The brainwashed

Since this piece got little to no love over at big sister ‘site BallinEurope.com, BuckBokai reruns it here – search engine voodoo be damned – for an audience perhaps more in touch with the eternal war between the supernatural undead and NBA basketball…

BuckBokai recently read the latest anti-Laker screed basketball column by ESPN.com’s Bill Simmons, an alternately funny and blood-boiling confession-style bit about conditioning one’s children to cheer for the “right” sports team, i.e. Daddy’s sports team.

Ultimately, however, The Sports Guy’s affectionate look at dominating your child’s formative years is perhaps best characterized as “disturbing.” And BuckBokai’s only saying this because he’s an ardent Lakers fan and the Boston Celtics can burn in hell of his profound belief in children’s self-determination.

After Simmons’ 5½-old daughter Zoë demonstrates an excellent liking for the color purple (good girl!), the ‘Guy decides to do what any unscrupulous and absolutely typical die-hard Boston Celtics fan would: Namely, he informs the wee lass that Kobe Bryant is an abusive father, that Phil Jackson’s love of dogs is matched only by Michael Vick’s, that Ron Artest wants to punch him in the face (this one might be true, actually), and that Pau Gasol is a vampire.

Unfortunately, writes Simmons, “that made her like [Gasol] more,” before going on to lament that “F***ing Edward [Cullen of “Twilight”] swayed an entire generation of girls under 15.”

This last bit made BuckBokai immediately realize two things:

1) The kid gloves are off and it’s time to get right to work on daughters Zsuzsa (five years old) and Szilvia (3½). My son may already be lost to the Dallas Mavericks, but goddamn it the girls won’t be programmed to go apoplectic at the sight of Celtic kelly green. “That Ray Allen is okay, I guess,” BuckBokai’ll say, “but that guy, that Kevin Garnett, he’s a bad alien.” (Zsuzsa’s totally into planets and stars these days) “And him? Rajon Rondo? He’s an angry man who eats people. Seriously, just look at him…”

and

2) I need a column idea for BuckBokai.

So, with all apologies to Simmons, Stephenie Meyer and just about everyone else, BuckBokai today sets out to answer that metaphysical question, “Pau Gasol vs. Edward Cullen in a Q-rating fight: Who’d win?”

The contest will take place over ten metrics measuring general awesomeness, pop cultural power and the all-important potential physic hold over impressionable young daughters.

Name. Whether you’re a badass supernatural force, a superstud professional athlete, or teen heartthrob packing a killing moniker is essential. Seriously, would there even be a “Russell vs. Wilt” debate if Mr. and Mrs. Russell had chosen something like “Julius” or “Shaquille” as their son’s name rather than “William Felton”? No.

Here, Edward Cullen is “blessed” with a name fit for a childhood movie star gone awry; even worse, the sucker would have won this category going away had he not changed to “Cullen” from the former New York Knick-referencing “Edward Anthony Masen.” Against the rounded cadence of “Pau Gasol” – not to mention the mysterious missing L; chicks dig mystery – Cullen has no chance. Edge: Gasol.

Team. Pau of course consorts with the two-time defending champion Lakers, who, until hitting a recent skid, was universally praised for its newfound depth. And for those brief stretches when Andrew Bynum is healthy, Gasol’s team may have the best first six in the NBA.

When not a romantic loner, Cullen mostly sticks with his family. All well and good, but that team’s not exactly going to win any supernatural titles against the likes of the werewolf pack, the Denali coven, the Egyptian coven, the Irish coven, the Volturi, and BiE’s personal favorite, the Amazonian coven. Edge: Gasol.

Recent Run. How recent are we talking? In the past week or so, the Lakers have shed the aura of invincibility among short attention-spanned observers – no respect for a two-time champ, eh? On the other hand, said back-to-back titles surely inspired off-season moves by at least the Boston Celtics, San Antonio Spurs and Dallas Mavericks, some of which may influence the NBA for a good five years to come.

On the other other hand, the Twilight machine is influencing all of American and British pop culture right now, affecting potentially dozens of franchises for god knows how long. Edge: Cullen.

Home country. Transylvania vs. Spain? Well, BuckBokai can’t recall the last time Transylvania even qualified for Eurobasket… Edge: Gasol.

