Joltin'.

I'm finally digging into the type of book I've long been wanting to read, a biography of Joe DiMaggio (The Hero's Life by Richard Ben Cramer), and I thought I'd give a little opinion — in part to chronicle the 500-page book for posterity, and in part to convince the people who may have once followed my blog that I am not, indeed, dead.

I'm about halfway through so far, and the picture of Joe is a sad one. Along the mantra of "Don't be motivated by fear; be motivated by hope," he hangs a failing grade from even his youth. The man is so driven by not making mistakes, not falling short with money, not succumbing to others' expectations, not letting anything out of his grasp, that much of his life appears to be that of a caged man.

Joe's career choice and most of how he lives after that come from this fear, but of course with a man as talented as Joe DiMaggio, the fear is but an ugly speck in his aura of defiance. Even though he may have lived most of his years scared of running out of cash or not being perfect, he transformed that fear into performance with such skill that most people watching just found him amazing.

That seems to be the larger tale for most great athletes: Demons so dark that the star is driven to push harder, jump higher, hit longer, be better, win more than anyone around. We laud them, follow them, and try to emulate them ... most times not knowing that their otherworldliness is not so much a heavenly bent as it is shadows of pain, failure, or exclusion pushing a man.

The fans who remember Joe recall a man locked in, devoted to winning. He stood solid in the batter's box, and in his quiet and strength he always had the right focus to be a superior hitter. He scrutinized and planned from the outfield, doing the large bits of work ahead of time to see where a hitter was going so his legs could easily handle the rest. He relentlessly kept his brain on winning, winning, winning, and styled his regimens and attitudes around that goal, and the glory that came with achieving it.

Would Joe have been this Joe if not for the World Series bonuses he was chasing? What if he wasn't pushing each year for a better salary? What if he didn't feel the need to be known as better than Ted Williams? Would Joe have ever even pursued baseball if he didn't think it could pay him well?

Where would those fly balls have gone if he wasn't obsessed with being the perfect outfielder? How about the batting crowns, MVP awards, and championship rings — or the legs shredded from ferocious sliding, the failed marriages, and his otherwise loveless and injured life?

Do you have to court the darkness of pride, fear, and hunger to be truly great?

Jerry West's book, West by West, seems to think so. Kobe Bryant's trophy case vs. LeBron James' happy zone backs up the thesis. Tiger Woods' altered landscape suggests that genius needs its ingredients just right — and on its own terms.

Can you be a winner without the killer instinct? And are the great ones' greatest talents really just their ability to keep their demons dancing on a row long enough that they can harness the bitterness, rage, and shortcomings into one giant burst of awesome?

Hope it's worth it, fellas.

Tiger tantrums

Tiger Woods says he's sorry, and that he respects the game, but in his slow slog back to respectability (if it will ever come) keeps stepping on top of people who have been behaving far better than he. Today, he granted five minutes to the Golf Channel and ESPN to interview him, once again presenting himself as an in-control, nose-in-the-air attention-grabber. Worse yet, he did it when one of his golf colleagues was winning the weekend event. (His first public statement, in February, came at a busy point in another golf tourney, not coincidentally sponsored by Accenture, which had dumped him as a sponsor when its slogan, "Be a Tiger," became understandably awkward.)

Never thought I'd say this, but Tiger is more A-Rod than Jeter. And if you want to know what that means, check out Selena Roberts' A-Rod or Joe Torre's The Yankee Years for the full treatment.

If Tiger's really sorry, he will allow himself to be really questioned, with no caveats, and he will give real answers. This is simply PR crap meant to placate the masses enough to he can put his foot back in the game he has always controlled. Who's to say that once Tiger starts winning, people won't forget the whole November incident? (Many are already giving him a free pass, calling it his personal life.)

Personal life or not, whether what he did was right or not, he violated the public trust that is intertwined in the game, and that is what he needs to answer for. Fine, he won't talk about his family. But these little controlled speaking sessions where he leads the media around on the leash (when the public wants some real answers, and some reasoning for why their hope in the image he had presented was crushed), are not acceptable. Especially when he continues to snub the integrity of the golf world.

January book reviews, part 2

The second in a series of book reviews on some of my January sports reading.

Today: Shooting Stars by Buzz Bissinger and LeBron James.

I should have known better than to jump for a book with LeBron James listed as the author, but I knew James had come from a rough background in his rise to king of the NBA, and I thought he'd have a good story to tell. Plus, Buzz Bissinger just wrote an excellent Vanity Fair cover story on the Tiger Woods situation, and he's the author of the acclaimed Friday Night Lights.

I still believe Bissinger is a good writer, but I think Bron-Bron wrote most of this book.

Completely missing are any details about the journey that was James' rise to greatness, supplanted instead by basic information about his childhood and a continuous telling...not showing...of his high school basketball experience.

The book doesn't promise to be about James, of course, but seeing as James was the heart of the five guys who won the state titles in Akron and called themselves the Shooting Stars, you'd think he would show up a little more in his own book. Instead, James tries to tell us about his friends, but he does it in a clunky, over-repetitive, this-is-how-it-is way rather than giving us a compelling narrative.

Shooting Stars has flashes of brilliance: A description of Akron, a sneak peek inside AAU and high school athletics, a glimpse at the craziness surrounding the kid who was destined to be the next great one. But these fleeting sentences and paragraphs do not save a book that is altogether lacking in good storytelling, leapfrogging in its treatment of years of these boys' lives, and loathsome in its repetition of details we've heard told before but now want to see.

