There Will Be Blood on the Tracks

The main reason I love to watch sports is because of championships. Don’t get me wrong; I do watch plenty NBA games during the regular season, but mainly because I know that every game is setting up that team for the contests that really matter. Every big game matchup that occurs during the regular season in basketball serves as a precursor to what may eventually be a championship match. A win or loss in December or March may not seem important at the time, but when a seven games series is on the line, these previous contests can show what has worked and not.

In the NBA’s championship, the Finals, great NBA teams like the Spurs, the Suns, the Pistons, the Lakers, know that no one game determines the course of that series. Professional basketball, in this sense, is really the ultimate game of adjustments. What didn’t work in Game 1 can be changed for Game 2. Mismatches can be prevented by players swapping position. Defense can be adjusted to better contain the other team’s offensive thrusting. Home field advantage can be a serious advantage; if you drop one of two in the opponent’s court, all you need is three wins at home and the best of seven is yours. Otherwise you’ll have to win one in the heart of the enemy.

In that sense, the NBA Finals are similar to the World Series. Both teams are going to play at their home stadiums for about half the series, and the winner of four games out of seven clinches the title. The NFL could not be more different. In professional American football, the regular season record does determine whether a team’s playoff games are played at their home stadium. But the championship itself, the Superbowl, is determined in a neutral third party stadium, regardless of any team’s record coming into it, and the World Title is determined in one single, sixty minute game. For a team like the Patriots, coming into the Superbowl with a perfect record after two playoff wins at home, the NFL’s championship format became their undoing.

The New York Giants had won six games in a row on the road, on their way to Phoenix, Arizona and the Superbowl. They did not expect a stadium to be packed tight with cheeky home fans. The Giants were happy if a handful showed up. I was speculating over the weekend that if I were on the Giants, or coaching the Giants, I would probably LET New England win, because then they would have a perfect season, the first since 1972’s Dolphins coached by Don Shula. I am not a Patriots fan, but I was a fan of the Patriots storyline and I wanted to see it end the right way. If it were the Giants coming into the Superbowl with a perfect record I would want them to win, too, because I’m a fan of symmetry.

This is the United States of America, however, and not Japan. It was not the Superbowl for the Japanese Football Association, and no one on the Giants team at the Superbowl in Arizona cared about saving face for New England. Where I saw a game that HAS to be won by the team with the perfect record, I missed what turned out to be the true story; New York saw this as a perfect time to punch Boston in the mouth, and remind its sister city of its second class citizen status. New York wanted, more badly than anyone anticipating the culmination of a perfect season, to beat down Boston, a city that has gotten too big for its britches. It was part reprisal for the World Series win this year.

Sports karma works in mysterious ways. Everyone who saw star Amare Stoudamire of the Suns sidelined for two deciding games in the Western Conference Finals last year knew it was complete bullshit. He was suspended those two games for jumping off the bench and taking two steps onto the court. The reason that he reacted like that was not because he wanted to physically attack the San Antonio Spurs. It was because Spurs like Robert Horry and Bruce Bowen were punching Steve Nash in the face, sitting on his chest and gouging his eyes, popping him in the nose, administering smurf bites and Indian burns. But the karma gods watched Nash take that horrible flogging, and allowed the Spurs to go on and win the championship.

This time it was Eli Manning, the younger brother of Peyton who won the Superbowl last year, and his team the Giants who engaged in the nasty nasty. Perhaps in response to Tom Brady’s arrogance, the karma gods powered up the Giant’s defensive line, and they hammered Brady until he lost the will to fight. Even if his ankle was supposedly fine before the start of the Superbowl, Brady the human must be broken now. He got clobbered until he was forced to submit. Eli Manning saw the star fall from the sky, and then administered the jungle boot to the Patriot’s neck. Prophetic words were spoken before this game, and many commentators called folly. With the play-winning game, Plexico Burress shut them up.

New England is a different place after last Sunday. People seem despondent; my roommate did not come out of his room for twenty four hours. No one has heard from my manager at work, an ardent Pat’s fan, since the conclusion of Sunday’s game. All the trees are brown, and the sky is gray. Grown men wept and dogs howled. The truest fans watched their perfect season conclude with a loss, and the one game that meant everything slipped away, never to replace the many games now meaningless. Those with less fanatical feelings and a fondness for championships, like myself, know I watched a damn good one. Hats off to the G-men. Forget the Patriots; Boston has to be worried about resetting that fickle thing called sports karma.

With one minute left in the season the Giants did the unthinkable, Don Shula popped open the champagne and poured all his ’72 Dolphins a glass, and the entire Patriot’s team made plans to jump off the Golden Gate Bridge. Both teams said they would leave it all on the field. For the Pats, that meant leaving behind their dream of a perfect season. For New York, it meant leaving behind the bloodied carcass of Boston and going back to New York for the City’s first ticker tape parade since 2000. For me, it meant dancing with the karma gods, reflecting on winning and losing in America, and more NBA. Go Suns!