Ownership has its privileges

One of the most satisfying things about sports is that, on any given day, you have something to evaluate. Teams win, teams lose, fans have something to evaluate and talk about. Each game is a self-contained story with a conclusion. And even when the story is off the field, there are winners and losers.

Today, LA Clippers owner Donald Sterling is the loser. This afternoon's announcement by NBA commissioner Adam Silver that Sterling has been banned from the NBA for life, and will be forced to sell the team, quickly capped a story that broke over the weekend. The punishment came in the wake of Sunday's release of secret recordings of Sterling telling girlfriend V. Stiviano to a) not have black people on her Instagram account b) not bring black people to Clippers game, and c) generally not associate with black people. The NBA announced on Sunday that it would investigate the incident, and apparently it didn't take league officials long to conclude that the man on the tape was indeed Sterling.

The reaction from player, fans, and media observers has been almost unanimously positive. Silver is being hailed for his swift and decisive action. But as others have pointed out, what's most remarkable about this entire episode is that the NBA acted so quickly in response to this incident, when Donald Sterling has a fairly long track record of being a despicable human being. Apparently, being sued by the Justice Department and other entities for housing discrimination, paying out the largest settlement for housing discrimination ever recorded by the Justice Department, and having your own General Manager say you ran the team like a plantation owner, wasn't enough for the men who run the league. No, it took a series of reprehensible comments, made in private, to get the league to do something about a man who's owned an NBA franchise for more than 30 years.

Let's not kid ourselves here. While one can applaud Silver for giving no quarter, and trust that he was appalled by Sterling's comments as he says he was, it would appear that this decision is about the bottom line. Sponsors have begun to distance themselves from the team, and players league-wide were reportedly discussing a potential boycott of the playoffs. Public sentiment against the league as a whole could have turned against the entire league if Sterling did not receive stiff punishment. Finally, this incident comes at the league's most important and lucrative time of year, the playoffs. Silver didn't want this hanging over LeBron James's run at a third straight title. None of Sterling's previous transgressions, no matter how egregious, ever created this type of PR crisis for the league. Nor, for that matter, did they prevent players from signing with the Clippers.

While's Sterling's comments are shocking and upsetting to many, he isn't the first team owner to publicly embarrass his fellow owners. In fact, he seems to be part of a tradition of millionaire ignoramuses who could only hide their true character for so long.

Let's run down the list: there's former Cincinnati Reds owner Marge Schott, who once told ESPN that Adolf Hitler was "good at the beginning, but he just went too far." Those comments, along with others, earned her a two year ban from Major League Baseball. Then there's former New York Yankees owner George Steinbrenner, who was banned after being convicted for hiring a gambler to extort one of his own players. How about former Twins owner Calvin Griffith? When asked in 1978 why he had moved the team from Washington D.C. to Minnesota, Griffith replied that it was because  Minnesota had "good, hardworking white people."

Some owners are simply jerks. Former Oakland Athletics owner Charlie Finley was so cheap that the only thing that could bring his combative team together was their universal loathing of him. NFL owners Art Modell, Al Davis, and Robert Irsay set the precedent for owners ditching cities and fan bases that wouldn't fulfill their demands for new and improved stadiums. And you can't forget Washington Redskins owner Daniel Snyder, who has shown a remarkable tone-deafness in his handling of the controversy over the team name.

Yes, the world of team ownership has had its share of crooks and nut jobs. Maybe owning a professional sports franchise requires a certain type of megalomania. Becoming a team owner is a way of letting people know just how insanely rich you are. And it gives you control over something that many people care intensely about. You bring your fans a championship, and you'll be revered in a way that you never could be through your business dealings. And, since there are no shareholders to please, it's a gig that you can maintain as long as you have the cash, now matter how nutty you are or how many bad decisions you make.

But owning a professional sports franchise also exposes you to the media spotlight, which has a way of highlighting everyone's flaws and revealing their true character. And that's what finally caught up with Donald Sterling. Fans, players, and league officials generally don't ask much of owners once they've proved they have the cash to become a member of the club. They want them to invest in the team, put out a winning product, and hopefully be decent people. Donald Sterling failed on all those fronts for much of his tenure as Clippers owner, but the NBA ever threatened to take the team away from him. Now that everyone knows who he really is, the only option is to get rid of him.

Of course, this story is far from over. Sterling, a former lawyer, is not going to give up easily. But for now, it's NBA 1, Donald Sterling 0. 

Hey Hey, My My....

I've been down the road and I've come back/lonesome whistle on the railroad track/ain't got nothin' on those feelings that I've had

Those lyrics are from Neil Young's 1975 song "Mellow My Mind", among my favorites in the Neil Young catalog. It's a song I've been thinking while reading Young's autobiography, "Waging Heavy Peace." 