Perhaps my high expectations for the book changed my perception beforehand. If I read it as a story a high school senior would write about the guys he was hanging out with, I can swallow it a lot better. In that setting, it makes sense that James would allude to smoking pot in high school for just a sentence without any connection to his current status as the hoops ambassador, or that he could talk about growing up with a single mom and moving from house to house without ever telling us how he got out of that mess. He treats his material like a high school essay-writer: Today I did this, people got mad about my mom's Hummer, Dru was my best friend! And it's easy to take it that way if you consider James hasn't had time to polish up his authoring skills.

But after reading Andre Agassi's Open, where all the mundane details of his life were swept into an orchestrated story that informed and inspired, I wanted an above-high-school performance from James. (Or at least Bissinger could have taken over.)

I know you could score 30 for St. V's, LeBron. Show me how you can get 60 now. Write it like a man.

Oh, Tiger.

Vanity Fair is digging into the archives for the newest slam on Tiger Woods, using old Annie Lebowitz photos and more-candid material from a 1997 GQ interview to fuel this article, by well-known sportswriter Buzz Bissinger.

I've withheld my view on Tiger mostly because I haven't learned enough/thought enough to give it complete treatment, but off of what this article purports, these are the questions I now have:

For all his "mental toughness," and superb control of his golf game, couldn't he control his desires?

For all his decency, his seeming ability torise about humanity, why was it so difficult for him to find the genuine love that would fuel a choice to commit to his family? (And not even choosing to commit to them in rough times...he had the best of opportunities.)

Is this why he wouldn't let anyone close, why he didn't want anyone to know him?

His golf game slid a bit this year, and his fellow golfers played looser with knowledge of his fallibility. What will they do now that they know he is seriously flawed? Will they prey on his weaknesses? Or will his knowing that they know be enough to take down that big Tiger mental edge?

What matters to him? Does he even care about the public disgrace? What does he want? Money? Fulfillment? With so much gone, does he even care about golf anymore? And if he does, what does that mean?

If he never really loved his wife or wanted to make his marriage work, what can he do now? Does he even want to patch up his family life? What is the motive there?

Will he want real help? (And I'm not talking about his indiscretion...I'm pointing at the whole package. Arrogance. Aloofness. Fraudness. The deceit and avoidance of moral behavior is the main problem here.) Will he ask for help? Will he accept help?

Is this the beginning of the end for him? Many predict the endorsements are irretrievably gone, yet I wonder more about this game he's been stalking for the past decade. What will smashing the records do for him now?

People now know he is a flawed human. If he embraces this and builds on it, will they not love him more? But if he keeps pushing away....

"Woods" will always rank above "Michelson" in the record books, but all those fans who clung to Phil, especially as his wife fell ill, now look like they know how to weed out the phonies.

Those sticking with Tiger ask why it is a big deal that his morals are a mess since they admire the player. But consider this: As fans, we can no longer see him as the epitome of the perfection that results from a character-driven, well-lived life of hard work. He's a trickster that plays his cards, and plays them well. He's figured out how to give superhuman performances on the golf course and weasel up a nice-enough image to pull in endorsement dollars. And he's the ultimate finagler when it comes to keeping the carousel of women going around while hurting his family. That's why you can't root for Tiger the player without thinking of Tiger the person. The Tiger that has been so amazing is rooted in the Tiger that is a fraud.

I wonder what kind of character his father had. First of all, the elder Woods had extremely misplaced priorities in the way he raised his son toward an addiction to golf, winning, and power. You have to wonder what kind of advice he gave his son as Tiger became good enough to get whatever he wanted (his father certainly knew about the women at some level). What kind of husband was Tiger's father? Did he know how to advise his son toward finding true fulfillment, finding a good wife, being a good father to his own kids? Finally, Tiger's dad told everyone his son was the "chosen one," with huge expectations for what one human could do. Did Tiger ever have alternatives? Did he ever think he could just be a person?

Tiger played in a sport that has a very rigid way of doing everything, demanding conformity. Tiger conformed, and was respected and made advances because he did. But at what point in conformity do you lose yourself?

The real problem in this whole situation was never that he "cheated on his wife"; it's that this life he had never was. The loss he is dealing with now is realizing how he really is, and people now wanting him to be treated for who he really is. The arrogance and fraudulence are realities he'll deal with every day, so while people say, "Hey, Kobe recovered from that scandal!", they're forgetting that this isn't Tiger making a mistake with some random woman. This is Tiger being an entirely different person.

Whether it was conformity to his sport, or constructing an image he could live behind, it's safe to guess that everyone is asking who Tiger really is, including Tiger himself. The Vanity Fair article labeled his deceitful actions as him living "a life without meaning."

The question now is whether (A) Tiger realizes the extent of what he has done, (B) whether he wants it to change or just wants to continue as much as he can, cutting his losses, and (C) if he does work toward change, toward a genuine life where he tries to live as person of character, who the people will be who stand beside him.

Patriots death knells?

I've refrained from writing about the Patriots this season, mostly because of lack of time but also because of some raising and dashing of hopes. The most recent loss, however, seems to have pushed some sportswriters over the edge, and I link to their comments here.

The Boston Globe's Christopher L. Gasper thinks Friar Bill has lost control of his locker room. (Surprisingly no references to Mr. Eric Mangini, though.)

Boston.com's Tony Massarotti says Adalius Thomas's time in New England is short, plus other good insights on the Boston sports scene (and Tiger Woods). Check out the Adrian Beltre comment, too.

Back in his groove

It looks like Tiger Woods has finally found his groove after an early season of major hiccups (pun intended). While he trashed his early rounds at the Master's, the U.S. Open and the British Open (missing the cut across the pond), he's a crisp -5 in his first round today at the PGA Championship.

We've all seen it coming, of course, with the recent tear he's had in his (minor) tournament appearances.

Now it's time to see if he pulls it out.

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