The Duper Level

Last week I found myself at Shaw's Crab House in Chicago, drinking beer and talking sports with a couple of work friends, JK and Brando. JK is Chicago born and bred and Brando is an Ohio boy now in the Windy City. And we got on the subject of Lebron James' future.

I suggested that Lebron James will be tempted by the Big Apple and make his way to the New York Knicks. They dismissed this as typical New York arrogance, and clearly believed that Madison Square Garden harbored snakes as evil as any in the Garden of Eden.

Like all good sports arguments this one got me thinking, and I thought I would helpfully share my thinking with Knicks management as they prepare to make their case to Lebron. They all fall under the broad argument of achieving what we'll call the Duper Level. In other words, there is no doubt Lebron is already a superstar, but if he wants to be a Super Duper Star, he's got to come to New York. Here are a few ways of thinking about The Duper Level.

The Lucille Test

One way to look at whether or not an athlete has achieved the Duper Level is the Lucille Test. Lucille is my Mom, and she is aware of sports but not what you'd call a passionate fan. And I just had the following conversation with her:

Me: Do you know who Lebron James is?

Mom: Who?

Me: Lebron James.

Mom: Legron?

Me: Lebron. With a B.

Mom: Lebon James...wait, I know that name. He's some kind of sports player. I know this because I just read it somewhere. He plays sports.

Me: Do you know what sport?

Mom: (pause). Football?

Now, my Mom knows Tiger Woods (and not because of recent scandals). She knows Derek Jeter and Peyton Manning and Kobe Bryant and Brett Favre, and back in the 90's she knew Michael Jordan and Larry Bird. But if Lebron James walked into her kitchen right now and said "Hi, I'm Lebron James and I play for the Cleveland Cavaliers", she'd have no idea what the hell he was talking about.

There are Lucilles all over this great land of ours and across the globe and part of achieving the Duper Level means having the Lucilles know who you are. Play in New York, and I assure you, you'll pass the Lucille Test.

Stern's Nightmare

There's a pretty good chance we'll see a rematch of Kobe vs. Lebron in the NBA Finals. But it's not unlikely we'll see Denver-Cleveland, or even worse, Utah-Cleveland. David Stern's nightmare is wasting the greatness of Lebron James on a Utah-Cleveland series. That thing might get Stanley Cup ratings.

But Lebron in New York? A Knicks-Whomever Finals? This could return the NBA to its glory days. And what is good for the NBA is good for Lebron - yet another step on the way to the Duper Level.

The Jeter Parallel

Another way of thinking about this is to remember my old friend Derek Jeter. Now Derek Jeter is a fine ball player, but he's no Mickey Mantle. He has won no MVPs, no batting titles, no home run titles. And yet, he is a Super Duper Star while clearly superior players like Albert Pujols couldn't pass the Lucille Test if you spotted her the Albert and the Pujo.

And why has he achieved the Duper Level? Because 15 years ago a Yankee team that did everything well went on a 5-year run, and he was arguably the best player on that team. Amazing what winning titles in New York will do for you.

What is Lebron Thinking?

Of course none of this matters if Lebron wants to stay in Cleveland. He's a hometown boy, can make a higher salary in Cleveland than anywhere else, and already has national endorsement deals. One could forgive him for thinking he is quite Duper enough already, thank you very much, regardless of what Lucille thinks.

And of course you don't have to play in New York to go Duper. Peyton Manning plays in the tiny little town of Indianapolis, population 784,118, where until recently the NFL was the fourth most popular sport behind college hoops, auto racing, and cow-tipping. Brooklyn has neighborhoods bigger than that. At rush hour, the 7 train holds more people than that. And yet Peyton is as Duper as you get.

But the NBA has lost some of its power to create stars. Random fun fact: the two worst-selling newstand issues that Sports Illustrated and ESPN Magazine had in 2009 were ones featuring Dwight Howard on the cover. The NBA does not have the star-making power it once had.

That said, I think the results of this year's playoffs could impact his decision. If, for example, the Cavs choke in the postseason, he may feel he needs to stay and win a title for Ohio. And good for him if he does.

