Sunday Punch

Taking the Bad With the Good

I love the NCAA tournament and all of the drama it produces: the scouting, preparation, strategy, and counter strategy by the coaches, the matchups between individual players and teams, the all-out effort by players who understand that any misstep or lapse in attention could end their season.

At the same time, there are a few disheartening aspects about the tournament. The commercial breaks that reduce the flow of the games to sudden (and protracted) stops and starts are a fact of life for the televised existence of the tournament. There’s nothing to be done about that. Well, I suppose we could wish for some kind of ad filter that would edit out the obvious, the witless, and the smug crassness and tastelessness of many of the messages. Has anyone if real life ever witnessed any of the bizarrely nerdy and anti-social behavior exhibited by young men in the light beer and/or insurance commercials? Perhaps Baudelaire had this in mind when he wrote of “the immense nausea of advertisements.”

I could live without the narcissism and outsized ego of some of the coaches and players. When not preening or arguing every call that goes against their team, a few big-time coaches settle for sarcastic smiles, as if to say, “That call is so ridiculous that all I can do is laugh.”  Likewise I could easily forego the now-commonplace primal screams released by players after a climactic moment as well as the chest-pounding, “look at me” antics and the angry glares into the cameras. Who or what, exactly, are they mad at?

I once asked Jerry West if showtime is an inextricable part of the game. “I suppose it is,” West said. “You see it all the time. You see some guy go do something and you watch his man kick his ass the whole game, and you start to say, ‘Hey, that guy after the game is probably laughing at you.’ But we do have excitable and emotional players and, again, that’s part of the game today.”

Villains Are More Interesting Than Heroes

“The color of truth is gray,” wrote Andre Gide. In his preview in the New York Times of “The Borgias,” the Showtime mini-series that begins next Sunday, Charles McGrath writes about Jeremy Irons, who plays Rodrigo Borgia: “The roles of characters who are strange or morally enigmatic have come to him…partly by accident, or because he has a reputation for playing them, and partly because he has sought them out.”

“Certainly they attract me,” Irons told McGrath. “I’m always interested in good and evil, who’s a good person, who’s a bad person, believing, really, that we’re all rather gray.”

“No one is grayer than Rodrigo Borgia,” writes McGrath. “[He] bought the papacy in a rigged election, had numerous mistresses and fathered four children yet was also a skilled diplomat and renowned patron of the arts.”

Of his research for the role of Rodrigo, Irons said, “It was like a rainbow. The list goes all the way from ‘generous man,’ ‘wonderful company,’ ‘a great organizer’ to ‘poisoner,’ ‘cruel’ and ‘despotic,’ all the worst adjectives you can think of. I thought: ‘That’s very interesting. Maybe it’s all true. Maybe from different vantage points all those adjectives could be seen to be the truth.’ Film is always a kind of patchwork anyway, and my hope is that Rodrigo will emerge as a man of many different colors and many different behaviors. He’s completely different when he’s being persuaded by his daughter or bullied by the mother of his children or negotiating with the Spanish ambassador. I never judge. That’s not my job. I just try to link all those attributes.”

Expendable     

Is there anyone more expendable than a newspaper’s sports television “reporter?” Any bean counter looking to save money should consider this staff position. The requirements of the job of this “beat writer”—a ludicrous assignment—seem to be to sit in front of the tube looking for nits in a broadcast when not grinding a personal ax, stating the obvious, or sucking up to network executives.

Of more value to the reader than any media guardian is an editor who would protect readers’ sensibilities from dull-witted hacks guilty of sycophancy and far greater abuses, especially of the English language, than any member of a television production team.

Game Plan

How many times in this year’s NCAA tournament has a coach called a time-out in the closing moments to draw up a play that results in a long and hasty three-pointer? It’s hard to believe that there was no better option at the time.