boykoff, all are expressly prohibited from expressing any kind of anti-Olympic dissent by the IOC official charter. The Olympics are one of the most heavily corporate sponsored activities in the world, and the prohibition is necessary to reduce the prospects for public exposure of it as a corporate utopia in which people have been stripped of all individuality and reduced to the roles of spectator, service worker and performer. The IOC, their corporate sponsers and government enablers loathe spontaneity.

In State, Scott observed that, as the attainment of the initial transformative intentions of high modernist projects became implausible, their promoters miniaturized them into models, model farms, model housing projects, model schools. It was as if the proponents sought to preserve their dreams for another day when they could be attained. But the Olympics constitute a model in which the momentum is in the other direction, and, as such, constitutes the emergence of a postmodern adaption of an essentially modernist project. In Vancouver, the IOC has persuaded government officials to import its authoritarianism into the surrounding communities. According to Boycoff:

In 2003 Olympic boosters low-balled their estimate for the Olympic security budget at $175 million. Since then, security costs have ballooned to almost $1 billion, with taxpayers on the hook for a huge chunk of it. Much of this money has been spent on the Vancouver Integrated Security Unit (ISU), created specifically for the Olympics in 2003 by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP). Comprised of groups like the Vancouver Police Department, the RCMP, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS—Canada’s top spy organization), and the Department of National Defense, the ISU patently shatters the thin glass wall between policing and military activity.

As the Olympics approach, the ISU has made numerous moves to intimidate activists and gather intelligence on them. For starters, there is a concern among activists and civil libertarians that ISU officials are infiltrating activist groups and that these undercover agents lack proper safeguards guiding their actions. In February 2009 B.C. Civil Liberties Association President Rob Holmes wrote letters to CSIS and the ISU asking for assurance that agents would not inflame tensions and tactics as agents provocateur or attempt to influence the political direction, policy positions, or internal discussions of any organizations infiltrated by security forces. In clipped, written responses, both CSIS and ISU officials refused to rule out the possibility that their infiltrating agents would break the law or try to assume leadership positions within anti-Olympic groups.

Law enforcement officials have also frequented the homes and workplaces of anti-Olympics activists as part of their threat assessment program. On January 20, 2010, ISU personnel visited the workspace of Vancouver-based dissident Franklin Lopez. An hour earlier, Lopez had filmed a public talk that political sportswriter Dave Zirin delivered at the Maritime Labour Centre in Vancouver. To be honest, Lopez told me, I was not surprised, being that most people that I have been involved with either through friendship or through organizing have been visited, some multiple times.

First Nations activist Gord Hill was also visited by the ISU’s Joint Intelligence Group after he offered strongly worded criticism of the Olympics in the media. It should be noted that the Olympics are taking place on unceded indigenous territory—hence, the slogan No Olympics on Stolen Native Land is plastered on kiosks across Vancouver, which sits on unceded Coast Salish territory. ISU officials visited Hill’s residence in October 2009, leaving their business cards when they did not find him home. Hill, from the Kwakwaka’wakw nation, promptly plunked images of these cards online along with an account he penned, Statement by Gord Hill Regarding Visits by Olympic Police Agents.

Canada has also refused to permit activists and alternative media participants from the US from entering the country after subjecting them to interrogation. Boycoff relates how Vancouver police are so obsessed with preventing the subversion of the transcendent IOC message of a joyful world of athletic competition that they are removing homeless people from the streets of the impoverished Eastside and arresting people for jaywalking, unlicensed street vending and, worst of all, putting up anti-Olympic posters on poles.

There is, however, an alternative to the passive, repressive social vision of the IOC and those within government who embrace it. It is an approach that celebrates unpredictability, spontaneity, diversity, and, most importantly, participation:

Reclaim the Streets often stage non-violent direct action street reclaiming events such as the 'invasion' of a major road, highway or freeway to stage a party. While this may obstruct the regular users of these spaces such as car drivers and public bus riders, the philosophy of RTS is that it is vehicle traffic, not pedestrians, who are causing the obstruction, and that by occupying the road they are in fact opening up public space. The events are usually spectacular and colourful, with sand pits for kids to play in, free food and music.

