From Shawn Mitchell's blog at the Dispatch:
Poster prints of The Dispatch
from Covering the Crew by Shawn Mitchell
I've gotten a couple of emails from readers wanting to know how to get extra copies or PDF images of today's A1 and sports sections (Crew coverage on C1 and C9). You can purchase poster-quality reprints of any page published in the paper from the Dispatch's online page store.
Yesterday, the Columbus Crew beat the New York Red Bulls 3-1 and took home their first MLS Cup.
I've been following the Crew since 1997, the year after I moved to Columbus. I have to fully admit I wasn't aware of the Crew until I moved down here in 1996, just after the MLS Cup of that year. My first game was a shootout win against the San Jose Clash in April of '97. I was confused as hell by the shootout (which I didn't realize even existed), but enjoyed the game. The next year, I bought season tickets. I've been a season ticket possessor since then (not always having paid for them, as I was on the Crew's website staff for several years and got free tickets for that).
I think it's safe to say I've seen this team through thick and thin since then. I was in the stadium for all the losses to DC United in the conference finals (including the deciding game in DC in '99) and have travelled to a few other games as well, in Chicago, New York, and a couple of friendlies against A-League teams in Pittsburgh and Cincinnati. I've exulted in Open Cup wins and Supporters' Shield victories, and despaired to watch us give it up in the playoffs. I've bemoaned our coaching situation as we went from league-leaders to the laughing stock of the league before the term of our current coach, Sigi Schmidt. I've put up with the fans who can only see the negative with the team, and exulted with the fans who love them no matter what.
I was there for the rise of the North End fan section with uber-fan Matt Bernhardt and made lifelong friends there. I witnessed the fall of it with the rise of V-Army. I've watched from afar as the North End was reborn in the Nordecke and smiled with appreciation for this fantastic group of fans.
I've played recreational soccer with my friends from the North End and met my wife on that team. I've interviewed players and coaches, made some friends among those folks, and gotten an appreciation of the down-to-earth nature of US soccer players, players who are genuinely happy to meet their fans and appreciative of the effort that the fans make in a country where their sport is considered second-level.
This past season I probably attended fewer games than I ever have before, due to family commitments and some unforseen circumstances. But the Crew was always in my sights. I hesitantly got excited as this team excelled, did things that in the past would seem impossible for a Crew team (like regularly come back from being down a goal and hold on to a lead in the last 5 minutes), and then watched in awe as the team rolled through the playoffs and took the league in a way that couldn't have been better.
1. We kept DC United out of the playoffs in the last game of the season, getting revenge for years of them keeping us out of MLS Cup.
2. We beat the hated Chicago Fire in the conference finals.
3. And we won the whole darned thing! After a shaky start in the game, the team took over in the second half and showed the form that had led them to victory after victory all season long.
This post would be absolutely remiss without the mention of Guillermo Barros Schelotto, the midfield wizard from Argentina, who came here last year and transformed the team with his incredible vision and creative passing. I can't say anything about him that hasn't already been said, but he absolutely deserves to be remembered with the great athletes of Columbus history.
We don't know what the future holds. Coach Sigi Schmidt's contract is up this year and apparently hasn't been renewed yet (RENEW IT NOW!). Schelotto is a bit older and may not be around with us much longer. And an expansion draft for the new team from Seattle may take key personnel away. You never know .
But now, in this year, and on this day, the Crew is the MLS Champion. Finally. The long suffering fans of Columbus can relax a bit now and enjoy the fruits of victory. Let the talk of MLS's conspiracy against Columbus fade for a bit. Let's ignore the awful pro-New York coverage of the game go. We beat them all - the Crew won the whole darned thing. Enjoy.
Michael Arace from the Dispatch captures this season perfectly.
Some ruminations on the election of Barack Obama last night. Don't expect too much structure... this is just going to be some bullet points. I'm a little too emotional right now to be very coherent.
For us, I can think of three: 9/11 (duh) and the Challenger explosion are two of them. But the third is the only one that's a GOOD thing: the US win in hockey over the Soviet Union at the 1980 Lake Placid Olympics.
Today is the 28th anniversary of that event. We were at the Otsego ski club in Gaylord, MI, on a week-long skiing vacation. The Olympics were going on at the same time, and we were all marveling at the accomplishments of Eric Heiden and his race toward all five speed skating medals.
But the night of February 22, 1980, we were at dinner with friends at the club's dining room. I finished early, and like most 11 year olds, I wanted to get up and go out to the lobby to play video games. While we were out there (my brother and I), we were watching the US/USSR game on the TV. The US won! I walked in to the table where my parents, grandparents, and some friends were eating and told Mom that the US beat the Soviets, 4-3. Mom stood up and announced it to the ENTIRE DINING ROOM!
