In which water freezes over in the South

Did you guys know that Nashville has a hockey team? They are called the "Predators," which apparently is this:

Which looks like a cross between a saber-toothed tiger and a wolf, if you blunted its teeth so it wouldn't bust free and kill everyone in the crowd.

Anyway, I went to my first Predators game last night (vs. the Wild, of course), and Nashville fans are... what is the nice word?... obnoxious. Now, I've been to Chicago Cubs games, and so I know that the logical opposite extreme to obnoxiousness is flirting and not paying attention to the game, and I absolutely prefer the obnoxious end of that spectrum. And also, attending hockey in the South I kind of expected that the stadium would be empty and the few people attending would laze about and not really understand what was going on. So, the first time there was a seemingly spontaneous cheer of "You suck!" (after the Predators' first goal), I kind of smiled. Then, when they chanted "Theeeeeodore*... Theeeeodore.... Theeeeeeodore! You suck! It's all your fault!" I was a little put off. And when they did the identical chants after every one of the Predators' five goals, I got a little ticked.

Here's my thing about booing. I get that these folks are paid millions of dollars, and they probably should be able to just deal with you chanting their name and yelling mean things at you. Certainly they can handle it better than I would, but I feel like that's not a license to be an asshole. Also, I hear people argue that it's "all part of the game," which I think is just not true.

We cheer and yell and scream when great things happen because we have been entertained, and because it's a visceral response of joy that we share, and that is what is beautiful about sports. And a loud, disappointed noise invariably goes up when the away team scores a goal, or someone misses a catch, or the ball is just short of fair, and that's beautiful too, because it is thousands of people all experiencing disappointment together and letting out a collective sigh for all the beauty they just missed and all the hope that they just lost. But when you take up chants, positive or negative, you're now consciously expressing your emotions and communicating them to your team and to the other fans and to everyone in the stadium. And maybe this is just irretrievably Midwestern of me, but I think you should keep your negative emotions to yourself. I'm sorry that you're upset about your team losing, but you don't have to be a dick about it. Even worse, don't be a sore winner.

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* The Wild's backup goalie: Jose Theodore. He did not have a good game.

Debate of the Day

So, while watching ESPN coverage of the Ohio State game and players' apologies for selling their football-related junk or at least exchanging it for tattoos, I was thinking once again about the issue of compensation and college sports. My big issue with the rules about compensation comes from the fact that someone does profit from it: the school sells tickets (which pay for the stadiums and the uniforms and the buses and all that, but in great Division I schools, some of that money is "left over") and jerseys with players' names and other memorabilia. I understand that allowing students to sell their own jerseys, or worse, play the game professionally, is fraught with all kinds of problems. I went to a Division III school with a laughable football team and was actually encouraged to attend by that fact. The last thing I want is for good academic programs to be undermined by kids playing a game. Nor do I want 18 year old kids to abandon their education to focus entirely on a career that has an outside chance (at best) of paying off.

But the fact is, that is already happening. It's a "problem" of our culture that we value sports to this ridiculous degree. We will pay $40 for a ticket to a baseball game and $50 for a jersey and $10 for a popcorn and whatever else. And in the majors, that money translates into massive salaries for players, and no that is not unfair: they are entertaining us and they deserve that portion of our ticket (though it would be pretty great if they'd pay concession workers a living wage and provide health insurance, etc, with all that money swimming around...). As long as we value college sports just as highly, I think that the players should get some portion of that value.

As an English major, I thought of it like this: if I wrote for my college newspaper, and they sold that newspaper at $10 a pop (because this is like the most popular college newspaper ever and apparently has naked lady pictures in it), but I did not get paid, would that be fair? What if then they decided to take the stories I wrote and bind them into a book and sell that at bookstores around the country and I still didn't see a dime? What if there were television shows about my writing and advertisers paid millions to put my name on their products, but I still sat in my dorm room, eating frozen pizzas?

Of course, from this arrangement I get a nice little resume boost, and the fame certainly will help me with publishers, but let's say I'm not allowed to even talk to those publishers until I leave the school newspaper, and those publishers are certainly not allowed to offer me any kind of advance, and in fact I'm not even allowed to write stories on my own time and publish them on the side, because then I'll be ineligible to write for the newspaper and lose my scholarship. And then what if my writing is actually pretty dangerous, because I write about skydiving and fighting in Iraq and my work on the offshore oil rigs, and all those stories get published and make a lot of money for other people and then right before I'm going to graduate and finally cash in on my fame and my resume points, a giant shark attacks me on a story and eats out half my brain and I can never write again. Now, I live out the rest of my life in a nursing home with someone wiping my ass and I can't even get the hot nurse because I have no money, and all the people that profited from my talent just move on to the next big thing.

Bert Alert!

Bert Blyleven made it into the Baseball Hall of Fame today, on his second to last shot, with 79.7% of the vote (the minimum is 75%), which was a totally awesome birthday present to me, and also made it so I can stop being apoplectic about this podcast Houseboy shared with me last week in which Kevin Goldstein argues that an important consideration for getting into the Hall of Fame should be... "fame." Ok, yeah, it is right in there in the title and all, but I would dare to argue that famous for what should be kind of important, and if he concedes that Bert's stats make him more than worthy (which he does), then the question of how famous he is is inherently subjective. I'm sure there is a significant amount of subjectivity in the voting of a bunch of people who make their money writing about a game and probably ingest more nacho vitamins than can be healthy, but I can tell you as a raised but not born Minnesotan who watches the Twins broadcasts on the Extra Innings package every year, that if he wasn't famous enough then he's certainly famous enough now, and plus there is this:

[Source]

Anyway, all of that doesn't matter now because he's in and so I'm happy... for now...