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"Moneyball" vs. "Trouble with the Curve": The limits of baseball's data-driven obsession

Jim Warren — Sun, 03 Feb 2013 13:22:47 +0000

WASHINGTON---First there was “Moneyball,” the Brad Pitt homage to empirical analysis of sports. Then came Clint Eastwood’s “Trouble with the Curve,” the recent homage to old-fashioned scouting and human intuition in assessing baseball talent.

To which should the sports fan pay the greater heed?

Well, the folks at Bloomberg News (actually a new operation called Bloomberg Sports) convened a private gathering the other evening, starring Dan Duquette, the executive vice president of baseball operations of the Baltimore Orioles, and Bryan Minniti, the assistant general manager of the Washington Nationals.

Both teams had fabulous seasons last year and while Minniti is a comparative newbie compared to his older counterpart, they were both interesting in mulling the state of the sport with Al Hunt, the prominent Bloomberg reporter-editor and a capital media mainstay.

The session began with a rather fascinating example of the sort of analytics Bloomberg is hawking to sports teams, initially in baseball and also in soccer worldwide. It was a breakdown of every single pitch thrown last season by Tim Lincecum of the San Francisco Giants.

There is probably no angle they haven’t pursued. Want to see what pitches he threw when the count was 2-1 against left-handed batters? And video of each one? Every possible pattern is dissected, along with where a ball was hit if it was hit. What appeared to be dozens, potentially hundreds, of criteria in breaking down his performance could be quickly highlighted by a click of a computer key.

For sure, “Moneyball,” both the original Michael Lewis book and the subsequent movie, has been dissected ad nauseam and it’s clear that virtually every team relies pretty heavily on numbers crunching assessments (with a few relative exceptions, said Duquette, notably the Atlanta Braves).

As for the Eastwood movie, and its protagonist’s belief that one has to “just go with the sound” when bat hits ball, he conceded that there are a few old codgers who may still go that route. Duquette, who is one of a curious number of baseball executives who are alumni of elite Amherst College, recalled his being a young scout, watching games in the Cape Cod League, and sitting near an old hand who said, “I go by the sound and buy the paper in the morning” to see how the game actually wound up.

And lest one think today’s data obsession is all that new, Duquette reminded that Earl Weaver, the Orioles famous manager who died recently, was way ahead of the sport in using analytics, in particular on-base percentage and a radar gun to track when a pitcher’s speed was decreasing.

For sure, analytics are particularly helpful, said Duquette, in assessing the impact of trades and positioning one’s players defensively (knowing the hitting tendencies of the other team). And, yes, they are a boon to fantasy league participants.

But there remain many weaknesses, especially in assessing young talent.

The subject of initial talent evaluation was the most interesting part of the session. Shortcomings were conceded by Minniti, a young statistics and math major from the University of Pittsburgh and thus a prototype of the sort of young gun now infiltrating the sport

Why do the National Football League and National Basketball Association have better luck in drafting players?

As Minniti said, amateur statistics are simply far more ambiguous, given dramatically different levels of competition. There, you do have to rely heavily on scouting.

And, said Duquette, there is the overarching reality that hitting a baseball demands a significantly high skills level, while pitching is just an unnatural act. “Combine the two and it’s hard to predict performance.”

Comparing a kid who’s played in the back woods of Pennsylvania with one who has played in bigtime Atlantic Coast Conference games is just inherently difficult.

No surprise, and knock on wood, whatever the resulting sound, there still still seems a whole lot of art to go with all the new-fangled science.

Before a grand victory, a final game among the Obama posse

Jim Warren — Wed, 07 Nov 2012 14:43:01 +0000

By James Warren

The Last Election had to include the Final Game.

In a gym on an austere stretch of Chicago’s West Side, President Obama reprised a sweat- and elbow-filled tradition Tuesday afternoon as he beckoned members of a personal sports posse to complete a ritual unique in the annals of the American presidency.

It was hours before a satisfying victory tinged for days with anxiety and ambiguity. But the scene was just like when the core cadre had commenced an unforeseen act of superstition amid the winter snows of Iowa in 2008. Back then the protagonist was a U.S. senator and longshot candidate for the Democratic nomination for president and the assembled were a bunch of male buddies recapturing their youth by playing a game, basketball, they love in a decidedly competitive manner.

