• Count us among those really excited about the NHL’s return to Winnipeg. The National Post’s Bruce Arthur has been terrific with what it means to the city and the NHL (Arthur is quickly becoming one of our favorite sports columnists, and almost certainly our favorite Canadian sports columnist), and The Awl‘s Jim Behrle steps up with 11 possible team names, complete with logos.

• For more on Shaq’s retirement, just check out Quickish’s thorough compilation of stories, including a fun one involving a different Connar Oberst.

• SplitSider hands out awards for the TV season. And BuzzFeed ranks the minor Arrested Development characters.

• Eugene Mirman wrote a letter to Time Warner Cable.

• An oldie but a relevant-ie: the top 100 shots in NBA history, complete with video. We don’t think the list has changed since it was made during the season.

• Michael Weinreb’s weekly top five on his personal blog has become a quick-stop must-read.

• Posner and Becker defend legacy admissions at colleges. Speaking of the academy, some journals are doubting the gold standard of a double-blind review process.

• NYT Magazine takes on another notable sports columnist, Bill Simmons.

• Michael Ian Black and Meghan McCain are writing a book together.

• Can we all get behind Attorney General Eric Holder on this one? 

• Michael Weinreb explores the American bacchanalia that is the Super Bowl…

• Michael Kruse starts examining the constitutionality of Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd’s sting operations, but doesn’t dive deeply enough into the crux of the issue for our tastes.

• Over in the movie world, Stephen Tobolowsky explained how Groundhog Day changed his life, while Tara Reid apparently announced plans for a nonexistent sequel to The Big Lebowski. The Writers Guild Awards happened (on two coasts!) and Kristen Schaal hosted the east coast version.

• Speaking of comedy, Dana Carvey was back hosting SNL. Also, old people don’t understand why David Brent is funny.

• Our favorite part of FOX’s NFL broadcasts–referee majordomo Mike Pereira–did an online chat with the Wall Street Journal, hinting at possible changes to the league’s challenge system.

• Chris Jones goes after Jason Whitlock! And Phil Simms goes after Desmond Howard!

• The Onion strikes again, this time on puppies. Man, we love the Puppy Bowl.

• Tyler Cowen enters the fray on the Chinese mother discussion. He also has a controversial new book out.

• We stumbled upon two websites that attempt to explain the endings of two notoriously impenetrable TV classics.

• Michael Lewis went to Ireland to figure out why the country’s going bankrupt.

• In honor of the greatest holiday ever, here’s Esquire‘s “What I’ve Learned” interview with Jesus H. Christ. And Ron Artest’s conjecture on the Savior’s basketball box scores.

• Your Christmas spirit may have distracted you from the big news from last week: Paramore broke up! Regardless of your opinion of the band, the blog statement of two ex-band members is an interesting look at how the record industry works today. One might call it a Misery Business…

• The Millions‘ fun annual series “A Year in Reading” has come to a close.

• The “Baseball Economist” answers questions on the Freakonomics Blog, including a question about why the Mets have been so lousy. And Jason Gay explains to parents what to tell the kids about this year’s Jets.

• Michael Weinreb’s 29 favorite things of 2010.

• In other best of 2010 news, there’s the Wall Street Journal‘s best photos and Give Me Something to Read‘s best, umm, reads. No matter what movies you’ve seen this year, these are the ten best. On a more serious note, here are Roger Ebert’s ten best feature films of 2010.

• If you are worried about the upcoming world war between Google and Apple, it’s worth reading this to decide which side you’ll take.

• The man behind Super Mario Brothers talks about what makes Nintendo special.

• Social media tips with help from The Wire.

• Ricky Gervais explains why he’s an atheist.

• Coolest foul shot ever.

• We didn’t watch last Sunday’s Muppet-infused Simpsons episode until the middle of the week, so by the time we thought up something angry to write about it, our pals at Dead Homer Society had already hit the nail on the head. And while we’re at it, Bill Oakley on how classic episodes of the show were written.

• Watching Ben Roethlisberger get beat up in yesterday’s win over the Bengals only reinforced the point Michael Weinreb makes here.

• Bill Hancock may be a little late the party, but he’s right: The BCS works (kind of)!

• We don’t always agree with Aaron Sorkin, but we can appreciate his takedown of Sarah Palin’s publicity-stunt moose killing. In other vaguely political news, New York magazine wonders how the last decade would have played out if Al Gore had won the 2000 election.

• In political philosophical news, we present you the political philosophy of Julian Assange.

• I guess you’ll just have to settle for Celine Dion in Vegas (and miss excellent Jay Leno impressions).

• Necco’s wafers may be atrocious, but they do make at least one good food product.

• Some NPI-favorites, specifically Hannibal Buress, are featured on this list of the 10 best comedy albums of the year.

• With a title like “Why does most modern sports broadcasting suck so bad?” you knew it was only a matter of time before Colin Cowherd is mentioned. More sports: The Nieman Foundation did an interview with feature writer Michael Paterniti, which prompted Gangrey to post Paterniti’s 1999 piece on Thurman Munson. And more good, long stuff from Sports Illustrated this week, with Alan Shipnuck’s investigation into the mysterious suicide of LPGA golfer Erica Blasberg.

• If there’s one thing everybody loves about Santa, it’s creepy jokes about child molestation!

• Sean Wilentz reviewed Bob Dylan’s pre-Thanksgiving shows at Terminal 5 in New York, but his love of all things Dylan may have skewed the objectivity. On the other side of the spectrum,  John Jurgensen wonders if Dylan should retire.

• In other classic rock news, if you like The Rolling Stones, “Gimme Shelter,” or just music, you should listen to this.

• John Paul Stevens was interviewed on 60 Minutes.  Even more interesting is the full transcript of his April interview with Jeffrey Rosen.

• A Chuck Klosterman profile of Jonathan Franzen? John S is literally giddy.

• Deborah Solomon’s live interview with Steve Martin had to be refunded because it was too boring. We at NPI have had our own run-ins with Ms. Solomon, but her interviews always have the potential to be delightfully uncomfortable.

• If you somehow missed it, LeBron James returned to Cleveland last week, leading many to pontificate on how his absence has affected the city and how his time in Miami is beginning.

• We don’t always read Sports Illustrated‘s longer features, but we usually find it worth our time. The latest case in point? Chris Ballard’s look at UC-Berkeley rower Jill Costello’s battle with cancer.

• To prep you for the now official BCS Championship Game, Michael Sokolove of The New York Times Magazine dives into Oregon’s point-a-minute offense while Michael Weinreb penned a guest piece for The War Eagle Reader on why it’s fine to root for Cam Newton and Auburn.

• An in-depth (if largely hypothetical) look at the NBA in the 1990s had Michael Jordan not existed, with Roger Pimentel suggesting that there may have been a few more youngsters wearing No. 22 than 23 these days.

• IFC continues its efforts to shamelessly pander to comedy nerds everywhere. Last year it began showing Arrested Development in syndication, and now, in addition to picking up The Onion News Network pilot, it has added three cult classics–The Larry Sanders Show, The Ben Stiller Show, and Mr. Show–to its lineup.

• Someone must be really excited about Broadway’s newest show (c/o here with a h/t here).

Meaning what? Meaning here’s your subtitle: Bo, Boz, the Punky QB, and How the 80′s Created the Modern Athlete. If you’re at all like me, you’re buying the book the second you see the picture of Bo Jackson (true: the first bio I ever read was Bo Knows Bo, and all I retain from it is the story of him spotting, through windows, some adult couple getting intimate)(I read it when I was 14). However, even if you’re not inspired to read by a picture of one of the best athletes of the last half-century, what you find soon is that the last bit of the subtitle, How the 80′s Changed the Modern Athlete, is where Weinreb’s gonna be spending the bulk of his time. For instance, here’s the start of “We’re Not Here to Start Trouble,” chapter 4:

Something was happening in Chicago that fall, something weird and dynamic and compelling, the origins of which could be traced back to the Thursday night in Minnesota when a woozy and petulant Jim McMahon nagged his way into a football game. It wasn’t just that the Bears were winning week after week after week (though, considering their fans had endured two decades of routine futility, that was strange enough). It was that the bears were winning with such naked audacity; it was that they actually appeared to be reveling in their own very public dysfunction. In the same city where a morning-show host named Oprah Winfrey was in the process of refashioning the tabloid talk show into a syndicated group-therapy session, the Bears were quickly becoming an affirmation of the new American ideal: a motley group of individualists who embraced capitalism and celebrity, who embodied nothing so much as immoderation and self-regard.

What’s cool about Weinreb’s fantastic Bigger Than the Game is the same thing that’s cool about the best sports writing (I’m looking at you, Mahler): he’s got a philosophic framework he’s fitting this stuff into, and so the sports under examination and discussion suddenly are larger by being contextualized. Like most of my peers, I, early on, bought into the notion that I absolutely needed to possess pairs of Air Jordans, and then, later, I realized the heat of that fervor was misplaced, was the result mainly of awe at Jordan and perfect work by Nike and the various ad agencies it worked with. What I didn’t consider, not once until Weinreb pointed it out, was that the mid-80′s allowed a terrifically strange cultural moment for folks like Jordan (and Bo, and Boz, and whoever Len Bias could’ve been) to take the stage.

