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A Hell of a Show

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The NFL season starts in just over a week, and it looks like the Dolphins may have a chance this year …

Football is the most intellectual of all the major sports in the USofA.  Go ahead, laugh, but it’s true.  All those breaks between plays are more than time for wagging commentary and the occasional Bud commercial, they are a chance for the coach to send in a play that one side will attempt to execute while the other tries to foil it.  Raw athletic ability is often thwarted by a clever plan or a quick wit that sees past it.  Amid the changing fronts of trench warfare that form the game, a good General is what it takes to win.

But there’s a lot more to football than that.  What we’ve learned from the NFL in particular is how important it is to set up a system where everyone has a chance and the rules are evenly enforced.  It’s America at its best.

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The Check is … Against the Boards?

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With a 5-4 win in overtime, the Minnesota Wild beat the Colorado Avalanche, achieving more than the trophy for teams that don’t end in “s”. They advanced to the next round of the playoffs, against the defending Stanley Cup holders Chicago Blackhawks in the resumption of an intense Midwest rivalry.

They also made a great stride towards the team actually breaking even this year.

As any true fan of the game knows, the playoffs bring out the fair weather fans – a term that in the hockey season applies far too literally. But there is a lot more to the game than who wins on the ice. There’s a lot of money flowing through the NHL, and I do mean flowing. Hardly any stays. It’s a great benefit to the city of St Paul, or at least my neighborhood on West Seventh Street, but how does a team stay on the ice? It’s almost amazing.

Let’s talk about the future of the NHL as the Wild has a pretty decent chance at bringing the Stanley Cup to St Paul for the next year.

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Nate Silver

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Nate Silver has left the biz.  The most celebrated political reporter in a long time jumped from the New York Times to become a sports reporter at ESPN.  It’s not really a mystery, given Silver’s love for sports and outsider status at the fossilized Times.  As Public Editor Margaret Sullivan put it, “A number of traditional and well-respected Times journalists disliked his work. … They were also tough on me for seeming to endorse what he wrote, since I was suggesting that it get more visibility.”

Not long ago that political reporters were more or less the top of the journalistic heap and sports writers were at the bottom.  Silver’s new gig turns that upside down.  It’s not a mystery given how much political writing is horserace driven and sports reporters have become the true celebrities of the biz.  But there is much more to it than that.  I believe Silver’s popularity brilliantly displays what journalism must be for a new generation.

Here is my obituary praising Silver’s career as a political journalist, written not as the end of Silver but as the end of good political reporting – for now.

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