I’ve long been a casual fan of track and field, probably due to my father’s influence. We often would watch not only the Olympics together but also many other track events on ABC’s Wide World of Sports when I was a kid. Track and Field was one of his “beats” as a sports writer for the Honolulu Star-Bulletin so I used to accompany him to the high school track and field championships. I can still remember his familiar refrains about the sport, like “No one will ever beat Beamon‘s record” (in the long jump — it was eventually broken, in 1991 by Mike Powell).

In addition to Beamon, who set his record at the 1968 Mexico Olympics, I can remember him educating me about another 1968 winner, 200-meter sprinter Tommie Smith. My father would always extol Smith’s world-record breaking performance in that Olympic’s 200-meter event, but he would also explain about what came after, Smith’s and bronze-medal winner John Carlos’ black-gloved salute, on the podium. I don’t think it would be hyperbole to say my father admired both deeds. Of course many people, when it happened in 1968, didn’t view it the same way, certainly not the International Olympic Committee itself, which stripped Smith and Carlos of their medals and banned the athletes from the Olympics for life. A spokesman for the IOC said that the act was “a deliberate and violent breach of the fundamental principles of the Olympic spirit.”

The other night, American Tyson Gay won the men’s 200-meter event at these Osaka championships. Like every other winner in every other event from every other country, he went over to the stands where someone, probably his coach, tossed him his country’s flag and he paraded around the track with his red, white, and blue cape. I suppose this has gone on for years but I hadn’t realized until now that it had become de rigeur. The uniformity of the gesture tends to even out the patriotism field a little, which I suppose is a good thing, but it also makes the gesture essentially empty, ritualized behavior. It seems to me that many of these flags are being produced from shrink-wrapped packages at the bottom of the coach’s bag. Perhaps by Beijing 2008, the athletes will be tucking them into their jockstraps and sports bras to save time. Perhaps by London 2012, those flags will be sponsored by Nike and Nikon.

The black fist is a meaningless symbol. When you open it, you have nothing but fingers — weak, empty fingers. The only time the black fist has significance is when there’s money inside. There’s where the power lies.
–Jesse Owens

In Owens’ day, his skin color precluded him from cashing in on his achievements. For Smith and Carlos, their bold gesture precluded them from even taking their “silverware” home, to say nothing of cashing in. For today’s generation of Black athletes like Gay and Allyson Felix, you can’t help but get the feeling that they’ve got their hands on Owens’ fistful of dollars, but that The Power still lies elsewhere.

(Above photo by JR3, and used according to the terms of SXC.hu.)

The usually decent SoccerBlog.com has a slightly misguided post about how the language of soccer — here comes the obligatory “ahem, football to most of you” acknowledgment — is suffering from “insidious word creep” because there has been an upsurge in in-the-throes-of-Beckham Americans taking to talking about “assists” (in the sense of the person whose kick or touch sets up or directly leads to the resulting goal), a term, and indeed a concept, that has heretofore not been part of the game in any codified sense.

Never mind that SoccerBlog messes up on the proper etymology of the term “soccer” in his first paragraph (the short story being that it wasn’t Americans who coined the blasted term, but Brits themselves), but really, is the growing use of the word “assist” that insidious (defined by the Cambridge Dictionary of American English as “gradually and secretly causing harm”). Although I myself haven’t heard this term used, probably because I don’t watch any American soccer or have much of a chance to hear American broadcasters (local cable outfit JSports has started showing a few of the Beckham L.A. Galaxy games on delay, but I haven’t watched them), I have no problem with it nor can I imagine why anyone would, unless they were worried about American “creep” on the global game. (Curiously, I do hear the word “assist” being used by Japanese soccer sportscasters — アシスト(ashisuto) — in the exact context that we’re talking about here.)

I suppose the same people who prescriptively declare that a “math teacher” should be a “maths teacher,” or can’t get over how aubergine begot the eggplant in American usage (“Where the fuck is the egg?” as someone not so delicately once asked me) would be crying in their Imperial teacups should “pitch” become “field,” “fixture” become “game,” “touch line” the “out of bounds” line, and so on. And I probably would too. But it seems to me that if “assist” is actually trying to make a push for inclusion, and I think the jury is still out of that one (I certainly have not heard any Sky Sports broadcaster using the word), it isn’t trying to supplant anything, merely supplement and add to the discussion. But that isn’t what “word creep” implies.