Or, as expressed by Reclaim the Streets London:

The street
is an
extremely
important
symbol
because
your
whole
enculturation
experience
is
geared
around
keeping
you
out of the street
...
The idea
is
to keep
everyone
indoors.

So,
when
you
come
to
challenge
the
powers
that
be,
inevitably
you
find
yourself
on the curbstone
of
indifference,
wondering
"should I play it safe
and stay on the
sidewalks,
or
should I
go into the street?"
And
it
is
the
ones
who
are
taking
the most risks
that will ultimately
effect the change in society

New Orleans Reclaim the Streets recently blockaded Canal Street to create a police free zone as a contrast to ineffectual policies of arrest and incarceration, as described in this flyer:

So, What’s Wrong with prisons anyway:

-Louisiana has the highest incarceration rate in the U.S., yet we are no safer.

-Louisiana has the highest arrest rate in the U.S., yet we are no safer.

-The Angola 3 are still in prison, yet we are no safer.

-We spend more on police and prisons, yet our communities are never protected from the violence that is poverty, war, racism, sexism, and homophobia. In fact, these communities are disproportionately targeted by the very system claiming to exist for their protection.

-We spend more on police, but no one protects our communities from the destruction of our homes for private hospitals, new condos, and “mixed-income” developments.

It was, no doubt, confirmation of what Reclaim the Streets London blanded observed in 2007: The Reclaim the Streets idea has grown up and left home. Street parties and suchlike often happen without anyone in RTS London hearing about them until afterwards.

Labels: Activism, Anarchism, Canada, Neoliberalism, Olympics, Police, Postmodernism, Sports

Back in my youth, I watched a lot of football games. I saw many NFL games involving the great teams of the 1970s, the Pittsburgh Steelers, the Oakland Raiders, the Dallas Cowboys, the Minnesota Vikings, the Los Angeles Rams. With the passage of time, I grew increasingly disinterested, only watching games periodically as the great 49er dynasty of the 1980s and early 1990s faded into history. One of the most concealed aspects of the game is its brutality, the permanent consequences for those who play it most intensely at the professional level.

A few weeks ago, fans of the 49ers marked the 25th anniversary of "the Catch", the last second touchdown in the corner of the end zone that sent the 49ers on their way to 5 Super Bowl victories over 14 years. But, as described by the San Francisco Chronicle today, there was a dark side to this victory:

On the most famous play in 49ers history, amid the din at raucous Candlestick Park, Joe Montana raced to his right and hurriedly scanned the field. He backpedaled to elude three onrushing Dallas players, twice pumped his arm to throw and floated an off-balance pass into the back of the end zone.

Dwight Clark had cut to the middle before abruptly reversing direction. Clark sprinted toward the corner, leaped high, reached both arms above his head and made The Catch, forever cementing his place in 49ers lore.

Twenty-five years later, Montana's left knee is essentially shredded. His right eye occasionally sags from nerve damage. His neck is so stiff, he could not turn his head to look at a reporter asking him questions while he signed memorabilia. Montana, 50, turned both shoulders instead.

Clark, also 50, endures sharp pain every time he lifts his arms above his head -- the exact motion he effortlessly completed on The Catch -- because of a bent screw in his left shoulder and arthritis in his right shoulder. The simple act of turning his head also is a chore, thanks to all those jarring hits on crossing patterns over the middle.

"I hurt," Clark said, "from getting my head squashed down into my neck."

Ron Kroichick, the writer, relates several other alarming individual stories:

Jim Stuckey hardly resembled a broken-down man on Jan. 10, 1982. Soon after The Catch, Stuckey -- then a spry, curly-haired, 23-year-old defensive end -- pounced on Cowboys quarterback Danny White's fumble to preserve San Francisco's 28-27 triumph in the NFC Championship Game.