And what was the cultural moment? Weinreb’s got suggestions, namely Reagan and Stallone movies. Before you balk at the notion, consider it for just a second more: Reagan was, yes, old enough to be a fossil, yet he was always canny, and he—Mr. Morning in America, the Gipper—led America with his image as much as anything else. And his image was, of course, old Hollywood, the rugged individual, that western ideal of self-sufficiency and -reliance. Rambo and Rocky were, of course, cut from much the same cloth. Nothing’s inherently wrong with this individualistic framework, but Weinreb points out how things got strange because of it: rugged, radical individualism came to be considered a legitimate form of citizenship. Think, for a second, of Rocky, fighting the Russian (Dolph Lundgren may as well be nameless, he’s just the Russian, but, of course, Stallone wrote the screenplay: dude’s name’s Ivan Drago) in Rocky IV, and the movie’s end, him wreathed in bruises and blood, wrapped in the flag, doing the whole thing for his country.

It’s hard to do this level of philosophic work justice, this stuff Weinreb does. His point is that, in the 80′s (mid-80′s, specifically: 85/85), there was a sudden twining of notions of wild inviduality(/-ism) and patriotism. Think otherwise? Think Joe Namath: he was a celebrity QB, and his style certainly gave rise to McMahon and the rest, later, but Namath wasn’t co-opted, instantly, by brands or a country’s hunger for authentic heroes. And don’t think that means nothing, the country’s hunger: ’85 was the middle of Iran/Contra stuff, was a decade after Watergate, Greed is Good and 9 years into what T. Wolfe called the Me Generation: Bo Jackson, Brian Bosworth, Michael Jordan, Jim McMahon—these men took the positions in culture they did because we needed them there, we need sports stars who, through self-interest, served everyone. It’s a scary but not serious stretch to think of this stuff in pretty Ayn Rand-ian terms.

There’s much, much more to this fascinating, absolutely devourable book: there’s lots about Len Bias who Weinreb slots in almost as a cipher, as an un-puzzlable clue. In fact, Weinreb almost uses Bias as the perfect example of the rise he’s tracking: Bias was quiet, dedicated, worked his ass off publicly, never drank or smoked or did anything around his teammates and coaches…yet had, according to several folks, another side, a coke-sniffing side. He never got the chance to—like McMahon, like Bo Jackson, like Jordan—be fully Himself (in order: cans of beers clutched on exit from limos; breaking bats over knees and playing whatever the hell sport he wanted; ushering in a whole new wave and level of branding in the NBA) publicly (of who he Himself most was was a drug-user). Bigger Than the Game is a riveting read, and one of the best books—not sports books, not nostalgia books, just books, period—of the fall. Get in on the Weinreb wagon early.

One Day

It’s funny—this book seemed poised to be brutally hyped, all set to be that annoying summer book that nobody’ll shut up about. Maybe it is, I don’t know (I live rural, far from book-chatter), but I’m actually sort of surprised and glad if the book didn’t get shaped hard into the summer’s Big Book (though give it time, I suppose–the thing’s already being turned into a movie, with Anne Hathaway and Jim Sturgess).

Let’s be real fair, from the start: One Day is almost 100% made to read like a Big Book. It feels like a book behind which a publicity department could gladly get. The construct is perfectly simple: the reader follows, over 20 years (1988-2007), a duo—Dexter Mayhew and Emma Morley—checking in with them every July 15th. It’s an innocuous date, intentionally: who hasn’t felt, making his way through easy, nothing-doing days, that those quiet days are as pivotal as any Grand Movement moments? David Nicholls has done a phenomenal job of allowing how inconspicuous moments, the simple, toss-off asides of day-to-day life, contain the DNA of all our larger shiftings, all potential unfoldings.

But Dex and Em (as they call themselves in the book): we meet them as they’re about to leave University (sorry, it’s British), track them over two decades through kids, relationships, careers, family deaths, developments, dreams rising and converging and submerging again. I mean this gently, easily: there’s nothing about this book that’s fundamentally surprising; meaning, the point of the book isn’t to read it as a way to be really taken by some event, to be sideswiped by what you can’t see coming, as a reader. No, it’s pretty straight-forward, not real surprising, One Day.

And yet, and yet: I read the book over maybe two days, and though I complained about the book, I finished it quick, somewhat glad I’d involved myself with it to begin with. Why the complaining? Partly because of the book’s lack of surprise, but mostly because the book’s almost sadistically easy to slip into: One Day is compelling, massive evidence for the pure pleasures of narrative, for how compellingly simple it is to ass-plant on a couch and spend a day lost in fictive worlds with fictive folks.

Summer, alas, seems over (it drops below 60˚ at night where I live now, which certainly must be a signal), but the book’s well worth your time, whatever season.

Rickwood Field by Allen Barra

As anyone who reads this with regularity will know, I’m all for the baseball books. Gimme Zirin, gimme Jonathan Mahler, gimme Halberstam by the yard: I’ll read whatever baseball book is available (coming soon: a review of Michael Weinreb’s Bigger than the Game, which features a couple baseball moments and, honestly, is one of the top-3 sports books of the year, the thing’s just a powerhouse and Weinreb’s now someone to watch very, very closely–the man can do anything).

And so I read Rickwood Field, the story of America’s oldest ballpark, with a good mix of cheer and interest, even if the park’s in Birmingham, Alabama, and was home not to any team I’ve loved (Twins/Senators, Cards, Cubs) but to the Birmingham Barons, both black and white. My grandpa didn’t live to be 100 but had tremendous stories, and, of course, Rickwood Field’s stories from all 100 of its years are spectacular. The headline-nabbers—Babe Ruth hit (maybe) baseball’s longest home run ever there; Hank Aaron played there when he was in the Negro Leagues, Jackie Robinson and a rookie Willie Mays played each other in the Negro Leagues World Series there—are fantastic, but what Barra offers, through the story of a single baseball stadium in Birmingham, is a cross-cut view of the south in the 20th century, living uneasily through the heaves and spasms and desegregation.

It’s a fantastic book, though one that ends up raising questions, simply by virtue of the fact that Rickwood, though it still stands, is now a hall of nostalgia: the Birmingham Barons play in nearbye Hoover, Alabama. So questions arise: what sort of baseball stadium is it if no baseball’s played? And want to know at least part of the reason the stadium didn’t get toppled in the 80′s? Would you believe it had anything to do with Hollywood, and the fact that several movies were filmed there? It’s true. It’s not at all a bad thing, it’s simply true.

I live in Iowa, and, over in the east part of the state, one can stop and visit the farm at which they filmed the movie Field of Dreams. It’s a strangely hard stop to make, at least for me—in the movie, if you’ll remember, the story goes and continues because of people keeping faith, because of people being willing to show up and pay for the pleasure of witnessing a good game. It’s fantastic that Rickwood Field is 100 years old (as of a month ago, literally), and it should stay standing; however, in this time of a new field ever year or so for professional teams, Rickwood casts a spooky charge, posing questions about nostalgia and utility and how we’ll square all that. Read it; consider it.

“The greatest struggle an athlete undergoes is the battle for our memories. It’s gradual. It begins before you’re aware that it’s begun, and it ends with a terrible fall from grace. It really is a battle to the death.”

–William Goldman

It hasn’t been a very good year for Tiger Woods.

Perhaps you’ve heard, but within the last 12 calendar months, Woods lost a major he led after 54 holes for the first time in 15 tries, crashed his SUV into a fire hydrant outside his Orlando home, had a deep history of infidelity and sexual philandering thrust into the public eye, issued multiple forced and awkward apologies, and attended sex rehab. And in the time since sex rehab, Woods has not won a single golf tournament.

This has led NPI-favorite Joe Posnanski to openly wonder why everyone still believes in Tiger Woods, why he was still the favorite to win the PGA Championship even though he’s coming off the worst performance of his career, why when he put a poll on his website, only 3% of respondents said Woods would “definitely not” break Jack Nicklaus’ career record of 18 grand slams (Woods has 14) when these days he looks “like everybody else.”

It has also led me, for pretty much the first time ever, to disagree with Joe Posnanski.

Posnanski is so admant about this point that it has begun to leak into his writing on non-Tiger topics. This post, about the Seattle Mariners and the power of narrative (psh…we’ve covered that before), makes an interesting point. To quote liberally:

“Narratives have all kinds of power. The story starts to go one way, and it picks up a little momentum, a couple of additions, a bit more speed and before you know it, the narrative becomes reality. The narrative: Tiger Woods will come back after his tabloid dance and be a great golfer again (maybe even better than before). Lots of people believed it. Then, he finished fourth at the Masters which pushed the narrative to the next level. More people believed. Then, after some bad performances, he finished fourth again at the U.S. Open to push the narrative to an even higher plateau.

“And, when I wrote that, hey, Tiger is almost 35, and golfers do not actually age all that well (despite the powerful narrative that they compete well into their 40s), and he’s having trouble with his putting for the first time, and his swing is kind of shaky, and golfers can’t dominate forever, and once things in golf start going south they usually keeps going south … well, I got a whole lot of people who called me the biggest idiot in the history of Western Civilization (and, to be fair, a lot of people who agreed … I was hardly alone on the island). Now, Tiger Woods is coming off his worst week of golf EVER — a performance so staggeringly wretched that people who watched him wonder if he even cares anymore — and he’s STILL the betting favorite to the win the PGA Championship. The power of narrative.”

But there’s another, more pervasive and inaccurate narrative at play, I think, than the “Tiger hasn’t been the same since November” one earning most of the discussion now. It is the “Tiger was as dominant as ever before November” narrative.

It’s something Posnanski himself wrote about two summers ago, when Woods came through with what might go down as his greatest victory ever (I disagree, but I don’t control legacies…yet):

“All I know about Tiger Woods can be summed up in about seven words: ‘I knew he would make that putt.’