Truth be told, the post’s author Shourin Roy has it more in for the “creep” of the “assist” statistic itself then the word, but on this score too I have to wonder what the fuss is about. Isn’t it meaningful — insofar as any stat is actually meaningful — to know that x player contributed more to his team by way of assists than actual scoring. Wouldn’t some people find that stat useful — again, if we assume that stats in general are actually useful?

Watching Nakamura for Celtic last year, as great as his free kicks were, it seemed that he also contributed directly to the scoring of goals by other means, such as corner kicks, yet that these were usually quickly forgotten as soon as the first slow-motion replay of the goal was shown. I’m sure I wouldn’t even be able to look up how many “assists” he had to make a comparison between these and the goals he ended up scoring. Oops, not so fast. It seems that, according to Nakamura’s Wikipedia entry, someone has been keeping track and according to that entry (no source given, sadly), Nakamura had 12 assists in Scottish Premier League play last season, as opposed to 9 goals. Naturally one would expect his free kicks against Man U (two of them! — here and here) and his Championship-winning one against Kilmarnock to remain in Celtic fans’ hearts for a long time, but could not a case be argued that his 12 “assists” contributed just as much. (And speaking of argued cases, could we not argue that in that season-winning Kilmarnock game, it was Nakamura who assisted himself in that it was he who drew the foul that led to the free kick?)

To be fair, Roy does ask this question when he writes that “it does make a difference as to who set up the goal and why their contributions shouldn’t be recognized more fully.” But that’s all he seems willing to concede, and ultimately he thinks “assist” is no more than jargon and something that keeps journalists lazy (easier to write “an assist from Beckham” than “Beckham guided a lovely pass to Donovan”). I doubt the impetus for this new stat is coming from lazy journalists, though.

The charge that Americans over-emphasize the statistic (especially individual ones) is probably fair, especially when it comes to America’s pastime sport of baseball in this day and age of “Moneyball” and “Sabermetrics.” There are all sorts of arcane measurements which make an old fogey like me who is content with RBI’s, batting average, ERA, etc. scratch his head. In addition to General Managers though, I’d say a lot of these new stats are driven by rotisserie baseball.

Baseball does use the “assist” statistic, but in a relatively minor way as a defensive stat. The main usage of assist comes I think from basketball, where it has been recorded as a statistic in the NBA since at least 1946 (interestingly enough, it predates the rebound stat by a few years, something I usually would pay more attention to).

Perhaps we should ask two-time NBA Most Valuable Player Steve Nash of the Phoenix Suns, who averages 7.6 assists per game and is ranked (currently) 28th all-time for career assists, for his opinion on the assist statistic for soccer. Not only does Nash know his assists from his shots, he may well be a soccer player trapped in an NBA uniform. At any rate, it would seem insane to strip basketball statistics down to goals and free throws made, though it is ultimately only those that matter in terms of winning or losing.

If Major League Soccer ever got to the point where it could support rotisserie leagues, with fantasy owners punching up Excel spreadsheets detailing assist stats on their laptops on “draft day,” then I’d say Beckham did his job and the popularization of the sport in America was complete. Sadly I don’t see that happening for a long time, if ever. However, if assists are recorded as diligently as “Posh and Becks” every move in America has been so far, then I hardly think that is a bad thing for the sport, in America, or globally.

You’ll rarely ever catch me arguing for more American influence in matters global, but at the same time, just because the culture does tend to act like the biggest kid in even the tiniest of sandboxes shouldn’t preclude it from participating and perhaps even, ahem, assisting the global game a little bit. I can see why some would view that as creep or just plain creepy, but I would probably give them a yellow card for overreacting.

Now, how about for some real influence. Let’s see, the game needs to institute a system of keeping time that isn’t from the 19th century, and instant replay wouldn’t be a bad idea, and yellow cards for writhing in pain from a love tap….