But if he wins a ring for Cleveland, and does so over Utah in a 6-game series that gets lower ratings than Conan O'Brien, he just might want to hear what those folks in the Garden have to say.

The Curious Popularity of March Madness

In the past I’ve been a bit of a bully, picking on lesser sports like swimming and softball. But today I’m going to take on one of our most popular sporting events, college basketball.

Don’t get me wrong. I totally get the appeal of March Madness. I watched the last ten minutes of Northern Iowa-Kansas and was captivated by every possession. I watched in wonderment yesterday as an Ivy League school, the 12 seed Cornell, completely dismantled a Big Ten team, the 4 seed Wisconsin. And I too felt the pain of watching my brackets crumble as Villanova and Kansas fell.

During my sophomore and junior years, I experienced the joy of watching my small school, Fairfield University, make the tournament (FU has only made the tourney three times in its history and I was lucky to be a student for two of them). Further, I’ve been to a Final Four weekend – North Carolina’s victory over Illinois in 2006 - and count it among my greatest experiences as a sports fan.

So I’m not here to knock college basketball exactly. Rather I’m here to wonder aloud how a sport that has so many potentially fatal flaws is so damned popular. Here is my list of why college basketball should suck:

+ Sixty Five teams make the postseason. Isn’t this ridiculous? Most professional sports leagues only have 30 teams or so, and fewer than half make the postseason. Baseball purists complain about wild cards because – gasp! –8 whole teams play in October. But in men’s basketball the tournament is the post-season and sixty–five frickin’ teams make it (and another half-dozen believe they got jobbed). This creates two problems for the casual fan. One, who can possibly track all these teams and still have cranium space for less important subjects like healthcare legislation or your children’s middle names. And two, it kinda sorta renders the entire “regular season” a joke – doesn’t it?

+ Roster Turnover. Even if you did have the time and energy to track so many teams, or even half of them, remember that all of these teams have 100% roster turnover at least every four years and the better players don't last that long. Carmelo Anthony, the best player to win a college championship the past 25 years, did it at as a freshman. We’d barely learned his name and he was gone from the sport. Imagine how much better this sport would be if we got to see Carmelo wearing orange for four years?

+ Mediocre Stars. Final Four weekends of yore featured future NBA legends on a regular basis. Michael Jordan, Magic Johnson, Larry Bird, Isiah Thomas, Hakeem Olajuwon, Kareem Abdul Jabbar, Patrick Ewing, Wilt Chamberlain, Bill Russell, Jerry West, Elgin Baylor, Oscar Robertson – they all played and excelled in the Final Four and most of them won a title and the Most Outstanding Player award. But the great players of today either skip college entirely (Lebron, Kobe, Garnett, Dwight Howard), pass through so quickly you don’t notice them (Steve Nash, Chris Bosh), can’t get their team out of the Sweet 16 (Shaquille O’Neal, Tim Duncan), or come from abroad (Dirk Nowitzki, Yao Ming). Which leaves us watching a collection of mediocre players who will end up in Europe, coaching, or at the end of the Knicks bench. (For more detail, see my piece Heaven without Stars).

+ Unfair Matchups. In most sports, there is some sort of governing authority that sets the schedule and creates a level playing field. But in college sports there are multiple conferences that set a conference schedule, thus freeing up schools to set the rest of their schedule to their liking. The result is that the strong schools get to make the rules. If Fairfield wants to play North Carolina, North Carolina will say sure – in our building on the day we decide with ACC refs. And if you don’t like it, tough. That’s not very sporting, is it?


Can you imagine any other sport with these flaws? College football doesn’t – most college football players stay for four years, the conference schedule comprises most of the games, and only a handful of bowl positions really matter. Imagine the NBA with 300 teams, 65 in the post-season, all Laker-Clippers games at the Staples Center and LeBron already retired.

