Washington’s Height. “Flight,” Reviewed.
By Will Leitch
1. Until the last 10 minutes, Flight in large part resembles one of those tough, dark character studies they used to make in the ’70s, like The Gambler or The Verdict, in which we watch a man who has lost control of his life face external circumstances that give him one last chance to save himself. But we live in different times now. Those movies were willing to follow their lead character down into the depths and toss him out to sea without any assurance he will be rescued. Today, we need to know everything’s going to be OK. For about two hours, Flight is surprisingly ballsy for a mainstream Hollywood film. Then it loses its nerve. That, perhaps, was inevitable.
The inevitable end of the Tebow train. The New Orleans-San Francisco game was obviously the better game, but Denver-New England was equally compelling. For a second. The thing about the way the Broncos have played with Tebow of late is that it allowed anyone so willing to suspend their disbelief. “They can’t really hang with the Patriots.” “Yeah, but have you seen what he’s been able to do? You never know.” This is the real Tebow Legacy—and it’s why we love sports. Not because we want to see Tebow fail and not because people call him a “winner,” “gamer,” “underdog” or any other euphemism for “not very good.” We love watching sports because we love watching crazy shit happen. Sometimes that crazy shit is a wildly over-matched team beating its superior. Tebow and the Broncos piloted that roller coaster ride for half the season and made people think that the crazy shit happening before their eyes was actually more than just crazy shit happening before their eyes. It’s true, you never do know, even when you should know better. There’s no way the Broncos had a chance but even the most die-hard anti-Tebowists out there couldn’t have felt completely confident saying that going into the game. There is always that doubt—or hope, depending on your perspective—that something crazy and inexplicable will happen (Like Alex Smith and Vernon Davis looking like Steve Young and Terrell Owens). Eventually though, it becomes too much to handle and we want the world to right itself and last night it finally did.
In life Davis was rightly seen by the media as devious, vindictive, mercenary, and “the crown prince of paranoia,” all just fancier words for asshole.
Having gone to the other side on the Day of Atonement, Davis has apparently been exculpated of his sins entirely. His negative traits have either been softened or simply disappeared. The words that keep getting batted around now to describe Davis are “controversial,”; “rebel,” “maverick,” “passionate,” and “complex.”
There were some excellent accounts of the true nature of his complexity (see Bill Plaschke’s obituary in the LA Times) in the print media. But the television networks, which I guess were bound to produce superficial coverage, for the most part ignored one of the most important aspects of Davis’s legacy: his assholery.
The woman who is so often criticized for a lack of involvement in the Great American Tennis Cause, as I understand it, is only permitted to show passion for the sport if she’s silent about it. Which is, if you really think about it, a rather impossible task for an athlete who sometimes gets competitive, which sometimes leads to anger. This is nothing new in sports; it is nothing new in tennis.
Fantastic article by Emma Carmichael on the Catch-22 that Serena Williams will always face (and, to her credit, doesn’t seem to care about)
Curtis Granderson is the Yankees union representative. So, of course, he’s chatting with the Orioles mascot about their labor deal.
(via Curtis Granderson And The Orioles’s Mascot Shared A Moment This Afternoon)
[Baseball] Players hitting .300 walked 14.5 percent of the time and players hitting .298 walked 5.8 percent of the time, but in their final plate appearance of the season, players hitting .299 have never walked. In the last quarter century, no player hitting .299 has ever drawn a base on balls in his final plate appearance of the season.
My name is 
