Distant Replay

Was up late last night doing work with the teevee on and got caught up in a couple of these “Top 50” shows on the MLB Network. Decided it was kind of a brilliant format, given how mesmerized I was as they carried me forward 10 items at a time from commercial to commercial, working their way through their lists.

One of the shows was dedicated to the “Top 50 Calls of All-Time,” culling examples from radio and television over many decades’ worth of games. (Here’s a blog post someone pulled together listing all 50.) The call of New York Giants’ announcer Russ Hodges of Bobby Thomson’s “shot heard ’round the world” home run to win the NL pennant in 1951 earned the top spot in that compilation.

The other list was devoted to the “Top 50 Most Infamous Arguments” which was not just compelling but also got the adrenaline going a little bit at times. The “pine tar incident” from 1983 when New York Yankees manager Billy Martin successfully challenged that Kansas City Royals third baseman George Brett had too much pine tar on his bat when hitting a game-winning home run earned top honors on that list. The Royals would protest and the ruling would later be reversed, but Brett’s madman-charge of the plate still stands a fairly iconic moment in baseball history when it comes to arguments.

I realized while watching the shows that I had no particular interest in the actual rankings. That is to say, it didn’t matter much to me what famous call (for example) was considered the “top” one of all-time, what was second, and so on. Rather, my interest was piqued as a longtime fan who was more or less familiar with most of the plays being highlighted. I could remember having either seen them or replays of them -- or in some cases, having read about them -- in just about every case.

I remember the Brett homer vividly, having been a fan of his as a kid growing up. I even wrote him for an autograph, and like pretty much every big leaguer to whom I sent such letters to when I was a kid, he responded with an autographed photo.

I also remembered watching another of the “infamous arguments” on the list, one ranking around #5, I believe -- the ugly “bean-brawl” game between the Atlanta Braves and San Diego Padres from August 1984. It was the kind of game that really had to be seen to be believed, with several hits batsmen, multiple bench-clearing brawls, fans getting involved in the fights, and numerous jaw-dropping moments.

To give you an idea how crazy the game was, San Diego managed to have three different pitchers deliberately throw at Atlanta pitcher Pascual Perez during four different at-bats in the game. (Perez had hit a San Diego better with the game’s first pitch.) All of those Padres pitchers were ejected, as were the manager and a couple of coaches. It was basically Slap Shot from start to finish. This clip doesn’t even mention some of what happened:

I followed the Braves closely back then thanks to TBS showing every game, and so remembered all of the players involved. I always liked the idiosyncratic Perez who once missed a start when he couldn’t find his way to Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium and afterwards wore a jacket with “I-285” on the back to refer to the interstate on which he had gotten lost. (Was sad to hear of his death a couple of years ago.)

After a couple of hours of these countdowns I realized the format was smartly conceived and that the MLB Network had come up with some excellent off-season programming to keep viewers tuned in.

As I say, I imagine for other “Top 50” shows the rankings would matter more to me -- e.g., shows ranking players or teams or certain, measurable achievements. But for categories as nebulous as these, I was mostly pleased just to have those nostalgia nodes in my brain be massaged as I watched and remembered the plays.

Happened to turn the television on again this afternoon during an idle moment and saw All In: The Poker Movie being shown on one of the Showtime networks we’re getting for free right now. Was right in the middle of the Moneymaker-Farha heads-up, and again I found it hard to turn away despite being so familiar with what was being shown.

Something reassuring, I guess, about reliving the past and reaffirming our memories of it, memories which become more imperfect each day.

Black Friday Stories; or, Where Were You?

Whenever I teach a class, I always take time early on to talk about things like the objectives of the course and what exactly it is I’m hoping the students learn by taking it. Part of that effort involves asking the students to think about why they are taking the class, that is, beyond the need to pick up credits or satisfy a requirement.

For example, when teaching literature classes I’ll ask students to think about the reasons for studying stories, plays, and poems. Of what use is it, really? Kind of a dangerous thing for the teacher to be doing, if you think about it, especially in those core classes where the great majority of those sitting in the seats didn’t sign up because they liked the subject, but rather because they had to take it to graduate.

But I remember my best teachers and how they all forced me to think about such questions -- not just with regard to their classes, but about everything. So I ask my students to do the same kind of work, to think not just about what we’re studying but why we’re studying it.

