And if I fight, I fight for something else.

Along with a book examining our national drug of choice comes a kick-ass documentary. Not that it will change anything though.

A blogger for the Lawrence Journal-World finds out the hellish side of winning national championships:

High five? I can’t. I’m sorry, but there is no more five left in my hand. My hand is bruised and mangled from high fiving everyone in Lawrence last night after the KU basketball team became the champions of the universe. It will probably be weeks before I am able to conduct any sort of appropriate, celebratory sports greetings that involve my right hand.

You may be wondering why I failed to effectively use my left hand as an alternate. Well, it should be plain to see that I can’t use my left hand for high fiving because my left hand is my beer hand. Don’t be ridiculous.

I don’t know when the rule for this blog became that the proportion of non-sports to sports postings must be 1:gazillion, but this has me all kinds of giggly today. That Southern Cal-Ohio State game in September is gonna be rough on my psyche.

In case you were wondering what it was like in the Fieldhouse on the greatest night of its 50+ year history. I swear, I’ll stop blogging about it today, but for one last time, KANSAS ÜBER ALLES!

Growing up I was not a Kansas fan. Simply put, my sister rooted for the Jayhawks, so I, in turn, had to root for the Wildcats against her. I remember cheering against KU in several Tournament games, if I even paid attention at all. But my junior year of high school, Kansas played Duke in the 2nd round, and when they lost, I went back to my room, closed the door, and sobbed uncontrollably for minutes. It was at that moment that I realized that I had been a Jayhawk all along.

Nine years later, on the first Monday in April, I had the privilege of experiencing the greatest joy a fan of college sports can possibly fathom: being able to hold your finger in the air as the number one team in the nation, and knowing that nobody can tell you you’re wrong. I sat in Allen Fieldhouse, half-full even though no players would take the court, and watched the greatest game of my life unfold on the video screens above. The tight first half, the nine-point Memphis lead with three minutes left, the missed free throws that brough Kansas back into it, and then, finally, the Chalmers three-pointer with 2.1 seconds left that send us into a frenzy. At that point, we knew Kansas would prevail; at that point, it was simply inevitable. So when Kansas continued its 14-3 run into overtime, we just let things fall into place, and when the buzzer sounded, Kansas fans stormed the court for possibly the only time that security will ever let them do so.

I bought the special edition Kansas City Star outside, and then ran the (seemingly) mile and a half down to Mass St. where there were more people crammed into a stretch of downtown than you will ever imagine. It took me 15min. to walk two blocks, and then, having savored the night I dreamt of for almost a decade, I turned back towards home, and a future that will take me to another school that knows a thing or two about celebrating titles. Tonight and forever, I am a Jayhawk; Kansas Über Alles!

And all was well in Jayhawk Nation for the rest of time. Monday night, bitches!

I’ve learned more about the holy game of baseball in 25 minutes of reading this post from the guru of SABRmetrics than I have in my 25 years on this planet. I also watched Bull Durham today; I’m gonna make that my opening day tradition every year, just like watching Hoosiers in the week before the Tournament starts.

Though the gap is small (ie: the Mighty Uclas avoiding an upset from the Aggies, Tennessee pulling away in OT over Butler), there is still a gap between the top, say, six to eight teams in the country, and everybody else who are all so bunched up together that this has inexplicably become an exciting tournament, ie: TWO 12-13 matchups in the 2nd round, Belmont’s near miss against the Dukies before West Fuckin’ Virginia polished them off, and today, Davidson’s upset over Georgetown. Even UNLV gave Kansas a good game for 30min. I think two very strong currents are at work here: the increasing level of parity at the D-1 level, in which the mid-majors are pulling in not just players but also developing coaches who are able to take it to the power conferences year in and year out, as well as the recent crop of freshmen who fundamentally shift the balance for the one year that they play ball (and some at non-traditional schools, mind you, like USC and K-State) before leaving for the NBA. For every senior-laden team out there with the experience that used to be considered necessary for tournament battles, there’s a Kevin Love. And though I’m still not quite sure how I feel about that, it does make these couple weekends of March rather fun indeed.

Taking all that into account, my bracket is almost in tatters, ‘almost’ being the operative word here. I still have six of my Elite Eight picks left, and all of my Final Four. Normally about this time I would be doing a second-chance bracket, but even though I lost a bunch of games this weekend, my power picks are carrying me through quite well. We’ll see how that goes next weekend while I’m in Tucson. Kansas Über Alles!

Barack picks the same Final Four as I do. It’ll be a pleasure though to beat down his choice to win it all. Kansas Über Alles!