First, Ghana completely outplayed the highly touted Czech Republic, winning 2-0 although really the low margin of victory was due two Czech’s goalie Cech and no one else. It wasn’t exactly the mastery that Argentina showed the night before in their 6-0 demolishment of Serbia and Montenegro, but it was still great stuff. Particularly pleasing was that the Black Stars didn’t play, after going ahead 1-0 in the first minute, 89 minutes of hold-out defensive soccer, but kept on attacking, all night.

There is invariably one of these sorts of upsets each World Cup, and in recent years it has been invariably one of the African sides. This time it was Ghana to come through, but based on their play tonight, and that of Cote d’Ivoire and Angola the night before, I can’t imagine it’ll be long before the African countries are feared (and patronized, it must be said) not for their “x-factor”-ness but feared simply because they’re damn good.

The next game I was going to record and watch tomorrow (well, it is tomorrow but you know what I mean) but I got so pumped up watching the Ghana-Czech game that there was no way I was going to fall asleep that soon, so I figured I’d watch the Americans get humiliated by the Italians. And indeed, as they showed the pre-game congregating of players in the locker room tunnels, the US players, especially Reyna, their captain, looking so wound up and tense that surely there would be no way to hold off the laughing, carefree Italians who seemed as loose as the Americans seemed tight.

But lo and behold, the Americans, and if you saw them get thrashed by Czech earlier this week you would know it was out of nowhere, were actually taking it to the Italians (granted, it is a bit of the Italian style to play defensively and then make the most of scoring opportunities). But when the Italians went up 1-0 after the 21st minute (off a free kick resulting from the predictable Italian flop by surprise, surprise Totti), I though the rout was on, for sure. However, not 5 minutes later, the Italians scored again, only they put the ball in the wrong net: an own goal by the Italians had just tied the game at 1-all.

Now, I wrote before that I could care a less for the US team, and in general that remains true. I have no country allegiance when it comes to the World Cup, I just want to see good, exciting matches. And I will root for the underdog, every time (except for perhaps Brazil matches, it depends on the mood I’m in). And oh yeah, I will generally smile very broadly if the Italians lose. No offense to anyone, but their football team — and indeed their whole professional soccer institutions — seems built around cheating. It’s no surprise that their is a huge scandal in Italy about match-fixing and referree-buying going on right now in the country. What is surprising is that some folks have finally said enough is enough, for this nonsense has been going on for years. On the field, as I’ve written before, they’re about the worst (and they do have stiff competition, mind you) when it comes to diving and flopping, and histrionics after getting love-taps on their Azzurri ankles and shins.

The own goal seemed somehow poetically justified, and I couldn’t help laughing my face off at the Italians, suffering the horror of actually letting the Americans (they actually play soccer in America? I can imagine some of those Italians thinking) equalize. Indeed, not a minute later, no doubt in frustration and some amount of shame and humiliation, the ugliest deed and in a rather ugly match — penalties and play both — occurred when the Italian thug De Rossi threw a vicious elbow to the American McBride’s face, like he was in a Sopranos episode and not a World Cup match (I stole that reference from the Guardian, I admit). De Rossi was red-carded and sent off, but before the half, in a questionable call, the ref apparently thought he ought to be fair and he red-carded the American Mastroeni, both sides now playing 10 vs. 10.

After that it was basically a war of attrition, another American got sent off (I thought for sure they would be goners then), and 9 US players basically did their best Rocky impersonation and slugged it out with the 10 Italians. It was, as I said, ugly — helped in no small part by the horrible referee, who does have some skeletons in his closet — but for me, thinking there would be no way to hold off the Italians, terribly nail-biting. I doubted the Italians would lose, but I sure as hell didn’t want them to win. And in the end, the Americans were able to hold off the Italians to save the draw and claim their first points of the World Cup. Because of the earlier Ghana upset, nothing in this Group E is decided, although the Italians are still one point clear at the top. As other pundits have noted, this is indeed now the “group of death.”