But you know what? It just doesn’t matter. Or maybe those very flaws are the game’s strengths. Who are these guys from Northern Iowa and Cornell? Is Kentucky as vulnerable as Kansas? Will Syracuse redeem the Big East? These questions, because of their newness, are much more interesting, or at least different, than wondering again if Brett Favre is returning, or watching Jeter and the Yankees making their 47th playoff run, or seeing Shaq win another ring with another talented teammate.

Besides, I’ve got Kentucky winning it all, so my sheet ain’t dead yet!

The Enduring Attraction of the Civil War

I recently watched Gods and Generals, a 2003 Civil War movie based on the novel by Jeff Shaara. It attempts, in the span of 3 hours and 45 minutes, to cover the two years of fighting in Northern Virginia between April 1861 and April 1863.

It is an impossible task and the filmmakers fail. Impossible because those two years include First Bull Run, Second Bull Run, The Valley campaign, the 7 Days battle, Antietam, Fredericksburg, and Chancellorsville. These are some of the largest, most important battles in American history.  And oh, by the way, these two years saw some of the most momentous political events in American history, like the election of Abraham Lincoln, secession, and the Emancipation Proclamation.

Maybe – maybe – you can capture the sweep of this period with a long miniseries, a la Band of Brothers*. But it is impossible in a theatrically-released film, even one as interminably long as Gods and Generals, to cover the period without unforgivable omissions. For example, the filmmakers simply pretend that George McClellan, the most important Union general of the period, and the battles he was in, simply didn’t exist.

* The mini-series is a highly underrated art form. In fact, two of my favorite “movies” of all time, Band of Brothers and Lonesome Dove, are miniseries. Miniseries are the only way to fully present a book on screen in all its richness. Also, to be fair, the filmmakers behind Gods & Generals also made Gettysburg, a fine Civil War film.

But still…I watched the whole damn thing. Yeah, some of it was painful, particularly the scenes that had, you know, dialogue. (in fact, some of the worst dialogue is uttered by Stonewall Jackson, played by the fine actor Stephen Lang, who you probably saw as Colonel Quaritch in a little flick called Avatar.)

But the battle scenes –it’s impossible to take your eyes away from the battle scenes, particularly if you’ve ever been captivated by the Civil War. The first clash at Bull Run. The Northern waves rolling up Marye’s Heights at Fredericksburg. And most compellingly, the Confederates under Robert Rodes stealthily emerging from the woods to hit O.O. Howard’s troops at Chancellorsville, the high mark of the Confederacy.

The Civil War is the American Iliad, and seeing these scenes brought to life as realistically as it’s ever been done is extraordinary. And it’s a reminder of the enduring attraction of the Civil War.

A Dramatic Climax
Ken Burns, the brilliant documentarian who made The Civil War and many other extraordinary documentaries about America, recounted a conversation he had with Shelby Foote, the historian who became an unlikely star in Burns’ masterpiece. Burns mentioned that he had never been to Ford’s Theater, the site of Lincoln’s assassination, because he found the idea of being there too emotionally painful.

Foote exclaimed, “But Lincoln’s assassination was the best part of the Civil War!” (Or something to that effect; I’m going from memory on the quote).

Burns was shocked. He knew Foote to be a great admirer of Lincoln; in fact Foote believed Lincoln and Nathan Bedford Forrest* to be the two authentic geniuses produced by The Civil War.

* Forrest is a fascinating individual, in many ways the epitome of the best and worst of America. He was a poor man who made a fortune, but the fortune was made at least in part as a slave trader. He was a brilliant, self-taught cavalry commander; a born genius on the battlefield, he was the only individual to enlist as a private and finish the war as a lieutenant general. He was an early leader of the Ku Klux Klan, but in 1875 gave a speech that recommended what was, for the time, an enlightened and radically aggressive agenda of equality for black Americans. The curious contradictory nature of Forrest made him a touchstone for many writers, notably Faulkner. Today he is mostly known as the guy who gave Mr. Gump his first name. It must pain the ghost of N.B. Forrest, one of the most aggressive military leaders in American history, that his name is most famously associated with the expression “Run, Forrest, run!!”

