International media distributor Remow teamed up with Nihon Eiga Broadcasting to bring historical dramas to overseas audiences with its Samurai vs Ninja website and YouTube channel. Remow has also gotten into anime licensing and continues to refrain from exclusives, sharing content on Tubi and YouTube.

Tonbo! (2024) is the best title in their anime portfolio so far. The manga by Ken Kawasaki and Yu Furusawa has been serialized in Weekly Golf Digest since 2014 and currently totals 52 volumes. So the viewer would do well to keep in mind that this isn't your usual shonen sports drama. It is written for golfers.
In other words, if you don't find Tonbo's inventive use of a 3 iron inherently fascinating, then the series probably isn't for you.

The plot merges the premises of Barakamon (2014), in which a professional calligrapher with a troubled past exiles himself to a tiny island and meets a bunch of quirky kids, and Rising Impact (2024), in which an eight-year-old golfing prodigy from the sticks is recruited to the elite Camelot Academy.

For idiosyncratic reasons I never divined, the names of several characters in Rising Impact are derived from the aforementioned Camelot, like Gawain and Lancelot. And speaking of Gawain (Misaki Kuno), a good part of the fun is listening to him (her) speak in a Tohoku accent you could cut with a knife.

In Tonbo! a professional golfer with a troubled past exiles himself to a tiny island in the Tokara archipelago and there encounters a quirky island girl named Tonbo, who turns out to be a golfing prodigy. He sees in her great potential, potential that will remain dormant and untested if she remains an island girl.

Along with smoothing out her more eccentric golfing habits (while not interfering with her unique approach to the game), he nudges her to leave the island when she graduates from junior high. The island has no high school. Students continuing their education live with relatives or attend boarding schools.

The Tokara archipelago is collectively governed as a village of Kagoshima Prefecture, so the favored destination for transfer students is the port city of Kagoshima and the surrounding areas.

While thoroughly entertaining, Birdie Wing (2022) and Rising Impact are so over the top that they more resemble superhero franchises that have to constantly invent new comically overpowered villains (and golf courses designed by M.C. Escher) to challenge the skills of the comically overpowered protagonists.

Tonbo! is far more realistic and treats the subject with the most technical accuracy. The main characters have actual character arcs, so there's no need for vaudevillian villains to create dramatic conflict. Instead, we focus our attention on how Tonbo evolves as an already gifted golfer and grows as a human being.

It's been an entertaining journey so far and I hope we can follow her all the way to a professional career.

The second cour is a continuation of season 1 starting with episode 14.

Related videos

Tonbo! (Tubi YouTube Prime)
Barakamon
Birdie Wing
Rising Impact

Labels: anime lists, anime reviews, geography, japanese culture, manga, remow, samurai vs ninja, sports, tubi

Sports is the most enduring genre in manga and anime. With the conflict built into the narrative, athletic competition is an always reliable source of story material. Baseball has long been the king of this particular hill, but the genre has tackled everything from mahjong (Saki) to archery (Tsurune) to bicycle touring (Long Riders).


And just when you think maybe all of those permutations have been exhausted, competitive karuta makes a brilliant contribution with Chihayafuru. And shogi becomes the center of the masterful melodrama, March Comes in like a Lion.

With both mainstream team and individual sports, significant parts of the story are often fashioned out of the play-by-play. Even Yowamuchi Pedal (bicycle racing) and Chihayafuru spend multiple episodes on a single competition, at each step along the way diving into the winning strategies of the players.

But with archery, there's not a whole lot to make of an arrow striking a target. Either it does or it doesn't (though roster order apparently matters). So Tsurune focuses more on the mental than the muscle, starting out by giving the protagonist a bad case of target panic as a source of the conflict (along with a bunch of teenage angst and a family tragedy to boot).

Even archery is more action-oriented than firearm "bullseye" or "range" shooting, where the "objective is to score points by hitting a round shooting target as close to the center as possible with slow precision fire." When the shooter is doing everything right, the only thing that moves is the trigger finger, and imperceptively.


Rifle is Beautiful (distributed in North America as Chidori RSC) is about a high school shooting team, so it could go down the melodrama route (like Tsurune) or slice of life. It takes the latter approach, what I call the "cute girls doing interesting things" genre, though more competitive aspects do emerge in the concluding arc at the national high school championships.

Now, given that Japan has some of the most restrictive gun control laws in the universe, the obvious question is what kind of rifles they are shooting.

Two of the girls in the series participate in air gun competitions. Doing so, we are told, is expensive. In order to purchase an air rifle (as opposed to less regulated airsoft and paintball weapons), you have to present a certificate obtained by attending a gun safety lecture and pass a test at a local police station. Thereafter, the certificate has to be renewed every three years.

So the emphasis of Rifle is Beautiful is on "beam."

Not a laser beam. The light source used in a beam rifle is the same kind of xenon lamp used in electronic camera flash units. The result is a weapon that literally couldn't hurt a fly (unless you smacked the fly with the butt of the rifle). A well-hit line drive, by contrast, is seriously dangerous. Not to mention a bow and arrow.

The target of a beam rifle is a photoelectric grid that feeds the "hits" to an electronic display that generates the sound and calculates the score. From a gadget point of view, this is totally cool technology. As an extracurricular activity, it means a shooting range can be set up in a high school gym. Of course, it helps if the high school has already purchased the equipment.

Not many have, so the entire Tokyo regionals can be held in a high school gym.

Hikari Kokura chose to attend Chidori High School because it did have the equipment. According to the well-established formula, she has to scrape together enough members to form a club. That turns out not be much of a challenge either. There isn't a whole lot of drama in Rifle is Beautiful. It's more about the how, what, and why of the sport.

Hikari gets a bit of a character arc at the end, but as with series like Laid Back Camp and Long Riders, your entertainment value will depend on how much you enjoy the subject matter and the characters and the comic relief (supplied by the club's scatterbrained faculty advisor), and less the threadbare plot. As a low-stress entry in the slice of life genre, it worked for me.

Here's footage from the 2019 high school championships at the Tsutsuga Shooting Range in Hiroshima Prefecture. It's been held there ever year since 2006 so you will recognize the setting from the series. If you wonder why the girls are walking rather stiffly in their uniforms, the series explains that as well.


Treat Rifle is Beautiful as a promotional video and you should have a good time. It's been officially endorsed by the National Rifle Association of Japan (first and foremost a sports organization). All the power to them if the series can excite more interest in what is, at heart, a very Zen activity.

