Made for sci-fi movies are great. Not "Lord of the Rings" great, or indy movie great, or even summertime blockbuster great, but genre-film great. Some decent dialogue, some comic relief, a few decent tricks with the genre-induced expectations, some stock characters and some depth, and occasionally decent direction. Sure, the plots usually unravel halfway through, but I enjoy these movies on a weekend. Especially when I'm folding laundry or doing other chores.
I just watched one about a Sasquatch that's killing people in the woods in the west somewhere (Colorado?). You've got bank robbers running into the woods, the local cops chasing them, Bishop the android coming after everyone because his wife was killed by a hit-and-run 12 years ago and with her last dying flip of the camcorder somehow recorded a sasquatch in the woods, and Cerina Vincent (who was in Cabin Fever, a reasonable horror movie from around 2003) as the hostage.
Before this there was the movie about the werewolf next door who thought that his cute teenage neighbor was his long-lost love. I didn't see the whole movie but what I saw had good comic relief, like the geeky teenage neighbor who also has a thing for the girl, the spunky little brother, and of course Kevin Sorbo, Hercules himself, as an actor who plays a big-game hunter.
I guess what fascinates me about sci-fi channel movies is that they're just like a typical Scooby Doo episode. Seriously, think about it... The beginning of each Scooby Doo episodes has a great setting and some kind of scary monster. The haunted swamp. The haunted amusement park. The haunted jungle with the Jaguaro. There's a new mystery to solve, with tons of potential!
Then we cut from the creepy setting that was just established to the Scooby gang, at the malt shop or in the Mystery Machine, and they somehow get stuck wherever the mystery is happening. At this moment, a Scooby Doo episode has peaked, and will play out the same way as every other episode. Some kind of trap with Shaggy and Scooby as the bait, the unmasking, the "meddling kids" line. If I could just watch the first half of Scooby Doo episodes, I'd be thrilled.
Sci-fi channel movies are quite similar. They establish a creepy setting, some stock characters, one or two heroes, some comic relief. If you're lucky there will be one or two spots where the genre conventions set you up for one thing, but something else happens instead.
Unfortunately, sci-fi channel movies usually play out in the same mostly uninteresting fashion as a typical Scooby Doo episode. This reminds me of how difficult it must be to end a movie, even when you've got a great set-up.
Sunday, June 28, 2009
Saturday, June 27, 2009
A different angle on the auto industry bailout
I've heard all the regular theories about the failure of the American auto industry---that the unions have created an unsustainable set of benefits for their retirees ("the unions are to blame!"), the the companies haven't been agile enough to handle foreign competition ("poor corporate culture is to blame!"), that the companies are managed so poorly that there's no way for them to compete ("the management is to blame!").
I had also heard a vague theory that the car companies needed to get out of bad deals with their franchises, but I had no idea what the heck that meant. At least I just heard an explanation on an Econtalk podcast with Michael Munger (Econtalk is hosted by Russ Roberts of George Mason University and is currently my favorite podcast). Munger has been doing some reading about the auto industry and he floated some new information (new at least to me).
Here's the gyst of his analysis: It is illegal in 46 of the 48 continental states for the major auto companies to run their own dealerships. This is ostensibly so that the car companies don't use the threat of setting up their own dealerships to push around dealership franchises.
Car dealerships also cannot close any franchises without paying back the full franchise fee---only the franchisee can make the call to shutter a franchise. Now, on top of that, the car companies are required to produce and market a certain number of vehicles for each franchise. So if GM has a bunch of franchises selling an unprofitable line of cars, it's often cheaper to lose money manufacturing unprofitable cars than to pay back all of the franchisees to close them.
I'm not sure about the history of this legislation; it's very possible that state legislators passed these laws in a good-faith attempt to protect their local car dealerships from the big car companies. But given how the system works, it currently prevents the big three in the US from being nimble, agile, compete 21st century companies.
So let's review:
One other angle here is that car dealerships are extremely profitable, especially in rural areas, and are big contributors to political campaigns, especially in the house of representatives. This may explain why congress has had a strong appetite over the decades to bail out the car companies on a semi-regular basis.