Siblings. Cullen’s brothers and sisters (though, admittedly, many among them adopted) include the superstrong Rosalie and Emmett, the empathic Jasper and the future-telling Alice – and yeah, they’re all gorgeous and immortal, too.

Pau has Marc, whose stats are a bit down in 2010-11 to 11.7 points, 7.6 rebounds and 2.4 stocks (steals+blocks, courtesy Simmons’ “Book of Basketball”). Gasol the younger has also been praised by Phil Jackson for being more physical that Pau, but, hey, the truth is Marc is with the Memphis Grizzlies, a deader-end lot than James’ leaderless posse. Edge: Cullen.

Superpowers. Cullen: super-strength, -speed, -endurance, and -agility; mind-reading telepathy; immortality.

Gasol: great range; best European skill set since Dirk Nowitzki; awesome back-to-the-basket and post games; well above-average defender; superhuman ability to defer in alpha dog role to Kobe Bryant; teflon-like skin protects from Jacksonian barbs. Edge: Even.

Antagonist. So often is a hero defined by his polar opposite: think Batman and the Joker, Sherlock Holmes and Professor Moriarty, Captain Kirk and Khaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaan. Both Cullen and Gasol have inherited their enemies: the former in factions who disagree with the Cullen Family’s “vegetarian” diet, while the latter arrived just in time for the resurrected Lakers-Celtics rivalry.

While the vegetarian/carnivore battle goes back to Genesis 4:2 (look it up), the Lakers vs. Celtics war began in the NBA’s first decade and has been a nearly continuous storyline since while creating two of America’s most universally loved sports franchises. Edge: Even.

Popularity. Gasol got up to a stunning no. 4 in jersey sales in Europe last season and his gear surely sells well in the huge L.A. market. But geez, *Twilight*?

Stephenie Meyer’s is the sort of franchise that would make any Simmons wannabe hack (and any writer this side of Stephen King and J.K. Rowling, really) Celtic green with envy: the books have sold over 100 million copies sold in 40 languages; comprised the entire top four in USA Today’s best-sellers list for 2008; won the 2008 British Book Award, the 2009 Kids’ Choice Award and an MTV Movie Awards best film nod.

They may love you in L.A., Pau, but until those free-throw time chants of “M-V-P!” are directed toward you rather than you-know-who, this one’s not even close. Edge: Cullen.

Physical Appearance. Have you seen Robert Pattinson? Good. Now check out the picture at left. BiE’s glad we’re all in agreement here. Edge (huge edge among the girlie set): Cullen.

And now we see just how Edward Cullen has become such a dominant force, even in the seemingly hermetically sports-sealed world of Simmons.

Poor Pau is going to have to get to work to win over the world from the eerie forces of superstudly vampires … or maybe the big Spaniard could just give in and become one himself under the motto of “If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.”

Now if you’ll excuse BuckBokai, there’s some brainwashing to be done…

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Nielsen is most remembered among sports fans (and the general movie-going populace) for his starring roles in “Airplane,” also featuring Kareem “Roger Murdock” Abdul-Jabbar, and the “Naked Gun” trilogy alongside He Who Shall Not Be Named plus a most memorable turn in episode one by Reggie Jackson. Goddamn it, too, if that umpire scene in Naked Gun I still isn’t one of moviedom’s funniest baseball scenes ever. We love it!

Of course, students of science-fiction film remember Nielsen as Captain James T. Kirk prototype Commander J.J. Adams in the awesome Shakespeare’s “Tempest”/pop Freudian psychology mashup “The Forbidden Planet.”

Rest in peace, Leslie Nielsen. Surely you were one of the all-time comedic greats!

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Video of “The Match of the Century” runs below, followed by the video of the song “6:3″ by Hungarian group Hobo Blues Band. The dramatic scenes are taken from the 1999 science-fiction film (really) on the match, entitled “6:3 (or, Play it Again, Tutti)” and long a favorite of BuckBokai. In the video’s opening sequence, our hero Tutti, having been hurtled back through time from 1990s Budapest to 1953, leads the workers at the pub in a rousing rundown of the Team Hungary roster before the radio broadcast of the match begins.

