Sports

College Football and Memory

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When I started following sports as a kid, I was fascinated by the Dodgers. I hated them, but with that cool stadium, the uniforms, and that LA vibe, I mean, wow. To me they were LA so when I heard some of the older folks starting to reminiscence about the “Brooklyn Dodgers” and that d*** Walter O’Malley, I found their bitterness hard to comprehend. I was seven, the Dodgers were always LA, and these old guys needed to stop living in the past. I didn’t ask them if they tied onions to their belts when they went to the games in Brooklyn, which I heard was the style at the time.

I think I understand them better now.

They have broken up the Pac-12, my conference since I was a kid, for spare parts to feed TV schedules. I’m reminded of Karl Marx and his quip about capitalism changing our social relations.

Living in Arizona, the Pac-12 was the dream. Day-trips out to LA to catch whoever ASU was playing. Five hour drive, hit the In-N-Out Burger in Palm Desert, both driving out and coming back. Living in Arizona you had a love-hate relationship with LA and with California in general, call it an inferiority complex. However, sitting in those stadiums! There was the Rose Bowl when the sun started to set behind the San Gabriel Mountains. Then there was the LA Coliseum. Al Davis was right when he called it a dump, but to go to a game in that place was as close as a western boy was getting to Yankee Stadium

Then there were the weekend trips to places like Eugene and Corvallis. Strange lands of green landscapes, humidity, and this water falling from the sky that they called rain.

That was the Pac-12, our conference, for us westerners. We were in a time zone that played games when the rest of the country went to bed. Games played in places that were either paradise or big sky. Now we are going to places where people want to escape from: Cincinnati, Oklahoma, Iowa.

A little while ago, a friend of mine reminded me before there was a Pac–12 there used to be a Pac 10. In fact he remembered there used to be a Pac-8 before 1978 when they let in the hicks from Arizona, and wow did the rest of the conference kick up a storm. What I saw as permanence was in reality a snapshot in the midst of constant change.

As my friend said, you had 45 years in the Pac, that should be enough. Things change, life moves on.

This Fall, there’s going to be a kid who starts watching college football for the first time and he will think that it’s normal for USC-Rutgers or ASU-Cincinnati to be a conference game. That’s okay, I can live with that. That belongs to him in the same way that for me the Dodgers belong in LA.

However, I’m never going to a conference game in Cincinnati.

Worthwhile Reading

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Vitaliy Katsenelson writes worthwhile content for those interested in investing, art, classical music, and philosophical thoughts about life in general.  See his recent post about coveting and envy.

Doggedness, canine and human.

A piece about skateboarding and flying, with thoughts from St-Exupery.

Speaking about flying, TxRed the Cat Rotator writes about some of her aerobatic experiences.

Projecting (simulated) 3D images onto your plate.

Doctors and state borders.

A Moment to Decide

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Once to ev’ry man and nation
Comes the moment to decide,
In the strife of truth and falsehood,
For the good or evil side;
Some great cause, some great decision,
Off’ring each the bloom or blight,
And the choice goes by forever
‘Twixt that darkness and that light.

– James Russell Lowell

So the first shots in the shooting war have been fired, to the surprise of practically no one who has been following civic matters over the last six months. Admittedly, that the first would be fired in Kenosha, of all places that’s a bit of a surprise. Although it isn’t at all startling that a Trump supporter would be gunned down on the streets of Portland by an Antifa thug shortly thereafter, to resounding cheers of approval.

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Creating a Mass Audience

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Today marks the 99th anniversary of the first radio broadcast heard by a very large number of people:  the Dempsey vs Carpentier boxing match.  (Although a Carpentier was French, he had quite a following in the United States, owing to his distinguished record as a pilot in the First World War.)

Boxing promoter Tex Ricard had the idea that radio broadcasting might be a good way to increase the popularity of prizefighting…there had previously been some broadcasts of fights in local areas with limited audiences, but what was envisaged for this broadcast was a much larger audience over a much wider area.  David Sarnoff of RCA, a strong advocate for the development of a broadcasting industry, was evidently a driving force behind this approach.  A dedicated phone line from ringside to a transmitter in Hoboken was established, and radio amateurs throughout the Middle Atlantic states were encouraged to set up their receivers in bars, auditoriums, etc, for the benefit of those people (most of the population) who did not have their own radio receivers.  The radio audience was estimated at 300,000 people.

The broadcast was not national in scope, owing to the limitations of the AM radio band, but it was a significant milestone in the the delocalization of information.  Very soon, network broadcasting, enabled by long-distance dedicated phone links, would make possible programs with truly national audiences.  The delocalization trend has continued, with television, intercontinental links via satellite and undersea cable, and the Internet, and has been a powerful driver of social, economic, and political changes.

 

More and Better Disclosures!

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It’s now required for publicly-traded companies to publish the ratio between the CEO’s annual compensation and that of the median employee.  That ratio is, for example,  367:1 at Disney (Robert Iger), 124:1 at Deere & Co (Samuel Allen), and 50:1 for Whirlpool (Jeff Fettig). Link

These numbers (which, it should be clarified, include seasonal and part-time employees) have caused much alarm in many quarters, and even referred to as heralding a “crisis of capitalism.”

But why stop at CEOs and other business executives when requiring this kind of analysis?  My idea is that there are many other fields in which high-visibility disclosures could be interestingly required…

In movies, for example, it should be required that the opening credits include the ratio of the pay of each of the top 5 stars to the median pay of the entire crew that worked on the film–including accounting clerks, boom operators, sweepers, and various ‘assistants to’.

In professional sports, team uniforms should display prominently the total value of the player’s current contract.  This feature would greatly add to the pleasure of fans, who could instantly and continuously compare the player’s financial value to his demonstrated, moment-by-moment playing-field value.

At colleges and universities, a sign out front of the president’s mansion should display the ratio of his compensation to that of the median faculty member, which category of course must include the starvation-paid adjunct professors.  (The compensation number for the president should certainly include the imputed value of his university-provided mansion and any other similar benefits, such as cars and drivers.)

For politicians, the disclosure problem is a little more complicated, since in many cases the main financial payoff for these jobs is in the form of “deferred compensation”, i.e., lobbying positions and consulting contracts offered after the term of office ends, in recognition of services rendered while in office.  About all I can think of for the politician class is that, for all public appearances, they must wear jackets, with the names of their top sponsoring/contributing organizations prominently emblazoned, in a manner similar to the way racecar drivers display the names of their sponsors.

There are probably a lot of additional possibilities for disclosure and transparency, which the ChicagoBoyz and Chicago Grrrlz and Readerz can surely suggest.

Concerning those who support the CEO pay-ratio requirement but would object to these further suggestions…I have to wonder if their primary agenda really concerns ‘inequality’ or is really about something else.