On Steph and the Oscars

On Saturday night this happened. On Sunday night this happened.

What do they have in common? Griping and sour grapes from people who should know better, making feeble attempts to protect selfish legacies.

First, the Saturday thing. Steph Curry broke his own record for 3-pointers in a single season – with 28 games remaining. He is shooting a three point field goal percentage better than most NBA players have for layups and dunks. It is in short, one of – if not THE – most impressive season in all of sports history. Not just basketball, but in all human sporting endeavor.

The Sunday thing was the 88^th Academy Awards. And of course this year, there was a big hue and cry about #oscarssowite – the rather uncomfortable fact that all nominees for actor and director were white. In a biting monologue and throughout the show, Chris Rock, AKA, “the man with the toughest job in the world,” did a pretty damn good job humorously laying waste to the racist Hollywood system and the white privilege that keeps it churning on.

If you are blessed with sight, and you came to both the Saturday thing and the Sunday thing as a normal person, you could only come away knowing both to be true: Steph Curry is a transcendent and brilliant player having the season of all seasons, and Hollywood is very racist. There really is no other honest position to take.

But some, blinded to this reality by their own sense of legacy and privilege, have.

With Steph, old guard stars like Oscar Robertson, Isiah Thomas and Stephen Jackson have weighed in and claimed that Steph couldn’t do what he’s doing, “back in the day.” That relaxed rules about physical play and a commitment to better defense would stop him in his tracks 10 or 20 or 30 years ago. These basketball chirping elders are of course doing what many chirping elders tend to do: refuse to acknowledge that a younger savant has come along and torched their talent and their memories.

Isaiah Thomas for example, a two-time NBA champion, hall of famer and 12-time NBA all-star, standing 6’1” and 180 pounds, averaged almost 20 point per game during his career – a career solidly located during that bygone NBA era of tough defenses and physical play. Steph Curry is a 1,000 percent better shooter than Thomas; has exponentially better ball handling skills and is bigger and faster than Isiah. Yet, Thomas says Curry couldn’t excel in his era? If I didn’t know better, I’d say that is the ravings of a lunatic.

But, despite his abysmal record as a coach, GM and owner, Isaiah is not a lunatic. He knows what he’s doing. He’s employing an argument as old as argument itself. To bask in the safe harbor of a point that is utterly unprovable. Just as kids squabble about who would win a fight; Godzilla or King Kong, Isaiah is casting shade on Steph because he knows that until someone actually invents a time machine and transports #30 back to 1989, he’s safe in his accusations. Thomas, or Robertson or Jackson or other retired stars can sit back and cast aspersions, because they can’t really be taken to task.

With the Oscars, the tactic is a bit different, but the sentiment is the same. Hollywood Royalty, Meryl Streep, Michael Cain and Charlotte Rampling, when confronted by the claim of racist Hollywood all took turns ham-handedly saying that either A.) Whites suffer too, or B.) Prejudice against minorities is overblown.

Here the attempt is not so much about preserving memories of greatness and glory, but more about attempting to preserve the status quo and cutting down competition.

Streep, Rampling and Cain are served well by an entertainment industry that goes out of its way to make acting, directing and producing opportunities much easier for those of their same skin tone. Further, these great actors don’t want to have to answer uncomfortable questions about how their path to fame and fortune was made much easier than that of blacks, Asians and Latinos. In an industry that celebrates the fantasy and fiction of the humble everyman waiting tables by night and auditioning by day overcoming long odds to become an Oscar Winner, no one currently supplying air to that dream balloon wants to confront the truly impossible odds of black actors and directors making it big.

Before pro sports integrated, many insiders knew that the glory of all-white teams in basketball; football and baseball were fool’s gold. It’s the same for Hollywood today. Do you really think that Marisa Tomei for My Cousin Vinny; Al Pacino for Scent of a Woman, or Kevin Costner as director for Dances With Wolves would have taken home Oscar gold if Hollywood was truly open to everyone with talent? Really?