…

“’I knew he’d make it,’ Mediate shouted when Tiger made it. We all knew. Anyone could make that putt with the right read, a good stroke and a touch of providence. I’d even say that most excellent pros could make that putt in that moment, under that pressure, with a throbbing knee and a U.S. Open at stake. But only Tiger would make it. Maybe that’s the difference with Tiger, the difference between could and would.”

There is this general idea in golf that Tiger Woods had been unbeatable for a very long time. It is false. Woods’ career arc had swerved many times well before his SUV failed to, from childhood wunderkind to “a win for the ages” to two years of disappointment to the single greatest stretch of golf anyone will ever see to the last nine years. Most people forget the last nine years.

Has Tiger Woods been the best golfer in the world over the last nine years? Of course. But has he been as dominant as he was from August of 1999 to May of 2001? No one can be. As I said last year, the Tiger Woods of 2000 would obliterate the Tiger Woods of any year since then. So when Posnanski wrote about Woods’ birdie on the 72^nd hole at Torrey Pines in 2008 as if it were a fait accompli, it ignores the seven years separating the Tiger who was automatic and the one who pumped his fists so vehemently that day because he had actually missed putts like that one. During those seven years, Woods had started finishing second a whole lot, losing in final-round battles to the likes of Rich Beem and Michael Campbell. He had missed similarly crucial putts in major championships to lose to Ben Curtis and Angel Cabrera.

Woods’ dominance has slowly eroded since 2001, punctuated by his losses to Beem and Y.E. Yang at Hazeltine in 2002 and 2009, respectively. The latter was, to me, the most remarkable sporting event of 2009–far more stunning than the Arizona Cardinals hosting the NFC Championship Game or the Detroit Red Wings losing a Game 7 at home. Woods had never lost a 54-hole lead in a major; he was 14 for 14. In his now decade-and-a-half professional career, Tiger Woods has done a lot of amazing things. But the principal exhibit in the Tiger Mystique was how well he finished. When Tiger Woods got a lead, Tiger Woods won. And he didn’t “hold on” to the lead or anything like that. He usually won easily. Even when Tiger was “playing it safe,” his playing partner usually imploded–simply, as the narrative told us, because he was playing with Tiger.*

*It is hugely debatable how much an effect Woods had on those playing with him. Guys in the final group shoot big scores all the time, regardless of playing partner.** Whenever it happened with Woods, though, it was ALWAYS attributed to him.

**See, for instance, Dustin Johnson (82) at this year’s U.S. Open, or Retief Goosen (81) and Jason Gore (84) in 2005’s version.

The ’09 PGA changed that, when Yang–someone even more unknown than Beem–didn’t just match Woods shot-for-shot like Mediate did. He beat Tiger, and soundly. Yang was four shots better than Woods that Sunday, and I wrote in an aborted post at that time that “[c]onceptually, Woods losing a Sunday lead in a major is akin to a 16-seed beating a No. 1. Sure, it was probably going to happen eventually; you just never planned on it.”

All of this makes it seem as if I’m agreeing with Joe’s “Tiger Woods isn’t as good as he used to be” point. But Posnanski, as shown in his post from 2008, is positing a Tiger Woods who up until very recently never looked “like everybody else” and always made the big putt, when those things simply aren’t true. Tiger has looked very ordinary on several major championship Sundays for many years. While Woods is worse in 2010 than he’s ever been before, his dropoff becomes unnecessarily exaggerated because he’s compared to the mythic figure he hasn’t been in some time. And so this slump of his looks positively Duvalesque, even career-threatening, when placed next to the false image of Dominant Tiger everyone still has.

Does this mean Woods is done? Is this most recent and most precipitous instance of erosion the death knell in his quest for 19 major championships? Please. If Woods does not have a record-tying comeback today at Whistling Straits,* he will have not won a major in 2.5 years. Contrary to what you might think, this would only tie the longest major-less drought of his career (’97 Masters to ’99 PGA and ’02 U.S. Open to ’05 Masters), and even then, he missed the last two of 2008 because of knee surgery. Furthermore, Woods’ finishes in the seven majors since his last win are, in order, T6, T6, CUT, 2, T4, T4, T23. His five top-10 finishes in the last seven majors are more than anyone else.

*I, for one, didn’t expect Woods to win. At the same time, it didn’t seem unreasonable to me that he was the favorite. In all of Posnanski’s criticism of Woods’ status as the fave, he didn’t offer up a sensible alternative. Woods is still the world’s No. 1 golfer. The No. 2 golfer, Phil Mickelson, is in a pretty bad slump himself. No. 3 (Lee Westwood) is out with an injury. Nos. 4, 7, 8, 9, and 10 (Steve Stricker, Luke Donald, Rory McIlroy, Paul Casey, and Ian Poulter) own a combined 0 major titles while Nos. 5 and 6 (Jim Furyk and Ernie Els) haven’t won a major between them since 2003. It’s a lot easier to say Woods ISN’T going to win than to actually bet money on someone else to win.

Woods’ two previous 2.5-year slumps were immediately followed by stretches in which he won seven of 11 majors and six of 14. In 2005 and 2006, he became the first player in golf history to win multiple majors in consecutive years. So he’s “bounced back” rather nicely from this kind of slump in the past.

Now, you can mention that this is different, since Tiger is older. Here’s Posnanski:

“First, he will turn 35 at the end of the year. There has been talk that this means Woods will still be in his golfing prime for the next few years, but history tells a different story. Since 1970, the average age of major championship winners is 32, and things tumble off for golfers after age 35. Fewer than a quarter of the major championship winners have been 36 or older. The only players since 1970 to win multiple majors after turning 36 are: Jack Nicklaus (4), Gary Player (4), Ray Floyd (2), Nick Price (2), Vijay Singh (2), Mark O’Meara (2), Angel Cabrera (2), Padraig Harrington (2).”

You may notice, as I did, how tilted that list is to recent history. The last four players on the list have won their majors since 1998. You may also notice that those last three players, well, aren’t exactly historically transcendent.

These days, it is not uncommon for players in their 40s and even 50s to contend in major championships these days. Tom Watson was a firm putt from winning the British Open last year at 57. Fred Couples was in it on the back nine on Sunday at this year’s Masters. Kenny Perry should have become the oldest man to win a major at the ’09 Masters. The last player to seize the No. 1 ranking from Woods, Vijay Singh, did it at the age of 41.

Posnanski goes on to wonder “why we would just ASSUME that [Woods] is like Nicklaus or Player,” the two golfers whose success in major championships lasted the longest. Well, we assume it because he’s Tiger Woods. I know, I know, it’s tautological. But Joe says a comparison between Woods and Watson is better, since Watson is the last player who it could be said “dominated” the Tour. Watson’s stretch of dominance, however, included seven majors in eight years. Woods’ contained seven majors in under three. There are degrees of dominance, and Woods was several levels beyond Watson in dominating the Tour. No one has dominated the Tour like Woods. Posnanski is assuming Woods is more like Watson, which doesn’t strike me as any more credible.

Finally, it isn’t like Woods is only halfway to Nicklaus. He’s over 75 percent of the way there. He only needs four more to tie Nicklaus. If he doesn’t win this weekend and doesn’t win all of next year, he will only have to match what Nicklaus did after he was 36. And I hope we can agree that Tiger is in a little better shape than Nicklaus was at that age. So Woods has roughly 16 years to win four more majors. Now, for most people, four majors are a lot. Phil Mickelson has four in his entire career, and he’s the second-greatest golfer of his era. But for Tiger? Tiger once won four in a row. Tiger also once won four in the span of two years. Posnanski writes that “[t]he difference between good and great is a whisper.” But as Michael Weinreb rebuts, “[T]he fact that Tiger built that aura in the first place was the most miraculous sports story of the modern age. To presume that he can’t build it again is to ignore that a whisper can pass in both directions.”

The tides of history move quickly when it comes to sports. After losing to Rafael Nadal in the ’09 Australian Open, Roger Federer was thought to be done as tennis’ best player. People wondered if he could catch and pass Pete Sampras’ record 14 grand slams (Fed had 13 at the time). Federer won three of the next four grand slams and appeared on a cover of ESPN: The Magazine with the headline “Who’s the World’s Greatest Athlete: Roger Federer Looks the Part” (the irony here being that the same magazine [and even the same writer!] questioned his reign the previous year). And now that he’s lost in back-to-back grand slam quarterfinals, Federer is done again.

Tiger Woods will break Jack Nicklaus’ record. I am sure of it still. The slumps, the momentary doubt, the returns to prominence–they’re all part of the narrative.

So we already heard from Tim (and, for that matter, from Michael Weinreb) some especially specific predictions for tonight’s game. Well, I’m not that audacious, but I feel compelled to give you my insights for the Super Bowl. As such, here are some predictions:

• Each team will run a variety of passing and rushing plays.

• The two teams will not have equal total yardage.

• Reggie Bush will at one point carry the football.

• In the first half, a touchdown will be scored in the stadium’s west end zone.

• At some point during the broadcast, Jim Nantz will ask Phil Simms if he would “go for it here.”

• At some point during the broadcast, Jim Nantz will describe Peyton Manning as “a quarterback.”

• At some point during the broadcast, the two coaches will be shown simultaneously via split-screen.

• At no point during the broadcast will Jim Nantz bring up his love of the Jonas Brothers.

• At least one field goal or extra point will be kicked.

• Some of the commercials will be good and some will be disappointing.

