This Could Get Interesting

With the deadline for the current CBA coming up, things are getting interesting in the relationship between the players, the owners, and the league itself.

According to The New York Times, the NFL players' union is considering an interesting course o action. The union might decertify itself, a move that could expose the league to individual lawsuits by players.

That could expose the owners to potential losses. We already know that the owners are way more interested in money than in actually having a football season. Read the full story here.

Not only that, but the Times is also reporting that a federal appeals court has ruled that the league acted against the interests of the players in renegotiating TV contracts. Here's the story.

Suddenly, it might be in the owner's best interest to concede on some points and actually get a CBA with the players. I'm a fan; all I really care is that we have NFL games in September.

Not For Long

I don’t remember what coach said it was or what player was involved, but I clearly remember a great clip of National Football League video. The coach said, “This is the NFL, son, and that stands for Not For Long if you keep playing like that."*

This week is the deadline for the CBA, or collective bargaining agreement, which is the basic contract that governs the relationship between owners and players in the NFL. If the two sides can’t reach an agreement, NFL could definitely stand for Not For Long.

For over a year, NFL fans have been hearing that the owners have an insurance policy that basically guarantees income for them in the event that there are no games played during the 2011 season. What that meant is that the owners really have no incentive to compromise on their position, because they have nothing to lose.

In the event that the two sides failed to negotiate a new CBA, the owners could simply lock the players out for a year and lose little in terms of money. The prospect that 2010 could be the last NFL season for a while sharpened the focus on each game of the season for some of us. We kept wondering if pro football really was Not For Long.

As of last week, things don’t really look good for an agreement any time soon. There might really not be a 2011 season.

The National Hockey League locked out their players and effectively canceled the 1194-95 season. It took several years for hockey to regain its fans, attendance, and TV ratings after the strike.

1994 was also the year that Major League Baseball lost a chunk of its regular season along with the entire postseason. They didn’t even play the World Series that year. Major League Baseball didn’t begin to regain its fans until the 1998 season and the home-run record chase between Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa.

Would the same thing happen to the NFL if it fails to  conduct a season this coming fall? Absolutely. What the owners and the players always forget is that fans can always find something else to do to occupy their time. A lot of NFL fans just might discover the beauty of fall foliage if there are no games on TV during those endless Sunday afternoons.

I hope the players and owners figure out a solution, because I’m a fan. Part of me, though, hopes they dig in, refuse to compromise with each other, and cancel the 2011 season. Part of me wants them to find out that, for many fans, a fall without pro football games would mean that the NFL is Not For Long.

*Update: A Twitter friend reminded me that it was Jerry Glanville, former head coach of the Atlanta Falcons, who delivered the line. He was talking to a referee and told the official he was "not for long" if he kept making bad calls.

Let's (Not) Go Bowling!

The seemingly never-ending Bowl Season has begun. It all started with three bowls on a December Saturday, including Northern Illinois beating Fresno State on the blue artificial turf at Boise State. That was the Humanitarian Bowl.

Really?

I’m a human, but I couldn’t generate any interest in the Huskies against the Raisins or whatever in the Humanitarian Bowl. But then, I’m old enough to remember when bowl games had a certain luster about them, and that was because there were four or five of them. This year there are 35 bowl games. Thirty-five.

Only one bowl game actually counts for something, because its real name is the BCS Championship. That one doesn’t get played until mid-January, and it will pit Auburn and Oregon against each other. Number One against Number Two.

The Bowl Championship Series executives and the fans of this stupid system are breaking their arms patting themselves on the back. They think it’s fantastic that the system has worked--the two teams that “should” be in the title game actually are!

Meanwhile, the Football Championship Series, formerly known as Division 1-AA, has a tournament that will pit two 12-2 teams against each other. Both teams played their way into the title game, the way a championship should work. Nobody in 1-AA is crying for Appalachian State, a traditional power and the top seed, because they were soundly beaten in the quarterfinals of a tournament. In the BCS system, App State would probably be in the championship game because they “should” be.

But Division 1-AA, just like Division II and Division III, has a real tournament. It’s had one for years, and nobody has ever claimed a negative impact on academics or any of the other endless baloney that gets thrown around as reasons for Division 1-A, aka BCS, not having a tournament.

I think that should end. The once-proud bowl lineup has lost all its value. When teams with 6-6 records qualify for bowls, how special are they? Flush the bowls; install a tournament.

Here’s my Christmas gift to the NCAA, a proposal for a Division 1-A Tournament. Start with 16 teams--sure, you’re going to get arguments every year about the teams that don’t get in, but that happens in basketball too. And there are 65 teams in the basketball tournament. So pick the top 16 and be done with it.