Indeed, this past weekend brought us ample evidence that for some, if history and reality are not on your side, better do your best to rewrite history and create a new reality.

So here’s to you Steph Curry and Chris Rock. Steph, keep shooting and keep pushing Isaiah and Robertson further down the list of all-time NBA greats and Chris, keep telling the truth and pushing Cain and Streep further into oblivion.

 

 

 

MAKING AN IMPACT SOMETIME BETWEEN THE YEARS OF 2017 AND 2021

... How the presidency is now like your cable provider

Has it really come to this? Is it even possible that Donald Trump is going to garner millions of votes to become the President of the United States?

When did the office of president become as pitiful and inevitably dysfunctional as Comcast or Time Warner?

Here’s what I mean. We all know that cable TV sucks and cable TV operators are devil-spawn. Everyone, I mean everyone, completely agrees that cable TV is unnecessarily s costly, provides Soviet-era levels of customer service, dictatorially forces you to bundle with a useless landline phone and –perhaps most egregious of all - requires you pay for The Oxygen Network for gods sakes!!

Further, most of us know that salvation from this hell scape currently exists in the form of video streaming and Netflix and Hulu and unbundled network apps and a host of other technologies which right now render cable TV as obsolete as cassette decks.

Yet there are millions and millions of us who still have cable. Why? Because like the scientific experiment of learned helplessness where dogs subjected to continuous electric shocks eventually learn to just lie down and take it, we have learned to just roll over and send a check to Big Cable.  We rationalize: because the damn cable connector is already wired into our houses or apartments; because, well, we’ve just always had cable; because all that other technology would require us to learn it and spend a little time and effort creating our own TV viewing ecosystem and despite its horrible graphics and useless networks, the cable guys have already done that for us, and we are too lazy to start from scratch.

And that my friends, is what the presidency has become: a failed institution which for mostly reasons of sloth, inattention and the learned helplessness of the modern American political system has devolved into an office where someone like Trump could actually occupy.

Even the most egregious, mouth-breathing supporter knows deep down that Trump is assuredly NOT going to make America great again. Even his angriest, whitest, oldest, racist and misogynist fan understands in his heart-of-hearts that there is not going to be a bejeweled wall of opulence which keeps all those Mexican rapists out of America.  From Nevada to South Carolina, the inarticulate and under-educated rabble – with their fanny packs, sensible shoes and sans-a-belt slacks – understand that Trump in the White House will become a cavalcade of stupid comments, embarrassing meetings with world leaders and the greatest recruiting tool for a democrat-controlled congress in history.

But he’s new and shiny and says stuff that is super easy to digest and makes many feel good for 30 minutes. Just like when they click on the TV and watch The Bachelor, or Moonshiners or American Idol. They know they are getting screwed by the cable guys, but hey, it keeps them entertained and they don’t have to think too much.

That’s what a Trump presidency would represent. National acknowledgement that the office of the president is old and kind of crappy, but like the cable adapter already drilled into our living room, we’re force to kind of sigh and muddle on. We know we are not getting the very best, heck, we know we are getting something pretty substandard, but well, who has the time to really consider other options?

Let’s further prove the point. Trump’s main claim of relevance is that he is a well-known businessman. But would the board of directors for Apple or Google ever approve a motion to name Trump as CEO? Of course not. His business record is way too spotty for a real company to even consider. I’m not sure Trump could even land a vice president gig at either of these two leading companies.

What about his entertainment experience? Do you think NBC or CBS would turn over their entire operation to Trump as CEO? Only if they want to sink further and further away from relevance in the TV landscape.

OK, he once founded something called Trump University. Could you see him every become president of Harvard or Yale or Stanford? Sorry, but I had to ask.

So Trump is clearly not qualified to become a leader in a vast away of positions and industries. He really is only qualified to be a celebrity – The Donald.

Yet, he is ever-increasingly seen as the next President of the United States?

Wow.

We’ve actually come to the point in our nation’s history where George W. Bush, by comparison, is seen as an Einstein-level Brainiac next to Trump. That Bill Clinton’s foibles in the Oval Office would seem classy and dignified compared to Trump.