After hearing the podcast, I was thinking a little bit about car dealerships, and I remembered hearing something about the relationship between TV ad revenue and car dealerships. If you notice, often the last commercial before the show starts back up is a spot for the local car dealer, which usually involves the owners of the dealership, poor acting and madcap antics ("You simply can't beat our prices! Why am I punching this monkey with a foam hammer? His name is Prices and only I can beat him!").
So it wouldn't surprise me to find out that car dealership franchises are extremely profitable, politically strong, and more than happy to throw the unions and the car companies under the bus to protect the deal they have set up.
I had also heard a vague theory that the car companies needed to get out of bad deals with their franchises, but I had no idea what the heck that meant. At least I just heard an explanation on an Econtalk podcast with Michael Munger (Econtalk is hosted by Russ Roberts of George Mason University and is currently my favorite podcast). Munger has been doing some reading about the auto industry and he floated some new information (new at least to me).
Here's the gyst of his analysis: It is illegal in 46 of the 48 continental states for the major auto companies to run their own dealerships. This is ostensibly so that the car companies don't use the threat of setting up their own dealerships to push around dealership franchises.
Car dealerships also cannot close any franchises without paying back the full franchise fee---only the franchisee can make the call to shutter a franchise. Now, on top of that, the car companies are required to produce and market a certain number of vehicles for each franchise. So if GM has a bunch of franchises selling an unprofitable line of cars, it's often cheaper to lose money manufacturing unprofitable cars than to pay back all of the franchisees to close them.
I'm not sure about the history of this legislation; it's very possible that state legislators passed these laws in a good-faith attempt to protect their local car dealerships from the big car companies. But given how the system works, it currently prevents the big three in the US from being nimble, agile, compete 21st century companies.
So let's review:
- The big three automakers in the US cannot legally run their own dealerships.
- The car companies cannot close franchises without paying back the full franchise fee to the franchisee.
- The big three must produce and advertise a certain number of (possibly unprofitable) cars for each of their franchisees, or else they need to close the franchise by paying back the franchise fee.
One other angle here is that car dealerships are extremely profitable, especially in rural areas, and are big contributors to political campaigns, especially in the house of representatives. This may explain why congress has had a strong appetite over the decades to bail out the car companies on a semi-regular basis.
After hearing the podcast, I was thinking a little bit about car dealerships, and I remembered hearing something about the relationship between TV ad revenue and car dealerships. If you notice, often the last commercial before the show starts back up is a spot for the local car dealer, which usually involves the owners of the dealership, poor acting and madcap antics ("You simply can't beat our prices! Why am I punching this monkey with a foam hammer? His name is Prices and only I can beat him!").
So it wouldn't surprise me to find out that car dealership franchises are extremely profitable, politically strong, and more than happy to throw the unions and the car companies under the bus to protect the deal they have set up.
Friday, June 26, 2009
Moving sucks, or why Jedi really developed the force
I just helped two of my closest friends pack up for the move from the Albany area to Oregon yesterday, so I have moving on the brain. So some thoughts on moving, in no particular order.
First, the dirty secret of the Jedi order is that the force was an evolutionary adaptation to having to move. Seriously, given a modest 2% economic growth rate per year for all the years until interstellar travel becomes possible, can you imagine how much stuff we'd have? Look at how much crap Americans in 2009 have compared with Americans in 1909! A hundred years ago, what did the typical American own? The bible, farming equipment, uncomfortable wool undergarments, and a very short life expectancy. Rich people also owned a piano. Kids played with dirt and rocks, and if they were lucky they could get a sticks. There was no need to rent storage facilities for all the crap that you couldn't jam into your house, because there just wasn't enough material wealth for people to own very much. Think about it: would you rather be the richest person in 1900 or make the median income in 2009? I'd rather make the median income today because even if I can't buy everything the richest person can today, I can still go to a useful doctor and buy an iPod and I didn't die in childbirth.
(So another quick aside about sparseness in home-decorating: One of my favorite details of Brokeback Mountain was that when Heath Ledger's character visits his Jake Gyllenhall's parents farmhouse, it's nearly completely empty, and everything is dusty and worn-down, because that's how a lot of ageing farmers live. Another quick aside on the topic of re-using things is that the Greenland Norse couldn't produce their own iron, so they re-used metal tools until there was just nothing left. Archaeologists have found knives with a handle bigger than the blade in Greenland.)