Related links

Chihayafuru (CR HD)
Laid Back Camp
Long Riders
March Comes in like a Lion (CR NF)
Rifle is Beautiful
Saki
Tsurune (CR HD)
Yowamuchi Pedal
A title by any other name

Labels: anime, anime lists, anime reviews, sports

Hakuho—shaping up as the most dominant sumo wrestler in history—sat out the 2019 Summer Basho with an arm injury, leaving fellow Mongolian Kakuryu as the only participating yokuzuna. Alas, with a 11-4 record, Kakuryu did not distinguish himself, leaving the door open for Asanoyama, a middle-ranked maegashira, to pick up the Emperor's Cup with twelve wins.


In any case, the 2019 Summer Basho will mostly be remembered for President Trump's participation in the awards ceremony (which was totally in keeping with the spirit of sumo awards ceremonies).

But it was the bouts of two other wrestlers that held my attention.


A previous winner of the Emperor's Cup, Georgian Tochinoshin (six-foot-six and 357 pounds) had been demoted after a two-tourney losing streak. He needed ten wins to regain his second-to-highest ozeki rank. He got win number ten on the penultimate day, concluding the tourney 10-5. If he can stay healthy (knees are a big problem for these big guys), I can see him winning again.

Ranking in sumo is similar to promotion and relegation in soccer.


At five-foot-six and 210 pounds, Enho debuted as the smallest wrestler in the makuuchi division, giving up six inches and at least 150 pounds to almost every opponent he faced. He started strong but got beaten up pretty badly the second week and finished with a 7-8 record. Still, an impressive enough performance to stay in the makuuchi. I hope to see him in the Nagoya Basho.


The manga and anime series Hinomaru Sumo features a protagonist who is too short for professional sumo and must earn an exemption by winning the high school national championship. The manga started in 2014 so reality has caught up with fiction. Though Enho (barely) meets the height requirement, he's a good example of what it means for sumo to have no weight classes.

The Summer Basho makuuchi bouts can be viewed at the NHK World website.

Labels: japanese culture, japanese tv, nhk, nhk world, sports, sumo

In a society that progressed as rapidly as did Japan during the post-war period, films from the 1950s and early 1960s like those of Yasujiro Ozu preserve a point in time as it mostly was rather than how it is now remembered.

At the time, Hollywood produced some fine films in and about Japan too. Shot on location, a movie like House of Bamboo (with Robert Stack) captures the Tokyo cityscape before modernity swept that sepia-colored world away.

Equally deserving of attention are those entertainment vehicles that won little in the way of high-culture respect (and even less in terms of international attention), and yet created the tropes and types of popular culture that still resonate today.

Unlike the works of Yasujiro Ozu or Akira Kurosawa (such as High and Low, his 1963 police procedural), these movies have little value as artistic or as historical documents that strove for verisimilitude.

But they have great value as records of how the general public perceived the world around them, the ways in which they were willing to suspend their disbelief in order to imagine that social change in entertaining ways (still true of manga and anime today).

A great example of this is the clumsily titled (in English) Detective Bureau 2-3: Go to Hell Bastards! released by Nikkatsu Studios in January 1963.

The bad boy of the post-war Japanese movie business, Nikkatsu Studio avoided historical dramas and concentrated on low-budget comedies, teen melodramas, and actioners. Losing ground to television in the 1970s, Nikkatsu became synonymous with the "pink" genre.

But in 1963, though chock-a-block with armies of gun-wielding yakuza and a sky-high body count, Detective Bureau 2-3 (the "2-3" refers to protagonist's office number) isn't any more violent or explicit than Hollywood westerns of the 1950s.

Director Seijun Suzuki gives the film the look of a classic noir thriller. Joe Shishido (who appeared in six of Suzuki's films) is perfectly cast as a debonair detective who infiltrates the yakuza to expose a gun-running operation.

Featuring a sports car (that looks cool today), beautiful women, and heavies that could pass for Edward G. Robinson's cousins, plus the inventive use of what were then high-tech devices, Detective Bureau 2-3 had Miami Vice and Don Johnson beat by two decades.

Speaking of which, Miami Vice did an episode about the yakuza that wasn't half bad. But Don Johnson never wriggled out of tight situation with a song-and-dance routine that Fred Astaire could have choreographed.

Suzuki later got himself fired from Nikkatsu for making films that were so surreal and absurdist that they alienated Nikkatsu's core audience. When you're in the crowd-pleasing business, you do have to please the crowds.

In Detective Bureau 2-3 Suzuki and Shishido get the mix just right. Sporting a plot worthy of Chandler, it skirts the nihilism that came to typify the yakuza genre and supplies an upbeat ending. More upbeat than how the real world was dealing with the issue.

Robert Whiting recalls of the years leading up to the 1964 Tokyo Olympics in the Japan Times (his fascinating five-part account starts here),

House theft was rampant, narcotics use was endemic, and it was considered too dangerous to walk in public parks at night. Moreover, yakuza were everywhere, their numbers at an all-time high. There were also twice as many places to eat as New York and more bars per square kilometer than anywhere else in the world.

The 1964 Olympics initiated a crackdown that was more of an accommodation. It essentially decriminalized the yakuza. Unlike American gangsters, the big yakuza organizations are legal corporations, and the police prefer to regulate them as such.

Sort of the same argument for decriminalizing drugs: stay away from the hard stuff and don't shoot civilians and we won't look too closely at where the hard cash is really coming from.

Capturing the yakuza sub-culture at its apex, Detective Bureau 2-3 makes hanging with the bad guys look cool. And the bad guys look cruel but cool. As with the glamour of the Miami Vice underworld, this comic book view of the yakuza persists to this day.

Labels: japan, japanese movie reviews, law, movies, politics, social studies, sports, whiting

The current NHK Asadora takes place during the 1960s. Mineko, a country girl, ventures from her rural farming village in northern Ibaraki prefecture (the "sticks" at the time, now a one-hour commute by Shinkansen) to Tokyo to help support her family.

During Japan's boom years in the 1960s, recruiters often turned to these outlying areas to supply factories with assembly line workers. The factories provided room and board (and many still do today).

Mineko's first job is "stuffing" or "populating" printed circuit boards (PCBs) for the brand new transistor radios. Women were deemed better suited for the job because of their slender fingers.


