Sports Is Hell by Ben Passmore

Somewhere there is a Super Bowl, between the Birds and Big White. Those seem to be the actual team names, not nicknames - this is a world where everything is a little more obvious, more extreme.

This is also a world where the Super Bowl is apparently played at the home team's stadium, because we see both the stadium with the game and the fans pouring out of it to riot in the streets, as of course sports fans must do when their teams win or lose.

At the same time -- on the evening of the Super Bowl? in the same town? -- there is also a big BLM protest, where at least some participants are looking forward to violence and burning down as much of the city as possible.

(I should say, before I go much farther, that I'm the wrong audience for this book in several ways: I don't care that much about sports, and my political leanings are not that close to creator Ben Passmore's burn-everything-down stance.)

The game ends, apparently with a win for the Birds, whose fans, at least as we see them here, are mostly Black. But there was a flag on that final play, and a blackout immediately hits this city - it's not clear why, but here are a couple of pages of big BOOM!s all around the neighborhood, so I'm going to guess some combination of incompetency on the part of authorities and bloodthirstiness on the part of random revolutionaries. (Both of those things are always fair bets in Passmore's work.)

And of course there's a riot, which we see raging across this business/sports district. (The action of Sports Is Hell doesn't take place in residential areas, except at the beginning to set up characters.)

All of this is narrated, off and on, by two sports announcers, presumably the guys broadcasting the game and who then just segued into doing the same for the ensuing battles of more-or-less organized militias and other armed groups of murderous thugs who claim to be sports fans. They have a lot of death and destruction to talk through, in best play-by-play fashion. They do not explicitly call it a race war, but Passmore possibly would: an awful lot of those militias, maybe even all of them, are aligned by race.

We follow a bunch of different people, all of whom are horrible in one way or another: clueless white would-be-protestors, a Black protestor devoted to nonviolence (which in Passmore's world is the sign of an idiot), a couple of Black anarchists, and a more organized and better armed Black militia group. Many of them die horribly over the course of the book, as do dozens of others - from the narration, it's pretty clear at least hundreds and possible thousands or tens of thousands are getting killed, mostly by gunfire from these various militias, over the course of this night. 

I don't think Sports Is Hell is meant to be a nihilistic book, but that's what I took away from it: that people are horrible and evil, only one minor moment away from mass murder, every last one of them. I do think Passmore intended to connect the violence in the streets with the violence of a football game, but it didn't really click for me. The game happens almost entirely off-page; the story is about non-athletes, who mostly seem to want to kill each other. The sports feels arbitrary and unnecessary: these people would kill each other for less, or nothing.

So, yeah, maybe sports is hell. But in Passmore's comics, as far as I've seen, everything is hell, so I'm not quite clear on the distinction here.

Dragon Hoops by Gene Luen Yang

I'm no more the obvious audience for this book than Gene Luen Yang was the obvious creator for it: neither of us cared all that much about basketball. The difference, I guess, is that Yang got interested in sports because of his community and a specific story at a specific time, and then created this graphic novel to tell that story and his involvement in it. [1]

Yang was a math teacher at Bishop O'Dowd, a respected private Catholic high school in Oakland, California. The men's varsity basketball team there, the Dragons, had a strong program: they'd been among the best in the state (and California is a big, competitive state) on and off for a couple of decades. But they'd never won the state championship -- coming into the 2015 season, there were 0-8 in that big game.

Yang was coming off his previous graphic-novel project, 2013's double-barreled Boxers & Saints, and was still semi-aimlessly casting around for his next big personal comics project a year later. Of course, at the same time he was also negotiating to do more writing of other people's properties, which Yang puts into this story as a secondary plot or background flavor. [2]

So my guess is that this was a more general period of "what do I want to do with the rest of my life." Yang shows himself with four young children, and dividing his time in three: comics, teaching, and family. Turning comics into a day-job allowed him to simplify that down to just two divisions, which has to be appealing. His soul-searching over the Superman job is connected in this book to his being a teacher at the school: this is a book about the school and its basketball team, with Yang as the viewpoint character, rather than a story essentially about Yang's career and life, with the school as a main setting.

But that's what was behind it all. Yang wanted new projects, was probably already thinking on some level about needing to quit teaching to focus on comics fully, and wondered what the big deal was about the Bishop O'Dowd Dragons. So he went to talk to a fellow teacher, head coach Lou Richie.

And out of that conversation, and the events of the next year, he made Dragon Hoops, the story of primarily the 2015 team and secondarily about Yang learning about the history of the Dragons, about the players on the team in 2015, and about Richie. And then, tertiarily, about Yang himself and his career decisions -- those are the least connected to the team, so Yang keeps them appropriately less important. (There's also a minor thread about how Yang tells the story: there's one loose, unfinished thread of this story that he didn't want to include -- but the fact that he mentions possibly not including it tells we sneaky readers that he already has included it.)

Again, Yang is the viewpoint character, and our lens into this world: this is a sports book largely for an audience that doesn't deeply care about sports a lot of the time. But it's not his story, and he's not trying to make it his story. It's the story of Richie and his players: superstars Ivan Rabb and Paris Austin, younger players like Arinze Chidom and Jeevin Sandhu, and a half-dozen others. It's a book organized by the rhythms of a season: preparing ahead of time, early practices, the games of the season in order, and then (of course) the post-season, culminating in that big championship game again.