Anyway, so in 1909 America there were no beanie babies collecting dust in attics or baseball card collections languishing in basements. People didn't own that much stuff because the economy couldn't produce that much stuff. 100 years later Americans have quite a lot of stuff, most of the stuff in the world according to Affluenza. Now imagine these trends continuing unabated for centuries or millenia, up until humanity can colonize distant galaxies. Can you imagine how much material wealth we'd have by then? And by material wealth, I of course mean stuff. You think you have a lot of collectible mugs now? Imagine in 1000 years when you have around 398 million times as much disposable income as you do now! This is why I've never understood why Duncan MacLeod wasn't absurdly wealthy. He should have just invested a little money in the Royal Bank of Scotland and then waited 400 years. Silly immortals...
I think it makes sense that only Jedi, with the power to move objects with their mind, would be able to keep up with the constant need to move into bigger and bigger houses or palaces or spaceships. Imagine the sophisticated mating calculus that would go on... "Let's see, this girl is beautiful and smart and loving, but this other girl can move objects with her mind and would allow me to accumulate limitless amounts of junk and move it into bigger houses without throwing out my cybernetic back again... Jedi-girl, here I come!" Not to mention some of the less-than-PG sexual implications of Jedi sex.
Another incredibly dorky thought I've had about far-fetched sci-fi paraphanelia is that if transporter technology a la Star Trek ever arrives, it will be heavily used for immigration. You think it's hard to keep Mexicans from crossing the border now, wait until they can beam themselves into the country!
One of my favorite aspects of science fiction is that sci-fi writers take something to its logical conclusion. I especially like the notion that sci-fi writers don't predict future technologies, they predict the human implications of future technologies. So they don't take buggies and engines and imagine cars, they look at cars and imagine road trips and traffic jams (I read this from Robert Sawyer, though I don't know if he said it originally).
So I figure that there's a lot of potential for sci-fi writers to expand on sci-fi concepts themselves, like Jedi and transporters. Much of this has probably showed up in fan fiction or in other blogs that I haven't read yet.
So the take-home message of this posting is that moving sucks, but it was great to see my friends before they head to the west coast and I don't see them as much anymore. And we had a lot of laughs, for example Chadd's response to Debbie's frantic worry about us packing up the broom before she had a chance to sweep: "Honey, we have 79 boxes of stuff to put into the moving truck. Packing up the broom is the last thing on my mind. And everything needs to go outside at some point anyway. It's not like we're going to get so confused about what to move that we start moving things from the truck back into the apartment." I guess you had to be there, because at 87 degrees and 65% humidity in suburban Albany, that was a hilarious line!
First, the dirty secret of the Jedi order is that the force was an evolutionary adaptation to having to move. Seriously, given a modest 2% economic growth rate per year for all the years until interstellar travel becomes possible, can you imagine how much stuff we'd have? Look at how much crap Americans in 2009 have compared with Americans in 1909! A hundred years ago, what did the typical American own? The bible, farming equipment, uncomfortable wool undergarments, and a very short life expectancy. Rich people also owned a piano. Kids played with dirt and rocks, and if they were lucky they could get a sticks. There was no need to rent storage facilities for all the crap that you couldn't jam into your house, because there just wasn't enough material wealth for people to own very much. Think about it: would you rather be the richest person in 1900 or make the median income in 2009? I'd rather make the median income today because even if I can't buy everything the richest person can today, I can still go to a useful doctor and buy an iPod and I didn't die in childbirth.
(So another quick aside about sparseness in home-decorating: One of my favorite details of Brokeback Mountain was that when Heath Ledger's character visits his Jake Gyllenhall's parents farmhouse, it's nearly completely empty, and everything is dusty and worn-down, because that's how a lot of ageing farmers live. Another quick aside on the topic of re-using things is that the Greenland Norse couldn't produce their own iron, so they re-used metal tools until there was just nothing left. Archaeologists have found knives with a handle bigger than the blade in Greenland.)