• Once, someone with whom you are watching the game will bring up how odd it is that a Pierre plays a significant role for both teams. This person will either know a lot about football or nothing about football.

• The Who’s status as rock legends will be neither tarnished nor enhanced by the halftime performance.

• The Manning family’s connection to the Saints will be broached quite a few times.

• The MVP award will go to a player on the winning team.

• At various points during the game, “Super Bowl,” “Colts,” “Saints,” “commercials,” and probably at least one player will all be trending topics on Twitter.

• The crowd will, at various times, cheer, boo, and groan.

• The winning team will have fun.

• Somebody will have a seven-yard rush in the second quarter.

• The winning team will score between 10 and 70 points.

• The losing team will score between 6 and 50 points.

• The game will end.

And one slightly adventurous one:

• The game will not be exciting. Why not? Well, for starters, because we can’t have three exciting Super Bowls in a row; it’d be too weird. Do you realize there are 6-year-old kids who can barely remember the last time a Super Bowl was boring? Also, people expect this game to be good, and the Super Bowls that people expect to be close (Bucs/Raiders, Giants/Ravens) usually turn out to be blowouts; the best Super Bowls are games where the favorite lays at least seven points (Pats/Giants, Pats/Panthers, Rams/Pats, Steelers/Cardinals, Rams/Titans). The Colts will score first, and the Saints will never tie or take the lead after that. Final score: Colts 34, Saints 20.

• The final season of Lost is coming up in three weeks. The trailers aren’t giving anything away, but ABC’s promotional poster indicates it’s going to be heavy-handed and laden with symbols…for a change. This premiere is so highly anticipated that even Obama is changing his schedule for it.

• As Shayne Graham and Neil Rackers reminded us this weekend, kicking can be huge in the playoffs. Michael Lewis tackled the importance of NFL kickers in 2007.

• The New York Times 36 hours travel series has gone just about everywhere, but now they go to a shocking new location.

• NPI-favorite Aziz Ansari did an interview with NPI-favorite Animal Collective. The interview promises to be an NPI-favorite.

• Another NPI favorite, Charles P. Pierce, now has his own blog over at Boston.com (h/t to the blog of another sportswriter we enjoy, Michael Weinreb).

• Alan Sepinwall discusses the 20th anniversary of The Simpsons. He does a good job putting the whole series, from the endearing early years to the regrettable later seasons, in perspective.

• If John S keeps giving films the Avatar treatment, we’ve got no shot of cracking eFilmCritic’s “Whores of the Year” in 2010 (although John was not the only one to feel that way about Cameron’s latest).

• We must have barely missed the cut of this list…

• Somehow, this gets even better after the subhead, “Jaguars may have to trade up to get Tim Tebow.“

Matt, this one’s for you.

So, today on ESPN.com there is a story by Michael Weinreb on the recent National Federation of State High School Associations (NFHS) that will essentially ban the A-11 offense.  For those of you who haven’t heard about the A-11 offense, Weinreb has done a previous article on the offense that has become a YouTube sensation.

First, I’ll tell you that I respect Steve Humphries and Kurt Bryan, the co-creators of the A-11 offense.  I like guys who think outside the box, although anyone who knows me knows I’m a traditionalist, I’m not against new things and I’m not against change.  I love the spread offense, and specifically I love the way people have found ways to run the football out of what look like “passing” formations.  Look at what Florida and West Virginia do out of sideline-to-sideline sets, they beat teams with option and a punishing ground attack.

The A-11 offense features two quarterbacks and six receivers.  If you’re doing the math, that’s 8 players that aren’t linemen, already making the offense illegal in both the collegiate and professional game.  (Sidenote, for those unaware, the offense must have 7 men on the line of scrimmage, 5 of them down linemen who are ineligible receivers.)  But the A-11 offense takes advantage of a (now outlawed) high school loop hole that allows more eligible receivers and was meant for punting downs to allow high schools teams who lack the specialization of the college and professional games to have more flexibility.

The A-11 co-creators hoped to overcome a lack of size with the offense.  They were successful.  Piedmont High School has made the playoffs each of the last two seasons using the A-11 offense, but their not unbeatable and certainly aren’t a scoring juggernaut (averaging 32.6 points per game in 2008).  The A-11 offense is unique, exciting, and a great innovation.

With all that said, the NFHS made the right call in closing the loophole that was exploited to make the A-11 legal.  Say what you want about “choking innovation,” but I don’t think people would look at allowing the use of hands in soccer, the use of smaller baseballs (ore larger bats), or allowing players to walk with the ball in basketball as innovation.  These three examples of things that would CHANGE the context of the sports that are played.  It didn’t take a major change in the rules to allow an end to become a split end or to allow a halfback to become a flanker.  By the same token, the shotgun, a major innovation, didn’t need a loophole or a rule change to become common-place.

Weinreb points to the “Wildcat Formation” and its introduction to the NFL as an example of how exciting innovation can be.  And believe, I believe the NFL needs more “innovative” risk takers.  Every Sunday you see the same teams running the same offense with different personnel and only the defenses different (two varients, the 3-4 or the 4-3).  I welcome the Wildcat formation.

But like the spread offense, the “wildcat formation” didn’t need a rule change.  In fact, both of these football innovations are a blast from the past retread.  The “wildcat” is old 1940′s single-wing football repackaged and opened up.  The Florida offense is a blend of wing-t/single wing football repackaged for today’s game.

Re-inventing the past isn’t living in it.  That’s what Houston Nutt did with Darren McFadden at Arkansas, and that’s what Rich Rodriquez and Urban Meyer have done at stops from Glenville State, Tulane, Clemson, Bowling Green, Utah, West Virginia, Florida, and Michigan.

Let’s look for innovators.  But let’s leave the basics of the game intact.

Not everything worth reading is good news. This tragic ESPN.com article by Michael Weinreb–which is about the inter-connected deaths of 5 people in a short period of time, 3 from the town high school, in the community of Willows, CA–is a sad example. These are the teens / young adults who die in a grotesque variety of ways:

• Brian Parks
• Kayla Arnold
• Steven Furtado
• Jennifer Carmen Carrigan
• Billy Carrigan

Below is the last part of the article:

Perhaps that’s what scares them most, that somehow these deaths will tear them apart. This, the people of Willows could not abide. And so they showed up early on a Friday night in September, and they watched the junior varsity game, and they lined up to purchase the boosters’ homemade tri-tip steak sandwiches, and they filled in the empty spaces in the bleachers. Eventually, people discovered the coach’s [father of Brian Parks] hiding place, including Nathan Michaud, and when he stopped to talk, the coach’s perpetually rheumy eyes filled with something like tears.

Nathan had changed, even since graduation. He had become friends with people he never could have imagined getting to know when he was younger. He still believed in the general inequity of the Almighty’s attitude toward the Class of ’08 — he still did not pretend to understand why fate had royally screwed them this way — but perhaps, he thought, these new friendships were meant as some sort of spiritual consolation. He was going to leave for college the next day, and he imagined he would return often — maybe, someday, he would even return for good — but it wouldn’t be the same, and he understood that, and Curtis Parks understood it, too. In some unspoken way, this was the end of the beginning for both of them.

The coach could not bring himself to stay for the entire game. It was a matter of sensory overload: the attention, the sympathy, the small talk, the smell of those tri-tip sandwiches, the sound of pad crunching against pad, the faces that inevitably and unintentionally evoked his son’s face. In the fourth quarter, as he prepared to depart and Nathan walked off, Curtis Parks called out to him, as if he were calling out to an incarnation of himself that no longer existed. “Nathan!” And to a boy he had known nearly as long as his own son, the coach said, “Call me every once in a while.”

All articles referenced are copied in full at end of post.

——————————————————–
ESPN.com: The Lost Kids of Willows

The Lost Kids of Willows
PART 1: FALL 2006

WILLOWS, Calif. — The quarterback ran one last play against thin air, against an opponent who did not exist, and then he turned away from his teammates and dropped face-first into the grass. “Quit screwing around,” someone said, and when it was clear the quarterback wasn’t screwing around, the coach knelt down, felt for a pulse and attempted to resuscitate him. Someone ran to fetch a pair of scissors to cut through the quarterback’s jersey and shoulder pads, and everyone else stood there and waited for the quarterback to rise again, for this stubborn hallucination to dissipate and the tedium of football practice to resume.

It did not take long at all for the paramedics to arrive. In the town of Willows, nothing is very far from anything, which is why people move to this part of California in the first place. There is one major thoroughfare in Willows, Wood Street, and the worst traffic for miles around can be found in the Wal-Mart parking lot, and the hospital is located approximately three-tenths of a mile from the football practice field where the quarterback lay, unable to breathe. When the paramedics showed up, they couldn’t believe what they were seeing, either. In a town with a population of little more than 6,000, where many of the families have lived for generations, where people sometimes introduce themselves by surname, there is no such thing as a stranger. Three of the paramedics were former students at Willows High School, which stood just across Wood Street from the practice field, a block east of the hospital. While they worked, the quarterback’s mother, who had been painting her house with a friend, dropped her brushes and drove three blocks, arriving at the field while the ambulance was still there. “Get in the car and pray,” the coach had told her when he called. “Just start praying and don’t stop.” The ambulance departed. The quarterback’s mother drove behind it. On the practice field, the quarterback’s teammates stood dazed, unsure of what to do or where to go or whom to call, because nothing like this had ever happened before, not in Willows, where, very much by design, nothing ever happened. The assistant principal heard the news from an office aide who was also a volunteer firefighter. He alerted the principal, and they darted across Wood Street and out to the practice field and found a burly assistant football coach on his hands and knees, weeping. “It’s not good,” the assistant coach said. The temperature was 92 degrees, but it couldn’t have been the heat that felled the quarterback because it was often much hotter than that in Willows in mid-August, and the quarterback had gone down — and that’s how they describe it, even now, as the day Brian Parks went down — just a few plays into practice. In the ambulance, the coach kept up his CPR, and the quarterback exhaled — more of a reflex from the drugs used to stimulate his heart than any sign of a revival — and the coach thought he felt a pulse. He said, “We’re going to make it.” And one of the EMTs just stared at the coach, knowing the truth, knowing the quarterback was already gone, his eyes reflecting back to the coach the utter surrealism of the moment: How could this be? How was this even possible? Another technician, one of the few who did not know the coach personally, told him he could use a mask to help the boy breathe, that he did not need to exhaust himself by continuing to force air from his lungs into the quarterback’s lungs. “It’s my kid,” the coach told him, and then for quite some time, no one said anything at all. This is how it began.