Yang was lucky in his story: teams fizzle out everywhere, every year. The Dragons could easily have ended up out of contention. It's the danger of starting to write about a story before the ending is clear -- Yang was something like a reporter telling this story, building blocks of how he wanted it to go while never being sure it would end the "right" way.

I won't tell you what the ending was, or even the middle: the Dragons played a lot of games that year. And the women's team, also called the Dragons, had some games that come in here. The story of whether or not the Dragons won is important, but more important (to Yang, at least, if not to many of the readers) is who these players were, how they worked, what they accomplished together, and how they came from different backgrounds to be part of something larger while still staying specific people.

Yang has always been interested in representation -- most obviously with Chinese-Americans like himself -- and Dragon Hoops is a book where he broadens that view to look more deeply at other ethnic groups in America. Most obviously, since this is about basketball and Oakland, Black Americans are central to Dragon Hoops. It was published in March of 2020, and so finished months before that -- the specifics of the American racial-justice landscape have shifted hugely since that point, though not in any way that damages Yang's story and understanding here. He is on the side of hyphenated Americans and ethnic Americans of all kinds, wanting them to have secure, real places in the world that are not reliant on the good will of white people.

Dragon Hoops never says the words "white supremacy." But Yang writes about it nevertheless: from his own point of view, and from the lives of the Black young men who make up most of the Dragons. There are several scenes of bigotry here, directed at the Dragons -- mostly trash-talking audiences at road games -- and Yang picks up the way hate grabs onto anything to demean and attack, that there will always be something that those bigots use, no matter who they're yelling at this time.

Because this is a real story. And a real story about a real basketball team of mostly Black teenagers in 2015 America is going to include some racial slurs. Maybe there will be a year when that won't be the case. Yang hopes so. I hope so. The Dragons players hope so. But we'll have to see.

[1] I frankly still don't care that much about basketball: even when I did care about sports, it was the one I never got into. But I liked the book, he said brightly!

[2] Everybody's got to eat, and everyone wants to do work that personally excites and speaks to them. So, if what Yang really wants to do with his life is write a bunch of stories about Superman punching things better, that's great. I generally have very little interest in punching-things-better stories, though, so those background negotiations can feel to me, and readers like me, like he's getting pulled into a sadder, lesser world after making personal stories and teaching for a living. 

Say No to Dope

Now, I'm not a big sports fan. I used to watch football in college semi-seriously, and I was more-or-less a Mets fan for almost two decades until I had kids. But times and priorities change, and I haven't seen more than a few minutes of a game in years. (I do sometimes watch a bit of baseball when flipping channels in odd hotel rooms, since it's soothing -- but there I don't really care who's playing.)

So that establishes the (lack of) my bona fides.

I don't care about doping in the slightest. More than that, I'm not surprised in the least when it happens -- in fact, I expect it. I don't think it's a big deal, and I don't think it will ever go away -- if I were magically in charge of all sports, I'd let athletes do whatever the hell they wanted with their own bodies, as long as they were adults. This all seems really obvious to me, and I'm continually surprised when I see people getting all worked up -- as if it's a personal affront -- when there's yet another inevitable doping scandal.

Here's the thing: professional athletes are the second-most competitive people on earth. (After only professional stock/bond traders.) They've devoted their lives, and in many cases sustained serious, permanent, life-destroying injuries to get to where they are. Their bodies are tools, and they're used to honing those tools to the highest level possible. So my assumption is always that the best -- the most competitive, the ones most driven to succeed at all costs -- will do whatever it takes to win. And thus I expect the top performers will always, by definition, be the ones using prohibited "PETs."

Are you seriously expecting them to avoid using a specific list of chemicals, when those chemicals are proven to make their performance better? Really? After they've been willing to ruin their knees and brains and childhoods just to get a little more speed or strength or power?

I just can't believe that -- the top athletes are always looking for that tiny bit of edge, and they're clearly willing to ignore everything else in life in pursuit of winning at their sport. Ergo, they're going to dope; it's the logical solution.

Sure, it's against the rules, but those are the secondary rules. Because every sport has two sets of rules, and every athlete knows the primary set -- the ones that govern actual play, the ones that decide who wins -- always outrank the technical details of eligibility and paraphernalia and good sportsmanship and the other "nice to have" stuff.

The bodies running those sports will, and should, enforce all of the rules, and catch as many dopers and other violators (bat-corkers, pine-tar-grippers, and so on) as they can -- understanding that no enforcement mechanism can ever be 100% effective. Some dopers will slip through, and never be caught -- I'm sure many of them are in Halls of Fame right now, and will stay there.

But fans that see this level of extreme competition as a moral failing should look in their mirrors: you want those athletes to fight as hard as they can, because you want them to win. Well, this is how to win. It's not pretty, but it works.

And remember: nobody ever talks about how nice it is that they all played fair when your team loses.

There Is No Joy in Poughkeepsie

Vassar's Quidditch team has lost the first intercollegiate tournament.

Nice to see the athletic program is just as dominant as it was in my day...