In a literature class, this means talking about how poets and fiction writers respond to the world and being humans differently than do historians or scientists or philosophers or others. Their stories and plays and poems are imaginative responses to their experiences in the time and place in which they live, perhaps meant to comment on the world as a historian or scientist or philosopher would but doing so in a much different way. And, of course, literature has other purposes, too, such as to entertain or provide pleasure, or force us to feel certain emotions in addition to think certain thoughts.

Sometimes I’ll ask students to think about what “literature” or “literary” writing is. Not a simple matter, really, even for those who’ve spent their lives studying the subject.

Among the distinctions I’ll draw in such discussions will be to point out how literary writing is more likely to involve less literal modes of expression (e.g., figurative language, symbols, metaphors, irony, allusion, and so on).

The writer of literature also isn’t as bound to realism as is the historian or scientist or philosopher. All of which means when reading a poem or story or play we always have to be ready for the possibility that something we read might not be meant to be taken “straight,” but rather is intended to evoke an idea in a less literal, more indirect way.

Sometimes it’s obvious the writer is being “literary.” When you get to chapter 19 of William Faulker’s As I Lay Dying and Vardaman Bundren startles us with the line “My mother is a fish,” well, we can be pretty sure the boy isn’t literally saying his recently deceased Mom is a fish. There’s something else going on there, clearly.

Other times, though, it isn’t so clear that a non-literal meaning is being intended within a poem, story, or play. Such is one of the many challenges literature provides -- that is, to figure out just what the author might be saying when he or she isn’t necessarily being “straight” with us.

This brings up one of the reasons why I think reading and studying literature is useful even to those who don’t go on to become teachers or scholars with jobs focusing primarily on parsing the meanings of sonnets or novels. The fact is, people use “literary” language all of the time, not just poets, fiction writers, etc. Understanding literary techniques helps us understand the world at large -- to recognize allusions, irony, symbolism, metaphors, and so forth when people communicate their ideas to one another.

I had been thinking about this use of “literary” language in non-literary contexts last week when reading some reviews of the new documentary All In: The Poker Movie.

The film begins and ends with Black Friday, and in both spots we see players and other commentators talking about the day itself, a somber soundtrack kind of emphasizing a tone of sadness and dismay. It’s pretty clear the film makers included the question “Where were you when you heard about Black Friday?” in a lot of their interviews, then used the replies to help create the bookends for the narrative they ended up creating.

In a couple of spots, people answering the question bring up the assassination of president John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963, appearing to suggest some sort of juxtaposition as they do.

“This is like the Kennedy assassination,” says author Peter Alson (Take Me To the River, One of a Kind) barely a minute into the film. “Every poker player knows where he was.” Alson’s tone suggests he’s questioning the interviewer, actually, guessing (correctly, in fact) the film makers’ intentions to suggest that exact “Where Were You When...?” kind of feel with regard to Black Friday.

Then near the end, Anthony Holden (Big Deal, Bigger Deal) is shown saying “It’s kind of like 'where were you when JFK was shot?'” That clip is presented without much context, so it’s hard to tell how serious Holden is being when making the comparison. But I’m going to guess that Holden -- who, like Alson, has authored some very “literary” reads about poker -- was similarly clued in to what the film makers were up to by asking the question.

In other words, in my estimation both Alson and Holden are making a historical allusion that is meant to evoke an analogy between two examples of large groups of people reacting collectively to an event. Obviously neither is suggesting the two events are somehow equal in their gravity, but rather the point is in both cases something happened that caught a lot of people by surprise and that the circumstances surrounding their learning of the news got kind of burned into their memories in similar fashion.

However, not everyone has been so generous in their response to such an analogy. In his review for Variety, John Anderson derisively notes how All In starts “with a number of the film’s recurring interviewees... making reference to some cataclysmic event in ways that suggest a combination of Pearl Harbor, 9/11 and the Kennedy assassination,” going on to explain how the event being remembered is “the so-called ‘Black Friday’ of April 15, 2011.”

Anderson is clearly mystified at why people in the movie are taking the whole Black Friday thing so seriously, and as the rest of his review shows he’s coming at it from the perspective of someone who doesn’t share the film makers’ view of the importance of poker to American history and culture. That’s fine, although I think Anderson has misrepresented the JFK references in the film, and in fact adds a couple of his own allusions (to Pearl Harbor and 9/11) that the film doesn’t make in order to exaggerate his response even further. (That is, he’s using another literary device -- hyperbole -- to make a point.)

