Your lyin eyes

ORWELL'S JUDGE AND JURY OF PRO TENNIS

It begins with a subtle flick of the finger pointed upward, like a Sotheby's veteran signaling a bid to the auctioneer. Fans follow with rhythmic clapping, getting louder as they wait for justice from the sky. All eyes turn to the video board, and an animated tennis ball swoops down from above, down onto an animated court. The outline of a ball is pressed against a sideline, and then magnified. The crowd invariably oohs and ahs, the chair umpire updates the score, announces how many challenges remain, and play resumes. It is both timely and tidy, it is unquestioned, but it can be wrong. Ot at least I think so. But we may never know if what is known as the Spot-Shot Challenge system (commonly referred to as its predecessor 'Hawkeye,') is ever wrong, it is never questioned or held accountable by the broadcasters, who have incredibly sophisticated technology to do just that.

The following match might have been a watershed moment for the GPS Challenge system in tennis: Australian Open women's semifinals, Sharapova and Kvitova battling in an epic struggle, a rematch of the Wimbledon final. The match is excruciatingly close, 4-4 in the final set. Kvitova's edge in power and fitness led to her surge late in the match, but Sharapova's superior concentration and focus kept her in the hunt for Grand Slam glory. There was literally nothing to separate them going into the 9th game. Sharapova's serve, long considered the Achilles heel in her otherwise magnificent tennis armor, falters in that fateful 9th game. Down love 30, she sends a groundstroke apparently long, the linesperson calls it out, and it is now at 0-40. Her shaky service game is facing 3 break points. Kvitova is rolling, a point away from serving out the match; she exudes confidence and is ready for the kill. Shoulders slumping, Sharapova throws up a finger for the appeal. The players, live audience and fans at home had no reason to think that the shot was in was in; the request was simply a stall and a prayer, part of this match's end-game.

All eyes fixed on the scoreboard, Hawkeye's animated yellow ball swooped down accompanied by the (religious?) ritual clapping and chanting, and BOOM, the cartoon showed the ball on the line. Love-40 was now a manageable 15-30. Sharapova righted herself, served out the game and now led 5-4. Kvitova, shaken if not stunned, never recovered. Five points later she was in the showers, vanquished from the tournament.

The broadcast rolled in no video evidence to support Hawkeye; it's ruling is always final in today's tennis. ESPN and the Australian Open's world feed has video replay devices with 500 frame per second technology called X-mo. Let's put that into perspective for those outside the live broadcast genre. The video you see on live TV has 30 frames per second, the "Super Slo-Mo" introduced on Monday Football in the 1990's had 90 frames per second which was a real breakthrough in terms of resolution and clarity. In 2004 CBS tried a Mac Cam at the U.S. Open, with thousands of frames per second, but its resolution suffered due to inadequate lighting. X-mo has solved all that, replaying images from 500 to literally thousands of frames per second with stunning focus and clarity. The resulting images from 2012 Aus Open have been mind-blowing: fuzz coming off balls, eyes blinking, leg muscles flexing, ankles rolling. Never before seen in such clarity. The location of a ball on the court would be routine based on the available technology.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dvkoWII-ukg&feature=fvst

But there was not a single voice questioning the call. I knocked on several doors of social media, tweeting like mad to all the top tennis writers, sending out alerts to ESPN's Interactive Facebook site. The few who did respond were generally negative, they didn't need the distraction because Hawkeye had spoken. So faced with the choice of what to believe, Hawkeye or your lyin' eyes, the overwhelming majority chose the former. The tennis community preferred to trust the animated cartoon of the truth, rather than call out for an X-mo replay. Can you imagine an NFL fan accepting digital animation rather than a Hi-Def replay of a disputed touchdown?

One of the most frequent contributors to the Aus Open Facebook page is Eduardo DeBritto, a former college player and a pro tennis fanatic. He had the best working knowledge of Hawkeye. "It has 8% margin for error and it takes a picture of a shadow of the ball and not actually where the ball touched, since the shadow is bigger than the contact point between the ball and the court it can make errors." Yet no outcry. This might be because of a moment in the 2004 U.S. Open when the CBS cameras showed several missed calls in a Capriati-Serena Williams quarterfinal match that made a mockery of the existing system in which all overrules were the domain of the chair umpire. Having today's system that works 92% of the time, that ends the human drama, was embraced by the tennis world.