Anyway, here's the History Channel's recounting of the event:
February 22: General Interest
1980 : U.S. hockey team makes miracle on ice
In one of the most dramatic upsets in Olympic history, the underdog U.S. hockey team, made up of college players, defeats the four-time defending gold-medal winning Soviet team at the XIII Olympic Winter Games in Lake Placid, New York. The Soviet squad, previously regarded as the finest in the world, fell to the youthful American team 4-3 before a frenzied crowd of 10,000 spectators. Two days later, the Americans defeated Finland 4-2 to clinch the hockey gold.
The Soviet team had captured the previous four Olympic hockey golds, going back to 1964, and had not lost an Olympic hockey game since 1968. Three days before the Lake Placid Games began, the Soviets routed the U.S. team 10-3 in an exhibition game at Madison Square Garden in New York City. The Americans looked scrappy, but few blamed them for it--their average age, after all, was only 22, and their team captain, Mike Eruzione, was recruited from the obscurity of the Toledo Blades of the International League.
Few had high hopes for the seventh-seeded U.S. team entering the Olympic tournament, but the team soon silenced its detractors, making it through the opening round of play undefeated, with four victories and one tie, thus advancing to the four-team medal round. The Soviets, however, were seeded No. 1 and as expected went undefeated, with five victories in the first round.
On Friday afternoon, February 22, the American amateurs and the Soviet dream team met before a sold-out crowd at Lake Placid. The Soviets broke through first, with their new young star, Valery Krotov, deflecting a slap shot beyond American goalie Jim Craig's reach in the first period. Midway through the period, Buzz Schneider, the only American who had previously been an Olympian, answered the Soviet goal with a high shot over the shoulder of Vladislav Tretiak, the Soviet goalie.
The relentless Soviet attack continued as the period progressed, with Sergei Makarov giving his team a 2-1 lead. With just a few seconds left in the first period, American Ken Morrow shot the puck down the ice in desperation. Mark Johnson picked it up and sent it into the Soviet goal with one second remaining. After a brief Soviet protest, the goal was deemed good, and the game was tied.
In the second period, the irritated Soviets came out with a new goalie, Vladimir Myshkin, and turned up the attack. The Soviets dominated play in the second period, outshooting the United States 12-2, and taking a 3-2 lead with a goal by Alesandr Maltsev just over two minutes into the period. If not for several remarkable saves by
Jim Craig, the Soviet lead would surely have been higher than 3-2 as the third and final 20-minute period began.
Nearly nine minutes into the period, Johnson took advantage of a Soviet penalty and knocked home a wild shot by David Silk to tie the contest again at 3-3. About a minute and a half later, Mike Eruzione, whose last name means "eruption" in Italian, picked up a loose puck in the Soviet zone and slammed it past Myshkin with a 25-foot wrist shot.
For the first time in the game, the Americans had the lead, and the crowd erupted in celebration.
There were still 10 minutes of play to go, but the Americans held on, with Craig making a few more fabulous saves. With five seconds remaining, the Americans finally managed to get the puck out of their zone, and the crowd began counting down the final seconds. When the final horn sounded, the players, coaches, and team officials poured onto the ice in raucous celebration. The Soviet players, as awestruck as everyone else, waited patiently to shake their opponents' hands.
The so-called Miracle on Ice was more than just an Olympic upset; to many Americans, it was an ideological victory in the Cold War as meaningful as the Berlin Airlift or the Apollo moon landing. The upset came at an auspicious time: President Jimmy Carter had just announced that the United States was going to boycott the 1980 Summer Games in Moscow because of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and Americans, faced with a major recession and the Iran hostage crisis, were in dire need of something to celebrate. After the game, President Carter called the players to congratulate them, and millions of Americans spent that Friday night in revelry over the triumph of "our boys" over the Russian pros.
As the U.S. team demonstrated in their victory over Finland two days later, it was disparaging to call the U.S. team amateurs. Three-quarters of the squad were top college players who were on their way to the National Hockey League (NHL), and coach Herb Brooks had trained the team long and hard in a manner that would have made the most authoritative Soviet coach proud. The 1980 U.S. hockey team was probably the best-conditioned American Olympic hockey team of all time--the result of countless hours running skating exercises in preparation for Lake Placid.
In their play, the U.S. players adopted passing techniques developed by the Soviets for the larger international hockey rinks, while preserving the rough checking style that was known to throw the Soviets off-guard. It was these factors, combined with an exceptional afternoon of play by Craig, Johnson, Eruzione, and others, that resulted in the miracle at Lake Placid.
This improbable victory was later memorialized in a 2004 film, Miracle, starring Kurt Russell.