As true many times before, they played Tuesday with the same weekend-warrior intensity found in hundreds of YMCA gyms by men long past their athletic prime but still deeply competitive. And, on this day, they didn’t have to daydream about trying to fake out a Michael Jordan, LeBron James or, say, a Scottie Pippen since one of them was right there to fake out or shoot over.

“It was tremendous fun, tiring and, at the same time, bittersweet, “ said Alexi Giannoulias, one of the original group and now a Chicago banker after a failed attempt to win his friend’s old Senate seat. “The mood was good but, obviously, it was different.”

As a high school senior in Hawaii, Obama was a substitute on a state championship team. He’s kept up his love of the game and, on the morning of the Iowa caucuses in 2008, beckoned buddies to play ball as a final and needed bit of fun and relaxation. They included Reggie Love, a former Duke University player who served as his “body man” on the campaign trail and later in the White House: Marty Nesbitt, a Chicago businessman; Eric Whittaker, a Chicago doctor; and Giannoulias.

Obama won a surprise victory in Iowa but then lost to Hillary Clinton in New Hampshire, where he did not play the morning of the primary. Superstitious, he reprised the game every election morning thereafter, including the day he completed an improbable personal journey and vanquished Sen. John McCain in 2008.

By Tuesday, there were nearly 20 invited to partake in the five-on-five game, including another mainstay, Education Secretary Arne Duncan, who, like Giannoulias, once played professionally overseas, and Pippen, the Hall of Famer who was Jordan’s top aide de camp as the Chicago Bulls won six National Basketball Association championships in the 1990s.

Nesbitt and Love generally decide on the sides and, on this day, the star of the show clearly was the beneficiary as the extremely competitive Obama both coached his team and played with Pippen. The game lasted nearly 90 minutes and, according to Giannoulias, who played with the president and Pippen ("the best player and athlete I've ever played with"), the commander-in-chief’s team won by 20 points with Obama scoring several baskets.

“He played well,” said Giannoulias, 36, who was the nation’s youngest state treasurer when elected in 2006, before his failed 2010 Senate candidacy.

When it was over, there was clearly a need to memorialize the occasion. Everybody high-fived the man who’d brought them together in the first place, took a group photo and wished him luck that night.

“It was being a part of history,” said Giannoulias, playing with him on what proved to be two historic Election Days in a row. “Then, again, it was just a bunch of friends playing ball.”

China keeps its censors busy and history books pristine: An item that might not make the internet over there

Jim Warren — Mon, 29 Oct 2012 03:06:11 +0000

The corrupt and lily-livered Chinese government will likely block access to this item as it assures work for tens of thousands of government-paid monitors.

Dear Censors: It really is remarkable how much the Chinese strive to keep from you and your fellow citizens. Recent days have given you guys some quite revealing work to hide.

First the New York Times ran a wonderful piece on the billions of dollars amassed by the family of Prime Minister Wen Jiabao during his tenure as the Big Cheese.

The next day the Wall Street Journal’s superb Saturday “Review” section (perhaps the best and most creative weekly newspaper section around) reviewed two books on the Great Famine of roughly 1958-1962 that killed 45 million Chinese and was a function of Mao Zedong’s “Great Leap Forward,” the manic and crazed great leap backward into huge collective farms and administrative units.

The Times reported how the Chinese quickly blocked access to both the English and Chinese versions of its investigation. It’s safe to assume that quickly did same with the reviews of the two books, “Tombstone,” by Yang Jisheng, and “The Great Famine in China, 1958-1962,” edited by Zhou Xun.

We can thank the nation’s two best newspapers---whose daily handiwork tends to sadly lap their deteriorating counterparts in much of the newspaper industry---for such stellar work that raises this question: Why do the Chinese do what they do when it comes to rampant censorship?

And it’s not just embarrassing breaking news stories. It’s their very history, as Michael Fathers’ review of the two books made clear:

"There is no memorial anywhere in China to the victims of the famine, no public monument, no remembrance day,” he wrote in the Journal. “Graves are not marked and mass burial grounds have disappeared into the landscape. The famine's very existence has been denied. The communist party will only admit to 'food shortages' and 'some difficulties' during the great leap forward. They claim that these setbacks were a result of natural disasters."

Why, oh why?