Anyway, so in 1909 America there were no beanie babies collecting dust in attics or baseball card collections languishing in basements. People didn't own that much stuff because the economy couldn't produce that much stuff. 100 years later Americans have quite a lot of stuff, most of the stuff in the world according to Affluenza. Now imagine these trends continuing unabated for centuries or millenia, up until humanity can colonize distant galaxies. Can you imagine how much material wealth we'd have by then? And by material wealth, I of course mean stuff. You think you have a lot of collectible mugs now? Imagine in 1000 years when you have around 398 million times as much disposable income as you do now! This is why I've never understood why Duncan MacLeod wasn't absurdly wealthy. He should have just invested a little money in the Royal Bank of Scotland and then waited 400 years. Silly immortals...
I think it makes sense that only Jedi, with the power to move objects with their mind, would be able to keep up with the constant need to move into bigger and bigger houses or palaces or spaceships. Imagine the sophisticated mating calculus that would go on... "Let's see, this girl is beautiful and smart and loving, but this other girl can move objects with her mind and would allow me to accumulate limitless amounts of junk and move it into bigger houses without throwing out my cybernetic back again... Jedi-girl, here I come!" Not to mention some of the less-than-PG sexual implications of Jedi sex.
Another incredibly dorky thought I've had about far-fetched sci-fi paraphanelia is that if transporter technology a la Star Trek ever arrives, it will be heavily used for immigration. You think it's hard to keep Mexicans from crossing the border now, wait until they can beam themselves into the country!
One of my favorite aspects of science fiction is that sci-fi writers take something to its logical conclusion. I especially like the notion that sci-fi writers don't predict future technologies, they predict the human implications of future technologies. So they don't take buggies and engines and imagine cars, they look at cars and imagine road trips and traffic jams (I read this from Robert Sawyer, though I don't know if he said it originally).
So I figure that there's a lot of potential for sci-fi writers to expand on sci-fi concepts themselves, like Jedi and transporters. Much of this has probably showed up in fan fiction or in other blogs that I haven't read yet.
So the take-home message of this posting is that moving sucks, but it was great to see my friends before they head to the west coast and I don't see them as much anymore. And we had a lot of laughs, for example Chadd's response to Debbie's frantic worry about us packing up the broom before she had a chance to sweep: "Honey, we have 79 boxes of stuff to put into the moving truck. Packing up the broom is the last thing on my mind. And everything needs to go outside at some point anyway. It's not like we're going to get so confused about what to move that we start moving things from the truck back into the apartment." I guess you had to be there, because at 87 degrees and 65% humidity in suburban Albany, that was a hilarious line!
Monday, June 22, 2009
In defense of selfishness
So on my drive home from Ithaca, I was listening to a Bill Simmons podcast with Dan LeBatard as a guest. I've been a huge fan of Simmons since his days as the Boston Sports Guy, and while I only know LeBatard from some of his work guest hosting PTI, I really like what I've heard from him so far.
What got me thinking about selfishness was their discussion of how the sports media seems to create the same nice storylines to describe the winning team. For example, Simmons points out in a great column about Kobe the belief that in 2009 suddenly Kobe "gets it" (where "it" has something to do with teamwork, passing, or camaraderie), when in fact his performance in the finals was statistically the same in 2009 as it was in 2008. What primarily changed is that his teammates shot 40% from behind the three point line in 2009 and thus his team won. Kobe didn't change, or at least his numbers didn't change, but the storyline has changed, all because of the scoreboard.
LeBatard points out that the year Allen Iverson's 76ers made it to the finals, casual fans were convinced by pundits that Iverson had learned how to be a better teammate, when in reality his team outlasted a weak eastern conference to make the finals. Iverson hadn't changed, his team just won, and that changed his storyline.
This got me thinking about The Wages of Wins, three economists take on sports. They concluded that Kevin Garnett has been the league MVP for many of his years in the league, in that he has had the same extremely high statistical performance for many season. Until he got traded to Boston, he was labeled as a guy who can't get it done in the playoffs, when statistically, he played with well below average teammates. The year his Timberwolves team made the conference finals, Sam Cassell and Latrell Sprewell played extremely well, and Garnett's numbers were at essentially the same excellent level they had been every other season.