A 16-team tournament gives you three playoff rounds and a championship game. That totals 15 games--eight in the first round, four in the quarterfinals, two semifinal games and the title game. The top 15 bowl games, which means the five BCS “series” bowls plus the next tier but not the Humanitarian Bowl, can be the automatic tournament game sites for the first three to five years. After that, cities can bid to be playoff sites just like they do in basketball.

If cities want to keep hosting bowl games that attract 6-6 teams, they can. Nobody will watch, which is how it should be.

Announce this plan at the beginning of the 2012 season, implement it for the 2015 season, and by 2020 you’ve got a football tournament. Presto.

The NCAA can send me a thank-you card any day now. I am not holding my breath.

Surviving, Not Inspiring

A friend from high school made the mistake recently of telling me in an email that I inspired her. Although I tried to be gentle because she couldn’t have known, I replied with firmness that I really don’t like to be called an inspiration.

It was two years ago that I was undergoing chemotherapy for testicular cancer. Most everyone who knows me says that I approached chemo with a great attitude and unbelievable strength.

They were right about my attitude. I was extremely optimistic and upbeat about chemo, and I had good reason. The urologist who diagnosed my cancer, the oncologist who treated me, and an oncological nurse who is also a good friend all confirmed that my particular form of cancer was curable. The chemo protocol that I was facing has a 90 percent success rate. I liked my chances.

I tried to keep a positive attitude during chemo, which was a three-month ordeal. I got infusions of two drugs every day for five days, then two weeks off, then another five-day week of infusions. I was getting a third drug administered every Tuesday for nine weeks.

As I was about to start chemo, some friends told me I should write about the experience as it was happening. Keep a blog, they said. I actually attempted to do just that. I still have the notes from the first couple of days of chemo. Absolutely nothing was happening, and I wondered what the big deal was.

Then the fourth day came along. On that day, two chemo drugs hit me like a runaway train. I was tired; no, I was exhausted. I hit a level of fatigue that I truly didn’t know existed. A day later, I felt worse. On the day after my first five-day infusion week, I hit the jackpot: I was exhausted, weak, nauseated and I had chills. I felt horrible and, with my wife working that day, I got to feel it all by myself.

In addition to those symptoms, which my oncologists and the nursing staff had warned me about, I was extremely emotional. I burst into tears for no reason at all, at the oddest times.

I was sure at that moment that I had made the right decision by not starting a blog. I wouldn’t have been able to accurately describe just how horrible I felt. Two years later, I still haven’t found the words that truly describe the complete absence of strength and vitality that chemo caused.

These days I feel strong and I haven’t shown any signs of tumors for a year and a half. I’m grateful for cancer research and for the dedication of the medical professionals who specialize in oncology. But I don’t feel like an inspiration.

I feel like a survivor. And that’s more than enough for me.

Waging the Annual War

About 20 years ago I worked for a small company in St. Louis that was operated by the two men who had founded the enterprise. They were the original odd couple: One was an Italian Catholic and the other was a Jew.

By apparent coincidence, the staff of just under a hundred people was roughly split evenly between Jews and gentiles.

It was an eye-opener for someone who had never spent a lot of time with Jewish people. I got to ask all sorts of questions about Jewish traditions, beliefs and holidays. In fact, this company was the first place I ever worked where we had an annual Holiday Party to make sure everyone felt included.

We had our party after New Years to make scheduling easier. Look at the calendar sometime and figure out when you can schedule a celebration for a hundred people without bumping into some December religious observance, Christian or Jewish.

What got me thinking about that experience is the fact that, once again, the usual suspects are bleating about the war that the liberals and their misguided ideas about political correctness are waging against Christmas. The outrage of these people has become more predictable than the sunrise, making it pretty easy to ignore.

The usual target is the retailers who have instructed employees to wish customers Happy Holidays instead of a Merry Christmas. Those weak retailers bending to the will of the liberals. Predictable.

So the thing that really captured my attention was hearing people I know, people who don’t have talk shows and ratings to worry about, talking about the war on Christmas. Specifically, they’re railing against those who wish everyone Happy Holidays. So I decided it’s time to sound off.

Look, there’s one thing retailers care about, and it is not political correctness. It’s sales. Retailers like selling things to customers. Several years ago, they caught onto the fact that Jewish people like to buy things toward the end of the year and give them as Hanukkah gifts. With a strong desire to avoid alienating any potential customer, retailers started telling employees to wish customers Happy Holidays. That’s a greeting that covers everybody.