And despite this, millions of Luddite voters will say yes to Trump and, by doing so, basically proclaim that POTUS is a job befitting an extremely underwhelming businessman who probably wouldn’t get a second interview to run 450 of Fortune 500 companies.

I give you the President of the United States – We promise to do something positive for the country sometime during the years of 2017 and 2021.

The Media and Crazy

Another week, another mass shooting perpetrated by a middle aged white guy who just happened to own a lot of guns. This story about Jason Brian Dalton going on a massive shooting spree in Kalamazoo over the weekend is already fading from news site front pages. And the story itself is all too familiar especially in the media’s portrayal of the perpetrator: a deeply disturbed white male who seemingly led a normal life, suddenly snapped and started shooting people. Clearly a mental defective…nothing to see here and nothing to ponder here as it pertains to larger societal issues.

It is simply not possible for our media to see a white mass shooter as anything other than crazy. It is beyond their abilities of reason and logic to infer or posit that such a person could be sane, yet smoldering with a violent agenda known only to him before firing a gun.

But if the person is brown-skinned and adhering to the Muslim faith, it is equally impossible for our media to ascribe the same level of insanity as if he were a white guy. No, Muslims don’t snap, lose their minds and grab their cache of weapons and start blasting away.  They are terrorists –sayeth our media – and they are loyally following some nefarious agenda of jihad.

Our media has a playbook and it always follows that playbook to the letter when it comes to mass shootings. I’m including a handy chart to illustrate said playbook .

1.       Determine race of shooter.

2.       If white, brand him a crazy loner. Everyone can relax.

3.       If middle-eastern, brand him a sane cold-blooded terrorist. EVERYONE PANIC!!

In a way, it’s very nice of our media to helpfully identify the intent of each mass shooter long-before we have to plod through some lengthy and boring investigation with all its “facts” and “evidence.” Who has the time these days? This way, we can quickly check on the race of the shooter and act accordingly. If it’s another in a huge line of white mass shooters who have claimed a staggering amount of victims over the years we can relax and sleep well knowing that despite our nation’s ridiculously lax gun laws and intensely violent nature, a white shooter absolutely portends no future violence we need worry about. Conversely, if the shooter is Muslim, we can immediately panic and assume that every brown-skinned person is planning to kill us all – despite infinitesimal evidence toward that conclusion.

Our national media: so helpful.

Haters and Players

My wife sometimes asks me: Knowing as much as I do about the corruption and the lies and the immorality of big time sports, how can I still be a fan?

She asks me this question often. Usually right after the latest scandal related to domestic violence involving players, the latest instance of massive NCAA “student athlete” hypocrisy or the latest billionaire extortion attempt by a team owner toward a community.

And she’s right to ask such a legitimate question. How can anyone who truly pays attention to the world of sports still be a fan? How can anyone see all this disgusting behavior and ludicrous spinning and not feel the need to shut off the TV forever and take a shower?

And I don’t know if I have a great answer. Perhaps my only attempt at a rational response is this:

·         In spite of the banality, despite the lies and the evil, a 35-yard spiraling football, magically placed into the oversized hands of a freakishly strong and fast wide receiver crossing the end zone between two equally fast and strong men trying to stop him is pure. It is beautiful and it is above the noise of the cesspool of corporate sports.

·         The willowy touch of a shooting guard’s 3-pt launch and the balls’ hypnotic arch toward the basket is free of malice and venom. It is untouchable by scandal and acrimony.

·         The pop that a 95-mile per hour cutter makes as it hits the catcher’s mitt right down Broadway and fans the batter is left unmarked by drugs or money.

We compartmentalize. We accept the putrid greed and meanness that surrounds sports for the purity of the athletic competition. We know it’s part of the grand bargain.

And while I decidedly hate that bargain at times, I do wonder if we sports fans are unequally harangued for our fandom compared to followers and lovers of other entertainment.