Stuckey once went on injured reserve with a sprained knee, but he had no surgeries during his seven-year NFL career. He was not as fortunate once he retired from the game -- his left knee steadily deteriorated because of degenerative joint disorder, leading to three operations.

Before long, Stuckey could not bend down to pick up his 2-year-old daughter or lift his left leg high enough to pedal a bike. Stuckey's doctor tried to persuade him to wait on knee-replacement surgery (an artificial knee typically lasts 10-to-20 years), but Stuckey insisted.

He had the operation in October 2000, at age 42. The doctor who performed the surgery said Stuckey had the equivalent of an 85-year-old knee.

"I was 42 and I couldn't do anything," he said. "Hopefully, by the time this (artificial knee) wears out, they'll invent some way to replace integral parts of the knee rather than the whole knee."

Keith Fahnhorst has a more fundamental wish: standing up straight. Fahnhorst, a mainstay on the 49ers' offensive line in the 1970s and '80s, stood tall at 6-foot-6 in 1981, but now he walks hunched over because of spinal stenosis and degeneration of the disks in his neck and back.

Fahnhorst, 54, also totes routine baggage for a longtime offensive lineman: worn, bent hands from years of grappling along the line of scrimmage. Fahnhorst said his left thumb and forefinger remain numb to this day, as they remind him every time he tries to button his shirt.

But the most publicly known extreme instance of the brutality of the game is the tragic story of 1970s Pittsburgh Steelers center Mike Webster:

Mike Webster never made it to his son's 10th birthday party in Lodi, Wis. Lying in a dark room at the Budgetel Inn, some 20 minutes away in Madison, he was bed-bound in a haze of pain and narcotics, a bucket of vomit by his side.

When his playing days were over, Mike Webster barely resembled the man they called Iron Mike.

Webster was often laced with a varying, numbing cocktail of medications: Ritalin or Dexedrine to keep him calm. Paxil to ease anxiety. Prozac to ward off depression. Klonopin to prevent seizures. Vicodin or Ultram or Darvocet or Lorcet, in various combinations, to subdue the general ache. And Eldepryl, commonly prescribed to patients who suffer from Parkinson's disease.

After 17 seasons in the National Football League, Webster had lost any semblance of control over his once-invincible body. His brain showed signs of dementia. His head throbbed constantly. He suffered from significant hearing loss. Three lumbar vertebrae and two cervical vertebrae ached from frayed and herniated discs. A chronically damaged right heel caused him to limp. His right shoulder was sore from a torn rotator cuff. His right elbow grew stiff from once being dislocated. His knees, the cartilage in them all but gone, creaked from years of bone grinding against bone. His knuckles were scarred and swollen. His fingers bent gruesomely wayward.

"He was too sick to come to my birthday party. He didn't even call me and I was mad," Garrett Webster remembered recently. "Now, I understand that there was something wrong."

Ten years later, there is only a faint strain of resentment in his voice. His father, the celebrated Hall of Fame center for the Pittsburgh Steelers, is gone now. Still, the mental snapshots, those harrowing memories, persist of the stoic man they called Iron Mike:

Desperate for a few moments of peace from the acute pain, repeatedly stunning himself, sometimes a dozen times, into unconsciousness with a black Taser gun. "The only way he could get to sleep," said Garrett.

Glassy-eyed like a punch-drunk boxer, huddled alone, staring into space night after night at the Amtrak station in downtown Pittsburgh. "Living on potato chips and dry cereal," said Joe Gordon, a Steelers employee.

A formidable man, at 6-foot-2 and 250 pounds, who sometimes forgot to eat for days -- sleeping in his battered, black Chevy S-10 pickup truck, a garbage bag duct-taped over the missing window. "Sometimes he didn't seem to care," said Sunny Jani, the primary caregiver the last six years of his life.