The 1964 Olympics was a big, big deal in Japan (even Hollywood got into the act). So much so that it produced an economic bubble, thanks to the accelerated work on the first showcase Shinkansen line and all the people buying the very latest radios and TVs.

The bubble popped when the Olympics ended, producing a short recession before the economic juggernaut got back up to speed again.

During this economic downturn, the company Mineko is working for goes bankrupt. Unsurprisingly. It was basically an overgrown mom & pop operation with factory floor the size of a basketball court and no room to expand.

Not much in the way of productivity gains could be made by hiring more girls to insert electronic components into circuit boards. This labor-intensive production model gave way to larger economies of scale and automation techniques such as wave soldering (patented in 1956).


In the drama, Mineko ends up working at a restaurant. Alas, the Asadora audience isn't as interested in electronics manufacturing as I am.

Populating PCBs is one of those invisible manufacturing processes our lives have grown dependent upon. Over the past half-century, the technology has become astoundingly efficient, not even counting the productivity gains made by replacing most of the components with integrated circuits.

The old way (what Mineko did on her assembly line) is "PCB Assembly Through Hole." The leads of the electronic components are literally fed through holes in the PCB and soldered.

Since the 1980s, "Surface Mount" PCBs have overtaken "Through Hole." With Surface Mount, there's no "threading the needle." The parts are glued onto the surface of the PCB and and then soldered using, for example, pre-soldered contacts and precision hot air guns.

But "Through Hole" remains alive and kicking wherever ruggedness and power transmission are primary concerns. Yeah, AI and humanoid robots are plenty cool, but the machines that populate PCBs never fail to impress me.

Related posts

Moore's Law illustrated
The accidental standard
The last picture tube show

Labels: asadora, economics, japanese culture, japanese tv, nhk, sports, tech history, technology

Height is a genetic puzzle. For the males in my family, averaging was the result, not Mendelian selection: shorter than the tall parent, taller than the short parent. Then there are tall/short combinations that produce tall offspring and tall parents who produce taller children.

Average height in Japan over the past century demonstrates the importance of environmental factors. And having leveled off since 1960, the importance of genetics, though Yankees pitcher Masahiro Tanaka (6' 3") and Anne Watanabe (5' 9") handily beat regression to the mean.

Once a country climbs high enough up Maslow's hierarchy, genes do up to 80 percent of the heavy lifting (so say the geneticists). Over 423 genetic regions are connected to height and they mix and match in ways that are hard to predict.

Scientists like to study identical and fraternal twins to tease such things out. I would recommend studying haafu: the offspring of a Japanese parent and not-Japanese (non-Asian) parent.

There's an analogy here to how "Japanese" the child appears. Masao Kusakari, for example, regularly plays Japanese characters in NHK historical dramas. But I wouldn't have otherwise guessed that Risa Stegmayer has a Japanese mother (other than her speaking fluent Japanese).

My theory is that "averaging" kicks in when similarly functioning genes are mirrored at the same loci on both chromosomes in the pair. But if there's a null set on one of the chromosomes, the height genes take over.

Masao Kusakari is six feet tall (his father was an American GI killed during the Korean War), way above average for a Japanese born in 1950. Rangers pitcher Yu Darvish (Iranian father) is a towering six-feet-five.

But the award for comedic contrast goes to Jun Soejima, a presenter on Asa-Ichi, NHK's morning chat show. He hosts the Sugowaza Q (スゴ技Ｑ) segment with Yumiko Udou, a Japanese woman of average height.

Jun Soejima (American father, Japanese mother) is six-foot-five. Wikipedia adds that his Afro adds eight inches, and also says that he traveled abroad only last year and doesn't speak English. In other words, height aside, a typical Japanese (yes, he played basketball in college).


Sugowaza Q translates roughly as "Super Skills IQ," about smarter ways to do common household activities like cooking.

Labels: japanese tv, medicine, nhk, science, social studies, sports

Chihayafuru is based on the award-winning manga by Yuki Suetsugu. It begins with Chihaya Ayase (her name is coincidentally the same as the first line of an Ogura Hyakunin Isshu poem) hanging recruiting posters for the high school karuta club. (See my previous post on the subject.)

Since there isn't a high school karuta club, she needs five members to form an official one (an official club gets an advisor, a budget, and a room).

Her first recruit is Taichi Mashima, one of the kids she learned karuta with in elementary school. The story then flashes back to their childhoods. Arata Wataya, the new kid in their elementary school homeroom class, is a karuta wizard, having been taught by his grandfather, a grand champion.

Chihaya, Taichi and Arata venture to the community center to join the local karuta club. The club president, Dr. Harada, is overjoyed to find three new members on his doorstep. Taichi is better than Chihaya. Arata is in a league of his own. But Chihaya is undaunted in her quest to be the best.

After elementary school, the three of them go their separate ways. In Japan, kids in the same neighborhood will usually attend the same elementary school; starting with junior high, the school they attend depends more on their academic goals and abilities.

Taichi is accepted into a prestigious junior high. Arata returns with his family to far-flung Fukui when his grandfather falls ill and grows out of touch. When we next meet him as an older teen, he speaks with a strong Hokuriku accent.

Arata has also grown out of touch with karuta. The most poignant dramatic arc in the first season involves Chihaya's efforts to re-inspire the person who first inspired her.

Now in high school, Chihaya has reached A-level, the highest rank in competitive karuta. But she's far from the top. Taichi hasn't played since elementary school but gets dragged along by Chihaya's enthusiasm. With another classmate they once competed with and two rookies, the club is on.

Chihayafuru follows the basic structure of the high school anime sports series. A big difference is that karuta isn't exactly a spectator sport. At first, there's no way to replay an entire karuta game in real time and hold our interest.

As the players get better and we become more familiar with the game, the competitions get longer, and begin to approximate real time. Similar to The Big Windup, commentary comes in the form of inner monologues that reveal the strategies, strengths, and weaknesses of each player and team.

Character profiles of the players and their opponents—examining what drew them to such an obscure and difficult sport in the first place—are depicted in often surprisingly intense melodramatic vignettes (accompanied by lush orchestration).


Now, stories about melodramatic teens usually appeal to me as much as fingernails scraping across a blackboard. A big problem with otherwise compelling teen romances like Kimi ni Todoke is that, as Kate puts it, the characters have too much time to "sit and around and get angsty."

A job, a sport, a serious hobby helps to mitigate that. The nascent love triangle (usually another annoying dramatic device) in Chihayafuru stays mostly nascent, largely because Arata is on the other side of Japan. And Chihaya's monomaniacal focus on karuta precludes such distractions.

Neither is it resolved (I'll have to start reading the manga). But there is a pay-off in the penultimate episode of season two when Kanade (the club medievalist) realizes the implications of a poem Chihaya wrote for a homework assignment and lectures Taichi to pick up his game (a cute scene).

So there's a lot more involved than the protagonist going from success to success. Common to anime sports series,the struggle, the hard work and effort, the growth and the team effort are what matter the most.

Kanade insists they wear traditional hakama and learn what the poems mean (think of how well the average educated person understands Chaucer). The club nerd calculates "batting averages" based on card placement. Taichi and Nikuman-kun rise quickly to match Chihaya's abilities.

For Chihaya, being the biggest fish in her own small pond doesn't mean there is nothing more for her to learn right where she is. She's still got a long way to go to become the "queen" of karuta. But her unrelenting passion for a game based on medieval poetry will surely take her there.

The videos below are from the 2016 Queen (women) and Meijin (men) matches. (I mentioned hakama above, which the competitors are wearing.)



Granted, at first it'll make about as much sense as, well, Cricket (though it should be obvious when a "dead" card is read). But once you've watched a season of Chihayafuru, you'll know exactly what is going on, even if you don't understand a word of Japanese.

Crunchyroll and HIDIVE have the three seasons of the series to date.

Related posts

Play ball!
Poetry in motion
Hollywood made in Japan

Labels: anime, anime reviews, chihayafuru, japanese culture, personal favs, sports

As discussed previously, there's a manga or anime for practically every sport, an entire subgenre for baseball alone. Competition makes for conflict and great story material, and that includes a fascinating series about a literary card game that quickly became one of my all-time favorites.

The game is kyougi (competitive) karuta, the latter word borrowed from the Portuguese carta during the Edo period and applied to Japanese playing cards in general. Here it refers specifically to the game of "singing karuta" or uta-garuta.

To be sure, even in Japan, more people know about karuta than can play with it with any competence. The Tokyo high school baseball regionals involve hundreds of teams. Only a dozen or so can muster enough members to compete in the Tokyo karuta regionals.

They'd all fit in a single gymnasium with room to spare.

The centuries-old game is based on a Heian period poetry collection known as the Ogura Hyakunin Isshu ("One hundred poems by one hundred poets"), compiled by the court noble Fujiwara no Teika in the 13th century. Not the kind of game that makes the average teenager sit up and take note.

In competitive karuta, given the first three lines of a waka, players pick the card with the last two lines. Skilled players can identify cards by the first one or two syllables of the poem. The game involves lots of memorization, short-term spatial memory, sharp hearing, and good reflexes.

The reader card is on the right. The player card on the left is written in kana, a purely phonetic syllabary. (Courtesy Tofugu.)

The best players become experts in assimilation and coarticulation,  the phonological processes by which the articulation of one phoneme influences the pronunciation of the next. That way, two poems that begin with identical syllables can be differentiated before the second syllable is spoken.

Fifty cards of the one hundred are randomly selected, each player receiving twenty-five, which they arrange in front of them. They have fifteen minutes to memorize the cards before the game begins. So players line up their cards to maximize ease of location and speed of identification.

A reader proceeds through a full, randomized deck (there are CDs to practice with: set the player to shuffle play), meaning that fifty cards will not be in play. Mistakenly choosing a "dead" card will cost one of your own.

A live card can be—is often—selected from the group with a sweep of the arm. With well-matched players, quick reactions matter, so this sweeping motion may be executed with considerable force, sending the cards flying. Multiple cards can be selected if the target card is included.

Towards the end of a match, a player can group his remaining cards together and hit them all at the same time; though if none of those cards are the right card, a penalty is exacted.

A player can also reach over and grab a card from his opponent's side (which requires being able to read the cards upside down), and then give his opponent one of his own (again, a strategic move). The first person to empty out his side wins.

The result is a formal poetry reading combined with a fast-moving athletic performance that gives competitive karuta a "chess boxing" vibe. It really is "poetry in motion." Oh, and that anime series? It's Chihayafuru. More about it next time.

Related posts

Play ball!
Chihayafuru
Hollywood made in Japan

Labels: anime, baseball, chihayafuru, history, japan, japanese culture, literature, nhk, personal favs, sports

I apologize for casting ill-informed aspersions, but when it comes to pastimes, football, baseball, and golf (and sumo) are more watchable ways of passing time than basketball, soccer, and hockey. The latter three are hampered by the wearying back and forth and back and forth that makes tennis boring too.

It's too stupidly easy to score in basketball, too stupidly difficult in soccer and hockey (soccer and hockey are what happen when human beings attempt to illustrate Brownian Motion).

What sets football, baseball, golf (and sumo) apart is the pacing. The punctuation. The pauses. The paragraph breaks. Winning depends on more than fine-tuned twitch responses, which, while demonstrating impressive physical prowess, make for a lousy narrative structure.

Granted, I rarely watch any sports event all the way through. Not even the Super Bowl (unless there's nothing else better on). But I will watch a sports movie all the way through. Especially a decent baseball movie.

The structure of baseball, the strategy of the game, the timing and pacing, allow it to become the drama itself. This is hardly news in Hollywood: The Natural, The Bad New Bears, The Sandlot, Bull Durham, The Rookie, and For Love of the Game, to start with.

And it's no less true of the sports drama in Japan, where baseball constitutes its own wide-ranging subgenre. And it is certainly applies to The Big Windup! based on the award-winning manga by Asa Higuchi.

As with many baseball stories, The Big Windup! concentrates on the "battery," the combination of the pitcher and catcher. It's a setup that brings to mind Bull Durham, with Tim Robbins as the cocky young pitcher and Kevin Costner as the veteran catcher showing him the ropes.

Except that Higuchi starts this game with a screwball, giving us a protagonist who's an emotional basketcase. Ren Mihashi, the starting pitcher, is well-nigh pathologically insecure. Imagine the Tim Robbins character instead played by Woody Allen. Seriously.

As it turns out, Ren has no pitching speed but does have exquisite control, a skill that's gone unappreciated. Catcher Takaya Abe is certain he can use it to great effect—if he can keep Ren from dissolving into an angst-ridden puddle before getting to the mound.

Yes, this could become monumentally annoying, but Higuchi knows better than to deliver the same pitch over and over. Having established a character trait, he doesn't pound it into the ground. Because this is, first and foremost, a sports melodrama.

The opening episodes consist of putting the team together, tossing in a couple of dumb teenage jokes, establishing the school as the underdogs (an all-freshman team), gearing up to face the overwhelming favorites in the regionals of the Summer Koshien tournament.

After that, it's all baseball, baseball, baseball. In fact, the entire first season consists of two games—that go on longer than would the actual games.

The Yankees should hire her.

The only comparable example I can think of is For Love of the Game, which documents a single game in near real-time. In that case, though, Kevin Costner fills its 137 minutes doing a lot of ruminating about things that have nothing to do with baseball.

The players in The Big Windup! think about nothing but baseball.

Now, I have a hard time believing that professional athletes think that much while they're playing the game, let alone high school freshmen. And yet this deconstruction of the sport at practically the atomic level works for a non-sports nut like me.

If you want to comprehend the egghead appeal of baseball, The Big Windup! is the perfect tutorial.

To be sure, this focused attention isn't monomaniacal. There are cute extraneous touches, like the baseball moms huddled together in the stands. And despite her ridiculous proportions, part-time manager Momoe is never depicted as anything but an excellent baseball tactician.

Even the quirky cheerleading culture in Japanese baseball gets its due (it's pretty much that way in real life too, only louder and more annoying).

Along the way, The Big Windup also clarifies the substance of dramatic conflict. There's more to a plot than how the tale ends. According to Nicholas Christenfeld and Jonathan Leavitt, "stories are not spoiled by spoilers." Knowing the ending can enhance enjoyment of a story.

So it could be that once you know how it turns out, it's cognitively easier—you're more comfortable processing the information—and can focus on a deeper understanding of the story.

As somebody who has only a glancing interest in who wins most sports contests (spoiler: Nishiura High wins), I can confirm that the difference between an interesting Super Bowl and a boring Super Bowl (the majority, it seems of late) has nothing to do with who wins.

It's all about how the game is played.

Related links

The Big Windup (CR Hulu)
The national Japanese pastime
Play ball!

Labels: anime reviews, baseball, japanese culture, movies, pop culture, soccer, sports

It's March, and that means it's time for--no, not basketball--the National High School Baseball Invitational Tournament, also known as Spring Koshien. Together with Summer Koshien, the bigger open tournament in August, it is the sporting event in Japan, a cultural (and television) institution.

Courtesy Japan Times.

The last twenty years of economic malaise took a lot of the air out of golf, though Japanese golf players have become competitive internationally. Soccer has recently rocketed past baseball in terms of sheer popularity. Sumo has the historical deepest roots (albeit now being dominated by Mongolians).

But baseball has truly become a Japan's "national pastime," occupying the same cultural and social space as football does in the U.S. (and particularly in states like Texas).

Baseball came to Japan in the mid-19th century with the opening of Japan and caught on quickly. Babe Ruth toured Japan with the American League All Stars in 1934. The first national high school championships were played in 1915, and moved to Hanshin Koshien Stadium in 1924.

The Koshien baseball tournaments equal the popularity of NCAA "March Madness" and the football bowl games. The summer tournament is open to every high school baseball team in the country, so at the beginning of every season, every baseball-loving Japanese kid can dream of going to Koshien.

And with American baseball teams using Japan as a kind of super-minor league system, every baseball-loving Japanese kid can dream of playing in the Majors as well.

Labels: baseball, education, history, japanese culture, sports

Hollywood cranks out a big sports movie every year or two, Kevin Costner and Dennis Quaid starring in about half of them. But sports is less commonly the primary focus of U.S. television series, Friday Night Lights being an exception that proves the rule.

In Japan, though, the sports drama is a hugely popular manga and anime genre (often adapted to live action). And no athletic endeavor or game gets left out.

From Captain Tsubasa (soccer) to Yawara! (judo) to Hikaru no Go (go) to Kuroko's Basketball to Free! (swimming) to Ashita no Joe (boxing) to Haikyu!! (volleyball) to Prince of Tennis to Princess Nine (baseball) to Over Drive (bicycling) and Initial D (street racing), and even Chihayafuru (the poetry-based card game of karuta).

We're barely grazing the surface. The My Anime List website dug up over 500 titles in anime alone. These series are certainly products of their times, both reflecting and arousing interest in their area of interest. As a case in point, each broadcast episode of Yawara! included a countdown to the Barcelona Olympics

Ashita no Joe debuted in 1968 and defined the boxing drama in the public imagination eight years before Rocky. In 1981, Captain Tsubasa presaged the huge popularity of soccer today. Basketball is interesting, in that Japan remains noncompetitive at the professional level outside Japan. But Kuroko's Basketball (2008) is a massive hit.

"Even if it's just for a moment, I'm gonna burn so bright it'll dazzle everyone. And all that'll be left is pure white ash."

If real sports don't strike your fancy, there's always Angelic Layer, a futuristic version of Rock'em Sock'em Robots. And Eureka 7, in which jet-powered hoverboarders save the planet. Bizarrely enough, Girls und Panzer somehow manages to turn armored war games into a high school extracurricular activity.

And yet no sport can match the enduring popularity of baseball. The roots of baseball's appeal in Japan go deeper than the simple cinematic appeal. Even more than home-grown sports like judo and sumo, baseball is woven into the fabric of modern Japanese society. The reason is high school. More about this next week.

Related links

Chihayafuru (CR)
Free! (Yahoo CR)
Girls und Panzer (Yahoo CR)
Hikaru no Go (Yahoo)
Haikyu!! (Yahoo CR)
Kuroko's Basketball (CR)
Princess Nine (CR)

Labels: anime, anime lists, baseball, chihayafuru, japanese culture, manga, movies, pop culture, sports

I get One World Sports in my international satellite package. Its unofficial motto: "Covering all the sports too boring and obscure even for ESPN2." Like soccer, which I discuss at length here.

Some of the "obscure" sports are popular American sports played elsewhere (Japanese baseball, Chinese basketball). But most are obscure for good reason, such as snooker (nine-ball with a bunch of needlessly confusing complications).

Darts, though, is fairly interesting simply because of the math involved.

Then there's table tennis, which looks terrible on television. They should use an orange ball or try that puck-tracking technology once employed in a futile attempt to make hockey interesting to the American sports fan.

Badminton is better. The shuttlecock slows itself down by design. It still suffers from being a "volley" sport: an object gets smacked back and forth (and back and forth and back and forth) until somebody misses.

Volleyball is the best "volley" sport. The ball is big, easy to follow, and each team can do something interesting with the ball before hitting it back. Thus the athletic skills on display rise above the purely reflexive.

But no matter how impressive the skills, in the end it's the same thing over and over. Volley sports are definitely more fun to play than they are to watch (beach volleyball having found the obvious solution to that problem).

But there is one not-made-in-America sport worth watching. Cricket! Well, cricket matches with all the boring stuff taken out (true of sumo too: a day's worth of boring live sumo coverage can be wrapped up in thirty exciting minutes).

Courtesy Wikipedia Commons.

The roots of baseball are obvious in the sport. Baseball "fixed" cricket the same way American football fixed rugby: by making it, to quote George Will,  "a game of discrete episodes" that provides for numerous "contemplative" moments.

Such moments of collective contemplation lead to offensive and defensive strategies that require the players to act together in a coordinated way over time, producing, for example, the always entertaining double play.

Because there are only two bases in cricket, there's no way to plan for or execute a base-running offensive strategy during play. Once the batting order is decided, its all up to the batsman to hit the ball as often as possible.

And some of them can really hit that ball! Cricket essentially turns batting practice into a sport. Now, as batting practice goes, it's pretty interesting.

The equipment makes it fairly easy to hit the ball. The ball is heavier and harder than a baseball, and it's bounced to boot, so it's difficult to hit well. Only the catcher wears gloves, so it's harder to catch too.

The batsman stands right in the strike zone. Hitting him is fair. That's why cricket batsmen are padded up like hockey goalies.

Runs are scored by running back between the two bases. One "strike" and the batsman is out. He can also get thrown out and caught out (like baseball). Hit a part of his body in the strike zone and he's out.

On the other hand, there's no foul territory. It's impossible for the defense to cover the outfield, and a good batsman can hit the ball where the fielders aren't. Though that does make defensive plays all the more remarkable.

The equivalent of a ground-rule double in baseball scores 4 points in cricket. An actual home run is worth 6 points. You can see why cricket produces scores in the hundreds.

Cricket also has the coolest, so-very-British terms for stuff in sports, like wicket, maiden, overs (always plural), beamer and yorker. A batsman isn't "out." He's "dismissed." How polite.

Cricket consistently creates highlight reel moments. The bowling (pitching) is wild and crazy. One batsman can score a hundred runs and the next zero. Catching "foul tips" and pop flies without gloves is pretty impressive.

But again, cricket's one major failing is the inability of the offense to mount any kind of strategy beyond the batter order. Cricket needs another base, and should switch sides every out or every set number of overs.

As far as that goes, it'd be interesting to score baseball the same as cricket: each base reached equals a run. A home run would score 4 and a base hit would score 1. It'd definitely revitalize the Ichiro Suzuki style of "small ball."

Labels: baseball, sports, television

Let's look at sports from a literary angle.

Perhaps the differences between the preferences of the average American sports fan (who cares about soccer every four years) and the rest of the world (who can't live without it) can be analogized to how people respond to the twists and turns of narrative plot.

More specifically, does knowing what's going to happen matter? Or put another way, do you read spoilers or studiously avoid them?

In Wired magazine, Jonah Lehrer sums up research by Nicholas Christenfeld and Jonathan Leavitt at U.C. San Diego. Testing the enjoyability of a range of short stories with and without spoilers appended, they concluded that "spoilers don't spoil anything."

Almost every single story, regardless of genre, was more pleasurable when prefaced with a spoiler. This suggests that I read fiction the right way, beginning with the end and working backwards. I like the story more because the suspense is contained.

As I argued before, it is the predictability in the strategic play of American sports--the sports fan knows what to expect, when and how--that makes them popular, while the inability to anticipate even a definitive ending in soccer is at the core of its appeal.

Soccer is a story where "anything can happen," including nothing. Soccer as postmodern theater: instead of Waiting for Godot we're "Waiting for a Goal." The genre in genre fiction, by contrast, is its own spoiler, where "the same only different" is a virtue.

Or put another way--to switch metaphors in the middle of the stream--American football (done well) is like a classical symphony while soccer (done well) is like jazz improvisation. And like soccer, I'm afraid I respect jazz a lot more than I actually enjoy it.

And I happily read spoilers.

Labels: literature, soccer, sports

As with most Theories of Everything, this will be an exercise in massive generalizations, gross oversimplifications, and carefree stereotyping.

For example, I'll leave out popular sports like skating and gymnastics (except at the end) where the "score" depends on an ultimately subjective evaluation of an athletic performance.

My next leap of logic is to define the popularity of a sport by the amount of regular weekend coverage on network television. Events periodically covered, like the Olympics, the World Cup, and Grand Slam tennis tournaments, don't count.

That makes limiting the field easy, leaving us with: football, basketball, baseball, golf, and NASCAR.

Two complaints commonly voiced about soccer are low scores and ties. Ties, yes. But football and baseball games can also be low scoring. A baseball game where a single pitcher allows no hits, errors, or runs is described as "perfect."

One of the biggest complaints voiced in turn about American sports is more telling: all that stopping and starting and time-outs that stretch a one-hour football game to three hours.

While I would agree that time-outs get mightily abused in basketball and football (and baseball could use some speeding up), the stopping and starting actually gets to the heart of the matter.

Because the stopping and starting is what makes a sport popular on American television. Specifically, the strategy of stopping and starting.

Yep, that's why the crashes matter in NASCAR too. Not only as a model of evolutionary bottlenecking, but because pitting at the right time--under green or risking waiting for a yellow--can make the difference at the end of the race.

All sports make you wonder what will happen next. The most popular American sports invite the viewer to anticipate the strategies each team will take next, and then watch to see if those predictions pay off when play resumes.

Thus the sport has to appeal to the armchair quarterbacks and backseat drivers and wannabee coaches and managers, who also demand that their predictions and expectations pay off quickly.

American football is designed to do just that, which has made it the blockbuster of spectator sports in America. As does golf, which commands comparably tiny audiences but is given saturation coverage most summer weekends.

Any paunchy, middle-aged man can imagine what he would do on the golf course if he had a swing like Tiger Woods, because every once in a great while, that paunchy, middle-aged man will hit a golf ball as well as Tiger Woods.

No, not imagine playing. Imagine strategizing: in this situation, that is what I would do. It's what every little kid playing sandlot football does when squats down in the huddle and traces a down-and-out on the palm of his hand.

The time-outs and game breaks give the coaches and players time to plan the next moves, the viewers time to take a breather and wonder, and the commentators time to examine the stats and discuss all the options when play resumes.

I had a World Cup game on last week as background noise (if anybody scores, it'll get replayed). No discussion of on-field strategies ever came up. Because there was nothing to discuss except what was happening right now.

Rather, soccer teams are described as personalities that shape the player interaction and the game as a whole. Nothing can be said about what will or won't happen at minute 1 or minute 89, except that 22 players will be kicking a ball around.

Want to "live in the moment"? Then soccer is for you. The moment is all you've got and it lasts for an hour and a half. As Dan observed in my last post on the subject:

There is a good portion of a game [of soccer] where there is no offense. Rather the players just push the ball forward and then fall back into defense. Why exhaust oneself to score a goal when the odds are so steep against it happening? [As a result], much of what happens in the game is inconsequential and everyone knows it.

I previously compared soccer to basketball, except with goaltending. Other than the obvious comparison to hockey, soccer also like tennis, slowed way down. Once the ball is in play, the action is real-time and mostly reflexive.

It's all about the now, and what the players are going to do right now is impossible to predict.

The offense will either do something brilliant--on the spur of the moment--or the defense will do something stupid--on the spur of the moment. This is what makes soccer a "performance" sport rather than a "strategy" sport.

Courtesy Wikipedia Commons.

The gymnast not falling off the balance beam, the skater not falling at the end of a jump, can be the difference between winning and losing. But while "not falling" may be a pleasant surprise, it isn't a strategy. It's a desire (or a desperate hope). It's all about the surprise at something unexpected happening.

Of course, in the end, all popular sports are performance sports judged by their highlight reels. But "American" sports (as defined above) are highlight machines designed to produce high-performance moments that negate the mistakes. Don't be the goat!

Soccer is watched for the unanticipated occurrences of its unpredictable performances, where a single bad roll of the dice can decide a championship.

The American football fan watches a game knowing there will probably be a couple of great passes, a couple of great runs, a couple of great interceptions, a couple of big hits, a couple of long kicks, and a couple of touchdowns.

As the clock winds down, the team behind will take bigger and bigger chances with bigger and bigger plays, and some of them will pay off, but as part of an overall strategy.

The soccer fan knows that something will happen. Maybe even a goal! Maybe. Beyond that, who knows? Maybe this time . . . Well, lotteries are hugely popular around the world too, despite the long--and totally random--odds.

Labels: baseball, soccer, social studies, sports

Every four years when the World Cup rolls around, American Exceptionalism once again rises to the fore as Americans by and large demonstrate their exceptional indifference to the world's most popular team sport.

To be sure, that's becoming less true by the year. Even Salt Lake City has a professional soccer club. And soccer is certainly a good way to get kids to run around outdoors without the risk of bodily injury from playing American football (and the huge cost).

The World Cup rings up respectable ratings in the U.S. simply by being rare enough and weird enough to draw in the curious. Thanks to its sheer excess and pageantry, the Olympics likewise gets millions to watch sporting events we never would otherwise.

Even so, most World Cup matches don't draw enough attention to escape the walled garden of ESPN. Meanwhile, NHK shuffles its schedule to broadcast World Cup matches (which, for licensing reasons, viewers of TV Japan are spared from viewing).

At times like this, I, who do not care that much about sports in general, am happy to care even less about soccer. But in the abstract, I am intrigued.

My international satellite TV package includes One World Sports. It reminds me of ESPN way back in the day when ESPN would carry any obscure athletic activity to fill 24 hours of programming. Stuff like cricket, snooker, badminton, and darts.

Plus lots of soccer.

So channel surfing around, now and then I'll end up watching five minutes here and there. At first, I was impressed by all the skillful passing going on. And then I realized it was mostly going on mid-field. And then I realized that nothing else was happening.

If the ball got anywhere near the goal, the defense simply fell back into the goalie box and turned the game into human bumper pool. Once everybody crowded in there, there was no "strategy," only a lot of randomly lunging and knocking the ball around.

And occasionally even knocking it into the net. A goal in soccer occasions such elation because it is such an unusual occurrence. As The Simpsons so aptly described the sport: "It's all here: fast-kickin', low scorin'. And ties? You bet!"

Then it struck me: soccer is what basketball would look like if goaltending was allowed. There was no shot clock. And the fast break was prohibited.

We'd be talking boring, low scoring games where the offense would somehow have to power through to the basket and slam the ball through the hoop without fouling anybody, or catch the defense so out of position it was incapable of blocking the shot.

Meaning that the most interesting games in soccer, paradoxically, are those when one team completely outclasses its opponent, or neither team has much of a defense (the very definition of a dull contest in football, basketball, or baseball).

But these are problems that can be easily fixed.

Getting rid of the offside rule is only the first step. The dumbest rule in all of sports, it's emblematic of a game absurdly weighted in favor of the defense (second dumbest: the secret time clock).

A physically bigger goal would help (in hockey too), twice as wide and arced (or make the blasted field smaller). That still wouldn't eliminate the bumper pool defense.

Here's what soccer really needs: basketball's 3-second and goaltending rules. In soccer, though, the 3-second rule would apply to the defense. Call it the "onside" rule:

Aside from the goalie, no defensive player shall remain inside the goalie box for more than 3 seconds unless the ball or an offensive player is also inside the goalie box.

Corner kicks would be like free throws. Nobody (except the goalie) could step into the goalie box until the ball was kicked.

These changes would make strategy and tactics a critical part of the equation. That is, setting up and executing specific plays with a high likelihood of producing desired results, rather than devolving into a life-sized illustration of Brownian motion.

During a corner kick, where would the offense position themselves? Would they group together or spread apart? Would the defense cover them man-to-man or attempt zone coverage? The kicker would need to signal where or to whom he would kick the ball.

A player dribbling the ball downfield would similarly need to decide whether to enter the goalie box, drawing the defense along with him, or pass to a teammate behind the defense but not in the goalie box, making possible a one-on-one fast break.

And while I'm at it, I'd allow hitting the ball with the hands, volleyball-style. Because deliberately hitting a fast-moving object with your head is really, really stupid.

Of course, one could counter that at some point, soccer would cease to be soccer. But consider how often the rules of basketball have changed over the past fifty years: the size of the key, the three-point shot, the zone defense, the shot clock, jump shots.