Does anyone every say: how can you watch TV, in response to the fact that Bill Cosby was a serial rapist, or that Charlie Sheen beat up his girlfriend? Do people look at music fans with disdain because of Chris Brown, or James Brown or Jackson Browne?  Are we told to boycott movies because of Mel Gibson’s anti-Semitic rages, or Christian Slater’s fists?

No. Actors and singers and their art are not held to the same standard as athletes and their sports, and therefore fans of art don’t carry the moralistic burdens as fans or sport. Further, there are still millions of people who believe athletes are, and should act like, role models for children, while letting actors and singers off the hook for their lawlessness and peccadillos.

Why? Why is Keith Richards celebrated for his ability to ingest more drugs than an elephant, but Daryl Strawberry was forever demonized for his drug addiction?

Sean Connery admits on a fairly regular basis that it’s OK one in a while to smack one’s wife, but when sports columnist Steve A. Smith said (incorrectly, I will add) a woman bears some responsibility in domestic violence for not leaving the abusive situation – he’s practically chased off the air with pitch-forks.

Moving up from the individual artist and athlete level, the institutional problems of the art and entertainment world and the sport world are massive of course. But is there the same level of acrimony and rending of garments? I think not.

Hollywood is shockingly discriminatory toward minorities and women in terms of opportunity and pay. The NFL has had a pretty checkered past as well. But it was only toward the NFL that congress vented its anger and forced the league to adopt the Rooney Rule which required teams to consider at least one minority candidate for a coaching assignment.

Baseball looked the other way for decades on steroid use and now has one of the strictest testing policies on the planet. Rock and roll looked directly at heroin and cocaine for decades and still says, “keep it coming.” 

The NCAA is a vast empire run by rich white guys who exploit a labor force of mostly poor black kids. Sounds like the music industry, past and present.

It took almost 40 years for people to turn against Bill Cosby for what he did to women. It took only a few months for people to turn against Michael Vick with seething hatred for what he did to dogs.

So yes, being a thinking sports fan is tough. It’s hard to look at all the bad that happens in sports and still be a fan. And yes, it is legitimate to wonder if the evil and greed and violence inherent in modern sports makes our fandom dirty.

However, oh dwellers in glass houses, don’t question my morality for being a sports fan without questioning yours as you feed your entertainment fix. Don’t scorn me for watching the NFL – with all its warts – yet float by blissfully unquestioning the behavior of the actors, writers and directors who make the magic happen on the big and small screen. Don’t roll your eyes as I consume the NBA or college football, and refuse to look within your soul as you consume the latest download in the hip hop or contemporary music scene.

And just in case you wanted to hide behind the idea that there are only a few bad apples in the entertainment world and most of them are good, decent people – I say hold on a second. That is the exact same reality in the sports world. The vast, vast majority of athletes are fine, upstanding human beings who raise families, pay taxes and do good things for others. In fact, something like 40% of professional athletes have foundations and charities. Further, all pro athletes in the big sports of baseball, football and basketball are required by contract to participate in their teams charitable activities. Do you think Justin Bieber is required to give back to his community – whatever community might actually claim him? How are things going at the Adam Sandler Foundation?

So ease up a bit on us sports fans. We are imperfect and we buy into an imperfect industry. And so is every person who watches TV, buys a movie ticket or listens to music. We are all bound by our love of something pure, covered in multiple layers of filth.

"You hate me! Your really, really hate me!"

I’m generally liked by people. My co-workers seem to like me fine, so do my boss and other leaders at work. I also seem to be liked well enough by friends and family and people I interact with on a daily or even occasional basis. In fact, I think I can say that for the most part, I’ve been pretty well-liked for the vast majority of my life.

I kind of feel like most people have a similar experience. Most people shuffle along and don’t cause enough waves and problems to become disliked. I think our society and our social mores are by and large set up for that.

Certainly, there are truly awful people who richly deserve hate. Murders, rapists, terrorists, hedge fund managers and the like. But that mortal scum did terrible things and probably has a good understanding why people hate them so.

