Despite Tragedy, the Games Go On

It isn’t easy, and it doesn’t necessarily get any easier, and acknowledging the problem doesn’t necessarily help. There’s no quick consolation to be derived from proclaiming something grandiose like “sports don’t matter” in the wake of a tragedy like the Newtown shooting, even if it feels important to acknowledge the gulf of importance between mourning the unsolicited death of children and wondering which teams will clinch a playoff berth over the weekend. It’s nothing as deep as catharsis or as routine as ritual to keep paying attention, though, no matter what platitudes might be spoken about the necessity of sports or anything else in helping people to recuperate from loss. If sports help at all, it’s that they give people something else to think about. “To say a real life tragedy puts a sporting event in perspective is unnecessary and wildly glib. Waking up puts sports in perspective,” writes the Journal’s Jason Gay. “In the aftermath of true suffering, the search for the right tone can be treacherous—a modern sporting event is usually rich with bombast, inflated in its sense of significance. Sometimes a sporting event is grandly offered as a release from blunt realities of everyday life. Games are not a release. They are a distraction.”

It wasn’t just the games, either. All around the sports world, the impact from Friday’s shooting was widely felt. Athletes tweeted messages of support and scribbled tributes to the dead on their shoes; moments of silence were held before games, and telecasts were rerouted to show President Obama’s speech at a vigil in Newtown on Sunday night. There were enough solemn, apolitical moments to distract from the messy politics of what could follow as our leaders try to prevent a similar event from happening in the future. There were sports, too, as there always are, even in cases like this. Just a few weeks ago, the Kansas City Chiefs took the field a day after a devastating horror rocked their team, and rallied to win.

49ers Withstand Furious Patriots’ Rally

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  • Pregame

  The first thing you'll notice when the San Francisco 49ers and New England Patriots take the field are the uniforms. It's always nice when the NFL's best teams also have their best colors, and the aesthetic value of watching red-and-gold clash with blue-and-silver can't be undervalued. It helps, too, that we might be watching a potential Super Bowl preview, which could've happened last season had it not been for Eli Manning and his meddling ways. This time, the Colin Kaepernick-boosted 49ers continue to speed along on the strength of their defense, while the Patriots continue their absurd scoring rate en route to looking, one again, like the league's most dangerous team. 

  Color vs. color; Jim Harbaugh vs. Bill Belichick; offense vs. defense; AFC vs. NFC; the veteran Tom Brady vs. the upstart Kaepernick; the New England O-line vs. a record-chasing San Francisco D-line; there's a lot to chew on, and with both teams chasing a first-round bye, anything less than a rightful showdown would be a surprise. I'll try to avoid harping on the Super Bowl angle too much, but forgive me if I can't help myself.

The Fix Picks the NFL: Week 15

He would never say it, of course, because he so studiously avoids saying anything. But it seems likely that Bill Belichick is enjoying—if that’s ever the word for something Bill Belichick feels—the Patriots’ recent postseason-during-the-regular-season stretch. Of course, it’s a lot easier to enjoy—or whatever the Belichickian answer to enjoyment is—when the Patriots wallop a would-be rival, as they did the Texans on Monday night in Week 14. They’ll get the 49ers, who are still the consensus class of the NFC, on Sunday night. The Patriots are favorites, although they will doubtless not act that way, before or after. We know that much about them at this point.

U.S. Open: We Like Mondays

The U.S. Open has made official what many top players have been saying for some time: Tennis is better after a day off.

The U.S. Tennis Association announced Friday that its men’s singles final would be played on Monday at 5 p.m. next year with a day of rest on Sunday. (The men’s semifinals will remain on Saturday.) The women’s final will be moved from prime time on Saturday evening to Sunday at 4:30 p.m. (The women’s semifinals will remain on Friday.)

