These distraction-free days of late-October are painful, depending on where your loyalties lie.  With David Carr stating "We've only just begun" after the Texans first win of the season ("preseason" turned out to be 10 games long), arguably the NFL season is limping towards the playoffs  But I guess this is the equivalent of going for dessert before the main meal, the World Series was on the whole...tormenting.  After losing Game 3 at home, those 15 innings, a game well past midnight, our first World Series game in Houston, everything hurt, and I've felt less spent from running 10 miles than I did after witnessing this...from avoiding talk radio, highlights on the news, to fighting the urge to disembowl bandwagon fans that seemed to crawl out from nowhere and appear everywhere (I swear, some of these people should never speak...in fact, they can start with giving up on breathing.  This goes for White Sox "fans" too. Hailing from Chicago doesn't entitle one to a share of their celebration.  You know who you are, and you should be ashamed of yourself. It's like shaking hands with the devil, although I doubt even he would do so if you've been anywhere near Moises Alou).  On top of trying to muster the faith that maybe we can pull a couple wins, make this series a little more close...but asking "Where is the fatal flaw...?" Game 4 came and went, and so did all of the talk, hype, Clemens jerseys and Astros caps...but I still had mine, the hollow feeling somewhere close to my stomach included.  Conciliatory "You saw the game?" quotes and the infamous "It's just a game" line filled my ears for the next couple of days, but that empty feeling still took up more space than all of this...garbage.  I still can't get over it.  For once, I ignored the annual "R.I.P." that was thrown on the front page of the sports section when the Astros were 15 under.  They had the most amazing pitching staff in the majors.  They showed they were capable of dominating the dreaded Braves that had ended many a past playoff run.  They came out on top against the historically, succesful St. Louis Cardinals in brilliant fashion...Everything said "This was our year." Apparently this was all wrong, or maybe everything was really just me.  I'm making allowances for anything...

Right now, everything is telling me that this was an amazing year. Arguably, the best.  Afterall, they did make it to the World Series for the first time, led by three guaranteed/potential/more than likely, but if they don't, I'm going to have to choke a bitch if they don't vote them Hall of Famers.  A year of amazing pitching performances by starting "aces" and relievers alike.  The 18-inning game is definitely in there as an all-time favorite of mine.  The "birthday game".  Just this year, and I'm not even going to start with past names, faces, games...An awesome culmination of my entire experience in following this team over the years.

I'll demolish in print any fool who would argue we couldn't have won it all...     

But, despite this, it's still wrong.  I'm unable to settle for the moral victories anymore with this team.  Forty plus years of existence.  We need the World Series.  I'll still be watching, and it will come.  So it goes.

On a last note, despite all of this, for the fact there are a good number of people who don't understand, refuse to/can't sympathize...I'm beginning to subscribe to the theory that sports is like jazz.  The intricacies and emotions aren't easily seen, and some are just resigned to the notion there's nothing there for them.  It's not for everyone, not even most.  All of this is just self-therapy. I'm sinking in these thoughts in a quest to find out how deep is the ocean.  Let me be. 

Passage from "Classic Wiley," a collection of essays, columns, and passages from various books by the late Ralph Wiley.

On the Natural Superiorty of Black Athletes

Are black people, all people of African descent but especially African-American men, naturally superior atheltes?If you are asking me, I'd have to say, not that I've noticed.  But why ask in the first place?  I want to know why black men have to be naturally superior athletes.  If we are, it would inevitably follow that black men are naturally inferior at something else.  Like thinking.  Trust me.  If not me, trust history.  Go back to Germany fifty years ago.  Go back a hundred years, to the Trail of Tears toward Oklahoma.  Go to South Africa next weekend.  It follows black people are not quite...right.  Not quite...human.

So the question becomes why ask? Ego? Sour grapes?  More?  This is no choice, and I'd rather not see it reach that point, so I will attempt to shatter the theory of racial athletic superiority with an expert exhibition of word-processor boxing.  I'm going to set you up, then hit you with the clincher. 

First, some particulars:

Jimmy "the Greek" Synder was at Duke Zeibert's restaurant in Georgetown in January 1988, just as Doug Williams was about to play quarterback for the Wahsington Redskins in the Super Bowl.  Synder intimated that black people were better athletes because they had been bred to be that way, with large thighs which shot up into their backs.

On a Nightline linterview from Houston in the spring of 1987, Al Campanis, an executive with the Los Angeles Dodgers, said he believed black people lacked "the necessities" to be field or general managers.  "How many are good swimmers?" he asked.  "Or pitchers?" Somewhere, three men named Frank Robinson, Anthony Nesty, and Dwight Gooden weren't laughing.  Here was institutional racism in the flesh, in all its suicidal, self-aggrandizing debasement.