And while I know what it’s like to walk through this world as someone pretty squarely in the “liked” camp, what I don’t know is what it must be like to be someone who is hated – universally hated.

Further, what must it be like to be someone who is absolutely loved and exalted by a select group of insiders, but widely loathed by the larger world?

In other words, what must it be like to be NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell?

Make no bones about it: the man is hated. By the vast majority of people. Universally. He’s hated by the poor, by the rich (except NFL team owners) by whites by blacks, by players, by fans, by sports broadcasters, by liberal commentators. He’s hated by moms and dads, by coaches and politicians, by educators and medical professionals, by actors and writers, by you and by me.

And it’s a little strange. Roger Goodell runs the thing that brings most Americans together. He runs professional football. In many ways he’s helped make it bigger and better than ever before. I know I’m the middle-aged blogger and I know I’m supposed to spout off about how things were better back in the day – but no, football as a game and as a spectacle is better than it was when I was a kid. And Goodell is one of the reasons why that is so.

Yet, we hate him. We hate looking at him. We see him and immediately word-associate: liar, slimy, oily, smug, disingenuous, thoughtless, uncaring, mean, etc. etc.

Let’s face it. Roger Goodell is loved by 32 NFL team owners (and probably a few high level associates of that group) and hated by everyone else. If you plotted that reality on a graph, you’d have one tiny bar hovering pitifully just above the horizontal axis, and the other bar reaching up beyond Mt. Everest.

What the hell is that like?

What is it like to wake up, shower, shave and have breakfast, get in his limo, chauffeured to work, drink his first cup of coffee, gaze out at the splendid view across Park Avenue in Manhattan and know that outside his luxury corner suite the world hates him. And if the glorious window affording such spectacular views somehow gave way and caused him to plummet to his death, a lot of the world would smile - quietly and respectfully - but still, they would be happy.

And that hate is a sustaining kind of hate. It’s not going to go away. The people who hate him now will hate him in five years. He’s not like the detestable Martin Shkreli, AKA “Pharma Bro” who is hated now but will be forgotten about when he either enters a minimum security prison for the rich or flees prosecution in the Seychelles. No. Goodell will be hated for quite some time to come.

I will never have the opportunity to interview the man. But if I ever did there is only one question I’d want to ask. No, I wouldn’t want to ask how many times he saw the Ray Rice video before denying its very existence. I wouldn’t want to ask if he personally coaches the NFL’s fleet of paid neurosurgeons on how to lie to the media about the “lack of evidence” linking football with CTE. I wouldn’t want to ask him how many starving people could have been fed with the money wasted on the “Deflategate” investigation.

No, the only question I’d want to ask is this: What is it like to be hated by millions of people he’s never met nor will ever meet? Does $44 million in annual salary dull the pain in knowing that farm boys in Iowa, hipsters in Brooklyn and wireless phone sales reps in San Diego collectively hate his guts?

I’d want to ask him that because unlike the other questions which touch on his unchecked power, his compulsion to lie and his moral repugnance, I actually believe he wants to answer it without the customary obfuscation, PR and bullshit. If you’ve seen him over the last couple of years at press conferences and official NFL appearances you might agree with me that there are many moments when Goodell looks like the unhappiest man on earth. I truly believe there are moments – just moments – during his day where he’d love to turn his pasty visage toward a questioner and gush forth with all honesty and candor:

“My god it sucks! I’m hated by practically everyone! Jesus Christ, my only ‘friends’ are werewolves like Dan Snyder and Jerry Jones. God, I’d love nothing better than to board my yacht and sail off to some tiny Island in the Caribbean where no one knows who the hell I am. Ah, but whom am I kidding! We’ve got millions of fans in the Islands. Christ we’re number one in Cuba for god sakes. Like a lily-white six-foot-four red-head with a famous face can go unnoticed on the beach in Barbados. Ha! I HATE MY LIFE!!!!!"