Writing wandering journals in a cramped, earnest hand so convoluted in their spare eloquence that, upon reading them in his lucid moments, he would be moved to weep. "You had absolutely no idea what was going through his mind," said Colin, his oldest son.

The powerfully proud former athlete, anguished and curled up in a fetal position for three or four days, puzzling over his life, contemplating suicide and, in later years, placing those sad, rambling calls, almost daily in the later years, to friends and family when he couldn't find his way home. "All I see is trees," he'd say apologetically, almost in a whisper.

As summarized in the wikipedia entry about Webster:

It is universally believed that Webster's ailments were the result of damage sustained over his playing career, and some doctors estimated he had been in the equivalent of "25,000 automobile crashes" in over 35 years of playing football at various levels. Protective equipment, in particular helmets, was inferior during Webster's time, and defensive players sometimes employed a "head slap" move that was then accepted although illegal.

Webster's nightmarish post-football life suggests something in addition to the physical destructiveness of the game, the possibility that teams manipulate mentally disordered people to play it:

Barret Robbins may be lonely, but he is not alone in his hospital room. At his bedside lurks the two-headed monster of manic depression. Heavily sedated, stricken with pneumonia and breathing with the help of a ventilator, the massive former pro football player struggles for every breath and, silently, his sanity.

Two years after going AWOL before Super Bowl XXXVII, the off-center former Oakland Raiders lineman is back in a hospital again — with an armed police officer outside his door. If he is fortunate, he will live to again confront his bipolar disorder in hopes of conquering mania and depression, demons exacerbated by his self-medicating use of alcohol and drugs.

This is a tragic story filled with turmoil, heartbreak — and a family's hope for a loved one tormented by the invisible pain of mental illness. In 2003, two days before the most important game of his life, Robbins went on a drinking binge in Tijuana, Mexico, that left him in a psychiatric ward and under a suicide watch on Super Bowl Sunday.

Nineteen days ago, disturbed by a dissolving marriage and his wife's restraining order, the 6-3, 360-pound native Texan was found by police hiding in a women's restroom. In a bizarre confrontation with three officers, the burly 31-year-old was shot in the heart and in a lung. He faces three felony attempted murder charges, punishable by as much as life in prison. His attorney says an insanity defense is appropriate, if needed.

Manic depression is an incurable mood disorder that is treatable with medication — prescriptions that friends and family say Robbins failed to take during his long nights of partying along a strip of bars and trendy clubs in South Beach.

Robbins was fortunate enough to be placed on probation:

Under a plea agreement, Robbins pled guilty to five charges, including the attempted murder charge, and was sentenced to five years probation, ordered to receive treatment for his bipolar disorder, and to avoid alcohol.

There is something perverse about this sport, and one wonders if, centuries from now (or, perhaps, just decades?), it will be considered akin to bear baiting in terms of its depravity. If so, that still leaves the troubling question as to why the sport has been so alluring for so long. What disturbing feature of human nature is brought to the surface and revealed by it?

Labels: American Culture, Sadomasochism, Sports

At lunch yesterday, I picked up a discarded section of the New York Times. Paging through it, an obituary grabbed me by the throat.

Robert W. Peterson, whose pioneering history of the Negro leagues, "Only the Ball Was White," recaptured a lost era in baseball history and a rich facet of black life in America, died Saturday at a hospital in Salisbury Township, Pa. Mr. Peterson, who lived in Lower Macungie Township, Pa., was 80 . . .When Mr. Peterson's account of black baseball was published by Prentice-Hall in 1970, little was known of the Negro leagues apart from the memories of black Americans who had been thrilled by players like Satchel Paige, Josh Gibson and Buck Leonard. Black baseball had flourished in a segregated America but was largely ignored by the mainstream press and went out of business in the 1950's, soon after the major league color barrier had been smashed. . . When Mr. Peterson was growing up in Warren, Pa., he had seen some of the great Negro leaguers in barnstorming games. He later played baseball at Upsala College in East Orange, N.J., and worked as an editor for The World-Telegram and The Sun. When the paper closed in 1966, he turned to freelance writing and set out to learn the history of the Negro leagues by interviewing the star players and studying microfilm of black newspapers.

