Make Sports Seasonal Again

Sports Outrage Roundup

 

 

We live in the Age of Outrage. I maintain some degree of equilibrium by ignoring as much of the noise as I can. I used to devour the news in various newspapers, magazines, TV broadcasts, and radio. One by one they melted away. We dumped cable because we were too busy to watch it. Magazines began to fold, but not in a good way, and newspapers melted away like creamsicles in 90-degree heat. Hearing loss led me to turn off NPR.

I’m not a total ignoramus. I read the Boston Globe thoroughly on Sundays and skim the Globe and New York Times on weekdays. I ignore Trump as nothing short of resignation or arrest would impress rather than depress me. Even sports have disappointed me. They have become a veritable Snide World of Sports. (Only those over a certain age will understand that pun!)

Texas Tech and quarterback Brendan Sorsby win the Dirtbag of the Year Award; Sorsby for trying to get an easy paycheck and Tech for not telling Sorsby to take a barefoot hike through rattlesnake country. Sorsby has already played at the University of Indiana and the University of Cincinnati. He sought to transfer again and engineered a $4-6 million Name, Image, Likeness (NIL) package from Texas Tech. This, though, he was facing charges of betting $90,000 on college football games, including some involving his own team.

Betting violates NCAA rules, though to be fair, the NCAA is as crooked as Sorsby. Cincinnati has countersued Sorsby for $1 million when he entered the portal to go to Tech. Surprisingly, Tech faces boycotts from schools scheduled to play them. It probably won’t surprise you to learn that several NFL teams have expressed interest in Sorsby if he is not be allowed to play for Texas Tech, though NFL bigwigs nixed a supplemental draft for his rights. A remaining complication is that a judge declared that he remains eligible to play for Tech. (If this doesn’t tell you that “college football” is an oxymoron and that some judges have dollar signs dancing in their heads, I can’t help you.)

What should happen is that Tech practices a few times and cuts Sorsby. If he’s not on the squad, NIL value disintegrates. Tech would probably need to negotiate a buyout (get-out-my-sight money and fire the AD responsible for this hot mess. In all likelihood, what will happen is the NCAA will tell other schools they must play Texas Tech. After all, in Texas, gridiron ball is BIG MONEY and actual education begs for pennies. 

 

 

The World Cup brings me joy, even though host cities are milking visitors as if they were cows about to explode. No matter what NFL image-makers claim, the World Cup is real football and gridiron a mere curiosity item. Not that FIFA, its governing body, is much of an improvement over the NCAA or NFL, but sometimes one must settle for small gains.

I may not be around to see it, but the gridiron obit is already being written. As the USA becomes more brown and yellow, soccer is the sport of the future. I’d love to see the NFL relegated to ESPN’s Night Owl programing after darts and duckpins for dollars. Use your own eyes and see how many kids are playing soccer and how few are willing to risk CET. In the immediate future, I foresee numerous colleges dumping gridiron programs because only handful of schools make money or can realistically compete against super conferences. High school gridiron makes even less economic sense when so many districts are under pressure to add teachers and programs. Imagine that. Spending money on education!  

 

 

I’m Sooo Bored. The Stanley Cup was lifted on June 14 and the NBA crowned the New York Knicks champions one night earlier. Major League Baseball is on the cusp of completing the first half of its season and probably won’t have a World Series winner until mid-November. Games have been added to the NFL season, the NBA, and the NHL. I find it impossible to maintain interest in all the noise happening at the same time. Why does it? Money, not athleticism is what’s on view. Oh please, please show that Liberty Mutual ad again.

What should happen but won’t: Sports should become seasonal again. MLB should go back to 154 games by eliminating Interleague play. The season should open April 15 and end the first week of September.