And maybe, after he wiped away the tears and spit, adjusted his tie, allowed the rage to drain from his face, composed himself and pretended the outburst never happened, there’d be a moment. A moment while pretending to listen to him drone on about protecting the shield and stating that he didn’t’ become commissioner to make friends, I’d feel something I thought not possible. I’d feel something akin to sympathy for the man in front of me. Sympathy for a smart person whose job and livelihood conspired against him. Sympathy for a man who traded his soul for a lot of money and a lot of power.

I give you Roger Goodell: Ebenezer Scrooge for the 21^st Century. Maybe the Ghost of Junior Seau can visit him some Christmas Eve and save him.

There are no words...

I remember this story from months back.  A young boy picks up a loaded weapon left out carelessly by an adult at a picnic and shoots his brother dead.

A quick read of the article shows that no charges were filed against the crushingly stupid adult, as the local sheriff categorizes this intense tragedy as an accident.

Juxtapose that insane response by law enforcement and the laws they enforce with this story out today. A NFL wide receiver accidently shoots himself while cleaning his gun - AND HE IS CHARGED WITH RECLESS ENDAGERMENT!!!

Indeed, there are no words. An adult who accidently shoots himself is considered to have committed a crime, while a mouth-breathing, troglodytic a--hole who's loaded gun atop a picnic table results in the death of a minor is left alone to wander this earth free as a bird. Free to continue his monumentally stupid, reckless and vapid behavior - abetted by the guns he is still allowed to possess in the eyes of the law - which may endanger or mortally wound another unsuspecting youth.

Whatever your stance is on guns, gun control or personal freedom, I ask you: how can this be?  How can the law of the land punish someone for unintentionally shooting himself in the leg and NOT punish someone whose direct negligence and mind-numbingly stupid actions led to the death of a 12-year-old innocent?

How can this be?

Oh, we Were So Young and Naive

We are truly living in a golden age of television. The sheer quantity of quality shows is almost alarming. Everyone you look; network, cable, pay per view, streaming…it’s gold, pure gold.

How do I know this? How do I know that we are seeing a TV explosion of great writing, acting and directing? Because I’m old enough to remember what TV was like in the 70’s and 80’s. I’m old enough to remember when Emmy Award winning, water cooler discussing TV meant, Three’s Company, The Jefferson’s, All in the Family and other such faire.

My God, think about it!  Jack Tripper, Archie Bunker and George Jefferson were considered groundbreaking characters in important shows that were moving our society forward.

Ick!

I mention this to frame the context of one Mr. Donald Trump.

I think a lot of our political and media elite who are older than 45 need to remember those crappy days of TV yore, when bad acting, juvenile writing yet, “this has never been done before” hutzpah littered our airwaves as a reference point to dissect The Donald.

Yes, Norman Leer’s All in the Family was a shock to the American entertainment complex when it aired. But that doesn’t mean it was an ensemble cast of genius.  Sally Struthers and Carol O’Conner had lead roles for god sakes. Yes, The Jefferson’s displayed race as never before, but the writing was ridiculously bad. Sure, Three’s Company began (albeit mockingly) a dialogue about homosexuality, but come on! Susan Sommers? Susan Freaking Sommers!

And I’m just talking about “the good TV” that was airing back them. Don’t get me started about Starsky and Hutch, BJ and the Bear and Charlie’s Angels!!!

Anyway, back to Trump. I have a feeling that in a few years’ time, through the lens of hindsight we are going to look back on him and cringe with soul-rocking embarrassment.  And I’m not just talking about liberals and democrats and main stream republicans who already feel shame because of his occupation atop national polls.  No, I mean his supporters and followers. I think like many of us who look back on 1970’s TV and feel flush and squeamish, his followers today are going to remember 2015-16, shake their head and say, “yeah, he was new and different, but man, now that I look back, what a sausage!” 

And it’s not even just the race-baiting and women- degrading rhetoric. The man is a Wharton-educated business man but speaks like a Wharton community college-educated HVAC repairman.

No matter what your opinion of Barack Obama or even George Bush, you have to admit that these two presidents could hold actual conversations and even more, provide actual data points and statistics to heighten the discussion.