(Incidentally, for those followers of BuckBokai or new discoverers of the ‘site, rest assured the BuckBokai lives! Life, that thing that happens when you’re busy making other plans, has been invasive lately. Regular posting will soon continue…)

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Seriously, existentially, think about how silly an accolade like “the greatest right-handed post-season relief pitcher of all-time” is: Even if you ignore the absence of modern-style relief pitching before Joe Page in 1947 and the wider opportunity for earning such a reputation thanks to Selig Era extra playoff series, the truth is that “all-time” in this context becomes a time period measuring 266 or 147 or 134 years long depending on when you personally date the origin of baseball.

“I don’t know about that,” BuckBokai typically cracks to anyone unfortunate enough to be watching the game alongside, “those 4th-century BCE Persians had some nasty junkballers.”

Speaking more soberly, competitions of either straightforward individual athletic sports or more abstract team ball games have been going on in some part of the world for nearly 2,800 years with the Ancient Greeks and possibly 4,500 with the soccer-like tsu chu in China. One Turkish tournament has run for over 640 years … and the baseball dudes are talking about “all-time” American League records? Come on!

As a service to those sports fans who haven’t utterly lost all historical perspective, BuckBokai presents a list of truly the top 10 athletes of all-time, with peak years in parentheses. Let the arguments begin!

• Coroebus of Elis (776 BC?-?), track and field. Coroebus makes this list if only by dint of his status as inaugural recorded sports champion in Western Civilization – he’s listed as the first-ever Olympic champion after winning the “stade” event – but check out his amazing Wikipedia bio: Coroebus of Elis “was a humble Elean baker and athlete who won the stadion race in the first recorded Ancient Olympic Games in 776 BC.” Whoa, now that is the stuff of pulp sports legend.

Coupled with the facts that before him Greek sports history consisted entirely of highlights from metamortals like Hercules and that he plied his athletic trade naked – which surely none of the others on this list would have – and Coroebus of Elis definitely deserves eternal fame.

• Gaius Appuleius Diocles (c.118-c.142), chariot racing. In a Roman “bloodsport” wherein the only apparent rule was that drivers had to spur on their auriga to complete seven laps around the track, most tended to last about two or three years. In dramatic contrast, Doicles was a combination of Gordie Howe, Satchel Paige, George Blanda, and Michael Schumacher multiplied by your basic general badass Roman gladiator in taking bodily punishment until retiring at the age of 42.

And Diocles has certainly racked up the most impressive stat line in any sport: In a reported 4,257 races, he won 1,462 – for a ridiculous winning percentage of .343 in a sport that was team-based roughly in the fashion of modern Formula One – and placed in 1,437. Even more mind-numbing in the 21st-century are Diocles’ other statistics: the financial ones.

According to Professor Peter Struck of the University of Chicago, “Twenty-four years of winnings brought Diocles – likely an illiterate man whose signature move was the strong final dash – the staggering sum of 35,863,120 sesterces (equivalent to roughly $15 billion in modern currency, no joke) – in prize money.

“His total take home [pay] amounted to five times the earnings of the highest paid provincial governors over a similar period – enough to provide grain for the entire city of Rome for one year, or to pay all the ordinary soldiers of the Roman Army at the height of its imperial reach for a fifth of a year.”

• Flamma (before 200 AD), gladiator. The other high-level ancient Roman spectator sports were of course the arena combat games made famous in approximately three zillion Hollywood films. Though the name Spartacus has become directly related in the public consciousness with gladiatorial sport, one of the most impressive careers on record appears to belong to Flamma.

More important than Flamma’s 21-4-9 mark, however, was his four-time reception of the “rudis.” Extremely few gladiators received more than one rudis, for such a prize allowed the awardee to walk through “the gate of life,” i.e. to exit the stadium with all the rights of a free man. Despite racking up these passes, Flamma persisted in fighting until his death at 30 years old – and if he didn’t die in an arena, you can bet thoughts of the bloodsport weren’t far from Flamma’s mind in his last moments.

• Two unknown players (c.1200 BC?-c.1520), Mesoamerican ball game variants. One of the first ball game team sports was created in Olmec culture probably around 1500 B.C. While morphing somewhat as it was passed around to cultures which were basically cut off from one another, descendants of the Olmec’s game lasted 2,700 years – some claim it’s up to 300 years older.