As the anniversary of Black Friday approaches, we’ll no doubt be hearing more of these kinds of stories as people remember where they were on April 15, 2011 when they first heard the news. I understand the Wicked Chops guys are gathering such accounts for piece they’ll be pulling together to mark the anniversary. You know, an “oral history”-type article in which all of the stories will come straight from the horse’s mouth. And no I don’t mean literally reaching in between the horse’s teeth and... oh, you knew what I meant.

We might well see more references to the Kennedy assassination among those stories. Or, perhaps even 9/11, which more experienced and thus remember.

I saw how yesterday Dusty Schmidt in his blog was apologizing for making a 9/11-Black Friday comparison in an earlier post. It appeared to be kind of a carelessly made reference, and in today’s post Schmidt expresses sincere regret for suggesting the analogy. Indeed, in his case it wasn’t as though he was referring to groups collectively reacting to an event, but was kind of suggesting something similar in the events themselves, which is obviously not a smart comparison to make.

I do recall others having made 9/11-Black Friday comparisons before, however, including our buddy Dan Michalski of Pokerati. Dan pursued that analogy a bit on QuadJacks radio the night of April 15, 2011 right after the DOJ unsealed the indictment and civil complaint -- with Dan even going so far as to describe PokerStars and Full Tilt Poker as “Twin Towers” of online poker going down.

Apologies to Dan for bringing up what was likely a first-response, off-the-cuff attempt at trying to characterize what was happening that day. I personally wouldn’t have gone in that direction with the analogy-making, although I’m going to suggest Dan was being somewhat “literary”-minded when trying to draw such an allegory.

Suffice it to say, Black Friday was an important moment for poker and for all of those affected by what transpired that day. I have written more than once here about where I was on April 15, 2011 -- in Lima, Peru, covering a poker tournament. The most “literary” of those posts was one written a couple of weeks after, titled “Plotting in Peru.”

We might well brace ourselves for more Black Friday stories over the next week or so. Some will probably include examples of hyperbole when trying to convey the magnitude of the day. And some of these stories may well adopt a more “literary” approach than others -- worth keeping in mind as we evaluate them and respond.

More Thoughts on All In: The Poker Movie: Building a “Boom”

Not too much time for scribblin’ today, but I did want to share just one thought that’s been banging around in the noggin’ over the last week or so.

I mentioned last week how I’d had a chance to see the new documentary All In: The Poker Movie and liked it quite a bit. You’ve no doubt started to see lots of reviews and other articles about the film. I imagine it will continue to have some momentum, especially within the poker community, all of the way up to the start of the World Series of Poker in late May and even after.

The limited theatrical run for All In will continue over the next month or more, then it will become available online and via DVD, which will ensure more viewers. You can get details about all of that on the film’s website.

If you’ve seen All In or even just read about it, you know how it was in production for several years, and in fact the makers were gearing up to finish everything when Black Friday suddenly arrived last April.

Our buddy Jeff “PKRGSSP” Walsh interviewed director Douglas Tirola on his show last week, and Tirola talked about how they were actually readying for a July 2011 release when the DOJ unsealed its indictment and civil complaint, effectively shutting down online poker in the U.S. Thus it became necessary to shoot some more interviews and refashion the film’s narrative a bit, which now begins and ends with Black Friday and positions that against the larger story of poker’s growth and importance in America.

A lot of attention has been given to the interviews with Howard Lederer and Chris “Jesus” Ferguson in the movie, both of which (I believe) were done not long before Black Friday. I think in the interview Tirola mentions the one with Lederer having been very close to April 15, what Tirola believes to have been the last real interview he did (aside from perhaps discussing a tourney with someone) before the DOJ hammer fell.

The many clips from the interviews with those two are of course quite provocative, and as I said in my review over at PokerListings I think the film does a good job handling all of the unintended irony surrounding the pair’s championing of Full Tilt Poker and other comments they make about poker.

One of the interviews conducted post-Black Friday was with Alexandra Berzon, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for the Wall Street Journal who covers Las Vegas and who wrote articles about Black Friday and its aftermath.

