Just about the time we were settling in for the Kansas-Syracuse game, my strange neighbor, Omar, appeared in my kitchen with a wild-looking Brazilian woman who spoke no English but seemed to understand everything we said. “Is it possible that we could watch the Big Dance with you?” he asked gently. “Today is very special for our family.”
Before I could answer, he grabbed my shoulders and kissed me on both ears, then he stepped around me and came face to face with the Sheriff, who immediately lifted him off the floor and slammed him against my black leather–covered refrigerator.
“I thought I told you never to come here again!” he shouted. “I have at least five warrants for your arrest.”
Omar screeched for a moment, then smiled and tried to adjust his clothes. “You know I am innocent,” he said. “Don’t you know who I am? I am your neighbor, Prince Omar of New York. I live just up the road. Why do you try to kill me?”
The game was about to start, so I quickly stepped between them and put my arm around the Brazilian woman, who took my arm and motioned for a cigarette.
“Of course, we have many cigarettes here,” I said suavely, escorting her into the lounge and putting her on a stool between the Sheriff and Anita, my elegant fiancée, where I knew she would be safe. “There is no room up here for you at the bar,” I told Omar. “You will have to find somewhere to stand.”
“Yeah,” the Sheriff chuckled. “You can stand over there with the losers.” He pointed to a narrow spot in a nearby hallway, with no view at all of the game, which was spinning out of control for the favored Kansas Jayhawks. I was down by something like 14 points when Kansas finally made its first free throw.
The score at halftime was 53–42, and Kansas already looked beat. They were the popular choice as well as a four-and-a-halfpoint gambling choice over Syracuse, the Champion of the East, with its three freshman starters and its shaggy reputation for showboating. “A perennial Big East power with big potential,” they said in New York. But their three (those freshman) starters were too young and too jittery to hang on for long against supercoach Roy Williams and his two big guns, Nick Collison and Kirk Hinrich, both seniors.
By halftime I was losing interest as well as money. Syracuse was simply too fast and tall and talented for the Jayhawks, who couldn’t score from outside or inside and missed 60 percent of their free throws. Their defense was like a helpless punchboard and their best shots were either crushed or swatted far into the crowd, as the huge crowd jeered and my bets sank out of sight.
Anita and Princess Omin had taken my new test Jeep into town for a box of Polish sausage and some orchids to dress up the War Room. They seemed to be getting along nicely, despite the language problem that had once plagued us in the past. They were quite beautiful together.
This is a very bad week for the American nation, and next week will be even worse. The Kansas-Syracuse game was barely over when I learned to my horror that the United States Marines were randomly murdering British and American journalists in Baghdad.
Five journalists have died in Iraq so far, and not one of them was killed by Enemy Fire. They were shot down like dogs by U.S. military personnel, killed and wounded and mangled by Americans, who drive American M1 Abrahms battle tanks and eat all-American pie, just like the rest of us. American troops are killing journalists in a profoundly foreign country, for savage, greed-crazed reasons that most of them couldn’t explain or even understand.
What the fuck is going on here? How could this once-proud nation have changed so much, so drastically, in only two years—almost three, to be sure. In what seems like the blink of an eye, this George Bush has brought us from a prosperous nation at peace to a broke nation at war. And why are we killing each other at point-blank range on the other side of the world—with big guns and big bombs that kill everything in reach?
Indeed, there is something going on here, Mister Jones, and you don’t know what it is, do you?
Bob Dylan said that, and he is still right, now more than ever. Hell, there is nothing really new about American cops and American soldiers killing and brutalizing innocent American citizens. It happens with depressing regularity. But at least the bastards used to have the decency to deny it.
That is a big difference, sports fans, and that is why I feel so savagely depressed tonight. When the Pentagon feels free and even gleeful about killing anybody and Everybody who gets in the way of their vicious crusade for oil, the public soul of this country has changed forever, and professional sports is only a serenade for the death of the American dream. Mahalo.
Another big loser last week was the CBS-TV network, which did a credible job and put most of the games on TV—but the invasion was impossible to compete with, and ratings for the Big Dance were down almost 30 percent overall. I was not among the quitters, but I still had a hard time staying focused on basketball. The total war against Evil dominated every waking moment of our lives.
War has always been a hard act to follow, and this rotten little massacre in Iraq is no exception. It is like that permanent shit-rain that Ronald Reagan talked about in his letters to Frank Sinatra. They both believed very deeply in the book of Revelation. Reagan even went so far as to say to his buddy, “We are screwed, Frankie. We are the ones who will have to face the end of the World.”
They had a good time for sure, those rogues. They were lifelong sports fans, but Wars kept getting in their way.
I used to laugh when good old Dutch said ominous things like that—but it is becoming clearer and clearer that he was right, dead right, if only because he was drawing up the blueprints himself, right in front of our eyes, and we loved him for it.
I had a soft spot in my heart for Ronald Reagan, if only because he was a sportswriter in his youth, and also because his wife gave the best head in Hollywood.
The war news from almost everywhere clamped a mean lid on coverage of the NCAA tournament this year, but that didn’t prevent us hoops junkies from getting an adult dose of high-speed, high-style heart-jerking college basketball last weekend. Two of the three Final Four games in New Orleans were serious ball-busters, even for those of us who had long since abandoned all hope of victory in the big-money bracket-bashing “office pools” that littered the newsrooms of the nation.
TV ratings fell 30 percent overall, and none of the favorites survived the Final Four, which left me with no hometown favorite to focus on, once top-ranked Kentucky was scraped off the floor after Marquette diced them up in the Midwest region finals.
Nothing had really surprised me until then (with the glaring exception of those whimpering sots from Wake Forest, who failed so horribly against Auburn that I swore to myself, even before that vulgar game had ended, that I was going to drive at once to the sleepy fat village of Winston-Salem, NC, and release a swarm of 900,000 full-grown Vulture fleas somewhere in the middle of the campus, or maybe in the basement of the team’s practice facility.
You can get anywhere from 250,000 to a million commercially grown breeding fleas—or ladybugs or chiggers or moles or even Black Widow spiders—for what might seem like a generous price, but your purchase will definitely Not be the end of it.
The last time I experimented with this kind of political action, the controlled release process got away from me and bad things happened.… It was long after midnight when we crept the iron cherry picker across the backyard and as close as possible to the tall brick chimney pipe that towered over the pompous, colonial mansion on the outskirts of Aspen.
Our job, our mission, was to sneak up on the large family home of a crooked politician, not far away, and dump a halfmillion fully grown Muscatel Fleas down the huge Greek chimney into his plush living room.
Ah, but that is another story. I was talking about Sports and the NCAA drowned in the war news.… Marquette Self-destructed.… Now back to the Championship.…
Syracuse beat Kansas last night for the U.S. college championship of the world. It was a wildly exciting game that came down to a failed final shot, but it hardly seemed to matter, compared to the horrible news from Iraq, and basketball faded away. There was bigger entertainment on the screen, primarily in the form of bombs dropping on people—mainly foreigners, of course—and newsreaders from CNN said we were winning. Is this a great country or what?
—April 9, 2003