Speaking of awesome shoe companies, I got a chance to try on the new Sparq TR Elites yesterday at Champ Sports in Kansas City, and they are quite simply the shoes I’ve been waiting for. I’d been wearing some adidas trainers for the past three years, ones that were made specifically for gym usage, and while I had no complaints with them, I always felt they hindered me a little in what I could do in them. The uppers were tearing apart (with holes that I could start to put a finger through), and when I made lateral movements my foot would actually spill over the midsole. I wanted not just something new, but something upgraded; I kept my eye on the new stuff out of Nike over the past few months, but felt resigned to getting the Under Armour prototypes, that is, until the ‘Better’ campaign started last week. And thank goodness. These are the lightest shoes I’ve worn since track, and that’s precisely why I bought them (also, getting Champ Sports to give me a $10 discount didn’t hurt. It’s not my fault they mislabeled the black & greens when the white and reds were marked full price!); they are a track spike for the gym, very responsive and fitted so that you can move with some pop, but also stable enough that I can plant my foot with confidence. I doubt they’ll change my athletic future, but I like what they’ve done to my daydreams already.

What a wonderful gem of a biography, even if the occasional editing error did drive me bonkers. I knew that Bill Bowerman was the dean of American track coaches, and the inspiration behind the one company I would literally pay to work for, yet I had no idea just how far his legend carried among those who came into contact with the man who despised being called ‘coach,’ let alone those who were coached by him. I took so much joy in learning about the weather and history of Oregon, the drama of dual meets and a good 5000m race, the sheer audacity of starting a shoe company from scratch, yet even all that couldn’t compare to simply reading the all-American story of Bill and Barbara Bowerman’s school years and courtship. This is a story that should be read by everybody who’s ever stopped and glanced at a runner churning out miles, wondering what lies etched on his face, and what drives his feet.

Though I live in the land of Jayhawk basketball, I probably spend most of my time following Pac-10 basketball, and have thus been tracking the relative fortunes of the Ducks, Sun Devils and Wildcats as they jockeyed for an at-large bid in the tourney, bids that were seemingly in jeopardy when they all lost in Thursday’s quarterfinals in LA. At best Oregon was projected to be an 11-seed, probably a 12, if they made it in at all. Thus, as I watched the Selection Show on CBS’ awesome streaming feed (every game of the first three rounds for free!) and saw that Oregon was made a 9-seed I exclaimed ‘Holy shit! Are you kidding me?!’ That being said, I like them to win at least their first game and then bow out to Memphis. Other thoughts as I look at my scrawled handwriting in Sharpie all over my newspaper-sized bracket:

• Kansas has a great road to the Final Four; they don’t meet a potential stumbling block until the Elite Eight, and even then they’ll only have to contend with either Georgetown, Wisconsin, or Southern California after they sort themselves out.

• Though I still don’t believe that Tennessee actually knows how to play basketball, they sure look like they do. However, my desire to see North Carolina burned alive and then the ashes beaten into the ground is tempered only by my desire for the Jayhawks to do that to them. Thus, I like UNC to come out of the East bracket.

• I actually have very few upsets on my bracket right now, aside from Memphis losing to Stanford in the South in order to set-up yet another go-round with UCLA in the national semifinal; I don’t know if the Cardinal can win three straight against Marquette, Texas and Memphis to get to the Final Four, but they’re about the only ones I could see doing it.

• And in the end, Kansas wins the game of the year over Tyler ‘I’m so awesome you’ve never heard my name before, and never will again’ Hansbrough to set up a championship match against the Mighty Uclas, and celebrate the 20th anniversary of Danny and the Miracles with a good ol’ San Antonio Massacre.  Kansas Über Alles!

So continuing on, I went with the Space/Atomic Age over the Information Age because while the interwebs are nice, what have they really accomplished for man aside from making it easier to get prostitutes? At least the Space Age put a man on the fucking moon. I also put the Space Age over the American Revolution because Washington’s men were still wiping their ass with leaves. I picked the Dutch Settlements over the Wild West for one reason: awesome names which we later bastardized. Hello, Haarlem? The Broncks? And then for the slot in the Final Four, the Space/Atomic Age: nothing says American exceptionalism like 20 years of threatening to blow up the rest of the world while buying tickets to Tomorrowland!

For Asia, I pretty much picked the seeds, though I did give the Romanovs the nod over the Ice Age into the Sweet Sixteen. However, I’m going with the Huns the whole way, even over the Mongols, because even though everybody was sacking Rome by the time they rolled in, the Huns did it with that certain panache that has ensured their name in the history books since. 