In the film, Berzon talks about how the WSJ reported on the Black Friday story, in particular the Full Tilt Poker fiasco, explaining how they approached it as “not about cheating but about bluffing.” That is, referring to the way FTP had lied and misled players regarding the security of their funds, the whole enterprise was ultimately revealed to be a kind of “bluff” unexpectedly called back in April of last year.

She also makes what I thought was an intriguing observation about the explosion in popularity of poker over the last decade, a “boom” most (including the makers of All In) attribute in large part to the overlapping influences of Chris Moneymaker, the rise of the online game, and the growth of televised poker.

“If you look at it, the [online] poker companies created the poker boom and had a huge amount to do with it on television,” says Berzon. “And so, was the poker boom a real boom or was it a manufactured thing by these online poker companies?”

Here Berzon is setting up another question -- “Can it outlast PokerStars and Full Tilt Poker?” -- regarding whether or not any “boom” can continue in the U.S. without the sites’ considerable efforts to keep it going. This is where the film kind of ends, with speculation about poker continuing to remain popular in the U.S. and a kind of hope that it will, indeed, survive this significant setback.

But the first time I watched All In I found myself contemplating that idea that the “boom” was in fact “manufactured” or at least accelerated in a kind of artificial way by the sites and their substantial marketing campaigns, ca. 2003-2011.

For those of you who came into poker post-Moneymaker, think about what the game seems to represent to you. What pleasures or values do you associate with poker? How does poker compare to other activities, pastimes, even professions? What does poker signify, ultimately?

Now, try to think whether any of those ideas have occurred to you independently from ideas or suggestions made by the online poker sites, either directly or indirectly.

I’m not implying anything nefarious here, just remarking on how pervasive the influence of Stars, Full Tilt, Absolute/UB, and other sites has been over this period of poker’s greatest growth in the U.S., with all of the sites’ efforts to ensure poker’s continued popularity having proven so obviously successful in terms of helping get people into the game. And more than just casually committed to it, too.

The film doesn’t pursue the implications of Berzon’s comment specifically, but rather just tosses it out as an idea worth contemplating. Which I guess I’ve been doing since I first saw All In.

All In: The Poker Movie Premieres Today

Readers of this blog have likely been hearing about this new documentary about poker that finally gets its official premiere today, All In: The Poker Movie. Check out the film’s website for details about where to see it as well as other background info related to the making of the film.

I had a chance to see an advance screener of it and wrote a full review over on PokerListings, if you’re curious to see my take. I very much enjoyed the film and in fact was pleasantly surprised at how engaging it was for me.

To be honest, I thought that having kind of lived all of this stuff for the last several years, never mind teaching my “Poker in American Film and Culture” class, I half-expected to find the movie a bit tedious since I was destined to be very familiar with just about everything it was going to say.

But I was basically riveted by it, sincerely engaged by all of the connections made between poker and American culture, the overview of Rounders (covering its conception, the making of the film, its lukewarm initial reception, and its ultimate influence on a generation of poker players), the telling of Chris Moneymaker’s story, the discussion of televised poker coming into prominence, and the overview of online poker’s sudden rise and spectacular fall (at least here in the U.S.).

In my review I noted how the movie has what appear to be a couple of agendas: (1) to tell the story of poker, emphasizing its connection to American culture and history; and (2) to defend the game against its detractors, chiefly legislators who would like to limit or prohibit our playing of poker. In my review I said I thought the film did a nice job as far as telling the story of poker went, although I wasn’t too sure the film would actually change any minds among the anti-poker crowd.

Have been reading others’ reviews this week, including a number in mainstream publications like The New York Times, Variety, and so forth, and have noticed a lot of mixed or even negative response to the film’s attempt to champion poker and criticize the U.S. government’s various efforts to keep people from playing, especially online. I did a survey of several reviews for Betfair poker today, if you’d like to get a taste of what people are saying about All In.

One reviewer -- John Anderson (Variety) -- characterized the film as “preaching largely to the converted” as far as its pro-poker argument went, and he’s probably right. Others kind of echoed that sentiment while also expressing broader cynicism about romanticizing poker as some sort of emblem of the “American dream.” I understand that response, too, and can see how those who aren’t interested in poker or invested in the game might grow impatient with a film that keeps hammering away with its pro-poker message for more than 100 minutes.

But for those who are invested in the game and the “subculture” surrounding it (as another reviewer characterizes it), All In: The Poker Movie is definitely worth checking out, if you get the chance to do so. And if you do, let me know what you think, too.