As for gridiron football, the NFL should return to a 12-game schedule with the regular season beginning September 15, and the Superbowl one week after the conference championships. As for college ball, absolutely no team with (or potentially with) a losing record can play a bowl game. I’m sure we can live without 6-6 Futile State in the Catheter Bowl against 5-7 Lameseville A & Ouch. The NBA and NHL must crown a champion before May 10.

Rob Weir

The Correspondent: Slow at First, then a Whallop

 

 

  

THE CORRESPONDENT (2025)

By Virginia Evans

Thorndike Press, 304 pages.

★★★

 

The Correspondent is an epistolary novel and the debut offering from Virginia Evans. Think of a bundle of letters that someone has squirreled away. Were you to read them, you’d probably find that they were not in chronological order. Everyone it seems has a “system” for filing personal papers: size, importance, subject, or randomly. My wife Emily faithfully wrote to her great aunt Frances in Maine for 40 years before Frances passed away. This is to say that Evans reveals letters in her novel covering the years between 1953-2021, but not sequentially.

 

The central character is Sybil Stone Van Antwerp, a retired law clerk living in Annapolis, Maryland. Though she does use email, think of her as among the fading breed that carefully composes letters. She writes to many people, including authors such as Kazuo Ishiguro, Ann Patchett, Larry McMurtry, and Joan Didion. Her favorite pen pal is Rosalie Boyd, who has been her BFF for 60+ years. They know everything about each other, though Rosalie now lives in Connecticut. It helps that Rosalie was once married to Sybil’s son Bruce. In addition to news, joys, and sorrows Sybil and Rosalie discuss what books they are reading.

 

This is not a Hallmark happy book. We learn that Sybil is divorced from Daan, who left the marriage and moved back to Belgium. Sybil is complex, can a bit of a snob, and lives vicariously through books and letters. She is estranged from her daughter Fiona, does battle with a University of Maryland dean who won’t allow her to audit a course, and wishes that her gay brother Felix who travels a lot lived nearer to her.

 

Yet, Sybil also has a soft side that grows more prominent as she ages. She is very proud of her law career and when Judge Landy tells her of his son’s social problems, Sybil takes on young Harry as a correspondent. She recognizes his math genius and they continue to write and visit until Harry is a young man. She also writes to Liz Donnelly, the wife of the late Judge Guy Donnelly for whom she clerked. That’s a gutsy thing to do as rumors flew that she was once more than a “work wife” to the judge. Was she? Sybil doesn’t dignify such whispers with a response. She is happy to intervene to help a Syrian man get an engineering job, but she flat out refuses to speak to the press about a 1981 murder case whose verdict was controversial.

 

Apparently, Sybil remains an attractive woman into her seventies as she is being courted by her kind German neighbor Theodore Lübeck and Mick Watts, a very rich Texan.  Nonetheless, it doesn’t take much to knock Sybil off her stride. She’s upset when Felix gives her a subscription to Legacy, one of those DNA testers that tell you stuff like you’re related to King Waldorfsalad III. Against her better judgment she takes the test and freaks out when she finds out she has a 49% match with a woman in Scotland. That probably wouldn’t throw you for a loop, but Sybil was adopted when she was a 14-month-old baby. Felix was also adopted, so it’s doubtful he’s a blood relative. And who is the mysterious D.M. who periodically sends her hate mail? Why does she throw a fit when she finds out that Fiona came to the States and spilled her heart to Rosalie but didn’t tell Sybil, her mother, that she was in the United States? Would you get so angry that you’d cut off contact with your best friend? To top it off, Sylvia is going blind. How will she survive without being able to read or write?

 

This is a novel in which what is not said or faced reveals more than what is. Who is the mysterious “D.M.” who periodically sends Sylvia hate mail? As she ages, can Sylvia find a balance between being in charge and being kind?

 

The Correspondent became a surprise hit months after it was released, a rare case in which reviewers followed the lead of readers rather than vice versa. In my view, though, it’s half of a brilliant book. I was initially bored by the constant parade of letters, but by the end, I was quite moved by it.

