The Songs of Wandering Shortstops

The dunk competition from NBA's All Star weekend showed some real creativity on the part of their athletes. Check it out at this link at The Huffington Post of all places. I don't know about you, but I prefer my reverse jams a little to the left. I must say that I do not really see a place for discussion about the dunk comp or any judged sport on this site. I love a lot of judged sport, do not get me wrong. I thought it was great to see Dwight Howard being what wrestlers would call a "good worker" by putting over the young talent. The point is at WCTS, we are trying to get a form of competitive sport recognized as an art form that is as yet unseen. It's like, of course something being judged on style points is art. Basically, all judged sporting events are beyond this discussion. That's someone else's blog. This is something quite different.

I guess a good place to start is Yeats' "The Song of Wandering Aengus." This is one artist trying to describe another artist creating and the constant need to do so. The act begins "Because a fire was in my head," and maps out this eternal and universal desire by the artist to forever seek out this inspiration that allows one to create through their own creations. This is all done while constantly knowing that it is something they will never truly encapsulate or reproduce. Everybody still with me? It is about how inspiration cannot be manufactured, but requires a quest of sorts. The same thing can be applied to sports and their athletes. They have their quests to try and create within. They are called plays, downs, at bats, shifts, possessions, games, series, seasons, careers. Each one produces different sorts of opportunity for creation to varying degrees of success.

Whenever I drive past a ball diamond, I always think of the stories that have unfolded there. Whether it be a well-looked-after pro-quality park or some old, neglected weed haven behind an elementary school, drama of all sorts has occurred at these places. It is both upsetting and inspiring to know that there are so many games at so many levels that will forever go unnoticed and unmentioned. At the same time, much like a freshly zambonied sheet of ice, it represents possibility. It is the canvas that which the "fire in the heads" of the athlete brings them to. What makes team sports particularly unique, aside from the astonishing fact that they have generally a few split seconds to create in their medium, is that it does contain tangible moments of concrete success. However, the truth is that they are just as fleeting as Inspirado herself. You will never score the very last goal, hit the final home run, even win the last championship. A select few have and will retire after a championship, but because the form endures through new games, seasons, etc., the sport itself remains a driving force. It's that clean sheet of ice or that old ball diamond, that "hazel wood." With each athletic opportunity, the athlete will continue to go here, and "pluck til time and times are done."


- Update regarding last week's post - A method to Mickey's madness?

"Who is this Rey Mysterio? And what does she do?"

So yeah, it was only a matter of time before I wrote about wrestling. I had been meaning to do it for a while, and seeing Mickey Rourke on a Kimmel rerun with Roddy Piper gave me that final kick in the ass that I needed. You see, I grew up with pro wrestling and it remains something to which I still have a genuine interest. I'm not entirely sure when I realized the matches were pre-determined. One day I was feeling thrilled to do the chore of bringing wood up to our fireplace in freezing Alberta winter, (something I usually detested) simply because Strike Force had won the tag belts. Some time later I was hoping that Bret would get a bigger push beyond his Intercontinental Champion status.

There were a lot of reasons why I began the presentation that started this project of mine with a quote from Bret Hart. First, wrestling is the only forum in which acting styles used by Chaplin and Keaton still thrive. The faces are always BIG, right? Add to that the snobbish attitudes of modernism running parallel to the present day average person's view of wrestling. Perhaps most important is the fact that pro wrestling is a blend of athletics and performance. They work to try and produce the thrills, chills, and plot twists that some real sporting events have to hope will happen (see previous post).

I loved The Wrestler of course, and a big reason had to do with the little man behind the curtain being revealed just a little bit more. How it got ignored for a Best Picture nom (along with Bruce's Best Song snub) is beyond me. Especially when Slumdog keeps winning awards. Say it with me: it's just a movie about a guy from India trying to get his girlfriend back. Gah. I'm not sure why I still get pissy about these things when it happens every year. Seen Juno lately? Anyways, The Wrestler. Super good. Like I said though, I have always liked getting to see a little more about wrestling's backstage going-ons. For instance, I actually watched Hogan's Celebrity Championship Wrestling series, and despite it looking like one big work from the start (my friend Kelly asked me, "Isn't all reality TV one big work?"), it somehow revealed to me that Brian Knobbs is a great match writer. I had never even really thought about that job existing in the manner that it did.