The Mayans are said to have invented the hoop aspect of the game, both in terms of its placement high above the court and the tradition that one score ends a game; the popularity of tlachtli in the Aztec world between 1200 and the Spanish conquest cannot be underestimated, however, with each city and major township fielding teams.

As far as the whole sacrifice-the-losing-team’s-captain (and thus, as more than one wag has commented, creating the first supporters of sports league expansion) in concerned, no one can really say for sure how often such a thing occurred or even whether winners or losers were sacrificed; artifacts portraying the ritualistic sacrifice of ballplayers have been found, but no matter. This game was dangerous enough before time expired, with bruises huge enough to require lancing and blows from the ball to the head or midsection were also known to kill.

BuckBokai will choose one ball player from Mayan and Aztec culture each; though unknowns, you can bet that when Nezahualpilli and Montezuma II staged a best-of-five series to settle a bet over the fate of the Aztec Empire in 1516 or so, that there were at least one Jordan-level tlachtli player out there.

(Nezahualpilli and Texcoco defeated Montezuma’s Tenochtitlan team and thus the former king had the satisfaction of being “proven” correct. Unfortunately, his satisfaction was short-lived as his prediction had a foreign invader laying waste to the Aztecs and filling Mexico from coast to coast.)

• Raiden Tameemon (1790-1811), sumo wrestling. Within the longest continuous written history of any sport, Raiden still stands out in sumo 220 years after his debut. Aside from his record, Raiden is most often noted as never having been awarded the top rank of “yokozuna.” While such a promotion was rare in the late 18th/early 19th century – only three had been awarded before the 1780s and no such award was bestowed from 1798 until 1828, when Ōnomatsu Midorinosuke became the sixth-ever yokozuna – experts still disagree as to why the great Raiden was ever denied the honor.

No matter, Raiden’s records still stand, albeit many unofficially, as pre-organized competitions are not recognized by today’s Japan Sumo Association. After getting training from all-time great Tanikaze Kajinosuke, Raiden would go on to achieve notable stats like:

– won every tournament in which he participated between November 1793 through April 1800;

– won 28 of 35 tournaments lifetime, including seven in which he finished 4-0 for the competition;

– compiled a streak of 11 straight tournament wins; and

– compiled a lifetime .962 winning percentage.

• Koca Yusuf (1885-1898), Turkish oil wrestling. Now mostly relegated to Asia Minor, this form of wrestling has remained the staple of a great sports culture for as long as modern Turkish culture itself. Standardized oil wrestling began in ancient Egypt and tournament rules were created in the Persian Empire in about 1065 BC. Turkey’s national “Kırkpınar” oil-wrestling tournament has been running annually since 1346, a clear record for longevity.

Even though Gaddar Kel Aliço, who also reportedly bore a killer nickname roughly translated as “Ruthless Bald Aliço,” was champion for an incredible 26 years, BuckBokai’s going with the guy who took the oil wrestling belt from Aliço in 1885. After winning at Kırkpınar, Koca Yusuf went on keep the title for 13 years; more importantly, Yusuf secured wins over top wrestlers throughout Europe and, after defeating American champion Dan McLeod in May 1898, became the undisputed world titleholder.

Unfortunately, Yusuf wouldn’t get a chance to defend the title, as on his return voyage on La Bourgogne, the ship sank off Nova Scotia. Circumstances surrounding his drowning death are sketchy and both versions are ignominious. Wikipedia notes that “It is said that Koca Yusuf tried to get on piece of floting debris with other survivors, but they refused to let him board for fear an additional person would cause it to capsize. They repeatedly beat at his hands as he tried to grasp the float and pull himself aboard; finally, one of the passengers hacked at his hands with a sharp object, whereupon Yusuf ceased his efforts to board and was left to drown.”

A second, more oft-repeated story, contains some of all of this retelling’s elements: “The survivors remember Yusuf acting like a wild beast. With a dagger in his hand, he forced his way through the frightened crowds waiting to board the lifeboats. By the time he reached the rails, a fully loaded boat was already being lowered. Ignoring the shouts of the crew, he jumped into it. His huge weight, together with the violence of his leap, overturned the boat and all its occupants were thrown into the sea. Yusuf, although a good swimmer, was dragged down the weight of his $10,000 gold belt and drowned.”

