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| worst basketball team ever |
This ran a good while back in the Weekly Dig, but a friend just posted it on his Facebook randomly, and since, as you know, I'm always interested in the intersection of sports and music culture, and how Boston is the most unique, special little place on earth, I thought I'd re-post, that way I don't have to generate any new content today in the 100 degree heat.
Some of the personal details in here have changed, but same rules still apply across the board vis a vis sports and music and Boston. Also worth mentioning that fantasy football season is about to start up again and I'm going to smoke all these basic ass bitches if they can manage not to cheat like they do every other year.
Rabid enthusiasm for both homegrown sports and music
It's the middle of the week, late August, and I spot a couple of friends by the door when I rush into the bar. "So," one of them asks immediately, "who are your keepers going to be this year?"
Rabid enthusiasm for both homegrown sports and music
It's the middle of the week, late August, and I spot a couple of friends by the door when I rush into the bar. "So," one of them asks immediately, "who are your keepers going to be this year?"
He's talking about fantasy football, of course. I've got Tom Brady, and I'm feeling pretty good, oblivious to the calamity that will change everything next week. We all turn to the game on TV. Sox are losing. Shit. A minute later, the local indie band we'd all come to see kicks into some Bowie-style glam rock, and we move closer to the stage. I keep one eye trained on the TV in the back of the room though, and for the next 45 minutes I stand there, swaying back and forth to the music, conscious of the Sox's dwindling prospects. I'm straddling the fence—eyeliner-wearing rockers on one side, beefed-up pro athletes on the other—and it couldn't feel more natural to be caught in the middle.
Like a surprising number of this city's indie rock fans, I'm also a huge sports nerd.
But wait a minute, isn't that a little weird? It's something that occurred to me at the season-opening barbeque for my fantasy football league. You're thinking maybe a group of back-slapping, brawny meatheads trading Anchorman quotes between bites of buffalo wings, right? Actually, we spent more time talking about the new Oasis and Verve records and planning which shows we were going to check out that week, because the league is stacked, somewhat incongruously, with local band types, DJs, club promoters and music journalists.
Fantasy football, for those of you not among the millions of football fans out there who are participating in increasing numbers every year, is basically like a sports-focused version of a multiplayer online role-playing game. But instead of, say, collecting magic powers and swords or whatever with your level 3 wizard, you're collecting touchdowns and field goals earned by real life NFL players you've drafted into a team. If my starting quarterback, Brett Favre (grabbed him after Brady went down), throws six touchdowns in a game, for example, I get a point value assigned to each score. And every week, I pit my collection of players against one of the other teams in my league, accumulating points that result in either victory or defeat against the other team. So, in other words, it's dork central.
But it still revolves around football, the antithesis of all things cerebral, interesting and tasteful. How can the culture of sports, one completely devoid of irony, one that engenders garish displays of overconsumption and aggressive "manhood," fit hand in hand in a big gay marriage with indie rock, as it does in my league?
Well, in Boston, how can it not? Sports and music obsession are two of our biggest exports.
Zack Wells, guitarist for The Information and The Fatal Flaw (fantasy football team name: Somerville Asspirates; record: 2-3), points out that the Celtics, Red Sox and Patriots made it to the finals all throughout the 1980s when most of the Boston rock scene was growing up, and that that sense of victory might be what's given sports what he calls "more prominence in our nostalgic mental slideshow."
"Most people who grew up in Boston, athletic or not, were sports fans," Wells says. "Or at least they were heavily exposed to it growing up and it was very important to at least one person in their family. Those sorts of things stay with you, even if you hate it, it's a part of your life."
Leo Crowley (team name: Sneaky Chinaman Piedouche Wot Limps; record: 2-1), who works for folk artist Josh Ritter, thinks fandom easily translates across genres, especially during childhood. "I think most of us spent countless afternoons in the backyard pretending to be Walter Payton or Jim Rice or Larry Bird," he says. "Later, when we started playing guitar and dreaming about being Kurt Cobain or Tom Petty or whoever, we simply added that activity and those dreams to our pre-existing interests. Maybe we pretended not to care that much about sports for a while in high school ... or maybe our newfound love of music pushed our love of sports into the background. But for me, eventually, an equilibrium was reached."
It's an equilibrium that many members of my fantasy league, and a few other music and sports-conscious types around town, refer to a lot. While there may be a general consensus that being in a band or working at a club or writing about music doesn't mix with sports fandom in a lot of other cities, in Boston, these pastimes meld easily.
Wells thinks that these music aficionados of our fantasy league—which also includes Carl Lavin, talent booker at Great Scott; Paul Driscoll of WFNX; Michael Marotta, promoter of the Pill dance night and Boston Herald music critic; and Jake Zavracky of the band The Cyanide Valentine—are similar to your average sports fan.
"Even if you love Morrissey and get all emo to the The Smiths with your lady, you still love watching some guy get his head taken off or a 60-yard bomb to Randy Moss," he says. "Football and music are very similar in their emotion, precision, and ability to offer many things to many people. At a show or a Pats game, you can cheer and yell with strangers and can all be connected to something bigger than yourself, but still feel like it is yours."
But is it only in Boston that we think this way?
Paul Driscoll (team name: Brighton Yellowjackets; record: 2-3), grew up a fan of his native Philly teams. "I think Boston, LA and Philadelphia are cities where music and sports are very connected," says Driscoll. "But Boston leads the way by far."