There’s no smarter person to ask than Evan Osnos, Beijing correspondent for the New Yorker. He worked previously for the Chicago Tribune before a change in ownership prompted a free fall in editorial ambitions and dismantling of foreign and national reporting staffs by an undistinguished newsroom hierarchy likely able to find either Beijing or Pekin, Illinois on a map (but it might somehow know that latter's school teams were actually known as The Chinks until enlightenment overcame the school board in 1980).

“The strategy is, essentially, like that of climate-change skeptics: If you can't beat the facts, then muddy, obfuscate, create barriers to discovery,” Osnos explained in an email.

“The Chinese government knows that some people will use technical workarounds to get access to blocked websites, but most people won't bother,” he wrote. “So if they hear there is a big story at the NYT, they might go to the site and if they find it blocked, they will go back to getting their kids ready for school or playing online games or whatever.”

“Some will persist, but they are a minority, and China is large.”

When it comes to the famine, he explained that the approach is related but somewhat different.

“For years the Party succeeded in diluting the horror of the famine by submerging it into what was, by any measure, a miserable century or two to be Chinese. As bad as the famine was, life was already so bleak - - - life expectancy in the 30s or low 40s, high infant mortality, absence of education - - that people were willing to accept much of the Party's argument that the famine was a ‘natural disaster,’ like locusts or droughts, etc.”

“That is still taught in schools; so people might know that their grandparents starved to death but not why. The fact that it was, in fact, the direct result of an irrational and ruinous economy fantasy cooked up by Chairman Mao is known by a tiny minority.”

That reality, he suspects, will change, “but more slowly than we might imagine.”

Chicago students and teachers, listen up: rare truth-telling about the system's future

Jim Warren — Wed, 24 Oct 2012 17:07:28 +0000

Wednesday's Chicago Public Schools monthly board meeting began with various rituals: the Pledge of Alliegiance, introducing a new student board observer, praising two high-achieving high schools and formally welcoming a new superintendent, the latest to make it through the beleaguered system's quickly-rotating executive revolving door.

After the Superintendent de Jour, Barbara Byrd Bennet, a New Yorker, made a few benign comments and announced two top appointments of her own---via Cincinnati and Cleveland, as if the nation's third-largest city lacks a sufficient talent pool to serve her interests---it was time for Tim Cawley, the chief administrative officer to enlighten the assembled with his Cliff's Notes version of an amended budget in light of a rather expensive new contract with the teachers union.

It was here that one was grateful for some adult supervision in the system, on this day in the presence of Henry Bienen, a former longtime president of Northwestern University, and Penny Pritzker, the wealthy and well-connected businesswoman.

In particular, there were several items of interest in Cawley's presentation that intrigued them due to the distinctly low-key manner in which they'd been offered.

First, there was a slide on "How will we cover the new costs?" of a contract that adds $103 million in compensation to a system hundreds of millions of dollars in the hole already and without any reserve funds.

The biggest element, Cawley said, was what he termed a "$70 million increase in operating revenue," which includes capitalizing interest on $13 million in bonds, selling surplus buildings and refinancing bonds maturing in 2013 and 2014.

Then there was a slide whose header declared, "FY 14 Budget Still Poses Significant Challenges," including a stunning $1 billion projected deficit.

Bienen asked to speak and briefly noted that to call the FY 14 budget one posing "significant challenges" was "the understatement of the week." He then pointed out that refinancing bonds wasn't a savings, it was just putting off certain (growing) payments for a bit.

Unless Cawley had Manna from Heaven, in the form of magical revenues, the budget was simply postponing for a year or so the real reckoning, Bienen declared. "We haven't come to grips with the structural problem," he said, while diplomatically, even decorously, dispelling any possible inferences that he was suggesting Cawley was trying to "pull the wool" over the eyes of anybody.

Pritzker later noted that she likes to look at budget numbers in a more far-reaching manner, such as three or so years out. Obviously, she said, the projected $1 billion deficit is not a onetime predicament. If you look at it all, as she is inclined to look at it, in terms of three years out, then one could argue you're staring at a $3 billion deficit.

She also indicated, as had Bienen, that you can't view as recurring revenues the capitalizing of interest when refinancing bond deals.

Cawley then offered up what he could easily have underscored in the first place. He "couldn't agree more. We clearly understand that capitalizing interest doesn't lead to recurring revenues." Better said late than never.