Trump on the other hand talks like your crazy Uncle Bob who empties septic tanks for a living, but fancies himself a raconteur of any and all subjects and believes in his heart of hearts that the key to public rhetoric is simply pounding repetition, baseless superlatives and a loud voice.

You tell me. If you were to plot Donald Trump’s conversational acumen and verbal skills on a horizontal access where a one is Uncle Bob and a 10 is the leader of the free world, could The Donald possible break a three?

Uncle Bob at a backyard BBQ after nine Bud Lights spouting off about how to fix illegal immigration; or Donald Trump behind a stately podium at the National Press Club also spouting off about how to fix illegal immigration? You’d need one of those CSI audio pathologists with state-of-the-art technology to be able to tell these two Mensa superstars apart.

Sure, Donald Trump is a billionaire and a famous person. And yes, if Uncle Bob had been born into the wealth and privilege of Trump he would have probably pissed it away on gold plated bass boats, private Metallica concerts on his own island and a whirlwind marriage and divorce to Morgan Fairchild.

But that’s the best the Donald has to recommend himself: he stayed rich?

Indeed, in a few years we are all going to look back on “The Year of Trump” and desperately want to take a shower. We are going to watch historic clips from his debates, press conferences and interviews and shut our eyes hard in the same way I do now when I momentarily stop on TV Land and hear the soaring theme song from Dallas. In the same cowed and embarrassed tones with which I speak to my teenage son while trying to explain that America was once gripped by the desperate need to know “who shot JR?,” others will try to explain to their children that this doughy, orange-coiffed , carnival barker was actually a leading contender for Commander-In-Chief?

I give you Donald Trump: the Captain Stubing of our day.

TOO FAST TO LIVE, TOO YOUNG TO DIE

This year, I’ll turn 50. Like a lot of Generation X’ers who are creeping toward, or already settled comfortably into middle age, I’m noticing something rather shocking.

The script I had invented for my teenage icons is not coming true in my advancing adulthood.  In short, when I was 17, I thought most of my rock heroes would be dead by the time they were 40 – going down in a blaze of rock and roll fantasy colored explosion of sex, drugs and alcohol.  At the same time, I thought football legends like Junior Seau and Kenny “The Snake” Stabler would live forever – yes with creaky knees and bad backs - but still alive with that swagger and bravado they wielded as football gladiators.

But that’s not how it’s working out. Now, the rockers of my youth are outliving their Caligula-esque lifestyle in order to die of old-people diseases.  Yet, the football heroes of yore are walking around or dropping dead with the ticking time bomb of CTE in their heads.

Already in the last couple of months, the most badass and wild rockers from youth are falling in front of my eyes –not from the drugs and booze and sex they were canonized for in younger days – but from infirmaries of the aged.

David Bowie didn’t die in some ultra-exclusive VIP Sex Club in the French Alps surrounded by Swedish models and mounds of fine Peruvian cocaine. No, he died quietly with friends and family by his side after a long battle with cancer.

Glenn Fry didn’t smash his 30-foot speed boat headlong into a pier while swilling tequila, gunning the engine and flashing his famous devilish grin to a 19-year old co-ed from Florida State on his lap. He passed from rheumatoid arthritis.  Rheumatoid arthritis?! 

Lemmy from Motorhead didn’t douse himself in 151 and immolate on stage in front of screaming fans as one last tribute to rocker excess. Nope, he also succumbed to cancer as his bandmates said, “at home playing his favorite video game.”

It may sound ghoulish, but a lot of guys my age sit around and ponder: “Wow, David Bowie made it to almost 70! Pete Townsend is still playing, and I guess, Keith Richards has crossed-over some line between life and death and will continue on forever!”

But when we shift our gaze from music to football, the picture turns darker. We stop wondering how they lived this long and instead wonder not if, but when the sustained battery their heads took as players is going to inevitably lead to premature death – by disease or by their own hand.

