Who's In?

Last year a pal I play hoops with cajoled me into joining his fantasy NFL league. It was fun to study the rosters. I’ve always been fascinated by people’s names. Somehow football players’ names are particularly fascinating, maybe because they’re so prominently displayed on the gigantic billboards that are their backs.

So naturally, knowing very little about the current crop of individual players, I chose a team based entirely on the players’ names. I could have made a whole league of such teams. An entire team of Toms playing an entire team of Cedrics and Derricks? An entire team of people with last names that are professions (Miller, Baker, Cook, Porter, etc.) versus an entire team of people with names longer than 10 letters? Or a team of all players with sexually ambiguous names (Marion, Lesley, Randy, etc.) I wonder who would win? Well, despite all the fun I could have had, I created one team with players who had tough names. Rough tough names. Like Mack Strong. Or Alge Crumpler.

I actually did all right for awhile. And way under the salary cap, I might add. Until I, uh, took my eye off the ball and several of my players were out for weeks with injuries unbeknownst to me. I played a few weeks with no quarterback, I think.

But I can see how the fantasy league concept is a fun one. Especially for the attentive.

And there's a league for everyone. You can play fantasy Congress too. Fantasy Congress: Where people play politics. I haven't played, mainly because returning from reality after fiddling around in a land of fantasy politics would be just too devastating. But if you want to play, you have until Thanksgiving to draft for the fall season!

Instructions are simple:

• Draft your team of Members of Congress (MCs).
• Earn points as your MCs legislate effectively.
• Manage by trading, benching, or picking up free MCs.
• Win by getting the most points by the end of the season and go down in political history.

Good concept! The site encourages teachers to use it, which seems like a good way to get kids involved in thinking about what's going on in the halls of the legislature beyond the posturing and speechifying we see most of. (What am I saying, "kids," really for anyone to get past the weapons of mass distraction constantly used against us.) Good luck!

Marion Jones in more innocent times, 1994. (Getty)

Marion Jones said she was sorry. And that she had behaved stupidly and was ashamed. I almost like her even more now.

It is more than so many others in her shoes have done.

I really didn’t want to believe that she had artificial help in achieving her amazing athletic goals. I loved her apparent joy in the process and like everyone, her apparently genuinely nice persona. She was beautiful to watch compete and you knew, drugs or not, she trained wicked hard. Plus she had braces as an adult at the same time I did.

The waste of her career, and her genuine efforts, that came from that little extra edge she got from outside rather than inside herself, is tragic in the classical sense: Hero brought low by one fatal flaw.

Marion Jones in the spring prior to the contentious Olympics. (Sports Illustrated)

She takes full accountability herself, which I admire. But you can’t overlook the pressures on her. Not only from her coach or whomever, but from all of us as well, wanting her to win, wanting a superchampion, and the corporate world rewarding that mightily with cash.

There’s a tunnel-visioned aspect of elite competition which gives it a certain beauty but also a potentially inaccurate accounting of reality. I remember it from years striving toward world championships on the U.S. rowing team. I believe American rowing, at least back in the day, was clean. The most unspoken-of drug I ever witnessed any U.S. rowers take was Ex-Lax. But we had the single-mindedness of purpose, the deep desire, and a sense of the self’s virtue that comes with incredibly hard work toward a respected goal. If “supplements” had been dangled in front of any of us (and if (a big hypothetical if) there had been any significant money to be made by winning rowing competitions), would we have remained so pure, albeit irregular? You can always make an exception for yourself, it seems. I suspect these little things (and I would posit that given all the issues across the globe, these are little things) don’t seem a crime when up close and personal.

An unrelated radio story today on All Things Considered discussed a very similar tale in the world of business. It was much shadier to begin with, a guy making millions off of inflated stock trading. But the key thing was that the guy, Jordan Belfort, who spent 22 months in prison on fraudulent trading charges, said that in the thick of his greed being positively reinforced, he stopped seeing certain actions as wrong or criminal. Actions which now, and well before his trading days, he would have thought were completely unacceptable. He too, like Jones, is contrite.

We inheritors of the Puritan tradition love contrition, I think. It makes a good story (which Scorcese has optioned the rights to, incidentally, in Belfort‘s case). And good stories often contain redemption.