You’ll never ever catch me chanting “USA, USA” or waving a flag, but not since probably the Miracle on Ice way back when have I been so glad to see an American team win something. Good on them for denying those flopping cheats the win, and seeing how good Ghana was tonight, I guess I’m going to have to root for the underdog Americans again when they face off against the Black Stars next week. Alright, time for bed!

Now mind you, I’m eternally grateful that NHK (Japan’s BBC if I can be forgiven a very threadbare comparison) is showing the games, all 64 of them, LIVE. And all games in 16:9 widescreen to boot. And we are in Japan after all, so I realize it is probably a bit rich to grouse about not getting an English-language commentary with which to ice this cake.

However, in my defense, on any given day, I can watch the Mariners, White Sox, or Yankees of Major League Baseball on NHK and tune in to the English language, I watched Game 1 of the NBA Finals with Hubie Brown the other day, Game 1 of the NHL Hockey Finals in English for chrissakes, not to mention I can watch the Bundesliga (German soccer league) with English commentary, the Copa Libertadores championship (South American soccer championship) with English on SAP, and Barca TV (the TV station for the FC Barcelona Spanish soccer team) in English as well — though admittedly that bloke’s commentary is some of the worst English commentary you can possibly hear.

But perhaps what’s even more inexplicable, and therefore makes this all the more grating, is that during the 2002 World Cup, co-hosted by Japan and South Korea, all the games had English on the sub-channel.

To be fair, because NHK is clearly using an “international feed” (the lineups and other graphics are in English, though NHK will occassionally overlay a Japanese graphic of the score), it may well be that the “international feed” comes with no sub-channel of any kind. Or, knowing FIFA, perhaps there’s an extra charge for it that goes beyond what NHK can justify. Who knows?

If there’s a silver lining (beyond seeing the games, which is of course most important), my Japanese is good enough to understand the commentary when I need to (and seriously, one doesn’t really need commentary, does one?), but not good enough to judge the quality of it. And at the very least, NHK doesn’t stoop to nearly the commercial pandering levels that the main networks here do. Besides, one has to be careful what one whinges for. They could slap on some ill-informed, God-forsaken, American soccer coverage on there: I’m told the inept American commentators referered to one “Mike Beckham” during the England – Paraguay game.

P.S. In other news, I’m 4 for 4 so far in my attempt to see all 64 games of the World Cup. Granted, it’s very early in the proceedings.

UPDATE (June 19): Just to follow up, I’ve resigned myself to the Japanese coverage and really it ain’t all that bad, as long as the game doesn’t feature the Japan national team. And in kind of a “if you can’t beat them, join them” outlook, I’ve decided to use the games to boost my Japanese vocabulary. Some color commentators talk too much, but overall it seems the quality is no worse than average, and that’s okay with me.

However, when Japan is playing, as they did tonight, then well, you can throw quality commentary out the window. On the other hand, the Japanese is painfully easy to understand. Basically, if Japan are attacking, it’s いいですよ、いいですよ！(ii desu yo, ii desu yo!, or “this is good, this is good!”), and if Japan are defending, it’s 危ないよ！ (abunai yo!, or “look out/watch out”). Seriously, that’s all the Japanese you need to know.

Another thing that has eased my rue is the realization that more than likely, my pining for some English (specifically British English) commentary is more due to some “it just sounds right” mental collocation on my part rather than it being quality commentating. Indeed, based on various reports and I’ve been reading, both the BBC and ITV broadcasts haven’t been anything special, and indeed when England was playing Trinidad and Tobago, the broadcast was exceedingly partisan toward England and patronizing towards T&T.

Not surprisingly, as in 2002, there are plenty of blogs that are dedicated to following World Cup 2006 in Germany. My RSS reader is reaching breaking point. At this point, I’m in danger of spending more time reading about the World Cup than watching it. (Note: If you’re still not hip to RSS and newsfeeds, then this is as good a time as any to get up to speed. I find it mildly scandalous that there are still major media outlets without feeds or with poorly-implemented feeds.)

Here is what surely is a partial list of World Cup 2006 blogs to get you started:

Independent blogs

SoccerBlog.com (feed) — A good, general soccer blog that needless to say will be almost exclusively focused on the World Cup for the time-being.