And in his prime, too.

• Jim Thorpe (1907-1928), several sports. The biggest scam in all that 1999/2000 hype on “Greatest Athlete of the Century” (yes, BuckBokai holds a grudge)? The exclusion of multi-sport master Thorpe from no. 1, without a question. As though it weren’t bad enough that many an outlet placed Michael Jordan or Babe Ruth in the top spot, Thorpe’s underrating by the general populace was yet another slap in the face for indigenous peoples.

Look, we’re talking about a guy who excelled in the decathlon, pentathlon, and American football. He was at least a competent Major League Baseball player, as evidenced by his .327 batting average at .787 OPS at the age of 32 mostly with the Boston Braves in 1919. Modern historians have discovered that Thorpe won a national ballroom dancing competition and went on at least one national basketball barnstorming tour.

Modern training and prejudices to the present-day aside, BuckBokai reckons that the ever-worsening apathy toward Thorpe’s all-time status can be attributed to the simple dearth of video clips. I mean, it couldn’t be because he was a Native American (most likely the reason the Olympic Committee stripped his medals from the 1912 Games), could it?

• Babe Didrikson Zaharias (1931-1955), basketball, golf, track and field, others. Certainly the greatest female athlete of the 20th century, Didrickson dominated the women’s side in two sports and probably could have tromped through a nice career in professional hoops, had such a thing been viable in the first half of the 20th century.

Didrikson seemingly picked up sports like we mere mortals pick up bad habits. After graduating high school, Didrikson joined the amateur basketball team sponsored by her Dallas employer, the Employers Casualty Insurance Company. In 1931, she led the team to the American Amateur Union (AAU) basketball championship; Didrikson was named all-American. The following year, she played in the AAU Championships, a track-and-field competition, and won eight of the ten offered events. Her team of one won the championship at the ’32 AAUs.

Didrikson parlayed this performance into a trip to Los Angeles for the 1932 Olympic Games, where she won two gold medals and a silver in track and field. In 1935, she got into golf; at first denied amateur status, Didrikson became the first woman (and last for 65 or so years) to golf on the men’s side of the PGA tour. Going back to the ladies’ side in 1942, Didrikson would go own to win 82 amateur or professional tournaments, including five majors and 17 straight amateur tourneys, before retiring in 1955 due to terminal cancer.

• Pelé (1956-1977), soccer. Though Edson Arantes do Nascimento, a.k.a. Pelé, would surely be dwarfed by any of the other names on this list (though at 5’8”, he was three inches taller than Didrikson, she probably would still make the Brazilian look small), there’s no doubting his greatness at the world’s most popular sport ever.

Still the top scorer of all-time by FIFA standards, Pelé unofficially scored 1,281 goals in 1,363 career appearances, for an incredible ratio of one score every 1.064 games; not including exhibition and amateur-level matches, these numbers go up to 1,201 goals in 1,276: one goal per *1.062* matches. The combination of longevity (21 seasons pro plus 92 caps earned in 14 years with Team Brazil) and consistency added to his presence on three World Cup-winning teams earns “The King” a spot on this list.

Despite the literal billions of kids playing soccer today, it is unlikely The Beautiful Game will ever see another on the level of Pelé.

• Special mention: Bo Jackson (1982-1994), American football and baseball. Look, statistics and history aside, ultimately the individual’s perception of sporting achievement will be subjective. But anyone who saw Bo’s incredible prowess, speed and strength in either field of his excellence knows – just *knows* – that he was the greatest athletic specimen in our lifetime.

If Bo hadn’t met with the crippling hip injury that so tragically cut short his sports career (though Jackson’s comeback to the MLB with a *plastic hip, for Doubleday’s sake* would return Bo to the sports world in a miracle of technology and literally awesome athletic achievement), he’d most likely be in the Pro Football Hall of Fame. He’d be in the Baseball Hall of Fame for his 1989 All-Star Game homer alone if the ball weren’t still approaching Pluto at approximately 3/8c. But fate has strange ways of toying with us and Bo will have to settle for his 1998 induction into the College Football Hall – and a prominent place in the memories of anyone who ever witness his – yes – all-time greatness.