This post is designed as more of a rambling thought process than as any sort of quantifiable or supportable hypothesis. Keep that in mind - the point here is to discuss, not to define or state fact.
Despite the fact that I think the idea of converting as much of our energy in the US (and yes, around the world) to renewable sources such as solar, tidal, wind, etc. is the necessary step for us to take to improve the environment and get out of the quagmire that is the Middle East, I'm also concerned that such a step will open the floodgates to a whole new set of problems. This is a discussion of some of those problems as regards terrorism.
During what is commonly called "the Dark Ages" in Europe (when in fact it was hardly any sort of dark age, from what I've been reading recently), the Middle East and Muslim culture was soaring forward on the academic and cultural fronts. Much of the learning of ancient Greece and Rome was absorbed by Muslim scholars and improved upon, and many new sciences were developed as well. The number system we use today comes directly from that used by Muslim scholars; indeed the number zero was created by the Muslim mathematicians who found need for a placeholder in their system. Truly brilliant work was done during this time, and the Muslim world was the greatest center of learning in the world during that period.
Fast forward to the discovery of oil in the Middle East. Suddenly (or not so suddenly, given the imperialist nature of European powers in the 18th and 19th centuries), the value of the Middle East was no longer in the quality of its scholars and its position as a center of learning, but rather in its location and the black, oozy mess that was under its sands.
Since that discovery, and the sudden wealth that the sheiks and shahs and the like were bringing in based on nothing more than blind luck (that the oil was under their territories), the culture of the Middle East has been in a sharp decline. Instead of centers of learning, we now had centers of power, where those who controlled the flow of oil controlled the politics as well. Learning was taken out of the equation and pure capitalism was embraced in its stead.
So we now have a once-great culture, renowned for repositories of knowledge and institutions of learning, and now simply the distributors of a product. One product - crude oil. And in that time, the Muslim world has gone from a peaceful, mostly tolerant area of the world (and despite traditional views of the Crusades, it was an invasion by the Christian world of the Muslim world) to a very factionalized area, with rampant terrorism and intolerant regimes of all sorts. Let's face it - the globalized world has not been kind to the Middle East, for the most part. Sure, there are great centers of capitalism in the Middle East such as Dubai, but how many of those people are actually benefiting from that money rolling in? That's right: very few.
Now, the primary consumers of that one product, the western world (America and Europe), are trying to move away from an oil-based energy system. A system that our demand for a single product has put in place in the Middle East is now basically going to be abandoned, now that we're increasingly done with the product. What will the outcry of that be in the Middle East?
If I was a resident of that part of the world, and I'd seen my entire country revolve around the sale of oil for decades based on the demand of the western world, only to have that demand vanish over the span of a few years, I wouldn't be a particularly understanding person. In fact, what I'd see is that the West took my country and used it up, then leaving it on its own after it served its use.
What kind of resentment is going to remain in those countries after we leave and take our money with us? And what kind of revenge are they going to seek against us after we leave?
As I see it, the one thing we'd have going for us is that no more money would be flowing out of our coffers and into theirs, so there would be less money for terrorism (and let's face it - terrorism costs money, otherwise they wouldn't need to get oil money from Arabian sheiks).
Other than that, the necessary step we are taking to reduce our use of oil is going to result in a whole new set of problems. Keep your eyes open.
I welcome your comments - please keep it civil. I don't mean to offend anyone with my comments, just to stir up some debate.
Wow... talk about coming out of the blue. I heard about this today when I was reading my ESPN email newsletter and was totally taken aback. Lamar Hunt, for those of you who don't know, isn't just the founder of the AFL and the Super Bowl, he's also one of the biggest proponents of soccer in the US. He was an owner of a team in the old NASL, and of course he was the owner (at one time or another) of the Columbus Crew, the Dallas Burn, and the Kansas City Wizards of MLS.
He died of prostate cancer after a long fight. May he rest in peace.
Keith Olbermann does it again, this time speaking candidly about the lessons that the Vietnam War should have impressed on our president. Instead Bush ignores them and continues to insist that "we only lose if we leave."
Also, here are some great comments on Olbermann from the Nation (reprinted by Alternet) that compare him to - who else? - Edward R. Murrow. Where have I heard that before?
A sad day for U of M fans - legendary coach Bo Schembechler passed away today at the age of 77.
The article gives his history, but I would obviously like to make a few comments.
I never liked Bo, but I respected him. He ran a clean, quality program at Michigan and gave a good name to college football in this country. He led the nation's winningest program for twenty-one years and was always a great opponent for the Irish. And he always remembered that college football's real wins came after graduation in the character and intelligence of the former players.
Bo, you will be missed. Hopefully your boys from Ann Arbor will be able to give you a proper send-off by crushing the Buckeyes tomorrow.