The bottom line was crystal clear: the system is headed toward huge shutdowns of schools. There was talk by Cawley and Bennet of looking at every "nook and cranny" for more savings and efficiencies. There are not that many nooks and crannies in any institution in America outside, say, the Pentagon or the New York Yankees payroll.

So one must thank Bienen and Pritzker---each pilloried gratuitously by the teachers union president in an outrageous, stream of consciousness speech to a Seattle group last year--- for understatedly stating the grotesquely obvious reality facing Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel and the school system.

Karen Lewis, the failed stand-up comic who negotiated a surprisingly strong, and thus unaffordable contract, for her members, sent a surrogate to begin the public portion of the meeting.

Michael Brunson praised the new teachers agreement, by and large, and then lambasted "the constant rumors of school closings." He beseached the board to go forward in a "participatory and transparent manner," otherwise, he said with an air of combative melodrama,"There will be reprecussions."

On Wednesday, if anybody, including Brunson, was listening, the reprecussions were entirely transparent.

The future of work: Do we forget the folks picking up our garbage and cleaning our sewers?

Jim Warren — Wed, 17 Oct 2012 17:23:32 +0000

There was a terrific gathering on the future of work during last week's Chicago Ideas Festival, with the main stage at Goodman Theatre nearly packed with perhaps 750 or so folks in the audience. There was engaging talk from some really smart people about trends in white-collar workplaces, notably away from hierarchical structures and endless meetings and communications that just get in the way of actual work.

There was talk, too, from a top Microsoft executive of holograms actually supplanting the actual presence of a worker. Several speakers were quite good on how workplaces can stifle creativity. And while there was disquieting mention of a new study in which it's clear that both employers and employers envision a world of far less mutual loyalty, there wasn't a whole lot of mention of blue-collar workers.

The only reference came from Pittsburgh-based writer Jeanne Marie Laskas, author of "Hidden America," a look at a lot of the folks who play a significant role in making the country work each and every day. Coal miners, landfill workers, truckers and cattle ranchers, among others.

"When I hear us all get excited about holograms and about moving inexorably to a life like George Jetson has, I think about the burden on infrastructure we never factor into dreams like that," she told me several days later.

"All the plumbing and sewer systems and trash trucks and landfills and water treatment plants. On and on. We've already forgotten about that stuff, and the people who make it work. We will never not need this stuff, or the people who get their hands dirty. We have to be willing to pay them. These jobs can't get outsourced."

"These are the people who will continue to make America work. I wish we would take better care of them. That sounds preachy and I don't mean to be. More like: we're kidding ourselves if we don't remember this piece of investment in the future of the workplace. I hate to be a downer! I certainly think holograms are as cool as the next person does!"

When we spoke backstage at the gathering (I moderated a small slice), I mentioned that, long ago, I was part of what was even back then an endangered species, namely labor writer. I covered the world of work. It was a fabulous job, with no shortage of drama, especially as industries like auto and steel met convulsive challenges from foreign competition starting in the late 1970s and thereafter.

As the influence of the organized labor sector declined, most editors lost interest. To them, "labor" meant unions. It was myopic. These days, coverage of labor is catastrophic. Laskas clearly agreed.

"It's just wrong that we don't cover this stuff anymore," she said. "And ironic in the ugliest sense: we hold these workers up as political props, knowing nothing about them or the actual issues they face. We used to know, and we didn't need to use them as props."

So what about Candy Crowley violating those debate rules?

Jim Warren — Wed, 17 Oct 2012 16:47:30 +0000

CNN's Candy Crowley was just fine moderating the second debate, with her live fact-checking of Mitt Romney predictably inspiring rhetorical dyspepsia among conservatives. Ah, the liberal media conspiracy.

But, speaking of facts, it was true that the two sides had signed a contract (which Crowley did not) in which it was crystal clear that the moderator would not ask follow-up questions. That's a typically spineless move by both sides in such debates. Heaven forbid that they might otherwise see their well-rehearsed combatant wind up in a hellish zone of spontaneity and lack of control.

So what is one to think? How might one explain this to an eight-year-old? The two parties cut a deal about the rules, with the obviously implicit assumption that the moderator would follow them, and she broke them, as she indicated earlier that she would.

"If she decided that the greater good was served by acting in a way that ran counter to the rules, she'd be among a long line of people who have violated laws or rules because they believe it is their ethical responsibility to do so," said Jeff Seglin, an ethics and policy meister at the Harvard Kennedy School.