[Interlude] Just now:

Ryan: This is so much fun! Such a better use of my time than deciding where to go to grad school!
Ellyn: [shakes head]

Ryan: You gotta be careful because in many brackets, the 5-12 matchup is where you find most of your upsets. Like the Tokugawa Shoganate and the Ming Dynasty; I almost went with the Ming, but I did pick the Shoguns at the last moment. And then in America, the Wild West and the Civil War. I mean come on, who picks the Civil War?
Ellyn: I can’t believe you just said that. Look at what came out of the Civil War.
Ryan: Massive death and destruction?
Ellyn: The civil war amendments!
Ryan: Oh come on, how about westward expansion and manifest destiny!

In Europe, I picked against the 5-12 upset by taking the Vikings, because I wanted that matchup with the Renaissance, which the Vikings cruise over. I hate Napolean, so picking Republican Rome was a no-brainer, even though I picked the Age of Exploration over Imperial Rome in a stunning first round upset. But I couldn’t pick the Age again because it was the beginning of the subjugation of entire civilizations at the hands of fucking Iberians. Rome goes through to the Elite Eight, where they upset the Viking juggernaut.

Ryan: You can’t believe you’re dating me, can you?
Ellyn: Are you kidding? You’re hot. And you’re an intellectual.
Ryan: Are you kidding? Carthaginian Era versus the Sumerians! Oh my god, this first round matchup: Prison Colony Australia and the Aboriginal Settlements.

No real upsets in Africa/Australia, though I was dismayed at some of the selections, seeing as how the Ottomans, the Persians and Mesopotamia are all actually Asian. But whatever; Egypt gets the nod over Babylon, who themselves saw off a fierce challenge from Carthage, which in the end was doomed by all that salt sown into the city streets.  

So for my final four, I have the Space Age versus the Huns, while Republican Rome faces Ancient Egypt. I have to put the relative environmental impacts in perspective in the first semifinal, which overwhelmingly goes to the Huns; sorry, but the age of atomic energy also spawned Silent Spring, Love Canal, Agent Orange, Chernobyl, and suburbia. While the pyramids are cool, and Egyptians did discover beer, I like columns and Roman numerals a lot, as well as any building with coliseum in its name. Which gives us historians an amazing championship matchup: the Huns against Republican Rome. How would the upstart Romans, with their Senate and competant generals, fare against those that would waylay their successors? It all comes down to one crucial second-half moment: If Caesar is crossing the Rubicon in a flanking manuever rather than a coup against the Republic, then the Huns are dones. Bank on it. And this is way more time and energy than I thought I was going to devote to this thing. My eyes might be bleeding a little bit.

Just now, as I’m filling out my bracket:

Ellyn: [distracted by video game] What?
Ryan: I said the Dutch did give us New York, so I’m putting them over the Inca Dominance, even though I’m rather partial to pre-Columbian civilizations. Which sucks because I’m also putting the Wild West over the Aztecs, but they did make human sacrifices on altars. The Aztecs, not the Wild West, though there were a lot of dead people in that era too.
Ellyn: You’re so cute! But jeez, you’re sooo nerdy too!

During the Super Bowl, Under Armour released the commercial for their new trainers that wouldn’t be available until May. Yesterday came Nike’s response, and in my honest opinion, it shows why Nike is still the best sports brand in the world today. Everything about that commercial is better than Under Armour’s approach. And the shoes are better too.

I give up. I tried to come up with reasons why this is awful, but I can’t. It’s just too badass. And that, friends, is why I will always forgive Nike; as a designer, I have to applaud the fucking balls it takes to create a uniform on the basis of ‘What if nobody can read it?’ just as I applaud the idea of over 300 separate football uni combinations. If you don’t have a classic look like Penn State or Alabama, then why the fuck not try to be on the avant garde? Because you gotta admit, when his knee wasn’t destroyed, Dennis Dixon made the greens, the blacks, the whites, and even the yellows look damn good.

Last week saw a stunning development in football (read: fútbol) news: the Premier League in England announced plans to add a 39th match to their schedule. Now this may not seem big, but let me briefly explain. As it stands, there are 20 clubs in England’s top-flight division, and unlike all American sports, there is no ‘post-season’ to determine the champion; each club plays all the others twice, home and away, in a 38-game round robin to determine the winner of the Premiership for that season. This has been a mainstay of British and indeed European soccer for decades, as all soccer leagues follow this format. However, the 39th match is for something that may well become the norm: an international fixture.