So Kvitova goes home, Sharapova moves to the finals, and the establishment chooses not to replay the controversial point because Big Brother had spoken, and not a soul protested (well, one did, and you're reading his work). The corporate cartoon trumps visual evidence, and not a soul speaketh, not even the vanquished.

The beneficiary of the call, Maria Sharapova, revealed on a quiet news day earlier this week that she is reading George Orwell's 1984. It is serving her well.

The Manger of American Hockey

THE ICE THAT BORE AMERICA'S HOCKEY GOD

Canada, the country that allegedly invented hockey (an Iroquois Indian tribe in Ottawa is the best guess) has never respected it's neighbors to the south, even if our Minnesotans are virtually indistinguishable from their northern counterparts. But Canadian hockey snobbery is justifiable: Canada can enter 5 teams in every international tournament and have 5 gold medal contenders if they entered by province.

You can feel the disdain for American hockey in the sports talk at the pubs, the kitchen tables and within the Canadian media; I lived it for a couple of weeks in Edmonton during the World Juniors earlier this month, a tourney in which Team USA did NOTHING to diminsh the Canucks superiority complex. All of the above might merely be stating the obvious, but it gives vital perspective to the century-old article quoted below.

In the 1910's American hockey was fledgling at best, though it was being played interscholastically at Ivy League colleges. American players were groomed by New England prep schools, with St. Paul's of Concord, New Hampshire turning out the majority of the elite players. The most gifted of them all was the legendary Hobey Baker, the man whose name still adorns the trophy for today's college player of the year.

After he graduated from Princeton in 1914, Hobey played for an amateur hockey club based in New York called St. Nick's, a collection of blue-blooded sportsmen who had played for the Ivy League's Big 3 (H, Y, P). In the 1915-16 season. St. Nick's went up to Canada and played their best amateur teams, beating them all. In those days Canada's amateur teams were taken very seriously, rivaling their professional clubs in terms of talent, if not depth. St. Nick's defeated the reigning champion Montreal Stars 6-2 in the opening game of the Ross Cup, which was essentially a World Championship of amateur hockey. Afterward the Montreal Press, the "Paper of Record" in the province, wrote the following:

"Uncle Sam has had the cheek to develop a world class hockey player. We had heard him advertised as a great hockey player, and we had always smiled a cynical grin at the thought. He wasn't born in Montreal, Ottawa, Winnipeg, Toronto or the other famous breeding grounds. We refused to see how an American could win over such a handicap and arrive. A few minutes of Baker on the ice convinced the most skeptical. He could catch a place and a star's place on any of our professional teams. The blonde-haired boy was a favorite with the crowd. We didn't want the St. Nick's to win, but Baker cooked out goose so artistically that we enjoyed it." (December 12, 1915)

No other American hockey player has received such praise from Canada in the ensuing 97 years. Baker's performance at the 1915-16 Ross Cup was the driving force in getting him elected into Canada's Hockey Hall of Fame, entering with the inaugural class of 1943.

He honed his skills outdoors in Concord, NH on the same frozen ponds pictured above. He spent 7 winters in at St. Paul's, training religiously whenever the ice could support him, staying on past sunset to perfect his stickhandling in the dark. He entered Princeton a finished product, by far the best player at Old Nassau as soon as he arrived. For American hockey, those ponds of St. Paul's might as well be referred to as "The Manger," the breeding ground of America's hockey deity.

Coaching Statesman

Legendary Hockey Institution JACK PARKER

Halfway through the third period of last Saturday's Big Red Hockey Classic at Madison Square Garden the video screen played an ancient clip from Lake Placid of Mike Eruzione's GWG vs the USSR. The ensuing image was a live shot of a rounder, balder and seemingly content Mike Eruzione, located about 10 rows behind the B.U. bench. A standing ovation followed, appropriate for all the baby-boomers who recalled that MSG was a critical footnote in the Miracle on Ice, the venue where Herb Brooks' charges got smoked 10-3 by the Soviets big red machine 10 days prior to the Winter Games.