Early in 1989, Tom Brokaw hosted an NBC program entitled "The black Athlete: Fact and Fiction," then went on to utterly ignore the facts for the speculations of two scientists.  Present in panel form were Dr. Harry Edwards, the Berkeley sociologist; Arthur Ashe, the author and former tennis champion; two scientists who were not named Mengele.  Others, like baseball star Mike Schmidt and Olympian Carl Lewis, were heard from on videotape.  This program accomplished one feat--it flushed out a certain...

Robert Stanton, publisher of pulp sports magazines, who wrote Brokaw a letter.  And it was not a love letter. Stanton: "...black players lack discipline, and they are the ones mostlikely to get into trouble...[A] black player in gneeral pays less attention to such things as showing up on time or following a rigid routine....[Edwards's] contention that blacks turn to athletics because they cannot do well in other professions is ridiculous.  They can be lawyers, doctors, or businessmen if they so desire.  But it takes hard work and discipline, and in many instances tehy are not willing to pay the price...Quarterback is a very intricate position and ther are not many blacks qualified...If you gave twenty white college players an IQ test, the whites would outshine the blacks every time."

We can strike Snyder and Campanis.  You could nearly understand them.  They were old, fat with the kill, and drunk or getting there.  Television cameras and reporters Ed Hotaling and Ted Koppel happened to show up at the wrong time for them.  Stanton was ignorant, which would be fine, except he had the forum to disseminate his ignorance.  He undoubtedly kowtowed to journalism's double standard regarding black and white athletes.  A middle-aged black former athlete "overdoses on drugs," and his immoral carcass is laid open on journalism's streets.  A midle-aged white former athlete "has a heart attack of undetermined cause" and we are told how much he loved children.  Stanton also wrote that Doug Williams's brilliant performance in the 1988 Super Bowl "may have been a fluke."  Stanton is inaccurate here.  Make that four flukes.  In one quarter.  On one leg.

But why would a sober sort like Brokaw enter this debacle?  His program, while it attempted seriousness, played like a badly tuned face.  Here the doctors were advancing the fast-twitch, slow-twitch muscle theory which states that black people from a certain region of Africa (they can't make up their minds if it is East or West Africa) and their more immediate descendants are better at explosive sports, sprints in track, short distances, hoop, while Europeans have slow-twitch muscles which enable them to win the longer races.  This came after an Olympics where white men had won the gold medals in basketball and volleyball, which are quite explosive sports.

Meanwhile, blacks from Kenya dominated the long-distance races out on the track, and later Ethiopians dominated the Boston Marathon and world cross-country championships.  The Russian Valery Borzov, a white man, won the Olympic gold medal in hudred meters in 1972.  The Russians won the four-by-hundred meter relay in 1988 as well.  And the wolrd two-hundred-meter record holder is not Carl Lewis, but an Italian, of all people, Pietro mennea.  No one on Tom Brokaw's special brought this up, least of all the doctors, who were too busy admitting they were testing the muscle fibers in all these cute little children's legs.

It was weird.

Then came the tape of Mike Schmidt, saying he would have to agree that black men seem to have the edge as natural athletes.  I guess they never had any mirrors in the clubhouse of the Philadelphia Philies, for whom Schmidt toiled so long and so well.  Mike Schmidt is only the greatest third baseman in the history of Major League Baseball.  Lots of black men have played third base in the major leagues since Jackie Robinson broke the color line.  Yet Schmidt still thinks black men are naturally superior athletes.  He'd always wanted to slam-dunk, but he could only hit 548 home runs in the Show.  Poor Schmitty. 

Then came Carl Lewis, who said black athletes seemed to be "made better." Carl can be narcisssistic.  If he was Serbo-Croatian, they would be "made better," no doubt.  Ashe said "My head tells me yes, but my heart tells me no," or vice versa, on the question.  The greatest victory of Ashe's career came at Wimbledon in 1975, when he defeated Jimmy Connors.  By this time, Connors, who is white, was quicker and hit harder than Ashe.  Connors was, in fact, the number one player in the world.  But Ashe out-thought him, refusing to play power against power.  Ashe moved the ball around, gave Connors nothing to feed off, and won on guile as much as athletic ability.  but his heart said no and his head said yes, or vice versa.  Ashe had recnetly completed a compendium entitled "The History of the Black Athlete," so I assume he was caught up in his subject matter.

Many older black people subscribe to the theory that black men are naturally superior athletes.  No way you can convince them otherwise.  There are reasons for their attitude.  Before integration of sports in ths country (which came after the abberation of Jack Johnson, and began in the boxing ring with Joe Louis and in baseball with Jackie Robinson), all the testimonials were that black people were naturally inferior athletically, as in everything else.  Black men could not develop the mental discipline it took to go fifteen rounds, or play second base in a taut, 2-1 World Series game....

More to come soon enough, but in light of the release of the sixth book in the Harry Potter series, I'd like to announce the release of my own story.  One of wizards, dragons, and Cleveland Browns fans.  It has potential.  (Seriously, am I the only, who upon seeing the movie clip in Madden '05 of a group of "Browns fans" cheering, thought they were paid actors?)  In any case, football season needs to arrive, and I need to start getting my fantasy squads in order.