I'm also reminded of a classic conundrum in sports about how much quality, high-character role-players matter. If your team wins, it's easy to point to the "good chemistry" provided by your basketball team's 10th man who plays hard in practice, or by your baseball team's prankster utility infielder. But if your team loses, suddenly the lack of size on your bench or the .225 average from your backups matters a lot more. Do we create storylines about chemistry because it gives us something to talk about? For that matter, how much does chemistry really matter? The Mets won the world series in 1986, and the Yankees win with Reggie Jackson. Those teams had no chemistry. The Spurs in the 2000s had great chemistry, but they also had great players. I don't know if chemistry matters, but I suspect it matters a lot less than sportswriters say that it does. Good chemistry comes from the scoreboard. Chemistry is revisionist.
So what does this have to do with selfishness? Well, LeBatard brought up another good point: whatever job you work at, are you happy if you are underpaid and underappreciated but the company does well? I teach at Colgate; how likely am I to take less money so that the school can hire extra personnel and do better? I'll tell you this: If Swarthmore offers me a 25% pay raise to do the same job, I promise I will shed at least one tear as the emerald green campus disappears in my rearview mirror, but I'm moving back to Philly. Well, I'd have to see if the move made sense for me and for my family, and maybe I'd conclude the pulling the (hypothetical future) kids out of school and having my (future) wife switch jobs isn't worth the extra money. Fine. But throw in enough extra money, and I wouldn't even slow the J-Train down on my way south. It would still be a calculation of what's best for me.
How exactly is it that athletes shouldn't take these factors into account? How on earth was the city of Boston so mad when Johnny Damon took more money to play for the Yankees? They offerd to pay him a lot more money, both teams were good, and in NY he can do the talk show circuit and host SNL. How can fans criticize him for making a perfectly rational decision? The same fans that have no problem giving running backs their walking papers with their 30th birthday cake?
Anyway, how does this all tie back into selfishness? Well, fans don't want athletes to be selfish about money or personal success. We want our athletes to respect winning and not be greedy and play the game the right way. But sports fans secretly love and respect selfishness. Even if the don't know it.
Why? Well, what makes great athletes great? Selfishness. Athletes focus on only one thing in their life, usually to the exclusion of everything else. If they don't do this, we complain that they lack the passion for the game. They we engage in some kind of psycho-babble, then go back to surfing the web at work.
For many great athletes, their whole life is their career. Do you think Tiger woods gets up at 3am to change his children's diapers? Do you think Brett Favre does his own laundry? Do you think LeBron James picks up his suits at the dry cleaners and then heads to the bank and the post-office on the way home from practice? I remember hearing a (possibly apocryphal) story that when Eisenhower first got out of office, he picked up a phone and told the dial-tone "Granite-two-four" because he hadn't made a phone call since 1951. People doing high-pressure, highly-sought after jobs don't have time for minute details.
And as fans, we love this about our athletes. Sure, in our own lives, we may not like obsessive, narrow-minded, hyper-competitive people who only think or talk about work... But we love the results when it comes to athletes. And most casual sports fans don't really care if athletes are good people or even if they are interesting people. We want them to sacrifice everything else in their lives for our enjoyment, just like we want from our artists and actors and entertainers.
I read a really interesting article from The Economist about autism that had one image I can't get out of my head: Autistic children will watch things like spinning coins or dripping water for hours on end, and where I would get bored quicker than a freshman who thinks that they're going to learn how to use excel in computer science 101, autists instead become experts on dripping water or spinning coins or counting toothpicks, and learn to spot subtle differences. They become connoisseurs of these seemingly identical events.
Now, I'm not claiming that athletes are autistic, but they certainly devote quite a lot of effort getting really good at one thing, typically to the exclusion of nearly everything else. With athletes we call this passion; with our neighbors we call this OCD and we try to run into the house before they can engage us in coversation.
Seriously, how well-balanced is Tom Brady really? Don't get me wrong, I admit without a trace of shame that I have a man-crush on Brady, and I've even been lobbying my girlfriend to put him on her "list" (from Friends). But I'm afraid that if I met him it would crush my illusions, because I'll bet he's pretty boring. Now, his profession is fascinating, and I'd gush like the middle-school boy who gets to help the hot substitute teacher wash the chalkboard after math class if Brady watched some game film with me... But come on, if he worked those kind of obsessive, meticulous hours at almost any other job, there's no way he'd be the coolest dude in the room. What if Tom Brady were a customer service rep, or an actuary, or a paralegal, and all he talked about was work? His friends would be all, "Tom, goddamit, nobody wants to hear about new innovations for modeling life expectancy!" But because his job is awesome and we want the Patriots to win another superbowl and put those Steelers fans back in their place, we are willing to excuse what could be called selfish, obsessive behavior.