Soccer Shout Podcast (podcast feed) — A podcast focused (for the next month anyway) on the World Cup.

World Cup 2006 News (feed) — A blog maintained by a 21-year old German.

World Cup Blog (feed) — The World Cup blog to end all World Cup blogs. There’s one main blog (linked above), and 32 accompanying blogs, one for each country participating (feeds here). There’s even a separate blog for the referrees!

World Cup Blog (feed) — Not to be confused with the uber-blog with the same creative name above, this is still a decent, often-updated blog from the UK (which means we can probably expect a heavy England focus).

World Cup Hippo (feed) — Blog focused mainly on England, as far as I can tell.

Mainstream media blogs

ABC: Der Blog (feed) — Blog from Stuart Watt of Australia’s ABC (not the American network). No doubt he’ll be focusing on the “Socceroos” of Australia. There’s also a podcast available.

About.com: World Soccer (feed) — Is About.com mainstream? At any rate, “guide” Bill Hutchison is traveling to Germany and therefore his daily updated site should be all things World Cup for the next month or so.

Active.com: World Cup 2006 (feed) — A group blog brought to us by Puma. A nice array of bloggers on call.

BBC World Cup 2006 Blog (feed) — 14 different authors working the World Cup in various capacities for the BBC share thoughts, insight, and gossip about the tournament.

Fox Sports: Jamie Trecker’s Blog — Blog from Fox Sports’ soccer writer Trecker, Fox being one of the few US networks committed to soccer.

Guardian Unlimited: World Cup Blog (feed) — Guardian scribes pen commentary from Germany. The “web feed” link on their page is still incorrect. Use the link here instead.

International Herald Tribune: The Beautiful Game — IHT’s Roger Cohen will be posting longer pieces during WC ’06. No feed though.

International Herald Tribune: From the Fans — IHT’s second World Cup-related blog is written by fans. IHT is still seeking participants for this new blog.

New York Times: World Cup ’06 (feed) — U.S. mainstream media gets in on the act with this well-written (and linked up) blog from the NY Times.

Spiegel Online (English) — Blog from the international version of Spiegel Online. Hallelujah! You have to click on each day’s listing from this page, and there you’ll find several entries per day. No RSS feed, sadly.

Telegraph Blogs: David Bond (feed) — Telegraph scribe Bond is reporting from the England camp while they’re in Germany. Expect a lot of Rooney-related posts in the coming days (yawn).

USA Today: Soccer Sweep (feed) — A somewhat anemic blog (with an awful title to boot) from USA Today, perhaps not surprising given that its two authors will be blogging from the World Cup hotbed of Virginia!

Washington Post: Road to the World Cup (feed) — Joe DeNunzio (with support from Jason La Canfora) are in Germany, doing their best to reverse American apathy towards the beautiful game. Apparently only intended to exist pre-World Cup (huh?), its run has now been graciously extended by the Post’s editors.

Player blogs

CBS Sportsline: Kasey Keller — US goalkeeper Keller is posting weekly updates from Germany. (Beware, the rest of the Sportsline site crashes my Firefox browser).

MSN Road to the World Cup: Player Diaries (see each diary for the feed) — Six sporadically updated blogs from star players at the World Cup, including Michael Owen and Ronaldinho, and one blog from Kevin Kuranyi, who was left off Jurgen Klinsmann’s German squad. If he keeps at it, I’d say Kuranyi’s blog will be the one to read from this bunch.

Other news coverage

There are naturally quite a few media outlets running special World Cup coverage that, while not blogs, deserve mention and reading if you want to keep up on every metatarsal and minutiae of the proceedings:

BBC Sports (feed)

ESPNsoccernet (feed) — Too bad their RSS feeds are all screwed up. They seem to have fixed their newsfeed now.

FIFAworldcup.com (feed) — The official site, done with Yahoo!. Available in eight other languages besides English. Plenty to sate one’s appetite.

Fox Sports (feed)

Guardian (feed) — There’s even a podcast.

National Public Radio (feed) — Even Frank Deford is writing about soccer positively.

