Ahhh, it’s all coming back to me now. For the first time, I’ve slipped the Monday Update to a Tuesday in the new era of the Monday Update. I apologize for this delay. The reason for this delay is probably about fifty percent due to me working on a video and fifty percent a simple Roast Beef / Toast situation. I have very little to discuss, as well, which complicates things even further. Or less, whatever. Nobody reads the first paragraphs of things like this anyway:
About a month ago I was at an antique mall and stumbled upon a one-dollar copy of David Halberstam’s The Breaks of the Game. This has been long-considered one of, if not the greatest book ever written about basketball by a large swath of basketball writers and fans, and though I’d always been curious, I’ve never just like happened upon a one dollar paperback copy in the wild like this. For those uninitiated, the book covers the 1979-80 Portland Trailblazers season, after the loss of Bill Walton to the then-San Diego Clippers. I’m only like eighty-five pages in at time of writing, so no spoilies regarding what happened in the 1979-80 NBA Season, please!!!
I’d only read one of Halberstam’s books before - his 1999 book Playing for Keeps: Michael Jordan and the World He Made, but I have a great deal of respect for the research put into that book and the appropriate gravitas given to the topic. That wasn’t my favorite basketball book, for what it’s worth, my favorite basketball book is either John Feinstein’s A Season on the Brink on the 1986 Indiana Hoosiers season or Wilt Chamberlain’s first autobiography Wilt: Just Like Any Other 7-Foot Black Millionaire Who Lives Next Door. From a modern perspective, it is truly incredible how much access Halberstam has, definitely illustrative of a different era of sports media. Like if you went to the Blazers now and tried to write like a fortieth (well, forty-second) anniversary version of The Breaks of the Game about the 2021-22 Portland Trailblazers season, I don’t think we’d be able to get into, say, the racial tensions within the locker room or money issues surrounding Damian Lillard and the front office. Instead what you’d get it surface-level banality like BubbleBall. (I made it like two weeks without talking about that book).
I read Paper Lion last year, the book where George Plimpton plays as a backup quarterback for the Detroit Lions for the purpose of writing a book about it. Just couldn’t happen today - and we’re worse off for it.
The thing that hit me today was this sort of epigraph included in this paperback version of the book:
This was… odd to read. For context - this paperback edition of the book was published in 1983, eleven years before this quote would gain the layer of intrigue that it has now, twenty-five before it would gain the next layer of intrigue, and like thirty-five before it would get the final, probably strangest because of how mundane it all seems as of right now, layer of intrigue that makes this particular man saying “The only thing that endures is character” truly baffling.
I find the quote itself profound, absolutely, and true, and I suppose I don’t have to attribute it to O.J. Simpson himself, if it came from some CBC Hockey announcer that O.J. was listening to one night, but still… O.J. said that? O.J. Simpson said “The only thing that endures is character”? I guess I was born midway through the first murder trial so I never really knew who he was before his public image changed on June 17th, 1994 driving in that Bronco. Also, it quotes Al Cowling? The guy on the phone with the police during the chase? How Bizarre.
It floors me because I do really like the quote and I could also see how a version of OJ Simpson from 1979 before the decade of fame and pressure as a celebrity that probably drove him mentally down the path where he could have… done whatever he did or did not do. I’m not sure what we’re supposed to think about the O.J. case anymore. It feels like one of those things, if by some stroke of fortune I end up having children in my lifetime, that my kid will ask me about someday, like probably when he dies, and ask me who OJ was, and I’ll show them the Naked Gun movies and that’ll be all. How about this - people love a Call to Action, right? Well, leave a comment about whether you think OJ did it or not.
Uh, anyway. I’ll have more to say about the book itself as time goes on and I get further in.
Sunday night brought the Concacaf Gold Cup Final, a game that had more of an effect on me than I figured it would. Within a span of like ten hours, both of the United States senior national soccer teams played against their biggest continental rival - The men against Mexico and the women against Canada. Due to my principles (not wanting to wake up at four AM to watch sports in empty stadiums), I have not watched much of the Olympics this year. I imagine that winning that semifinal match on a penalty felt vindicating for Canada after what happened in the 2012 semifinal, in particular to veterans like Labbé and Sinclair, and I have to imagine it took a little bit of the sting off of the loss to Mexico for John Herdman. I like the Canadian national teams as well as the American ones so I’m not like that heartbroken about it.
But the Gold Cup final was genuinely wonderful in my eyes. It felt so perfect - it was tilting towards 0-0 for about 118 minutes before Miles Robinson broke through and scored that goal. How perfect was it for that goal to happen that way - Caused by the actions of three Americans whose performances at this Gold Cup likely significantly improved their standing among the USMNT player pool - The foul drawn by Nicolas Gioacchini, the free-kick assist by Kellyn Acosta, and the header home by Miles Robinson. Matt Turner was excellent in goal as well for this game.
Robinson’s trajectory was hurt last year by his injury, but it’s worth noting that he was a Best XI player in MLS in 2019 with Atlanta (it’s also worth noting that current Mexico coach Tata Martino didn’t play him nearly at all during 2018 when they were both with Atlanta United) and I think this tournament really represented him getting back on track with the national team. The injury to Walker Zimmerman in the group stages really pushed Robinson up into a position where he had to perform well, and he definitely did on the defensive side, and I think it’s only fitting that he put home the match and tournament-winner in this match.
I was less emotionally affected by this final than I was the Nations League final, probably because the entire tournament was so weird with this not being the assumed “A” Team for the US, but I was still very happy to see what happened.
This makes me very excited for the World Cup qualifiers coming up this fall into next spring. I feel a real sense of hunger coming from this current crop of Americans. The failures in 2017 stung as much as they did because I think they lost the identity that had brought them to the highs of that period between 2009 and 2014. It sounds cliché, but what fans loved about those teams was more about the intensity and the spirit moreso than being the most technical soccer team. It was the relative success in spite of not having the most talented squad in the world (which is a rarity with a lot of American national team sports) that I think endeared that era of USMNT teams to fans, and some of that definitely seemed lost in 2016 and 2017.
So there you have it. Another week, another update. I’m working on a video right now that should be done sometime during this week if I think it’s good. Thank you for reading, and I hope you have a great week, and here’s the Peter Face I promised earlier: