TRI Presents: Pre-World Cup Awards!

　
Best Reason to Watch the World Cup:
Short of actual wars, the World Cup is the only event where the nations of the world truly compete head-to-head. Please don’t bring up the Olympics. The Winter Olympics are full of a bunch of competitions that only 0.05 percent of the world’s population has ever even tried (luge, bobsled, figure skating, biathalon, ski jumping, etc. etc. etc.) while the Summer Olympics are mostly events like track and field and swimming that come purely down to physical ability and preparation, with no real aspect of performance or teamwork.
Football, on the other hand, is played by just about everyone in every nation on the planet, all playing by the same rules. So if your national team isn’t good enough, you have to wonder, why not? Are your people not physically athletic enough? Not organized enough? Not good enough under pressure? Not in possession of enough resources to devote to athletics?
These can be painful questions when the reputations of entire nations are at stake—which is why the World Cup is the only sporting event in the world that is truly bigger than the games.
　
　
Best U.S. Contribution to World Football:
Music! The riff from "Seven Nation Army" by the White Stripes has been a near-ubiquitous chant in football stadiums around the world for years now.

Watching some of the matches leading up to this year’s Cup, TRI has heard some stadiums chanting the chorus from "Bro Hymn" by Pennywise. If the chorus of a song called "Bro Hymn" by a punk band from Hermosa Beach ends up becoming the musical refrain for the globe’s greatest gathering…well…that’s fuckin awesome, bro!
　
　
Best Team Nickname:
A five-way tie between all the tournament’s African teams: Ghana ("The Black Stars"), Nigeria ("The Super Eagles"), Cameroon ("The Indomitable Lions"), Ivory Coast ("The Elephants") and South Africa ("Bafana Bafana," which roughly translates to, "the boys, the boys").
Compare those to most European teams, whose nicknames mostly come from the color of their jerseys (for instance, Italy wears blue and is known as "The Azzuri," meaning, "the men in blue," while Spain wears red and is known as "La Furia Roja," meaning "the red fury"—at least they threw "fury" in there) and the U.S., which has no real nickname except in Britain, where we’re known as "The Yanks," and here at home, where most hardcore followers refer to the team as "USMNT," short for "U.S. Men’s National Team." Isn’t that poetic.
　
　
Best Backhanded Compliment:
English football pundit Michael Davies said the "maddening" thing about facing the U.S. is this:
"America’s team is not good enough to win the World Cup. However, American athletes never believe that they are not good enough to win."
You’re damn right motherfucker!!!! Um…on both points.
　
Best Horseshit TRI Predictions That Will Most Likely Be Wrong:
Spain romps through the group stage, scoring goals by the bucketful…but Argentina wins the tournament.
Mexico and Uruguay both make surprising quarterfinal runs in the tournament. And since they are in the same group, I guess this means we’re picking former champions France and hosts South Africa to head home after the first round.
The U.S. beats England and makes the quarters!! Fuck yeah!
Portugal’s Cristiano Ronaldo is linked by the tabloids with Yo-Landi of Die Antwoord…and is then murdered by Ninja of Die Antwoord with a samurai sword.

Assorted Rants on NBA Finals Coverage From Someone Who Has Been Reading WAY Too Much of It

A Letter From the Editor

Mind Games
Nothing gives the mainstream hoops press a collective hard-on quicker than Lakers coach Phil Jackson making a statement that could be considered a "mind game," whether it’s picking at the inferiority complex of an entire city (such as when he called Sacramento a "cow town" in the early 2000s), pointing out something for the referees to watch (saying before the Phoenix series that point guard Steve Nash illegally "carries" the ball when he dribbles) or denigrating someone’s style of play (saying before this series that Kevin Garnett and Boston have a "smackdown mentality").
The one thing the mainstream hoops press always misses is the reason why Phil’s "mind games" work: He is always right. Sacramento IS a fucking cow town. If it’s not, then someone needs to explain to me why there are piles of cow shit short walking distance from the basketball arena.
And Steve Nash DOES carry the basketball, and Kevin Garnett DOES have a "smackdown" mentality. Look at this video of him from last week’s Eastern Conference Finals.

I see Kevin Garnett’s arm smacking Dwight Howard’s in a downward motion. Smacking. Down. Maybe I would have gone with "hacking" or "hackdown mentality." Oh, that Phil and his mind games.
Meanwhile on the other side of things, Celtics coach Doc Rivers is already complaining about a referee’s decision that HASN’T HAPPENED YET.
Discussing the possibility of his center/professional thug Kendrick Perkins getting suspended for amassing too many technical fouls, Doc said:
"What's going to happen is it'll be a double-technical [foul] that Perk doesn't deserve and we're going to have to deal with it. It's unfair, but that's the way it is."
This comes after NBA Commissioner David Stern warned that he would be coming down hard on any coach who tries to manipulate the referees through the media. But Doc is able to go all "Minority Report" on us and condemn someone for something "unfair" they haven’t even done yet, and still hasn’t faced any punishment. Mind games? Doc must be a fucking Jedi.
　
Basketball Bard
The LA Times’ Mark Heisler is the Basketball Bard, a one-of-a-kind sports journalist whose understanding of the game is matched only by his perspective on it:
"It's not real life," Heisler wrote today. "Sports fans live to hate other teams and their fans. It's fun if you don't take it seriously, which, no one really does.
OK, maybe a few (hundred million) people, here and there, do."

Which brings me to:
　
　
I Crack My Knuckles
ESPN.com’s Bill Simmons is someone who most definitely takes it seriously. He’s a diehard fan of all Boston teams (but has since transplanted to LA, of course) and is a poster boy of the willful ignorance that Boston fan-hood entails.
Simmons earned himself millions of readers with a really funny blend self-pity (when Boston’s teams all sucked) and pop culture references. Now that Boston’s teams are all good…well, all that’s left is the willful ignorance.
Take for example one of Simmons’ favorite NBA myths that he propagates in nearly every hoops column he writes: That the Lakers obtained All-Star forward Pau Gasol in a trade from Memphis in some sort of league-engineered conspiracy to return big-market LA to championship heights.
Simmons often refers to the trade as a "gift" or "theft" or says the Lakers got Gasol "for pennies on the dollar."
This is hilarious, and ignorant (willfully so—have I mentioned that?), because the NBA has a system for ensuring that trades are fair, and it involves pennies and dollars. The rule basically states that the salaries of players being traded have to roughly match up.
In this system, a shitty player who has a big contract that is about to expire is an extremely valuable bargaining chip, because the team acquiring said shitty player can let the contract expire and then have the cash in hand to go sign someone they really want.
The Lakers had such a bargaining chip: a 7-foot-tall pile of basketball excrement named Kwame Brown. They got Kwame by trading Caron Butler. They got Caron by trading a guy named Shaquille O’Neal (in a deal that was widely panned at the time).
So the Lakers getting Gasol wasn’t so much a "gift" or a "theft"--it was a case of the smartest franchise in basketball parlaying one of its most traumatic events (Shaq’s departure) into a renaissance era of dominance.
In addition to willful ignorance regarding his enemies, Simmons has lost touch with his own teams. He predicted before the playoffs that his beloved Celtics would lose in the first round (as Heisler noted today). So pretty much all you're getting from his columns now are pop-culture riffs from a married father of two from Boston.
(And how do I know all this? Because I still read his columns! I also still crack my knuckles. Bad habits are hard to break.)

Sincerely,
A man who is Sincerely losing his fucking mind waiting for this series to start,
Travis Lee Hunter
Editor and Publisher