L.A. Corners the MLB Market

Spoken as recently as a year ago, the following statement would’ve prompted healthy scoffs from most serious baseball fans. But yes, it does seem true that Los Angeles may be MLB’s new epicenter for elite play and ceiling-less expectation, given the cavalcade of high-profile signings and trades bringing more and more of the game’s best players out West. Less than a week after the Los Angeles Dodgers re-asserted their status as baseball’s biggest new whale by tossing a small national GDP’s worth of cash at Zach Greinke, the Los Angeles Angels returned the favor by stealing the prodigiously talented Josh Hamilton away from the Texas Rangers, their division rivals in the American League West. The Rangers weren’t willing to pay as much as the Angels did for a player who’d struggled with the lingering effects of a much-publicized drug addiction, including a somewhat brittle body that saw him missing extended stretches of time over the last few years. But given the chance to solidify their already eye-popping lineup, which includes the former best player alive (Albert Pujols) and the future best player alive (Mike Trout, who might already be the best by some metrics), the Angels had no qualms about dropping a reported $125 million over five years on Hamilton, who goes from one high-pressure situation to another.

Video: NFL Week 15-Why to Care

This week, Jim Chairusmi and I discuss whether the Washington Redskins have two rookie quarterbacks capable of leading them to a late-season surge and a potential playoff spot. We also discuss whether the New York Giants are making yet another sneaky Super Bowl run and whether you should root against your team if the top draft pick is at stake. Plus, we make picks for the week’s biggest games: Bears-Packers and 49ers-Patriots.

Cash-Happy Angels Lure Hamilton

The Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim have shocked the baseball world–and fired a shot across the bow of their free-spending SoCal rivals, the Dodgers–by signing the top free agent on the market, Josh Hamilton, to a five-year, $125 million deal, according to multiple news reports.

What had been a sleepy free-agent season for baseball has now witnessed a mind-boggling shower of cash for a player with a checkered past full of question marks. The man on the giving end of this mega-deal, Arte Moreno, can now lay claim to having made baseball’s signature move for two straight winters, after his Angels stunned observers last December by swooping from seemingly out of nowhere to sign Albert Pujols to a 10-year, $240 million deal.

Podcast: And They Ran

On the latest Sports Retort, can the Big East’s basketball schools make a football-style defection and get any major college sports executives to notice? Plus: Every other scenario has been tossed out, why not Duke and North Carolina to the Big Ten? How would the world cope with a monster Atlantic 10? What if NBA teams rotated players in like they were on hockey lines, and should the Knicks employ that strategy with Stoudemire? And Ben Cohen reports on Duke’s Belk Bowl preparations.

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Are the Lakers Really This Bad?

Your more enterprising NBA fans—the types who own markers and wall calendars and use the former to circle dates on the latter—have doubtless had Thursday night’s game between the Los Angeles Lakers and New York Knicks circled for a while. This year’s Lakers, after all, have a roster stacked with future hall of famers and entered the season as favorites to make the NBA finals. The Knicks, for all their talent, were supposed to offer a different experience entirely: fun stretches of play studded amid sluggish, selfish, self-thwarting, weirdly fascinating basketball. It was a game worth circling, if only because of how strange it might have been. It’s doubtful in the extreme that anyone foresaw just how strange the match-up would become, though, with the Lakers assuming the Hobbling, Seething Mess role and the Knicks looking like one of the very best teams in the NBA.

We discussed the peculiar and increasingly undeniable rise of the Knicks in an earlier Fix, and the Knicks have continued to look great since. The Lakers, after firing coach Mike Brown early in the season, have managed to get worse under new coach (and former Knicks coach) Mike D’Antoni. The NBA’s Western Conference has effectively turned itself upside down—witness, for instance, the suddenly unbeatable Golden State Warriors, who just wrapped a 5-0 road trip with a dramatic and strikingly non-fluky win over the defending champion Heat. In that new order, the Lakers are 12th in the standings, and look it. They’ve been rudderless, recriminatory, sluggish on offense and intermittently appalling on defense.

Watson Gets the Ryder Cup Call

The PGA of America on Thursday Wednesday morning tapped 63-year-old Tom Watson to captain the U.S. Ryder Cup team for the 2014 matches. It was a controversial decision, since in recent years Ryder Cup captains have served only once. Watson was the winning Ryder Cup captain in 1993.

Larry Nelson, a three-time major winner, had been the frontrunner for the captaincy until word got out earlier this week that Watson was the likely pick. Many of Nelson’s peers, including Mark O’Meara, expressed disappointment in the PGA’s decision.