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The overwhelming majority of North Americans have never heard the man’s name, despite his literal hand in the creation of three sports currently played and enjoyed by billions. Though he never recorded an official statistic, his effect on the sports universe was a cataclysmic bolt that changed everything. Though his innovation was sometimes called “cheating” by contemporaries, his mode of play now defines leagues all over the world.

Ladies of gentlemen, BuckBokai presents the single most important figure in the history of modern sport itself: William Webb-Ellis!

Webb-Ellis great feat? Well, as the history books and a memorial plaque at the Warwickshire school where he played would have it, the 16-year-old, “with a fine disregard for the rules of football as played in his time first took the ball in his arms and ran with it.”

“Thus,” readeth the legend, “originating the distinctive feature of the rugby game,” which would later serve as father to rugby union and rugby league games and as godfather to American football, in 1823. Association football, a.k.a. soccer, would ultimately see definitive rules hammered out in a London pub in 1863, based firmly around the elimination of the then-growing tendency in the British game to do as Webb-Ellis did.

(I don’t know … picking up the ball and barreling schoolboys over seems like sounder strategy than attempting to advance the ball to guarded teammates with your feet, but BuckBokai’s a 20th-century Yank and thus prone to that sort of thinking. Incidentally, here’s reportedly the only picture of Webb-Ellis in existence. Presumably, that’s not his football uniform.)

Incidentally, as with the Abner Doubleday myth, plenty of debunkers to the grand tale of Webb-Ellis exist. But BuckBokai’ll go with the beautiful tale of individual ingenuity here, methinks.

After all, even if, as critics charge, “the rules were discussed almost every time the boys went out to play and that adjustments were frequently made,” the truth is that unlike Doubleday, actual documentation of Webb-Ellis’ rugby “career” exists.

The truth is, however, that something about *that particular match* in 1823 caught the imaginations of enough organizers and authoritative types to send a few ripples through the rugby web (sorry) at that time. Unfortunately, no records of the game featuring the Webb-Ellis incident exist; such would certainly clear a few things up.

Slightly like the utterly planned fabrication of the Doubleday story (though without the big-business interests, the Webb-Ellis incident is at most a convenience for historians, much like Eddie Cochems or whoever else one chooses to credit with perfecting the forward pass once American football rules were adapted to encourage (not allow creation of!) the rarely-used play.

The certain bit in a pastiche of parallel universe possibilities: What British English terms the “code” (as in the OED definition, “A system or collection of rules or regulations on any subject”) of rugby football would certainly have been properly codified, and certainly within Webb-Ellis lifetime.

Come the Victorian Age, which kicked off 14 years after Webb-Ellis’ disregard for orderly ball, the British suddenly showed a remarkable propensity for organizing and/or creating sports and games. Most popular card games of the 20th century (think bridge, hearts, spades, cribbage, whist, etc.) may garner accolades for The Empire plus hundreds of thousands – maybe millions – of referee types can praise bored Victorians for their livelihoods in soccer, rugby and cricket to name a few.

Had Webb-Ellis not carried the ball on that day, a later attempt of the maneuver may have been disallowed (or encouraged!) in another match. It seems logical in 2010 to suppose that surely someone would have eventually dreamed up Webb-Ellis’ stratagem anyway, but isn’t this a bit of an anthropologist’s trap of interpreting cultures as conveniently based on our sensibilities? With the rules for football games then-permanently in flux, perhaps the run-with-the-ball move would come to dominate such games.

But who can know? Only a traveler through the multiverse can say with certainty what happens in an existence free of Webb-Ellis and/or his moment of inspiration; considering the worldwide importance of soccer and the ‘Stateside obsession with American football, we can surely surmise that the entire world – not just the sportsworld – would have been decidedly different.

So go on out there, enjoy the rugby, soccer or football game and be sure to lift a pint to William Webb-Ellis, key figure in sports history.

(This article extrapolated from a piece previously published at RealFootball365.com.)

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While no evidence that the Bokai Family still lives in the coastal town exists (most of the autobiographical information on Buck will be gotten by outlets such as this by way of a 2026 baseball card), it’s nice to think that the future Hall of Famer is growing up in the vicinity of Starfleet’s future headquarters.