"But then I can't get inside of her head to know what her reasoning would be," he said. "If she was doing it because she truly believed it was the right thing to do, that's one thing. If she was doing it because she wanted to draw attention to herself, that's quite another."

So I might tell my eight-year-old that President Obama and Mitt Romney agreed on the terms of combat, Crowley thought they were stupid and went her own way. For sure, it was ultimately a good thing for the country that she did.

So maybe that's my retort to the eight-year-old next time he announces that Mom's and Dad's rules are dumb and a) he's not going to bed at a certain time b) will play a videogame longer than the mandated limit or c) not show up at grandpa's for dinner because he doesn't like all those boring adults.

If he somehow claims it's his ethical responsibility to do any of the above, then I guess my retort is sorry, guy, you lose, it's not a matter of national significance.

And, please, no follow-up protests about my decision.

Remember Tom Cruise predicting crimes in "Minority Report?" We're not far away

Jim Warren — Thu, 11 Oct 2012 18:06:27 +0000

The intellectual food fest that is Chicago Ideas Week continues unabated with a dozen or more pretty meaty and provocative gatherings each day. It can leave one's head spinning.

You can go from the future of media, cities and our coming water crisis to a debate on whether we should ration end of life health care. Then there are "labs" on building robots, luring opera audiences, innovation in the gaming industry, preparing seafood and maximizing transparency in an online world.

There are lots of young folks making and listening to presentations and scads of emerging high-tech entrepreneurs. There's a reassuring air of vitality coursing many of the sessions and the hallways discussions after each gathering.

A criminal justice session caught my attention as much as any so far, with journalist Ray Bonner setting the stage (on a stage) at the Goodman Theatre by noting our nation's depressing incarceration rate: 730 per 100,000 citizens, highest in the world and even topping the likes of Russia and Cubs. The youth incarceration rate is especially dismal, at 336 per 100,000 citizens, leaving all nations in the dust.

He then introduced Richard Berk, a criminologist at the University of Pennsylvania who applies sophisticated statistical models to discern how to best forecast criminal behavior.

So remember Tom Cruise in "Minority Report" (2002)? The flick is set in 2054 Washington, D.C., which has eliminated most crime due to some brainy folks called "Pre-Cogs" who can look into the future and predict crimes before they take place. Pretty handy.

Well, said Berk, a very respected fellow, we're well on our way there. That sounded a bit hyperbolic, at least until he started rattling off the many ways in which we already attempt to predict criminal behavior. such as in sentencing, parole board and other decisions. We're "lousy" at it, he said, but we do try.

We try to forecast the possibility somebody will commit a homicide while out on parole. We try, too, when we consider bail recommendations and prison housing decisions (the guys likely to be badasses are dispatched to the most onerous cells).

Now, he said, consider the increasing use of GPS, closed circuit television and other technologies when it comes to both tracking any or all of us and also discerning patterns of behavior. Computer chips embedded in a parolee's electronic ankle bracelet can be read by a hidden video camera on a building.

It's all part and parcel of an extensive attempt to do what Cruise's character was doing, especially after he learned that a Pre-Cog was predicting that the character would murder someone soon. Scads of social science research and demographic data come into play as we make sense of distinct patterns of behavior.

Berk's prediction for what's up ahead: "We won't be as effective as Tom Cruise but with each passing year, we're getting closer."

He was followed by Shawn Henry, a former FBI cyber crime chief; Eva Paterson, San Francisco-based founder of the Equal Justice Society; and Kamala Harris, the attorney general of California. They were all very engaging, though unavoidably one was most drawn to Henry's tales of online skullduggery and the success of bad guys in undermining our world's critical technological infrastructures.

In some cases he recounted, companies had no idea that their seemingly safe intellectual property, research and development, phone conversations and employee information had already been stolen many months earlier. There are organized crime groups on what amount to electronic jihads and we best figure out ways to protect our networks.

Bring on the Pre-Cogs.

Election fraud: if there's any problem, this is it

Jim Warren — Mon, 08 Oct 2012 14:47:02 +0000

Good for the New York Times’ Adam Liptak to do a comprehensive piece on absentee ballot hanky-panky. There’s been so much written about voter identification problems that most people don’t realize that problems with absentee ballots are a bigger challenge.

But how big?