On the afternoon of Aug. 21, 2006, Brian Curtis Parks, 16, was pronounced dead at Glenn Medical Center in Willows, of a cause yet to be determined. Shortly afterward, several of the town’s authority figures held a meeting outside the emergency room and tried to determine what exactly they were supposed to do next. The principal, Mort Geivett, was new in town, as was the superintendent, although he had grown up in Orland, the town just north on Interstate 5 and the home of Willows’ traditional football rival. His name was Steve Olmos, and he had moved here from Los Angeles because he wanted to find a safe place to raise his children, because he had seen enough violence, and because he couldn’t imagine a safer place in the entire known universe than Willows. Seriously: What were the odds of a football coach’s son dying in his father’s arms? A number of small-town clichés hold true in the modern era, perhaps none more so than the maxim that news travels fast, especially when that news involves teenagers. Within minutes, through a series of e-mails and text messages and MySpace postings, everyone in town had heard about Brian Parks. The school brought in grief counselors and bottles of water and boxes of tissues and opened up the gym for the students, and hundreds showed up because they didn’t know where else to go. At one point that evening, the coach, whose name is Curtis Parks, showed up and addressed the students and told them they had to move forward. The coach was broken, and he said as much, comparing himself to a bicycle missing a seat and handlebars. But he assured them that he would repair himself and that the children of Willows would endure, and after that remarkable show of strength, he went home and broke down completely. There were approximately 115 members of the Class of ’08 at Willows High School, and every one of them knew Brian Parks. How could they not? He was the heir apparent at quarterback, the coach’s son in a town where football was the unifying passion. His classmates viewed Brian as the type of kid whose charm allowed him to transcend cliques. “He didn’t have enemies,” says his teammate and close friend, Nathan Michaud, who had known Brian Parks since they attended day care together. “He may not have liked certain people, but he never would show that he didn’t like them.”

Brian counseled at church camps and worked with children in the local parks and recreation program; he partied, but he didn’t drink much, if at all. “Kind of a pretty boy,” his friend Walter Michael says. Brian worried often about pleasing his father now that he had inherited the starting quarterback job (he was not a great athlete, but he had huge feet that the coaches hoped he might soon grow into). He had an enormous shock of curly hair he had been cultivating for months — to the chagrin of his mother, Cindy — and he had a girlfriend named Devin who played field hockey in Corning, 30 miles away. He also had many admirers, including a classmate named Kayla Arnold. Kayla’s mother, Raina, used to drive a school bus; now she worked at the elementary school, and every morning, because their parents arrived at the school early, Brian and Kayla — who also worked at the parks department — arrived early at school, as well. There is only one indoor hallway at Willows High School, adorned with blocky medieval-themed murals that have endured for decades despite the protestations of generations of students who would like to modernize the decor. None of the lockers actually have locks on them because nobody has ever deemed locks to be necessary. In the morning, Brian and Kayla would sit in the hallway alone and discuss their lives, and at times they engaged in a pubescent version of “My Fair Lady,” with Brian giving Kayla advice on how to dress and where to shop (Abercrombie & Fitch, the Gap) and how to attract boys. Kayla was stubborn and outspoken and flighty and impatient. She was on the tennis team, although she spent more time socializing with her opponents than she did preparing for her matches. You want to know Kayla? This is Kayla: For a while, she tried using a natural supplement to improve her memory, but she kept forgetting to take the pills. Every week, she called the director of the parks and rec department to ask what time she was due at work, even though the time never changed. She argued with teachers over her grades and negotiated her way out of trouble using food as currency. When her mother presented her with her first car, a clunky Oldsmobile instead of the truck she wanted, she cried and asked whether she was being punished. Once, in the ninth grade, she got into a fight in the hallway, and Jerry Smith, the assistant principal, pulled both girls into his office and, in a classic attempt at disarmament, asked them whether they truly had arrived at school that day with the intention of fighting each other. The other girl said no. “Hell yes!” Kayla said. But Kayla idolized Brian — he was the quarterback, and he was going to be a star in this town soon enough, after all — and she heeded his advice and began dressing the way Brian dressed. After he died, she visited his grave often, and she kept a scrapbook of news clippings about Brian to sort through her grief. And maybe she loved him a little, in the way teenagers harbor deep and vaguely irrational crushes that feel a lot like love. When he died, she wrote on her MySpace page, “I miss you bri. thanks for the good times.” And 20 months later, when Kayla Arnold fell violently and inexplicably ill while vacationing near San Francisco, when she also died for reasons that could not be easily explained, those words remained on her page.

The town of Willows is impossibly far removed from the California that has been packaged for public consumption. It is nowhere near a beach or a fashionable ZIP code; the story goes that an exchange student once arrived in town and asked why no one was surfing. It is bordered by fields of rice and almonds and walnuts and olives. Downtown has been subsumed by the gaping maw of Wal-Mart. Most of the local public officials are Republicans. The preferred method of conveyance is a pickup truck. The office of the assistant principal is a virtual shrine to Dale Earnhardt Jr. The major employer, beyond the government (Willows is the seat of Glenn County), the school system and the local farms, is insulation manufacturer Johns Manville. And the biggest dates on the social calendar in the fall are high school football games. Even people in surrounding towns tend to think of the kids of Willows as “country hicks,” according to Nathan Michaud, whose father owns a crop-dusting business. The nickname of the school’s sports teams: the Honkers. Seriously. The Willows Honkers. Go Honkers! Locals say the name has to do with the geese and migratory birds that foul the town’s many beautiful trees. But come on: How quaint, how “of the American heartland,” as our politicians might say, is a town with a football team known as the Honkers?

To make a donation Donations in the name of Brian Parks can be sent to Willows Christian Church, 200 S. Plumas, Willows, CA 95988, Attn: Brian Parks Memorial Fund.

Donations to a scholarship fund in memory of Kayla Arnold can be made at Bank of America.

Donations to the Steven Furtado Memorial Fund can be made at any U.S. Bank branch.

So here it is, this place straight out of “Friday Night Lights,” a red-state town wrapped in a blue-state shell, just three hours north of the leftist demons’ gate of Berkeley and San Francisco, an hour north of the capital city of Sacramento, 40 minutes from the nearest shopping mall in Chico, a little speck on the map known to most outsiders as Exit 603, a pit stop off I-5 for truck drivers burning overpriced diesel fuel on their way back and forth from Oregon. At the west end of Willows, just off the freeway, are the amenities of the road: cheap restaurants, budget motels, a Starbucks and several gas stations. On the other side of the overpass is the Wal-Mart, and across the road, a tiny airstrip with an even tinier 24-hour diner, Nancy’s Airport Cafe, set just off the taxiway. Nancy’s is one of the last of the independents at this end of town, and it is a hangout for the children of Willows, the place to meet up when you’re not ready to go home at night, because it’s either a slice of homemade pie at Nancy’s or the Moons Over My Hammy at the Denny’s a block away. There’s not much else to do at night except hang out either at Nancy’s or someone’s house, and although this makes for a generally boring formative experience, that protective bubble has always been the allure of small-town family life. In Willows, parents rarely have to ask where their children are because generally they are in one of a few places, and if they happen to be drinking, someone’s parents will pick them up and drive them home. This is what we mean when we espouse small-town values, isn’t it? That there is safety in familiarity. That there is comfort in tedium. And it’s true that sometimes, even in small towns, this bubble is pierced, and terrible things happen, and children die. But often, there are lessons in those tragedies: Don’t drive drunk. Don’t drive recklessly. Wear a helmet. Look both ways. Keep with the right crowd. Don’t do drugs. And those lessons facilitate the repair of the bubble, and those lessons facilitate the return to normalcy. But this is the spiritual quandary the people of Willows have had to face over the past two years, amid a cruel and relentless series of circumstances: What happens when the bubble is pierced over and over and over again, when good and well-meaning and otherwise healthy children keep dying? And what happens when there are no distinct and discernible lessons in any of it?

PART 2: SPRING 2008

Months passed after the death of Brian Parks, and though Willows was perhaps quieter than usual, the members of the Class of ’08 progressed toward adulthood the way high school students often do: They passed their driver’s tests, they worked menial jobs, they applied to college, they fretted about college, they hung out, they raged at their parents, and they partied. They did not forget Brian Parks — how could they forget when he had gone down right before their eyes? — and they laid out his No. 2 jersey on the bench at every game that first fall (when they somehow made it to the sectional semifinals). They visited his grave at the cemetery at the far end of town, and they dropped in on Curtis and Cindy Parks and brought them food. But they were beginning to process it, to allow it to settle in their minds, to find some measure of acceptance. The cause of Brian’s death had been determined — a heart defect known as spontaneous ventricular fibrillation, a curious condition that doctors insisted could have felled him on the steps of a medical center with little hope for revival. Although it raised as many questions as it answered, at least, they figured, it was something.