The book is less a traditional chronological telling of a life story than a collection of Young's musings on his life, career, and the things that he's passionate about. If you're looking for the definitive story of Neil Young, this isn't it. If you're looking for a deep dive into his creative process and the story behind some of his best albums, you won't find too much of that here. And if you're looking for a really well-written book by a notable musician, move on. Let's just say Neil has trouble with structure and linear thinking. Chapters that seem to begin one topic (say, his early days as a musician in Canada) end up somewhere else completely, as do paragraphs. Hell, some sentences end up on a different topic from where they begin. Knowing what a control freak Young has been throught his career, I'd be willing to bet that part of the deal with the publisher was that no substantive editing could be done to the manuscript. It shows. 

 

Here's one of the highlights, in which Neil discusses the LA scene in the late '60s:

"It was not long afterward that suddenly I realized I had the clap. There were a lot of hippie girls, and we saw them at the Whisky all the time. After the show it was time to go to the International House of Pancakes on Sunset Boulevard. I remember those German pancakes. They were delicious. How much sugar can one person eat? After that we paired off and went back to our shacks for some fun. Anyway, I had the clap and I had to go to the clinic"

You get the idea. Throughout the book, Neil's train of thought is often derailed (sorry) by a random memory (delicious pancakes!), and he's never really able to get back to the original point. 

 

But if an autobiography can be viewed as a window into how an artist thinks about his art, "Waging Heavy Piece" does provide some explanation for Young's enigmatic, meandering, and inconsistent career. And I make that statement as a longtime Neil Young fan who was hooked after first hearing the plaintive voice on "Sugar Mountain" (which struck me as the saddest song I'd ever heard). After the Goldrush and Harvest are among the best rock albums of the '70s, and are merely two highlights of an incredibly prolific decade for Young. But when you put out as much material as Neil Young has over his 50 year career, there are bound to be duds. And there have been several of them since the '70s. Hell, his own record company sued him for making albums "uncharacteristic of Neil Young."

But that's the beauty of Neil Young. Just as he shows no ability to edit himself in his autobiography, it doesn't seem there's been much music in Young's career that's gotten left on the cutting room floor. And that's either an indication of his ego as an artist or of how much the recording industry has changed. It's rare in today's music business to see established bands put out a stinker of an album, a real shit sandwich of misconceived and poorly produced songs. Which, in a way, is too bad. It's kind of nice to have a record (again, sorry) of the dross and not just the gold. What music fan hasn't flipped through a stack of old vinyl and thought "how did this album ever get released?" Musicians today seem to be so careful, and so carefully managed, that their subpar material rarely sees the light of day. Or maybe they just have a better sense of what the audience deserves.

The '70s were a different time for the music business. Record labels nurtured young artists and stuck with them. And after Young made Harvest, he could pretty much do anything he wanted. He was a star, and he got to make the music he wanted to make. Not all of it was good (and, according to Neil, some of it was intentionally bad, simply to piss off his record label after they sued him).

But for whatever critical filters Neil Young lacks in his music and his writing, he certainly makes up for it with his passion, whether it's for model trains, electric cars, high quality digital recordings, or the music itself. And it's clear that Young's belief in the power of music has been the driving force in his life. 

Which brings me back to the song "Mellow My Mind," which appeared on the 1975 album Tonight's the Night, an album recorded in an alcohol-induced fog after the drug-related deaths of Crazy Horse guitarist Danny Whitten and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young roadie Bruce Berry. The album was controversial both for it's dark content and the raw quality of the recordings (Young calls it "audio verite"), and it sat for two years because the record executives were nervous and Neil was unhappy with the remixes. But he fought to have it released, and his artistic instincts were right on this one. 

 

Tonight's the Night is my favorite Neil Young album because of its rawness and emotion, best exemplified when Young sings the lines I cited in the beginning of this post. With the song building to a ramshackle crescendo, he strains to hit the high notes as he sings "ain't got nothin' on those feelings that I had," his voice cracking with weariness. It's pure and aching and beautiful, and no amount of added production or remixing could make it any more poignant. It's as pure a Neil Young moment as anything he's ever recorded.

So go on Neil, keep following your muse. Sometimes it leads you to beautiful places.

Cold War Kids

Like many others, I've become a fan of the new breed of TV dramas that have become so ubiquitous on cable TV. Although I was slow to join the bandwagon on shows like The Sopranos, Six Feet Under, and Mad Men (and I'm not even halfway through the first season of Breaking Bad), once I got a taste I quickly became addicted. My latest addiction, and this one I've been on from the beginning, is the FX show The Americans, which chronicles the lives of two KGB sleeper agents in America in the early 1980s. Reagan is president, it's the height of the Cold War, and our two protagonists are deep undercover, posing as travel agents and raising a family in Suburban DC. 