Come to think about it, basketball still favors the offense too much. Goaltending should be permitted if a defensive player jumps from outside the paint. That should make the game more interesting.

Not that I'd be likely to watch in any case (unless I was really bored and there was nothing else on).

Labels: baseball, nhk, soccer, sports, television, tv japan

Throughout the Warring States and Edo periods, women of samurai lineage were specifically trained in the naginata. Demonstration matches pitting a naginata against a shinai (bamboo sword) are commonly held at meets.


The wives of medieval warlords often donned samurai armor, took up the defense of a besieged castle, and occasionally engaged the enemy on the battlefield. Documented examples include Lady Hangaku and Tomoe Gozen.

Judô, archery, and kendô remain staples of the Japanese high school physical education curriculum for both sexes. The Ministry of Education recently made Japanese martial arts a required subject in junior high school.

However, concerns have been raised in particular about the judô requirement, due to a lack of qualified coaches, and students suffering the kind of head and neck injuries often associated with American football.

Labels: education, history, japanese culture, serpent notes, serpent of time, sports

Drucker in the Dug-Out [sic], the anime version of 「もし高校野球の女子マネージャーがドラッカーの『マネジメント』を読んだら」 ("What if the Girl Manager of a High School Baseball Team read Drucker's Management?"), debuted this week on NHK (alas, only in Japan). It's being produced by veteran anime studio Production I.G. The official website is in Japanese, but Production I.G. has an English summary, and the Japan Times did an English write-up. I'd like to see a major U.S. studio or network license it, if only for the novelty value. Say, CNBC. Or PBS could run it alongside Nightly Business Report.

Related posts

Baseball according to Drucker (1)
Baseball according to Drucker (2)
Baseball according to Drucker (3)
Baseball according to Drucker (4)
Baseball according to Drucker (5)
Baseball according to Drucker (6)

Labels: anime, baseball, business, japan, moshidora, sports, television

"What if the Girl Manager of a High School Baseball Team read Drucker's Management?" (now commonly abbreviated to "Moshidora") by Natsumi Iwasaki turned into 2010's unexpected best-seller, which spawned an anime series, and now a live-action feature film starring Atsuko Maeda.

She's a member of the fabulously popular girl group AKB48, 2010's best-selling pop group. This is called synergy!

Iwasaki previously worked on the business end of the AKB48 production machine and reportedly patterned his lead character after group member Minami Minegishi. As it turns out, though, "the role was given to Maeda because of her greater visibility and experience as an actress."

In other words, Minegishi had zero acting talent, while Maeda had greater than zero acting talent. Not to mention her other assets.

Related posts

Baseball according to Drucker (1)
Baseball according to Drucker (2)
Baseball according to Drucker (3)
Baseball according to Drucker (4)
Baseball according to Drucker (5)
Pop chart domination

Labels: baseball, japan, moshidora, movies, pop culture, sports

「もし高校野球の女子マネージャーがドラッカーの『マネジメント』を読んだら」 ("What if the Girl Manager of a High School Baseball Team read Drucker's Management?")  topped Japan's bestseller charts for 2010. (Hey, and I spotted it way back in March). No big surprise, then, that NHK has it slated as a ten part anime series. I have no idea when or if the book or the anime will reach the U.S., but you can read the introduction and first chapter here.

Related posts

Baseball according to Drucker (1)
Baseball according to Drucker (2)
Baseball according to Drucker (3)
Baseball according to Drucker (4)
Baseball according to Drucker (6)

Labels: anime, baseball, books, business, japan, moshidora, sports

My thoughts on the World Cup after enduring the tedium of watching the U.S. playing the U.K. to a 1-1 tie (by "watching" I mean that the television was on while I did more interesting stuff). I consider myself an objective observer, as my general interest in all sports is minimal at best.

In short: soccer is an art house movie without a plot. You know it's over because it says "Fin" on the screen. (Hockey is an action movie without a plot, and is similarly pointless.) Soccer is what basketball would look like if basketball allowed goaltending and had an offside rule.

The solution (for hockey too) is to eliminate the goalie. "Offsides" would only mean being inside the goal box ahead of the ball (both defense and offense).

Americans being Americans, any sport that penalizes the fast break and the Hail Mary will forever be doomed to the sidelines. Though the real underlying difference is that Americans demand from their sports clear evidence of premeditated thought and a means of incremental evaluation.

A bunch of talented athletes improvising however brilliantly on the spur of the moment is not enough. Like improvisational jazz. Yeah, everybody "admires" improvisational jazz. Nobody actually listens to it.

An overall strategy revealed through well-planned and executed plays is the essence of American football. Americans want to see the generals directing those armies on the "playing fields of Eton," and will judge them by the wars they win. This it is true of baseball, golf, and even NASCAR.

This ability follow the deliberations and judge incremental outcomes is why boring sports like golf and baseball get so much network television coverage. Steve Sailer is spot on that golf courses "look like happy hunting grounds—a Disney-version of the primordial East African grasslands."

Unlike tennis, which stupidly bans the coach to the bleachers. This is why tennis, aside from Grand Slam tournaments, doesn't get much network television coverage. The other being that tennis is a "fast-twitch" sport that depends largely on the other guy screwing up to score. Like soccer.

Basketball hovers halfway between both worlds, which may be why it is the one international "crossover" sport that America shares with the world—fast-twitch but offense-intensive. Plays are expected. Like the double play in baseball, "Stockton to Malone" was a beautiful thing to watch.

And you could expect to see it more than once.

In evolutionary-psych terms, Americans want to see a group of individuals acting as a single team. It's the heart and soul of every classic war movie, the platoon of rugged individualists coming together for the common good. Hence the most cutting criticism of all: "He's not a team player."

Because controlling actual "team play" is impossible in soccer (and hockey), these sports are necessarily about a team acting as a collection of talented individuals. Think of soccer as a way of subverting socialism. And sublimating collectivized religious and nationalistic passions.

Americans are shamelessly patriotic and openly religious (though are more Jeffersonian about it that they'll admit), and so don't really require another weekly groupthink where nothing happens and "all the fun is in getting there" (because there's no actual "there" there).

Getting caught up in the same-only-different drama of the competitive moment is enough. The only true American national theater is the sports stadium, and the one true national imperative is to "Win one for the Gipper."

Labels: baseball, culture, deep thoughts, politics, soccer, sports