But Burns slowly realized what Foote meant. Shelby Foote was a novelist by training and a historian by accident. And as a novelist the assassination of Abraham Lincoln – days after Appomattox but before the final surrender of the South – was a dramatic climax to the story of the Civil War, a perfect finish to a beautifully constructed plot. (Burns, on the other hand, is the classic sensitive artist type, hence his reluctance to enter Ford’s).

That story stayed with me, and the more I thought about it the more I realized that Americans’ enduring interest in the Civil War can be partly explained by the unusually dramatic arc of the war. In fact, it all plays out rather nicely as a 3-act play.

Act I
The first act centers on the run-up to and start of the war.

It can start in many places – as early as the first slaves arriving in Virginia, or the compromises built into the Constitution, or the end of the Mexican War, which added new states to the Union and new controversy over whether those states would be free or not.

But I’d start it on May 22, 1856, when South Carolina Senator Preston Brooks beat Massachussets Senator Charles Sumner with a wooden cane on the floor of the Senate, in response to an anti-slavery speech made Sumner three days earlier. The beating was so savage that Sumner couldn’t return to the Senate for 3 years. *

* And people get worked up about Joe Wilson – also of South Carolina - shouting “You Lie!” during President Obama’s healthcare speech, or Rahm Emmanuel's bullying. Anyone who thinks Washington DC used to be more civil should get thee to a library.

From there we’d follow the story through Bleeding Kansas, the Lincoln-Douglas debates, Lincoln’s election, Secession, and the Fort Sumter crisis. We’d be introduced to characters who’d become important later – like Robert E. Lee, a colonel in the United States Army, who ends John Brown’s siege of Harper’s Ferry.

Act I ends with the bombardment of Fort Sumter and the beginning of the Civil War.

Act II
The story of Act II is the story of the underdog Confederacy. They are outnumbered, out gunned, out-allied, out-everything – and yet they win battle after battle. Robert E. Lee is the star of Act II, and a succession of bumbling Union generals provide the pathos and the comedy. But others rise too – the flamboyant Confederate cavalryman Jeb Stuart, an eloquent but unsure Abraham Lincoln learning his job, and just offstage, a stoic Union general named U.S. Grant providing foreshadowing out West.

Act II has no shortage of political drama, as Lincoln balances the demands of Radical Republicans who want abolition and Copperhead Democrats who want to let the South go. He demonstrates his political shrewdness through the timing and military justification for the Emancipation Proclamation.

Act II ends with the Southern invasion of Pennsylvania and the dramatic victory by the Union at Gettysburg, coupled with Grant’s victory at Vicksburg. With the end of the act, the tide has turned.

Act III
Here’s where Foote’s observation about Ford’s Theater comes into play. Act III would be a fairly boring act – a grinding series of battles between Lee and Grant leading to the inevitable Union victory. There is no drama and little poetry during the brutal final 9 months of the war. Then – pow! – John Wilkes Booth, who fittingly happens to be an accomplished dramatic actor*, kills Lincoln, leaps onto the stage and runs out of the theater. A despicable act, but as Foote says, from a dramatic standpoint the highlight of the war, and the one that destined Lincoln for the pantheon.

* Again...people who think actors and their political views are annoying now should recall the past...

Of course a great play requires more than just compelling characters and a well-structured plot. It needs dialogue, and boy does the CW deliver dialogue. Quotes from Lincoln alone fill books, but many other quotes from "Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead" to "War is hell" derive from the War Between the States.


One can argue, certainly, that the American Revolution is a more important war. The Revolution created America, whereas the Civil War merely maintained it. And we have been, since at least 1994's Saving Private Ryan, obsessed with the Second World War.

But the Civil War endures, and I suspect it will for a long time. The walls of Troy were stormed some 3000 years ago (or maybe not; who knows?) and many of us are still familiar with the feats of Achilles, Hector, and Odysseus.

Will the same be true of the American Civil War? I suspect so, and like the Iliad, it will be in part because of its dramatic structure.