In many respects, the show is preposterous and requires some suspension of disbelief. As the story goes, KGB officers Philip and Elizabeth Jennings (played by Matthew Rhys and the very fetching Keri Russell) were set up in an arranged marriage by their handlers and have apparently been in the U.S. since the mid-1960s, building their cover as an average American couple. The occasional flashback scenes to their initial arrival are incongruous because the actors don't really look much different from their early '80s versions. When Philip and Elizabeth aren't at their travel agency or parenting their son and daughter (and they never seem to be doing much of either), they're directing other operatives, arranging secret information drops, bugging the house of Defense Secretary Casper Weinberger, assassinating CIA agents, and doing all sorts of other spy things that involve not-so-elaborate disguises. All while maintaining their cover. Even with an FBI agent living in their housing complex.

 

Philip and Elizabeth are also having inordinate amounts of sex with a variety of American dupes (apparently being a spy involves having sex with multitudes of people in order to get information). One of Philip's alter egos is actually married to an FBI secretary. I haven't done a full tally of hours yet, but I'm pretty sure there isn't enough time in the day, let alone a week, to do everything they do. It's exhausting just watching them.

While the show clearly takes some liberties, it's not without some connection to reality. As in Mad Men, the period details are spot on. The creators of the show, one of them a former CIA agent, got the idea from the bust of a Russian sleeper cell in New Jersey in 2010. And there were Soviet "illegals" living in the U.S. in the late '70s and '80s, though this interview with an intelligence historian makes it clear that such sleeper agents would not likely have been engaging in spying themselves. Their whole purpose was to blend in, recruit Americans to do the dirty work, and be contacts for the real spies. Obviously, that would make for a less interesting TV show.

Perhaps the show's best feature is the way it captures the heightened tensions in the U.S.-Soviet relationship in the early 1980s. After a period of detente in the 1970s, the relationship between the world's two superpowers was as bad as it had been since the Cuban Missile Crisis. During the period that the show chronicles, psychological warfare conducted by the U.S. Military (including air and sea operations held very close to Russian territory) had the Soviets convinced that the U.S. was planning a surprise nuclear attack. In response, the Soviets and the KGB began a counter-operation, using sleeper agents in America and other countries, to gather as much information as they could on what the U.S. Military was up to. 

 

Philip and Elizabeth appear to be at the very center of this effort. Need some submarine plans stolen? Call Philip and Elizabeth. Need a scientist defector kidnapped and repatriated to the Soviet Union? Don't worry, Philip and Elizabeth will take care of it. The whole KGB operation seems to rest on their shoulders. Don't their employees at the travel agency, not to mention their kids, ever wonder where the hell they are? Where's all the tedious minutiae of adult life?

Of course, details like these can be overlooked because the Americans is not so much a show about spycraft as it is about the personalities involved and their relationships. Just as The Sopranos wasn't really about the mafia and Mad Men isn't about advertising. While those shows are about lost little boys looking for something to fill an aching void in their lives, The Americans is about what gets sacrificed in the name of a cause. Like Tony Soprano and Don Draper, Philip and Elizabeth are anti-heroes, people we root for no matter how despicable they are. They're cold-blooded killers devoted to Mother Russia, yet somehow I find myself cheering for them to succeed.

What also makes the show interesting is the creeping doubts you see in Philip about what they are fighting for, and his growing realization that living in the land of plenty isn't so bad. In the very first episode of the show, we see Philip trying on a new pair of cowboy boots and liking what he sees. In the most recent episode, he gives in to his urges and buys a Corvette. Then, after being shamed by Elizabeth for the purchase, he asks if there isn't a small part of her that likes everything they've acquired. In one of the best moments of the current season, Philip sits in cowed silence as the defector he's helping to send back to the Soviet Union calls him a monster and begs to stay in America. Philip clearly has his doubts. Meanwhile, Elizabeth remains devoted to the cause. In an era where there are still too few strong female characters on TV, she's one tough mofo. (And totally hot, to boot. But I digress).

While I can't say the show evokes any Cold War nostalgia for me, I can't help but wonder if Vladimir Putin has been watching it and getting a little misty-eyed. Even if captures an era in which the Soviets were deeply paranoid, it also harkens back to a time when the Russians were a force to be reckoned with, and there was a deep belief in what they stood for (well, at least among KGB sleeper agents). Elizabeth is a true believer deeply committed to the struggle of the workers against the injustices of Capitalism. Despite her fears for her children (yes, Sting, apparently the Russians do love their children, too) and some growing unease with the amount of killing she has to do, she wants nothing more than to destroy the American imperialists.