This is an excellent article by David Brooks of the New York Times. It talks about the situation in Iraq (in regard to the total chaos into which it is falling) and why that is. Read the op-ed piece, but the jist of the article is that the reason Iraq is failing is because Iraq, as a nation, doesn't really exist in the minds of the so-called "Iraqis."
Before the British takeover of the area known as Iraq, it was a simple group of small tribes that constantly fought with each other for the resources available. After the British created the state of Iraq, they figured that simply having a constitution and a government would be enough for them. Well, that wasn't the case.
So what you have is a boundary encasing several warring tribes (not even just the Kurds, Shia, and Sunnis, but smaller factions beyond those) that have been trying to use the government to "get over" on each other for centuries. Even the government of Saddam Hussein was one tribe getting power of the main resource of the state - oil - and forcing their will on everyone else. And now we're trying to do what the British tried and failed.
Again, the Bush Administration fails to understand history and has gotten us involved in a situation we can't win. The Iraqis simply don't have the same motivations as we do.
Read a great excerpt today from retired USMC General Smedley Butler, one of the few men in American history to have won the prestigious Congressional Medal of Honor TWICE. Definitely a warrior, and a respected member of the military community.
He wrote a book after he finished his service entitled War is a Racket. Here's an excerpt from a speech he made in 1933 that I found very enlightening.
"War is just a racket. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of people. Only a small inside group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few at the expense of the masses.
I believe in adequate defense at the coastline and nothing else. If a nation comes over here to fight, then we'll fight. The trouble with America is that when the dollar only earns 6 percent over here, then it gets restless and goes overseas to get 100 percent. Then the flag follows the dollar and the soldiers follow the flag.
I wouldn't go to war again as I have done to protect some lousy investment of the bankers. There are only two things we should fight for. One is the defense of our homes and the other is the Bill of Rights. War for any other reason is simply a racket.
There isn't a trick in the racketeering bag that the military gang is blind to. It has its "finger men" to point out enemies, its "muscle men" to destroy enemies, its "brain men" to plan war preparations, and a "Big Boss" Super-Nationalistic-Capitalism.
It may seem odd for me, a military man to adopt such a comparison. Truthfulness compels me to. I spent thirty- three years and four months in active military service as a member of this country's most agile military force, the Marine Corps. I served in all commissioned ranks from Second Lieutenant to Major-General. And during that period, I spent most of my time being a high class muscle- man for Big Business, for Wall Street and for the Bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism.
I suspected I was just part of a racket at the time. Now I am sure of it. Like all the members of the military profession, I never had a thought of my own until I left the service. My mental faculties remained in suspended animation while I obeyed the orders of higher-ups. This is typical with everyone in the military service.
I helped make Mexico, especially Tampico, safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefits of Wall Street. The record of racketeering is long. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. In China I helped to see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested.
During those years, I had, as the boys in the back room would say, a swell racket. Looking back on it, I feel that I could have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents."
BEWARE: HISTORY-BASED RANT AHEAD!
I'm not one for getting too addicted to TV show... one will come along every once in a while that I love but even then, it's not like I have to watch it NOW (Thank you, TiVo). The X-Files and Lost are the two most recent examples (See? Two shows in the past 10 years).
But recently I've been watching NBC's Treasure Hunters and getting into the search for whatever this treasure may be. It's been neat to watch the show weave its way around the country (and, in the last episode, through parts of France and Britain). And it's also fun to watch them solve the puzzles while you sit there and agonize at their not seeing what's right in front of them.
However... I'm getting very disappointed at this group of people because they don't seem to have even the FIRST bit of knowledge about this country's history sometimes!
Example: last episode, the clue they found was a mask of a person, and they were told it was a foreigner who had a lot to offer the continental army under Washington. I was torn for a while as to whether they were referring to the Marquis de Lafayette or Casimir Pulaski, both of whom were Europeans that offered their services to the Father of our Country during the Revolutionary War.
What disturbed the HELL out of me, though, was that no one in the Treasure Hunters group even had a theory about who the person might be, even when they knew their next stop was Paris, France! In fact, on the show's website they had some "behind the scenes" video of the show, and one of the contestants (who is an Air Force officer) explained to the camera that they were looking for the statue of Lafayette, "even though they weren't sure who he was!"
When even the officers who are defending our country don't know our history, what hope is there for the rest of the country? The lack of knowledge about this country's history among the general populace makes me sick.
I'll continue watching the show, because it's fun to see how much SMARTER I am than the folks who are taking part, and because it's neat to see all the puzzles. But at this point, I don't care who wins because they're all losers.
For some reason, this was really bugging me today after the comments left by Dale in the joke posting below. So I looked it up.
Um... General Tso sounds like something of a nasty guy. Good thing his chicken is so spicy-good.