 

Rob Weir

 

 

Laura Revisited: Preminger's Best?

 

 

 

LAURA (1944)

Directed by Otto Preminger

20^th Century Fox, 88 minutes, pre-ratings system

(In black and white)

★★★★

 

This review originally ran in 2021. I offer it again as I am in the midst of films directed by Otto Preminger (1905-86). This version is lightly edited.

 

There are many reasons to prefer Laura for film noir fans wishing to discover/rediscover actress Gene Tierney. They begin with Otto Preminger. He was a legendary director, whereas various remakes by other directors, including a 1968 made-for-TV film were at best middle-of-the-road. I’ve never seen Fiona on Fire, a porn film based on Laura, but let us assume that Gene Tierney was a superior actress. Preminger had the sense to tantalize rather than fetishize. His noir classic in black and white exemplifies how films about shadowy characters should be done. Preminger dusted his frames with psychological theory rather than encasing them.

 

Laura is a study in obsession. It begins when New York City Police Detective Mark McPherson (Dana Andrews) is assigned to a grisly murder scene. Wealthy advertising executive Laura Hunt (Tierney) is the presumed victim of a shotgun blast to the face. Although she was beautiful and accomplished, she also had a reputation for being difficult and ruthless, which means any of a number of people had motives to dispatch her. At first, McPherson centers his investigation on her snooty, no-account fiancé Shelby Carpenter (Vincent Price). Carpenter is a classic “kept man” with no discernible skills of his own, hence his motive for murder doesn’t add up. Maybe Hunt’s aunt, Ann Treadway (Judith Anderson), knows more than she lets on. She has also been bankrolling Carpenter and may have been having a side affair with him. There’s also a matter of a missing murder weapon and the ace in the hole: Waldo Lydecker (Clifton Webb). He’s a newspaper writer who “made” Laura by lifting her out of her uncultivated bumpkin ways, mentoring her, and showering her with expensive gifts, including her pricey apartment and most of its flashy appointments. Lydecker insists their relationship was non-sexual, but he speaks of Laura as if she is one of his possessions. 

 

McPherson finds himself making repeated trips to Laura’s apartment, and we soon suspect that his motive is to solve the crime because he has become creepily attracted to the large portrait of Laura hanging above the fireplace mantle. One night, McPherson falls asleep beneath her picture. When he awakes, Laura is standing before him!  It’s not a dream. McPherson concludes that the actual victim was one of Hunt’s models, Diane Redfern. McPherson arrests Laura for Redfern’s murder, a complication as he has fallen in love with Laura. Can he do his duty or will he help her, even if it means letting a murderer walk away? We know what Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade would do, but is McPherson cut from the same trench coat cloth? And is Laura actually guilty of anything?

 

Laura is a corkscrew mystery involving a cast of oil-covered, morality-challenged characters. Who, if anyone, is telling the truth? And where is the rifle that killed Diane Redfern?  I called it a study of obsession and that should be interpreted literally and broadly. It seems that everyone–especially Lydecker and McPherson–is obsessed with Laura. She, in turn, seems demure, but perhaps she’s infatuated with herself. Or maybe not!

 

The acting–though affected in 1940s’ ways–is superb, even Vincent Price and Tierney’s who at this stage of his career was a character actor more than a star. He’s quite good as Tierney’s castoff lover. The much-underappreciated Dana Andrews strikes the needed balance between believability and cheesy fascination, and Tierney scores as a raven-haired femme fatale. (Don’t believe those garish 1940s posters in which she’s colorized to look like a redhead!) Clifton Webb, though, comes close to stealing the glory. His is a performance that walks several lines, not the least of which is the thin one between utterly contemptible and wholly fascinating. For what it’s worth, elements of Preminger’s own personality can be read into Webb-as-Lydecker. One could easily become obsessed by this film. Several Preminger films are considered superior, but few surpass Laura.

 

Rob Weir