As events unfold in Ukraine, it's clear that anti-U.S. and anti-Western rhetoric is among the tactics being used by Putin to fan the flames among ethnic Russians living in eastern part of the country. Maybe it's easier to play that card than it is to appeal to patriotism. It seems like it would be hard to feel patriotic toward a nation being run by oligarchs and kleptocrats. Maybe Putin thinks reviving Cold War paranoia is the way to return his country to the good old days when Russia was feared. I don't know. I'm not a foreign policy analyst, nor have I looked into Putin's soul lately.

Whatever Putin's doing, I think he could use a little help from Philip and Elizabeth. They'd take care of things, and no one would ever know.

The Rock Star Pope

It's almost Easter, and I've been thinking a lot about the Pope lately. That's not a sentence I'd ever thought I'd be writing, but there you have it. Maybe it's because Pope Francis is everywhere these days. He's on Twitter. He's on Facebook. He's even got his own tabloid style magazine. And I've been thinking about him because he's actually made me want to give the Catholic Church a second chance.

If nothing else, Pope Francis has breathed new life into the Vatican, an institution so calcified it's amazing they had the vision to choose him as pope. Of course, my suspicion is they had no idea what they were getting. And how has he done this? By being more a man of faith and less a moralizer, and by showing he's not afraid to say things that might make the Vatican unhappy. He's acknowledged that the Church ought to spend more time focusing on poverty and injustice and less time on people's sexual and reproductive choices. He's left the confines of the Vatican under cover of darkness to meet with the homeless. He's been humble, self-effacing, and loving. Francis has given the Catholic Church better PR than it's had in decades. Catholics are talking about Francis in the same reverential way that my mother used to talk about Pope John XXIII, the man who presided over Vatican II. The question is, can he bring the legions of people who left the church back into the fold?

That will be a difficult task. Ever since the child abuse scandal in the Boston Archdiocese back in 2002, the Catholic Church (at least in America) has been beset by scandals that have steadily eroded the faith that many Catholics had in the institution. The latest, thoroughly detailed in some excellent reporting by MPR News, has been in the Minneapolis-St. Paul archdiocese. As a result many Catholics, already struggling with beliefs that fundamentally contradict the teachings of the Church, have walked away completely. I know, because I'm one of them.

For the first 18 years of my life, I had a regular Sunday appointment with the Catholic Church. For three of those years, I was an altar boy. Sure, part of the reason was that my parents were devout Catholics, and therefore not going to Church was never an option. But for the most part I enjoyed going to Church. During my college years, as happens with many adolescents, I steadily began to separate from the church. Not only was it difficult to make it to a 9am mass after a typical Saturday night, but there was also a growing sense that my personal beliefs on topics like abortion and homosexuality didn't jibe with the church, and never would. Of course, learning about the history of the Catholic Church didn't help. College has a way of shaking people out traditional beliefs. 

After college my attendance was sporadic, and I struggled with the notion that I was always going to be what the traditionalists refer to as a cafeteria Catholic, picking the teachings I could get on board with and tossing aside those with which I disagreed. Still, I got married in the Church, and my daughter was baptized in the Church. And I will fully acknowledge that had more to do with making my mother happy than in a belief that those rituals needed the blessing of a priest.

The real break for me came in 2002, when the Boston Archdiocese scandal broke. I was living in Boston at the time, and working in the media. The revelations of that scandal were horrifying, not just the acts themselves, but the behavior of the institution that hid those acts from the public. It was the behavior of an institution that seemed both broken and rotten to its core. After my mother died in 2003, I stopped going to church altogether. In fact, my mother's funeral might have been the last time I set foot in a church. I could no longer support the institution that had played a key role in my upbringing.

I have no faith to speak of these days. I've tried other denominations, but it never seems right. We Catholics are brought up on a certain kind of ritual, and all other rituals seem false and strange. I remember attending a protestant church in Colorado once and thinking, why are all these people so happy? Where's the sin and the guilt? Where's the bloodied Christ suffering for our sins? Where's the incense? What the hell kind of church is this?

I know that it's that kind of attitude that got the Church where it is today, this belief that it is the one and only true faith and impervious to criticism. But I miss it. I miss the ritual and the structure it gave to my Sunday mornings. And that's why Pope Francis has me thinking about returning. Though he can't fundamentally alter the teachings of the Church, he can perhaps make us cafeteria Catholics feel more welcome by acknowledging that there can be differences of opinion on certain issues. I can accept a happier, lighter, more loving Church. Just don't take away the incense.