(Plus if I met Brady, all the cultural reference points I've got that help me be the life of the nerd party would be useless---wow, you're in magazines and married to a supermodel and have three superbowl rings? Yeah, I just scored a silver medal on the lighthouse level of Left 4 Dead, so you know, I know a think or two about excellence as well. And there's no way that he can code. If Brady can hack Java, I'll cheer for the Cowboys. And don't tell me he took a Basic course in high school or something---I played football in high school but that doesn't make me a jock.)
The point is that sports fans like excellence, which comes from selfish, hyper-specialized athletes, but we want to read certain stories about chemistry, and players "getting it", and playing the game the right way, so sportswriters feed us stories about the winning team that probably aren't true in the least.
I'd like to read a book about the place of selfishness in sports. I'll bet a lot of top athletes are pretty obsessive about their craft, and I'd like to read more about this aspect of sports. I'm sure there are some biographies I need to look up.
In a related note, a lot of top scientists are incredibly narrowly-focused people as well, but that's a blog post for a different time.
What got me thinking about selfishness was their discussion of how the sports media seems to create the same nice storylines to describe the winning team. For example, Simmons points out in a great column about Kobe the belief that in 2009 suddenly Kobe "gets it" (where "it" has something to do with teamwork, passing, or camaraderie), when in fact his performance in the finals was statistically the same in 2009 as it was in 2008. What primarily changed is that his teammates shot 40% from behind the three point line in 2009 and thus his team won. Kobe didn't change, or at least his numbers didn't change, but the storyline has changed, all because of the scoreboard.
LeBatard points out that the year Allen Iverson's 76ers made it to the finals, casual fans were convinced by pundits that Iverson had learned how to be a better teammate, when in reality his team outlasted a weak eastern conference to make the finals. Iverson hadn't changed, his team just won, and that changed his storyline.
This got me thinking about The Wages of Wins, three economists take on sports. They concluded that Kevin Garnett has been the league MVP for many of his years in the league, in that he has had the same extremely high statistical performance for many season. Until he got traded to Boston, he was labeled as a guy who can't get it done in the playoffs, when statistically, he played with well below average teammates. The year his Timberwolves team made the conference finals, Sam Cassell and Latrell Sprewell played extremely well, and Garnett's numbers were at essentially the same excellent level they had been every other season.
I'm also reminded of a classic conundrum in sports about how much quality, high-character role-players matter. If your team wins, it's easy to point to the "good chemistry" provided by your basketball team's 10th man who plays hard in practice, or by your baseball team's prankster utility infielder. But if your team loses, suddenly the lack of size on your bench or the .225 average from your backups matters a lot more. Do we create storylines about chemistry because it gives us something to talk about? For that matter, how much does chemistry really matter? The Mets won the world series in 1986, and the Yankees win with Reggie Jackson. Those teams had no chemistry. The Spurs in the 2000s had great chemistry, but they also had great players. I don't know if chemistry matters, but I suspect it matters a lot less than sportswriters say that it does. Good chemistry comes from the scoreboard. Chemistry is revisionist.
So what does this have to do with selfishness? Well, LeBatard brought up another good point: whatever job you work at, are you happy if you are underpaid and underappreciated but the company does well? I teach at Colgate; how likely am I to take less money so that the school can hire extra personnel and do better? I'll tell you this: If Swarthmore offers me a 25% pay raise to do the same job, I promise I will shed at least one tear as the emerald green campus disappears in my rearview mirror, but I'm moving back to Philly. Well, I'd have to see if the move made sense for me and for my family, and maybe I'd conclude the pulling the (hypothetical future) kids out of school and having my (future) wife switch jobs isn't worth the extra money. Fine. But throw in enough extra money, and I wouldn't even slow the J-Train down on my way south. It would still be a calculation of what's best for me.