The man known as "Ruz" has never strayed too far from the family of B.U. hockey, attending all the Beanpots, several NCAA games and even helped out as an associate coach for Jack Parker's club. Ruz had been captain of Parker's 1977 team who had gone to the Frozen Four in Detroit in 1977. A semifinal loss to host Michigan kept them from the NCAA championship, which they won the following year, a team without Ruz but with 3 other Miracle workers: Silk, O'Callahan and a goalie named Jim Craig. The point of this is that while Ruz looked a generation or two from his playing form, his coach was still at it, grinding out a wildly entertaining Holiday Festival win in the big Apple, 2-1 in overtime over a game Cornell club.

Eruzione played for JACKIE Parker, the brash coach with his signature plaid jacket who took over for the legendary Jack Kelly and never missed a beat, winning his own national championship in 1978 and again in 1995 and 2009. Now in his fifth decade at the helm of the Terriers, it's a more refined JACK Parker, lopping a syllable off his first name and planting the red plaid sports jacket in the back of the cedar closet. But never underestimate Parker's energy, his ability to process information or his knack for getting the best from stripe shirted officials. He still gets out three sentences in the time it takes you to utter one, and his passion for the game remains torrid.

At the conclusion of Red Hot Hockey, a Thanksgiving event that seems destined for a long run on Broadway, Parker had no intention of leaving the stage until he had shared celebratory waves with all four corners of yet another hockey Garden, 200 miles south of the Boston version where he wins Beanpot titles with such regularity. Perhaps the only downer of the night was that his coaching counterpart, Cornell's Mike Schafer, had blown off the traditional handshake, sulking off the ice without his team because he was upset over a disallowed goal in the third period.

Imagine a respected rival coach like BC's Jerry York pulling off a stunt like that--unthinkable. Boston hockey media would hold him accountable for years to come. When B.U. lost a crushing Beanpot consolation game last spring to Harvard--talk about unthinkable--Parker humbly stood in line to shake with Ted Donato. Schafer, a coaching institution in the isolated gorges of Ithaca, New York, should observe and learn from the class act of Parker, the elder statesman of Division I college coaches.

When it comes to Curing cancer, PUNT!

PUNTING ON A CURE

Saturday night I was watching the World Series at a local tavern with my fellow coach Duane after our team's hockey game.

Major League Baseball has embraced the MasterCard marketing campaign Stand Up for Cancer. If you've watched any TV recently you've probably seen celebrities getting involved being pictured holding their little placards with the name of a loved one affected by Cancer. What's not to like? Right?

Well my new buddy Duane, a 55 year old guy who's been around the block several times over, shakes his head, saying it's all a bunch of Bullshit.

"Really?," I say, knowing that Duane is a man devoted to family and God, hardly a radical cynic. But Duane rails on about the pink accessories that most of the NFL is wearing for the entire month of October to increase awareness of breast cancer, and he stated that it's all a ridiculous money grab. "Really?"

He proceeds to tell me what he has learned about Cancer, and the monumental finances at stake for the American Medical Association, the American Cancer Society, Big Pharmaceuticals and the whole medical industrial complex itself. He then told me an anecdotal tale about how he advocated for a loved one with cancer and how he located a doctor who had a practice in Texas with an amazing success rate battling cancer using holistic methods, mainly nutrition. How he got in touch with those close to the doctor and discovered that he was basically blackballed and chased out of the United States. The practice resurfaced in Tijuana, Mexico. Duane told me about how he had to sneak his uncle across the border for treatments. I didn't take any notes, but Duane shared a lot he learned about dealing with cancer, and explained in layman terms how vital it is to battle it organically, to get one's body involved in the fight through boosting the immune system, and how chemo and radiation are so poisonous. I left thinking that he made a lot of sense, but that it was still his passion, not mine.

The next night I'm watching the World Series over at my ex-wife's house with my son with his step-family, and see a huge TV pitch for Stand Up for Cancer integrated into the live telecast, more immediate and impacting than a paid commercial. I didn't have enough facts or passion to tell the living room audience that Stand Up for Cancer is simply an exploitive money grab. But it was impossible not to think about it after previous night's conversation with coach Duane.