Reuters — Decent coverage, but I defy you to find a link to this section on Reuters’ home page. Not to mention no dedicated feed. Give the not-updated-in-over-a-week “blogs” a miss too.

Spiegel — Check out their “interactive guide” for just about everything you need to know, all in one handy and easy-to-navigate package.

Washington Post

Wikipedia — Everything you need to know, all on one page.

Chaminade�s upset hard to forget

detailing his memories, 20 years hence, of what some called at the time “the greatest upset in college basketball history,” when little known and tiny Chaminade College of Honolulu (ironically, my mother was a student there at the time), not even an NCAA school, defeated the then No. 1 NCAA basketball team in America.

Brought back memories, not only of that basketball game, but of reading my father’s writing. It had been a long time since I’d read one of his pieces. When I was a kid, I used to read his articles every day. There was a time in my life when my only goal was to follow in his footsteps, be a sportswriter like him. If you’ve got a few minutes, it’s a nice piece on what was not only a defining moment in Hawaii sports, but in my father’s career as well.

It’s things like this that bring home just how hard it is for me to get into that “world’s sport” football, or as we call it back home (and in Japan), soccer: England captain David Beckham has admitted that he got a penalty on purpose so that he would miss his next game, a World Cup qualifier with Azerbaijan. Beckham, who knew he was going to miss the game anyway on account of a rib injury (and little matter, as Azerbaijan hardly posed a threat to England, though I did find myself hoping for an upset just to throw a spanner in the works), rather than having the threat of a one-game suspension in a tougher World Cup qualifiying contest hanging over his head, basically got the suspension “out of the way” with his deliberate penalty (he already was sitting on one yellow card and two yellows result in a one-game suspension).

I suppose we should at least commend Sir Beckham for coming forward with his admission, and to be fair he does seem to be taking a bit of heat for it, notably from England football hero Geoff Hurst, who went so far as to imply that Beckham should be stripped of his captaincy. But what got me was a poll on BBC’s web site that showed that out of 80,598 respondents (at time of writing), a full 61% of them thought that Beckham’s sin was admitting to the intentional foul. Indeed, only 18% of respondents actually think that getting deliberately booked was wrong (21% said Beckham did nothing wrong at all).

Granted, as the BBC elegantly but cryptically disclaims, “Results are indicative and may not reflect public opinion,” and no one would try to claim the poll was scientific, but what I’m wondering is if the poll indicates that England fans desperately want their team to win any way they can, or if this kind of foul play is treated as an accepted part of the game, sort of an open secret that Beckham foolishly blew further open.

You see, if there’s one thing about the sport that bugs me to no end, and that really makes it difficult for me to fully enjoy, it’s all the diving, you know the feigning of penalties and the laughable sight of grown athletes pretending to writhe in pain after suffering the equivalent of a grade-school wedgie. (Okay, so the fact that sponsors’ logos are ten times bigger than team logos on uniforms, and the loosy-goosy way of time keeping, also bug the hell out of me, but that I can accept as part of the sport’s makeup, just like how the varying ballpark dimensions in American baseball seem part of the character of the game).

Now I can hardly be accused of subscribing to the “real men don’t eat quiche” school of thought (hell, I’m practically a vegetarian and you know what they say about vegetarians), but seeing superstar athletes crying wolf or pounding the ground in agony after getting their pinkie toe stepped on — followed by the obligatory stretcher trip to the sidelines and the inevitable sprint back to the playing pitch two seconds later — my latent American machismo can’t help but kick into overdrive and I start to wonder if those are real men out there or drama queens gone missing from a Shakespeare production.

(In fairness, American football, the sport that shares a name with Association football but little else — no doubt to the rueful consternation of most fans of the latter — is not immune to diving, with punters being the usual culprit, trying to draw “roughing” penalties. I hope the irony of players called punters — incidentally only one of two positions in American football that actually put foot to ball — being inveterate divers is not lost on my British readers. Anyway, I’ve always hated punters, divers all of them, and wusses who can’t tackle either.)