Courtesy of the Arnold familyKayla Arnold played tennis at Willows, but she spent more time socializing with her opponents.

By April, graduation was just two months away, which meant most of the Class of ’08 would soon leave Willows for community colleges, four-year colleges, military assignments or vocational training programs, and many of them would never really come back again. “The kids were moving on,” says Jerry Smith, the assistant principal. “The class was moving on. And then Kayla.” And then Kayla. She’d been suffering from bladder infections all year, and she was impossibly thin to begin with (she’d been drinking protein shakes to try to gain weight), and a series of doctors had put her on a kaleidoscopic regimen of antibiotics. When one course of antibiotics made her violently ill, a doctor put her on a potent anti-nausea medication. On her MySpace page, she described herself as “sick and dizzy from medicine,” and yet one weekend in April, she insisted on accompanying her boyfriend and her mother to the Bay Area to visit her aunt. She didn’t want to stay home with her grandmother, who also lives in Willows, in a house so close that Kayla often retreated there when she fell out with her mother. This was Kayla being Kayla, obstinate and insistent on seizing any opportunity to explore the world beyond Willows. Typically, she won; she went on the trip. “My sister and I ran in a race in Santa Cruz that morning,” says her mother. “She stayed on the beach with her boyfriend and just kind of threw up, you know, and didn’t feel good.” Raina Arnold checked her daughter into the hospital that night. More medications, more imprecise diagnoses, her prognosis suddenly growing bleaker, the text messages passing back and forth, people in Willows spreading rumors that Kayla was dead already. The next day, Smith called the Class of ’08 to the cafeteria and told them what they had already figured out for themselves. “It’s not good,” he said. Twenty-four hours later, Kayla Arnold was gone, for reasons that remain unclear to doctors and to her own family, reasons that might or might not have to do with the medications that made her sick. They are still awaiting a definitive cause of death. In the days that followed, the Arnolds had to say something, and they relied on a spokesman who had grown close to Kayla in the past year to deliver a statement to the local newspaper. “I know the community will rally behind the family the same way they did last time,” said the spokesman, whose very presence served as a testament to the interconnectedness of a town where nothing and no one is ever more than five minutes away. “Kayla was a wonderful young lady,” Curtis Parks also told the newspaper.

After Kayla, the Class of ’08 lurched toward graduation. For the first time, the world no longer seemed compact and manageable. The world seemed indiscriminate and unforgiving, and it didn’t seem to give a damn where they lived or how they behaved. Who among them would it swallow next? Among the impending graduates was an Eagle Scout named Steven Furtado who also bagged groceries at the Sani-Food supermarket, played the trumpet in the band, and, at 5-foot-9, 170 pounds, was an undersized center and defensive lineman on the football team. He had delivered one last snap before Brian went down that day in August 2006, and he knew Kayla a little, too. In fact, there are photographs of Steven standing in front of Kayla’s coffin because Raina Arnold hired a professional photographer to shoot her daughter’s funeral. Her friends thought this was bizarre, but she didn’t care. She knew she would remember none of this later, and she felt, just as her daughter had recorded her thoughts in diaries and scrapbooks and in endless notes to herself so as not to forget, it was her duty to document everything that came after. Courtesy of the Parks familyCenter Steven Furtado, right, was on the practice field the day Brian died. Less than two years later, Steven would become the third Willows student to die.

Steven did not really travel in the same groups as Brian and Kayla. But like Brian, he had a group of close friends, an inner circle, and, like Brian, he had enough self-confidence to indulge his own interests without fear of mockery from his peers. It is one of the perks of growing up in a small town that cliques are often weak enough to be transcended. It isn’t that Willows doesn’t have them: There are growing numbers of Hispanic and Chinese immigrants, and there is an inevitable amount of stratification between those who own sprawling farms outside of town and modest houses in town, and those who can barely afford to live in the low-slung apartment complexes near I-5. But there is an unmistakable familiarity, as well: Everyone knows certain things about everyone else in town, which can be both humiliating and comforting. “I like knowing who people are,” Nathan Michaud says. “Maybe you don’t get along with them, but you know them. You know what kind of people they are.”

Steven’s reputation was as a hunter and a skilled marksman, as a quiet kid who seemed intent on experiencing as much as possible. He stayed up late and read fantasy novels about dragons and occasionally dyed his hair odd colors, and he didn’t care much if his friends thought his whims and his passion for scouting, band, auto-shop (his father spent 25 years as a mechanic), golf and elk-hunting to be a bit of a goof. In the months after Brian’s death, he’d had trouble sleeping and struggled with narcolepsy; at one point, he nodded off while watching game tape with his football teammates, who occasionally referred to him as “Sleepy Steve.” But with graduation fast approaching, Steven had also found an additional measure of personal happiness: He had a girlfriend. Her name was Jenny, and they met at an honors band camp in Sacramento, and she lived in Chester, 100 miles northeast of Willows, a town of 2,000 that by all accounts makes Willows look like San Jose. Though they had been dating for only two months, “We really felt like they were going somewhere as a couple,” says Steven’s father, Dan. In May, four weeks after the death of Kayla Arnold, Steven Furtado marched with the band in the annual Willows town parade, known as the Lamb Derby. That night, he drove to Chico to buy a Mother’s Day gift for his mom, then to Chester to sleep over at Jenny’s house. Her prom was that night, but she was due at work the next morning, at the Holiday Market, and they skipped the dance. When Steven hadn’t arrived home by 11 the next morning, his mother, Denise, began calling her son’s cell phone. It went straight to voice mail. Dan Furtado called the market and asked for “just Jenny”; he realized then that he didn’t know her last name. No one had heard from her, either. They began to think — they began to hope — that perhaps their son and his new girlfriend had indulged in one of those youthful indiscretions that seniors on the verge of graduation are wont to engage in. Maybe they’d blown off everyone and everything and gone to the lake and gone swimming.

Finally, Dan Furtado called the sheriff’s department. The person who answered the phone said an officer would call back. After that, every phone call the Furtados placed went unanswered, and they felt their own quiet reality giving way to the surreal movie-of-the-week tension that had first swept through Willows 21 months before. At 6 p.m., a police car pulled up to the Furtados’ house on Third Street, the one with the BEWARE OF DOG sign on the front gate and the paw prints all over the front door. Two people got out of the car. One was Dan Furtado’s niece, Steven Furtado’s cousin, Brandy McDonald, who worked as a deputy for the Glenn County Sheriff’s Department. Dan Furtado did not wait for the knock. He walked out and met them in the street. That afternoon, another sheriff’s deputy placed a call to a friend, Jerry Smith, who, in addition to being the assistant principal at Willows, is also (A) a local scout for the Houston Astros and (B) a bail bondsman. He carries business cards for all three professions. He assumed this was a call regarding bail. It was not. “I guess this has something to do with one of our kids, huh?” Smith said, and the deputy (whose name was Jim) said nothing, and Smith, who had been barbecuing for his wife and daughter on Mother’s Day, walked out to his driveway to wait. When the deputy arrived, Smith could see it in his face. He said, “Jimmy, who is it?” The deputy could not speak. “Who is it?” Smith asked again.

On Friday, June 6, at 8 p.m., the Class of ’08 held its commencement ceremony in the football stadium, just across Wood Street from the field where Brian Parks went down. The graduates proceeded through an arch with a pair of star-shaped banners on either side. The Willows Senior Singers performed a version of Sarah McLachlan’s “I Will Remember You,” and people crowded the bleachers and some of the old-timers set up lawn chairs on the grass, and the younger children chased after each other in the end zones, their screams drowning out the silence. Mostly, the people of Willows stared out into the encroaching darkness in a vain attempt to process what the hell had happened to their town over the past 22 months. This latest sequence of events had prompted a rare occurrence in a largely media-free pocket of California: a tabloid news story, one that was picked up by newspapers and television stations in Sacramento and beyond merely for the staggering and heartbreaking shame of it all. The bodies of Steven Daniel Furtado and his girlfriend, Jennifer Carmen Carrigan, were discovered in Carrigan’s house at noon on Sunday, Mother’s Day, by Carrigan’s own mother, Joan. They had each been stabbed multiple times, allegedly by Reyes Carrillo, Carrigan’s classmate and ex-boyfriend, who was in custody. Officers described the crime scene as especially brutal.