I bid farewell around 10 pm and began scanning radio channels during my drive home. I landed on an independent station in New York, and as if on cue, one of those fundraisers was going on where they play clips from a documentary as an enticement to contribute. I sat in rapture as I heard the century-long history of how the American Medical Association has been demonizing holistic Cancer cures to boost the profits of their publication and the medical industry as a whole. They spoke at length about a Dr. Gerson who was having some amazing results curing cancer mainly through nutrition, but only one of his many studies got published before the magazine was threatened and Gerson was blackballed. The documentary went on about how advocates for Gerson used the Freedom of Information Act to read the alleged findings of medical malfeasance by Gerson and other holistic doctors, only to find that the report didn't exist, even though it was being cited frequently by an AMA "assasin" Dr. Fishbein.

The report continued, detailing the demise of Dr. Gerson, and how he and his practice had to flee to Mexico. I was almost sickened to learn how humanity's #1 killer has been subjugated by the medical industrial complex to keep the massive profits flowing. The documentary and coach Duane's bar spiel were in perfect concert. The documentary spoke so logically about how mainstream treatment for cancer: cutting, chemo and radiation; hasn't changed in the better part of a century. There's simply too much money at stake for any change. The documentary actually quoted doctors as saying there was no way that a solution based on nutrition was going to replace traditional cancer treatments because of the financial implications.

I got out of my car at the end of the documentary clip, and looked into the night sky filled with stars, a glowing universe. Here we are on this planet, a planet that provides us with the natural remedies to fight this disease, and our country's lust for profits systematically run people with the knowledge to cure, people like Dr. Gerson, out of town, out of state, out of the country.

Uggh. Hard to swallow.

Larussa speaks to both sides of the border

LaRUSSA GOES BI

In one of the great moments in TV sports for reasons of cultural inclusion, Tony Larussa complies with Houston reporter Francisco's (SportsRap is efforting to get his name and affiliation)request to have Larussa comment in Spanish on his choice to use Mexican-born Jamie Garcia to start Game 2 of the series. Garcia rightly called it historic, mentioning Fernando Valenzuela in the same breath, saying that Larussa would be speaking to Hispanic baseball fans on both sides of the border. Larussa complied with competent, if not fluent, Spanish.

http://multimedia.foxsports.com/m/video/47154100/la-russa-answers-in-spanish.htm

This is yet another feather in the cap of a man enjoying the pinnacle of a very difficult profession.

Down on Wall Street

Middle Age Mike Journeys Down to Wall Street to be Heard

On the same day in which a Wall Street financier goes public in the New York Times dismissing the Wall Street "Occupants" as simply unemployed kids looking for sex drugs and rock and roll, Zuccotti Park was teeming with Baby Boomers, getting the word out with a vast array of signs and plenty of "hoarse power," maintaining momentum for a protest with no cause that has seeming gone viral. It's global now, and apparently can't be dismissed. Where it leads, no one knows, but there is seemingly limitless human energy behind it.

There is love and good will and altruism everywhere one turns at the Park. Locals are having a tough time dealing with 12 hours of daily drumming, bathroom issues, bathing in sinks and other symptoms of overpopulation. But the Occupation continues. Young and old, black and white, male and female. Can it be ignored?

Occupation Wall Street

It
DIMITRI Fresh from a night in the Pokey

It was a classic fall Sunday in lower Manhattan, and unless you were within a block of Liberty Square, you might have missed the Occupation that the participants are calling "Living History." Despite hundreds of arrests the night before, the scene was completely peaceful, with Police keeping an eye on the Occupation HQ and special police liaisons in light blue NYPD golf shirts doing their best to maintain peaceful dialogue.
(Link to Photos
http://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.2015289108684.2095731.1437532070&type=1)
or just hit my name on Facebook

They aren't fools, just fellow disenfranchised citizens. No, they can't articulate any demands, because the western banking system is simply too complex. Michael Lewis said as much on Charlie Rose Monday night, but he did agree that they this Occupation may have legs. Much of it is due to vast unemployment of American youth, and a resentment of the investor class that is getting unlimited backing from our government with taxpayer money.

Mainstream media is marginalizing this group, but underground media via social networking has created a buzzing hive of fresh information.
http://occupywallst.org/
Attitudes were all upbeat, people getting on board, not sure where they're going, but most don't have jobs to return to. A microcosm of modern America, 99% of a country adrift.