It’s not like I don’t want to enjoy football/soccer. Growing up in seemingly the only part of the world that doesn’t take it seriously I always felt I was missing something. And while as a teen we had the North American Soccer League, and I guess I can claim some smidgen of football/soccer “cred” for having seen the great Pele play live when I was 11 (for the New York Cosmos, at Aloha Stadium in Hawaii), it seemed pretty clear that that wasn’t what all the fuss was about. But now that I get my fair share of access to world football, the game is on the whole more frustrating than thrilling, and indeed I can’t take it seriously. Not in the same way that I can’t take the WWF seriously, mind you, just that I will never be able to get past the feigning and flopping or accept it as “part of the game.”

Thinking on the 2002 World Cup, which was played (or co-played) in Japan, and which I watched nightly, the moment I still remember above all others, the moment that gave me the biggest thrill, was seeing Italian captain Francesco Totti — poster boy for whiny prima donna football players everywhere — sent off for diving against South Korea (later it was determined that there was contact in the play in question though I still contend Totti flopped). Rather a waste of fan support I know, but such is my disappointment with the sport that I end up decrying or praising referree calls rather than getting upset about the blown goal opportunities or cheering the spectacular goal. Try as I might, rather than viewing these shenanigans — oh, let’s just call a spade a spade, this cheating — as a distraction like I do similar antics in say, NBA basketball, I see them not as part of the game, but as the game.

I was watching the tube with the in-laws earlier tonight when the sports news came on, the lead story of which was Ichiro‘s pursuit of the Major League Baseball record for most hits in a season, which has been held for 84 years by George Sisler. Going into yesterday’s game, Ichiro needed 24 hits to tie Sisler’s mark of 257 hits. Alas, he didn’t get any hits in the game and remains on 233 hits, with just 16 games left in the season.

In the game Ichiro was intentionally walked twice, and this produced cries of kawaiisou from the in-laws (“kawaiisou” might approximate “you poor thing” or just “poor thing” in this case). I explained as best I could that Seattle’s opponent, the Anaheim Angels, were in the penant race and that an intentional walk was a legitimate strategy to win the game. Not that I like it mind you, obviously I want to see Ichiro get a chance to get a base hit like everyone else, but you can’t disparage the Angels for trying to win the game any way they (fairly) can. “But he’s going for the record,” they replied.

I then asked if they remembered what happened to Randy Bass some 20 years ago. Now, you’d have to be a fairly hardcore baseball fan, or to have lived in Japan, to know who Randy Bass was. In fact, there were two Randy Basses, the MLB Randy Bass, and the Japanese Pro baseball Randy Bass, and while they shared the same body that’s really where the comparison ended. After a bench-warming six-year career with 5 different teams, hitting a career .212, Bass quit the Majors and came to Japan to play for the Hanshin Tigers, one of Japan baseball’s oldest teams.

In six years for Hanshin, Bass (pictured here) tore up the league, winning two triple crowns, and leaving with a career .337 batting average and 202 home runs. 54 of those home runs came in the 1985 season, and the Tigers won their first penant in 20 years. The story of those 54 home runs, and why Bass didn’t perhaps have more than 54, was what I was asking my in-laws about.

Going into the final series of the season, sitting on 54 homers, Bass needed just one more to tie the Japan baseball single season record for home runs of 55, set by the great slugger Sadaharu Oh. The Tigers’ opponent for those final two games was the Tokyo Giants, their archrival, managed by none other than…Sadaharu Oh.

Did Bass see any pitches to hit during that final series of the year? Not a chance. In fact, in 9 plate appearances, he was walked 6 times. In the final game of the year, Bass was walked all four times he came up to the plate (though none of them were official “intentional” walks). At one point, with pitches being thrown so far out of the strikezone that it was as clear as day what was happening, Bass turned his bat upside down is disgust. The story goes that Giants’ pitchers had been warned that they would be fined if they gave Bass any pitches to hit. Who’s to say whether Bass would have been able to homer even had he had a decent chance to swing the bat. (I feel compelled to add, however, that Oh set the record in a 140-game season, while Bass was trying to break it in a 130-game season).