It’s weird but on any Saturday afternoon while channel surfing, one can stumble across some rock and roll retrospective about a band like the Eagles and when they get to the second segment basically titled “…then the drugs took over,” we think, “well of course they did – it was the 70’s!” And then when the show ends, we still can count most of the band members; Don Henley, Joe Walsh and Randy Meissner among the living.

But a few channels over we can watch the pre-HD grainy video of NFL Films and see Stabler getting demolished by Jack Youngblood and wonder: is that the hit that first started his brain to turn against him? Or view Junior Seau crash into Thurman Thomas like a white shark hitting a seal and now realize, “God, did that ultimately lead him to blow a .357-sized hole in his chest?

It seemed impossible to image back when I was a kid, but it is likely to turn out that the excesses of a rock and roll life aren’t as deleterious as a football life. Perhaps “Live Fast, Die Young” is more the mantra of football players than it is for stadium rockers.

THE 2015 NFL SEASON IN REVIEW: OBSERVATIONS FROM THE COUCH

The Denver Broncos, having won one of the ugliest and unwatchable Super Bowl’s in the past 50 years, now sit atop the NFL Kingdom -champions for the next year. And so we can look back on the 2015 Season and contemplate what it all has meant. So for this rather unnecessary exercise, here is one fan’s observation from the past five months of on and off the field triumph and turmoil.

·         Just as we expected a positive test for PED’s among homerun hitters during MLB’s “steroid era,” we now fully expect a positive diagnosis for CTE when one of our former gridiron heroes dies and is autopsied.

·         Like the band on the Titanic, Roger Goodell and his crew showed they will orchestrate a virtuoso investigation into football air pressure, while willfully ignoring and obfuscating the critical issue of concussions.

·         We are more likely to get a decisive and logical explanation of American foreign policy from Donald Trump, than we are from the NFL when it comes to rules governing the forward pass.

·         If you are a black NFL quarterback and want to be loved by all fans, your blackness should be something akin to the Three Bear’s porridge: not too black, as that could scare off Baby Boomers; not too white, as that could lose the critical 18-34 year-old demographic; just right, hip and cool, but with enough humility and deference to play on Main Street.  Congratulations Russel Wilson! Cam and RG3? Work on it.

·         If you are a black head coach, you’d better have a winning program within three years of hire or you are out the door with little chance of getting another head coaching opportunity. White guys? You’ve got five to seven years and/or at least three more chances to fail as a head coach. Don’t worry Chip Kelly, you still have several more shots after San Francisco.  Lovie Smith, sorry, but please accept a coordinator’s job as a lovely parting gift.

·         The NFL has a long and rich tradition of linkage with the United States Military. Even football terminology is interwoven with military tactics as evidenced by phrases such as blitz, ground attack and aerial assault. And that linkage was further reinforced this year by the NFL patriotically using tax dollars to put on goose pimple-inspiring support to our troops.

·         The “controversy” surrounding over-celebration is like every single generation’s conflict over popular music. Basically grandpa, if the music’s too loud, you’re too old. Wild celebrations get players on highlight reels which get them commercials and get them paid. Chronically over-rated JJ Watt and his celebratory antics helped garner defensive MVP, while the much more impactful yet subdued Von Miller still waits for his Papa John’s ad. If I was an agent, I’d instruct all my clients to hire Beyoncé’s choreographer this off-season.

·         And finally, LA will get a team, maybe two. Kind of a mixed bag for the NFL. Yes, the second largest market in America finally gets the NFL back and every other team owner gets an obscene amount of cash via “relocation fee.” But, with LA now spoken for, what are wanderlust owner’s going to use as a bargaining chip to get their stupefied fan-base to pay for a new billion dollar stadium? Is the Jaguar’s owner really going to threaten to leave Florida for Columbus if he doesn’t get new digs?

The NFL in 2016. It’s a vaguely racist oligarchy that tramples on fans, plays roulette with the health of its employees and spits out PR half-truths and spin like Enron on steroids. What do you say? Let’s do it all again next season!