If so, Buck’s surely a San Francisco Giants backer – possibly to the sadness of his father, who may be a Minnesota Twins fan. (After all, who else would name a lad “Harmon” in the 21th century aside from a Killebrew devotee?)

This writer is of course seeking his first sighting of young Bokai. He should be signing his first professional contract within the next three years, and history will show that Buck debuts to play his entire rookie season before turning 17 years old during the 2025 World Series with the London Kings against the Chicago Cubs.

Perhaps he may be sighted in this clip of the Marina del Rey Little League all-stars from 2009, though no one of his famous “short stature” on the team really resembles the Buck Bokai of lore. It’s quite possible that his height has caused him to go overlooked by locals, or again perhaps he’s simply not living in the town anymore. (Can someone in Marina del Rey provide some insight?)

In any case, wishes of happy birthday again to Harmon Gin Bokai, wherever you are. See you in the big leagues soon!

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Reads press material, in part:

“For decades, legend and lore have swirled around the 2.66 miles of asphalt that make up racing’s fastest track: Talladega Superspeedway. This Halloween, in celebration of the AMP Energy Juice 500 at Talladega on October 31st, the world will learn the truth.

“[The Legend of Hallowdega], presented by AMP Energy Juice, is directed by Terry Gilliam and stars David Arquette and Justin Kirk, with special appearances by Dale Earnhardt Jr., Darrell Waltrip and more.”

The first part of the “filmette” will be shown on ESPN right before the 1pm Talladega 500 broadcast. And the entire film will be available a few hours later at LegendOfHallowdega.com.

Why will this be so bitchin’? It’s Terry Gilliam, man! Plus, it’s certain to have 100% nothing to do with this:

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A few visionaries presented their wonderful new sport, a glorious amalgamation of half-pipe snowboarding and hoops, on YouTube in February, whereupon it promptly went viral, ultimately getting the attention of The Onion’s A.V. Club, ESPN’s TrueHoop blog, Yahoo! Sports, and BallinEurope, among others.

So without further ado, here’s the winter sport of the future – or so BuckBokai hopes.

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Like the 1960 Pittsburgh Pirates to which BuckBokai devoted an earlier entry, the Giants and Rangers are seeking to break historically notable runs of futility. In fact, the vanquished team in 2010 goes home with the second-longest active run of World Series futility. Reads the all-time list:

– Chicago Cubs: 102 years (1908-present)
– Chicago White Sox: 88 years (1917-2005)
– Boston Red Sox: 86 years (1918-2004)
– Pittsburgh Pirates: 73 years (1887-1960)
– Brooklyn Dodgers: 65 years (1890-1955)
– Cleveland: 62 years (1948-present)
– New York/San Francisco Giants: 53 years (1957-present)
– Washington Senators II/Texas Rangers: 49 years (1961-present)
– Houston Astros: 48 years (1962-present)
– San Diego Padres: 41 years (1969-present)
– Seattle Pilots/Milwaukee Brewers: 41 years (1969-present)

Adding further wackiness to the incipient plot is that the “San Francisco Giants” have never taken a World Series, having been turned away by the mighty New York Yankees in 1962, later falling in a sweep to the Oakland A’s in the “Earthquake Series” of 1989, and giving up a California Angels comeback in game seven in 2002.

Look, here’s ESPN’s Jim Caple last year, attempting to describe the pre-2004 Simmons-esque angst of Giants fandom with a Sheckleyan morbidity for the future just one year before the apocalyptic vision may be blown away:

“The Cuban Missile Crisis [a particular favorite of parallel-Earth storytellers] began the same day Willie McCovey lined out to Bobby Richardson in the bottom of the ninth inning to end the 1962 World Series. I was nine months old at the time. Fortunately for the world, the missile crisis ended more happily than the World Series did for Giants fans. But had we all been killed in nuclear Armageddon, the San Francisco Giants still would have as many world championships in my lifetime as they do now.

“As all Giants fans know too well, they haven’t won the World Series since moving to San Francisco in 1958. Thus, with the Giants leading the National League West by two games, I’m hoping for the best and bracing for the worst.”

Congratulations to both the Giants and Rangers for ascending to the big stage in 2010. All BuckBokai wants to know is: What happened to those champion Florida Marlins?

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