Whether Oh’s actions were motivated by personal reasons (“He ain’t gonna break my record as long as I have something to say about it.”) or a larger xenophobic one is beyond me to say. It’s complicated, to be sure (Oh himself is half-Chinese). Readers interested would be advised to seek out a used copy of Robert Whiting’s You Gotta Have Wa or Pico Iyer’s essay “Perfect Strangers” which appears in his book Video Night in Kathmandu.

One thing I know for sure: as the walks to Ichiro increase, as they surely will — after all, all of Seattle’s remaining games are against teams with a legitimate shot at the postseason, and Ichiro is Seattle’s biggest threat — so will the cries of “kawaiisou” and “kibishii” (idiomatically, “that’s harsh”) and “okashii” (“strange”). Perhaps there’ll be some idle speculation that Americans don’t want to see a foreigner break “their” record (a notion even I the cynic have no qualms about dismissing without a second thought). I can only hope that somewhere out there in the Japanese household, or on the various TV networks that serve them their news, some of them will remember Randy Bass.

As I’ve been writing this, the biggest Japan baseball story of this season has broke: the Japan professional players association has decided to go on strike, effective tomorrow (for now, the strike only effects games played on the remaining weekends of the season), for the first time in its 70-year history. The fans are overwhelmingly on the side of the players in this one: as I type this, one of the news shows is running a call-in poll on whether or not viewers support the strike or not. At the moment, 235,700 callers are in favor of the strike, while a measly 7,800 are not. There’s more to be said here of course, but I’ll save that for another day.

Truth be told as well, I’ve been trying to assess exactly what I want out of this blog. I haven’t been entirely happy with how it has started out, and frankly I don’t have (especially now with employment) the energy to keep it going as some sort of political or news analysis blog. On the other hand, I haven’t been very comfortable with the idea of making it more personal, more like a diary. Lord knows there are plenty of those types of blogs out there, and most that I read bore me to tears when they’re not making me cringe out of embarrassment for the author. (To be fair of course, there are also plenty of politically minded web-rags out there that either bore me or make me cringe). I suppose we’ll just have to see where it goes….

Speaking of work, I went out for beers after my first day of non-on-the-job-training last Friday night, and ended up in a sports bar watching the second half of the England-Argentina game. I’ll admit I got more than a bit tipsy, and at 11:45pm found myself at a crowded Omiya station with a lot of other tipsy members of Japanese society waiting for the last train home. As I stood there on the platform in my salaryman suit and tie trying to stay balanced with my cellphone in hand and my thumb typing out an email to my wife letting her know that I indeed was on my way home, I had an epiphany: I had arrived in Japan. In some small very tiny way, I felt I belonged, that I had passed that grey demarcation line between tourist and resident.

The sports bar itself had been energizing. all these young Japanese inexplicably rooting passionately for England, many of them sporting painted red and white flags on their cheeks. I could have cared less about the outcome, but I found myself by the end rooting for the British side as well. After Beckham and co. came out victorious, I had my British by association hand shaken by a half-dozen or so Japanese who congratulated me on my victory.

Speaking of the Japanese side, I watched their opener against on tape as recorded by my wife, since I was working during the match. Somehow I managed to make it home from work without hearing the score, although at one of the stops on my line I could see Japan supporters in their blue shirts in the train opposite the platform (obviously returning from Saitama Stadium, the site of the match and not very far from where we live), and they didn’t look exactly overjoyed, so I was assuming a Japan loss. What a joy then to see that the hosting upstarts actually make a game of it and play a lot better than the team I saw perform mediocrely in several friendlies recently. In fact, they perhaps should have won the game, because to my untrained eye it seemed quite obvious that they were denied two foul calls which would have given them penalty kicks, and I couldn’t help wondering whether Rivaldo’s recent admission of faking an injury in Brazil’s match against Turkey may have contributed to last night’s referree being overly forgiving. (However, when the play wasn’t in either team’s goal area, the Costa Rican referree was more than happy to blow the whistle — a total of 48 fouls were called during the game).

Speaking of Rivaldo and the Brazil vs. Turkey match, I was amused by this bit of hyperbole from the Turks on Korean referree Kim Young-joo:

Uh, the Turks should be the last one‘s using genocidal references in vain.