The redemption in Jones’s case will come from her acquiescence to be brought so low. Ron Rappaport wrote in the L.A. Times (good article; he wrote a book about her) that she has thrown out her chance to go on to be a respected spokesperson or even announcer for her sport or advocate for women’s sports generally. I disagree. Puritan proclivities aside, I think we (as in We, the People) are pretty good at forgiving in some cases. (Or am I just being cynical about the seriousness with which the country views doping, all lamentations about disappointing role models to the contrary? (Though ESPN’s Jemele Hill might say gullible rather than cynical.)) Especially in cases where a personally appealing individual is truly remorseful, we want to forgive. (I’m not sure people would re-embrace a fallen Barry Bonds as enthusiastically, for example.) I hope Marion does not disappear after her expected six month prison sentence, though about now I bet she would like to. I think she could still have a lot to offer. I am still rooting for her.

We did get two inches of snow, being generous in the measuring. I strapped on my skis and skated across the slightly windblown, powderless inch that remained a day later on the local playing fields. And determined that my hunch based on towing a kid while on skates was correct. I’m in good shape, but completely unfit for a 50 km race, or even a 25 km race. Or even a 25 km dawdle. Just a lap around two soccer fields, and a couple of trips up a nearby hill had be convinced. The anterior tibialis have just had not enough practice holding my feet off the ground. To say nothing of the rest of the specific muscles required. So plans are revised.

No Loppet in my year. There will be a Play Forever League consolation basketball game on the day of the ski race. Sigh. Would rather be missing a championship game to go off skiing… My team lost our semi-final last week by one basket. Two too many mistakes on our part, but that’s neither here nor there.

My goal now is to get up to ski the course in Lake Placid at some point this winter, so I know what I’m working toward for next year. And to sneak in as much snow time as I can in the next six weeks. Or fewer, as foretold by the Oracle at Punxatawny.

On that topic, The New York Times says: Groundhog Day has been part of the Western calendar since around the fifth century, which means it has survived centuries of Catholicism, the Reformation, the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, and the advent of the agriculture of cloned sheep. But whether it will survive in an age of global warming was one questionǿalbeit not the biggest one—raised by the awkward coincidence yesterday of Groundhog Day 2007 falling on the same day a report was released by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change of the United Nations.

On the plus side, I will stop for a while with writing about this boring and solipsistic topic. Be back later with issues.

I did go out and practice my tennis serve, as threatened in my last post. My “shooting percentage” is embarrassing so I won’t go into it.

Besides, it seems inappropriate to the point of affrontery to natter on about sports when so many people are so miserable and at risk through no fault of their own. People in my own country, which sort of surprisingly still means something, even though they are far from where I am. The whole Katrina disaster is as horrifying as it naturally would be and as shocking and disappointing as the government has made it.

I heard comments on Thursday night (BBC) from Andre Agassi, saying that he had no illusions about the importance of hitting tennis balls (“All I’ve got to do is look at my kids,” he said). But of course he has commitments, so he was still playing in the U.S. Open, despite its seeming irrelevance in light of things. Still, admirably, he and others in U.S. tennis pledged to donate to Red Cross relief efforts. I had thought the BBC said a million, but yesterday The New York Times in an article titled When Reality Intrudes noted the United States Tennis Association is donating $500,000 (as is Lance Armstrong).

As commentator Charlie Pierce said on Only a Game this week, when asked if he were encouraged by announcements from the NBA Players Association and other such groups that they would assist in the relief effort: “At this point I’m encouraged by any leadership anywhere by people on a national basis, since we don’t apparently have it where it is supposed to be…. This is a very good thing going in a whole lot of different directions, though I wish it was coming from the people paid to provide direction and not people paid to provide bounce passes. But we’ll take what we can get.”

For yourself, I exhort you to keep fit for potential survival purposes as well as your ongoing health.

For others, donations can be made to:

• The American Red Cross
  1-800-HELP NOW (435-7669) English; 1-800-257-7575 Spanish.
• Americ’a Second Harvest
• Convoy of Hope
• Corporation for National and Community Service
• And for more avenues to help, see The National Voluntary Organizations Active in Disaster site

Also, if The Red Cross’s site is maxed out, you can contribute to the organization via Amazon, which is also linked via’ Google’s front page.