After hearing the news that evening, Jenny’s older brother, Billy, while speeding along a mountain road on his way back home from college in the Bay Area, lost control of his pickup truck and slammed into several trees. He died a short time later. There was nothing more to be said. Even the mental health counselors found themselves at a loss. Upon delivering the news to the Class of ’08, Jerry Smith, standing before several hundred students in the school’s gymnasium, broke down completely. Many broke down with him; Smith had addressed the seniors first, in the cafeteria, as he had done twice before, and they no longer wanted anything to do with that room, where they had met as a group for no other reason than to mourn. Fights started, violent disagreements in the hallway among otherwise decent kids over nothing at all. Talk of curses and hexes surfaced, and the trauma spawned two disparate reactions for mental health counselors to address: recklessness (as in, Why should I obey the rules when the rules no longer seem to protect us?) and caution. “They were thinking, ‘Is it over?’” says Amy Lindsey, a counselor. “‘What else is going to happen to us?’” Graduation approached in a fog; the only way the Class of ’08 could sustain its collective will was by imagining more tributes and memorials. The seniors began to feel this was all they did; they’d already held a candlelight vigil for Brian on the practice field and one for Kayla in a courtyard outside the school, and now they held one for Steven in the auto shop. They’d already made up car decals memorializing Brian, and Kayla; now they made up decals for Steven. Another tribute to Kayla and Brian, at graduation, had already been planned, with the parents to receive framed portraits of their children, the matting autographed by every member of the Class of ’08. This had been planned weeks ago, and Steven had signed both of those portraits. “Not in a million years — a million years — did I think we’d have to do one more,” Smith says. “Not in a million years. A murder? Are you kidding me?” By now, they’d done scrapbooks and hung ribbons from trees and adorned the graves with flowers and glow-in-the-dark frogs and Titleist golf balls and trumpets and footballs, and they were running out of ideas. “I was kind of run dry,” says Nathan Michaud. “I couldn’t cry anymore. I was blank.” And maybe it sounds selfish, but how were the surviving members of the Class of ’08 supposed to define themselves, to mark their own passage into adulthood, amid all this mourning and remembrance? What about their identity? What about their achievements? “These kids are supposed to be happy and excited,” Amy Lindsey says. “They don’t want people in their faces with cameras, asking, ‘How do you feel?’” At the ceremony, one of the valedictorians, Chelsea Berens, spoke of chaos theory, of the notion that “the flap of a butterfly’s wing could set off a tornado in Texas,” and that somehow, the universe is a series of interconnected accidents. This would be the legacy of the Class of ’08: These seniors were inextricably linked to their fallen classmates and to a town that would take years to regain its equilibrium. Then another valedictorian, Nathan Michaud, who would soon leave to study engineering at Cal Poly-San Luis Obispo, stood and leaned into the microphone, and as the sky darkened, he told the village that had raised him what the loss of his friend Brian had evoked, and what the Class of ’08 had come to know, above all else. “We have now learned,” he said, “that life isn’t fair.”

PART 3: SUMMER 2008

In July, several weeks before the start of two-a-days, Curtis Parks stepped outside into the beating heart of a 109-degree day, into a wilting and lifeless heat, and began to water his lawn. Summer had come down harder than usual on Willows, in a place where people had come to expect the worst. The wildfires were burning out of control up north, and the sky was the color of a bruise. The air felt toxic and the humidity lay flat from one end of town to the other, from the Wal-Mart to the cemetery. At this moment, Parks was no longer a teacher, no longer a coach, no longer an authority figure. He was planning to take a leave for the following school year and figure it out from there. He was a private citizen of Willows for the first time in his adult life. It felt odd and daunting but it was also liberating because the past two years had all been too much. He had hewed to his duties only to keep a promise he made to his son when Brian was just a waterboy — that he would stay on until Brian’s graduation. Sensing the void, the assistant coaches assumed most of Curtis Parks’ duties, and the same man who wept on all fours on the practice field that day, Jim Ward, prepared to take over the team in the fall.

“That first game after Brian, my friend had to lead me out to the field,” Parks says. “He held onto my elbow like I was walking around on crutches, for heaven’s sake. I stood 10 yards away the whole night. When that game was done, it was evident these kids had lost a very dear friend. And the next worst thing would be for them to lose me.” The friend who steadied him that night, Gary Enos, who owned a nearby rice farm, volunteered to drive the coach to road football games because Parks couldn’t handle the emotional burden of riding on the bus. Everything reminded him of Brian. That was the thing people didn’t understand: Brian was not merely his son. Brian was his best friend. During the school year, Brian would often ride home with his father or sit with him in the cab of his pickup truck so they could eat lunch together — how many fathers and sons did that? They went hunting together up north, and Curtis drove Brian and his friends to a Cal football game down south, and Brian was set to become his starting quarterback, which would have been a fitting culmination to a three-decade coaching career. Now, Curtis didn’t know how to bring himself around again. None of it seemed to matter anymore. There were nights, not long after Brian went down, when he would stand in his backyard and stare at the sky and wonder whether he might also just go down, right there, because he could not will himself to make it back inside the house. He and Cindy kept Brian’s room as it was — the magazines and the Florida State football posters and the 2002 World Series pennant and the Xbox — and they allowed his classmates to come through and sit on Brian’s bed and take away whatever they wanted. And although their twin daughters had long ago grown up and moved away, Cindy found a surrogate in Kayla Arnold. In the morning, Kayla would bring Curtis biscuits and gravy from Nancy’s, and in the afternoon, she and Cindy would discuss books and philosophy and the Lord and how all of it might fit together, then Kayla would drive herself to Brian’s grave and read from a book called “90 Minutes in Heaven.” “I still feel like it wouldn’t surprise me to have her walk through the door, and that’s just because of the connection we had with her,” Cindy Parks says. “One day she looked at me and said, ‘Why is God doing this to us?’ And the conversations that we were having are the very things that we’re now telling someone else about her.” It was amazing, everyone kept saying, not just the bizarre and inexplicable sequence of events, but the way connections and coincidences seemed to manifest themselves in the aftermath. The girl who had been reading at Brian’s grave was now buried just a few feet from that same grave, and another boy, photographed at that girl’s funeral, was now buried several feet behind her. There were fingerprints left all over town, including on Steven’s arm — he’d been in the process of getting a tattoo with Brian and Kayla’s names before he was murdered. And there were reminders everywhere you looked. On Mother’s Day, after learning of Steven’s death, Jerry Smith sat for a time on the bed of his truck, and when he leapt down, the first thing he saw was a scratch that Steven had left when pulling out of a tight space in the faculty parking lot. No one doubted that Cindy and Curtis Parks were the axis around which this town had come to rotate. They were quiet, self-sustaining and churchgoing people who had raised three children here, who shopped at Sani-Foods and lived on Pacific Avenue. They had been reliable neighbors, and they had maintained faith, to the point that their son was the only student in his Sunday school class before he died. Curtis had won sectional championships in his decade as head coach (he also spent nearly two decades coaching at nearby Williams High School, but always resided in Willows), yet he had never hesitated to suspend star players for insubordination. Unlike many high school football coaches in small towns, he was almost universally beloved. Even after their son had been struck down, even in their darkest hour, the Parks rushed to comfort the Arnolds and Furtados, and Curtis could no longer open a newspaper without reaching out over the phone or in person to some mourning family in a nearby community. “Now we have a forever connection,” Cindy says. “We’re parents who have lost kids. It’s a group of folks that nobody wants to belong to, but now we do.”

Over the course of two years, the people of Willows had done what they could to restore balance to their world, smothering all three families with condolence cards, food and donations, so many that Raina Arnold found herself writing thank-you notes to people she had never met, so many that Gary Enos actually brought Curtis and Cindy Parks an extra refrigerator, so many that when Dan and Denise Furtado opened up a memorial account, they had $10,000 in small donations within five days. It was the essence of Willows, that the same people who might be given to gossip about you in the produce section of the Sani-Foods would show up at your front door with a pot roast and tin of cookies. But of course, there was still that overarching question, lying heavy in the air alongside the smoke and the humidity, a question that refused to dissipate, a question that was posed in suddenly well-populated Sunday school classes and in the aisles of Wal-Mart and on the oft-deserted streets of downtown Willows and in the back booths at Nancy’s. It was a question that no one could dignify with a proper answer because there was no proper answer.

Why us? “One of the reasons why a lot of us live here is because we like the small-town pace of life,” Smith says. “This doesn’t happen here, you know. When it does happen, then it really brings into reality that anything can happen to anybody.”

In September, there was a pep rally that consisted of approximately 400 high school students, segregated into classes, standing in a gymnasium and screaming at each other. It was a quintessential small-town moment: band wailing, cheerleaders chattering, handmade signs taped to the walls, the seniors razzing the juniors razzing the sophomores razzing the freshmen, who were not permitted to stand merely because they had not yet earned the right to stand. The rally culminated with a flag football game between the varsity and junior varsity, and with Smith delivering a PG-13 motivational speech directed at the opponent in the first home game of the season, Winters High, a team that happened to be coached by his own stepson. It felt good, to be back at football again. It felt like — well, it felt something like what normal used to feel like around here, if that even made any sense anymore. Two years earlier, football had been the source of the breakdown; maybe now football could inaugurate a restoration for the classes of ’09 and ’10 and ’11 and ’12, for a generation of children scarred by this seemingly impossible sequence of events. “A town needs its children, just as much and in the same ways a family does,” author Russell Banks once wrote. “It comes undone without them, turns a community into a windblown scattering of isolated individuals.”