How exactly is it that athletes shouldn't take these factors into account? How on earth was the city of Boston so mad when Johnny Damon took more money to play for the Yankees? They offerd to pay him a lot more money, both teams were good, and in NY he can do the talk show circuit and host SNL. How can fans criticize him for making a perfectly rational decision? The same fans that have no problem giving running backs their walking papers with their 30th birthday cake?
Anyway, how does this all tie back into selfishness? Well, fans don't want athletes to be selfish about money or personal success. We want our athletes to respect winning and not be greedy and play the game the right way. But sports fans secretly love and respect selfishness. Even if the don't know it.
Why? Well, what makes great athletes great? Selfishness. Athletes focus on only one thing in their life, usually to the exclusion of everything else. If they don't do this, we complain that they lack the passion for the game. They we engage in some kind of psycho-babble, then go back to surfing the web at work.
For many great athletes, their whole life is their career. Do you think Tiger woods gets up at 3am to change his children's diapers? Do you think Brett Favre does his own laundry? Do you think LeBron James picks up his suits at the dry cleaners and then heads to the bank and the post-office on the way home from practice? I remember hearing a (possibly apocryphal) story that when Eisenhower first got out of office, he picked up a phone and told the dial-tone "Granite-two-four" because he hadn't made a phone call since 1951. People doing high-pressure, highly-sought after jobs don't have time for minute details.
And as fans, we love this about our athletes. Sure, in our own lives, we may not like obsessive, narrow-minded, hyper-competitive people who only think or talk about work... But we love the results when it comes to athletes. And most casual sports fans don't really care if athletes are good people or even if they are interesting people. We want them to sacrifice everything else in their lives for our enjoyment, just like we want from our artists and actors and entertainers.
I read a really interesting article from The Economist about autism that had one image I can't get out of my head: Autistic children will watch things like spinning coins or dripping water for hours on end, and where I would get bored quicker than a freshman who thinks that they're going to learn how to use excel in computer science 101, autists instead become experts on dripping water or spinning coins or counting toothpicks, and learn to spot subtle differences. They become connoisseurs of these seemingly identical events.
Now, I'm not claiming that athletes are autistic, but they certainly devote quite a lot of effort getting really good at one thing, typically to the exclusion of nearly everything else. With athletes we call this passion; with our neighbors we call this OCD and we try to run into the house before they can engage us in coversation.
Seriously, how well-balanced is Tom Brady really? Don't get me wrong, I admit without a trace of shame that I have a man-crush on Brady, and I've even been lobbying my girlfriend to put him on her "list" (from Friends). But I'm afraid that if I met him it would crush my illusions, because I'll bet he's pretty boring. Now, his profession is fascinating, and I'd gush like the middle-school boy who gets to help the hot substitute teacher wash the chalkboard after math class if Brady watched some game film with me... But come on, if he worked those kind of obsessive, meticulous hours at almost any other job, there's no way he'd be the coolest dude in the room. What if Tom Brady were a customer service rep, or an actuary, or a paralegal, and all he talked about was work? His friends would be all, "Tom, goddamit, nobody wants to hear about new innovations for modeling life expectancy!" But because his job is awesome and we want the Patriots to win another superbowl and put those Steelers fans back in their place, we are willing to excuse what could be called selfish, obsessive behavior.
(Plus if I met Brady, all the cultural reference points I've got that help me be the life of the nerd party would be useless---wow, you're in magazines and married to a supermodel and have three superbowl rings? Yeah, I just scored a silver medal on the lighthouse level of Left 4 Dead, so you know, I know a think or two about excellence as well. And there's no way that he can code. If Brady can hack Java, I'll cheer for the Cowboys. And don't tell me he took a Basic course in high school or something---I played football in high school but that doesn't make me a jock.)
The point is that sports fans like excellence, which comes from selfish, hyper-specialized athletes, but we want to read certain stories about chemistry, and players "getting it", and playing the game the right way, so sportswriters feed us stories about the winning team that probably aren't true in the least.
I'd like to read a book about the place of selfishness in sports. I'll bet a lot of top athletes are pretty obsessive about their craft, and I'd like to read more about this aspect of sports. I'm sure there are some biographies I need to look up.
In a related note, a lot of top scientists are incredibly narrowly-focused people as well, but that's a blog post for a different time.
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