For sure, there's an inherent, obvious problem, as Liptak concisely gets to by quoting Richard Posner, the federal appeals court judge in Chicago: “Absentee voting is to voting in person,” Judge Richard A. Posner of the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit has written, “as a take-home exam is to a proctored one.”

Gotcha. But how big?

“Absentee ballot fraud is a bigger problem in potential than impersonation fraud, but there doesn't seem to be much of either one,” says John Mark Hansen, a University of Chicago political scientist and former dean of social sciences there.

That would indicate two different things: A) Election fraud is a lot of trouble for relatively low reward and B) The legal penalties if prosecuted are sufficiently severe.

There is strong work by academics Gary W. Cox and J. Morgan Kousser that used media reports and legal proceedings to inspect vote fraud both before and after New York implemented voter registration rules. It’s found in “Turnout and Rural Corruption: New York as a Test Case. American Journal of Political Science, 25(4): 646–663, 1981.

They did find evidence of vote inflation before registration laws. After those went into effect, the evidence suggests vote suppression, either by denying legitimate voters the right to cast ballots or by crooked counts, was as great in Republican areas upstate as it was in largely Democratic New York City.

If you look back at American history, which obviously does have instances of election fraud, voters have rarely perpetrated it, notes Hansen. It’s been more a function of crooked election officials.

Those officials challenge voters in a discriminatory fashion. Ballot boxes disappear. Election officials stuff ballot boxes or simply make up the returns.

As historian Robert Caro made clear, Lyndon Johnson's first election to the U.S. Senate in 1948 hinged on "Ballot Box 13" from Jim Wells County, at which a couple dozen "voters" signed their names with identical ink and in identical handwriting. This was evidently common practice in Texas at the time, with Caro indicating that Johnson’s supporters were better at skullduggery than those of rival Coke Stevenson.

The more modern day equivalent of this sort of concern is the controversy over the Debold electronic voting machines. They produced no paper record for audit and they could easily be hacked. There wasn’t a whole lot to stop a sleazy county clerk from rigging up the vote recording software to register votes a certain way.

The real shenanigans in Florida in 2000, Hansen reminds one, all had to do with the counting of ballots, not the casting. There was even a special issue of PS, a publication of the American Political Science Association, that explored the Bush-Gore mess, including the pressure from the Bush campaign to count absentee ballots postmarked after election day in counties with large military populations and to disqualify absentee ballots in counties with lots of students and minorities.

Then, of course, there was the whole dispute over hanging, swinging, and dimpled chads.

We’ll surely never dispel the questions about Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley stealing the election in 1960 for John Kennedy (though my late friend, columnist Mike Royko, always asserted that Richard Nixon was helped even more by suspect Downstate counting by Republicans assisting his effort).

The irregularities associated with that count are generally viewed as having been largely dealt with in the decades since. That’s in part due to a seemingly greater penchant to actually prosecute ballot fraud but also due to the reality, in many places, of more professional and fair-minded election oversight.

Do vote irregularities remain a problem of sorts in scattered spots? Yes. A big problem? Probably not.

The Miracle at Medinah: The Euros kick our butt with a Spaniard looking down from above

Jim Warren — Mon, 01 Oct 2012 00:46:31 +0000

You need not be a fan of golf to appreciate what played out Sunday in the Chicago suburbs, with the likes of Michael Jordan and two former presidents by the name of Bush looking on.

The United States went into the final day of the greatest team competition in the sport with a huge lead. Seemingly insurmountable. The home crowd cheering it on ("U.S.A!!! U.S.A!!!!") and reminding one why this biennial tussle is so neat, partly because it doesn't take place in the church-like serenity of the average golf tournament, where being too boisterous is cause for security escorting you off the grounds.

In the Ryder Cup, cheering and booing are all tolerated and part of the very nationalistic scene. It changes the complexion of the sport, at least for a few days, as all these famous (and rich) independent contractors have to compete as a team, with great shots boosting their eleven other compadres and, thus, bad ones letting them down.

On Sunday, there were mostly great shots by the Europeans, and poor ones by the Americans, prompting a quite amazing comeback by the Europeans to retain the trophy. Martin Kaymer, a German who had been down on his luck and played terribly previously, sank the winning putt. He thus also partly erased the painful Teutonic memory of another German blowing the final putt in the matches back in 1991.