Perhaps that’s what scares them most, that somehow these deaths will tear them apart. This, the people of Willows could not abide. And so they showed up early on a Friday night in September, and they watched the junior varsity game, and they lined up to purchase the boosters’ homemade tri-tip steak sandwiches, and they filled in the empty spaces in the bleachers. Raina Arnold showed up, and so did Dan and Denise Furtado, even though they had attended a preliminary hearing for the suspect in their son’s murder the day before. “I can’t see leaving this house, or leaving this town, or leaving these people,” says Denise Furtado, whose husband showed up at the game wearing a T-shirt bearing his son’s photograph. “I really feel for people who have to go through things like this alone. The question of leaving is not even a question. I have no desire to leave at all.” As the evening wore on, as darkness descended on Willows once again and the home team ground out a 14-7 victory, Curtis Parks stood in a distant corner of the stadium, shielded from the bleachers by an emergency vehicle parked near the gates. He was doing nothing much at all these days; to fill the time, he had started working the rice harvest on Gary Enos’ farm, and it was good work because it was mindless work. Eventually, people discovered the coach’s hiding place, including Nathan Michaud, and when he stopped to talk, the coach’s perpetually rheumy eyes filled with something like tears. Nathan had changed, even since graduation. He had become friends with people he never could have imagined getting to know when he was younger. He still believed in the general inequity of the Almighty’s attitude toward the Class of ’08 — he still did not pretend to understand why fate had royally screwed them this way — but perhaps, he thought, these new friendships were meant as some sort of spiritual consolation. He was going to leave for college the next day, and he imagined he would return often — maybe, someday, he would even return for good — but it wouldn’t be the same, and he understood that, and Curtis Parks understood it, too. In some unspoken way, this was the end of the beginning for both of them. The coach could not bring himself to stay for the entire game. It was a matter of sensory overload: the attention, the sympathy, the small talk, the smell of those tri-tip sandwiches, the sound of pad crunching against pad, the faces that inevitably and unintentionally evoked his son’s face. In the fourth quarter, as he prepared to depart and Nathan walked off, Curtis Parks called out to him, as if he were calling out to an incarnation of himself that no longer existed. “Nathan!” And to a boy he had known nearly as long as his own son, the coach said, “Call me every once in a while.”

Michael Weinreb is a regular contributor to ESPN.com. His book “Game of Kings: A Year Among the Oddballs and Geniuses Who Make Up America’s Top High School Chess Team” is now available in paperback from Gotham Books. He is working on a book about sports in the 1980s. He can be reached at http://www.michaelweinreb.com.
—————————————————————————

As someone who lives in the Southeast, relatively close to the sort of strip mining and mountaintop removal under scrutiny and lament in Michael Shnayerson’s Coal River, I was both embarrassed to find out how bad the situation was and is, but, way worse, I was amazed to read that all this is happening right around here and yet I’ve seen not the first bit of it. It’s not, I don’t think, because I’m a dolt or uninterested; mountaintop removal, a process of coal mining that’s not even cleverly enough named to cover its own devastation, is happening out here in the sticks, so to speak. Which, of course, makes sense: it’s easy to get up in arms about, say, the pollution of the Mississippi River (a river I worked on for enough years to see, firsthand, the real tremendous pollution of (and, in fairness, the late and gradual cleanup of)) because people live right near it. Mining coal in mountains that line and limn tiny communities in out-of-the-way parts of the country is a sneaky, ongoing fact, and more than anything we all—those of us living in places freakishly near the mining, those of you far, far from it—need to know more about the whole thing.

And into this need comes Michael Shnayerson and his great book—a book which is, in fairness, almost equally about the absolute catastrophe that is mining in the southeast of the United States and about the equal catastrophe that is the EPA and governmental oversight of industry in general. Shnayerson, by the way, is exactly the pilot you want in this sort of literary plane ride: he’s a contributing editor at Vanity Fair, and has written about drug-resistant bacteria and GM’s electric car. He’s the sort of guy you want feeding you details when you come to a problem that’s tough on scales both large and small, which coal mining absolutely is.

The book is basically all about how small, resolute West Virginians kept on fighting a guy named Don Blackenship, a guy who works for Massey Energy. The West Virginians have, as you’d expect, pluck and diligence and what seems inarguably the smart argument on their side; Blackenship and Massey energy have, of course, money and power and, in ways that should shake any environmentalist right down to his or her boots, Massey’s got the status quo. If nothing else, this book’s a(nother, like we need more, but we always will) terrifying account of how the phrase “this is how things’ve always been done” might actually be a more destructive phrase and mentality than anything like WMD or Axis of Evil or whatever.

And the fighting! What’s sick is that these small-town West Virginians have to argue, over and over, that coal particulates in the air around them are increasing and that that might be a bad thing. The sick part isn’t the specifics, but the general: people have to fight for clean air. It’s wildly disturbing. Plus—and this’ll surprise no one who has paid unit of energy #1 to the goings-on of the EPA under President Bush’s administration—the book is largely about forcing governmental agencies to do their own jobs. No shit. (for a fun refresher, Google some recent news stories about how the EPA had to be sued into regulating CO2. True story).

It’s not just that there’s a clear, heroic, David v. Goliath like fight at the heart of this book that makes it so great, though that’s a huge deal: if you can get through this book without loving Joe Lovett, the good-guy lawyer, and without an almost DNA-deep level dread of and revulsion toward Don Blackenship (and Massey Energy), bravo (and also, my apologies: you’ve got no heart). One of the most absurd things, I think, about reading and loving books is that they somehow expand worlds and experiences precisely by narrowing the world’s horizon to the edges of a page. We all know that bad shit’s happening, environmentally, and we all know we should do something, and most of us seem to say we’d like to know more about how bad it is and what we can do. What can we do? Make better decisions, use less energy, etc—this isn’t the place for any preaching. What we can all do, however, to know more, is to read books like Michael Shnayerson’s Coal River, read books like this and pass the books along to friends and strangers and try to make everyone pay attention, fast.

(for those who want more reading material, check out the NYTimes article dated 15 January. Google Blackenship for more stomach-churning reading.) 

Game of Kings by Michael Weinreb

So, this book, along with Marc Fisher’s Something in the Air, is at the top of my list of books I wish I’d known about when they’d come out in hardcover. It’s not like it’s that huge a deal—this book was released in March of 07 (titled, at the time, The Kings of New York) and a ten-month lag between hardcover and paperback’s actually great—but still, there’s something, to me anyway, about reading a book that’s been out for awhile (and not, like, a long while: I didn’t feel bad getting into old McPhee stuff because I was not living when he wrote half his books), a book I should’ve been onto the minute it was released but, of course, missed (and sure, we all miss as many great books as we read, but it still makes me sad).

Anyway: rectified! Game of Kings is the story of the Edward R. Murrow high school chess team, and the story’s full of exactly the narrative elements that make these sorts of stories so great (there should be a whole subgenre of against-all-odds, high-school stories (the #1 of which would have to be, of course, Joe Miller’s Cross-X, but whatever)). You want underprivileged kids with somewhat dicey backgrounds? Check. A beleaguered coach/teacher working above and beyond and hearable call of duty? Check. Triumph despite the outrageous odds? Check. A whimsical, maybe-this’ll-never-happen-again sort of ending, full of oomph and portent? Check. (I apologize for the dumb “check” punning back there: totally unintentional and it looks dumb. If I’d said Bingo, it’d’ve looked way worse, though).

The fact that the book so clearly follows the code, though—unlikely heroes coming from surprising quarters, basically—actually makes its job tougher. How many books are there like this, you think? Expand it past high school stories, and suddenly you’re contending with any (real generally) against-the-odds type sports-related story (try: Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bronx is Burning or Ticket Out). How about pushing it beyond sports? Try Fermat’s Last Theorem. Just play a quick mental game and try to think of as many recent nonfiction books that’ve had the words “surprising” or “unlikely” or some synonym in the subtitle. Go ahead. Try it.

(I’m not going to look it up, but there’ve got to be hundreds).

Understand: I’m not at all against books like these. All the books I’ve named have been great, great fun. But when you get into this sort of territory—where the structure of the narrative is so well-understood that we can, as readers, sort of predict how the next shoe’ll drop—the stakes climb real damn quickly (as a weird, probably faulty analog to this situation, consider the huge variety of bottled water available. It’s all, we know, just water, plain old H2O, but the details suddenly become everything—we want rectangular bottles, or the pretty plastic bottle with the cursive writing, or the water that’s advertised as having been enriched by god knows what).

All of which, I realize, is a real roundabout way to say that books like this, underdog books, have to be written really, really well if they’re going to work. That earlier mention of Joe Miller? Absolute best book re: underdogs—the writing in there, and the emphatic concern on the part of the author, make the book just spellbinding.

But! But. Michael Weinreb. His Game of Kings is, in fact, one of the best nonfiction accounts of underdogs I’ve read in a while, and it’s one of the best because Weinreb can write circles around lots, lots of the folks writing crap like this. At random: “And the room is beginning to come together, and the room is a sight, man, just your average day at Bizarro High School, all these smart-ass intellectuals and hipsters and geniuses and wannabe geniuses and misfits and preppies and born-against thrown together inside an airplane hangar.” (p. 225). (Whether or not you like New Journalists and all they’ve wrought, you can’t help but love, even a little, that Tom Wolfe and Hunter Thompson’s influence has now spread so far as to be the tone of choice for so much reporting).

On the cover of this new paperback copy, there’s a blurb from Chess Life saying that the book’s “One of the most readable books about chess ever written,” and as someone who reads way more than my share of chess books (I am horribly, horribly sucky at the game, but reading about the folks who can do it well is, usually, pretty great), I absolutely agree. Weinreb’s a sympathetic observer of these strange and motley mix of boys from this strange high school in Brooklyn and you need know little more than the fundamentals of the game to find entry in the stories (though it’s not, like, horrible if you know more than a little—you just get to feel slightly smart when discussions of games get into real specific, pawn-to-d4-type details).

So: read the damn thing already.

(for what it’s worth, simply because it was already named: really, really, read Marc Fisher’s Something In the Air.Unbelievable. It’s about radio. It’ll make you want to either watch Pump Up the Volume or start your own radio station or both).