Trust me on this: Liberals have no influence over the retail industry. Unless they can drive down sales. If you think liberals have the power to dampen sales during Christmas and Hanukkah, you just don’t pay attention.

So have yourself a merry little Christmas. Or a happy Hanukkah. And if you don’t like hearing “Happy Holidays” from employees at particular store, shop at another store.

The Cult of Mac

I still remember the very first time I saw a Macintosh computer. It was January 1986 and I had just been hired as a technical writer by McDonnell-Douglas. The man who hired me was building a team of outside-the-box thinkers and wanted us all to be working on an outside-the-box computer.

So I started writing on a Macintosh Plus. To say I was unimpressed is being kind. This was the beige box with a 9-inch diagonal black and white screen. At least it had an external hard drive to actually store some documents. I wanted a real computer--you know, an IBM PC.

Well, I got past that initial reaction and eventually fell in love with the cute little computer. I even bought one. I even found myself completely immersed  in the cult of Macintosh. We cultists tolerated no criticism of our computer; I once even launched an email attack on the Chicago Tribune’s technology columnist because he damned the Mac OS with faint praise. Poor guy’s inbox was overwhelmed.

By 1995 I owned a PowerBook 190 and was attempting to run a freelance writing business using mostly that machine. Problem is, that machine was spending a lot of time in Apple’s Dallas repair facility.

It was in Dallas more than it was in my home. The cult couldn’t help me at that point.

That’s because, at about the same time, I got a project that involved an animated tutorial. The best software I could find to deliver what the client wanted ran only on Windows. And the price for the project was enough to justify buying a shiny new PC.

I discovered that Windows 95, for all the jokes, was pretty sweet. It was usable and I could deliver files to clients who insisted on PC native files. So I broke up with the Mac. I said good-bye to the cult.

Fast forward to today. I was looking for a small, light laptop with long battery life. Netbooks looked promising, but they seemed slow and underpowered for what I wanted a computer to do. You can beef some of them up, but then you’re spending almost as much as you do for a full-blown laptop.

“Get a Mac” is what I kept hearing. Apple’s making quality again, and Macs just work.

So I bit the bullet. In August I bought the 13-inch MacBook Pro. It supposedly had this long battery life, great keyboard and all sorts of other stuff.

Some things have been great. Macs in the past were difficult to network, and that’s putting it mildly. But the MacBook Pro latched onto our wireless network and Internet connection with just a couple of clicks. All I had to do was name this computer and type in the network password.

But at times the pre-installed Safari browser wouldn’t launch. So I got hold of Firefox and use it instead. But the battery life is about hald what was promised. And the DVD/CD drive choked on a DVD. The computer wouldn’t recognize the drive. I had to reset the System Management Controller, and a person on the Mac support forums said that, yeah, that problem sometimes just happens.

I had forgotten what it was like to deal with the cult. Mac believers will tell you that Macs just work, even when they obviously don’t. That problem sometimes just happens. PC owners bitch and moan about every little glitch in the Windows OS, but Mac owners gloss over them. That sometimes just happens.

Something tells me I won’t be renewing my cult membership anytime soon.

The Simplicity of Writing

It was the legendary college basketball coach Bobby Knight who said it as a putdown for a sportswriter he thought was particularly stupid.

"All of us learn to write in the second grade. Most of us go on to greater things."

Permit me to take offense for just a moment. I've been making my living by writing things for the last 30 years or so, which means I've never gone on to the greater things Knight had in mind. Being a writer, however, has introduced me to some fascinating aspects of the business world.

But once I'm over my pity party, I have to admit that Knight was right, in a way. Writing, at its essence, is a pretty basic endeavor. Most, if not all, of us really master the essential act of writing pretty early in elementary school.

That's where we learn about words. That's where we learn what nouns are, and verbs. That's where we learn the value of adjectives and adverbs. That's where we learn the practicality of prepositions.

If we're really lucky, that's also where we learn that writing really is a simple act. All we're doing is stringing together the best combination of nouns, verbs, adverbs, and adjectives, with maybe some prepositions for spice, in order to communicate an idea to someone else. That simplicity is the beauty of writing. That simplicity is also the difficulty, because the quest for the "best combination" of words can be excruciating.

Nobody can tell us, in any situation, what the "best combination" of words will be. We have to find them on our own. That search is where the work is; for me, that search is where the joy of writing truly lives.

On that rare occasion when I know--I know--that I've found the best combination of words to convey my idea, I can say with conviction that Bobby Knight was flat-out wrong. That's when I know that there is nothing, absolutely nothing, greater than writing something very well.