Anyways, Aronofsky's film got its critical acclaim, and we have all seen Rourke's announcement that he would wrestle for realzies at Wrestlemania 25. Then he backed out on Larry King after Chris Jericho spoke via satellite. Even though press releases said he had backed out, my initial reaction was that this was all a work. Chris Jericho would comment further on the next Raw about how Mickey ran away with his tail between his legs and the angle would progress. The interesting thing was that as I was thinking about this, my non-wrestling fan friends started telling me that they had heard Randy "The Ram" would not get another shot. It was at that point that I started hoping it was a work, mostly because there remains a belief among wrestling fans that it may well be. If this backing out were to end up being all part of the story, that same general public that thinks wrestling is stupid would have been outsmarted by wrestling.

So, I tuned in to Raw and sure enough, Jericho took a dig at Rourke backing out, but there have been no developments in the week or so since regarding the match being "back on." So it may all be my personal pipe dream that this match takes place. I really hope it does though, because that kid that loved Strike Force in me wants to see a "Ram Jam," the wrestling observer in me wants to see what kind of story these two men could tell, as well as what kind of bumps they are willing to take in the process, and the absolute adoration I have always had in me for these guys and their sport/art form wants to see it eke closer to a place that for them has always seemed unreachable: artistic credibility.

"You are a good and beautiful game."

When Paul Thomas Anderson was in the process of finishing Magnolia, he commented on how he was taking things from real life. As the great Ricky Jay would say as the narrator, "...we generally say, 'Well if that was in a movie I wouldn't believe it.'" Do we sometimes forget how ridiculously unlikely some occurrences are?

Sometimes it rains frogs. Really, it does. And sometimes we get a really great Superbowl. The fact that if it was in a movie, it would seem ridiculous only amplifies its importance. There is a reason why people will remember not just the one big play, but remember the game itself and the plays within. Think of the storylines. Will the Steelers defence really show how bad-ass they can be? Uh, sure. And in doing so, produce what many are already calling the greatest single play ever seen in the big game. Wanna bet they'll still remember the game more though? Fitzgerald lived up to his billing as the greatest wide receiver in the world, and Roethlisberger showed that he could move past his self-admitted "tarnished" first ring. If there was a big question about Kurt Warner going in to last Sunday, it was whether or not he belonged in the hall of fame. Another part of what made this year's show extraordinary and unique was that he confirmed his place in the hallowed halls as a losing quarterback.
This all led to Santonio Holmes making a catch that is iconic of what makes the NFL, for me the most consistently entertaining sport going. To really appreciate it through two separate images, go from the one above to #13 on this site. I can explain to you why it resonates so much for me but by now, you have no doubt seen this play dissected from every-which angle. I could gush forever about how brilliant the LeBron homage in the endzone celebration was for God's sake. We can say the same about the other events I touched on too, but I guess that makes my point.

This game will definitely continue to be remembered as it fades away in to NFL films of lore, somehow the talk of it will also give it this weird kind of legendary feel. Whether you want to call it the "best game ever" is simply up to whoever wants to call it that or not. A lot of people are still sticking with Tyree over Harrison's play above, so go figure. The important thing to remember is best revealed through a revisiting and paraphrasing of Ricky Jay's Magnolia closing monologue. See if you can picture his voice saying it: "In Tampa Bay on February 1st, 2009, there were stories of coincidence and chance and intersections and strange things told and which is which and who only knows... and someone's so and so passed the ball to someone's so and so and so on --."

Unlike Jay's closing words that follow, what makes sports truly a mark of importance is that "these strange things" do not "happen all the time." For about 4 hours it did though. It really did. And I didn't even mention The Boss.