Diversions

As Serious As Football

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This morning was a chance to ponder the mysteries of life.

As a New England Patriots supporter (the Calgary Stampeders having missed the NFL playoffs again this year), I’m still in shock over the Pats’ upset 24-21 win over No. 1 seeded San Diego yesterday. The Patriots had no business winning that game. Tom Brady was unexpectedly off-target with many of his passes. More than once I was yelling at the TV screen “what the [heck] are you throwing at?” The experts last week, almost to a man, picked San Diego to win. The folks in San Diego were booking airline tickets for the Superbowl in Miami in early February. The city of San Diego was advance planning their Superbowl parade celebrations on city streets. Yet somehow New England scored 10 unanswered points in the last five minutes of the game, and won the game on a missed San Diego field goal in the final few seconds of play. What planet are we on?

And what would sports writers and fans make of this strange, strange turn of events? Of opportunities lost on both sides? Of outstanding athletes blowing very hot and very cold over the course of sixty minutes of play? Of the top seeded team, with the NFL’s MVP, losing at home?

It was an eye-opening experience to surf the Web this morning because I don’t read much sports journalism. The game was dissected in a thousand different ways. A few writers were clearly “in the bag” for one team or another but by and large I learned a great deal more about the game through the eyes of people who know it far better than I. It was clear, however, we’d watched the same game. The reference points, and the general sense of what was important, were the same.

It was a column by Pete King on the Sports Illustrated website which brought me up short and gave me reason to think. Here’s first-year NY Jets coach Eric Mangini’s post-season comments to the press corps:

I want to thank all of you guys. I know it’s been a long season for you. I appreciate your patience with me. I know I haven’t been Don Rickles in here. I’m trying. I think I made some progress. I’ll continue to try to make progress. I think the things that you guys do is extremely important. You’re the conduit to the fans. I just appreciate your patience with me and your understanding and your support throughout the course of the season.

“A conduit to the fans.” Jeez. That’s right. The media’s there to inform the fans.

It got me thinking. Most sports writers have an opinion. And certainly the local sports writers have an investment in communicating as much about their teams as humanly possible. Fan appetite for information is insatiable and where newspapers, TV and the Internet can’t satisfy it, fans will simply manufacture it themselves. Their passion is legendary.

Yet something still distinguishes sports media from the “current events” media — the MSM — that I usually read. Most of the sports media actually recognize that there are things that the coaches and players will not tell them. Never have. Never will. That the media do not require, and will not get, a briefing on all the details of a game plan, and certainly don’t need ongoing espionage operations to do a good job for their employers and readers. Coach Bill Belichick of the New England Patriots is legendary for his non-informative press conferences, yet sports reporters still line up to hear his words. One reason. His team wins, mostly.

Part of the “good guys” winning requires that the media play it straight. They can read between the lines all they want. They can dream up whatever schemes, plans, and strategies they think will prevail. They can interprete the slightest facial twitch or player limp in whatever way they want. But they cannot, must not, seek to betray confidences that would benefit the opposing team. A reporter who consistently attempted to sabotage the local team’s game plans would quickly be looking for work in a different discipline. Fans have too much invested in their teams to let that kind of behaviour continue.

Thus my broader view for the day — America will get the MSM it wants when America takes its national security as seriously as its football.

We don’t need “happy hacks” (to quote Mickey Kaus) but we do need media who recognize that they’ve got some skin in this game. That there are things that they do not need to know, immediately, under a system of representative government. That their role in life is not to undermine the effectiveness of the local team. Yes, we want to know the strengths and weaknesses. But winning the game … not exposing how the game is to be won … is what ultimately counts to the fans.

Bill Belichick, Tom Brady, and the New England Patriots move on to the AFC Championship against Indianapolis next week. And the fans couldn’t care less what they discussed LAST week. Thank goodness the media in Pats’ world are actually required to love football more than themselves. Football fans can still dictate how the game is played.

Maybe America needs a few more fans.

Industrial Archaeology: Aerojet’s Everglades Rocket Factory

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In the 1960s the Aerojet company was considered* as the possible supplier of solid-fuel rocket motors to be used as primary power plants for the Saturn I space booster. The idea was to use a single, very large rocket motor in place of a cluster of smaller, though still large motors on the Saturn’s first stage.

The first-stage motor (see also the photo of a test-firing on this page) was to be approximately 21 feet in diameter — so big that it could not be transported by road, rail or air. Aerojet therefore built a facility in the Florida Everglades, about forty miles South-Southwest of Miami and remote from residential areas, where the motors could be assembled and tested, and from there barged to the Atlantic Ocean and then up the coast to Cape Canaveral, where they launched the rockets. The State of Florida provided land and built the canal that Aerojet wanted. (A corporate-welfare boondoggle, yes, but probably a modest one in the grand scheme of such things.)

[*Update: Rand Simberg was kind enough to link to this post. One of his commenters says that Werner Von Braun, designer of the Saturn I, never considered using a solid booster, and that Aerojet’s Everglades plant was thus a self-inflicted boondoggle by the company. Another commenter provides a link to a website (search on the word “Thiokol”) that provides information about a plant that Thiokol built in Georgia to develop rocket motors similar to the ones that Aerojet developed. At least one of the Encyclopedia Astronautica articles about Aerojet, to which I linked above, mentions Thiokol as a parallel developer of large solids. However, I don’t know enough to evaluate this information, so I am putting it all out with the suggestion that you read the comments on Rand’s post.]

You can read the Encyclopedia Astronautica articles linked above to get a better idea of the project’s technical history. The short version is that NASA never did use Aerojet’s giant rocket motors, and Aerojet eventually gave up on its plant and sold the land back (nice trick) to the State of Florida, which holds it to this day as a nature preserve. Most of the original buildings associated with the plant, and some of the machinery, appear to be still there, albeit in decrepit condition. It’s accessible, though the last couple of miles of the access road are closed to motor vehicles, so if you want to visit you have to bicycle or walk part of the way. There are a few houses nearby, and people come to bird watch or to fish in the canal that parallels the road, but the place is essentially deserted once you get past the no-motor-vehicles-beyond-this-point sign.

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Happy Thanksgiving

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Worked late last night. Tired. Wanted to do sleepin’, but made four pies instead. Stuffing tomorrow. I’d rather do it the night before, but the wall has been hit. The computer was between me and the arms of Morpheus, so this is the last stop.

Saying prayers with the kids, I asked them to thank God for various things. Before they went to bed we talked about the Pilgrims. I told them that we would not have liked everything about the Pilgrims. They would not have liked us, since we are Catholics, for one thing. But we had to respect their courage and their faith in God. They believed they were doing the right thing, worshipping God in their way, and they left everything civilization offered to go across a trackless desert of water, to a wilderness more remote than anything we can now imagine or experience. The Pilgrims were tough and serious people,and they knew how to say “no” — to themselves, to their own weakness, to the temptations of comfort over principle, to fear.

If we are ever put the test like they were, how strong are our own principles? Would we get on that ship? Would we have the spirit to kneel on the ground and thank God upon arriving at the edge of that sea-facing forest, where there was not a chair to sit in or a roof or a wall or a fireplace to warm your hands?

This country was founded by great people. Not perfect people, but people who had an ample supply of the most rock-solid virtues. Be grateful for them, and for what they started, and do your best to hand it on better than it was when you came along.

God bless my fellow ChicagoBoyz and Girlz, our readers, our friends and our enemies. Enjoy the day. Hug your parents, and your children. Have two pieces of pie, just not enormous pieces.

God bless America.