Carl Lavin (team name: Anno 1844; record: 2-3] agrees. "I would imagine that it's really difficult to be a person of any profession to live in Boston and be less than conversationally literate about at least the Red Sox," he says. "Having come of age as a sports fan in San Antonio and remaining a diehard fan of the Spurs, the difference in the passion and involvement of the region is striking. Sports have completely dominated Boston's cultural psyche."
Eli Anderson—talent buyer at the Seattle rock club The Crocodile—stepped through the looking glass when he recently lived in Boston for a short time. "In Seattle, sports buffs and music enthusiasts are very different breeds. I don't see a ton of reasons why the two should be so mutually exclusive," says Anderson. "They both inspire the same kind of rabid, hyper-detailed fandom. They both cultivate the overbearing 'expert' that resides deep within the minds of all über-fans."
Perhaps it's the success of our teams that breeds the crossover, he suggests. "I can't help but wonder if sports and music would overlap more in Seattle if we had more successful franchises," he says. "It's hard to get casual sports fans excited about the kind of rampant mediocrity that rules the roost out here ... When I used to work at the Great Scott, we'd always have the Sox game on in the bar area while the bands were playing. Occasionally, the crowd cheering on the Sox would be louder than the crowd cheering on the band. I can't think of an equivalent situation in Seattle. If you want to watch the football game on Sunday, you have to go to one kind of bar, and then if you want to go to a place with bands or a cool jukebox, you have to go to another kind of place."
But Boston is different. Tom Kielty, a Boston music journalist and sports junkie, cites the example of Hot Stove, Cool Music, a local charity concert series run by baseball's Peter Gammons that brings the worlds of sports and rock together like nowhere else. At their biannual concerts, Boston rock luminaries share the stage with local sports heroes. It's a surprisingly harmonious match. "Hot Stove is unique in that you have active participants in the Red Sox success who also play and love music," Kielty says. "I don't know that there are very many baseball GMs who play guitar well enough to sit in with Pearl Jam the way Theo Epstein did, or 15 game-winning pitchers who enjoy singing as much as Bronson Arroyo does."
The Hot Stove phenomenon, pulling Boston music stalwarts like Bill Janovitz and Kay Hanley right into the center of the sports world, is a pretty fertile metaphor for the overlap here in town. And that's before we even consider the success the Dropkick Murphys have had with their Red Sox- and Bruins-themed songs.
It's something Mark Kates—the local independent record label Fenway Recordings' honcho, and as big a sports fan as you'll meet—points to as evidence of our peculiar love affair. "Peter Gammons always says that Hot Stove could only happen in Boston," he says. "It has less to do with the musicians being into sports than the athletes being into music ... But there is a definite mutual interest in the other side, and I have gotten to know a number of athletes over the years through their love of music."
That sports and music overlap can create problems, though. "I find myself trying not to make too many plans this time of year until more is known about the playoff schedule," says Kates. "I can honestly say that we have had second thoughts about some Fenway Recordings Sessions shows on nights of Sox-Yankees games, for example. I doubt that is ever a factor in New York City."
It's a tricky line to walk, one even further complicated by the wealth of big games we've had to deal with in every sports season these past few years. "We had to delay the Love Is All show [at Great Scott] until Game 5 of the Lakers-Celtics series was over, because it was close and almost everyone in the club wanted to watch the Celtics clinch," says Lavin. "They ended up losing, and this Swedish band that was patient enough to delay their set for about 20 minutes until the game was final, now got to be the soundtrack for fan frustration."
Driscoll had a similar experience at the Middle East four years ago. "The band had the venue set up two TVs because the Sox were playing game 2 of the ALCS," he says. "In between songs, the band kept asking for game updates."
Sports simply aren't seen as the bastion of the square, uncool jocks they once were, says Wells' bandmate Max Fresen (team name: Mt. Vernon Villains; record: 1-4). "The last 20 years of ESPN and white-people-co-opting-black-culture have so radically changed the way that we consume sports that the stigma of being a sports fan has melted away," he says. "The presentation of the material has become so much more hip, immediate and ubiquitous, thereby allowing even the freaks and geeks or punks or whatever to get into it as kids, without getting strange looks from peers."
In the meantime, reasonable sports and music fans seem to be at peace with their coexistence within the same city, and usually within the same person. It's an alliance that seems likely to stick, as long as there is, of course, a different group of assholes to shift our scorn onto.
"Being a 'big sports fan' in the sense of a guy who gets dressed up and goes to games or parties in full regalia is definitely still a stigma because that behavior is reflective of the 'old' style of fandom," says Fresen. "It's the douchey, meathead, guys-who-like-strippers way of doing things."
There are still rules, after all.
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9 comments:
Who is that giant man?
Some basketball dude whose name I forget. Sorry, too hot to be funny today. Or ever.
So, what you're saying is -- you don't care about women's opinions on music or sports.
I suppose I did underrepresent the big women into indie rock who also play fantasy football demo.
When there is love and passion then there is no women and men.Its all about love and interest.
scratch the indie rock part, but if you walk up to any 40+ woman in east Cambridge, there's a 99% chance she could talk your ear off about her fantasy league... and also has that Bronson Arroyo karaoke CD in her car. And she's probably related to me.
We might be related.
DADDY!!!
Excellent stuff from you, man I’ve read your things before and you are just too awesome.
this is one of the best posts that I’ve ever seen; you may include some more ideas in the same theme. I’m still waiting for some interesting thoughts from your side in your next post.
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