Under the new plan, one weekend in January would see all 20 EPL teams fly off to five previously announced sites in other parts of the world, with the pairings drawn at random (but the top five sides, ie: Manchester United, Chelsea, Arsenal, etc., kept out so as to not draw each other) and each city hosting two matches in two days. Such places may include Shanghai, Melbourne, Miami, New York, and other cities in the West and Far East. The purpose of this is two-fold: 1) to make a lot of money, and 2) see number one. Understandably, a few folks are pissed. Premiership managers say they were not consulted, FIFA and UEFA both say ‘no way in hell,’ and all of the various national and regional federations that would be host to such matches say that they don’t want to see another country’s competitive fixtures when they’re still nursing their own domestic leagues. Top European clubs make more money in television rights (especially satellite TV which can beam their matches all over the world) and merchandise, which means that they have quite a fan base outside of England; Arsenal’s manager was probably very close to the mark when he said that 90% of his team’s fans live outside of Britain. It does make a certain amount of sense to take your show on the road, and especially if you can do it with an actual, honest-to-God fixture rather than the preseason tours that those clubs regularly make (the kind that see Chelsea face the MLS All-Stars, for example). But does it make sense to sell out a game that, as we know it, was practically born in England? Especially with the wrath of everybody from Sepp Blatter to Sir Alex Ferguson to Gordon Brown coming down on you?

Meanwhile, on this side of the pond, it seems as if the NFL is still pursuing its own dreams of global dominance (which will never happen for reasons that don’t have to be elaborated again), but now we see that the NBA is on the verge of something just as stunning as the EPL: a possible European division. That, actually makes sense. Basketball is becoming rather popular in Europe, and many players from that continent are excelling in the college and professional levels here. In Spain some of the top football clubs also have basketball teams, and when the NBA does preseason tours they usually base a team in a city for those few games, even modifying the uniforms to that end. I can see this being a rather viable expansion project (certainly makes more sense than Oklahoma City; I mean come on, you’re a pro basketball player in your early 20s who’s just been drafted. Where do you want to live and play? Oklahoma…or Amsterdam? I rest my case). Honestly, I don’t really care where anybody plays, so long as Tampa Bay loses its baseball team. It’ll be a cold day in hell before I recognize a major league franchise known as the Rays.

NFL Street ain’t got nothin’ on the FIFA version. As I said, this is a major reason why the game of Giants and Cowboys will never make inroads into the land of fútbol. Kids in all over the world, in Brazil and Europe, rich and poor, native and immigrant, play soccer just as often in alleys and parking lots (and apparently rooftops and overpasses) as on grassy pitches. And, they look like they have a lot more fun doing it too. Because in all honesty, if you’re head over heels during a football game, you’re doing something wrong.

• Great, now those pricks from the ‘72 Dolphins are going to be even more insufferable.

• Bill Belichick, I’ve been a great fan of yours. From the way you approach the game and the media to way you justify running up the score (‘What do you want me to do? Kick a field goal?’), I’m with you all the way. How then, given two weeks and the most awesome offense in the history of the game, do you not prepare for the possibility that the Giants might, oh I don’t know, rush the fucking passer?

• Similarly, Patriots’ offensive line? Forget any chance you might of had of having Tom Brady hook you up with Gisele’s friends.

• There is nothing more pathetic in all of sports than a team that wins the Super Bowl, after going 10-6 in the regular season, beating Green Bay in Ice Bowl II, and getting 10 straight road wins in the process, complaining afterwards about how nobody gave them any respect. We did give you respect; we believed that you would get your ass handed to you, but we still respected you.

• I’m so pre-ordering the new Under Armour trainers. They’re quite badass, even if the commercial kinda sucked (1st quarter). We get it already; people who wear your stuff like to scream a lot. I’m literally just waiting for their next campaign to be nothing but grunting.

• The best Super Bowl commercial I’ve ever seen? Doritos’ ‘Mouse Trap’ (2nd quarter). I couldn’t stop laughing. And Ellyn ignored me.

• I hope you enjoyed 18-0, ladies and gentlemen, cause we’ll never see it again. 

In the same week that K-State breaks a 25-year home losing streak, Wales just went into Twickenham, where they haven’t won in 20 years, and told England to cram it up their cramhole. I happen to catch the last 20min. on BBC Radio Wales right as they started their 17 unanswered point comeback to start the Six Nations with a landmark win. And for England? Absolute disgust. Just like with the national football team, I think England needs to strip down and rebuild completely. All that grit and determination doesn’t last forever if you can’t last through the second half. Bloody hell.