Half-German, I was happy to see that putt go in, meaning that the Euros had won and the Americans' last chance, the brilliant but somber and beleaguered Tiger Woods, was left on the last tee box knowing that whatever he did in the final pairing of the day was inconsequential. One of the two greatest players ever (with Jack Nicklaus) wound up losing three of his four matches on this weekend.

I was also happy for Seve Ballesteros, a brilliant and famously creative Spanish golfer who passed away last year of brain cancer at age 54. This European team just happened to be captained by another Spaniard, who saw to it that Ballesteros' iconic image was sewn into the shirt sleeves of his team.

My friend, the journalist-author David Maraniss, and I, occasionally take to a course in Madison, Wi. and stumble about, cooking up imaginary face-offs between great golfers. I have always been "The Spaniard," which largely has referenced Ballesteros but, on occasion, morphs into referencing Sergio Garcia, a younger Spaniard who was among the many heroes on Sunday.

Americans will probably wind up knowing this Sunday as the Meltdown at Medinah (the name of the course on which they played). That's too harsh. The Euros were just a lot better, touched with a bit of magic and a reminder of that simple admonition that it's never over 'til it's over. The Spaniard is smiling.

Romney's favorite casino mogul botches that famous "Vince Lombardi" line

Jim Warren — Wed, 26 Sep 2012 03:07:50 +0000

Sheldon Adelson’s understanding of casinos worldwide is clearly superior to his take on American history. In spending unprecedented amounts to defeat President Obama, he’s inspired by one of the great American myths.

In a lengthy Las Vegas interview with Politico, the multi-billionaire gaming executive explained his Obama animus and plan to spend as much as $100 million by Election Day this way:

“I suppose you could say that I live on Vince Lombardi’s belief: ‘Winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing.’ So, I do whatever it takes, as long as it’s moral, ethical, principled, legal.”

It would surely come as a surprise to many Americans----from working class football fans to Lombardi-adoring corporate executives---that Lombardi did not coin a phrase long associated with him and that remains a fixture of his unceasing and iconic aura that clearly transcends sports.

For sure, the fabled and late Green Bay Packers coach pinned it on locker-room walls. But he might as well have stuck a picture of either John Wayne or a long-ago UCLA football coach, Red Sanders, next to it. They were far closer to the phrase’s origins than Lombardi.

As recounted in “When Pride Still Mattered,” a great 1999 Lombardi biography by David Maraniss, the phrase was first uttered for posterity by an eleven-year-old actress who played the daughter of a character portrayed by Wayne in “Trouble Along the Way.” That was a 1953 flop in which Wayne was a down-on-his-luck football coach with a sleazy past who is hired to revive the sport at a fictional New York college.

He does revive the sport but partly through illegal recruiting of players. This becomes known to a social worker played by Donna Reed, who sits next to the coach’s tough-minded, tomboy daughter at a game in which the college is on the way to a big upset.

The daughter wonders why the social worker isn’t cheering. The Reed character, knowing of the father’s suspect ways, responds, “I’m not getting paid.” She then asks the girl, “Is winning so important?”

“Listen,” the daughter responds, then referring to her father in the third-person. “Like Steve says, ‘Winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing!’”

The line, it turns out, actually came to the screenwriter, Melville Shavelson, via his own Hollywood agent, who also represented the UCLA coach, Sanders.

As Shavelson told Maraniss, “The agent quoted me the line once and said that he had heard Sanders say it. That’s how it got into the script.”

Nobody knows for sure how Lombardi came to a line that somehow seeped into the national consciousness in a potent way and that he used. And yet another famous coach, Sid Gillman, used the line before Lombardi ever stuck it on a Packers locker room wall.

Indeed, it was found in the 1961 yearbook of Gillman’s San Diego Chargers, then a member of the American Football League prior to its merger with the National Football League. “Winning isn’t everything to Coach Sid Gillman,” it declared. “It’s the only thing.”

But, as certainly opposed to Wayne’s movie coach, there was a big distinction in Lombardi’s own philosophy between paying the price to win and winning at any price, as Maraniss recounts.

Lombardi was thus very much like Adelson, if you take the latter at his word when it comes to not crossing ethical boundaries in his pursuit of a Mitt Romney victory.

Then, again, if current polling is correct, it’s quite possible Adelson will be paying a rather staggering price to lose.