The publication of Peterson's book built upon Ted Williams' famous comment during his induction into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1966:

I hope some day Satchel Paige and Josh Gibson will be voted into the Hall of Fame as symbols of the great Negro players who are not here only because they weren't given the chance.

It sounds improbable now, after the romanticization of the Negro Leagues by people like documentary filmmaker Ken Burns, and a wealth of books published about the players and their experiences in recent decades, but the history so vividly documented by Peterson in 1970 exploded with the force of revelation. Especially so for someone like myself, a precocious 10 year old who had recently signed up for the Sports Illustrated book club. At first, I found myself involuntarily receiving Curt Flood's autobiography, describing his struggle to overcome baseball's infamous reserve clause, because I failed to return the postcard saying that I didn't want the book. Apparently, it's now out of print. But when Peterson's book was subsequently listed as a 'book of the month' selection, I received it enthusiastically. Enthralled with professional sports, and baseball specifically, I found the description of the book irresistable, as it conveyed an air of mystery, a sense of secret knowledge that only can only be shared with a select few. Upon reading, it did not disappoint.

The book is especially noteworthy for its portrayal of the early history of the Negro Leagues, powerfully enshrouding the participants of the pre-Ruth era in the aura of myth. Peterson rescued the experiences of players like John Henry Lloyd, Smoky Joe Williams and Rube Foster from obscurity. Foster is described as a protean figure: pitcher, manager, league president, major league in everything but name. About Lloyd, baseball giant, Pirates third baseman Honus Wagner said: I am honored to have John Lloyd called the Black Wagner. It is a privilege to have been compared to him.

Peterson's evocation of barnstorming, and the theatrics associated with it, as manifested in the phenomenon known as clowning are bittersweet, yet mesmerizing, with a keen sense of social insight. One example, Peterson quotes from his interview of Arthur W. Hardy, who toured with the Topeka Giants in 1906 and 1907:

On the Topeka Giants we did some clowning on the field, but it was done like this: As you know, some people might resent what they might consider you making fun of them, and so Topeka Jack Johnson would always talk to the local people. He'd say, "Now what about your folks here? Do you want us to put on some kind of funny act? Or do you think that they would resent it?"

Here was one of the stunts: The pitcher would throw the ball and maybe it would be a little low but the umpire would call it a strike; all right, you'd get down on your knees at the plate. Or some guy would hit the ball out of the park and run to third base and around the bases backward, that sort of thing.

Well now, unless the local people would approve, we would never do it. Johnson always insisted that we didn't want to humiliate anybody.

Not surprisingly, conditions were difficult for African American players as they traveled long distances in turn of the century vehicles and frequently had trouble obtaining lodging in many parts of the country. It did not have to be so. Peterson explains how African Americans and Latinos were driven from the late 19th Century professional leagues that ultimately became the major leagues we know today. Cap Anson played an especially odious role as one of the most notoriously bigoted players of his time. In this, he gave expression to prevailing sentiment.

Upon reflection, it is evident that Peterson persuaded me to look behind the curtain and seek to understand the often ignored, if not deliberately concealed, social experiences of people marginalized by conventional thought. As I age, I find myself reading more and more works that rely upon the oral histories of participants, with Black Workers Remember, Embracing the Infidel, and, of course, the inimitable Blood of Spain constituting compelling examples of the genre. Only the Ball Was White shall therefore always occupy a prominent, visible place on my bookshelf. It is obvious that the black players that inspired Peterson in his youth also touched a compassionate place in his heart, and that he acknowledged the debt by writing such a magical, yet brutally honest book about their lives.

Labels: American Culture, Book Reviews, Obituaries, Racism, Sports